Добірка наукової літератури з теми "The anti-pornography bill"

After the fall of the New Order in 1998, the Ulama Council of Indonesia (MUI) has been in the limelight for many of its controversial and conservative fatwa (legal opinions). Formed in 1975 by President Suharto, MUI was intended to serve as an institution to manage and discipline dissent, challenges and defiance by grassroots organisations. However, recent writings point to its changing character: Its fatwas are becoming more conservative; it is more assertive and powerful; and its fatwas, particularly the 2005 SIPILIS (anti-secularism, pluralism and liberalism), are deemed as contributing to violence towards minorities. This article reassess the scholarly conclusions and media reports made about the relationship between MUI, the Indonesian state and society. Examining MUI’s attempt to define public morality as a case study, particularly its role in the 2008 pornography bill and efforts to “moralise” entertainment, the article argues that MUI is internally fragmented and weak.

In recent years, the Ugandan government has proposed a number of laws that attempt to control the sexual conduct of the Ugandan population. The much-debated Anti-Homosexuality Bill, signed by Museveni in February 2014 but overturned on constitutional grounds in August 2014, is only the most well-known. Further examples include legal measures related to HIV/AIDS, defilement, prostitution, and pornography. This article analyzes why and in which contexts these laws and recent public debates on sexuality have emerged and what consequences they entail. I argue that they must be seen in relation to ongoing power struggles at the local and national level – between men and women, youth and elders, state, and citizens. Based on discourse analysis and drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I show how both state and non-state actors exploit popular concerns about recent processes of social change and instrumentalize ‘sexuality’ to extend their control and reinforce a normative order based on patriarchal values.

In 2008 vehement debates about the freedom of expression divided Indonesia, after the government resubmitted a bill for Anti-Pornography to Parliament. The various sides employed all kinds of arguments and perspectives, the main ones being religious versus human rights and pluralism. The main problem of the new law is its vague and very broad definition of pornography, which could threaten women’s rights, cultural expression and press freedom. In the context of democratization in Indonesia post Soeharto, freedom of expression has been progressively promoted, particularly by the adoption of a Constitutional guarantee for freedom of expression. Nevertheless, the constitutionality of freedom of expression still needs to be comprehensively re-explored in order to advance human rights and democracy development.Key words: Anti-Pornography, Freedom of Expression, Human Rights

Showtime’s reality TV series Family Business opens with a black screen and audio: the whirring of a 16mm projector, the home movies of a generation ago. The sound connotes nostalgia, memory, family, and film. In my childhood, the sound of the projector meant family time, a glance back at our toddler years, the years of Sunday dinners in the suburbs, when my mother and all my aunts still smoked. Later, as my sister and cousins whose childhoods are fixed in that celluloid began to date and marry, family movies were a means of introducing the soon-to-be-married other into the family; this was how we told our history. This kind of telling is one side of Family Business. The other, as Adam Glasser reports in his voiceover in the opening credits is “just one more thing. My business is entertaining adults.” Glasser, producer, director and occasional actor, is known in the adult entertainment industry as Seymore Butts, alluding to his particular personal and professional interest in anal sex. He self-describes, in the opening credits of Family Business, as “a pretty average guy,” a single father who runs his business with help from his mother and cousin. Viewers glance over Glasser’s shoulder into his everyday life as he cooks breakfast for his son, dates women in his ongoing search for a lasting relationship, and goes about the business of producing pornography. Family Business uniquely combines two genres that trouble perceptions of reality mediated through television, pornography and reality TV. Reality television troubles the real by effectively blurring the lines between the actual and the contrived. With the genre of reality TV now firmly in place, viewers take pleasure in reading between those lines, trying to determine what aspects of the characters, contexts and events of a television program are “authentic”. Searching for the real demands the viewer suspend disbelief, conveniently forgetting the power of the camera’s presence. Scripted or not, the camera is always played to, suppressing the “real” in favor of performance. Like reality TV, pornography blurs the line between reality and fantasy. As Elizabeth Bell points out, the difference between soft-core pornography and hard-core pornography is the difference between simulated and real sex. Hard-core porn depends on “an ironic tension between ‘real’ sexual acts within ‘faked’ sexual contexts” (181), troubling the viewer’s sense of whether such performances could “really” take place. The lingering disbelief sets porn apart from one’s personal sex life, just as questioning the authentic in reality TV keeps it from being “real.” Reality TV plays on a tension similar to Bell’s description of hard-core pornography. Manufactured contexts succinctly expose the personalities of the actors/ordinary people who are featured on reality TV programs. As a result, the audience can gain familiarity with these individuals in a neat thirty or sixty minute time slot. Inherent in any TV series is the notion that the audience forms opinions about and alliances for or against certain characters, stepping into their lives, mediated as they are, each week. Kenneth Gergen notes that “so powerful are the media in their well-wrought portrayals that their realities become more compelling than those furnished by common experience” (57). By conflating pornography with the everyday lives of its actors and directors, Family Business works to naturalize pornography by displaying it as real. When viewers are constantly sorting between the scripted and the spontaneous, where do they locate the real on Family Business? In a mediated world, the search for the real is always already fruitless: viewers and producers of reality TV recognize that the chasm between lived experience and the depiction of lived experience on television and film can’t be crossed. Reality TV and pornography both work to bring the mediated image closer to the experience of the viewer, placing “people just like you” in everyday situations that brush up against the outrageous. Laura Kipnis argues that pornography does not reflect reality but is “mythological and hyperbolic, peopled by fictional characters. It doesn’t and never will exist.” While pornography does not try to claim itself as real, Kipnis says, it does “insist on a sanctioned space for fantasy.” Acknowledging that space, and declaring that “normal” people engage the fantasy of porn, is important cultural work for Glasser. An episode of Family Business features Glasser giving a class on ways to please your partner using methods he learned in the industry. He speaks in interviews about letters he has received, proclaiming that the Seymore Butts films have enhanced couples’ sex lives. Family Business is not only important cultural work for Glasser; it is also important professional work. Naturalizing pornography, and giving viewers a glimpse of Seymore Butts films, certainly helps his product sales. Seeing Family Business as part of the mainstreaming of pornography, Glasser says “it’s the natural course of things” for pornography to be increasingly accepted. “Sex is just so much a part of mainstream people’s lives. So it’s natural that they would be curious about sex and people who have sex for a living” (Brioux). Adam Glasser “is” Seymore Butts, or is he? Viewers are exposed to a character-within-a-character: Glasser as father, son, and entrepreneur is difficult to separate from Glasser as Butts—adult entertainment producer and actor, porn celebrity. Glasser does not appear to distinguish between these identities, but is presented as one person seamlessly performing the everyday roles of his chosen life. He is a role model for the normalizing and mainstreaming of pornography. Family