Articoli di riviste sul tema "FICTION / LGBT / General"

It is now twenty years since the publication of Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys (2001). O’Neill’s novel was not the first Irish novel to depict same-sex passion, and not even the first Irish gay novel of the post-decriminalisation period. However, it did attain a wider and higher level of recognition among mainstream Irish, and international, readers. This may have been at least partly due to O’Neill’s decision to write a historical romance – a genre which still retains its enduring appeal for readers. By adapting this genre, O’Neill uses fiction to unearth, and imaginatively recreate, an archaeology of same-sex passions between men in revolutionary Ireland. As such, his novel speaks powerfully to a yearning to make the silences of history speak and is motivated by the belief that, as Scott Bravmann puts it in a different context, ‘lesbian and gay historical self-representation – queer fictions of the past – help construct, maintain and contest identities – queer fictions of the present.’ Revisiting O’Neill’s novel now – after two decades of remarkable social change for Ireland’s LGBT communities, and after almost a decade of national commemoration of the revolutionary period – is a timely opportunity to reflect on the relationship between history, fiction and how we imagine sexual liberation. Keywords: Gay Men in Irish Culture; Historical Fiction; Jamie O’Neill; Denis Kehoe; ANU Theatre Company

Breaking the Silence. Changes in the Ways of Presenting LGBT+ Issues in Contemporary Slovak Prose In Slovakia after the Velvet Revolution of 1989 groups previously marginalized and discriminated against in the communism era, including the LGBT+ community, began activities aimed at obtaining full civil rights and developing forms of cultural representation. Gradually, the issues of non-heteronormativity began to appear in various areas of culture. As regards prose texts, which are the basis for the reflections presented in this paper, non-heteronormativity was initially portrayed in a stigmatizing, stereotype-based manner. Since the beginning of the 21st century, the dominant approach has been to expose the problem of LGBT+ people living in the closet, hiding their identity due to the homophobia in the society; the sphere of intimacy is considered as the only one that allows a sense of security and the free expression of affection and desire. In more recent works, examples of characters who have come out of the closet and have no problems with functioning openly in the family and social contexts begin to appear. The specificity of Slovak fiction featuring the themes of non-heteronormativity lies mainly in the lack of works of a clearly emancipatory nature, the domination of stories focused on intimate relations between women, and only occasionally introducing gay or transgender themes.

The existence of fan fiction nowadays shows more progressive development especially in this digital era when people does not only use internet for communicating and socializing across time and space but they also show their creativity, one of them is by writing a fan fiction. By writing fan fiction in online platforms, people get the opportunity to express their interests and their identities. This opportunity is also obtained by minority groups such as LGBTQ+ where they can express their identity through fan fiction. LGBTQ+ community utilizes online platform as the tool that brings benefit for them. In this case, writing fan fiction in online platforms allows people to create the preferable representation of minority groups and empower them as the part of LGBTQ+ community. This phenomenon can be seen through a website named Asianfanfics.com which shows an increasing number of fan fictions especially the ones with lesbian related tags such as girl x girl, lesbian, and femslash. Particularly, through the femslash subgenre, people use fan fiction to question the heteronormativity. Regarding to this phenomenon, an interview was conducted by choosing three Asian American fan fiction writers from Asianfanfics.com as the interviewees. Furthermore, by using gender theory and intersectionality, this article focuses on how fan fiction becomes a safe space to express their sexual identities and how lesbian relationship is viewed by Asian families.

The article offers an analysis of the frequency and quality of LGBTQ+ representation in fictional podcasts. I examine how frequently and with what intent LGBTQ+ characters are included in this medium. This research aims to fill the gap in academic work on LGBTQ+ representation in podcasts. Though scholars note an increase in representation in mainstream media, LGBTQ+ media consumers, especially young people, still look to other sources for validation of their identities. Many LGBTQ+ people look to fictional podcasts as a source of quality representation, especially because podcasts are small-scale and rely on the funding, and thus the opinion, of listeners (Bottomley, 2015). In this paper, I analyze four fictional podcast series for LGBTQ+ inclusivity. I note how many LGBTQ+ characters are included and in what proportion. I assess the quality of representation in four ways: diversity, depth, and the frequency and type of stereotypical LGBTQ+ tropes. My findings show a high frequency of LGBTQ+ characters and diversity of personalities and backgrounds, opportunities for these characters to express their sexual and/or gender identities as well as LGBTQ+ trope subversions. Thus, we see that fictional podcasts, as a medium that sustains itself by listeners’ patronage, present stories that their audience can relate to. As a result, fictional podcasts create more niche stories that make connections with smaller demographics of media consumers.

The article serves as an analysis of Familia, a Polish independent fiction podcast from 2020 produced by the Teraz Poliż theatre as a response to increase of state supported homophobic propaganda in the recent years. By pointing out similarities and differences between the podcast in question and mainstream Polish audio series, as well as drawing comparisons to popular globally distributed independent audio fiction produced in English, the author aims to prove the unique position of Familia as a sole representative of a politically conscious podcast drama presenting a specifically Polish perspective on queer emancipation. The author then proceeds to analyse the narrative content of the podcast, presenting the ways in which the story plays with elements of traditional, Polish national identity, reframing them via a radical lens as potential symbolic tools for LGBTQ+ emancipation and antifascist resistance in everyday life, while at the same time warning of the limited scope of use for such tools.

The paper focuses on Mexican guerrilla leader and global rebel icon Subcommander Marcos, and in particular on his acquaintance with and affinity for detective fiction. More specifically, it explores his exposure to the genre and the influence it had upon him; his references to it in his communiqués; and his relationship with the detective novelists Manuel Vázquez Montalbán from Spain and Paco Ignacio Taibo II from Mexico. This study examines numerous communiqués and oral presentations by the Subcommander that mention Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories as well as Marcos and Taibo II’s co-authored highly-political crime novel, The Uncomfortable Dead. This novel, which represents Marcos’s longest piece of unified prose-writing and features his literary creation, the indigenous detective Elías Contreras, exhibits certain shared preoccupations on the part of Marcos, Montalbán and Taibo: namely, the detrimental impact of neoliberal globalisation, and the importance of historical memory in combatting it. Finally, the paper explores the factors that led Marcos to employ a crime novel as a major vehicle for conveying his socially inclusive, pro-indigenous, pro-ecology, pro-democracy, pro-female empowerment, pro-LGBTQ, anti-capitalist and anti-neoliberal globalisation political philosophy.

Par l’entremise d’un web-feuilleton, Anne Archet nous invite à repenser les interactions humaines au-delà des binarismes. Vie de licorne raconte les aventures de multiples personnages, liés les uns aux autres par le polyamour, la coparentalité, l’amitié et des pratiques sexuelles non normatives. Armée d’une palette où les couleurs de peau, les orientations sexuelles et les identités de genre des personnages s’unissent, Archet développe un processus de désinvisibilisation de minorités parfois – et même, souvent – oubliées dans l’acronyme LGBTQ+. Les anarchies relationnelles qu’elle dépeint, subvertissent l’espace virtuel pour créer une queertopie. En nous penchant sur ce processus et ces anarchies, nous analyserons la pluralité des voix qui participent d’une flexibilité des identités et des relations non binaires pour ensuite considérer les réactions face à cette pluralité. Il s’agira enfin de poser la question de la fiction et de la réalité qui déboulonnent tout cloisonnement.

In recent years, the success of Irish female authors and the increase of Irish Young Adult literature publications have contributed to a wider recognition of narratives of girlhood. Such is the case of Claire Hennessy’s YA fiction novel Like Other Girls, which focuses on the experiences of sixteen-year-old Lauren Carroll as she navigates being a queer young female in contemporary Ireland and deals with having an abortion in the pre-Repeal Republic. This article analyses Like Other Girls focusing on three key aspects depicted in the novel: female body and sexuality, the concept of an LGBTQ+ group as a support network for queer youth, and the experience of abortion in pre-Repeal Ireland. Such analysis is carried out with the objective of giving recognition of Irish girlhood, as well as acknowledging the importance of narratives where the female body, diverse sexualities and those concerns involved in growing up female in contemporary Ireland are depicted so that young girls can find a space to identify themselves.

<p><strong><em>The purpose of the study</em></strong><em> is to find out the specifics of the perception of the LGBTQ(IA+) community in books for Ukrainian adolescents.</em><em></em></p><p><strong><em>Research methodology. </em></strong><em>A survey was used to identify the respondents’ opinions on the topic. A number of assumptions were made. In particular: 1) such literature will be more interesting to young people; 2) respondents will believe that this topic should be presented in teenage literature because the world in general and Ukrainian society in particular are multifaceted and diverse, so it is normal to hear all voices; 3) realistic prose and genre publications will compete for readers’ attention; 4) such books will be in demand if they are primarily about an interesting story. Accordingly, our task was to verify these assumptions. Based on this, we created a questionnaire of 7 questions: 2 open-ended questions and 5 with possible answers (+ «other» option). The «Teenage Books on an Important Topic» survey was conducted on November 10–13, 2023, using the snowball method with the help of Google Forms. A total of 145 respondents were interviewed. To process the information received, the following methods of generalization and analysis of information were used: systematization, grouping, qualitative (text analysis, classification) and quantitative (digital data) methods of data interpretation. The results are presented as a detailed verbal description. </em><em></em></p><p><strong><em>Results.</em></strong><em> It was found that the vast majority of respondents are young people living in large cities. 96.6% of respondents believe that the topic of the LGBTQ(IA+) community <strong>should be</strong> represented (including a balanced representation) in Ukrainian teen literature. 3.4% of respondents believe that it <strong>should not be</strong> represented. According to the key messages, the following groups can be distinguished from the category «<strong>should be</strong> represented» because it: 1: 1) promotes awareness of adolescents about the topic of the queer community, overcoming prejudice and stigma; 2) helps to understand that the orientation of people who are part of the queer community is a variant of the norm, and it is the norm that should be accepted by all members of society; 3) promotes the development of a culture of tolerance, gender equality, self-awareness, and self-acceptance by any member of society; 4) promotes cultural identification and representation of adolescents belonging to the queer community; 5) makes it clear that literature should cover all aspects of life; 6) is a reality for many adolescents; 7) because the niche needs to be filled. The arguments that the topic «<strong>should not be</strong> represented» include personal rejection; stereotypical understanding of the «usefulness of literature/art»; misunderstanding of the role of cultural identification; and the traditional accusation of the threat to the institution of the «traditional» family.</em><em></em></p><p><em>Only 55 respondents were able to name certain works from this segment by 27 foreign and 8 Ukrainian authors, and there is no distinction between books by age categories. On the Ukrainian book market, publications on the topic are represented by two genres: science fiction and fantasy and realistic prose. Annotations to publications containing elements of queer culture rarely mention this. Indirect and disguised/metaphorical/allusive references dominate.</em><em></em></p><p><em>Almost all respondents are ready to buy books that cover the topic of queer culture, among other topics. However, 4% of respondents would not buy or read such books under any circumstances. Thus, the results confirm all our assumptions.</em><em></em></p><p><em>It should also be noted that the Ukrainian book market is dominated by translated editions. In addition, we can assume that for Ukrainian authors and publishers (in order to avoid being judged), the best way to present the topic of the LGBTQ(IA+) community in books for Ukrainian adolescents would be to present it through well-written and published interesting/important stories in which characters belonging to the queer community act on an equal basis with all other characters and this is justified and is the norm.</em><em></em></p><p><strong><em>Novelty. </em></strong><em>This is the first niche audience study of the perception of the specifics of the representation of the LGBTQ(IA+) community in books for Ukrainian adolescents.</em><em></em></p><p><strong><em>Practical importance.</em></strong><em> The obtained results can be used in the process of forming publishing portfolios of Ukrainian publishing houses; promoting reading; teaching disciplines related to teenage literature, in particular, the author will include the data obtained in the content of the author’s course «Fiction Text from A to Z» and the module «Teenage Literature» for students majoring in 061 «Journalism» (curriculum «Publishing and Media Editing», «Media Production», «Journalism and Social Communication», «Advertising and Public Relations»).</em><em></em></p><p><strong><em>Key words:</em></strong><em> LGBTQ(IA+), queer community, queer history, queer culture, reading, teenage literature.</em></p>

In recent years, there has been an exponential increase in the number of LGTBIQ+ characters and storylines appearing in serialized fiction in the United States. This has gained importance due to the effects of media discourses on social imaginaries with regard to the sexual diversity of a community that suffers a high degree of social, political and labor discrimination. The objective is to critically analyze which are the general trends in recent years. Hence, this research is based on a critical discourse analysis of fictional series from the last decade, from two levels: first, the macro-level, in which the discourse around which the storylines are based is analyzed; and a second micro-level, which addresses the issues of lexicalization, focus and conceptual polarization. The results suggest the existence of a dual pattern in these characters, whereby they are based within the construction of a homonormative narrative and/or otherwise placed in marginal or socially excluded settings. Moreover, many traditionally common stereotypes are maintained, and sexual identity and orientation continue to feature prominently among the main story arcs of these characters. It is thus concluded that quantitative growth is insufficient if it is not accompanied by greater normalization.

