Artykuły w czasopismach na temat „Home invasion – Fiction”

This paper examines the struggle of American-Muslim women to negotiate their identities in literary works published after the invasion of Iraq (20 March-1 May 2003). In this case, I examine Randa Jarrar’s A Map of Home (2008) in order to investigate how Jarrar both negotiates her identity through folktales, naming, and rites of passages. By engaging with postcolonial studies, and working within the frameworks of cultural studies, this paper aims to investigate aesthetic strategies that Jarrar (Egyptian-Palestinian-American) deploys in her writing. Jarrar also respects her Muslim intellectual forebears, such as Muhammad al-Ghazali (Iran), Muhyiddin al-Arabi (Spain), and Jalaluddin Rumi (Turkey), by emulating their tendency to combine in their writings allusions to the Qur’an, ancient storytelling traditions, and contemporary social issues in order to engage with their readers. In doing so, Jarrar uses folktales, naming, and rites of passages to question American belonging and eurocentrism in her fiction. These techniques enable Jarrar to reveal her multiple and complex identities and work to represent both her pride in being Muslims and her desire to claim her rights as American citizens of Muslim descent. Keywords: Randa Jarrar, A Map of Home, folktales, Rites of Passages, US-Muslim women’s literature Artikel ini membahas perjuangan perempuan Amerika-Muslim untuk menegosiasikan identitas mereka dalam karya sastra yang diterbitkan setelah invasi ke Irak (20 Maret-1 Mei 2003). Dalam hal ini, saya meneliti Randa Jarrar's A Map of Home (2008) untuk menyelidiki bagaimana Jarrar menegosiasikan identitasnya dan menentang orientalisme di sepanjang novelnya. Dengan menggunakan studi postkolonial dan studi budaya, artikel ini bertujuan untuk menyelidiki strategi estetika yang Jarrar (Mesir-Palestina-Amerika) gunakan dalam tulisannya. Jarrar juga menghormati leluhur intelektual Muslimnya, seperti Muhammad al-Ghazali (Iran), Muhyiddin al-Arabi (Spanyol), dan Jalaluddin Rumi (Turki), dengan meniru kecenderungan mereka untuk menggabungkan dalam tulisan-tulisan mereka kiasan Alquran, kuno tradisi mendongeng, dan masalah sosial kontemporer untuk menarik pembaca mereka. Dalam hal ini, Jarrar juga menggunakan dongeng, penamaan, dan ritus-ritus untuk mempertanyakan kepemilikan Amerika dan Eurosentrisme dalam fiksinya. Teknik-teknik ini memungkinkan Jarrar untuk mengungkapkan identitasnya yang beragam dan kompleks yang berfungsi untuk menunjukkan kebanggaannya sebagai Muslim dan keinginannya untuk mengklaim hak-haknya sebagai warga negara Amerika keturunan Muslim. Kata kunci: Randa Jarrar, A Map of Home, cerita rakyat, ritus peralihan, sastra Muslimah-Amerika

Celebrities playing fictionalized versions of themselves in commercials, campaigns, and video spots have become an increasingly viral phenomenon. The George Clooney commercials for Nespresso are circulated and promoted on various media platforms, segments from The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon are released on NBC.com and shared on YouTube, and some videos are explicitly created to go viral and even published on social media sites. In this article, I draw on recent work in fictionality studies and studies of virality to investigate how the celebrity trend of ‘vitafiction’ possesses a viral potential. In vitafictional performances, the relationship between fiction and reality is thematized through a concurrent surplus of fictionality and biographical details, which invites recipients to negotiate between the celebrity’s performance and the receiver’s media cultural knowledge. Taking vitafictional performances in two online circulated spots as case studies – ‘Bono rides a bike with Jimmy Fallon’, a spot for The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon, and Peter Jackson’s Facebook video post ‘Home Invasion’, a video that thematizes Jackson’s role as director of an episode of Doctor Who – this article demonstrates how the equivocality that is central to the vitafictional performance comprises a force that prompts receivers to circulate the vitafictional message. It is argued that the mediatization of society and the virality that this brings about create new possibilities for the impact of this kind of celebrity self-fashioning.

Readings of films involving alien invasions do not take into account the fact that in many science fiction films, notably 'E. T', aliens are benign and friendly, are trapped in human societies, and desire above all to return to their homelands. A key to understanding such good aliens is the idea of the 'Indian', a figure widely used in the US to encode ideas about home, belonging and identity, often through the deployment of New Age discourses.

Attention is paid in the article to the landmark event of modern Ukrainian culture – the book celebrating its anniversary in 2024 – Ivan Bahrianyi’s novel the Tiger Trappers and the rethinking, interpretation of this work in the modern Ukrainian artistic space, in particular in cinematographic and theatrical texts. This year, 80 years have passed since the world saw the adventure work with autobiographical elements, which resonated not only at home, but also abroad. And this is not surprising, because Tiger Trappers has been translated into many languages of the world and had a circulation of over a million copies. Ivan Bahrianyi has submitted to a wide audience a very Ukrainian in spirit and worldview action, which even today in the 21st century is able to interest young people with its truthfulness and insight, its thirst and desire for freedom. The film version of the Tiger Trappers novel, which has appeared in 1994 at the Ukrtelefilm studio is analysed in the investigation. A well-known figure of Ukrainian culture Rostyslav Synko is a director and screenwriter of the film. The film text is based on the original source, but there are also differences those testify not only to another time period, the other era in which the film was shot, but also to certain new accents, a new vision, a reinterpretation of Ivan Bahrianyi’s novel about the young aviator Hryhorii Mnohohrishnyi. According to the plan of the author of the film story has another name. He is called Andrii Chumak in the film. There are also the other details those differ in the novel and in the fictional strip of the same name. And this is quite natural, because it is about the author’s interpretation, reinterpretation of a well-known work. The film of the same name also draws the viewer’s attention to the two Ukraines of the main characters: to the distant, dreamed-of real Ukraine with Golden-topped Kyiv and to the Second Ukraine, which immigrants, exiles from their native land, have built for them in the Far East in the bloody 20th century. In our time, this motif acquires new shades, because again, already in the 21st century, there are Ukrainian immigrants, again there are people who are forced to seek refuge all over the world, escaping from the terrible Russian invasion. Will new immigrants be able to find their Second Ukraine? Will they be able to return to their homeland? Life will show... The interpretation of the novel in modern Ukrainian musical theater is considered. Last year the musical Tiger Trappers directed by Serhii Pavliuk has been released basing on the novel of the same name by Ivan Bahrianyi. This fact, without exaggeration, has become a landmark artistic event, which has success with the audience and favourable reviews of critics. It is emphasized in the article that when we see a finished cultural product of the Ukrainian artistic space, whether it is a film or a theatrical production, a musical, etc., based on a certain work of fiction, we realize that this is already an interpretation, a reinterpretation. So, we are already talking about the creation of a new cultural text – a film text, a theatrical text, a musical text, etc. The significance of modern theater and film art is understood. It is claimed that the mission of art today is exactly rehabilitation through art. An artistic product should give hope, show a happy version of the course of events. Faith in the victory of good over evil, glorification of love that does not pass away – all this should be present in modern theatrical, musical and film texts today. After all, there is a demand for such cultural products in the modern time slice of the 2020s.

The analogy of critical representation of the feminine issues prohibits the sustained continuation of the ideological manuscript of gender division in Pakistan. The Postcolonial nativity, the charisma of nationalism, the rigid concentration of aristocratic Westernization create a hard line between the social, cultural, and political identification of regional/national roles after the establishment of Pakistan. Bhabha (1994) reminds us that ‘postcoloniality is a salutary reminder of the persistent neo-colonial relations within new world order’(p.06). The structure of crucial gender boundaries is drawn in Pakistani society to promote the collective nationalistic consciousness in the wake of political achievements. Whereas, ‘the recesses of the domestic space become sites for history’s most intricate invasions’ (1994, p.09).This invasion confuses the ‘borders between home and world’ and combines the public and private to a more disorienting vision of life. This paper tries to recollect the gist of deformed gender rhetoric in the nationalistic restructuring of Pakistani society in Meatless Days by Sara Suleri. The paper concentrates on the artistic development in the course of the memoir to identify the irony of people as a dichotomy between the real and the fictional re-appropriation of Postcolonial Pakistan. Key Words: Feminism, Nationalistic consciousness, Gender-boundaries, Memoir, Irony, Postcolonial Pakistan.

Area studies, as a newly fashionable field of academic research, needs to recognize its less likely precedents if it is going to secure for itself a fresh start. The question of “desire” is relevant here because it indicates the less value-free aspects in its genealogy. As shown in Emma Bovary's embellished representation of Paris at her provincial home, an understanding of an area often reflects the particular needs and desires of the one who understands that area. Such restricted and restricting views of an area repeats itself outside the world of literary fictions, as is shown by the example of Guizot's picture of Europe in which his own country is given a privileged place as the very center of Western civilization itself. An instructive case showing the thin line between the projected desire of one who strives to know a geographical area and the scientific purity of the labor itself is further offered by Napoleon Bonaparte's heavy reliance on Orientalist scholarship in his invasion of Egypt. Moving further east from Egypt to China, we witness the denigrating remarks on China made by the great German thinkers of the past century, Hegel and Weber. Although their characterization of Chinese culture could find echoes in unbiased empirical research, they reveal all the same the trace of Europeans' desire to affirm their superiority over the supposedly inferior and false civilization of the East. Similarly, the Americans who divided the Korean peninsular at the 38th Parallel, with unquestioning confidence in their knowledge of the area and in the justice of their action, rightfully deserve their place in the tradition of Western area studies of serving the needs to dominate, control and exploit an objectified overseas territory. He assumed that words had kept their meaning, that desires still pointed in a single direction, and that ideas retained their logic; and he ignored the fact that the world of speech and desires has known invasions, struggles, plundering, disguises, ploys. From these elements, however, genealogy retrieves an indispensable restraint: it must record the singularity of events outside of any monotonous finality; it must seek them in the most unpromising places, in what we tend to feel is without history—in sentiments, love, conscience, instincts; it must be sensitive to their recurrence, not in order to trace the gradual curve of their evolution, but to isolate the different scenes where they engaged in different roles. — Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (Foucault 139–40).

Abstract British pre-First World War culture has often been described as militaristic. An Englishman’s Home, Guy du Maurier’s 1909 play about a German invasion of Britain, forms part of this picture. Yet the message of the play was not clear-cut, and Edwardian society reacted as much with bemusement and criticism to the idea that Britain could be invaded as with militaristic fervour. This article investigates the reactions to du Maurier’s play, and sets it in the context of the wider invasion-scare and future-war genre, a popular element in late Victorian and Edwardian culture. The play was quickly linked with a recruitment drive for the newly organised Territorial Force, and its success has been interpreted as a sign of increased British uncertainty, militarism and xenophobia. However, the play was also mocked, its success as a recruitment vehicle was uncertain, and the audience interpreted the play in different and often contradictory ways. The article offers a reinterpretation and a critical assessment of the pre-war period, showing that Edwardian society was not as militaristic or fearful of invasion as has previously been argued. It presents a new interpretation of invasion-scare and future-war fiction, and a new analysis of the question of pre-war militarism in Britain.

Over the last two decades the female forensic pathologist investigator has become a prominent figure in crime fiction. Her presence causes suspicion on a number of levels in the narrative and this article will examine the reasons for that suspicion and the manner in which it is presented in two texts: Patricia Cornwell’s Postmortem and Tess Gerritsen’s The Sinner. Cornwell and Gerritsen are North American crime writers whose series of novels both feature female forensic pathologists who are deeply involved in homicide investigation. Cornwell’s protagonist is Dr Kay Scarpetta, then-Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond, Virginia. Gerritsen’s is Dr Maura Isles, a forensic pathologist in the Boston Medical Examiner’s office. Their jobs entail attending crime scenes to assess bodies in situ, performing examinations and autopsies, and working with police to solve the cases.In this article I will first examine Western cultural attitudes towards dissection and autopsy since the twelfth century before discussing how the most recent of these provoke suspicion in the selected novels. I will further analyse this by drawing on Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject. I will then consider how female pathologist protagonists try to deflect their colleagues’ suspicion of their professional choices, drawing in part on Judith Butler’s ideas of gender as a performative category. I define ‘gender’ as the socially constructed roles, activities, attributes, and behaviours that Western culture considers appropriate for women and men, and ‘sex’ as the physical biological characteristics that differentiate women and men. I argue that the female forensic pathologist investigator is portrayed as suspicious in the chosen novels for her occupation of the abject space caused by her sex in her roles as investigator and pathologist, her identification with the dead, and her performance of elements of both masculine and feminine conventional gender roles. Scholars such as Barthes, Rolls, and Grauby have approached detective fiction by focusing on intertextuality, the openness of the text, and the possibility of different meanings, with Vargas being one example of how this can operate; however, this article focuses on examining how the female forensic pathologist investigator is represented as suspicious in mainstream crime novels that attract a readership seeking resolution and closure.A significant part of each of these novels focuses on the corpse and its injuries as the site at which the search for truth commences, and I argue that the corpse itself, those who work most closely with it and the procedures they employ in this search are all treated with suspicion in the crime fiction in this study. The central procedures of autopsy and dissection have historically been seen as abominations, in some part due to religious views such as the belief of Christians prior to the thirteenth century that the resurrection of the soul required an intact body (Klaver 10) and the Jewish and Muslim edicts against disfigurement of the dead (Davis and Peterson 1042). In later centuries dissection was made part of the death sentence and was perceived “as an abhorrent additional post-mortem punishment” that “promised the exposure of nakedness, dismemberment, and the deliberate destruction of the corpse,” which was considered “a gross assault on the integrity and the identity of the body, and upon the repose of the soul” (Richardson 154). While now a mainstay of many popular crime narratives, the autopsy as a procedure in real life continues to appall much of the public (Klaver 18). This is because “the human body—especially the dead human body—is an object still surrounded by taboos and prohibitions” (Sawday 269). The living are also reluctant to “yield the subjecthood of the other-dead to object status” (Klaver 18), which often produces a horrified response from some families to doctors seeking permission to dissect for autopsy. According to Gawande, when doctors suggest an autopsy the victim’s family commonly asks “Hasn’t she been through enough?” (187). The forensic pathologists who perform the autopsy are themselves linked with the repugnance of the act (Klaver 9), and in these novels that fact combined with the characters’ willingness to be in close proximity with the corpse and their comfort with dissecting it produces considerable suspicion on the part of their police colleagues.The female sex of the pathologists in these novels causes additional suspicion. This is primarily because women are “culturally associated [...] with life and life giving” (Vanacker 66). While historically women were also involved in the care of the sick and the dead (Nunn and Biressi 200), the growth of medical knowledge and the subsequent medicalisation of death in Western culture over the past two centuries has seen women relegated to a stylised kind of “angelic ministry” (Nunn and Biressi 201). This is an image inconsistent with these female characters’ performance of what is perceived as a “violent ‘reduction’ into parts: a brutal dismemberment” (Sawday 1). Drawing on Butler’s ideas about gender as a culturally constructed performance, we can see that while these characters are biologically female, in carrying out tasks that are perceived as masculine they are not performing their traditional gender roles and are thus regarded with suspicion by their police colleagues. Both Scarpetta and Isles are aware of this, as illustrated by the interior monologue with which Gerritsen opens her novel:They called her the Queen of the Dead. Though no one ever said it to her face, Dr. Maura Isles sometimes heard the nickname murmured in her wake as she travelled the grim triangle of her job between courtroom and death scene and morgue. [...] Sometimes the whispers held a tremolo of disquiet, like the murmurs of the pious as an unholy stranger passes among them. It was the disquiet of those who could not understand why she chose to walk in Death’s footsteps. Does she enjoy it, they wonder? Does the touch of cold flesh, the stench of decay, hold such allure for her that she has turned her back on the living? (Gerritsen 6)The police officers’ inability to understand why Isles chooses to work with the dead leads them to wonder whether she takes pleasure in it, and because they cannot comprehend how a “normal” person could act that way she is immediately marked as a suspicious Other. Gerritsen’s language builds images of transgression: words such as murmured, wake, whispers, disquiet, unholy, death’s footsteps, cold, stench, and decay suggest a fearful attitude towards the dead and the abjection of the corpse itself, a topic I will explore shortly. Isles later describes seeing police officers cast uneasy glances her way, noting details that only reinforce their beliefs that she is an odd duck: The ivory skin, the black hair with its Cleopatra cut. The red slash of lipstick. Who else wears lipstick to a death scene? Most of all, it’s her calmness that disturbs them, her coolly regal gaze as she surveys the horrors that they themselves can barely stomach. Unlike them, she does not avert her gaze. Instead she bends close and stares, touches. She sniffs. And later, under bright lights in her autopsy lab, she cuts. (Gerritsen 7) While the term “odd duck” suggests a somewhat quaintly affectionate tolerance, it is contrasted by the rest of the description: the red slash brings to mind blood and a gaping wound perhaps also suggestive of female genitalia; the calmness, the coolly regal gaze, and the verb “surveys” imply detachment; the willingness to move close to the corpse, to touch and even smell it, and later cut it open, emphasise the difference between the police officers, who can “barely stomach” the sight, and Isles who readily goes much further.Kristeva describes the abject as that which is not one thing or another (4). The corpse is recognisable as once-human, but is no-longer; the body was once Subject, but we cannot make ourselves perceive it yet as fully Object, and thus it is incomprehensible and abject. I suggest that the abject is suspicious because of this “neither-nor” nature: its liminal identity cannot be pinned down, its meaning cannot be determined, and therefore it cannot be trusted. In the abject corpse, “that compelling, raw, insolent thing in the morgue’s full sunlight [...] that thing that no longer matches and therefore no longer signifies anything” (Kristeva 4), we see the loss of borders between ourselves and the Other, and we are simultaneously “drawn to and repelled” by it; “nausea is a biological recognition of it, and fear and adrenalin also acknowledge its presence” (Pentony). In these novels the police officers’ recognition of these feelings in themselves emphasises their assumptions about the apparent lack of the same responses in the female pathologist investigators. In the quote from The Sinner above, for example, the officers are unnerved by Isles’ calmness around the thing they can barely face. In Postmortem, the security guard who works for the morgue hides behind his desk when a body is delivered (17) and refuses to enter the body storage area when requested to do so (26) in contrast with Scarpetta’s ease with the corpses.Abjection results from “that which disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules” (Kristeva 4), and by having what appears to be an unnatural reaction to the corpse, these women are perceived as failing to respect systems and boundaries and therefore are viewed as abject themselves. At the same time, however, the female characters strive against the abject in their efforts to repair the disturbance caused by the corpse and the crime of murder that produced it by locating evidence leading to the apprehension of the culprit. Ever-present and undermining these attempts to restore order is the evidence of the crime itself, the corpse, which is abject not only for its “neither-nor” status but also because it exposes “the fragility of the law” (Kristeva 4). In addition, these female pathologist characters’ sex causes abjection in another form through their “liminal status” as outsiders in the male hierarchy of law enforcement (Nunn and Biressi 203); while they are employed by it and work to maintain its dominance over law-breakers and society in general, as biological females they can never truly belong.Abjection also results from the blurring of boundaries between investigator and victim. Such blurring is common in crime fiction, and while it is most likely to develop between criminal and investigator when the investigator is male, when that investigator is female it tends instead to involve the victim (Mizejewski 8). In these novels this is illustrated by the ways in which the female investigators see themselves as similar to the victims by reason of gender plus sensibility and/or work. The first victim in Cornwell’s Postmortem is a young female doctor, and reminders of her similarities to Scarpetta appear throughout the novel, such as when Scarpetta notices the pile of medical journals near the victim's bed (Cornwell 12), and when she considers the importance of the woman's fingers in her work as a surgeon (26). When another character suggests to Scarpetta that, “in a sense, you were her once,” Scarpetta agrees (218). This loss of boundaries between self and not-self can be considered another form of abjection because the status and roles of investigator and victim become unclear, and it also results in an emotional bond, with both Scarpetta and Isles becoming sensitive to what lies in wait for the bodies. This awareness, and the frisson it creates, is in stark contrast to their previous equanimity. For example, when preparing for an autopsy on the body of a nun, Isles finds herself fighting extreme reluctance, knowing that “this was a woman who had chosen to live hidden from the eyes of men; now she would be cruelly revealed, her body probed, her orifices swabbed. The prospect of such an invasion brought a bitter taste to [Isles’s] throat and she paused to regain her composure” (Gerritsen 57). The language highlights the penetrative nature of Isles’s contact with the corpse through words such as revealed, orifices, probed, and invasion, which all suggest unwanted interference, the violence inherent in the dissecting procedures of autopsy, and the masculine nature of the task even when performed by a female pathologist. This in turn adds to the problematic issue here of gender as performance, a subject I will discuss shortly.In a further blurring of those boundaries, the female characters are often perceived as potential victims by both themselves and others. Critic Lee Horsley describes Scarpetta as “increasingly giv[ing] way to a tendency to see herself in the place of the victim, her interior self exposed and open to inspection by hostile eyes” (154). This is demonstrated in the novel when plot developments see Scarpetta’s work scrutinised (Cornwell 105), when she feels she does not belong to the same world as the living people around her (133), and when she almost becomes a victim in a literal sense at the climax of the novel, when the perpetrator breaks into her home to torture and kill her but is stopped by the timely arrival of a police officer (281).Similarly, Gerritsen’s character Isles comes to see herself as a possible victim in The Sinner. When it is feared that the criminal is watching the Boston police and Isles realises he may be watching her too, she thinks about how “she was accustomed to being in the eye of the media, but now she considered the other eyes that might be watching her. Tracking her. And she remembered what she had felt in the darkness at [a previous crime scene]: the prey’s cold sense of dread when it suddenly realises it is being stalked” (Gerritsen 222). She too almost becomes a literal victim when the criminal enters her home with intent to kill (323).As investigators, these characters’ sex causes suspicion because they are “transgressive female bod[ies] occupying the spaces traditionally held by a man” (Mizejewski 6). The investigator in crime fiction has “traditionally been represented as a marginalized outsider” (Mizejewski 11), a person who not only needs to think like the criminal in order to apprehend them but be willing to use violence or to step outside the law in their pursuit of this goal, and is regarded as suspicious as a result. To place a woman in this position then makes that investigator’s role doubly suspicious (Mizejewski 11). Judith Butler’s work on gender as performance provides a useful tool for examining this. Because “the various acts of gender create the gender itself” (Butler 522), these female characters are judged as woman or not-woman according to what they do. By working as investigators in the male-dominated field of law-enforcement and particularly by choosing to spend their days handling the dead in ways that involve the masculine actions of penetrating and dismembering, each has “radically crossed the limits of her gender role, with her choice of the most unsavoury and ‘unfeminine’ of professions” (Vanacker 65). The suspicion this attracts is demonstrated by Scarpetta being compared to her male predecessor who got on so well with the police, judges, and lawyers with whom she struggles (Cornwell 91). This sense of marginalisation and unfavourable comparison is reinforced through her recollections of her time in medical school when she was one of only four women in her class and can remember vividly the isolating tactics the male students employed against the female members (60). One critic has estimated the dates of Scarpetta’s schooling as putting her “on the leading edge of women moving into professionals schools in the early 1970s” (Robinson 97), in the time of second wave feminism, when such changes were not welcomed by all men in the institutions. In The Sinner, Isles wants her male colleagues to see her as “a brain and a white coat” (Gerritsen 175) rather than a woman, and chooses strategies such as maintaining an “icy professionalism” (109) and always wearing that white coat to ensure she is seen as an intimidating authority figure, as she believes that once they see her as a woman, sex will get in the way (175). She wants to be perceived as a professional with a job to do rather than a prospective sexual partner. The white coat also helps conceal the physical indicators of her sex, such as breasts and hips (mirroring the decision of the murdered nun to hide herself from the eyes of men and revealing their shared sensibility). Butler’s argument that “the distinction between appearance and reality [...] structures a good deal of populist thinking about gender identity” (527) is appropriate here, for Isles’s actions in trying to mask her sex and thus her gender declare to her colleagues that her sex is irrelevant to her role and therefore she can and should be treated as just another colleague performing a task.Scarpetta makes similar choices. Critic Bobbie Robinson says “Scarpetta triggers the typical distrust of powerful women in a male-oriented world, and in that world she seems determined to swaddle her lurking femininity to construct a persona that keeps her Other” (106), and that “because she perceives her femininity as problematic for others, she intentionally misaligns or masks the expectations of gender so that the masculine and feminine in her cancel each other out, constructing her as an androgyne” (98). Examples of this include Scarpetta’s acknowledgement of her own attractiveness (Cornwell 62) and her nurturing of herself and her niece Lucy through cooking, an activity she describes as “what I do best” (109) while at the same time she hides her emotions from her colleagues (204) and maintains that her work is her priority despite her mother’s accusations that “it’s not natural for a woman” (34). Butler states that “certain kinds of acts are usually interpreted as expressive of a gender core or identity, and that these acts either conform to an expected gender identity or contest that expectation in some way” (527). Scarpetta’s attention to her looks and her enjoyment of cooking conform to a societal assumption of female gender identity, while her construction of an emotionless facade and focus on her work falls more in the area of expected male gender identity.These characters deliberately choose to perform in a specific manner as a way of coping and succeeding in their workplace: by masking the most overt signs of their sex and gender they are attempting to lessen the suspicion cast upon them by others for not being “woman.” There exists, however, a contradiction between that decision and the clear markers of femininity demonstrated on occasion by both characters, for example, the use by Isles of bright red lipstick and a smart Cleopatra haircut, and the performance by both of the “feminised role as caretaker of, or alignment with, the victim’s body” (Summers-Bremner 133). While the characters do also perform the more masculine role of “rendering [the body’s] secrets in scientific form” (Summers-Bremner 133), a strong focus of the novels is their emotional connection to the bodies and so this feminised role is foregrounded. The attention to lipstick and hairstyle and their overtly caring natures fulfill Butler’s ideas of the conventional performance of gender and may be a reassurance to readers about the characters’ core femininity and their resultant availability for romance sub-plots, however they also have the effect of emphasising the contrasting performative gender elements within these characters and marking them once again in the eyes of other characters as neither one thing nor another, and therefore deserving of suspicion.In conclusion, the female forensic pathologist investigator is portrayed in the chosen novels as suspicious for her involvement in the abject space that results from her comfort around and identification with the corpse in contrast to the revulsion experienced by her police colleagues; her sex in her roles as investigator and pathologist where these roles are conventionally seen as masculine; and her performance of elements of both masculine and feminine conventional gender roles as she carries out her work. This, however, sets up a further line of inquiry about the central position of the abject in novels featuring female forensic pathologist investigators, as these texts depict this character’s occupation of the abject space as crucial to the solving of the case: it is through her ability to perform the procedures of her job while identifying with the corpse that clues are located, the narrative of events reconstructed, and the criminal identified and apprehended.ReferencesBarthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. London: Jonathan Cape. 1975. Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal. 40.4 (1988): 519–31. 5 October 2011 ‹http://www.jstor.org/stable/3207893›Cornwell, Patricia. Postmortem. London: Warner Books, 1994. Davis, Gregory J. and Bradley R. 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New York: Columbia UP, 1982.Mizejewski, Linda. “Illusive Evidence: Patricia Cornwell and the Body Double.” South Central Review. 18.3/4 (2001): 6–20. 19 March 2010. ‹http://www.jstor.org/stable/3190350›Nunn, Heather and Anita Biressi. “Silent Witness: Detection, Femininity, and the Post Mortem Body.” Feminist Media Studies. 3.2 (2003): 193–206. 18 January 2011. ‹http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1468077032000119317›Pentony, Samantha. “How Kristeva’s Theory of Abjection Works in Relation to the Fairy Tale and Post Colonial Novel: Angela Carter’s The Blood Chamber and Keri Hulme’s The Bone People.” Deep South. 2.3 (1996): n.p. 13 November 2011. ‹http://www.otago.ac.nz/DeepSouth/vol2no3/pentony.html›Richardson, Ruth. “Human Dissection and Organ Donation: A Historical Background.” Mortality. 11.2 (2006): 151–65. 13 May 2011. ‹http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13576270600615351›Robinson, Bobbie. “Playing Like the Boys: Patricia Cornwell Writes Men.” The Journal of Popular Culture. 39.1 (2006): 95–108. 2 August 2010. ‹http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1540-5931.2006.00205.x/full›Rolls, Alistair. “An Uncertain Place: (Dis-)Locating the Frenchness of French and Australian Detective Fiction.” in Mostly French: French (in) Detective Fiction. Modern French Identities, v.88. Ed. Alistair Rolls. Oxford: Peter Lang. 2009.---. “What Does It Mean? Contemplating Rita and Desiring Dead Bodies in Two Short Stories by Raymond Carver.” Literature and Aesthetics: The Journal of the Sydney Society of Literature and Aesthetics. 18.2 (2008): 88-116. Sawday, Jonathon. The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture. London: Routledge, 1996.Summers-Bremner, Eluned. “Post-Traumatic Woundings: Sexual Anxiety in Patricia Cornwell’s Fiction.” New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics. 43 (2001): 131–47. Vanacker, Sabine. “V.I Warshawski, Kinsey Millhone and Kay Scarpetta: Creating a Feminist Detective Hero.” Criminal Proceedings: The Contemporary American Crime Novel. Ed. Peter Messent. London: Pluto P, 1997. 62–87. Vargas, Fred. This Night’s Foul Work. Trans. Sian Reynolds. London: Harvill Secker, 2008.