Business aspires to naturalize the integration of pornography into everyday life, naturalizing the adult entertainment industry, its producers and ultimately, its consumers. Viewers see Glasser as a fun-loving, single dad who plays baseball with his son. We look on as his Cousin Stevie, nearing 60 years old, goes to the doctor for a prostate exam (which the audience voyeuristically enjoys, is repelled by, and is compelled by to tend to health concerns). That Glasser and Cousin Stevie are also producers and distributors of adult entertainment enables the viewer to naturalize her/his own consumption of pornography. Fans posting on Showtime’s Family Business message board question whether the show authentically depicts the “real” lives of its characters, with discussions about what scenes are staged and scripted. Media consumption is seldom a passive practice, and one of the pleasures of reality TV is the audience’s resistance to what is presented as “real.” While the everyday lives of the characters are hotly debated on the message board, there is little discussion of pornography, beyond assertions of support for and the rare protest against adult entertainment on cable television. The Seymore Butts movies are rarely mentioned. What Family Business gives viewers access to is a soft-porn version of the staging of Seymore Butts films, as much as censors allow for MA cable programming. According to Bell, “all theoretical treatments of hard-core pornography…begin with the declaration that the performers are engaged in real sexual activity” (183). Glasser categorizes his porn as hard-core, but should fans believe it is authentically real, not just real sex acts but also a reflection of real life? He claims that it is: “My adult movies that I’ve made for the last 12 years have been what you would call reality based,” Glasser says. “They’re basically a documentation of my life, my relationships, good and bad.” (Haffenreffer). Glasser’s documentary of his life and relationships, however, is mediated through the lens of his camera and work in the editing room, presented in such a way to be compelling to its audience. Whether there is something intrinsically real in the Seymore Butts films, the contexts of the films are certainly contrived. Viewers of Family Business see Glasser describe fantasy scenarios to the actors preparing for a scene. While the situations are more mundane than fantastic, the implausibility of a group of people spontaneously having sex while waiting for friends to come back from lunch, for example, places Glasser’s pornography in a liminal space between fantasy and the real. What renders these films different from other pornography and makes them somewhat more believable is precisely the mundane scenarios in which they occur. The conflation of pornography and the everyday is reinforced spatially on Family Business: viewers see Glasser shoot a porn film in his living room, where sexual acts are performed on the same sofa where, in another scene, Glasser’s mother Lila plays with his son, Brady. After a comment about this was posted on the show’s message board, Flower, one of Glasser’s “Tushy Girls” posted a response: “But in defence [sic] of Semyore, He has his furniture steam cleaned after every shoot. Have you ever heard of kids laying or sitting on their parents [sic] bed? Don’t parents have sex too? I’m sure plenty of kids have sat where people have had sex before. So I don’t find it strange.” What Flower asks of message board readers is the normalization of pornography, a blending of porn and private sex acts into the same category. Family Business works to eradicate the perceptions of pornography that Kipnis describes as “all the nervous stereotypes of pimply teenagers, furtive perverts in raincoats, and anti-social compulsively masturbating misfits.” Pornography is not situated in the world of the outcast, Kipnis argues. Rather, it is “central to our culture,” simultaneously revealing our mostly deeply felt desires and fears. The series functions to relieve its viewers of the sense of guilty indiscretion. It typically airs on Friday nights at 11:00 p.m., the opening of Mature Adult-rated programming on cable television. Family Business is not only pornography, it also presents itself as a family sitcom. The show provides a neat segue from prime-time programming to after-hours, commingling the two genres for viewers to seamlessly make that shift themselves. Week after week, viewers of Family Business find the conflation of pornography and everyday life more acceptable. In sharp contrast to the sordid, sad life stories of Linda Lovelace, the Mitchell brothers and organized crime that are stitched into the history of pornography, Adam Glasser is presented as a respectable public figure, a free speech activist with a solid moral foundation. The morality or immorality of adult entertainment is not questioned here: inherent in Family Business is the idea that “they” have rendered sexual expression immoral where “we” (the characters in the series and the viewers at home) are accepting of, and even committed to, the pleasures of sex. As presented on Family Business, Glasser’s lifestyle is rather morally sound. There is no drug use, not even cigarette smoking, and although a pack of Merits appears occasionally in the pocket of Cousin Stevie’s stylish shirt, he does not smoke on camera. Safe sex is a priority, and the actors are presented as celebrating and enjoying their sexuality. The viewer is encouraged to do the same. The everyday behavior of the cast of Family Business is far from extraordinary, as Glasser takes pains to point out. Comparing Family Business to The Osbournes, he says “they are outrageous people in a normal world, and we’re normal people in an outrageous world” (Hooper). We’ve come to tolerate the Osbournes, perhaps even pitying them at times as if they have no control over their own outrageousness. Can viewers accept the outrageous in Family Business? Certainly the mundane lives of Adam and Lila—a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn and his dear, doting mom—indicate that normal people can accept the outrageous world of pornography, so why should we not accept it as well? Tolerating Family Business is, essentially, tolerating pornography. Bringing the backstage of the adult entertainment industry into the frontstage of cable television programming marks a desire to shift the uses of pornography. Rather than being an underground outlet for sexual deviance, Family Business works to make porn a reflection of our everyday personal and sexual lives. Kipnis notes there is “virtually no discussion of pornography as an expressive medium in the positive sense—the only expressing it’s presumed to do is of misogyny or social decay.” Viewers can openly chat about Family Business and the glimpse it offers into the world of pornography, without the shame or embarrassment that would run alongside a discussion of porn itself. When sexual pleasure enters the public discourse through mainstream entertainment, there is power for those who fight against conservative voices wishing to suppress not just pornography but also sexual pleasure. References Bell, Elizabeth. “Weddings and Pornography: The Cultural Performance of Sex.” Text and Performance Quarterly 19 (1999): 173-195. Brioux, Bill. “A Family Affair: New Show Takes a Peek Behind Adam Glasser’s Porn Business.” The Toronto Sun. 3 October 2003, final ed.: E11. Gergen, Kenneth J. The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Haffenreffer, David. “Reality Imitates Art: When the ‘Family Business’ is in the Sex Industry.” CNN.com. 13 January 2004. Hooper, Barrett. “‘Normal people in an outrageous world’: Adam Glasser, star of the reality TV show Family Business, is just a regular guy who also happens to be a porn producer.” National Post. 5 December 2003: B4. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/porn/special/eloquence.html MLA Style Levitt, Linda. "Searching for the Real: “Family Business,” Pornography, and Reality Television." M/C Journal 7.4 (2004). 10 October 2004 <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0410/04_searching.php> APA Style Levitt, L. (2004 Oct 11). Searching for the Real: “Family Business,” Pornography, and Reality Television, M/C Journal 7(4). Retrieved Oct 10 2004 from <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0410/04_searching.php>