Despite the increasing societal acceptance of homosexual individuals, the perception of homosexuality by heterosexual individuals is polluted by personal bias. My study observed the interaction between 422 heterosexuals and the homosexual community. First, my subjects self reported their beliefs on the determinant of sexual orientation (genetic or lifestyle). Next, they took the Activism Orientation (AO) and Sexual Prejudice (SP) Scales as a baseline measure of their relationship with members homosexual community. Subjects were randomly assigned to listen to an interview of two fictional homosexual individuals that spoke of life experience which either supported or contradicted the subjects’ self reported beliefs. Additionally, subjects were assigned to a high or low empathy condition toward the interviewee. After listening to the interview, subjects were given the choice to allocate $0 - $8,000 in support of a pro - LGBT charity. Subjects then retook the AO and SP scales to measure for significant changes in perception of homsexuals after the fictional scenario. Results indicated a significant decrease in the AO of subjects that viewed interviews that contradicted their beliefs. Additionally, subjects assigned to the low empathy condition donated significantly larger amounts. The present study has two main implications: Heterosexual individuals’ generalize their advocacy toward the LGBT community based on the actions of a singular homosexual. Furthermore, many activists naturally approach issues regarding social justice from a place of empathy, it is more sustainable to approach social justice movements from a logical perspective to allow for more meaningful and long term participation in a social justice movement.

Employed by libraries across the globe since its conception in 1876, the Dewey Decimal Classification System (DDC) is meant to organize non-fiction materials so they can be easily shelved, retrieved, and discovered by all who access them. Although this knowledge organization system uses Arabic numerals to categorize information, the system is far from objective; the assignment of meaning to those numbers introduces bias, especially when it comes to categorizing identities. Partially due to the time and place of its invention as well as the personal prejudices held by its creator, Melvil Dewey, in practice, the DDC marginalizes the vast majority of knowledge regarding any identities that deviate from the Christian, white, cisgender, heteronormative man. This marginalization takes many forms, including the assignment of a disproportionately small divisions (or sections) for certain racial and/or religious groups, the exclusion and delegitimization of some religious identities, and the derogatory naming of specific groups of people. Notably, the ways in which materials in public libraries are organized and presented can significantly affect how the knowledge they convey is understood. And so, the biases in the organization of knowledge concerning certain racial, religious, and LGBTQ+ minorities can negatively impact the social attitudes of the community that library serves. However, neither the DDC nor the public library are static, in fact, they act as reflections of our ever-changing social beliefs; the spheres of knowledge organization and of public knowledge are constantly reinforcing and reverberating off of one another, working in tandem to shape our perception of identity and difference.

