Journal articles: 'Help your doctor to help you when you have constipation' – Grafiati (2024)

Abstract:

A patient has committed suicide. You are his/her doctor. You're faced with the emotional impact this has on yourself, your colleagues, the patient's family and your other patients. You must report the suicide to your hospital authority and to the coroner (or procurator fiscal in Scotland). If you're very unlucky, you may be the focus of media attention. You have the prospect of a coroner's (or fatal accident) inquiry, a hospital inquiry and perhaps copycat suicides or para-suicides among your other patients. What are your obligations, where do you turn for help and can anything positive come from the experience?

Abstract:

With our fast-pacing life, numerous learning and scientific sources and information are available and required for medical students to boost their skills since their early life to accommodate with the great knowledge they take. Medical students should re-elaborate what they studied and exploit knowledge clinically. A good doctor is a good observer, so eyes should be kept on while mentor managing patients in order to add more to our medical notions. A seed to become a great future doctor starts by searching for a specialty that fits your personality, to practice it as a volunteer, to gain its skills earlier. So when you graduate, you have more time to gain other learning experience. As long as you practice it, the more chance to become one of its experts. Managing your patient as a relative, not as a bag of money, is very important to be applied. Inability to diagnose a patient is not a shame, so never let a patient go home without referring him to another doctor who has more experience than you. Having a background in other medical specialties will help you recognize common signs of other related medical conditions that could lead you to refer him to right specialty doctor. Joining a research lab will keep you updated with new inventions, drugs, algorithms, and guidelines, which will help you become more acknowledged with medical problems that you were unaware of. Time management is the key to success as a researcher without affecting your daily life activities and study requirements.

Abstract:

“And so, light your face up with a smile, Why waste your life on something really not worthwhile, Look up to the stars, take your eyes off the ground, Come, live your life, turn around.”1 As Doctors of Medicine we should be no strangers to aspiration; “a striving after something higher than oneself” that “usually implies that the striver is thereby ennobled.”2 Aspiration in this context truly earns us the full connotation of the title “Doctor,” as eminent, authoritative, learned healers and teachers of the art and science of medicine. Many among us deserve this title in word and deed, and are worthy of emulation. Their personal and professional lives bear witness, not to self-serving accomplishments, but to their improving life and living in the world around them. Aspiration may be synonymous with ambition, although the latter term which “applies to the desire for personal advancement” may equally suggest “a praiseworthy or an inordinate desire … for rank, fame or power.” 2 Ambition of this sort often resorts to manipulation to achieve its ends, and manipulation in this context is “to control or play upon by artful, unfair, or insidious means especially to one's own advantage.” 3 Whether subtly stolen or brazenly grabbed at the expense of others, the means is often distorted to justify the end. In the process, rights are trampled, dreams shattered, alliances betrayed and relationships severed. According to Messina and Messina4, manipulation is a set of behaviors whose goal is to: Get you what you want from others even when the others are not willing initially to give it to you. Make it seem to others that they have come up with an idea or offer of help on their own when in reality you have worked on them to promote this idea or need for help for your own benefit. Dishonestly get people to do or act in a way which they might not have freely chosen on their own. "Con'' people to believe what you want them to believe as true. Get "your way'' in almost every interaction you have with people, places, or things. Present reality the way you want others to see it rather than the way it "really is.'' Hide behind a "mask'' and let people see you in an acceptable way when in reality you are actually feeling or acting in an ``unacceptable'' way for these people. Maintain control and power over others even though they think they have the control and power. Manipulation also means “to change by artful or unfair means so as to serve one's purpose” or, shameful as it may sound, to “doctor.”3 This derogatory use of the term is not untainted by our actions, whether the arena be laboratory or operating theatre, clinic or lecture hall, hospital or home, interest group or organization, community or society. Blind ambition may delude us into rationalizing dodgy deals and shady maneuverings, convincing even ourselves that they are beneficent and non-maleficent. We get our way, oblivious to the injustice and injury wrought on others. When shameless machinations, “scheming, crafty actions or artful designs intended to accomplish some usually evil end”5 are engaged in by supposed practitioners of the healing art, they do more than validate the colloquial dinu-doktor or dinuktor; they invalidate the rest of us.

Abstract:

I’m sitting at my desk, trying to concentrate. On anything. It’s impossible. No, I should rephrase that, it’s “challenging” is the term I’ve been taught to use. I can’t focus. I have no motivation. And it’s been like this for nine months. I’ve been treated for depression twice in the past and promised I’d never let myself get depressed again. “Let myself” – that phrase shows how ignorant I still was. Whilst on maternity leave, I became snappy, lethargic, irritable, moody and low. I was certain that it was all due to being a mother with a newborn. All new mums are exhausted, right? I couldn’t be bothered to see people, to cook, to do anything really. But surely it was all down to extreme tiredness? I couldn’t be depressed. I come from a secure background, have a loving and supportive husband and family, close friends, a good job (I’m a doctor, did I mention that?), a beautiful house and no financial worries. I had no reason to be depressed. I was diagnosed, however, with depression and anxiety. How could I let it happen again? That’s the point – I didn’t “let it happen”. It’s not my fault. Depression and anxiety are medical illnesses. Like diabetes. Or heart failure. It could happen to anyone. Depression and anxiety permeate your life. Small things become unmanageable. You cry for no reason. You hate yourself. You feel terrible and unrepentant guilt. About everything. It’s a frightening and lonely world. Nobody understands that even when you look happy on the surface, you’re flat inside, terrified that you’re crazy and may not get better. My return to work became the main focus of my anxiety. I would lie in bed at night panicking. I couldn’t concentrate, focus or make decisions. How could I run an acute medical take? Surely I wouldn’t be safe as a doctor anymore? You cannot understand tiredness until you’ve experienced the tiredness associated with having small children. Or the tiredness associated with having small children and depression. Sometimes I feel like I’ll never have any energy ever again. That I will forever be trying to catch up, to get through the day, to make it to bed. I feel like my life is constantly on the brink of chaos and that I can only rest when I collapse into bed. Except that I can’t rest in bed. Bedtime is the worst. I lie there thinking. Thinking about everything. One night I was still awake at midnight, so got out of bed and scribbled down everything that was in my head. I was thinking 47 things at once. That’s how well women can multitask. And that’s why I can’t relax and get to sleep. They say that anxiety makes it hard to fall asleep and depression makes you wake up early. Well I have anxiety, depression, a four year old and a baby, so that makes for little sleep. Depression seeps into your bones. It gnaws away at your soul, until you don’t know who you are anymore. At times you feel overwhelmed with emotion, wretched, beyond help. At other times you feel nothing at all. Absolutely nothing. I don’t know which is more frightening. I wrote this eighteen months ago. I am now back at work as an acute medical consultant, having had Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, psychiatry input and antidepressants. Depression and suicide are more common in the medical profession than in the general public, yet we rarely discuss it. Many of the personality traits that help us to become highly functioning professionals also increase our risk of depression, such as perfectionism and being overly self-critical. Depression has also been shown to be associated with symptoms of burnout, which is commonplace within the medical workforce. Other risk factors for depression within the medical profession include poor relationships with senior doctors, work overload, job responsibility, making mistakes, lack of sleep and a conflicting work-life balance. How to deal with mental health within the medical profession will not be straightforward and will need addressing from medical school onwards. We must recognise the risk factors and provide adequate support, mentoring, debriefing and rest periods. But first, we need to reduce the stigmatisation and start talking about it.

Abstract:

Magandang Gabi po sa inyong lahat lalo na sa mga bagong specialista (o Diplomate) ng ating samahang PBO-HNS na pinararangalan natin ngayon; Ganuon din sa kanilang mga kabiyak, at mga magulang, mga marangal nating panauhin at syempre sa mga dati kong kasama sa PSO at PBO-HNS. Itong samahang ito ang hindi tumitigil na paunlarin ang mga patakaran ng Society at para ang ENT Diplomate ay maging tunay na specialist at hindi “ispecialista daw.” For the single ones among you, let’s give your parents special citation for having sacrificed not only once during your medical student days but twice-during your residency days. Their encouragement and material aid are phenomenal. Likewise to those married, your spouses either had a more challenging housewife’s role or became “house bands” during your busy training days. So in this talk of mine which you may consider “unsolicited advice,” I will mention some idealistic-- even bordering on the philosophical -- reminders of some of our pillars in the specialty and my own experience as a budding practitioner. Also my personal pitfalls and how to possibly solve them. After all, when we reach our sunset years, we can discuss such topics ad infinitum. Success in your practice is more or less guaranteed. After all, our specialty is still relatively young and in demand and our membership is still wanting in proportion to the needs of a 100-million population. I still have to see an ENT practitioner unhappy in his chosen field. The only factor that may be unfavourable is your questionable attitude towards your patient, your colleagues in the profession and the hospital administrators in the institution where you belong. In an article by the multi-awarded neurotologist Dr. Michael Glassco*ck entitled “The Lost Art of Medicine,”1 he enumerated the basic principles of the time-honored physician-patient relationship which are: “The Science of Medicine” which you have just endured by passing the board so I will not elaborate on it. “The Art of Medicine” which is multifaceted approach to patient care that takes into consideration the patient’s emotional as well as his physical well-being. I remember a patient, my own cousin, who fainted in front of me when he learned from the histopath that he had cancer. I miscalculated his intelligence against his anxiety, which brings me to the next topic; “The Art of Full Disclosure” a most important aspect of good patient care is keeping the patient fully informed. A well-informed patient is an understanding patient who may think twice or more before suing you after a surgical complication, because you have explained that possibility to him. A DVD or disc on the surgical procedure, showing its advantages, indications, and possible complications can be a good source of informed consent. An anatomic picture in your laptop can explain the pathophysiology and help prevent problems in the lifestyle of -- let’s say-- a chronically allergic patient. “The Art of Listening” studies have shown that during the initial interview an average doctor interrupts the patient’s story within 17-20 seconds. This frustrates the patient. True, the patient can be a poor historian so you can prompt him-- but not to the point of leading the story. Remember 40 to even 60% of his story can be the source of the diagnosis. “The Art of Compassion” Postoperatively make rounds twice a day and even more if the case is a difficult one. This lets the patient and family know that you are on top of the situation and are concerned about their well-being. A secure physician will suggest a second opinion before the patient and/or family ask for one.1 And again will not even consider a malpractice suit if a complication happens. Those are the emotionally-charged problems you may encounter. So it’s not only the 3A’s of malpractice, namely Ability, Availability, Acceptability that can ensure success. Maybe add 2 more – Accessibility and Affordability for obvious reasons, when inefficiency is very palpable, such as in this unfortunate place known as Metro Manila with its horrendous traffic and other problems. There is a clamour for the next president to create a “department of common sense.” As to affordability, you may be the best ENT doctor but if your PF is preposterous, that will be a definite turn-off for the patient. Here are few reminders for a starter: Recruit a “smiling staff” from the secretary in the reception room, your clinic nurse and/or clinic assistant. Nothing can be a better welcome scene for a sick, depressed patient than a smiling, assuring face. Be always on time as posted. Working patients have to rush back to work and get disappointed with errant doctors, and seek one who is available. A few red flags in practice: Beware of a secretary who may be a cheat, charging your pro bono patients without your knowledge and pocketing the money. A colleague who captures “walk-in” patients by socializing with personnel from the admitting section, OPD-ER nurses and residents. No wonder inspite of “on call” scheduling you never received any patient from these departments. These events really happen. One of the fastest ways for a quick fix to accumulate patients is to join HMO’s. Financial returns may not be as great as private patients but in the long run an HMO-satisfied patient is eventually your recruiter of his relatives and friends. Some downsides on joining HMO’s: Controlling your work-ups such as by refusing necessary, thorough, but expensive requests. Delayed payments. Defining what is pre-existing illness. In this day and age of social media, here are some do’s and don’ts: Never refuse an invitation to TV forums. During my time the two popular ones were: “Kapwa Ko, Mahal Ko” and “Damayan.” I was invited a few times to guest in these fora. As a result, my telephone lines became busy answering calls about my schedule. I felt like a superstar. The availability of information about your practice at a click of a mouse will allow you to reduce your marketing budgets. You can even create your own website or thru the services of facebook, twitter, etc. As long as your statements in your ads are not false, misleading and deceptive you can’t go wrong. Some examples of false statements: Statements of ability to do subspecialty procedures where in fact he did it with a “ghost surgeon.” Has had fellowship in a well-known medical center abroad but actually spent just a few days of observation. Example of deceptive claims: - paid testimonials by prominent patients about his greatness. Still some other tricks of the trade: Practice in the provinces where you grew up. People there are very familiar with you, a returning professional, who will appreciate your humanitarian services. You will be the pride of your family. A very rewarding feeling indeed. Accept speaking engagements from other medical groups, and socio-civic clubs. Again, they become your sources of referral. The PhilHealth is a noble undertaking by the government for those who have less in life should have more in law. It is a law and we are all bound to abide by it. Let us not abuse it as is happening with one of the other specialties. I understand there is also an ongoing controversy between LGU’s and provincial hospitals about PhilHealth Returns. Thinking of academic medicine and research? You don’t have to be in a classroom or in the laboratory. Remember even the ancient Oath of Hippocrates mentioned this art of sharing knowledge and experience with others, when it states: “I will impart this knowledge of the art to my own sons and those of my teachers and to other disciples…”2 Teaching can also be self-serving since it forces one to study more and updated. Masama naman na mas marunong pa sayo ang estudyante mo. In closing, let me remind you about the past. While you are in a solitary moment savouring the thought of your enormous professional success, please remember the toils, the sacrifices, the idealism of the “heroic nine” who founded our specialty society, and the Board and the subsequent leaders who nourished it. Don’t forget your Department Chairmen, Training Officers and Consultant staff who shared their time and expertise with you. They are part and parcel of your success. So there goes the remark of a French philosopher, Bernard De Charter: “We are like dwarfs seated on giants shoulders. If we can see far, it’s not because we are tall but because we are seated on giant’s shoulders.”3 And most of these giants are with us tonight and they are all very proud of you. Good evening and thank you for the pleasure of sharing these ideas with you today.

Abstract:

Case report/ IntroductionA panic attack is an explosion of high anxiety. It is strongly associated with a sense of losing control or predicting that the very worst will happen. It is not a mental disorder, more than one in five people experience one or more panic attacks in their lifetime, but few go on to develop panic disorder or agoraphobia. There are different types of panic attacks: Cued Panic Attacks, Situational Predisposed Panic Attacks and Spontaneous Panic Attacks.ObjectivesTo discuss three case reports with one year follow-up, each one of a different type of panic attack.Case report1 Female, 25-years-old. First panic attack at age 20, since there several spontaneous episodes with a mean of 4 a week, not related to any specific situation, event, or place, without any warning.Case report2 Male, 28-years-old. Has always been afraid of airplanes but it was only 3 years ago that riding on an airplane has started to trigger panic attack. He don’t experience panic attacks in any other situation.Case report3 Male, 31-years-old. First episode 4 years ago while driving alone and since there driving, traveling alone, enclosed spaces and crowds are more likely to trigger a panic attack but not always. They don’t have a specific fear or phobia tied to that situation or place; they simply tend to experience panic attacks when there.ConclusionUnderstanding the different types of panic attacks can help you and your doctor determine the cause of your attacks and the best way to go about treating them.

Abstract:

OBJECTIVES/SPECIFIC AIMS: Stigma has been recognized as a major impediment to accessing mental health care among Vietnamese and Asian Americans (Leong and Lau, 2001; Sadavoy et al., 2004; Wynaden et al., 2005; Fong and Tsuang, 2007). The underutilization of mental health care, and disparities in both access and outcomes have been attributed to a large extent to stigma and cultural characteristics of this population (Wynaden et al., 2005; Jang et al., 2009; Leung et al., 2010; Spencer et al., 2010; Jimenez et al., 2013; Augsberger et al., 2015). People with neurotic or behavioral disorders may be considered “bad” as many Vietnamese people believe it is a consequence of one’s improper behavior in a previous life, for which the person is now being punished (Nguyen, 2003). Mental disorders can also been seen as a sign of weakness, which contributes to ambivalence and avoidance of help-seeking (Fong and Tsuang, 2007). Equally important is the need to protect family reputation; having emotional problems often implies that the person has “bad blood” or is being punished for the sins of his/her ancestors (Herrick and Brown, 1998; Leong and Lau, 2001), which disgraces the entire family (Wynaden et al., 2005). In these cases, public stigma (as opposed to internal stigma) is the primary reason for delays in seeking help (Leong and Lau, 2001). Other research has also highlighted the influences of culture on how a disorder may be labeled in different settings, although the presentation of symptoms might be identical (see Angel and Thoits, 1987). In Vietnamese culture, mental disorders are often labeled điên (literally translated as “madness”). A điên person and his or her family are often severely disgraced; consequently the individuals and their family become reluctant to disclose and seek help for mental health problems for fear of rejection (Sadavoy et al., 2004). Despite the critical role of stigma in accessing mental health care, there has been little work in trying to understand how stigmatizing attitudes towards mental illness among Vietnamese Americans manifest themselves and the influences of acculturation on these attitudes. Some previous work indicated a significant level of mental illness stigma among Vietnamese Americans, and experiences of living in the United States might interact with the way stigma manifests among this population (Do et al., 2014). Stigma is a complex construct that warrants a deeper and more nuanced understanding (Castro et al., 2005). Much of the development of stigma-related concepts was based on the classic work by Goffman (1963); he defined stigma as a process by which an individual internalizes stigmatizing characteristics and develops fears and anxiety about being treated differently from others. Public stigma (defined by Corrigan, 2004) includes the general public’s negative beliefs about specific groups, in this case individuals and families with mental illness concerns, that contribute to discrimination. Public stigma toward mental illness acts not only as a major barrier to care, but can also exacerbate anxiety, depression, and adherence to treatment (Link et al., 1999; Sirey et al., 2001; Britt et al., 2008; Keyes et al., 2010). Link and Phelan (2001) conceptualized public stigma through four major components. The first component, labeling, occurs when people distinguish and label human differences that are socially relevant, for example, skin color. In the second component, stereotyping, cultural beliefs link the labeled persons to undesirable characteristics either in the mind or the body of such persons, for example people who are mentally ill are violent. The third component is separating “us” (the normal people) from “them” (the mentally ill) by the public. Finally, labeled persons experience status loss and discrimination, where they are devalued, rejected and excluded. Link and Phelan (2001) emphasized that stigmatization also depends on access to social, economic, and political power that allows these components to unfold. This study aims to answer the following research questions: (1) how does public stigma related to mental illness manifest among Vietnamese Americans? and (2) in what ways does acculturation influence stigma among this population? We investigate how the 4 components of stigma according to Link and Phelan (2001) operationalized and how they depend on the level of acculturation to the host society. Vietnamese Americans is the key ethnic minority group for this study for several reasons. Vietnamese immigration, which did not start in large numbers until the 1970s, has features that allow for a natural laboratory for comparisons of degree of acculturation. Previous research has shown significant intergenerational differences in the level of acculturation and mental health outcomes (e.g., Shapiro et al., 1999; Chung et al., 2000; Ying and Han, 2007). In this study, we used age group as a proxy indicator of acculturation, assuming that those who were born and raised in the United States (the 18–35 year olds) would be more Americanized than those who were born in Vietnam but spent a significant part of their younger years in the United States (the 36–55 year olds), and those who were born and grew up in Vietnam (the 56–75 year olds) would be most traditional Vietnamese. The language used in focus group discussions (FGDs) reflected some of the acculturation, where all FGDs with the youngest groups were done in English, and all FGDs with the oldest groups were done in Vietnamese. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: Data were collected through a set of FGDs and key informant interviews (KIIs) with experts to explore the conceptualization and manifestation of mental illness public stigma among Vietnamese Americans in New Orleans. Six FGDs with a total of 51 participants were conducted. Participants were Vietnamese American men and women ages 18–75. Stratification was used to ensure representation in the following age/immigration pattern categories: (1) individuals age 56–75 who were born and grew up in Vietnam and immigrated to the United States after age 35; (2) individuals age 36–55 who were born in Vietnam but spent a significant part of their youth in the United States; and (3) individuals age 18–35 who were born and grew up in the United States. These groups likely represent different levels of acculturation, assuming that people who migrate at a younger age are more likely to assimilate to the host society than those who do at a later age. Separate FGDs were conducted with men and women. Eleven KIIS were conducted with 6 service providers and 5 community and religious leaders. In this analysis, we focused on mental illness public stigma from the FGD participants’ perspectives. FGDs were conducted in either English or Vietnamese, whichever participants felt more comfortable with, using semistructured interview guides. All interviews were audio recorded, transcribed and translated into English if conducted in Vietnamese. Data coding and analysis was done using NVivo version 11 (QSR International, 2015). The analysis process utilized a Consensual Qualitative Research (CQR) approach, a validated and well-established approach to collecting and analyzing qualitative data. CQR involves gathering textual data through semistructured interviews or focus groups, utilizing a data analysis process that fosters multiple perspectives, a consensus process to arrive at judgments about the meaning of data, an auditor to check the work of the research team, and the development of domains, core-ideas, and cross-analysis (Hill et al., 2005). The study was reviewed and approved by Tulane University’s Internal Review Board. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: Components of public stigma related to mental illness. The 4 components of public stigma manifest to different extents within the Vietnamese Americans in New Orleans. Labeling was among the strongest stigma components, while the evidence of the other components was mixed. Across groups of participants, Vietnamese Americans agreed that it was a common belief that people with mental disorders were “crazy,” “acting crazy,” or “madness.” “Not normal,” “sad,” and “depressed” were among other words used to describe the mentally ill. However, there were clear differences between younger and older Vietnamese on how they viewed these conditions. The youngest groups of participants tended to recognize the “craziness” and “madness” as a health condition that one would need to seek help for, whereas the oldest groups often stated that these conditions were short term and likely caused by family or economic problems, such as a divorce, or a bankruptcy. The middle-aged groups were somewhere in between. The evidence supporting the second component, stereotyping, was not strong among Vietnamese Americans. Most FGD participants agreed that although those with mental disorders may act differently, they were not distinguishable. In a few extreme cases, mentally ill individuals were described as petty thefts or being violent towards their family members. Similarly to the lack of strong evidence of stereotyping, there was also no evidence of the public separating the mentally ill (“them”) from “us”. It was nearly uniformly reported that they felt sympathetic to those with mental disorders and their family, and that they all recognized that they needed help, although the type of help was perceived differently across groups. The older participants often saw that emotional and financial support was needed to help individuals and families to pass through a temporary phase, whereas younger participants often reported that professional help was necessary. The last component, status loss and discrimination, had mixed evidence. While nearly no participants reported any explicit discriminatory behaviors observed and practiced towards individuals with mental disorders and their families, words like “discrimination” and “stigma” were used in all FGDs to describe direct social consequences of having a mental disorder. Social exclusion was common. Our older participants said: “They see less of you, when they see a flaw in you they don’t talk to you or care about you. That’s one thing the Vietnamese people are bad at, spreading false rumors and discrimination” (Older women FGD). One’s loss of status seemed certain if their or their loved one’s mental health status was disclosed. Shame, embarrassment, and being “frowned upon” were direct consequences of one’s mental health status disclosure and subsequently gossiped about. Anyone with mental disorders was certain to experience this, and virtually everyone in the community would reportedly do this to such a family. “You get frowned upon. In the Vietnamese culture, that’s [a family identified as one with mental health problems] the big no-no right there. When everybody frowns upon your family and your family name, that’s when it becomes a problem” (Young men FGD). This is tied directly to what our participants described as Vietnamese culture, where pride and family reputation were such a high priority that those with mental disorders needed to go to a great extent to protect—“We all know what saving face means” as reported by our young participants. Even among young participants, despite their awareness of mental illness and the need for professional help, the desire to avoid embarrassment and save face was so strong that one would think twice about seeking help. “No, you just don’t want to get embarrassed. I don’t want to go to the damn doctor and be like ‘Oh yeah, my brother got an issue. You can help him?’ Why would I do that? That’s embarrassing to myself…” (Young men FGD). Our middle-aged participants also reported: “If I go to that clinic [mental health or counseling clinic], I am hoping and praying that I won’t bump into somebody that I know from the community” (Middle-aged women FGD). Vietnamese people were also described as being very competitive among themselves, which led to the fact that if a family was known for having any problem, gossips would start and spread quickly wherever they go, and pretty soon, the family would be looked down by the entire community. “I think for Vietnamese people, they don’t help those that are in need. They know of your situation and laugh about it, see less of you, and distant themselves from you” (Older women FGD). Culture and mental illness stigma, much of the described stigma and discrimination expressed, and consequently the reluctance to seek help, was attributed to the lack of awareness of mental health and of mental health disorders. Many study participants across groups also emphasized a belief that Vietnamese Americans were often known for their perseverance and resilience, overcoming wars and natural disasters on their own. Mental disorders were reportedly seen as conditions that individuals and families needed to overcome on their own, rather than asking for help from outsiders. This aspect of Vietnamese culture is intertwined with the need to protect one’s family’s reputation, being passed on from one generation to the next, reinforcing the beliefs that help for mental disorders should come from within oneself and one’s family only. Consequently persons with mental health problems would be “Keeping it to themselves. Holding it in and believing in the power of their friends” (Middle-aged FGD) instead of seeking help. Another dimension of culture that was apparent from FGDs (as well as KIIs) was the mistrust in Western medicine. Not understanding how counseling or medicines work made one worry about approaching service providers or staying in treatment. The habit of Vietnamese people to only go see a doctor if they are sick with physical symptoms was also a hindrance to acknowledging mental illness and seeking care for it. Challenges, including the lack of vocabulary to express mental illness and symptoms, in the Vietnamese language, exaggerated the problem, even among those who had some understanding of mental disorders. It was said in the young men FGD that: “when you classify depression as an illness, no one wants to be sick,… if you call it an illness, no one wants to have that sort of illness, and it’s not an illness that you can physically see…” (Young men FGD). Another young man summarized so well the influence of culture on mental illness stigma: “Us Southeast Asian, like, from my parents specifically has Vietnam War refugees. I think the reason why they don’t talk about it is because it’s a barrier that they have to overcome themselves, right? As refugees, as people who have been through the war… [omitted]They don’t want to believe that they need help, and so the trauma that they carry when they give birth to us is carried on us as well. But due to the language barrier and also the, like, they say with the whole health care, in Vietnam I know that they don’t really believe in Western and Eurocentric medicine. So, from their understanding of how, like from their experience with colonization or French people, and how medicine works, they don’t believe in it” (Young men FGD). One characteristic of the Vietnamese culture that was also often mentioned by our FGD participants (as well as KIIs) was the lack of sharing and openness between generations, even within a family. Grandparents, parents, and children do not usually share and discuss each other’s problems. Parents and grandparents do not talk about problems because they need to appear strong and good in front of their children; children do not talk about problems because they are supposed to do well in all aspects, particularly in school. The competitiveness of Vietnamese and high expectations of younger generations again come into play here and create a vicious cycle. Young people are expected to do well in school, which put pressure on them and may result in mental health problems, yet, they cannot talk about it with their parents because they are not supposed to feel bad about school, and sharing is not encouraged. The Asian model minority myth and the expectations of parents that their children would do well in school and become doctors and lawyers were cited by many as a cause of mental health problems among young people. “Our parents are refugees, they had nothing and our parents want us to achieve this American Dream…. [omitted] It set expectations and images for us…. It was expected for all the Asians to be in the top 10, and for, like a little quick minute I thought I wasn’t going to make it, I was crying” (Yong men FGD). As a result, the mental health problems get worse. “If you’re feeling bad about something, you don’t feel like you can talk about it with anyone else, especially your family, because it is not something that is encouraged to be talked about anyway, so if you are feeling poorly and you don’t feel like you could talk to anybody, I think that just perpetuates the bad feelings” (Middle-aged women FGD). Acculturation and mental illness stigma Acculturation, the degree of assimilation to the host society, has changed some of the understanding of mental illness and stigmatizing attitudes. Differences across generations expressed in different FGDs indicated differences in perceptions towards mental illness that could be attributed to acculturation. For example, the young generation understood that mental illness was a health problem that was prevalent but less recognized in the Vietnamese community, whereas a prominent theme among the older participants was that mental illness was a temporary condition due to psychological stress, that it was a condition that only Caucasians had. Some of the components of public stigma related to mental illness seemed to vary between generations, for example the youngest participants were less likely to put a label on a person with mental health problems, or to stereotype them, compared to the oldest and middle-aged participants. This was attributed to their education, exposure to the media and information, and to them “being more Americanized.” However, there was no evidence that acculturation played an important role in changing the other components of public stigma, including stereotyping, separating, and status loss and discrimination. For example, the need to protect the family reputation was so important that our young participants shared: “If you damage their image, they will disown you before you damage that image” (Young men FGD). Young people, more likely to recognize mental health problems, were also more likely to share within the family and to seek help, but no more likely than their older counterparts to share outside of the family—“maybe you would go to counseling or go to therapy, but you wouldn’t tell people you’re doing that” (Young women FGD). The youngest participants in our study were facing a dilemma, in which they recognized mental health problems and the need for care, yet were still reluctant to seek care or talk about it publicly because of fears of damaging the family reputation and not living up to the parents’ expectations. Many young participants reported that it actually made it very difficult for them to navigate mental health issues between the 2 cultures, despite the awareness of the resources available. “I think it actually makes it harder. Only because you know to your parents and the culture, and your own people, it’s taboo, and it’s something that you don’t talk about. Just knowing that you have the resources to go seek it… You want advice from your family also, but you can’t connect the appointment to your family because you’re afraid to express that to your parents, you know? So I think that plays a big part, and knowing that you are up and coming, but you don’t want to do something to disappoint your family because they are so traditional” (Young men FGD). Some participants felt more comfortable talking about mental health problems, like depression, if it was their friend who experienced it and confided in them, but they would not necessarily felt open if it was their problem. Subtle cultural differences like this are likely overlooked by Western service providers. One older participant summarized it well “They [the young generation] are more Americanized. They are more open to other things [but] I think that mental health is still a barrier.” DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE OF IMPACT: This study investigated how different components of public stigma related to mental illness manifest among Vietnamese Americans, a major ethnic group in the United States, and how acculturation may influence such stigma. The findings highlighted important components of public stigma, including labeling and status loss, but did not provide strong evidence of the other components within our study population. Strong cultural beliefs underlined the understanding of mental health and mental illness in general, and how people viewed people with mental illness. Several findings have been highlighted in previous studies with Asian immigrants elsewhere; for example, a study from the perspectives of health care providers in Canada found that the unfamiliarity with Western biomedicine and spiritual beliefs and practices of immigrant women interacted with social stigma in preventing immigrants from accessing care (O’Mahony and Donnelly, 2007). Fancher et al. (2010) reported similar findings regarding stigma, traditional beliefs about medicine, and culture among Vietnamese Americans. Acculturation played a role in changing stigmatizing attitudes as evidenced in intergenerational differences. However, being more Americanized did not equate to being more open, having less stigmatizing attitudes, or being more willing to seek care for mental health issues. Consistent with previous studies (Pedersen and Paves, 2014), we still found some level of stigma among young people aged 18–35, although some components were lessened with an increased level of acculturation. There was also a conflict among the younger generation, in which the need for mental health care was recognized but accessing care was no easier for them than for their parent and grandparent generations. The study’s findings are useful to adapt existing instruments to measure stigma to this population. The findings also have important program implications. One, they can be directly translated into basic supports for local primary and behavioral health care providers. Two, they can also be used to guide and inform the development and evaluation of an intervention and an additional study to validate the findings in other immigrant ethnic groups in the United States. Finally, based on results of the study, we can develop a conceptual framework that describes pathways through which social, cultural, and ecological factors can influence stigma and the ways in which stigma acts as a barrier to accessing mental health care among Vietnamese Americans. The guiding framework then can be validated and applied in future programs aimed to improve mental health care utilization among ethnic minorities.