On Wednesday 21 April the Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts introduced a piece of legislation into the Australian Senate to regulate the way Australians use the Internet. This legislation is presented within Australia's existing system of content regulation, a scheme that the Minister describes is not censorship, but merely regulation (Alston 55). Underlying Senator Alston's rhetoric about the protection of children from snuff film makers, paedophiles, drug pushers and other criminals, this long anticipated bill is aimed at reducing the amount of pornographic materials available via computer networks, a censorship regime in an age when regulation and classification are the words we prefer to use when society draws the line under material we want to see, but dare not allow ourselves access to. Regardless of any noble aspirations expressed by free-speech organisations such as Electronic Frontiers Australia relating to the defence of personal liberty and freedom of expression, this legislation is about porn. Under the Bill, Australia would proscribe our citizens from accessing: explicit depictions of sexual acts between consenting adults; mild non-violent fetishes; depictions of sexual violence, coercion or non-consent of any kind; depictions of child sexual abuse, bestiality, sexual acts accompanied by offensive fetishes, or exploitative incest fantasies; unduly detailed and/or relished acts of extreme violence or cruelty; explicit or unjustifiable depictions of sexual violence against non-consenting persons; and detailed instruction or encouragement in matters of crime or violence or the abuse of proscribed drugs. (OFLC) The Australian public, as a whole, favour the availability of sexually explicit materials in some form, with OFLC data indicating a relatively high degree of public support for X rated videos, the "high end" of the porn market (Paterson et al.). In Australia strict regulation of X rated materials in conventional media has resulted in a larger illegal market for these materials than the legalised sex industries of the ACT and Northern Territory (while 1.2 million X rated videos are legally sold out of the territories, 2 million are sold illegally in other jurisdictions, according to Patten). In Australia, censorship of media content has traditionally been based on the principles of the protection of society from moral harm and individual degradation, with specific emphasis on the protection of innocents from material they are not old enough for, or mentally capable of dealing with (Joint Select Committee on Video Material). Even when governments distanced themselves from direct personal censorship (such as Don Chipp's approach to the censorship of films and books in the late 1960s and early 1970s) and shifted the rationale behind censorship from prohibition to classification, the publicly stated aims of these decisions have been the support of existing community standards, rather than the imposition of strict legalistic moral values upon an unwilling society. In the debates surrounding censorship, and especially the level of censorship applied (rather than censorship as a whole), the question "what is the community we are talking about here?" has been a recurring theme. The standards that are applied to the regulation of media content, both online and off, are often the focus of community debate (a pluralistic community that obviously lacks "standards" by definition of the word). In essence the problem of maintaining a single set of moral and ethical values for the treatment of media content is a true political dilemma: a problem that lacks any form of solution acceptable to all participants. Since the introduction of the Internet as a "mass" medium (or more appropriately, a "popular" one), government indecision about how best to treat this new technology has precluded any form or content regulation other than the ad hoc use of existing non-technologically specific law to deal with areas of criminal or legally sanctionable intent (such as the use of copyright law, or the powers under the Crimes Act relating to the improper use of telecommunications services). However, indecision in political life is often associated with political weakness, and in the face of pressure to act decisively (motivated again by "community concern"), the Federal government has decided to extend the role of the Australian Broadcasting Authority to regulate and impose a censorship regime on Australian access of morally harmful materials. It is important to note the government's intention to censor access, rather than content of the Internet. While material hosted in Australia (ignoring, of course, the "cyberspace" definitions of non-territorial existence of information stored in networks) will be censored (removed from Australia computers), the government, lacking extraterritorial powers to compel the owners of machines located offshore, intends to introduce of some form of refused access list to materials located in other nations. What is interesting to consider in this context is the way that slight shifts of definitional paradigm alter the way this legislation can be considered. If information flows (upon which late capitalism is becoming more dependent) were to be located within the context of international law governing the flow of waterways, does the decision to prevent travel of morally dubious material through Australia's informational waterways impinge upon the riparian rights of other nations (the doctrine of fair usage without impeding flow; Godana 50)? Similarly, if we take Smith's extended definition of community within electronic transactional spaces (the maintenance of members' commitment to the group, monitoring and sanctioning behaviour and the production and distribution of resources), then the current Bill proposes the regulation of the activities of one community by another (granted, a larger community that incorporates the former). Seen in this context, this legislation is the direct intervention in an established social order by a larger and less homogeneous group. It may be trite to quote the Prime Minister's view of community in this context, where he states ...It is free individuals, strong communities and the rule of law which are the best defence against the intrusive power of the state and against those who think they know what is best for everyone else. (Howard 21) possibly because the paradigm in which this new legislation is situated does not classify those Australians online (who number up to 3 million) as a community in their own right. In a way the Internet users of Australia have never identified themselves as a community, nor been asked to act in a communitarian manner. While discussions about the value of community models when applied to the Internet are still divided, there are those who argue that their use of networked services can be seen in this light (Worthington). What this new legislation does, however, is preclude the establishment of public communities in order to meet the desires of government for some limits to be placed on Internet content. The Bill does allow for the development of "restricted access systems" that would allow pluralistic communities to develop and engage in a limited amount of self-regulation. These systems include privately accessible Intranets, or sites that restrict access through passwords or some other form of age verification technique. Thus, ignoring the minimum standards that will be required for these communities to qualify for some measure of self-regulatory freedom, what is unspoken here is that specific subsections of the Internet population may exist, provided they keep well away from the public gaze. A ghetto without physical walls. Under the Bill, a co-regulatory approach is endorsed by the government, favouring the establishment of industry codes of practice by ISPs and (or) the establishment of a single code of practice by the content hosting industry (content developers are relegated to yet undetermined complementary state legislation). However, this section of the Bill, in mandating a range of minimum requirements for these codes of practice, and denying plurality to the content providers, places an administrative imperative above any communitarian spirit. That is, that the Internet should have no more than one community, it should be an entity bound by a single guiding set of principles and be therefore easier to administer by Australian censors. This administrative imperative re-encapsulates the dilemma faced by governments dealing with the Internet: that at heart, the broadcast and print press paradigms of existing censorship regimes face massive administrative problems when presented with a communications technology that allows for wholesale publication of materials by individuals. Whereas the limited numbers of broadcasters and publishers have allowed the development of Australia's system