Autumn is not only a gloriously colourful time of the year, it is a time when a plethora of children’s book related events and awards take place. Just see what is happening in the next few months:IBBY: “Silent Books: Final Destination Lampedusa” travelling exhibit In response to the international refugee crisis that began last year, the Italian arm of the International Board on Books for Young People has launched a travelling picture-book exhibit to support the first children’s library on the island of Lampedusa, Italy where many African and Middle Eastern refugees are landing. After stops in Italy, Mexico, and Austria, the exhibit is currently touring Canada. It premiered in Edmonton at the Stanley A. Milner Library in August. Next are three Vancouver locations: UBC Irving Barber Learning Centre (Oct. 1 to 23), Vancouver Public Library central branch (Oct. 8 to 18), and the Italian Cultural Centre (Oct. 10 to 22). Then the North York Central Library in Toronto from Nov. 2 to Dec 11. Recognizing Lampedusa island’s cultural diversity, the exhibit comprises exclusively wordless picture books from 23 countries, including three from Canada:“Hocus Pocus” by Sylvie Desrosiers & Rémy Simard’s (Kids Can Press), “Ben’s Big Dig” by Daniel Wakeman and Dirk van Stralen’s(Orca Book Publishers)“Ben’s Bunny Trouble” also by Wakeman and van Stralen (Orca Book Publishers). Other books are drawn from an honour list selected by a jury of experts from the 2015 Bologna Children’s Book Fair including Ajubel’s “Robinson Crusoe” (Spain), Ara Jo’s “The Rocket Boy”(Korea), and Madalena Matoso’s “Todos Fazemos Tudo” (Switzerland), among others. The full catalogue can be viewed online.TD Canadian Children’s Book Week.Next year’s TD Canadian Children’s Book Week will take place from May 7-14, 2016. Thirty Canadian children’s authors, illustrators and storytellers will be touring across Canada visiting schools, libraries, bookstores and community centres. Visit the TD Book Week site (www.bookweek.ca) to find out who will be touring in your area and the types of readings and workshops they will be giving. If your school or library is interested in hosting a Book Week visitor, you can apply online starting in mid-October.Shakespeare Selfie CBC Books will once again be running the Shakespeare Selfie writing challenge in April 2016. Shakespeare took selfies all the time but instead of a camera, he used a quill. And instead of calling them "selfies," they were called "soliloquies."The challenge: Write a modern-day soliloquy or monologue by a Shakespearean character based on a prominent news, pop culture or current affairs event from the last year (April 2015-April 2016). It can be in iambic pentameter or modern syntax with a word count from 200 to 400 words. There are two age categories: Grades 7-9 and 10-12. Details at: http://www.cbc.ca/books/2015/10/the-2016-shakespeare-selfie-writing-challenge-for-students.html Awards:The winners of this year’s Canadian Jewish Literary Awards, celebrating Jewish literature and culture in Canada, have been announced. Amongst the nine awards is one for Youth Literature which was awarded to Suri Rosen for “Playing with Matches” (ECW Press). See all the award winners here: http://www.cjlawards.ca/.The Canadian Children's Book Centre administers several awards including the TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award, the Marilyn Baillie Picture Book Award, the Monica Hughes Award for Science Fiction and Fantasy and the Norma Fleck Award for Canadian Children’s Non-Fiction. This year’s winners will be announced on November 18, 2015. http://www.bookcentre.ca/awardThe Fitzhenry Family Foundation has revealed the winners of its Lane Anderson Awards for the best Canadian science books published in the previous year. Selections are made based on a title’s pertinence to science in today’s world and the author’s ability to relate scientific issues to everyday life. Prolific Halifax kids’ science writer L.E. Carmichael was awarded the YA prize for “Fuzzy Forensics: DNA Fingerprinting Gets Wild” (Ashby-BP Publishing), about using forensic science to fight crimes against animals. Uxbridge, Ontario–based environmental journalist Stephen Leahy received the adult prize for “Your Water Footprint” (Firefly Books), which examines human usage of the valuable natural resource. http://laneandersonaward.ca/The Edmonton Public Library has named Sigmund Brouwer (author and Rock & Roll Literacy Show host) as the winner (by public vote) of Alberta Reader’s Choice Award. Sigmund’s “Thief of Glory” (WaterBrook Press) is about a young boy trying to take care of his family in the aftermath of the 1942 Japanese Imperialist invasion of the Southeast Pacific. The prize awards $10,000 to an Alberta-based author of a work of excellent fiction or narrative non-fiction. http://www.epl.ca/alberta-readers-choiceHarperCollins Canada, the Cooke Agency, and the University of British Columbia have announced the shortlist of the annual HarperCollins Publishers/UBC Prize for Best New Fiction awarded to students and alumni of UBC’s creative writing program, and offers the winner literary representation by the Cooke Agency and a publishing contract with HarperCollins Canada.“Between the Wind and Us” by Iranian-Canadian writer Nazanine Hozar, the story of a young abandoned girl set during the political unrest of 1953–1979 Iran.“Learning to Breathe” by B.C.-based Janice Lynn Mather, a young adult novel about a Caribbean teenager’s struggle to establish herself in a new city and home life.“At The Top of the Wall, Alight” by Sudbury, Ontario, author Natalie Morrill, which follows a Viennese Jew separated from his family during the Second World War. An early version of this novel was previously nominated for the award.Novelist and University of Guelph writing professor, Thomas King, and L.A.-based author, graphic novelist, and musician, Cecil Castellucci, have been named winners of this year’s Sunburst Awards for excellence in Canadian literature of the fantastic. Castellucci won in the YA category for “Tin Star” (Roaring Brook/Raincoast), the first novel in a planned series about a teenager who struggles to survive parent-less in a space station where she is the only human, and which played scene to a brutal assault that haunts her memory. King won in the adult category for his novel “The Back of the Turtle” (HarperCollins Canada), for which he also received a Copper Cylinder Award from the Sunburst Society last week. The book follows a First Nations scientist who finds himself torn after he’s sent to clean up the ecological mess his company has left on the reserve his family grew up on.Be sure to save October 28th on your calendar for the GG book awards announcement. Of course, “GG” stands for Governor-General. The short lists can be viewed here:http://ggbooks.ca/books/. There are categories in both English and French for both children’s text and illustration books.Online ResourcesPodcast: Yegs and Bacon: Episode 22: the full audio from our recent Indigenous Representation in Popular Culture panel. In the audio, you’ll be hearing from (in order of first vocal appearance) Brandon, who introduces the panelists, James Leask, Richard Van Camp, Kelly Mellings, and Patti Laboucane-Benson. Recorded on Monday, September 28th, 2015. http://variantedmonton.com/category/yegs-and-bacon/European Picture Book Collection: The EPBC was designed to help pupils to find out more about their European neighbours through reading the visual narratives of carefully chosen picture books. Here you can find out about how the project began, the theoretical papers that have been presented on European children's literature, and how the materials were initially used in schools. http://www.ncrcl.ac.uk/epbc/EN/index.aspMore next time around,Yours in stories, Gail de VosGail de Vos is an adjunct professor who teaches courses on Canadian children's literature, young adult literature, and comic books & graphic novels at the School of Library and Information Studies (SLIS) at the University of Alberta. She is the author of nine books on storytelling and folklore. Gail is also a professional storyteller who has taught the storytelling course at SLIS for over two decades.

The novel challenges the derealization loss in the context of Iraqi war fiction by trying to portray the dark reality of the US invasion. The American granddaughter is not only about war trauma, memories, atrocities, and the huge loss caused by an endless and unjust war waged against a sovereign country. It is about, as the paper argues, a disoriented homecoming and the scattered identity of Zeina, the protagonist, who appears to be a dissociative personality. This paper also explores how the protagonist’s dual identity crisis is of a unique type as it is being questioned through three stages. Exile and the coming back on an American military truck as a translator for the invaders’ army attacking her origin homeland and finally returning to the United States only to find herself unfit for both homes.

IntroductionIt has been nearly half a century since the appearance of Susan Sontag’s landmark essay “The Imagination of Disaster.” The critic wrote of the public fascination with science fiction disaster films, claiming that, on the one hand “from a psychological point of view, the imagination of disaster does not greatly differ from one period in history to another [but, on the other hand] from a political and moral point of view, it does” (224). Even if Sontag is right about aspects of the imagination of disaster not changing, the types, frequency, and magnitude of disasters and their representation in media and popular culture suggest that dynamic conditions prevail on both counts. Disaster has become a significantly urban phenomenon, and highly publicised “worst case” scenarios such as Hurricane Katrina and the Haiti earthquake highlight multiple demographic, cultural, and environmental contexts for visualising cataclysm. The 1950s and 60s science fiction films that Sontag wrote about were filled with marauding aliens and freaks of disabused science. Since then, their visual and dramatic effects have been much enlarged by all kinds of disaster scenarios. Partly imagined, these scenarios have real-life counterparts with threats from terrorism and the war on terror, pan-epidemics, and global climate change. Sontag’s essay—like most, if not all of the films she mentions—overlooked the aftermath; that is, the rebuilding, following extra-terrestrial invasion. It ignored what was likely to happen when the monsters were gone. In contrast, the psychological as well as the practical, social, and economic aspects of reconstruction are integral to disaster discourse today. Writing about how architecture might creatively contribute to post-conflict (including war) and disaster recovery, for instance, Boano elaborates the psychological background for rebuilding, where the material destruction of dwellings and cities “carries a powerful symbolic erosion of security, social wellbeing and place attachment” (38); these are depicted as attributes of selfhood and identity that must be restored. Similarly, Hutchison and Bleiker (385) adopt a view evident in disaster studies, that disaster-struck communities experience “trauma” and require inspired responses that facilitate “healing and reconciliation” as well as material aid such as food, housing, and renewed infrastructure. This paper revisits Sontag’s “The Imagination of Disaster,” fifty years on in view of the changing face of disasters and their representation in film media, including more recent films. The paper then considers disaster recovery and outlines the difficult path that “creative industries” like architecture and urban planning must tread when promising a vision of rebuilding that provides for such intangible outcomes as “healing and reconciliation.” We find that hopes for the seemingly positive psychologically- and socially-recuperative outcomes accompanying the prospect of rebuilding risk a variety of generalisation akin to wish-fulfilment that Sontag finds in disaster films. The Psychology of Science Fiction and Disaster FilmsIn “The Imagination of Disaster,” written at or close to the height of the Cold War, Sontag ruminates on what America’s interest in, if not preoccupation with, science fiction films tell us about ourselves. Their popularity cannot be explained in terms of their entertainment value alone; or if it can, then why audiences found (and still find) such films entertaining is something that itself needs explanation.Depicted in media like photography and film, utopian and dystopian thought have at least one thing in common. Their visions of either perfected or socially alienated worlds are commonly prompted by criticism of the social/political status quo and point to its reform. For Sontag, science fiction films portrayed both people’s worst nightmares concerning disaster and catastrophe (e.g. the end of the world; chaos; enslavement; mutation), as well as their facile victories over the kinds of moral, political, and social dissolution the films imaginatively depicted. Sontag does not explicitly attribute such “happy endings” to wish-fulfilling phantasy and ego-protection. (“Phantasy” is to be distinguished from fantasy. It is a psychoanalytic term for states of mind, often symbolic in form, resulting from infantile wish-fulfilment, desires and instincts.) She does, however, describe the kinds of fears, existential concerns (like annihilation), and crises of meaning they are designed (purpose built) to allay. The fears are a product of the time—the down and dark side of technology (e.g. depersonalisation; ambivalence towards science, scientists, and technology) and changes wrought in our working and personal lives by urbanisation. In short, then as now, science fictions films were both expressions of deep and genuine worries and of the pressing need to inventively set them to rest.When Sontag claims that “the imagination of disaster does not greatly differ” (224) from one period to another, this is because, psychologically speaking, neither the precipitating concerns and fears (death, loss of love, meaninglessness, etc.), nor the ways in which people’s minds endeavour to assuage them, substantively differ. What is different is the way they are depicted. This is unsurprisingly a function of the political, social, and moral situations and milieus that provide the context in which the imagination of disaster unfolds. In contemporary society, the extent to which the media informs and constructs the context in which the imagination operates is unprecedented.Sontag claims that there is little if any criticism of the real social and political conditions that bring about the fears the films depict (223). Instead, fantasy operates so as to displace and project the actual causes away from their all too human origins into outer space and onto aliens. In a sense, this is the core and raison d’etre for such films. By their very nature, science fiction films of the kind Sontag is discussing cannot concern themselves with genuine social or political criticism (even though the films are necessarily expressive of such criticism). Any serious questioning of the moral and political status quo—conditions that are responsible for the disasters befalling people—would hamper the operation of fantasy and its production of temporarily satisfying “solutions” to whatever catastrophe is being depicted.Sontag goes on to discuss various strategies science fiction employs to deal with such fears. For example, through positing a bifurcation between good and evil, and grossly oversimplifying the moral complexity of situations, it allows one to “give outlet to cruel or at least amoral feelings” (215) and to exercise feelings of superiority—moral and otherwise. Ambiguous feelings towards science and technology are repressed. Quick and psychologically satisfying fixes are sought for these by means of phantasy and the imaginative construction of invulnerable heroes. Much of what Sontag says can straightforwardly be applied to catastrophe in general. “Alongside the hopeful fantasy of moral simplification and international unity embodied in the science fiction films lurk the deepest anxieties about contemporary existence” (220). Sontag writes:In the films it is by means of images and sounds […] that one can participate in the fantasy of living through one’s own death and more, the death of cities, the destruction of humanity itself. Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects in art. In science fiction films disaster is rarely viewed intensively; it is always extensive. It is a matter of quality and ingenuity […] the science fiction film […] is concerned with the aesthetics of disaster […] and it is in the imagery of destruction that the core of a good science fiction film lies. (212–13)In science fiction films, disaster, though widespread, is viewed intensively as well as extensively. The disturbances constitutive of the disaster are moral and emotional as well as material. People are left without the mental or physical abilities they need to cope. Government is absent or useless. We find ourselves in what amounts to what Naomi Zack (“Philosophy and Disaster”; Ethics for Disaster) describes as a Hobbesian second state of nature—where government is inoperative and chaos (moral, social, political, personal) reigns. Science fiction’s way out is to imaginatively construct scenarios emotionally satisfying enough to temporarily assuage the distress (anomie or chaos) experienced in the film.There is, however, a tremendous difference in the way in which people who face catastrophic occurrences in their lives, as opposed to science fiction, address the problems. For one thing, they must be far closer to complex and quickly changing realities and uncertain truths than are the phantastic, temporarily gratifying, and morally unproblematic resolutions to the catastrophic scenarios that science fiction envisions. Genuine catastrophe, for example war, undermines and dismantles the structures—material structures to be sure but also those of justice, human kindness, and affectivity—that give us the wherewithal to function and that are shown to be inimical to catastrophe as such. Disaster dispenses with civilization while catastrophe displaces it.Special Effects and Changing StorylinesScience fiction and disaster film genres have been shaped by developments in visual simulation technologies providing opportunities for imaginatively mixing fact and fiction. Developments in filmmaking include computer or digital techniques for reproducing on the screen what can otherwise only be imagined as causal sequences of events and spectacles accompanying the wholesale destruction of buildings and cities—even entire planets. Indeed films are routinely promoted on the basis of how cinematographers and technicians have advanced the state of the art. The revival of 3-D movies with films such as Avatar (2009) and Prometheus (2012) is one of a number of developments augmenting the panoramas of 1950s classics featuring “melting tanks, flying bodies, crashing walls, awesome craters and fissures in the earth, plummeting spacecraft [and] colourful deadly rays” (Sontag 213). An emphasis on the scale of destruction and the wholesale obliteration of recognisable sites emblematic of “the city” (mega-structures like the industrial plant in Aliens (1986) and vast space ships like the “Death Star” in two Star Wars sequels) connect older films with new ones and impress the viewer with ever more extraordinary spectacle.Films that have been remade make for useful comparison. On the whole, these reinforce the continuation and predictability of some storylines (for instance, threats of extra-terrestrial invasion), but also the attenuation or disappearance of other narrative elements such as the monsters and anxieties released by mid-twentieth century atomic tests (Broderick). Remakes also highlight emerging themes requiring novel or updated critical frameworks. For example, environmental anxieties, largely absent in 1950s science fiction films (except for narratives involving colliding worlds or alien contacts) have appeared en masse in recent years, providing an updated view on the ethical issues posed by the fall of cities and communities (Taylor, “Urban”).In The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers and its remakes (1956, 1978, 1993), for example, the organic and vegetal nature of the aliens draws the viewer’s attention to an environment formed by combative species, allowing for threats of infestation, growth and decay of the self and individuality—a longstanding theme. In the most recent version, The Invasion (2007), special effects and directorial spirit render the orifice-seeking tendrils of the pod creatures threateningly vigorous and disturbing (Lim). More sanctimonious than physically invasive, the aliens in the 1951 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still are fed up with humankind’s fixation with atomic self-destruction, and threaten global obliteration on the earth (Cox). In the 2008 remake, the suave alien ambassador, Keanu Reeves, targets the environmental negligence of humanity.Science, including science as fiction, enters into disaster narratives in a variety of ways. Some are less obvious but provocative nonetheless; for example, movies dramatising the arrival of aliens such as War of the Worlds (1953 and 2005) or Alien (1979). These more subtle approaches can be personally confronting even without the mutation of victims into vegetables or zombies. Special effects technologies have made it possible to illustrate the course of catastrophic floods and earthquakes in considerable scientific and visual detail and to represent the interaction of natural disasters, the built environment, and people, from the scale of buildings, homes, and domestic lives to entire cities and urban populations.For instance, the blockbuster film The Day After Tomorrow (2004) runs 118 minutes, but has an uncertain fictional time frame of either a few weeks or 72 hours (if the film’s title is to taken literally). The movie shows the world as we know it being mostly destroyed. Tokyo is shattered by hailstones and Los Angeles is twisted by cyclones the likes of which Dorothy would never have seen. New York disappears beneath a mountainous tsunami. All of these events result from global climate change, though whether this is due to human (in) action or other causes is uncertain. Like their predecessors, the new wave of disaster movies like The Day After Tomorrow makes for questionable “art” (Annan). Nevertheless, their reception opens a window onto broader political and moral contexts for present anxieties. Some critics have condemned The Day After Tomorrow for its scientific inaccuracies—questioning the scale or pace of climate change. Others acknowledge errors while commending efforts to raise environmental awareness (Monbiot). Coincident with the film and criticisms in both the scientific and political arena is a new class of environmental heretic—the climate change denier. This is a shadowy character commonly associated with the presidency of George W. Bush and the oil lobby that uses minor inconsistencies of science to claim that climate change does not exist. One thing underlying both twisting facts for the purposes of making science fiction films and ignoring evidence of climate change is an infantile orientation towards the unknown. In this regard, recent films do what science fiction disaster films have always done. While freely mixing truths and half-truths for the purpose of heightened dramatic effect, they fulfil psychological tasks such as orchestrating nightmare scenarios and all too easy victories on the screen. Uncertainty regarding the precise cause, scale, or duration of cataclysmic natural phenomena is mirrored by suspension of disbelief in the viability of some human responses to portrayals of urban disaster. Science fiction, in other words, invites us to accept as possible the flight of Americans and their values to Mexico (The Day After Tomorrow), the voyage into earth’s molten core (The Core 2003), or the disposal of lava in LA’s drainage system (Volcano 1997). Reinforcing Sontag’s point, here too there is a lack of criticism of the real social and political conditions that bring about the fears depicted in the films (223). Moreover, much like news coverage, images in recent natural disaster films (like their predecessors) typically finish at the point where survivors are obliged to pick up the pieces and start all over again—the latter is not regarded as newsworthy. Allowing for developments in science fiction films and the disaster genre, Sontag’s observation remains accurate. The films are primarily concerned “with the aesthetics of destruction, with the peculiar beauties to be found in wreaking havoc, in making a mess” (213) rather than rebuilding. The Imagination of Disaster RecoverySontag’s essay contributes to an important critical perspective on science fiction film. Variations on her “psychological point of view” have been explored. (The two discourses—psychology and cinema—have parallel and in some cases intertwined histories). Moreover, in the intervening years, psychological or psychoanalytical terms and narratives have themselves become even more a part of popular culture. They feature in recent disaster films and disaster recovery discourse in the “real” world.Today, with greater frequency than in the 1950s and 60s films arguably, representations of alien invasion or catastrophic global warming serve to background conflict resolutions of a more quotidian and personal nature. Hence, viewers are led to suspect that Tom Cruise will be more likely to survive the rapacious monsters in the latest The War of the Worlds if he can become less narcissistic and a better father. Similarly, Dennis Quaid’s character will be much better prepared to serve a newly glaciated America for having rescued his son (and marriage) from the watery deep-freezer that New York City becomes in The Day After Tomorrow. In these films the domestic and familial comprise a domain of inter-personal and communal relations from which victims and heroes appear. Currents of thought from the broad literature of disaster studies and Western media also call upon this domain. The imagination of disaster recovery has come to partly resemble a set of problems organised around the needs of traumatised communities. These serve as an object of urban governance, planning, and design conceived in different ways, but largely envisioned as an organic unity that connects urban populations, their pasts, and settings in a meaningful, psychologically significant manner (Furedi; Hutchison and Bleiker; Boano). Terms like “place” or concepts like Boano’s “place-attachment" (38) feature in this discourse to describe this unity and its subjective dimensions. Consider one example. In August 2006, one year after Katrina, the highly respected Journal of Architectural Education dedicated a special issue to New Orleans and its reconstruction. Opening comments by editorialist Barbara Allen include claims presupposing enduring links between the New Orleans community conceived as an organic whole, its architectural heritage imagined as a mnemonic vehicle, and the city’s unique setting. Though largely unsupported (and arguably unsupportable) the following proposition would find agreement across a number of disaster studies and resonates in commonplace reasoning:The culture of New Orleans is unique. It is a mix of ancient heritage with layers and adaptations added by successive generations, resulting in a singularly beautiful cultural mosaic of elements. Hurricane Katrina destroyed buildings—though not in the city’s historic core—and displaced hundreds of thousands of people, but it cannot wipe out the memories and spirit of the citizens. (4) What is intriguing about the claim is an underlying intellectual project that subsumes psychological and sociological domains of reasoning within a distinctive experience of community, place, and memory. In other words, the common belief that memory is an intrinsic part of the human condition of shock and loss gives form to a theory of how urban communities experience disaster and how they might re-build—and justify rebuilding—themselves. This is problematic and invites anachronistic thinking. While communities are believed to be formed partly by memories of a place, “memory” is neither a collective faculty nor is it geographically bounded. Whose memories are included and which ones are not? Are these truly memories of one place or do they also draw on other real or imagined places? Moreover—and this is where additional circumspection is inspired by our reading of Sontag’s essay—does Allen’s editorial contribute to an aestheticised image of place, rather than criticism of the social and political conditions required for reconstruction to proceed with justice, compassionately and affectively? Allowing for civil liberties to enter the picture, Allen adds “it is necessary to enable every citizen to come back to this exceptional city if they so desire” (4). However, given that memories of places and desires for their recovery are not univocal, and often contain competing visions of what was and should be, it is not surprising they should result in competing expectations for reconstruction efforts. This has clearly proven the case for New Orleans (Vederber; Taylor, “Typologies”)ConclusionThe comparison of films invites an extension of Sontag’s analysis of the imagination of disaster to include the psychology, politics, and morality of rebuilding. Can a “psychological point of view” help us to understand not only the motives behind capturing so many scenes of destruction on screen and television, but also something of the creative impulses driving reconstruction? This invites a second question. How do some impulses, particularly those caricatured as the essence of an “enterprise culture” (Heap and Ross) associated with America’s “can-do” or others valorised as positive outcomes of catastrophe in The Upside of Down (Homer-Dixon), highlight or possibly obscure criticism of the conditions which made cities like New Orleans vulnerable in the first place? The broad outline of an answer to the second question begins to appear only when consideration of the ethics of disaster and rebuilding are taken on board. If “the upside” of “the down” wrought by Hurricane Katrina, for example, is rebuilding of any kind, at any price, and for any person, then the equation works (i.e., there is a silver lining for every cloud). If, however, the range of positives is broadened to include issues of social justice, then the figures require more complex arithmetic.ReferencesAllen, Barbara. “New Orleans and Katrina: One Year Later.” Journal of Architectural Education 60.1 (2006): 4.Annan, David. Catastrophe: The End of the Cinema? London: Lorrimer, 1975.Boano, Camillo. “‘Violent Space’: Production and Reproduction of Security and Vulnerabilities.” The Journal of Architecture 16 (2011): 37–55.Broderick, Mick, ed. Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film. London: Kegan Paul, 1996.Cox, David. “Get This, Aliens: We Just Don’t Care!” The Guardian 15 Dec. 2008 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2008/dec/15/the-day-the-earth-stood-still›. Furedi, Frank. “The Changing Meaning of Disaster.” Area 39.4 (2007): 482–89.Heap, Shaun H., and Angus Ross, eds. Understanding the Enterprise Culture: Themes in the Work of Mary Douglas. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992. Homer-Dixon, Thomas. The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2006.Hutchison, Emma, and Roland Bleiker. “Emotional Reconciliation: Reconstituting Identity and Community after Trauma.” European Journal of Social Theory 11 (2008): 385–403.Lim, Dennis. “Same Old Aliens, But New Neuroses.” New York Times 12 Aug. 2007: A17.Monbiot, George. “A Hard Rain's A-gonna Fall.” The Guardian 14 May 2004.Sontag, Susan. “The Imagination of Disaster” (1965). Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Dell, 1979. 209–25.Taylor, William M. “Typologies of Katrina: Mnemotechnics in Post-Disaster New Orleans.” Interstices 13 (2012): 71–84.———. “Urban Disasters: Visualising the Fall of Cities and the Forming of Human Values.” Journal of Architecture 11.5 (2006): 603–12.Verderber, Stephen. “Five Years After – Three New Orleans Neighborhoods.” Journal of Architectural Education 64.1 (2010): 107–20.Zack, Naomi. Ethics for Disaster. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009.———. “Philosophy and Disaster.” Homeland Security Affairs 2, article 5 (April 2006): ‹http://www.hsaj.org/?article=2.1.5›.FilmographyAlien. Dir. Ridley Scott. Brandywine Productions, 1979.Aliens. Dir. James Cameron. Brandywine Productions, 1986.Avatar. Dir. James Cameron. Lightstorm Entertainment et al., 2009.The Core. Dir. Jon Amiel. Paramount Pictures, 2003.The Day after Tomorrow. Dir. Roland Emmerich. 20th Century Fox, 2004.The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Dir. Don Siegel. Allied Artists, 1956; also 1978 and 1993.The Invasion. Dirs. Oliver Hirschbiegel and Jame McTeigue. Village Roadshow et al, 2007.Prometheus. Dir. Ridley Scott. Scott Free and Brandywine Productions, 2012Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Dir. George Lucas. Lucasfilm, 1977.Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. Dir. George Lucas. Lucasfilm, 1983.Volcano. Dir. Mick Jackson. 20th Century Fox, 1997.War of the Worlds. Dir. George Pal. Paramount, 1953; also Steven Spielberg. Paramount, 2005.Acknowledgments The authors are grateful to Oenone Rooksby and Joely-Kym Sobott for their assistance and advice when preparing this article. It was also made possible in part by a grant from the Australian Research Council.

