Статті в журналах з теми "Yao (Asian people)"

The re/production of Chinese cultural identity is often fraught with contradictions. When China’s Yao Ming was drafted Number 1 in the National Basketball Association (NBA) draft, he was supposed to reinforce and transcend Chinese/ Asian identity. Yao’s entrance into the NBA signaled a new understanding of Asian identity in the United States. To study this phenomenon, the author examined commentary from television broadcasts of U.S. NBA games featuring a prominent Asian athlete (Yao Ming) using critical discourse analysis. Analysis of 13 games from Yao Ming’s 2nd and 3rd seasons revealed that Yao is linguistically constructed as a panethnic Asian/Chinese person. In addition, the analysis upholds the stereotypes that Asian people are a “model minority” and unfit to play professional sports. Given the dearth of Asian players in the NBA, how do linguistic representations of Yao Ming in game commentary reinforce Asian and Chinese cultural stereotypes or create a new identity of China?

As an important part of China’s excellent traditional culture, the agricultural classics holds an important position. As one of the representative works of agricultural classics, “Chi Min Yao Shu” condenses the great wisdom of China’s ancient working people, records the agricultural and animal husbandry production experience, including natural disasters governance, sericulture technology, animal husbandry and other practical values, and its research will play an important role in foreign cultural exchanges. At present, there is a certain gap in the research of agricultural classics in China, and the research results are not fruitful. This paper will discuss the practical value of Chi Min Yao Shu and its dissemination in Western and Asian countries from the perspective of skopos theory, and explore its research significance and impact on our international communication with other countries.

Concluding this issue of Sociolinguistic Studies on the crossing of the urban-rural border or divide in Linguistic Landscape research, this article takes up the questions formulated in the opening contribution by Yao and Xu. It thus addresses communicative affordances of rural vs. urban spaces, and sign-making and sign usage in rural areas. Drawing on the findings of the four studies from the Asian Pacific and Oceania included in this issue as well as the work by Charles Goodwin, this article suggests that Linguistic Landscape research of rural areas could pay more attention to how social practices of people build on each other, reuse the material culture accumulated in an environment by their predecessors and in this way develop certain types of infrastructure for its population, which changes the nature of rural space.

In order to “describe world history from a new angle,” Professor Haneda Masashi has set up the framework of “Comparative Studies on the Cross-cultural Contacts in Asian Port Cities in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” One of the proposed points of comparison concerned communications between Europeans and local people and the indispensable role of interpreters, on whose work “the Dutch trade representatives relied utterly in their business and daily life” in Canton as well as Nagasaki.Whereas Professor Yao Keisuke, elsewhere in this special issue, has emphasised the different roles of the interpreters in both port cities, Professor Haneda is more in favour of pointing out the similarities. He has identified state control of foreign trade, motivated by concerns over “security, social stability, and the prosperity of the state,” as a fundamental feature common to both countries in this period. Because of a clear distinction between the local people as “insiders” and Europeans as “outsiders,” the foreigners' activities were strictly controlled and contacts between locals and Westerners restricted to a minimum. The interpreters stood between both parties as mediators and were intentionally used by the authorities as “tools of control,” sometimes functioning as spies reporting on suspicious activities, but also acting as safety shields against direct Dutch confrontations or breaches of etiquette and protocol. Mechanisms to control the interpreters themselves were built in as well.

Yak (Bos grunniens L.) herding plays an important role in the domestic economy throughout much of the Asian highlands. Yak represents a major mammal species of the rangelands found across the Asian highlands from Russia and Kyrgyzstan in the west to the Hengduan Mountains of China in the east. Yak also has great cultural significance to the people of the Asian highlands and is closely interlinked to the traditions, cultures, and rituals of the herding communities. However, increasing issues like poverty, environmental degradation, and climate change have changed the traditional practices of pastoralism, isolating and fragmenting herders and the pastures they have been using for many years. Local cultures of people rooted in the practice of yak herding are disappearing. Therefore, it is very important to document the socioeconomic and cultural aspects of yak herding. The broad aim of this paper was to provide a brief overview on the geographical distribution of yak in the Asian highlands and to provide in-depth information on yak-herding ethnic communities, the sociocultural aspect associated with yak herding, and challenges and emerging opportunities for yak herding in the Asian highlands. Altogether, 31 ethnic groups in 10 different countries of Asia and their cultures are documented herein. Yak was found to be utilized for many different household purposes, and to have cultural and religious aspects. Unfortunately, yak rearing and related traditions have been losing their charm in recent years due to modernization and several other environmental issues. Lastly, we suggest that there is an urgent need to take action to minimize the challenges faced by yak-herding mountain communities to conserve the traditional pastoral system and associated cultures of these ethnic communities.

Abstract The number of people of Caribbean, African, and Asian descent living in the United States is quite high. Most of these people live in diverse ethnic centers, such as New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Miami, and Atlanta. It might be profitable to provide traditional foods (2, 3) for these groups. Many of these foods already are imported into the United States. However, importation sometimes is not possible because of (a) inadequate storage facilities, (b) low cost effectiveness, and (c) small amounts that need to be imported (J.R. Suah, CARDI, personal communication). Three of these crops that may be grown in Missouri are hot pepper, ‘Scotch Bonnet,’ a low moisture pumpkin, ‘Calabash,’ and yam. ‘Scotch Bonnet,’ pepper grown under tropical conditions is semiperennial with peak production occurring in the first year. ‘Calabash’ pumpkin, requires a growing season of at least 7 months. Yam requires a 6- to 10-month growing period under tropical conditions. The potential production of these vegetables in the United States has not been adequately investigated. We, therefore, investigated their performance under mid-Missouri growing conditions.

AbstractOccupation of the humid tropics by Late Holocene food producers depended on the use of vegetative agricultural systems. A small number of vegetative crops from the Americas and Asia have come to dominate tropical agriculture globally in these warm and humid environments, due to their ability to provide reliable food output with low labour inputs, as well as their suitability to these environments. The prehistoric arrival in Africa of Southeast Asian crops, in particular banana, taro and greater yam but also sugar cane and others, is commonly regarded as one of the most important examples of transcontinental exchanges in the tropics. Although chronologies of food-producer expansions in Central Africa are increasingly gaining resolution, we have very little evidence for the agricultural systems used in this region. Researchers have recovered just a handful of examples of archaeobotanical banana, taro and sugar cane remains, and so far none from greater yam. Many of the suggested dispersal routes have not been tested with chronological, ecological and linguistic evidence of food producers. While the impact of Bantu-speaking people has been emphasised, the role of non-Bantu farmers speaking Ubangi and Central Sudanic languages who have expanded from the (north)east has hardly been considered. This article will review the current hypotheses on dispersal routes and suggest that transmissions via Northeast Africa should become a new focus of research on the origins of Asian vegeculture crops in Africa.

Gembili or wild white yam (Dioscorea esculenta L.) is one of underutilized tubers that can be found during dry season in Indonesia and other Southeast Asian countries. Although it has been consumed as staple food by people for centuries during famine, no further studies have been conducted to explore its potentials in food applications. This work aims to study the preparation, characterization and potential analysis of Gembili flour for use as raw material in novel foods development. Creamy white flour was obtained from white yam tuber from milling and sieving of dried tuber chips. The flour has water content about 12.08%, which is acceptable for storage. No lipid was detected. In addition, the protein, ash, and fiber content of the flour were respectively 3.00%, 1.27%, and 9.04%. The carbohydrate and amylose contents of the flour were 86.69% and 29.92% indicating its suitability for energy source. As expected, the cyanide content is very low of about 1.688 ppm suggesting that it is safe for consumption. Refer to those properties, Gembili flour can be a promising raw material for the preparation of bakery, cookies, noodle and confectioneries.Keywords: proximate composition, flour, white yam, food, preparation

Goals. The article aims at characterizing a unique animal of Inner and Central Asian nomads — the domestic yak (sarlyk) and its hybrid (khainak) that have been bred by Mongols and Buryats for hundreds of years. The work provides a first ethnographic insight into statistical data on yak population dynamics in synchronous and diachronous perspectives, reviews adaptive properties of the animal instrumental in surviving in extreme conditions of highlands, its exterior, breeding and behavioral specifics, economic significance. Materials and methods. The article explores literary, field and online sources to employ the methodology of comparative analysis, in particular, the comparative-historical-genetic method. Materials about yak breeding among Turkic peoples are essentially verifying by nature. Results. When it comes to declare the five traditional types of livestock bred, Mongols and Buryats mention no yak, the latter be clustered with cattle. Mongolia’s yak population ranks second worldwide — after China. The post-Socialist era witnessed an increase in yak numbers in Mongolia paralleled by a decrease in Russia. Domestic yaks have unique adaptive properties towards low oxygen partial pressure, extreme cold, and meagre fodder resources. The incomplete domestication of animals is determined by high profitability via such extensive farming techniques. Being meat, dairy and working animals, sarlyks and khainaks were most essential to the traditional economy of nomads. In the 21st century, their products become exotic and environment friendly food items, while skin, hair, wool, undercoat and other components serve as unique raw materials for light industry, pharmacology and cosmetology. Conclusions. The 21st century Mongolia with its vast yak friendly territories witnesses a significant head increase resulting in industrial processing facilities of yak raw materials nationwide. In the 1980s, the Soviets were undertaking active purposeful efforts to develop yak breeding, while the free market period decreased both numbers of animals held by Buryats and their habitat. The situation is due to the lack of demand for yak products and the lack of infrastructure for industrial processing of raw materials. The domestic yak and its hybrid had made it possible for nomads of Inner Asia — Mongols and Buryats — to significantly extend economic boundaries of their ethnic territories and inhabit montane grasslands and shrublands.

This paper attempts to explore the manifestations of the forest in the lives of the Bateks who reside within the vast region of the Taman Negara National Park in Pahang, Peninsular Malaysia. Such manifestations emerged from the mutual relationship between the Bateks and their surroundings of the forest. In the Bateks belief system, there exist the concept of Lawad, Ye’ Yo’ and Tum Yap; all of which represent the Bateks’ unique way of giving value to the forest. Lawad, Ye’ Yo’ and Tum Yap are the manifestations of how the Bateks navigate themselves in the forest. The Bateks see that the forest represents a dynamic dimension which has to be calmed through good spirits and behavior because the physical environment is a medium for the spiritual world to express its feelings, thinking, decisions, and punishments. This belief is to them the best way in endearing themselves to the environment. To the Bateks, all concerns for the forest could be settled through this belief. © 2016 The Author. Published for AMER ABRA by e-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK.. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer–review under responsibility of AMER (Association of Malaysian Environment-Behaviour Researchers), ABRA (Association of Behavioural Researchers on Asians) and cE-Bs (Centre for Environment-Behaviour Studies), Faculty of Architecture, Planning & Surveying, UniversitiTeknologi MARA, Malaysia. Keywords: Environment-behaviour, indigenous people, Orang Asli, Orang Batek, taboos, Taman Negara, National Park.

Abstract Introduction: Anemia, one of the most common and widespread disorders in the world, is a public health problem, and among various causes, iron deficiency is the most common cause of anemia, affecting more than 2.2 billion people worldwide. In developing countries, insufficient dietary intake is a main cause whereas eating habits like vegetarian diet or avoidance of red meat is associated with anemia in developed countries. Shanghai has been sharing many characteristics with Tokyo not only in rapid economic growth and westernization but also in more volition on personal life and late marriage in women of child-bearing age. Here in this study, with the large-scale database in both areas, the prevalence of anemia was elucidated among non-pregnant women age in urban areas of representative Asian countries undergoing routine annual health checkups. Methods: All participants in this retrospective observational study were limited to women aged between 20 and 44. A total of 2,006 health checkup data (from May to September 2016) from residents of Xinqiao, Sheshan and Maogang towns in Songjiang District by stratified cluster sampling were collected. These three towns are located in the southwestern part of Shanghai and their population is approximately 230,000 in total. A total 877 health checkup data (from February to July 2017) from 1,087 employees in the dispensing pharmacies in Tokyo area were collected. Anemia was defined as a hemoglobin (Hb) concentration lower than 12.0 g/dL, which was further categorized as mild (10.0<Hb≤12.0), moderate (7.0<Hb≤10.0) and severe (<7.0). Microcytic anemia was defined as Hb < 12 and a mean corpuscular volume (MCV) < 80 fL. In-group comparisons regarding anemia prevalence according to age and body mass index (BMI) were conducted. Results: Medians of age, BMI, Hb and MCV in Shanghai area (SA) group were 36 y.o. (range; 20-44), 21.7 (14.7-41.5), 13.1 (6.4-17.9) and 91.6 (59.0-107.2), while these in Tokyo area (TA) group were 36 y.o. (20-44), 20.5 (13.3-42.8), 13.0 (8.7-16.0) and 91.0 (61.0-106.0). Anemia was seen in 14.8% (n=297) of participants in SA and 11.4% (100) of participants in TA, among which prevalences of mild and moderate anemia were 12.2% (SA: 244) / 10.0% (TA: 88) and 2.6% (SA: 53) / 1.4% (TA: 12), respectively. No severe anemia was detected. Microcytic anemia was found in 5.7% (115) of SA and 3.4% (30) of TA. In-group comparison according to age (persons aged 20-24, 25-29, 30-34, 35-39, 40-44) showed a gradual increase of anemia prevalence in SA, the highest prevalence of 20.8% in persons aged 40-44. By contrast, in TA group, persons aged 30-34 had the highest prevalence of 14.7%. Another in-group comparison by BMI (<18.5, 18.5≤BMI<25.0, 25.0≤BMI<30.0, 30.0≤) revealed an inverse correlation to anemia prevalence, the highest of 18.2% in SA group, while in TA group persons with BMI ranging 18.5-25.0 had the highest of 10.8%. Discussion and Conclusion: Using the large-scale database of health checkup program, our analysis of CBC data revealed that high prevalence of anemia was associated with older age and lower BMI in SA group but that the prevalence of anemia in TA group had no correlation with age and BMI. First of all, the difference of recruitment for health checkup between the two areas was a possible cause. People who have health checkup might be more interested in healthy lifestyle, possibly generating selection bias in our study. And multiple factors including calorie intake, type of diet, iron supplementation and so on would affect the difference. Besides them, it is of note that beta thalassemia is highly prevalent in south China, which might contribute to the difference. Although the prevalences of anemia in two areas were lower than the global prevalence of about 25%, there still exists a sizable anemic population even in urban areas of developed countries, suggesting the importance of considering regional difference in etiology of anemia. Still needed further study with larger cohorts with detailed parameters, our data could provide an important information about anemia prevalence in two major Asian metropolises, constructing a basis of anti-anemia countermeasures for women of child-bearing age. Our findings call for well-designed public health policies with more individualized approach reflecting on eating and social habits in such urban areas. Disclosures No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.

Each region undoubtedly owns traditional visual culture, and the most common are traditional motifs whose existence is now increasingly evident. The bamboo shoots (pucuk rebung), boats (kapal), and ferns (pucuk pakis) motifs are part of the traditional Lampung motifs, which are generally found on traditional fabrics used in traditional Lampung cultural events. In its development, these motifs are dominantly used by Lampung people to produce new products in 3D (three-dimensional) media which previously used 2D media forms. The purpose of this research is to see how far the transformation process of these motifs has developed and its application in new 3D media. The method used is qualitative through field observations and interviews. The results showed that the transformation started from 3D media, which was then developed on 2D media (custom cloth), and is currently being developed again on 3D media. This transformation process is considered necessary and reasonable and has the support of the people of Lampung. With the cultural change, these traditional motifs are increasingly known by the people of Lampung and the broader community.Keywords: transformation, traditional motifs, 2D, 3D AbstrakBudaya visual tradisional tentunya dimiliki oleh setiap daerah, paling umum adalah motif-motif tradisi yang pada zaman sekarang semakin jelas eksistensinya. Pucuk rebung, kapal, dan pucuk pakis, merupakan bagian dari motif tradisi Lampung, yang pada umumnya banyak dijumpai pada kain-kain adat, yang digunakan dalam acara adat tradisional masyarakat Lampung. Dalam perkembangannya, motif-motif tersebut dominan digunakan oleh pemilik budaya untuk memproduksi produk-produk budaya baru melalui media tiga dimensi (3D) yang sebelumnya lebih banyak diterapkan bentuk media dua dimensi (2D). Tujuan dari penelitian ini antara lain melihat perkembangan proses transformasi motif tradisi, serta penerapannya dalam media 3D. Metode yang digunakan adalah kualitatif dengan observasi lapangan dan wawancara. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa transformasi justru dimulai dari media 3D yang kemudian dikembangkan pada media 2D, seperti kain adat, dan pada saat ini kembali lagi dikembangkan pada media 3D. Proses transformasi ini dianggap perlu dan wajar, dan mendapat dukungan dari masyarakat Lampung. Dengan adanya proses perubahan budaya tersebut motif-motif tradisi ini menjadi semakin dikenal oleh masyarakat Lampung khususnya dan masyarakat luas pada umumnya.Kata Kunci: transformasi, motif tradisi, 2D, 3D. Authors:Maria Veronika Br Halawa : Institut Teknologi SumateraPutri Kholida : Institut Teknologi Sumatera References:Nur, M. H. A., Susyanti, S., & Budiman, A. (2019). Persepsi Visual Anak Muda Bandar Lampung Terhadap Motif Khas Lampung (Pucuk Rebung dan Kapal). Jurnal Bahasa Rupa, 3(1), 22-30.Fadila, A. (2017). Penerapan geometri transformasi pada motif Batik Lampung. In Semasdik Universitas Muhammadiyah Metro: Prosiding Seminar Nasional Pendidikan (365-370).Irwan, I. (2021). “Transformasi Motif-motif Lampung di benda kerajinan”. Hasil Wawancara Pribadi: 10 Juli 2021, PKOR Way Halim Lampung.Lisianti, S., Hagijanto, A. D., & Malkisedek, M. H. (2020). Kajian Visual Siger dalam Budaya Kontemporer Masyarakat Lampung. Jurnal DKV Adiwarna, 1(16), 11.Mesra, M., Kartono, G., & Ibrahim, A. (2022). Penerapan Ornamen Tradisional Sumatera Utara Pada Toples Makanan Sebagai Sarana Revitalisasi. Gorga: Jurnal Seni Rupa, 11(1), 81-88.Mikaresti, P., & Mansyur, H. (2022). Pewarisan Budaya Melalui Tari Kreasi Nusantara. Gorga: Jurnal Seni Rupa, 11(1), 147-155.Nasukah, B., & Winarti, E. (2021). Teori Transformasi dan Implikasinya pada Pengelolaan Lembaga Pendidikan Islam. Southeast Asian Journal of Islamic Education Management, 2(2), 177-190.Nugroho, M. P., Cahyana, A., & Falah, A. M. (2021). Penelitian Antropologi Kajian Etnografi Visual Pada Kain Tapis Lampung. ATRAT: Jurnal Seni Rupa, 9(2), 18-26.Rahmat, S. P. N. (2021). Transformasi Dokumen Komunikasi Visual Sampul Buku Digital Dalam Metode Penelitian Kualitatif Perspektif Sosial Budaya Bidang Desain Komunikasi Visual. Gorga: Jurnal Seni Rupa, 10(1), 172-183.Sachari, A., & Yan, Y. S. (2001). Wacana Transformasi Budaya. Bandung: ITB.Sari, D. M., & Purnomo, E. (2021). Efektifitas Usability (Penggunaan) Sign System Tempat Wisata Kota Sawahlunto sebagai Kota Tambang Berbudaya. Gorga: Jurnal Seni Rupa, 10(2), 254-261.Sari, G. P., & Arief, D. R. (2022). Transformasi Ragam Hias Kawung Kedalam Desain Bentuk Pola Modul Untuk Digunakan Pada Proses Pembuatan Produk Kulit Dengan Mendayagunakan Perca Kulit Menggunakan Teknik Modular Interlocking. Berkala Penelitian Teknologi Kulit, Sepatu, dan Produk Kulit, 21(1), 56-67.Wahyuningsih, E. (2022). “Analisis Penerapan Mengenai Motif Tradisi Lampung”. Hasil Wawancara Pribadi: 8 Oktober 2022, Museum Lampung.