of classification of materials (on a sliding scale from G to RC classifications or the equivalent print press version), the new legislation introduced into the Senate uses the classification scheme simply as a censorship mechanism: Internet content is either "ok" or "not ok". From a public administration perspective, this allows government to drastically reduce the amount of work required by regulators and eases the burden of compliance costs by ISPs, by directing clear and unambiguous statements about the acceptability of existing materials placed online. However, as we have seen in other areas of social policy (such as the rationalisation of Social Security services or Health), administrative expedience is often antipathetic to small communities that have special needs, or cultural sensitivities outside of mainstream society. While it is not appropriate to argue that public administration creates negative social impacts through expedience, what can be presented is that, where expedience is a core aim of legislation, poor administration may result. For many Australian purveyors of pornography, my comments will be entirely unhelpful as they endeavour to find effective ways to spoof offshore hosts or bone up (no pun intended) on tunnelling techniques. Given the easy way in which material can be reconstituted and relocated on the Internet, it seems likely that some form of regulatory avoidance will occur by users determined not to have their content removed or blocked. For those regulators given the unenviable task of censoring Internet access it may be worthwhile quoting from Sexing the Cherry, in which Jeanette Winterson describes the town: whose inhabitants are so cunning that to escape the insistence of creditors they knock down their houses in a single night and rebuild them elsewhere. So the number of buildings in the city is always constant but they are never in the same place from one day to the next. (43) Thus, while Winterson saw this game as a "most fulfilling pastime", it is likely to present real administrative headaches to ABA regulators when attempting to enforce the Bill's anti-avoidance clauses. The Australian government, in adapting existing regulatory paradigms to the Internet, has overlooked the informal communities who live, work and play within the virtual world of cyberspace. In attempting to meet a perceived social need for regulation with political and administrative expedience, it has ignored the potentially cohesive role of government in developing self-regulating communities who need little government intervention to produce socially beneficial outcomes. In proscribing activity externally to the realm in which these communities reside, what we may see is a new type of community, one whose desire for a feast of flesh leads them to evade the activities of regulators who operate in the "meat" world. What this may show us is that in a virtual environment, the regulators' net is no match for a world wide web. References Alston, Richard. "Regulation is Not Censorship." The Australian 13 April 1999: 55. Paterson, K., et. al. Classification Issues: Film, Video and Television. Sydney: The Office of Film and Literature Classification, 1993. Patten, F. Personal interview. 9 Feb. 1999. Godana, B.A. Africa's Shared Water Resources: Legal and Institutional Aspects of the Nile, Niger and Senegal River Systems. London: Frances Pinter, 1985. Howard, John. The Australia I Believe In: The Values, Directions and Policy Priorities of a Coalition Government Outlined in 1995. Canberra: Liberal Party, 1995. Joint Select Committee On Video Material. Report of the Joint Select Committee On Video Material. Canberra: APGS, 1988. Office of Film and Literature Classification. Cinema & Video Ratings Guide. 1999. 1 May 1999 <http://www.oflc.gov.au/classinfo.php>. Smith, Marc A. "Voices from the WELL: The Logic of the Virtual Commons." 1998. 2 Mar. 1999 <http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/csoc/papers/voices/Voices.htm>. Winterson, Jeanette. Sexing the Cherry. New York: Vintage Books. 1991. Worthington, T. Testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Information Technologies. Unpublished, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Peter Chen. "Community without Flesh: First Thoughts on the New Broadcasting Services Amendment (Online Services) Bill 1999." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.3 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/bill.php>. Chicago style: Peter Chen, "Community without Flesh: First Thoughts on the New Broadcasting Services Amendment (Online Services) Bill 1999," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 3 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/bill.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Author. (1999) Community without flesh: first thoughts on the new broadcasting services amendment (online services) bill 1999. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(3). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/bill.php> ([your date of access]).

Are male porn stars full-fledged citizens? Recent political developments make this question more than rhetorical. The Bush Justice Department, led by Attorney General John Ashcroft, has targeted the porn industry, beginning with its prosecution of Extreme Associates. More recently, the President requested an increase in the FBI’s 2005 budget for prosecuting obscenity, one of the few budget increases for the Bureau outside of its anti-terrorism program (Schmitt A1). To be sure, the concept of “citizen” is itself vexed. Citizenship, when obtained or granted, ostensibly legitimates a subject and opens up pathways to privilege: social, political, economic, etc. Yet all citizens do not seem to be created equal. “There is, in the operation of state-defined rules and in common practices an assumption of moral worth in which de facto as opposed to de jure rights of citizenship are defined as open to those who are deserving or who are capable of acting responsibly,” asserts feminist critic Linda McDowell. “The less deserving and the less responsible are defined as unworthy of or unfitted for the privileges of full citizenship” (150). Under this rubric, a citizen must measure up to a standard of “moral worth”—an individual is not a full-fledged citizen merely on the basis of birth or geographical placement. As McDowell concludes, “citizenship is not an inclusive but an exclusive concept” (150). Thus, in figuring out how male porn stars stand in regard to the question of citizenship, we must ask who determines “moral worth,” who distinguishes the less from the more deserving, and how people have come to agree on the “common practices” of citizenship. Many critics writing about citizenship, including McDowell, Michael Warner, Lauren Berlant, Russ Castronovo, Robyn Wiegman, Michael Moon, and Cathy Davidson (to name only a few) have located the nexus of “moral worth” in the body. In particular, the ability to make the body abstract, invisible, and non-identifiable has been the most desirable quality for a citizen to possess. White men seem ideally situated for such acts of “decorporealization,” and the white male body has been installed as the norm for citizenship. Conversely, women, people of color, and the ill and disabled, groups that are frequently defined by their very embodiment, find themselves more often subject to regulation. If the white male body is the standard, however, for “moral worth,” the white male porn star would seem to disrupt such calculations. Clearly, the profession demands that these men put their bodies very much in evidence, and the most famous porn stars, like John C. Holmes and Ron Jeremy, derive much of their popularity from their bodily excess. Jeremy’s struggle for “legitimacy,” and the tenuous position of men in the porn industry in general, demonstrate that even white males, when they cannot or will not aspire to abstraction and invisibility, will lose the privileges of citizenship. The right’s attack on pornography can thus be seen as yet another attempt to regulate and restrict citizenship, an effort that forces Jeremy and the industry that made him famous struggle for strategies of invisibility that will permit some mainstream acceptance. In American Anatomies, Robyn Wiegman points out that the idea of democratic citizenship rested on a distinct sense of the abstract and non-particular. The more “particular” an individual was, however, the less likely s/he could pass into the realm of citizen. “For those trapped by the discipline of the particular (women, slaves, the poor),” Wiegman writes, “the unmarked and universalized particularity of the