Abstract:

Introduction Such symptoms as hard, complex, bodily or mental feelings, that turn our everyday life into a hell, at first, lead us to a doctor, and then - to a psychotherapist. A sick man is keen to get rid of a symptom. A doctor prescribes medication, that is ought to eliminate a symptom. A psychotherapist searches for a reason of the problem that needs to be removed. There is such an idea that a neurotic symptom, in particular, an anxiety - is a pathological (spare or extra) response of a body. It is generally believed that such anxiety doesn’t have some real, objective reasons and that it is the result of a nervous system disorder, or some disruption of a cognitive sphere etc. Meanwhile, it is known that in the majority of cases, medical examinations of anxious people show that they don’t have any organic damages, including nervous system. It often happens that patients even wish doctors have found at least any pathology and have begun its treatment. And yet - there is no pathology. All examinations indicate a high level of functionality of a body and great performance of the brain's work. Doctors throw their hands up, as they can't cure healthy people. One of my clients told me her story of such medical examinations (which I’ll tell you with her permission). She said that it was more than 10 years ago. So, when she told her doctor all of her symptoms - he seemed very interested in it. He placed a helmet with electrodes on her head and wore some special glasses, when, according to her words, he created some kind of stressful situation for her brain, as she was seeing some flashings of bright pictures in her eyes. She said that he had been bothered with her for quite a long time, and at the end of it he had told her that her brain had been performing the best results in all respects. He noted that he’d rarely got patients with such great health indicators. My client asked the doctor how rare that was. And he answered: “one client in two or three months.” At that moment my client didn’t know whether to be relieved, flattered or sad. But since then, when someone told her that anxiety was a certain sign of mental problems, or problems with the nervous system, or with a body in general, she answered that people who had anxiety usually had already got all the required medical examinations sufficiently, and gave them the advice to go through medical screening by themselves before saying something like that. Therefore, we see a paradoxical situation, when some experts point to a neurotic anxiety as if it is a kind of pathology, in other words - some result of a nervous system disorder. Other specialists in the same situation talk about cognitive impairments. And some, after all the examinations, are ready to send such patients into space Main text I don’t agree with the statement that any neurotic anxiety that happens is excessive and unfounded. It often happens that there is objective, specific and real causes for appearance of anxiety conditions. And these causes require solutions. And it’s not about some organic damages of the brain or nervous system. The precondition that may give a rise to anxiety disorder is the development of such a life story that at some stage becomes too toxic - when, on the one hand, a person interacts with the outside world in a way that destroys his or her personality, and, on the other hand, this person uses repression and accepts such situation as common and normal. Repression - is an essential condition for the development of a neurotic symptom. Sigmund Freud was the first who pointed this out. Repression is such a defense mechanism that helps people separate themselves from some unpleasant feelings of discomfort (pain) while having (external or internal) irritations. It is the situation when, despite the presence of irritations and painful feelings, a person, however, doesn't feel any of it and is not aware of them in his or her conscious mind. Repression creates the situation of so-called emotional anesthesia. As a result, a displacement takes place, so a body starts to signal about the existing toxic life situation via a symptom. Anxiety disorder is usually an appropriate response (symptom) of a healthy body to an unhealthy life situation, which is seen by a person as normal. And it’s common when such a person is surrounded by others (close people), who tend to benefit from such situation, and so they actively maintain this state of affairs, whether it is conscious for them or not. At the beginning of a psychotherapy almost all clients insist that everything is good in their lives, even great, as it is like in everyone else’s life. They say that they have only one problem, which is that goddamn symptom. So they focus all of their attention on that symptom. They are not interested in all the other aspects of their life, and they show their irritation when it comes to talking about it. People want to get rid of it, whatever it takes, but they often tend to keep their lives the way that it was. In such cases a psychotherapist is dealing with the resistance of clients, trying to turn their attention from a symptom to their everyday situation that includes their way of thinking, interactions with themselves and with others and with the external world in order to have the opportunity to see the real problem, to live it through, to rethink and to change the story of their lives. For better understanding about how it works I want to tell you three allegorical tales. The name of the first tale is “A frog in boiling water”. There is one scientific anecdote and an assumption (however, it is noted that such experiments were held in 19 century), that if we put a frog in a pot with warm water and start to slowly heat the water, then this frog get used to the temperature rise and stays in a hot water, the frog doesn’t fight the situation, slowly begins to lose its energy and at the last moment it couldn’t find enough strength and energy to get out of that pot. But if we throw a frog abruptly in hot water - it jumps out very quickly. It is likely that a frog, that is seating in boiling water, will have some responses of the body (symptoms). For example, the temperature of its body will rise, the same as the color of it, etc., that is an absolutely normal body response to the existing situation. But let us keep fantasizing further. Imagine a cartoon where such a frog is the magical cartoon hero, that comes to some magical cartoon doctor, shows its skin, that has changed the color, to the doctor, and asks to change the situation by removing this unpleasant symptom. So the doctor prescribes some medication to return the natural green color of the frog’s skin back. The frog gets back in its hot water. For some period of time this medication helps. But then, after a while, the frog’s body gets over the situation, and the redness of the frog's skin gets back. And the magical cartoon doctor states that the resistance of the body to this medication has increased, and each time prescribes some more and more strong drugs. In this example with the frog it is perfectly clear that the true solution of the problem requires the reduction of the water temperature in that pot. We could propose that magical cartoon frog to think and try to realize that: 1) the water in that pot is hot, and that is the reason why the skin is red; 2) the frog got used to this situation and that is why it is so unnoticeably for this frog; 3) if the temperature of the water in the pot still stay so hot, without any temperature drop, then all the medication works only temporarily; 4) if we lower the temperature in that pot - the redness disappears on its own, automatically and without any medication. Also this cartoon frog, that will go after the doctor to some cartoon physiotherapist, will face the necessity to give itself some answers for such questions as: 1) What is going on? Who has put this frog in that pot? Who is raising the temperature progressively? Who needs it? And what is the purpose or benefit for this person in that? Who benefits? 2) Why did the frog get into the pot? What are the benefits in it for the frog? Or why did the frog agree to that? 3) What does the frog lose when it gets out of this pot? What are the consequences of it for the frog? What does the frog have to face? What are the possible difficulties on the way? Who would be against the changes? With whom the frog may confront? 4) Is the frog ready to take control over its own pot in its own hands and start to regulate the temperature of the water by itself, so to make this temperature comfortable for itself? Is this frog ready to influence by itself on its own living space, to take the responsibility for it to itself? The example “A frog in boiling water” is often used as a metaphorical portrayal of the inability of people to respond (or fight back) to significant changes that slowly happen in their lives. Also this tale shows that a body, while trying to adjust to unfavorable living conditions, will react with a symptom. And it is very important to understand this symptom. Symptom - is the response of a body, it’s a way a body adjusts to some unfriendly environment. Symptom, on the one hand, informs about the existence of a problem, and from the other hand - tries to regulate this problem, at least in some way (like, to remove or reduce), at the level on which it can do it. The process is similar to those when, for example, in a body, while it suffers from some infectious disease, the temperature rises. Thus, on the one hand, the temperature informs about the existence of some infection. On the other hand, the temperature increase creates in a body the situation that is damaging for the infection. So, it would be good to think about in what way does an anxiety symptom help a body that is surrounded by some toxic life situation. And this is a good topic for another article. Here I want to emphasize that all the attempts to remove a symptom without a removal of a problem, without changing the everyday life story, may lead to strengthening of the symptom in the body. Even though the removal of a symptom without elimination of its cause has shown success, it only means that the situation was changed into the condition of asymptomatic existence of a problem. And it is, in its essence, a worse situation. For example, it can cause an occurrence of cancer. The tale “A frog in boiling water” is about the tendency of people to treat a symptom, instead of seeing their real problems, as its cause, and trying to solve it. People don’t want to see their problems, but it doesn’t mean that the problem doesn’t exist. The problem does exist and it continues to destroy a person, unnoticeably for him or her. A person with panic disorder could show us anxiety that is out of control (fear, panic), which, by its essence, seems to exist without any logical reason. Meanwhile the body of such a person could be in such processes that are similar to those that occur in the conditions of some real dangers, when the instinct for self-preservation is triggered and an automatic response of a body to fight or flight implements for its full potential. We can see or feel signs of this response, for example, in cases when some person tries to avoid some real or imaginary danger via attempts to escape (the feeling of fear), or tries to handle the situation by some attempts to fight (the feeling of anger). As I mentioned before, many doctors believe that such fear is pathological, as there is no real reason for such intense anxiety. They may see the cause of the problem in worrisome temper, so they try to remove specifically anxiety rather than help such patients to understand specific reason of their anxiety, they use special psychotherapeutic methods that are designed to help clients to develop logical thinking, so it must help them to realize the groundlessness of their anxiety. In my point of view, such anxiety often has specific, real reasons, when this response of a body, fight or flight, is absolutely appropriate, but not excessive or pathological. Inadequacy, in fact, is in the unconsciousness, but not in the reactions of a body. For a better understanding of the role of anxiety in some toxic environment, that isn’t realized, I want to tell you another allegorical tale called “The wolf and the hare”. Let us imagine that two cages were brought together in one room. The wolf was inside one cage and the hare was in another. The cages were divided by some kind of curtain that makes it impossible for them to see each other. At this point a question arises whether the animals react to each other in some way in such a situation, or not? I think that yes, they will. Since there are a lot of other receptors that participate in the receiving and processing of the sensory information. As well as sight and hearing, we have of course a range of other senses. For example, animals have a strong sense of smell. It is well known that people, along with verbal methods of communicating information, like language and speaking, also have other means of transmitting information - non-verbal, such as tone of voice, intonation, look, gestures, body language, facial expressions etc., that gives us the opportunity to receive additional information from each other. The lie detector works by using this principle: due to detecting non-verbal signals, it distinguishes the level of the accuracy of information that is transmitted. It is assumed, that about 30% of information, that we receive from the environment, comes through words, vision, hearing, touches etc. This is the information that we are aware of in our consciousness, so we could consciously (logically) use it to be guided by. And approximately 70% of everyday information about the reality around us we receive non-verbally, and this information in the majority of cases could remain in us without any recognition. It is the situation when we’ve already known something, and we even have already started to respond to it via our body, but we still don’t know logically and consciously that we know it. We can observe the responses of our own body without understanding what are the reasons for such responses. We can recognize this unconscious information through certain pictures, associations, dreams, or with the help of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is a great tool that can help to recognize the information from the unconscious mind, so that it can be logically processed further on, in other words, a person then receives the opportunity to indicate the real problems and to make right decisions. But let us return to the tale where the hare and the wolf stay in one room and don’t see each other, and, maybe, don’t hear, though - feel. These feelings (in other words - non-verbal information that the hare receives) activate a certain response in the hare’s body. And it reacts properly and adequately to the situation, for instance, the body starts to produce adrenaline and runs the response “fight or flight”. So the hare starts to behave accordingly and we could see the following symptoms: the hare is running around his cage, fussing, having some tremor and an increased heart rate, etc.. And now let us imagine this tale in some cartoon. The hare stays in its house, and the wolf wanders about this house. But the hare doesn’t see the wolf. Though the body of the hare gives some appropriate responses. And then that cartoon hare goes to a cartoon doctor and asks that doctor to give it some pill from its tremor and the increased heart rate. And in general asks to treat in some way this incomprehensible, confusing, totally unreasonable severe anxiety. If we try to replace the situation from this fairy-tale to a life story, we could see that it fits well to the script of interdependent relationships, where there are a couple “a victim and an aggressor”, and where such common for our traditional families’ occurrences as a domestic family violence, psychological and physical abuse take place. Only in 2019 a law was passed that follows the European norms and gives a legislative definition of such concepts as psychological domestic abuse, sexual abuse, physical abuse, bullying, that criminalizes all of these occurrences, establishes the punishment and directly points to people that could be a potential abuser. Among them are: a husband towards his wife, parents towards their children, a wife towards her husband, a superior towards a subordinate, a teacher towards his or her students, children towards each other etc.. When it comes to recognition of something as unacceptable, it seems more easy to put to that category such occurrences as physical and sexual abuse, as we could see here some obvious events. For example, beating or sexual harassment. Our society is ready to respond to these incidents in more or less adequate way, and to recognize them as a crime. But it is harder to deal with the recognition of psychological abuse as an offence. Psychological abuse in our families is common. Psychological abuse occurs through such situations, when one person, while using different psychological manipulations, such as violation of psychological borders, imposition of feeling of guilty or shame, etc., force another person to give up his or her needs and desires, and so in such a way make this person live another’s life. Such actions have an extremely negative effect on the mental health of these people, just as much as physical abuse. It can destroy a person from the inside, ruin self-esteem and a feeling of self-worth, create the situation of absolute dependence such victim from an abuser, including financial dependence etc.. It often happens that psychological abuse takes place against the backdrop of demonstrations of care and love. So you've got this story about the wolf and the hare, that are right next to each other, and the shield between two of them is a repression - a psychological defense mechanism, when a person turns a blind eye to such offences, that take place in his or her own life and towards him or her. And this person considers this as normal, doesn't realize, doesn't have a resource to realize, that it is a crime. Most importantly - doesn’t feel anything, as a repression takes place. But a body responds in a right way - from a certain point of the existence of such a toxic situation the response “fight or flight” is launched in a body at full, in other words - the fear and anxiety with the associated symptoms. The third allegorical tale I called “Defective suit”, which I read in the book of Clarissa Pinkola Estés with the name “Running With the Wolves". “Once one man came to a tailor and started to try on a suit. When he was standing in front of a mirror, he saw that the costume had uneven edges. - Don’t worry, - said the tailor. - If you hold the short edge of the suit by your left hand - nobody notices it. But then the man saw that a lapel of a jacket folded up a little bit. - It's nothing. You only need to turn your head and to nail it by your chin. The customer obeyed, but when he put on trousers, he saw that they were pulling. - All right, so just hold your trousers like this by your right hand - and everything will be fine, - the tailor comforts him. The client agreed with him and took the suit. The next day he put on his new suit and went for a walk, while doing everything exactly in the way that the tailor told him to. He waddled in a park, while holding the lapel by his chin, and holding the short edge of the suit by his left hand, and holding his trousers by his right hand. Two old men, who were playing checkers, left the game and started to watch him. - Oh, God! - said one of them. - Look at that poor cripple. - Oh, yes - the limp - is a disaster. But I'm wondering, where did he get such a nice suit?” Clarissa wrote: “The commentary of the second old man reflects the common response of the society to a woman, who built a great reputation for herself, but turned into a cripple, while trying to save it. “Yes, she is a cripple, but look how great her life is and how lovely she looks.” When the “skin” that we put on ourselves towards society is small, we become cripples, but try to hide it. While fading away, we try to waddle perky, so everyone could see that we are doing really well, everything is great, everything is fine”. As for me, this tale is also about the process of forming a symptom in a situation when one person tries very hard to match to another one, whether it is a husband, a wife or parents. It’s about a situation when such a person always tries to support the other one, while giving up his or her own needs and causing oneself harm in such a way by feeling a tension every day, that becomes an inner normality. And so this person doesn’t give oneself a possibility to relax, to be herself (or himself), to be spontaneous, free. As a result, in this situation the person, who was supported, looks perfect from the outside, but those who tried to match, arises some visible defect, like a limp - a symptom. And so this person lives like a cripple, under everyday stress and tension, trying to handle it, while sacrificing herself (or himself) and trying to maintain this situation, so not to lose the general picture of a beautiful family and to avoid shame. The tailor, who made this defective suit and tells how to wear the suit properly, in order to keep things going as they are going, often is a mother who raised a problematic child and then tells another person how to deal with her child in the right way. It is the situation when a mother-in-law tells her daughter-in-law how to treat her son properly. In other words, how to support him, when to keep silent, to handle, how to fit in, so that her problematic son and this relationship in general looks perfect. Or vice versa, when a mother-in-law tells her son-in-law how to support her problematic daughter, how to fit in etc.. When, for example, a woman acts like this in her marriage and with her husband, with these excessive efforts to fit in - then after a while everybody will talk like: “Look at this lovely man: he lives with his sick wife, and their family seems perfect!”. But when such a woman becomes brave enough to relax and to just let the whole thing go, everybody will see that the relationship in her marriage isn’t perfect, and it is the other one who has problems. Each time when someone tries excessively to match up to another one, while turning oneself in some kind of a cripple, - he or she, on the one hand, supports the comfort of that person, to whom he or she tries to match up, and on the other hand - such a situation always arises in that person such conditions as a continuous tension, anxiety, fear to act spontaneously. A symptom - is like a visible defect, that shows itself through the body (and may look like some kind of injury). It is the result of a hidden inner prison. As a result of evolution, a pain tells us about a problem that is needed to be solved. When we repress our pain we can’t see our needs and our problems at full. And then a body starts to talk to us via a symptom. Psychotherapy aims for providing a movement from a symptom to a resumption of sensitivity to feelings, a resumption of the ability to feel your psychological pain, so you can realize your own toxic story. In this perspective another fairy-tale looks interesting to analyze - it is Andersen's fairytale “Princess and the Pea”. In the tale a prince wanted to find a princess to marry. There was one requirement for women candidates, so the prince could select her among commoner - high level of sensitivity, as the real princess would feel a pea through the mountain of mattresses, and so she could have the ability to feel discomfort, to be in a good contact with her body, to tell about her discomfort without such feeling as shame and guilt, and to refuse that discomfort, so to have the readiness to solve her problems and to demand from others the respect for her needs. It is common for our culture that the expression “a princess on a pea” very often uses for a negative meaning. So people who are in good contact with their body and who can demand comfort for themselves are often called capricious. At the same time the heroes who are ready to suffer and to tolerate their pain, who are able to repress (stop to feel) their pain represents a good example to be followed in our society. So, we may see the next algorithm in cases of various anxiety disorders: the existence of some toxic situation that brings some danger to a person. And we need not to be confused: a danger exists not for a body, but for a personality. A toxic live situation as well as having a panic attack is not a threat for the health of a body (that is what medical examinations show), and vice versa - it’s like every day intensive sport training, that could be good for your health only to some degree. A toxic situation destroys a person as a personality, who longs for one self’s expression; the existence of such a defense mechanism as repression - it’s a life with closed eyes, in pink glasses, when there is inability (or the absence of the desire) to see its own toxic story; 3.the presence of a symptom - a healthy response of a body “fight or flight” to some toxic situation; displacement - it’s replacement of the attention from the situation to a symptom, when a person starts to see and search for the problem in some other place, not where it really is. A symptom takes as some spare, pathological reaction that we need to get rid of. The readiness to fight the symptom arises, and that is the goal of such methods of therapy as pharmacological therapy, CBT and many others; the absence of adequate actions that are directed towards the change of a toxic situation itself. The absence of the readiness to show aggression when it comes to protect its space. All of it is a mechanism of formation of primary anxiety and preparation for launch of secondary anxiety. A complete anxiety disorder is the interaction between a primary and a secondary anxiety.

Abstract:

Who was Clara?By Kaj ThaningIn this essay the author describes his search for Clara Bolton and her acquaintance with among others Benjamin Disraeli and the priest, Alexander d’Arblay, a son of the author, Fanny Burney. He gives a detailed account of Clara Bolton and leaves no doubt about the deep impression she made on Grundtvig, even though he met her and spoke to her only once in his life at a dinner party in London on June 24th 1830. Kaj Thaning has dedicated his essay to Dr. Oscar Wood, Christ Church College, Oxford, and explains why: “Just 30 years ago, while one of my daughters was working for Dr. Oscar Wood, she asked him who “Mrs. Bolton” was. Grundtvig speaks of her in a letter to his wife dated June 25th 1830. Through the Disraeli biographer, Robert Blake, Dr. Wood discovered her identity, so I managed to add a footnote to my thesis (p. 256). She was called Clara! The Disraeli archives, once preserved in Disraeli’s home at Hughenden Manor but now in the British Museum, contain a bundle of letters which Dr. Wood very kindly copied for me. The letters fall into three groups, the middle one being from June 1832, when Clara Bolton was campaigning, in vain, for Disraeli’s election to parliament. Her husband was the Disraeli family doctor, and through him she wrote her first letter to Benjamin Disraeli, asking for his father’s support for her good friend, Alexander d’Arblay, a theology graduate, in his application for a position. This led to the young Disraeli asking her to write to him at his home at Bradenham. There are therefore a group of letters from before June 1832. Similarly there are a number of letters from a later date, the last being from November 1832”.The essay is divided into three sections: 1) Clara Bolton and Disraeli, 2) The break between them, 3) Clara Bolton and Alexander d’Arblay. The purpose of the first two sections is to show that the nature of Clara Bolton’s acquaintance with Disraeli was otherwise than has been previously assumed. She was not his lover, but his political champion. The last section explains the nature of her friendship with Alex d’Arblay. Here she was apparently the object of his love, but she returned it merely as friendship in her attempt to help him to an appointment and to a suitable lifelong partner. He did acquire a new position but died shortly after. There is a similarity in her importance for both Grundtvig and d’Arblay in that they were both clergymen and poets. Disraeli and Grundtvig were also both writers and politicians.At the age of 35 Clara Bolton died, on June 29th 1839 in a hotel in Le Havre, according to the present representative of the Danish Institute in Rouen, Bent Jørgensen. She was the daughter of Michael Peter Verbecke and Clarissa de Brabandes, names pointing to a Flemish background. On the basis of archive studies Dr. Michael Hebbert has informed the author that Clara’s father was a merchant living in Bread Street, London, between 1804 and 1807. In 1806 a brother was born. After 1807 the family disappears from the archives, and Clara’s letters reveal nothing about her family. Likewise the circ*mstances of her death are unknown.The light here shed on Clara Bolton’s life and personality is achieved through comprehensive quotations from her letters: these are to be found in the Danish text, reproduced in English.Previous conceptions of Clara’s relationship to Disraeli have derived from his business manager, Philip Rose, who preserved the correspondence between them and added a commentary in 1885, after Disraeli’s death. He it is who introduces the rumour that she may have been Disraeli’s mistress. Dr. Wood, however, doubts that so intimate a relationship existed between them, and there is much in the letters that directly tells against it. The correspondence is an open one, open both to her husband and to Disraeli’s family. As a 17-year-old Philip Rose was a neighbour of Disraeli’s family at Bradenham and a friend of Disraeli’s younger brother, Ralph, who occasionally brought her letters to Bradenham. It would have been easy for him to spin some yarn about the correspondence. In her letters Clara strongly advocates to Disraeli that he should marry her friend, Margaret Trotter. After the break between Disraeli and Clara it was public knowledge that Lady Henrietta Sykes became his mistress, from 1833 to 1836. Her letters to him are of a quite different character, being extremely passionate. Yet Philip Rose’s line is followed by the most recent biographers of Disraeli: the American, Professor B. R. Jerman in The Young Disraeli (1960), the English scholar Robert Blake, in Disraeli (1963) and Sarah Bradford in Disraeli (1983). They all state that Clara Bolton was thought to be Disraeli’s mistress, also by members of his own family. Blake believes that the originator of this view was Ralph Disraeli. It is accepted that Clara Bolton 7 Grundtvig Studier 1985 was strongly attracted to Disraeli, to his manner, his talents, his writing, and not least to his eloquence during the 1832 election campaign. But nothing in her letters points to a passionate love affair.A comparison can be made with Henrietta Sykes’ letters, which openly burn with love. Blake writes of Clara Bolton’s letters (p. 75): “There is not the unequivocal eroticism that one finds in the letters from Henrietta Sykes.” In closing one of her letters Clara writes that her husband, George Buckley Bolton, is waiting impatiently for her to finish the letter so that he can take it with him.She wants Disraeli married, but not to anybody: “You must have a brilliant star like your own self”. She writes of Margaret Trotter: “When you see M. T. you will feel so inspired you will write and take her for your heroine... ” (in his novels). And in her last letter to Disraeli (November 18th 1832) she says: “... no one thing could reconcile me more to this world of ill nature than to see her your wife”. The letter also mentions a clash she has had with a group of Disraeli’s opponents. It shows her temperament and her supreme skill, both of which command the respect of men. No such bluestockings existed in Denmark at the time; she must have impressed Grundtvig.Robert Blake accepts that some uncertainty may exist in the evaluation of letters which are 150 years old, but he finds that they “do in some indefinable way give the impression of brassiness and a certain vulgarity”. Thaning has told Blake his view of her importance for Grundtvig, and this must have modified Blake’s portrait. He writes at least: “... she was evidently not stupid, and she moved in circles which had some claim to being both intellectual and cosmopolitan.”He writes of the inspiration which Grundtvig owed to her, and he concludes: “There must have been more to her than one would deduce by reading her letters and the letters about her in Disraeli’s papers.” - She spoke several languages, and moved in the company of nobles and ambassadors, politicians and literary figures, including John Russell, W.J.Fox, Eliza Flower, and Sarah Adams.However, from the spring of 1833 onwards it is Henrietta Sykes who portrays Clara Bolton in the Disraeli biographies, and naturally it is a negative portrait. The essay reproduces in English a quarrel between them when Sir Francis Sykes was visiting Clara, and Lady Sykes found him there. Henrietta Sykes regards the result as a victory for herself, but Clara’s tears are more likely to have been shed through bitterness over Disraeli, who had promised her everlasting friendship and “unspeakable obligation”. One notes that he did not promise her love. Yet despite the quarrel they all three dine together the same evening, they travel to Paris together shortly afterwards, and Disraeli comes to London to see the them off. The trip however was far from idyllic. The baron and Clara teased Henrietta. Later still she rented a house in fashionable Southend and invited Disraeli down. Sir Francis, however, insisted that the Boltons should be invited too. The essay includes Blake’s depiction of “the curious household” in Southend, (p. 31).In 1834 Clara Bolton left England and took up residence at a hotel in the Hague. A Rotterdam clergyman approached Disraeli’s vicar and he turned to Disraeli’s sister for information about the mysterious lady, who unaccompanied had settled in the Hague, joined the church and paid great attention to the clergy. She herself had said that she was financing her own Sunday School in London and another one together with the Disraeli family. In her reply Sarah Disraeli puts a distance between the family and Clara, who admittedly had visited Bradenham five years before, but who had since had no connection with the family. Sarah is completely loyal to her brother, who has long since dropped Clara. By the time the curious clergyman had received this reply, Clara had left the Hague and arrived at Dover, where she once again met Alexander d’Arblay.Alex was born in 1794, the son of a French general who died in 1818, and Fanny Burney. She was an industrious correspondent; as late as 1984 the 12th and final volume of her Journals and Letters was published. Jens Peter .gidius, a research scholar at Odense University, has brought to Dr Thaning’s notice a book about Fanny Burney by Joyce Hemlow, the main editor of the letters. In both the book and the notes there is interesting information about Clara Bolton.In the 12th volume a note (p. 852) reproduces a letter characterising her — in a different light from the Disraeli biographers. Thaning reproduces the note (pp. 38-39). The letter is written by Fanny Burney’s half-sister, Sarah Harriet Burney, and contains probably the only portrait of her outside the Disraeli biographies.It is now easier to understand how she captivated Grundtvig: “very handsome, immoderately clever, an astrologer, even, that draws out... Nativities” — “... besides poetry-mad... very entertaining, and has something of the look of a handsome witch. Lady Combermere calls her The Sybil”. The characterisation is not the letter-writer’s but that of her former pupil, Harriet Crewe, born in 1808, four years after Clara Bolton. A certain distance is to be seen in the way she calls Clara “poetry-mad”, and says that she has “conceived a fancy for Alex d’Arblay”.Thaning quotes from a letter by Clara to Alex, who apparently had proposed to her, but in vain (see his letter to her and the reply, pp. 42-43). Instead she pointed to her friend Mary Ann Smith as a possible wife. This is the last letter known in Clara’s handwriting and contradicts talk of her “vulgarity”. However, having become engaged to Mary Ann Alex no longer wrote to her and also broke off the correspondence with his mother, who had no idea where he had gone. His cousin wrote to her mother that she was afraid that he had “some Chére Amie”. “The charges are unjust,” says Thaning. “It was a lost friend who pushed him off. This seems to be borne out by a poem which has survived (quoted here on p. 45), and which includes the lines: “But oh young love’s impassioned dream /N o more in a worn out breast may glow / Nor an unpolluted stream / From a turgid fountain flow.””Alex d’Arblay died in loneliness and desperation shortly afterwards. Dr. Thaning ends his summary: “I can find no other explanation for Alexander d’Arblay’s fate than his infatuation with Clara Bolton. In fact it can be compared to Grundtvig’s. For Alex the meeting ended with “the pure stream” no longer flowing from its source. For Grundtvig, on the other hand the meeting inspired the lines in The Little Ladies: Clara’s breath opened the mouth, The rock split and the stream flowed out.”

Abstract:

This study aimed to explore the perceived barriers to physical activity among college students Study Design: Qualitative research design Eight focus group discussions on 67 college students aged 18-24 years (48 females, 19 males) was conducted on College premises. Data were analysed using inductive approach. Participants identified a number of obstacles to physical activity. Perceived barriers emerged from the analysis of the data addressed the different dimensions of the socio-ecological framework. The result indicated that the young adults perceived substantial amount of personal, social and environmental factors as barriers such as time constraint, tiredness, stress, family control, safety issues and much more. Understanding the barriers and overcoming the barriers at this stage will be valuable. Health professionals and researchers can use this information to design and implement interventions, strategies and policies to promote the participation in physical activity. This further can help the students to deal with those barriers and can help to instil the habit of regular physical activity in the later adult years.

Abstract:

When your children are small, you cannot help but have aspirations for them. Dreams couched in success of some sort, often academic, sport or careers based or even a combination. I did: I had visions of my sons following the conventional academic route leaving with a fistful of qualifications and then embarking on a professional careers whether doctor, solicitor or whatever, while being successful at whatever sport they played. However, one day when my eldest son was 14, I watched those dreams go up in smoke literally—cannabis smoke.