Abstract This study examines the differences in breast cancer survival among Medicare beneficiaries enrolled in either Traditional Medicare (TM) or Medicare Advantage (MA) plans during 1999-2017 in California. Medicare is federal health insurance for people of age 65 or older. Beneficiaries can choose between TM (directly administered by the Federal government) or MA (offered by private companies) plans. California (CA) has the largest number of Medicare beneficiaries of any state (6.6 million), nearly half (49%) of them enrolled in MA plans. Due to different management mechanisms, detailed claims data are not routinely submitted and available for MA enrollees as for TM, making objective assessment for the claimed MA advantages and effectiveness hard to find. Medicare beneficiaries often find it challenging to choose between TM and MA during the Medicare open enrollment period or make changes between these two types of plans. The National Cancer Institute’s (NCI) Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) Program, routinely link its cancer registry data with Medicare to provide detailed information about Medicare beneficiaries aged 65 and older diagnosed with cancer. Using the SEER-Medicare linked data for the state of California (CA), we were able to compare the survival differences among Medicare beneficiaries with female breast cancer (BC) stratified by TM or MA enrollment in CA during 1999-2017. We identified a total of 189,517 women Medicare beneficiaries who had BC, of which 83,223 (43.9%) enrolled in TM and never had MA, while 106,294 (56.1%) ever enrolled in MA regardless of the length of MA coverage. Because Medicare enrollment is on monthly basis and enrollees may change plans during the annual open enrollment period each year. Therefore, among the MA enrollees, we found 61,006 (57.4%) who switched between MA and TM from time to time (MA switch), in contrast to 45,288 (42.6%) who were in MA for the entire study period (MA only). We calculated 5-year observed survival rates from all causes of death among these Medicare beneficiaries with BC, using Kaplan-Meier method. We found that MA switch group had the highest 5-year survival of 81.5% (95% CI: 81.2%-81.8%), followed by MA only (72.6%, 95% CI: 72.1%-73.0%) and TM (72.5%, 95% CI: 72.2%-72.8%) groups. The survival advantage of the MA switch group is evident across race/ethnicity. Asian MA switchers had the highest 5-year survival rate (87.3%) followed by Hispanic (83.3%), Non-Hispanic White (80.5%), and Non-Hispanic Black (75.9%). In a multivariate Cox proportional hazards regression analysis, controlling for sociodemographic and clinical characteristics (i.e., age at diagnosis, race and ethnicity, poverty indicator, summary stage of tumor, marital status, urbanization, and number of cancers), MA switch group displayed a statistically significant (α&lt;0.05) mortality reduction of 25% as compared to the TM group. No significant differences between TM and MA only group was found. More informed and proactive Medicare beneficiaries are associated with the best health outcomes. Citation Format: Lihua Liu Liu, Ying Yan, Sue E. Kim. Differential survival among Medicare beneficiaries diagnosed with breast cancer in California [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 16th AACR Conference on the Science of Cancer Health Disparities in Racial/Ethnic Minorities and the Medically Underserved; 2023 Sep 29-Oct 2;Orlando, FL. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2023;32(12 Suppl):Abstract nr A126.

The pandemic of COVID-19 has afflicted every individual and has initiated a cascade of directly or indirectly involved events in precipitating mental health issues. The human species is a wanderer and hunter-gatherer by nature, and physical social distancing and nationwide lockdown have confined an individual to physical isolation. The present review article was conceived to address psychosocial and other issues and their aetiology related to the current pandemic of COVID-19. The elderly age group has most suffered the wrath of SARS-CoV-2, and social isolation as a preventive measure may further induce mental health issues. Animal model studies have demonstrated an inappropriate interacting endogenous neurotransmitter milieu of dopamine, serotonin, glutamate, and opioids, induced by social isolation that could probably lead to observable phenomena of deviant psychosocial behavior. Conflicting and manipulated information related to COVID-19 on social media has also been recognized as a global threat. Psychological stress during the current pandemic in frontline health care workers, migrant workers, children, and adolescents is also a serious concern. Mental health issues in the current situation could also be induced by being quarantined, uncertainty in business, jobs, economy, hampered academic activities, increased screen time on social media, and domestic violence incidences. The gravity of mental health issues associated with the pandemic of COVID-19 should be identified at the earliest. Mental health organization dedicated to current and future pandemics should be established along with Government policies addressing psychological issues to prevent and treat mental health issues need to be developed. References World Health Organization (WHO) Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Dashboard. 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Southern China was the original center of multiple ancestral populations related to modern Hmong-Mien, Tai-Kadai, Austroasiatic, and Austronesian people. More recent genetic surveys have focused on the fine-scale genetic structure and admixture history of southern Chinese populations, but the genetic formation and diversification of Hmong-Mien speakers are far from clear due to the sparse genetic sampling. Here, we reported nearly 700,000 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) data from 130 Guizhou Miao and Yao individuals. We used principal component analysis, ADMIXTURE, f-statistics, qpAdm, phylogenetic tree, fineSTRUCTURE, and ALDER to explore the fine-scale population genetic structure and admixture pattern of Hmong-Mien people. The sharing allele patterns showed that our studied populations had a strong genetic affinity with ancient and modern groups from southern and southeastern East Asia. We identified one unique ancestry component maximized in Yao people, which widely existed in other Hmong-Mien-speaking populations in southern China and Southeast Asia and ancient samples of Guangxi. Guizhou Hmong-Mien speakers harbored the dominant proportions of ancestry related to southern indigenous East Asians and minor proportions of northern ancestry related to Yellow River farmers, suggesting the possibility of genetic admixture between Hmong-Mien people and recent southward Sino-Tibetan-related populations. Furthermore, we found a genetic substructure among geographically different Miao and Yao people in Leishan and Songtao. The Yao and Miao people in Leishan harbored more southern East Asian ancestry, but Miao in Songtao received more northern East Asian genetic influence. We observed high mtDNA but low Y-chromosome diversity in studied Hmong-Mien groups, supporting the role of sex-specific residence in influencing human genetic variation. Our data provide valuable clues for further exploring population dynamics in southern China.

Abstract Background The underrepresentation of Hmong-Mien (HM) people in Asian genomic studies has hindered our comprehensive understanding of the full landscape of their evolutionary history and complex trait architecture. South China is a multi-ethnic region and indigenously settled by ethnolinguistically diverse HM, Austroasiatic (AA), Tai-Kadai (TK), Austronesian (AN), and Sino-Tibetan (ST) people, which is regarded as East Asia’s initial cradle of biodiversity. However, previous fragmented genetic studies have only presented a fraction of the landscape of genetic diversity in this region, especially the lack of haplotype-based genomic resources. The deep characterization of demographic history and natural-selection-relevant genetic architecture of HM people was necessary. Results We reported one HM-specific genomic resource and comprehensively explored the fine-scale genetic structure and adaptative features inferred from the genome-wide SNP data of 440 HM individuals from 33 ethnolinguistic populations, including previously unreported She. We identified solid genetic differentiation between HM people and Han Chinese at 7.64‒15.86 years ago (kya) and split events between southern Chinese inland (Miao/Yao) and coastal (She) HM people in the middle Bronze Age period and the latter obtained more gene flow from Ancient Northern East Asians. Multiple admixture models further confirmed that extensive gene flow from surrounding ST, TK, and AN people entangled in forming the gene pool of Chinese coastal HM people. Genetic findings of isolated shared unique ancestral components based on the sharing alleles and haplotypes deconstructed that HM people from the Yungui Plateau carried the breadth of previously unknown genomic diversity. We identified a direct and recent genetic connection between Chinese inland and Southeast Asian HM people as they shared the most extended identity-by-descent fragments, supporting the long-distance migration hypothesis. Uniparental phylogenetic topology and network-based phylogenetic relationship reconstruction found ancient uniparental founding lineages in southwestern HM people. Finally, the population-specific biological adaptation study identified the shared and differentiated natural selection signatures among inland and coastal HM people associated with physical features and immune functions. The allele frequency spectrum of cancer susceptibility alleles and pharmacogenomic genes showed significant differences between HM and northern Chinese people. Conclusions Our extensive genetic evidence combined with the historical documents supported the view that ancient HM people originated from the Yungui regions associated with ancient “Three-Miao tribes” descended from the ancient Daxi-Qujialing-Shijiahe people. Then, some have recently migrated rapidly to Southeast Asia, and some have migrated eastward and mixed respectively with Southeast Asian indigenes, Liangzhu-related coastal ancient populations, and incoming southward ST people. Generally, complex population migration, admixture, and adaptation history contributed to the complicated patterns of population structure of geographically diverse HM people.

The author, an instructor in nutrition in the home economics department of Queens College of the City University of New York, visited China in the summer of 1980. She took advantage of the opportunity to question various kinds of people about current Chinese attitudes to the principles of Yin and Yang (the two opposing forces which, according to the Tao philosophy, must be balanced in the diet to maintain good health). The responses varied from surprise that anyone should still see any significance in an such an old-fashioned concept to assurances that it goes without saying that the balance between yin and yang must constantly be maintained. Rather bewildering. But this informal questioning took place against the background of a systematic study, conducted by means of carefully composed written questionnaires, directed at Chinese people in China, in Hong Kong and in the United States, which produced a reasonably coherent pattern. In this essay, based on a paper recently delivered to a conference on Asian studies in New York, Elaine Kris explains her findings on a subject which seems still to be fundamental to an understanding of the cuisines of China and of the overseas Chinese.

Abstract Picosecond neodymium-doped yttrium aluminium garnet (Nd-YAG) lasers have emerged as the leading technology for tattoo removal due to their shorter pulse lengths and are considered better than other nanosecond lasers. The aim was to study the efficacy and adverse effects of a picosecond quality-switched (QS) Nd-YAG laser in a case series of 15 Asian patients for tattoo removal. Fifteen patients with black- and blue-coloured tattoos were recruited for tattoo removal. All were treated with a 1064-picosecond QS Nd-YAG laser. A single session with one pass was performed using a spot size of 4 mm, a fluence of 0.5–1 J cm–2 and a frequency of 6–10 Hz. The parameters were adjusted based on the size and type of tattoo and the patient’s skin type. Patients were treated at 4–6-weekly intervals. The clearance of pigmentation and local reactions was evaluated based on clinical photographs and dermoscopy, done at each sitting. At the end, both patients and physician assessed the clearance of tattoo. For patient assessment, a visual analogue scale (VAS) was used. To assess the efficacy of laser treatment by the physician, the tattoo removal rate was scored on a 5-point (0–4) scale (4: ≥ 70% removal, excellent improvement; 3: ≥ 50% and &lt; 70%, marked improvement; 2: ≥ 30% and &lt; 50%, moderate improvement; 1: ≥ 10% and &lt; 30%, mild improvement and 0: &lt; 10%, no effect). Patients were asked to assess their satisfaction (0 = dissatisfactory, 10 = satisfactory) and pain (0 = no pain, 10 = worst pain) using the VAS. Clinical photographs were assessed both by the patients and the physicians. Four women and 11 men were included (aged 30–45 years). At the end of treatment, all patients had &gt; 75% clearance and seven obtained almost complete clearance. Thus, all patients had an excellent response. The average patient-reported score for satisfaction was 8.2 and 2.5 for pain. The average score was 4.4 for the number of sessions. A few adverse effects, including erythema, blistering and crusting, were observed. Picosecond lasers allow for the most effective delivery of thermal radiation to tattoo particles through more specific photothermal and photomechanical effects than traditional nanosecond lasers. They also have an additional effect of minimizing the collateral damage to the surrounding dermis and epidermis. Thus, a picosecond laser is a safe and effective method for tattoo removal in Asian people.

Clinicians commonly place ultrasound-guided intravenous catheters in peripheral veins for the diagnostic and therapeutic treatments of patients. This procedural skill requires practice and static phantom models are a commonly used education tool. Several commercial models that simulate blood vessels within tissue are available; however, they can be expensive. There are many examples of “Do-It-Yourself” models proposed; however, many of these require time to create the model. Mixing water and gelatin to make a gelatinous material, and the time necessary to set and store the phantom may deter people from pursuing these options. We propose Konnyaku jelly, or “yam cake,” found in many Asian grocery stores, as the substrate to create a phantom model. When imaging with ultrasound, this model is similar to commercially available models, however the cost is less than $3.00 and preparation is about 5 min. We believe that Konnyaku jelly should be a more generally accepted homemade static model for phantom preparation.

From 1925-1929, the popular social movement of "Emperor" Flor Intrencherado in Western Visayas gained notoriety within the press local. The Iloilo-based local newspaper, the Makinaugalingon, extensively covered the movement in their press release articles. The newspaper, unsurprisingly, recreated a picture of Intrencherado and his followers in a language of ridicule, dismissing the movement and identifying its leader as a lunatic and insane despite the locality of the press. This, in turn, marginalized the movement, its goals, and objectives, as well as the leader, "Emperor" Flor Intrencherado. The goal of this study is to present, review, and analyze the different representations the local press created with the “infamous” peasant movement and give the context in which similar social movements could be understood. References Primary Materials El Tiempo. Microfilm. Information Services and Instruction Section, University of the Philippines Main Library. Quezon City. The issue used: August 8, 1907 Makinaugalingon. Microfilm. Information Services and Instruction Section, University of the Philippines Main Library. Quezon City. Various Issues used. Manila Times. Microfilm. Information Services and Instruction Section, University of the Philippines Main Library. Quezon City. Various Issues used. Philippines Free Press. Microfilm. Information Services and Instruction Section, University of the Philippines Main Library. Quezon City. Various Issues used. Works Cited Acevedo, Christian George. “Rosendo Mejica, the Golden Age of the Hiligaynon Literature and the Vernacularization of Jose Rizal’s Novels.” AGATHOS: An International Review of the Humanities and Social Sciences 11, no. 2 (2020): 107–18. Adamkiewicz, Andrei. “The Legitimating Aspects of Colonial Discourse.” In Culture and Texts: Representations of Philippine Society, edited by Raul Pertierra and Eduardo Ugarte, 155-176. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1994. Aguilar, Filomeno. Clash of Spirits: The History of Power and Sugar Planter Hegemony on a Visayan Island. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1998. Aguilar, Filomeno Jr. “Masonic Myths and Revolutionary Feats in Negros Occidental.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 28, no. 2 (September 1997): 285–300. Alayon, John Richard. “The Empire of Flor Yntrencherado: A Study of Anti-Colonial Resistance.” Undergraduate Research, University of the Philippines in the Visayas, 1999. Bankoff, Greg. "Bandits, Banditry, and Landscapes of Crime in the Nineteenth-Century Philippines." Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 29, no. 2 (September 1998): 319–39. Baumgartner, Joseph. "Newspapers as Historical Sources." Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society 9, no. 3 (September 1981): 256–58. Borrinaga, George Emmanuel. “Seven Churches: The Pulahan Movement in Leyte, 1902-1907.” Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society 43, no. 1/2 (2015): 1–139. Braünlein, Peter. "Who Defines 'the Popular'? Post-Colonial Discourses on National Identity and Popular Christianity in the Philippines." In Religion, Tradition and the Popular: Transcultural Views from Asia and Europe, edited by Judith Schlehe and Evamaria Sandkühler, 75–111. History in Popular Cultures. Bielefeld, 2014. Constantino, Renato. The Philippines: A Past Revisited. Quezon City: Tala Publications Inc., 1975. Fernandez, Doreen. “The Philippine Press System: 1811-1989.” Philippine Studies 37, no. 3 (1989): 317–44. Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Translated by Richard Howard. Vintage Books Edition. New York: Random House, Inc., 1988. Funtecha, Henry. “The Making of a ‘Queen City’: The Case of Iloilo 1890s-1930s.” Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society 20, no. 2/3 (September 1992): 107–32. Goh, Daniel. “Postcolonial Disorientations: Colonial Ethnography and the Vectors of the Philippine Nation in the Imperial Frontier.” Postcolonial Studies 11, no. 3 (2008): 259–76. Guerrero, Milagros. “The Colorum Uprisings, 1924-1931.” Asian Studies 5, no. 1 (1967): 65–78. Holt, Elizabeth Mary. Colonizing Filipinas: Nineteenth-Century Representations of the Philippines in Western Historiography. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2002. Ileto, Reynaldo. Filipinos and Their Revolution: Event, Discourse, and Historiography. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1998.__________. Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840-1910. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1979. Kaufmann, John. Kapulúngan Binisayá-Ininglís. Iloilo: La Editorial, 1935. https://www.gutenberg.ph/previews/kaufmann/KVED-Body.pdf. Lanternari, Vittorio. “Nativistic and Socio-Religious Movements: A Reconsideration.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 16, no. 4 (September 1974): 483–503. Larkin, John. Sugar and the Origins of Modern Philippine Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Madrid, Randy, and Joefe Santarita. “Montor: Iloilo’s Robinhood and Reluctant Revolutionary.” In The Struggle Against the Spaniards and the Americans in Western Visayas: Papers on the 1st and 2nd Conferences on the West Visayan Phase of the Philippine Revolution, edited by Henry Funtecha and Melanie Jalandoni Padilla, 129-135. Iloilo: UP in the Visayas Centennial Committee, 1998. Magos, Alicia P. “Birdin: Bukidnon (Sulod) Revolutionary Hero.” In The Struggle Against the Spaniards and the Americans in Western Visayas: Papers on the 1st and 2nd Conferences on the West Visayan Phase of the Philippine Revolution, edited by Henry Funtecha and Melanie Jalandoni Padilla, 125-128. Iloilo: UP in the Visayas Centennial Committee, 1998. __________. The Enduring Ma-Aram Tradition: An Ethnography of a Kinaray-a Village in Antique. Quezon City: New Day Publishers, 1992. Marco, Sophia. “Dios-Dios in the Visayas.” Philippine Studies 49, no. 1 (2001): 42–77. McCoy, Alfred. “A Queen Dies Slowly: The Rise and Decline of Iloilo City.” In Philippine Social History: Global Trade and Local Transformations, edited by Alfred McCoy and Edilberto de Jesus, 297–358. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1982. __________. “Baylan: Animist Religion and Philippine Peasant Ideology.” Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society 10, no. 3 (September 1982): 141–94. __________. “Sugar Barons: Formation of a Native Planter Class in the Colonial Philippines.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 19, no. 3–4 (1992): 106–41. Oosterwal, Gottfried. “Messianic Movements.” Philippine Sociological Review 16, no. 1 (1968): 40–50. Pertierra, Raul. “Philippine Studies and the New Ethnography.” In Cultures and Texts: Representations of Philippine Society, edited by Raul Pertierra and Eduardo Ugarte, 121–37. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1994. Rafael, Vicente. White Love and Other Events in Filipino History. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2000. Spivak, Gayatri. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. London: MacMillan Education LTD, 1988. Sturtevant, David. “Guardia de Honor: Revitalization with the Revolution.” Asian Studies 4, no. 2 (1966): 342–52. Tan, Samuel K. A History of the Philippines. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1995. Reprint, 2012. Vergara, Benito Jr. Displaying Filipinos: Photography and Colonialism in Early 20th Century Philippines. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1995. Other References Arellano Law Foundation. The LawPhil Project. https://www.lawphil.net/ Cruz-Lucero, Rosario, Doreen Fernandez, John Barrios, and Jeffrey Yap. “Ilonggo.” Our Islands, Our People: The Histories and Cultures of the Filipino Nation (blog), 2018. https://ourislandsourpeople.wordpress.com/ilonggo/. Hudtohan, Emiliano. “Makinaugalingon Advocacy of Rosendo Mejica.” Dr. Emiliano Hudtohan (blog), July 23, 2014. http://emilianohudtohan.com/makinaugalingon-advocacy-of-rosendo-mejica/. Lagos, Joy, and Nazaria Lagos. "Remembering Don Rosendo Mejica." The News Today Online Edition, March 12, 2007. http://www.thenewstoday.info/2007/03/12/remembering.don.rosendo.mejica.html. Lua, Shirley. “Rediscovering the Rosendo Mejica Museum in Molo, Iloilo.” Lifestyle Inquirer, January 4, 2016. https://lifestyle.inquirer.net/218350/rediscovering-the-rosendo-mejica-museum-in-molo-iloilo/.