The pop cultural moment that most typifies the social psychology of invasion for many of us is Orson Welles's 1938 coast to coast CBS radio broadcast of Invaders from Mars, a narration based on H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds. News bulletins and scene broadcasts followed Welles's introduction, featuring, in contemporary journalistic style, reports of a "meteor" landing near Princeton, N.J., which "killed" 1500 people, and the discovery that it was in fact a "metal cylinder" containing strange creatures from Mars armed with "death rays" which would reduce all the inhabitants of the earth to space dust. Welles's broadcast caused thousands to believe that Martians were wreaking widespread havoc in New York and Jersey. New York streets were filled with families rushing to open spaces protecting their faces from the "gas raids", clutching sacred possessions and each other. Lines of communication were clogged, massive traffic jams ensued, and people evacuated their homes in a state of abject terror while armouries in neighbouring districts prepared to join in the "battle". Some felt it was a very cruel prank, especially after the recent war scare in Europe that featured constant interruption of regular radio programming. Many of the thousands of questions directed at police in the hours following the broadcast reflected the concerns of the residents of London and Paris during the tense days before the Munich agreement. The media had undergone that strange metamorphosis that occurs when people depend on it for information that affects themselves directly. But it was not a prank. Three separate announcements made during the broadcast stressed its fictional nature. The introduction to the program stated "the Columbia Broadcasting System and its affiliated stations present Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air in The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells", as did the newspaper listing of the program "Today: 8:00-9:00 -- Play: H.G. Wells's 'War of the Worlds' -- WABC". Welles, rather innocently, wanted to play with the conventions of broadcasting and grant his audience a bit of legitimately unsettling, though obviously fictitious, verisimilitude. There are not too many instances in modern history where we can look objectively at such incredible reactions to media soundbytes. That evening is a prototype for the impact media culture can have on an audience whose minds are prepped for impending disaster. The interruption of scheduled radio invoked in the audience a knee-jerk response that dramatically illustrated the susceptibility of people to the discourse of invasion, as well as the depth of the relationship between the audience and media during tense times. These days, the media itself are often regarded as the invaders. The endless procession of information that grows alongside technology's ability to present it is feared as much as it is loved. In the current climate of information and technological overload, invasion has swum from the depths of our unconscious paranoia and lurks impatiently in the shallows. There is so much invasion and so much to feel invaded about: the war in Kosovo (one of over sixty being fought today) is getting worse with the benevolence and force of the UN dwindling in a cloud of bureaucracy and failed talks, Ethiopia and Eritrea are going at it again, the ideology of the Olympic Games in Sydney has gone from a positive celebration of the millennium to a revenue-generating boys club of back scratchers, Internet smut is still everywhere, and most horrifically, Baywatch came dangerously close to being shot on location on the East Coast of Australia. In this issue of M/C we take a look at literal and allegorical invasions from a variety of cleverly examined aspects of our culture. Firstly, Axel Bruns takes a look a subtle invasion that is occurring on the Web in "Invading the Ivory Tower: Hypertext and the New Dilettante Scholars". He points to the way the Internet's function as a research tool is changing the nature of academic writing due to its interactivity and potential to be manipulated in a way that conventional written material cannot. Axel investigates the web browser's ability to invade the text and the elite world of academic publishing via the format of hypertext itself rather than merely through ideas. Felicity Meakins's article Shooting Baywatch: Resisting Cultural Invasion examines media and community reactions to the threat of having the television series Baywatch shot on Australian beaches. Felicity looks at the cultural cringe that has surrounded the relationship between Australia and America over the years and is manifested by our response to American accents in the media. American cultural imperialism has come to signify a great deal in the dwindling face of Aussie institutions like mateship and egalitarianism. In a similarly driven piece called "A Decolonising Doctor? British SF Invasion Narratives", Nick Caldwell investigates some of the implications of the "Britishness" of the cult television series Doctor Who, where insularity and cultural authority are taken to extremes during the ubiquitous intergalactic invasions. Paul Mc Cormack's article "Screen II: The Invasion of the Attention Snatchers" turns from technologically superior invaders to an invasion by technology itself -- he considers how the television has irreversibly invaded our lives and claimed a dominant place in the domestic sphere. Recently, the (Internet-connected) personal computer has begun a similar invasion: what space will it eventually claim? Sandra Brunet's "Is Sustainable Tourism Really Sustainable? Protecting the Icon in the Commodity at Sites of Invasion" explores the often forgotten Kangaroo Island off the coast of South Australia. She looks at ways in which the image of the island is constructed by the government and media for eco-tourism and how faithful this representation is to the farmers, fishermen and other inhabitants of the island. Paul Starr's article "Special Effects and the Invasive Camera: Enemy of the State and The Conversation" rounds off the issue with a look at the troubled relationship between cutting-edge special effects in Hollywood action movies and the surveillance technologies that recent movies such as Enemy of the State show as tools in government conspiracies. The depiction of high-tech gadgetry as 'cool' and 'evil' at the same time, he writes, leads to a collapse of meaning. This issue of M/C succeeds in pointing out sites of invasion in unusual places, continuing the journal's tradition of perception in the face of new media culture. I hope you enjoy this second issue of the second volume: 'invasion'. Ben King 'Invasion' Issue Editor Citation reference for this article MLA style: Ben King. "Editorial: 'Invasion'." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.2 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9903/edit.php>. Chicago style: Ben King, "Editorial: 'Invasion'," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 2 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9903/edit.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Ben King. (1999) Editorial: 'invasion'. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(2). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9903/edit.php> ([your date of access]).

Historically, science and medicine have been a great source of inspiration for fiction writers. Mary Shelley, in the 1831 introduction to her novel Frankenstein said she was been inspired, in part, by discussions about scientific experiments, including those of Darwin and Galvani. Shelley states “perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth” (10). Countless other authors have followed her lead, from H.G. Wells, whose mad scientist Dr Moreau takes a lead from Shelley’s Dr Frankenstein, through to popular contemporary writers of adult fiction, such as Michael Crichton and Kathy Reichs, who have drawn on their scientific and medical backgrounds for their fictional works. Science and medicine themed fiction has also proven popular for younger readers, particularly in dystopian settings. Reichs has extended her writing to include the young adult market with Virals, which combines forensic science with the supernatural. Alison Allen-Grey’s 2009 novel, Lifegame, deals with cloning and organ replacement. Nathan Hobby’s The Fur is based around an environmental disaster where an invasive fungal-fur grows everywhere, including in people’s internal organs. Catherine Jinks’ Piggy in the Middle incorporates genetics and biomedical research into its horror-science fiction plot. Brian Caswell’s young adult novel, Cage of Butterflies uses elements of neuroscience as a plot device. However, although Caswell’s novel found commercial and critical success—it was shortlisted in the 1993 Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) Book of the Year Awards Older Readers and was reprinted several times—neuroscience is a field that writers of young adult fiction tend to either ignore or only refer to on the periphery. This paper will explore how neuroscientific and dystopian elements interact in young adult fiction, focusing on the current trend for neuroscientific elements to be something that adolescent characters are subjected to rather than something they can use as a tool of positive change. It will argue that the time is right for a shift in young adult fiction away from a dystopian world view to one where the teenaged characters can become powerful agents of change. The term “neuroscience” was first coined in the 1960s as a way to hybridise a range of disciplines and sub-disciplines including biophsyics, biology and chemistry (Abi-Rached and Rose). Since then, neuroscience as a field has made huge leaps, particularly in the past two decades with discoveries about the development and growth of the adolescent brain; the dismissal of the nature versus nurture dichotomy; and the acceptance of brain plasticity. Although individual scientists had made discoveries relating to brain plasticity in adult humans as far back as the 1960s, for example, it is less than 10 years since neuroplasticity—the notion that nerve cells in human brains and nervous systems are malleable, and so can be changed or modified by input from the environment—was accepted into mainstream scientific thinking (Doidge). This was a significant change in brain science from the once dominant principle of localisation, which posited that specific brain functions were fixed in a specific area of the brain, and that once damaged, the function associated with a brain area could not improve or recover (Burrell; Kolb and Whishaw; Doidge). Furthermore, up until the late 1990s when neuroscientist Jay Giedd’s studies of adolescent brains showed that the brain’s grey matter, which thickens during childhood, thins during adolescence while the white matter thickens, it was widely accepted the human brain stopped maturing at around the age of twelve (Wallis and Dell). The research of Giedd and others showed that massive changes, including those affecting decision-making abilities, impulse control and skill development, take place in the developing adolescent brain (Carr-Gregg). Thus, within the last fifteen years, two significant discoveries within neuroscience—brain plasticity and the maturation of the adolescent brain­—have had a major impact on the way the brain is viewed and studied. Brian Caswell’s Cage of Butterflies, was published too early to take advantage of these neuroscientific discoveries. Nevertheless the novel includes some specific details about how the brains of a group of children within the story, the Babies, have been altered by febrile convulsions to create an abnormality in their brain anatomy. The abnormality is discovered by a CAT scan (the novel predates the use of fMRI brain scans). Due to their abnormal brain anatomy, the Babies are unable to communicate verbally but can communicate telepathically as a “shared mind” with others outside their small group. It is unlikely Caswell would have been aware of brain plasticity in the early 1990s, nevertheless, in the narrative, older teens are able to slowly understand the Babies by focusing on their telepathic messages until, over time, they can understand them without too much difficulty. Thus Caswell has incorporated neuroscientific elements throughout the plot of his novel and provided some neuroscientific explanation for how the Babies communicate. In recent years, several young adult novels, both speculative and contemporary, have used elements of neuroscience in their narratives; however, these novels tend to put neuroscience on the periphery. Rather than embracing neuroscience as a tool adolescent characters can use for their benefit, as Caswell did, neuroscience is typically something that exists around or is done to the characters; it is an element over which they have no control. These novels are found across several sub-genres of young adult fiction, including science fiction, speculative fiction and contemporary fiction. Most place their narratives in a dystopian world view. The dystopian settings reinforce the idea that the world is a dangerous place to live, and the teenaged characters living in the world of the novels are at the mercy of powerful oppressors. This creates tension within the narrative as the adolescents battle authorities for power. Without the ability to use neuroscientific advantages for their own gain, however, the characters’ power to change their worlds remains in the hands of adult authorities and the teenaged characters ultimately lose the fight to change their world. This lack of agency is evident in several dystopian young adult novels published in recent years, including the Uglies series and to a lesser extent Brain Jack and Dark Angel. Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series is set in a dystopian future world and uses neuroscientific concepts to both reinforce the power of the ruling regime and give limited agency to the protagonists. In the first book in the series, Uglies, the science supports the narrative where necessary but is always subservient to the action. Westerfeld’s intended the Uglies series to focus on action. Westerfield states “I love a good action sequence, and this series is of full of hoverboard chases, escapes through ancient ruins, and leaps off tall buildings in bungee jackets” (Books). Nevertheless, the brain’s ability to rewire itself—the neuroscientific concept of brain plasticity—is a central idea within the Uglies series. In book one, the protagonist Tally Youngblood is desperate to turn 16 so she can join her friends and become a Pretty. However, she discovers the operation to become a Pretty involves not just plastic surgery to alter her looks: a lesion is inflicted on the brain, giving each Pretty the equivalent of a frontal lobotomy. In the next book, Pretties, Tally has undergone the procedure and then becomes one of the elite Specials, and in the third instalment she eventually rejects her Special status and returns to her true nature. This latter process, one of the characters explains, is possible because Tally has learnt to rewire her brain, and so undo the Pretty operation and the procedure that made her a Special. Thus neuroscientific concepts of brain injury and recovery through brain plasticity are prime plot devices. But the narrative offers no explanations for how Tally and some others have the ability to rewire their brains to undo the Pretty operation while most do not. The apparent complexity of the neuroscience is used as a surface plot device rather than as an element that could be explored to add narrative depth. In contrast, the philosophical implications of recent neuroscientific discoveries, rather than the physical, are explored in another recent young adult novel, Dark Angel. David Klass’ novel, Dark Angel, places recent developments in neuroscience in a contemporary setting to explore the nature of good and evil. It tells the story of 17-year-old Jeff, whose ordinary, small-town life implodes when his older brother, Troy, comes home on parole after serving five years for manslaughter. A school assignment forces Jeff to confront Troy’s complex nature. The science teacher asks his class “where does our growing knowledge of the chemical nature of the brain leave us in terms of... the human soul? When we think, are we really making choices or just following chemical pathways?” (Klass 74). This passage introduces a neuroscientific angle into the plot, and may refer to a case brought before the US Supreme Court in 2005 where the court admitted a brief based on brain scans showing that adolescent brains work differently than adult brains (Madrigal). The protagonist, Jeff, explores the nature of good and evil through this neuroscientific framework as the story's action unfolds, and examines his relationship with Troy, who is described in all his creepiness and vulnerability. Again through the teacher, Klass incorporates trauma and its impact on the brain from a neuroscientific perspective: There are psychiatrists and neurologists doing studies on violent lawbreakers...who are finding that these felons share amazingly similar patterns of abusive childhoods, brain injuries, and psychotic symptoms. (Klass 115)Jeff's story is infused with the fallout of his brother’s violent past and present, yet there is no hint of any trauma in Jeff’s or Troy’s childhoods that could be seen as a cause for Troy’s aberrant behaviour. Thus, although Klass’ novel explores more philosophical aspects of neuroscience, like Westerfeld’s novel, it uses developments in neuroscience as a point of interest. The neuroscience in Dark Angel is not embedded in the story but is a lens through which to view the theme of whether people are born evil or made evil. Brain Jack and Being are another two recent young adult novels that explore physical and philosophical aspects of modern neuroscience to some extent. Technology and its possible neurological effects on the brain, particularly the adolescent brain, is a field of research popularised by English neuroscientist Baroness Susan Greenfield. Brian Falkner’s 2010 release, Brain Jack, explores this branch of neuroscience with its cautionary tale of a hands-free device—a cap with small wires that attach to your head called the neuro-headset­—that allows you to control your computer with your thoughts. As more and more people use the neuro-headset, the avatar designed to help people learn to use the software develops consciousness and its own moral code, destroying anyone who it considers a threat by frying their brains. Like Dark Angel and Uglies, Brain Jack keeps the neuroscience on the periphery as an element over which the characters have little or no control, and details about how the neuro-headset affects the brain of its wearers, and how the avatar develops consciousness, are not explored. Conversely, Kevin Brooks’ novel Being explores the nature of consciousness outside the field of neuroscience. The protagonist, Robert, goes into hospital for a routine procedure and discovers that instead of internal organs, he has some kind of hardware. On the run from authorities who are after him for reasons he does not understand, Robert tries frantically to reconstruct his earliest memories to give him some clue as to who, or what, he really is: if he does not have normal human body parts, is he human? However, whether or not he has a human brain, and the implications of either answer for his consciousness, is never addressed. Thus, although the novels discussed above each incorporate neuroscience to some degree, they do so at a cursory level. In the case of Being this is understandable as neuroscience is never explicitly mentioned; rather it is a possible sub-text implied through the theme of consciousness. In Dark Angel, through the teacher as mouthpiece, neuroscience is offered up as a possible explanation for criminal behaviour, which causes the protagonist to question his beliefs and judgements about his brother. However, in Uglies, and to a lesser extent in Brain Jack, neuroscience is glossed over when more detail may have added extra depth and complexity to the novels. Fast-paced action is a common element in much contemporary young adult fiction, and thus it is possible that Westerfeld and Falkner both chose to sacrifice complexity for the sake of action. In Uglies, it is likely this is the case, given Westerfeld’s love of action sequences and his attention to detail about objects created exclusively for his futuristic world. However, Brain Jack goes into explicit detail about computer hacking. Falkner’s dismissal of the neuroscientific aspects of his plot, which could have added extra interest, most likely stems from his passion for computer science (he studied computer science at university) rather than a distaste for or ignorance of neuroscience. Nevertheless Falkner, Westerfeld, Brooks, and to a lesser extent Klass, have each glossed over a source of potential power that could turn the dystopian worlds of their novels into one where the teenaged protagonists hold the power to make lasting change. In each of these novels, neuroscientific concepts are generally used to support a bleak or dystopian world view. In Uglies, the characters have two choices: a life as a lobotomised Pretty or a life on the run from the authorities, where discovery and capture is a constant threat. The USA represented in Brain Jack descends into civil war, where those unknowingly enslaved by the avatar’s consciousness fight against those who refuse to wear the neuro-headsets. The protagonist in Being lives in hiding from the secret authorities who seek to capture and destroy him. Even in Dark Angel, the neuroscience is not a source of comfort or support for the protagonist, whose life, and that of his family, falls apart as a consequence of his older brother’s criminal actions. It is only in the 1990s novel, Cage of Butterflies, that characters use a neuroscientific advantage to improve their situation. The Babies in Caswell’s Cage of Butterflies are initially victims of their brain abnormality; however, with the help of the teenaged characters, along with two adult characters, they are able to use their “condition” to help create a new life for themselves. Telepathically communicating through their “shared mind,” the Babies coordinate their efforts with the others to escape from the research scientists who threaten their survival. In this way, what starts as a neurological disability is turned into an advantage. Cage of Butterflies illustrates how a young adult novel can incorporate neuroscience into its narrative in a way that offers the young adults agency to make positive changes in their lives. Furthermore, with recent neuroscientific discoveries showing that adolescence is a vital time for brain development and growth, there is potential for neuroscience to be explored as an agent of positive change in a new wave of young adult fiction, one that adopts a non-dystopian (if not optimistic) world view. Dystopian young adult fiction has been enjoying enormous popularity in western publishing in the past few years with series such as Chaos Walking, Hunger Games and Maze Runner trilogies topping bestseller lists. Dystopian fiction’s appeal to young adult audiences, states Westerfeld, is because: Teenagers’ lives are constantly defined by rules, and in response they construct their identities through necessary confrontations with authority, large and small. Imagining a world in which those authorities must be destroyed by any means necessary is one way of expanding that game. ("Teenage Wastelands")Teenagers often find themselves in trouble, and are almost as often like to cause trouble. Placing them in a fictional dystopian world gives them room to fight authority; too often, however, the young adult protagonists are never able to completely escape the world the adults impose upon them. For example, the epilogue of James Dashner’s The Maze Runner tells the reader the surviving group have not escaped the makers of the maze, and their apparent rescuers are part of the same group of adult authorities. Caswell’s neurologically evolved Babies, along with their high IQ teenage counterparts, however, provide a model for how young protagonists can take advantage of neuroscientific discoveries to cause trouble for hostile authorities in their fictional worlds. The power of the brain harnessed by adolescents, alongside their hormonal changes, is by its nature a recipe for trouble: it has the potential to give young people an agency and power adults may fear. In the everyday, lived world, neuroscientific tools are always in the hands of adults; however, there needs to be no such constraint in a fictional world. The superior ability of adolescents to grow the white matter of their brains, for example, could give rise to a range of fictional scenarios where the adolescents could use their brain power to brainwash adults in authority. A teenage neurosurgeon might not work well in a contemporary setting but could be credible in a speculative fiction setting. The number of possible scenarios is endless. More importantly, however, it offers a relatively unexplored avenue for teenaged characters to have agency and power in their fictional worlds. Westerfeld may be right in his assertion that the current popularity of dystopian fiction for young adults is a reaction to the highly monitored and controlled world in which they live ("Teenage Wastelands"). However, an alternative world view, one where the adolescents take control and defeat the adults, is just as valid. Such a scenario has been explored in Cory Doctorow’s For the Win, where marginalised and exploited gamers from Singapore and China band together with an American to form a global union and defeat their oppressors. Doctorow uses online gaming skills, a field of expertise where youth are considered superior to adults, to give his characters power over adults in their world. Similarly, the amazing changes that take place in the adolescent brain are a natural advantage that teenaged characters could utilise, particularly in speculative fiction, to gain power over adults. To imbue adolescent characters with such power has the potential to move young adult fiction beyond the confines of the dystopian novel and open new narrative pathways. The 2011 Bologna Children’s Book Fair supports the view that western-based publishing companies will be looking for more dystopian young adult fiction for the next year or two (Roback). However, within a few years, it is possible that the popularity of zombies, werewolves and vampires—and their dominance of fictional dystopian worlds—will pass or, at least change in their representations. The “next big thing” in young adult fiction could be neuroscience. Moreover, neuroscientific concepts could be incorporated into the standard zombie/vampire/werewolf trope to create yet another hybrid to explore: a zombie virus that mutates to give a new breed of undead creature superior intelligence, for example; or a new cross-breed of werewolf that gives humans the advantages of the canine brain with none of the disadvantages. The capacity and complexity of the human brain is enormous, and thus it offers enormous potential to create exciting young adult fiction that explores new territory, giving the teenaged reader a sense of their own power and natural advantages. In turn, this is bound to give them infinite potential to create fictional trouble. References Abi-Rachedm, Rose. “The Birth of the Neuromolecular Gaze.” History of the Human Sciences 23 (2010): 11-36. Allen-Gray, Alison. Lifegame. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Brooks, Kevin. Being. London: Puffin Books, 2007. Burrell, Brian. Postcards from the Brain Museum. New York: Broadway, 2004. Carr-Gregg, Michael. The Princess Bitchface Syndrome. Melbourne: Penguin Books. 2006. Caswell, Brian. A Cage of Butterflies. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1992. Dashner, James. The Maze Runner. Somerset, United Kingdom: Chicken House, 2010. Doctorow, Cory. For the Win. New York: Tor, 2010. Doidge, Norman. The Brain That Changes Itself. Melbourne: Scribe, 2007. Falkner, Brian. Brain Jack. New York: Random House, 2009. Hobby, Nathan. The Fur. Fremantle: Fremantle Press, 2004. Jinks, Catherine. Piggy in the Middle. Melbourne: Penguin, 1998. Klass, David. Dark Angel. New York: HarperTeen, 2007. Kolb, Bryan, and Ian Whishaw. Fundamentals of Human Neuropscychology, New York, Worth, 2009. Lehrer, Jonah. “The Human Brain Gets a New Map.” The Frontal Cortex. 2011. 10 April 2011 ‹http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/04/the-human-brain-atlas/›. Madrigal, Alexis. “Courtroom First: Brain Scan Used in Murder Sentencing.” Wired. 2009. 16 April 2011 ‹http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/11/brain-scan-murder-sentencing/›. Reichs, Kathy. Virals. London: Young Corgi, 2010. Roback, Diane. “Bologna 2011: Back to Business at a Buoyant Fair.” Publishers Weekly. 2011. 17 April 2011 ‹http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-industry-news/article/46698-bologna-2011-back-to-business-at-a-buoyant-fair.html›. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. London: Arrow Books, 1973. Wallis, Claudia, and Krystina Dell. “What Makes Teens Tick?” Death Penalty Information Centre. 2004. 10 April 2011 ‹http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/what-makes-teens-tick-flood-hormones-sure-also-host-structural-changes-brain-can-those-explain-behav›. Wells, H.G. The Island of Dr Moreau. Melbourne: Penguin, 1896. Westerfeld, Scott. Uglies. New York: Simon Pulse, 2005. ———. Pretties. New York: Simon Pulse, 2005. ———. Specials. New York: Simon Pulse, 2006. ———. Books. 2008. 1 Sep. 2010 ‹http://www.scottwesterfeld.com/author/books.htm›. ———. “Teenage Wastelands: How Dystopian YA Became Publishing’s Next Big Thing.” Tor.com 2011. 17 April 2011 ‹http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/04/teenage-wastelands-how-dystopian-ya-became-publishings-next-big-thing›.