Abstract:

In the third episode of the British sci-fi/thriller television series Torchwood (BBC3, 2007-) the team are investigating a portable ‘ghost machine’, which allows its users to see events which occurred in the past. After visiting an old man whose younger self the device may have allowed them to witness, the team’s medic, Owen Harper, spots Bernie Harris, who’d previously been in possession of the machine. A chase ensues; they run past a park, between a gang of kids playing football, over a railway bridge, through a housing estate, and eventually Bernie is cornered in a back garden and taken away for questioning. The scene demonstrates the series’ intention to be a fast-paced, modern, glossy thriller, with loud incidental music, fast cuts, and energetic camerawork. Yet for me the scene has quite a different meaning. The housing estate they run through is the one in which I used to live; the railway bridge they run over is the one I crossed every day on my way to and from work; the street they run down is my street; and there, in the background, clear and apparent and obvious for all to see, is my home. Yes; my house was on Torchwood. As Blunt and Dowling note, “home does not simply exist, but is made … [and] … this process has both material and imaginative elements” (23). It is through such imaginative elements that we turn ‘spaces’ that are “unnamed, unhistoried, unnarativized” into ‘places’ that are “indubitably bound up with personal experience” (Darby 50). Such experiences may be ‘real’ (as in things that actually happened there) or ‘representational’ (as in seen on television); my relationship to ‘home’ is here being inflected through the “indexical bond” (Kilborn and Izod 29) that links both of these strategies. In using a scene from Torchwood to say something about my personal history, I’m taking what is, in essence, a televisual ‘space’ and converting it into a ‘place’ which is not only defined by my “profilmic” (Ward 8) relationship to it, but also helps express that relationship. Telling everyone that my house was on Torchwood certainly says something about the programme; but more fundamentally I’m engaging in a process intended to say something about me. A bit of autobiography. The house is in Splott, a residential area of Cardiff, the capital of Wales, where Torchwood is set and filmed. I lived in Cardiff from 2000 to 2006, when I worked at the University of Glamorgan. For much of that time I lived in rented accommodation in Cathays, the student area of Cardiff. But in 2005 I bought a house in Splott, and this was the first property I ever owned. A year later I moved to Norwich (virtually the other side of the UK from Cardiff) to take a job at the University of East Anglia, but I kept the house in Cardiff and now rent it out. It was while living in Norwich that my house appeared on Torchwood, and I had no idea that the programme had been filming in that area. This means that, strictly speaking, at the time it was on television the property was no longer my ‘home’, but was instead my tenants’. Yet what I want to examine here is the “geography of feeling and emotion” (Rodaway 263) which is central to the idea of ‘home’, and which has been kick-started in me since some fictional television characters ran down the street I used to live in and the ‘real’ and the ‘representational’ began to intersect. There certainly is something personal which is required in order to turn a ‘space’ into a ‘place’, but what is it that then transforms it into ‘home’? That is, for me Cardiff is more than a ‘place’ which I know. Owning a property there makes a difference, but that is to too easily equate a commercial transaction with an emotive sense of feeling. Indeed, Cardiff felt like ‘home’ before I’d bought a house, and the majority of my memories of the city are connected to other properties I’ve lived in. In a capitalist society it’s tempting to equate ‘home’ with the property we own, and this probably is the case for the majority of people (Morley 19). Nevertheless, something emotive stirred in me when I saw my house in a chase sequence on a science-fiction television programme when I live in an entirely different city. Tuan defines this as ‘topophilia’, which is “the affective bond between people and place or setting” (Topophilia 4), and it’s clear that such bonds can be highly emotionally charged and a significant aspect of one’s sense of self. This is noticeable because of the ways in which I’ve used my house’s appearance on television. I’ve not been quiet about it; I was telling everyone at work the day after it appeared. Whenever people mention Torchwood it’s something I point out. This might not sound as if that is likely to occur very often, but considering the programme is a spin-off from the highly successful revival of Doctor Who (BBC1, 1963-89, 1996, 2005-) it is part of a well-known media landscape. Both Doctor Who and Torchwood are predominantly filmed in Cardiff and the surrounding areas of South Wales, but whereas Torchwood is also narratively set in Cardiff, Doctor Who merely uses the locations to represent other places, most often London. Yet many of these places are distinctive and therefore obviously Cardiff for those who know the area. For example, the hospital in the episode ‘New Earth’ (2006) is recognisably the interior of the Wales Millennium Centre, just as the exterior location where the Tardis lands at the beginning of the episode is clearly Rhossili on the Gower Peninsula. Inevitably, the use of such locations has often disrupted my understanding of the story being told. That is, it’s hard to accept that this episode is taking place on a planet at the other end of the galaxy thousands of years into the future if the characters are standing on a cliff you recognise because you’ve been camping there. Of course, the use of locations to represent other places is necessary in media fictions, and I’m not trying to carry out some kind of trainspotter location identification in an attempt to undermine the programme’s diegesis. But it is important to note that while “remembering is a process that today is increasingly media-afflicted” (Hoskins 110), media texts can also be affected by the memories, whether communal or individual, that we bring to bear on them. A ‘real’ relationship with a place can be so intimate that it refuses to be ignored when ‘representations’ require it to be unnecessary. I’m a fan of Doctor Who and would rather not recognise the places so I can just get on with enjoying the programme. But it’s not possible to simply erase “Expressions of community” (Moores 368) which bring together identity and place, especially when that place is your home. Importantly, my idea of ‘home’ is inextricably bound up in the past. As it is a place I no longer live in, the ways in which I feel towards it are predicated on the notion that I used to live there, but no longer do. It’s clear that notions of home – especially those related to nation – are often predicated on ideas of history with significant emotional resonance (Anderson; Blunt and Dowling 140-195; Calhoun). This is a place that is an emotional rather than geographical home, even if it used to also be my home geographically. In buying a house, and engaging in the consumer culture which dominates the ways in which we turn a house into a home (oh, those endless hours at Ikea), I spent a lot of time wondering what it was that this sofa, or those lampshades, or that rug, said about me. The idea that the buildings that we own are a key way of creating and demonstrating a particular kind of identity or affiliation with a certain social group is necessary to consumer capitalism. But as I no longer live in it, the inside of this house can no longer be used as something I can show to other people hoping that they’ll ‘read’ my home how I want them to. Instead, the sense of home invigorated by my house’s appearance on Torchwood is one centred on location, related to the city and the housing estate where my house is, rather than what I did to it. ‘Home’ here becomes something symbolised by the bricks and mortar of the house I bought, but is instead more accurately located in the city and area which the house sits in; Cardiff. More importantly, Cardiff and my house become emotionally meaningful because I’m no longer there. That is, while it’s clear I had a particular relationship to Cardiff when I was a resident, this has altered since my move to Norwich. In moving to a new city – one which I had never visited before, and had no family or friends living in – it seems that my understanding of Cardiff as my ‘home’ has become intensified. This might be because continuing to own property there gives me an investment in the city, both emotionally and financially. But this idea of ‘home’ would, I think, have existed even if I’d sold my house. Instead, Cardiff-as-home is predicated on an idea of personal history and nostalgia (Wheeler; Massey). Academics are used to moving great distances in order to get jobs; indeed, “To spend an entire working career in a single department may seem to be a failure of geographical imagination” (Ley 182). The labour market insists that “All people may now be wanderers” (Bauman, Globalization 87), and hence geographical origins become something to be discussed with new colleagues. For me, like most people, this is a complicated question; does it mean where I was born, or where I grew up, or where I studied, or where I have lived most of my life? In the choices I make to answer this question, I’m acknowledging that “migration is a complex process of cultural negotiation, resistance, and adaptation” (Sinclair and Cunningham 14). As Freeman notes, “the history one tells, via memory, assumes the form of a narrative of the past that charts the trajectory of how one’s self came to be” (33, italics in original). Importantly, this narrative must be seen to make sense; that is, it must help explain the present, conforming to narrative ideas of cause and effect. In constructing a “narratable self” (Caravero 33, italics in original) I’m demonstrating how I think I came to end up where I am now, doing the job I’m doing. In order to show that “I am more than what the thin present defines” (Tuan, Space and Place 186) it’s necessary to reiterate a notion of ‘home’ which supports and illustrates the desired identity narrative. This narrative is as much about “the reflexive project of the self” (Gauntlett 99) in these “liquid times” (Bauman, Liquid Times), as it is a “performance” (Goffman) for others. The coherence and stability of my performance was undercut in a recent episode of Doctor Who – ‘Smith and Jones’ (2007) – in which a family row occurred outside a pub. I became quite distraught that I couldn’t work out where that pub was, and was later reassured to discover that it was in Pontypridd, a town a good few miles from Cardiff, and therefore it wasn’t surprising that I couldn’t recognise it. But in being distraught at not recognising locations I was demonstrating how central knowledge is to an idea of ‘home’. Knowing your way around, knowing where certain shops are, knowing the history of the place; these are all aspects of home, all parts of what Crouch calls “lay knowledge” (217). Ignorance of a space marks the outsider, who must stand on street corners with a map and ask locals for directions. For someone like me who prides himself on his sense of direction (who says I conform to gender stereotypes?) an inability to recognise a pub that I thought I should know suggested my knowledge of the area was dissipating, and so perhaps my ability to define that city as my home was becoming less valid. This must be why I take pleasure in noting that Torchwood’s diegesis is often geographically correct, for the ‘representational’ helps demonstrate my knowledge of the ‘real’ place’s layout. As Tuan notes, “When space feels thoroughly familiar to us, it has become place” (Space and Place 73), and the demonstration of that familiarity is one of the ways of reasserting one’s relationship to home. In demonstrating a knowledge of the place I’m defining as home, I’m also insisting that I’m not a tourist. Urry shows how visitors use a “tourist gaze” (The Tourist Gaze), arguing viewing is the most important activity when encountering a place, just as Tuan (Space and Place 16) and Strain (3) do. To visit somewhere is to employ “a dominance of the eye” (Urry, “Sensing the City” 71); this is why photography has become the dominant manner for recording tourist activity. Strain sees the tourist gaze as one “trained for consumerism” (15) with tourist activity defined primarily by commerce. Since Doctor Who returned Cardiff has promoted its association with the programme, opening an ‘Up Close’ exhibition and debating whether to put together a tourist trail of locations. As a fan of these programmes I’m certainly excited by all of this, and have been to the exhibition. Yet it feels odd being a tourist in a place I want to call home, and some of my activity seems an attempt to demonstrate that it was my home before it became a place I might want to visit for its associations with a television programme. For example, I never went and watched the programme being filmed, even though much of it was shot within walking distance of my house, and “The physical places of fandom clearly have an extraordinary importance for fans” (Sandvoss 61). While some of this was due to not wanting to know what was going to happen in the programme, I was uncomfortable with carrying out an activity that would turn a “landscape” into a “mediascape” (Jansson 432), replacing the ‘real’ with the ‘representational’. In insisting on seeing Cardiff, and my house, as something which existed prior to the programmes, I’m attempting to maintain the “imagined community” (Anderson) I have for my home, distinguishing it from the taint of commerce, no matter how pointless or naïve such an act is in effect. Hence, home is resolutely not a commercial place; or, at least, it is a location whose primary emotive aspects are not defined by consumerism. When houses are seen as nothing more than aspects of commerce, that’s when they remain ‘houses’ or ‘properties’; the affective aspects of ‘homes’ are instead emotionally detached from the commercial factors which bring them about. I think this is why I’m keen to demonstrate that my associations with Cardiff existed before Doctor Who started being made there, for if the place only meant anything to me because of the programme that would define me as a tourist and therefore undermine those emotional and personal aspects of the city which allow me to call it ‘home’. It also means I can be proud that such a cultural institution is being made in ‘my’ city. But it’s a city I can no longer claim residence in. This means that Torchwood and Doctor Who have become useful ways for me to ‘visit’ Cardiff. It seems I have started to adopt a ‘tourist gaze’, for the programmes visually recreate the locations and all I can do is view them, no matter how much I use my knowledge of location in an attempt to interpret those images differently from a tourist. It’s tempting to suggest that this shows how there is a “perpetual negotiation between the real event and its representation” (Bruzzi 9), and how willing I am to engage in the “mobile privatization” that Williams saw as a defining aspect of television (26). But this would be to accept the “unhomeyness” which results from “the ultimate failures of the home in postmodern times” (Lewis and Cho 74). In adopting an autobiographical approach to these issues, I hope I’ve demonstrated the ways in which individuals can experience emotional resonances related to ‘home’ which, while clearly inflected through the social, cultural, and technological aspects I’ve outlined, are nevertheless meaningful and maintain a dominance of the ‘real’ over the ‘representational’. Furthermore, my job tells me I shouldn’t feel this way about my home; or, at least, it reminds me that such emotionality can be explained away through cultural analysis. But that doesn’t in any way make ‘home’ any less powerful nor fully explain how such dry criteria mutate into humanist, emotional significance. So, I can tell you what my home is: but I’m not sure I can get you to understand how seeing my home on television makes me feel. In that sense it’s almost too neat that the episode which kick-started all of this is called ‘Ghost Machine’, for television has become the technology through which the ghosts of my home haunt me on a weekly basis, and ghosts have always been difficult to make sense of. References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1983. Bauman, Zygmunt. Globalization: The Human Consequences. Cambridge: Polity, 1998. ———. Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity, 2007. Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. Home. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Bruzzi, Stella. New Documentary: A Critical Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Calhoun, Craig. Nations Matter: Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan Dream. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Caravero, Adriana. Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood. Trans. Paul A. Kottman. London and New York: Routledge, 2000/1997. Crouch, David. “Surrounded by Place: Embodied Encounters.” Tourism: Between Place and Performance. Eds. Simon Coleman and Mike Crang. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2002. 207-18. Darby, Wendy Joy. Landscape and Identity: Geographies of Nation and Class in England. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000. Freeman, Mark. Rewriting the Self: History, Memory, Narrative. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Gauntlett, David. Media, Gender and Identity: An Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Goffmann, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin, 1959. Hoskins, Andrew. “Television and the Collapse of Memory.” Time and Society 13.1 (2004): 109-27. Jansson, André. “Spatial Phantasmagoria: the Mediatization of Tourism Experience.” European Journal of Communication 17.4 (2002): 429-43. Kilborn, Richard, and John Izod. An Introduction to Television Documentary: Confronting Reality. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1997. Lewis, Tyson, and Daniel Cho. “Home Is Where the Neurosis Is: A Topography of the Spatial Unconscious.” Cultural Critique 64.1 (2006): 69-91. Ley, David. “Places and Contexts.” Approaches to Human Geography. Eds. Stuart Aitken and Gill Valentine. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage, 2006. 178-83. Massey, Doris. For Space. London: Sage, 2005. Moores, Shaun. “Television, Geography and ‘Mobile Privatization’.” European Journal of Communication 8.4 (1993): 365-79. Morley, David. Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Rodaway, Paul. “Humanism and People-Centred Methods.” Approaches to Human Geography. Eds. Stuart Aitken and Gill Valentine. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage, 2006. 263-72. Sandvoss, Cornel. Fans: The Mirror of Consumption. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. Sinclair, John, and Stuart Cunningham. “Go with the Flow: Diasporas and the Media.” Television and New Media 1.1 (2000): 11-31. Strain, Ellen. Public Places, Private Journeys: Ethnography, Entertainment, and the Tourist Gaze. New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers UP, 2003. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. New York: Columbia UP, 1974. ———. Space and Place: the Perspective of Experience. London: Edward Arnold, 1977. Urry, John. “Sensing the City.” The Tourist City. Eds. Dennis R. Judd and Susan S. Fainstein. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1999. 71-86. ———. The Tourist Gaze. 2nd ed. London: Sage, 2002. Ward, Paul. Documentary: The Margins of Reality. London and New York: Wallflower, 2005. Wheeler, Wendy. A New Modernity: Change in Science, Literature and Politics. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1999. Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Mills, Brett. "What Happens When Your Home Is on Television?." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/08-mills.php>. APA Style Mills, B. (Aug. 2007) "What Happens When Your Home Is on Television?," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/08-mills.php>.

Abstract:

I can remember setting up the dish, all the excitement of assembling it [...] and then putting the motor on. And in the late afternoon, you position the dish and kind of turn it, to find the right spot, and all of a sudden on this blank television screen there was an image that came on. And it was shocking knowing that this noise and this thing would be there, and begin to infiltrate – because I see it as an infiltration, I see it as invasion – I’m not mad on television, very choosy really about what I watch – and I see it as an invasion, and there was GWN as well as the ABC. I just thought ‘by golly, I’m in the process of brain-washing people to accept stuff without thinking about it, like consciously considering either side of any case’ [...] The one thing that protected you from having it on at all times was the need to put on the generator in order to power it. I felt a bit sad actually. (Savannah Kingston, Female, 55+ – name changed – homestead respondent) This paper addresses the huge communications changes that occurred over the past fifty years in outback Western Australia. (What happened in WA also has parallels with equivalent events in the Northern Territory, Queensland, in the larger properties in western New South Wales and northern South Australia.) Although the ‘coming of television’ – associated in remote areas with using a satellite dish to scan for the incoming signal – is typically associated with a major shift in community and cultural life, the evidence suggests that the advent of the telephone had an equivalent or greater impact in remote areas. With the introduction of the telephone, the homestead family no longer had to tune into (or scan) the radio frequencies to check on predicted weather conditions, to respond to emergencies, to engage in roll call or to hold a ‘public meeting’. As the scanning of the radio frequencies ended, so the scanning of the satellite signals began. As Sandstone resident Grant Coleridge (pseudonym, male, 40-54) said, only half ironically, “We got the telephone and the telly at the same time, so civilisation sort of hit altogether actually.” The scale and importance of changes to the technological communications infrastructure in remote WA within a single life-time spans pre-2-way radio to video livestock auctions by satellite. It comes as a surprise to most Australians that these changes have occurred in the past generation. As recent viewers of the unexpectedly-successful Mongolian film The Story of the Weeping Camel (2004) would know, one of the themes of the Oscar-nominated movie is the coming of television and its impact upon a traditional rural life. The comparative availability of television outside the rural areas of Mongolia – and its attraction to, particularly, the younger family members in the Weeping Camel household – is a motif that is explored throughout the narrative, with an unspoken question about the price to be paid for including television in the cultural mix. It’s easy to construct this story as a fable about the ‘exotic other’, but the same theme was played out comparatively recently in remote Western Australia, where the domestic satellite service AUSSAT first made television an affordable option just under twenty years ago. This paper is about the people in remote Western Australia who started scanning for the satellite signal in 1986, and stopped scanning for the RFDS (Royal Flying Doctor Service) 2-way radio phone messages at about the same time. Savannah Kingston (name changed), who in 1989 generously agreed to an in-depth interview discussing the impact of satellite broadcasting upon her outback life, was a matriarch on a rural property with four grown children. She had clear views upon ways in which life had changed dramatically in the generation before the satellite allowed the scanning of the television signal. Her recollection of the weft and warp of the tapestry of life in outback WA started thirty-five years previously, with her arrival on the station as a young wife: When I went there [mid-1950s], we had a cook and we ate in the dining room. The cook and anyone who worked in the house ate in the kitchen and the men outside ate in the outside. So, with the progress of labour away from the bush, and the cost of labour becoming [prohibitive] for a lot of people, we got down to having governesses or house-girls. If the house-girls were white, they ate at the table with us and the governesses ate with us. If the house-girls were Aboriginal, they didn’t like eating with us, and they preferred to eat in the kitchen. The kids ate with them. Which wasn’t a good idea because two of my children have good manners and two of them have appalling manners. The availability of domestic help supported a culture of hospitality reminiscent of British between-the-wars country house parties, recreated in Agatha Christie novels and historically-based films such as The Remains of the Day (1993): In those early days, we still had lots of visitors [...] People visited a lot and stayed, so that you had people coming to stay for maybe two or three days, five days, a week, two weeks at a time and that required a lot of organisation. [int:] WHERE DID YOUR VISITORS COME FROM? City, or from the Eastern states, occasionally from overseas. [Int:] WOULD THEY BE RELATIVES? Sometimes relatives, friends or someone passing through who’d been, you know, someone would say ‘do visit’ and they’d say ‘they’d love to see you’. But it was lovely, it was good. It’s a way of learning what’s going on. (Savannah Kingston.) The ‘exotic other’ of the fabled hospitality of station life obscures the fact that visitors from the towns, cities and overseas were a major source of news and information in a society where radio broadcasts were unpredictable and there was no post or newspaper delivery. Visitors were supplemented by a busy calendar of social events that tied together a community of settlements in gymkhanas, cricket fixtures and golf tournaments (on a dirt course). Shifts in the communications environment – the introduction of television and telephone – followed a generation of social change witnessing the metamorphosis of the homestead from the hub of a gentrified lifestyle (with servants, governesses, polo and weekends away) to compact, efficient business-units, usually run by a skeleton staff with labour hired in at the peak times of year. Over the years between the 1960s-1980s isolation became a growing problem. Once Indigenous people won the fight for award-rate wages their (essentially) unpaid labour could no longer support the lifestyle of the station owners and the absence of support staff constrained opportunities for socialising off the property, and entertaining on it, and the communication environment became progressively poorer. Life on the homestead was conceived of as being more fragile than that in the city, and more economically vulnerable to a poor harvest or calamities such as wildfire. The differences wrought by the introduction of newer communication technologies were acknowledged by those in the country, but there was a clear resistance to city-dwellers constructing the changes as an attack upon the romance of the outback lifestyle. When the then Communications Minister Tony Staley suggested in 1979 that a satellite could help “dispel the distance – mental as well as geographical – between urban and regional dwellers, between the haves and the have-nots in a communication society”, he was buying into a discourse of rural life which effectively disempowered those who lived in rural and remote areas. He was also ignoring the reality of a situation where the Australian outback was provided with satellite communication a decade after it was made available to Canadians, and where the king-maker in the story – Kerry Packer – stood to reap a financial windfall. There was a mythological dimension to Australia (finally) having a domestic satellite. Cameron Hazelhurst’s article on ‘The Dawn of the Satellite Era in Australia’ includes a colourful account of Kerry Packer’s explanation to Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser of the capacity of domestic satellites to bring television, radio and telephone services to isolated communities in arctic Canada: And I [Packer] went and saw the Prime Minister and I explained to him my understanding of what was happening in those areas, and to his undying credit he grasped on to it immediately and said ‘Of course, it’s what we want. It’s exactly the sort of thing we need to stop the drift of people into urban areas. We can keep them informed. We can allow them to participate in whatever’s happening around the nation (Day 7, cited in Hazelhurst). Fraser here, as someone with experience of running a rural property in Victoria, propounds a pro-country rhetoric as a rationale for deployment of the satellite in terms of the Australian national policy agenda. (The desire of Packer to network his television stations and couple efficiency with reach is not addressed in this mythological reconstruction.) It is difficult, sometimes, to appreciate the level of isolation experienced on outback properties at the time. As Bryan Docker (male, 40-54), a resident of Broome at the time of the interviews, commented, “Telegrams, in those days, were the life-blood of the stations, through the Flying Doctor Service. But at certain times of the year the sun spots would interfere with the microwave links and we were still on morse from Broome to Derby during those periods.” Without reliable shortwave radio; with no television, newspapers or telephone; and with the demands of keeping the RFDS (Royal Flying Doctor Service) 2-way radio channel open for emergencies visitors were one of the ways in which station-dwellers could maintain an awareness of current events. Even at the time of the interviews, after the start of satellite broadcasting, I never travelled to an outback property without taking recent papers and offering to pick up post. (Many of the stations were over an hour’s journey from their nearest post office.) The RFDS 2-way radio service offered a social-lifeline as well as an emergency communication system: [Int:] DO YOU MISS THE ROYAL FLYING DOCTOR SERVICE AT ALL? Yes, I do actually. It’s – I think it’s probably more lonely now because you used to switch it on and – you know if you’re here on your own like I am a lot – and you’d hear voices talking, and you used to know what everybody was doing – sort of all their dramas and all their [...] Now you don’t know anything that’s going on and unless somebody rings you, you don’t have that communication, where before you used to just hop over to another channel and have a chat [...] I think it is lonelier on the telephone because it costs so much to ring up. (Felicity Rohrer, female, 40-54, homestead.) Coupled with the lack of privacy of 2-way radio communication, and the lack of broadcasting, was the particular dynamic of a traditional station family. Schooled at home, and integrated within their homestead lifestyle, station children spent most of their formative years in the company of one or other of their parents (or, in previous decades, the station staff). This all changed at secondary school age when the children of station-owners and managers tended to be sent away to boarding school in the city. Exposure of the next generation to the ways of city life was seen as a necessary background to future business competence, but the transitions from ‘all’ to ‘next-to-nothing’ in terms of children’s integration within family life had a huge socio-emotional cost which was aggravated, until the introduction of the phone service, by the lack of private communication channels. Public Relations and news theory talk about the importance of the ‘environmental scan’ to understand how current events are going to impact upon a business and a family: for many years in outback Australia the environmental scan occurred when families got together (typically in the social and sporting rounds), on the RFDS radio broadcasts and ‘meetings’, in infrequent visits to the closest towns and through the giving and receiving of hospitality. Felicity Rohrer, who commented (above) about how she missed the RFDS had noted earlier in her interview: “It’s made a big difference, telephone. That was the most isolating thing, especially when your children were away at school or your parents are getting older [...] That was the worst thing, not having a phone.” Further, in terms of the economics of running a property, Troy Bowen (male, 25-39, homestead respondent) noted that the phone had made commercial life much easier: I can carry out business on the phone without anyone else hearing [...] On the radio you can’t do it, you more or less have to say ‘well, have you got it – over’. ‘Yeah – over’. ‘Well, I’ll take it – over’. That’s all you can do [...] Say if I was chasing something [...] the cheapest I might get it down to might be [...] $900. Well I can go to the next bloke and I can tell him I got it down to $850. If you can’t do any better than that, you miss out. ‘oh, yes, alright $849, that’s the best I can do.’ So I’ll say ‘alright, I’ll take it’. But how can you do that on the radio and say that your best quote is [$850] when the whole district knows that ‘no, it isn’t’. You can’t very well do it, can you? This dynamic occurs because, for many homestead families prior to the telephone, the RFDS broadcasts were continuously monitored by the women of the station as a way of keeping a finger on the pulse of the community. Even – sometimes, especially – when they were not part of the on-air conversation, the broadcast could be received for as far as reception was possible. The introduction of the phone led to a new level of privacy, particularly appreciated by parents who had children away at school, but also introduced new problems. Fran Coleridge, (female, 40-54, Sandstone) predicted that: The phone will lead to isolation. There’s an old lady down here, she’s about 80, and she housekeeps for her brother and she’s still wearing – her mother died 50 years ago – but she’s still wearing her clothes. She is so encapsulated in her life. And she used to have her [RFDS] transceiver. Any time, Myrtle would know anything that’s going on. Anything. Birthday party at [local station], she’d know about it. She knew everything. Because she used to have the transceiver on all the time. And now there’s hardly any people on, and she’s a poor little old lonely lady that doesn’t hear anything now. Can you see that? Given the nuances of the introduction of the telephone (and the loss of the RFDS 2-way), what was the perceived impact of satellite broadcasting? Savannah Kingston again: Where previously we might have sat around the table and talked about things – at least the kids and I would – with television there is now more of a habit of coming in, showering and changing for dinner, putting on the motor and the men go and sit in front of the television during [...] six o’clock onwards, news programs and whatnot and um, I find myself still in the kitchen, getting the meal and then whoever was going to eat it, wanting to watch whatever was on the television. So it changed quite appreciably. Felicity Rohrer agrees: [Int:] DO YOU THINK THERE HAVE BEEN CHANGES IN THE TIME THAT YOU SPEND WITH EACH OTHER? Yes, I think so. They [the homestead household] come home and they – we all sit down here and look at the news and have a drink before tea whereas people used to be off doing their own tea. [Int] SO YOU THINK IT’S INCREASED THE AMOUNT OF TIME YOU SPEND TOGETHER? Yes, I think so – well, as a family. They all try and be home by 6 to see the [GWN] news. If they miss that, we look at the 7 o’clock [ABC], but they like the Golden West because it’s got country news in it. But the realities of everyday life, as experienced in domestic contexts, are sometimes ignored by commentators and analysts, except insofar as they are raised by interviewees. Thus the advent of the satellite might have made Savannah Kingston feel “a bit sad actually”, but it had its compensations: It was definitely a bit of a peace-maker. It sort of meant there wasn’t the stress that we had previously when going through [...] at least people sitting and watching something, you’re not so likely to get into arguments or [...] It definitely had value there. In fact, when I think about it, that might be one of its major applications, ’cos a lot of men in the bush tend to come in – if they drink to excess they start drinking in the evening, and that can make for very uncomfortable company. For film-makers like the Weeping Camel crew – and for audiences and readers of historical accounts of life in outback Australia – the changes heralded by the end of scanning the RFDS channels, and the start of scanning for satellite channels, may seem like the end of an era. In some ways the rhythms of broadcasting helped to hom*ogenise life in the country with life in the city. For many families in remote homes, as well as the metropolis, the evening news became a cue for the domestic rituals of ‘after work’. A superficial evaluation of communications changes might lead to a consideration of how some areas of life were threatened by improved broadcasting, while others were strengthened, and how some of the uniqueness of a lifestyle had been compromised by an absorption into the communication patterns of urban life. It is unwise for commentators to construct the pre-television past as an uncomplicated romantic prior-time, however. Interviews with those who live such changes as their reality become a more revealing indicator of the nuances and complexities of communications environments than a quick scan from the perspective of the city-dweller. References Day, C. “Packer: The Man and the Message.” The Video Age (February 1983): 7 (cited in Hazelhurst). Hazelhurst, Cameron. “The Dawn of the Satellite Era.” Media Information Australia 58 (November 1990): 9-22. Staley, Tony. Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates. Canberra: House of Representatives Hansard (18 October 1979): 2225, 2228-9. The Remains of the Day. 1993. The Story of the Weeping Camel. Thinkfilm and National Geographic, 2004. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Green, Lelia. "Scanning the Satellite Signal in Remote Western Australia." M/C Journal 8.4 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0508/01-green.php>. APA Style Green, L. (Aug. 2005) "Scanning the Satellite Signal in Remote Western Australia," M/C Journal, 8(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0508/01-green.php>.