Introduction: Doctor Who's “Wilderness Years”1989 saw the cancellation of the BBC's long-running science fiction television series Doctor Who (1965 -). The 1990s were largely bereft of original Doctor Who television content, leading fans to characterise that decade as the “wilderness years” for the franchise (McNaughton 194). From another perspective, though, the 1990s was an unprecedented time of production for Doctor Who media. From 1991 to 1997, Virgin Publishing was licensed by the BBC's merchandising division to publish a series of original Doctor Who novels, which they produced and marketed as a continuation of the television series (Gulyas 46). This series of novels, Doctor Who: The New Adventures (commonly referred to as “the Virgin New Adventures” by fans) proved popular enough to support a monthly release schedule, and from 1994 onwards, a secondary "Missing Adventures" series.Despite their central role in the 1990s, however, many fans have argued that the Doctor Who novels format makes them either less "canonical" than the television series, or completely "apocryphal" (Gulyas 48). This fits with a general trend in transmedia properties, where print-based expansions or spin-offs are generally considered less official or authentic than those that are screen-based (Hills 223). This article argues that the openness of the series to contributions from fan writers – and also some of the techniques and approaches prioritised in fan fiction - resulted in the Virgin range of Doctor Who novels having an unusually significant impact on the development and evolution of the franchise as a whole when compared to the print-based transmedia extensions of other popular series’. The article also argues that the tonal and stylistic influence of the New Adventures novels on the revived Doctor Who television series offers an interesting counter-example to the usually strict hierarchies of content that are implied in Henry Jenkins's influential model of transmedia storytelling. Transmedia StorytellingJenkins uses the term “transmedia storytelling” to describe the ways in which media franchises frequently expand beyond the format they originate with, potentially encompassing television series, films, games, toys, comics and more (Jenkins “Transmedia 202”). In discussing this paradigm, Jenkins notes the ways in which contemporary productions increasingly prioritise “integration and coordination” between the different forms of media (Jenkins Convergence Culture 105). As Jenkins argues, “most discussions of transmedia place a high emphasis on continuity – assuming that transmedia requires a high level of coordination and creative control and that all of the pieces have to cohere into a consistent narrative or world” (Jenkins “Transmedia 202”). Due to this increased emphasis on continuity, the ability to decide which media will be considered as “canonical” within the story-world of the franchise becomes an important one. Where previously questions of canon had been largely confined to fan discussions, debates and interpretive readings of media texts (Jenkins Textual Poachers 102-104), the proprietors of franchises in a transmedia economy have an interest in proactively defining and policing the canon. Designating a particular piece of media as a “canonical” expansion or spinoff of its parent text can be a useful marketing tool, as it creates the expectation that it will provide an important contribution. Correspondingly, declaring that a particular set of media texts is no longer canonical can make the franchise more accessible and allow the authors of new material more creative freedom (Proctor and Freeman 238-9).While Jenkins argues that a reliance on “one single source or ur-text” (“Transmedia 101”) is counter to the spirit of transmedia storytelling, Pillai notes that his emphasis on cohesiveness across diverse media tends to implicitly prioritise the parent text over its various offshoots (103-4). As the parent text establishes continuity and canon, any transmedia supplements are obligated to remain consistent with it, but this is often a one-sided and hierarchical relationship. For example, in the Star Wars transmedia franchise, the film series is considered crucial in establishing the canon; and transmedia supplements are obliged to remain consistent with it in order to be recognised as authentic. The filmmakers, however, are largely free to ignore or contradict the contributions of spin-off books.Hills notes that the components of transmedia franchises are often arranged into “transmedial hierarchies” (223), where screen-based media like films, television series and video games are assigned dominance over print-based productions like comics and novels. This hierarchy means that print-based works typically have a less secure place within the canon of transmedia franchises, despite often contributing a disproportionately large quantity of narratives and concepts (Guynes 143). Using the Star Wars Expanded Universe as an example, he notes a tendency whereby “franchise novels” are generally considered as disposable, and are easily erased or decanonised despite significantly long, carefully interwoven and coordinated periods of storytelling (143-5). Doctor Who as a Transmedia FranchiseWhile questions of canon are frequently debated and discussed among Doctor Who fans, it is less easy to make absolutist distinctions between canonical and apocryphal texts in Doctor Who than it is in other popular transmedia franchises. Unlike comparable transmedia productions, Doctor Who has traditionally lacked a singular authority over questions of canon and consistency in the manner that Jenkins argues for in his implicitly hierarchical conception of transmedia storytelling (Convergence Culture 106). Where franchises like Star Wars, Star Trek or The X-Files have been guided by creator-figures who either exert direct control over their various iterations or oblige them to remain broadly consistent with their original vision, Doctor Who has generally avoided this focus; creative control has passed between various showrunners and production teams, who have been largely free to establish their own style and tone.Furthermore, the franchise has traditionally favoured a largely self-contained and episodic style of storytelling; and different storylines and periods from its long history often contradict one another. For these reasons, Booth suggests that the largely retroactive attempts on the part of fans and critics to read the entire series as the type of transmedia production that Jenkins advocates for (i.e. an internally consistent narrative of connected stories) are counter-productive. He argues that Doctor Who is perhaps best understood not as a continuing series but as a long-running anthology, where largely autonomous stories and serials can be grouped into distinct “periods” of resemblance in terms of style and subject matter (198-206).As Britton argues, when appreciating Doctor Who as franchise, there is no particular need to assign primary importance to the parent media. Since its first season in 1965, the Doctor Who television series has been regularly supplemented by other media in the form of comics, annuals, films, stage-plays, audio-dramas, and novelisations. Britton maintains that as the transmedia works follow the same loosely connected, episodic structure as the television series, they operate as equally valid or equally disposable components within its metanarrative (1-9). Doctor Who writer Paul Cornell argues that given the accommodating nature of the show’s time-travel premise (which can easily accommodate the inconsistencies that Jenkins argues should be avoided in transmedia storytelling), and in the absence of a singular revered creator-figure or authority, absolutist pronouncements on canon from any source are unnecessary and exclusionary, either delegitimising texts that the audience may value, or insisting on familiarity with a particular text in order for an experience of the media to be considered “legitimate”. The Transmedia Legacy of the Virgin New AdventuresAs the Virgin Doctor Who novels are not necessarily diminished by either their lack of a clear canonical status or their placement as a print work within a screen-focused property, they can arguably be understood as constituting their own distinct “period” of Doctor Who in the manner defined by Booth. This claim is supported by the ways in which the New Adventures distinguish themselves from the typically secondary or supplemental transmedia extensions of most other television franchises.In contrast with the one-sided and hierarchical relationship that typically exists between the parent text and its transmedia extensions (Pillai 103-4), the New Adventures range did not attempt to signal their authenticity through stylistic and narrative consistency with their source material. Virgin had already published a long series of novelisations of story serials from the original television series under its children’s imprint, Target, but from their inception the New Adventures were aimed at a more mature audience. The editor of the range, Peter Darvill-Evans, observed that by the 1990s, Doctor Who’s dedicated fan base largely consisted of adults who had grown up with the series in the 1970s and 1980s rather than the children that both the television series and the novelisations had traditionally targeted (Perryman 23). The New Adventures were initially marketed as being “too broad and deep for the small screen” (Gulyas 46), positioning them as an improvement or evolution rather than an attempt to imitate the parent media or to compensate for its absence.By comparison, most other 1990s print-based supplements to popular screen franchises tended to closely mimic the style, tone and storytelling structure of their source material. For example, the Star Wars "Expanded Universe" series of novels (which began in 1991) were subject to strict editorial oversight to ensure they remained consistent with the films and were initially marketed as "film-like events" as a way of emphasising their equivalence to the original media (Proctor and Freeman 226). The Virgin New Adventures were also distinctive due to their open submission policy (which actively encouraged submissions from fan writers who had not previously achieved conventional commercial publication) alongside work from "professional" authors (Perryman 24). This policy began because Darvill-Evans noted the ability, high motivation and deep understanding of Doctor Who possessed by fan writers (Bishop) and it proved essential in establishing the more mature approach that the series was aiming for. After three indifferently received novels from professional authors, the first work from a fan author, Paul Cornell’s Timewyrm: Revelation (1991) became highly popular, due to its more grounded, serious and complex exploration of the character of the Doctor and their human companion. Following the success of Cornell’s novel, the series began to establish its own distinctive tone, emphasising gritty urban settings, character development and interpersonal drama, and the exploration of moral ambiguities and social and political issues that would have not been permissible in the original television series (Gulyas 46-8).Works by previously unpublished fan authors came to dominate the range to such an extent that the New Adventures has been described as “licensing professionally produced fan fiction” (Perryman 23). This trajectory established the New Adventures as an unusual hybrid text, combining the sanction of an official license with the usually unofficial phenomenon of fan custodianship. The cancellation of a television series (as experienced by Doctor Who in 1989) often allows its fan community to take custodianship of it in a variety of ways (McNoughton 194). While a series is being broadcast, fans are often constructed as elite but essentially ”powerless” readers, whose interpretations and desires can easily be contradicted or ignored by the series creators (Tulloch and Jenkins 141). With cancellation and a diminishing mass audience, fans become the custodians of the series and its memory. Their interpretations can no longer be overwritten, and they become the principle market for official merchandise and transmedia extensions (McNoughton 194-6).Also, fans can explore and fulfil their desires for the narrative direction and tone of the series, through the “cottage industries” of fan-created merchandise (196) and “gift economies” of fan fiction (Flegal and Roth 258), without being impeded or overruled by official developments in the parent media. This movement towards fan custodianship and production became more visible during the 1990s, as digital technology allowed for rapid communication, connection and exchange (Coppa 53). The Virgin New Adventures range arguably operated as a meeting point between officially sanctioned commercial spin-off media and the fan-centric industries of production that work to prolong the life and memory of a cancelled television series. Indeed, the direct inclusion of fan authors and the techniques and approaches associated with fan fiction likely helped to establish the deeper, more mature interpretation of Doctor Who offered by the New Adventures.As Stein and Busse observe, a recurring feature of fan fiction has been a focus on exploring the inner lives of the characters from its source media, and adding depth and complexity to their relationships (196-8). Furthermore, the successful New Adventures fan authors tended to offer support and encouragement to each other via their informal networks, which affected the development of the series as a transmedia production (Perryman 24). Flegal and Roth note that in contrast to often solitary and individualistic forms of “professional” and “literary” writing, the composition of fan fiction emerges out of collegial, supportive and reciprocal communities (265-8). The meeting point that the Virgin New Adventures provided between professional writing practice and the attitudes and approaches common to the types of fan fiction that were becoming more prominent in the nineties (Coppa 53-5) helped to shape the evolution of Doctor Who as a franchise.Where previous Doctor Who stories (regardless of the media or medium) had been largely isolated from each other, the informal fan networks that connected the New Adventures authors allowed and encouraged them to collaborate more closely, ensuring consistency between the instalments and plotting out multi-volume story-arcs and character development. Where the Star Wars Expanded Universe series of novels ensured consistency through extensive and often intrusive top-down editorial control (Proctor and Freeman 226-7), the New Adventures developed this consistency through horizontal relationships between authors. While Doctor Who has always been a transmedia franchise, the Virgin New Adventures may be the first point where it began to fully engage with the possibilities of the coordinated and consistent transmedia storytelling discussed by Jenkins (Perryman 24-6). It is notable that this largely developed out of the collaborative and reciprocal relationships common to communities of fan-creators rather than through the singular and centralised control that Jenkins advocates.While the Virgin range of Doctor Who novels ended long before the revival of the television series in 2005, its influence on the style, tone and subject matter of the new series has been noted. As Perryman argues, the emphasis on more cohesive story-arcs and character development between episodes has been inherited from the New Adventures (24). The 2005 