Artykuły w czasopismach na temat „Link-Up Diary”

Background:Our aim was to investigate the association between different components of physical activity (PA) and health-related fitness in 10-to 14-year-old children.Methods:241 children were recruited from 15 primary and 15 secondary schools. PA was assessed using the SenseWear Mini and an electronic diary. Health-related fitness was assessed using Eurofit and translated into indicators of body fatness, cardiorespiratory fitness and muscular fitness. Associations between PA intensity and physical fitness components were determined using multiple linear regression models adjusted for possible confounders and the contribution of PA domains per intensity categories was calculated.Results:Associations between PA intensities and body fatness were low to moderate (|β| = 0.09 to 0.44), explaining up to 6% of the variance in boys and 17% in girls. For cardiorespiratory fitness, associations were higher (|β| = 0.17 to 0.56), with PA explaining up to 6% of the variance in boys and 31% in girls. Low-tomoderate associations (|β| = 0.06 to 0.43) were found for muscular fitness, with PA explaining up to 7% in boys and 13% in girls. Stronger associations were found for sedentary and light activities.Conclusions:Low-to-moderate associations between PA and fitness components were observed, with higher associations in girls. Sedentary and light intensity activity showed the strongest link with body fatness, cardiorespiratory fitness and muscular fitness.

The present study examines the effect of extended work hours on experienced exhaustion in the evening in mobile-flexible employees who work in activity-flexible offices. In a seven-day diary study, it was anticipated that daily rumination is a mediator, linked to additional daily exhaustion in individuals. In a morning questionnaire, mobile-flexible employees completed daily questions about the link between extended work hours and exhaustion. Thirty-three employees completed daily questions on the extension of working hours, rumination, and exhaustion. Multilevel analyses of up to 238 daily measurements revealed that more intense extension of working hours predicted more rumination as well as exhaustion. Extended work hours and rumination both predicted more exhaustion. A test of the indirect effects showed no mediation from the extension of working hours via rumination to exhaustion. When designing mobile-flexible work models, overtime is a risk. Occupational prevention of exhaustion should promote recovery processes, especially as new work models may lead to increased rumination due to more personal responsibility of employees.

Background: Despite an obvious link between social anxiety and acute state of insomnia, chronic types of sleep disturbances in people with social phobia have so far received limited research/clinical attention. This case report aims to illustrate the possibility of rectifying sleep disturbances comorbid with social phobia, using a brief cognitive behaviour therapy for insomnia (CBT-I). Method: Treatment involved five sessions of CBT-I provided individually on a weekly basis. Major treatment components included psychoeducation, sleep restriction therapy, stimulus control and cognitive restructuring. Results: Treatment effects were assessed using sleep diary and questionnaires over the course of the treatment and at ~9 month follow-up. The results were encouraging with all targeted sleep parameters demonstrating improvements that met dual criteria for clinical significance. The gains were well maintained even at ~9 months after treatment. These improvements in sleep were accompanied by a reduction in sleep-related anxiety and dysfunctional beliefs and attitudes about sleep. Whilst the patient also reported a corresponding improvement in daytime functioning and general anxiety, no gains were observed in depression and social anxiety. Conclusions: These findings highlight the potential benefits of incorporating brief CBT-I into existing treatments for social phobia and encourage further research on the intricate relationship between sleep, mood and social anxiety.

Background The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) situation demands a lot from citizens, health care providers, and governmental institutions. Citizens need to cope with guidelines on social interaction, work, home isolation, and symptom recognition. Additionally, health care providers and policy makers have to cope with unprecedented and unpredictable pressure on the health care system they need to manage. By providing citizens with an app, they always have access to the latest information and can assess their own health. This data could be used to support policy makers and health care providers to get valuable insights in the regional distribution of infection load and health care consumption. Objective The aim of this observational study is to assess people’s use of an app to support them with COVID-19 education, self-assessment, and monitoring of their own health for a 7-day period. In addition, we aim to assess the usability of this data for health care providers and policy makers by applying it to an interactive map and combining it with hospital data. The secondary outcomes of the study were user’s satisfaction with the information provided in the app, perceived usefulness of the app, health care providers they contacted, and the follow-up actions from this contact. Methods This observational cohort study was carried out at the nonacademic teaching hospital “Elisabeth Twee Steden” (ETZ) in Tilburg, Netherlands. From April 1, 2020, onwards ETZ offered the COVID-19 education, self-assessment, and symptom tracking diary to their already existing app for patient education and monitoring. Results Between April 1 and April 20, 2020, a total of 6194 people downloaded the app. The self-assessment functionality was used abundantly to check one’s health status. In total, 5104 people responded to the question about severe symptoms, from which 242 indicated to suffer from severe symptoms. A total of 4929 people responded to the question about mild symptoms, from which 3248 indicated to suffer from these. The data was successfully applied to an interactive map, displaying user demographics and health status. Furthermore, the data was linked to clinical data. App users were satisfied with the information in the app and appreciated the symptom diary functionality. In total, 102 users reached out to a health care provider, leading to 91 contacts. Conclusions Our study demonstrated the successful implementation and use of an app with COVID-19 education, self-assessment, and a 7-day symptom diary. Data collected with the app were successfully applied to an interactive map. In addition, we were able to link the data to COVID-19 screening results from the hospital’s microbiology laboratory. This data could be used to support policy makers and health care providers to get valuable insights in the regional distribution of infection load and health care consumption. Trial Registration Netherlands Trial Register NL8501; https://www.trialregister.nl/trial/8501

Abstract Introduction School-aged children with anxiety frequently experience sleep-related problems (SRPs) such as bedtime resistance. Results are mixed, but some children with anxiety also report longer sleep onset latency (SOL). Despite the link between SRPs and mental and physical health consequences, limited research has evaluated the efficacy of brief sleep treatments in this population. Methods A mixed methods approach employing a multiple-baseline single-case design and qualitative methods was used to evaluate the efficacy of a four-session parent training intervention in ten children with anxiety and chronic insomnia (M=9.6 years, range 8–12 years, 8 female). Questionnaires on SRPs and anxiety were completed by parents and children at baseline, one-week post-treatment, and one-month follow-up assessments. Subjective SOL (i.e., sleep diary) and objective SOL (i.e., actigraphy) were measured daily during assessment and treatment weeks. Parents and children completed qualitative interviews at the post-treatment assessment. Results The majority of participants no longer met criteria for chronic insomnia at post-treatment (n=9) or follow-up (n=6). SRPs (e.g., bedtime resistance) were significantly less frequent at post-treatment and follow-up than at baseline. The majority of participants demonstrated significant reductions in subjective (n=7) but not objective (n=3) SOL at post-treatment or follow-up compared to baseline. Qualitatively, parents and children described improvements in sleep during treatment. Some parents described discovering while completing sleep diaries that their child believed themselves to be taking longer to fall asleep at the beginning of treatment than they actually were (i.e., sleep misperception), and that this sleep misperception improved during treatment. Conclusion The findings of the current study support the preliminary efficacy of a brief parent training intervention to treat SRPs in school-aged children with anxiety. They also begin to help elucidate mixed findings in the literature on sleep of children with anxiety by providing a potential reason for discrepancies between subjective and objective SOL in this population. Specifically, qualitative findings suggest that this discrepancy may be related to sleep misperception, that children with anxiety may feel themselves to be taking a long time to fall asleep even when objective measures of SOL are within the normative range. Support (if any) Boston University Clara Mayo Memorial Research Fellowship

Background: Despite a growing recognition that a strict low sodium diet may not be warranted in compensated heart failure (HF) patients, the link between sodium restriction below 2 g/day and health outcomes is unknown in patients at different levels of HF severity. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to compare differences in event-free survival among patients with <2 g/day, 2–3 g/day, or >3 g/day sodium intake stratified by New York Heart Association (NYHA) class. Method: A total of 244 patients with HF completed a four-day food diary to measure daily sodium intake. All-cause hospitalization or death for a median of 365 follow-up days and covariates on age, gender, etiology, body mass index, NYHA class, ejection fraction, total comorbidity score, the presence of ankle edema, and prescribed medications were determined by patient interview and medical record review. Hierarchical Cox hazard regression was used to address the purpose. Results: In NYHA class I/II ( n=134), patients with <2 g/day sodium intake had a 3.7-times higher risk ( p=0.025), while patients with >3 g/day sodium intake had a 0.4-times lower risk ( p=0.047) for hospitalization or death than those with 2–3 g/day sodium intake after controlling for covariates. In NYHA class III/IV ( n=110), >3 g/day sodium intake predicted shorter event-free survival ( p=0.044), whereas there was no difference in survival curves between patients with <2 g/day and those with 2–3 g/day sodium intake. Conclusion: Sodium restriction below 2 g/day is not warranted in mild HF patients, whereas excessive sodium intake above 3 g/day may be harmful in moderate to severe HF patients.

Abstract Introduction Studies consistently demonstrate a link between subjective sleep disturbances and the continuum of suicidality, although this evidence primarily comes from retrospective, cross-sectional studies using limited items to assess sleep. Longitudinal assessment of well-defined and measured sleep/wake behaviors with high-risk individuals are needed to enhance the specificity of near-term suicide risk detection and render concrete targets for suicide prevention. Methods Participants (N=46) included ultra-high-risk adolescents (N=29 ages 12-18) and college students (N=17 ages 18-24). For up to 12 weeks, participants wore an actigraph to yield objective data on sleep/wake, and concurrently completed daily cellphone-based ratings of subjective sleep and suicidality. Generalized estimating equations were used to examine the association between sleep parameters (subjective and objective) and the odds of next-day suicidal outcomes (i.e., passive death wish [PDW], suicidal ideation, suicidal intent) controlling for age, gender, and depression severity. Results Significant quadratic relationships were observed between actigraphy-derived total sleep time (TST) and probability of next-day PDW (Z=3.7, p=0.0002), suicidal ideation (Z=2.1, p=0.04), and suicidal intent (Z=2.78, p=0.006), with increasing suicidality at low and high values of TST. Low sleep efficiency (&lt;75%) was associated with increased odds of next-day PDW (OR=1.24, Z=2.07, p=0.038). Subjectively (sleep diary measures), low sleep quality (&lt;50 on 100-point scale) was associated with increased odds of next-day suicidal ideation (OR=1.57, Z=3.42, p&lt;0.001), and longer sleep onset latency (&gt;20 minutes) with next-day suicidal intent (OR=3.00, Z=2.37, p=0.018). Conclusion Poor sleep health may signal increasing suicide risk, and are modifiable risk factors. We document a significant temporal association whereby objectively-derived short and long TST and low sleep efficiency, as well as subjective sleep quality and sleep onset latency, predicts next day’s suicidality. Further understanding of the temporal association between sleep and suicidality may hold promise to inform real-time monitoring and preventive strategies. Interventions targeting these factors may therefore help reduce suicidality in high-risk youth. Support American Foundation for Suicide Prevention; University of Pittsburgh Clinical and Translational Science Institute

Abstract Background Observational studies link vitamin D deficiency with acute respiratory tract infection (ARTI) but results from randomised controlled trials are heterogeneous. Methods We used data from The D-Health Trial (N = 21,315); ARTI was a pre-specified trial outcome. Participants were men and women aged 60 to 79 years (with volunteers aged up to 84 years), supplemented with monthly doses of 60,000 international units of vitamin D and followed for up to 5 years. Participants were asked to report occurrence of ARTI over the previous month via annual surveys, and a subset of participants completed 8-week respiratory symptom diaries in winter. We used regression models to estimate odds ratios, rate ratios and rate differences. Results Vitamin D supplementation did not reduce the risk of ARTI (survey OR 0.98, 95% CI 0.93 to 1.02; diary OR 0.98, 95% CI 0.83 to 1.15). Analyses of diary data showed that vitamin D reduced the average duration by 0.5 days (95% CI 0.2 to 0.7 days) and the average number of days with severe symptoms by 0.4 days (95% CI 0.3 to 0.6 days). Conclusions Monthly bolus doses of 60,000 IU of vitamin D did not reduce the overall risk of ARTI but slightly reduce the duration of symptoms in the general population. Key messages The reduction in the duration of symptoms suggests a potential impact of vitamin D on the immune response to infection.

Social networking site (SNS) use is common and speculation about the negative impact of SNS use on mental health and psychological well-being is a recurring theme in scientific debates. The evidence for this link, however, is inconclusive. The Fear of Missing Out (FoMO) may assist in understanding the mixed evidence, as individuals who experience FoMO are more driven to keep up with what is happening to avoid missing out. We used a 2-week daily diary study of 408 university students to measure the daily associations between SNS use and negative and positive affect and whether FoMO moderated these associations. Multi-level Bayesian regression analyses revealed that 1) greater SNS use was associated with reductions in successive positive affect, but not increases in negative affect and 2) FoMO moderated the influence of SNS use such that increases in successive negative affect occurred only in those individuals high in trait FoMO.

General and domain-specific (e.g., relationship-specific) mindfulness frequently predict salutary relationship outcomes. The present preregistered study examined whether general and relationship mindfulness predicted longitudinal change in positive and negative relationship quality via greater perceived partner responsiveness (PPR). One hundred couples completed a baseline lab session (Phase 1), a 14-day diary period (Phase 2), and a 2-month follow-up survey (Phase 3). Actor-Partner Interdependence Mediation Model analyses revealed that actors’ Phase 1 relationship mindfulness—but not general mindfulness—predicted increases in their own positive relationship quality from Phase 1–3 and decreases in their own negative relationship quality from Phase 1–3 indirectly via their own Phase 2 PPR. An exploratory alternate model testing if Phase 1 PPR predicted changes in Phase 1–3 relationship quality via Phase 2 relationship mindfulness did not reveal significant indirect effects. All results held when controlling for gender, age, and relationship length, and no partner effects emerged in any analysis. These findings further elucidate the relationship-enhancing role of mindfulness in couples and highlight PPR as a critical mediator explaining the link between domain-specific mindfulness and relationship quality. Implications for mindfulness-based training programs for couples are discussed.

Abstract Objective Chronic low back pain (CLBP) has a significant negative impact on daily functioning, particularly for those with challenges coping adaptively with ongoing pain. However, the dynamics of pain coping in daily life remain understudied. Therefore, we examined the extent to which pain intensity interferes with daily activities, and assessed whether pain coping strategies (as assessed using daily diaries) moderated this link. Method We analyzed diary data from a sample of 84 participants with CLBP who completed daily diaries for up to 30 days rating pain intensity, pain interference with daily activities, and their use of pain coping strategies, including pain rumination (i.e., repetitive thinking about the pain and its causes), reappraisal (i.e., evaluating one’s pain less negatively or more positively), and distraction (i.e., diverting attention from the pain). We hypothesized that these coping strategies would moderate the associations between pain and pain interference with daily activities, although in different directions. Results Results suggest that pain rumination strengthens the association between pain intensity and pain interference both on the person and day level, while pain reappraisal and distraction weaken this association, at the day and person levels, respectively. Conclusion Our findings suggest that those who are more preoccupied with their pain and those who are less likely to reappraise their pain have more pain interference with daily activities. These findings build on prior work on pain coping by using daily diaries and highlight two pain coping strategies that have particular relevance for reducing the impact of CLBP in daily life.

BackgroundInsomnia is the most common comorbidity in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and seriously affects their rehabilitation and prognosis. Thus, an intervention targeting insomnia in ASD seems warranted. Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), a potentially effective treatment for improving sleep quality and optimizing sleep structure, has already been demonstrated to alleviate insomnia symptoms and sleep disturbance in different neurological and neuropsychiatric conditions. This trial aims to investigate the effects of rTMS on insomnia in patients with ASD.MethodThis study is designed to be a double-blind, randomized, and sham-controlled trial with a target sample size of 30 participants (aged 3–13 years) diagnosed with ASD comorbid with insomnia. The intervention phase will comprise 20 sessions of rTMS or sham rTMS applied over the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) within four consecutive weeks. The effect of rTMS on insomnia and other symptoms of ASD will be investigated through home-PSG (two consecutive overnights), sleep diary, CSHQ, CARS, ABC, SRS, RBS-R, and metabolomics analysis at baseline and posttreatment. A follow-up assessment 1 month after the intervention will examine the long-term effects.DiscussionThe results of this study may address an important knowledge gap and may provide evidence for the use of rTMS to treat insomnia in ASD. Furthermore, it will elucidate the potential mechanism and link between sleep disorders and clinical symptoms.Clinical trial registrationThe study is ongoing and has been registered at the Chinese Clinical Trial Registry (ChiCTR2100049266) on 28/07/2021.