Teichman notes in her study of illegitimacy that “the point of the legitimate/illegitimate distinction is not to cause suffering; rather, it has to do with certain widespread human aims connected with the regulation of sexual activities and of population” (4). She also writes that, until relatively recently, “the shame of being an unmarried mother was the worst possible shame a woman could suffer” (119). Hence the secrecy, silences, and lies that used to be so common around the issue of an illegitimate birth and adoption.I was adopted at birth in the mid-1960s in New Zealand because my mother was a long way from family in England and had no support. She and my father had fallen in love, and planned to marry, but it all fell apart, and my mother was left with decisions to make. It was indeed a difficult time for unwed mothers, and that issue of shame and respectability was in force. The couple who adopted me were in their late forties and had been married for twenty-five years. My adoptive father had served in World War Two in the Royal Air Force before being invalided out for health problems associated with physical and psychological injuries. He was working in the same organisation as my mother and approached her when he learned of her situation. My adoptive mother loved England as her Home all of her life, despite living in Australia permanently from 1974 until her death in 2001. I did not know of my adoption until 1988, when I was twenty-three years old. The reasons for this were at least partly to do with my adoptive parents’ fear that I would leave them to search for my birth parents. My feelings about this long-held secret are complex and mixed. My adoptive mother never once mentioned my adoption, not on the day I was told by my adoptive father, nor at any point afterwards. My adoptive father only mentioned it again in the last two years of his life, after a long estrangement from me, and it made him weep. Even in the nursing home he did not want me to tell anyone that I had been adopted. It was impossible for me to obey this request, for my sense of self and my own identity, and for the recognition of the years of pain that I had endured as his daughter. He wanted to keep so much a secret; I could not, and would not, hold anything back anymore.And so I found myself telling anyone who would listen that I was adopted, and had only found out as an adult. This did not transmogrify into actively seeking out my birth parents, at least not immediately. It took some years before I obtained my original birth certificate, and then a long while again before I searched for, and found, my birth mother. It was not until my adoptive mother died that I launched into the search, probably because I did not want to cause her pain, though I did not consciously think of it that way. I did not tell my adoptive father of the search or the discovery. This was not an easy decision, as my birth mother would have liked to see him again and thank him, but I knew that his feelings were quite different and I did not want to risk further hurt to either my birth mother or my adoptive father. My own pain endures.I also found myself writing about my family. Other late discovery adoptees, as we are known, have written of their experiences, but not many. Maureen Watson records her shock at being told by her estranged husband when she was 40 years old; Judith Lucy, the comedian, was told in her mid-twenties by her sister-in-law after a tumultuous Christmas day; the Canadian author Wayson Choy was in his late fifties when he received a mysterious phone call from a woman about seeing his “other” mother on the street.I started with fiction, making up fairy tales or science fiction scenarios, or one act plays, or poetry, or short stories. I filled notebooks with these words of confusion and anger and wonder. Eventually, I realised I needed to write about my adoptive life in fuller form, and in life story mode. The secrecy and silences that had dominated my family life needed to be written out on the page and given voice and legitimacy by me. For years I had thought my father’s mental disturbance and destructive behaviour was my fault, as he often told me it was, and I was an only child isolated from other family and other people generally. My adoptive mother seemed to take the role of the shadow in the background, only occasionally stepping forward to curb my father’s disturbing and paranoid reactions to life.The distinction between legitimacy and illegitimacy may not have been created and enforced to cause suffering, but that, of course, is what it did for many caught in its circle of grief and exclusion. For me, I did not feel the direct effect of being illegitimate at birth, because I did not “know”. (What gathered in my unconscious over the years was another thing altogether.) This was different for my birth mother, who suffered greatly during the time she was pregnant, hoping something would happen that would enable her to keep me, but finally having to give me up. She does not speak of shame, only heartache. My adoptive father, however, felt the shame of having to adopt a child; I know this because he told me in his own words at the end of his life. Although I did not know of my adoption until I was an adult, I picked up his fear of my inadequacy for many years beforehand. I realise now that he feared that I was “soiled” or “tainted”, that the behaviour of my mother would be revisited in me, and that I needed to be monitored. He read my letters, opened my diaries, controlled my phone calls, and told me he had spies watching me when I was out of his range. I read in Teichman’s work that the word “bastard”, the colloquial term for an illegitimate child or person, comes from the Old French ba(s)t meaning baggage or luggage or pack-saddle, something that could be slept on by the traveller (1). Being illegitimate could feel like carrying heavy baggage, but someone else’s, not yours. And being adopted was supposed to render you legitimate by giving you the name of a father. For me, it added even more heavy baggage. Writing is one way of casting it off, refusing it, chipping it away, reducing its power. The secrecy of my adoption can be broken open. I can shout out the silence of all those years.The first chapter of the memoir, “A Shark in the Garden”, has the title “Revelation”, and concerns the day I learned of my adoptive status. RevelationI sat on my bed, formed fists in my lap, got up again. In the mirror there was my reflection, but all I saw was fear. I sat down, thought of what I was going to say, stood again. If I didn’t force myself out through my bedroom door, all would be lost. I had rung the student quarters at the hospital, there was a room ready. I had spoken to Dr P. It was time for me to go. The words were formed in my mouth, I had only to speak them. Three days before, I had come home to find my father in a state of heightened anxiety, asking me where the hell I had been. He’d rung my friend C because I had told him, falsely, that I would be going over to her place for a fitting of the bridesmaid dresses. I lied to him because the other bridesmaid was someone he disliked intensely, and did not approve of me seeing her. I had to tell him the true identity of the other bridesmaid, which of course meant that I’d lied twice, that I’d lied for a prolonged period of time. My father accused me of abusing my mother’s good nature because she was helping me make my bridesmaid’s dress. I was not a good seamstress, whereas my mother made most of her clothes, and ours, so in reality she was the one making the dress. When you’ve lied to your parents it is difficult to maintain the high ground, or any ground at all. But I did try to tell him that if he didn’t dislike so many of my friends, I wouldn’t have to lie to him in order to shield them and have a life outside home. If I knew that he wasn’t going to blaspheme the other bridesmaid every time I said her name, then I could have been upfront. What resulted was a dark silence. I was completing a supplementary exam in obstetrics and gynaecology. Once passed, I would graduate with a Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery degree, and be able to work as an intern in a hospital. I hated obstetrics and gynaecology. It was about bodies like my own and their special functions, and seemed like an invasion of privacy. Women were set apart as specimens, as flawed creatures, as beings whose wombs were always going wrong, a difficult separate species. Men were the predominant teachers of wisdom about these bodies, and I found this repugnant. One obstetrician in a regional hospital asked my friend and me once if we had regular Pap smears, and if our menstrual blood contained clots. We answered him, but it was none of his business, and I wished I hadn’t. I can see him now, the small eyes, the bitchiness about other doctors, the smarminess. But somehow I had to get through it. I had to get up each morning and go into the hospital and do the ward rounds and see patients. I had to study the books. I had to pass that exam. It had become something other than just an exam to me. It was an enemy against which I must fight.My friend C was getting married on the 19th of December, and somehow I had to negotiate my father as well. He sometimes threatened to confiscate the keys to the car, so that I couldn’t use it. But he couldn’t do that now, because I had to get to the hospital, and it was too far away by public transport. Every morning I woke up and wondered what mood my father would be in, and whether it would have something to do with me. Was I the good daughter today, or the bad one? This happened every day. It was worse because of the fight over the wedding. It was a relief to close my bedroom door at night and be alone, away from him. But my mother too. I felt as if I was betraying her, by not being cooperative with my father. It would have been easier to have done everything he said, and keep the household peaceful. But the cost of doing that would have been much higher: I would have given my life over to him, and disappeared as a person.I could wake up and forget for a few seconds where I was and what had happened the day before. But then I remembered and the fear exploded in my stomach. I lived in dread of what my father would say, and in dread of his silence.That morning I woke up and instantly thought of what I had to do. After the last fight, I realised I did not want to live with such pain and fear anymore. I did not want to cause it, or to live with it, or to kill myself, or to subsume my spirit in the pathology of my father’s thinking. I wanted to live.Now I knew I had to walk into the living room and speak those words to my parents.My mother was sitting in her spot, at one end of the speckled and striped grey and brown sofa, doing a crossword. My father was in his armchair, head on his hand. I walked around the end of the sofa and stood by ‘my’ armchair next to my mother.“Mum and Dad, I need to talk with you about something.”I sat down as I said this, and looked at each of them in turn. Their faces were mildly expectant, my father’s with a dark edge.“I know we haven’t been getting on very well lately, and I think it might be best if I leave home and go to live in the students’ quarters at the hospital. I’m twenty-three now. I think it might be good for us to spend some time apart.” This sounded too brusque, but I’d said it. It was out in the atmosphere, and I could only wait. And whatever they said, I was going. I was leaving. My father kept looking at me for a moment, then straightened in his chair, and cleared his throat.“You sound as if you’ve worked this all out. Well, I have something to say. I suppose you know you were adopted.”There was an enormous movement in my head. Adopted. I suppose you know you were adopted. Age of my parents at my birth: 47 and 48. How long have you and Dad been married, Mum? Oooh, that’s a tricky one. School principal’s wife, eyes flicking from me to Mum and back again, You don’t look much like each other, do you? People referring to me as my Mum’s friend, not her daughter. I must have got that trait from you Oh no I know where you got that from. My father not wanting me to marry or have children. Not wanting me to go back to England. Moving from place to place. No contact with relatives. This all came to me in a flash of memory, a psychological click and shift that I was certain was audible outside my mind. I did not move, and I did not speak. My father continued. He was talking about my biological mother. The woman who, until a few seconds before, I had not known existed.“We were walking on the beach one day with you, and she came towards us. She didn’t look one way or another, just kept her eyes straight ahead. Didn’t acknowledge us, or you. She said not to tell you about your adoption unless you fell in with a bad lot.”I cannot remember what else my father said. At one point my mother said to me, “You aren’t going to leave before Christmas are you?”All of her hopes and desires were in that question. I was not a good daughter, and yet I knew that I was breaking her heart by leaving. And before Christmas too. Even a bad daughter is better than no daughter at all. And there nearly was no daughter at all. I suppose you know you were adopted.But did my mother understand nothing of the turmoil that lived within me? Did it really not matter to her that I was leaving, as long as I didn’t do it before Christmas? Did she understand why I was leaving, did she even want to know? Did she understand more than I knew? I did not ask any of these questions. Instead, at some point I got out of the chair and walked into my bedroom and pulled out the suitcase I had already packed the night before. I threw other things into other bags. I called for a taxi, in a voice supernaturally calm. When the taxi came, I humped the suitcase down the stairs and out of the garage and into the boot, then went back upstairs and got the other bags and humped them down as well. And while I did this, I was shouting at my father and he was shouting at me. I seem to remember seeing him out of the corner of my eye, following me down the stairs, then back up again. Following me to my bedroom door, then down the stairs to the taxi. But I don’t think he went out that far. I don’t remember what my mother was doing.The only words I remember my father saying at the end are, “You’ll end up in the gutter.”The only words I remember saying are, “At least I’ll get out of this poisonous household.”And then the taxi was at the hospital, and I was in a room, high up in a nondescript, grey and brown building. I unpacked some of my stuff, put my clothes in the narrow wardrobe, my shoes in a line on the floor, my books on the desk. I imagine I took out my toothbrush and lotions and hairbrush and put them on the bedside table. I have no idea what the weather was like, except that it wasn’t raining. The faces of the taxi driver, of the woman in reception at the students’ quarters, of anyone else I saw that day, are a blur. The room is not difficult to remember as it was a rectangular shape with a window at one end. I stood at that window and looked out onto other hospital buildings, and the figures of people walking below. That night I lay in the bed and let the waves of relief ripple over me. My parents were not there, sitting in the next room, speaking in low voices about how bad I was. I was not going to wake up and brace myself for my father’s opprobrium, or feel guilty for letting my mother down. Not right then, and not the next morning. The guilt and the self-loathing were, at that moment, banished, frozen, held-in-time. The knowledge of my adoption was also held-in-time: I couldn’t deal with it in any real way, and would not for a long time. I pushed it to the back of my mind, put it away in a compartment. I was suddenly free, and floating in the novelty of it.ReferencesChoy, Wayson. Paper Shadows: A Chinatown Childhood. Ringwood: Penguin, 2000.Lucy, Judith. The Lucy Family Alphabet. Camberwell: Penguin, 2008.Teichman, Jenny. Illegitimacy: An Examination of Bastardy. New York: Cornell University Press, 1982. Watson, Maureen. Surviving Secrets. Short-Stop Press, 2010.

The Resident Evil video game series is especially notable for engaging with uncanny nature and monstrous reproduction, often facilitated through viral contamination. These third-person games usually feature an outbreak of some kind, instigated by a shadowy organisation, and star a member of law enforcement or the military as the protagonist. However, the seventh and eighth games of the franchise were different. While they explored many of the same themes and conventions as their predecessors, the technologies by which they evoked fear and suspense had become further immersed in the survival horror genre and ecoGothic affect. Survival horror video games, which often exploit anxieties surrounding uncanny motherhood to produce feelings of dread, use the processes and spectacle of reproduction, gestation, and childbirth as the locus of player fear. The ecoGothic, that is the non-human ecology rendered uncanny, monstrous, and sublime, permeates survival horror spaces and has the potential to empower these malevolent matriarchs. In Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (Nakanishi) and Resident Evil VIII: Village (Sato), player-protagonist Ethan Winters is under constant attack from female antagonists. From unexpected onslaughts from his rapidly transforming wife Mia at the beginning of Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, to his heart being wrenched from his body by the overarching villain Mother Miranda in Resident Evil VIII: Village, Ethan’s life is under constant threat from women and girls infected by a parasitic fungus. These monstrous females, through their corporeal forms and means of control, blur the boundaries between the human and the non-human. Furthermore, they represent the perceived degradation of the human form and delegitimisation of man's dominion over nature. These women—who have merged with the non-human ecosystem—have become creatures that challenge our conception of what it is to be human. It is this intersection of ecophobia and the perceived transgression of gender roles that make up the anatomy of the female and non-cis-masculine presenting videoludic monster. Using Resident Evil 7: Biohazard and Resident Evil VIII: Village as my primary examples, in this article I unpack the implications of these fungus-infested women, and explore how family and trauma play a role in their narratives. EcoGothic Origins In defining the ecoGothic it is important to acknowledge its origins as a response to the idealised ecologies of the nature writing of the Romantic period (Smith and Hughes 2). Rather than sweeping through the green pastoral valleys of the Romantic novel, the ecoGothic lurks in the shadows of labyrinthine forests and stands awestruck before sublime wonders. The ecoGothic shatters the illusion of human control, confronting the audience with their fears and anxieties. The ecoGothic monsters of Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (referred to here as Resident Evil 7) and Resident Evil VIII: Village (referred to here as Village) represent deep-seated anxieties about the boundaries between the human and the non-human. Whilst Gothic narratives have traditionally expressed fears about the loss of control to nature, Estok notes that this loss of control is a real and present threat in the environmental crisis of the Anthropocene (Estok 29), lending these modern ecoGothic monsters additional relevance and potency. The ecoGothic challenges human corporeality through transformation, hybridity, and invasion, destabilising our ideas of the human as separate from, and superior to, the greater ecology. It is vital to interrogate assumptions associated with the false dichotomy between humans and nature to demonstrate the anxieties at play within these manifestations of female eco-monstrosity. As Tidwell notes, ecohorror narratives are “fundamentally predicated upon a relationship between humanity and nature that does not allow for their interconnectedness” (539). These games, through the compromised, infected form of the protagonist, problematise the dichotomy between the good of humanity and the evil of the non-human. However, they still weaponise anxieties about human specificity and depict hybridity as monstrous and unstable. The patriarchal fear of transgressive female power is similarly weaponised through the female antagonists. These monstrous female antagonists are used to police boundaries of acceptable womanhood and their fates demonstrate the dangers of transgressing those boundaries. Through an ecofeminist lens we can examine the interplay between anxieties surrounding gender and anxieties surrounding the wildness and unpredictability of the ecology. As the intersection between ecocriticism, which is interested in the interconnectedness of ecologies, and feminism, which is interested in the “social analysis” of power structures and systems of domination (Carr 160), ecofeminism allows us to analyse the subjugation, exploitation, and demonisation of the feminine and the broader ecology. Part of what makes a female monster so threatening is that she transgresses two societal modes of categorisation. She is a predator rather than prey, no longer fitting the submissive female archetype, and she has become a hybrid form closely associated with the animal. Krzywinska highlights the role of this altered power relationship as being a potent manifestation of the Gothic in video games (33). This common expression of transgressive and monstrous female power draws on the traditional role of the Gothic in facilitating the male experience of fear and vulnerability with impunity (Krzywinska 33). Resident Evil as a video game series has an inconsistent history of depicting women and female-presenting entities, both antagonists and protagonists alike. MacCallum-Stewart asserts that the series’ shift towards more problematic and monstrous female representation coincides with a move from action-adventure to survival horror (170). The series has long been preoccupied with monstrous inheritance and legacy, but Resident Evil 7 and Village represent a new move towards female villains, abandoning patriarchal dynasties like the Weskers. The female ecoGothic monsters of Resident Evil 7 and Village transgress gender and species norms, signifying a move further into the ecoGothic realm of the uncanny. The Technology of Ecohorror The Resident Evil series uses science fiction conventions to explain the mystery that lies at the centre of its horrific spectacles. Despite the distinctly ecoGothic affect of Resident Evil 7 and Village, the ’scientific’ explanation provided in-game for these supernatural occurrences is a mutated fungus with psychotropic and self-replicating properties. The Cadou (Romanian for “gift”) is a fictional fungus developed from a fungal root under the village, and altered to create bioweapons by a shadowy organisation, The Connections. Known as the megamycete in the English script (not used in the Japanese script), the fungus has various effects including controlling its host, retaining and replicating genetic information, and rapid growths capable of focussed movement. A second fungal root was established in Louisiana, under the Baker House of Resident Evil 7. As a locus of human anxiety, fungal bodies are inherently unstable and defy characterisation, thus queering ideas of the corporeal body (Bishop et al. 220). Bishop posits that in the human consciousness fungus is closely linked to the animal as they live on “dead or decomposing matter”. Some fungal species reproduce asexually “through the release of spores that produces new organisms that are genetically identical to the parent organism” (Bishop et al. 204). This asexual reproduction means that fictional fungal bodies are representative of a reproductive process that runs contrary to the human-sanctioned sexual reproduction and established gendered power dynamics. Reproduction through tiny spores allows the site of reproduction to go undetected, opening the possibility within the human imagination for the invasion and violation of the human form. Bishop also notes that fungal bodies “are hardly contained organisms; they form complex systems of mycorrhizae, symbiotic underground relationships with other fungal and vegetal life” (Bishop et al. 204). It is this resistance to categorisation is an emergent theme as we define the parameters of these female eco-monsters. Whilst the fungal properties of the Cadou are behind the malevolent forces at work within Resident Evil 7 and Village, the mould and associated slime are a looming presence in the bulk of the gameplay. It clings to the walls in the Baker house and lurks in the shadows of the Village. It exists within the interior and exterior of the human body, threatening to control, corrupt, and engulf. The invasive presence of the mould in the Old House places the phenomenon firmly in the domestic sphere, in the space to which the matriarch of the family, Marguerite, is bound (McGreevy et al. 254). Hurley notes that slime “constitutes a threat to the integrity of the human subject” (35), due to its lack of fixed identity and form. Slime represents a challenge to the human understanding of the body as a closed system that is impenetrable and self-contained. Estok posits that slime’s resistance to categorisation and refusal to fit within male delineated boundaries creates an association with the feminine (33). Slime is unstable and resists control, making it a culturally pervasive expression of fears about the loss of established systems of power that reinforce sexism and misogyny (Estok 31). This theory of the gendered significance of slime brings new meaning to use of the mould and slime forms of the Cadou for the purposes of unnatural reproduction and the exercising of psychological control. The abhuman, or not-quite-human (Hurley 3), spectacles of Resident Evil’s Cadou infected antagonists are able to be at once tragic and disposable. While the player is required to kill vast hordes of amorphous “molded”, emaciated “thralls” and degenerated “lycans”, the humanoid bosses or key antagonists complicate human claims to exceptionalism and specificity. Tidwell notes that “this breakdown of the animacy hierarchy and of separations between human and nonhuman emphasizes materiality itself and de-emphasizes consciousness or sentience” (546). It is implied that we are to think of the zombie-like hordes of non-player combatants as non-sentient, as under the complete control of the non-human, therefore entirely expendable. This othering of non-player combatant is a staple of the survival horror genre as it offers monstrosity as both motive and mitigation. As Perron notes, the monsters of videoludic horror are constructed from “mundane” player anxieties, allowing the player to kill that which they fear (11). The Scientist and the ‘Broodmother’ The dangerous potential of the grieving mother is demonstrated in the actions of Mother Miranda, whose loss of her daughter Eva serves as the catalyst for the Cadou narrative arc of Resident Evil 7 and Village. Miranda, through her experimentation with the mould and her pathological determination to resurrect her child, becomes a monstrous maternal spectacle. Miranda forces both children and adults to become infantilised, deferential hosts to the Cadou, attempting to create a “vessel” to carry her daughter’s DNA and consciousness. As Paxton notes, such monstrous and destructive maternal behaviour is “pathologized as unnatural and identified as the seamy underside of woman’s nature” (170). This depiction of unnatural maternal behaviour is compounded by her means of reproduction and the multitudes of “children” she has produced. Stang notes that “the monster polices the borders of what is permissible” and Miranda’s status as the “Broodmother”, through her complex combination of asexual reproduction and infection, represents transgressions of those borders that circumvent patriarchal processes (235). Killing Miranda is the culmination of a two-game arc that requires the player-character to kill her “false children”. The similarities between the unnatural birth of Frankenstein’s creature and the unnatural birth of Miranda’s children are significant. Facilitated by science and societal transgression, they are constructed from death and ultimately result in parental rejection. Miranda cements her status as the monstrous mother by revealing that the player has been doing her bidding in killing her children: "you've fulfilled your purpose, Mr. Winters. You disposed of my false children and awakened the glorious Megamycete” (Sato). In creating these “children” and then casting them aside, Mother Miranda fashions a hierarchy of hybrid entities, desperate for her approval and under her thrall due to the controlling properties of the Cadou. The player-character’s mission to kill Miranda as the monstrous maternal figure expresses a “revulsion and fear towards female fecundity” and a “potent fear” of “female reproduction without male input” (Stang 238). The damage perpetuated by Miranda’s unnatural motherhood is far reaching, with one of her “failed vessels”, Eveline, becoming the source of the Louisiana Cadou infestation from Resident Evil 7. Eveline was originally created as a bioweapon (or B.O.W.) using the DNA of Miranda’s dead daughter and a sample of the Cadou mould. Manifesting as a ten-year old girl, Eveline has an insatiable drive to create a family which motivates her manipulation and infection of the Bakers, Mia, and the play-character Ethan. "I don't want to live at the lab anymore. I want a house. And I want you to be my mommy" says Eveline to Mia (Nakanishi). Eveline’s ability to reproduce and infect is even more monstrous and abject than that of her “Broodmother” as she is ostensibly a young girl. Her status as an uncanny, abhuman “mother” is not a means of empowerment and comes at a tremendous cost. As Stang writes the ecoGothic mother’s reproductive power “is often the result of infection, contamination, or mutation and causes abject transformations, madness, and, eventually, death at the hands of the protagonist” (238). Therefore, with each one of these abject mothers Ethan kills he is completing the patriarchal narrative of the dangers of unnatural reproduction and matriarchal power structures. The Abhuman Mother Resident Evil 7 antagonist Marguerite Baker is already a mother when the Cadou, brought into her home by Eveline, establishes fungal growths on her brain. She and Jack take in Eveline and Mia out of a genuine human concern and compassion which has completely disappeared by the time Ethan arrives in the home. Soon Eveline’s drive for a family kicks in and she begins to insidiously control the Bakers, worming her way into their psyche and infecting them with the mould. From this point on Marguerite begins to mutate into a maternal monster, referring to spiders and insects as her babies. Not only does her nurturing begin to transgress species, but she begins to feed her human family human flesh, creating grotesque parodies of the nurturing and nourishing mother: "I'll feed you to my babies and fertilize the garden with what was left" Marguerite to Ethan (Nakanishi). As Marguerite begins her homicidal pursuit of Ethan, the ecohorror of her monstrous body is revealed. She transforms becoming progressively less human. Her “monster” form, with its elongated limbs and mutated vulva, becomes more closely aligned with a female arthropod or arachnid. McGreevy et al notes that “Marguerite’s transformation mirrors the impact of mycoestrogens, such as zearalenone, which the body treats as a high dose of estrogen … . The infection thus amplifies feminine traits to a dangerous level, as the female body is abject: horrific and alluring” (261). The insects that are birthed from her genitals have an intrinsic association with death and decomposition, playing a key role in the process of disarticulating the human form (Shelomi 31). From this association we might infer that the fear and disgust the player feels at Marguerite’s association with insects and her mutated arachnid form goes beyond anxieties of ambiguity between the human and the non-human. The Eastern European castle and snow-capped peaks of Village offer a different type of female monstrosity to that found on the bayou in Louisiana. Whilst not a vampire through the traditional transmission mode of Dracula and his ilk, Alcina Dimitrescu’s vampirism is necessitated by an inherited blood condition and invites discussion of matriarchal lines of reproduction. The inhabitants of the Castle Dimitrescu play into the same ecoGothic conventions as that have been employed in female vampire narratives. These narratives play into anxieties about unnatural reproduction, in this case reproduction without the men or masculine forces. Paxton in their exploration of Le Fanu’s Carmilla draws connections between female vampirism and parasitic ichneumon wasps, resonating with the depiction of Cadou infestation in Resident Evil (170). Like fungus vampirism is depicted as parasitic and a disruption to the patriarchal lineage through its potential for asexual reproduction. Not unlike the structure of infection, psychic control, and reproduction that we see in vampire fiction, Mother Miranda operates as matriarchal head of an expansive hivemind that mimics a family like structure. Alcina Dimitrescu is a sexualised spectacle whose rejection and suspicion of men reinforces her role as a transgressive woman. Alcina and her daughters determine the fates of their victims by gender, with men being consumed and women being enslaved and drained of blood for the production of wine. She further transgresses normative expectations of the mother through the animalism associated with vampirism (Paxton 178) and her stature. She is an imposing nine feet tall with rapidly growing claws due to the effects of the Cadou, making her difficult to dominate through brute strength. Further compounding her threat to patriarchal power structures, she explicitly expresses hatred for men during her attacks. Her voice lines demonstrate a powerful drive to protect her daughters from patriarchal power and masculine violence: “You ungrateful, selfish wretch! You come into MY house—You lay your filthy man-hands on MY daughters”—Alcina Dimetrescu to Ethan (Sato). Depicted as a beautiful, elegant lady, the vampiric body of Alcina Dimitrescu, transforms into a grotesque dragon-like creature, providing visual confirmation of her underlying status as non-human. The abhuman as the covert and deceptive non-human monstrosity plays into her late-stage transformation reinforces her disconnect from the human, legitimising her death. Mother Miranda’s daughter Donna Beneviento poses a deeper psychological threat to the player, stepping further away from the action-adventure genre with which Resident Evil has previously been associated. Like Marguerite, her house manifests her psychological state, reflecting her trauma and implied mental illness. This trauma manifests externally, turning the Beneviento mansion into an extension of her psychic agency. She achieves this through the use of secreted fungal hallucinogens activated by pollen allowing her to manifest and prey on the anxieties of her victims. Donna Beneviento’s relationship to her Cadou infested and their uncanny animation echoes the unnatural reproduction of Mother Miranda. Throughout the Beneviento mansion motifs of parenthood and childbirth play out in increasingly grotesque forms, culminating in a giant foetus monster emerging from the shadows, wailing and giggling. Donna Beneviento is playing with Ethan expressing her status as child, despite the reality of her adulthood. Donna is infantilised, crafting dolls in an expression her loneliness and desire for family in a manner similar to Eveline’s misguided attempts to construct a family. The Sanctioned Mother and the Good Daughter The counterpoint to these spectacles of female monstrosity are female characters who manage to maintain the appearance of human specificity and adherence to societal norms. Marguerite’s daughter Zoe remains relatively unaffected by the Cadou and retains her humanity, aligning herself with the player-character. She is the good daughter, the sanctioned and acceptable human daughter. Ethan’s wife Mia is intermittently affected by the same fungal infestation as Marguerite, yet her initial monstrous manifestation and frenzied chainsaw attack on Ethan at the beginning of the game is all but forgotten through her subsequent ability to maintain the appearance of human specificity. By the beginning of Village Mia is depicted as an ideal picture of rehabilitated motherhood and femininity. Positioning herself as the “good” in the good/bad mother dichotomy, she is cooking, wearing soft fabrics and colours, and is nurturing her baby (Digioia 15-16). But this figure of the socially sanctioned mother has been replaced by the “bad” Mother Miranda. This raises further questions about the illusory and performative qualities of maternal affection in the Resident Evil series. After being kidnapped, Ethan’s baby Rose is dissected into four parts and given to four main antagonists of Village. It is only through her integration with the Cadou and the resurrection procedure of Mother Miranda that she is revived. Rose’s resurrection is an obscured and noncorporeal affair, unlike the resurrection of Alcina Dimatrescu’s daughters Bela, Daniela, and Cassandra, which is documented in scientific detail. As a discarded “Insect observation journal” notes, their corpses became covered in carnivorous insects that “vigorously consume meat”, morphing and mutating to recreate their resurrected human forms (Sato). The visceral descriptions of this process and their subsequent ability to control hordes of insects are reminiscent Marguerite’s monster form. Like Mia and Zoe, Rose’s acceptability and status as the good daughter is predicated on her ability to adhere to societal norms and patriarchal categorisations. Conclusion In depicting female antagonists as ecoGothic monstrosities, Resident Evil 7: Biohazard and Resident Evil VIII: Village position the player character in vain defence of human specificity and supremacy. It is telling that, as a figure who has been unknowingly infected with the Cadou, Ethan Winters has already lost the battle against the parasitic invasion of his own corporeal form. By tapping into ecophobic anxieties about fungus and slime that defy categorisation, Resident Evil is able to challenge the player’s human specificity and agency. This lack of specificity and agency is only accentuated by the monstrous and transgressive presence of the unnatural mother and the dangerous female. It is this loss of control and vulnerability that is common to both the ecoGothic and the survival horror genre. By contrasting examples of the monstrous feminine with sanctioned feminine figures like Mia, Rose, and Zoe, Resident Evil 7: BioHazard and Resident Evil VIII: Village establish policeable boundaries for female behaviour and a means of justifying the killing of abhuman bodies. While the powerful monstrous female antagonists of the games are able to exert a phenomenal amount of agency when compared to their monstrous peers, their construction still plays into destructive misogynist and ecophobic ideas of the female and the non-human world. References Bishop, Katherine E., David Higgins, and Jerry Määttä. Plants in Science Fiction: Speculative Vegetation. Cardiff: U of Wales P, 2020. Carr, Emily. “The Riddle Was the Angel in the House: Towards an American Ecofeminist Gothic.” Ecogothic. Eds. Andrew Smith and William Hughes. United Kingdom: Manchester UP, 2016. 160-176. DiGioia, Amanda. Childbirth and Parenting in Horror Texts : The Marginalized and the Monstrous. Bingley: Emerald, 2017. Estok, Simon C. “Corporeality, Hyper-Consciousness, and the Anthropocene ecoGothic: Slime and Ecophobia”. Neohelicon 1 (2020). 27 Aug. 2021 <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11059-020-00519-0>. Hurley, Kelly. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. Krzywinska, Tanya. “The Gamification of Gothic Coordinates”. Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies of the Supernatural 1 (2015). 26 Aug. 2021 <http://www.revenantjournal.com/contents/the-gamification-of-gothic-coordinates-in-videogames/>. McGreevy, Alan, Christina Fawcett, and Marc A. Ouellette. “The House and the Infected Body: The Metonomy of Resident Evil 7.” 2020. 28 Aug. 2021 <https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/english_fac_pubs/155/>. Paxton, Amanda. “Mothering by Other Means: Parasitism and J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla”. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 1 (2021). 2 Aug. 2021 <https://doi-org.ezproxy-f.deakin.edu.au/10.1093/isle/isz119>. Perron, Bernard. The World of Scary Video Games: A Study in Videoludic Horror. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018. Resident Evil 7: Biohazard. Dev. Koshi Nakanishi. Capcom 2017. Resident Evil Village. Dev. Morimasa Sato. Capcom, 2021. Shelomi, Matan. “Entomoludology: Arthropods in Video Games”. American Entomologist 2 (2019). 28 Aug. 2021 <https://doi.org/10.1093/ae/tmz028>. Smith, Andrew, and William Hughes. Introduction. In EcoGothic. Manchester University Press, 2015. Stang, Sarah. “The Broodmother as Monstrous – Feminine – Abject Maternity in Video Games.” 42 (2019). 28 Aug. 2021 <https://doi.org/10.7557/13.5014>. Tidwell, Christy. “Monstrous Natures Within: Posthuman and New Materialist Ecohorror in Mira Grant’s ‘Parasite’.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 3 (2014). 27 Aug. 2021 <https://www.jstor.org/stable/26430361>.