series also followed the Virgin novels in presenting the Doctor’s companions with detailed backgrounds and having their relationships shift and evolve, rather than remaining static like they did in the original series. The more distinctly urban focus of the new series was also likely shaped by the success of the New Adventures (Haslop 217); its well-publicised emphasis on inclusiveness and diversity was likewise prefigured by the Virgin novels, which were the first Doctor Who media to include non-Anglo and LGBQT companions (McKee "How to tell the difference" 181-2). It is highly unusual for a print-based transmedia extension to have this level of impact. Indeed, one of the most visible and profitable transmedia initiatives that began in the 1990s, the Star Wars Expanded Universe novels (which like the New Adventures was presented as an officially sanctioned continuation of the original media), was unceremoniously decanonised in 2014, and the interpretations of Star Wars characters and themes that it had developed over more than a decade of storytelling were almost entirely disregarded by the new films (Proctor and Freeman 235-7). The comparably large influence that the New Adventures had on the development of its franchise indicates the success of its fan-centric approach in developing a more relationship-driven and character-focused interpretation of its parent media.The influence of the New Adventures is also felt more directly through the continuing careers of its authors. A number of the fan writers who achieved their first commercial publication with the New Adventures (e.g. Paul Cornell, Gareth Roberts, Mark Gatiss) went on to write scripts for the new series. The first showrunner, Russell T. Davies, was the author of the later novels, Damaged Goods (1997), and the second, Steven Moffat, had been an active member of Doctor Who fan communities that discussed and promoted the Virgin books (Bishop). As the former New Adventures author Kate Orman notes, this movement from writing usually secondary franchise novels to working on and having authority over the parent media is almost unheard of (McKee “Interview with Kate Orman” 138), and speaks to the success of the combination of fan authorship and official licensing and support found in the New Adventures. As Hadas notes, the chief difference between the new series of Doctor Who and its classic version is that former and long-term fans of the series are now directly involved in its production, thus complicating Tullouch and Jenkin’s assessment of Doctor Who fans as a “powerless elite” (141). ConclusionThe continuing influence of the nineties New Adventures novels can still be detected in the contemporary series. These novels operate with regard to the themes, preoccupations and styles of storytelling that this range pioneered within the Doctor Who franchise, and which developed directly out of its innovative and unusual strategy of giving official sanction and editorial support to typically obscured and subcultural modes of fan writing. The reductive and exclusionary question of canon can be avoided when considering the above novels. These transmedia productions are important to the evolution and development of the media franchise as a whole. In this respect, the Virgin New Adventures operate as their own distinctive, legitimate and influential "period" within Doctor Who, demonstrating the creative potential of an approach to transmedia storytelling that deemphasises strict hierarchies of content and control and can readily include the contributions of fan producers.ReferencesBishop, David. “Four Writers, One Discussion: Andy Lane, Paul Cornell, Steven Moffat and David Bishop.” Time Space Visualiser 43 (March 1995). 1 Nov. 2018 <http://doctorwho.org.nz/archive/tsv43/onediscussion.html>.Booth, Paul. “Periodising Doctor Who.” Science Fiction Film and Television 7.2 (2014). 195-215.Britton, Piers D. TARDISbound: Navigating the Universes of Doctor Who. London: I.B. Tauris and Company, 2011.Coppa, Francesca. “A Brief History of Media Fandom.” Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet. Eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse. Jefferson NC: McFarland and Company, 2009. 41-59.Cornell, Paul. “Canonicity in Doctor Who”. PaulConell.com. 10 Feb. 2007. 30 Nov. 2018 <https://www.paulcornell.com/2007/02/canonicity-in-doctor-who/>.Doctor Who. British Broadcasting Corporation, 1965 to present.Flegal, Monica, and Jenny Roth. “Writing a New Text: the Role of Cyberculture in Fanfiction Writers’ Transition to ‘Legitimate’ Publishing.” Contemporary Women’s Writing 10.2 (2016): 253-270.Gulyas, Aaron. “Don’t Call It a Comeback.” Doctor Who in Time and Space: Essays on Themes, Characters, History and Fandom, 1963-2012. Ed. Donald E. Palumbo and C.W. Sullivan. Jefferson NC: McFarland and Company, 2013. 44-63.Guynes, Sean. “Publishing the New Jedi Order: Media Industries Collaboration and the Franchise Novel.” Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling. Eds. Sean Guynes and Dan Hassler-Forest. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2017. 143-154.Hadas, Leora. “Running the Asylum? Doctor Who’s Ascended Fan-Showrunners.” Deletion. 23 June 2014. 30 Nov. 2018 <http://www.deletionscifi.org/episodes/episode-5/running-asylum-doctor-whos-ascended-fan-showrunners/>.Haslop, Craig. “Bringing Doctor Who Back for the Masses: Regenerating Cult, Commodifying Class.” Science Fiction Film and Television 9.2 (2016): 209-297.Hills, Matt. “From Transmedia Storytelling to Transmedia Experience: Star Wars Celebration as a Crossover/Hierarchical Space.” Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling. Eds. Sean Guynes and Dan Hassler-Forest. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2017. 213-224.Jenkins III, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge. 1992.———. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York UP, 2006.———. “Transmedia Storytelling 101.” Confessions of an Aca-Fan. 22 Mar. 2007. 30 Nov. 2018 <http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html>.———. “Transmedia Storytelling 202: Further Reflections.” Confessions of an Aca-Fan. 1 Aug. 2011. 30 Nov. 2018 <http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2011/08/defining_transmedia_further_re.html>.McKee, Alan. "How to Tell the Difference between Production and Consumption: A Case Study in Doctor Who Fandom." Cult Television. Eds. Sara Gwenllian-Jones and Richard M. Pearson. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2004: 167-186.———. “Interview with Kate Orman: Dr Who Author.” Continuum 19.1 (2005): 127-139. McNaughton, Douglas. “Regeneration of a Brand: The Fan Audience and the 2005 Doctor Who Revival.” Ruminations, Peregrinations, and Regenerations: A Critical Approach to Doctor Who. Ed. Christopher J. Hansen. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010. 192-208.Perryman, Neil. “Doctor Who and the Convergence of Media: A Case Study in ‘Transmedia Storytelling’.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 14.1 (2008): 21-39.Pillai, Nicolas. “’What Am I Looking at, Mulder?’ Licensed Comics and the Freedoms of Transmedia Storytelling.” Science Fiction Film and Television 6.1 (2013): 101-117.Porter, Lynnette. The Doctor Who Franchise: American Influence, Fan Culture, and the Spinoffs. Jefferson NC: McFarland and Company, 2018.Procter, William, and Matthew Freeman. “’The First Step into a Smaller World’: The Transmedia Economy of Star Wars.” Revisiting Imaginary Worlds: A Subcreation Studies Anthology. Ed. Mark J.P. Wolf. New York: Routledge. 2016. 223-245.Stein, Louisa, and Kristina Busse. “Limit Play: Fan Authorship between Source Text, Intertext, and Context.” Popular Communication 7.4 (2009): 192-207.Tullouch, John, and Henry Jenkins III. Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Star Trek and Doctor Who. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Introduction: Serial Space“It feels …like the edge of the world; far more remote than it actually is, perhaps because it looks at such immensity” (Godden “Black,” 38). This is the priest’s warning to Sister Clodagh in Rumer Godden’s 1939 novel Black Narcissus. The young, inexperienced Clodagh leads a group of British nuns through the Indian Himalayas and onto a remote mountain top above Mopu. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger adapted Godden’s novel into the celebrated feature film, Black Narcissus (1947). Following the novel, the film narrates the nuns’ mission to establish a convent, school, and hospital for the local population. Yet, immensity moves in mysterious ways. Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr) loses her managerial grip. Sister Philippa (Flora Robson) cultivates wild flowers instead of vegetables. Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron) sheds nun’s attire for red lipstick and a Parisian dress. The young Indian woman Kanchi (Jean Simmons) becomes a force of libidinous disturbance. At the twilight of the British Empire, white, western nuns experience the psychical effects of colonialism at the precipice. Taking such cues from Pressburger and Powell’s film, Michelle Williams Gamaker, an artist, filmmaker, and scholar, responds to Black Narcissus, both film and novel. She does so through a radical interpretation of her own. Gamaker William’s 24-minute film, The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten (forthcoming, London 2018) is a longer “short,” which breaks the mould of what scholar Linda Hutcheon would term an “adaptation” (2006). For Hutcheon, there is a double “mode of engagement” between an original work and its adapted form (22). On the one hand, there is a “transcoding” (22). This involves “transporting” characters from a precedent work to its adapted form (11). On the other, there is an act of “creative interpretation” (22). The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten transports yet recreates the Indian “beggar girl” Kanchi, played by a “blacked up” white Hollywood actor Jean Simmons (Black Narcissus), into Williams Gamaker’s contemporary Kanchi, played by Krishna Istha. In this 2018 instalment, Kanchi is an Asian and transgender protagonist of political articulacy. Hence, Williams Gamaker’s film engages a double tactic of both transporting yet transforming Kanchi, as well as Sisters Clodagh and Philippa, from the feature film into The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten. To analyse Williams Gamaker’s film, I will make a theoretical jump off the precipice, stepping from Hutcheon’s malleable concept of adaptation into a space of “trans-serial” narrative.In what follows, I shall read The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten as an “episode” in a serial. The prior episodes, Williams Gamaker’s House of Women (London 2017, Berlin 2018) is a short, fictional, and surreal documentary about casting the role of Kanchi. It can be read as the next episode in Kanchi’s many incarnations. The relationship between Sister Clodagh (Kelly Hunter as voiceover) and Kanchi in House of Women develops from one of confrontation to a transgender kiss in the climatic beat of The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten. Williams Gamaker’s film can be read as one of a series which is itself inflected with the elements of a “trans-serial.” Henry Jenkins argues that “transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels” (emphasis in original, “Transmedia”). I use the word “trans” to define the gap between novelistic texts and film. Throughout Williams Gamaker’s series, she uses many textual citations from Godden’s novel, and dialogue from Pressburger and Powell’s film. In other words, verbal elements as well as filmic images are adapted in Hutcheon’s sense and transmediated in Jenkins’s sense. To build the “serial” concept for my analysis requires re-working concepts from television studies. Jason Mittell introduces “narrative complexity” as the “redefinition of episodic forms under serial narration” (“Narrative,” 32). In serial TV, characters and narratives develop over a sequence of episodes and seasons. In serial TV, missing one episode can thwart the viewer’s reception of later ones. Mittell’s examples reveal the plasticity of the narrative complexity concept. He mentions TV series that play games with the audience’s expectations. As Mittell points out, Seinfeld has reflexive qualities (“Narrative,” 35) and Twin Peaks mixes genres (“Narrative,” 33). I would add that Lynch’s creative liberties offered characters who could appear and disappear while leaving their arcs hanging intriguingly unresolved. The creative possibilities of reflexivity via seriality, of characters who appear and disappear or return in different guises, are strategies that underpin William’s Gamaker’s short film serial. The third in her trilogy, The Eternal Return (in post-production 2018) fictionalises the life of Sabu, the actor who played the General’s son in Black Narcissus. Once again, the protagonist, this time male, is played by Krishna Istha, a non-binary transgender actor who, by taking all the lead roles in William’s Gamaker’s trilogy, grows over the serial as a malleable ethnic and transgender subject. Importantly, The Eternal Return carries residues of the characters from The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten by casting the same team of actors again (Charlotte Gallagher and myself Catherine Lord), and switching their genders. Istha played Kanchi in the previous two episodes. The General’s son, played by Sabu, courted Kanchi in Black Narcissus. In The Eternal Return, Istha crosses the character and gender boundary by playing Sabu. Such casting tactics subvert the gender and colonial hegemonies inherent in Pressburger and Powell’s film.The reflexive and experimental approach of Williams Gamaker’s filmmaking deploys serial narrative tactics for its political goals. Yet, the use of “serial” needs to be nuanced. Glen Creeber sets out three terms: “episodic,” “series” and “serial.” For Creeber, a series provides continuous storylines in which the connection between episodes is strong. In the serial format, the connection between the episodes is less foregrounded. While it is not possible to enjoy stand-alone episodes in a serial, at the same time, serials produce inviting gaps between episodes. Final resolutions are discouraged so that there are greater narrative possibilities for later seasons and the audience’s own game of speculative storytelling (11).The emerging “serial” gaps between Williams Gamaker’s episodes offer opportunities for political interpretation. From House of Women and The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten, Kanchi develops an even stronger political voice. Kanchi’s character arc moves from the wordless obedience of Pressburger and Powell’s feature to the transgender voice of post-colonial discourse in House of Women. In the next episode, The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten, Kanchi becomes Clodagh’s guide both politically, spiritually, and erotically.I will read The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten as both my primary case-study and as the third episode in what I shall theorise to be a four-part serial. The first is the feature film Black Narcissus. After this is Williams Gamaker’s House of Women, which is then followed by The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten, my central case study here. There may be immediate objections to my argument that Williams Gamaker’s series can be read by treating Pressburger and Powell’s feature as the first in the series. After all, Godden’s novel could be theorised as