This essay combines life writing with meditations on the significance of walking as integral to the ritual practice of pilgrimage, where the individual improves her soul or health through the act of walking to a shrine containing healing relics of a saint. Braiding together insights from medieval literature, contemporary ecocriticism, and memory studies, I reflect on my own pilgrimage practice as it impacts the land itself. Canterbury, England serves as the central shrine for four pilgrimages over decades: 1966, 1994, 1997, and 2003.The act of memory was not invented in the Anthropocene. Rather, the nonhuman world has taught humans how to remember. From ice-core samples retaining the history of Europe’s weather to rocks embedded with fossilized extinct species, nonhuman actors literally petrifying or freezing the past—from geologic sites to frozen water—become exposed through the process of anthropocentric discovery and human interference. The very act of human uncovery and analysis threatens to eliminate the nonhuman actor which has hospitably shared its own experience. How can humans script nonhuman memory?As for the history of memory studies itself, a new phase is arguably beginning, shifting from “the transnational, transcultural, or global to the planetary; from recorded to deep history; from the human to the nonhuman” (Craps et al. 3). Memory studies for the Anthropocene can “focus on the terrestrialized significance of (the historicized) forms of remembrance but also on the positioning of who is remembering and, ultimately, which ‘Anthropocene’ is remembered” (Craps et al. 5). In this era of the “self-conscious Anthropocene” (Craps et al. 6), narrative itself can focus on “the place of nonhuman beings in human stories of origins, identity, and futures point to a possible opening for the methods of memory studies” (Craps et al. 8). The nonhuman on the paths of this essay range from the dirt on the path to the rock used to build the sacred shrine, the ultimate goal. How they intersect with human actors reveals how the “human subject is no longer the one forming the world, but does indeed constitute itself through its relation to and dependence on the object world” (Marcussen 14, qtd. in Rodriguez 378). Incorporating “nonhuman species as objects, if not subjects, of memory [...] memory critics could begin by extending their objects to include the memory of nonhuman species,” linking both humans and nonhumans in “an expanded multispecies frame of remembrance” (Craps et al. 9). My narrative—from diaries recording sacred journey to a novel structured by pilgrimage—propels motion, but also secures in memory events from the past, including memories of those nonhuman beings I interact with.Childhood PilgrimageThe little girl with brown curls sat crying softly, whimpering, by the side of the road in lush grass. The mother with her soft brown bangs and an underflip to her hair told the story of a little girl, sitting by the side of the road in lush grass.The story book girl had forgotten her Black Watch plaid raincoat at the picnic spot where she had lunched with her parents and two older brothers. Ponchos spread out, the family had eaten their fresh yeasty rolls, hard cheese, apples, and macaroons. The tin clink of the canteen hit their teeth as they gulped metallic water, still icy cold from the taps of the ancient inn that morning. The father cut slices of Edam with his Swiss army knife, parsing them out to each child to make his or her own little sandwich. The father then lay back for his daily nap, while the boys played chess. The portable wooden chess set had inlaid squares, each piece no taller than a fingernail paring. The girl read a Junior Puffin book, while the mother silently perused Agatha Christie. The boy who lost at chess had to play his younger sister, a fitting punishment for the less able player. She cheerfully played with either brother. Once the father awakened, they packed up their gear into their rucksacks, and continued the pilgrimage to Canterbury.Only the little Black Watch plaid raincoat was left behind.The real mother told the real girl that the story book family continued to walk, forgetting the raincoat until it began to rain. The men pulled on their ponchos and the mother her raincoat, when the little girl discovered her raincoat missing. The story book men walked two miles back while the story book mother and girl sat under the dripping canopy of leaves provided by a welcoming tree.And there, the real mother continued, the storybook girl cried and whimpered, until a magic taxi cab in which the father and boys sat suddenly appeared out of the mist to drive the little girl and her mother to their hotel.The real girl’s eyes shone. “Did that actually happen?” she asked, perking up in expectation.“Oh, yes,” said the real mother, kissing her on the brow. The girl’s tears dried. Only the plops of rain made her face moist. The little girl, now filled with hope, cuddled with her mother as they huddled together.Without warning, out of the mist, drove up a real magic taxi cab in which the real men sat. For magic taxi cabs really exist, even in the tangible world—especially in England. At the very least, in the England of little Susie’s imagination.Narrative and PilgrimageMy mother’s tale suggests how this story echoes in yet another pilgrimage story, maintaining a long tradition of pilgrimage stories embedded within frame tales as far back as the Middle Ages.The Christian pilgrim’s walk parallels Christ’s own pilgrimage to Emmaus. The blisters we suffer echo faintly the lash Christ endured. The social relations of the pilgrim are “diachronic” (Alworth 98), linking figures (Christ) from the past to the now (us, or, during the Middle Ages, William Langland’s Piers Plowman or Chaucer’s band who set out from Southwark). We embody the frame of the vera icon, the true image, thus “conjur[ing] a site of simultaneity or a plane of immanence where the actors of the past [...] meet those of the future” (Alworth 99). Our quotidian walk frames the true essence or meaning of our ambulatory travail.In 1966, my parents took my two older brothers and me on the Pilgrims’ Way—not the route from London to Canterbury that Chaucer’s pilgrims would have taken starting south of London in Southwark, rather the ancient trek from Winchester to Canterbury, famously chronicled in The Old Road by Hilaire Belloc. The route follows along the south side of the Downs, where the muddy path was dried by what sun there was. My parents first undertook the walk in the early 1950s. Slides from that pilgrimage depict my mother, voluptuous in her cashmere twinset and tweed skirt, as my father crosses a stile. My parents, inspired by Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, decided to walk along the traditional Pilgrims’ Way to Canterbury. Story intersects with material traversal over earth on dirt-laden paths.By the time we children came along, the memories of that earlier pilgrimage resonated with my parents, inspiring them to take us on the same journey. We all carried our own rucksacks and walked five or six miles a day. Concerning our pilgrimage when I was seven, my mother wrote in her diary:As good pilgrims should, we’ve been telling tales along the way. Yesterday Jimmy told the whole (detailed) story of That Darn Cat, a Disney movie. Today I told about Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey, which first inspired me to think of walking trips and everyone noted the resemblance between Stevenson’s lovable, but balky, donkey and our sweet Sue. (We hadn’t planned to tell tales, but they just happened along the way.)I don’t know how sweet I was; perhaps I was “balky” because the road was so hard. Landscape certainly shaped my experience.As I wrote about the pilgrimage in my diary then, “We went to another Hotel and walked. We went and had lunch at the Boggly [booglie] place. We went to a nother hotel called The Swan with fether Quits [quilts]. We went to the Queens head. We went to the Gest house. We went to aother Hotle called Srping wells and my tooth came out. We saw some taekeys [turkeys].” The repetition suggests how pilgrimage combines various aspects of life, from the emotional to the physical, the quotidian (walking and especially resting—in hotels with quilts) with the extraordinary (newly sprung tooth or the appearance of turkeys). “[W]ayfaring abilities depend on an emotional connection to the environment” (Easterlin 261), whether that environment is modified by humans or even manmade, inhabited by human or nonhuman actors. How can one model an “ecological relationship between humans and nonhumans” in narrative (Rodriguez 368)? Rodriguez proposes a “model of reading as encounter [...] encountering fictional story worlds as potential models” (Rodriguez 368), just as my mother did with the Magic Taxi Cab story.Taxis proliferate in my childhood pilgrimage. My mother writes in 1966 in her diary of journeying along the Pilgrims’ Way to St. Martha’s on the Hill. “Susie was moaning and groaning under her pack and at one desperate uphill moment gasped out, ‘Let’s take a taxi!’ – our highborn lady as we call her. But we finally made it.” “Martha’s”, as I later learned, is a corruption of “Martyrs”, a natural linguistic decay that developed over the medieval period. Just as the vernacular textures pilgrimage poems in the fourteeth century, the common tongue in all its glorious variety seeps into even the quotidian modern pilgrim’s journey.Part of the delight of pilgrimage lies in the characters one meets and the languages they speak. In 1994, the only time my husband and I cheated on a strictly ambulatory sacred journey occurred when we opted to ride a bus for ten miles where walking would have been dangerous. When I ask the bus driver if a stop were ours, he replied, “I'll give you a shout, love.” As though in a P. G. Wodehouse novel, when our stop finally came, he cried out, “Cheerio, love” to me and “Cheerio, mate” to Jim.Language changes. Which is a good thing. If it didn’t, it would be dead, like those martyrs of old. Like Latin itself. Disentangling pilgrimage from language proves impossible. The healthy ecopoetics of languages meshes with the sustainable vibrancy of the land we traverse.“Nettles of remorse…”: Derek Walcott, The Bounty Once my father had to carry me past a particularly tough patch of nettles. As my mother tells it, we “went through orchards and along narrow woodland path with face-high nettles. Susie put a scarf over her face and I wore a poncho though it was sunny and we survived almost unscathed.” Certain moments get preserved by the camera. At age seven in a field outside of Wye, I am captured in my father’s slides surrounded by grain. At age thirty-five, I am captured in film by my husband in the same spot, in the identical pose, though now quite a bit taller than the grain. Three years later, as a mother, I in turn snap him with a backpack containing baby Sarah, grumpily gazing off over the fields.When I was seven, we took off from Detling. My mother writes, “set off along old Pilgrims’ Way. Road is paved now, but much the same as fifteen years ago. Saw sheep, lambs, and enjoyed lovely scenery. Sudden shower sent us all to a lunch spot under trees near Thurnham Court, where we huddled under ponchos and ate happily, watching the weather move across the valley. When the sun came to us, we continued on our way which was lovely, past sheep, etc., but all on hard paved road, alas. Susie was a good little walker, but moaned from time to time.”I seem to whimper and groan a lot on pilgrimage. One thing is clear: the physical aspects of walking for days affected my phenomenological response to our pilgrimage which we’d undertaken both as historical ritual, touristic nature hike, and what Wendell Berry calls a “secular pilgrimage” (402), where the walker seeks “the world of the Creation” (403) in a “return to the wilderness in order to be restored” (416). The materiality of my experience was key to how I perceived this journey as a spiritual, somatic, and emotional event. The link between pilgrimage and memory, between pilgrimage poetics and memorial methods, occupies my thoughts on pilgrimage. As Nancy Easterlin’s work on “cognitive ecocriticism” (“Cognitive” 257) contends, environmental knowledge is intimately tied in with memory (“Cognitive” 260). She writes: “The advantage of extensive environmental knowledge most surely precipitates the evolution of memory, necessary to sustain vast knowledge” (“Cognitive” 260). Even today I can recall snatches of moments from that trip when I was a child, including the telling of tales.Landscape not only changes the writer, but writing transforms the landscape and our interaction with it. As Valerie Allen suggests, “If the subject acts upon the environment, so does the environment upon the subject” (“When Things Break” 82). Indeed, we can understand the “road as a strategic point of interaction between human and environment” (Allen and Evans 26; see also Oram)—even, or especially, when that interaction causes pain and inflames blisters. My relationship with moleskin on my blasted and blistered toes made me intimately conscious of my body with every step taken on the pilgrimage route.As an adult, my boots on the way from Winchester to Canterbury pinched and squeezed, packed dirt acting upon them and, in turn, my feet. After taking the train home and upon arrival in London, we walked through Bloomsbury to our flat on Russell Square, passing by what I saw as a new, less religious, but no less beckoning shrine: The London Foot Hospital at Fitzroy Square.Now, sadly, it is closed. Where do pilgrims go for sole—and soul—care?Slow Walking as WayfindingAll pilgrimages come to an end, just as, in 1966, my mother writes of our our arrival at last in Canterbury:On into Canterbury past nice grassy cricket field, where we sat and ate chocolate bars while we watched white-flannelled cricketers at play. Past town gates to our Queen’s Head Inn, where we have the smallest, slantingest room in the world. Everything is askew and we’re planning to use our extra pillows to brace our feet so we won’t slide out of bed. Children have nice big room with 3 beds and are busy playing store with pounds and shillings [that’s very hard mathematics!]. After dinner, walked over to cathedral, where evensong was just ending. Walked back to hotel and into bed where we are now.Up to early breakfast, dashed to cathedral and looked up, up, up. After our sins were forgiven, we picked up our rucksacks and headed into London by train.This experience in 1966 varies slightly from the one in 1994. Jim and I walk through a long walkway of tall, slim trees arching over us, a green, lush and silent cloister, finally gaining our first view of Canterbury with me in a similar photo to one taken almost thirty years before. We make our way into the city through the West Gate, first passing by St. Dunstan’s Church where Henry II had put on penitential garb and later Sir Thomas More’s head was buried. Canterbury is like Coney Island in the Middle Ages and still is: men with dreadlocks and slinky didjeridoos, fire tossers, mobs of people, tourists. We go to Mercery Lane as all good pilgrims should and under the gate festooned with the green statue of Christ, arriving just in time for evensong.Imagining a medieval woman arriving here and listening to the service, I pray to God my gratefulness for us having arrived safely. I can understand the fifteenth-century pilgrim, Margery Kempe, screaming emotionally—maybe her feet hurt like mine. I’m on the verge of tears during the ceremony: so glad to be here safe, finally got here, my favorite service, my beloved husband. After the service, we pass on through the Quire to the spot where St. Thomas’s relic sanctuary was. People stare at a lit candle commemorating it. Tears well up in my eyes.I suppose some things have changed since the Middle Ages. One Friday in Canterbury with my children in 2003 has some parallels with earlier iterations. Seven-year-old Sarah and I go to evensong at the Cathedral. I tell her she has to be absolutely quiet or the Archbishop will chop off her head.She still has her head.Though the road has been paved, the view has remained virtually unaltered. Some aspects seem eternal—sheep, lambs, and stiles dotting the landscape. The grinding down of the pilgrimage path, reflecting the “slowness of flat ontology” (Yates 207), occurs over vast expanses of time. Similarly, Easterlin reflects on human and more than human vitalism: “Although an understanding of humans as wayfinders suggests a complex and dynamic interest on the part of humans in the environment, the surround itself is complex and dynamic and is frequently in a state of change as the individual or group moves through it” (Easterlin “Cognitive” 261). An image of my mother in the 1970s by a shady tree along the Pilgrims’ Way in England shows that the path is lower by 6 inches than the neighboring verge (Bright 4). We don’t see dirt evolving, because its changes occur so slowly. Only big time allows us to see transformative change.Memorial PilgrimageOddly, the erasure of self through duplication with a precursor occurred for me while reading W.G. Sebald’s pilgrimage novel, The Rings of Saturn. I had experienced my own pilgrimage to many of these same locations he immortalizes. I, too, had gone to Somerleyton Hall with my elderly mother, husband, and two children. My memories, sacred shrines pooling in familial history, are infused with synchronic reflection, medieval to contemporary—my parents’ periodic sojourns in Suffolk for years, leading me to love the very landscape Sebald treks across; sadness at my parents’ decline; hope in my children’s coming to add on to their memory palimpsest a layer devoted to this land, to this history, to this family.Then, the oddest coincidence from my reading pilgrimage. After visiting Dunwich Heath, Sebald comes to his friend, Michael, whose wife Anne relays a story about a local man hired as a pallbearer by the local undertaker in Westleton. This man, whose memory was famously bad, nevertheless reveled in the few lines allotted him in an outdoor performance of King Lear. After her relating this story, Sebald asks for a taxi (Sebald 188-9).This might all seem unremarkable to the average reader. Yet, “human wayfinders are richly aware of and responsive to environment, meaning both physical places and living beings, often at a level below consciousness” (Easterlin “Cognitive” 265). For me, with a connection to this area, I startled with recollection emerging from my subconscience. The pallbearer’s name in Sebald’s story was Mr Squirrel, the very same name of the taxi driver my parents—and we—had driven with many times. The same Mr Squirrel? How many Mr Squirrels can there be in this small part of Suffolk? Surely it must be the same family, related in a genetic encoding of memory. I run to my archives. And there, in my mother’s address book—itself a palimpsest of time with names and addressed scored through; pasted-in cards, names, and numbers; and looseleaf memoranda—there, on the first page under “S”, “Mr. Squirrel” in my mother’s unmistakable scribble. She also had inscribed his phone number and the village Saxmundum, seven miles from Westleton. His name had been crossed out. Had he died? Retired? I don’t know. Yet quick look online tells me Squirrell’s Taxis still exists, as it does in my memory.Making KinAfter accompanying a class on a bucolic section of England’s Pilgrims’ Way, seven miles from Wye to Charing, we ended up at a pub drinking a pint, with which all good pilgrimages should conclude. There, students asked me why I became a medievalist who studies pilgrimage. Only after the publication of my first book on women pilgrims did I realize that the origin of my scholarly, long fascination with pilgrimage, blossoming into my professional career, began when I was seven years old along the way to Canterbury. The seeds of that pilgrimage when I was so young bore fruit and flowers decades later.One story illustrates Michel Serres’s point that we should not aim to appropriate the world, but merely act as temporary tenants (Serres 72-3). On pilgrimage in 1966 as a child, I had a penchant for ant spiders. That was not the only insect who took my heart. My mother shares how “Susie found a beetle up on the hill today and put him in the cheese box. Jimmy put holes in the top for him. She named him Alexander Beetle and really became very fond of him. After supper, we set him free in the garden here, with appropriate ceremony and a few over-dramatic tears of farewell.” He clearly made a great impression on me. I yearn for him today, that beetle in the cheese box. Though I tried to smuggle nature as contraband, I ultimately had to set him free.Passing through cities, landscape, forests, over seas and on roads, wandering by fields and vegetable patches, under a sky lit both by sun and moon, the pilgrim—even when in a group of fellow pilgrims—in her lonesome exercise endeavors to realize Serres’ ideal of the tenant inhabitant of earth. Nevertheless, we, as physical pilgrims, inevitably leave our traces through photos immortalizing the journey, trash left by the wayside, even excretions discretely deposited behind a convenient bush. Or a beetle who can tell the story of his adventure—or terror—at being ensconced for a time in a cheese box.On one notorious day of painful feet, my husband and I arrived in Otford, only to find the pub was still closed. Finally, it became time for dinner. We sat outside, me with feet ensconced in shoes blessedly inert and unmoving, as the server brought out our salads. The salad cream, white and viscous, was presented in an elegantly curved silver dish. Then Jim began to pick at the salad cream with his fork. Patiently, tenderly, he endeavored to assist a little bug who had gotten trapped in the gooey sauce. Every attempt seemed doomed to failure. The tiny creature kept falling back into the gloppy substance. Undaunted, Jim compassionately ministered to our companion. Finally, the little insect flew off, free to continue its own pilgrimage, which had intersected with ours in a tiny moment of affinity. Such moments of “making kin” work, according to Donna Haraway, as “life-saving strateg[ies] for the Anthropocene” (Oppermann 3, qtd. in Haraway 160).How can narrative avoid the anthropocentric centre of writing, which is inevitable given the human generator of such a piece? While words are a human invention, nonhuman entities vitally enact memory. The very Downs we walked along were created in the Cretaceous period at least seventy million years ago. The petrol propelling the magic taxi cab was distilled from organic bodies dating back millions of years. Jurassic limestone from the Bathonian Age almost two hundred million years ago constitutes the Caen stone quarried for building Canterbury Cathedral, while its Purbeck marble from Dorset dates from the Cretaceous period. Walking on pilgrimage propels me through a past millions—billions—of eons into the past, dwarfing my speck of existence. Yet, “if we wish to cross the darkness which separates us from [the past] we must lay down a little plank of words and step delicately over it” (Barfield 23). Elias Amidon asks us to consider how “the ground we dig into and walk upon is sacred. It is sacred because it makes us neighbors to each other, whether we like it or not. Tell this story” (Amidon 42). And, so, I have.We are winding down. Time has passed since that first pilgrimage of mine at seven years old. Yet now, here, I still put on my red plaid wollen jumper and jacket, crisp white button-up shirt, grey knee socks, and stout red walking shoes. Slinging on my rucksack, I take my mother’s hand.I’m ready to take my first step.We continue our pilgrimage, together.ReferencesAllen, Valerie. “When Things Break: Mending Rroads, Being Social.” Roadworks: Medieval Britain, Medieval Roads. Eds. Valerie Allen and Ruth Evans. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2016.———, and Ruth Evans. Introduction. Roadworks: Medieval Britain, Medieval Roads. Eds. Valerie Allen and Ruth Evans. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2016.Alworth, David J. Site Reading: Fiction, Art, Social Form. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2016.Amidon, Elias. “Digging In.” Dirt: A Love Story. Ed. Barbara Richardson. Lebanon, NH: ForeEdge, 2015.Barfield, Owen. History in English Words. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1967.Berry, Wendell. “A Secular Pilgrimage.” The Hudson Review 23.3 (1970): 401-424.Bright, Derek. “The Pilgrims’ Way Revisited: The Use of the North Downs Main Trackway and the Medway Crossings by Medieval Travelers.” Kent Archaeological Society eArticle (2010): 4-32.Craps, Stef, Rick Crownshaw, Jennifer Wenzel, Rosanne Kennedy, Claire Colebrook, and Vin Nardizzi. “Memory Studies and the Anthropocene: A Roundtable.” Memory Studies 11.4 (2017) 1-18.Easterlin, Nancy. A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2012.———. “Cognitive Ecocriticism: Human Wayfinding, Sociality, and Literary Interpretation.” Introduction to Cognitive Studies. Ed. Lisa Zunshine. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2010. 257-274.Haraway, Donna. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.” Environmental Humanities 6 (2015): 159-65.James, Erin, and Eric Morel. “Ecocriticism and Narrative Theory: An Introduction.” English Studies 99.4 (2018): 355-365.Marcussen, Marlene. Reading for Space: An Encounter between Narratology and New Materialism in the Works of Virgina Woolf and Georges Perec. PhD diss. University of Southern Denmark, 2016.Oppermann, Serpil. “Introducing Migrant Ecologies in an (Un)Bordered World.” ISLE 24.2 (2017): 243–256.Oram, Richard. “Trackless, Impenetrable, and Underdeveloped? Roads, Colonization and Environmental Transformation in the Anglo-Scottish Border Zone, c. 1100 to c. 1300.” Roadworks: Medieval Britain, Medieval Roads. Eds. Valerie Allen and Ruth Evans. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2016.Rodriquez, David. “Narratorhood in the Anthropocene: Strange Stranger as Narrator-Figure in The Road and Here.” English Studies 99.4 (2018): 366-382.Savory, Elaine. “Toward a Caribbean Ecopoetics: Derek Walcott’s Language of Plants.” Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment. Eds. Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. 80-96.Sebald, W.G. The Rings of Saturn. Trans. Michael Hulse. New York: New Directions, 1998.Serres, Michel. Malfeasance: Appropriating through Pollution? Trans. Anne-Marie Feenberg-Dibon. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2011.Walcott, Derek. Selected Poems. Ed. Edward Baugh. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997. 3-16.Yates, Julian. “Sheep Tracks—A Multi-Species Impression.” Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects. Ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Washington, D.C.: Oliphaunt Books, 2012.