Abstract:

February 15, 1999 THE DIGITAL EXAM digital was such a sanitary hi-tech word until my urologist snuck up from behind and gave me the bird shocked and taken back I try to ignore the painful experience by pondering the conundrum of hom*osexuality there had to be more to it than that "You can get dressed now" was the good doctor’s way of saying "Pull up your pants, Dude, and I’ll see you back in my office." but his casual demeanor seemed to exude foreboding "There is a stiffness in the gland demanding further examination. I’d like to schedule a blood test, ultrasound and biopsy." the doctor’s lips kept moving but I couldn’t hear him through the sheet of white fear that guillotined between us CANCER! The big C! Me? I spent the rest of that day up to my genitals in the grave I was digging. Hamlet gazing full into the face of the skull "Alas poor Yorick, I knew him well, Horatio. Before scalpel took gland. Back when he sang in a bass baritone." desperate for encouragement I turn to the illustrated brochure the informative flyer detailing the upcoming procedure where in the ultrasound and biopsy probe resembled the head of a black water moccasin baring its fang "Dang!" says I jumping back relief came 36 hours later something about the PSA blood test the prostate specific-antigen results leading the doctor to now suspect infection prescribing an antibiotic of course five weeks from now the FOLLOW-UP APPOINTMENT! and as the date approaches tension will build like in those Mel Gibson Lethal Weapon films when you know there’s a snake in the grass and Danny Glover isn’t there to cover your ass *** April 2, 1999 As it turns out, at the follow-up appointment, things had worsened so the biopsy and bone scan were re-scheduled and it was discovered that I do have incurable metastatic advanced prostate cancer. Of course the doctor is most optimistic about all the new and miraculous treatments available. But before I go into that, I want you to know that I find myself experiencing a strange and wonderful kind of peace. Hell, I’ve lived 70 years already — done exactly what I wanted to do with my life. All worthwhile dreams have come true. Made my living since 1968 as a "Performance Poet" — Billie Barbara and I have been together for 47 years — growing closer with each passing day. We have four great kids, five neat and nifty grandchildren. All things considered, I’ve been truly blessed and whether my departure date is next year or 15 years from now I’m determined not to wreck my life by doing a lousy job with my death. LIKE HAROLD / LIKE HOWARD like Harold I don’t want to blow my death I don’t want to see a lifetime of pluck and courage rubbed out by five weeks of whiny fractious behavior granted Harold’s was a scary way to go from diagnosis to last breath the cancer moving fast but five weeks of bitching and moaning was more than enough to erase every trace of a man I have wanted to emulate his wife sending word that even she can’t remember what he was like before his undignified departure no — I don’t want to go like Harold like Howard let me come swimming up out of the deepening coma face serene as if seen through undisturbed water breaking the surface to eagerly take the hand of bedside well wishers unexpected behavior I must admit as Howard has always been a world class hypochondriac second only to me the two of us able to sit for hours discussing the subtle shade of a mole turning each other on with long drawn out organ recitals in the end one would have thought such a legendary self centered soul would cower and fold up completely like Harold but no — when my time comes let me go sweetly like Howard *** April 7, 1999 The treatment was decided upon. Next Monday, the good Doctor is going to pit my apricots. From here on the Sultan can rest easy when Masten hangs with his harem. Prognosis good. No more testosterone - no more growth. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not looking forward to giving up the family jewels. I must say that over the years they’ve done me proud and to be totally honest I don’t think Billie Barbara will be all that disappointed either. I’m told that Viagra will help in this area., However, I’m also told that the drug is very expensive. Something like twelve bucks a pop. But hell, Billie Barbara and I can afford twenty four dollars a year.. Some thoughts the morning of— Yesterday I did a program for the Unitarian Society of Livermore. About 60 people. I had a bet with the fellow who introduced me, that at least 7 out of the 60 would come up after the reading (which would include my recent prostate musings) and share a personal war story about prostate cancer. I was right. Exactly 7 approached with an encouraging tale about themselves, a husband, a brother, a son. I was told to prepare myself for hot flashes and water retention. To which Billie Barbara said "Join the club!" I ended the presentation with one of those inspirational poetic moments. A hot flash, if you will. "It just occurred to me," I said, " I’m going to get rich selling a bumper sticker I just thought of — REAL MEN DON’T NEED BALLS A couple of days after the event The Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula is referred to as CHOMP, and the afternoon of April 12th I must say this august institution certainly lived up to it’s name. The waiting room in the Out Patient Wing is an event unto itself. Patients huddled together with friends and family, everyone speaking in hushed voices. The doomed keeping a wary eye on the ominous swinging doors, where a big tough looking nurse appeared from time to time shouting: NEXT! Actually the woman was quite sweet and mild mannered, enunciating each patient’s name in a calm friendly manner. But waiting to have done to me what was going to be done to me - the chilling word "NEXT!" is what I heard and "Out Patient Wing" certainly seemed a misnomer to me. Wasn’t the "Out-Patient Wing" where you went to have splinters removed? Of course I knew better, because in the pre-op interview the young interviewer, upon reading "Bilateral Orchiectomy" winced visibly, exclaiming under her breath "Bummer!" I recently came across this haiku — bilateral orchiectomy the sound a patient makes when he learns what it is Our daughter April lives in New York and couldn’t join the Waiting Room rooting section so as her stand in she sent her best friend Molly Williams. Now, Molly works as a veterinarian in a local animal shelter and a when I told her my operation was supposed to take no more than half an hour, she laughed: "Heck Ric, I’ll do it in five minutes and not even use gloves." NEXT! My turn to be led through those swinging doors, pitifully looking back over my shoulder. Wife, family and friends, bravely giving me the thumbs up. Things blur and run together after that. I do remember telling the nurse who was prepping me that I was afraid of being put to sleep. "Not to worry" she said, I’d have a chance to express these fears to the anesthetist before the operation would begin. And as promised the man did drop by to assure me that I would get a little something to ease my anxiety before he put me under. When the moment finally arrived, he said that I might feel a slight prick as he gave me the relaxant. Of course, that is the last thing I remember - the prick! Obviously, I‘d been suckered in by the mask man’s modus operandi. On the other side of this I surface to begin the waiting. WAITING for the catheter to be removed — for the incision to heal — WAITING to see if the pain subsides and I can loose the cane — WAITING to learn if my PSA will respond to treatment. Waiting—waiting—waiting—and I’ve never been a cheerful waiter. *** May 7, 1999 The doctor tells me I must keep taking Casodex— one a day at eleven dollars a cap - for the rest of my life. And no more doctor freebees. No wonder the listed side effect of this pricey medication is depression. But the recent funk I’ve fallen into is much deeper than dollars and cents. In the past I’ve had my share of operations and illnesses and always during the recuperation I could look forward to being my old self again. But not this time .... Not this time. Funny bumper stickers can only hold reality at bay for a short while. And anyway Billie had me remove the homemade REAL MEN DON’T NEED BALLS bumper sticker from the back of our car — She didn’t like the dirty looks she got while driving around town alone. *** Eight months later BILATERAL ORCHECTOMY never could look up words in the dictionary in a high school assignment writing an autobiography I described my self as a unique person scribbled in the margin the teachers correction fairly chortled "unique" not "eunuch" how could he have known that one day I would actually become a misspelling backed against the wall by advanced prostate cancer I chose the operation over the enormous ongoing expense of chemical castration "No big deal." I thought at the time what’s the difference they both add up to the same thing but in the movies these days during the hot gratuitous sex scene I yawn…bored... wishing they’d quit dicking around and get on with the plot and on TV the buxom cuties that titillate around the products certainly arn’t selling me anything I realize now that although it would probably kill them the guys who went chemical still have an option I don’t philosophically I’m the same person but biologically I ‘m like the picture puzzle our family traditionally puts together over the holidays the French impressionist rendition of a flower shop interior in all it’s bright colorful confusion this season I didn’t work the puzzle quite as enthusiastically... and for good reason this year I know pieces are missing where the orchids used to be "So?" says I to myself "You’re still here to smell the roses." *** January 13, 2000 Real bad news! At the third routine follow-up appointment. My urologist informs me that my PSA has started rising again. The orchectomy and Casodex are no longer keeping the cancer in remission. In the vernacular, I have become "hormone refractory" and there was nothing more he, as a urologist could do for me. An appointment with a local oncologist was arranged and another bone scan scheduled. The "T" word having finally been said the ostrich pulled his head from the sand and began looking around. Knowing what I know now, I’m still annoyed at my urologist for not telling me when I was first diagnosed to either join a support group and radically change my diet or find another urologist. I immediately did both - becoming vegan and finding help on-line as well as at the local Prostate Cancer Support Group. This during the endless eighteen day wait before the oncologist could fit me in. *** IRON SOCKS time now for a bit of reverse prejudice I once purchased some stockings called "Iron Socks" guaranteed to last for five years they lasted ten! but when I went back for another pair the clerk had never heard of them as a cancer survivor… so far in an over populated world I consider the multi-billion dollar medical and pharmaceutical industries realizing that there is absolutely no incentive to come up with a permanent cure *** From here on, I’ll let the poems document the part of the journey that brings us up to the present. A place where I can say — spiritually speaking, that the best thing that ever happened to me is metastatic hormone refractory advanced prostate cancer. *** SUPPORT GROUPS included in this close fraternity... in this room full of brotherly love I wonder where I’ve been for the last 11 months no — that’s not quite right… I know where I’ve been I’ve been in denial after the shock of diagnosis the rude indignity of castration the quick fix of a Casodex why would I want to hang out with a bunch of old duffers dying of prostate cancer? ignoring the fact that everybody dies we all know it but few of us believe it those who do, however rack up more precious moments than the entire citizenry of the fools paradise not to mention studies showing that those who do choose to join a support group on average live years longer than the stiff upper lip recluse and while I’m on the subject I wonder where I’d be without the internet and the dear supportive spirits met there in cyber-space a place where aid care and concern are not determined by age, gender, race, physical appearance, economic situation or geological location and this from a die-hard like me who not ten years ago held the computer in great disdain convinced that poetry should be composed on the back of envelopes with a blunt pencil while riding on trains thank god I’m past these hang-ups because without a support system I doubt if this recent malignant flare-up could have been withstood how terrifying… the thought of being at my writing desk alone… disconnected typing out memos to myself on my dead father’s ancient Underwood *** PC SPES in the sea that is me the hormone blockade fails my urologist handing me over to a young oncologist who recently began practicing locally having retired from the stainless steel and white enamel of the high tech Stanford medical machine in the examination room numbly thumbing through a magazine I wait expecting to be treated like a link of sausage another appointment ground out in a fifteen minute interval what I got was an 18th century throw back a hands-on horse and buggy physician with seemingly all the time in the world it was decided that for the next three weeks (between blood tests) all treatment would cease to determine how my PSA was behaving this done, at the next appointment the next step would be decided upon and after more than an hour of genial give and take with every question answered all options covered it was I who stood up first to go for me a most unique experience in the annals of the modern medicine show however condemned to three weeks in limbo knowing the cancer was growing had me going online reaching out into cyberspace to see what I could find and what I found was PC SPES a botanical herbal alternative medicine well documented and researched but not approved by the FDA aware that the treatment was not one my doctor had mentioned (I have since learned that to do so would make him legally vulnerable) I decided to give it a try on my own sending off for a ten day supply taking the first dose as close after the second blood test as I could two days later back in the doctors office I confess expecting a slap on the wrist instead I receive a bouquet for holding off until after the second PSA then taking the PC SPES container from my hand and like a Native American medicine man he holds it high over his head shaking it "Okay then, this approach gets the first ride!" at the receptionist desk scheduling my next appointment I thought about how difficult it must be out here on the frontier practicing medicine with your hands tied *** PREJUDICE "It's a jungle out there!" Dr. J. George Taylor was fond of saying "And all chiropractors are quacks! Manipulating pocket pickers!" the old physician exposing his daughter to a prejudice so infectious I suspect it became part of her DNA and she a wannabe doctor herself infects me her son with the notion that if it wasn’t performed or prescribed by a licensed M.D. it had to be Medicine Show hoopla or snake oil elixir certainly today’s countless array of practitioners and patent remedies has both of them spinning in their grave but Ma you and Grandpa never heard the words hormone-refractory even the great white hunters of our prestigious cancer clinics don't know how to stop the tiger that is stalking me and so with a PSA rising again to 11.9 I get my oncologist to let me try PC SPES a Chinese herbal formula yes, the desperate do become gullible me, reading and re-reading the promotional material dutifully dosing myself between blood tests and this against the smirk of disapproval mother and grandfather wagging their heads in unison: "It won’t work." "It won’t work." having condemned myself beforehand the moment of truth finally arrives I pace the floor nervously the doctor appears at the door "How does it feel to be a man with a PSA falling to 4.8?" it seems that for the time being at least the tiger is content to play a waiting game which is simply great! Mother tell Grandpa I just may escape our families bigotry before it’s too late *** HELPLINE HARRY "Hi, how are you?" these days I'm never sure how to field routine grounders like this am I simply being greeted? or does the greeter actually want a list of grisly medical details my wife says it's easy she just waits to see if the "How is he?" is followed by a hushed "I mean… really?" for the former a simple "Fine, and how are you?" will do for the latter the news isn't great indications are that the miracle herbal treatment is beginning to fail my oncologist offering up a confusing array of clinical trials and treatments that flirt seductively but speak in a foreign language I don't fully understand so Harry, once again I call on you a savvy old tanker who has maneuvered his battle scared machine through years of malignant mine fields and metastatic mortar attacks true five star Generals know much about winning wars and such but the Command Post is usually so far removed from the front lines I suspect they haven't a clue as to what the dog-faces are going through down here in the trenches it's the seasoned campaigners who have my ear the tough tenacious lovable old survivors like you *** "POOR DEVIL!" in my early twenties I went along with Dylan Thomas boasting that I wanted to go out not gently but raging shaking my fist staring death down however this daring statement was somewhat revised when in my forties I realized that death does the staring I do the down so I began hoping it would happen to me like it happened to the sentry in all those John Wayne Fort Apache movies found dead in the morning face down — an arrow in the back "Poor devil." the Sergeant always said "Never knew what hit him." at the time I liked that... the end taking me completely by surprise the bravado left in the hands of a hard drinking Welshman still wet behind the ears older and wiser now over seventy and with a terminal disease the only thing right about what the Sergeant said was the "Poor devil" part "Poor devil" never used an opening to tell loved ones he loved them never seized the opportunity to give praise for the sun rise or drink in a sunset moment after moment passing him by while he marched through life staring straight ahead believing in tomorrow "Poor devil!" how much fuller richer and pleasing life becomes when you are lucky enough to see the arrow coming *** END LINE (Dedicated to Jim Fulks.) I’ve always been a yin / yang - life / death - up / down clear / blur - front / back kind of guy my own peculiar duality being philosopher slash hypochondriac win win characteristics when you’ve been diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer finally the hypochondriac has something more than windmills to tilt with the philosopher arming himself with exactly the proper petard an anonymous statement found in an e-mail message beneath the signature of a cancer survivor’s name a perfect end line wily and wise quote: I ask God: "How much time do I have before I die?" "Enough to make a difference." God replies *** STRUM lived experience taught them most of what they know so MD's treating men diagnosed with androgen-independent advanced prostate cancer tend to put us on death row and taking the past into account this negativity is understandable… these good hearted doctors watching us come and go honestly doing what they can like kindly prison guards attempting to make the life we have left as pleasant as possible to be otherwise a physician would have to be a bit delusional evangelical even… to work so diligently for and believe so completely in the last minute reprieve for those of us confined on cell block PC doing time with an executioner stalking it is exhilarating to find an oncologist willing to fly in the face of history refusing to call the likes of me "Dead man walking." *** BAG OF WOE there are always moments when I can almost hear the reader asking: "How can you use that as grist for your poetry mill? How can you dwell on such private property, at least without masking the details?" well... for the feedback of course the war stories that my stories prompt you to tell but perhaps the question can best be answered by the ‘bag of woe’ parable the "Once Upon a Time" tale about the troubled village of Contrary its harried citizens and the magical mystical miracle worker who showed up one dreary day saying: I am aware of your torment and woe and I am here to lighten your load! he then instructed the beleaguered citizens to go home and rummage through their harried lives bag up your troubles he said both large and small stuff them all in a sack and drag them down to the town square and stack them around on the wall and when everyone was back and every bag was there the magical mystical miracle worker said: "It’s true, just as I promised. You won’t have to take your sack of troubles home leave it behind when you go however, you will have to take along somebody’s bag of woe so the citizens of Contrary all went to find their own bag and shouldering the load discovered that it was magically and mystically much easier to carry --- End ---

Abstract:

“Communicating deep feeling in linear solid blocks of print felt arcane, a method beyond me” — Audre Lorde in an interview with Adrienne Rich (Lorde 87) How do you disclose? In writing, in spoken words, in movements, in sounds, in the quiet energetic vibration and its trace in discourse? Is disclosure a narrative account of a self, or a poetic fragment, sent into the world outside the sanction of a story or another recognisable form (see fig. 1)?These are the questions that guide my exploration in this essay. I meditate on them from the vantage point of my own self-narrative, as a community performance practitioner and writer, a poet whose artistry, in many ways, relies on the willingness of others to disclose, to open themselves, and yet who feels ambivalent about narrative disclosures. What I share with you, reader, are my thoughts on what some may call compassion fatigue, on boredom, on burn-out, on the inability to be moved by someone’s hard-won right to story her life, to tell his narrative, to disclose her pain. I find it ironic that for as long as I can remember, my attention has often wandered when someone tells me their story—how this cancer was diagnosed, what the doctors did, how she coped, how she garnered support, how she survived, how that person died, how she lived. The story of how addiction took over her life, how she craved, how she hated, how someone sponsored her, listened to her, how she is making amends, how she copes, how she gets on with her life. The story of being born this way, being prodded this way, being paraded in front of doctors just like this, being operated on, being photographed, being inappropriately touched, being neglected, being forgotten, being unloved, being lonely. Listening to these accounts, my attention does wander, even though this is the heart blood of my chosen life—these are the people whose company I seek, with whom I feel comfortable, with whom I make art, with whom I make a life, to whom I disclose my own stories. But somehow, when we rehearse these stories in each others’s company (for rehearsal, polishing, is how I think of storytelling), I drift. In this performance-as-research essay about disclosure, I want to draw attention to what does draw my attention in community art situations, what halts my drift, and allows me to find connection beyond a story that is unique and so special to this individual, but which I feel I have heard so many times. What grabs me, again and again, lies beyond the words, beyond the “I did this… and that… and they did this… and that,” beyond the story of hardship and injury, recovery and overcoming. My moment of connection tends to happen in the warmth of this hand in mine. It occurs in the material connection that seems to well up between these gray eyes and my own deep gaze. I can feel the skin change its electric tonus as I am listening to the uncoiling account. There’s a timbre in the voice that I follow, even as I lose the words. In the moment of verbal disclosure, physical intimacy changes the time and space of encounter. And I know that the people I sit with are well aware of this—it is not lost on them that my attention isn’t wholly focused on the story they are telling, that I will have forgotten core details when next we work together. But they are also aware, I believe, of those moments of energetic connect that happen through, beyond and underneath the narrative disclosure. There is a physical opening occurring here, right now, when I tell this account to you, when you sit by my side and I confess that I can’t always keep the stories of my current community participants straight, that I forget names all the time, that I do not really wish to put together a show with lots of testimony, that I’d rather have single power words floating in space.Figure 1. Image: Keira Heu-Jwyn Chang. Performer: Neil Marcus.”water burns sun”. Burning. 2009. Orientation towards the Frame: A Poetics of VibrationThis essay speaks about how I witness the uncapturable in performance, how the limits of sharing fuel my performance practice. I also look at the artistic processes of community performance projects, and point out traces of this other attention, this poetics of vibration. One of the frames through which I construct this essay is a focus on the formal in practice: on an attention to the shapes of narratives, and on the ways that formal experimentation can open up spaces beyond and beneath the narratives that can sound so familiar. An attention to the formal in community practice is often confused with an elitist drive towards quality, towards a modern or post-modern play with forms that stands somehow in opposition to how “ordinary people” construct their lives. But there are other ways to think about “the formal,” ways to question the naturalness with which stories are told, poems are written, the ease of an “I”, the separation between self and those others (who hurt, or love, or persecute, or free), the embedment of the experience of thought in institutions of thinking. Elizabeth St. Pierre frames her own struggle with burn-out, falling silent, and the need to just keep going even if the ethical issues involved in continuing her research overwhelm her. She charts out her thinking in reference to Michel Foucault’s comments on how to transgress into a realm of knowing that stretches a self, allows it “get free of oneself.”Getting free of oneself involves an attempt to understand the ‘structures of intelligibility’ (Britzman, 1995, p. 156) that limit thought. Foucault (1984/1985) explaining the urgency of such labor, says, ‘There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all’ (p. 8). (St. Pierre 204)Can we think outside the structure of story, outside the habits of thought that make us sense and position ourselves in time and space, in power and knowledge? Is there a way to change the frame, into a different format, to “change our mind”? And even if there is not, if the structures of legibility always contain what we can think, there might be riches in that borderland, the bordercountry towards the intelligible, the places where difference presses close in an uncontained, unstoried way. To think differently, to get free of oneself: all these concerns resonate deeply with me, and with the ways that I wish to engage in community art practice. Like St. Pierre, I try to embrace Deleuzian, post-structuralist approaches to story and self:The collective assemblage is always like the murmur from which I take my proper name, the constellation of voices, concordant or not, from which I draw my voice. […] To write is perhaps to bring this assemblage of the unconscious to the light of day, to select the whispering voices, to gather the tribes and secret idioms from which I extract something I call myself (moi). I is an order word. (Deleuze and Guattari 84).“I” wish to perform and to write at the moment when the chorus of the voices that make up my “I” press against my skin, from the inside and the outside, query the notion of ‘skin’ as barrier. But can “I” stay in that vibrational moment? This essay will not be an exercise in quotation marks, but it is an essay of many I’s, and—imagine you see this essay performed—I invite the vibration of the hand gestures that mark small breaches in the air next to my head as I speak.Like St. Pierre, I get thrown off those particular theory horses again and again. But curiosity drives me on, and it is a curiosity nourished not by the absence of (language) connection, by isolation, but by the fullness of those movements of touch and density I described above. That materiality of the tearful eye gaze, the electricity of those fine skin hairs, the voice shivering me: these are not essentialist connections that somehow reveal or disclose a person to me, but these matters make the boundaries of “me” and “person” vibrate. Disclose here becomes the density of living itself, the flowing, non-essential process of shaping lives together. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) have called this bordering “deterritorialization,” always already bound to the reterritorialisation that allows the naming of the experience. Breath-touch on the limits of territories.This is not a shift from verbal to a privileging of non-verbal communication, finding richness and truth in one and less in the other. Non-verbal communication can be just as conventional as spoken language. When someone’s hand reaches out to touch someone who is upset, that gesture can feel ingrained and predictable, and the chain of caretaking that is initiated by the gesture can even hinder the flow of disclosure the crying or upset person might be engaged in. Likewise, I believe the common form of the circle, one I use in nearly every community session I lead, does not really create more community than another format would engender. The repetition of the circle just has something very comforting, it can allow all participants to drop into a certain kind of ease that is different from the everyday, but the rules of that ease are not open—circles territorialise as much as they de-territorialise: here is an inside, here an outside. There is nothing inherently radical in them. But circles might create a radical shift in communication situations when they break open other encrusted forms—an orientation to a leader, a group versus individual arrangement, or the singularity of islands out in space. Circles brings lots of multiples into contact, they “gather the tribes.” What provisional I’s we extract from them in each instance is our ethical challenge.Bodily Fantasies on the Limit: BurningEven deeply felt inner experiences do not escape the generic, and there is lift available in the vibration between the shared fantasy and the personal fantasy. I lead an artists’ collective, The Olimpias, and in 2008/2009, we created Burning, a workshop and performance series that investigated cell imagery, cancer imagery, environmental sensitivity and healing journeys through ritual-based happenings infused with poetry, dramatic scenes, Butoh and Contact Improvisation dances, and live drawing (see: http://www.olimpias.org/).Performance sites included the Subterranean Arthouse, Berkeley, July and October 2009, the Earth Matters on Stage Festival, Eugene, Oregon, May 2009, and Fort Worden, Port Townsend, Washington State, August 2009. Participants for each installation varied, but always included a good percentage of disabled artists.(see fig. 2).Figure 2. Image: Linda Townsend. Performers: Participants in the Burning project. “Burning Action on the Beach”. Burning. 2009. In the last part of these evening-long performance happenings, we use meditation techniques to shift the space and time of participants. We invite people to lie down or otherwise become comfortable (or to observe in quiet). I then begin to lead the part of the evening that most closely dovetails with my personal research exploration. With a slow and reaching voice, I ask people to breathe, to become aware of the movement of breath through their bodies, and of the hollows filled by the luxuriating breath. Once participants are deeply relaxed, I take them on journeys which activate bodily fantasies. I ask them to breathe in colored lights (and leave the specific nature of the colors to them). I invite participants to become cell bodies—heart cells, liver cells, skin cells—and to explore the properties and sensations of these cell environments, through both internal and external movement. “What is the surface, what is deep inside, what does the granular space of the cell feel like? How does the cell membrane move?” When deeply involved in these explorations, I move through the room and give people individual encounters by whispering to them, one by one—letting them respond bodily to the idea that their cell encounters alchemical elements like gold and silver, lead or mercury, or other deeply culturally laden substances like oil or blood. When I am finished with my individual instruction to each participant, all around me, people are moving gently, undulating, contracting and expanding, their eyes closed and their face full of concentration and openness. Some have dropped out of the meditation and are sitting quietly against a wall, observing what is going on around them. Some move more than others, some whisper quietly to themselves.When people are back in spoken-language-time, in sitting-upright-time, we all talk about the experiences, and about the cultural body knowledges, half-forgotten healing practices, that seem to emerge like Jungian archetypes in these movement journeys. During the meditative/slow movement sequence, some long-standing Olimpias performers in the room had imagined themselves as cancer cells, and gently moved with the physical imagery this brought to them. In my meditation invitations during the participatory performance, I do not invite community participants to move as cancer cells—it seems to me to require a more careful approach, a longer developmental period, to enter this darkly signified state, even though Olimpias performers do by no means all move tragically, darkly, or despairing when entering “cancer movement.” In workshops in the weeks leading up to the participatory performances, Olimpias collaborators entered these experiences of cell movement, different organ parts, and cancerous movement many times, and had time to debrief and reflect on their experiences.After the immersion exercise of cell movement, we ask people how it felt like to lie and move in a space that also held cancer cells, and if they noticed different movement patterns, different imaginaries of cell movement, around them, and how that felt. This leads to rich discussions, testimonies of poetic embodiment, snippets of disclosures, glimpses of personal stories, but the echo of embodiment seems to keep the full, long stories at bay, and outside of the immediacy of our sharing. As I look around myself while listening, I see some hands intertwined, some gentle touches, as people rock in the memory of their meditations.nowyour light shines very brightlybut I want youto knowyour darkness alsorichand beyond fear (Lorde 87)My research aim with these movement meditation sequences is not to find essential truths about human bodily imagination, but to explore the limits of somatic experience and cultural expression, to make artful life experiential and to hence create new tools for living in the chemically saturated world we all inhabit.I need to add here that these are my personal aims for Burning—all associated artists have their own journey, their own reasons for being involved, and there is no necessary consensus—just a shared interest in transformation, the cultural images of disease, disability and addiction, the effects of invasion and touch in our lives, and how embodied poetry can help us live. (see fig. 3). For example, a number of collaborators worked together in the participatory Burning performances at the Subterranean Arthouse, a small Butoh performance space in Berkeley, located in an old shop, complete with an open membrane into the urban space—a shop-window and glass door. Lots of things happen with and through us during these evenings, not just my movement meditations.One of my colleagues, Sadie Wilcox, sets up live drawing scenarios, sketching the space between people. Another artist, Harold Burns, engages participants in contact dance, and invites a crossing of boundaries in and through presence. Neil Marcus invites people to move with him, gently, and blindfolded, and to feel his spastic embodiment and his facility with tender touch. Amber diPietra’s poem about cell movement and the journeys from one to another sounds out in the space, set to music by Mindy Dillard. What I am writing about here is my personal account of the actions I engage in, one facet of these evenings—choreographing participants’ inner experiences.Figure 3. Image: Keira Heu-Jwyn Chang. Performers: Artists in the Burning project. “water burns sun”. Burning. 2009. My desires echo Lorde’s poem: “I want you”—there’s a sensual desire in me when I set up these movement meditation scenes, a delight in an erotic language and voice touch that is not predicated on sexual contact, but on intimacy, and on the borderlines, the membranes of the ear and the skin; ‘to know’—I continue to be intrigued and obsessed, as an artist and as a critic, by the way people envision what goes on inside them, and find agency, poetic lift, in mobilising these knowledges, in reaching from the images of bodies to the life of bodies in the world. ‘your darkness also’—not just the bright light, no, but also the fears and the strengths that hide in the blood and muscle, in the living pulsing shadow of the heart muscle pumping away, in the dark purple lobe of the liver wrapping itself around my middle and purifying, detoxifying, sifting, whatever sweeps through this body.These meditative slow practices can destabilise people. Some report that they experience something quite real, quite deep, and that there is transformation to be gained in these dream journeys. But the framing within which the Burning workshops take place question immediately the “authentic” of this experiential disclosure. The shared, the cultural, the heritage and hidden knowledge of being encultured quickly complicate any essence. This is where the element of formal enframing enters into the immediacy of experience, and into the narration of a stable, autonomous “I.” Our deepest cellular experience, the sounds and movements we listen to when we are deeply relaxed, are still cultured, are still shared, come to us in genres and stable image complexes.This form of presentation also questions practices of self-disclosure that participate in trauma narratives through what Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman has called “impression management” (208). Goffman researched the ways we play ourselves as roles in specific contexts, how we manage acts of disclosure and knowledge, how we deal with stigma and stereotype. Impression management refers to the ways people present themselves to others, using conscious or unconscious techniques to shape their image. In Goffman’s framing of these acts of self-presentation, performance and dramaturgical choices are foregrounded: impression management is an interactive, dynamic process. Disclosure becomes a semiotic act, not a “natural,” unfiltered display of an “authentic” self, but a complex engagement with choices. The naming and claiming of bodily trauma can be part of the repertoire of self-representation, a (stock-)narrative that enables recognition and hence communication. The full traumatic narrative arc (injury, reaction, overcoming) can here be a way to manage the discomfort of others, to navigate potential stigma.In Burning, by-passing verbal self-disclosure and the recitation of experience, by encountering ourselves in dialogue with our insides and with foreign elements in this experiential way, there is less space for people to speak managed, filtered personal truths. I find that these truths tend to either close down communication if raw and direct, or become told as a story in its complete, polished arc. Either form leaves little space for dialogue. After each journey through bodies, cells, through liver and heart, breath and membrane, audience members need to unfold for themselves what they felt, and how that felt, and how that relates to the stories of cancer, environmental toxins and invasion that they know.It is not fair. We should be able to have dialogues about “I am poisoned, I live with environmental sensitivities, and they constrict my life,” “I survived cancer,” “I have multiple sclerosis,” “I am autistic,” “I am addicted to certain substances,” “I am injured by certain substances.” But tragedy tugs at these stories, puts their narrators into the realm of the inviolate, as a community quickly feel sorry for these persons, or else feels attacked by them, in particular if one does not know how to help. Yes, we know this story: we can manage her identity for her, and his social role can click into fixity. The cultural weight of these narratives hinders flow, become heavily stigmatised. Many contemporary writers on the subjects of cancer and personhood recognise the (not always negative) aspects of this stigma, and mobilise them in their narratives. As Marisa Acocella Marchetto in the Cancer-Vixen: A True Story puts it: ‘Play the cancer card!’ (107). The cancer card appears in this graphic novel memoir in the form of a full-page spoof advertisem*nt, and the card is presented as a way to get out of unwanted social obligations. The cancer card is perfectly designed to create the communal cringe and the hasty retreat. If you have cancer, you are beyond the pale, and ordinary rules of behavior do no longer apply. People who experience these life-changing transformational diagnoses often know very well how isolating it can be to name one’s personal story, and many are very careful about how they manage disclosure, and know that if they choose to disclose, they have to manage other people’s discomfort. In Burning, stories of injury and hurt swing in the room with us, all of these stories are mentioned in our performance program, but none of them are specifically given individual voice in our performance (although some participants chose to come out in the sharing circle at the end of the event). No one owns the diagnoses, the identity of “survivor,” and the presence of these disease complexes are instead dispersed, performatively enacted and brought in experiential contact with all members of our temporary group. When you leave our round, you most likely still do not know who has multiple sclerosis, who has substance addiction issues, who is sensitive to environmental toxins.Communication demands territorialisation, and formal experimentation alone, unanchored in lived experience, easily alienates. So how can disclosure and the storytelling self find some lift, and yet some connection, too? How can the Burning cell imaginary become both deep, emotionally rich and formal, pointing to its constructed nature? That’s the question that each of the Olimpias’ community performance experiments begins with.How to Host a Past Collective: Setting Up a CirclePreceding Burning, one of our recent performance investigations was the Anarcha Project. In this multi-year, multi-site project, we revisited gynecological experiments performed on slave women in Montgomery, Alabama, in the 1840s, by J. Marion Sims, the “father of American gynecology.” We did so not to revictimise historical women as suffering ciphers, or stand helpless at the site of historical injury. Instead, we used art-based methods to investigate the heritage of slavery medicine in contemporary health care inequalities and women’s health care. As part of the project, thousands of participants in multiple residencies across the U.S. shared their stories with the project leaders—myself, Aimee Meredith Cox, Carrie Sandahl, Anita Gonzalez and Tiye Giraud. We collected about two hundred of these fragments in the Anarcha Anti-Archive, a website that tries, frustratingly, to undo the logic of the ordered archive (Cox et al. n.p).The project closed in 2008, but I still give presentations with the material we generated. But what formal methods can I select, ethically and responsibly, to present the multivocal nature of the Anarcha Project, given that it is now just me in the conference room, given that the point of the project was the intersection of multiple stories, not the fetishisation of individual ones? In a number of recent presentations, I used a circle exercise to engage in fragmented, shrouded disclosure, to keep privacies safe, and to find material contact with one another. In these Anarcha rounds, we all take words into our mouths, and try to stay conscious to the nature of this act—taking something into our mouth, rather than acting out words, normalising them into spoken language. Take this into your mouth—transgression, sacrament, ritual, entrainment, from one body to another.So before an Anarcha presentation, I print out random pages from our Anarcha Anti-Archive. A number of the links in the website pull up material through chance procedures (a process implemented by Olimpias collaborator Jay Steichmann, who is interested in digital literacies). So whenever you click that particular link, you get to a different page in the anti-archive, and you can not retrace your step, or mark you place in an unfolding narrative. What comes up are poems, story fragments, images, all sent in in response to cyber Anarcha prompts. We sent these prompts during residencies to long-distance participants who could not physically be with us, and many people, from Wales to Malaysia, sent in responses. I pull up a good number of these pages, combined with some of the pages written by the core collaborators of our project. In the sharing that follows, I do not speak about the heart of the project, but I mark that I leave things unsaid. Here is what I do not say in the moment of the presentation—those medical experiments were gynecological operations without anesthesia, executed to close vagin*l fistula that were leaking piss and sh*t, executed without anesthesia not because it was not available, but because the doctor did not believe that black women felt pain. I can write this down, here, in this essay, as you can now stop for a minute if you need to collect yourself, as you listen to what this narrative does to your inside. You might feel a clench deep down in your torso, like many of us did, a kinesthetic empathy that translates itself across text, time and space, and which became a core choreographic element in our Anarcha poetics.I do not speak about the medical facts directly in a face-to-face presentation where there is no place to hide, no place to turn away. Instead, I point to a secret at the heart of the Anarcha Project, and explain where all the medical and historical data can be found (in the Anarcha Project essay, “Remembering Anarcha,” in the on-line performance studies journal Liminalities site, free and accessible to all without subscription, now frequently used in bioethics education (see: http://www.liminalities.net/4-2). The people in the round, then, have only a vague sense of what the project is about, and I explain why this formal frame appears instead of open disclosure. I ask their permission to proceed. They either give it to me, or else our circle becomes something else, and we speak about performance practices and formal means of speaking about trauma instead.Having marked the space as one in which we agree on a specific framework or rule, having set up a space apart, we begin. One by one, raw and without preamble, people in the circle read what they have been given. The meaning of what they are reading only comes to them as they are reading—they have had little time to familiarise themselves with the words beforehand. Someone reads a poem about being held as a baby by one’s mother, being accepted, even through the writer’s body is so different. Someone reads about the persistence of shame. Someone reads about how incontinence is so often the borderline for independent living in contemporary cultures—up to here, freedom; past this point, at the point of leakage, the nursing home. Someone reads about her mother’s upset about digging up that awful past again. Someone reads about fibroid tumors in African-American women. Someone reads about the Venus Hottentott. Someone begins to cry (most recently at a Feminisms and Rhetorics conference), crying softly, and there is no knowing about why, but there is companionship, and quiet contemplation, and it is ok. These presentations start with low-key chatting, setting up the circle, and end the same way—once we have made our way around, once our fragments are read out, we just sit and talk, no “presentation-mode” emerges, and no one gets up into high drama. We’ve all taken strange things into our mouths, talked of piss and sh*t and blood and race and oppression and love and survival. Did we get free of ourselves, of the inevitability of narrative, in the attention to articulation, elocution, the performance of words, even if just for a moment? Did we taste the words on our tongues, material physical traces of a different form of embodiment? Container/ConclusionThe poet Anne Carson attended one of our Anarcha presentations, and her comments to us that evening helped to frame our subsequent work for me—she called our work creating a container, a vessel for experience, without sharing the specifics of that experience. I have since explored this image further, thought about amphorae as commemorative vases, thought of earth and clay as materials, thought of the illustrations on ancient vessels, on pattern and form, flow and movement. The vessel as matter: deterritorialising and reterritorialising, familiar and strange, shaping into form, and shaped out of formlessness, fired in the light and baked in the earth’s darkness, hardened only to crumble and crack again with the ages, returning to dust. These disclosures are in time and space—they are not narratives that create an archive or a body of knowledge. They breathe, and vibrate, and press against skin. What can be contained, what leaks, what finds its way through the membrane?These disclosures are traces of life, and I can touch them. I never get bored by them. Come and sit by my side, and we share in this river flow border vessel cell life.ReferencesBritzman, Deborah P. "Is There a Queer Pedagogy? Or, Stop Reading Straight." Educational Theory 45:2 (1995): 151–165. Burning. The Olimpias Project. Berkley; Eugene; Fort Worden. May-October, 2009Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: Vol. 2. The Use of Pleasure. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1985.Goffman, Erving. Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor, 1969Kuppers, Petra. “Remembering Anarcha: Objection in the Medical Archive.” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 4.2 (2006): n.p. 24 July 2009 < http://liminalities.net/4-2 >.Cox, Aimee Meredith, Tiye Giraud, Anita Gonzales, Petra Kuppers, and Carrie Sandahl. “The Anarcha-Anti-Archive.” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 4.2 (2006): n.p. 24 July 2009 < http://liminalities.net/4-2 >.Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley: The Crossing Press, 1984.Marchetto, Marisa Acocella. Cancer Vixen: A True Story. New York: Knopf, 2006.St. Pierre, Elizabeth Adams. “Circling the Text: Nomadic Writing Practices.” Qualitative Inquiry 3.4 (1997): 403–18.