Fig. 1: "Xiao Ming (little Ming) and xiao meng (little sprout/cutie)", satirical take on a popular Chinese textbook character. Shared online Introduction: Cuteness, Online Vernaculars, and Digital FolkloreThis short essay presents some preliminary materials for a discussion of the social circulation of contemporary Chinese vernacular terms among digital media users. In particular, I present the word meng (萌, literally "sprout", recently adopted as a slang term for "cute") as a case in point for a contextual analysis of elements of digital folklore in their transcultural flows, local appropriations, and social practices of signification. One among many other neologisms that enter Mandarin Chinese from seemingly nowhere and gain a widespread popularity in everyday online and offline linguistic practices, meng belongs to a specific genealogy of Japanese animation fansubbing communities, and owes its rapid popularisation to its adaptation to local contexts in different syntactic forms. The resulting inclusion of meng in the changing repertoire of wangluo liuxing ciyu ("words popular on the Internet")—the online vernacular common among Chinese Internet users which is often the target of semantic or structural analyses—is in fact just the last step of processes of networked production and social signification happening across digital media and online platforms.As an anthropologist of media use, I aim to advance the thesis that, in the context of widespread access to digital media, vernacular terms popularised across online platforms and making their way into everyday linguistic interactions are not necessarily the epiphenomena of subcultural formations, nor can they be simply seen as imported aesthetics, or understood through semantic analyses. Rather, “words popular on the Internet” must be understood as part of a local digital folklore, the open repertoire of vernacular content resulting from the daily interaction of users and digital technologies (Lialina & Espenschied 9) in a complex and situated media ecology (Fuller). I argue that the difference between these two approaches is the same passing between a classical structural understanding of signification proposed by Lévi-Strauss and the counter-Copernican revolution proposed by Latour’s quasi-objects proliferating in collectives of actors. Are incredibly pervasive terms like meng actually devoid of meaning, floating signifiers enabling the very possibility of signification? Or are they rather more useful when understood as both signifiers and signifieds, quasi-objects tracing networks and leading to collectives of other hybrids and practices?The materials and observations presented in this essay are part of the data collected for my PhD research on Chinese digital folklore, a study grounded on both ethnographic and archaeological methods. The ethnographic part of my project consists of in-depth interviews, small talk and participant observation of users on several Chinese online platforms such as AcFun, Baidu Tieba, Douban, Sina Weibo and WeChat (Hine). The archaeological part, on the other hand, focuses on the sampling of user-generated content from individual feeds and histories of these online platforms, an approach closer to the user-focused Internet archaeology of Nicholson than to the media archaeology of Parikka. My choice of discussing the term meng as an example is motivated by its pervasiveness in everyday interactions in China, and is supported by my informants identifying it as one of the most popular vernacular terms originating in online interaction. Moreover, as a rather new term jostling its way through the crowded semantic spectrum of cuteness, meng is a good example of the minor aesthetic concepts identified by Ngai as pivotal for judgments of taste in contemporary consumer societies (812). If, as in the words of one of my informants, meng "just means 'cute'," why did it end up on Coca-Cola bottle labels which were then featured in humorous self-portraits with perplexed cats? Fig. 2: "Meng zhu" (Cute leader, play on word on homophone “alliance leader”) special edition Coca-Cola bottle with cat, uploaded on Douban image gallery. Screenshot by the author Cuteness after JapanContemporary Japan is often portrayed as the land of cuteness. Academic explanations of the Japanese fascination with the cute, neotenic and miniaturised abound, tackling the topic from the origins of cute aesthetics in Japanese folkloric characters (Occhi) and their reappearance in commercial phenomena such as Pokémon (Allison), to the role of cuteness as gender performance and normativity (Burdelski & Mitsuhashi) and the "spectacle of kawaii" (Yano 681) as a trans-national strategy of cultural soft power (683). Although the export and localisation of Japanese cultural products across and beyond Asia has been widely documented (Iwabuchi), the discussion has often remained at the level of specific products (comics, TV series, games). Less frequently explored are the repertoires of recontextualised samples, snippets and terms that local audiences piece together after the localisation and consumption of these transnational cultural products. In light of this, is it the case that "the very aesthetic and sensibility that seems to dwell in the playful, the girlish, the infantilized, and the inevitably sexualized" are inevitably adopted after the "widespread distribution and consumption of Japanese cute goods and aesthetics to other parts of the industrial world" (Yano 683)? Or is it rather the case that language precedes aesthetics, and that terms end up reconfigured according to the local discursive contexts in ongoing dialogic and situated negotiations? In other words, what happens when the Japanese word moe (萌え), a slang term "originally referring to the fictional desire for characters of comics, anime, and games or for pop idols” (Azuma 48) is read in its Mandarin Chinese pronunciation meng by amateur translators of anime and manga, picked up by audiences of video streaming websites, and popularised on discussion boards and other online platforms? On a broader level, this is a question of how the vocabularies of specialised fan cultures mutate when they move across language barriers on the vectors of digital media and amateur translations. While in Japanese otaku culture moe indicates a very specific, physically arousing form of aesthetic appreciation that is proper to a devote fan (Azuma 57), the appropriation of the (originally Chinese) logograph by the audiences of dongman (animation and comics) products in Mainland China results in the general propagation of meng as a way of saying 'cute' slightly more fashionable and hip than the regular Mandarin word ke'ai. Does this impact on the semantics or the aesthetics of cuteness in China? These questions have not been ignored by researchers; Chinese academics in particular, who have a first-hand experience of the unpredictable moods of vernacular terms circulating from digital media user cultures to everyday life interactions, appear concerned with finding linguistic explanations or establishing predictors for these rogue terms that seem to ignore lexical rules and traditional etymologies. Liu, for example, tries to explain the popularity of this particular term through Dawkins' neo-Darwinian theorisation of memes as units of cultural transmission, identifying in meng the evolutionary advantages of shortness and memorisability. As simplistic treatments of language, this sort of explanations does not account for the persistence of various other ways of describing general and specific kinds of cuteness in Mandarin Chinese, such as ke'ai, dia or sajiao, as described by Zhang & Kramarae (767). On the other hand, most of the Chinese language research about meng at least acknowledges how the word appears under the sign of a specific media ecology: Japanese comics and animation (dongman) translated and shared online by fan communities, Japanese videogames and movies widely consumed by Chinese young audiences, and the popularisation of Internet access and media literacy across China. It is in this context that this and other neologisms "continuously end up in the latest years' charts of most popular words" (Bai 28, translation by the author), as vernacular Mandarin integrates words from digital media user cultures and online platforms. Similar comparative analyses also recognise that "words move faster than culture" (Huang 15, translation by the author), and that it is now young Chinese digital media users who negotiate their understanding of meng, regardless of the implications of the Japanese moe culture and its aesthetic canons (16). According to Huang, this process indicates on the one hand the openness and curiosity of Chinese youth for Japanese culture, and on the other "the 'borrowist' tendency of the language of Internet culture" (18). It is precisely the speed and the carefree ‘borrowist’ attitude with which these terms are adopted, negotiated and transformed across online platforms which makes it questionable to inscribe them in the classic relationship of generational resistance such as the one that Moore proposes in his treatment of ku, the Chinese word for 'cool' described as the "verbal icon of a youth rebellion that promises to transform some of the older generation's most enduring cultural values" (357). As argued in the following section, meng is definitely not the evolutionary winner in a neo-Darwinian lexical competition between Chinese words, nor occupies a clear role in the semantics of cuteness, nor is it simply deployed as an iconic and rebellious signifier against the cultural values of a previous generation. Rather, after reaching Chinese digital media audiences along the "global wink of pink globalization" (Yano 684) of Japanese animation, comics, movies and videogames, this specific subcultural term diffracts along the vectors of the local media ecology. Specialised communities of translators, larger audiences of Japanese animation streaming websites, larger populations of digital media users and ultimately the public at large all negotiate meng’s meaning and usage in their everyday interactions, while the term quickly becomes just another "word popular on the Internet” listed in end-of-the-year charts, ready to be appropriated by marketing as a local wink to Chinese youth culture. Fig. 3: Baidu image search for 萌 (meng), as of 28 February 2014: the term ‘cute’ elicits neotenic puppies, babies, young girls, teen models, and eroticised Japanese comic characters. Screenshot by the author Everything Meng: Localising and Appropriating CutenessIn the few years since it entered the Chinese vernacular, first as a specialised term adopted by dongman fans and then as a general exclamation for "cute!", meng has been repurposed and adapted to local usages in many different ways, starting from its syntactic function: while in Japanese moe is usually a verb (the action of arousing feelings of passion in the cultivated fan), meng is more frequently used in Chinese as an adjective (cute) and has been quickly compounded in new expressions such as maimeng (literally "to sell cuteness", to act cute), mengwu (cute thing), mengdian (cute selling point), widening the possibilities for its actual usage beyond the specific aesthetic appreciation of female pre-teen anime characters that the word originally refers to. This generalisation of a culturally specific term to the general domain of aesthetic judgments follows local linguistic patterns: for example maimeng (to act cute) is clearly modelled on pre-existing expressions like zhuang ke'ai (acting cute) or sajiao (acting like a spoiled child) which, as Zhang & Kramarae (762) show, are common Mandarin Chinese terms to describe infantilised gender performativity. This connection between being meng and setting up a performance is confirmed by the commentative practices and negotiations around the cuteness of things: as one of my informants quipped regarding a recently popular Internet celebrity: "Some people think that he is meng. But I don't think he's meng, I think he's just posing." Hence, while Japanese moe characters belong to a specific aesthetic canon in the realm of 2D animation, the cuteness that meng indicates in Chinese refers to a much broader scope of content and interactions, in which the semantic distinctions from other descriptors of cuteness are quite blurred, and negotiated in individual use. As another informant put it, commenting on the new WeChat avatar of one of her contacts: "so meng! This is not just ke'ai, this is more ke'ai than ke'ai, it's meng!" Other informants explained meng variably as a more or less performed and faked cuteness, as regular non-specified cuteness, as a higher degree or as a different form of it, evidencing how the term is deployed in both online and offline everyday life interactions according to imitation, personal invention, context and situation, dialogic negotiations, shared literacies, and involvements in specific communities. Moreover, besides using it without the sexual overtones of its Japanese counterpart, my research participants were generally not aware of the process of cross-linguistic borrowing and specialised aesthetic meaning of meng—for most of them, it just meant 'cute', although it did so in very personal ways. These observations do not exclude, however, that meng maintains its linkages to Japanese cultural products and otaku fandom: on the same online platforms where meng was originally borrowed from the lines of fansubbed Japanese anime series, its definition continues to be discussed and compared to its original meaning. The extremely detailed entries on Mengniang Baike (MoeGirl Wiki, http://zh.moegirl.org) testify a devoted effort in collecting and rationalising the Japanese moe aesthetics for an audience of specialised Chinese zhainan (literally 'shut-in guy", the Chinese word for otaku), while Weimeng (Micro-Moe, http://www.weimoe.com) provides a microblogging platform specifically dedicated to sharing dongman content and discuss all things meng. The recent popularity of the word is not lost on the users of these more specialised online platforms, who often voice their discontent with the casual and naive appropriations of uncultured outsiders. A simple search query of the discussion board archives of AcFun, a popular zhainan culture video streaming website, reveals the taste politics at play around these vernacular terms. Here are some complaints, voiced directly by anonymous users of the board, regarding meng: "Now I really detest this meng word, day and night everywhere is meng meng meng and maimeng but do you really understand what do these words mean?" "Don't tell me, alternative people think that watching anime is fashionable; they watch it, learn some new word and use it everywhere. Last time I was playing videogames I heard a girl saying Girl: 'Do you know what does meng mean?' Guy: 'I don't know' Girl: 'You don't even know this! Meng means beautiful, lovely' Fuck your mom's cunt hearing this I wanted to punch through the screen" "Anyway these 'popular words' are all leftovers from our playing around, then a bunch of boons start using them and feel pleased of 'having caught up with fashion', hehe" Fig. 4: "Don't tell me, alternative people think that watching anime is fashionable…", anonymous post commenting on the use of meng on the AcFun message board. Screenshot by the authorConclusion: Do Signifiers Float in Media Ecologies? The choice of examining the networks traced by a slang term signifying cuteness was determined by the conviction that the "minor aesthetics" described by Ngai (812) play an important role in the social construction of taste and judgment in contemporary consumer societies. This is especially significant when discussing digital folklore as the content produced by the everyday interactions of users and digital media: cuteness and the negotiations around its deployment are in fact important features of the repertoires of user-generated content shared and consumed on online platforms. In the case of this essay, the strange collective included green sprouts, textbook illustrations, cats, Japanese anime characters, selfies, and Coke bottle label designs. Summing up the overview of the word meng presented above, and attempting a critical response to Ngai's linkage of the minor aesthetics of cuteness to national contexts which make them "ideologically meaningful" (819), I suggest the recuperation of Lévi-Strauss’ concept of floating signifier as developed in his analysis of Melanesians’ fuzzy notion of mana. This theoretical choice comes almost naturally when dealing with pervasive terms: as Holbraad explains, “part of the original attraction of mana-terms to anthropologists was their peculiarly double universality – their semantic breadth (‘mana is everywhere’, said the native) coupled with their geographical diffusion (‘mana-terms are everywhere’, replied the anthropologist)” (189). Meng seems to be everywhere in China as both a term (in everyday, online and offline interactions) and as cuteness (in popular culture and media), thus making it an apparently perfect candidate for the role of floating signifier. Lévi-Strauss deployed Mauss’ concept as a reinforcement of his structuralist conception of meaning against a surfeit of signifiers (Holbraad 196-197), "a symbol in its pure state, therefore liable to take on any symbolic content whatever [...] a zero symbolic value […] a sign marking the necessity of a supplementary symbolic content over and above that which the signified already contains" (Lévi-Strauss 63-64). Moore’s framing of the Chinese ku and the American cool as “basic slang terms” (360) follows the same structuralist logic: extremely pervasive terms lose in meaning and specificity what they gain in supplementary symbolic content (in his case, generational distinction). Yet, as shown through the examples presented in the essay, meng does in no case reach a zero symbolic value—rather, it is “signifier and signified (and more)” (Holbraad 197), meaning different kinds of cuteness and aesthetic judgement across more or less specialised usages, situated contexts, individual understandings and dialogic negotiations. This oversimplified rebuttal to Lévi-Strauss' concept is my attempt to counter several arguments that I believe to be grounded in the structuralist theorisation of series of signifiers and signified: the linkage between aesthetic categories and national contexts (Ngai); the correlation between language and cultural practices or aesthetics (Yano); the semantic analyses of slang terms (Moore, Bai); the memetic explanations of digital folklore (Liu). As briefly illustrated, meng’s popularity does not necessarily convey a specific Japanese aesthetic culture, nor does its adaptation mirror a peculiarly Chinese one; the term does not necessarily define a different form of cuteness, nor does it confront generational values. It could be more useful to conceptualise meng, and other elements of digital folklore, as what Latour calls quasi-objects, strange hybrids existing in different versions and variations across different domains. Understood in this way, meng traces a network leading to: the specialised knowledge of fansubbing communities, the large audiences of video streaming websites, the echo chambers of social networking platforms and participatory media, and the ebbs and flows of popular culture consumption. To conclude, I agree with Yano that "it remains useful for Asia analysts to observe these ebbs and flows as they intersect with political frameworks, economic trends, and cultural values" (687-88). Meng, as scores of other Chinese slang terms that crowd the yearly charts of ‘words popular on the Internet’ might not be here to stay. But digital folklore is, as long as there will be users interacting and negotiating the minor aesthetics of their everyday life on online platforms. The general theoretical aim of this brief discussion of one vernacular term is evidencing how the very idea of a "Internet culture", when understood through the concepts of media ecology, online vernaculars and quasi-objects becomes hard to grasp through simple surveying, encyclopaedic compilations, statistical analyses or linguistic mapping. Even in a brief contextualisation of one simple slang term, what is revealed is in fact a lively bundle of practices: the cross-linguistic borrowing of a specialised aesthetic, its definition on crowdsourced wikis and anonymous discussion boards, the dialogic negotiations regarding its actual usage in situated contexts of everyday life, and the sectorial dynamics of distinction and taste. Yet, meng just means 'cute'.ReferencesAllison, Anne. “Portable Monsters and Commodity Cuteness: Pokémon as Japan’s New Global Power.” Postcolonial Studies 6.3 (2003): 381–95. Azuma, Hiroki. Otaku: Japan's Database Animals. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2009. Bai, Lin. “Qianxi Wangluo Liuxingyu - Meng [A Brief Analysis of a Popular Internet Term - Meng].” Wuyi Xueyuan Xuebao 31.3 (2012): 28–30. Burdelski, Matthew, and Koji Mitsuhashi. “‘She Thinks You’re Kawaii’: Socializing Affect, Gender, and Relationships in a Japanese Preschool.” Language in Society 39.1 (2010): 65–93. Chuang, Tzu-i. “The Power of Cuteness.” Stanford Journal of East Asian Affairs 5.2 (2005): 21–28. Fuller, Matthew. Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005. Hine, Christine. The Internet. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Holbraad, Martin. “The Power of Powder: Multiplicity and Motion in the Divinatory Cosmology of Cuban Ifá (or Mana, Again).” In Thinking through Things, eds. Amiria J. M. Henare, Martin Holbraad and Sari Wastell. London: Routledge, 2007. 189–225. Huang, Yuyan. “‘Meng’ Yu ‘Moe’: Shixi Zhongguo Liuxing Wenhua Dui Riben Wenhua de Shourong [‘Meng’ and ‘Moe’: A Tentative Analysis of the Acceptance of Japanese Culture in Chinese Popular Culture].” Zhejiang Waiguoyu Xueyuan Xuebao 3 (2012): 15–19. Iwabuchi, Kōichi. Recentering Globalization. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss. London: Routlege & K. Paul, 1987. Lialina, Olia, and Dragan Espenschied. “Do You Believe in Users?” In Digital Folklore, eds. Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied. Stuttgart: Merz & Solitude, 2009. Liu, Yiting. “Cong Moyinlun Jiaodu Qianxi ‘Meng’ Ci de Liuxing [A Brief Analysis of the Word ‘Meng’ from a Memetic Point of View].” Yuyan Wenxue 7 (2013): 168. Moore, Robert L. “Generation Ku: Individualism and China’s Millennial Youth.” Ethnology 44.4 (2005): 357–76. Ngai, Sianne. “The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde.” Critical Inquiry 31.4 (2005): 811–847. Nicholson, Scott. “A Framework for Internet Archeology: Discovering Use Patterns in Digital Library and Web–Based Information Resources.” First Monday 10.2 (2005). Occhi, Debra J. “Consuming Kyara ‘Characters:’ Anthropomorphization and Marketing in Contemporary Japan.” Comparative Culture 15 (2010): 77–86. Parikka, Jussi. What Is Media Archaeology?. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012. Yano, Christine R. “Wink on Pink: Interpreting Japanese Cute as It Grabs the Global Headlines.” The Journal of Asian Studies 68.3 (2009): 681–88. Zhang, Wei, and Cheris Kramarae. “Are Chinese Women Turning Sharp-Tongued?” Discourse & Society 23.6 (2012): 749–70.