the camouflaged pilot. Yet, a series or serial is defined as such when it is in the same medium. Game of Thrones (2011-) is a TV series that adapts George R.R. Martin’s novel cycle, but the novels are not episodes. In this regard, I follow Hutcheon’s emphasis on theorising adapted works as forged between different media, most commonly novels to films. The adaptive “deliveries” scatter through The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten with an ecological precision.Eco SeriesEcological descriptions from Godden’s novel and Pressburger and Powell’s mise-en-scene are performed in The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten through Kelly Hunter’s velvety voiceover as it enjoys a painterly language: butterflies daub the ferns with “spots of ochre, scarlet, and lemon sherbet.” Hutcheon’s term transcoding usefully describes the channelling of particles from the novelist’s text into an intensified, ecological language and cinematic mise-en-scene. The intensification involves an ingestion of Godden’s descriptive prose, which both mimics and adds an adjectival and alliterative density. The opening descriptions of the nuns’ arrival in Mopu is a case in point. In the novel, the grooms joke about the nuns’ habits appearing as “snows, tall and white” (Godden “Black,” 1). One man remarks that they look like “a row of teeth” (Godden “Black,” 2). Williams Gamaker resists shots of nuns as Godden described them, namely on Bhotiya ponies. Rather, projected onto a white screen is an image of white and red flowers slowly coming into focus. Kelly Hunter’s voiceover describes the white habits as a set of “pearly whites” which are “hungry for knowledge” and “eat into the landscape.” White, western nuns in white habits are metaphorically implied to be like a consuming mouth, eating into Indian territories and Indian people.This metaphor of colonial consumption finds its corollary in Godden’s memoirs where she describes the Pressburger, Powell, and Simons representation of Kanchi as “a basket of fruit, piled high and luscious and ready to eat” (“A House,” 24-5; 52). The nun’s quest colonially consumes Mopu’s natural environment. Presumably, nuns who colonially eat consume the colonised Other like fruit. The Kanchi of the feature film Black Narcissus is a supporting character, performed by Simmons as mute, feral and objectified. If Kanchi is to release herself from the “fruity” projections of sexism and racism, it will be through the filmmaker’s aesthetic and feminist tactic of ensuring that planets, trees, fruits and flowers become members of the film cast. If in episode 1 (Black Narcissus), plants and Asian subalterns are colonised, in episode 2, House of Women, these fruits and flowers turn up as smart, young Asian women actors with degrees in law and photography, ready to hold their own in the face of a faceless interviewer. In episode 3, The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten, it is important that Krishna Istha’s Kanchi, turning up like a magical character from another time and space (transformed from episode 1), commands the film set amidst an excess of flowers, plants and fruits. The visual overflow correlates with Kanchi’s assertiveness. Flowers and Kanchi know how to “answer back.”Like Black Narcissus the feature, The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten relies heavily on a mise-en-scene of horticultural and mountain ecology. Just as Michael Powell filmed at Pinewood and Leonardslee Gardens in East Sussex, Williams Gamaker used Rotherhithe’s Brunel Museum roof Gardens and Sands Film Studios. The lusciousness of Leonardslee is film-intertextually echoed in the floral exuberance of the 2018 shots of Rotherhithe. After the crew have set up the classroom, interwoven with Kelly Hunter’s voiceover, there is a hard cut to a full, cinematic shot of the Leonardslee garden (fig. 1).Then cutting back to the classroom, we see Kanchi calmly surveying the set, of which she is the protagonist, with a projection of an encyclopaedic display of the flowers behind her. The soundtrack plays the voices of young women students intoning the names of flowers from delphinium to lupens.These meta-filmic moments are supported by the film’s sharp juxtaposition between classroom and outdoor scenes. In Pressburger and Powell’s school scenes, Sister Ruth attempts to teach the young General how to conjugate the French verb “recevoir.” But the lesson is not successfully received. The young General becomes aphasic, Kanchi is predictably mute and the children remain demure. Will colonialism let the Other speak? One way to answer back in episode 3 is through that transgressive discourse, the language of flowers.In The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten, the young women study under Sister Clodagh and Sister Philippa (myself, Catherine Lord). The nuns teach botanical lists and their ecological contexts through rote learning. The young women learn unenthusiastically. What is highlighted is the ludicrous activity of repetition and abstractions. When knowledge becomes so objectified, so do natural environments, territories and people. Clodagh aligns floral species to British locations. The young women are relatively more engaged in the garden with Sister Philippa. They study their environment through sketching and painting a diverse range of flowers that could grow in non-British territory. Philippa is the now the one who becomes feral and silent, stroking stalks and petals, eschewing for the time being, the game of naming (fig. 2).However, lessons with colonial lexicons will be back. The young women look at screen projections of flowers. Sister Philippa takes the class through an alphabet: “D is for Dogbright … L is for Ladies’ Fingers.” Clodagh whirls through a list of long, Latin names for wild flowers in British Woodlands. Kanchi halts Clodagh’s act of associating the flowers with the British location, which colonizes them. Kanchi asks: “How many of us will actually travel, and which immigration border will test our botanical knowledge?” Kanchi then presents a radically different alphabet, including “Anne is African … Ian is Intersex … Lucy loves Lucy.” These are British names attributed to Africans, Arabs, and Asians, many of their identities revealed to be LGBQT-POC, non-binary, transgender, and on the move. Clodagh’s riposte is “How do you know you are not travelling already?” The flowers cannot be pinned down to one location. They cannot be owned by one nation.Like characters who travel between episodes, the travelling flowers represent a collision of spaces that undermine the hegemonies of race, gender and sexuality. In episode 1, Black Narcissus the feature film, the western nuns face the immensities of mountain atmosphere, ecology and an unfamiliar ethnic group. In episode 2, House of Women, the subalterns have transformed their role, achieving educational and career status. Such political and dramatic stakes are raised in episode 3, The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten. There is a strong focus on the overlapping oppressions of racial, colonial and ecological exploitation. Just as Kanchi has a character arc and serial development, so do plants, fauna, fruits, flowers and trees. ‘Post’-Space and Its AtmosphereThe British Empire colonised India’s ecological space. “Remember you and your God aren't on British Territory anymore” declares the auditioning Krishna Istha in House of Women. Kanchi’s calm, civil disobedience continues its migration into The Fruit is There to be Eaten between two simultaneously existing spaces, Mopu and Rotherhithe, London. According to literature scholar Brian McHale, postmodern worlds raise ontological questions about the dramatic space into which we are drawn. “Which” worlds are we in? Postmodern worlds can overlap between separate spaces and different temporalities (McHale 34-35). As McHale notes, “If entities can migrate across the semipermeable membrane that divides a fictional world from the real, they can also migrate between two different fictional worlds” (35).In The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten, the semipermeable membrane between it and Black Narcissus folds together the temporalities of 1947 and 2018, and the terrains of India and London. Sister Philippa tells a Kanchi seeking Mopu, that “My dear, you are already here.” This would seem odd as Sister Philippa describes the death of a young man close to Saint Mary’s Church, London. The British capital and woodlands and the Himalayas co-exist as intensified, inter-crossing universes that disrupt the membranes between both colonial and ecological space-time, or what I term “post-space.”Williams Gamaker’s post-spaces further develop Pressburger and Powell’s latent critique of post-colonialism. As film scholar Sarah Street has observed, Black Narcissus the film performs a “post-colonial” exploration of the waning British Empire: “Out of the persistence of the colonial past the present is inflected with a haunting resonance, creating gaps and fissures” (31). This occurs in Powell’s film in the initial Calcutta scenes. The designer Alfred Junge made “God shots” of the nuns at dinner, creating from them the iconic shape of a cross. This image produces a sense of over-exactness. Once in the mountains, it is the spirit of exactitude that deteriorates. In contrast, Williams Gamaker prefers to reveal the relative chaos of setting up her world. We watch as the crew dress the school room. Un-ceremoniously, Kanchi arrives in shorts before she picks up a floral dress bearing the label “Kanchi.” There is then a shot in which Kanchi purveys the organised set, as though she is its organiser (fig. 3).Post-spaces are rich in atmosphere. The British agent Dean tells Clodagh in Black Narcissus the film that the mountain “is no place to put a nunnery” due its “atmosphere.” In the climactic scene of The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten, Kanchi and Clodagh face two screens revealing the atmospheric projection of the high mountains, the black cut between them visible, like some shadowy membrane. Such aesthetic strategies continue Powell’s use of technical artifice. Street details the extensive labour of technical and craft work involved in creating the artificial world of Black Narcissus, its mountains, artificial colours, and hence atmosphere, all constructed at Pinewood studios. There was a vast amount of matte painting and painting on glass for special effects (19).William Gamaker’s screens (projection work by Sophie Bramley and Nick Jaffe) reflexively emphasise atmosphere as artifices. The atmosphere intensifies with the soundscape of mountain air and Wayne Urquhart’s original and haunting music. In Powell and Pressburger’s feature, Brian Easdale’s music also invokes a sense of mystery and vastness. Just as TV series and serials maintain musical and mise-scene-scene signatures from one episode to another, so too does Williams Gamaker reframe her precursor’s cinematic aesthetics with that of her own episode. Thus, serial as stylistic consistency is maintained between episodes and their post-spaces.At the edge of such spaces, Kanchi will scare Clodagh by miming a tight-rope walk across the mountain: it is both real and pretend, dramatic, but reflexively so. Kanchi walks a membrane between colliding worlds, between colonialism and its transgression. In this episode of extreme spirituality and eroticism, Kanchi reaches greater heights than in previous episodes, discoursing on the poetics of atmosphere: “… in the midst of such peaks, one can draw near what is truly placeless … the really divine.” Here, the membrane between the political and cultural regions and the mountains that eschew even the human, is about to be breached. Kanchi relates the legend of those who go naked in the snow. These “Abominable Men” are creatures who become phantoms when they merge with the mountain. If the fractures between locations are too spacious, as Kanchi warns, one can go mad. In this episode 3, Kanchi and Clodagh may have completed their journeys. In Powell and Pressburger’s interpretation, Sister Ruth discards nun’s attire for a Parisian, seductive dress and red lipstick. Yet, she does so for a man, Dean. However, the Sister Clodagh of 2018 is filmed in a very long take as she puts on an elegant dress and does her make-up. In a scene of philosophical intimacy with Kanchi, the newly dressed Clodagh confesses her experience of “immensity.” As they break through the erotic membrane separating their identities, both immersed in their full, queer, transgender kiss, all racial hierarchies melt into atmosphere (fig. 4).Conclusion: For a Pitch By making a film as one episode in a series, Williams Gamaker’s accomplishment is to enhance the meeting of narrative and political aims. As an arthouse film serial, The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten has enabled definitions of “serial” to migrate from the field of television studies. Between Hutcheon’s “adaptation” and Mittell and Creeber’s articulations of “narrative complexity,” a malleable concept for arthouse seriality has emerged. It has stretched the theoretical limits of what can be meant by a serial in an arthouse context. By allowing the notion of works “adapted” to occur between different media, Henry Jenkins’ broader term of “transmedia storytelling” (Convergence) can describe how particles of Godden’s work transmigrate through episodes 1, 2, and 3, where the citational richness emerges most in episodes 3, The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten.Because one novel informs all the episodes while each has entirely different narratives and genres, The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten is not a serial adaptation, as is Game of Thrones. It is an experimental serial inflected with trans-serial properties. Kanchi evolves into a postcolonial, transgender, ecological protagonist who can traverse postmodern worlds. Perhaps the witty producer in a pitch meeting might say that in its serial context, The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten is like a cross between two fantasy TV serials, still to be written: Transgender Peaks meets Kanchi Is the New Black. The “new black” is multifaceted and occupies multi-worlds in a post-space environment. ReferencesCreeber, Glen. Serial Television: Big Drama on the Small Screen. London: BFI, 2004.Godden, Rumer. 1939. Black Narcissus: A Virago Modern Classic. London: Hatchette Digital, 2013.———. A House with Four Rooms. New York: William Morrow, 1989. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd ed. New York: New York University Press, 2012.Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006.———. “Transmedia, 202: Further Reflections.” Confessions of an Aca-Fan 1 Aug. 2011. 1 May 2012 <http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2011/08/defining_transmedia_further_re.html>.McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. London: Routledge, 1987.Powell, Michael. A Life in Movies: An Autobiography. London: Heinemann, 1986.Mittell, Jason. “Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television.” The Velvet Light Trap 58 (Fall 2006): 29-40. Street, Sarah. Black Narcissus. London: I.B. Tauris, 2005.FilmographyBlack Narcissus. Dirs. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Pinewood Studios, 1947.House of Women. Dir. Michelle Williams Gamaker. Cinema Suitcase, 2017.The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten. Dir. Michelle Williams Gamaker. Cinema Suitcase, 2018.The Eternal Return. Dir. Michelle Williams Gamaker. Cinema Suitcase, 2018-2019.