Introduction In not dismissing the personal narratives of individuals, Frederic Jameson describes the ‘telling of the individual story and individual experience as ultimately involving the whole laborious process of telling of the collectivity itself’ (cf. Bhabha 292). The construction of a nation involves a process of selection and textual mediation which binds an imagined community to a constructed past. Homi Bhabha refers to the ‘cultural construction of nationness as a form of social and textual affiliation’ (292). He observes how narratives employ a host of complex strategies and cultural identification and discursive address which displace historicism. The focus on temporality, according to Bhabha, then resists the linearity of events and idea that historicism proposes. Personal narratives in this sense, provide a canvas for disjunctive forms of representations to re-represent cultures and nations. It is in this context, this paper considers the role of weblogs in society and seeks to analyse their potential agency to re-cast historicity and to re-negotiate the identity of a nation. Personal commentaries and narratives contained in weblogs firstly jam spaces in the Internet, and secondly, they jam both temporality and the linearity of historicity that is contained in official voices that claim to speak on behalf of the nation. Nations are conceived as ‘imagined’ (Anderson), as a ‘myth’ (Gellner) or ‘invented’ (Hobsbawm & Ranger) rather than real and consequentially require great effort to construct and maintain. As such people and their narratives can be conceived as ‘neither the end nor the beginning of the national narrative’ (Bhabha 297). They represent a binary dialogism between the ethnographic perspective of people’s individual psyche and the ideological forces of the nation. While weblogs are often viewed as having the potential to build social networks and virtual settlements (Nardi et al.; Blanchard), this paper analyses the agency of personal narratives in providing embedded ethnographic perspectives in the electronic terrain and its consequences for the trajectory of history. It seeks to understand how mediated texts in weblogs can be situated in society and how it can be assessed as a media genre through cultural and literary theories. New media spaces have created opportunities and novel ways of recording and archiving narratives of communities, cultures and societies. They represent sites of cultural production where cultural or collective memory can be articulated or re-ignited. The act of remembering can be ritualised and visualised in web spaces. The ability to personalise and publicise on the web presents new avenues for understanding and reviewing history. Undoubtedly, the internet as a repository of information and narratives accommodates a multitude of environments and genres which co-exist on the same platform. This co-presence can in many ways represent the dialectical struggles between competing forces in the offline society. The web spaces present a possibility for both the ephemeral and transient to manifest and equally narratives which can resist the linearity of historicity. This jamming or flooding of electronic spaces with competing narratives makes the electronic terrain a contested space between the authentic and inauthentic as well as the empowered and the marginalised. This incessant plurality on the Internet can reorder both the temporal and spatial dimensions of mediated consciousness hence disrupting the linear historicity of nation-states and modernity. Modernity as a form of cognitive consciousness in society is constructed by carefully selecting the narratives of its birth to celebrate rationality, to resist the primeval tendencies and to renounce any association with its ignominious past or traditions. New media to a degree resists the dominant power structures of mainstream media thus encouraging civic participation and plurality in the new spaces where audiences can appropriate the role of producers; where the pronoun ‘I’ can assume a counter-point to the dominant discourses in society. Invariably, the age of globalization is one characterised by competing mediations which give rise to a postmodern ‘new memory’ (Hoskins) which is diffused yet not entirely free from the processes of state power or the emergence of ‘Holocaust Industry’ (Finklestein). The Internet as a diverse platform for activities ranging from publishing to commerce forms part of the wider contemporary media landscape. Its lack of centrality and sheer expanse makes it a diffused medium catering to a plethora of niche interests and audiences. The personal blogs compete with a multitude of data and information that occur on the Internet and elsewhere in other media. The mass media inevitably has the power to construct national events and to sustain a mediated national memory through its image archives and narratives. Its ability to reach a wider audience and its pervasiveness in narrating the nation stands in contrast to niche and personalised media like blogs with their disparate audiences. Nevertheless, the occurrence of personal narratives in the alternative and niche spaces provides a counter-point to the dominant narratives of the mass media. Its occurrence, presence and sustained counter-commentary create a civilian electronic archive to represent people’s narratives and memory. While its ability to monopolise or dominate national narratives may be limited, its presence and utterance needs to be acknowledged and celebrated. With the proliferation of new media platforms in postmodern societies, the centre-periphery distinctions with regard to information, news and memory construction will become more problematic without completely diminishing the divisions between mass and niche media spaces. The Physical and Virtual as Entwined Just as physical spaces are a place of gathering for those who belong and those who are displaced, the Internet provides a convening space for disembodied presence. This is often viewed as a Manichean dualism between the occurrence of thought and material presence. Equally, this is seen as unleashing a virulent ‘avatarism’ (Donath) which seeks to re-invent this virtual disembodiment by assuming different identities or by embracing a non-identity of anonymity. This cognitive engagement with the virtual sphere and the attendant consequences with regard to identity construction and reinvention have been observed and studied by media theorists. Nevertheless the offline and online are not separate and compartmentalised entities. They are entwined in complex ways (Miller and Slater). Virtual articulations as sites of cultural production reinforce the links between the real society and the virtual world, for the virtual is mediated through the societal norms and values of offline communities. Vygotsky’s (cf. Wertsch, Vygotsky; “Narrative”) concept of ‘mediation’ particularly in the form of language provides a link between the individual and the socio-cultural setting in which an individual is located. Hence the media artefact and the forms of use provide a form of mediation which reinforces the link between the individual and the social context. The performative in the pronoun ‘I’ in a personal narrative can implicate the collective consciousness of a society linking the ‘I’ with an abstract ‘we’ and hence connecting individual narratives to the social frames and groups in society. In applying the Bakhtinian approach of self and authorship, for the ‘perceiver their own time is forever open and unfinished, their own space is always the centre of perception. In contrast the time within which we perceive others is always closed and finished’ (cf. Holquist 29). The cognitive time and space of an individual in a weblog interacts with the virtual spaces imposing a material world time on an illusive and imagined cyberspace. For Bakhtin, existence, like language is a shared event. Invariably, ‘self and authorship’ both conjoin and separate the immediate reality of ‘my own living particularity (a uniqueness that is present itself as only for me ) with the reality of the system that precedes me in existence (that is always-already-there) and which is intertwined with everyone and everything else.’ (Holquist 28). Unequivocally, ‘otherness’ is perceived from the vantage point of the self and in tandem, the utterance of ‘I’ provides the central point needed to calibrate all further time and space discriminations. Hence, ‘I’ is the invisible ground of all further time and space discriminations (Bakhtin). Individual Psyche and Collective Memory Maurice Halbwachs conceived the concept of collective memory in the 1920’s inspired by Durkeim’s notion of a ‘collective consciousness’ realized through the will of a crowd in a gathering. According to Halbwachs, it is the individuals (as group members) who remember with the aid of cultural tools (cf. Wertsch, “Narrative”). Hence the act of remembering is a diffused activity which is realised through the interface between individual agency and the utilization of cultural tools. Central to the notion of collective memory is textual mediation where active agents use symbolic means such as written texts, particularly narratives (Wertsch, “Narrative”). Web spaces with an abundance of individual and communal narratives embody a construct which is incomplete and prone to de-selection and decentring and where the identity of a nation can be re-imagined and re-conceived textually. Employing the recurrent metaphor of the palimpsest (sheets of vellum on which the original writing has been rubbed out and written over) to the narratives of the Internet, these personal narratives or weblogs both challenge and retain the national past hence disrupting the sense of temporality and history. They can be both a symbolic form of resistance and conformity. For the post-structuralists, the palimpsest is representative of an intertextuality between different fields (Cryderman). These contemporaneous narratives on the Internet viewed through the allegory of the palimpsest signify a dialogism between the nationally-endorsed narratives and individual perspectives. In citing Homi Bhaba in the context of the Internet, it is evident that ‘the nation reveals in its ambivalent and vacillating representations, the ethnography of its own historicity and opens up the possibility of other narratives of the people and their difference’ (Bhabha 300) Weblogs as Ethnographic Tools Weblogs have started to a play a bigger role in the breaking and shaping of news since the late 1990s. With millions being published, blogs offer a new way of mediating national and global events with personal narratives which can contradict and or complement news and events as they are told in traditional media spaces. Blogs are often more localized and may be useful in building communities (Herring et al.). The Internet was initially conceived as a borderless entity with fluid boundaries which threaten the physical demarcations of nation-states. Nevertheless, the moulding of the Internet through the context and culture of use has witnessed a rise in the role of nation-states in enacting artificial boundaries on the virtual environment through regulations and social norms which have mediated the patterns of usage and forms of local appropriation of this global platform. The localisation and the personalisation of this electronic terrain represent the embeddedness of the Internet in the offline society and culture. One of the most significant events in the trajectory of this electronic genre was the emergence of the post 9/11 weblogs which re-told the stories of ground-zero from the perspectives of the personal (Krishnamurthy). It showcased how individual narratives mediated global events tempering the landscape of news reporting. Likewise, the warblogs recorded the Iraq war from ethnographic perspectives providing intricate insights and in the process re-mediating the tone and coverage of mainstream media and public opinion. Weblogs or web-based diaries occupy a tenuous space between the private and public. While diaries are kept by individuals to relate private experiences; their sacredness is in many ways characterised by their inaccessibility by others; often representing a solitary space for private ruminations and reflection. A diary loses its aura if its engagement with the self and the tenets of privacy are broken or violated. Weblogs which are written by individuals and made available to a potentially global community celebrate the performative aspect of the ‘self.’ A weblog’s relevance as an e-genre is signified by both its ability to retain its individual voice and its access to a wider community of strangers. Weblogs are intrinsically hybrid formats which fuse private thoughts and commentary on a global plaftform facilitating communion with ‘imagined others’ while anchoring the self at the centre stage of articulation. In applying Bakhtin’s ‘law of placement’ in dialogism, everything is perceived from a unique position in existence, as such the meaning of whatever is observed is shaped by the place from which it is perceived (cf. Holquist 21). In this sense, we regard each other from different centres in cognitive space and thus the personal articulation has significance for the representation of the society and social frames. These spaces of private commemoration in part puncture the temporality of history and indeed the processes of history-making. Invariably, ‘the present of the people’s history then is a practice that destroys the constant principles of the national culture that attempt to hark back to true national past which is often represented in the reified forms of realism and stereotype’ (Bhabha 300). The present is not a static moment, but a mass of different combinations of past and present relations (Holquist 37). This is comparable to the format of a weblog where permalinks to other sites mediate the memory of blogs widening the potential ability to remember beyond the text that falls in the spaces of personal narrative. Conclusion The jamming of web spaces with personal narratives for the consumption of local and global audiences signifies new public spaces of private commentary, public commemoration and global communion. These private spaces then link the national events of the world with personal perceptions, hence incorporating historic time within the spaces of self expression. Here the chronotope of world events becomes embedded in the ‘personal.’ Web diaries written in war zones by citizens of their day-to-day encounters with the aggressor record both time and events from the vantage point of the oppressed; a private narrative which occupies its space in a global stage. Here the private narrative in a public space challenges the temporality of war as well as the linearity of historicity. National cultures, according to Bhabha are ‘signs of control or abandonment and as such counter-narratives continuously evoke and erase its totalising boundaries both actual and conceptual thus disturbing those ideological manoeuvres through which ‘imagined communities’ are given essentialist identities’ (Bhabha 300). Inevitably the emergence of ‘new memory’ (Hoskins) in the postmodern world is a contradictory one which needs to reconcile the durable visual images of our electronically mediated world as well as the competing mediations of diverse niche and personalised media artefacts which negate or recast the hegemony of this visual culture. References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. Bakhtin, M. Translated by C. Emerson and M. Holquist. In The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Bhabha, H.K. “Dissemination: Time, Narrative and the Margins of Modern Nation.” In Nation and Narration. Ed. H.K. Bhabha. London: Routledge, 1990. 291-322. Blanchard, A. “Blogs as Virtual Communities: Identifying a Sense of Community in the Julie/Julia Project.” In Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community and Culture. 2004. http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogsphere>. Cryderman, K. “Ghosts in the Palimpsest of Cultural Memory: An Archeology of Faizal Deen’s Poetic Memoir, Land without Chocolate.” 2000. 9 Sep. 2006. http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v61/cryder.htm>. Donath, J.S. “Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community.” Communities in Cyberspace. Eds. M.A. Smith and P. Kollock. New York: Routledge, 1998. Finklestein, N. The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. London: Verso, 2000. Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Translation of Les Cadres Sociaux de la Mémoire. Edited, translated and with an introduction by Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Herring, S.C., et al. “Conversations in the Blogsphere: An Analysis from ‘Bottom Up.” Proceedings of the Thirty-Eighth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Los Almitos, USA, 2005. 107-118. Hobswawm, E., and T. Ranger. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983. Gellner, E. Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1983. Holquist, M. Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World. London: Routledge, 1990 Hoskins, A. “New Memory: Mediating History.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 21.4 (2001): 333-346. Krishnamurthy, S. “The Multidimensionality of Blog Conversations: The Virtual Enactment of September 11.” Internet Research 3.0. Maastricht, The Netherlands, 2002. Miller, D., and D. Slater. Internet: An Ethnographic Approach. Oxford: Berg, 2000. Nardi, B.A., D.J. Schiano, M. Gumbrecht, and L. Swartz. “Why We Blog.” Communications of the ACM 47.12 (2004): 41–46. Wertsch, J.V. “Narrative as a Cultural Tool in Collective Memory.” Conference for Sociocultural Research III, 2000. 9 Sep. 2006 http://www.fae.unicamp.br/br2000/trabs/2045.doc>. ———. Vygotsky and the Social Formation of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1985. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Ibrahim, Yasmin. "Weblogs as Personal Narratives: Displacing History and Temporality." M/C Journal 9.6 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0612/08-ibrahim.php>. APA Style Ibrahim, Y. (Dec. 2006) "Weblogs as Personal Narratives: Displacing History and Temporality," M/C Journal, 9(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0612/08-ibrahim.php>.