Whilst urban growth is generally accepted as a global phenomenon, this has numerous and ambivalent implications for Australia and its identity-work. Suburbia the site where the majority of Australians live, located somewhere between the privileged spaces of the city and the bush comes into focus as the emblematic topos through which the representational work of nation is articulated. Here, space becomes imbued with much current Australian political import. This article puts the discursive representation of Australian suburbia into juncture with hegemonic formations of nationness, and posits potential critical refigurations of these formations by mobilising a spatialised politics of cultural difference. Suburbia has come to represent a site of egalitarianism, signifying a truly Australian way of life. The masculinist and colonialist Australian myth of egalitarianism is constituted through a practice of carving up the land into equal portions, such that each man could have his stake in the country (Chambers 87). In this schema, the ownership of a detached house on a plot of land ensures proper and viable national subjects, since what is known as the suburban good life is nestled in a conception of house as home, where home is that which is familiar and secure. Consider John Howard's nationalist rhetoric: I believe that the concept of home is a compelling notion in our psyche…The loss of security challenges traditional notions of home and people feel the need to react to alienation…he or she must embrace what is secure, what people see as 'home.' (qtd. in Burke 8) It comes as no surprise, then, that Howard has initiated a scheme that grants $7000 to young couples toward establishing their first home. Home is not only a metaphor for nation; home is constituted in a material way through the house. The secure, housed, nation is most effectively enacted through the house and its ideal subjects: the white model of the heterosexual nuclear family. If European nostalgia is under threat, Howard's response is to maintain attempts to recover a unified national home. Ghassan Hage writes that the homely nation is itself an aspiration that guides the national subject's practices (68-9, my emphasis). Howard's anxiety is displayed in his response to the recent Tampa crisis, and it has become overwhelmingly evident who or what is not figured in his homely imaginary. Textuality becomes an effective means by which to negotiate and contest these dominant discourses of nation-space, and their prescribed modes of subjectivity. Suneeta Peres da Costa's recent novel Homework provides one such exigent re-mapping of nation-informed discourses of suburbia. Peres da Costa's text enacts a strategic invocation of cultural difference. Here, difference is not meant to connote inclusion or assimilation; difference must be seen as a dynamic constitutive mode of oppositionality, a provisional but insurrectionary and necessarily strategic other to dominant formations of nationness. As the novel's title itself suggests, home is work the work of being between spaces. Working from within the interstices of locatedness and worldliness allows the text to challenge embedded hegemonic inscriptions of nation-space. Whilst the novel was written and set in Australia, its packaging and subsequent reception also evokes the current trend of diasporic cosmopolitanism, signaling a world supposedly exempt from national belonging (Brennan qtd. in Kaplan 123). The novel was published simultaneously in the UK, the US, and Australia by Bloomsbury in 1999. The construction of this worldliness is here constituted in the politics of publishing, but this (dis)juncture between national and international, or the local and global, continues in the narrative itself. The narrative traverses both Australian domestic spaces and (imagined) international spaces. The fictive autobiography details Mina Pereira's late-childhood years as she lives with her family in suburban Rain Hill, Sydney. Whilst Mina and her sisters have grown up in Australia, their parents originate from Portuguese Goa, and Bombay, India. The narrative produces a tension between a global dislocation, where both Mr and Mrs Pereira's different and contradictory forms of homesickness are articulated, and the situatedness of Australia, where colonialism continues to construct hegemonic narratives of nationness. It is at this (dis)juncture that the narrative re-writes suburban space. Integrated into the suburban landscape and, in particular, the house itself, is the psychic space of memory. In the Pereira's house involuntary memories of former spaces and incidents in both Australia and India are evoked. A prolonged melancholia infiltrates the psychic and actual suburban spaces of the text, and in particular, the Federation house that the family lives in. If the Federation house signifies national unification, then this text enacts a kind of dis-unification of nation. With, in Gaston Bachelard's words, the past com[ing] to dwell in the new house (5), the seamless coherence of the suburban house is ruptured. As Homi Bhabha writes, [t]he recesses of the domestic space become sites for history's most intricate invasions. In that displacement, borders between home and world become confused; and, uncannily, the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting. (9) In Homework, memory stretches beyond the limits of the nation such that nostalgia, as a politicised construction of the present, productively challenges the nation's boundaries. As Ien Ang writes, diasporas have the potential to unsettle static, essentialist and totalitarian conceptions of 'national culture' or 'national identity' with origins firmly rooted in fixed geography and common history (7). In this sense, the text interrogates the representational work of nation that attempts to maintain integrity and unity through incessant policing and securing of its borders. In Homework, the suburban house becomes unhomely, or unheimlich, in the haunting of subjects' memories that inhabit it, such that the house becomes not a tool for inculcating Australian nationness, but a zone of intermediacy between home and world. From this border space, that Homi Bhabha calls international (38) for the space of translation, negotiation, and hybridity, Australian space is unbounded and defamiliarised. Homework effectively dislodges the nation's homely imaginary by pointing to the excesses of belonging. Here home, as a mode of security and belonging, becomes detached from house. Aamir Mufti and Ella Shohat write that belonging cannot be housed simply within the material space of walls and roofs, of fenced topographies and well-drawn maps (1). This re-writing of hegemonic spatiality is concomitant with the re-constitution of prescribed modes of subjectivity. A politics of difference becomes a tool of creativity to question multiple forms of repression and dominance (Trinh 73). Cultural difference must be seen as disordering, as opening up new spaces for critical exchange (Soja and Hooper 193), and as positing new ways of critically writing and occupying spaces. By spatialising this politics of difference, the supposedly coherent spatiality of suburbia is ruptured and shown to be vulnerable. Re-narrating suburban spaces according to a politics of difference has the potential to dislodge hegemonic narratives that have become naturalised as they are mapped onto, or materialised in, real spaces. At the conclusion of Homework, the Pereira's house is enflamed. In this spectacular climax, part oneiric and fantastical, the house on fire becomes, in its pyrotechnical wizardry (255), a final recalcitrant figure to Australian suburban space. Merging with, and working against, that other sanctioned element of official multiculturalism, food, the fire sends out a toxic vapour to the hegemonic suburb: The pungent perfume that hung in a thick vapour above us was that of a vast spice warehouse burning to the ground. I could smell vast vats of mango and lime pickle; the bittersweet of cardamom spores that, with the intensity of the heat must have burst from their pods; peppercorns and paprika; turmeric, tamarind, and bay leaf; all these now lingered and mingled in a masala of mixed messages with the certain scents of dried cloves and the singular aroma of coriander. (256-7) The Federation house, with its symbolic encodings of nationness, is not only under de(con)struction here, but this image of a monstrous other further insults the suburban landscape's very senses. At the very heart of Australian suburbia is a stirring of the unhomely that is bound to repeat its disturbance to the mappings of nation. References Ang, Ien. Migrations of Chineseness. SPAN 34 (1993) : 9 pp. <http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom...> Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. 1958. Boston: Beacon, 1994. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Burke, Anthony. Australia's Asian Crisis. Australian Humanities Review June (2001) : 9 pp. 27 August 2001 <http://www.lib.latrobe.edu/AHR/archive/I...> Chambers, Deborah. A Stake in the Country: Women's Experiences of Suburban Development. Visions of Suburbia. Ed. Roger Silverstone. London: Routledge, 1997. 86-107. Hage, Ghassan. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. Leichhardt: Pluto Press, 1998. Kaplan, Caren. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement. Durham: Duke UP, 1996. Peres da Costa, Suneeta. Homework. London: Bloomsbury, 1999. Soja, Edward, and Barbara Hooper. The Spaces that Difference Makes: Some Notes on the Geographical Margins of the New Cultural Politics. Place and the Politics of Identity. Ed. Michael Keith and Steve Pile. London: Routledge, 1993. 183-205. Trinh, T. Minh-ha. Not You/Like You: Post-Colonial Women and the Interlocking Questions of Identity and Difference. Inscriptions 3-4 (1988) : 71-7. Links http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/litserv/SPAN/34/Ang.html http://www.lib.latrobe.edu/AHR/archive/Issue-June-2001/burke.html Citation reference for this article MLA Style Bullock, Emily. "Re-Writing Suburbia" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.2 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/suburbia.php>. Chicago Style Bullock, Emily, "Re-Writing Suburbia" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 2 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/suburbia.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Bullock, Emily. (2002) Re-Writing Suburbia. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(2). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/suburbia.php> ([your date of access]).