Jeanette Winterson’s 2019 novel Frankissstein is a contemporary re-reading of Mary Shelley’s classic Gothic text Frankenstein that profoundly challenges ideas of what it means to be human in the present day, by drawing on posthuman ideas about the constitution of the self. In this novel, Winterson portrays various forms of ‘monsters’ such as AI, lifelike sex dolls and transgender embodiment. Drawing on both Frankenstein as a text and the infamous creation story of the novel, Winterson creates a deeply intertextual cast of characters that blurs the following: Ry (Mary Shelley), a transgender doctor, Ron Lord (Lord Byron), the creator of a line of sex bots, and Professor Stein (Frankenstein), a scientist interested in AI and cryopreservation. Framed by vignettes of Shelley’s composition of Frankenstein, these characters draw together a set of highly contemporary desires and anxieties about the relationship between the social and science, the ways in which matter is always articulated through both the discursive and the material, and how, to quote Karen Barad, “what often appears as separate entities (and separate sets of concerns) with sharp edges does not actually entail a relation of absolute exteriority at all” (“Posthumanist Performativity” 803). Winterson implicitly and explicitly explores ideas of the posthuman—for instance, in the novel Stein gives a lecture titled “The Future of Humans in a Post-Human World” (74)—and suggests that the future is one in which “binaries belong to our carbon-based past” (72), in ways both liberating and disturbing. While Stein talks about our posthuman future of overcoming even death with the zeal of an evangelist, Winterson undercuts this celebratory rhetoric by situating these emerging forms of self-making in a lineage of the monstrous—”Frankenstein was a vision of how life might be created—the first non-human intelligence” (27)—that suggests the posthuman itself to be a kind of monstrosity. For Winterson, the contemporary monster is one bound up in technologies of self-making, an ambivalent process of both promise and danger that entangles us with monstrosity: “Frankenstein in the monster ... the monster in Frankenstein” (130). Drawing on posthuman theory, I propose that we can read Winterson’s novel as suggesting that modern subjectivity in itself has become defined by hybridity, a mixing between human and non-human elements that problematises many of the boundaries of selfhood that Enlightenment humanism valourised for so long. As Donna Haraway famously said in her “Cyborg Manifesto”: late Twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert. (11) Against this historical backdrop, Winterson suggests that new forms of being human—or becoming posthuman—are emerging, in which sex, gender and sexuality have become profoundly entangled with various forms of biological and informational technology. “We’re still biology but we’re better biology” says Stein (113), suggesting that the future holds new forms of modifications of the body, including smart implants and the uploading of consciousness to computing systems. In situating transgender treatments, AI and sex-bots in a lineage of the monstrous that begins with Frankenstein, Winterson (as much as posthuman theorists), is interested in the way that new forms of technologies mean that all subjectivity has become monstrous itself. But what might it mean to be posthuman? Feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti has suggested that our post-Enlightenment, posthuman era is one in which the category of the human has become problematised. She says, “not all of us can say, with any degree of certainty, that we have always been human, or that we are only that” (1). For Braidotti, women, people of colour and LGBT people have never been accorded fully human status, and as such the rapid technological change that has challenged humanity as a category is to be embraced, if not precisely uncritically. She argues that posthuman subjectivity is notable for the way that it collapses the boundary between nature and culture, and for the interweaving between human and non-human elements in contemporary life. I want to suggest that one name for those subjects that Braidotti describes that ‘have never have been quite’ human is monster. The figure of the monster deployed by Winterson is one that haunts contemporary ideas of sex, gender, and sexuality. Nikita Mazurov has called the monster a “continuous, unstable project of both disassembly or ex-figuration and of unsanctioned coupling” (262), a posthuman praxis of “hybridity of form” that challenges state-sanctioned productions of the self. The monster challenges ideas of fixity, the metaphysics of presence and essence that created the humanist project. It is, in this sense, abject in the sense that Julia Kristeva famously described, as that which “disturbs identity, system, order [and] does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (4). The composition of the monster collapses such foundational binaries as male/female, gay/straight, dead/alive, human/machine, human/animal, black/white, and inside/outside. “The monster is one who lives in transition”, as Paul Preciado says (“Can the Monster Speak” 20). Monsters have therefore historically done profound cultural work, for as Jack Halberstam has said, “monsters have to be everything the human is not and, in producing the negative of human, these novels make way for the invention of human as white, male, middle class, and heterosexual” (22). As Frankissstein suggests, monstrous others continue to haunt contemporary subjectivity. Winterson suggests the human to be an embattled category—and here we must remember that one of the ways in which humanisation emerges is the easy identification of binary gender, as Judith Butler noted long ago in Bodies That Matter (xiii). Haraway anticipated the mainstreaming of the monster in her metaphor of the cyborg, which was, after all, “monstrous and illegitimate” (15), a post-gender, post-Oedipal figure built from the interaction between flesh and machine, nature and culture. The invention of the human, therefore, has become ever more a precarious thing in a posthuman world. Given her interest in gender and sexuality, one of the chief lenses through which Winterson has been read through is queer theory (Moore; Haslett; McAvan). With its portrayal of new forms of gendered and sexual subjectivity, Frankissstein can be productively read against more recent queer and trans theory that take a more posthuman approach to embodiment, rather than that of the linguistically-constructed, Butler-inflected queer theory, which has largely formed the critical context for Winterson’s work on sex and gender. While queer and posthuman theory are not completely coterminous with one another, both arguably take as their starting point a deconstruction of an image of the human which has historically been normatively considered white, male, heterosexual, and cissexual. Taking queer and trans theory into a material turn, Preciado has notably talked about what he calls a “pharmacopornographic” (Testo Junkie, 33) regime, in which globalised post-industrial capitalism runs on the “biomolecular” and “semiotic-technical” (33) industries that produce gendered and sexual subjectivity. Preciado polemically argues that contemporary capitalism is notable for its pervasive regime of pharmaceuticals that modify the body, and pornography that stimulates sexual desire (and here we might add the semiotic regime of sexuality on smartphones, through chat, photos, and dating apps like Tinder and Grindr). Capital, in this regime, has become “sexual capital” (40). As a result, what is a commonsense cis-normative understanding of transgender subjectivity, which relies upon an economy of medicalised body modification, can be said in Preciado’s analysis to constitute the truth of all subjectivity in the present given the ubiquity of pharmaceutical interventions like the contraceptive pill, Viagra, Prozac, and Ritalin. He says, “you think that you’re cis-females, but you take the Pill; or you think that you’re cis-males, but you take Viagra ... . You, you as well, you are the monster that testosterone is waking up in me” (393). The figure of the monster has been a trope of transgender studies since at least Susan Stryker’s “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix”, which explicitly draws upon Shelley’s Frankenstein as an antecedent for trans subjectivity, suggesting that we see trans bodies as profoundly unnatural, and that as a result, “like the monster, [trans people are] too often perceived as less than fully human due to the means of [their] embodiment” (245). Preciado suggests that the monstrosity popularly imagined to be the unique property of transgender bodies, their partiality and hybridity, is in fact more properly a universal condition of the biopolitical regimes that constitute contemporary life. Almost all of us take pills that modify our bodies and minds, almost all of us construct our sexualities through the semiotic—these non-human elements profoundly interweave with the human in new forms of universal monstrosity. It is perhaps therefore unsurprising that Winterson would also take up the figure of Frankenstein’s monster in her examination of contemporary forms of posthuman subjectivity. The character of Ry, a transgender doctor, is characterised in the novel as an exemplar of a broader cultural interest in self-making, stating that “it really is my body. I had it made for me” (122). This is a self-making that calls into question the construction of other selves, for as Ry says, “I am part of a small group of transgender medical professionals. Some of us are transhuman enthusiasts too. This isn’t surprising; we feel or have felt that we’re in the wrong body. We can understand the feeling that any-body is the wrong body” (114). As strongly as Preciado, the novel suggests that biomolecular and semiotic-technical regimes constitute all contemporary subjectivity, conditioning what is possible, materially and discursively. Far from being uniquely transgender, the desire to transform the body has become universal. Halberstam notes that “the monster always represents the disruption of categories, the destruction of boundaries, and the presence of impurities” (27). “I live with doubleness” says Ry (88), who is depicted as both a transgender man and non-binary. Winterson’s rendering of trans subjectivity suggests transgender to be a kind of both/and state, in between or troubling the sex/gender binary. This occurs in broad and occasionally problematic ways, as when Ry describes himself as “fully female [and] also partly male” (97), an idea that has not been universally appreciated by trans readers for whom misgendering has been a critical concern since at least Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl. Winterson’s take on trans identity as being fluid but grounded in assigned sex seems in many ways ill at ease with a contemporary trans politics grounded in a post-transition authenticity. But what is at stake in Winterson’s depiction of monstrosity is the impurity of the very category of human, the way that it has become interwoven with the bio-medical and semiotic forms of capitalism. It is not simply that Ry disrupts boundaries—though he does do that—, it is that by troubling the sex/gender binary he calls into questions the construction of identity of those around him, too (Stein dubiously says that he is “not gay” despite his desire for Ry). Where Stein’s posthuman rhetoric describes a future in which “we will be able to choose our bodies” (119), this customisation of the self is suggested to already be here for transgender people; “think of yourself as future-early” (119). Ry’s transness is described by Stein as “interven[ing] in your own evolution [being both] the here and now, and a harbinger of the future” (154). The monstrosity of trans corporeality is thus figured as indicative of a general societal movement, confirming Preciado’s ideas of a generalised bio-medical-semiotic posthumanity. We can see this in another way in Winterson’s depiction of sex bots, which render the landscape of contemporary sexuality in characteristically grotesque ways. The character Ron Lord creates a range of female sex bots from 60s hippy to a bra-less 70s feminist. “All of these girls come in different skin tones: black, brown or white. Plus, you can have a muff on the Vintage model if that’s what you want” (47). Lord suggests that sex bots entail a form of sexuality that is endlessly customisable, that allows people to have sex without baggage or complication: ”a lot of people will be happy to not have any more crap relationships with crap humans” (312). The commodification of sex and becoming-semiotic that Preciado has discussed becomes a way of overcoming the limitations—and indeed ethical responsibility—of human relationships. As Lord puts it, “what we offer is fantasy life, not real life” (46). That there is something monstrous about this sexuality is clear in the novel. We might think of Lord’s sex bots as monstrous in a number of ways—firstly, as problematising the boundaries between the sexes, secondly, the confluence between machinic and organic, and thirdly, the inability to distinguish between public and private. All of the bots are female, only made for a presumed heterosexual male audience. The bot’s proportions are exaggerated, with a “20-inch waist and 40-inch boobs” (91) while her legs are “slightly longer than they would be if she was human. This is fantasy, not nature, so you can have what you want” (37). Here it is normative heterosexual male desire, not queer or trans embodiment, that troubles the very boundaries of the human. The sex bot’s body exposes, in Judith Butler’s terms, the performativity of sex and gender disconnected from the limits of the corporeal, the intensification of normative expectations of heterosexual femininity in the sex industry beyond the boundaries of human possibility. “Will women be the first casualties of obsolescence in your brave new world?” asks one character (74), in a pointed critique of the very idea of “female” sex bots. As Preciado notes, in pornography, “sex is performance, which is to say that it is composed of public representations and processes of repetition that are socially and politically regulated” (268). And yet, there is something irreducibly virtual in this regime of “tele-techno-masturbation” (Preciado 266)—for how can a machine be any kind of sex, precisely? How can it have sex? The sex/gender of the “girls in action” is one fraught with the logic of the supplement (recall Derrida, after all, used the term to describe masturbation in Of Grammatology), an addition and replacement, in which the gender and sexuality of the bots is produced through their repetition of norms that are always exceeded and complicated by their performance by a non-human machine. This becomes apparent in a grotesque scene in which one of the sex bots malfunctions and starts saying things while folded up in a cloakroom like “OPEN MY LEGS, DADDY! WIDER!” (90), for which Lord apologises, and states that the bot is “sexually explicit when she is in Bedroom Mode” (91). Preciado has defined pornography as “sexuality transformed into public representation” (266), when the private becomes public. Lord’s sex bots mark the point in which sexuality has become semiotic, technologised, masturbatory. Preciado talks about “the capture of sex and sexuality by economy, the process by which sex becomes work” (274), a work primarily done by women. While Preciado celebrates this becoming-semiotic of sexuality in an accelerationist fashion, it is clear that Winterson has serious ambivalences about this posthuman turn of sexuality (indeed, her earlier book The Stone Gods (2007) is much more positive about the possibilities of cyborg sexuality). Though the posthuman offers possibilities for new forms of sexuality in Frankissstein just as it has for sex and gender, this brings with it the ever-present spectre of monstrosity, the abject disruption of humanist binaries. For Winterson, the power of new technologies that re-shape bodies, minds and desires is one that is profoundly fraught. While there is the pleasure of self-determination (as for Ry), and the potential to transcend human limits, there is also the possibility of new forms of de-humanisation. While Winterson’s early work like 1989’s Sexing the Cherry embraced the pleasures of monstrosity (McAvan), Frankissstein is ultimately more ambivalent about it, if resigned to its future. “I feel the like agony of mind of Victor Frankenstein; having created his monster, he cannot uncreate him. Time has no pity. Time cannot unhappen. What is done is done” (128). New forms of biological modification of the body, new forms of virtualised minds and sexuality, Winterson seems to suggest, are likely to proliferate whether we like it or not. “Nothing we do to the body is without consequences”, reflects Ry (310), suggesting that his body will always be at war with his mind. Just as Mary Shelley imagined Victor Frankenstein as a modern Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods, the posthuman attempts to overcome the limits of the human in a monstrous confluence of human and the bio-technical-semiotic. Though she stages this movement in interesting ways, Winterson is ultimately mostly pessimistic about the possible social consequences of the posthuman turn, if understanding of the desires that animate human attempts to reshape the self. But we need not conclude that posthuman monstrosity is entirely so problematic. Drawing on her work on quantum physics, Karen Barad has written that “matter is not the given, the unchangeable, the bare facts of nature. It is not inanimate, lifeless, eternal. Matter is an imaginative material exploration of non/being, creatively regenerative, an ongoing trans*/formation” (“TransMaterialities,” 411). Perhaps we might find new possibilities in the refiguration of matter, of hybrid forms, of unsanctioned coupling. Winterson has Mary Shelley ponder that “in childbirth there is no me/not me” (12)—a productive challenging of binaries that suggests monstrosity to be the very pre-condition of human life in itself. Perhaps what posthuman monsters expose is that the blurring of binaries happens on every level of matter, that the virtual and material are not as distinct from one another as we would like to think, and that the making and remaking of the self is an inherent part of being human. And that the monsters are not just the ones with bolts in their necks or sex bots or hormone injections in their veins—they are, now and always have been, all of us. References Barad, Karen. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28.3 (2003): 801-831. Barad, Karen. “TransMaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings.” GLQ 2.2–3 (2015): 387-421. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” Routledge, 1993. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge and Malden, Polity, 2013. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Johns Hopkins Press, 1974. Halberstam, Judith (Jack). Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Duke UP, 1995. Haraway, Donna. “The Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Manifestly Haraway. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. 5-90. Haslett, Jane. “Winterson’s Fabulous Bodies.” Jeanette Winterson: A Contemporary Critical Guide. Ed. Sonya Andermahr. Continuum, 2007. 41-54. Mazurov, Nikita. “Monster/The Unhuman.” Posthuman Glossary. Eds. Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajora. Bloomsbury, 2018. 261-264. McAvan, Emily. Jeanette Winterson and Religion. Bloomsbury, 2020. Moore, Lisa. “Teledildonics: Virtual Lesbians in Fiction of Jeanette Winterson.” Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism. Eds. Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn. Routledge, 1995. 104-127. Preciado, Beatriz (Paul). Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. Trans. Bruce Benderson. The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2013. Preciado, Paul. Can the Monster Speak? A Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts. Trans. Frank Wynne. Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2021. Serano, Julia. Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity. Seal, 2007. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein: Or, Modern Prometheus. Oxford UP, 1969. Stryker, Susan. “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage.” The Transgender Studies Reader. Eds. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle. Routledge, 2006. 244-256. Winterson, Jeanette. Sexing the Cherry. Grove, 1989. ———. The Stone Gods. Penguin, 2007. ———. Frankissstein. Jonathan Cape, 2019.