When characters in the Fox Television sitcom The Mindy Project call Mindy Lahiri fat, Mindy sees it as a case of misidentification. She reminds the character that she is a “petite Asian woman,” that she has large, beautiful breasts, that she has nothing in common with fat people, and the terms “chubbster” and “BBW – Big Beautiful Woman” are offensive and do not apply to her. Mindy spends some of each episode on her love for food and more food, and her hatred of fitness regimes, while repeatedly falling for meticulously fit men. She dates, has a string of failed relationships, adventurous sexual techniques, a Bridget Jones-scale search for perfect love, and yet admits to shame in showing her naked body to lovers. Her contradictory feelings about food and body image mirror our own confusions, and reveal the fear and fascination we feel for fat in our fat-obsessed culture. I argue that by creating herself as sexy, successful, popular, sporadically confident and insecure, Mindy works against stigmas that attach both to big women – women who are considered big in comparison to the societal size-zero ideal – and women who have historically been seen as belonging to “primitive” or colonized cultures, and therefore she disrupts the conflation of thinness to civilization. In this article, I look at the performance of fat and ethnic identity on American television, and examine the bodily mechanisms through which Mindy disrupts these. I argue that Mindy uses issues of fat and body image to disrupt stereotypical iterations of race. In the first part of the paper, I look at the construction of South Asian femininity in American pop culture, to set up the discussion of fat, gender and race as interrelated performative categories. Race, Gender, Performativity As Judith Butler says of gender, “performativity must be understood not as a singular or deliberate ‘act,’ but, rather as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names” (Bodies, 2). Bodies produce and perform their gender through repeating and imitating norms of clothing, body movement, choices in gesture, action, mannerism, as well as gender roles. They do so in such a way that the discourses and histories that are embedded in them start to seem natural; they are seen to be the truth, instead of as actions that have a history. These choices do not just reflect or reveal gender, but rather produce and create it. Nadine Ehlers takes performativity into the realm of race. Ehlers says that “racial performativity always works within and through the modalities of gender and sexuality, and vice versa, and these categories are constituted through one another” (65). In this sense, neither race nor gender are produced or iterated without also producing their interrelationship. They are in fact produced through this interrelationship. So, for example, when studying the performativity of black bodies, you would need to specify whether you are looking at black femininity or masculinity. And on the other hand, when studying gender, it is important to specify gender where? And when? You couldn’t simply pry open the link between race and gender and expect to successfully theorize either on its own. Mindy’s performance of femininity, including her questions about body image and weight, her attractive though odd clothing choices, her search for love, these are all bound to her iteration of race. She often explains her body through defining herself as Asian. Yet, I suggest in a seeming contradiction that her othering of herself as a big woman (relative to normative body size for women in American film and television) who breaks chairs when she sits on them and is insecure about her body, keeps the audience from othering her because of race. Her weight, clumsiness, failures in love, her heartbreaks all make her a “normal” woman. They make her easy to identify with. They suggest that she is just a woman, an American woman, instead of othering her as a South Asian woman, or a woman from a “primitive”, colonized or minority culture.Being South Asian on American Television Mindy Lahiri (played by writer, producer and actor Mindy Kaling) is a successful American obstetrician/gynaecologist, who works in a successful practice in New York. She breaks stereotypes of South Asian women that are repeated in American television and film. Opposite to the stereotype of the traditional, dutiful South Asian who agrees to an arranged marriage, and has little to say for him or herself beyond academic achievement that is generally seen in American and British media, Mindy sleeps with as many men as she can possibly fit into a calendar year, is funny, self-deprecating, and has little interest in religion, tradition or family, and is obsessed with popular culture. The stereotypical characteristics of South Asians in the popular British media, listed by Anne Ciecko (69), include passive, law-abiding, following traditional gender roles and traditions, living in the “pathologized” Asian family, struggling to find self-definitions that incorporate their placement as both belonging to and separate from British culture. Similarly, South Asian actors on American television often play vaguely-comic doctors and lawyers, seemingly with no personal life or sexual desire. They are simply South Asians, with no further defining personality traits or quirks. It is as if being South Asian overrides any other character trait. They are rarely in lead roles, and Mindy is certainly the first South Asian-American woman to have her own sitcom, in which she plays the lead. What do South Asians on American television look and sound like? In her study on performativity of race and gender, Ehlers looks at various constructions of black femininity, and suggests that black femininity is often constructed in the media in terms of promiscuity and aggression (83), and, I would add, the image of the mama with the big heart and even bigger bosom. Contrary to black femininity, South Asian femininity in American media is often repressed, serious, concerned with work and achievement or alternatively with menial roles, with little in terms of a personal or sexual life. As Shilpa S. Dave says in her book on South Asians in American television, most South Asians that appear in American television are shown as immigrants with accents (8). That is what makes them recognizably different and other, more so even than any visual identification. It is much more common to see immigrants of Chinese or Korean descent in American television as people with American accents, as people who are not first generation immigrants. South Asians, on the other hand, almost always have South Asian accents. There are exceptions to this rule, however, the exceptions are othered and/or made more mainstream using various mechanisms. Neela in ER (played by Parminder Nagra) and Cece in New Girl (played by Hannah Simone) are examples of this. In both instances the characters are part of either an ensemble cast, or in a supporting role. Neela is a step removed from American and South Asian femininity, in that she is British, with a British accent – she is othered, but this othering makes her more mainstream than the marking that takes place with a South Asian accent. The British accent and a tragic marriage, I would say, allow her to have a personal and sexual life, beyond work. Cece goes through an arranged marriage scenario, full with saris and a South Asian wedding that is the more recognized and acceptable narrative for South Asian women in American media. The characters are made more acceptable and recognizable through these mechanisms. Bhoomi K. Thakore, in an article on the representation of South Asians in American television, briefly explains that after the 1965 Immigration and Nationality act, highly-educated South Asians could immigrate to the United States, either to get further education, or as highly skilled workers (149) – a phenomenon often called “brain-drain.” In addition, says Thakore, family members of these educated South Asians immigrated to the States as well, and these were people that were less educated and worked often in convenience stores and motels. Thakore suggests that immigrants to the United States experience a segmented assimilation, meaning that not all immigrants (first and second generation) will assimilate to the same extent or in the same way. I would say from my own experience that the degree to which immigrants can assimilate into American society often depends on not only financial prospects or education, but also attractiveness, skin tone, accent, English-speaking ability, interests and knowledge of American popular culture, interest in an American way of life and American social customs, and so on. Until recently, I would say that South Asian characters in American television shows have tended to represent either first-generation immigrants with South Asian accents and an inability or lack of desire to assimilate fully into American society, or second-generation immigrants whose personal and sexual lives are never part of the narrative. Examples of the former include South Asians who play nameless doctors and cops in American television. Kal Penn’s character Lawrence Kutner in the television series House is an example of the latter. Kutner, one of the doctors on Dr. House’s team, did not have a South Asian accent. However, he also had no personal narrative. All doctors on House came with their relationship troubles and baggage, their emotional turmoil, their sexual and romantic ups and downs – all but Kutner, whose suicide in the show (when he left it to join the Obama administration) is framed around the question – do we ever really know the people we see every day? Yet, we do know the other doctors on House. But we never know anything about Kutner’s private life. His character is all about academic knowledge and career achievement. This is the stereotype of the South Asian character in American television. Yet, Mindy, with her American accent, sees herself as American, doesn’t obsess about race or skin colour, and has no signs of a poor-me narrative in the way she presents herself. She does not seem to have any diasporic longings or group belongings. Mindy doesn’t ignore race on the show. In fact, she deploys it strategically. She describes herself as Asian on more than one occasion, often to explain her size, her breasts and femininity, and in one episode she goes to a party because she expects to see black sportsmen there, and she explains, “It’s a scientific fact that black men love South Asian girls.” Her production of her femininity is inextricably bound up with race. However, Mindy avoids marking herself as a racial minority by making her quest for love and her confusions about body image something all women can identify with. But she goes further in that she does not place herself in a diaspora community, she does not speak in a South Asian accent, she doesn’t hide her personal life or the contours of her body, and she doesn’t harp on parents who want her to get married. By not using the usual stereotypes of South Asians and Asians on American television, while at the same time acknowledging race, I suggest that she makes herself a citizen of the alleged “melting pot” as the melting pot should be, a hybrid space for hybrid identities. Mindy constructs herself as an American woman, and suggests that being a racial minority is simply part of the experience of being American. I am not suggesting that this reflects the reality of experience for many women in the USA who belong to ethnic minorities. I am suggesting that Mindy is creating a possible or potential reality, in which neither size nor being a racial minority are causes for shame. In a scene in the second season, a police officer chastises Mindy for prescribing birth control to his young daughter. He charges out of her office, and she follows him in to the street. She is wearing a version of her usual gear – a check-pinafore, belted over a printed shirt – her shoulders curved forward, arms folded, in the characteristic posture of the big-breasted, curvy woman. She screams at the officer for his outdated views on birth-control. He questions if she even has kids, suggesting that she knows nothing about raising them. She says, “How dare you? Do I look like a woman who’s had kids? I have the hips of an eleven-year-old boy.” She then informs him that she wolfed down a steak sandwich at lunch, has misgivings about the outfit she is wearing, and says that she is not a sex-crazed lunatic. He charges her for public female hysteria. She screams after him as he drives off, “Everyone see this!” She holds up the citation. “It’s for walking, while being a person of colour.” She manages in the space of a two-minute clip to deploy race, size and femininity, without shame or apology, and with humour. It is interesting to note that, contrary to her persona on the show, in interviews in the media, Kaling suggests that she is not that concerned with the question of weight. She says that though she would like to lose fifteen pounds, she is not hung up on this quest. On the other hand, she suggests that she considers herself a role model for minority women. In fact, in real life she makes the question of race as something more important to her than weight – which is opposite to the way she treats the two issues in her television show. I suggest that in real life, Kaling projects herself as a feminist, as someone not so concerned about size and weight, an intelligent woman who is concerned about race. On the show, however, she plays an everywoman, for whom weight is a much bigger deal than race. Neither persona is necessarily real or assumed – rather, they both reveal the complexities by which race, gender and body size constitute each other, and become cruxes for identification and misidentification. Is It Civilized to Be Fat? When Mindy and her colleague Danny Castellano get together in the second season of the show, you find yourself wondering how on earth they are going to sustain this sitcom, without an on-again/off-again romance, or one that takes about five years to start. When Danny does not want to go public with the relationship, Mindy asks him if he is ashamed of her. Imagine one of the Friends or Sex in the City women asking this question to see just how astonishing it is for a successful, attractive woman to ask a man if he is ashamed to be seen with her. She doesn’t say is it because of my weight, yet the question hangs in the air. When Danny does break up with her, again Mindy feels all the self-disgust of a woman rejected for no clear reason. As Amy Erdman Farrell suggests in her book on fat in American culture and television, fat people are not expected to find love or success. They are expected to be self-deprecating. They are supposed to expect rejection and failure. She says that not only do fat people bear a physical but also a character stigma, in that not only are they considered visually unappealing, but this comes with the idea that they have uncontrolled desires and urges (7-10). Kaling suggests through her cleverly-woven writing that it is because of her body image that Mindy feels self-loathing when Danny breaks up with her. She manages again to make her character an everywoman. Not a fat South Asian woman, but simply an American woman who feels all the shame that seems to go with weight and body image in American culture. However, this assumed connection of fat with immorality and laziness goes a step further. Farrell goes on to say that fat denigration and ethnic discrimination are linked, that popularity and the right to belong and be a citizen are based both on body size and ethnicity. Says Farrell, “our culture assigns many meanings to fatness beyond the actual physical trait – that a person is gluttonous, or filling a deeply disturbed psychological need, or is irresponsible and unable to control primitive urges” (6) – psychological traits that have historically been used to describe people in colonized cultures. Farrell provides an intriguing analysis of Oprah Winfrey and her public ups and downs with weight. She suggests that Winfrey’s public obsession with her own weight, and her struggles with it, are an attempt to be an “everywoman”, to be someone all and not only black women can identify with. Says Farrell, “in order to deracinate herself, to prove that ‘anyone’ can make it, Winfrey must lose weight. Otherwise, the weight of all that fat will always, de facto, mark her as a ‘black woman’, with all the accompanying connotations of inferior, primitive, bodily and out of control” (126). She goes on to say that, “Since the end of the 19th century, fatness has … served as a potent signifier of the line between the primitive and the civilized, feminine and masculine, ethnicity and whiteness, poverty and wealth, homosexuality and heterosexuality, past and future” (126). This suggests that Winfrey’s public confrontations with the question of weight help the women in the audience identify with her as a woman, rather than as a black woman. In a volume on fat studies, Farrell explains that health professionals have further demarcated lines between “civilization and primitive cultures, whiteness and blackness, sexual restraint and sexual promiscuity, beauty and ugliness, progress and the past” (260). She suggests that fat is not just part of discourses on health and beauty, but also intelligence, enterprise, work ethics, as well as race, ethnicity, sexuality and class. These connections are of course repeated in media representations, across media genres and platforms. In women’s magazines, an imperative towards weightloss comes hand-in-hand with the search for love, a woman’s ability to satisfy a man’s as well as her own desires, and with success in glamorous jobs. Sitcom couples on American television often feature men who are ineffectual but funny slobs, married to determined, fit women who are mainly homemakers, and in fact, responsible for the proper functioning of the family, and consequentially, society. In general, bigger women in American and British media are on a quest both for love and weight loss, and the implication is that deep-seated insecurities are connected to both weight gain, as well as failures in love, and that only a resolution of these insecurities will lead to weight loss, which will further lead to success in love. Films such as My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Bridget Jones’s Diary are examples of this prevailing narrative. Thakore investigates the changing image of South Asians on American television, suggesting that South Asians are represented more and more frequently, and in increasingly more central roles. However, Thakore suggests that, “all women of colour deal with hegemonic skin tone ideologies in their racial/ethnic communities, with lighter skin tone and Caucasian facial features considered more appealing and attractive … . As media producers favour casting women who are attractive, so too do the same media producers favour casting women of colour who are attractive in terms of their proximity to White physical characteristics” (153). Similarly, Lee and Vaught suggest that in American popular culture, “both White women and women of colour are represented as reflecting a White ideal or aesthetic. These women conform to a body ideal that reflects White middle class ideals: exceedingly thin, long, flowing hair, and voluptuous” (458). She goes on to say that Asian American women would need to take on a White middle class standing and a simultaneous White notion of the exotic in order to assimilate. For Mindy, then, fat allows her to be an everywoman, but also allows her to adopt her own otherness as a South Asian, and make it her own. This trend shows some signs of changing, however, and I expect that women like Lena Dunham in the HBO comedy Girls and Mindy Kaling are leading the march towards productions of diverse femininities that are at the same time iterated as attractive and desirable. On The Hollywood Reporter, when asked about the more ludicrous questions or comments she faces on social media, Kaling puts on a male voice and says, “You’re ugly and fat, it’s so refreshing to watch!” and “We’re used to skinny people, and you’re so ugly, we love it!” On David Letterman, she mentions having dark skin, and says that lazy beach holidays don’t work for her because she doesn’t understand the trend for tanning, and she can’t really relax. Mindy’s confusions about her weight and body image make her a woman for everyone – not just for South Asian women. Whereas Kaling’s concern over the question of race – and her relative lack of concern over weight – make her a feminist, a professional writer, a woman with a conscience. These personas interweave. They question both normative performances of gender and race, and question the historical conflation of size and minority identity with shame and immorality. Butler suggests that gender is “the repeated stylisation of the body” (Gender, 33). She argues that gender roles can be challenged through a “subversive reiteration” of gender (Gender, 32). In this way, women like Dunham and Kaling, through their deployment of diverse female bodies and femininities, can disrupt the normative iteration of gender and race. Their production of femininity in bodies that are attractive (just not normatively so) has more than just an impact on how we look at fat. They bring to us women that are flawed, assertive, insecure, confident, contradictory, talented, creative, that make difficult choices in love and work, and that don’t make an obsession with weight or even race their markers of self worth.References Bridget Jones’s Diary. Dir. Sharon Maguire. Miramax and Universal Pictures, 2001. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. London: Routledge, 1990. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. London: Routledge, 1993. Ciecko, Anne. “Representing the Spaces of Diaspora in Contemporary British Films by Women Directors.” Cinema Journal 38.3 (Spring 1999): 67-90. Dave, Shilpa S. Indian Accents: Brown Voice and Racial Performance in American Television. U of Illinois, 2013. Ehlers, Nadine. Racial Imperatives: Discipline, Performativity, and Struggles against Subjection. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. ER. Warner Bros. Television. NBC, 1994-2009. Farrell, Amy. “‘The White Man’s Burden’”: Female Sexuality, Tourist Postcards, and the Place of the Fat Woman in Early 20th-Century U.S. Culture.” In Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay (eds.), The Fat Studies Reader. New York: New York University Press, 2009. Farrell, Amy Erdman. Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2011. Friends. Warner Bros. Television. NBC, 1994-2004. Girls. HBO Entertainment and Apatow Productions. HBO, 2012-present. House. Universal Television. Fox, 2004-2012. Lee, Stacey J., and Sabina Vaught. “‘You Can Never Be Too Rich or Too Thin’: Popular and Consumer Culture and the Americanization of Asian American Girls and Young Women.” The Journal of Negro Education 72.4 (2003): 457-466. My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Dir. Joel Zwick. Playtone, 2002. New Girl. 20th Century Fox. Fox, 2011-present. Nicholson, Rebecca. “Mindy Kaling: ‘I Wasn’t Considered Attractive or Funny Enough to Play Myself.’” The Observer 1 June 2014. ‹http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/jun/01/mindy-kaling-project›. Sex in the City. Warner Bros. Television and HBO Original Programming. HBO, 1998-2004. Strauss, Elissa. “Why Mindy Kaling – Not Lena Dunham – Is the Body Positive Icon of the Moment.” The Week 22 April 2014. ‹http://theweek.com/article/index/260126/why-mindy-kaling-mdash-not-lena-dunham-mdash-is-the-body-positive-icon-of-the-moment›. Thakore, Bhoomi K. “Must-See TV: South Asian Characterizations in American Popular Media.” Sociology Compass 8.2 (2014): 149-156. The Mindy Project. Universal Television, 3 Arts Entertainment, Kaling International. Fox, 2012-present. Ugly Betty. ABC Studios. ABC, 2006-2010. YouTube. “Mindy Kaling on David Letterman.” 29 April 2013. 21 Oct. 2014 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8K1ye2gnJw›. YouTube. “Mindy on Being Called Fat and Ugly on Social Media.” The Hollywood Reporter 14 June 2014. 21 Oct. 2014 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ockt-BeMOWk›. YouTube. “Chris Messina: ‘I Think Mindy Kaling’s Beautiful.’” HuffPost Live 24 April 2014. 21 Oct. 2014 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HtCjGNERKQ›.