white masculine prohibited their entrance into the abstraction of personhood that democratic equality supposedly entailed” (49). The norm of the “white masculine” caused others to signify “an incontrovertible difference” (49), so people who were visibly different (or perceived as visibly different) could be tyrannized over and regulated to ensure the purity of the norm. Like Wiegman, Lauren Berlant has written extensively about the ways in which the nation recognizes only one “official” body: “The white, male body is the relay to legitimation, but even more than that, the power to suppress that body, to cover its tracks and its traces, is the sign of real authority, according to constitutional fashion” (113). Berlant notes that “problem citizens”—most notably women of color—struggle with the problem of “surplus embodiment.” They cannot easily suppress their bodies, so they are subjected to the regulatory power of a law that defines them and consequently opens their bodies up to violation. To escape their “surplus embodiment,” those who can seek abstraction and invisibility because “sometimes a person doesn’t want to seek the dignity of an always-already-violated body, and wants to cast hers off, either for nothingness, or in a trade for some other, better model” (114). The question of “surplus embodiment” certainly has resonance for male porn stars. Peter Lehman has argued that hardcore pornography relies on images of large penises as signifiers of strength and virility. “The genre cannot tolerate a small, unerect penis,” Lehman asserts, “because the sight of the organ must convey the symbolic weight of the phallus” (175). The “power” of male porn stars derives from their visibility, from “meat shots” and “money shots.” Far from being abstract, decorporealized “persons,” male porn stars are fully embodied. In fact, the more “surplus embodiment” they possess, the more famous they become. Yet the very display that makes white male porn stars famous also seemingly disqualifies them from the “legitimacy” afforded the white male body. In the industry itself, male stars are losing authority to the “box-cover girls” who sell the product. One’s “surplus embodiment” might be a necessity for working in the industry, but, as Susan Faludi notes, “by choosing an erection as the proof of male utility, the male performer has hung his usefulness, as porn actor Jonathan Morgan observed, on ‘the one muscle on our body we can’t flex’” (547). When that muscle doesn’t work, a male porn star doesn’t become an abstraction—he becomes “other,” a joke, swept aside and deemed useless. Documentary filmmaker Scott J. Gill recognizes the tenuousness of the “citizenship” of male porn stars in his treatment of Ron Jeremy, “America’s most famous porn star.” The film, Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy (2001), opens with a clear acknowledgment of Jeremy’s body, as one voiceover explains how his nickname, “the Hedgehog,” derives from the fact that Jeremy is “small, fat, and very hairy.” Then, Gill intercuts the comments of various Jeremy fans: “An idol to an entire generation,” one young man opines; “One of the greatest men this country has ever seen,” suggests another. This opening scene concludes with an image of Jeremy, smirking and dressed in a warm-up suit with a large dollar sign necklace, standing in front of an American flag (an image repeated at the end of the film). This opening few minutes posit the Hedgehog as super-citizen, embraced as few Americans are. “Everyone wants to be Ron Jeremy,” another young fan proclaims. “They want his life.” Gill also juxtaposes “constitutional” forms of legitimacy that seemingly celebrate Jeremy’s bodily excess with the resultant discrimination that body actually engenders. In one clip, Jeremy exposes himself to comedian Rodney Dangerfield, who then sardonically comments, “All men are created equal—what bullshit!” Later, Gill employs a clip of a film in which Jeremy is dressed like Ben Franklin while in a voiceover porn director/historian Bill Margold notes that the Freeman decision “gave a birth certificate to a bastard industry—it legitimized us.” The juxtaposition thus posits Jeremy as a “founding father” of sorts, the most recognizable participant in an industry now going mainstream. Gill, however, emphasizes the double-edged nature of Jeremy’s fame and the price of his display. Immediately after the plaudits of the opening sequence, Gill includes clips from various Jeremy talk show appearances in which he is denounced as “scum” and told “You should go to jail just for all the things that you’ve helped make worse in this country” and “You should be shot.” Gill also shows a clearly dazed Jeremy in close-up confessing, “I hate myself. I want to find a knife and slit my wrists.” Though Jeremy does not seem serious, this comment comes into better focus as the film unfolds. Jeremy’s efforts to go “legit,” to break into mainstream film and leave his porn life behind, keep going off the tracks. In the meantime, Jeremy must fulfill his obligations to his current profession, including getting a monthly HIV test. “There’ll be one good thing about eventually getting out of the porn business,” he confesses as Gill shows scenes of a clearly nervous Jeremy awaiting results in a clinic waiting room, “to be able to stop taking these things every fucking month.” Gill shows that the life so many others would love to have requires an abuse of the body that fans never see. Jeremy is seeking to cast off that life, “either for nothingness, or in a trade for some other, better model.” Behind this “legend” is unseen pain and longing. Gill emphasizes the dichotomy between Jeremy (illegitimate) and “citizens” in his own designations. Adam Rifkin, director of Detroit Rock City, in which Jeremy has a small part, and Troy Duffy, another Jeremy pal, are referred to as “mainstream film directors.” When Jeremy returns to his home in Queens to visit his father, Arnold Hyatt is designated “physicist.” In fact, Jeremy’s father forbids his son from using the family name in his porn career. “I don’t want any confusion between myself and his line of work,” Hyatt confesses, “because I’m retired.” Denied his patronym, Jeremy is truly “illegitimate.” Despite his father’s understanding and support, Jeremy is on his own in the business he has chosen. Jeremy’s reputation also gets in the way of his mainstream dreams. “Sometimes all this fame can hurt you,” Jeremy himself notes. Rifkin admits that “People recognize Ron as a porn actor and immediately will ask me to remove him from the final cut.” Duffy concurs that Jeremy’s porn career has made him a pariah for some mainstream producers: “Stigma attached to him, and that’s all anybody’s ever gonna see.” Jeremy’s visibility, the “stigma” that people have “seen,” namely, his large penis and fat, hairy body, denies him the abstract personhood he needs to go “legitimate.” Thus, whether through the concerted efforts of the Justice Department or the informal, personal angst of a producer fearing a backlash against a film, Jeremy, as a representative of an immoral industry, finds himself subject to regulation. Indeed, as his “legitimate” filmography indicates, Jeremy has been cut out of more than half the films he has appeared in. The issue of “visibility” as the basis for regulation of hardcore pornography has its clearest articulation in Potter Stewart’s famous proclamation “I know it when I see it.” But as Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong report in The Brethren, Stewart was not the only Justice who used visibility as a standard. Byron White’s personal definition was “no erect penises, no intercourse, no oral or anal sodomy” (193). William Brennan, too, had what his clerks called “the limp dick standard” (194). Erection, what Lehman has identified as the conveyance of the phallus, now became the point of departure for regulation, transferring, once again, the phallus to the “law.” When such governmental regulation failed First Amendment ratification, other forms of societal regulation kicked in. The porn industry has accommodated itself to this regulation, as Faludi observes, in its emphasis on “soft” versions of product for distribution to “legitimate” outlets like cable and hotels. “The version recut for TV would have to be entirely ‘soft,’” Faludi notes, “which meant, among other things, no erect penises and no semen” (547). The work of competent “woodsmen” like Jeremy now had to be made invisible to pass muster. Thus, even the penis could be conveyed to the viewer, a “fantasy penis,” as Katherine Frank has called it, that can be made to correlate to that viewer’s “fantasized