Introduction A 2021 listicle pronouncing “10 Things That Are Bisexual Culture” concludes that “claiming that random things are ‘bi culture’ is the most bi-culture thing of all” (Wilber n.p.). While posed as tongue-in-cheek, the assignment of status as a signifier of bisexuality to seemingly arbitrary actions and items reinforces the notion that bi people seek a distinct visual and cultural identity and struggle to make one. We consider how creators on the algorithmically driven social media platform TikTok responded to an open-ended 2019 prompt (“ayo, bisexual check”) to show off styles and accessories that project a bisexual display, and how these videos, understood collectively, contribute to the cohesion of a prototype for a bisexual social uniform. By social uniform, we refer to informally standardised clothing that identifies members of a group but lacks the bureaucratic regulation of an institutional uniform (Joseph). This lens is productive for interpreting subcultural dress norms, including those of queer identities at various scopes (e.g. Nelson, “Here”; Stines). The development of these social uniforms can allow for stronger group coherence and provide individuals with “self-esteem through conformity” with one’s group and “self-regard by conflict” with other groups (Joseph 74). There is added utility to this signalling for queer people as a means to seek community and partnership against a societal backdrop of stigmatisation (Brennan). Being able to identify who is like oneself at a glance lets one know when and where one is safe to outwardly present an authentic version of oneself (Huxley and Hayfield; Rostosky et al.; Wang and Feinstein). Bisexual communities notably lack such a uniform (Hayfield, Bisexual; Hayfield, “Invisibility”; Hayfield, “Never”; Hayfield and Wood; Huxley et al.). While bi people have expressed interest in having a distinct, coherent aesthetic or set of visual markers to express their bisexuality and recognise others as specifically bisexual, they have encountered obstacles towards the establishment of such a bi uniform (Madison, “Representing”; Nelson, “What”). The conception of homosexuality and heterosexuality as a binary leaves little room for the notion of bisexuality at all (Nelson, “Here”). In instances when people do attempt to stake a claim to a specifically bisexual visual identity, the result tends to be read binaristically nonetheless (Daly et al.; Hartman; Hayfield, Bisexual; Morgan and Davis-Delano; Nelson, “What”). Attempts to visually “split the middle” of established gay and straight styles have thus historically failed, with onlookers (even bisexual onlookers) either assuming the bi person in question is gay or straight (Hartman). Rosie Nelson goes so far as to contend that “the body of the bisexual is incapable of declaring itself outwardly bisexual to a monosexist society” (“Here” 87). In other words, Nelson argues that a distinctly bi visual identity—a bi social uniform—may be impossible so long as bisexuality remains invisible in broader discourses of sexual orientation and that only improved or increased representations of bisexuality in media, law, research, and culture can foment the conditions for bisexual visibility in the most literal sense (“Here”). TikTok’s Bisexual Displays Within this context of binary assumptions of gender and sexual orientation, Julie Hartman-Linck conceived the “bisexual display” (Hartman 39). By analogy with gender display as theorised by Lorber and building on Goffman’s construction of identity performance, the bisexual display refers to attempts to project a bisexual identity “using the accoutrements of gender, as well as more direct visual and verbal cues” (Hartman 43). Bisexuality is discursively erased, and even seemingly straightforward attempts to make bi identities known are often misconstrued by observers, either through ignorance (e.g., unfamiliarity with the significance of the bi pride flag) or through willful disbelief (e.g., doubt in the authenticity of bisexuality / the bisexual; see Alarie and Gaudet). Therefore, analysis of bisexual display focusses on the intended effect of the performer rather than on the actual understandings of their audiences: bisexual display offers a productive theoretical lens through which to consider how a bisexual identity is intentionally fashioned, even if attempts to fashion the bisexual identity may be misunderstood or ignored. Emiel Maliepaard, in his research on bisexual geographies, argues that bisexual spaces are “temporal, local and (often) unplanned” (47). We identified one such space on TikTok, an algorithmically driven video-centric social media platform. TikTok affords creators a great deal of power to respond to and remix other creators’ content, most prominently with the “use this sound” function which lets creators incorporate audio either originating from or used in another video (colloquially a TikTok) into their own (Abidin and Kaye). The memetic process of (re)using a sound with some amount of variation generates a constituency of creators and other users whose participation in the video creation and engagement process aligns with what Zulli and Zulli theorised as TikTok’s imitation publics: “a collection of people whose digital connectivity is constituted through the shared ritual of content imitation and replication” (1882). These imitation publics in turn may spawn these temporal, local, and unplanned spaces, including virtual bisexual spaces. Here, we conducted a content analysis of 50 short videos posted in 2019 with over 1,000 likes using the “ayo, bisexual check” (“ABC”) sound, which was first uploaded in late March 2019. The originator of the sound posted a video of themselves saying “ayo, bisexual check” and then showing off certain elements of clothing and reifying or countering certain stereotypes about bi identity. When other creators subsequently began to use the sound and associated format to do the same, they constituted the “ABC” sound’s imitation public. While there are multiple possible ways creators might have understood the prompt of a “bisexual check” (e.g., as encouraging them to dress in a way that projects their own bisexuality; to dress in a way that projects bisexuality most legibly to other bisexual or nonbisexual people; to dress in a way that feels most comfortable to them, as a bisexual; etc.), the intention behind these videos can be understood broadly to display some bisexual identity. The simple and direct nature of the prompt (“bisexual check”) generates the virtual “bisexual space”, both “highly temporal and specific” (Maliepaard 59). This space both offers an open-ended venue for creators to engage with a culture of visual identity, and maximises the potential for audiences to read what transpires in the videos as demonstrative (if not constitutive) of bisexual identity. By creating these TikToks, users are not waiting for more or better bisexual representation on TikTok but instead are actively embodying it, responding to the need identified by Nelson. Elements of the Bisexual Check At the broadest level, creators in the 50 sampled videos primarily showcased discrete fashion elements or accessories, rather than entire outfits. The structure of “ABC” TikToks allowed creators to draw attention to specific pieces of clothing, jewelry, haircuts and styles, makeup looks, and ways of fashioning clothes (see fig. 1 for an example). This mode of engaging with the “bisexual check” challenge differs from the mode of engagement we saw in videos using the “ABC” sound posted after 2019; while onscreen text, closed captions, and video descriptions in TikToks posted in 2019 were primarily in English, text in videos posted in 2020 and later was mostly in Tagalog. This suggested that 2019 and post-2019 TikToks emerged from distinct and separate cultural contexts; despite using the same “ABC” sound, they represented different imitation publics. The post-2019 videos tended to show their creators posing for one or several shots without focussing on particular elements of their outfits, instead displaying their looks as a whole. The later videos offer a useful variation in memetic content and stance (Shifman), a contrast which permits us to understand the 2019 “ABC” videos as attempts to display bisexuality chiefly through discrete visual markers (e.g., fashion elements). Fig. 1: A screencap from the authors’ mocked-up “ABC” TikTok in which the creator uses a fingergun to showcase their cuffed jeans. Studies of bi people in the past two decades (almost all of which have been about bi women; see Clarke et al., though see Rogers for a recent exception) have identified several ways bi subjects attempt to make their bisexuality known in the face of overwhelming invisibility. Hayfield summarised research about bi women’s fashion, documenting styles that are “funky, flamboyant, or associated with alternative looks and looking (e.g., hippie, Goth, punk, and so on) including through piercings and tattoos” (“Invisibility” 180). Hartman-Linck recorded bi women using bumper stickers, pride flags and pride flag iconography, pins, and jewelry using the pink-purple-blue bi pride flag design, as well as a general playfulness with specific gendered markers (Hartman). Madison likewise found bi people using the bi pride flag design and colours on clothes and jewelry, as well as bi-specific iconography like the biangles (overlapping pink and blue triangles that generate a smaller purple triangle between them), interlocking Mars and Venus signs (⚤), and pun-based symbols like the “bisexuwhale” (“Representing” 151–3). More recently, the Internet has been a fruitful venue for discussions among bisexuals about a visual culture (Madison, “Bisexual”); discourse among bisexual people on social media sites like Twitter and Tumblr has generated some seemingly novel styles and fashions that have been highlighted as specifically bi looks. A 2017 tweet about jeans cuffed at the ankles (see fig. 1) and baggy shirts tucked in at the waist being “bisexual culture” has been mentioned in numerous popular news articles and blogs (e.g., Cao; Wilber). A Tumblr post from around the same time with images of three fictional characters sporting neck-length hairstyles cut straight at the bottoms appears to have been the genesis of the “bisexual bob”, a bob haircut worn by a bi person (usually a woman) that received similar coverage and discussion to the cuffed jeans and tucked-in shirts tweet (e.g., Locke; Vandervalk; Wilber). Other items identified in listicles as constituting “bi culture” include: being unable to sit in chairs “correctly”, dyed pink hair, puns, Converse brand shoes, plaid shirts, outer space, (excessive) use of the bi pride flag and colours, and anxiety disorders. Within our sample, we identified an uptake of these nascent bi fashions, with 62% of videos featuring clothing being cuffed (most frequently jeans), 36% of videos highlighting shirts tucked into pants, and 20% of videos demonstrating bi bobs. More explicit iconography like bi pride flags and colours (what Hartman-Linck referred to as “sign equipment” in her conceptualisation of bisexual display) appeared in 16% of videos, compared to more general rainbow iconography, which showed up in 20% of them (Hartman). Button-down shirts appeared in 34% of videos, and both floral print shirts and Converse shoes appeared in 18% of the total corpus. Nose piercings actively contributed to the “bisexual check” in 12% of sampled TikToks, while a full-body dress appeared in just one video (2%). We identified no instances of biangles, interlocking Mars and Venus signs, or punny sign equipment. Display Becoming Prototype, Prototype Becoming Uniform Interpreting “ABC” videos as bisexual displays on the individual level and conceptualising the community of “ABC” creators and engagers as an imitation public allows us to understand the process taking place as social identity work, “the construction of identities for groups of people” (Eschler and Menking 2). Eschler and Menking (drawing upon Donath as well as Schwalbe and Mason-Schrock) argued that for social identities (like bisexuality), certain memes can offer prototypes: “a set of minimal social cues that a person can use to infer other information about an individual’s social world” (9). Similarly, Joseph argued that for any complex of sartorial meaning, there is a minimal symbol: “the least symbol necessary to suggest a uniform” (24). By their nature, prototypes (or minimal symbols) will be limited to the fewest key elements required to demarcate a social identity. TikTok creators have the capacity to share their own “bisexual checks” with the “use this sound” feature or duet other creators’ videos to mirror or counter elements of the original creators’ checks in their own lives. Further, even if not posting their own “ABC” content, users have the ability to share, comment on, and like TikToks to engage with a creator’s bisexual display. Each new “ABC” video accomplishes what Rogers identified in his research on images of bi men on Instagram: they “add to a discourse and visual culture of bisexuality that both describes and prescribes the visual forms in which bisexuality appears” (366). Each contribution introduces a new, or more likely reifies an existing (if nascent) indicator of a bisexual identity. It is no surprise, then, that visual indicators that had already garnered some popular support within online bisexual spaces (bi bobs, cuffed jeans, tucked-in shirts) were among the most common in our sample. Still, a fashion choice having already entered the bisexual public consciousness does not solely explain why it recurred in our sample while other choices and items mentioned in listicles did not. The userbase of creators who tend to achieve virality on TikTok skews young, white, wealthy, and female (Boffone; Kennedy), so styles favoured by bi people who share at least some of these identities (e.g., white teen or twentysomething girls and women with personal or familial wealth) are likely to recur more frequently and receive increased engagement from the broader TikTok userbase, which also skews young and female (Cyca). Anecdotally, this demographic picture of TikTok mirrored our sample, suggesting that markers posited by creators and received by users were most likely to reflect the tastes and norms of young, white, and female creators. Indeed, one of the few nonwhite “ABC” creators was the only person in our sample to use the sound to argue against the core premise of the videos, contending that all one needed to be bisexual was attraction to people of multiple genders rather than any of the specific visual markers posed by others in the sample. While a universal “bisexual check” is suggested by the sparse wording of the challenge, the resulting videos nonetheless demonstrate a specific racially, temporally, and culturally positioned understanding of bi identity. Just because anyone has the capacity to contribute their own vision of the “bisexual check” does not mean that all “ABC” videos will land with equal frequency on users’ For You Page feeds (TikTok’s “homepage” where videos are algorithmically delivered to users; see Simpson and Semaan), nor enjoy the same volume of attention from TikTok’s userbase. Eschler and Menking consider the prototype to be “the least common denominator” (9), meaning that users will take the few most common elements shared amongst the “ABC” videos as symbols of a bisexual style. That the top “ABC” videos (those we sampled) heavily skew young, white, and female means that a bi uniform emerges from elements favoured by users sharing those demographics. Our mode of investigating this sound’s videos (moving systematically through all the videos using the “ABC” sound from most liked to less liked) does not contravene the affordances of TikTok’s platform but is somewhat outside of the app’s environment of expected use (Light et al.), which we understand to be either scrolling through the user’s For You Page or receiving and viewing TikToks messaged privately by friends. Still, users in these settings served two or more “ABC” videos are likely to consciously or unconsciously begin to identify the prototypical elements of a bisexual look as being those shared across multiple videos: the most frequently recurring markers creators choose to share as part of their bisexual displays reify existing styles already identified as “bi looks” or introduce new ones to the viewer. Through the continuous and repeated proposal of bisexual looks, the prototype emerges for a bisexual uniform. These accoutrements (cuffed sleeves and pantlegs, especially on jeans, bi bob haircuts, tucked-in shirts) point towards a bi uniform that is put-together and favours clothes like jeans and button-down shirts that are commonly worn across genders. That a bisexual uniform that may be comfortably worn by members of any gender follows logically from the necessity for a bi look that is both shaped by and liable to be worn by bisexuals, who may be of any gender. Further, this bi uniform emphasises alterations that may be undertaken on items commonly already held rather than distinct new pieces that must first be acquired. This may be one reason that creators favoured these styles, rather than more blatant sign equipment like pins or shirts with bi iconography on them: they were simply more likely to have jeans in their closet than a biangles T-shirt. The creators in our sample, regardless of the specific accoutrements displayed, answered Nelson’s call for increased and better bisexual representation, building one of many possible images for how bi people can fashion themselves (“Here”). The “ABC” imitation public’s collagic vision of a bisexual uniform may, in the future, be adapted, rejected, or serve as inspiration for others in the endlessly cyclical process of identity formation and reinforcement. Conclusion We have sought to understand what TikTok users have accomplished through the creation of and engagement with “ABC” videos, both specifically (i.e., what are the predominant visual indicators across the most popular videos) and generally (i.e., what processes are taking place and how they contribute towards the establishment of a bisexual social uniform). Creators are unlikely to have set out with a larger project of developing a bi uniform in mind when posting their 15-second “ayo, bisexual check” videos, but as part of one of TikTok’s innumerable imitation publics, their personal bisexual displays nonetheless offer prototypes for what a bisexual uniform could be. Any single “ABC” video is an example of a creator using TikTok’s affordances to respond individually to an open-ended prompt, but taken collectively, a consensus about the least common denominators for a bisexual uniform begins to emerge. Whether this online effort to cohere bisexual style results in bi people being able to identify one another (and/or be identified by nonbisexuals) remains to be seen, but we hope this article provides both a useful record of styles favoured by bisexuals on TikTok in 2019 and a productive explanation of the way individual posts in TikTok’s ecosystem of imitation publics may begin to constitute a social uniform for a community whose members have historically lacked one. Acknowledgments Thanks to Elizabeth Fetterolf, Amy Giacomucci, Trevor Harty, and the editors and reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. All online sources have been archived via Archive.org. References Abidin, Crystal, and D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye. “Audio Memes, Earworms, and Templatability: The ‘Aural Turn’ of Memes on TikTok.” Critical Meme Reader: Global Mutations of the Viral Image. Eds. Chloë Arkenbout, Jack Wilson, and Daniel de Zeeuw. 