About half way through Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s film Home (2009) the narrator describes the fall of the Rapa Nui, the indigenous people of the Easter Islands. The narrator posits that the Rapa Nui culture collapsed due to extensive environmental degradation brought about by large-scale deforestation. The Rapa Nui cut down their massive native forests to clear spaces for agriculture, to heat their dwellings, to build canoes and, most importantly, to move their enormous rock sculptures—the Moai. The disappearance of their forests led to island-wide soil erosion and the gradual disappearance of arable land. Caught in the vice of overpopulation but with rapidly dwindling basic resources and no trees to build canoes, they were trapped on the island and watched helplessly as their society fell into disarray. The sequence ends with the narrator’s biting remark: “The real mystery of the Easter Islands is not how its strange statues got there, we know now; it's why the Rapa Nui didn't react in time.” In their unrelenting desire for development, the Rapa Nui appear to have overlooked the role the environment plays in maintaining a society. The island’s Moai accompanying the sequence appear as memento mori, a lesson in the mortality of human cultures brought about by their own misguided and short-sighted practices. Arthus-Bertrand’s Home, a film composed almost entirely of aerial photographs, bears witness to present-day environmental degradation and climate change, constructing society as a fragile structure built upon and sustained by the environment. Home is a call to recognise how contemporary practices of post-industrial societies have come to shape the environment and how they may impact the habitability of Earth in the near future. Through reflexivity and a ritualised structure the text invites spectators to look at themselves in a new light and remake their self-image in the wake of global environmental risk by embracing new, alternative core practices based on balance and interconnectedness. Arthus-Bertrand frames climate change not as a burden, but as a moment of profound realisation of the potential for change and humans ability to create a desirable future through hope and our innate capacity for renewal. This article examines how Arthus-Bertrand’s ritualised construction of climate change aims to remake viewers’ perception of present-day environmental degradation and investigates Home’s place in contemporary climate change communication discourse. Climate change, in its capacity to affect us globally, is considered a world risk. The most recent peer-reviewed Synthesis Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests that the concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gases has increased markedly since human industrialisation in the 18th century. Moreover, human activities, such as fossil fuel burning and agricultural practices, are “very likely” responsible for the resulting increase in temperature rise (IPPC 37). The increased global temperatures and the subsequent changing weather patterns have a direct and profound impact on the physical and biological systems of our planet, including shrinking glaciers, melting permafrost, coastal erosion, and changes in species distribution and reproduction patterns (Rosenzweig et al. 353). Studies of global security assert that these physiological changes are expected to increase the likelihood of humanitarian disasters, food and water supply shortages, and competition for resources thus resulting in a destabilisation of global safety (Boston et al. 1–2). Human behaviour and dominant practices of modernity are now on a path to materially impact the future habitability of our home, Earth. In contemporary post-industrial societies, however, climate change remains an elusive, intangible threat. Here, the Arctic-bound species forced to adapt to milder climates or the inhabitants of low-lying Pacific islands seeking refuge in mainland cities are removed from the everyday experience of the controlled and regulated environments of homes, offices, and shopping malls. Diverse research into the mediated and mediatised nature of the environment suggests that rather than from first-hand experiences and observations, the majority of our knowledge concerning the environment now comes from its representation in the mass media (Hamilton 4; Stamm et al. 220; Cox 2). Consequently the threat of climate change is communicated and constructed through the news media, entertainment and lifestyle programming, and various documentaries and fiction films. It is therefore the construction (the representation of the risk in various discourses) that shapes people’s perception and experience of the phenomenon, and ultimately influences behaviour and instigates social response (Beck 213). By drawing on and negotiating society’s dominant discourses, environmental mediation defines spectators’ perceptions of the human-nature relationship and subsequently their roles and responsibilities in the face of environmental risks. Maxwell Boykoff asserts that contemporary modern society’s mediatised representations of environmental degradation and climate change depict the phenomena as external to society’s primary social and economic concerns (449). Julia Corbett argues that this is partly because environmental protection and sustainable behaviour are often at odds with the dominant social paradigms of consumerism, economic growth, and materialism (175). Similarly, Rowan Howard-Williams suggests that most media texts, especially news, do not emphasise the link between social practices, such as consumerist behaviour, and their environmental consequences because they contradict dominant social paradigms (41). The demands contemporary post-industrial societies make on the environment to sustain economic growth, consumer culture, and citizens’ comfortable lives in air-conditioned homes and offices are often left unarticulated. While the media coverage of environmental risks may indeed have contributed to “critical misperceptions, misleading debates, and divergent understandings” (Boykoff 450) climate change possesses innate characteristics that amplify its perception in present-day post-industrial societies as a distant and impersonal threat. Climate change is characterised by temporal and spatial de-localisation. The gradual increase in global temperature and its physical and biological consequences are much less prominent than seasonal changes and hence difficult to observe on human time-scales. Moreover, while research points to the increased probability of extreme climatic events such as droughts, wild fires, and changes in weather patterns (IPCC 48), they take place over a wide range of geographical locations and no single event can be ultimately said to be the result of climate change (Maibach and Roser-Renouf 145). In addition to these observational obstacles, political partisanship, vested interests in the current status quo, and general resistance to profound change all play a part in keeping us one step removed from the phenomenon of climate change. The distant and impersonal nature of climate change coupled with the “uncertainty over consequences, diverse and multiple engaged interests, conflicting knowledge claims, and high stakes” (Lorenzoni et al. 65) often result in repression, rejection, and denial, removing the individual’s responsibility to act. Research suggests that, due to its unique observational obstacles in contemporary post-industrial societies, climate change is considered a psychologically distant event (Pawlik 559), one that is not personally salient due to the “perceived distance and remoteness [...] from one’s everyday experience” (O’Neill and Nicholson-Cole 370). In an examination of the barriers to behaviour change in the face of psychologically distant events, Robert Gifford argues that changing individuals’ perceptions of the issue-domain is one of the challenges of countering environmental inertia—the lack of initiative for environmentally sustainable social action (5). To challenge the status quo a radically different construction of the environment and the human-nature relationship is required to transform our perception of global environmental risks and ultimately result in environmentally consequential social action. Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s Home is a ritualised construction of contemporary environmental degradation and climate change which takes spectators on a rite of passage to a newfound understanding of the human-nature relationship. Transformation through re-imagining individuals’ roles, responsibilities, and practices is an intrinsic quality of rituals. A ritual charts a subjects path from one state of consciousness to the next, resulting in a meaningful change of attitudes (Deflem 8). Through a lifelong study of African rituals British cultural ethnographer Victor Turner refined his concept of rituals in a modern social context. Turner observed that rituals conform to a three-phased processural form (The Ritual Process 13–14). First, in the separation stage, the subjects are selected and removed from their fixed position in the social structure. Second, they enter an in-between and ambiguous liminal stage, characterised by a “partial or complete separation of the subject from everyday existence” (Deflem 8). Finally, imbued with a new perspective of the outside world borne out of the experience of reflexivity, liminality, and a cathartic cleansing, subjects are reintegrated into the social reality in a new, stable state. The three distinct stages make the ritual an emotionally charged, highly personal experience that “demarcates the passage from one phase to another in the individual’s life-cycle” (Turner, “Symbols” 488) and actively shapes human attitudes and behaviour. Adhering to the three-staged processural form of the ritual, Arthus-Bertrand guides spectators towards a newfound understanding of their roles and responsibilities in creating a desirable future. In the first stage—the separation—aerial photography of Home alienates viewers from their anthropocentric perspectives of the outside world. This establishes Earth as a body, and unearths spectators’ guilt and shame in relation to contemporary world risks. Aerial photography strips landscapes of their conventional qualities of horizon, scale, and human reference. As fine art photographer Emmet Gowin observes, “when one really sees an awesome, vast place, our sense of wholeness is reorganised [...] and the body seems always to diminish” (qtd. in Reynolds 4). Confronted with a seemingly infinite sublime landscape from above, the spectator’s “body diminishes” as they witness Earth’s body gradually taking shape. Home’s rushing rivers of Indonesia are akin to blood flowing through the veins and the Siberian permafrost seems like the texture of skin in extreme close-up. Arthus-Bertrand establishes a geocentric embodiment to force spectators to perceive and experience the environmental degradation brought about by the dominant social practices of contemporary post-industrial modernity. The film-maker visualises the maltreatment of the environment through suggested abuse of the Earth’s body. Images of industrial agricultural practices in the United States appear to leave scratches and scars on the landscape, and as a ship crosses the Arctic ice sheets of the Northwest Passage the boat glides like the surgeon’s knife cutting through the uppermost layer of the skin. But the deep blue water that’s revealed in the wake of the craft suggests a flesh and body now devoid of life, a suffering Earth in the wake of global climatic change. Arthus-Bertrand’s images become the sublime evidence of human intervention in the environment and the reflection of present-day industrialisation materially altering the face of Earth. The film-maker exploits spectators’ geocentric perspective and sensibility to prompt reflexivity, provide revelations about the self, and unearth the forgotten shame and guilt in having inadvertently caused excessive environmental degradation. Following the sequences establishing Earth as the body of the text Arthus-Bertrand returns spectators to their everyday “natural” environment—the city. Having witnessed and endured the pain and suffering of Earth, spectators now gaze at the skyscrapers standing bold and tall in the cityscape with disillusionment. The pinnacles of modern urban development become symbols of arrogance and exploitation: structures forced upon the landscape. Moreover, the images of contemporary cityscapes in Home serve as triggers for ritual reflexivity, allowing the spectator to “perceive the self [...] as a distanced ‘other’ and hence achieve a partial ‘self-transcendence’” (Beck, Comments 491). Arthus-Bertrand’s aerial photographs of Los Angeles, New York, and Tokyo fold these distinct urban environments into one uniform fusion of glass, metal, and concrete devoid of life. The uniformity of these cultural landscapes prompts spectators to add the missing element: the human. Suddenly, the homes and offices of desolate cityscapes are populated by none other than us, looking at ourselves from a unique vantage point. The geocentric sensibility the film-maker invoked with the images of the suffering Earth now prompt a revelation about the self as spectators see their everyday urban environments in a new light. Their homes and offices become blemishes on the face of the Earth: its inhabitants, including the spectators themselves, complicit in the excessive mistreatment of the planet. The second stage of the ritual allows Arthus-Bertrand to challenge dominant social paradigms of present day post-industrial societies and introduce new, alternative moral directives to govern our habits and attitudes. Following the separation, ritual subjects enter an in-between, threshold stage, one unencumbered by the spatial, temporal, and social boundaries of everyday existence. Turner posits that a subjects passage through this liminal stage is necessary to attain psychic maturation and successful transition to a new, stable state at the end of the ritual (The Ritual Process 97). While this “betwixt and between” (Turner, The Ritual Process 95) state may be a fleeting moment of transition, it makes for a “lived experience [that] transforms human beings cognitively, emotionally, and morally.” (Horvath et al. 3) Through a change of perceptions liminality paves the way toward meaningful social action. Home places spectators in a state of liminality to contrast geocentric and anthropocentric views. Arthus-Bertrand contrasts natural and human-made environments in terms of diversity. The narrator’s description of the “miracle of life” is followed by images of trees seemingly defying gravity, snow-covered summits among mountain ranges, and a whale in the ocean. Grandeur and variety appear to be inherent qualities of biodiversity on Earth, qualities contrasted with images of the endless, uniform rectangular greenhouses of Almeria, Spain. This contrast emphasises the loss of variety in human achievements and the monotony mass-production brings to the landscape. With the image of a fire burning atop a factory chimney, Arthus-Bertrand critiques the change of pace and distortion of time inherent in anthropocentric views, and specifically in contemporary modernity. Here, the flames appear to instantly eat away at resources that have taken millions of years to form, bringing anthropocentric and geocentric temporality into sharp contrast. A sequence showing a night time metropolis underscores this distinction. The glittering cityscape is lit by hundreds of lights in skyscrapers in an effort, it appears, to mimic and surpass daylight and thus upturn the natural rhythm of life. As the narrator remarks, in our present-day environments, “days are now the pale reflections of nights.” Arthus-Bertrand also uses ritual liminality to mark the present as a transitory, threshold moment in human civilisation. The film-maker contrasts the spectre of our past with possible visions of the future to mark the moment of now as a time when humanity is on the threshold of two distinct states of mind. The narrator’s descriptions of contemporary post-industrial society’s reliance on non-renewable resources and lack of environmentally sustainable agricultural practices condemn the past and warn viewers of the consequences of continuing such practices into the future. Exploring the liminal present Arthus-Bertrand proposes distinctive futurescapes for humankind. On the one hand, the narrator’s description of California’s “concentration camp style cattle farming” suggests that humankind will live in a future that feeds from the past, falling back on frames of horrors and past mistakes. On the other hand, the example of Costa Rica, a nation that abolished its military and dedicated the budget to environmental conservation, is recognition of our ability to re-imagine our future in the face of global risk. Home introduces myths to imbue liminality with the alternative dominant social paradigm of ecology. By calling upon deep-seated structures myths “touch the heart of society’s emotional, spiritual and intellectual consciousness” (Killingsworth and Palmer 176) and help us understand and come to terms with complex social, economic, and scientific phenomena. With the capacity to “pattern thought, beliefs and practices,” (Maier 166) myths are ideal tools in communicating ritual liminality and challenging contemporary post-industrial society’s dominant social paradigms. The opening sequence of Home, where the crescent Earth is slowly revealed in the darkness of space, is an allusion to creation: the genesis myth. Accompanied only by a gentle hum our home emerges in brilliant blue, white, and green-brown encompassing most of the screen. It is as if darkness and chaos disintegrated and order, life, and the elements were created right before our eyes. Akin to the Earthrise image taken by the astronauts of Apollo 8, Home’s opening sequence underscores the notion that our home is a unique spot in the blackness of space and is defined and circumscribed by the elements. With the opening sequence Arthus-Bertrand wishes to impart the message of interdependence and reliance on elements—core concepts of ecology. Balance, another key theme in ecology, is introduced with an allusion to the Icarus myth in a sequence depicting Dubai. The story of Icarus’s fall from the sky after flying too close to the sun is a symbolic retelling of hubris—a violent pride and arrogance punishable by nemesis—destruction, which ultimately restores balance by forcing the individual back within the limits transgressed (Littleton 712). In Arthus-Bertrand’s portrayal of Dubai, the camera slowly tilts upwards on the Burj Khalifa tower, the tallest human-made structure ever built. The construction works on the tower explicitly frame humans against the bright blue sky in their attempt to reach ever further, transgressing their limitations much like the ill-fated Icarus. Arthus-Bertrand warns that contemporary modernity does not strive for balance or moderation, and with climate change we may have brought our nemesis upon ourselves. By suggesting new dominant paradigms and providing a critique of current maxims, Home’s retelling of myths ultimately sees spectators through to the final stage of the ritual. The last phase in the rite of passage “celebrates and commemorates transcendent powers,” (Deflem 8) marking subjects’ rebirth to a new status and distinctive perception of the outside world. It is at this stage that Arthus-Bertrand resolves the emotional distress uncovered in the separation phase. The film-maker uses humanity’s innate capacity for creation and renewal as a cathartic cleansing aimed at reconciling spectators’ guilt and shame in having inadvertently exacerbated global environmental degradation. Arthus-Bertrand identifies renewable resources as the key to redeeming technology, human intervention in the landscape, and finally humanity itself. Until now, the film-maker pictured modernity and technology, evidenced in his portrayal of Dubai, as synonymous with excess and disrespect for the interconnectedness and balance of elements on Earth. The final sequence shows a very different face of technology. Here, we see a mechanical sea-snake generating electricity by riding the waves off the coast of Scotland and solar panels turning towards the sun in the Sahara desert. Technology’s redemption is evidenced in its ability to imitate nature—a move towards geocentric consciousness (a lesson learned from the ritual’s liminal stage). Moreover, these human-made structures, unlike the skyscrapers earlier in the film, appear a lot less invasive in the landscape and speak of moderation and union with nature. With the above examples Arthus-Bertrand suggests that humanity can shed the greed that drove it to dig deeper and deeper into the Earth to acquire non-renewable resources such as oil and coal, what the narrator describes as “treasures buried deep.” The incorporation of principles of ecology, such as balance and interconnectedness, into humanity’s behaviour ushers in reconciliation and ritual cleansing in Home. Following the description of the move toward renewable resources, the narrator reveals that “worldwide four children out of five attend school, never has learning been given to so many human beings” marking education, innovation, and creativity as the true inexhaustible resources on Earth. Lastly, the description of Antarctica in Home is the essence of Arthus-Bertrand’s argument for our innate capacity to create, not simply exploit and destroy. Here, the narrator describes the continent as possessing “immense natural resources that no country can claim for itself, a natural reserve devoted to peace and science, a treaty signed by 49 nations has made it a treasure shared by all humanity.” Innovation appears to fuel humankind’s transcendence to a state where it is capable of compassion, unification, sharing, and finally creating treasures. With these examples Arthus-Bertrand suggests that humanity has an innate capacity for creative energy that awaits authentic expression and can turn humankind from destroyer to creator. In recent years various risk communication texts have explicitly addressed climate change, endeavouring to instigate environmentally consequential social action. Home breaks discursive ground among them through its ritualistic construction which seeks to transform spectators’ perception, and in turn roles and responsibilities, in the face of global environmental risks. Unlike recent climate change media texts such as An Inconvenient Truth (2006), The 11th Hour (2007), The Age of Stupid (2009), Carbon Nation (2010) and Earth: The Operator’s Manual (2011), Home eludes simple genre classification. On the threshold of photography and film, documentary and fiction, Arthus-Bertrand’s work is best classified as an advocacy film promoting public debate and engagement with a universal concern—the state of the environment. The film’s website, available in multiple languages, contains educational material, resources to organise public screenings, and a link to GoodPlanet.info: a website dedicated to environmentalism, including legal tools and initiatives to take action. The film-maker’s approach to using Home as a basis for education and raising awareness corresponds to Antonio Lopez’s critique of contemporary mass-media communications of global risks. Lopez rebukes traditional forms of mediatised communication that place emphasis on the imparting of knowledge and instead calls for a participatory, discussion-driven, organic media approach, akin to a communion or a ritual (106). Moreover, while texts often place a great emphasis on the messenger, for instance Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth, Leonardo DiCaprio in The 11th Hour, or geologist Dr. Richard Alley in Earth: The Operator’s Manual, Home’s messenger remains unseen—the narrator is only identified at the very end of the film among the credits. The film-maker’s decision to forego a central human character helps dissociate the message from the personality of the messenger which aids in establishing and maintaining the geocentric sensibility of the text. Finally, the ritual’s invocation and cathartic cleansing of emotional distress enables Home to at once acknowledge our environmentally destructive past habits and point to a hopeful, environmentally sustainable future. While The Age of Stupid mostly focuses on humanity’s present and past failures to respond to an imminent environmental catastrophe, Carbon Nation, with the tagline “A climate change solutions movie that doesn’t even care if you believe in climate change,” only explores the potential future business opportunities in turning towards renewable resources and environmentally sustainable practices. The three-phased processural form of the ritual allows for a balance of backward and forward-looking, establishing the possibility of change and renewal in the face of world risk. The ritual is a transformative experience. As Turner states, rituals “interrupt the flow of social life and force a group to take cognizance of its behaviour in relation to its own values, and even question at times the value of those values” (“Dramatic Ritual” 82). Home, a ritualised media text, is an invitation to look at our world, its dominant social paradigms, and the key element within that world—ourselves—with new eyes. It makes explicit contemporary post-industrial society’s dependence on the environment, highlights our impact on Earth, and reveals our complicity in bringing about a contemporary world risk. The ritual structure and the self-reflexivity allow Arthus-Bertrand to transform climate change into a personally salient issue. This bestows upon the spectator the responsibility to act and to reconcile the spectre of the past with the vision of the future.Acknowledgments The author would like to thank Dr. Angi Buettner whose support, guidance, and supervision has been invaluable in preparing this article. References Beck, Brenda E. “Comments on the Distancing of Emotion in Ritual by Thomas J. Scheff.” Current Anthropology 18.3 (1977): 490. Beck, Ulrich. “Risk Society Revisited: Theory, Politics and Research Programmes.” The Risk Society and Beyond: Critical Issues for Social Theory. Ed. Barbara Adam, Ulrich Beck, and Joost Van Loon. London: Sage, 2005. 211–28. Boston, Jonathan., Philip Nel, and Marjolein Righarts. “Introduction.” Climate Change and Security: Planning for the Future. Wellington: Victoria U of Wellington Institute of Policy Studies, 2009. Boykoff, Maxwell T. “We Speak for the Trees: Media Reporting on the Environment.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 34 (2009): 431–57. Corbett, Julia B. Communicating Nature: How we Create and Understand Environmental Messages. Washington, DC: Island P, 2006. Cox, Robert. Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere. London: Sage, 2010. Deflem, Mathieu. “Ritual, Anti-Structure and Religion: A Discussion of Victor Turner’s Processural Symbolic Analysis.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 30.1 (1991): 1–25. Gifford, Robert. “Psychology’s Essential Role in Alleviating the Impacts of Climate Change.” Canadian Psychology 49.4 (2008): 273–80. Hamilton, Maxwell John. “Introduction.” Media and the Environment. Eds. Craig L. LaMay, Everette E. Dennis. Washington: Island P, 1991. 3–16. Horvath, Agnes., Bjørn Thomassen, and Harald Wydra. “Introduction: Liminality and Cultures of Change.” International Political Anthropology 2.1 (2009): 3–4. Howard-Williams, Rowan. “Consumers, Crazies and Killer Whales: The Environment on New Zealand Television.” International Communications Gazette 73.1–2 (2011): 27–43. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Climate Change Synthesis Report. (2007). 23 March 2012 ‹http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr.pdf› Killingsworth, M. J., and Jacqueliene S. Palmer. “Silent Spring and Science Fiction: An Essay in the History and Rhetoric of Narrative.” And No Birds Sing: Rhetorical Analyses of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Ed. Craig Waddell. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 2000. 174–204. Littleton, C. Scott. Gods, Goddesses and Mythology. New York: Marshall Cavendish, 2005. Lorenzoni, Irene, Mavis Jones, and John R. Turnpenny. “Climate Change, Human Genetics, and Post-normality in the UK.” Futures 39.1 (2007): 65–82. Lopez, Antonio. “Defusing the Cannon/Canon: An Organic Media Approach to Environmental Communication.” Environmental Communication 4.1 (2010): 99–108. Maier, Daniela Carmen. “Communicating Business Greening and Greenwashing in Global Media: A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of CNN's Greenwashing Video.” International Communications Gazette 73.1–2 (2011): 165–77. Milfront, Taciano L. “Global Warming, Climate Change and Human Psychology.” Psychological Approaches to Sustainability: Current Trends in Theory, Research and Practice. Eds. Victor Corral-Verdugo, Cirilo H. Garcia-Cadena and Martha Frias-Armenta. New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2010. 20–42. O’Neill, Saffron, and Sophie Nicholson-Cole. “Fear Won’t Do It: Promoting Positive Engagement with Climate Change through Visual and Iconic Representations.” Science Communication 30.3 (2009): 355–79. Pawlik, Kurt. “The Psychology of Global Environmental Change: Some Basic Data and an Agenda for Cooperative International Research.” International Journal of Psychology 26.5 (1991): 547–63. Reynolds, Jock., ed. Emmet Gowin: Changing the Earth: Aerial Photographs. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2002. Rosenzweig, Cynthia, David Karoly, Marta Vicarelli, Peter Neofotis, Qigang Wu, Gino Casassa, Annette Menzel, Terry L. Root, Nicole Estrella, Bernard Seguin, Piotr Tryjanowski, Chunzhen Liu, Samuel Rawlins, and Anton Imeson. “Attributing Physical and Biological Impacts to Anthropogenic Climate Change.” Nature 453.7193 (2008): 353–58. Roser-Renouf, Connie, and Edward W. Maibach. “Communicating Climate Change.” Encyclopaedia of Science and Technology Communication. Ed. Susanna Hornig Priest. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage. 2010. 141–47. Stamm, Keith R., Fiona Clark, and Paula R. Eblacas. “Mass Communication and the Public Understanding of Environmental Problems: The Case of Global Warming.” Public Understanding of Science 9 (2000): 219–37. Turner, Victor. “Dramatic Ritual – Ritual Drama: Performative and Reflexive Anthropology.” The Kenyon Review, New Series 1.3 (1979): 80–93. —-. “Symbols in African Ritual.” Perspectives in Cultural Anthropology. Ed. Herbert A. Applebaum. Albany: State U of New York P, 1987. 488–501. —-. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. 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The doppelgänger (literally ‘double-goer’) of 18th and 19th century European literature and lore is a sinister likeness that dogs and shadows a protagonist heralding their death or descent into madness – a ‘spectral presentiment of disaster’ (Schwartz 84). Recently the term ‘digital doppelgänger’ has been adopted by the English-speaking entertainment and technology press to refer to a digital image of an actor or performer; whether that image is a computer-generated wire-frame model, an amalgamation of old film footage and artistry, or a three dimensional laser scan of the face and body’s topography. (Magid, Chimielewski) This paper examines some of the implications of this term and its linkage to a set of anxieties about the relationship between the self and its image. According to Friedrich Kittler, media of recording and storing bodily data are central to how many of us imagine identity today. Technologies such as photography and film ushered in a ‘technological rechristening of the soul’ (149). Kittler contends that these image technologies have had an impact on identity by creating ‘mechanised likenesses [that] roam the databanks that store bodies’ (96). In this context the use of the term ‘digital doppelgänger’ suggests some kind of perceived disruption to the way identity and image, or original and copy, relate. For example, a short article in Variety, ‘Garner finds viewing her digital doppelgänger surreal’, promotes the release of the videogame version of the television show Alias. But instead of the usual emphasis on the entertainment value of the game and its potential to extend the pleasures of the televisual text, this blurb focuses on the uncanniness of an encounter between the show’s lead, Jennifer Garner, and the digitally animated game character modelled from her features (Fritz 2003). An actor’s digital likeness can be made to perform actions that are beyond the will or physicality of the actor themselves. Such images have a variety of uses. In action cinema the digital likeness often replaces the actor’s stunt double, removing much of the risk previously borne by the human body in filming explosions, car chases and acrobatic leaps. Through its multiplication or manipulation the digital doppelgänger can expand the performative limits of the actor’s body and face. These figures also have an important role in video game versions of popular action or science fiction films such as the Wachowski brothers’ Matrix trilogy. The digital doppelgänger therefore extends the capabilities of the human performer’s image, bestowing ‘superhuman’ qualities and granting it entry to interactive media forms. The most serendipitous use of these images, however, is in the completion of films where an actor has died in mid-production, as when, for instance, Oliver Reed famously passed on during the filming of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator. In such cases the image literally substitutes for the once-living; its digitally animated gestures and expressions filling in for an inanimate body that can express and gesture no longer and never will again. The history of doppelgängers and doubles, you see, is intimately bound up with human mortality and the origins of image making. According to Otto Rank, the earliest connotations of the double in Indo-European lore were benign, entailing the immortality of the self. This incarnation stems from animistic beliefs in the manifestation of the soul in shadows, reflections and images (49-77) and is intimately connected to the magical origins of figurative representation. Andre Bazin argues that the most enduring form of image magic has been that concerned with rendering the subject immortal. In his essay ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, he emphasises that the basic psychological impulse beneath the origins of the plastic arts was a desire to snatch mortal things from the indifferent flow of time – to cheat death through the creation of a substitute, a double, for the living body (9). However, by the post-Enlightenment era, Western belief in the preservative powers of the double had eroded, and subsequently, the meaning of this figure in folktales and literature came to be inverted. The double or doppelgänger became a spectral projection of the self, an ‘uncanny harbinger of death’ (Freud 324-5). Meanwhile, even as the haunted image persists as a motif in short stories, novels and film, rationally: No one believes any longer in the ontological identity of model and image, but all are agreed that the image helps us to remember the subject and to preserve him from a second spiritual death (Bazin 9). Photographic and filmic images have aided Western cultures in keeping the dead in view, saving them from being totally forgotten. These images are filled in or animated by the subjective memory of the viewer. The digital likeness, however, is birthed in a computer and made to gesture in the performer’s stead, promising not just a ‘technological rechristening of the soul’, but the possibility of future career resurrection. Ron Magid reports: Cyberware president David Addleman is hopeful that all stars will eventually stockpile their data, like the suspended bodies in Coma, just waiting for the day when technology will resurrect them for as yet undreamed-of projects. (Magid) This reference to the 1970s horror film, Coma, with its connotations of lifeless bodies and sinister scientific procedures, brings to mind unconscious forms, zombies awaiting resurrection, an actor’s image as puppet, a mindless figure forced to gesture at the control of another. These are fears of decorporealised detachment from one’s own likeness. It is a fear of the image being in exile from its referent, being endowed with the semblance of life though digital processes. In this fear we can hear the echoes of earlier anxieties about the double. But these fears also revisit earlier responses to the cinematic recording of the human image, ones that now may seem quaint to us in a culture where people fantasise of becoming media celebrities and indeed queue in their thousands for the chance. To put this into some historical perspective, it is worth noting how the figure of the double played a part in some responses to then new cinema technologies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Yuri Tsivian writes of the unease expressed in the early 1900s by Russian performers when encountering their own moving image on screen. For some the root of their discomfort was a belief that encountering their projected moving image would play havoc with their own internal self-image. For others, their unease was compounded by non-standardised projection speeds. Until the mid to late 1910s both camera and projector were cranked by hand. It was common for a projectionist to lend some haste to the action on the screen in order to finish work at the auditorium early. Early Russian writers on film were well aware of the projectionist’s role in transforming ‘calm fluent gesture’ into a ‘jerky convulsive twitch’, and making the ‘actors gesture like puppets’ (cited in Tsivian 53-54). Luigi Pirandello’s novel Shoot! from 1916 dealt with a cinema actress traumatised by the sight of her own ‘altered and disordered’ screen image (59-60). A playwright, Pirandello condemned the new media as reducing the craft of the living, breathing stage-actor to an insubstantial flickering phantom, a ‘dumb image’ subtracted from a moment of live action before the camera (105-6). Walter Benjamin refers to Pirandello’s novel in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, recognising it as one of the first discourses on the relationship between the actor and their screen image. For Benjamin the screen actor is in exile from their image. He or she sends out his or her shadow to face the public and this decorporealised shadow heralds a diminishment of presence and aura for the audience (222). Benjamin suggests that in compensation for this diminishment of presence, the film industry ‘responds to the shrivelling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the “personality” outside the studio’ (224). The development of star-image discourse and celebrity works to collapse the split between person and decorporealised shadow, enveloping the two in the electrified glow of interconnected texts such as roles, studio publicity, glamour photography, interviews, and gossip. Star personality, celebrity scandal and gossip discourse have smoothed over this early unease, as have (importantly) the sheer ubiquity and democracy of mediated self-images. The mundane culture of home video has banished this sense of dark magic at work from the appearance of our own faces on screens. In the context of these arguments it remains to be seen what impact the ‘digital doppelgänger’ will have on notions of public identity and stardom, concepts of cinematic performance and media immortality. Further research is also required in order to uncover the implications of the digital double for the image cultures of indigenous peoples or for cinema industries such as Bollywood. As for the term ‘digital doppelgänger’ itself, perhaps with ubiquity and overuse, its older and more sinister connotations will be gradually papered over and forgotten. The term ‘doppelgänger’ suggests a copy that threatens its original with usurpation, but it may be that the digital doppelgänger functions in a not dissimilar way to the waxwork models at Madame Tussauds – as a confirmation of a celebrity’s place in the media galaxy, wholly reliant on the original star for its meaning and very existence. References Bazin, A. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” What is Cinema? Ed./Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley & London: U of California P, 1967. 9-16. Benjamin, W. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Fonatan, 1992. 211-44. Chimielewski, D. “Meet Sunny’s Digital Doppelganger.” The Age (5 January 2005). http://www.theage.com.au/news/Film/Meet-Sunnys-digital-doppelganger/2005/01/04/1104601340883.html>. Freud, S. “The ‘Uncanny.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. Ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud et al. Vol. xvii (1917-19). London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1955. 219-52. Fritz, B. “Garner Finds Viewing Her Digital Doppelganger Surreal.” Variety (27 August 2003). http://www.variety.com/index.asp?layout=upsell_article&articleID=VR1117891622&cs=1>. Kittler, F. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Trans. and intro. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford, California: Stanford UP, 1999. Magid, R. “New Media: Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” Wired News (March 1998). http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,10645,00.html>. Parisi, P. “Silicon Stars: The New Hollywood.” Wired (December 1995): 144-5, 202-10. http:www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,10645,00.html>. Pirandello, L. Shoot! (Si Gira) The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematographer Operator. Trans. C.F. Scott Moncrieff. New York: E.P. Dutton and Co.,1926. Rank, O. The Double: A Psychoanalytical Study. Trans./ed. Harry Tucker, Jr. North Carolina: U of North Carolina P, 1971. Schwartz, H. The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles. New York: Zone, 1996. Tsivian, Y. Early Russian Cinema and Its Cultural Reception. Trans. A. Bodger. Ed. R. Taylor. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1998. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Bode, Lisa. "Digital Doppelgängers." M/C Journal 8.3 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0507/07-bode.php>. APA Style Bode, L. (Jul. 2005) "Digital Doppelgängers," M/C Journal, 8(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0507/07-bode.php>.

Introduction Special occasion cookery has been a staple of the cookbook writing in the English speaking Western world for decades. This includes providing catering for personal milestones as well as religious and secular festivals. Yet, in an era when the culinary publishing sector is undergoing considerable expansion and market segmentation, narratives of foods marking of one of life’s central and inescapable rites—death—are extremely rare. This discussion investigates examples of food writing related to death and funeral rites in contemporary cookbooks. Funeral feasts held in honour of the dead date back beyond recorded history (Luby and Gruber), and religious, ceremonial and community group meals as a component of funeral rites are now ubiquitous around the world. In earlier times, the dead were believed to derive both pleasure and advantage from these offerings (LeClercq), and contemporary practice still reflects this to some extent, with foods favoured by the deceased sometimes included in such meals (see, for instance, Varidel). In the past, offering some sustenance as a component of a funeral was often necessary, as mourners might have travelled considerable distances to attend the ceremony, and eateries outside the home were not as commonplace or convenient to access as they are today. The abundance and/or lavishness of the foods provided may also have reflected the high esteem in which the dead was held, and offered as a mark of community respect (Smith and Bird). Following longstanding tradition, it is still common for Western funeral attendees to gather after the formal parts of the event—the funeral service and burial or cremation —in a more informal atmosphere to share memories of the deceased and refreshments (Simplicity Funerals 31). Thursby notes that these events, which are ostensibly about the dead, often develop into a celebration of the ties between living family members and friends, “times of reunions and renewed relationships” (94). Sharing food is central to this celebration as “foods affirm identity, strengthen kinship bonds, provide comfortable and familiar emotional support during periods of stress” (79), while familiar dishes evoke both memories and promising signals of the continued celebration of life” (94). While in the southern states and some other parts of the USA, it is customary to gather at the church premises after the funeral for a meal made up of items contributed by members of the congregation, and with leftovers sent home with the bereaved family (Siegfried), it is more common in Australasia and the UK to gather either in the home of the principal mourners, someone else’s home or a local hotel, club or restaurant (Jalland). Church halls are a less common option in Australasia, and an increasing trend is the utilisation of facilities attached to the funeral home and supplied as a component of a funeral package (Australian Heritage Funerals). The provision of this catering largely depends on the venue chosen, with the cookery either done by family and/or friends, the hotel, club, restaurant or professional catering companies, although this does not usually affect the style of the food, which in Australia and New Zealand is often based on a morning or afternoon tea style meal (Jalland). Despite widespread culinary innovation in other contexts, funeral catering bears little evidence of experimentation. Ash likens this to as being “fed by grandmothers”, and describes “scones, pastries, sandwiches, biscuits, lamingtons—food from a fifties afternoon party with the taste of Country Women’s Association about it”, noting that funerals “require humble food. A sandwich is not an affront to the dead” (online). Numerous other memoirists note this reliance on familiar foods. In “S is for Sad” in her An Alphabet for Gourmets (1949), food writer M.F.K. Fisher writes of mourners’s deep need for sustenance at this time as a “mysterious appetite that often surges in us when our hearts seem breaking and our lives too bleakly empty” (135). In line with Probyn’s argument that food foregrounds the viscerality of life (7), Fisher notes that “most bereaved souls crave nourishment more tangible than prayers: they want a steak. […] It is as if our bodies, wiser than we who wear them, call out for encouragement and strength and […] compel us […] to eat” (135, 136). Yet, while funerals are a recurring theme in food memoirs (see, for example, West, Consuming), only a small number of Western cookbooks address this form of special occasion food provision. Feast by Nigella Lawson Nigella Lawson’s Feast: Food that Celebrates Life (2004) is one of the very few popular contemporary cookbooks in English that includes an entire named section on cookery for funerals. Following twenty-one chapters that range from the expected (Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, and wedding) to more original (children’s and midnight) feasts, Lawson frames her discussion with an anthropological understanding of the meaning of special occasion eating. She notes that we use food “to mark occasions that are important to us in life” (vii) and how eating together “is the vital way we celebrate anything that matters […] how we mark the connections between us, how we celebrate life” (vii). Such meals embody both personal and group identities because both how and what is eaten “lies at the heart of who we are-as individuals, families, communities” (vii). This is consistent with her overall aims as a food writer—to explore foods’ meanings—as she states in the book’s introduction “the recipes matter […] but it is what the food says that really counts” (vii). She reiterates this near the end of the book, adding, almost as an afterthought, “and, of course, what it tastes like” (318). Lawson’s food writing also reveals considerable detail about herself. In common with many other celebrity chefs and food writers, Lawson continuously draws on, elaborates upon, and ultimately constructs her own life as a major theme of her works (Brien, Rutherford, and Williamson). In doing so, she, like these other chefs and food writers, draws upon revelations of her private life to lend authenticity to her cooking, to the point where her cookbooks could be described as “memoir-illustrated-with-recipes” (Brien and Williamson). The privileging of autobiographical information in Lawson’s work extends beyond the use of her own home and children in her television programs and books, to the revelation of personal details about her life, with the result that these have become well known. Her readers thus know that her mother, sister and first and much-loved husband all died of cancer in a relatively brief space of time, and how these tragedies affected her life. Her first book, How to Eat: The Pleasures and Principles of Good Food (1998), opened with the following dedication: “In memory of my mother, Vanessa (1936–1985) and my sister Thomasina (1961–1993)” (dedication page). Her husband, BBC broadcaster and The Times (London) journalist John Diamond, who died of throat cancer in 2001, furthered this public knowledge, writing about both his illness and at length about Lawson in his column and his book C: Because Cowards Get Cancer Too (1999). In Feast, Lawson discusses her personal tragedies in the introduction of the ‘Funeral Foods’ chapter, writing about a friend's kind act of leaving bags of shopping from the supermarket for her when she was grieving (451). Her first recipe in this section, for a potato topped fish pie, is highly personalised in that it is described as “what I made on the evening following my mother’s funeral” (451). Following this, she again uses her own personal experience when she notes that “I don’t think anyone wants to cook in the immediate shock of bereavement […] but a few days on cooking can be a calming act, and since the mind knows no rest and has no focus, the body may as well be busy” (451). Similarly, her recipe for the slowly hard-boiled, dark-stained Hamine Eggs are described as “sans bouche”, which she explains means “without mouths to express sorrow and anguish.” She adds, drawing on her own memories of feelings at such times, “I find that appropriate: there is nothing to be said, or nothing that helps” (455). Despite these examples of raw emotion, Lawson’s chapter is not all about grief. She also comments on both the aesthetics of dishes suitable for such times and their meanings, as well as the assistance that can be offered to others through the preparation and sharing of food. In her recipe for a lamb tagine that includes prunes, she notes, for example, that the dried plums are “traditionally part of the funeral fare of many cultures […] since their black colour is thought to be appropriate to the solemnity of the occasion” (452). Lawson then suggests this as a suitable dish to offer to someone in mourning, someone who needs to “be taken care of by you” (452). This is followed by a lentil soup, the lentils again “because of their dark colour … considered fitting food for funerals” (453), but also practical, as the dish is “both comforting and sustaining and, importantly, easy to transport and reheat” (453). Her next recipe for a meatloaf containing a line of hard-boiled eggs continues this rhetorical framing—as it is “always comfort food […] perfect for having sliced on a plate at a funeral tea or for sending round to someone’s house” (453). She adds the observation that there is “something hopeful and cheering about the golden yolk showing through in each slice” (453), noting that the egg “is a recurring feature in funeral food, symbolising as it does, the cycle of life, the end and the beginning in one” (453). The next recipe, Heavenly Potatoes, is Lawson’s version of the dish known as Mormon or Utah Funeral potatoes (Jensen), which are so iconic in Utah that they were featured on one of the Salt Lake City Olympic Games souvenir pins (Spackman). This tray of potatoes baked in milk and sour cream and then topped with crushed cornflakes are, she notes, although they sound exotic, quite familiar, and “perfect alongside the British traditional baked ham” (454), and reference given to an earlier ham recipe. These savoury recipes are followed by those for three substantial cakes: an orange cake marbled with chocolate-coffee swirls, a fruit tea loaf, and a rosemary flavoured butter cake, each to be served sliced to mourners. She suggests making the marble cake (which Lawson advises she includes in memory of the deceased mother of one of her friends) in a ring mould, “as the circle is always significant. There is a cycle that continues but—after all, the cake is sliced and the circle broken—another that has ended” (456). Of the fruitcake, she writes “I think you need a fruit cake for a funeral: there’s something both comforting and bolstering (and traditional) about it” (457). This tripartite concern—with comfort, sustenance and tradition—is common to much writing about funeral foods. Cookbooks from the American South Despite this English example, a large proportion of cookbook writing about funeral foods is in American publications, and especially those by southern American authors, reflecting the bountiful spreads regularly offered to mourners in these states. This is chronicled in novels, short stories, folk songs and food memoirs as well as some cookery books (Purvis). West’s memoir Consuming Passions: A Food Obsessed Life (2000) has a chapter devoted to funeral food, complete with recipes (132–44). West notes that it is traditional in southern small towns to bring covered dishes of food to the bereaved, and that these foods have a powerful, and singular, expressive mode: “Sometimes we say all the wrong things, but food […] says, ‘I know you are inconsolable. I know you are fragile right now. And I am so sorry for your loss’” (139). Suggesting that these foods are “concern and sympathy in a Pyrex bowl” (139), West includes recipes for Chess pie (a lemon tart), with the information that this is known in the South as “funeral pie” (135) and a lemon-flavoured slice that, with a cup of tea, will “revive the spirit” (136). Like Lawson, West finds significance in the colours of funeral foods, continuing that the sunny lemon in this slice “reminds us that life continues, that we must sustain and nourish it” (139). Gaydon Metcalf and Charlotte Hays’s Being Dead is No Excuse: The Official Southern Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect Funeral (2005), is one of the few volumes available dedicated to funeral planning and also offers a significant cookery-focused section on food to offer at, and take to, funeral events. Jessica Bemis Ward’s To Die For: A Book of Funeral Food, Tips, and Tales from the Old City Cemetery, Lynchburg, Virginia (2004) not only contains more than 100 recipes, but also information about funeral customs, practical advice in writing obituaries and condolence notes, and a series of very atmospheric photographs of this historic cemetery. The recipes in the book are explicitly noted to be traditional comfort foods from Central Virginia, as Ward agrees with the other writers identified that “simplicity is the by-word when talking about funeral food” (20). Unlike the other examples cited here, however, Ward also promotes purchasing commercially-prepared local specialties to supplement home-cooked items. There is certainly significantly more general recognition of the specialist nature of catering for funerals in the USA than in Australasia. American food is notable in stressing how different ethnic groups and regions have specific dishes that are associated with post-funeral meals. From this, readers learn that the Amish commonly prepare a funeral pie with raisins, and Chinese-American funerals include symbolic foods taken to the graveside as an offering—including piles of oranges for good luck and entire roast pigs. Jewish, Italian and Greek culinary customs in America also receive attention in both scholarly studies and popular American food writing (see, for example, Rogak, Purvis). This is beginning to be acknowledged in Australia with some recent investigation into the cultural importance of food in contemporary Chinese, Jewish, Greek, and Anglo-Australian funerals (Keys), but is yet to be translated into local mainstream cookery publication. Possible Publishing Futures As home funerals are a growing trend in the USA (Wilson 2009), green funerals increase in popularity in the UK (West, Natural Burial), and the multi-million dollar funeral industry is beginning to be questioned in Australia (FCDC), a more family or community-centered “response to death and after-death care” (NHFA) is beginning to re-emerge. This is a process whereby family and community members play a key role in various parts of the funeral, including in planning and carrying out after-death rituals or ceremonies, preparing the body, transporting it to the place of burial or cremation, and facilitating its final disposition in such activities as digging the grave (Gonzalez and Hereira, NHFA). Westrate, director of the documentary A Family Undertaking (2004), believes this challenges us to “re-examine our attitudes toward death […] it’s one of life’s most defining moments, yet it’s the one we typically prepare for least […] [and an indication of our] culture of denial” (PBS). With an emphasis on holding meaningful re-personalised after-disposal events as well as minimal, non-invasive and environmentally friendly treatment of the body (Harris), such developments would also seem to indicate that the catering involved in funeral occasions, and the cookbooks that focus on the provision of such food, may well become more prominent in the future. References [AHF] Australian Heritage Funerals. “After the Funeral.” Australian Heritage Funerals, 2013. 10 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.ahfunerals.com.au/services.php?arid=31›. Ash, Romy. “The Taste of Sad: Funeral Feasts, Loss and Mourning.” Voracious: Best New Australian Food Writing. Ed. Paul McNally. Richmond, Vic.: Hardie Grant, 2011. 3 Apr. 2013 ‹http://www.romyash.com/non-fiction/the-taste-of-sad-funeral-feasts-loss-and-mourning›. Brien, Donna Lee, Leonie Rutherford, and Rosemary Williamson. "Hearth and Hotmail: The Domestic Sphere as Commodity and Community in Cyberspace." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). 28 Apr. 2013 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/10-brien.php›. Brien, Donna Lee, and Rosemary Williamson. “‘Angels of the Home’ in Cyberspace: New Technologies and Biographies of Domestic Production”. Biography and New Technologies. Australian National University. Humanities Research Centre, Canberra, ACT. 12-14 Sep. 2006. Conference Presentation. Diamond, John. C: Because Cowards Get Cancer Too… . London: Vermilion, 1998. Fisher, M.F.K. “S is for Sad.” An Alphabet for Gourmets. New York, North Point P, 1989. 1st. pub. New York, Viking: 1949. Gonzalez, Faustino, and Mildreys Hereira. “Home-Based Viewing (El Velorio) After Death: A Cost-Effective Alternative for Some Families.” American Journal of Hospice & Pallative Medicine 25.5 (2008): 419–20. Harris, Mark. Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial. New York: Scribner, 2007. Jalland, Patricia. Australian Ways of Death: A Social and Cultural History 1840-1918. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 2002. Jensen, Julie Badger. The Essential Mormon Cookbook: Green Jell-O, Funeral Potatoes, and Other Secret Combinations. Salt Lake City: Deseret, 2004. Keys, Laura. “Undertaking a Jelly Feast in Williamstown.” Hobsons Bay Leader 28 Mar. 2011. 2 Apr. 2013 ‹http://hobsons-bay-leader.whereilive.com.au/news/story/undertaking-a-jelly-feast-in-williamstown›. Lawson, Nigella. How to Eat: The Pleasures and Principles of Good Food. London: Chatto & Windus, 1998. ---. Feast: Food that Celebrates Life. London: Chatto & Windus, 2004. LeClercq, H. “The Agape Feast.” The Catholic Encyclopedia I, New York: Robert Appleton, 1907. 3 Apr. 2013. ‹http://www.piney.com/AgapeCE.html›. Luby, Edward M., and Mark F. Gruber. “The Dead Must Be Fed: Symbolic Meanings of the Shellmounds of the San Francisco Bay Area.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 9.1 (1999): 95–108. Metcalf, Gaydon, and Charlotte Hays. Being Dead Is No Excuse: The Official Southern Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect Funeral. New York: Miramax, 2005. [NHFA] National Home Funeral Alliance. “What is a Home Funeral?” National Home Funeral Alliance, 2012. 3 Apr. 2013. ‹http://homefuneralalliance.org›. PBS. “A Family Undertaking.” POV: Documentaries with a Point of View. PBS, 2004. 3 Apr. 2013 ‹http://www.pbs.org/pov/afamilyundertaking/film_description.php#.UYHI2PFquRY›. Probyn, Elspeth. Carnal Appetites: Food/Sex/Identities. London: Routledge, 2000. Purvis, Kathleen. “Funeral Food.” The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink. Ed. Andrew F. Smith. New York: Oxford UP, 2007. 247–48. Rogak, Lisa. Death Warmed Over: Funeral Food, Rituals, and Customs from Around the World. Berkeley: Ten Speed P, 2004. Siegfried, Susie. Church Potluck Carry-Ins and Casseroles: Homestyle Recipes for Church Suppers, Gatherings, and Community Celebrations. Avon, MA.: Adams Media, 2006. Simplicity Funerals. Things You Need To Know About Funerals. Sydney: Simplicity Funerals, 1990. Smith, Eric Alden, and Rebecca L. Bliege Bird. “Turtle Hunting and Tombstone Opening: Public Generosity as Costly Signaling.” Evolution and Human Behavior 21.4 (2000): 245–61.Spackman, Christy. “Mormonism’s Jell-O Mold: Why Do We Associate the Religion With the Gelatin Dessert?” Slate Magazine 17 Aug. (2012). 3 Apr. 2013.Thursby, Jacqueline S. Funeral Festivals in America: Rituals for the Living. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2006. Varidel, Rebecca. “Bompas and Parr: Funerals and Food at Nelson Bros.” Inside Cuisine 12 Mar. (2011). 3 Apr. 2013 ‹http://insidecuisine.com/2011/03/12/bompas-and-parr-funerals-and-food-at-nelson-bros›. Ward, Jessica Bemis. Food To Die for: A Book of Funeral Food, Tips, and Tales from the Old City Cemetery, Lynchburg, Virginia. Lynchburg: Southern Memorial Association, 2004. West, Ken. A Guide to Natural Burial. Andover UK: Sweet & Maxwell, 2010. West, Michael Lee. Consuming Passions: A Food Obsessed Life. New York: Perennial, 2000. Wilson, M.T. “The Home Funeral as the Final Act of Caring: A Qualitative Study.” Master in Nursing thesis. Livonia, Michigan: Madonna University, 2009.