Introduction‘Dream’ has been researched across numerous fields in its multiplicity within both a physical and emotional capacity. For Pagel et al., there is no fixed definition of what ‘dream’ is or are. However, in an advertising context, ’dream’ is the idealised version of our desires, re-visualised in real life (Coombes and Batchelor 103). It could be said that for countless consumers, advertising imagery has elicited dreams of living the perfect life and procuring material pleasures (Manca et al.; Hood). Goodis asserts, “advertising doesn’t always mirror how people are acting but how they are dreaming, in a sense what we are doing is wrapping up your emotions and selling them back to you” (qtd. in Back and Quaade 65). One component of this notion of ‘dream’ in advertising is captured by wishful images of the face and body in their ‘perfect form’ presented in a field of other beauty ideals. For our purposes, ‘dream’ is a “philosophical concept” (Pagel et al. 14) by which dreams are a series of aspirations and desires that consumers internalise, while at the same time, find difficult to achieve. ‘Dream’, then, will be used to critically explore how the beauty and advertising industries collectively employ ethnic ambiguity in addition to other tactics and strategies to sell us dream-like visions of idealised beauty. Forever Dreaming: The Introduction of Ethnic AmbiguityWe can link dreams to beauty as both areas of analysis contain many cultural interpretations and can be deconstructed to reveal different meanings (Sontag). In many ways, beauty is another dream and Sontag notes that the concept of beauty is often linked to certain physical traits that an individual possesses. These physical traits are capitalised upon by product marketing by which Hood claims, aims to enhance one, or even more, of them. For example, lipstick is not marketed as simply as a mixture of wax and pigment but rather a way to “obtain beauty, find romance or gain confidence” (7). As a result, global beauty brands can find long term marketing success through meaningful product marketing. This long-term marketing success relies on influencing human behaviour and perceptions. As a result of meaningful marketing, consumers may find themselves driven to purchase implicit qualities in products advertised to reflect their dreams (Hood).Following the 1980s, this version of meaningful marketing has become a driving purpose for advertising agencies around the globe (Steel). Advertising agencies rely on deeper human insights, identifying latent desires to create a brief that must ultimately sell a dream (Steel). The ideal strategy needs to define something that will build brand loyalty and encourage consumers to have a symbiotic relationship connecting their dreams with the product being sold. As Hood argues, “advertising consists of selling not just things but also dreams”. While this concept is one that “some see as inherently damning”, it is also inherently necessary (7). We understand that people are emotional beings, investing in the artefacts they build, obtain or use with significance “beyond merely utilitarian” (7). For these reasons, beauty advertisers act as the purveyors of dreams in the form of physical perfection as an articulation of consumer’s own aspirations of beauty.These aspirations of dream beauty are a direct representation of our thoughts and feelings. As such, it should be noted that we as consumers are often encouraged to draw inspiration from imagery that is often times seen as ethnically ambiguous. “Ethnic ambiguity” is the absence of any one prominent ethnic or racial feature that is easily discernible to one specific group (Garcia 234; Harrison et al.). An example of this ethnic ambiguity can be seen in marketing campaigns by high end makeup artist and her eponymous range of cosmetics, Charlotte Tilbury. Most notably, in a 2015 launch for her “Makeup Wardrobe”, Tilbury’s makeup palettes boasted 10 aspirational ‘looks’ and personas that could be achieved simply through purchase. The images of women featured on a figurative ‘wheel of fortune’ digital display used to market products online. This digital ‘wheel of fortune’ comprised of ethnically ambiguous models against descriptive persona’s such as “The Dolce Vita” and “The Glamour Muse”. These kinds of digital marketing tools required consumers to make a decision based on what their dream ‘look’ is through an ethnically ambiguous lens and from here are guided to purchase their desired aesthetic. Like Charlotte Tilbury, the beauty industry has seen a growing body of cosmetic brands that employ ethnic ambiguity to sell dreams of homogenised beauty. We will see the ways in which modern day beauty brands, such as Kylie Jenner Cosmetics and Fenty Beauty have come to adopt ethnic ambiguity or embrace entire ethnic and racial groups in order to expand their consumer influence.Aspirational Ambiguity: Dreams of DisempowermentSince the early 2000s, beauty advertising has seen a prominent rise in the use of ethnically ambiguous models. Some see this as an effort to answer the global desire for diversity and inclusion. However, the notion that beauty standards transcend racial boundaries and is inclusive, is simply another form of appropriating and fetishising ethnicity (R. Sengupta). In many ways, these manufactured dream-like versions of beauty have evolved to reach wider markets, in the hope that consumers will be emboldened to both embrace their racial heritage, and at the same time conform to homogenised standards of beauty (Frith et al.; Harrison et al.).In this bid to diversify and extend consumer reach, there are three prominent reasons why ethnically ambiguous models are more likely to be featured over models whose African, Indigenous, and/or Asian heritage is more prominent. Firstly, ethnically ambiguous models do not seem to conform to a particular notion of what is considered beautiful. For many decades, popular culture has been saturated with images of thin, of young, of narrow noses and hips, of blonde, blue eyes, and Caucasian hair textures (Harrison et al.; Hunter; Saraswati). These Westernised beauty ideals have been historically shaped through years of colonial influence, grounded in an imbalance of power and imposed to create a culture of dominance and oppression (Saraswati). Secondly, ethnic models are featured to convey “the sense of the ‘exotic’, and their ‘otherness’ acts to normalise and entrench the dominant ideal of white beauty” (qtd. in Redmond 175). ‘Otherness’ can be defined as the opposite of the majority, in Westernised society this ‘other’ can mean “people who are other than white, male, able bodied, heterosexual” (qtd. in Graycar 74). This ‘otherness’ showcased by ethnically ambiguous models draws viewers in. Physical features that were possessed by one specific ethnic group such as African, Asian, Latinx or Indigenous peoples have now become blended and are no longer confined to one race. Additionally, ethnically ambiguous models enable white consumers to dream about an exotic local or lifestyle, while at the same time providing ethnic audiences a way to see themselves.Finally, it is undeniable that ethnically ambiguous and mixed-race models have become desirable due to a historical preference for light skin (Saraswati). The visual references of light-skinned beauty epitomise a colonial dream and this standardisation has been transferred to indigenous peoples, or ethnic minorities in Western countries. According to Harrison et al, “marketers use mixed-race representations as cultural currency by mythologising mixed-race bodies as the new beauty standard” to represent a racial bridge, “tailored to ameliorate perceived racial divides” (503). Therefore, ethnically ambiguous models have an assumed advantage over their racially dominant counterparts, because they appear to straddle various racial boundaries. They are constructed to embody whomever, from wherever and whenever, fetishising their roleplay for the industry, when it pleases. This further exoticises multi-racial beauty models and renders them a commodified fantasy for many consumers alike. The continued commodification of ethnic ambiguity is problematic as it exploits models with distinctly mixed-race heritage to continue to sell images of white-washed beauty (Solomon et al.). An argument could be made that scarcity contributes to mixed-race models’ value, and therefore the total number of advertising opportunities that are offered to mixed-race models remains limited. To date, numerous studies highlight a limited use of racially diverse models within the beauty industry and does not reflect the growing global body of diverse consumers with purchasing power (Wasylkiw et al.; Redmond; Johnson; Jung and Lee; Frith et al.). In fact, prior to globalisation, Yan and Bissell claim that “each culture had a unique standard of attractiveness, derived from traditional views about beauty as well as the physical features of the people” (197) and over time the construction of dream beauty is characterised using Western features combined with exoticised traits of indigenous ethnic groups. Akinro and Mbunyuza-Memani claim that this “trend of normalising white or 'western' feminine looks as the standard of beauty” has pervaded a number of these indigenous cultures, eventually disseminated through the media as the ultimate goal (308). It can also be argued that the “growing inclusion of mixed-race models in ads is driven less by the motivation to portray diversity and driven more by pragmatism,” and in a more practical sense has implications for the “financial future of the advertised brands and the advertising industry as a whole” (Harrison et al. 513). As a result, uses of mixed-race models “are rather understood as palatable responses within dominant white culture to racial and ethnic minority populations growing in … cultural prominence” (513) in a tokenistic bid to sell a dream of unified beauty.The Dream Girl: Normalisation of Mixed-RaceIn 2017, an article in CNN’s Style section highlighted the growing number of mixed-race models in Japan’s fashion and beauty industry as a modern-day phenomenon from Japan’s interlocking history with the United States (Chung and Ogura). These beauty and fashion influencers refer to themselves as hafu, an exclusionary term that historically represented an “othered” minority of mixed-race heritage in Japanese society signalling complex and troubled interactions with majority Japanese (Oshima). The complications once associated with the term ‘hafu’ are now being reclaimed by bi-racial beauty and fashion models and as such, these models are beginning to defy categorisation and, in some ways, national identity because of their chameleon-like qualities. However, while there is an increasing use of mixed-race Japanese models, everyday mixed-race women are regularly excluded within general society; which highlights the incongruent nature of ‘half’ identity. And yet there is an increasing preference and demand from fashion and beauty outlets to feature them in Japanese and Western popular culture (Harrison et al.; Chung and Ogura). Numéro Tokyo’s editorial director Sayumi Gunji, estimated that almost 30-40 per cent of runway models in present day Japan, identify as either bi-racial mixed-race or multi-racial (Chung and Ogura).Gunji claims:"Almost all top models in the their 20s are hafu, especially the top models of popular fashion magazines ... . [In] the Japanese media and market, a foreigner's flawless looks aren't as readily accepted -- they feel a little distant. But biracial models, who are taller, have bigger eyes, higher noses [and] Barbie-doll-like looks, are admired because they are dreamy looking but not totally different from the Japanese. That's the key to their popularity," she adds. (Qtd. in Chung and Ogura)The "dreamy look" that Gunji describes is attributed to a historical preference toward light skin and a kind of willingness and sensuality, that once, only white models could be seen to tout (Frith et al. 58). Frith et al. and O’Barr discuss that beauty in Japanese advertising mirrors “the way women are portrayed in advertising in the West” (qtd. in Frith et al. 58). The emergence of hafu in Japanese beauty advertising sees these two worlds, a mixture of doll-like and sensual beauty, converging to create a dream-like standard for Japanese consumers. The growing presence of Japanese-American models such as Kiko Mizuhara and Jun Hasegawa are both a direct example of the unattainable ‘dreamy look’ that pervades the Japanese beauty industry. Given this ongoing trend of mixed-race models in beauty advertising, a recent article on Refinery29 talks about the significance of how mixed-race models are disassembling their once marginalised status.A. Sengupta writes:In contrast to passing, in which mixedness was marginalized and hidden, visibly multiracial models now feature prominently in affirmative sites of social norms. Multiracial looks are normalized, and, by extension, mixed identity is validated. There’s no cohesive social movement behind it, but it’s a quiet sea change that’s come with broadened beauty standards and the slow dismantling of social hierarchies.Another example of the normalisation in multi-racial identity is Adwoa Aboah, a mixed-race British model and feminist activist who has been featured on the covers of numerous fashion publications and on runways worldwide. In British Vogue’s December 2017 issue, titled “Great BRITAIN”, Adwoa Aboah achieved front cover status, alongside her image featured other politically powerful names, perhaps suggesting that Aboah represents not only the changing face of a historically white publication but as an embodiment of an increasingly diverse consumer landscape. Not only is she seen as both as a voice for those disenfranchised by the industry, by which she is employed, but as a symbol of new dreams. To conclude this section, it seems the evolution of advertising’s inclusion of multi-racial models reveals a progressive step change for the beauty industry. However, relying simply on the faces of ethnically ambiguous talent has become a covert way to fulfil consumer’s desire for diversity without wholly dismantling the destructive hierarchies of white dominance. Over this time however, new beauty creations have entered the market and with it two modern day icons.Architecting Black Beauty through the American DreamAccording to Kiick, the conception of the ‘American Dream’ is born out of a desire to “seek out a more advantageous existence than the current situation” (qtd. in Manca et al. 84). As a result of diligent hard work, Americans were rewarded with an opportunity for a better life (Manca et al.). Kylie Jenner’s entry into the beauty space seemed like a natural move for the then eighteen-year-old; it was a new-age representation of the ‘American Dream’ (Robehmed 2018). In less than five years, Jenner has created Kylie Cosmetics, a beauty empire that has since amassed a global consumer base, helping her earn billionaire status. A more critical investigation into Jenner’s performance however illustrates that her eponymous range of beauty products sells dreams which have been appropriated from black culture (Phelps). The term cultural appropriation refers to the way dominant cultures “adopt and adapt certain aspects of another’s culture and make it their own” (qtd. in Han 9). In Jenner’s case, her connection to ethnic Armenian roots through her sisters Kourtney, Kim, and Khloe Kardashian have significantly influenced her expression of ‘othered’ culture and moreover ethnic beauty ideals such as curvier body shapes and textured hair. Jenner’s beauty advertisements have epitomised what it means to be black in America, cherry picking racialised features of black women (namely their lips, hips/buttocks and afro-braided hairstyles) and rearticulated them through a white lens. The omission of the ‘black experience’ in her promotion of product is problematic for three reasons. Firstly, representing groups or people without invitation enables room for systemic stereotyping (Han). Secondly, this stereotyping can lead to continued marginalisation of minority cultures (Kulchyski). And finally, the over exaggeration of physical attributes, such as Jenner’s lips, hips and buttocks, reinforces her complicity in exoticising and fetishising the “other”. As a result, consumers of social media beauty advertising may pay less attention to cultural appropriation if they are already unaware that the beauty imagery they consume is based on the exploitation of black culture.Another perspective on Jenner’s use of black culture is in large part due to her cultural appreciation of black beauty. This meaning behind Jenner’s cultural appreciation can be attributed to the inherent value placed on another person’s culture, in the recognition of the positive qualities and the celebration of all aspects of that culture (Han). This is evidenced by her recent addition of cosmetic products for darker complexions (Brown). However, Jenner’s supposed fascination with black culture may be in large part due to the environment in which she was nurtured (Phelps). As Phelps reveals, “consider the cultural significance of the Kardashian family, and the various ways in which the Kardashian women, who are tremendously wealthy and present as white, have integrated elements of black culture as seemingly “natural” in their public bodily performances” (9). Although the Kardashian-Jenner family have faced public backlash for their collective appropriation they have acquired a tremendous “capital gain in terms of celebrity staying power and hyper-visibility” (Phelps 9). Despite the negative attention, Kylie Jenner’s expression of black culture has resurfaced the very issues that had once been historically deemed insignificant. In spite of Jenner’s cultural appropriation of black beauty, her promotion through Kylie Cosmetics continues to sell dreams of idealised beauty through the white lens.In comparison, Rihanna Fenty’s cosmetic empire has been touted as a celebration of diversity and inclusion for modern-age beauty. Unlike Kylie Cosmetics, Fenty’s eponymous brand has become popular for its broader message of inclusivity across both skin tone, body shape and gender. Upon her product release, Fenty Beauty acknowledged a growing body of diverse consumers and as a direct response to feature models of diverse skin tones, cultural background and racial heritage. Perhaps more importantly, Fenty Beauty’s challenge to the ongoing debate around diversity and inclusion has been in stark contrast to Kylie Jenner’s ongoing appropriation of black culture. Images featured at the first brand and product launch of Fenty Beauty and in present day advertising, show South Sudanese model Duckie Thot and hijab-wearing model Halima Aden as central characters within the Fenty narrative, illustrating that inclusion need not remain ambiguous and diversity need not be appropriated. Fenty’s initial product line up included ninety products, but most notably, the Pro Filt’r foundation caused the most publicity. Since its introduction in 2017, the foundation collection contained range of 40 (now 50) inclusive foundation shades, 13 of these shades were designed to cater for much darker complexions, an industry first (Walters). As a result of the brand’s inclusion of diverse product shades and models, Fenty Beauty has been shown to push boundaries within the beauty industry and the social media landscape (Walters). Capitalising on all races and expanding beauty ideals, Fenty’s showcase of beauty subscribes to the notion that for women everywhere in the world, their dreams can and do come true. In conclusion, Fenty Beauty has played a critical role in re-educating global consumers about diversity in beauty (Walters) but perhaps more importantly Rihanna, by definition, has become a true embodiment of the ‘American Dream’.Conclusion: Future Dreams in BeautyIt is undeniable that beauty advertising has remained complicit in selling unattainable dreams to consumers. 