At a time when almost every human transgression, illness, profession and other personal aspect of life has been chronicled in autobiographical writing (Rak)—in 1998 Zinsser called ours “the age of memoir” (3)—writing about fat is one of the most recent subjects to be addressed in this way. This article surveys a range of contemporary autobiographical texts that are titled with, or revolve around, that powerful and most evocative word, “fat”. Following a number of cultural studies of fat in society (Critser; Gilman, Fat Boys; Fat: A Cultural History; Stearns), this discussion views fat in socio-cultural terms, following Lupton in understanding fat as both “a cultural artefact: a bodily substance or body shape that is given meaning by complex and shifting systems of ideas, practices, emotions, material objects and interpersonal relationships” (i). Using a case study approach (Gerring; Verschuren), this examination focuses on a range of texts from autobiographical cookbooks and memoirs to novel-length graphic works in order to develop a preliminary taxonomy of these works. In this way, a small sample of work, each of which (described below) explores an aspect (or aspects) of the form is, following Merriam, useful as it allows a richer picture of an under-examined phenomenon to be constructed, and offers “a means of investigating complex social units consisting of multiple variables of potential importance in understanding the phenomenon” (Merriam 50). Although the sample size does not offer generalisable results, the case study method is especially suitable in this context, where the aim is to open up discussion of this form of writing for future research for, as Merriam states, “much can be learned from […] an encounter with the case through the researcher’s narrative description” and “what we learn in a particular case can be transferred to similar situations” (51). Pro-Fat Autobiographical WritingAlongside the many hundreds of reduced, low- and no-fat cookbooks and weight loss guides currently in print that offer recipes, meal plans, ingredient replacements and strategies to reduce fat in the diet, there are a handful that promote the consumption of fats, and these all have an autobiographical component. The publication of Jennifer McLagan’s Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes in 2008 by Ten Speed Press—publisher of Mollie Katzen’s groundbreaking and influential vegetarian Moosewood Cookbook in 1974 and an imprint now known for its quality cookbooks (Thelin)—unequivocably addressed that line in the sand often drawn between fat and all things healthy. The four chapter titles of this cookbook— “Butter,” subtitled “Worth It,” “Pork Fat: The King,” “Poultry Fat: Versatile and Good For You,” and, “Beef and Lamb Fats: Overlooked But Tasty”—neatly summarise McLagan’s organising argument: that animal fats not only add an unreplaceable and delicious flavour to foods but are fundamental to our health. Fat polarised readers and critics; it was positively reviewed in prominent publications (Morris; Bhide) and won influential food writing awards, including 2009 James Beard Awards for Single Subject Cookbook and Cookbook of the Year but, due to its rejection of low-fat diets and the research underpinning them, was soon also vehemently criticised, to the point where the book was often described in the media as “controversial” (see Smith). McLagan’s text, while including historical, scientific and gastronomic data and detail, is also an outspokenly personal treatise, chronicling her sensual and emotional responses to this ingredient. “I love fat,” she begins, continuing, “Whether it’s a slice of foie gras terrine, its layer of yellow fat melting at the edges […] hot bacon fat […] wilting a plate of pungent greens into submission […] or a piece of crunchy pork crackling […] I love the way it feels in my mouth, and I love its many tastes” (1). Her text is, indeed, memoir as gastronomy / gastronomy as memoir, and this cookbook, therefore, an example of the “memoir with recipes” subgenre (Brien et al.). It appears to be this aspect – her highly personal and, therein, persuasive (Weitin) plea for the value of fats – that galvanised critics and readers.Molly Chester and Sandy Schrecengost’s Back to Butter: A Traditional Foods Cookbook – Nourishing Recipes Inspired by Our Ancestors begins with its authors’ memoirs (illness, undertaking culinary school training, buying and running a farm) to lend weight to their argument to utilise fats widely in cookery. Its first chapter, “Fats and Oils,” features the familiar butter, which it describes as “the friendly fat” (22), then moves to the more reviled pork lard “Grandma’s superfood” (22) and, nowadays quite rarely described as an ingredient, beef tallow. Grit Magazine’s Lard: The Lost Art of Cooking with Your Grandmother’s Secret Ingredient utilises the rhetoric that fat, and in this case, lard, is a traditional and therefore foundational ingredient in good cookery. This text draws on its publisher’s, Grit Magazine (published since 1882 in various formats), long history of including auto/biographical “inspirational stories” (Teller) to lend persuasive power to its argument. One of the most polarising of fats in health and current media discourse is butter, as was seen recently in debate over what was seen as its excessive use in the MasterChef Australia television series (see, Heart Foundation; Phillipov). It is perhaps not surprising, then, that butter is the single fat inspiring the most autobiographical writing in this mode. Rosie Daykin’s Butter Baked Goods: Nostalgic Recipes from a Little Neighborhood Bakery is, for example, typical of a small number of cookbooks that extend the link between baking and nostalgia to argue that butter is the superlative ingredient for baking. There are also entire cookbooks dedicated to making flavoured butters (Vaserfirer) and a number that offer guides to making butter and other (fat-based) dairy products at home (Farrell-Kingsley; Hill; Linford).Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef is typical among chef’s memoirs in using butter prominently although rare in mentioning fat in its title. In this text and other such memoirs, butter is often used as shorthand for describing a food that is rich but also wholesomely delicious. Hamilton relates childhood memories of “all butter shortcakes” (10), and her mother and sister “cutting butter into flour and sugar” for scones (15), radishes eaten with butter (21), sautéing sage in butter to dress homemade ravoli (253), and eggs fried in browned butter (245). Some of Hamilton’s most telling references to butter present it as an staple, natural food as, for instance, when she describes “sliced bread with butter and granulated sugar” (37) as one of her family’s favourite desserts, and lists butter among the everyday foodstuffs that taste superior when stored at room temperature instead of refrigerated—thereby moving butter from taboo (Gwynne describes a similar process of the normalisation of sexual “perversion” in erotic memoir).Like this text, memoirs that could be described as arguing “for” fat as a substance are largely by chefs or other food writers who extol, like McLagan and Hamilton, the value of fat as both food and flavouring, and propose that it has a key role in both ordinary/family and gourmet cookery. In this context, despite plant-based fats such as coconut oil being much lauded in nutritional and other health-related discourse, the fat written about in these texts is usually animal-based. An exception to this is olive oil, although this is never described in the book’s title as a “fat” (see, for instance, Drinkwater’s series of memoirs about life on an olive farm in France) and is, therefore, out of the scope of this discussion.Memoirs of Being FatThe majority of the other memoirs with the word “fat” in their titles are about being fat. Narratives on this topic, and their authors’ feelings about this, began to be published as a sub-set of autobiographical memoir in the 2000s. The first decade of the new millennium saw a number of such memoirs by female writers including Judith Moore’s Fat Girl (published in 2005), Jen Lancaster’s Such a Pretty Fat: One Narcissist’s Quest to Discover If Her Life Makes Her Ass Look Big, or Why Pie Is Not the Answer, and Stephanie Klein’s Moose: A Memoir (both published in 2008) and Jennifer Joyne’s Designated Fat Girl in 2010. These were followed into the new decade by texts such as Celia Rivenbark’s bestselling 2011 You Don’t Sweat Much for a Fat Girl, and all attracted significant mainstream readerships. Journalist Vicki Allan pulled no punches when she labelled these works the “fat memoir” and, although Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s influential categorisation of 60 genres of life writing does not include this description, they do recognise eating disorder and weight-loss narratives. Some scholarly interest followed (Linder; Halloran), with Mitchell linking this production to feminism’s promotion of the power of the micro-narrative and the recognition that the autobiographical narrative was “a way of situating the self politically” (65).aken together, these memoirs all identify “excess” weight, although the response to this differs. They can be grouped as: narratives of losing weight (see Kuffel; Alley; and many others), struggling to lose weight (most of these books), and/or deciding not to try to lose weight (the smallest number of works overall). Some of these texts display a deeply troubled relationship with food—Moore’s Fat Girl, for instance, could also be characterised as an eating disorder memoir (Brien), detailing her addiction to eating and her extremely poor body image as well as her mother’s unrelenting pressure to lose weight. Elena Levy-Navarro describes the tone of these narratives as “compelled confession” (340), mobilising both the conventional understanding of confession of the narrator “speaking directly and colloquially” to the reader of their sins, failures or foibles (Gill 7), and what she reads as an element of societal coercion in their production. Some of these texts do focus on confessing what can be read as disgusting and wretched behavior (gorging and vomiting, for instance)—Halloran’s “gustatory abject” (27)—which is a feature of the contemporary conceptualisation of confession after Rousseau (Brooks). This is certainly a prominent aspect of current memoir writing that is, simultaneously, condemned by critics (see, for example, Jordan) and popular with readers (O’Neill). Read in this way, the majority of memoirs about being fat are about being miserable until a slimming regime of some kind has been undertaken and successful. Some of these texts are, indeed, triumphal in tone. Lisa Delaney’s Secrets of a Former Fat Girl is, for instance, clear in the message of its subtitle, How to Lose Two, Four (or More!) Dress Sizes—And Find Yourself Along the Way, that she was “lost” until she became slim. Linden has argued that “female memoir writers frequently describe their fat bodies as diseased and contaminated” (219) and “powerless” (226). Many of these confessional memoirs are moving narratives of shame and self loathing where the memoirist’s sense of self, character, and identity remain somewhat confused and unresolved, whether they lose weight or not, and despite attestations to the contrary.A sub-set of these memoirs of weight loss are by male authors. While having aspects in common with those by female writers, these can be identified as a sub-set of these memoirs for two reasons. One is the tone of their narratives, which is largely humourous and often ribaldly comic. There is also a sense of the heroic in these works, with male memoirsts frequently mobilising images of battles and adversity. Texts that can be categorised in this way include Toshio Okada’s Sayonara Mr. Fatty: A Geek’s Diet Memoir, Gregg McBride and Joy Bauer’s bestselling Weightless: My Life as a Fat Man and How I Escaped, Fred Anderson’s From Chunk to Hunk: Diary of a Fat Man. As can be seen in their titles, these texts also promise to relate the stratgies, regimes, plans, and secrets that others can follow to, similarly, lose weight. Allen Zadoff’s title makes this explicit: Lessons Learned on the Journey from Fat to Thin. Many of these male memoirists are prompted by a health-related crisis, diagnosis, or realisation. Male body image—a relatively recent topic of enquiry in the eating disorder, psychology, and fashion literature (see, for instance, Bradley et al.)