identity” of himself (133-4). At the beginning of Porn Star, during the various homages paid to Jeremy, one fan draws a curious comparison: “There’s Elvis, and then there’s Ron.” Elvis’s early career had certainly been plagued by criticism related to his bodily excess. Musicologist Robert Fink has recently compared Presley’s July 2, 1956, recording of “Hound Dog” to music for strip tease, suggesting that Elvis used such subtle variations to challenge the law that was constantly impinging on his performances: “The Gray Lady was sensitive to the presence of quite traditional musical erotics—formal devices that cued the performer and audience to experience their bodies sexually—but not quite hep enough to accept a male performer recycling these musical signifiers of sex back to a female audience” (99). Eventually, though, Elvis stopped rebelling and sought respectability. Writing to President Nixon on December 21, 1970, Presley offered his services to help combat what he perceived to be a growing cultural insurgency. “The drug culture, the hippie elements, the SDS, Black Panthers, etc., do not consider me as their enemy or as they call it, The Establishment,” Presley confided. “I call it America and I love it” (Carroll 266). In short, Elvis wanted to use his icon status to help reinstate law and order, in the process demonstrating his own patriotism, his value and worth as a citizen. At the end of Porn Star, Jeremy, too, craves legitimacy. Whereas Elvis appealed to Nixon, Jeremy concludes by appealing to Steven Spielberg. Elvis received a badge from Nixon designating him as “special assistant” for the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. Presumably Jeremy invests his legitimacy in a SAG card. Kenny Dollar, a Jeremy friend, unironically summarizes the final step the Hedgehog must take: “It’s time for Ron to go on and reach his full potential. Let him retire his dick.” That Jeremy must do the latter before having a chance for the former illustrates how “surplus embodiment” and “citizenship” remain inextricably entangled and mutually exclusive. References Berlant, Lauren. “National Brands/National Body: Imitation of Life.” Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex and Nationality in the Modern Text. Ed. Hortense Spillers. New York: Routledge, 1991: 110-140. Carroll, Andrew, ed. Letters of a Nation: A Collection of Extraordinary American Letters. New York: Broadway Books, 1999. Castronovo, Russ and Nelson, Dana D., eds. Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Faludi, Susan. Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1999. Fink, Robert. “Elvis Everywhere: Musicology and Popular Music Studies at the Twilight of the Canon.” Rock Over the Edge: Transformations in Popular Music Culture. Eds. Roger Beebe, Denise Fulbrook, and Ben Saunders. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002: 60-109. Frank, Katherine. G-Strings and Sympathy: Strip Club Regulars and Male Desire. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Gill, Scott J., dir. Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy. New Video Group, 2001. Lehman, Peter. Running Scared: Masculinity and the Representation of the Male Body. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993. McDowell, Linda. Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Moon, Michael and Davidson, Cathy N., eds. Subjects and Citizens: From Oroonoko to Anita Hill. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Schmitt, Richard B. “U. S. Plans to Escalate Porn Fight.” The Los Angeles Times 14 February 2004. A1. Wiegman, Robyn. American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Woodward, Bob and Armstrong, Scott. The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979. MLA Style Russell, David. "The Tumescent Citizen: The Legend of Ron Jeremy." M/C Journal 7.4 (2004). 10 October 2004 <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0410/01_citizen.php>. APA Style Russell, D. (2004 Oct 11). The Tumescent Citizen: The Legend of Ron Jeremy, M/C Journal, 7(4). Retrieved Oct 10 2004 from <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0410/01_citizen.php>

Our thesis is that the city’s ambience is now an unstable dialectic in which we are watchers and watched, mirrored and refracted in a landscape of iPhone auteurs, eTags, CCTV and sousveillance. Embrace ambience! Invoking Benjamin’s spirit, this article does not seek to limit understanding through restriction to a particular theme or theoretical construct (Buck-Morss 253). Instead, it offers snapshots of interactions at the dawn of the postmodern city. That bricolage also engages how people appropriate, manipulate, disrupt and divert urban spaces and strategies of power in their everyday life. Ambient information can both liberate and disenfranchise the individual. This article asks whether our era’s dialectics result in a new personhood or merely restate the traditional spectacle of ‘bright lights, big city’. Does the virtualized city result in ambient anomie and satiation or in surprise, autonomy and serendipity? (Gumpert 36) Since the steam age, ambience has been characterised in terms of urban sound, particularly the alienation attributable to the individual’s experience as a passive receptor of a cacophony of sounds – now soft, now loud, random and recurrent–from the hubbub of crowds, the crash and grind of traffic, the noise of industrial processes and domestic activity, factory whistles, fire alarms, radio, television and gramophones (Merchant 111; Thompson 6). In the age of the internet, personal devices such as digital cameras and iPhones, and urban informatics such as CCTV networks and e-Tags, ambience is interactivity, monitoring and signalling across multiple media, rather than just sound. It is an interactivity in which watchers observe the watched observing them and the watched reshape the fabric of virtualized cities merely by traversing urban precincts (Hillier 295; De Certeau 163). It is also about pervasive although unevenly distributed monitoring of individuals, using sensors that are remote to the individual (for example cameras or tag-readers mounted above highways) or are borne by the individual (for example mobile phones or badges that systematically report the location to a parent, employer or sex offender register) (Holmes 176; Savitch 130). That monitoring reflects what Doel and Clark characterized as a pervasive sense of ambient fear in the postmodern city, albeit fear that like much contemporary anxiety is misplaced–you are more at risk from intimates than from strangers, from car accidents than terrorists or stalkers–and that is ahistorical (Doel 13; Scheingold 33). Finally, it is about cooption, with individuals signalling their identity through ambient advertising: wearing tshirts, sweatshirts, caps and other apparel that display iconic faces such as Obama and Monroe or that embody corporate imagery such as the Nike ‘Swoosh’, Coca-Cola ‘Ribbon’, Linux Penguin and Hello Kitty feline (Sayre 82; Maynard 97). In the postmodern global village much advertising is ambient, rather than merely delivered to a device or fixed on a billboard. Australian cities are now seas of information, phantasmagoric environments in which the ambient noise encountered by residents and visitors comprises corporate signage, intelligent traffic signs, displays at public transport nodes, shop-window video screens displaying us watching them, and a plethora of personal devices showing everything from the weather to snaps of people in the street or neighborhood satellite maps. They are environments through which people traverse both as persons and abstractions, virtual presences on volatile digital maps and in online social networks. Spectacle, Anomie or Personhood The spectacular city of modernity is a meme of communication, cultural and urban development theory. It is spectacular in the sense that of large, artificial, even sublime. It is also spectacular because it is built around the gaze, whether the vistas of Hausmann’s boulevards, the towers of Manhattan and Chicago, the shopfront ‘sea of light’ and advertising pillars noted by visitors to Weimar Berlin or the neon ‘neo-baroque’ of Las Vegas (Schivelbusch 114; Fritzsche 164; Ndalianis 535). In the year 2010 it aspires to 2020 vision, a panoptic and panspectric gaze on the part of governors and governed alike (Kullenberg 38). In contrast to the timelessness of Heidegger’s hut and the ‘fixity’ of rural backwaters, spectacular cities are volatile domains where all that is solid continues to melt into air with the aid of jackhammers and the latest ‘new media’ potentially result in a hypereality that make it