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Introduction Japan has long been cited as a major source of cute (kawaii) culture as it has spread around the world, as encapsulated in Christine R. Yano’s phrase ‘Pink Globalization’. This essay charts recent developments in Japanese society through the cute character Rilakkuma, a character produced by San-X (a competitor to Sanrio, which produces the famed Hello Kitty). His name means ‘relaxed bear’, and Rilakkuma and friends are featured in comics, games and other products, called kyarakutā shōhin (also kyarakutā guzzu, which both mean ‘character goods’). Rilakkuma is pictured relaxing, sleeping, eating sweets, and listening to music; he is not only lazy, but he is also unproductive in socio-economic terms. Yet, he is never censured for this lifestyle. He provides visual pleasure to those who buy these goods, but more importantly, Rilakkuma’s story charitably portrays a lifestyle that is fully consumptive with very little, if any, productivity. Rilakkuma’s reified consumption is certainly in line with many earlier analyses of shōjo (young girl) culture in Japan, where consumerism is considered ‘detached from the productive economy of heterosexual reproduction’ (Treat, 281) and valued as an end in itself. Young girl culture in Japan has been both critiqued and celebrated in in opposition to the economic productivity as well as the emotional emptiness and weakening social prestige of the salaried man (Roberson and Suzuki, 9-10). In recent years, ideal masculinity has been further critiqued with the rise of the sōshokukei danshi (‘grass-eating men’) image: today’s Japanese male youth appear to have no appetite for the ‘meat’ associated with heteronormative, competitively capitalistic male roles (Steger 2013). That is not to say all gender roles have vanished; instead, social and economic precarity has created a space for young people to subvert them. Whether by design or by accident, Rilakkuma has come to represent a Japanese consumer maintaining some standard of emotional equilibrium in the face of the instability that followed the Tōhoku earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster in early 2011. A Relaxed Bear in a Precarious Japan Certainly much has been written about the ‘lost decade(s)’ in Japan, or the unraveling of the Japanese postwar miracle since the early 1990s in a variety of unsettling ways. The burst of the ‘bubble economy’ in 1991 led to a period of low or no economic growth, uncertain employment conditions and deflation. Because of Japan’s relative wealth and mature economic system, this was seen a gradual process that Mark Driscoll calls a shift from the ‘so-called Japan Inc. of the 1980s’ to ‘“Japan Shrink” of the 2010s and 2020s’ (165). The Japanese economy was further troubled by the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, and then the Tōhoku disasters. These events have contributed to Japan’s state of ambivalence, as viewed by both its citizens and by external observers. Despite its relative wealth, the nation continues to struggle with deflation (and its corresponding stagnation of wages), a deepening chasm between the two-tier employment system of permanent and casual work, and a deepening public mistrust of corporate and governing authorities. Some of this story is not ‘new’; dual employment practices have existed throughout Japan’s postwar history. What has changed, however, is the attitudes of casual workers; it is now thought to be much more difficult, if not impossible, to shift from low paid, insecure casual labour to permanent, secure positions. The overall unemployment rate remains low precisely because the number of temporary and part time workers has increased, as much as one third of all workers in 2012 (The Japan Times). The Japanese government now concedes that ‘the balance of working conditions between regular and non-regular workers have therefore become important issues’ (Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare); many see this is not only a distinction between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’, but also of a generational shift of those who achieved secure positions before the ‘lost decade’, and those who came after. Economic, political, environmental and social insecurity have given rise to a certain level public malaise, not conducive to a robust consumer culture. Enter Rilakkuma: he, like many other cute characters in Japan, entices the consumer to feel good about spending – or perhaps, to feel okay about spending? – in this precarious time of underemployment and uncertainty about the future. ‘Cute’ Characters: Attracting as Well as Attractive Cute (‘kawaii’) culture in Japan is not just aesthetic; it includes ‘a turn to emotion and even sentimentality, in some of the least likely places’ (Yano, 7). Cute kyarakutā are not just sentimentally attractive; they are more precisely attracting images which are used to sell these character goods: toys, household objects, clothing and stationery. Occhi writes that many kyarakutā are the result of an ‘anthropomorphization’ of objects or creatures which ‘guide the user towards specific [consumer] behaviors’ (78). While kyarakutā would be created first to sell a product, in the end, the character’s popularity at times can eclipse the product’s value, and the character thus becomes ‘pure product’, as in the case of Hello Kitty (Yano, 10). Most characters, however, merely function as ‘specific representatives of a product or service rendered mentally “sticky” through narratives, wordplay and other specialized aspects of their design’ (Occhi, 86). Miller refers to this phenomenon as ‘Japan’s zoomorphic urge’, and argues that etiquette guides and public service posters, which frequently use cute and cuddly animals in the place of humans, is done to ‘render […] potentially dangerous or sensitive topics as safe and acceptable’ (69). Cuteness instrumentally turns away from negative aspects of society, whether it is the demonstration of etiquette rules in public, or the portrayal of an underemployed or unemployed person watching TV at home, as in Rilakkuma. Thus we see a revitalization of the cute zeitgeist in Japanese consumerism in products such as the Rilakkuma franchise, produced by San-X, a company that produces and distributes ‘stationary [sic], sundry goods, merchandises [sic], and paper products with original design.’ (San-X Net). Who Is Rilakkuma? According to the company’s ‘fan’ books, written in response to the popularity of Rilakkuma’s character goods (Nakazawa), the background story of Rilakkuma is as follows: one day, a smallish bear found its way unexplained into the apartment of a Japanese OL (office lady) named Kaoru. He spends his time ‘being of no use to Kaoru, and is actually a pest by lying around all day doing nothing… his main concerns are meals and snacks. He seems to hate the summer [heat].’ Other activities include watching television, listening to music, taking long baths, and tossing balls of paper into the rubbish bin (Nakazawa, 4). His comrades are Korilakkuma (loosely translated as ‘Little Rilakkuma’) and Kiiroitori (simply, ‘Yellow Bird’). Korilakkuma is a smaller and paler version of Rilakkuma; like her friend, she appears in Kaoru’s apartment for no reason. She is described as liking to pull pranks (itazuradaisuki) and is comparatively more energetic (genki) than Rilakkuma; her main activities are imitating Rilakkuma and looking for someone with whom to play (6). Lastly, Kiiroitori is a small yellow bird resembling a chick, and seems to be the only character of the three who has any ‘right’ to reside in Kaoru’s apartment. Kiiroitori was a pet bird residing in cage before the appearance of these two bears, but after Rilakkuma and Korilakkuma set themselves up in her small apartment, Kiiroitori was liberated from his cage and flies in the faces of lazy Rilakkuma and mischievous Korilakkuma (7). Kiiroitori likes tidiness, and is frequently cleaning up after the lazy bears, and he can be short tempered about this (ibid). Kiiroitori’s interests include the charming but rather thrifty ‘finding spare change while cleaning up’ and ‘bear climbing’, which is enjoyed primarily for its annoyance to the bears (ibid). Fig. 1: Korilakkuma, Rilakkuma and Kiiroitori, in 10-year anniversary attire (photo by author). This narrative behind these character goods is yet another aspect of their commodification (in other words, their management, distribution and copyright protection). The information presented ­– the minute details of the characters’ existence, illustrated with cute drawings and calligraphy – enriches the consumer process by deepening the consumers’ interaction with the product. How does the story become as attractive as the cute character? One of the striking characteristics of the ‘official’ Rilakkuma discourse is the sense of ‘ikinari yattekita’ (things happening ‘out of the blue’; Nakazawa 22), or ‘naru yō ni narimasu’ (‘whatever will be will be’; 23) reasoning behind the narrative. Buyers want to know how and why these cute characters come into being, but there is no answer. To some extent, this vagueness reflects the reality of authorship: the characters were first conceptualized by a designer at San-X named Kondō Aki, who left the company soon after Rilakkuma’s debut in 2003 (Akibako). But this ‘out of the blue’ quality of the characters strikes a chord in many consumers’ view of their own lives: why are we here? what are we doing, and why do we do it? The existence of these characters and the reasons for their traits and preferences are inexplicable. There is no reason why or how Rilakkuma came to be – instead, readers are told that to just relax, ‘go with the flow’, and ‘what can be done today can always be done tomorrow’. Procrastination would normally be considered meiwaku, or bothersome to others who depend on you. In Productive Japan, this behavior is not valued. In Precarious Japan, however, underemployment and nonproductivity takes the pressure away from individuals to judge this behavior as negative. Procrastination shifts from meiwaku to normality, and to be transformed into kawaii culture, accepted and even celebrated as such. Rilakkuma is not the first Japanese pop cultural character to rub up against the hyper productive, gambaru (fight!) attitude associated with previous generations, with their associated tropes of the juken jikoku (exam preparation hell) for students, or the karōshi (death from overwork) salaried worker. An early example of this would be Chibi Marukochan (‘Little Maruko’), a comic character created in 1986 but whose popularity peaked in the 1990s. Maruko is an endearing but flawed primary school student who is cute and amusing, but also annoying and short tempered (Sakura). Flawed characters were frequently featured in Japanese popular culture, but Maruko was one of the first featured as heroine, not a jester-like sidekick. As an early example of Japanese cute, subversive characters, Maruko was often annoying and lazy, but she at least aspired to traits such as doing well in school and being a good daughter in her extended family. Rilakkuma, perhaps, demonstrates the extension of this cute but subversive hero/ine: when the stakes are lower (or at their lowest), so is the need for stress and anxiety. Taking it easy is the best option. Rilakkuma’s ‘charm point’ (chāmu pointo, which describes one’s personal appeal), is his transgressive cuteness, and this has paid off for San-X over the years in successful sales of his comic books as well as a variety of products (see fig. 2). Fig. 2: An example of some of the goods for sale in early 2014: a fleecy blanket, a 3d puzzle, note pads and stickers, decorative toggles for a school bag or purse, comic and ‘fan’ books, and a toy car (photo by the author). Over the decade between 2003 and 2013, San X has produced 51 volumes of Rilakkuma comics (Tonozuka, 37 – 42) and over 20 different series of stuffed animals (43 – 45); plus cushions, tote bags, tableware, stationery, and variety goods such as toilet paper holders, umbrellas and contact lens cases (46 – 52). While visiting the Rilakkuma themed shop in Tokyo Station in October 2013, a newly featured and popular product was the Rilakkuma ‘onesie’, a unisex and multipurpose outfit for adults. These products’ diversity are created to meet the consumer desires of Rilakkuma’s significant following in Japan; in a small-scale study of Japanese university students, researchers found that Rilakkuma was the number one nominated ‘favorite character’ (Nosu and Tanaka, 535). Furthermore, students claimed that the attractiveness of favorite characters were judged not just on their appearance, but also due to specific characteristics: ‘characters that are always idle, relaxed, stress-free’ and those ‘that have unusual behavior or stray from the right path’ (ibid) were cited as especially attractive/attracting. Just like Rilakkuma, these researchers found that young Japanese people – the demographic perhaps most troubled by an insecure economic future – are attracted to ‘characters that have flaws in some ways and are not merely cute’ (536). Where to, Rilakkuma? Miller, in her discussion of Japanese animal characters in a variety of cute cultural settings writes Non-human animals emerge as useful metaphors for humans, yet […] it is this aesthetic load rather than the lesson or the ideology behind the image that often becomes the center of our attention. […] However, I think it is useful to separate our analysis of zoomorphic images as vehicles for cuteness from their other possible uses and possible utility in many areas of culture (70). Similarly, we need to look beyond cute, and see what Miller terms as ‘the lesson’ behind the ‘aesthetic load’: here, how cuteness disguises social malaise and eases the shift from ‘Japan Inc.’ to ‘Japan Shrink’. When particular goods are ‘tied’ to other products, the message behind the ‘aesthetic load’ are complicated and deepened. Rilakkuma’s recent commercial (in)activity has been characterized by a variety of ‘tai uppu’ (tie ups), or promotional links between the Rilakkuma image and other similarly aligned products. Traditionally, tie ups in Japan have been most successful when formed between products that were associated with similar audiences and similar aesthetic preferences. We have seen tie ups, for example, between Hello Kitty and McDonald’s (targeting youthful fast food customers) since 1999 (Yano, 129). In ‘Japan Shrink’s’ competitive consumer market, tie ups are becoming more strategic, and all the more interesting. One of the troubled markets in Japan, as elsewhere, is the music industry. Shrinking expendable income coupled with a variety of downloading practices means the traditional popular music industry (primarily in the form of CDs) is in decline. In 2009, Rilakkuma began a co-badged campaign with Tower Records Japan – after all, listening to music is one of Rilakkuma’s listed favourite past times. TRJ was then independent from its failed US counterpart, and a major figure in the music retail scene despite disappointing CD sales since the late 1990s (Stevens, 85). To stir up consumer interest, TRJ offered objects, such as small dolls, towels and shopping bags, festooned with Rilakkuma images and phrases such as ‘Rilakkuma loves Tower Records’ and ‘Relaxed Tour 2012’ (Tonozuka, 72 – 73). Rilakkuma, in a familiar pose lying back with his arms crossed behind his head, but surrounded by musical notes and the phrase ‘No Music, No Life’ (72), presents compact image of the consumer zeitgeist of the day: one’s ikigai (reason for living) is clearly contingent on personal enjoyment, despite Japan’s music industry woes. Rilakkuma also enjoys a close relationship with the ubiquitous convenience store Lawson, which has over 11,000 individual stores throughout Japan and hundreds more overseas (Lawson, Corporate Information). Japanese konbini (the Japanese term for convenience stores), unlike their North American or Australian counterparts, enjoy a higher consumer image in terms of the quality and variety of their products, thus symbolize a certain relaxed lifestyle, as per Merry I. White’s description of the ‘no hands housewife’ breezing through the evening meal preparations thanks to ready made dishes purchased at konbini (72). Japanese convenience stores sell a variety of products, but sweets (Rilakkuma’s favourite) take up a large proportion of shelf space in many stores. The most current ‘Rilakkuma x Lawson campaign’ was undertaken between September and November 2013. During this period, customers earned points to receive a free teacup; certainly Rilakkuma’s cuteness motivated consumers to visit the store to get the prize. All was not well with this tie up, however; complaints about cracked teacups resulted in an external investigation. Finding no causal relationship between construction and fault, Lawson still apologized and offered to exchange any of the approximately 1.73 million cups with an alternate prize for any consumers who so wished (Lawson, An Apology). The alternate prize was still cute in its pink colouring and kawaii character pattern, but it was a larger and much sturdier commuter type mug. Here we see that while Rilakkuma is relaxed, he is still aware of corporate Japan’s increasing sense of corporate accountability and public health. One last tie up demonstrates an unusual alliance between the Rilakkuma franchise and other cultural icons. 2013 marked the ten-year anniversary of Rilakkuma and friends, and this was marked by several prominent campaigns. In Kyoto, we saw Rilakkuma and friends adorning o-mamori (religious amulets) at the famed Kinkakuji (Golden Pavilion), a major temple in Kyoto (see fig. 3a). The ‘languid dream’ of the lazy bear is a double-edged symbol, contrasting with the disciplined practice of Buddhism and complying with a Zen-like dream state of the beauty of the grounds. Another ten-year anniversary campaign was the tie up between Rilakkuma and the 50 year anniversary of JR’s Yamanote Line, the ‘city loop’ in Tokyo. Fig. 3a: Kiiroitori sits atop Rilakkuma with Korilakkuma by their side at the Golden Pavillion, Kyoto. The top caption reads: ‘Relaxed bear, Languid at the Golden Pavilion; Languid Dream Travelogue’Fig. 3b: a key chain made to celebrate Rilakkuma’s appointment to the JR Line; still lazy, Rilakkuma lies on his side but wears a conductor’s cap. This tie up was certainly a coup, for the Yamanote Line is a significant part of 13 million Tokyo residents’ lives, as well as a visible fixture in the cultural landscape since the early postwar period. The Yamanote, with its distinctive light green coloring (uguisuiro, which translates literally to ‘nightingale [bird] colour’) has its own aesthetic: as one of the first modern train lines in the capital, it runs through all the major leisure districts and is featured in many popular songs and even has its own drinking game. This nostalgia for the past, coupled with the masculine, super-efficient former national railway’s system is thus juxtaposed with the lazy, feminized teddy bear (Rilakkuma is male, but his domain is feminine), linking a longing for the past with gendered images of production and consumption in the present. In figure 3b, we see Rilakkuma riding the Yamanote on his own terms (lying on his side, propped up by one elbow – a pose we would never see a JR employee take in public). This cheeky cuteness increases the iconic train’s appeal to its everyday consumers, for despite its efficiency, this line is severely overcrowded during peak hours and suffers from user malaise with respect to etiquette and safety issues. Life in contemporary Japan is no longer the bright, shiny ‘bubble’ of the 1980s. Japan is wrestling with internal and external demons: the nuclear crisis, the lagging economy, deteriorating relations with China, and a generation of young people who have never experienced the optimism of their parents’ generation. Dreamlike, Japan’s denizens move through the contours of their daily lives much as they have in the past, for major social structures remain for the most part in tact; instead, it is the vision of the future that has altered. In this environment, we can argue that kawaii aesthetics are all the more important, for if we are uncomfortable thinking about negative or depressing topics such as industries in decline, questionable consumer safety standards, and overcrowded trains, a cute bear can make it much more ‘bear’-able.ReferencesDriscoll, Mark. “Debt and Denunciation in Post-Bubble Japan: On the Two Freeters.” Cultural Critique 65 (2007): 164-187. Kondō Aki - akibako. “Profile [of Designer Aki Kondō].” 6 Feb. 2014 ‹http://www.akibako.jp/profile/›. Lawson. “Kigyō Jōhō: Kaisha Gaiyō [Corporate Information: Company Overview].” Feb. 2013. 10 Feb. 2014 ‹http://www.lawson.co.jp/company/corporate/about.html/›. Lawson. “Owabi to Oshirase: Rōson aki no rilakkuma fea keihin ‘rilakkuma tei magu’ hason no osore [An Apology and Announcement: Lawson’s Autumn Rilakkuma Fair Giveaway ‘Rilakkuma Tea Mug’ Concern for Damage.” 2 Dec. 2013. 10 Feb. 2014 ‹http://www.lawson.co.jp/emergency/detail/detail_84331.html›. Miller, Laura. “Japan’s Zoomorphic Urge.” ASIANetwork Exchange XVII.2 (2010): 69-82. Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare. “Employment Security.” 10 Feb. 2014 ‹http://www.mhlw.go.jp/english/policy/employ-labour/employment-security/dl/employment_security_bureau.pdf›. Nakazawa Kumiko, ed. Rirakkuma Daradara Fuan Bukku [Relaxed Bear Leisurely Fan Book]. Tokyo: Kabushikigaisha Shufutoseikatsu. 2008. Nosu, Kiyoshi, and Mai Tanaka. “Factors That Contribute to Japanese University Students’ Evaluations of the Attractiveness of Characters.” IEEJ Transactions on Electrical and Electronic Engineering 8.5 (2013): 535–537. Occhi, Debra J. “Consuming Kyara ‘Characters’: Anthropomorphization and Marketing in Contemporary Japan.” Comparative Culture 15 (2010): 78–87. Roberson, James E., and Nobue Suzuki, “Introduction”, in J. Roberson and N. Suzuki, eds., Men and Masculinities in Contemporary Japan: Dislocating the Salaryman Doxa. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003. 1-19. Sakura, Momoko. 