—is also often a surprising motif in these texts, and a theme in common with weight loss memoirs by female authors. Edward Ugel, for instance, opens his memoir, I’m with Fatty: Losing Fifty Pounds in Fifty Miserable Weeks, with “I’m haunted by mirrors … the last thing I want to do is see myself in a mirror or a photograph” (1).Ugel, as that prominent “miserable” in his subtitle suggests, provides a subtle but revealing variation on this theme of successful weight loss. Ugel (as are all these male memoirists) succeeds in the quest be sets out on but, apparently, despondent almost every moment. While the overall tone of his writing is light and humorous, he laments every missed meal, snack, and mouthful of food he foregoes, explaining that he loves eating, “Food makes me happy … I live to eat. I love to eat at restaurants. I love to cook. I love the social component of eating … I can’t be happy without being a social eater” (3). Like many of these books by male authors, Ugel’s descriptions of the food he loves are mouthwatering—and most especially when describing what he identifies as the fattening foods he loves: Reuben sandwiches dripping with juicy grease, crispy deep friend Chinese snacks, buttery Danish pastries and creamy, rich ice cream. This believable sense of regret is not, however, restricted to male authors. It is also apparent in how Jen Lancaster begins her memoir: “I’m standing in the kitchen folding a softened stick of butter, a cup of warmed sour cream, and a mound of fresh-shaved Parmesan into my world-famous mashed potatoes […] There’s a maple-glazed pot roast browning nicely in the oven and white-chocolate-chip macadamia cookies cooling on a rack farther down the counter. I’ve already sautéed the almonds and am waiting for the green beans to blanch so I can toss the whole lot with yet more butter before serving the meal” (5). In the above memoirs, both male and female writers recount similar (and expected) strategies: diets, fasts and other weight loss regimes and interventions (calorie counting, colonics, and gastric-banding and -bypass surgery for instance, recur); consulting dieting/health magazines for information and strategies; keeping a food journal; employing expert help in the form of nutritionists, dieticians, and personal trainers; and, joining health clubs/gyms, and taking up various sports.Alongside these works sit a small number of texts that can be characterised as “non-weight loss memoirs.” These can be read as part of the emerging, and burgeoning, academic field of Fat Studies, which gathers together an extensive literature critical of, and oppositional to, dominant discourses about obesity (Cooper; Rothblum and Solovay; Tomrley and Naylor), and which include works that focus on information backed up with memoir such as self-described “fat activist” (Wann, website) Marilyn Wann’s Fat! So?: Because You Don’t Have to Apologise, which—when published in 1998—followed a print ’zine and a website of the same title. Although certainly in the minority in terms of numbers, these narratives have been very popular with readers and are growing as a sub-genre, with well-known actress Camryn Manheim’s New York Times-bestselling memoir, Wake Up, I'm Fat! (published in 1999) a good example. This memoir chronicles Manheim’s journey from the overweight and teased teenager who finds it a struggle to find friends (a common trope in many weight loss memoirs) to an extremely successful actress.Like most other types of memoir, there are also niche sub-genres of the “fat memoir.” Cheryl Peck’s Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs recounts a series of stories about her life in the American Midwest as a lesbian “woman of size” (xiv) and could thus be described as a memoir on the subjects of – and is, indeed, catalogued in the Library of Congress as: “Overweight women,” “Lesbians,” and “Three Rivers (Mich[igan]) – Social life and customs”.Carol Lay’s graphic memoir, The Big Skinny: How I Changed My Fattitude, has a simple diet message – she lost weight by counting calories and exercising every day – and makes a dual claim for value of being based on both her own story and a range of data and tools including: “the latest research on obesity […] psychological tips, nutrition basics, and many useful tools like simplified calorie charts, sample recipes, and menu plans” (qtd. in Lorah). The Big Skinny could, therefore, be characterised with the weight loss memoirs above as a self-help book, but Lay herself describes choosing the graphic form in order to increase its narrative power: to “wrap much of the information in stories […] combining illustrations and story for a double dose of retention in the brain” (qtd. in Lorah). Like many of these books that can fit into multiple categories, she notes that “booksellers don’t know where to file the book – in graphic novels, memoirs, or in the diet section” (qtd. in O’Shea).Jude Milner’s Fat Free: The Amazing All-True Adventures of Supersize Woman! is another example of how a single memoir (graphic, in this case) can be a hybrid of the categories herein discussed, indicating how difficult it is to neatly categorise human experience. Recounting the author’s numerous struggles with her weight and journey to self-acceptance, Milner at first feels guilty and undertakes a series of diets and regimes, before becoming a “Fat Is Beautiful” activist and, finally, undergoing gastric bypass surgery. Here the narrative trajectory is of empowerment rather than physical transformation, as a thinner (although, importantly, not thin) Milner “exudes confidence and radiates strength” (Story). ConclusionWhile the above has identified a number of ways of attempting to classify autobiographical writing about fat/s, its ultimate aim is, after G. Thomas Couser’s work in relation to other sub-genres of memoir, an attempt to open up life writing for further discussion, rather than set in placed fixed and inflexible categories. Constructing such a preliminary taxonomy aspires to encourage more nuanced discussion of how writers, publishers, critics and readers understand “fat” conceptually as well as more practically and personally. It also aims to support future work in identifying prominent and recurrent (or not) themes, motifs, tropes, and metaphors in memoir and autobiographical texts, and to contribute to the development of a more detailed set of descriptors for discussing and assessing popular autobiographical writing more generally.References Allan, Vicki. “Graphic Tale of Obesity Makes for Heavy Reading.” Sunday Herald 26 Jun. 2005. Alley, Kirstie. How to Lose Your Ass and Regain Your Life: Reluctant Confessions of a Big-Butted Star. Emmaus, PA: Rodale, 2005.Anderson, Fred. From Chunk to Hunk: Diary of a Fat Man. USA: Three Toes Publishing, 2009.Bhide, Monica. “Why You Should Eat Fat.” Salon 25 Sep. 2008.Bradley, Linda Arthur, Nancy Rudd, Andy Reilly, and Tim Freson. “A Review of Men’s Body Image Literature: What We Know, and Need to Know.” International Journal of Costume and Fashion 14.1 (2014): 29–45.Brien, Donna Lee. “Starving, Bingeing and Writing: Memoirs of Eating Disorder as Food Writing.” TEXT: Journal of Writers and Writing Courses Special Issue 18 (2013).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).Brooks, Peter. Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.Chester, Molly, and Sandy Schrecengost. Back to Butter: A Traditional Foods Cookbook – Nourishing Recipes Inspired by Our Ancestors. Vancouver: Fair Winds Press, 2014.Cooper, Charlotte. “Fat Studies: Mapping the Field.” Sociology Compass 4.12 (2010): 1020–34.Couser, G. Thomas. “Genre Matters: Form, Force, and Filiation.” Lifewriting 2.2 (2007): 139–56.Critser, Greg. Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World. New York: First Mariner Books, 2004. Daykin, Rosie. Butter Baked Goods: Nostalgic Recipes from a Little Neighborhood Bakery. New York: Random House, 2015.Delaney, Lisa. Secrets of a Former Fat Girl: How to Lose Two, Four (or More!) Dress Sizes – and Find Yourself along the Way. New York: Plume/Penguin, 2008.Drinkwater, Carol. The Olive Farm: A Memoir of Life, Love and Olive Oil in the South of France. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2001.Farrell, Amy Erdman. Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2011.Farrell-Kingsley, Kathy. The Home Creamery: Make Your Own Fresh Dairy Products; Easy Recipes for Butter, Yogurt, Sour Cream, Creme Fraiche, Cream Cheese, Ricotta, and More! North Adams, MA: Storey Publishing, 2008.Gerring, John. Case Study Research: Principles and Practices. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Gill, Jo. “Introduction.” Modern Confessional Writing: New Critical Essays, ed. Jo Gill. London: Routledge, 2006. 1–10.Gilman, Sander L. Fat Boys: A Slim Book. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2004.———. Fat: A Cultural History of Obesity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008.Grit Magazine Editors. Lard: The Lost Art of Cooking with Your Grandmother’s Secret Ingredient. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel, 2012.Gwynne, Joel. Erotic Memoirs and Postfeminism: The Politics of Pleasure. Houndsmills, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013.Halloran, Vivian Nun. “Biting Reality: Extreme Eating and the Fascination with the Gustatory Abject.” Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 4 (2004): 27–42.Hamilton, Gabrielle. Blood, Bones and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef. New York: Random House, 2013.Heart Foundation [Australia]. “To Avoid Trans Fat, Avoid Butter Says Heart Foundation: Media Release.” 27 Sep. 2010.Hill, Louella. Kitchen Creamery: Making Yogurt, Butter & Cheese at Home. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2015.Jordan, Pat. “Dysfunction for Dollars.” New York Times 28 July 2002.Joyne, Jennifer. Designated Fat Girl: A Memoir. Guilford, CT: Skirt!, 2010.Katzen, Mollie. The Moosewood Cookbook. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1974.Klein, Stephanie. Moose: A Memoir. New York: HarperCollins, 2008.Kuffel, Frances. Passing for Thin: Losing Half My Weight and Finding My Self. New York: Broadway, 2004. Lancaster, Jen. Such a Pretty Fat: One Narcissist’s Quest to Discover If Her Life Makes Her Ass Look Big, or Why Pie Is Not the Answer. New York: New American Library/Penguin, 2008.Lay, Carol. The Big Skinny: How I Changed My Fattitude. New York: Villard Books, 2008.Levy-Navarro, Elena. “I’m the New Me: Compelled Confession in Diet Discourse.” The Journal of Popular Culture 45.2 (2012): 340–56.Library of Congress. Catalogue record 200304857. Linder, Kathryn E. “The Fat Memoir as Autopathography: Self-Representations of Embodied Fatness.” Auto/biography Studies 26.2 (2011): 219–37.Linford, Jenny. The Creamery Kitchen. London: Ryland Peters & Small, 2014.Lorah, Michael C. “Carol Lay on The Big Skinny: How I Changed My Fattitude.” Newsarama 26 Dec. 2008. Lupton, Deborah. Fat. Milton Park, UK: Routledge, 2013.Manheim, Camryn. Wake Up, I’m Fat! New York: Broadway Books, 2000.Merriam, Sharan B. Qualitative Research: A Guide to Design and Implementation. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009.McBride, Gregg. Weightless: My Life as a Fat Man and How I Escaped. Las Vegas, NV: Central Recovery Press, 2014.McLagan, Jennifer. Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2008.Milner, Jude. Fat Free: The Amazing All-True Adventures of Supersize Woman! New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2006.Mitchell, Allyson. “Big Judy: Fatness, Shame, and the Hybrid Autobiography.” Embodied Politics in Visual Autobiography, eds. Sarah Brophy and Janice Hladki. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. 64–77.Moore, Judith. Fat Girl: A True Story. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005. Morris, Sophie. “Fat Is Back: Rediscover the Delights of Lard, Dripping and Suet.” The Independent 12 Mar. 2009. Multiple Sclerosis Society, New York. “Books for a Better Life Awards: 2007 Finalists.” Book Reporter 2006. Okada, Toshio. Sayonara Mr. Fatty: A Geek’s Diet Memoir. Trans. Mizuho Tiyishima. New York: Vertical Inc., 2009.O’Neill, Brendan. “Misery Lit … Read On.” BBC News 17 Apr. 2007. O’Shea, Tim. “Taking Comics with Tim: Carol Lay.” Robot 6 16 Feb. 2009. Peck, Cheryl. Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs. New York: Warner Books, 2004. Phillipov, M.M. “Mastering Obesity: MasterChef Australia and the Resistance to Public Health Nutrition.” Media, Culture and Society 35.4 (2013): 506–15.Rak, Julie. Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013.Rivenbark, Celia. You Don’t Sweat Much for a Fat Girl: Observations on Life from the Shallow End of the Pool. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2011.Rothblum, Esther, and Sondra Solovay, eds. The Fat Studies Reader. New York: New York University Press, 2009.Smith, Shaun. “Jennifer McLagan on her Controversial Cookbook, Fat.” CBC News 15. Sep. 2008. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.Stearns, Peter N. Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West. New York and London: New York University Press, 2002.Story, Carol Ann. “Book Review: ‘Fat Free: The Amazing All-True Adventures of Supersize Women’.” WLS Lifestyles 2007. Teller, Jean. “As American as Mom, Apple Pie & Grit.” Grit History Grit. c. 2006. Thelin, Emily Kaiser. “Aaron Wehner Transforms Ten Speed Press into Cookbook Leader.” SF Gate 7 Oct. 2014. Tomrley, Corianna, and Ann Kaloski Naylor. Fat Studies in the UK. York: Raw Nerve Books, 2009.Ugel, Edward. I’m with Fatty: Losing Fifty Pounds in Fifty Miserable Weeks. New York: Weinstein Books, 2010.Vaserfirer, Lucy. Flavored Butters: How to Make Them, Shape Them, and Use Them as Spreads, Toppings, and Sauces. Boston, MA: Harvard Common Press, 2013.Verschuren, Piet. “Case Study as a Research Strategy: Some Ambiguities and Opportunities.” International Journal of Social Research Methodology 6.2 (2003): 121–39.Wann, Marilyn. Fat!So?: Because You Don’t Have to Apologize for Your Size. Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press, 1998.———. Fat!So? n.d. Weitin, Thomas. “Testimony and the Rhetoric of Persuasion.” Modern Language Notes 119.3 (2004): 525–40.Zadoff, Allen. Lessons Learned on the Journey from Fat to Thin. Boston, MA: Da Capo Press, 2007.Zinsser, William, ed. Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998.