“People live here, they die here so they must leave traces.” (Read 140) “Whatever colonialism was and is, it has made this place unsettling and unsettled.” (Gibson, Badland 2) Introduction What does it mean for [a] country to be haunted? In much theoretical work in film and Cultural Studies since the 1990s, the Australian continent, more often than not, bears traces of long suppressed traumas which inevitably resurface to haunt the present (Gelder and Jacobs; Gibson; Read; Collins and Davis). Felicity Collins and Therese Davis illuminate the ways Australian cinema acts as a public sphere, or “vernacular modernity,” for rethinking settler/indigenous relations. Their term “backtracking” serves as a mode of “collective mourning” in numerous films of the last decade which render unspoken colonial violence meaningful in contemporary Australia, and account for the “aftershocks” of the Mabo decision that overturned the founding fiction of terra nullius (7). Ray Lawrence’s 2006 film Jindabyne is another after-Mabo film in this sense; its focus on conflict within settler/indigenous relations in a small local town in the alpine region explores a traumatised ecology and drowned country. More than this, in our paper’s investigation of country and its attendant politics, Jindabyne country is the space of excessive haunting and resurfacing - engaging in the hard work of what Gibson (Transformations) has termed “historical backfill”, imaginative speculations “that make manifest an urge to account for the disconnected fragments” of country. Based on an adaptation by Beatrix Christian of the Raymond Carver story, So Much Water, So Close to Home, Jindabyne centres on the ethical dilemma produced when a group of fishermen find the floating, murdered body of a beautiful indigenous woman on a weekend trip, but decide to stay on and continue fishing. In Jindabyne, “'country' […] is made to do much discursive work” (Gorman-Murray). In this paper, we use the word as a metonym for the nation, where macro-political issues are played out and fought over. But we also use ‘country’ to signal the ‘wilderness’ alpine areas that appear in Jindabyne, where country is “a notion encompassing nature and human obligation that white Australia has learned slowly from indigenous Australia” (Gibson, Badland 178). This meaning enables a slippage between ‘land’ and ‘country’. Our discussion of country draws heavily on concepts from Ross Gibson’s theorisation of badlands. Gibson claims that originally, ‘badland’ was a term used by Europeans in North America when they came across “a tract of country that would not succumb to colonial ambition” (Badland 14). Using Collins and Davis’s “vernacular modernity” as a starting point, a film such as Jindabyne invites us to work through the productive possibilities of postcolonial haunting; to move from backtracking (going over old ground) to imaginative backfill (where holes and gaps in the ground are refilled in unconventional and creative returns to the past). Jindabyne (as place and filmic space) signifies “the special place that the Australian Alps occupy for so many Australians”, and the film engages in the discursive work of promoting “shared understanding” and the possibility of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal being “in country” (Baird, Egloff and Lebehan 35). We argue specifically that Jindabyne is a product of “aftermath culture” (Gibson Transformations); a culture living within the ongoing effects of the past, where various levels of filmic haunting make manifest multiple levels of habitation, in turn the product of numerous historical and physical aftermaths. Colonial history, environmental change, expanding wire towers and overflowing dams all lend meaning in the film to personal dilemmas, communal conflict and horrific recent crimes. The discovery of a murdered indigenous woman in water high in the mountains lays bare the fragility of a relocated community founded in the drowning of the town of old Jindabyne which created Lake Jindabyne. Beatrix Christian (in Trbic 61), the film’s writer, explains “everybody in the story is haunted by something. […] There is this group of haunted people, and then you have the serial killer who emerges in his season to create havoc.” “What’s in this compulsion to know the negative space?” asks Gibson (Badland 14). It’s the desire to better know and more deeply understand where we live. And haunting gives us cause to investigate further. Drowned, Murderous Country Jindabyne rewrites “the iconic wilderness of Australia’s High Country” (McHugh online) and replaces it with “a vast, historical crime scene” (Gibson, Badland 2). Along with nearby Adaminaby, the township of Old Jindabyne was drowned and its inhabitants relocated to the new town in the 1960s as part of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme. When Jindabyne was made in 2006 the scheme no longer represented an uncontested example of Western technological progress ‘taming’ the vast mountainous country. Early on in the film a teacher shows a short documentary about the town’s history in which Old Jindabyne locals lament the houses that will soon be sacrificed to the Snowy River’s torrents. These sentiments sit in opposition to Manning Clark’s grand vision of the scheme as “an inspiration to all who dream dreams about Australia” (McHugh online). With a 100,000-strong workforce, mostly migrated from war-ravaged Europe, the post-war Snowy project took 25 years and was completed in 1974. Such was this engineering feat that 121 workmen “died for the dream, of turning the rivers back through the mountains, to irrigate the dry inland” (McHugh online). Jindabyne re-presents this romantic narrative of progress as nothing less than an environmental crime. The high-tension wires scar the ‘pristine’ high country and the lake haunts every aspect of the characters’ interactions, hinting at the high country’s intractability that will “not succumb to colonial ambition” (Gibson, Badland 14). Describing his critical excavation of places haunted, out-of-balance or simply badlands, Gibson explains: Rummaging in Australia's aftermath cultures, I try to re-dress the disintegration in our story-systems, in our traditional knowledge caches, our landscapes and ecologies […] recuperate scenes and collections […] torn by landgrabbing, let's say, or by accidents, or exploitation that ignores rituals of preservation and restoration (Transformations). Tourism is now the predominant focus of Lake Jindabyne and the surrounding areas but in the film, as in history, the area does not “succumb to the temptations of pictorialism” (McFarlane 10), that is, it cannot be framed solely by the picture postcard qualities that resort towns often engender and promote. Jindabyne’s sense of menace signals the transformation of the landscape that has taken place – from ‘untouched’ to country town, and from drowned old town to the relocated, damned and electrified new one. Soon after the opening of the film, a moment of fishing offers a reminder that a town once existed beneath the waters of the eerily still Lake Jindabyne. Hooking a rusty old alarm clock out of the lake, Stuart explains to Tom, his suitably puzzled young son: underneath the water is the town where all the old men sit in rocking chairs and there’s houses and shops. […] There was a night […] I heard this noise — boing, boing, boing. And it was a bell coming from under the water. ‘Cause the old church is still down there and sometimes when the water’s really low, you can see the tip of the spire. Jindabyne’s lake thus functions as “a revelation of horrors past” (Gibson Badland 2). It’s not the first time this man-made lake is filmically positioned as a place where “violence begins to seem natural” (Gibson, Badland 13). Cate Shortland’s Somersault (2004) also uses Lake Jindabyne and its surrounds to create a bleak and menacing ambience that heightens young Heidi’s sense of alienation (Simpson, ‘Reconfiguring rusticity’). In Somersault, the male-dominated Jindabyne is far from welcoming for the emotionally vulnerable out-of-towner, who is threatened by her friend’s father beside the Lake, then menaced again by boys she meets at a local pub. These scenes undermine the alpine region’s touristic image, inundated in the summer with tourists coming to fish and water ski, and likewise, with snow skiers in the winter. Even away from the Lake, there is no fleeing its spectre. “The high-tension wires marching down the hillside from the hydro-station” hum to such an extent that in one scene, “reminiscent of Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975)”, a member of the fishing party is spooked (Ryan 52). This violence wrought upon the landscape contextualises the murder of the young indigenous woman, Susan, by Greg, an electrician who after murdering Susan, seems to hover in the background of several scenes of the film. Close to the opening of Jindabyne, through binoculars from his rocky ridge, Greg spots Susan’s lone car coursing along the plain; he chases her in his vehicle, and forces her to stop. Before (we are lead to assume) he drags her from the vehicle and murders her, he rants madly through her window, “It all comes down from the power station, the electricity!” That the murder/murderer is connected with the hydro-electric project is emphasised by the location scout in the film’s pre-production: We had one location in the scene where Greg dumps the body in some water and Ray [Lawrence] had his heart set on filming that next to some huge pipelines on a dam near Talbingo but Snowy Hydro didn’t […] like that negative content […] in association with their facility and […] said ‘no’ they wouldn’t let us do it.” (Jindabyne DVD extras) “Tales of murder and itinerancy in wild country are as old as the story of Cain in the killing fields of Eden” (Badlands 14). In Jindabyne we never really get to meet Greg but he is a familiar figure in Australian film and culture. Like many before him, he is the lone Road Warrior, a ubiquitous white male presence roaming the de-populated country where the road constantly produces acts of (accidental and intentional) violence (Simpson, ‘Antipodean Automobility’). And after a litany of murders in recent films such as Wolf Creek (Greg McLean, 2005) and Gone (Ringan Ledwidge, 2007) the “violence begins to seem natural” (Gibson Transformations 13) in the isolating landscape. The murderer in Jindabyne, unlike those who have migrated here as adults (the Irish Stuart and his American wife, Claire), is autochthonous in a landscape familiar with a trauma that cannot remain hidden or submerged. Contested High Country The unsinkability of Susan’s body, now an ‘indigenous murdered body’, holds further metaphorical value for resurfacing as a necessary component of aftermath culture. Such movement is not always intelligible within non-indigenous relations to country, though the men’s initial response to the body frames its drifting in terms of ascension: they question whether they have “broken her journey by tying her up”. The film reconfigures terra nullius as the ultimate badland, one that can never truly suppress continuing forms of physical, spiritual, historical and cultural engagement with country, and the alpine areas of Jindabyne and the Snowy River in particular. Lennon (14) points to “the legacy of biased recording and analysis” that “constitutes a threat to the cultural significance of Aboriginal heritage in alpine areas” (15). This significance is central to the film, prompting Lawrence to state that “mountains in any country have a spiritual quality about them […] in Aboriginal culture the highest point in the landscape is the most significant and this is the highest point of our country” (in Cordaiy 40). So whilst the Jindabyne area is contested country, it is the surfacing, upward mobility and unsinkable quality of Aboriginal memory that Brewster argues “is unsettling the past in post-invasion Australia” (in Lambert, Balayi 7). As the agent of backfill, the indigenous body (Susan) unsettles Jindabyne country by offering both evidence of immediate violence and reigniting the memory of it, before the film can find even the smallest possibility of its characters being ‘in country’. Claire illustrates her understanding of this in a conversation with her young son, as she attempts to contact the dead girls’ family. “When a bad thing happens,” she says, “we all have to do a good thing, no matter how small, alright? Otherwise the bad things, they just pile up and up and up.” Her persistent yet clumsy enactment of the cross-cultural go-between illuminates the ways “the small town community move through the terms of recent debate: shame and denial, repressed grief and paternalism” (Ryan 53). It is the movement of backfill within the aftermath: The movement of a foreign non-Aboriginal woman into Aboriginal space intertextually re-animates the processes of ‘settlement’, resolution and environmental assimilation for its still ‘unsettled’ white protagonists. […] Claire attempts an apology to the woman’s family and the Aboriginal community – in an Australia before Kevin Rudd where official apologies for the travesties of Australian/colonial history had not been forthcoming […] her movement towards reconciliation here is reflective of the ‘moral failure’ of a disconnection from Aboriginal history. (Lambert, Diasporas) The shift from dead white girl in Carver’s story to young Aboriginal woman speaks of a political focus on the ‘significance’ of the alpine region at a given moment in time. The corpse functions “as the trigger for crisis and panic in an Australia after native title, the stolen generation and the war-on-terror” (Lambert, Diasporas). The process of reconnecting with country and history must confront its ghosts if the community is to move forward. Gibson (Transformations) argues that “if we continue to close our imaginations to the aberrations and insufficiencies in our historical records. […] It’s likely we won’t dwell in the joy till we get real about the darkness.” In the post-colonial, multicultural but still divided geographies and cultures of Jindabyne, “genocidal displacement” comes face to face with the “irreconciled relation” to land “that refuses to remain half-seen […] a measure of non-indigenous failure to move from being on the land to being in country” (Ryan 52), evidenced by water harvesting in the Snowy Mountains Scheme, and the more recent crises in water and land management. Aftermath Country Haunted by historical, cultural and environmental change, Jindabyne constitutes a post-traumatic screen space. In aftermath culture, bodies and landscapes offer the “traces” (Gibson, Transformations) of “the social consequences” of a “heritage of catastrophe” that people “suffer, witness, or even perpetrate” so that “the legacy of trauma is bequeathed” (Walker i). The youth of Jindabyne are charged with traumatic heritage. The young Susan’s body predictably bears the semiotic weight of colonial atrocity and non-indigenous environmental development. Evidence of witnesses, perpetrators and sufferers is still being revealed after the corpse is taken to the town morgue, where Claire (in a culturally improper viewing) is horrified by Susan’s marks from being secured in the water by Stuart and the other men. Other young characters are likewise haunted by a past that is environmental and tragically personal. Claire and Stuart’s young son, Tom (left by his mother for a period in early infancy and the witness of his parents strained marital relations), has an intense fear of drowning. This personal/historical fear is played with by his seven year old friend, Caylin-Calandria, who expresses her own grief from the death of her young mother environmentally - by escaping into the surrounding nature at night, by dabbling in the dark arts and sacrificing small animals. The two characters “have a lot to believe in and a lot of things to express – belief in zombies and ghosts, ritual death, drowning” (Cordaiy 42). As Boris Trbic (64) observes of the film’s characters, “communal and familial harmony is closely related to their intense perceptions of the natural world and their often distorted understanding of the ways their partners, friends and children cope with the grieving process.” Hence the legacy of trauma in Jindabyne is not limited to the young but pervades a community that must deal with unresolved ecologies no longer concealed by watery artifice. Backfilling works through unsettled aspects of country by moving, however unsteadily, toward healing and reconciliation. Within the aftermath of colonialism, 9/11 and the final years of the Howard era, Jindabyne uses race and place to foreground the “fallout” of an indigenous “condemnation to invisibility” and the “long years of neglect by the state” (Ryan 52). Claire’s unrelenting need to apologise to the indigenous family and Stuart’s final admission of impropriety are key gestures in the film’s “microcosm of reconciliation” (53), when “the notion of reconciliation, if it had occupied any substantial space in the public imagination, was largely gone” (Rundell 44). Likewise, the invisibility of Aboriginal significance has specificity in the Jindabyne area – indigeneity is absent from narratives recounting the Snowy Mountains Scheme which “recruited some 60,000 Europeans,” providing “a basis for Australia’s postwar multicultural society” (Lennon 15); both ‘schemes’ evidencing some of the “unrecognised implications” of colonialism for indigenous people (Curthoys 36). The fading of Aboriginal issues from public view and political discourse in the Howard era was serviced by the then governmental focus on “practical reconciliation” (Rundell 44), and post 9/11 by “the broad brushstrokes of western coalition and domestic political compliance” (Lambert, CMC 252), with its renewed focus on border control, and increased suspicion of non-Western, non-Anglo-European difference. Aftermath culture grapples with the country’s complicated multicultural and globalised self-understanding in and beyond Howard’s Australia and Jindabyne is one of a series of texts, along with “refugee plays” and Australian 9/11 novels, “that mobilised themselves against the Howard government” (Rundell 43-44). Although the film may well be seen as a “profoundly embarrassing” display of left-liberal “emotional politics” (44-45), it is precisely these politics that foreground aftermath: local neglect and invisibility, terror without and within, suspect American leadership and shaky Australian-American relations, the return of history through marked bodies and landscapes. Aftermath country is simultaneously local and global – both the disappearance and the ‘problem’ of Aboriginality post-Mabo and post-9/11 are backfilled by the traces and fragments of a hidden country that rises to the surface. Conclusion What can be made of this place now? What can we know about its piecemeal ecology, its choppy geomorphics and scarified townscapes? […] What can we make of the documents that have been generated in response to this country? (Gibson, Transformations). Amidst the apologies and potentialities of settler-indigenous recognition, the murdering electrician Gregory is left to roam the haunted alpine wilderness in Jindabyne. His allegorical presence in the landscape means there is work to be done before this badland can truly become something more. Gibson (Badland 178) suggests country gets “called bad […] partly because the law needs the outlaw for reassuring citizens that the unruly and the unknown can be named and contained even if they cannot be annihilated.” In Jindabyne the movement from backtracking to backfilling (as a speculative and fragmental approach to the bodies and landscapes of aftermath culture) undermines the institutional framing of country that still seeks to conceal shared historical, environmental and global trauma. The haunting of Jindabyne country undoes the ‘official’ production of outlaw/negative space and its discursively good double by realising the complexity of resurfacing – electricity is everywhere and the land is “uncanny” not in the least because “the town of Jindabyne itself is the living double of the drowned original” (Ryan 53). The imaginative backfill of Jindabyne reorients a confused, purgatorial Australia toward the “small light of home” (53) – the hope of one day being “in country,” and as Gibson (Badland 3) suggests, the “remembering,” that is “something good we can do in response to the bad in our lands.” References Baird, Warwick, Brian Egloff and Rachel Lenehan. “Sharing the mountains: joint management of Australia’s alpine region with Aboriginal people.” historic environment 17.2 (2003): 32-36. Collins, Felicity and Therese Davis. Australian Cinema after Mabo. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Cordaiy, Hunter. “Man, Woman and Death: Ray Lawrence on Jindabyne.” Metro 149 (2006): 38-42. Curthoys, Anne. “An Uneasy Conversation: The Multicultural and the Indigenous.” Race Colour and Identity in Australia and New Zealand. Ed. John Docker and Gerhard Fischer. Sydney, UNSW P, 2000. 21-36. Gelder, Ken and Jane M. Jacobs. Uncanny Australia: Sacredness an Identity in a Postcolonial Nation. Carlton: Melbourne UP, 1998. Gibson, Ross. Seven Versions of an Australian Badland. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2002. Gibson, Ross. “Places, Past, Disappearance.” Transformations 13 (2006). Aug. 11 2008 transformations.cqu.edu.au/journal/issue_13/article_01.shtml. Gorman-Murray, Andrew. “Country.” M/C Journal 11.5 (this issue). Kitson, Michael. “Carver Country: Adapting Raymond Carver in Australia.” Metro150 (2006): 54-60. Lambert, Anthony. “Movement within a Filmic terra nullius: Woman, Land and Identity in Australian Cinema.” Balayi, Culture, Law and Colonialism 1.2 (2001): 7-17. Lambert, Anthony. “White Aborigines: Women, Mimicry, Mobility and Space.” Diasporas of Australian Cinema. Eds. Catherine Simpson, Renata Murawska, and Anthony Lambert. UK: Intellectbooks, 2009. Forthcoming. Lambert, Anthony. “Mediating Crime, Mediating Culture.” Crime, Media, Culture 4.2 (2008): 237-255. Lennon, Jane. “The cultural significance of Australian alpine areas.” Historic environment 17.2 (2003): 14-17. McFarlane, Brian. “Locations and Relocations: Jindabyne & MacBeth.” Metro Magazine 150 (Spring 2006): 10-15. McHugh, Siobhan. The Snowy: The People Behind the Power. William Heinemann Australia, 1999. http://www.mchugh.org/books/snowy.html. Read, Peter. Haunted Earth. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2003. Rundle, Guy. “Goodbye to all that: The end of Australian left-liberalism and the revival of a radical politics.” Arena Magazine 88 (2007): 40-46. Ryan, Matthew. “On the treatment of non-indigenous belonging.” Arena Magazine 84 (2006): 52-53. Simpson, Catherine. “Reconfiguring Rusticity: feminizing Australian Cinema’s country towns’. Studies in Australasian Cinemas 2.1 (2008): forthcoming. Simpson, Catherine. “Antipodean Automobility & Crash: Treachery, Trespass and Transformation of the Open Road.” Australian Humanities Review 39-40 (2006). http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-September-2006/simpson.html. Trbic, Boris. “Ray Lawrence’s Jindabyne: So Much Pain, So Close to Home.” Screen Education 44 (2006): 58–64. Walker, Janet. Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust. Berkley, Los Angeles and London: U of California P, 2005.