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Fig. 1: “Pink Flamingo Furby” (2000), “Peachy Furby Baby” (1999), and “Owl Furby” (1999) Sunlight Up (“Dah-ay-loh oo-tye”): Introduction As playthings at the junction of human experience and imagination, toys like Furby present an interesting touch point to explore cultural imaginations, hopes, and fears about zoomorphic robots and AI toys. This year marks their 25th anniversary. Created by Dave Hampton and Caleb Chung, Furby publicly debuted at the American International Toy Fair in 1998. Originally released by Tiger Electronics, this toy was later sold to Hasbro in 2005 to 2007. Since their introduction to the market, Furbys have been occupying our shelves and basements, perceived as “annoying little owl-like dolls with embedded sound-recording chips” (Gullin) that speak their own language “furbish” (shown throughout in parenthesis). Early reportage likened Furby to all kinds of cute critters: mogwais, hamsters, and Star Trek’s tribbles. Narratively Furbys are framed as a benevolent, alien species, living in space in a cloud known as Furbyland. For motivations not revealed, Furbys, in looking down on our planet, were so struck by the beautiful view of nature and its signs of peacefulness — “no worry (boo boh-bay)” — that they jumped, plummeting to us like tiny fluffy asteroids. Little did they know that their arrival would spark an intergalactic diplomatic incident. During its introduction in 1998, the initial discourse in media reportage emphasised anxieties of the unknown. What lies beneath the surface of Furby, as a toy that might blur the line between the real and imagined for children? What technologies might it harbour? As a hybrid of technology and animal, Furby appeared as a creepy-cute cultural icon that simultaneously delighted and horrified children and adults alike. Today adult fans reimagine Furby through play and customisation as part of their reflections on their childhood experiences of this cultural moment, and as a way of exploring new futures. Furby provides an opportunity to reflect on adults’ interactions with toys, including parents, members of the public, and fans motivated by nostalgia. At the time of its release Furby presented adults with moments of “dissonance” towards new horrifying technologies that “might occur at the seams [of] … monumental cultural shifts” (Powell 4). But for adult fans today, as a childhood memory, the toy represents both strangeness and future possibilities; it has become a tool of “disrupt[ing] and challeng[ing] beliefs and connections” (Rand 9). In this article I primarily analyse the “original” Furbys of 1998 to 2002, but also mention a range of later versions. This includes: the Emoto-tronic Furbys (2006) which were designed to have more expressive faces; the Furby Boom (2003), a toy whose personality changes according to the level of care it is provided with; and the Furby Connect (2016), which has bluetooth capacity. This discussion is supported by a thematic analysis of 3800 news articles about Furby from 1998 to 2000, visual analysis of both the original and customised iterations of Furby, as well as my reflections as a member of the Furby fandom community. You Play? (U-nye-loo-lay-doo?): Furby Encounters A key part of the discourse around Furby since its introduction in 1998 was, “who would want one?” Indeed, the answer at the time appeared to be “several million of us, the toy demons hope” (Weeks). After their release in American toy stores on 2 October 1998 in limited supplies, a Furbish frenzy ensued, resulting in altercations between shoppers and staff (e.g. Munroe; Warmbir; Associated Press). Aged 10, I recall my little black and white Furby, Coco, waiting for me on the shelves of the electronics section of Big W in Australia, fortunately with no such commotion. Furby is classed by the Guinness World Records as the world’s first AI toy, but it was certainly not the first electronic toy to enter the market; at the time of Furby’s release, Tickle Me Elmo and My Interactive Pooh presented competition, and by the late 1980s there was already concern about how electronic pet toys might erode emotion and connection (Turkle, “Authenticity”; Turkle, “Nascent”). Speculation over the reason for the Furby mass hysteria ensued. Some suggested the appeal was the toy’s status symbol status (Beck), whereas others cited its broad appeal: “it's not gender specific; it doesn't appeal to a particular age group; and most important, it's affordable and doesn't require additional equipment or a computer” (Davis). Some experts offered their commentary of the cyberpet phenomena in general, suggesting that it is a way of dealing with isolation and loneliness (Yorkshire Post). Indeed, all of these features are important to note when we consider the transformation of Furby into queer icon. Central to Furby’s cultural narrative is the idea of contact, or a meeting between robot and user; through play children “teach” their new pet Earth’s new ways (Marsh, “Coded”; Marsh, “Uncanny”). And with this contact also comes a sense of the unknown: what lies beneath the creature’s surface? In their study of zoomorphic robots, Hirofumi Katsumi and Daniel White suggest that Donna Haraway’s work on animal encounters might help us understand this idea of contact. As “animal-like” creature, Furby recalls the transformative potentials of meeting with the more-than-human. Furby’s presence on toy shelves, in classrooms and in homes was one of the first times society had to consider what it meant to “enter the world of becoming with” zoomorphic robots, and to reflect on “who or what ... is precisely at stake” in this entanglement (Haraway 19). What do we learn about ourselves and the unknown through our encounters with Furby? “Monster” (Moh-moh): Technological Threat, Monstrous Other In media reportage, Furby is framed as both new and innovative, but also as a threatening fluffy anarchist. With its technology largely unknown, Furby at the time of its release presented society with a sense of “technohorror” and “imaginings of [social] collapse” (Powell 24). A common concern was that Furby might record and repeat inappropriate language in an act of rebellion. Occasionally tabloid newspapers would report claims such as, "MUM … was horrified when she sat down to play with her daughter's new Furby toy and it squeaked: "F*** me" (The Sun). Some concerns were quite serious, including that Furby could emit electromagnetic fields that would create interference for medical devices and aircraft instruments; this was later disproven by engineers (Tan and Hinberg; Basky; Computer Security). Other urban myths pointed to a more whimsical Furby, whose sensors had the capacity to launch spacecraft (Watson). One persistent concern was the surveillance potentials of Furby. In 1999 the US National Security Agency (NSA) issued a ban on Furby in their Fort Mead headquarters, with concern that they might record and repeat confidential information (Gullin; Ramalho; Borger). This was denied by Tiger Electronics, who emphatically stated “Furby is not a spy” (Computer Security). Engineers performing “autopsies” on Furbys quickly put much of this anxiety to rest (Phobe). This was met with mirthful rebuttals of how future Furbys might be transformed into cute and ubiquitous “wireless furby transmitters” to gather intelligence in warzones (Gullin). As a result, the initial anxiety about surveillance and toys dissipated. However, academics continue to remind us of the real risks of smart toys (e.g. Lupton; Milkaite and Lievens). The 2016 Furby Connect, equipped with voice recognition and Bluetooth capacities has been shown to be hackable (Williams). Further, Maria Ramalho has reported Snowden’s 2014 claims that both NSA and the UK Government Communication Headquarters have been accessing the data collected. In this context, Furby has become “Big Brother transmogrified into ambiguous, cute” unaccountable creature (Ramalho). Through this, we can see how our entanglement with Furby as an object of technohorror speaks both to our anxieties and the real possibilities of technology. In order to craft a narrative around Furby that speaks to this monstrous potential, many have drawn comparisons between Furby and the character Gizmo from the Gremlins franchise. This reference to Gizmo appears in the majority of the media articles sampled for this research. Gizmo is a “mogwai” (trans. demon) with both cute and monstrous potential; like Furby, it also has the potential to transform into a threat to “good society” (Chesher 153-4). This comparison speaks to Gremlins as an anti-technology statement (Sale). However, when we consider how media rhetoric has framed Furby as something to be tamed and controlled, it’s important we approach this comparison with caution in light of the Orientalist underpinnings of the Gremlins franchise. Wendy Allison Lee highlights how Gremlins reflects xenophobic themes of invasion and assimilation. While Gizmo is a “cute, well-behaved” character who “strives to assimilate” much like how Furby might, through play with children, it also harbours a threat to order. In this encounter are resonances of “racist love” that can sometimes underpin our affection for cuteness (Bow). Further reflection is needed on how we might unentangle ourselves from this framing and imagine more inclusive futures with toys like Furby. Fig. 2: Interactive Gizmo, a “Furby Friend” produced by Hasbro, Tiger and Warner Bros in 1999 Big Fun! (Dah doo-ay wah!): Queer Re-Imaginings of Furby Fig. 3: Party time! Adult fans around the world now gather under the “Furby” banner, participating in a colourful array of playful mischief. Reddit forum r/furby (11,200 subscribers) creates a fun space to enjoy the whimsy of Furby, transforming the figure into a sweet and kind companion. Under this umbrella, r/oddbodyfurby (997 subscribers) explore the horrifying potentials of Furby to its playful and surprising ends, which I discuss in this section. In other forums, such as Furby Collectors and Customisers (4.1k members) on Facebook, these different interests come together in a playful and creative space. There was also an active community on Tumblr, where some of the most creatively generative activities around Furby have occurred (Tiffany). In Japan, there is a lively community of fans on Twitter who dress and photograph Emoto-tronic Furbys in a range of cute and charming ways. This forms part of a broader network of creatives, such as “Circuit Benders” who tear down toys and rework them into instruments in a process known as “frankensteining”, such as Look Mum No Computer’s Furby Organ (Deahl). As fans and artists, people act as “queer accessories” to help Furby escape the world and narrative that sought to enclose it, so it might enact its revenge or transcend as a non-binary queer icon (Rand 9-11). As small, collectible and customisable friends, images of happy and creepy Furbys are part of a network of cute media that provides my generation with a source of comfort during times of precarity, occupying our spaces with their own vitality and presence as soothing companions (e.g. Stevens; Allison; Yano). Cuteness as media also lends itself to hybridisation; a mixing and matching with seemingly “opposing” aesthetics. For many fans, the charm of Furby lies in its nostalgic pull as a creature of childhood creepy-cute nightmares. Indeed, it seems that early concerns that Furby may “blur the line between the real and imagined for many children” were in fact valid (Knowlton). While we knew they weren’t “alive” in the true sense, to us they appeared “sort of alive” as our everyday environments became increasingly technological with a dazzling array of electronics (Turkle, “Authenticity”). As Allison (179) explains, we had to “adjust to a world where the border between the imaginary and the real” began to shift rapidly, leaving us open to dream, imagine, and craft narratives populated by a fear of the mechanised undead. Many Millennials were convinced as children that their Furby was waiting for them in the dark, watching, chuckling (“he he heeeee”). Patrick Lenton, diarising his adventures with a rescue Furby this year recalls his childhood toy as “a riot of noise and fury, the kind of demonic household terror”. Some adults, recalling these memories now refer to Furby as “it” or “evil” (Marsh, “Uncanny” 59). In 2020, adult Furby fans, thinking back to their childhood toys, speculated if the positioning of Furby’s eyes at the front of its head meant it was a predator (Watson). Some suggested that their short legs meant they are ambush predators, their infra-red sensor enabling them to detect prey in the dark. Other playful lore suggested that they were made of real cat and dog fur. Through this act of imaginative play, adults reach back to the playful horrors of their childhoods, combining their sense of dread with glee. This has been recently animated by films such as The Mitchells vs. The Machines (2021), where Furbys equipped with “PAL” chips transmogrify into a horrific pack of menacing creatures, and exact revenge. The main contributing factor to this experience is in part the puppetry of Furby. The 1999 Furby presents an exaggerated performance that is both “alive” and “unalive”, its wild rocking, owlish blinking, and cackling creating a sense of “dread and creeping horror” (Freud 2; Marsh, “Uncanny”). Through a blend of animation and imagination, agency is diffused between toy and child to give Furby “life” (Silvio 423). Interestingly, studies of the 2016 Furby Connect and its friendly and social programming that is designed to encourage positive care and engagement has counteracted some of this experience for children (Marsh, “Uncanny” 54). Likewise, in discussing the 2013 Furby Boom Chesher (151) describes this animation as “zany”, working with Sianne Ngai’s conceptualisation of this aesthetic and its relationship to cuteness. While some might praise these later developments in the Furby franchise as having saved another generation of children from nightmares, compared to the original Furby these later editions are less popular among fans; perhaps there is less “material” to work with. Fans as adults now draw on Furby as a playful and cute text to experiment with and hybridise with a variety of horrifying and surprising potentials. This leans into Furby’s design as a chimera, as it uses a combination of cute features to create a “short-hand” for life and also evoke the “idea” or “character” of appealing animals that form part of cultures “charismatic megafauna” (Nishimura 179; Stuck and Rogers; Gn). With cat-like ears, a tuft of hair that drifts with sympathetic movement, two wide eyes, framed with coquettish false lashes, a bird’s beak, and two paws, Furby both suspends and confounds our disbelief. Following the principles of the Kindchenschema (Lorenz) to a “100% ratio” its body is reduced to a round form, its most dominant feature its large eyes (Borgi, Cogliati-Dezza, Brelsford Meints, and Cirulli). While large eyes generally are thought to have an affective pull to them (Harris 4), their fixed placement in the original Furby’s skull creates a dead-pan gaze, that morphs into a Kubrik stare as the toy tilts forward to greet the viewer. Fig. 4: Kindschenschema at work in Furby’s design Furby fans mischievously extend this hybridisation of Furby’s body further through a range of customisation practices. Through “skinning”, Furby’s faux fur surfaces are removed and replaced with a fantastic array of colours and textures. Through breaking into their mechatronic shell – a practice known as “shucking” – their parts are repaired or modified. This results in a range of delightfully queer, non-binary representations of Furby with a range of vibrant furs, piercings, and evocative twinkling and gentle eyes (“tee-wee-lah!”). These figures act as both avatars and as companions for fans. Sporting earrings and rainbow bead necklaces, they are photographed resting in grassy fields, soft crochet rainbows, and bookshelves: they are an expression of all that is joyful in the world. Some fans push the customisation further to create whimsical creatures from another dimension. Some Furbys appear with moss and lichen for fur, sprouting tiny toadstools. Furbys are also transformed into “oddbodies” of varying species. Some appear both as winged fairies, and as transcendental multi-eyed and winged “biblically accurate” angels. Others are hybridised with plush toys or are reworked into handbags. Some veer into the realm of body horror, using doll limbs and bodies to create humanoid forms. The most iconic is the “long furby”, created by Tumblr user FurbyFuzz in 2018. Elongated and insect-like, the Long Furby wriggles into homes and curls up on soft furnishings. Collectors gather “haunted photos from the dark recesses of the internet” to document their escapades (Long Furby). Sometimes, hybridised Furbys appear not through creator interventions but rather emerge from nature itself. One such mythical creature is Murby, an original Furby unearthed in 2013 on an old farm property. Once toy, now woodland spirit, Murby gazes upon and blesses fans with dreamy, clouded eyes, its body an entanglement of thick moss, rich earth and time. Furby’s queerness, strangeness, and hybridity speaks to fans in different ways. Personally, as a neurodivergent person, I experience the coding and the playful reimaginings of Furby as a reflection of my own life experience. Neurodivergent people have a high capacity for care and empathy for objects as curiosities, supports, and friends (e.g. Atherton and Cross; White and Remington; Clutterbuck, Shah and Livingston). Like Furby, I am an alien whom people want to tame. My body and movement are treated with the same infantilising bemusement and suspicion. I feel like a chimera myself; an entanglement of many parts that make a whole, each on their own charming, but together forming a chaotic attempt to connect with neurotypicals. For me, what lies beneath Furby’s surface is my own psyche; rescuing and customising Furbys is a symbolic act, a creative expression of my desire to transcend and resist ableist forces. Together my Furbys and I revel in our strangeness in solidarity, plotting our mischievous revenge (“party time!”). This micro-level resistance will not overturn ableism but brings me a sense of reprieve as I work with my allies to bring socio-cultural change. Fig. 5: The author, Furby Queen. Photo by Sherbet Birdie Photography. Through their creative work, fans explore how Furbys could be reimagined. While fannish activities may at first glance appear fringe or frivolous, they hold up a mirror to our own limitations, anxieties, and practices as a society. The future is Furby. Go to Sleep Now (U-nye-way-loh-nee-way): Conclusions As a source of technohorror and queer potential, Furby provides a vessel by which we can imagine the futures of toys. Through encounter and contact, this seemingly harmless fluffy robot brought about disruption and chaos as a threat to securities and social fabrics. Adult fans, now recalling this cultural moment, lean into this creature’s promise of new possibilities, queering its cultural narrative. Through exploring adults’ interactions with toys, we explore new potentials for change and futures that are playful and creative. Acknowledgments This article was produced with the support of a Vitalities Lab Scholarship and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. I also thank Deborah Lupton and David Eastwood for their support in the production of an arts-based project that draws on this research into cyberpet histories. References Allison, Anne. Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination. Berkeley: U of California P, 2006. Associated Press. “Two Injured in Flurry over Furby.” Charleston Daily Mail 28 Nov. 1998. Atherton, Gray, and Liam Cross. “Seeing More than Human: Autism and Anthropomorphic Theory of Mind.” Frontiers in Psychology 9 (2018): 1–18. Basky, Greg. “Furby Not Guilty as ‘Charged’.” The Western Journal of Medicine 172 (2000): 59. Beck, Rachel. “‘Must-Have’ Toys Created by Intense Publicity Campaigns.” AP Business Writer 16 Oct. 1998. 