IntroductionIn this article, I set out to accomplish two tasks. The first is to map coffee and cafés in Mainland China in different historical periods. The second is to focus on coffee and cafés in the socio-cultural milieu of contemporary China in order to understand the symbolic value of the emerging coffee/café-scape. Cafés, rather than coffee, are at the centre of this current trend in contemporary Chinese cities. With instant coffee dominating as a drink, the Chinese have developed a cultural and social demand for cafés, but have not yet developed coffee palates. Historical Coffee Map In 1901, coffee was served in a restaurant in the city of Tianjin. This restaurant, named Kiessling, was run by a German chef, a former solider who came to China with the eight-nation alliance. At that time, coffee was reserved mostly for foreign politicians and military officials as well as wealthy businessmen—very few ordinary Chinese drank it. (For more history of Kiessling, including pictures and videos, see Kiessling). Another group of coffee consumers were from the cultural elites—the young revolutionary intellectuals and writers with overseas experience. It was almost a fashion among the literary elite to spend time in cafés. However, this was negatively judged as “Western” and “bourgeois.” For example, in 1932, Lu Xun, one of the most important twentieth century Chinese writers, commented on the café fashion during 1920s (133-36), and listed the reasons why he would not visit one. He did not drink coffee because it was “foreigners’ food”, and he was too busy writing for the kind of leisure enjoyed in cafés. Moreover, he did not, he wrote, have the nerve to go to a café, and particularly not the Revolutionary Café that was popular among cultural celebrities at that time. He claimed that the “paradise” of the café was for genius, and for handsome revolutionary writers (who he described as having red lips and white teeth, whereas his teeth were yellow). His final complaint was that even if he went to the Revolutionary Café, he would hesitate going in (Lu Xun 133-36). From Lu Xun’s list, we can recognise his nationalism and resistance to what were identified as Western foods and lifestyles. It is easy to also feel his dissatisfaction with those dilettante revolutionary intellectuals who spent time in cafés, talking and enjoying Western food, rather than working. In contrast to Lu Xun’s resistance to coffee and café culture, another well-known writer, Zhang Ailing, frequented cafés when she lived in Shanghai from the 1920s to 1950s. She wrote about the smell of cakes and bread sold in Kiessling’s branch store located right next to her parents’ house (Yuyue). Born into a wealthy family, exposed to Western culture and food at a very young age, Zhang Ailing liked to spend her social and writing time in cafés, ordering her favourite cakes, hot chocolate, and coffee. When she left Shanghai and immigrated to the USA, coffee was an important part of her writing life: the smell and taste reminding her of old friends and Shanghai (Chunzi). However, during Zhang’s time, it was still a privileged and elite practice to patronise a café when these were located in foreign settlements with foreign chefs, and served mainly foreigners, wealthy businessmen, and cultural celebrities. After 1949, when the Chinese Communist Party established the People’s Republic of China, until the late 1970s, there were no coffee shops in Mainland China. It was only when Deng Xiaoping suggested neo-liberalism as a so-called “reform-and-open-up” economic policy that foreign commerce and products were again seen in China. In 1988, ten years after the implementation of Deng Xiaoping’s policy, the Nestlé coffee company made the first inroads into the mainland market, featuring homegrown coffee beans in Yunnan province (China Beverage News; Dong; ITC). Nestlé’s bottled instant coffee found its way into the Chinese market, avoiding a direct challenge to the tea culture. Nestlé packaged its coffee to resemble health food products and marketed it as a holiday gift suitable for friends and relatives. As a symbol of modernity and “the West”, coffee-as-gift meshed with the traditional Chinese cultural custom that values gift giving. It also satisfied a collective desire for foreign products (and contact with foreign cultures) during the economic reform era. Even today, with its competitively low price, instant coffee dominates coffee consumption at home, in the workplace, and on Chinese airlines. While Nestlé aimed their product at native Chinese consumers, the multinational companies who later entered China’s coffee market, such as Sara Lee, mainly targeted international hotels such as IHG, Marriott, and Hyatt. The multinationals also favoured coffee shops like Kommune in Shanghai that offered more sophisticated kinds of coffee to foreign consumers and China’s upper class (Byers). If Nestlé introduced coffee to ordinary Chinese families, it was Starbucks who introduced the coffee-based “third space” to urban life in contemporary China on a signficant scale. Differing from the cafés before 1949, Starbucks stores are accessible to ordinary Chinese citizens. The first in Mainland China opened in Beijing’s China World Trade Center in January 1999, targeting mainly white-collar workers and foreigners. Starbucks coffee shops provide a space for informal business meetings, chatting with friends, and relaxing and, with its 500th store opened in 2011, dominate the field in China. Starbucks are located mainly in the central business districts and airports, and the company plans to have 1,500 sites by 2015 (Starbucks). Despite this massive presence, Starbucks constitutes only part of the café-scape in contemporary Chinese cities. There are two other kinds of cafés. One type is usually located in universities or residential areas and is frequented mainly by students or locals working in cultural professions. A representative of this kind is Sculpting in Time Café. In November 1997, two years before the opening of the first Starbucks in Beijing, two newlywed college graduates opened the first small Sculpting in Time Café near Beijing University’s East Gate. This has been expanded into a chain, and boasts 18 branches on the Mainland. (For more about its history, see Sculpting in Time Café). Interestingly, both Starbucks and Sculpting in Time Café acquired their names from literature, Starbucks from Moby Dick, and Sculpting in Time from the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s film diary of the same name. For Chinese students of literature and the arts, drinking coffee is less about acquiring more energy to accomplish their work, and more about entering a sensual world, where the aroma of coffee mixes with the sounds from the coffee machine and music, as well as the lighting of the space. More importantly, cafés with this ambience become, in themselves, cultural sites associated with literature, films, and music. Owners of this kind of café are often lovers of foreign literatures, films, and cultures, and their cafés host various cultural events, including forums, book clubs, movie screenings, and music clubs. Generally speaking, coffee served in this kind of café is simpler than in the kind discussed below. This third type of café includes those located in tourist and entertainment sites such as art districts, bar areas, and historical sites, and which are frequented by foreign and native tourists, artists and other cultural workers. If Starbucks cultivates a fast-paced business/professional atmosphere, and Sculpting in Time Cafés an artsy and literary atmosphere, this third kind of café is more like an upscale “bar” with trained baristas serving complicated coffees and emphasising their flavour. These coffee shops are more expensive than the other kinds, with an average price three times that of Starbucks. Currently, cafés of this type are found only in “first-tier” cities and usually located in art districts and tourist areas—such as Beijing’s 798 Art District and Nanluo Guxiang, Shanghai’s Tai Kang Road (a.k.a. “the art street”), and Hangzhou’s Westlake area. While Nestlé and Starbucks use coffee beans grown in Yunnan provinces, these “art cafés” are more inclined to use imported coffee beans from suppliers like Sara Lee. Coffee and Cafés in Contemporary China After just ten years, there are hundreds of cafés in Chinese cities. Why has there been such a demand for coffee or, more accurately, cafés, in such a short period of time? The first reason is the lack of “third space” environments in Mainland China. Before cafés appeared in the late 1990s, stores like KFC (which opened its first store in 1987) and McDonald’s (with its first store opened in 1990) filled this role for urban residents, providing locations where customers could experience Western food, meet friends, work, or read. In fact, KFC and McDonald’s were once very popular with college students looking for a place to study. Both stores had relatively clean food environments and good lighting. They also had air conditioning in the summer and heating in the winter, which are not provided in most Chinese university dormitories. However, since neither chain was set up to be a café and customers occupying seats for long periods while ordering minimal amounts of food or drink affected profits, staff members began to indirectly ask customers to leave after dining. At the same time, as more people were able to afford to eat at KFC and McDonald’s, their fast foods were also becoming more and more popular, especially among young people. As a consequence, both types of chain restaurant were becoming noisy and crowded and, thus, no longer ideal for reading, studying, or meeting with friends. Although tea has been a traditional drink in Chinese culture, traditional teahouses were expensive places more suitable for business meetings or for the cultural or intellectual elite. Since almost every family owns a tea set and can readily purchase tea, friends and family would usually make and consume tea at home. In recent years, however, new kinds of teahouses have emerged, similar in style to cafés, targeting the younger generation with more affordable prices and a wider range of choices, so the lack of a “third space” does not fully explain the café boom. Another factor affecting the popularity of cafés has been the development and uptake of Internet technology, including the increasing use of laptops and wireless Internet in recent years. The Internet has been available in China since the late 1990s, while computers and then laptops entered ordinary Chinese homes in the early twenty-first century. The IT industry has created not only a new field of research and production, but has also fostered new professions and demands. Particularly, in recent years in Mainland China, a new socially acceptable profession—freelancing in such areas as graphic design, photography, writing, film, music, and the fashion industry—has emerged. Most freelancers’ work is computer- and Internet-based. Cafés provide suitable working space, with wireless service, and the bonus of coffee that is, first of all, somatically stimulating. In addition, the emergence of the creative and cultural industries (which are supported by the Chinese government) has created work for these freelancers and, arguably, an increasing demand for café-based third spaces where such people can meet, talk and work. Furthermore, the flourishing of cafés in first-tier cities is part of the “aesthetic economy” (Lloyd 24) that caters to the making and selling of lifestyle experience. Alongside foreign restaurants, bars, galleries, and design firms, cafés contribute to city branding, and link a city to the global urban network. Cafés, like restaurants, galleries and bars, provide a space for the flow of global commodities, as well as for the human flow of tourists, travelling artists, freelancers, and cultural specialists. Finally, cafés provide a type of service that contributes to friendly owner/waiter-customer relations. During the planned-economy era, most stores and hotels in China were State-owned, staff salaries were not related to individual performance, and indifferent (and even unfriendly) service was common. During the economic reform era, privately owned stores and shops began to replace State-owned ones. At the same time, a large number of people from the countryside flowed into the cities seeking opportunities. Most had little if any professional training and so could only find work in factories or in the service industry. However, most café employees are urban, with better educational backgrounds, and many were already familiar with coffee culture. In addition, café owners, particularly those of places like Sculpting in Time Cafe, often invest in creating a positive, community atmosphere, learning about their customers and sharing personal experiences with their regular clients. This leads to my next point—the generation of the 1980s’ need for a social community. Cafés’ Symbolic Value—Community A demand for a sense of community among the generation of the 1980s is a unique socio-cultural phenomenon in China, which paradoxically co-exists with their desire for individualism. Mao Zedong started the “One Child Policy” in 1979 to slow the rapid population growth in China, and the generations born under this policy are often called “the lonely generations,” with both parents working full-time. At the same time, they are “the generation of me,” labelled as spoiled, self-centred, and obsessed with consumption (de Kloet; Liu; Rofel; Wang). The individuals of this generation, now aged in their 20s and 30s, constitute the primary consumers of coffee in China. Whereas individualism is an important value to them, a sense of community is also desirable in order to compensate for their lack of siblings. Furthermore, the 1980s’ generation has also benefitted from the university expansion policy implemented in 1999. Since then, China has witnessed a surge of university students and graduates who not only received scientific and other course-based knowledge, but also had a better chance to be exposed to foreign cultures through their books, music, and movies. With this interesting tension between individualism and collectivism, the atmosphere provided by cafés has fostered a series of curious temporary communities built on cultural and culinary taste. Interestingly, it has become an aspiration of many young college students and graduates to open a community-space style café in a city. One of the best examples is the new Henduoren’s (Many People’s) Café. This was a project initiated by Wen Erniu, a recent college graduate who wanted to open a café in Beijing but did not have sufficient funds to do so. She posted a message on the Internet, asking people to invest a minimum of US$316 to open a café with her. With 78 investors, the café opened in September 2011 in Beijing (see pictures of Henduoren’s Café). In an interview with the China Daily, Wen Erniu stated that, “To open a cafe was a dream of mine, but I could not afford it […] We thought opening a cafe might be many people’s dream […] and we could get together via the Internet to make it come true” (quoted in Liu 2011). Conclusion: Café Culture and (Instant) Coffee in China There is a Chinese saying that, if you hate someone—just persuade him or her to open a coffee shop. Since cafés provide spaces where one can spend a relatively long time for little financial outlay, owners have to increase prices to cover their expenses. This can result in fewer customers. In retaliation, cafés—particularly those with cultural and literary ambience—host cultural events to attract people, and/or they offer food and wine along with coffee. The high prices, however, remain. In fact, the average price of coffee in China is often higher than in Europe and North America. For example, a medium Starbucks’ caffè latte in China averaged around US$4.40 in 2010, according to the price list of a Starbucks outlet in Shanghai—and the prices has recently increased again (Xinhua 2012). This partially explains why instant coffee is still so popular in China. A bag of instant Nestlé coffee cost only some US$0.25 in a Beijing supermarket in 2010, and requires only hot water, which is accessible free almost everywhere in China, in any restaurant, office building, or household. As an habitual, addictive treat, however, coffee has not yet become a customary, let alone necessary, drink for most Chinese. Moreover, while many, especially those of the older generations, could discern the quality and varieties of tea, very few can judge the quality of the coffee served in cafés. As a result, few Mainland Chinese coffee consumers have a purely somatic demand for coffee—craving its smell or taste—and the highly sweetened and creamed instant coffee offered by companies like Nestlé or Maxwell has largely shaped the current Chinese palate for coffee. Ben Highmore has proposed that “food spaces (shops, restaurants and so on) can be seen, for some social agents, as a potential space where new ‘not-me’ worlds are encountered” (396) He continues to expand that “how these potential spaces are negotiated—the various affective registers of experience (joy, aggression, fear)—reflect the multicultural shapes of a culture (its racism, its openness, its acceptance of difference)” (396). Cafés in contemporary China provide spaces where one encounters and constructs new “not-me” worlds, and more importantly, new “with-me” worlds. While café-going communicates an appreciation and desire for new lifestyles and new selves, it can be hoped that in the near future, coffee will also be appreciated for its smell, taste, and other benefits. Of course, it is also necessary that future Chinese coffee consumers also recognise the rich and complex cultural, political, and social issues behind the coffee economy in the era of globalisation. References Byers, Paul [former Managing Director, Sara Lee’s Asia Pacific]. Pers. comm. Apr. 2012. China Beverage News. “Nestlé Acquires 70% Stake in Chinese Mineral Water Producer.” (2010). 31 Mar. 2012 ‹http://chinabevnews.wordpress.com/2010/02/21/nestle-acquires-70-stake-in-chinese-mineral-water-producer›. Chunzi. 张爱玲地图[The Map of Eileen Chang]. 汉语大词典出版 [Hanyu Dacidian Chubanshe], 2003. de Kloet, Jeroen. China with a Cut: Globalization, Urban Youth and Popular Music. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2010. Dong, Jonathan. “A Caffeinated Timeline: Developing Yunnan’s Coffee Cultivation.” China Brief (2011): 24-26. Highmore, Ben. “Alimentary Agents: Food, Cultural Theory and Multiculturalism.” Journal of Intercultural Studies, 29.4 (2008): 381-98. ITC (International Trade Center). The Coffee Sector in China: An Overview of Production, Trade And Consumption, 2010. Liu, Kang. Globalization and Cultural Trends in China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004. Liu, Zhihu. “From Virtual to Reality.” China Daily (Dec. 2011) 31 Mar. 2012 ‹http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/life/2011-12/26/content_14326490.htm›. Lloyd, Richard. Neobohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City. London: Routledge, 2006. Lu, Xun. “Geming Kafei Guan [Revolutionary Café]”. San Xian Ji. Taibei Shi: Feng Yun Shi Dai Chu Ban Gong Si: Fa Xing Suo Xue Wen Hua Gong Si, Mingguo 78 (1989): 133-36. Rofel, Lisa. Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2007: 1-30. “Starbucks Celebrates Its 500th Store Opening in Mainland China.” Starbucks Newsroom (Oct. 2011) 31 Mar. 2012. ‹http://news.starbucks.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=580›. Wang, Jing. High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng’s China. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: U of California P, 1996. Xinhua. “Starbucks Raises Coffee Prices in China Stores.” Xinhua News (Jan. 2012). 31 Mar. 2012 ‹http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2012-01/31/c_131384671.htm›. Yuyue. Ed. “On the History of the Western-Style Restaurants: Aileen Chang A Frequent Customer of Kiessling.” China.com.cn (2010). 31 Mar. 2012 ‹http://www.china.com.cn/culture/txt/2010-01/30/content_19334964.htm›.