difficult to determine what is real and what is not (Wark 22; Berman 19). The spectacular city embodies a dialectic. It is anomic because it induces an alienation in the spectator, a fatigue attributable to media satiation and to a sense of being a mere cog in a wheel, a disempowered and readily-replaceable entity that is denied personhood–recognition as an autonomous individual–through subjection to a Fordist and post-Fordist industrial discipline or the more insidious imprisonment of being ‘a housewife’, one ant in a very large ant hill (Dyer-Witheford 58). People, however, are not automatons: they experience media, modernity and urbanism in different ways. The same attributes that erode the selfhood of some people enhance the autonomy and personhood of others. The spectacular city, now a matrix of digits, information flows and opportunities, is a realm in which people can subvert expectations and find scope for self-fulfillment, whether by wearing a hoodie that defeats CCTV or by using digital technologies to find and associate with other members of stigmatized affinity groups. One person’s anomie is another’s opportunity. Ambience and Virtualisation Eighty years after Fritz Lang’s Metropolis forecast a cyber-sociality, digital technologies are resulting in a ‘virtualisation’ of social interactions and cities. In post-modern cityscapes, the space of flows comprises an increasing number of electronic exchanges through physically disjointed places (Castells 2002). Virtualisation involves supplementation or replacement of face-to-face contact with hypersocial communication via new media, including SMS, email, blogging and Facebook. In 2010 your friends (or your boss or a bully) may always be just a few keystrokes away, irrespective of whether it is raining outside, there is a public transport strike or the car is in for repairs (Hassan 69; Baron 215). Virtualisation also involves an abstraction of bodies and physical movements, with the information that represents individual identities or vehicles traversing the virtual spaces comprised of CCTV networks (where viewers never encounter the person or crowd face to face), rail ticketing systems and road management systems (x e-Tag passed by this tag reader, y camera logged a specific vehicle onto a database using automated number-plate recognition software) (Wood 93; Lyon 253). Surveillant Cities Pervasive anxiety is a permanent and recurrent feature of urban experience. Often navigated by an urgency to control perceived disorder, both physically and through cultivated dominant theory (early twentieth century gendered discourses to push women back into the private sphere; ethno-racial closure and control in the Black Metropolis of 1940s Chicago), history is punctuated by attempts to dissolve public debate and infringe minority freedoms (Wilson 1991). In the Post-modern city unprecedented technological capacity generates a totalizing media vector whose plausible by-product is the perception of an ambient menace (Wark 3). Concurrent faith in technology as a cost-effective mechanism for public management (policing, traffic, planning, revenue generation) has resulted in emergence of the surveillant city. It is both a social and architectural fabric whose infrastructure is dotted with sensors and whose people assume that they will be monitored by private/public sector entities and directed by interactive traffic management systems – from electronic speed signs and congestion indicators through to rail schedule displays –leveraging data collected through those sensors. The fabric embodies tensions between governance (at its crudest, enforcement of law by police and their surrogates in private security services) and the soft cage of digital governmentality, with people being disciplined through knowledge that they are being watched and that the observation may be shared with others in an official or non-official shaming (Parenti 51; Staples 41). Encounters with a railway station CCTV might thus result in exhibition of the individual in court or on broadcast television, whether in nightly news or in a ‘reality tv’ crime expose built around ‘most wanted’ footage (Jermyn 109). Misbehaviour by a partner might merely result in scrutiny of mobile phone bills or web browser histories (which illicit content has the partner consumed, which parts of cyberspace has been visited), followed by a visit to the family court. It might instead result in digital viligilantism, with private offences being named and shamed on electronic walls across the global village, such as Facebook. iPhone Auteurism Activists have responded to pervasive surveillance by turning the cameras on ‘the watchers’ in an exercise of ‘sousveillance’ (Bennett 13; Huey 158). That mirroring might involve the meticulous documentation, often using the same geospatial tools deployed by public/private security agents, of the location of closed circuit television cameras and other surveillance devices. One outcome is the production of maps identifying who is watching and where that watching is taking place. As a corollary, people with anxieties about being surveilled, with a taste for street theatre or a receptiveness to a new form of urban adventure have used those maps to traverse cities via routes along which they cannot be identified by cameras, tags and other tools of the panoptic sort, or to simply adopt masks at particular locations. In 2020 can anyone aspire to be a protagonist in V for Vendetta? (iSee) Mirroring might take more visceral forms, with protestors for example increasingly making a practice of capturing images of police and private security services dealing with marches, riots and pickets. The advent of 3G mobile phones with a still/video image capability and ongoing ‘dematerialisation’ of traditional video cameras (ie progressively cheaper, lighter, more robust, less visible) means that those engaged in political action can document interaction with authority. So can passers-by. That ambient imaging, turning the public gaze on power and thereby potentially redefining the ‘public’ (given that in Australia the community has been embodied by the state and discourse has been mediated by state-sanctioned media), poses challenges for media scholars and exponents of an invigorated civil society in which we are looking together – and looking at each other – rather than bowling alone. One challenge for consumers in construing ambient media is trust. Can we believe what we see, particularly when few audiences have forensic skills and intermediaries such as commercial broadcasters may privilege immediacy (the ‘breaking news’ snippet from participants) over context and verification. Social critics such as Baudelaire and Benjamin exalt the flaneur, the free spirit who gazed on the street, a street that was as much a spectacle as the theatre and as vibrant as the circus. In 2010 the same technologies that empower citizen journalism and foster a succession of velvet revolutions feed flaneurs whose streetwalking doesn’t extend beyond a keyboard and a modem. The US and UK have thus seen emergence of gawker services, with new media entrepreneurs attempting to build sustainable businesses by encouraging fans to report the location of celebrities (and ideally provide images of those encounters) for the delectation of people who are web surfing or receiving a tweet (Burns 24). In the age of ambient cameras, where the media are everywhere and nowhere (and micro-stock photoservices challenge agencies such as Magnum), everyone can join the paparazzi. Anyone can deploy that ambient surveillance to become a stalker. The enthusiasm with which fans publish sightings of celebrities will presumably facilitate attacks on bodies rather than images. Information may want to be free but so, inconveniently, do iconoclasts and practitioners of participatory panopticism (Dodge 431; Dennis 348). Rhetoric about ‘citizen journalism’ has been co-opted by ‘old media’, with national broadcasters and commercial enterprises soliciting still images and video from non-professionals, whether for free or on a commercial basis. It is a world where ‘journalists’ are everywhere and where responsibility resides uncertainly at the editorial desk, able to reject or accept offerings from people with cameras but without the industrial discipline formerly exercised through professional training and adherence to formal codes of practice. It is thus unsurprising that South Australia’s Government, echoed by some peers, has mooted anti-gawker legislation aimed at would-be auteurs who impede emergency services by stopping their cars to take photos of bushfires, road accidents or other disasters. The