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Introduction Lillian Ng was born in Singapore and lived in Hong Kong and the United Kingdom before migrating to Australia with her daughter and Ah Mah Yin Jie (“Ah Mahs are a special group of people who took a vow to remain unmarried … [so they] could stick together as a group and make a living together” (Yu 118)). Ng studied classical Chinese at home, then went to an English school and later on studied Medicine. Her first book, Silver Sister (1994), was short-listed for the inaugural Angus & Robertson/Bookworld Prize in 1993 and won the Human Rights Award in 1995. Ng defines herself as a “Chinese living in Australia” (Yu 115). Food, flesh and meat are recurrent topics in Lillian Ng´s second novel Swallowing Clouds, published in 1997. These topics are related to desire and can be used as a synecdoche (a metaphor that describes part/whole relations) of the human body: food is needed to survive and pleasure can be obtained from other people´s bodies. This paper focuses on one type of meat and animal, pork and the pig, and on the relation between the two main characters, Syn and Zhu Zhiyee. Syn, the main character in the novel, is a Shanghainese student studying English in Sydney who becomes stranded after the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 1989. As she stops receiving money from her mother and fears repression if she goes back to China, she begins to work in a Chinese butcher shop, owned by Zhu Zhiyee, which brings her English lessons to a standstill. Syn and Zhu Zhiyee soon begin a two-year love affair, despite the fact that Zhu Zhiyee is married to KarLeng and has three daughters. The novel is structured as a prologue and four days, each of which has a different setting and temporal location. The prologue introduces the story of an adulterous woman who was punished to be drowned in a pig´s basket in the HuanPu River in the summer of 1918. As learnt later on, Syn is the reincarnation of this woman, whose purpose in life is to take revenge on men by taking their money. The four days, from the 4th to the 7th of June 1994, mark the duration of a trip to Beijing and Shanghai that Syn takes as member of an Australian expedition in order to visit her mother with the security of an Australian passport. During these four days, the reader learns about different Chinese landmarks, such as the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, the Ming Tomb and the Summer Palace, as well as some cultural events, such as a Chinese opera and eating typical foods like Peking duck. However, the bulk of the plot of the book deals with the sexual relationship, erotic games and fantasies of Syn and Zhu Zhiyee in the period between 1989 and 1992, as well as Syn´s final revenge in January 1993. Pigs The fact that Zhu Zhiyee is a butcher allows Lillian Ng to include references to pigs and pork throughout the novel. Some of them refer to the everyday work of a butcher shop, as the following examples illustrate: “Come in and help me with the carcass,” he [Zhu Zhiyee] pointed to a small suckling pig hung on a peg. Syn hesitated, not knowing how to handle the situation. “Take the whole pig with the peg,” he commanded (11).Under dazzling fluorescent tubes and bright spotlights, trays of red meat, pork chops and lamb cutlets sparkled like jewels … The trays edged with red cellophane frills and green underlay breathed vitality and colour into the slabs of pork ribs and fillets (15).Buckets of pig´s blood with a skim of froth took their place on the floor; gelled ones, like sliced cubes of large agate, sat in tin trays labelled in Chinese. More discreetly hidden were the gonads and penises of goats, bulls and pigs. (16)These examples are representative of Syn and Zhu Zhiyee´s relationship. The first quotation deals with their interaction: most of the time Zhu Zhiyee orders Syn how to act, either in the shop or in bed. The second extract describes the meat’s “vitality” and this is the quality of Syn's skin that mesmerised Zhu when he met her: “he was excited, electrified by the sight of her unblemished, translucent skin, unlined, smooth as silk. The glow of the warmth of human skin” (13). Moreover, the lights seem to completely illuminate the pieces of meat and this is the way Zhu Zhiyee leers at Syn´s body, as it can be read in the following extract: “he turned again to fix his gaze on Syn, which pierced and penetrated her head, her brain, eyes, permeated her whole body, seeped into her secret places and crevices” (14). The third excerpt introduces the sexual organs of some of the animals, which are sold to some customers for a high price. Meat is also sexualised by Zhu Zhiyee´s actions, such as his pinching the bottoms of chickens and comparing them with “sacrificial virgins”: “chickens, shamelessly stripped and trussed, hung by their necks, naked in their pimply white skin, seemed like sacrificial virgins. Syn often caught Zhu pinching their fleshy bottoms, while wrapping and serving them to the housewives” (15-16). Zhu also makes comments relating food with sex while he is having lunch next to Syn, which could be considered sexual harassment. All these extracts exemplify the relationship between Syn and Zhu Zhiyee: the orders, the looks and the implicit sexuality in the quotidian activities in the butcher´s shop. There are also a range of other expressions that include similes with the word `pig´ in Ng´s novel. One of the most recurrent is comparing the left arm and hand of Zhu Zhiyee´s mother with a “pig´s trotter”. Zhu Zhiyee´s mother is known as ZhuMa and Syn is very fond of her, as ZhuMa accepts her and likes her more than her own daughter-in-law. The comparison of ZhuMa´s arm and hand with a trotter may be explained by the fact that ZhuMa´s arm is swollen but also by the loving representation of pigs in Chinese culture. As Seung-Og Kim explains in his article “Burials, Pigs, and Political Prestige in Neolithic China”: In both Melanesia and Asia, pigs are viewed as a symbolic representation of human beings (Allen 1976: 42; Healey 1985; Rappaport 1967: 58; Roscoe 1989: 223-26). Piglets are treated as pets and receive a great deal of loving attention, and they in turn express affection for their human “parents.” They also share some physiological features with human beings, being omnivorous and highly reproductive (though humans do not usually have multiple litters) and similar internal anatomy (Roscoe 1989: 225). In short, pigs not only have a symbiotic relationship with humans biologically but also are of great importance symbolically (121). Consequently, pigs are held in high esteem, taken care of and loved. Therefore, comparing a part of a human´s body, such as an arm or a hand, for example, to a part of a pig´s body such as a pig´s trotter is not negative, but has positive connotations. Some descriptions of ZhuMa´s arm and hand can be read in the following excerpts: “As ZhuMa handed her the plate of cookies Syn saw her left arm, swollen like a pig´s trotter” (97); “Syn was horrified, and yet somewhat intrigued by this woman without a breast, with a pig´s trotter arm and a tummy like a chessboard” (99), “mimicking the act of writing with her pig-trotter hand” (99), and ZhuMa was praising the excellence of the opera, the singing, acting, the costumes, and the elaborate props, waving excitedly with her pig trotter arm and pointing with her stubby fingers while she talked. (170) Moreover, the expression “pig´s trotters” is also used as an example of the erotic fetishism with bound feet, as it can be seen in the following passage, which will be discussed below: I [Zhu Zhiyee] adore feet which are slender… they seem so soft, like pig´s trotters, so cute and loving, they play tricks on your mind. Imagine feeling them in bed under your blankets—soft cottonwool lumps, plump and cuddly, makes you want to stroke them like your lover´s hands … this was how the bound feet appealed to men, the erotic sensation when balanced on shoulders, clutched in palms, strung to the seat of a garden swing … no matter how ugly a woman is, her tiny elegant feet would win her many admirers (224).Besides writing about pigs and pork as part of the daily work of the butcher shop and using the expression “pig´s trotter”, “pig” is also linked to money in two sentences in the book. On the one hand, it is used to calculate a price and draw attention to the large amount it represents: “The blouse was very expensive—three hundred dollars, the total takings from selling a pig. Two pigs if he purchased two blouses” (197). On the other, it works as an adjective in the expression “piggy-bank”, the money box in the form of a pig, an animal that represents abundance and happiness in the Chinese culture: “She borrowed money from her neighbours, who emptied pieces of silver from their piggy-banks, their life savings”(54). Finally, the most frequent porcine expression in Ng´s Swallowing Clouds makes reference to being drowned in a pig´s basket, which represents 19 of the 33 references to pigs or pork that appear in the novel. The first three references appear in the prologue (ix, x, xii), where the reader learns the story of the last woman who was killed by drowning in a pig´s basket as a punishment for her adultery. After this, two references recount a soothsayer´s explanation to Syn about her nightmares and the fact that she is the reincarnation of that lady (67, 155); three references are made by Syn when she explains this story to Zhu Zhiyee and to her companion on the trip to Beijing and Shanghai (28, 154, 248); one refers to a feeling Syn has during sexual intercourse with Zhu Zhiyee (94); and one when the pig basket is compared to a cricket box, a wicker or wooden box used to carry or keep crickets in a house and listen to them singing (73). Furthermore, Syn reflects on the fact of drowning (65, 114, 115, 171, 172, 173, 197, 296) and compares her previous death with that of Concubine Pearl, the favourite of Emperor Guanxu, who was killed by order of his aunt, the Empress Dowager Cixi (76-77). The punishment of drowning in a pig´s basket can thus be understood as retribution for a transgression: a woman having an extra-marital relationship, going against the establishment and the boundaries of the authorised. Both the woman who is drowned in a pig´s basket in 1918 and Syn have extra-marital affairs and break society’s rules. However, the consequences are different: the concubine dies and Syn, her reincarnation, takes revenge. Desire, Transgression and Eroticism Xavier Pons writes about desire, repression, freedom and transgression in his book Messengers of Eros: Representations of Sex in Australian Writing (2009). In this text, he explains that desire can be understood as a positive or as a negative feeling. On the one hand, by experiencing desire, a person feels alive and has joy de vivre, and if that person is desired in return, then, the feelings of being accepted and happiness are also involved (13). On the other hand, desire is often repressed, as it may be considered evil, anarchic, an enemy of reason and an alienation from consciousness (14). According to Pons: Sometimes repression, in the form of censorship, comes from the outside—from society at large, or from particular social groups—because of desire´s subversive nature, because it is a force which, given a free rein, would threaten the higher purpose which a given society assigns to other (and usually ideological) forces … Repression may also come from the inside, via the internalization of censorship … desire is sometimes feared by the individual as a force alien to his/her true self which would leave him/her vulnerable to rejection or domination, and would result in loss of freedom (14).Consequently, when talking about sexual desire, the two main concepts to be dealt with are freedom and transgression. As Pons makes clear, “the desiring subject can be taken advantage of, manipulated like a puppet [as h]is or her freedom is in this sense limited by the experience of desire” (15). While some practices may be considered abusive, such as bondage or sado-masochism, they may be deliberately and freely chosen by the partners involved. In this case, these practices represent “an encounter between equals: dominance is no more than make-believe, and a certain amount of freedom (as much as is compatible with giving oneself up to one´s fantasies) is maintained throughout” (24). Consequently, the perception of freedom changes with each person and situation. What is transgressive depends on the norms in every culture and, as these evolve, so do the forms of transgression (Pons 43). Examples of transgressions can be: firstly, the separation of sex from love, adultery or female and male homosexuality, which happen with the free will of the partners; or, secondly, paedophilia, incest or bestiality, which imply abuse. Going against society’s norms involves taking risks, such as being discovered and exiled from society or feeling isolated as a result of a feeling of difference. As the norms change according to culture, time and person, an individual may transgress the rules and feel liberated, but later on do the same thing and feel alienated. As Pons declares, “transgressing the rules does not always lead to liberation or happiness—transgression can turn into a trap and turn out to be simply another kind of alienation” (46). In Swallowing Clouds, Zhu Zhiyee transgresses the social norms of his time by having an affair with Syn: firstly, because it is extra-marital, he and his wife, KarLeng, are Catholic and fidelity is one of the promises made when getting married; and, secondly, because he is Syn´s boss and his comments and ways of flirting with her could be considered sexual harassment. For two years, the affair is an escape from Zhu Zhiyee´s daily worries and stress and a liberation and fulfillment of his sexual desires. However, he introduces Syn to his mother and his sisters, who accept her and like her more than his wife. He feels trapped, though, when KarLeng guesses and threatens him with divorce. He cannot accept this as it would mean loss of face in their neighbourhood and society, and so he decides to abandon Syn. Syn´s transgression becomes a trap for her as Zhu, his mother and his sisters have become her only connection with the outside world in Australia and this alienates her from both the country she lives in and the people she knows. However, Syn´s transgression also turns into a trap for Zhu Zhiyee because she will not sign the documents to give him the house back and every month she sends proof of their affair to KarLeng in order to cause disruption in their household. This exposure could be compared with the humiliation suffered by the concubine when she was paraded in a pig´s basket before she was drowned in the HuangPu River. Furthermore, the reader does not know whether KarLeng finally divorces Zhu Zhiyee, which would be his drowning and loss of face and dishonour in front of society, but can imagine the humiliation, shame and disgrace KarLeng makes him feel every month. Pons also depicts eroticism as a form of transgression. In fact, erotic relations are a power game, and seduction can be a very effective weapon. As such, women can use seduction to obtain power and threaten the patriarchal order, which imposes on them patterns of behaviour, language and codes to follow. However, men also use seduction to get their own benefits, especially in political and social contexts. “Power has often been described as the ultimate aphrodisiac” (Pons 32) and this can be seen in many of the sexual games between Syn and Zhu Zhiyee in Swallowing Clouds, where Zhu Zhiyee is the active partner and Syn becomes little more than an object that gives pleasure. A clear reference to erotic fetishism is embedded in the above-mentioned quote on bound feet, which are compared to pig´s trotters. In fact, bound feet were so important in China in the millennia between the Song Dynasty (960-1276) and the early 20th century that “it was impossible to find a husband” (Holman) without them: “As women’s bound feet and shoes became the essence of feminine beauty, a fanatical aesthetic and sexual mystique developed around them. The bound foot was understood to be the most intimate and erotic part of the female anatomy, and wives, consorts and prostitutes were chosen solely on the size and shape of their feet” (Holman). Bound feet are associated in Ng’s novel with pig´s trotters and are described as “cute and loving … soft cottonwool lumps, plump and cuddly, [that] makes you want to stroke them like your lover´s hands” (224). This approach towards bound feet and, by extension, towards pig´s trotters, can be related to the fond feelings Melanesian and Asian cultures have towards piglets, which “are treated as pets and receive a great deal of loving attention” (Kim 121). Consequently, the bound feet can be considered a synecdoche for the fond feelings piglets inspire. Food and Sex The fact that Zhu Zhiyee is a butcher and works with different types of meat, including pork, that he chops it, sells it and gives cooking advice, is not gratuitous in the novel. He is used to being in close proximity to meat and death and seeing Syn’s pale skin through which he can trace her veins excites him. Her flesh is alive and represents, therefore, the opposite of meat. He wants to seduce her, which is human hunting, and he wants to study her, to enjoy her body, which can be compared to animals looking at their prey and deciding where to start eating from. Zhu´s desire for Syn seems destructive and dangerous. In the novel, bodies have a price: dead animals are paid for and eaten and their role is the satiation of human hunger. But humans, who are also animals, have a price as well: flesh is paid for, in the form of prostitution or being a mistress, and its aim is satiation of human sex. Generally speaking, sex in the novel is compared to food either in a direct or an indirect way, and making love is constantly compared to cooking, the preparation of food and eating (as in Pons 303). Many passages in Swallowing Clouds have cannibalistic connotations, all of these being used as metaphors for Zhu Zhiyee’s desire for Syn. As mentioned before, desire can be positive (as it makes a person feel alive) or negative (as a form of internal or social censorship). For Zhu Zhiyee, desire is positive and similar to a drug he is addicted to. For example, when Zhu and Syn make delivery rounds in an old Mazda van, he plays the recordings he made the previous night when they were having sex and tries to guess when each moan happened. Sex and Literature Pons explains that “to write about sex … is to address a host of issues—social, psychological and literary—which together pretty much define a culture” (6). Lillian Ng´s Swallowing Clouds addresses a series of issues. The first of these could be termed ‘the social’: Syn´s situation after the Tiananmen Massacre; her adulterous relationship with her boss and being treated and considered his mistress; the rapes in Inner Mongolia; different reasons for having an abortion; various forms of abuse, even by a mother of her mentally handicapped daughter; the loss of face; betrayal; and revenge. The second issue is the ‘psychological’, with the power relations and strategies used between different characters, psychological abuse, physical abuse, humiliation, and dependency. The third is the ‘literary’, as when the constant use of metaphors with Chinese cultural references becomes farcical, as Tseen Khoo notes in her article “Selling Sexotica” (2000: 164). Khoo explains that, “in the push for Swallowing Clouds to be many types of novels at once: [that is, erotica, touristic narrative and popular], it fails to be any one particularly successfully” (171). Swallowing Clouds is disturbing, full of stereotypes, and with repeated metaphors, and does not have a clear readership and, as Khoo states: “The explicit and implicit strategies behind the novel embody the enduring perceptions of what exotic, multicultural writing involves—sensationalism, voyeuristic pleasures, and a seemingly deliberate lack of rooted-ness in the Australian socioscape (172). Furthermore, Swallowing Clouds has also been defined as “oriental grunge, mostly because of the progression throughout the narrative from one gritty, exoticised sexual encounter to another” (Khoo 169-70).Other novels which have been described as “grunge” are Edward Berridge´s Lives of the Saints (1995), Justine Ettler´s The River Ophelia (1995), Linda Jaivin´s Eat Me (1995), Andrew McGahan´s Praise (1992) and 1988 (1995), Claire Mendes´ Drift Street (1995) or Christos Tsiolkas´ Loaded (1995) (Michael C). The word “grunge” has clear connotations with “dirtiness”—a further use of pig, but one that is not common in the novel. The vocabulary used during the sexual intercourse and games between Syn and Zhu Zhiyee is, however, coarse, and “the association of sex with coarseness is extremely common” (Pons 344). Pons states that “writing about sex is an attempt to overcome [the barriers of being ashamed of some human bodily functions], regarded as unnecessarily constrictive, and this is what makes it by nature transgressive, controversial” (344-45). Ng´s use of vocabulary in this novel is definitely controversial, indeed, so much so that it has been defined as banal or even farcical (Khoo 169-70).ConclusionThis paper has analysed the use of the words and expressions: “pig”, “pork” and “drowning in a pig’s basket” in Lillian Ng´s Swallowing Clouds. Moreover, the punishment of drowning in a pig’s basket has served as a means to study the topics of desire, transgression and eroticism, in relation to an analysis of the characters of Syn and Zhu Zhiyee, and their relationship. This discussion of various terminology relating to “pig” has also led to the study of the relationship between food and sex, and sex and literature, in this novel. Consequently, this paper has analysed the use of the term “pig” and has used it as a springboard for the analysis of some aspects of the novel together with different theoretical definitions and concepts. Acknowledgements A version of this paper was given at the International Congress Food for Thought, hosted by the Australian Studies Centre at the University of Barcelona in February 2010. References Allen, Bryan J. Information Flow and Innovation Diffusion in the East Sepic District, Papua New Guinea. PhD diss. Australian National University, Australia. 1976. Berridge, Edward. Lives of the Saints. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1995. C., Michael. “Toward a sound theory of Australian Grunge fiction.” [Weblog entry] Eurhythmania. 5 Mar. 2008. 4 Oct. 2010 http://eurhythmania.blogspot.com/2008/03/toward-sound-theory-of-australian.html. Ettler, Justine. The River Ophelia. Sydney: Picador, 1995. Healey, Christopher J. “Pigs, Cassowaries, and the Gift of the Flesh: A Symbolic Triad in Maring Cosmology.” Ethnology 24 (1985): 153-65. Holman, Jeanine. “Bound Feet.” Bound Feet: The History of a Curious, Erotic Custom. Ed. Joseph Rupp 2010. 11 Aug. 2010. http://www.josephrupp.com/history.html. Jaivin, Linda. Eat Me. Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company, 1995. Khoo, Tseen. “Selling Sexotica: Oriental Grunge and Suburbia in Lillian Ngs’ Swallowing Clouds.” Diaspora: Negotiating Asian-Australian. Ed. Helen Gilbert, Tseen Khoo, and Jaqueline Lo. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2000. 164-72. Khoo, Tseen; Danau Tanu, and Tien. "Re: Of pigs and porks” 5-9 Aug. 1997. Asian- Australian Discussion List Digest numbers 1447-1450. Apr. 2010 . Kim, Seung-Og. “Burials, Pigs, and Political Prestige in Neolithic China.” Current Anthopology 35.2 (Apr. 1994): 119-141. McGahan, Andrew. Praise. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992. McGahan, Andrew. 1988. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1995. Mendes, Clare. Drift Street. Pymble: HarperCollins, 1995. Ng, Lillian. Swallowing Clouds. Ringwood: Penguin Books Australia,1997. Pons, Xavier. Messengers of Eros. Representations of Sex in Australian Writing. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. Rappaport, Roy. Pigs for the Ancestors. New Have: Yale UP, 1967. Roscoe, Paul B. “The Pig and the Long Yam: The Expansion of the Sepik Cultural Complex”. Ethnology 28 (1989): 219-31. Tsiolkas, Christos. Loaded. Sydney: Vintage, 1995. Yu, Ouyang. “An Interview with Lillian Ng.” Otherland Literary Journal 7, Bastard Moon. Essays on Chinese-Australian Writing (July 2001): 111-24.