Introduction It has frequently been noted that ICTs and social networking applications have blurred the once-clear boundary between work, leisure and entertainment, just as they have collapsed the distinction between public and private space. While each individual has a sense of what “home” means, both in terms of personal experience and more conceptually, the following three examples of online interaction (based on participants’ interest, or involvement, in activities traditionally associated with the home: pet care, craft and cooking) suggest that the utilisation of online communication technologies can lead to refined and extended definitions of what “home” is. These examples show how online communication can assist in meeting the basic human needs for love, companionship, shelter and food – needs traditionally supplied by the home environment. They also provide individuals with a considerably expanded range of opportunities for personal expression and emotional connection, as well as creative and commercial production, than that provided by the purely physical (and, no doubt, sometimes isolated and isolating) domestic environment. In this way, these case studies demonstrate the interplay and melding of physical and virtual “home” as domestic practices leach from the most private spaces of the physical home into the public space of the Internet (for discussion, see Gorman-Murray, Moss, and Rose). At the same time, online interaction can assert an influence on activity within the physical space of the home, through the sharing of advice about, and modeling of, domestic practices and processes. A Dog’s (Virtual) Life The first case study primarily explores the role of online communities in the formation and expression of affective values and personal identity – as traditionally happens in the domestic environment. Garber described the 1990s as “the decade of the dog” (20), citing a spate of “new anthropomorphic” (22) dog books, Internet “dog chat” sites, remakes of popular classics such as Lassie Come Home, dog friendly urban amenities, and the meteoric rise of services for pampered pets (28-9). Loving pets has become a lifestyle and culture, witnessed and commodified in Pet Superstores as well as in dog collectables and antiques boutiques, and in publications like The Bark (“the New Yorker of Dog Magazines”) and Clean Run, the international agility magazine, Website, online book store and information gateway for agility products and services. Available online resources for dog lovers have similarly increased rapidly during the decade since Garber’s book was published, with the virtual world now catering for serious hobby trainers, exhibitors and professionals as well as the home-based pet lover. At a recent survey, Yahoo Groups – a personal communication portal that facilitates social networking, in this case enabling users to set up electronic mailing lists and Internet forums – boasted just over 9,600 groups servicing dog fanciers and enthusiasts. The list Dogtalk is now an announcement only mailing list, but was a vigorous discussion forum until mid-2006. Members of Dogtalk were Australian-based “clicker-trainers”, serious hobbyist dog trainers, many of whom operated micro-businesses providing dog training or other pet-related services. They shared an online community, but could also engage in “flesh-meets” at seminars, conferences and competitive dog sport meets. An author of this paper (Rutherford) joined this group two years ago because of her interest in clicker training. Clicker training is based on an application of animal learning theory, particularly psychologist E. F. Skinner’s operant conditioning, so called because of the trademark use of a distinctive “click” sound to mark a desired behaviour that is then rewarded. Clicker trainers tend to dismiss anthropomorphic pack theory that positions the human animal as fundamentally opposed to non-human animals and, thus, foster a partnership (rather than a dominator) mode of social and learning relationships. Partnership and nurturance are common themes within the clicker community (as well as in more traditional “home” locations); as is recognising and valuing the specific otherness of other species. Typically, members regard their pets as affective equals or near-equals to the human animals that are recognised members of their kinship networks. A significant function of the episodic biographical narratives and responses posted to this list was thus to affirm and legitimate this intra-specific kinship as part of normative social relationship – a perspective that is not usually validated in the general population. One of the more interesting nexus that evolved within Dogtalk links the narrativisation of the pet in the domestic sphere with the pictorial genre of the family album. Emergent technologies, such as digital cameras together with Web-based image manipulation software and hosting (as provided by portals like Photobucket and Flickr ) democratise high quality image creation and facilitate the sharing of these images. Increasingly, the Dogtalk list linked to images uploaded to free online galleries, discussed digital image composition and aesthetics, and shared technical information about cameras and online image distribution. Much of this cultural production and circulation was concerned with digitally inscribing particular relationships with individual animals into cultural memory: a form of family group biography (for a discussion of the family photograph as a display of extended domestic space, see Rose). The other major non-training thread of the community involves the sharing and witnessing of the trauma suffered due to the illness and loss of pets. While mourning for human family members is supported in the off-line world – with social infrastructure, such as compassionate leave and/or bereavement counselling, part of professional entitlements – public mourning for pets is not similarly supported. Yet, both cultural studies (in its emphasis on cultural memory) and trauma theory have highlighted the importance of social witnessing, whereby traumatic memories must be narratively integrated into memory and legitimised by the presence of a witness in order to loosen their debilitating hold (Felman and Laub 57). Postings on the progress of a beloved animal’s illness or other misfortune and death were thus witnessed and affirmed by other Dogtalk list members – the sick or deceased pet becoming, in the process, a feature of community memory, not simply an individual loss. In terms of such biographical narratives, memory and history are not identical: “Any memories capable of being formed, retained or articulated by an individual are always a function of socially constituted forms, narratives and relations … Memory is always subject to active social manipulation and revision” (Halbwachs qtd. in Crewe 75). In this way, emergent technologies and social software provide sites, akin to that of physical homes, for family members to process individual memories into cultural memory. Dogzonline, the Australian Gateway site for purebred dog enthusiasts, has a forum entitled “Rainbow Bridge” devoted to textual and pictorial memorialisation of deceased pet dogs. Dogster hosts the For the Love of Dogs Weblog, in which images and tributes can be posted, and also provides links to other dog oriented Weblogs and Websites. An interesting combination of both therapeutic narrative and the commodification of affect is found in Lightning Strike Pet Loss Support which, while a memorial and support site, also provides links to the emerging profession of pet bereavement counselling and to suppliers of monuments and tributary urns for home or other use. loobylu and Narratives of Everyday Life The second case study focuses on online interactions between craft enthusiasts who are committed to the production of distinctive objects to decorate and provide comfort in the home, often using traditional methods. In the case of some popular craft Weblogs, online conversations about craft are interspersed with, or become secondary to, the narration of details of family life, the exploration of important life events or the recording of personal histories. As in the previous examples, the offering of advice and encouragement, and expressions of empathy and support, often characterise these interactions. The loobylu Weblog was launched in 2001 by illustrator and domestic crafts enthusiast Claire Robertson. Robertson is a toy maker and illustrator based in Melbourne, Australia, whose clients have included prominent publishing houses, magazines and the New York Public Library (Robertson “Recent Client List” online). She has achieved a measure of public recognition: her loobylu Weblog has won awards and been favourably commented upon in the Australian press (see Robertson “Press for loobylu” online). In 2005, an article in The Age placed Robertson in the context of a contemporary “craft revolution”, reporting her view that this “revolution” is in “reaction to mass consumerism” (Atkinson online). The hand-made craft objects featured in Robertson’s Weblogs certainly do suggest engagement with labour-intensive pursuits and the construction of unique objects that reject processes of mass production and consumption. In this context, loobylu is a vehicle for the display and promotion of Robertson’s work as an illustrator and as a craft practitioner. While skills-based, it also, however, promotes a family-centred lifestyle; it advocates the construction by hand of objects designed to enhance the appearance of the family home and the comfort of its inhabitants. Its specific subject matter extends to related aspects of home and family as, in addition to instructions, ideas and patterns for craft, the Weblog features information on commercially available products for home and family, recipes, child rearing advice and links to 27 other craft and other sites (including Nigella Lawson’s, discussed below). The primary member of its target community is clearly the traditional homemaker – the mother – as well as those who may aspire to this role. Robertson does not have the “celebrity” status of Lawson and Jamie Oliver (discussed below), nor has she achieved their market saturation. Indeed, Robertson’s online presence suggests a modest level of engagement that is placed firmly behind other commitments: in February 2007, she announced an indefinite suspension of her blog postings so that she could spend more time with her family (Robertson loobylu 17 February 2007). Yet, like Lawson and Oliver, Robertson has exploited forms of domestic competence traditionally associated with women and the home, and the non-traditional medium of the Internet has been central to her endeavours. The content of the loobylu blog is, unsurprisingly, embedded in, or an accessory to, a unifying running commentary on Robertson’s domestic life as a parent. Miles, who has described Weblogs as “distributed documentaries of the everyday” (66) sums this up neatly: “the weblogs’ governing discursive quality is the manner in which it is embodied within the life world of its author” (67). Landmark family events are narrated on loobylu and some attract deluges of responses: the 19 June 2006 posting announcing the birth of Robertson’s daughter Lily, for example, drew 478 responses; five days later, one describing the difficult circumstances of her birth drew 232 comments. All of these comments are pithy, with many being simple empathetic expressions or brief autobiographically based commentaries on these events. Robertson’s news of her temporary retirement from her blog elicited 176 comments that both supported her decision and also expressed a sense of loss. Frequent exclamation marks attest visually to the emotional intensity of the responses. By narrating aspects of major life events to which the target audience can relate, the postings represent a form of affective mass production and consumption: they are triggers for a collective outpouring of largely homogeneous emotional reaction (joy, in the case of Lily’s birth). As collections of texts, they can be read as auto/biographic records, arranged thematically, that operate at both the individual and the community levels. Readers of the family narratives and the affirming responses to them engage in a form of mass affirmation and consumerism of domestic experience that is easy, immediate, attractive and free of charge. These personal discourses blend fluidly with those of a commercial nature. Some three weeks after loobylu announced the birth of her daughter, Robertson shared on her Weblog news of her mastitis, Lily’s first smile and the family’s favourite television programs at the time, information that many of us would consider to be quite private details of family life. Three days later, she posted a photograph of a sleeping baby with a caption that skilfully (and negatively) links it to her daughter: “Firstly – I should mention that this is not a photo of Lily”. The accompanying text points out that it is a photo of a baby with the “Zaky Infant Sleeping Pillow” and provides a link to the online pregnancystore.com, from which it can be purchased. A quotation from the manufacturer describing the merits of the pillow follows. Robertson then makes a light-hearted comment on her experiences of baby-induced sleep-deprivation, and the possible consequences of possessing the pillow. Comments from readers also similarly alternate between the personal (sharing of experiences) to the commercial (comments on the product itself). One offshoot of loobylu suggests that the original community grew to an extent that it could support specialised groups within its boundaries. A Month of Softies began in November 2004, describing itself as “a group craft project which takes place every month” and an activity that “might give you a sense of community and kinship with other similar minded crafty types across the Internet and around the world” (Robertson A Month of Softies online). Robertson gave each month a particular theme, and readers were invited to upload a photograph of a craft object they had made that fitted the theme, with a caption. These were then included in the site’s gallery, in the order in which they were received. Added to the majority of captions was also a link to the site (often a business) of the creator of the object; another linking of the personal and the commercial in the home-based “cottage industry” sense. From July 2005, A Month of Softies operated through a Flickr site. Participants continued to submit photos of their craft objects (with captions), but also had access to a group photograph pool and public discussion board. This extension simulates (albeit in an entirely visual way) the often home-based physical meetings of craft enthusiasts that in contemporary Australia take the form of knitting, quilting, weaving or other groups. Chatting with, and about, Celebrity Chefs The previous studies have shown how the Internet has broken down many barriers between what could be understood as the separate spheres of emotional (that is, home-based private) and commercial (public) life. The online environment similarly enables the formation and development of fan communities by facilitating communication between those fans and, sometimes, between fans and the objects of their admiration. The term “fan” is used here in the broadest sense, referring to “a person with enduring involvement with some subject or object, often a celebrity, a sport, TV show, etc.” (Thorne and Bruner 52) rather than focusing on the more obsessive and, indeed, more “fanatical” aspects of such involvement, behaviour which is, increasingly understood as a subculture of more variously constituted fandoms (Jenson 9-29). Our specific interest in fandom in relation to this discussion is how, while marketers and consumer behaviourists study online fan communities for clues on how to more successfully market consumer goods and services to these groups (see, for example, Kozinets, “I Want to Believe” 470-5; “Utopian Enterprise” 67-88; Algesheimer et al. 19-34), fans regularly subvert the efforts of those urging consumer consumption to utilise even the most profit-driven Websites for non-commercial home-based and personal activities. While it is obvious that celebrities use the media to promote themselves, a number of contemporary celebrity chefs employ the media to construct and market widely recognisable personas based on their own, often domestically based, life stories. As examples, Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson’s printed books and mass periodical articles, television series and other performances across a range of media continuously draw on, elaborate upon, and ultimately construct their own lives as the major theme of these works. In this, these – as many other – celebrity chefs draw upon this revelation of their private lives to lend authenticity to their cooking, to the point where their work (whether cookbook, television show, advertisement or live chat room session with their fans) could be described as “memoir-illustrated-with-recipes” (Brien and Williamson). This generic tendency influences these celebrities’ communities, to the point where a number of Websites devoted to marketing celebrity chefs as product brands also enable their fans to share their own life stories with large readerships. Oliver and Lawson’s official Websites confirm the privileging of autobiographical and biographical information, but vary in tone and approach. Each is, for instance, deliberately gendered (see Hollows’ articles for a rich exploration of gender, Oliver and Lawson). Oliver’s hip, boyish, friendly, almost frantic site includes the what are purported-to-be self-revelatory “Diary” and “About me” sections, a selection of captioned photographs of the chef, his family, friends, co-workers and sponsors, and his Weblog as well as footage streamed “live from Jamie’s phone”. This self-revelation – which includes significant details about Oliver’s childhood and his domestic life with his “lovely girls, Jools [wife Juliette Norton], Poppy and Daisy” – completely blurs the line between private life and the “Jamie Oliver” brand. While such revelation has been normalised in contemporary culture, this practice stands in great contrast to that of renowned chefs and food writers such as Elizabeth David, Julia Child, James Beard and Margaret Fulton, whose work across various media has largely concentrated on food, cooking and writing about cooking. The difference here is because Oliver’s (supposedly private) life is the brand, used to sell “Jamie Oliver restaurant owner and chef”, “Jamie Oliver cookbook author and TV star”, “Jamie Oliver advertising spokesperson for Sainsbury’s supermarket” (from which he earns an estimated £1.2 million annually) (Meller online) and “Jamie Oliver social activist” (made MBE in 2003 after his first Fifteen restaurant initiative, Oliver was named “Most inspiring political figure” in the 2006 Channel 4 Political Awards for his intervention into the provision of nutritious British school lunches) (see biographies by Hildred and Ewbank, and Smith). Lawson’s site has a more refined, feminine appearance and layout and is more mature in presentation and tone, featuring updates on her (private and public) “News” and forthcoming public appearances, a glamorous selection of photographs of herself from the past 20 years, and a series of print and audio interviews. Although Lawson’s children have featured in some of her television programs and her personal misfortunes are well known and regularly commented upon by both herself and journalists (her mother, sister and husband died of cancer) discussions of these tragedies, and other widely known aspects of her private life such as her second marriage to advertising mogul Charles Saatchi, is not as overt as on Oliver’s site, and the user must delve to find it. The use of Lawson’s personal memoir, as sales tool, is thus both present and controlled. This is in keeping with Lawson’s professional experience prior to becoming the “domestic goddess” (Lawson 2000) as an Oxford graduated journalist on the Spectator and deputy literary editor of the Sunday Times. Both Lawson’s and Oliver’s Websites offer readers various ways to interact with them “personally”. Visitors to Oliver’s site can ask him questions and can access a frequently asked question area, while Lawson holds (once monthly, now irregularly) a question and answer forum. In contrast to this information about, and access to, Oliver and Lawson’s lives, neither of their Websites includes many recipes or other food and cooking focussed information – although there is detailed information profiling their significant number of bestselling cookbooks (Oliver has published 8 cookbooks since 1998, Lawson 5 since 1999), DVDs and videos of their television series and one-off programs, and their name branded product lines of domestic kitchenware (Oliver and Lawson) and foodstuffs (Oliver). Instruction on how to purchase these items is also featured. Both these sites, like Robertson’s, provide various online discussion fora, allowing members to comment upon these chefs’ lives and work, and also to connect with each other through posted texts and images. Oliver’s discussion forum section notes “this is the place for you all to chat to each other, exchange recipe ideas and maybe even help each other out with any problems you might have in the kitchen area”. Lawson’s front page listing states: “You will also find a moderated discussion forum, called Your Page, where our registered members can swap ideas and interact with each other”. The community participants around these celebrity chefs can be, as is the case with loobylu, divided into two groups. The first is “foodie (in Robertson’s case, craft) fans” who appear to largely engage with these Websites to gain, and to share, food, cooking and craft-related information. Such fans on Oliver and Lawson’s discussion lists most frequently discuss these chefs’ television programs and books and the recipes presented therein. They test recipes at home and discuss the results achieved, any problems encountered and possible changes. They also post queries and share information about other recipes, ingredients, utensils, techniques, menus and a wide range of food and cookery-related matters. The second group consists of “celebrity fans” who are attracted to the chefs (as to Robertson as craft maker) as personalities. These fans seek and share biographical information about Oliver and Lawson, their activities and their families. These two areas of fan interest (food/cooking/craft and the personal) are not necessarily or always separated, and individuals can be active members of both types of fandoms. Less foodie-orientated users, however (like users of Dogtalk and loobylu), also frequently post their own auto/biographical narratives to these lists. These narratives, albeit often fragmented, may begin with recipes and cooking queries or issues, but veer off into personal stories that possess only minimal or no relationship to culinary matters. These members also return to the boards to discuss their own revealed life stories with others who have commented on these narratives. Although research into this aspect is in its early stages, it appears that the amount of public personal revelation either encouraged, or allowed, is in direct proportion to the “open” friendliness of these sites. More thus are located in Oliver’s and less in Lawson’s, and – as a kind of “control” in this case study, but not otherwise discussed – none in that of Australian chef Neil Perry, whose coolly sophisticated Website perfectly complements Perry’s professional persona as the epitome of the refined, sophisticated and, importantly in this case, unapproachable, high-end restaurant chef. Moreover, non-cuisine related postings are made despite clear directions to the contrary – Lawson’s site stating: “We ask that postings are restricted to topics relating to food, cooking, the kitchen and, of course, Nigella!” and Oliver making the plea, noted above, for participants to keep their discussions “in the kitchen area”. Of course, all such contemporary celebrity chefs are supported by teams of media specialists who selectively construct the lives that these celebrities share with the public and the postings about others’ lives that are allowed to remain on their discussion lists. The intersection of the findings reported above with the earlier case studies suggests, however, that even these most commercially-oriented sites can provide a fruitful data regarding their function as home-like spaces where domestic practices and processes can be refined, and emotional relationships formed and fostered. In Summary As convergence results in what Turow and Kavanaugh call “the wired homestead”, our case studies show that physically home-based domestic interests and practices – what could be called “home truths” – are also contributing to a refiguration of the private/public interplay of domestic activities through online dialogue. In the case of Dogtalk, domestic space is reconstituted through virtual spaces to include new definitions of family and memory. In the case of loobylu, the virtual interaction facilitates a development of craft-based domestic practices within the physical space of the home, thus transforming domestic routines. Jamie Oliver’s and Nigella Lawson’s sites facilitate development of both skills and gendered identities by means of a bi-directional nexus between domestic practices, sites of home labour/identity production and public media spaces. As participants modify and redefine these online communities to best suit their own needs and desires, even if this is contrary to the stated purposes for which the community was instituted, online communities can be seen to be domesticated, but, equally, these modifications demonstrate that the activities and relationships that have traditionally defined the home are not limited to the physical space of the house. While virtual communities are “passage points for collections of common beliefs and practices that united people who were physically separated” (Stone qtd in Jones 19), these interactions can lead to shared beliefs, for example, through advice about pet-keeping, craft and cooking, that can significantly modify practices and routines in the physical home. Acknowledgments An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Association of Internet Researchers’ International Conference, Brisbane, 27-30 September 2006. The authors would like to thank the referees of this article for their comments and input. Any errors are, of course, our own. References Algesheimer, R., U. Dholake, and A. Herrmann. “The Social Influence of Brand Community: Evidence from European Car Clubs”. Journal of Marketing 69 (2005): 19-34. Atkinson, Frances. “A New World of Craft”. The Age (11 July 2005). 28 May 2007 http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/07/10/1120934123262.html>. Brien, Donna Lee, and Rosemary Williamson. “‘Angels of the Home’ in Cyberspace: New Technologies and Biographies of Domestic Production”. Paper. Biography and New Technologies conference. Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT. 12-14 Sep. 2006. Crewe, Jonathan. “Recalling Adamastor: Literature as Cultural Memory in ‘White’ South Africa”. In Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, eds. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College, 1999. 75-86. Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge, 1992. Garber, Marjorie. Dog Love. New York: Touchstone/Simon and Schuster, 1996. Gorman-Murray, Andrew. “Homeboys: Uses of Home by Gay Australian Men”. Social and Cultural Geography 7.1 (2006): 53-69. Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Trans. Lewis A. Closer. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992. Hildred, Stafford, and Tim Ewbank. Jamie Oliver: The Biography. London: Blake, 2001. Hollows, Joanne. “Feeling like a Domestic Goddess: Post-Feminism and Cooking.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 6.2 (2003): 179-202. ———. “Oliver’s Twist: Leisure, Labour and Domestic Masculinity in The Naked Chef.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 6.2 (2003): 229-248. Jenson, J. “Fandom as Pathology: The Consequences of Characterization”. The Adoring Audience; Fan Culture and Popular Media. Ed. L. A. Lewis. New York, NY: Routledge, 1992. 9-29. Jones, Steven G., ed. Cybersociety, Computer-Mediated Communication and Community. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995. Kozinets, R.V. “‘I Want to Believe’: A Netnography of the X’Philes’ Subculture of Consumption”. Advances in Consumer Research 34 (1997): 470-5. ———. “Utopian Enterprise: Articulating the Meanings of Star Trek’s Culture of Consumption.” Journal of Consumer Research 28 (2001): 67-88. Lawson, Nigella. How to Be a Domestic Goddess: Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking. London: Chatto and Windus, 2000. Meller, Henry. “Jamie’s Tips Spark Asparagus Shortages”. Daily Mail (17 June 2005). 21 Aug. 2007 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/health/dietfitness.html? in_article_id=352584&in_page_id=1798>. Miles, Adrian. “Weblogs: Distributed Documentaries of the Everyday.” Metro 143: 66-70. Moss, Pamela. “Negotiating Space in Home Environments: Older Women Living with Arthritis.” Social Science and Medicine 45.1 (1997): 23-33. Robertson, Claire. Claire Robertson Illustration. 2000-2004. 28 May 2007 . Robertson, Claire. loobylu. 16 Feb. 2007. 28 May 2007 http://www.loobylu.com>. Robertson, Claire. “Press for loobylu.” Claire Robertson Illustration. 2000-2004. 28 May 2007 http://www.clairetown.com/press.html>. Robertson, Claire. A Month of Softies. 28 May 2007. 21 Aug. 2007 . Robertson, Claire. “Recent Client List”. Claire Robertson Illustration. 2000-2004. 28 May 2007 http://www.clairetown.com/clients.html>. Rose, Gillian. “Family Photographs and Domestic Spacings: A Case Study.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 28.1 (2003): 5-18. Smith, Gilly. Jamie Oliver: Turning Up the Heat. Sydney: Macmillian, 2006. Thorne, Scott, and Gordon C. Bruner. “An Exploratory Investigation of the Characteristics of Consumer Fanaticism.” Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal 9.1 (2006): 51-72. Turow, Joseph, and Andrea Kavanaugh, eds. The Wired Homestead: An MIT Press Sourcebook on the Internet and the Family. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Citation reference for this article MLA Style 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). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/10-brien.php>. APA Style Brien, D., L. Rutherford, and R. Williamson. (Aug. 2007) "Hearth and Hotmail: The Domestic Sphere as Commodity and Community in Cyberspace," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/10-brien.php>.