flipside of that iPhone auteurism is anxiety about the public gaze, expressed through moral panics regarding street photography and sexting. Apart from a handful of exceptions (notably photography in the Sydney Opera House precinct, in the immediate vicinity of defence facilities and in some national parks), Australian law does not prohibit ‘street photography’ which includes photographs or videos of streetscapes or public places. Despite periodic assertions that it is a criminal offence to take photographs of people–particularly minors–without permission from an official, parent/guardian or individual there is no general restriction on ambient photography in public spaces. Moral panics about photographs of children (or adults) on beaches or in the street reflect an ambient anxiety in which danger is associated with strangers and strangers are everywhere (Marr 7; Bauman 93). That conceptualisation is one that would delight people who are wholly innocent of Judith Butler or Andrea Dworkin, in which the gaze (ever pervasive, ever powerful) is tantamount to a violation. The reality is more prosaic: most child sex offences involve intimates, rather than the ‘monstrous other’ with the telephoto lens or collection of nastiness on his iPod (Cossins 435; Ingebretsen 190). Recognition of that reality is important in considering moves that would egregiously restrict legitimate photography in public spaces or happy snaps made by doting relatives. An ambient image–unposed, unpremeditated, uncoerced–of an intimate may empower both authors and subjects when little is solid and memory is fleeting. The same caution might usefully be applied in considering alarms about sexting, ie creation using mobile phones (and access by phone or computer monitor) of intimate images of teenagers by teenagers. Australian governments have moved to emulate their US peers, treating such photography as a criminal offence that can be conceptualized as child pornography and addressed through permanent inclusion in sex offender registers. Lifelong stigmatisation is inappropriate in dealing with naïve or brash 12 and 16 year olds who have been exchanging intimate images without an awareness of legal frameworks or an understanding of consequences (Shafron-Perez 432). Cameras may be everywhere among the e-generation but legal knowledge, like the future, is unevenly distributed. Digital Handcuffs Generations prior to 2008 lost themselves in the streets, gaining individuality or personhood by escaping the surveillance inherent in living at home, being observed by neighbours or simply surrounded by colleagues. Streets offered anonymity and autonomy (Simmel 1903), one reason why heterodox sexuality has traditionally been negotiated in parks and other beats and on kerbs where sex workers ply their trade (Dalton 375). Recent decades have seen a privatisation of those public spaces, with urban planning and digital technologies imposing a new governmentality on hitherto ambient ‘deviance’ and on voyeuristic-exhibitionist practice such as heterosexual ‘dogging’ (Bell 387). That governmentality has been enforced through mechanisms such as replacement of traditional public toilets with ‘pods’ that are conveniently maintained by global service providers such as Veolia (the unromantic but profitable rump of former media & sewers conglomerate Vivendi) and function as billboards for advertising groups such as JC Decaux. Faces encountered in the vicinity of the twenty-first century pissoir are thus likely to be those of supermodels selling yoghurt, low interest loans or sportsgear – the same faces sighted at other venues across the nation and across the globe. Visiting ‘the mens’ gives new meaning to the word ambience when you are more likely to encounter Louis Vuitton and a CCTV camera than George Michael. George’s face, or that of Madonna, Barack Obama, Kevin 07 or Homer Simpson, might instead be sighted on the tshirts or hoodies mentioned above. George’s music might also be borne on the bodies of people you see in the park, on the street, or in the bus. This is the age of ambient performance, taken out of concert halls and virtualised on iPods, Walkmen and other personal devices, music at the demand of the consumer rather than as rationed by concert managers (Bull 85). The cost of that ambience, liberation of performance from time and space constraints, may be a Weberian disenchantment (Steiner 434). Technology has also removed anonymity by offering digital handcuffs to employees, partners, friends and children. The same mobile phones used in the past to offer excuses or otherwise disguise the bearer’s movement may now be tied to an observer through location services that plot the person’s movement across Google Maps or the geospatial information of similar services. That tracking is an extension into the private realm of the identification we now take for granted when using taxis or logistics services, with corporate Australia for example investing in systems that allow accurate determination of where a shipment is located (on Sydney Harbour Bridge? the loading dock? accompanying the truck driver on unauthorized visits to the pub?) and a forecast of when it will arrive (Monmonier 76). Such technologies are being used on a smaller scale to enforce digital Fordism among the binary proletariat in corporate buildings and campuses, with ‘smart badges’ and biometric gateways logging an individual’s movement across institutional terrain (so many minutes in the conference room, so many minutes in the bathroom or lingering among the faux rainforest near the Vice Chancellery) (Bolt). Bright Lights, Blog City It is a truth universally acknowledged, at least by right-thinking Foucauldians, that modernity is a matter of coercion and anomie as all that is solid melts into air. If we are living in an age of hypersocialisation and hypercapitalism – movies and friends on tap, along with the panoptic sorting by marketers and pervasive scrutiny by both the ‘information state’ and public audiences (the million people or one person reading your blog) that is an inevitable accompaniment of the digital cornucopia–we might ask whether everyone is or should be unhappy. This article began by highlighting traditional responses to the bright lights, brashness and excitement of the big city. One conclusion might be that in 2010 not much has changed. Some people experience ambient information as liberating; others as threatening, productive of physical danger or of a more insidious anomie in which personal identity is blurred by an ineluctable electro-smog. There is disagreement about the professionalism (for which read ethics and inhibitions) of ‘citizen media’ and about a culture in which, as in the 1920s, audiences believe that they ‘own the image’ embodying the celebrity or public malefactor. Digital technologies allow you to navigate through the urban maze and allow officials, marketers or the hostile to track you. Those same technologies allow you to subvert both the governmentality and governance. You are free: Be ambient! References Baron, Naomi. Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Bauman, Zygmunt. 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This thesis investigates the attitudes of two of Indonesia’s main Islamic parties, National Awakening Party (PKB) and the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), towards gender and women’s issues. There has been an assumption that PKB is more liberal than PKS due to the progressive religious backgrounds of many of its parliamentarians and leaders. While PKB has strong roots in the reform-minded Cultural Islam movement, which tended to support gender equality, PKS has its origins in the Tarbiyah movement, which was heavily influenced by the thinking of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhoodand was socially conservative and Islamist. This study examines whether the contrasting backgrounds of these parties produces markedly different policies and actions on gender and women’s issues. It analyses the two parties’ attitudes during deliberations in parliament on two controversial items of draft legislation: the Anti- Domestic Violence and the Anti-Pornography bill. This thesis argues that despite their differing doctrinal and intellectual origins, PKB and PKS had similar views on these bills. I contend that the interaction with non-Islamists and activists from women’s NGOs enabled PKS to moderate its attitude on gender and women’s issues. PKB supported the Anti-Pornography bill though in some ways, the party failed to serve as a champion of gender equality in parliament, belying its reputation for pro-women’s activism.