Abstract:

I wake up early, questions buzzing through my mind. While I sip my morning cup of tea and read The Guardian online, the writer, restless because I’m ignoring her, walks around firing questions.“Expecting the patriarchy to want to share its enormous wealth and power with women is extremely naïve.”I nod. Outside the window pieces of sky are framed by trees, fluffy white clouds alternate with bright patches of blue. The sweet, heady first wafts of lavender and citrus drift in through the open window. Spring has come to Hvar. Time to get to work.The more I understand about narcissism, the more I understand the world. I didn’t understand before. In the 1990s.“No—you knew, but you didn’t know at the same time.”I kept telling everybody The River Ophelia wasn’t about sex, (or the sex wasn’t about sex), it was about power. Not many people listened or heard, though. Only some readers.I’ve come here to get away. To disappear. To write.I can’t find the essay I want for my article about the 1990s. I consider the novel I’m reading, I Love Dick by Chris Kraus and wonder whether I should write about it instead? It’s just been reprinted, twenty years after its initial release. The back cover boasts, “widely considered to be the most important feminist novel of the past two decades.” It was first published in the 1990s. So far it’s about a woman named Chris who’s addictively obsessed with an unavailable man, though I’m yet to unravel Kraus’s particular brand of feminism—abjection? Maybe, maybe … while I think, I click through my storage folder. Half way through, I find a piece I wrote about Kathy Acker in 1997, a tribute of sorts that was never published. The last I’d heard from Kathy before this had been that she was heading down to Mexico to try shark cartilage for her breast cancer. That was just before she died.When I was first introduced to the work of Foucault and Deleuze, it was very political; it was about what was happening to the economy and about changing the political system. By the time it was taken up by the American academy, the politics had gone to hell. (Acker qtd. in Friedman 20)Looking back, I’d have to say my friendship with Kathy Acker was intense and short-lived.In the original I’d written “was a little off and on.” But I prefer the new version. I first met Kathy in person in Sydney, in 1995. We were at a World Art launch at Ariel bookshop and I remember feeling distinctly nervous. As it turned out, I needn’t have been. Nervous, that is.Reading this now brings it all back: how Kathy and I lost touch in the intervening two years and the sudden fact of her death. I turn to the end and read, “She died tragically, not only because she was much too young, but because American literature seems rather frumpy without her, of cancer on the 30th November 1997, aged 53.”The same age as I am now. (While some believe Kathy was 50 when she died, Kathy told me she lied about her age even to the point of changing her passport. Women who lie about their age tend to want to be younger than they are, so I’m sticking with 53.) This coincidence spooks me a little.I make a cup of tea and eat some chocolate.“This could work …” the writer says. My reasons for feeling nervous were historical. I’d spoken to Kathy once previously (before the publication of The River Ophelia on the phone from Seattle to San Francisco in 1993) and the conversation had ended abruptly. I’d wanted to interview Kathy for my PhD on American fiction but Kathy wouldn’t commit. Now I was meeting her face to face and trying to push the past to the back of my mind.The evening turned out to be a memorable one. A whole bunch of us—a mixture of writers, publishers, academics and literati—went out to dinner and then carried on drinking well into the night. I made plans to see Kathy again. She struck me as a warm, generous, sincere and intensely engaging person. It seemed we might become friends. I hesitated: should I include the rest? Or was that too much?The first thing Kathy had said when we were introduced was, “I loved your book, The River Ophelia. I found it as soon as I arrived. I bought it from the bookshop at the airport. I saw your amazing cover and then I read on the back that it was influenced by the work of Kathy Acker. I was like, wow, no one in America has ever put that on the back cover of a novel. So I read it immediately and I couldn’t put it down. I love the way you’ve deconstructed the canon but still managed to put a compelling narrative to it. I never did that.”Why didn’t I include that? It had given me more satisfaction than anything anyone else had said.I remember how quickly I abandoned my bestselling life in Sydney, sexual harassment had all but ruined my career, and exchanged it for an uncertain future in London. My notoriety as an author was damaging my books and my relationship with my publisher had become toxic. The first thing I did in London was hire a lawyer, break my contract with Picador and take both novels out of print.Reality intrudes in the form of a phone call from my mother. Terminally ill with cancer, she informs me that she’s off her food. For a retired chef, the loss of appetite is not inconsiderable. Her dying is a dull ache, a constant tiredness and sadness in me. She’s just arrived in London. I will go there next week to meet her.(1)I first came across Kathy’s work in 1991. I’d just finished my MA thesis on postmodernism and parody and was rewarding myself with some real reading (i.e. not related to my thesis) when I came across the novel Don Quixote. This novel had a tremendous impact on me. Those familiar with DQ may recall that it begins with an abortion that transforms its female narrator into a knight.When she was finally crazy because she was about to have an abortion, she conceived of the most insane idea that any woman can think of. Which is to love. How can a woman love? By loving someone other than herself. (Acker Quixote 9)Kathy’s opening sentences produced a powerful emotional response in me and her bold confronting account of an abortion both put me in touch with feelings I was trying to avoid and connected these disturbing feelings with a broader political context. Kathy’s technique of linking the personal and emotional with the political changed the way I worked as a writer.I’d submitted the piece as an obituary for publication to an Australian journal; the editor had written suggestions in the margin in red. All about making the piece a more conventional academic essay. I hadn’t been sure that was what I wanted to do. Ambitious, creative, I was trying to put poststructuralist theory into practice, to write theoretical fiction. It’s true, I hadn’t been to the Sorbonne, but so what? What was the point of studying theory if one didn’t put it into practice? I was trying to write like French theorists, not to write about them. The editor’s remarks would have made a better academic essay, it’s just I’m not sure that’s where I wanted to go. I never rewrote it and it was never published.I first encountered I Love Dick (2017) during a film course at the AFTVRS when the lecturer presented a short clip of the adaptation for the class to analyse. When I later saw the novel in a bookshop I bought a copy. Given my discovery of the unpublished obituary it is also a bit spooky that I’m reading this book as both Chris Kraus and Kathy Acker had relationships with academic and Semiotext(e) publisher Sylvère Lotringer. Chris as his wife, Kathy as his lover. Kraus wrote a biography of Acker called After Kathy Acker: A Biography, which seems fairly unsympathetic according to the review I read in The Guardian. (Cooke 2017) Intrigued, I add Kraus’s biography to my growing pile of Acker related reading, the Acker/Wark letters I’m Very Into You and Olivia Laing’s novel, Crudo. While I’ve not read the letters yet, Crudo’s breathless yet rhythmic layering of images and it’s fragmented reflections upon war, women and politics reminded me less of Acker and more of Woolf; Mrs Dalloway, in fact.(2)What most inspired me, and what makes Kathy such a great writer, is her manner of writing politically. For the purposes of this piece, when I say Kathy writes politically, I’m referring to what happens when you read her books. That is, your mind—fuelled by powerful feelings—makes creative leaps that link everyday things and ideas with political discourses and debates (for Kathy, these were usually critiques of bourgeois society, of oedipal culture and of the patriarchy).In the first pages of Don Quixote, for example, an abortion becomes synonymous with the process of becoming a knight. The links Kathy makes between these two seemingly unrelated events yields a political message for the creative reader. There is more at stake than just gender-bending or metamorphoses here: a reversal of power seems to have taken place. A relatively powerless woman (a female victim except for the fact that in having an abortion she’s exerting some measure of control over her life), far from being destroyed by the experience of aborting her foetus, actually gains power—power to become a knight and go about the world fulfilling a quest. In writing about an abortion in this way, Kathy challenges our assumptions about this controversial topic: beyond the moral debate, there are other issues at stake, like identity and power. An abortion becomes a birth, rather than a banal tragedy.When I think about the 1990s, I automatically think of shoulder pads, co*cktails and expense accounts (the consumption of the former, in my case, dependent on the latter). But on reflection, I think about the corporatisation of the publishing industry, the Backlash and films like Thelma and Louise, (1991) Basic Instinct (1992) and Single White Female (1992). It occurs to me that the Hollywood movie star glamorous #MeToo has its origin in the turbulent 1990s Backlash. When I first saw each of these films I thought they were exciting, controversial. I loved the provocative stance they took about women. But looking back I can’t help wondering: whose stories were they really, why were we hearing them and what was the political point?It was a confusing time in terms of debates about gender equality.Excluding the premise for Thelma and Louise, all three films present as narrative truth scenarios that ran in stark contrast to reality. When it came to violence and women, most domestic homicide and violence was perpetrated by men. And violence towards women, in the 1990s, was statistically on the rise and there’s little improvement in these statistics today.Utter chaos, having a British passport never feels quite so wonderful as it does in the arrivals hall at Heathrow.“Perhaps these films allow women to fantasise about killing the men who are violent towards them?”Nyah, BI is chick killing chick … and think about the moral to the story. Fantasy OK, concrete action painful, even deadly.“Different story today …”How so?“Violent female protagonists are all the rage and definitely profitable. Killing Eve (2018) and A Simple Favour (2018).”I don’t have an immediate answer here. Killing Eve is a TV series, I think aloud, A Simple Favour structurally similar to Single White Female … “Why don’t you try self-publishing? It’ll be 20 years since you took The River Ophelia out of print, bit of an anniversary, maybe it’s time?”Not a bad idea. I’m now on the tube to meet mum at her bed and breakfast but the writer is impatient to get back to work. Maybe I should just write the screenplay instead?“Try both. If you don’t believe in your writing, who else will?”She has a point. I’m not getting anywhere with my new novel.A message pips through on Facebook. Want to catch up?What? Talk about out of the blue. I haven’t heard from Sade in twenty years … and how on earth did he get through my privacy settings?After meeting mum, the next thing I do is go to the doctor. My old doctor from West Kensington, she asks me how I’m going and I say I’m fine except that mum’s dying and this awful narcissistic ex-partner of mine has contacted me on Facebook. She recommends I read the following article, “The Highly Sensitive Person and the Narcissist” (Psychology Today).“Sometimes being a kind caring person makes you vulnerable to abusers.”After the appointment I can’t get her words out of my head.I dash into a Starbucks, I’m in Notting Hill just near the tube station, and read the article on my laptop on wifi. I highlight various sections. Narcissists “have a complete lack of empathy for others including their own family and friends, so that they will take advantage of people to get their own needs and desires met, even if it hurts someone.” That sounds about right, Sade could always find some way of masking his real motives in charm, or twisting reality around to make it look like things weren’t his fault, they were mine. How cleverly he’d lied! Narcissists, I read, are attracted to kind, compassionate people who they then use and lie to without remorse.But the bit that really makes me sit up is towards the end of the article. “For someone on the outside looking at a relationship between a highly sensitive person and a narcissist, it’s all too easy to blame the HSP. How and why would anyone want to stay in such a relationship?” Narcissists are incredibly good at making you doubt yourself, especially the part of you that says: this has happened before, it’ll happen again. You need to leave.The opening paragraph of the psychology textbook I read next uses Donald Trump as an example. Trump is also Patrick Bateman’s hero, the misogynistic serial killer protagonist of Bret Easton Ellis’s notorious American Psycho. Despite an earlier version that broadly focused on New York fiction of the 1990s, Ellis’s novel and the feminist outcry it provoked became the central topic of my PhD.“Are you alright mum?”I’ve just picked Mum up and I’m driving her to Paris for a night and then on to Switzerland where she’s going to have voluntary euthanasia. Despite the London drizzle and the horrific traffic the whole thing has a Thelma and Louise feel about it. I tell mum and she laughs.“We should watch it again. Have you seen it since it first came out?”“Sounds like a good idea.”Mum, tiny, pointy-kneed and wearing an out-of-character fluoro green beanie given to her at the oncology clinic in Sydney, is being very stoic but I can tell from the way she constantly wrings her hands that she’s actually quite terrified.“OK Louise,” she says as I unfold her Zimmer frame later that evening.“OK Thelma,” I reply as she walks off towards the hotel.Paris is a treat. My brother is waiting inside and we’re hoping to enjoy one last meal together.Mum didn’t want to continue with chemo at 83, but she’s frightened of dying a horrific death. As we approach hotel reception Mum can’t help taking a detour to inspect the dinner menu at the hotel restaurant.“Oysters naturel. That sounds nice.”I smile, wait, and take her by the elbow.I’ve completely forgotten. The interview/review I wrote of Acker’s puss*, King of the Pirates, in 1995 for Rolling Stone. Where is it? I open my laptop and quickly click through the endless publicity and reviews of The River Ophelia, the interview/review came out around the same time the novel was published, but I can’t find it. I know I had it out just a few months ago, when I was chasing up some freelance book reviews.I make a fresh pot of tea from the mini bar, green, and return to my Acker tribute. Should I try to get it published? Here, or back in Australia? Ever the émigré’s dilemma. I decide I like the Parisian sense of style in this room, especially the cotton-linen sheets.Finally, I find it, it’s in the wrong folder. Printing it out, I remember how Kathy had called her agent and publisher in New York, and her disbelief when I’d told her the book hadn’t been picked up overseas. Kathy’s call resulted in my first New York agent. I scrutinise its pages.Kathy smiles benign childlike creativity in the larger photo, and gestures in passionate exasperation in the smaller group, her baby face framed by countless metal ear piercings. The interview takes place—at Kathy’s insistence—on her futon in her hotel room. My memories clarify. It wasn’t that we drifted apart, or rather we did, but only after men had come between us first. Neither of us had much luck in that department.(4)Kathy’s writing is also political because her characters don’t act or speak the way you’d expect them to. They don’t seem to follow the rules or behave in the way your average fictional character tends to do. From sentence to sentence, Kathy’s characters either change into different people, or live revolutionary lives, or even more radical still, live impossible lives.When the narrator of DQ transforms herself into a knight (and lives an impossible life); she turns a situation in which she is passive and relatively powerless—she is about to be operated on and drugged—into an empowering experience (and lives a creative revolutionary life). Ironically, getting power means she turns herself into a male knight. But Kathy gets around the problem that power is male by not letting things rest there. The female, aborting Kathy isn’t actually replaced by a male knight, bits of him are just grafted onto her. Sure, she sets out on a quest, but the other aspects of her empowerment are pretty superficial: she does adopt a new name (which is more like a disguise), and identity (appearance); and picks up a bad habit or two—a tendency to talk in the language used by knights.“But who’s the father?” the writer wants to know. “I mean isn’t that the real question here?”No, that is exactly not the real question here and not the point. It is not about who the father is—it’s about what happens to a woman who has an unwanted unplanned pregnancy.The phone rings. It’s my brother. Mum’s waiting for me downstairs and the oysters are beckoning.(5)The idea that writing could be political was very appealing. The transformation between my first novel, Marilyn’s Almost Terminal New York Adventure and my second, The River Ophelia (Picador insisted on publishing them in reverse chronology) was partly a result of my discovery of Kathy’s work and the ideas it set off in me. Kathy wasn’t the first novelist to write politically, but she was the first female novelist to do so in a way that had an immediate impact on me at an emotional level. And it was this powerful emotional response that inspired me as a writer—I wanted to affect my readers in a similar way (because reading Kathy’s work, I felt less alone and that my darkest experiences, so long silenced by shame and skirted around in the interests of maintaining appearances, could be given a voice).We’re driving through Switzerland and I’m thinking about narcissism and the way the narcissists in my personal and professional life overshadowed everything else. But now it’s time to give the rest of the world some attention. It’s also one way of pulling back the power from the psychopaths who rule the world.As we approach Zurich, my mother asks to pull over so she can use the ladies. When she comes out I can see she’s been crying. Inside the car, she reaches for my hand and clasps it. “I don’t know if I’m strong enough to say goodbye.”“It’s alright Mum,” I say and hold her while we both cry.A police car drives by and my mother’s eyes snag. Harassed by the police in Australia and unable to obtain Nembutal in the UK, Mum has run out of options.To be a woman in this society is to find oneself living outside the law. Maybe this is what Acker meant when she wrote about becoming a pirate, or a knight?Textual deconstruction can be a risky business and writers like Acker walk a fine line when it comes to the law. Empire of the Senseless ran into a plagiarism suit in the UK and her publishers forced Acker to sign an apology to Harold Robbins (Acker Hannibal Lecter 13). My third novel Dependency similarly fell foul of the law when I discovered that in deconstructing gossip and myths about celebrities, drawing on their lives and then making stuff up, the result proved prophetic. When my publisher, Harper Collins, refused to indemnify me against potential unintended defamation I pulled the book from its contract on the advice of a lawyer. I was worth seven million pounds on paper at that point, the internet travel site my then husband and I had founded with Bob Geldof had taken off, and the novel was a radical hybrid text comprised of Rupert Murdoch’s biography, Shakespeare’s King Lear and Hello Magazine and I was worried that Murdoch might come after me personally. I’d fictionalised him as a King Lear type, writing his Cordelia out of his will and leaving everything to his Goneril and Reagan.Recent theoretical studies argue that Acker’s appropriation and deconstruction constitute a feminist politics as “fragmentation” (June 2) and as “agency” (Pitchford 22). As Acker puts it. “And then it’s like a kid: suddenly a toy shop opens up and the toy shop was called culture.” (Acker Hannibal Lecter 11).We don’t easily fit in a system that wasn’t ever designed to meet our needs.(6)By writing about the most private parts of women’s lives, I’ve tried to show how far there is to go before women and men are equal on a personal level. The River Ophelia is about a young woman whose public life might seem a success from the outside (she is a student doing an honours year at university in receipt of a scholarship), but whose private life is insufferable (she knows nothing about dealing with misogyny on an intimate level and she has no real relationship-survival skills, partly as a result of her family history, partly because the only survival skills she has have been inscribed by patriarchy and leave her vulnerable to more abuse). When Justine-the-character learns how to get around sexism of the personal variety (by re-inventing her life through parodies of classic texts about oedipal society) she not only changes her life, but she passes on her new-found survival skills to the reader.A disturbing tale about a young university student who loses herself in a destructive relationship, The River Ophelia is a postmodern novel about domestic violence and sexual harassment in the academy, contrary to its marketing campaign at the time. It’s protagonist, Justine, loves Sade but Sade is only interested in sex; indeed, he’s a brutish sex addict. Despite this, Justine can’t seem to leave: for all her education, she’s looking for love and commitment in all the wrong places. While the feminist lore of previous generations seems to work well in theory, Justine can’t seem to make it work in practise. Owning her power and experimenting with her own sexuality only leaves her feeling more despairing than before. Unconventional, compelling and controversial, The River Ophelia became an instant best-seller and is credited with beginning the Australian literary movement known as grunge/dirty realism.But there is always the possibility, given the rich intertextuality and self referentiality, that The River Ophelia is Justine’s honours thesis in creative writing. In this case, Sade, Juliette, Ophelia, Hamlet, Bataille, Simone, Marcelle and Leopold become hybrids made up from appropriated canonical characters, fragments of Justine’s turbulent student’s world and invented sections. But The River Ophelia is also a feminist novel that partly began as a dialogue with Ellis whose scandalous American Psycho it parodies even as it reinvents. This creative activity, which also involves the reader by inviting her to participate in the textual play, eventually empowers Justine over the canon and over her perpetrator, Sade.Another hotel room. This one, just out of Zürich, is tiny. I place my suitcase on the rack beneath the window overlooking the narrow street and start to unpack.“Hasn’t this all been said before, about The River Ophelia?” The writer says, trying out the bed. I’m in the middle of an email about self-publishing a new edition of TRO.Some of it. While the grunge label has been refuted, Acker’s influence has been underplayed.Acker often named her protagonists after herself, so losing the Acker part of my textual filiation plays into the whole grunge/dirty realism marketing campaign. I’ve talked about how I always name protagonists after famous women but not linked this to Acker. Bohemia Beach has a protagonist named after Cathy as in Wuthering Heights. Justine of The River Ophelia was doubly an Acker trait: firstly, she was named Justine after De Sade’s character and is a deconstruction of that character, and secondly she was named Justine self-reflexively after me, as a tribute to Kathy as in Kathy Goes to Haiti.The other context for The River Ophelia that has been lost is to do with the early work of Mary Gaitskill, and Catherine Texier. The narcissists were so destructive and so powerful they left no time for the relatively more subtle Gaitskill or Texier. Prototypes for Sex in the City, the 1990s was also a time when Downtown New York women writers explored the idea that gender equality meant women could do anything men did sexually, that they deserved the full gamut of libertine sexual freedoms. Twenty years on it should also be said that women who push the envelope by writing women protagonists who are every bit as sexually transgressive as men, every bit as addictively self-destructive as male protagonists deserve not to be shamed for that experimentation. They deserve to be celebrated and read.AfterwordI’d like to remember Kathy as I knew her briefly in Sydney. A bottle-blonde with a number two haircut, a leopard-skin bikini and a totally tattooed body, she swam a surprisingly genteel breast-stroke in the next lane in one of the world’s most macho lap-swimming pools.ReferencesA Simple Favour. Dir. Paul Feig. Lionsgate, 2018.Acker, Kathy. Don Quixote. London: Collins, 1986.———. Empire of the Senseless. New York: Grove, 1988.———. Hannibal Lecter, My Father. New York: Semiotext(e), 1991.———. Kathy Goes to Haiti. New York: Grove Press/Atlantic Monthly, 1994.——— and McKenzie Wark. I’m Very into You: Correspondence 1995-1996. New York: Semiotext(e), 2015.Basic Instinct. Dir. Paul Verhoeven. TriStar Pictures, 1992.Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. New York: Norton and Co, 2003.Bushnell, Candace. Sex in the City. United States: Grand Central Publishing, 1996.Cooke, Rachel. “Review of After Kathy Acker: A Biography by Chris Kraus—Baffling Life Study.” The Guardian 4 Sep. 2017. 4 Dec. 2018 <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/04/after-kathy-acker-a-biography-chris-kraus-review>.Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho. New York: Vintage, 1991.Ettler, Justine. Bohemia Beach. Melbourne: Transit Lounge. 2018.———. “Kathy Acker: King of the puss*es.” Review of puss*, King of the Pirates, by Kathy Acker. Rolling Stone. Nov. 1995: 60-61.———. Marilyn’s Almost Terminal New York Adventure. Sydney: Picador, 1996.———. “La Trobe University Essay: Bret Easton Ellis’s Glamorama, and Catherine Texier’s Break Up.” Australian Book Review, 1995.———. The Best Ellis for Business: A Re-Examination of the Mass Media Feminist Critique of “American Psycho.” PhD. Sydney: University of Sydney, 2013.———. The River Ophelia. Sydney: Picador, 1995.Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women. New York: Crown, 1991.Friedman, Ellen G. “A Conversation with Kathy Acker.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 9.3 (Fall 1989): 20-21.Gaitskill, Mary. Bad Behaviour. New York: Random House, 1988.I Love Dick. Dir. Jill Soloway. Amazon Video, 2017.June, Pamela B. The Fragmented Female Body and Identity: The Postmodern Feminist and Multiethnic Writings of Toni Morrison, Therese Huk, Kyung Cha, Phyllis Alesia Perry, Gayl Jones, Emma Perez, Paula Gunn Allen, and Kathy Acker. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2010.Killing Eve. Dir. Phoebe Waller-Bridge. BBC America, 2018.Kraus, Chris. After Kathy Acker: A Biography. London: Penguin, 2017.———. I Love Dick. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2016.Laing, Olivia. Crudo. London: Picador, 2018.Lee, Bandy. The Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. New York: St Martin’s Press. 2017.Lombard, Nancy, and Lesley McMillan. “Introduction.” Violence against Women. Eds. Nancy Lombard and Lesley McMillan. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2013.Pitchford, Nicola. Tactical Readings: Feminist Postmodernism in the Novels of Kathy Acker and Angela Carter. London: Associated Uni Press, 2002.Schiffrin, André. The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read. London and New York: Verso, 2000.Shakespeare, William. King Lear. London: Penguin Classics, 2015.Siegle, Robert. Suburban Ambush: Downtown Writing and the Fiction of Insurgency. United States: John Hopkins Press, 1989.Single White Female. Dir. Barbet Schroeder. Columbia Pictures, 1992.Texier, Catherine. Panic Blood. London: Collins, 1991.Thelma and Louise. Dir. Ridley Scott. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1991.Ward, Deborah. “Sense and Sensitivity: The Highly Sensitive Person and the Narcissist.” Psychology Today (16 Jan. 2012). 4 Dec. 2018 <https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sense-and-sensitivity/201201/the-highly-sensitive-person-and-the-narcissist>.

Abstract:

In November 2015 the progressive rock band, Coheed and Cambria, released their latest album and art-book, both titled The Color before the Sun (Color) (2015). This album deviates from their previous six releases by explicitly using a biographical frame for the art-book, the album, and their paratexts. This is a divergence from the band’s concept album approach, a transmedia storyworld, The Amory Wars (TAW) (2002-17), which fictionalised the life experiences of Claudio Sanchez, the band’s lead singer. When scholars discuss transmedia they often refer to fantastic and speculative fictions, such as the Star Wars (1977-2018), Star Trek (1966-2018), Doctor Who (1963-2018) and Marvel Universe (1961-2018) franchises, and TAW fits this framework. However, there is increasing consideration of the impact transmedia reading and writing practices have on storytelling that straddles representations of the “real” world. By making collaborative life-writing explicit, Color encourages readers to resist colonising ontologies. Framing the life-writing within the band’s earlier auto-fiction(s) (TAW), Color destabilises genre divides between fiction and life-writing, and positions readers to critique Sanchez’s narration of his subjectivity. This enables readers to abstract their critique to ontological narratives that have a material impact on their own subjectivities: law, medicine, religion, and economics.The terms subject and identity are often used interchangeably in the study of life-writing. By “subjectivity” I mean the individual’s understanding of their status and role in relation to their community, culture, socio-political context, and the operations of power dynamics therein. In contrast “identity” speaks to the sense of self. While TAW and Color share differing literary conceits—one is a space opera, the other is more explicitly biographical—they both explore Sanchez’s subjectivity and can be imagined as a web of connections between recordings (both audio and video), social media, books (comics, art books, novels and scripts), and performances that contribute to a form of transmedia life-writing. Life-writing is generic term that covers “protean forms of contemporary personal narrative” (Eakin 1). These narratives can be articulated across expressive practices, including interviews, profiles, diaries, social media, prose, poetry and so on. Zachary Leader notes in his introduction to On Life-Writing that “theoreticians and historians of life-writing commonly fuse or meld sub-genres [… and this] blurring of distinctions may help to account for life-writing’s growing acceptance as a field of academic study” (1-2). The growing relationship between life-writing and transmedia is therefore unsurprising.This article ties my research considering the construction of subjectivity through transmedia life-writing, with Emma Hill and Máiréad Nic Craith’s consideration of transmedia storytelling’s political potential (87-109). My intention is to determine how readers might construct their own subjectivity to resist oppressive interpellations. Hill and Nic Craith argue that the “lack of closure” in transmedia storyworlds creates “a greater breadth and depth of interpretation … than a single telling could achieve” (104). They conclude that “this expansive quality has allowed the campaigners to continue their activism in a number of different arenas” (104). I contest their assertion that transmedia lacks closure, and instead contend that closure, or the recognition of meaning, inheres with the reader (McCloud 33) rather than in a universalised meaning attributed to the text: transmedia storytelling therefore arouses political potential in reading communities. It is precisely this feature that enables the “expansive quality” valued in political activism. I therefore focus my discussion on the readers of transmedia life-writing, rather than on its writer(s). I argue that in reading a life or lives across multiple media the reader is exposed to the texts’ self-referential citations, its extra-diegetic reiterations, and its contradictions. The reader is invited to make meaning from these citations, reiterations and contradictions; they are positioned to confront the ways in which space and time shape life-writing and subjectivity. Transmedia life-writing can therefore empower readers to invoke critical reading practices.The reader’s agency offers the potential for resistance and revolution. This agency is invited in Color where readers are asked to straddle the fictional world of TAW and the “real” world. The Unravelling Palette of Dawn (2015) is the literary narrative that parallels this album. The book is written by Chondra Echert, Sanchez’s collaborator and wife, and is an amalgam of personal essay and photo-book. It opens by invoking the space opera that informs The Amory Wars: “Sector.12, Paris, Earth. A man and a woman sit in a café debating their fate” (n.p.). This situates the reader in the fictional world of TAW, but also brings the reader into the mundanity and familiarity of a discussion between two people. The reader is witness to a discussion between intimates that focusses on the question of “where to from here.” The idea of “fate” is either misunderstood or misapplied: fate is predetermined, and undebatable. The reader is therefore positioned to remember the band’s previous “concept,” and juxtapose it against a new “realistic” trajectory: fictional characters might have a fate that is determined by their writer, but does that fate extend to the writer themselves? To what extent is Sanchez and Echert’s auto/biography crafted by writers other than themselves?The opening passage provides a skin for the protagonists of the essay, enabling a fantastical space within which Echert and Sanchez might cloak themselves, as they have done throughout TAW. However, this conceit is peeled away on the second page:This might have been the story you find yourself holding. A Sci-fi tale, shrouded in fiction. The real life details modified. All names changed. Threads neatly tied up at the end and altered for the sake of ego and feelings.But the truth is rarely so well planned. The story isn’t filled with epic action scenes or glossed-over romance. Reality is gritty and mucky and thrown together in the last seconds. It’s painful. It is not beautiful … and so it is. The events that inspired this record are acutely personal. (n.p.)In this passage Echert makes reference to the method of storytelling employed throughout the texts that make up TAW. She lays bare the shroud of fiction that covers the lived realities of her and her husband’s lives. She goes on to note that their lives have been interpreted “to fit the bounds of the concept” (n.p.), that is TAW as a space opera, and that the current album was an opportunity to “pull back the curtain” (n.p.) on this conceit. This narrative is echoed by Sanchez in the documentary component of the project, The Physics of Color (2015). Like Echert, Sanchez locates the narrative’s genesis in Paris, but in the Paris of our own world, where he and Echert finalised the literary component of the band’s previous project, The Afterman (2012). Color, like the previous works, is written as a collaboration, not just between Sanchez and Echert, but also by the other members of the band who contributed to the composition of each track. This collaborative writing is an example of relationality that facilitates a critical space for readers and invites them to consider the ways in which their own subjectivity is constructed.Ivor Goodson and Scherto Gill provide a means of critically engaging with relational reading practices. They position narrative as a tool that can be used to engage in critical self, and social, reflection. Their theory of critical narrative as a form of pedagogy enables readers to shift away from reading Color as auto-fiction and towards reading it as an act of collaborative auto/biography. This transition reflects a shifting imperative from the personal, particularly questions of identity, to the political, to engaging with the web of human relations, in order to explore subjectivity. Given transmedia is generally employed by writers of fantasy and speculative literatures, it can be difficult for readers to negotiate their expectations: transmedia is not just a tool for franchises, but can also be a tool for political resistance.Henry Jenkins initiated the conversation about transmedia reading practices and reality television in his chapters about early seasons of Survivor and American Idol in his book Convergence Culture. He identifies the relationship between viewers and these shows as one that shifts from “real-time interaction toward asynchronous participation” (59): viewers continue their engagement with the shows even when they are not watching a broadcast. Hill and Nic Craith provide a departure from literary and media studies approaches to transmedia by utilising an anthropological approach to understanding storyworlds. They maintain that both media studies and anthropological methodologies “recognize that storytelling is a continually contested act between different communities (whether media communities or social communities), and that the final result is indicative of the collective rather than the individual” (88–89). They argue that this collectivity results from “negotiated meaning” between the text and members of the reading community. This is a recognition of the significance held by readers of life-writing regarding the “biographical contract” (Lejeune 22) resulting from the “rationally motivated inter subjective recognition of norms” (Habermas n.p.). Collectivity is analogous to relationality: the way in which the readers’ subjectivity is impacted upon by their engagement with the storyworld, helixed with the writer(s) of transmedia life-writing having their subjectivity impacted upon by their engagement with reader responses to their developing texts. However, the term “relationality” is used to slightly different effect in both transmedia and life-writing studies. Colin Harvey’s definition of transmedia storytelling as relational emphasises the relationships between different media “with the wider storyworld in question, and by extension the wider culture” (2). This can be juxtaposed with Paul John Eakin’s assertion that life-writing as a genre that requires interaction between the author and their audience: “autobiography of the self but the biography and autobiography of the other” (58). It seems to me that the differing articulations of “relationality” arising from both life-writing and transmedia scholarship rely on, but elide, the relationship between the reader and the storyworld. In both instances it is left to the reader to make meaning from the text, both in terms of understanding the subject(s) represented in relation to their own, and also as the nexus between the transmedia text, the storyworld, and the broader culture. The readers’ own experiences, their memories, are central to this relationality.The song “Colors” (2015), which Echert notes in her essay was the first song to be written for the album, chronicles the anxieties that arose after Sanchez and Echert discovered that their home (which they had been leasing out) had been significantly damaged by their tenants. In the documentary The Physics of Color, both Echert and Sanchez speak about this song as a means for Sanchez to reassert his identity as a musician after an extended period where he struggled with the song-writing process. The song is pared back, the staccato guitar in the introduction echoing a similar theme in the introduction to the song “The Afterman” (2012) which was released on the band’s previous album. This tonal similarity, the plucked electric guitar and the shared rhythm, provides a sense of thoroughness between the songs, inviting the listener to remember the ways in which the music on Color is in conversation with the previous albums. This conversation is significant: it relies on the reader’s experience of their own memory. In his book Fantastic Transmedia, Colin Harvey argues that memories are “the mechanisms by which the ‘storyworld’ was effectively sewn together, helping create a common diegetic space for me—and countless others—to explore” (viii). Both readers’ and creators’ experiences of personal and political time and space in relation to the storyworld challenge traditional understandings of readers’ agency in relation to the storyworld, and this challenge can be abstracted to frame the reader’s agency in relation to other economic, political, and social manifestations of power.In “The Audience” Sanchez sings:This is my audience, forever oneTogether burning starsCut from the same diseaseEver longing what and who we areIn the documentary, Sanchez states that this song is an acknowledgement that he, the band and their audience are “one and the same in [their] oddity, and it’s like … family.” Echert echoes this, referring to the intimate relationships built with fans over the years at conventions, shows and through social media: “they’ve superseded fandom and become a part of this extended family.” Readers come to this song with the memory of TAW: the memory of “burning Star IV,” a line that is included in the titles of two of Coheed’s albums (Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV Vols. 1 (2005) and 2 (2007), and to the Monstar disease that is referenced throughout Second Stage Turbine Blade, both the album (2002) and the comic books (2010). As a depiction of his destabilised identity however, the lyrics can also be read as a poetic commentary on Sanchez’s experiences with renegotiating his subjectivity: his status as an identity that gains its truth through consensus with others, an audience who is “ever longing what and who we are.” In the documentary Sanchez states “I could do the concept thing again with this album, you know, take it and manipulate it and make it this other sort of dimension … but this one … it means so much more to be … I really wanted this to be exposed, I really want this to be my story.” Sanchez imagines that his story, its truth, its sacredness, is contingent on its exposure on being shared with an audience. For Sanchez his subjectivity arises from on his relationality with his audience. This puts the reader at the centre of the storyworld. The assertion of subjectivity arises as a result of community.However, there is an uncertainty that floats in the lacunae between the texts contributing to the Color storyworld. As noted, in the documentary, both Echert and Sanchez speak lovingly of their relationships with Coheed audiences, but Sanchez goes on to acknowledge that “there’s a little bit of darkness in there too, that I don’t know if I want to bring up… I’ll keep that a mystery,” and some of the “The Audience” lyrics hint at a more sinister relationship between the audience and the band:Thieves of our timeWatch as they rape your integrityMarch as the beat suggests.One reader, Hecatonchair, discusses these lyrics in a Reddit post responding to “The Audience”. They write:The lyrics are pretty aggressive, and could easily be read as an attack against either the music industry or the fans. Considering the title and chorus, I think the latter is who it was intended to reach, but both interpretations are valid.This acknowledgement by the poster that there the lyrics are polyvalent speaks to the decisions that readers are positioned to make in responding to the storyworld.This phrase makes explicit the inconsistency between what Sanchez says about the band’s fans, and what he feels. It is left to the reader to account for this inconsistency between the song lyrics and the writers’ assertions. Hecatonchair and the five readers who respond to their post all write that they enjoy the song, regardless of what they read as its aggressive position on the band’s relationship with them as audience members. In identifying as both audience members and readers with different interpretations, the Reddit commentators recognise their identities in intersecting communities, and demonstrate their agency as subjects. Goodson and Gill invoke Charles Taylor’s assertion that one of the defining elements of “identity” is a “defining community,” that is “identity is lived in social and historical particulars, such as the literature, philosophy, religious teaching and great conversations taking place along one’s life’s journeys” (Goodson and Gill 27).Harvey identified readers as central to transmedia practices. In reading a life across multiple media readers assert agency within the storyworld: they choose which texts to engage with, and how and when to engage with them. They must remember, or more specifically re-member, the life or lives with which they are engaging. This re-membering is an evocative metaphor: it could be described as Frankensteinian, the bringing together of texts and media through a reading that is stretched across the narrative, like the creature’s yellow skin. It also invokes older stories of death (the author’s) and resurrection (of the author, by the reader): the murder and dismemberment of Osiris by his brother Set, and Isis, Osiris's wife, who rejoins the fragmented pieces of Osiris, and briefly brings him back.Coheed and Cambria regularly cite musical themes or motifs across their albums, while song lyrics are quoted in the text of comic books and the novel. The readers recognise and weave together these citations with the more explicitly autobiographical writing in Color. Readers are positioned to critique the function of a canonical truth underpinning the storyworld: whose life is being told? Sanchez invokes memory throughout the album by incorporating soundscapes, such as the sounds of a train-line on the song “Island.” Sanchez notes he and his wife would hear these sounds as they took the train from their home in Brooklyn to the island of Manhattan. Sanchez brings his day-to-day experiences to his readers as overlapping but not identical accounts of perspectives. They enable a plurality of truths and destabilise the Western focus on a singular or universal truth of lived experience.When life-writing is constructed transmedially the author must—of necessity—relinquish control over their story’s temporality. This includes both the story’s internal and external temporalities. By internal temporality I am referring to the manner in which time plays out within the story: given that the reader can enter into and engage with the story through a number of media, the responsibility for constructing the story’s timeline lies with the reader; they may therefore choose, or only be able, to engage with the story’s timeline in a haphazard, rather than a chronological, manner. For example, in Sanchez’ previous work, TAW, comic book components of the storyworld were often released years after the albums with which they were paired. Readers can only engage with the timelines as they are published, as they loop back through and between the storyworld’s temporality.The different media—CD, comic, novel, or art-book—often represent different perspectives or experiences within the same or at least within overlapping internal temporalities: significant incidences are narrated between the media. This results in an unstable external temporality, over which the author, again, has no control. The reader may listen to the music before reading the book, or the other way around, but reading the book and listening to the music simultaneously may not be feasible, and may detract from the experience of engaging with each aspect of the storyworld. This brings us back to the importance of memory to readers of transmedia narratives: they must remember in order to, as Harvey says, stitch together a common “diegetic space.” Although the author often relinquishes control to the external temporality of the text, placing the reader in control of the internal temporality of their life-writing destabilises the authority that is often attributed to an auto/biographer. It also makes explicit that transmedia life-writing is an ongoing project. This allows the author(s) to account for “a reflexive process where individuals take the opportunity to evaluate their actions in connection with their intentions and thus ‘write a further part’ of their histories” (Goodson and Gill 33).Goodson and Gill note that “life’s events are never linear and any intention for life to be coherent and progressive in accordance with a ‘plan’ will constantly be interrupted” (30). This is why transmedia offers writers and readers a more authentic means of engaging with life-writing. Its weblike structure enables readers to view subjectivity through a number of lenses: transmedia life-writing narrates a relational subjectivity that resists attempts at delineation. There is still a “continuity” that arises when Sanchez invokes the storyworld’s self-referential citations, reiterations, and contradictions in order to “[define] narratives within a temporal, social and cultural framework” (Goodson and Gill 29), however transmedia life-writing refuses to limit itself, or its readers, to the narratives of space and time that regulate mono-medial life-writing. Instead it positions readers to “unmask the world and then change it” (43).ReferencesArendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1958.Coheed and Cambria. Second Stage Turbine Blade. New York: Equal Vision Records, 2002.———. In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3. New York: Equal Vision Records, 2003.———. Good Apollo I’m Burning Star IV, Vol. 1: From Fear through the Eyes of Madness. New York: Columbia, 2005.———. Good Apollo I’m Burning Star IV, Vol. 2: No World for Tomorrow. New York: Columbia, 2007.———. The Year of the Black Rainbow. New York: Columbia, 2010.———. The Afterman: Ascension. Los Angeles: Hundred Handed/Everything Evil, 2012.———. The Afterman: Descension. Los Angeles: Hundred Handed/Everything Evil, 2013.———. The Colour before the Sun. Brooklyn: the bag.on-line.adventures and Everything Evil Records, 2015.———. “The Physics of Color” Documentary DVD. Brooklyn: Everything Evil Records, 2015. Eakin, Paul John. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999. ———. The Ethics of Life Writing. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004.Echert, Chondra. The Unravelling Palette of Dawn. Brooklyn: the bag.on-line.adventures and Everything Evil Records, 2015.Goodson, Ivor, and Scherto Gill. Critical Narrative as Pedagogy. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014.Habermas, Jürgen. The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1: Reason and the Rationalisation of Society. Trans. Thomas McCarthy. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984.Harvey, Colin. Fantastic Transmedia: Narrative, Play and Memory Across Science-Fiction and Fantasy Storyworlds. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.Hecatonchair. “r/TheFence's Song of the Day Database Update Day 9: The Audience”. 11 Feb. 2018 <https://www.reddit.com/r/TheFence/comments/4eno9o/rthefences_song_of_the_day_database_update_day_9/>.Hill, Emma, and Máiréad Nic Craith. “Medium and Narrative Change: The Effects of Multiple Media on the ‘Glasgow Girls’ Story and Their Real-Life Campaign.” Narrative Culture 3.1 (2016). 9 Dec. 2017 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13110/narrcult.3.1.0087>.Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York UP, 2006.Leader, Zachary, ed. On Life-Writing. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015.Lejeune, Philippe, and Paul John Eakin, eds. On Autobiography. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989.McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, New York: Harper Perennial, 1994.Sanchez, Claudio, and Gus Vasquez. The Amory Wars Sketchbook. Los Angeles: Evil Ink Comics, 2006.———, Gus Vasquez, et al. The Amory Wars: The Second Stage Turbine Blade Ultimate Edition. Los Angeles: BOOM! Studios, 2010.———, Peter David, Chris Burnham, et al. In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3 Ultimate Edition. Los Angeles: BOOM! Studios, 2010.———, and Christopher Shy. Good Apollo I’m Burning Star IV, Vol. 1: From Fear through the Eyes of Madness. Los Angeles: Evil Ink Comics, 2005.———, and Peter David. Year of the Black Rainbow. Nashville: Evil Ink Books, 2010.———, and Nathan Spoor, The Afterman. Los Angeles: Evil Ink Comics/Hundred Handed Inc., 2012.

Abstract:

Affect theory is generally associated with the lifetime’s work of Silvan S. Tomkins, whose four volume work, Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, was published between 1962-92. The volumes argue that humans are subject to a range of innate affects: two positive (interest/excitement; enjoyment/joy), one neutral (surprise/startle) and six negative (distress/anguish; fear/terror; anger/rage; shame/humiliation; dissmell [reaction to a bad smell]; disgust). In a crude “advanced search” using Google, affect is related to emotion in 3,620,000 Web references; to intellect in 1,530,000 instances; and to both intellect and emotion in 1,670,000 cases (Google). Affect may consequently be constructed as a common but complicated response which cannot be simply elided with either emotion or intellect but which involves the integration of both. In particular, affect is generally constructed as a human response to a precipitating stimulus (be it an idea, a physical event, etc). If this is accepted, then Tomkins’s Affect theory might imply that the innate affects only reach conscious awareness as a result of a change in circ*mstance (e.g., idea or event) which requires a response. The importance of affect as a motivator for action has long been put to good use by advertising and marketing professionals who recognised early in their professions’ development that it is the ESP (emotional selling proposition) that delivers more punch, more quickly, than rational argument. An organisation’s (or individual’s) unique selling point can be rational or emotional, but it is easier for many people marketing a product or service to craft a perceived (unique) difference using emotion rather than logical rationality. For example, co*ke and Pepsi are generally constructed as fighting their turf wars based on their emotional appeals, rather than any logical difference between the brands. This paper deals with the use of affect to craft an online therapeutic Website (HeartNET) as a joint ARC-Linkage research project between the National Heart Foundation of Australia (WA Division) and Edith Cowan University’s School of Communications and Multimedia. The research originally started with the idea that heart patients would appreciate the opportunity to communicate online with people going through similar experiences, and that this might create a virtual community of mutually supportive recovering participants. The reality held a few surprises along the way, as we discuss below. HeartNET has been designed to: 1) reduce the disadvantage experienced by people in regional and remote areas; 2) aid the secondary prevention of heart disease in Australia; and, 3) investigate whether increased interaction with an organisation-sponsored affective environment (e.g., the Website) impacts upon perceptions of the organisation. (This might have long-term implications for the financial viability of charitable organisations). In brief, the purpose of the research is to understand the meanings that Web-participants might generate in terms of affective responses to the notion of a shared HeartNET community, and investigate whether these meanings are linked to lifestyle change and responses to the host charity. Ultimately the study aims to determine whether the Website can add value to the participants’ communication and support strategies. The study is still ongoing and has another 18 months to run. Some early results, however, indicate that we need more than a Website and a common life experience to build an affective relationship with others online. The added extra might be what makes the difference between interaction and affective interaction: this needs conscious strategies to generate involvement, aided by the construction of a dynamic (and evolving) Web environment. In short, one stimulus is not enough to generate persistent affective response; the environment has to sustain multiple, evolving and complex stimuli. Online support groups are proliferating because they are satisfying unmet needs and offering an alternative to face-to-face support programs (Madara). Social support also combines some elements of affective community, namely belongingness, intimacy and reciprocity. These community elements can be observed through three levels or layers of social support: 1) belongingness or a sense of integration, 2) bonding which is somewhat more personal and involves linkages between people, and, 3) binding whereby a sense of responsibility for others is experienced and expressed (Lin). Here, social support may prompt an affective response and provide a useful measure of community because it incorporates other elements. Initial Design The project was initially designed to build “an affective interactive space” in the belief that an effective online community might develop thereafter. However, the first stumbling block came in terms of recruiting participants: this took almost nine-months longer than anticipated (even once Ethics approval had been granted). Partly this was due to a specific focus on recruiting people born between 1946–64 (“baby boomers”), partly it was due to the requirement that participants had access to the Web, and partly it was because we sought to specifically recruit non-metropolitan Western Australians who had suffered a health-challenging heart-related episode. We were hoping to identify at least 80 such people, to allow for a control group in addition to the people invited to join the online community. Stage 1 was to be the analysis of the functioning of the online community; Stage 2 would take the form of interviews of both community members and the control group. One aspect of the research was to determine whether online participants perceived themselves as belonging to an online community (as opposed to “interacting on a Website”) and whether this community was constructed as therapeutic, or in other ways beneficial. Once the requisite number of people had been recruited, the Website went “live”. Usage was extremely hesitant, and this was the case even though more people were added to the Website than originally planned. (In the end we had to rely upon the help of cardiologists publicising the research among their heart patients. This had a continuing trickle effect that meant that the Website ultimately had 68 people who agreed to participate, of whom 15 never logged in. Of the remaining 53 participants, 31 logged in but never posted anything. Of the 22 people who posted, 17 made between one and four contributions. The remaining five people posted five or more times, and included the researcher and an experienced facilitator, Sven (name changed), who was serving in a “professionally-supportive” role (as well as a recovering heart patient himself). This was hardly the vibrant, affectively-supportive environment for which we had been planning. Even with the key researcher-moderator calling people individually and talking them through the mechanics of how to post, the interactions fell away and eventually ceased, more or less, altogether after 11 weeks. One of the particularly distressing implications of the lack of interaction was the degree of self-revelation that some participants had offered when first logging onto the site. New members, for example, were encouraged to “share their heart story”. Susan’s (name changed) is an example of how open these could be: I had a heart attack in February 2004. This came as a huge shock. I didn’t have any of the usual risk factors. Although my father has Coronary Vascular Disease, he didn’t have any symptoms until his mid 60s and never had a heart attack. I had angioplasty and a stent. I accept I will be taking medication for the rest of my life. I’m fine physically but am having treatment for depression, which was diagnosed 6 months after my heart attack. In normal social situations an affective revelation such as “I’m fine physically but am having treatment for depression” would elicit a sympathetic response. In fact, such “stories” did often get responses from active members (and always got a response from the researcher-moderator), but the original poster would often not log in again and would thus not receive the group’s feedback. In this case, it was particularly relevant that the poster should have learned that other site users were aware that some heart medication has depression as a common side effect and were urging Susan to ask her doctor whether this could be a factor in her case. A further problem was that there was no visible traffic on much of the Website. During the first 12 weeks, only seven of 155 posts were made to the discussion forums. Instead, participants tended to leave individual messages for each other in “private spaces” that had been designed as blogs, to allow people to keep online diaries (and where blog-visitors had the opportunity to post comments, feedback and encouragement). It was speculated that this pattern of invisible interaction was symptomatic of a generation that felt most comfortable with using the internet for e-mail, and were unfamiliar with discussion boards. (Privacy, ethics, research design and good practice meant that the only way that participants could contact each other was via the Website; they couldn’t use a private e-mail address.) The absence of visible interactive feedback was a disincentive to participation for even the most active posters and it was clear that, while some people felt able to reveal aspects of themselves and their heart condition online, they needed more that this opportunity to encourage them to return and participate further. Effectively, the research was in crisis. Crisis Measures After 10 weeks of the HeartNET interaction stalling, and then crashing, it was decided to do four things: write up what had been learned about what didn’t work (before the site was “polluted” by what we hoped would be the solution); redesign the Website to allow more ways to interact privately as well as publicly; throw it open to anyone who wished to join so that there was a more dynamic, developing momentum; use a “newbie” icon to indicate new network members joining in the previous seven days so that these people could be welcomed by existing members (who would also have an incentive to log in at least weekly). Five weeks into the revamped Website a number of things have become apparent. There is some “incidental traffic” apart from research-recruited participants and word-of-mouth, for example (Jane): “I discovered this site while surfing the net. I haven’t really sought much support since my heart attack which was nearly a year ago, but wish I had since it would have made those darker days a lot easier to get through.” An American heart patient has joined the community (Sam): “I have a lot to be positive about and feel grateful to have found this site full of caring people.” Further, some returnees, who had experienced the first iteration of the site, were warm with acknowledgement (Betty): “the site is taking off in leeps [sic] and bounds. You should all be so proud.” People are making consecutive postings, updating and developing their stories, revealing their need for support and recognising the help when they receive it. It is not hard to empathise with “Wonky” (name changed) who may not have family in whom s/he can confide: (Wonky, post 12, Wed) [I need] preventative surgery of this aorta [addressing a bi-cuspid aortic valve] before it has an aneurysm or dissects … and YES I AM SCARED … but trying to be brave cos at least now I know what is wrong with me and its kinda fixable … After being asked by interested members to update the community on his/her progress, Wonky makes the following posts: (Wonky, post 13, Wed) […] I am currently petrified … And anxiously waiting to see the cardio at 3 pm Thursday regarding the results of my aorta echo … and when they are going to decide I need lifesaving surgery … (Wonky, post 15, Fri) ok…so I am up to Friday morning and fasting for the CT scan of the dodgy aorta etc … this morning … why do I get hungry when I have to fast yet any other day I really have to force myself to remember to even eat … (Sven, online support person, Fri) great news [Wonky] and I sense a more ‘coming to terms’ understanding of your situation on your part. You’re in good hands believe you me and you are surrounded by a great number of friends who are here to cheer you on. Keep smiling. […] (Wonky, post 16, Sun) Yes [Sven], you are exactly right […] [declining health] I guess is what scared me and plus I had pretty-much not bothered to research into the condition early on when I was first diagnosed … but yeah … my cardio guy is wonderful and has assured me I am not going to drop dead any-time soon from this … For people who had experienced heart disease without support, the value of the HeartNET site was self-evident (Jace): “My heart attack was 18 months ago and I knew no one with a similar experience. My family and friends were very supportive but they were as shocked as me. Heartnet has given me the opportunity to hear other people’s stories.” Almost two weeks later, Jace was able to offer the benefit of her experience to someone suffering from panic attacks: I had several panic attacks post my heart attack. They are very frightening aren’t they? They seemed to come out of nowhere and I felt very out of control. I found making myself breath[e] more slowly and deeply, while telling myself to calm down, helped a lot. I also started listening to relaxation CDs as well. Take care, [Jace]. Others have asked for advice: (Anne): “Everyone, and I mean everyone, has been saying ‘are you sure you want to go [back to work]?’ Does anyone have coping strategies for those well meaning colleagues and bosses who think you need to be wrapped up in cotton wool?” Several people have taken the opportunity to confide their deepest fear: (Marc): “Why me? Why now? Can I get back to work normally? Every twinge you feel, you think is the big one or another attack that will get you this time.” (Anne): “I decided to spend last night in A&E [accident and emergency] after a nice little ambulance ride. It turned out to be nothing more than stress and indigestion but it scared the crap out of me. I have taken it so easy today and intend to rest up from now on in.” Some of the posts are both celebratory and inspirational (although the one cited below required a rider to the effect that any change in activity should be checked with a GP or specialist): (Joggy) I mentioned on an earlier post that I was going to run the 4km in the City to Surf and I actually did it. This is from someone who has probably run no more than 100 metres in one go in her life and guess what, I quite like it now […] I know that I am way fitter now than I have ever been and in a nutshell it’s great. Others see support as a two-way street: (Drew) “If you no longer fell [sic] YOU need the support, keep in mind others may benefit from YOUR support.” Discussion Tomkins’s Affect theory suggests that humans are subject to two positive affects: interest/excitement; enjoyment/joy, and one neutral affect: surprise/startle, along with six negative affects. All these affects are decoded/interpreted from facial expressions and require face-to-face interactions to be fully perceived. When we look at what affective prompts may be inciting people to log into HeartNET and communicate online, however, it becomes hard to second guess the affective motivation. Interest/excitement may be overstating the emotional impulse while enjoyment/joy may be an extreme way to describe the pleasure of recognition and identification with others in a similar situation. Arguably, HeartNET offers an opportunity to minimise negative affect, in particular “distress/anguish; fear/terror; anger/rage; shame/humiliation” – all of which may be present in some people’s experiences of heart disease. A strategy for reducing negative affect may be as valuable as the promise of increasing the experience of positive affect. As for the rational or emotional impact, it seems clear from the first stages of the research that rationally people were willing to take part in the trial and agreed to participate, but a large majority then failed to either log in or post any contribution. The site came to emotional life only when it was less obviously a “research project” (in the sense that all participants still had to log in via an ethics disclosure and informed consent screen) in that people could join when and if they were motivated to do so, and were invited to participate by those who were already online. Since the Website was revamped and relaunched on 2 August 2005 a further 124 people have joined. It appears that HeartNET is now both an affective and effective success. References “Affective Therapy.” Affective Therapy Website: Tomkins and Affect. 9 Oct. 2005 http://www.affectivetherapy.co.uk/Tomkins_Affect.htm>. “Google Advanced Search.” Google. 1 Nov. 2005 http://www.google.com.au/advanced_search>. Lin, Nan. Conceptualizing Social Support: Social Support, Life Events, and Depression. Ed. Nan Lin, Alfred Dean, & Walter Ensel. Orlando: Florida, Academic Press, 1986. Madara, Edward. “The Mutual-Aid Self-Help Online Revolution”. Social Policy 27 (1997): 20. Tomkins, Silvan S. Affect, Imagery, Consciousness (Volume 1): The Positive Affects. New York: Springer, 1962. ———. Affect, Imagery, Consciousness (Volume 2): The Negative Affects. New York: Springer, 1963. ———. Affect, Imagery, Consciousness (Volume 3): The Negative Affects: Anger and Fear. New York: Springer, 1991. ———. Affect, Imagery, Consciousness (Volume 4): Cognition: Duplication and Transformation of Information. New York: Springer, 1992. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Bonniface, Leesa, Lelia Green, and Maurice Swanson. "Affect and an Effective Online Therapeutic Community." M/C Journal 8.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/05-bonnifacegreenswanson.php>. APA Style Bonniface, L., L. Green, and M. Swanson. (Dec. 2005) "Affect and an Effective Online Therapeutic Community," M/C Journal, 8(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/05-bonnifacegreenswanson.php>.