A slash manip is a photo remix that montages visual signs from popular media with those from gay pornography, creating a new cultural artefact. Slash (see Russ) is a fannish practice that homoeroticises the bonds between male media characters and personalities—female pairings are categorised separately as ‘femslash’. Slash has been defined almost exclusively as a female practice. While fandom is indeed “women-centred” (Bury 2), such definitions have a tendency to exclude male contributions. Remix has been well acknowledged in discussions on slash, most notably video remix in relation to slash vids (Kreisinger). Non-written slash forms such as slash vids (see Russo) and slash fanart (see Dennis) have received increased attention in recent years. This article continues the tradition of moving beyond fiction by considering the non-written form of slash manips, yet to receive sustained scholarly attention. Speaking as a practitioner—my slash manips can be found here—I perform textual analysis from an aca–fan (academic and fan) position of two Merlin slash manips by male Tumblr artist wandsinhand. My textual analysis is influenced by Barthes’s use of image semiotics, which he applies to the advertising image. Barthes notes that “all images are polysemous”, that underlying their signifiers they imply “a ‘floating chain’ of signifieds, the reader able to choose some and ignore others” (274). That said, the advertising image, he argues, constructs an “undoubtedly intentional […] signification”, making it ideally suited for analysis (270). By supplementing my analysis with excerpts from two interviews I conducted with wandsinhand in February and April 2013 (quoted here with permission), I support my readings with respect to the artist’s stated ‘intentional reading’. I then contextualise these readings with respect to canon (Merlin) representations and gay pornography—via the chosen sexual acts/positions, bukkake and doggystyle, of the pornographic base models, as selected by the artist. This approach allows me to examine the photo remix qualities of slash manips with respect to the artist’s intentions as well as how artistic choices of inclusion function to anchor meaning in the works. I describe these choices as the ‘semiotic significance of selection’. Together the readings and interviews in this article help illustrate the value of this form and the new avenues it opens for slash scholars, such as consideration of photo remix and male production, and the importance of gay pornography to slash. My interviews also reveal, via the artist’s own assessment of the ‘value’ of his practice, a tendency to devalue or overlook the significance of this particular slash form, affirming a real need for further critical engagement with this under-examined practice. Slash Photo Remix: Famous Faces, Porny Bodies Lessig defines remix culture as based on an activity of “rip, mix and burn” (12–5); while Navas describes it as a “practice of cut/copy and paste” (159)—the latter being more applicable to photo remix. Whereas Lessig is concerned primarily with issues of copyright, Navas is interested in remix’s role in aesthetics and the political economy. Within fan studies, slash vids—a form of video remix—has been a topic of considerable academic interest in recent years. Slash manips—a form of photo or image remix—however, has not attracted the same degree of interest. Stasi’s description of slash as “a non-hierarchical, rich layering of genres” points to the usefulness of slash manips as an embodiment of the process of slash; whereby artists combine, blend and mutate graphic layers from popular media with those from gay pornography. Aesthetics and the slash manip process are central concerns of this article’s consideration of slash photo remix. Slash manips, or slash photo montage, use image manipulation software (Adobe Photoshop being the community standard, see wandsinhand’s tutorial) to layer the heads of male fictional characters from stills or promotional images with scenes—static or moving—from gay pornography. Once an artist has selected pornographic ‘base models’ anatomically suited to canon characters, these models are often then repositioned into the canon universe, which in the case of Merlin means a medieval setting. (Works not repositioned and without added details from canon are generally categorised as ‘male celebrity fakes’ rather than ‘slash manips’.) Stedman contends that while many fan studies scholars are interested in remix, “studies commonly focus on examples of remixed objects rather than the compositional strategies used by remix composers themselves” (107). He advocates moving beyond an exclusive consideration of “text-centred approaches” to also consider “practice-” and “composer-centred” approaches. Such approaches offer insight into “the detailed choices composers actually make when composing” (107). He refers to recognition of the skills required by a remix composer as “remix literacy” (108). This article’s consideration of the various choices and skills that go into the composition of slash manips—what I term the ‘semiotic significance of selection’—is explored with respect to wandsinhand’s practice, coupling my reading—informed by my experience as a practitioner—with the interpretations of the artist himself. Jenkins defines slash as “reaction against” constructions of male sexuality in both popular media and pornography (189). By their very nature, slash manips also make clear the oft-overlooked connections between slash and gay pornography, and in turn the contributions of gay male participants, who are well represented by the form. This contrasts with a tendency within scholarship to compare slash with heterosexual female forms, such as the romance genre (Salmon and Symons). Gay pornography plays a visible role in slash manips—and slash vids, which often remix scenes from popular media with gay cinema and pornography. Slash as Romance, Slash as Pornography Early scholarship on slash (see Russ; Lamb and Veith) defines it as a form of erotica or pornography, by and for women; a reductive definition that fails to take into account men’s contribution, yet one that many researchers continue to adopt today. As stated above, there has also been a tendency within scholarship to align the practice with heterosexual female forms such as the romance genre. Such a tendency is by and large due to theorisation of slash as heterosexual female fantasy—and concerned primarily with romance and intimacy rather than sex (see Woledge). Weinstein describes slash as more a “fascination with” than a “representation of” homosexual relationships (615); while MacDonald makes the point that homosexuality is not a major political motivator for slash (28–9). There is no refuting that slash—along with most fannish practice—is female dominated, ethnographic work and fandom surveys reveal that is the case. However there is great need for research into male production of slash, particularly how such practices might challenge reigning definitions and assumptions of the practice. In similar Japanese practices, for example, gay male opposition to girls’ comics (shōjo) depicting love between ‘pretty boys’ (bishōunen) has been well documented (see Hori)—Men’s Love (or bara) is a subgenre of Boys’ Love (or shōnen’ai) predominately created by gay men seeking a greater connection with the lived reality of gay life (Lunsing). Dennis finds male slash fanart producers more committed to muscular representations and depiction of graphic male/male sex when compared with female-identifying artists (14, 16). He also observes that male fanart artists have a tendency of “valuing same-sex desire without a heterosexual default and placing it within the context of realistic gay relationships” (11). I have observed similar differences between male and female-identifying slash manip artists. Female-identifying Nicci Mac, for example, will often add trousers to her donor bodies, recoding them for a more romantic context. By contrast, male-identifying mythagowood is known for digitally enlarging the penises and rectums of his base models, exaggerating his work’s connection to the pornographic and the macabre. Consider, for example, mythagowood’s rationale for digitally enlarging and importing ‘lips’ for Sam’s (Supernatural) rectum in his work Ass-milk: 2012, which marks the third anniversary of the original: Originally I wasn’t going to give Sammy’s cunt any treatment (before I determined the theme) but when assmilk became the theme I had to go find a good set of lips to slap on him and I figured, it’s been three years, his hole is going to be MUCH bigger. (personal correspondence, used with permission) While mythagowood himself cautions against gendered romance/pornography slash arguments—“I find it annoying that people attribute certain specific aspects of my work to something ‘only a man’ would make.” (ibid.)—gay pornography occupies an important place in the lives of gay men as a means for entertainment, community engagement and identity-construction (see McKee). As one of the only cultural representations available to gay men, Fejes argues that gay pornography plays a crucial role in defining gay male desire and identity. This is confirmed by an Internet survey conducted by Duggan and McCreary that finds 98% of gay participants reporting exposure to pornographic material in the 30-day period prior to the survey. Further, the underground nature of gay pornographic film (see Dyer) aligns it with slash as a subcultural practice. I now analyse two Merlin slash manips with respect to the sexual positions of the pornographic base models, illustrating how gay pornography genres and ideologies referenced through these works enforce their intended meaning, as defined by the artist. A sexual act such as bukkake, as wandsinhand astutely notes, acts as a universal sign and “automatically generates a narrative for the image without anything really needing to be detailed”. Barthes argues that such a “relation between thing signified and image signifying in analogical representation” is unlike language, which has a much more ‘arbitrary’ relationship between signifier and signified (272). Bukkake and the Assertion of Masculine Power in Merlin Merlin (2008–12) is a BBC reimagining of the Arthurian legend that focuses on the coming-of-age of Arthur and his close bond with his manservant Merlin, who keeps his magical identity secret until Arthur’s final stand in the iconic Battle of Camlann. The homosexual potential of Merlin and Arthur’s story—and of magic as a metaphor for homosexuality—is something slash fans were quick to recognise. During question time at the first Merlin cast appearance at the London MCM Expo in October 2008—just one month after the show’s pilot first aired—a fan asked Morgan and James, who portray Merlin and Arthur, is Merlin “meant to be a love story between Arthur and Merlin?” James nods in jest. Wandsinhand, who is most active in the Teen Wolf (2011–present) fandom, has produced two Merlin slash manips to date, a 2013 Merlin/Arthur and a 2012 Arthur/Percival, both untitled. The Merlin/Arthur manip (see Figure 1) depicts Merlin bound and on his knees, Arthur ejaculating across his face and on his chest. Merlin is naked while Arthur is partially clothed in chainmail and armour. They are both bruised and dirty, Arthur’s injuries suggesting battle given his overall appearance, while Merlin’s suggesting abuse, given his subordinate position. The setting appears to be the royal stables, where we know Merlin spends much of his time mucking out Arthur’s horses. I am left to wonder if perhaps Merlin did not carry out this duty to Arthur’s satisfaction, and is now being punished for it; or if Arthur has returned from battle in need of sexual gratification and the endorsement of power that comes from debasing his manservant. Figure 1: wandsinhand, Untitled (Merlin/Arthur), 2013, photo montage. Courtesy the artist. Both readings are supported by Arthur’s ‘spent’ expression of disinterest or mild curiosity, while Merlin’s face emotes pain: crying and squinting through the semen obscuring his vision. The artist confirms this reading in our interview: “Arthur is using his pet Merlin to relieve some stress; Merlin of course not being too pleased about the aftermath, but obedient all the same.” The noun ‘pet’ evokes the sexual connotations of Merlin’s role as Arthur’s personal manservant, while also demoting Merlin even further than usual. He is, in Arthur’s eyes, less than human, a sexual plaything to use and abuse at will. The artist’s statement also confirms that Arthur is acting against Merlin’s will. Violence is certainly represented here, the base models having been ‘marked up’ to depict sexualisation of an already physically and emotionally abusive relationship, their relative positioning and the importation of semen heightening the humiliation. Wandsinhand’s work engages characters in sadomasochistic play, with semen and urine frequently employed to degrade and arouse—“peen wolf”, a reference to watersports, is used within his Teen Wolf practice. The two wandsinhand works analysed in this present article come without words, thus lacking a “linguistic message” (Barthes 273–6). However even so, the artist’s statement and Arthur’s stance over “his pet Merlin” mean we are still able to “skim off” (270) the meanings the image contains. The base models, for example, invite comparison with the ‘gay bukkake’ genre of gay pornography—admittedly with a single dominant male rather than a group. Gay bukkake has become a popular niche in North American gay pornography—it originated in Japan as a male–female act in the 1980s. It describes a ritualistic sexual act where a group of dominant men—often identifying as heterosexual—fuck and debase a homosexual, submissive male, commonly bareback (Durkin et al. 600). The aggression on display in this act—much like the homosocial insistency of men who partake in a ‘circle jerk’ (Mosher 318)—enables the participating men to affirm their masculinity and dominance by degrading the gay male, who is there to service (often on his knees) and receive—in any orifice of the group’s choosing—the men’s semen, and often urine as well. The equivalencies I have made here are based on the ‘performance’ of the bukkake fantasy in gay niche hazing and gay-for-pay pornography genres. These genres are fuelled by antigay sentiment, aggression and debasement of effeminate males (see Kendall). I wish here to resist the temptation of labelling the acts described above as deviant. As is a common problem with anti-pornography arguments, to attempt to fix a practice such as bukkake as deviant and abject—by, for example, equating it to rape (Franklin 24)—is to negate a much more complex consideration of distinctions and ambiguities between force and consent; lived and fantasy; where pleasure is, where it is performed and where it is taken. I extend this desire not to label the manip in question, which by exploiting the masculine posturing of Arthur effectively sexualises canon debasement. This began with the pilot when Arthur says: “Tell me Merlin, do you know how to walk on your knees?” Of the imported imagery—semen, bruising, perspiration—the key signifier is Arthur’s armour which, while torn in places, still ensures the encoding of particular signifieds: masculinity, strength and power. Doggystyle and the Subversion of Arthur’s ‘Armoured Self’ Since the romanticism and chivalric tradition of the knight in shining armour (see Huizinga) men as armoured selves have become a stoic symbol of masculine power and the benchmark for aspirational masculinity. For the medieval knight, armour reflects in its shiny surface the mettle of the man enclosed, imparting a state of ‘bodilessness’ by containing any softness beneath its shielded exterior (Burns 140). Wandsinhand’s Arthur/Percival manip (see Figure 2) subverts Arthur and the symbolism of armour with the help of arguably the only man who can: Arthur’s largest knight Percival. While a minor character among the knights, Percival’s physical presence in the series looms large, and has endeared him to slash manip artists, particularly those with only a casual interest in the series, such as wandsinhand: Why Arthur and Percival were specifically chosen had really little to do with the show’s plot, and in point of fact, I don’t really follow Merlin that closely nor am I an avid fan. […] Choosing Arthur/Percival really was just a matter of taste rather than being contextually based on their characterisations in the television show. Figure 2: wandsinhand, Untitled (Arthur/Percival), 2012, photo montage. Courtesy the artist. Concerning motivation, the artist explains: “Sometimes one’s penis decides to pick the tv show Merlin, and specifically Arthur and Percival.” The popularity of Percival among manip artists illustrates the power of physicality as a visual sign, and the valorisation of size and muscle within the gay community (see Sánchez et al.). Having his armour modified to display his muscles, the implication is that Percival does not need armour, for his body is already hard, impenetrable. He is already suited up, simultaneously man and armoured. Wandsinhand uses the physicality of this character to strip Arthur of his symbolic, masculine power. The work depicts Arthur with a dishevelled expression, his armoured chest pressed against the ground, his chainmail hitched up at the back to expose his arse, Percival threading his unsheathed cock inside him, staring expressionless at the ‘viewer’. The artist explains he “was trying to show a shift of power”: I was also hinting at some sign of struggle, which is somewhat evident on Arthur’s face too. […] I think the expressions work in concert to suggest […] a power reversal that leaves Arthur on the bottom, a position he’s not entirely comfortable accepting. There is pleasure to be had in seeing the “cocky” Arthur forcefully penetrated, “cut down to size by a bigger man” (wandsinhand). The two assume the ‘doggystyle’ position, an impersonal sexual position, without eye contact and where the penetrator sets the rhythm and intensity of each thrust. Scholars have argued that the position is degrading to the passive party, who is dehumanised by the act, a ‘dog’ (Dworkin 27); and rapper Snoop ‘Doggy’ Dogg exploits the misogynistic connotations of the position on his record Doggystyle (see Armstrong). Wandsinhand is clear in his intent to depict forceful domination of Arthur. Struggle is signified through the addition of perspiration, a trademark device used by this artist to symbolise struggle. Domination in a sexual act involves the erasure of the wishes of the dominated partner (see Cowan and Dunn). To attune oneself to the pleasures of a sexual partner is to regard them as a subject. To ignore such pleasures is to degrade the other person. The artist’s choice of pairing embraces the physicality of the male/male bond and illustrates a tendency among manip producers to privilege conventional masculine identifiers—such as size and muscle—above symbolic, nonphysical identifiers, such as status and rank. It is worth noting that muscle is more readily available in the pornographic source material used in slash manips—muscularity being a recurrent component of gay pornography (see Duggan and McCreary). In my interview with manip artist simontheduck, he describes the difficulty he had sourcing a base image “that complimented the physicality of the [Merlin] characters. […] The actor that plays Merlin is fairly thin while Arthur is pretty built, it was difficult to find one. I even had to edit Merlin’s body down further in the end.” (personal correspondence, used with permission) As wandsinhand explains, “you’re basically limited by what’s available on the internet, and even then, only what you’re prepared to sift through or screencap yourself”. Wandsinhand’s Arthur/Percival pairing selection works in tandem with other artistic decisions and inclusions—sexual position, setting, expressions, effects (perspiration, lighting)—to ensure the intended reading of the work. Antithetical size and rank positions play out in the penetration/submission act of wandsinhand’s work, in which only the stronger of the two may come out ‘on top’. Percival subverts the symbolic power structures of prince/knight, asserting his physical, sexual dominance over the physically inferior Arthur. That such a construction of Percival is incongruent with the polite, impeded-by-my-size-and-muscle-density Percival of the series speaks to the circumstances of manip production, much of which is on a taste basis, as previously noted. There are of course exceptions to this, the Teen Wolf ‘Sterek’ (Stiles/Derek) pairing being wandsinhand’s, but even in this case, size tends to couple with penetration. Slash manips often privilege physicality of the characters in question—as well as the base models selected—above any particular canon-supported slash reading. (Of course, the ‘queering’ nature of slash practice means at times there is also a desire to see such identifiers subverted, however in this example, raw masculine power prevails.) This final point is in no way representative—my practice, for example, combines manips with ficlets to offer a clearer connection with canon, while LJ’s zdae69 integrates manips, fiction and comics. However, common across slash manip artists driven by taste—and requests—rather than connection with canon—the best known being LJ’s tw-31988, demon48180 and Tumblr’s lwoodsmalestarsfakes, all of whom work across many fandoms—is interest in the ‘aesthetics of canon’, the blue hues of Teen Wolf or the fluorescent greens of Arrow (2012–present), displayed in glossy magazine format using services such as ISSUU. In short, ‘the look’ of the work often takes precedent over canonical implications of any artistic decisions. “Nothing Too Serious”: Slash Manips as Objects Worth Studying It had long been believed that the popular was the transient, that of entertainment rather than enlightenment; that which is manufactured, “an appendage of the machinery”, consumed by the duped masses and a product not of culture but of a ‘culture industry’ (Adorno and Rabinbach 12). Scholars such as Radway, Ang pioneered a shift in scholarly practice, advancing the cultural studies project by challenging elitism and finding meaning in traditionally devalued cultural texts and practices. The most surprising outcome of my interviews with wandsinhand was hearing how he conceived of his practice, and the study of slash: If I knew I could get a PhD by writing a dissertation on Slash, I would probably drop out of my physics papers! […] I don’t really think too highly of faking/manip-making. I mean, it’s not like it’s high art, is it? … or is it? I guess if Duchamp’s toilet can be a masterpiece, then so can anything. But I mainly just do it to pass the time, materialise fantasies, and disperse my fantasies unto others. Nothing too serious. Wandsinhand erects various binaries—academic/fan, important/trivial, science/arts, high art/low art, profession/hobby, reality/fantasy, serious/frivolous—as justification to devalue his own artistic practice. Yet embracing the amateur, personal nature of his practice frees him to “materialise fantasies” that would perhaps not be possible without self-imposed, underground production. This is certainly supported by his body of work, which plays with taboos of the unseen, of bodily fluids and sadomasochism. My intention with this article is not to contravene views such as wandsinhand’s. Rather, it is to promote slash manips as a form of remix culture that encourages new perspectives on how slash has been defined, its connection with male producers and its symbiotic relationship with gay pornography. I have examined the ‘semiotic significance of selection’ that creates meaning in two contrary slash manips; how these works actualise and resist canon dominance, as it relates to the physical and the symbolic. This examination also offers insight into this form’s connection to and negotiation with certain ideologies of gay pornography, such as the valorisation of size and muscle. 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