It has been fifteen months since the World Health Organisation declared the COVID-19 outbreak a global pandemic and the first lockdowns went into effect, dramatically changing the social landscape for millions of individuals worldwide. Overnight, it seemed, Zoom became the default platform for video conferencing, rapidly morphing from brand name to eponymous generic—a verb and a place and mode of being all at once. This nearly ubiquitous transition to remote work and remote play was both unprecedented and entirely anticipated. While teleworking, digital commerce, online learning, and social networking were common fare by 2020, in March of that year telepresence shifted from option to mandate, and Zooming became a daily practice for tens of millions of individuals worldwide. In an era of COVID-19, our relationships and experiences are deeply intertwined with our ability to “Zoom”. This shift resulted in new forms of artistic practice, new modes of pedagogy, and new ways of social organising, but it has also created new forms (and exacerbated existing forms) of exploitation, inequity, social isolation, and precarity. For millions, of course, lockdowns and restrictions had a profound impact that could not be mitigated by the mediated presence offered by way of Zoom and other video conferencing platforms. For those of us fortunate enough to maintain a paycheck and engage in work remotely, Zoom in part highlighted the degree to which a network logic already governed our work and our labour within a neoliberal economy long before the first lockdowns began. In the introduction to The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Lyotard identifies a “logic of maximum performance” that regulates the contemporary moment: a cybernetic framework for understanding what it means to communicate—one that ultimately frames all political, social, and personal interactions within matrices of power laid out in terms of performativity and optimisation (xxiv.) Performativity serves as a foundation for not only how a system operates, but for how all other elements within that system express themselves. Lyotard writes, “even when its rules are in the process of changing and innovations are occurring, even when its dysfunctions (such as strikes, crises, unemployment, or political revolutions) inspire hope and lead to a belief in an alternative, even then what is actually taking place is only an internal readjustment, and its results can be no more than an increase in the system’s ‘viability’” (11-12). One may well add to this list of dysfunctions global pandemics. Zoom, in effect, offered universities, corporations, mass media outlets, and other organisations a platform to “innovate” within an ongoing network logic of performativity: to maintain business as usual in a moment in which nothing was usual, normal, or functional. Zoom foregrounds performativity in other senses as well, to the extent that it provides a space and context for social performance. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Erving Goffman explores how social actors move through their social environments, managing their identities in response to the space in which they find themselves and the audience (who are also social actors) within those spaces. For Goffman, the social environment provides the primary context for how and why social actors behave the way that they do. Goffman further denotes different spaces where our performances may shift: from public settings to smaller audiences, to private spaces where we can inhabit ourselves without any performance demands. The advent of social media, however, has added new layers to how we understand performance, audience, and public and private social spaces. Indeed, Goffman’s assertion that we are constantly managing our impressions feels particularly accurate when considering the added pressures of managing our identities in multiple social spaces, both face to face and online. Thus, when the world shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic, and all forms of social interactions shifted to digital spaces, the performative demands of working from home became all the more complex in the sharp merging of private and public spaces. Thus, discussions and debates arose regarding proper “Zoom etiquette”, for different settings, and what constituted work-appropriate attire when working from home (a debate that, unsurprisingly, became particularly gendered in nature). Privacy management was a near constant narrative as we began asking, who can be in our spaces? How much of our homes are we required to put on display to other classmates, co-workers, and even our friends? In many ways, the hyper-dependence on Zoom interactions forced an entry into the spaces that we so often kept private, leaving our social performances permanently on display. Prior to COVID-19, the networks of everyday life had already produced rather porous boundaries between public and private life, but for the most part, individuals managed to maintain some sort of partition between domestic, intimate spaces, and their public performances of their professional and civic selves. It was an exception in The Before Times, for example, for a college professor to be interrupted in the midst of his BBC News interview by his children wandering into the room; the suspended possibility of the private erupting in the midst of a public social space (or vice versa) haunts all of our network interactions, yet the exceptionality of these moments speaks to the degree to which we sustained an illusion of two distinct stages for performance in a pre-pandemic era. Now, what was once the exception has become the rule. As millions of individuals found themselves Zooming from home while engaging co-workers, clients, patients, and students in professional interactions, the interpenetration of the public and private became a matter of daily fare. And yes, while early on in the pandemic several newsworthy (or at least meme-worthy) stories circulated widely on mass media and social media alike, serving as teleconferencing cautionary tales—usually involving sex, drugs, or bowel movements—moments of transgressive privacy very much became the norm: we found ourselves, in the midst of the workday, peering into backgrounds of bedrooms and kitchens, examining decorations and personal effects, and sharing in the comings and goings of pets and other family members entering and leaving the frame. Some users opted for background images or made use of blurring effects to “hide the mess” of their daily lives. Others, however, seemed to embrace the blur itself, implicitly or explicitly accepting the everydayness of this new liminality between public and private life. And while we acknowledge the transgressive nature of the incursions of the domestic and the intimate into workplace activities, it is worth noting as well that this incursion likewise takes place in the opposite direction, as spaces once designated as private became de facto workplace settings, and fell under the purview of a whole range of workplace policies that dictated appropriate and inappropriate behaviour. Not least of these intrusions are the literal and ideological apparatuses of surveillance that Zoom and other video conferencing platforms set into motion. In the original conception of the Panopticon, the observer could see the observed, but those being observed could not see their observers. This was meant to instill a sense of constant surveillance, whether the observer was there or not. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault considered those observed through the Panopticon as objects to be observed, with no power to turn the gaze back towards the structures of power that infiltrated their existence with such invasive intent. With Zoom, however, as much as private spaces have been infiltrated by work, school, and even family and friends, those leading classes or meetings may also feel a penetrative gaze by those who observe their professional performances, as many online participants have pushed back against these intrusions with cameras and audio turned off, leaving the performer with an audience of black screens and no indication of real observers behind them or not. In these unstable digital spaces, we vacillate between observed and observer, with the lines between private and public, visible and invisible, utterly blurred. Yet we should not lose sight of the fact that the panoptic power of the platform itself is hardly optic and remains one degree removed from its users, at the level of data extraction, collection, and exchange. In an already data-dependent era, more privacy and personal data has become available than ever before through online monitoring and the constant use of Zoom in work and social interactions. Such incursions of informatic biopower require further consideration within an emerging discussion of digital capital. There has also been the opportunity for these transformative, digital spaces to be used for an invited gaze into artistic and imaginative spaces. The global pandemic hit many industries hard, but in particular, artists and performers, as well as their performance venues, saw a massive loss of space, audiences, and income. Many artists developed performance spaces through online video conferencing in order to maintain their practice and their connection to their audiences, while others developed new curriculums and worked to find accessible ways for community members to participate in online art programming. Thus, though performers may still be faced with black squares as their audience, the invited gaze allows for artistic performances to continue, whether as digital shorts, live streamed music sets, or isolated cast members performing many roles with a reduced cast list. Though the issue of access to the technology and bandwidth needed to partake in these performances and programming is still front of mind, the presentation of artistic performances through Zoom has allowed in many other ways for a larger audience reach, from those who may not live near a performance centre, to others who may not be able to access physical spaces comfortably or safely. The ideology of ongoing productivity and expanded, remote access baked into video conferencing platforms like Zoom is perhaps most apparent in the assumptions of access that accompanied the widespread use of these platforms, particularly in the context of public institutions such as schools. In the United States, free market libertarian think tanks like the Cato Institute have pointed to the end of “Net Neutrality” as a boon for infrastructure investment that led to greater broadband access nationwide (compared to a more heavily regulated industry in Europe). Yet even policy think tanks such as the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation—with its mission to “formulate, evaluate, and promote policy solutions that accelerate innovation and boost productivity to spur growth, opportunity, and progress”—acknowledged that although the U.S. infrastructure supported the massive increase in bandwidth demands as schools and businesses went online, gaps in rural access and affordability barriers for low income users mean that more needs to be done to bring about “a more just and effective broadband network for all Americans”. But calls for greater access are, in effect, supporting this same ideological framework in which greater access presumably equates with greater equity. What the COVID-19 pandemic revealed, we would argue, is the degree to which those most in need of services and support experience the greatest degree of digital precarity, a point that Jenny Kennedy, Indigo Holcombe-James, and Kate Mannell foreground in their piece “Access Denied: How Barriers to Participate on Zoom Impact on Research Opportunity”. As they note, access to data and devices provide a basic threshold for participation, but the ability to deploy these tools and orient oneself toward these sorts of engagements suggests a level of fluency beyond what many high-risk/high-need populations may already possess. Access reveals a disposition toward global networks, and as such signals one’s degree of social capital within a network society—a “state nobility” for the digital age (Bourdieu.) While Zoom became the default platform for a wide range of official and institutional practices, from corporate meetings to college class sessions, we have seen over the past year unanticipated engagements with the platform as well. Zoombombing offers one form of evil media practice that disrupts the dominant performativity logic of Zoom and undermines the assumptions of rational exchange that still drive much of how we understand “effective” communication (Fuller and Goffey). While we may be tempted to dismiss Zoombombing and other forms of “shitposting” as “mere” trollish distractions, doing so does not address the political agency of strategic actions on these platforms that refuse to abide by “an intersubjective recognition that is based on a consensus about values or on mutual understanding” (Habermas 12). Kawsar Ali takes up these tactical uses in “Zoom-ing in on White Supremacy: Zoom-Bombing Anti-Racism Efforts” and explores how alt-right and white supremacist groups have exploited these strategies not only as a means of disruption but as a form of violence against participants. A cluster of articles in this issue take up the question of creative practice and how video conferencing technologies can be adapted to performative uses that were perhaps not intended or foreseen by the platform’s creators. xtine burrough and Sabrina Starnaman offer up one such project in “Epic Hand Washing: Synchronous Participation and Lost Narratives”, which paired live performances of handwashing in domestic spaces with readings from literary texts that commented upon earlier pandemics and plagues. While Zoom presents itself as a tool to keep a neoliberal economy flowing, we see modes of use such as burrough’s and Starnaman’s performative piece that are intentionally playful, at the same time that they attempt to address the lived experiences of lockdown, confinement, and hygienic hypervigilance. Claire Parnell, Andrea Anne Trinidad, and Jodi McAlister explore another form of playful performance through their examination of the #RomanceClass community in the Philippines, and how they adapted their biannual reading and performance events of their community-produced English-language romance fiction. While we may still use comparative terms such as “face-to-face” and “virtual” to distinguish between digitally-mediated and (relatively) unmediated interactions, Parnell et al.’s work highlights the degree to which these technologies of mediation were already a part of this community’s attempt to support and sustain itself. Zoom, then, became the vehicle to produce and share community-oriented kilig, a Filipino term for embodied, romantic affective response. Shaun Wilson’s “Creative Practice through Teleconferencing in the Era of COVID-19” provides another direct reflection on the contemporary moment and the framing aesthetics of Zoom. Through an examination of three works of art produced for screen during the COVID-19 pandemic, including his own project “Fading Light”, Wilson examines how video conferencing platforms create “oscillating” frames that speak to and comment on each other at the same time that they remain discrete and untouched. We have opened and closed this issue with bookends of sorts, bringing to the fore a range of theoretical considerations alongside personal reflections. In our feature article, “Room without Room: Affect and Abjection in the Circuit of Self-Regard”, Ricky Crano examines the degree to which the aesthetics of Zoom, from its glitches to its default self-view, create modes of interaction that drain affect from discourse, leaving its users with an impoverished sense of co-presence. His focus is explicitly on the normative uses of the platform, not the many artistic and experimental misappropriations that the platform likewise offers. He concludes, “it is left to artists and other experimenters to expose and undermine the workings of power in the standard corporate, neoliberal modes of engagement”, which several of the following essays in this issue then take up. And we close with “Embracing Liminality and ‘Staying with the Trouble’ on (and off) Screen”, in which Tania Lewis, Annette Markham, and Indigo Holcombe-James explore two autoethnographic studies, Massive and Microscopic Sensemaking and The Shut-In Worker, to discuss the liminality of our experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, on and off—and in between—Zoom screens. Rather than suggesting a “return to normal” as mask mandates, social distancing, and lockdown restrictions ease, they attempt to “challenge the assumption that stability and certainty is what we now need as a global community … . How can we use the discomfort of liminality to imagine global futures that have radically transformative possibilities?” This final piece in the collection we take to heart, as we consider how we, too, can stay in the trouble, and consider transformative futures. Each of these pieces offers a thoughtful contribution to a burgeoning discussion on what Zooming means to us as academics, teachers, researchers, and community members. Though investigations into the social effects of digital spaces are not new, this moment in time requires careful and critical investigation through the lens of a global pandemic as it intersects with a world that has never been more digital in its presence and social interactions. The articles in this volume bring us to a starting point, but there is much more to cover: issues of disability and accessibility, gender and physical representations, the political economy of digital accessibility, the transformation of learning styles and experiences through a year of online learning, and still more areas of investigation to come. It is our hope that this volume provides a blueprint of sorts for other critical engagements and explorations of how our lives and our digital landscapes have been impacted by COVID-19, regardless of the instability of our connections. We would like to thank all of the contributors and peer reviewers who made this fascinating issue possible, with a special thanks to the Cultural Studies Association New Media and Digital Cultures Working Group, where these conversations started … on Zoom, of course. References Bourdieu, Pierre. The State Nobility. Stanford UP, 1998. Brake, Doug. “Lessons from the Pandemic: Broadband Policy after COVID-19.” Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, 13 July 2020. <http://itif.org/publications/2020/07/13/lessons-pandemic-broadband-policy-after-covid-19>. “Children Interrupt BBC News Interview – BBC News.” BBC News, 10 Mar. 2017. <http://youtu.be/Mh4f9AYRCZY>. Firey, Thomas A. “Telecommuting to Avoid COVID-19? Thank the End of ‘Net Neutrality.’” The Cato Institute, 16 Apr. 2020. <http://www.cato.org/blog/telecommuting-avoid-covid-19-thank-end-net-neutrality>. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Penguin, 2020. Fuller, Matthew, and Andrew Goffey. Evil Media. MIT P, 2012. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Anchor, 2008. Habermas, Jürgen. On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction. Polity, 2001. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. U of Minnesota P, 1984. “WHO Director-General's Opening Remarks at the Media Briefing on COVID-19 – 11 March 2020.” World Health Organization, 11 Mar. 2020. <http://www.who.int/director-general/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-media-briefing-on-covid-19---11-march-2020>. “Zoom Etiquette: Tips for Better Video Conferences.” Emily Post. <http://emilypost.com/advice/zoom-etiquette-tips-for-better-video-conferences>.

IntroductionThe horror film Hush (2016) has attracted attention since its release due to the uniqueness of its central character—a deaf–mute author who lives in a world of silence. Maddie Young (Kate Siegel) moves into a remote cabin in the woods to recover from a breakup and finish her new novel. Aside from a cat, she is alone in the house, only engaging with loved ones via online messaging or video chats during which she uses American Sign Language (ASL). Maddie cannot hear nor speak, so writing is her primary mode of creative expression, and a key source of information for the audience. This article explores both the presence and absence of text in Hush, examining how textual “captions” of various kinds are both provided and withheld at key moments. As an author, Maddie battles the limits of written language as she struggles with writer’s block. As a person, she fights the limits of silence and isolation as a brutal killer invades her retreat. Accordingly, this article examines how the interplay between silence, text, and sound invites viewers to identify with the heroine’s experience and ultimate triumph.Hush is best described as a slasher—a horror film in which a single (usually male) killer stalks and kills a series of victims with relentless determination (Clover, Men, Women). Slashers are about close, visceral killing—blood and the hard stab of the knife. With her big brown eyes and gentle presence, quiet, deaf Maddie is clearly framed as a lamb to slaughter in the opening scenes. Indeed, throughout Hush, Maddie’s lack of hearing is leveraged to increase suspense and horror. The classic pantomime cry of “He’s behind you!” is taken to dark extremes as the audience watches a nameless man (John Gallagher Jr.) stalk the writer in her isolated house. She is unable to hear him enter the building, unable to sense him looming behind her. Neither does she hear him killing her friend outside on the porch, banging her body loudly against the French doors.And yet, despite her vulnerability, she rises to the challenge. Fighting back against her attacker using a variety of multisensory strategies, Maddie assumes the role of the “Final Girl” in this narrative. As Carol Clover has explained, the Final Girl is a key trope of slasher films, forming part of their essential structure. While others in the film are killed, “she alone looks death in the face; but she alone also finds the strength either to stay the killer long enough to be rescued (ending A) or to kill him herself (ending B)” (Clover, Her Body, Himself). However, reviews and discussions of Hush typically frame Maddie as a Final Girl with a difference. Adding disability into the equation is seen as “revolutionising” the trope (Sheppard) and “updating the Final Girl theory” for a new age (Laird). Indeed, the film presents its Final Girl as simultaneously deaf and powerful—a twist that potentially challenges the dynamics of the slasher and representations of disability more generally.My Weakness, My StrengthThe opening sequence of Hush introduces Maddie’s deafness through the use of sound, silence, and text. Following an establishing shot sweeping over the dark forest and down to her solitary cottage, the film opens to warm domesticity. Close-ups of onion, eggs, and garlic being prepared are accompanied by clear, crisp sounds of crackling, bubbling, slicing, and frying. The camera zooms out to focus on Maddie, busy at her culinary tasks. All noises begin to fade. The camera focuses on Maddie’s ear as audio is eliminated, replaced by silence. As she continues to cook, the audience experiences her world—a world devoid of sound. These initial moments also highlight the importance of digital communication technologies. Maddie moves smoothly between devices, switching from laptop computer to iPhone while sharing instant messages with a friend. Close-ups of these on-screen conversations provide viewers with additional narrative information, operating as an alternate form of captioning from within the diegesis. Snippets of text from other sources are likewise shown in passing, such as the author’s blurb on the jacket of her previous novel. The camera lingers on this book, allowing viewers to read that Maddie suffered hearing loss and vocal paralysis after contracting bacterial meningitis at 13 years old. Traditional closed captioning or subtitles are thus avoided in favour of less intrusive forms of expositional text that are integrated within the plot.While hearing characters, such as her neighbour and sister, use SimCom (simultaneous communication or sign supported speech) to communicate with her, Maddie signs in silence. Because the filmmakers have elected not to provide captions for her signs in these moments, a—typically non-ASL speaking—hearing audience will inevitably experience disruptions in comprehension and Maddie’s conversations can therefore only be partially understood. This allows for an interesting role reversal for viewers. As Katherine A. Jankowski (32) points out, deaf and hard of hearing audiences have long expressed dissatisfaction with accessing the spoken word on television and film due to a lack of closed captioning. Despite the increasing technological ease of captioning digital media in the 21st century, this barrier to accessibility continues to be an ongoing issue (Ellis and Kent). The hearing community do not share this frustrating background—television programs that include ASL are captioned to ensure hearing viewers can follow the story (see for example Beth Haller’s article on Switched at Birth in this special issue). Hush therefore inverts this dynamic by presenting ASL without captions. Whereas silence is used to draw hearing viewers into Maddie’s experience, her periodic use of ASL pushes them out again. This creates a push–pull dynamic, whereby the hearing audience identify with Maddie and empathise with the losses associated with being deaf and mute, but also realise that, as a result, she has developed additional skills that are beyond their ken.It is worth noting at this point that Maddie is not the first Final Girl with a disability. In the 1967 thriller Wait until Dark, for instance, Audrey Hepburn plays Susy Hendrix, a blind woman trapped in her home by three crooks. Martin F. Norden suggests that this film represented a “step forward” in cinematic representations of disability because its heroine is not simply an innocent victim, but “tough, resilient, and resourceful in her fight against the criminals who have misrepresented themselves to her and have broken into her apartment” (228). Susy’s blindness, at first presented as a source of vulnerability and frustration, becomes her strength in the film’s climax. Bashing out all the lights in the apartment, she forces the men to fight on her terms, in darkness, where she holds the upper hand. In a classic example of Final Girl tenacity, Susy stabs the last of them to death before help arrives. Maddie likewise uses her disability as a tactical advantage. An enhanced sense of touch allows her to detect the killer when he sneaks up behind her as she feels the lightest flutter upon the hairs of her neck. She also wields a blaring fire alarm as a weapon, deafening and disorienting her attacker, causing him to drop his knife.The similarities between these films are not coincidental. During an interview, director Mike Flanagan (who co-wrote Hush with wife Siegel) stated that they were directly informed by Wait until Dark. When asked about the choice to make Maddie’s character deaf, he explained that “it kind of happened because Kate and I were out to dinner and we were talking about movies we liked. One of the ones that we stumbled on that we both really liked was Wait Until Dark” (cited in Thurman). In the earlier film, director Terence Young used darkness to blind the audience—at times the screen is completely black and viewers must listen carefully to work out what is happening. Likewise, Flanagan and Siegel use silence to effectively deafen the audience at crucial moments. The viewers are therefore forced to experience the action as the heroines do.You’re Gonna Die Screaming But You Won’t Be HeardHorror films often depend upon sound design for impact—the most mundane visuals can be made frightening by the addition of a particular noise, effect, or tune. Therefore, in the context of the slasher genre, one of the most unique aspects of Hush is the absence of the Final Girl’s vocalisation. A mute heroine is deprived of the most basic expressive tool in the horror handbook—a good scream. “What really won me over,” comments one reviewer, “was the fact that this particular ‘final girl’ isn’t physically able to whinge or scream when in pain–something that really isn’t the norm in slasher/home invasion movies” (Gorman). Yet silence also plays an important part in this genre, “when the wind stops or the footfalls cease, death is near” (Whittington 183). Indeed, Hush’s tagline is “silence can be killer.”The arrival of the killer triggers a deep kind of silence in this particular film, because alternative captions, text, and other communicative techniques (including ASL) cease to be used or useful when the man begins terrorising Maddie. This is not entirely surprising, as the abject failure of technology is a familiar trope in slasher films. As Clover explains, “the emotional terrain of the slasher film is pretechnological” (Her Body, Himself, 198). In Hush, however, the focus on text in this context is notable. There is a sense that written modes of communication are unreliable when it counts. The killer steals her phone, and cuts electricity and Internet access to the house. She attempts to use the neighbours’ Wi-Fi via her laptop, but does not know the password. Quick thinking Maddie even scrawls backwards messages on her windows, “WON’T TELL. DIDN’T SEE FACE,” she writes in lipstick, “BOYFRIEND COMING HOME.” In response, the killer simply removes his mask, “You’ve seen it now” he says. They both know there is no boyfriend. The written word has shifted from being central to Maddie’s life, to largely irrelevant. Text cannot save her. It is only by using other strategies (and senses) that Maddie empowers herself to survive.Maddie’s struggles to communicate and take control are integral to the film’s unfolding narrative, and co-writer Siegel notes this was a conscious theme: “A lot of this movie is … a metaphor for feeling unheard. It’s a movie about asserting yourself and of course as a female writer I brought a lot to that.” In their reflection on the limits of both verbal and written communication, the writers of Hush owe a debt to another source of inspiration—Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer television series. Season four, episode ten, also called Hush, was first aired on 14 December 1999 and features a critically acclaimed storyline in which the characters all lose their ability to speak. Voices from all over Sunnydale are stolen by monstrous fairytale figures called The Gentlemen, who use the silence to cut fresh hearts from living victims. Their appearance is heralded by a morbid rhyme:Can’t even shout, can’t even cry The Gentlemen are coming by. Looking in windows, knocking on doors, They need to take seven and they might take yours. Can’t call to mom, can’t say a word, You’re gonna die screaming but you won’t be heard.The theme of being “unheard” is clearly felt in this episode. Buffy and co attempt a variety of methods to compensate for their lost voices, such as hanging message boards around their necks, using basic text-to-voice computer software, and drawing on overhead projector slides. These tools essentially provide the captions for a story unfolding in silence, as no subtitles are provided. As it turns out, in many ways the friends’ non-verbal communication is more effective than their spoken words. Patrick Shade argues that the episode:celebrates the limits and virtues of both the nonverbal and the verbal. … We tend to be most readily aware of verbal means … but “Hush” stresses that we are embodied creatures whose communication consists in more than the spoken word. It reminds us that we have multiple resources we regularly employ in communicating.In a similar way, the film Hush emphasises alternative modes of expression through the device of the mute Final Girl, who must use all of her sensory and intellectual resources to survive. The evening begins with Maddie at leisure, unable to decide how to end her fictional novel. By the finale she is clarity incarnate. She assesses each real-life scene proactively and “writes” the end of the film on her own terms, showing that there is only one way to survive the night—she must fight.Deaf GainIn his discussion of disability and cinema, Norden explains that the majority of films position disabled people as outsiders and “others” because “filmmakers photograph and edit their work to reflect an able-bodied point of view” (1). The very apparatus of mainstream film, he argues, is designed to embody able-bodied experiences and encourage audience identification with able-bodied characters. He argues this bias results in disabled characters positioned as “objects of spectacle” to be pitied, feared or scorned by viewers. In Hush, however, the audience is consistently encouraged to identify with Maddie. As she fights for her life in the final scenes, sound fades away and the camera assumes a first-person perspective. The man is above, choking her on the floor, and we look up at him through her eyes. As Maddie’s groping hand finds a corkscrew and jabs the spike into his neck, we watch his death through her eyes too. The film thus assists viewers to apprehend Maddie’s strength intimately, rather than framing her as a spectacle or distanced “other” to be pitied.Importantly, it is this very core of perceived vulnerability, yet ultimate strength, that gives Maddie the edge over her attacker in the end. In this way, Maddie’s disabilities are not solely represented as a space of limitation or difference, but a potential wellspring of power. Hence the film supports, to some degree, the move to seeing deafness as gain, rather than loss:Deafness has long been viewed as a hearing loss—an absence, a void, a lack. It is virtually impossible to think of deafness without thinking of loss. And yet Deaf people do not often consider their lives to be defined by loss. Rather, there is something present in the lives of Deaf people, something full and complete. (Bauman and Murray, 3)As Bauman and Murray explain, the shift from “hearing loss” to “deaf gain” involves focusing on what is advantageous and unique about the deaf experience. They use the example of the Swiss national snowboarding team, who hired a deaf coach to boost their performance. The coach noticed they were depending too much on sound and used earplugs to teach a multi-sensory approach, “the earplugs forced them to learn to depend on the feel of the snow beneath their boards [and] the snowboarder’s performance improved markedly” (6). This idea that removing sound strengthens other senses is a thread that runs throughout Hush. For example, it is the loss of hearing and speech that are credited with inspiring Maddie’s successful writing career and innovative literary “voice”.Lennard J. Davis warns that framing people as heroic or empowered as a result of their disabilities can feed counterproductive stereotypes and perpetuate oppressive systems. “Privileging the inherent powers of the deaf or the blind is a form of patronizing,” he argues, because it traps such individuals within the concept of innate difference (106). Disparities between able and disabled people are easier to justify when disabled characters are presented as intrinsically “special” or “noble,” as this suggests inevitable divergence, rather than structural inequality. While this is something to keep in mind, Hush skirts the issue by presenting Maddie as a flawed, realistic character. She does not possess superpowers; she makes mistakes and gets injured. In short, she is a fallible human using what resources she has to the best of her abilities. As such, she represents a holistic vision of a disabled heroine rather than an overly glorified stereotype.ConclusionHush is a film about the limits of text, the gaps where language is impossible or insufficient, and the struggle to be heard as a woman with disabilities. It is a film about the difficulties surrounding both verbal and written communication, and our dependence upon them. The absence of closed captions or subtitles, combined with the use of alternative “captioning”—in the form of instant messaging, for instance—grounds the narrative in lived space, rather than providing easy extra-textual solutions. It also poses a challenge to a hearing audience, to cross the border of “otherness” and identify with a deaf heroine.Returning to the discussion of the Final Girl characterisation, Clover argues that this is a gendered device combining both traditionally feminine and masculine characteristics. The fluidity of the Final Girl is constant, “even during that final struggle she is now weak and now strong, now flees the killer and now charges him, now stabs and is stabbed, now cries out in fear and now shouts in anger” (Her Body, Himself, 221). Men viewing slasher films identify with the Final Girl’s “masculine” traits, and in the process find themselves looking through the eyes of a woman. In using a deaf character, Hush suggests that an evolution of this dynamic might also occur along the dis/abled boundary line. Maddie is a powerful survivor who shifts between weak and strong, frightened and fierce, but also between disabled and able. This portrayal encourages the audience to identify with her empowered traits and in the process look through the eyes of a disabled woman. Therefore, while slashers—and horror films in general—are not traditionally associated with progressive representations of disabilities, this evolution of the Final Girl may provide a fruitful topic of both research and filmmaking in the future.ReferencesBauman, Dirksen, and Joseph J. Murray. “Reframing: From Hearing Loss to Deaf Gain.” Trans. Fallon Brizendine and Emily Schenker. Deaf Studies Digital Journal 1 (2009): 1–10. <http://dsdj.gallaudet.edu/assets/section/section2/entry19/DSDJ_entry19.pdf>.Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1992.———. “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film.” Representations 20 (1987): 187–228.Davis, Lennard J. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. London: Verso, 1995.Ellis, Katie, and Mike Kent. Disability and New Media. 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