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In August 2017, a white supremacist rally marketed as “Unite the Right” was held in Charlottesville, Virginia. In participation were members of the alt-right, including neo-nazis, white nationalists, neo-confederates, and other hate groups (Atkinson). The rally swiftly erupted in violence between white supremacists and counter protestors, culminating in the death of a counter-protester named Heather Heyer, who was struck by a car driven by white supremacist James Alex Fields, and leaving dozens injured. Terry McQuliffe, the Governor of Virginia, declared a state of emergency on August 12, and the world watched while white supremacists boldly marched in clothing emblazoned with symbols ranging from swastikas to a cartoon frog (Pepe), with flags featuring the nation of “Kekistan”, and carrying tiki torches chanting, “You Will Not Replace Us... Jews Will Not Replace Us”.The purpose of this essay is not, however, to examine the Internet symbols that circulated during the Unite the Right rally but rather to hone in on a specific moment that illustrates a key part of Internet culture that was often overlooked during analysis of the events that occurred during the riots: a documentary filmmaker, C. J. Hunt, was at the rally to record footage for a project on the removal of Confederate monuments. While there, he saw a rally-goer dressed in the white polo t-shirt and khaki pants uniform of the white nationalist group Vanguard America. The rally-goer, a young white man, was being chased by a counter-protester. He began to scream and beg for mercy, and even went as far as stripping off his clothing and denying that he really believed in any of the group’s ideology. In the recording by Hunt, who asks why he was there and why he was undressing, the young white man responded that shouting white power is “fun”, and that he was participating in the event because he, quote, “likes to be offensive” (Hunt).As Hunt notes in a piece for GQ reflecting on his experience at the rally, as soon as the man was cut off from his group and confronted, the runaway racist’s demeanor immediately changed when he had to face the consequences of his actions. Trolls often rely on the safety and anonymity of online forums and digital spaces where they are often free from having to face the consequences of their actions, and for the runaway racist, things became real very quickly when he was forced to own up to his hateful actions. In a way, many members of these movements seem to want politics without consequence for themselves, but with significant repercussions for others. Milo Yiannopoulos, a self-professed “master troll”, built an entire empire worth millions of dollars off of what the far-right defends as ironic hate speech and a form of politics without consequences reserved only for the privileged white men that gleefully engage in it. The runaway racist and Yiannopoulos are borne out of an Internet culture that is built on being offensive, on trolling, and “troll” itself being an aspirational label and identity, but also more importantly, a political aesthetic.In this essay, I argue that trolling itself has become a kind of political aesthetic and identity, and provide evidence via examples like hoaxes, harassment campaigns, and the use of memes to signal to certain online populations and extremist groups in violent attacks. First coined by Walter Benjamin in order to explain a fundamental component of using art to foster consent and compliance in fascist regimes, the term since then has evolved to encompass far more than just works of art. Benjamin’s original conception of the term is in regard to a creation of a spectacle that prevents the masses from recognizing their rights – in short, the aestheticization of politics is not just about the strategies of the fascist regimes themselves but says more about the subjects within them. In the time of Benjamin’s writing, the specific medium was mass propaganda through the newly emerging film industry and other forms of art (W. Benjamin). To Benjamin, these aesthetics served as tools of distracting to make fascism more palatable to the masses. Aesthetic tools of distraction serve an affective purpose, revealing the unhappy consciousness of neoreactionaries (Hui), and provide an outlet for their resentment.Since political aesthetics are concerned with how cultural products like art, film, and even clothing reflect political ideologies and beliefs (Sartwell; McManus; Miller-Idriss), the objects of analysis in this essay are part of the larger visual culture of the alt-right (Bogerts and Fielitz; Stanovsky). Indeed, aesthetic aspects of political systems shift their meaning over time, or are changed and redeployed with transformed effect (Sartwell). In this essay, I am applying the concept of the aestheticization of politics by analyzing how alt-right visual cultures deploy distraction and dissimulation to advance their political agenda through things like trolling campaigns and hoaxes. By analyzing these events, their use of memes, trolling techniques, and their influence on mainstream culture, what is revealed is the influence of trolling on political culture for the alt-right and how the alt-right then distracts the rest of the public (McManus).Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Troll?Large scale analyses of disinformation and extremist content online tends to examine how certain actors are connected, what topics emerge and how these are connected across platforms, and the ways that disinformation campaigns operate in digital environments (Marwick and Lewis; Starbird; Benkler et al.). Masculine and white-coded technology gave rise to male-dominated digital spaces (R. Benjamin), with trolling often being an issue faced by non-normative users of the Internet and their communities (Benjamin; Lumsden and Morgan; Nakamura; Phillips, Oxygen). Creating a kind of unreality where it is difficult to parse out truth from lies, fiction from non-fiction, the troll creates cultural products, and by hiding behind irony and humor confuses onlookers and is removed from any kind of reasonable blame for their actions. Irony has long been a rhetorical strategy used in politics, and the alt right has been no exception (Weatherby), but for our current sociopolitical landscape, trolling is a political strategy that infuses irony into politics and identity.In the digital era, political memes and internet culture are pervasive components of the spread of hate speech and extremist ideology on digital platforms. Trolling is not an issue that exists in a vacuum – rather, trolls are a product of greater mainstream culture that encourages and allows their behaviors (Phillips, This Is Why; Fichman and Sanfilippo; Marwick and Lewis). Trolls, and meme culture in general, have often been pointed to as being part of the reason for the rise of Trump and fascist politics across the world in recent years (Greene; Lamerichs et al.; Hodge and Hallgrimsdottir; Glitsos and Hall). Although criticism has been expressed about how impactful memes were in the election of Donald Trump, political memes have had an impact on the ways that trolling went from anonymous jerks on forums to figures like Yiannapoulos who built entire careers off of trolling, creating empires of hate (Lang). These memes that are often absurd and incomprehensible to those who are not a part of the community that they come from aim to cheapen, trivialize, and mock social justice movements like Black Lives Matter, feminism, LGBTQ+ rights, and others.But the history of trolling online goes as far back as the Internet itself. “Trolling” is just a catch all term to describe online behaviors meant to antagonize, to disrupt online conversations, and to silence other users (Cole; Fichman and Sanfilippo). As more and more people started moving online and engaging in participatory culture, trolling continued to evolve from seemingly harmless jokes like the “Rick Roll” to targeted campaigns meant to harass women off of social media platforms (Lumsden and Morgan; Graham). Trolling behaviors are more than just an ugly part of the online experience, but are also a way for users to maintain the borders of their online community - it’s meant to drive away those who are perceived to be outsiders not just from the specific forum, but the Internet itself (Graham). With the rise of modern social media platforms, trolling itself is also a part of the political landscape, creating a “toxic counterpublic” that combines irony with a kind of earnestness to spread and inject their beliefs into mainstream political discourse (Greene). As a mode of information warfare, these subversive rhetorical strategies meant to contradict or reverse existing political and value systems have been used throughout history as a political tactic (Blackstock).The goal of trolling is not just to disrupt conversations, but to lead to chaos via confusion about the sincerity and meaning of messages and visuals, and rather than functioning as a politics of outrage (on the part of the adherents), it is a politics of being as outrageous as possible. As a part of larger meme culture, the aesthetics of trolls and their outrageous content manage to operate under the radar by being able to excuse their behaviors and rhetoric as just “trolling” or “joking”. This ambiguity points to trolling on the far right as a political strategy and identity to absolve them of blame or accusations of what their real intentions are. Calling them “trolls” hides the level of sophistication and vast levels of influence that they had on public opinion and discourse in the United States (Geltzer; Starks et al.; Marwick and Lewis). We no longer live in a world apart from the troll’s influence and immune from their toxic discourse – rather, we have long been under the bridge with them.Co-Opted SymbolsOne of the most well-known examples of trolling as a political aesthetic and tactic may be the OK hand sign used by the Christchurch shooter. The idea that the OK hand sign was a secretly white supremacist symbol started as a hoax on 4chan. The initial 2017 hoax purported that the hand sign was meant to stand for “White Power”, with the three fingers representing the W and the circle made with the index finger and thumb as the P (Anti-Defamation League, “Okay Hand Gesture”). The purpose of perpetuating the hoax was to demonstrate that (a) they were being watched and (b) that the mainstream media is stupid and gullible enough to believe this hoax. Meant to incite confusion and to act as a subversive strategy, the OK hand sign was then actually adopted by the alt-right as a sort of meme to not just perpetuate the hoax, but to signal belonging to the larger group (Allyn). Even though the Anti-Defamation League initially listed it as not being a hate symbol and pointed out the origins of the hoax (Anti-Defamation League, “No, the ‘OK’ Gesture Is Not a Hate Symbol”), they then switched their opinion when the OK hand sign was being flashed by white supremacists, showing up in photographs at political events, and other social media content. In fact, the OK hand sign is also a common element in pictures of Pepe the Frog, who is a sort of “alt right mascot” (Tait; Glitsos and Hall), but like the OK hand sign, Pepe the Frog did not start as an alt-right mascot and was co-opted by the alt-right as a mode of representation.The confusion around the actual meaning behind the hand symbol points to how the alt-right uses these modes of representation in ways that are simultaneously an inside joke and a real expression of their beliefs. For instance, the Christchurch shooter referenced a number of memes and other rhetoric typical of 4chan and 8chan communities in his video and manifesto (Quek). In the shooter’s manifesto and video, the vast amounts of content that point to the trolling and visual culture of the alt-right are striking – demonstrating how alt-right memes not only make this violent ideology accessible, but are cultural products meant to be disseminated and ultimately, result in some kind of action (DeCook).The creation and co-optation of symbols by the alt-right like the OK hand sign are not just memes, but a form of language created by extremists for extremists (Greene; Hodge and Hallgrimsdottir). The shooter’s choice of including this type of content in his manifesto as well as certain phrases in his live-streamed video indicate his level of knowledge of what needed to be done for his attack to get as much attention as possible – the 4chan troll is the modern-day bogeyman, and parts of the manifesto have been identified as intentional traps for the mainstream media (Lorenz).Thus, the Christchurch shooter and trolling culture are linked, but referring to the symbols in the manifesto as being a part of “trolling” culture misses the deeper purpose – chaos, through the outrage spectacle, is the intended goal, particularly by creating arguments about the nature and utility of online trolling behavior. The shooter encouraged other 8chan users to disseminate his posted manifesto as well as to share the video of the attack – and users responded by immortalizing the event in meme format. The memes created celebrated the shooter as a hero, and although Facebook did remove the initial livestream video, it was reuploaded to the platform 1.2 million times in the first 24 hours, attempting to saturate the online platform with so many uploads that it would cause confusion and be difficult to remove (Gramenz). Some users even created gifs or set the video to music from the Doom video game soundtrack – a video game where the player is a demon slayer in an apocalyptic world, further adding another layer of symbolism to the attack.These political aesthetics – spread through memes, gifs, and “fan videos” – are the perfect vehicles for disseminating extremist ideology because of what they allow the alt-right to do with them: hide behind them, covering up their intentions, all the while adopting them as signifiers for their movement. With the number of memes, symbols, and phrases posted in his manifesto and spoken aloud in his mainstream, perhaps the Christchurch shooter wanted the onus of the blame to fall on these message board communities and the video games and celebrities referenced – in effect, it was “designed to troll” (Lorenz). But, there is a kernel of truth in every meme, post, image, and comment – their memes are a part of their political aesthetic, thus implicit and explicit allusions to the inner workings of their ideology are present. Hiding behind hoaxes, irony, edginess, and trolling, members of the alt-right and other extremist Internet cultures then engage in a kind of subversion that allows them to avoid taking any responsibility for real and violent attacks that occur as a result of their discourse. Antagonizing the left, being offensive, and participating in this outrage spectacle to garner a response from news outlets, activists, and outsiders are all a part of the same package.Trolls and the Outrage SpectacleThe confusion and the chaos left behind by these kinds of trolling campaigns and hoaxes leave many to ask: How disingenuous is it? Is it meant for mere shock value or is it really reflective of the person’s beliefs? In terms of the theme of dissimulation for this special issue, what is the real intent, and under what pretenses should these kinds of trolling behaviors be understood? Returning to the protestor who claimed “I just like to be offensive”, the skepticism from onlookers still exists: why go so far as to join an alt-right rally, wearing the uniform of Identity Evropa (now the American Identity Movement), as a “joke”?Extremists hide behind humor and irony to cloud judgments from others, begging the question of can we have practice without belief? But, ultimately, practice and belief are intertwined – the regret of the Runaway Racist is not because he suddenly realized he did not “believe”, but rather was forced to face the consequences of his belief, something that he as a white man perhaps never really had to confront. The cultural reach of dissimulation, in particular hiding true intent behind the claim of “irony”, is vast - YouTuber Pewdiepie claimed his use of racial and anti-Semitic slurs and putting on an entire Ku Klux Klan uniform in the middle of a video were “accidental” only after considerable backlash (Picheta). It has to be noted, however, that Pewdiepie is referenced in the manifesto of the Christchurch shooter – specifically, the shooter yelled during his livestream “subscribe to Pewdiepie”, (Lorenz). Pewdiepie and many other trolls, once called out for their behavior, and regardless of their actual intent, double down on their claims of irony to distract from the reality of their behaviors and actions.The normalization of this kind of content in mainstream platforms like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and even Instagram show how 4chan and alt-right Internet culture has seeped out of its borders and exists everywhere online. This “coded irony” is not only enabled rhetorically due to irony’s slippery definition, but also digitally via these online media (Weatherby). The aesthetics of the troll are present in every single platform and are disseminated everywhere – memes are small cultural units meant to be passed on (Shifman), and although one can argue it was not memes alone that resulted in the rise of the alt-right and the election of Donald Trump, memes are a part of the larger puzzle of the political radicalization process. The role of the Internet in radicalization is so powerful and insidious because of the presentation of content – it is funny, edgy, ironic, offensive, and outrageous. But these behaviors and attitudes are not just appealing to some kind of adolescent-like desire to push boundaries of what is and is not socially acceptable and/or politically incorrect (Marwick and Lewis), and calling it such clouds people’s perceptions of their level of sophistication in shaping political discourse.Memes and the alt-right are a noted phenomenon, and these visual cultures created by trolls on message boards have aided in the rise of the current political situation worldwide (Hodge and Hallgrimsdottir). We are well in the midst of a type of warfare based on not weapons and bodies, but information and data - in which memes and other elements of the far right’s political aesthetic play an important role (Molander et al.; Prier; Bogerts and Fielitz). The rise of the online troll as a political player and the alt-right are merely the logical outcomes of these systems.ConclusionThe alt-right’s spread was possible because of the trolling cultures and aesthetics of dissimulation created in message boards that predate 4chan (Kitada). The memes and inflammatory statements made by them serve multiple purposes, ranging from an intention to incite outrage among non-members of the group to signal group belonging and identity. In some odd way, if people do not understand the content, the content actually speaks louder and, in more volumes, that it would if its intent was more straightforward – in their confusion, people give these trolling techniques more attention and amplification in their attempt to make sense of them. Through creating confusion, distraction, and uncertainty around the legitimacy of messages, hand signs, and even memes, the alt-right has elevated the aestheticization of politics to a degree that Walter Benjamin could perhaps not have predicted in his initial lament about the distracted masses of fascist regimes (McManus). The political dimensions of trolling and the cognitive uncertainty that it creates is a part of its goal. Dismissing trolls is no longer an option, but also regarding them as sinister political operatives may be overblowing their significance. In the end, “ironic hate speech” is still hate speech, and by couching their extremist ideology in meme format they make their extremist beliefs more palatable -- and nobody is completely immune to their strategies.ReferencesAllyn, Bobby. “The ‘OK’ Hand Gesture Is Now Listed as a Symbol of Hate.” NPR 2019. <https://www.npr.org/2019/09/26/764728163/the-ok-hand-gesture-is-now-listed-as-a-symbol-of-hate>.Anti-Defamation League. “No, the ‘OK’ Gesture Is Not a Hate Symbol.” Anti-Defamation League. 10 Dec. 2017 <https://www.adl.org/blog/no-the-ok-gesture-is-not-a-hate-symbol>.———. “Okay Hand Gesture.” Anti-Defamation League. 28 Feb. 2020 <https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/okay-hand-gesture>.Atkinson, David C. “Charlottesville and the Alt-Right: A Turning Point?” Politics, Groups, and Identities 6.2 (2018): 309-15.Benjamin, Ruha. Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity, 2019.Benjamin, Walter. 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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. 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