Abstract:

“Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them [...] life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.” (Garcia Marquez 165) Introduction The refugee experience is, at heart, one of rebirth. Just as becoming a new, distinctive being—biological birth—necessarily involves the physical separation of mother and infant, so becoming a refugee entails separation from a "mother country." This mother country may or may not be a recognised nation state; the point is that the refugee transitions from physical connectedness to separation, from insider to outsider, from endemic to alien. Like babies, refugees may have little control over the timing and conditions of their expulsion. Successful resettlement requires not one rebirth but multiple rebirths—resettlement is a lifelong process (Layton)—which in turn require hope, imagination, and energy. In rebirthing themselves over and over again, people who have fled or been forced from their homelands become both mother and child. They do not go through this rebirthing alone. A range of agencies and individuals may be there to assist, including immigration officials, settlement services, schools and teachers, employment agencies and employers, English as a Second Language (ESL) resources and instructors, health-care providers, counsellors, diasporic networks, neighbours, church groups, and other community organisations. The nature, intensity, and duration of these “midwives’” interventions—and when they occur and in what combinations—vary hugely from place to place and from person to person, but there is clear evidence that post-migration experiences have a significant impact on settlement outcomes (Fozdar and Hartley). This paper draws on qualitative research I did in 2012 in a regional town in New South Wales to illuminate some of the ways in which settlement aides ease, or impede, refugees’ rebirth as fully recognised and participating Australians. I begin by considering what it means to be resilient before tracing some of the dimensions of the resettlement process. In doing so, I draw on data from interviews and focus groups with former refugees, service providers, and other residents of the town I shall call Easthaven. First, though, a word about Easthaven. As is the case in many rural and regional parts of Australia, Easthaven’s population is strongly dominated by Anglo Celtic and Saxon ancestries: 2011 Census data show that more than 80 per cent of residents were born in Australia (compared with a national figure of 69.8 per cent) and about 90 per cent speak only English at home (76.8 per cent). Almost twice as many people identify as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander as the national figure of 2.5 per cent (Australian Bureau of Statistics). For several years Easthaven has been an official “Refugee Welcome Zone”, welcoming hundreds of refugees from diverse countries in Africa and the Middle East as well as from Myanmar. This reflects the Department of Immigration and Citizenship’s drive to settle a fifth of Australia’s 13,750 humanitarian entrants a year directly in regional areas. In Easthaven’s schools—which is where I focused my research—almost all of the ESL students are from refugee backgrounds. Defining Resilience Much of the research on human resilience is grounded in psychology, with a capacity to “bounce back” from adverse experiences cited in many definitions of resilience (e.g. American Psychological Association). Bouncing back implies a relatively quick process, and a return to a state or form similar to that which existed before the encounter with adversity. Yet resilience often requires sustained effort and significant changes in identity. As Jerome Rugaruza, a former UNHCR refugee, says of his journey from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Australia: All the steps begin in the burning village: you run with nothing to eat, no clothes. You just go. Then you get to the refugee camp […] You have a little bread and you thank god you are safe. Then after a few years in the camp, you think about a future for your children. You arrive in Australia and then you learn a new language, you learn to drive. There are so many steps and not everyone can do it. (Milsom) Not everyone can do it, but a large majority do. Research by Graeme Hugo, for example, shows that although humanitarian settlers in Australia face substantial barriers to employment and initially have much higher unemployment rates than other immigrants, for most nationality groups this difference has disappeared by the second generation: “This is consistent with the sacrifice (or investment) of the first generation and the efforts extended to attain higher levels of education and English proficiency, thereby reducing the barriers over time.” (Hugo 35). Ingrid Poulson writes that “resilience is not just about bouncing. Bouncing […] is only a reaction. Resilience is about rising—you rise above it, you rise to the occasion, you rise to the challenge. Rising is an active choice” (47; my emphasis) I see resilience as involving mental and physical grit, coupled with creativity, aspiration and, crucially, agency. Dimensions of Resettlement To return to the story of 41-year-old Jerome Rugaruza, as related in a recent newspaper article: He [Mr Rugaruza] describes the experience of being a newly arrived refugee as being like that of a newborn baby. “You need special care; you have to learn to speak [English], eat the different food, create relationships, connections”. (Milsom) This is a key dimension of resettlement: the adult becomes like an infant again, shifting from someone who knows how things work and how to get by to someone who is likely to be, for a while, dependent on others for even the most basic things—communication, food, shelter, clothing, and social contact. The “special care” that most refugee arrivals need initially (and sometimes for a long time) often results in their being seen as deficient—in knowledge, skills, dispositions, and capacities as well as material goods (Keddie; Uptin, Wright and Harwood). As Fozdar and Hartley note: “The tendency to use a deficit model in refugee resettlement devalues people and reinforces the view of the mainstream population that refugees are a liability” (27). Yet unlike newborns, humanitarian settlers come to their new countries with rich social networks and extensive histories of experience and learning—resources that are in fact vital to their rebirth. Sisay (all names are pseudonyms), a year 11 student of Ethiopian heritage who was born in Kenya, told me with feeling: I had a life back in Africa [her emphasis]. It was good. Well, I would go back there if there’s no problems, which—is a fact. And I came here for a better life—yeah, I have a better life, there’s good health care, free school, and good environment and all that. But what’s that without friends? A fellow student, Celine, who came to Australia five years ago from Burundi via Uganda, told me in a focus group: Some teachers are really good but I think some other teachers could be a little bit more encouraging and understanding of what we’ve gone through, because [they] just look at you like “You’re year 11 now, you should know this” […] It’s really discouraging when [the teachers say] in front of the class, “Oh, you shouldn’t do this subject because you haven’t done this this this this” […] It’s like they’re on purpose to tell you “you don’t have what it takes; just give up and do something else.” As Uptin, Wright and Harwood note, “schools not only have the power to position who is included in schooling (in culture and pedagogy) but also have the power to determine whether there is room and appreciation for diversity” (126). Both Sisay and Celine were disheartened by the fact they felt some of their teachers, and many of their peers, had little interest in or understanding of their lives before they came to Australia. The teachers’ low expectations of refugee-background students (Keddie, Uptin, Wright and Harwood) contrasted with the students’ and their families’ high expectations of themselves (Brown, Miller and Mitchell; Harris and Marlowe). When I asked Sisay about her post-school ambitions, she said: “I have a good idea of my future […] write a documentary. And I’m working on it.” Celine’s response was: “I know I’m gonna do medicine, be a doctor.” A third girl, Lily, who came to Australia from Myanmar three years ago, told me she wanted to be an accountant and had studied accounting at the local TAFE last year. Joseph, a father of three who resettled from South Sudan seven years ago, stressed how important getting a job was to successful settlement: [But] you have to get a certificate first to get a job. Even the job of cleaning—when I came here I was told that somebody has to go to have training in cleaning, to use the different chemicals to clean the ground and all that. But that is just sweeping and cleaning with water—you don’t need the [higher-level] skills. Simple jobs like this, we are not able to get them. In regional Australia, employment opportunities tend to be limited (Fozdar and Hartley); the unemployment rate in Easthaven is twice the national average. Opportunities to study are also more limited than in urban centres, and would-be students are not always eligible for financial assistance to gain or upgrade qualifications. Even when people do have appropriate qualifications, work experience, and language proficiency, the colour of their skin may still mean they miss out on a job. Tilbury and Colic-Peisker have documented the various ways in which employers deflect responsibility for racial discrimination, including the “common” strategy (658) of arguing that while the employer or organisation is not prejudiced, they have to discriminate because of their clients’ needs or expectations. I heard this strategy deployed in an interview with a local businesswoman, Catriona: We were advertising for a new technician. And one of the African refugees came to us and he’d had a lot of IT experience. And this is awful, but we felt we couldn't give him the job, because we send our technicians into people's houses, and we knew that if a black African guy rocked up at someone’s house to try and fix their computer, they would not always be welcomed in all—look, it would not be something that [Easthaven] was ready for yet. Colic-Peisker and Tilbury (Refugees and Employment) note that while Australia has strict anti-discrimination legislation, this legislation may be of little use to the people who, because of the way they look and sound (skin colour, dress, accent), are most likely to face prejudice and discrimination. The researchers found that perceived discrimination in the labour market affected humanitarian settlers’ sense of satisfaction with their new lives far more than, for example, racist remarks, which were generally shrugged off; the students I interviewed spoke of racism as “expected,” but “quite rare.” Most of the people Colic-Peisker and Tilbury surveyed reported finding Australians “friendly and accepting” (33). Even if there is no active discrimination on the basis of skin colour in employment, education, or housing, or overt racism in social situations, visible difference can still affect a person’s sense of belonging, as Joseph recounts: I think of myself as Australian, but my colour doesn’t [laughs] […] Unfortunately many, many Australians are expecting that Australia is a country of Europeans … There is no need for somebody to ask “Where do you come from?” and “Do you find Australia here safe?” and “Do you enjoy it?” Those kind of questions doesn’t encourage that we are together. This highlights another dimension of resettlement: the journey from feeling “at home” to feeling “foreign” to, eventually, feeling at home again in the host country (Colic-Peisker and Tilbury, Refugees and Employment). In the case of visibly different settlers, however, this last stage may never be completed. Whether the questions asked of Joseph are well intentioned or not, their effect may be the same: they position him as a “forever foreigner” (Park). A further dimension of resettlement—one already touched on—is the degree to which humanitarian settlers actively manage their “rebirth,” and are allowed and encouraged to do so. A key factor will be their mastery of English, and Easthaven’s ESL teachers are thus pivotal in the resettlement process. There is little doubt that many of these teachers have gone to great lengths to help this cohort of students, not only in terms of language acquisition but also social inclusion. However, in some cases what is initially supportive can, with time, begin to undermine refugees’ maturity into independent citizens. Sharon, an ESL teacher at one of the schools, told me how she and her colleagues would give their refugee-background students lifts to social events: But then maybe three years down the track they have a car and their dad can drive, but they still won’t take them […] We arrive to pick them up and they’re not ready, or there’s five fantastic cars in the driveway, and you pick up the student and they say “My dad’s car’s much bigger and better than yours” [laughs]. So there’s an expectation that we’ll do stuff for them, but we’ve created that [my emphasis]. Other support services may have more complex interests in keeping refugee settlers dependent. The more clients an agency has, the more services it provides, and the longer clients stay on its books, the more lucrative the contract for the agency. Thus financial and employment imperatives promote competition rather than collaboration between service providers (Fozdar and Hartley; Sidhu and Taylor) and may encourage assumptions about what sorts of services different individuals and groups want and need. Colic-Peisker and Tilbury (“‘Active’ and ‘Passive’ Resettlement”) have developed a typology of resettlement styles—“achievers,” “consumers,” “endurers,” and “victims”—but stress that a person’s style, while influenced by personality and pre-migration factors, is also shaped by the institutions and individuals they come into contact with: “The structure of settlement and welfare services may produce a victim mentality, leaving members of refugee communities inert and unable to see themselves as agents of change” (76). The prevailing narrative of “the traumatised refugee” is a key aspect of this dynamic (Colic-Peisker and Tilbury, “‘Active’ and ‘Passive’ Resettlement”; Fozdar and Hartley; Keddie). Service providers may make assumptions about what humanitarian settlers have gone through before arriving in Australia, how they have been affected by their experiences, and what must be done to “fix” them. Norah, a long-time caseworker, told me: I think you get some [providers] who go, “How could you have gone through something like that and not suffered? There must be—you must have to talk about this stuff” […] Where some [refugees] just come with the [attitude] “We’re all born into a situation; that was my situation, but I’m here now and now my focus is this.” She cited failure to consider cultural sensitivities around mental illness and to recognise that stress and anxiety during early resettlement are normal (Tilbury) as other problems in the sector: [Newly arrived refugees] go through the “happy to be here” [phase] and now “hang on, I’ve thumped to the bottom and I’m missing my own foods and smells and cultures and experiences”. I think sometimes we’re just too quick to try and slot people into a box. One factor that appears to be vital in fostering and sustaining resilience is social connection. Norah said her clients were “very good on the mobile phone” and had links “everywhere,” including to family and friends in their countries of birth, transition countries, and other parts of Australia. A 2011 report for DIAC, Settlement Outcomes of New Arrivals, found that humanitarian entrants to Australia were significantly more likely to be members of cultural and/or religious groups than other categories of immigrants (Australian Survey Research). I found many examples of efforts to build both bonding and bridging capital (Putnam) in Easthaven, and I offer two examples below. Several people told me about a dinner-dance that had been held a few weeks before one of my visits. The event was organised by an African women’s group, which had been formed—with funding assistance—several years before. The dinner-dance was advertised in the local newspaper and attracted strong interest from a broad cross-section of Easthaveners. To Debbie, a counsellor, the response signified a “real turnaround” in community relations and was a big boon to the women’s sense of belonging. Erica, a teacher, told me about a cultural exchange day she had organised between her bush school—where almost all of the children are Anglo Australian—and ESL students from one of the town schools: At the start of the day, my kids were looking at [the refugee-background students] and they were scared, they were saying to me, "I feel scared." And we shoved them all into this tiny little room […] and they had no choice but to sit practically on top of each other. And by the end of the day, they were hugging each other and braiding their hair and jumping and playing together. Like Uptin, Wright and Harwood, I found that the refugee-background students placed great importance on the social aspects of school. Sisay, the girl I introduced earlier in this paper, said: “It’s just all about friendship and someone to be there for you […] We try to be friends with them [the non-refugee students] sometimes but sometimes it just seems they don’t want it.” Conclusion A 2012 report on refugee settlement services in NSW concludes that the state “is not meeting its responsibility to humanitarian entrants as well as it could” (Audit Office of New South Wales 2); moreover, humanitarian settlers in NSW are doing less well on indicators such as housing and health than humanitarian settlers in other states (3). Evaluating the effectiveness of formal refugee-centred programs was not part of my research and is beyond the scope of this paper. Rather, I have sought to reveal some of the ways in which the attitudes, assumptions, and everyday practices of service providers and members of the broader community impact on refugees' settlement experience. What I heard repeatedly in the interviews I conducted was that it was emotional and practical support (Matthews; Tilbury), and being asked as well as told (about their hopes, needs, desires), that helped Easthaven’s refugee settlers bear themselves into fulfilling new lives. References Audit Office of New South Wales. Settling Humanitarian Entrants in New South Wales—Executive Summary. May 2012. 15 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.audit.nsw.gov.au/ArticleDocuments/245/02_Humanitarian_Entrants_2012_Executive_Summary.pdf.aspx?Embed=Y>. Australian Bureau of Statistics. 2011 Census QuickStats. Mar. 2013. 11 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.censusdata.abs.gov.au/census_services/getproduct/census/2011/quickstat/0>. Australian Survey Research. Settlement Outcomes of New Arrivals—Report of Findings. Apr. 2011. 15 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.immi.gov.au/media/publications/research/_pdf/settlement-outcomes-new-arrivals.pdf>. Brown, Jill, Jenny Miller, and Jane Mitchell. “Interrupted Schooling and the Acquisition of Literacy: Experiences of Sudanese Refugees in Victorian Secondary Schools.” Australian Journal of Language and Literacy 29.2 (2006): 150-62. Colic-Peisker, Val, and Farida Tilbury. “‘Active’ and ‘Passive’ Resettlement: The Influence of Supporting Services and Refugees’ Own Resources on Resettlement Style.” International Migration 41.5 (2004): 61-91. ———. Refugees and Employment: The Effect of Visible Difference on Discrimination—Final Report. Perth: Centre for Social and Community Research, Murdoch University, 2007. Fozdar, Farida, and Lisa Hartley. “Refugee Resettlement in Australia: What We Know and Need To Know.” Refugee Survey Quarterly 4 Jun. 2013. 12 Aug. 2013 ‹http://rsq.oxfordjournals.org/search?fulltext=fozdar&submit=yes&x=0&y=0>. Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. Love in the Time of Cholera. London: Penguin Books, 1989. Harris, Vandra, and Jay Marlowe. “Hard Yards and High Hopes: The Educational Challenges of African Refugee University Students in Australia.” International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education 23.2 (2011): 186-96. Hugo, Graeme. A Significant Contribution: The Economic, Social and Civic Contributions of First and Second Generation Humanitarian Entrants—Summary of Findings. Canberra: Department of Immigration and Citizenship, 2011. Keddie, Amanda. “Pursuing Justice for Refugee Students: Addressing Issues of Cultural (Mis)recognition.” International Journal of Inclusive Education 16.12 (2012): 1295-1310. Layton, Robyn. "Building Capacity to Ensure the Inclusion of Vulnerable Groups." Creating Our Future conference, Adelaide, 28 Jul. 2012. Milsom, Rosemarie. “From Hard Luck Life to the Lucky Country.” Sydney Morning Herald 20 Jun. 2013. 12 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/national/from-hard-luck-life-to-the-lucky-country-20130619-2oixl.html>. Park, Gilbert C. “’Are We Real Americans?’: Cultural Production of Forever Foreigners at a Diversity Event.” Education and Urban Society 43.4 (2011): 451-67. Poulson, Ingrid. Rise. Sydney: Pan Macmillan Australia, 2008. Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Sidhu, Ravinder K., and Sandra Taylor. “The Trials and Tribulations of Partnerships in Refugee Settlement Services in Australia.” Journal of Education Policy 24.6 (2009): 655-72. Tilbury, Farida. “‘I Feel I Am a Bird without Wings’: Discourses of Sadness and Loss among East Africans in Western Australia.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 14.4 (2007): 433-58. ———, and Val Colic-Peisker. “Deflecting Responsibility in Employer Talk about Race Discrimination.” Discourse & Society 17.5 (2006): 651-76. Uptin, Jonnell, Jan Wright, and Valerie Harwood. “It Felt Like I Was a Black Dot on White Paper: Examining Young Former Refugees’ Experience of Entering Australian High Schools.” The Australian Educational Researcher 40.1 (2013): 125-37.

Abstract:

During the War on Terror, the United States military has been conducting an increasing number of foreign campaigns by remote control using drones—also called unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or remotely piloted vehicles (RPVs)—to extend the reach of military power and augment the technical precision of targeted strikes while minimizing bodily risk to American combatants. Stationed on bases throughout the southwest, operators fly weaponized drones over the Middle East. Viewing the battle zone through a computer screen that presents them with imagery captured from a drone-mounted camera, these combatants participate in war from a safe distance via an interface that resembles a video game. Increasingly, this participation takes the form of targeted killing. Despite their relative physical safety, in 2008 reports began mounting that like boots-on-the-ground combatants, many drone operators seek the services of chaplains or other mental health professionals to deal with the emotional toll of their work (Associated Press; Schachtman). Questions about the nature of the stress or trauma that drone operators experience have become a trope in news coverage of drone warfare (see Bumiller; Bowden; Saleton; Axe). This was exemplified in May 2013, when former Air Force drone pilot Brandon Bryant became a public figure after speaking to National Public Radio about his remorse for participating in targeted killing strikes and his subsequent struggle with post-traumatic stress (PTS) (Greene and McEvers). Stories like Bryant’s express American culture’s struggle to understand the role screen-mediated, remotely controlled killing plays in shifting the location of combatants’s sense of moral agency. That is, their sense of their ability to act based on their own understanding of right and wrong. Historically, one of the primary ways that psychiatry has conceptualized combat trauma has been as combatants’s psychological response losing their sense of moral agency on the battlefield (Lifton).This articleuses the popular science fiction novel Ender's Game as an analytic lens through which to examine the ways that screen-mediated warfare may result in combat trauma by investigating the ways in which it may compromise moral agency. The goal of this analysis is not to describe the present state of drone operators’s experience (see Asaro), but rather to compare and contrast contemporary public discourses on the psychological impact of screen-mediated war with the way it is represented in one of the most influential science fiction novels of all times (The book won the Nebula Award in 1985, the Hugo Award in 1986, and appears on both the Modern Library 100 Best Novels and American Library Association’s “100 Best Books for Teens” lists). In so doing, the paper aims to counter prevalent modes of critical analysis of screen-mediated war that cannot account for drone operators’s trauma. For decades, critics of postmodern warfare have denounced how fighting from inside tanks, the co*ckpits of planes, or at office desks has removed combatants from the experiences of risk and endangerment that historically characterized war (see Gray; Levidow & Robins). They suggest that screen-mediation enables not only physical but also cognitive and emotional distance from the violence of war-fighting by circ*mscribing it in a “magic circle.” Virtual worlds scholars adopted the term “magic circle” from cultural historian Johan Huizinga, who described it as the membrane that separates the time and space of game-play from those of real life (Salen and Zimmerman). While military scholars have long recognized that only 2% of soldiers can kill without hesitation (Grossman), critics of “video game wars” suggest that screen-mediation puts war in a magic circle, thereby creating cyborg human-machine assemblages capable of killing in cold blood. In other words, these critics argue that screen-mediated war distributes agency between humans and machines in such a way that human combatants do not feel morally responsible for killing. In contrast, Ender’s Game suggests that even when militaries utilize video game aesthetics to create weapons control interfaces, screen-mediation alone ultimately cannot blur the line between war and play and thereby psychically shield cyborg soldiers from combat trauma.Orson Scott Card’s 1985 novel Ender’s Game—and the 2013 film adaptation—tells the story of a young boy at an elite military academy. Set several decades after a terrible war between humans and an alien race called the buggers, the novel follows the life of a boy named Ender. At age 6, recruiters take Andrew “Ender” Wiggin from his family to begin military training. He excels in all areas and eventually enters officer training. There he encounters a new video game-like simulator in which he commands space ship battalions against increasingly complex configurations of bugger ships. At the novel’s climax, Ender's mentor, war hero Mazer Rackham, brings him to a room crowded with high-ranking military personnel in order to take his final test on the simulator. In order to win Ender opts to launch a massive bomb, nicknamed “Little Doctor”, at the bugger home world. The image on his screen of a ball of space dust where once sat the enemy planet is met by victory cheers. Mazer then informs Ender that since he began officer training, he has been remotely controlling real ships. The video game war was, "Real. Not a game" (Card 297); Ender has exterminated the bugger species. But rather than join the celebration, Ender is devastated to learn he has committed "xenocide." Screen-mediation, the novel shows, can enable people to commit acts that they would otherwise find heinous.US military advisors have used the story to set an agenda for research and development in augmented media. For example, Dr. Michael Macedonia, Chief Technology Officer of the Army Office for Simulation, Training, and Instrumentation told a reporter for the New York Times that Ender's Game "has had a lot of influence on our thinking" about how to use video game-like technologies in military operations (Harmon; Silberman; Mead). Many recent programs to develop and study video game-like military training simulators have been directly inspired by the book and its promise of being able to turn even a six-year-old into a competent combatant through well-structured human-computer interaction (Mead). However, it would appear that the novel’s moral regarding the psychological impact of actual screen-mediated combat did not dissuade military investment in drone warfare. The Air Force began using drones for surveillance during the Gulf War, but during the Global War on Terror they began to be equipped with weapons. By 2010, the US military operated over 7,000 drones, including over 200 weapons-ready Predator and Reaper drones. It now invests upwards of three-billion dollars a year into the drone program (Zucchino). While there are significant differences between contemporary drone warfare and the plot of Ender's Game—including the fact that Ender is a child, that he alone commands a fleet, that he thinks he is playing a game, and that, except for a single weapon of mass destruction, he and his enemies are equally well equipped—for this analysis, I will focus on their most important similarities: both Ender and actual drone operators work on teams for long shifts using video game-like technology to remotely control vehicles in aerial combat against an enemy. After he uses the Little Doctor, Mazer and Graff, Ender's long-time training supervisors, first work to circumvent his guilt by reframing his actions as heroic. “You're a hero, Ender. They've seen what you did, you and the others. I don't think there's a government on Earth that hasn't voted you their highest metal.” “I killed them all, didn't I?” Ender asked. “All who?” asked Graff. “The buggers? That was the idea.” Mazer leaned in close. “That's what the war was for.” “All their queens. So I killed all their children, all of everything.” “They decided that when they attacked us. It wasn't your fault. It's what had to happen.” Ender grabbed Mazer's uniform and hung onto it, pulling him down so they were face to face. “I didn't want to kill them all. I didn't want to kill anybody! I'm not a killer! […] but you made me do it, you tricked me into it!” He was crying. He was out of control. (Card 297–8)The novel up to this point has led us to believe that Ender at the very least understands that what he does in the game will be asked of him in real life. But his traumatic response to learning the truth reveals that he was in the magic circle. When he thinks he is playing a game, succeeding is a matter of ego: he wants to be the best, to live up to the expectations of his trainers that he is humanity’s last hope. When the magic circle is broken, Ender reconsiders his decision to use the Little Doctor. Tactics he could justify to win the game, reframed as real military tactics, threaten his sense of himself as a moral agent. Being told he is a hero provides no solace.Card wrote the novel during the Cold War, when computers were coming to play an increasingly large role in military operations. Historians of military technology have shown that during this time human behavior began to be defined in machine-like, functionalist terms by scientists working on cybernetic systems (see Edwards; Galison; Orr). Human skills were defined as components of large technological systems, such as tanks and anti-aircraft weaponry: a human skill was treated as functionally the same as a machine one. The only issue of importance was how all the components could work together in order to meet strategic goals—a cybernetic problem. The reasons that Mazer and Graff have for lying to Ender suggest that the author believed that as a form of technical augmentation, screen-mediation can be used to evacuate individual moral agency and submit human will to the command of the larger cybernetic system. Issues of displaced agency in the military cyborg assemblage are apparent in the following quote, in which Mazer compares Ender himself to the bomb he used to destroy the bugger home world: “You had to be a weapon, Ender. Like a gun, like the Little Doctor, functioning perfectly but not knowing what you were aimed at. We aimed you. We're responsible. If there was something wrong, we did it” (298). Questions of distributed agency have also surfaced in the drone debates. Government and military leaders have attempted to depersonalize drone warfare by assuring the American public that the list of targets is meticulously researched: drones kill those who we need killed. Drone warfare, media theorist Peter Asaro argues, has “created new and complex forms of human-machine subjectivity” that cannot be understood by considering the agency of the technology alone because it is distributed between humans and machines (25). While our leaders’s decisions about who to kill are central to this new cyborg subjectivity, the operators who fire the weapons nevertheless experience at least a retrospective sense of agency. As phenomenologist John Protevi notes, in the wake of wars fought by modern military networks, many veterans diagnosed with PTS still express guilt and personal responsibility for the outcomes of their participation in killing (Protevi). Mazer and Graff explain that the two qualities that make Ender such a good weapon also create an imperative to lie to him: his compassion and his innocence. For his trainers, compassion means a capacity to truly think like others, friend or foe, and understand their motivations. Graff explains that while his trainers recognized Ender's compassion as an invaluable tool, they also recognized that it would preclude his willingness to kill.It had to be a trick or you couldn't have done it. It's the bind we were in. We had to have a commander with so much empathy that he would think like the buggers, understand them and anticipate them. So much compassion that he could win the love of his underlings and work with them like a perfect machine, as perfect as the buggers. But somebody with that much compassion could never be the killer we needed. Could never go into battle willing to win at all costs. If you knew, you couldn't do it. If you were the kind of person who would do it even if you knew, you could never have understood the buggers well enough. (298)In learning that the game was real, Ender learns that he was not merely coming to understand a programmed simulation of bugger behavior, but their actual psychology. Therefore, his compassion has not only helped him understand the buggers’ military strategy, but also to identify with them.Like Ender, drone operators spend weeks or months following their targets, getting to know them and their routines from a God’s eye perspective. They both also watch the repercussions of their missions on screen. Unlike fighter pilots who drop bombs and fly away, drone operators use high-resolution cameras and fly much closer to the ground both when flying and assessing the results of their strikes. As one drone operator interviewed by the Los Angeles Times explained, "When I flew the B-52, it was at 30,000 to 40,000 feet, and you don't even see the bombs falling … Here, you're a lot closer to the actual fight, or that's the way it seems" (Zucchino). Brookings Institute scholar Peter Singer has argued that in this way screen mediation actually enables a more intimate experience of violence for drone operators than airplane pilots (Singer).The second reason Ender’s trainers give for lying is that they need someone not only compassionate, but also innocent of the horrors of war. The war veteran Mazer explains: “And it had to be a child, Ender,” said Mazer. “You were faster than me. Better than me. I was too old and cautious. Any decent person who knows what warfare is can never go into battle with a whole heart. But you didn't know. We made sure you didn't know" (298). When Ender discovers what he has done, he loses not only his innocence but his sense of himself as a moral agent. After such a trauma, his heart is no longer whole.Actual drone operators are, of course, not kept in a magic circle, innocent of the repercussions of their actions. Nor do they otherwise feel as though they are playing, as several have publicly stated. Instead, they report finding drone work tedious, and some even play video games for fun (Asaro). However, Air Force recruitment advertising makes clear analogies between the skills they desire and those of video game play (Brown). Though the first generations of drone operators were pulled from the ranks of flight pilots, in 2009 the Air Force began training them from the ground. Many drone operators, then, enter the role having no other military service and may come into it believing, on some level, that their work will be play.Recent military studies of drone operators have raised doubts about whether drone operators really experience high rates of trauma, suggesting that the stresses they experience are seated instead in occupational issues like long shifts (Ouma, Chappelle, and Salinas; Chappelle, Psy, and Salinas). But several critics of these studies have pointed out that there is a taboo against speaking about feelings of regret and trauma in the military in general and among drone operators in particular. A PTS diagnosis can end a military career; given the Air Force’s career-focused recruiting emphasis, it makes sense that few would come forward (Dao). Therefore, it is still important to take drone operator PTS seriously and try to understand how screen-mediation augments their experience of killing.While critics worry that warfare mediated by a screen and joystick leads to a “‘Playstation’ mentality towards killing” (Alston 25), Ender's Game presents a theory of remote-control war wherein this technological redistribution of the act of killing does not, in itself, create emotional distance or evacuate the killer’s sense of moral agency. In order to kill, Ender must be distanced from reality as well. While drone operators do not work shielded by the magic circle—and therefore do not experience the trauma of its dissolution—every day when they leave the cyborg assemblage of their work stations and rejoin their families they still have to confront themselves as individual moral agents and bear their responsibility for ending lives. In both these scenarios, a human agent’s combat trauma serves to remind us that even when their bodies are physically safe, war is hell for those who fight. This paper has illustrated how a science fiction story can be used as an analytic lens for thinking through contemporary discourses about human-technology relationships. However, the US military is currently investing in drones that are increasingly autonomous from human operators. This redistribution of agency may reduce incidence of PTS among operators by decreasing their role in, and therefore sense of moral responsibility for, killing (Axe). Reducing mental illness may seem to be a worthwhile goal, but in a world wherein militaries distribute the agency for killing to machines in order to reduce the burden on humans, societies will have to confront the fact that combatants’s trauma cannot be a compass by which to measure the morality of wars. Too often in the US media, the primary stories that Americans are told about the violence of their country’s wars are those of their own combatants—not only about their deaths and physical injuries, but their suicide and PTS. To understand war in such a world, we will need new, post-humanist stories where the cyborg assemblage and not the individual is held accountable for killing and morality is measured in lives taken, not rates of mental illness. ReferencesAlston, Phillip. “Report of the Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions, Addendum: Study on Targeted Killings.” United Nations Human Rights Council (2010). Asaro, Peter M. “The Labor of Surveillance and Bureaucratized Killing: New Subjectivities of Military Drone Operators”. Social Semiotics 23.2 (2013): 196-22. Associated Press. “Predator Pilots Suffering War Stress.” Military.com 2008. Axe, David. “How to Prevent Drone Pilot PTSD: Blame the ’Bot.” Wired June 2012.Bowden, Mark. “The Killing Machines: How to Think about Drones.” The Atlantic Sep. 2013.Brown, Melissa T. Enlisting Masculinity: The Construction of Gender in US Military Recruiting Advertising during the All-Volunteer Force. London: Oxford University Press, 2012. Bumiller, Elisabeth. “Air Force Drone Operators Report High Levels of Stress.” New York Times 18 Dec. 2011: n. pag. Card, Orson Scott. Ender’s Game. Tom Doherty Associates, Inc., 1985. Chappelle, Wayne, D. Psy, and Amber Salinas. “Psychological Health Screening of Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) Operators and Supporting Units.” Paper presented at the Symposium on Mental Health and Well-Being across the Military Spectrum, Bergen, Norway, 12 April 2011: 1–12. Dao, James. “Drone Pilots Are Found to Get Stress Disorders Much as Those in Combat Do.” New York Times 22 Feb. 2013: n. pag. Edwards, Paul N. The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997.Galison, Peter. “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision.” Critical Inquiry 21.1 (1994): 228.Gray, Chris Hables “Posthuman Soldiers in Postmodern War.” Body & Society 9.4 (2003): 215–226. 27 Nov. 2010.Greene, David, and Kelly McEvers. “Former Air Force Pilot Has Cautionary Tales about Drones.” National Public Radio 10 May 2013.Grossman, David. On Killing. Revised. Boston: Back Bay Books, 2009. Harmon, Amy. “More than Just a Game, But How Close to Reality?” New York Times 3 Apr. 2003: n. pag. Levidow, Les, and Robins. Cyborg Worlds: The Military Information Society. London: Free Association Books, 1989. Lifton, Robert Jay. Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans: Neither Victims nor Executioners. New York: Random House, 1973. Mead, Corey. War Play: Video Games and the Future of Armed Conflict. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013. Orr, Jackie. Panic Diaries: A Genealogy of Panic Disorder. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.Ouma, J.A., W.L. Chappelle, and A. Salinas. Facets of Occupational Burnout among US Air Force Active Duty and National Guard/Reserve MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper Operators. Air Force Research Labs Technical Report AFRL-SA-WP-TR-2011-0003. Wright-Patterson AFB, OH: Air Force Research Laboratory. 2011.Protevi, John. “Affect, Agency and Responsibility: The Act of Killing in the Age of Cyborgs.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 7.3 (2008): 405–413. Salen, Katie, and Eric Zimmerman. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Saleton, William. “Ghosts in the Machine: Do Remote-Control War Pilots Get Combat Stress?” Slate.com Aug. 2008. Schachtman, Nathan. “Shrinks Help Drone Pilots Cope with Robo-Violence.” Wired Aug. 2008.Silberman, Steve. “The War Room.” Wired Sep. 2004: 1–5.Singer, P.W. Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Penguin Press, 2009. Zucchino, David. “Drone Pilots Have Front-Row Seat on War, from Half a World Away.” Los Angeles Times 21 Feb. 2010: n. pag.

Abstract:

IntroductionLike other forms of embodiment, pregnancy has increasingly become subject to representation and interpretation via digital technologies. Pregnancy and the unborn entity were largely private, and few people beyond the pregnant women herself had access to the foetus growing within her (Duden). Now pregnant and foetal bodies have become open to public portrayal and display (Lupton The Social Worlds of the Unborn). A plethora of online materials – websites depicting the unborn entity from the moment of conception, amateur YouTube videos of births, social media postings of ultrasounds and self-taken photos (‘selfies’) showing changes in pregnant bellies, and so on – now ensure the documentation of pregnant and unborn bodies in extensive detail, rendering them open to other people’s scrutiny. Other recent digital technologies directed at pregnancy include mobile software applications, or ‘apps’. In this article, we draw on our study involving a critical discourse analysis of a corpus of pregnancy-related apps offered in the two major app stores. In so doing, we discuss the ways in which pregnancy-related apps portray pregnant and unborn bodies. We place a particular focus on the ludification and gamification strategies employed to position pregnancy as a playful, creative and fulfilling experience that is frequently focused on consumption. As we will demonstrate, these strategies have wider implications for concepts of pregnant and foetal embodiment and subjectivity.It is important here to make a distinction between ludification and gamification. Ludification is a broader term than gamification. It is used in the academic literature on gaming (sometimes referred to as ‘ludology’) to refer to elements of games reaching into other aspects of life beyond leisure pursuits (Frissen et al. Playful Identities: The Ludification of Digital Media Cultures; Raessens). Frissen et al. (Frissen et al. "hom*o Ludens 2.0: Play, Media and Identity") for example, claim that even serious pursuits such as work, politics, education and warfare have been subjected to ludification. They note that digital technologies in general tend to incorporate ludic dimensions. Gamification has been described as ‘the use of game design elements in non-game contexts’ (Deterding et al. 9). The term originated in the digital media industry to describe the incorporation of features into digital technologies that not explicitly designed as games, such as competition, badges, rewards and fun that engaged and motivated users to make them more enjoyable to use. Gamification is now often used in literatures on marketing strategies, persuasive computing or behaviour modification. It is an important element of ‘nudge’, an approach to behaviour change that involves persuasion over coercion (Jones, Pykett and Whitehead). Gamification thus differs from ludification in that the former involves applying ludic principles for reasons other than the pleasures of enjoying the game for their own sake, often to achieve objectives set by actors and agencies other than the gamer. Indeed, this is why gamification software has been described by Bogost (Bogost) as ‘exploitationware’. Analysing Pregnancy AppsMobile apps have become an important medium in contemporary digital technology use. As of May 2015, 1.5 million apps were available to download on Google Play while 1.4 million were available in the Apple App Store (Statista). Apps related to pregnancy are a popular item in app stores, frequently appearing on the Apple App Store’s list of most-downloaded apps. Google Play’s figures show that many apps directed at pregnant women have been downloaded hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of times. For example, ‘Pregnancy +’, ‘I’m Expecting - Pregnancy App’ and ‘What to Expect - Pregnancy Tracker’ have each been downloaded between one and five million times, while ‘My Pregnancy Today’ has received between five and ten million downloads. Pregnancy games for young girls are also popular. Google Play figures show that the ‘Pregnant Emergency Doctor’ game, for example, has received between one and five million downloads. Research has found that pregnant women commonly download pregnancy-related apps and find them useful sources of information and support (Hearn, Miller and Fletcher; Rodger et al.; Kraschnewski et al.; Declercq et al.; Derbyshire and Dancey; O'Higgins et al.). We conducted a comprehensive analysis of all pregnancy-related smartphone apps in the two major app stores, Apple App Store and Google Play, in late June 2015. Android and Apple’s iOS have a combined market share of 91 percent of apps installed on mobile phones (Seneviratne et al.). A search for all pregnancy-related apps offered in these stores used key terms such as pregnancy, childbirth, conception, foetus/fetus and baby. After eliminating apps listed in these searches that were clearly not human pregnancy-related, 665 apps on Google Play and 1,141 on the Apple App Store remained for inclusion in our study. (Many of these apps were shared across the stores.)We carried out a critical discourse analysis of these apps, looking closely at the app descriptions offered in the two stores. We adopted the perspective that sees apps, like any other form of media, as sociocultural artefacts that both draw on and reproduce shared norms, ideals, knowledges and beliefs (Lupton "Quantified Sex: A Critical Analysis of Sexual and Reproductive Self-Tracking Using Apps"; Millington "Smartphone Apps and the Mobile Privatization of Health and Fitness"; Lupton "Apps as Artefacts: Towards a Critical Perspective on Mobile Health and Medical Apps"). In undertaking our analysis of the app descriptions in our corpus, attention was paid to the title of each app, the textual accounts of its content and use and the images that were employed, such as the logo of the app and the screenshots that were used to illustrate its content and style. Our focus in this article is on the apps that we considered as including elements of entertainment. Pregnancy-related game apps were by far the largest category of the apps in our corpus. These included games for young girls and expectant fathers as well as apps for ultrasound manipulation, pregnancy pranks, foetal sex prediction, choosing baby names, and quizzes. Less obviously, many other apps included in our analysis offered some elements of gamification and ludification, and these were considered in our analysis. ‘Pregnant Adventures’: App Games for GirlsOne of the major genres of apps that we identified was games directed at young girls. These apps invited users to shop for clothes, dress up, give a new hair style, ‘make-over’ and otherwise beautify a pregnant woman. These activities were directed at the goal of improving the physical attractiveness and therefore (it was suggested) the confidence of the woman, who was presented as struggling with coming to terms with changes in her body during pregnancy. Other apps for this target group involved the player assuming the role of a doctor in conducting medical treatments for injured pregnant women or assisting the birth of her baby.Many of these games represented the pregnant woman visually as looking like an archetypal Barbie doll, with a wardrobe to match. One app (‘Barbara Pregnancy Shopping’) even uses the name ‘Barbara’ and the screenshots show a woman similar in appearance to the doll. Its description urges players to use the game to ‘cheer up’ an ‘unconfident’ Barbara by taking her on a ‘shopping spree’ for new, glamorous clothes ‘to make Barbara feel beautiful throughout her pregnancy’. Players may find ‘sparkly accessories’ as well for Barbara and help her find a new hairstyle so that she ‘can be her fashionable self again’ and ‘feel prepared to welcome her baby!’. Likewise, the game ‘Pregnant Mommy Makeover Spa’ involves players selecting clothes, applying beauty treatments and makeup and adding accessories to give a makeover to ‘Pregnant Princess’ Leila. The ‘Celebrity Mommy’s Newborn Baby Doctor’ game combines the drawcard of ‘celebrity’ with ‘mommy’. Players are invited to ‘join the celebrities in their pregnancy adventure!’ and ‘take care of Celebrity Mom during her pregnancy!’.An app by the same developer of ‘Barbara Pregnancy Shopping’ also offers ‘Barbara’s Caesarean Birth’. The app description claims that: ‘Of course her poor health doesn’t allow Barbara to give birth to her baby herself.’ It is up to players to ‘make everything perfect’ for Barbara’s caesarean birth. The screenshots show Barbara’s pregnant abdomen being slit open, retracted and a rosy, totally clean infant extracted from the incision, complete with blonde hair. Players then sew up the wound. A final screenshot displays an image of a smiling Barbara standing holding her sleeping, swaddled baby, with the words ‘You win’.Similar games involve princesses, mermaids, fairies and even monster and vampire pregnant women giving birth either vagin*lly or by caesarean. Despite their preternatural status, the monster and vampire women conform to the same aesthetic as the other pregnant women in these games: usually with long hair and pretty, made-up faces, wearing fashionable clothing even on the operating table. Their newborn infants are similarly uniform in their appearance as they emerge from the uterus. They are white-skinned, clean and cherubic (described in ‘Mommy’s Newborn Baby Princess’ as ‘the cutest baby you probably want’), a far cry from the squalling, squashed-faced infants smeared in birth fluids produced by the real birth process.In these pregnancy games for girls, the pain and intense bodily effort of birthing and the messiness produced by the blood and other body fluids inherent to the process of labour and birth are completely missing. The fact that caesarean birth is a major abdominal surgery requiring weeks of recovery is obviated in these games. Apart from the monsters and vampires, who may have green- or blue-hued skin, nearly all other pregnant women are portrayed as white-skinned, young, wearing makeup and slim, conforming to conventional stereotypical notions of female beauty. In these apps, the labouring women remain glamorous, usually smiling, calm and unsullied by the visceral nature of birth.‘Track Your Pregnancy Day by Day’: Self-Monitoring and Gamified PregnancyElements of gamification were evident in a large number of the apps in our corpus, including many apps that invite pregnant users to engage in self-tracking of their bodies and that of their foetuses. Users are asked to customise the apps to document their changing bodies and track their foetus’ development as part of reproducing the discourse of the miraculous nature of pregnancy and promoting the pleasures of self-tracking and self-transformation from pregnant woman to mother. When using the ‘Pregnancy+’ app, for example, users can choose to construct a ‘Personal Dashboard’ that includes details of their pregnancy. They can input their photograph, first name and their expected date of delivery so that that each daily update begins with ‘Hello [name of user], you are [ ] weeks and [ ] days pregnant’ with the users’ photograph attached to the message. The woman’s weight gain over time and a foetal kick counter are also included in this app. It provides various ways for users to mark the passage of time, observe the ways in which their foetuses change and move week by week and monitor changes in their bodies. According to the app description for ‘My Pregnancy Today’, using such features allows a pregnant woman to: ‘Track your pregnancy day by day.’ Other apps encourage women to track such aspects of physical activity, vitamin and fluid intake, diet, mood and symptoms. The capacity to visually document the pregnant user’s body is also a feature of several apps. The ‘Baby Bump Pregnancy’, ‘WebMD Pregnancy’, ‘I’m Expecting’,’iPregnant’ and ‘My Pregnancy Today’ apps, for example, all offer an album feature for pregnant bump photos taken by the user of herself (described as a ‘bumpie’ in the blurb for ‘My Pregnancy Today’). ‘Baby Buddy’ encourages women to create a pregnant avatar of themselves (looking glamorous, well-dressed and happy). Some apps even advise users on how they should feel. As a screenshot from ‘Pregnancy Tracker Week by Week’ claims: ‘Victoria, your baby is growing in your body. You should be the happiest woman in the world.’Just as pregnancy games for little girls portrayal pregnancy as a commodified and asetheticised experience, the apps directed at pregnant women themselves tend to shy away from discomforting fleshly realities of pregnant and birthing embodiment. Pregnancy is represented as an enjoyable and fashionable state of embodiment: albeit one that requires constant self-surveillance and vigilance.‘Hello Mommy!’: The Personalisation and Aestheticisation of the FoetusA dominant feature of pregnancy-related apps is the representation of the foetus as already a communicative person in its own right. For example, the ‘Pregnancy Tickers – Widget’ app features the image of a foetus (looking far more like an infant, with a full head of wavy hair and open eyes) holding a pencil and marking a tally on the walls of the uterus. The app is designed to provide various icons showing the progress of the user’s pregnancy each day on her mobile device. The ‘Hi Mommy’ app features a cartoon-like pink and cuddly foetus looking very baby-like addressing its mother from the womb, as in the following message that appears on the user’s smartphone: ‘Hi Mommy! When will I see you for the first time?’ Several pregnancy-tracking apps also allow women to input the name that they have chosen for their expected baby, to receive customised notifications of its progress (‘Justin is nine weeks and two days old today’).Many apps also incorporate images of foetuses that represent them as wondrous entities, adopting the visual style of 1960s foetal photography pioneer Lennart Nilsson, or what Stormer (Stormer) has referred to as ‘prenatal sublimity’. The ‘Pregnancy+’ app features such images. Users can choose to view foetal development week-by-week as a colourful computerised animation or 2D and 3D ultrasound scans that have been digitally manipulated to render them aesthetically appealing. These images replicate the softly pink, glowing portrayals of miraculous unborn life typical of Nilsson’s style.Other apps adopt a more contemporary aesthetic and allow parents to store and manipulate images of their foetal ultrasounds and then share them via social media. The ‘Pimp My Ultrasound’ app, for example, invites prospective parents to manipulate images of their foetal ultrasounds by adding in novelty features to the foetal image such as baseball caps, jewellery, credit cards and musical instruments. The ‘Hello Mom’ app creates a ‘fetal album’ of ultrasounds taken of the user’s foetus, while the ‘Ultrasound Viewer’ app lets users manipulate their 3/4 D foetal ultrasound images: ‘Have fun viewing it from every angle, rotating, panning and zooming to see your babies [sic] features and share with your family and friends via Facebook and Twitter! … Once uploaded, you can customise your scan with a background colour and skin colour of your choice’.DiscussionPregnancy, like any other form of embodiment, is performative. Pregnant women are expected to conform to norms and assumptions about their physical appearance and deportment of their bodies that expect them to remain well-groomed, fit and physically attractive without appearing overly sexual (Longhurst "(Ad)Dressing Pregnant Bodies in New Zealand: Clothing, Fashion, Subjectivities and Spatialities"; Longhurst "'Corporeographies’ of Pregnancy: ‘Bikini Babes'"; Nash; Littler). Simultaneously they must negotiate the burden of bodily management in the interests of risk regulation. They are expected to protect their vulnerable unborn from potential dangers by stringently disciplining their bodies and policing to what substances they allow entry (Lupton The Social Worlds of the Unborn; Lupton "'Precious Cargo': Risk and Reproductive Citizenship"). Pregnancy self-tracking apps enact the soft politics of algorithmic authority, encouraging people to conform to expectations of self-responsibility and self-management by devoting attention to monitoring their bodies and acting on the data that they generate (Whitson; Millington "Amusing Ourselves to Life: Fitness Consumerism and the Birth of Bio-Games"; Lupton The Quantified Self: A Sociology of Self-Tracking).Many commentators have remarked on the sexism inherent in digital games (e.g. Dickerman, Christensen and Kerl-McClain; Thornham). Very little research has been conducted specifically on the gendered nature of app games. However our analysis suggests that, at least in relation to the pregnant woman, reductionist heteronormative, cisgendered, patronising and paternalistic stereotypes abound. In the games for girls, pregnant women are ideally young, heterosexual, partnered, attractive, slim and well-groomed, before, during and after birth. In self-tracking apps, pregnant women are portrayed as ideally self-responsible, enthused about their pregnancy and foetus to the point that they are counting the days until the birth and enthusiastic about collecting and sharing details about themselves and their unborn (often via social media).Ambivalence about pregnancy, the foetus or impending motherhood, and lack of interest in monitoring the pregnancy or sharing details of it with others are not accommodated, acknowledged or expected by these apps. Acknowledgement of the possibility of pregnant women who are not overtly positive about their pregnancy or lack interest in it or who identify as transgender or lesbian or who are sole mothers is distinctly absent.Common practices we noted in apps – such as giving foetuses names before birth and representing them as verbally communicating with their mothers from inside the womb – underpin a growing intensification around the notion of the unborn entity as already an infant and social actor in its own right. These practices have significant implications for political agendas around the treatment of pregnant women in terms of their protection or otherwise of their unborn, and for debates about women’s reproductive rights and access to abortion (Lupton The Social Worlds of the Unborn; Taylor The Public Life of the Fetal Sonogram: Technology, Consumption and the Politics of Reproduction). Further, the gamification and ludification of pregnancy serve to further commodify the experience of pregnancy and childbirth, contributing to an already highly commercialised environment in which expectant parents, and particularly mothers, are invited to purchase many goods and services related to pregnancy and early parenthood (Taylor "Of Sonograms and Baby Prams: Prenatal Diagnosis, Pregnancy, and Consumption"; Kroløkke; Thomson et al.; Taylor The Public Life of the Fetal Sonogram: Technology, Consumption and the Politics of Reproduction; Thomas).In the games for girls we examined, the pregnant woman herself was a commodity, a selling point for the app. The foetus was also frequently commodified in its representation as an aestheticised entity and the employment of its image (either as an ultrasound or other visual representations) or identity to market apps such as the girls’ games, apps for manipulating ultrasound images, games for predicting the foetus’ sex and choosing its name, and prank apps using fake ultrasounds purporting to reveal a foetus inside a person’s body. As the pregnant user engages in apps, she becomes a commodity in yet another way: the generator of personal data that are marketable in themselves. In this era of the digital data knowledge economy, the personal information about people gathered from their online interactions and content creation has become highly profitable for third parties (Andrejevic; van Dijck). Given that pregnant women are usually in the market for many new goods and services, their personal data is a key target for data mining companies, who harvest it to sell to advertisers (Marwick).To conclude, our analysis suggests that gamification and ludification strategies directed at pregnancy and childbirth can serve to obfuscate the societal pressures that expect and seek to motivate pregnant women to maintain physical fitness and attractiveness, simultaneously ensuring that they protect their foetuses from all possible risks. In achieving both ends, women are encouraged to engage in intense self-monitoring and regulation of their bodies. These apps also reproduce concepts of the unborn entity as a precious and beautiful already-human. These types of portrayals have important implications for how young girls learn about pregnancy and childbirth, for pregnant women’s experiences and for concepts of foetal personhood that in turn may influence women’s reproductive rights and abortion politics.ReferencesAndrejevic, Mark. Infoglut: How Too Much Information Is Changing the Way We Think and Know. New York: Routledge, 2013. Print.Bogost, Ian. "Why Gamification Is Bullsh*t." The Gameful World: Approaches, Issues, Applications. Eds. Steffen Walz and Sebastian Deterding. Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2015. 65-80. Print.Declercq, E.R., et al. Listening to Mothers III: Pregnancy and Birth. New York: Childbirth Connection, 2013. Print.Derbyshire, Emma, and Darren Dancey. "Smartphone Medical Applications for Women's Health: What Is the Evidence-Base and Feedback?" International Journal of Telemedicine and Applications (2013).Deterding, Sebastian, et al. "From Game Design Elements to Gamefulness: Defining Gamification." Proceedings of the 15th International Academic MindTrek Conference: Envisioning Future Media Environments. ACM, 2011. Dickerman, Charles, Jeff Christensen, and Stella Beatríz Kerl-McClain. "Big Breasts and Bad Guys: Depictions of Gender and Race in Video Games." Journal of Creativity in Mental Health 3.1 (2008): 20-29. Duden, Barbara. Disembodying Women: Perspectives on Pregnancy and the Unborn. Trans. Lee Hoinacki. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Frissen, Valerie, et al. "hom*o Ludens 2.0: Play, Media and Identity." Playful Identities: The Ludification of Digital Media Cultures. Eds. Valerie Frissen et al. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2015. 9-50. ———, eds. Playful Identities: The Ludification of Digital Media Cultures. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015. Hearn, Lydia, Margaret Miller, and Anna Fletcher. "Online Healthy Lifestyle Support in the Perinatal Period: What Do Women Want and Do They Use It?" Australian Journal of Primary Health 19.4 (2013): 313-18. Jones, Rhys, Jessica Pykett, and Mark Whitehead. "Big Society's Little Nudges: The Changing Politics of Health Care in an Age of Austerity." Political Insight 1.3 (2010): 85-87. Kraschnewski, L. Jennifer, et al. "Paging “Dr. Google”: Does Technology Fill the Gap Created by the Prenatal Care Visit Structure? Qualitative Focus Group Study with Pregnant Women." Journal of Medical Internet Research. 16.6 (2014): e147. Kroløkke, Charlotte. "On a Trip to the Womb: Biotourist Metaphors in Fetal Ultrasound Imaging." Women's Studies in Communication 33.2 (2010): 138-53. Littler, Jo. "The Rise of the 'Yummy Mummy': Popular Conservatism and the Neoliberal Maternal in Contemporary British Culture." Communication, Culture & Critique 6.2 (2013): 227-43. Longhurst, Robyn. "(Ad)Dressing Pregnant Bodies in New Zealand: Clothing, Fashion, Subjectivities and Spatialities." Gender, Place & Culture 12.4 (2005): 433-46. ———. "'Corporeographies’ of Pregnancy: ‘Bikini Babes'." Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18.4 (2000): 453-72. Lupton, Deborah. "Apps as Artefacts: Towards a Critical Perspective on Mobile Health and Medical Apps." Societies 4.4 (2014): 606-22. ———. "'Precious Cargo': Risk and Reproductive Citizenship." Critical Public Health 22.3 (2012): 329-40. ———. The Quantified Self: A Sociology of Self-Tracking. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016. ———. "Quantified Sex: A Critical Analysis of Sexual and Reproductive Self-Tracking Using Apps." Culture, Health & Sexuality 17.4 (2015): 440-53. ———. The Social Worlds of the Unborn. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Marwick, Alice. "How Your Data Are Being Deeply Mined." The New York Review of Books (2014). Millington, Brad. "Amusing Ourselves to Life: Fitness Consumerism and the Birth of Bio-Games." Journal of Sport & Social Issues 38.6 (2014): 491-508. ———. "Smartphone Apps and the Mobile Privatization of Health and Fitness." Critical Studies in Media Communication 31.5 (2014): 479-93. Nash, Meredith. Making 'Postmodern' Mothers: Pregnant Embodiment, Baby Bumps and Body Image. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. O'Higgins, A., et al. "The Use of Digital Media by Women Using the Maternity Services in a Developed Country." Irish Medical Journal 108.5 (2015). Raessens, Joost. "Playful Identities, or the Ludification of Culture." Games and Culture 1.1 (2006): 52-57. Rodger, D., et al. "Pregnant Women’s Use of Information and Communications Technologies to Access Pregnancy-Related Health Information in South Australia." Australian Journal of Primary Health 19.4 (2013): 308-12. Seneviratne, Suranga, et al. "Your Installed Apps Reveal Your Gender and More!" Mobile Computing and Communications Review 18.3 (2015): 55-61. Statista. "Number of Apps Available in Leading App Stores as of May 2015." 2015. Stormer, Nathan. "Looking in Wonder: Prenatal Sublimity and the Commonplace 'Life'." Signs 33.3 (2008): 647-73. Taylor, Janelle. "Of Sonograms and Baby Prams: Prenatal Diagnosis, Pregnancy, and Consumption." Feminist Studies 26.2 (2000): 391-418. ———. The Public Life of the Fetal Sonogram: Technology, Consumption and the Politics of Reproduction. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008. Thomas, Gareth M. "Picture Perfect: ‘4d’ Ultrasound and the Commoditisation of the Private Prenatal Clinic." Journal of Consumer Culture. Online first, 2015. Thomson, Rachel, et al. Making Modern Mothers. Bristol: Policy Press, 2011. Thornham, Helen. “'It's a Boy Thing'.” Feminist Media Studies 8.2 (2008): 127-42. Van Dijck, José. 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Abstract:

Edith and John Power were a wealthy expatriate Australian couple who lived in England and Europe from the early years of the 20th century until their deaths. In 1915 John Power married Edith Lee in London before serving as a surgeon on the Western Front in the Royal Army Medical Corps. After the war Edith and John left Britain to live in Paris and Brussels in the centre of a large international group of avant-garde artists. Edith, who was twelve years older than her husband, and had been married twice before (once widowed and once divorced), was to all accounts the driving force behind John's success as an artist -- he exhibited alongside Picasso, Braque and Kandinsky -- and the great love of his life. The following comes from a book-length fictionalised biography of their lives, narrated by Edith in the early 1960s when she was ninety-two years old. This extract comes from the part of the manuscript dealing with the Nazi Occupation of the Channel Island of Jersey in the second world war; the 'safe haven' to which the Powers had fled in 1938 when war threatened. The first winter under the Germans was very hard and there were reports of old people dying of starvation and exposure. Jack had terrible chilblains and we were both very thin. Cooking fat was only available for doctors to give to invalids, and one poor chap was so desperate that he used sump oil from his car to fry up some gull eggs, and poisoned himself. Sitting down to a plate of boiled potatoes I couldn't sometimes help but reminisce about the wonderful meals we had eaten in Paris and Brussels. How decadent they seemed -- oysters, poached salmon, grilled tournedos with asparagus or a roasted duck, then a glass of champagne, a slice or two of Ange à Cheval and some wild strawberries to finish off with. I also realised how petty all our worries had been up 'til then. We would be upset if the hotel we fancied was booked out for the summer, the bath water cold or a soufflé heavy. When the stock market dropped a point or two we were devastated, and Jack used to sulk for days when he had trouble with a painting or if his frames were not exactly as ordered, the moulding wrong, the gilding scratched or too bright. Such concerns seemed absurd when we faced death every day and misery and fear were all around us. Then the prisoners-of-war arrived from Russia, dressed in rags and even thinner than us. They suffered terribly, working impossibly hard every day on the railway and underground hospital, with nowhere proper to sleep and very little to eat. We felt so sorry for them, and admired those Islanders who, although it was a serious crime, sheltered them if they managed to escape. We had another dreadful reminder of just how awful the Germans could be when they started shooting anyone caught with a crystal radio set. By the summer of 1942 Jack was very ill, although he continued to deny anything was wrong. He finally confided in me just how dire things were one afternoon when we were sitting on the terrace. We were drinking the last of our English tea and discussing how wild the garden had become. One minute Jack was saying how much he enjoyed watching everything return to its natural state, the next he was telling me that he thought he had a cancerous tumour in his kidneys and should see a doctor. I listened in a daze as he detailed the possible treatments and his prognosis, which he anticipated to be poor. Then he stood, drank the dregs in his cup, kissed me and said he had to return to the studio. He had salvaged a piece of wood from somewhere to paint on and didn't want to lose the last light. I was stunned, not wanting to believe what he had told me. I never found out whether Jack suspected the cancer before the Occupation, but if he did, I can't understand why he didn't tell me. We could have gone back to England or over to Switzerland and seen the best doctors. This still puzzles me for Jack was never reticent to seek medical treatment. Tony even laughingly called Jack a hypochondriac, he was so careful with his health, but then again, I know Jack's father had hidden the same condition from his family some forty years before. For many years after the war Ceylon tea only ever tasted of trouble and dismay to me. Nowadays everyone wants to give me tea all the time, especially the nurses. I tell them I'd really like a stiff gin and tonic, but alcohol is another of life's pleasures denied to the elderly. If I could only get out of this bed, I'd get one for myself -- a big one. I have forgotten the name of that doctor we consulted a few days later, but I remember exactly what he said. He confirmed what Jack thought, that the tumours were in his kidneys, but added that they had possibly settled in his lungs as well. In a last (but futile) effort, my poor darling was operated on by this old fashioned surgeon who had to work in the most primitive conditions; without the drugs, anaesthetics or antiseptics he needed. By that time it was difficult to find soap whatever price you were willing to pay, and I gave him some fancy little rose scented tablets to wash up with before he cut Jack open. Jack had never been a fast healer and all the odds were against him; the strain of the advancing cancer, the inadequacy of our diet and the lack of proper medicines. The only foods we could obtain were quite coarse, there was no lean meat to make beef tea or eggs for milk puddings. Jack once said to me something to the effect that the ghastly jokes of fate are not always in the best of taste but they could be extremely witty. I never, however, found anything except the most savage cruelty in his situation, that such a highly trained surgeon had to endure such a crude assault on his body, and that a wealthy philanthropist could suffer so for the want of the most basic requirements of food, firewood and pain killers. My darling, who had been so dreadful when struck down with the slightest illness, was a model patient. It took a long time, but eventually he was able to leave his bed, and the first thing he did was to boil up his own analgesics, potent narcotics which he followed with a stiff whisky. When his condition deteriorated and I had to tend to all his most intimate needs, he was always good tempered and never made me feel I was humiliating or demeaning him. We grew closer than ever, but I knew our time was running out. In another cruel twist of fate Jack was only exempted from deportation to a German internment camp by the sick certificate. An order of 1942 decreed that all the British men not born on the Channel Islands, from the young boys of sixteen to poor old men of seventy, would be transferred to Germany. Thinking about it now, it seems bizarre that such a reasonable bureaucratic rule could regulate the Germans' inhumanity. My darling's last days are as clear in my memory as if they were yesterday. He lay in our yellow bedroom, looking out over the garden to the sea. I only left his side for the briefest periods, and slept in a chair by his bed. Early one morning I woke from an uneasy doze. I looked over to Jack. His face was grey and much too old for his sixty-two years, he was no longer the boy he had always been in my heart. Lying stiffly in the middle of the bed, arms by his side, eyes and lips closed, his breathing was so shallow that his chest hardly rose or fell. I wondered if he felt the weight of the blankets or heard the wind outside. Did he even know how I sat with him? I looked out over the garden. The vegetable patches dug in the chamomile lawn were flourishing, but the grass was long, the roses run to briars, the pond filled with sludge and rotting weeds. I wanted to lie beside my darling and hold him, just as I had each night for so many years, so after I had removed my shoes and placed them together under the bed, I pulled back the sheets and lay on my side facing Jack. He didn't move. I traced my finger across his cheekbones and down his nose to the mouth I had kissed so often. His skin was cool and very dry. I moved over and pressed my body close to his and as he made no sign that this was uncomfortable, I began to relax. The house was quiet and, for the first time in weeks, I sank into a peaceful sleep. When I woke, the soft light of late afternoon was filtering through the curtains. The breeze had dropped outside and I heard a lone bird calling for its mate. Most of the birds had been killed and I thought I would put out some potato bread for him. What depths we were reduced to in those days, eating the gentle creatures around us. It was rumoured that some desperate soul had roasted and eaten a hedgehog, but I still can't believe that was true. There were so many dreadful stories in those days, you never knew what to believe. My hand found Jack's. It was icy. I willed myself not to think of it, but I knew he was gone. I touched his cheek, my fingers slightly warming the cold flesh, then I put my arms right around him and pressed my face into his neck. We lay like that for a long time. Eventually I got up, tucked the blankets around him and closed the window. Downstairs I washed in cold water and dressed in black stockings, black slip and my best black dress. My black shoes were still under Jack's bed, so I laced on my tan brogues. I found my veiled black hat and put it on the sideboard. Even though I knew it was ridiculous, I felt uncomfortable wearing brown shoes with black and returned them to the cupboard. I looked around for my pearls, and realised I had left them upstairs too. I stood outside the bedroom door for some time before I could enter. Then I went in, raised the window and sat on the chair. I don't know what I thought about, but after some time the chirping of the little bird brought me back to the present. I bent and retrieved my shoes from under the bed and placed them beside the door. I could see my pearls lying in a shining mound on top of the blankets just below his hip. As I was picking them up I finally looked at Jack properly. His eyes were closed and his face was relaxed as if in a deep dreamless sleep. He looked years younger. He wore his favourite blue striped pyjamas from Jeremyn Street, but he was a stranger to me. I kissed him for the last time, then lifted the linen sheet to cover the face I had loved so much. I turned away, picked up my shoes and left the room, closing the door behind me. Although I hadn't noticed, that dreadful Sunday, the 1st of August 1943, had been a beautifully hot summer's day, just the sort of day Jack had always loved. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Donna Lee Brien. "Just the Sort of Day Jack Had Always Loved." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.8 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/day.php>. Chicago style: Donna Lee Brien, "Just the Sort of Day Jack Had Always Loved," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 8 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/day.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Donna Lee Brien. (1999) Just the sort of day Jack had always loved. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(8). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/day.php> ([your date of access]).

Abstract:

We ask you now, reader, to put your mind, as a citizen of the Australian Commonwealth, to the facts presented in these pages. We ask you to study the problem, in the way that we present the case, from the Aborigines’ point of view. We do not ask for your charity; we do not ask you to study us as scientific-freaks. Above all, we do not ask for your “protection”. No, thanks! We have had 150 years of that! We ask only for justice, decency, and fair play. (Patten and Ferguson 3-4) Jack Patten and William Ferguson’s above declaration on “Plain Speaking” in Aborigines Claim Citizenship Rights! A Statement of the Case for the Aborigines Progressive Association (1938), outlining Aboriginal Australians view of colonisation and the call for Aboriginal self-determinacy, will be my guiding framework in writing this paper. I ask you to study the problem, as it is presented, from the viewpoint of an Indigenous woman who seeks to understand how “sorry” has been uttered in political domains as a word divorced from the moral freight attached to a history of “degrading, humiliating and exterminating” Aboriginal Australians (Patten and Ferguson 11). I wish to argue that the Opposition leader’s utterance of “sorry” in his 13 February 2008 “We Are Sorry – Address to Parliament” was an indicator of the insidious ways in which colonisation has treated Aboriginal Australians as less than, not equal to, white Australians and to examine the ways in which this particular utterance of the word “sorry” is built on longstanding colonial frameworks that position ‘the Aborigine’ as peripheral in the representation of a national identity – a national identity that, as shown by the transcript of the apology, continues to romanticise settler values and ignore Indigenous rights. Nelson’s address tries to disassociate the word “sorry” from any moral attachment. The basis of his address is on constructing a national identity where all injustices are equal. In offering this apology, let us not create one injustice in our attempts to address another. (Nelson) All sorrys are equal, but some are more equal than others. Listening to Nelson’s address, words resembling those of Orwell’s ran through my head. The word “sorry” in relation to Indigenous Australians has taken on cultural, political, educational and economic proportions. The previous government’s refusal to utter the word was attached to the ways in which formations of rhetorically self-sufficient arguments of practicality, equality and justice “functioned to sustain and legitimate existing inequalities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Australia” (Augoustinos, LeCouteur and Soyland 105). How then, I wondered as I nervously waited for Nelson to begin apologising, would he transform this inherited collective discursive practice of legitimised racism that upheld mainstream Australia’s social reality? The need for an apology, and the history of political refusal to give it, is not a simple classification of one event, one moment in history. The ‘act’ of removing children is not a singular, one-off event. The need to do, the justification and rationalisation of the doing and what that means now, the having done, as well as the impact on those that were left behind, those that were taken, those that were born after, are all bound up in this particular “sorry”. Given that reluctance of the previous government to admit injustices were done and still exist, this utterance of the word “sorry” from the leader of the opposition precariously sat between freely offering it and reluctantly giving it. The above quote from Nelson, and its central concern of not performing any injustice towards mainstream Australia (“let us not” [my italics]) very definitely defines this sorry in relation to one particular injustice (the removing of Indigenous children) which therefore ignores the surrounding and complicit colonialist and racist attitudes, policies and practices that both institutionalised and perpetuated racism against Australia’s Indigenous peoples. This comment also clearly articulates the opposition’s concern that mainstream Australia not be offended by this act of offering the word “sorry”. Nelson’s address and the ways that it constructs what this “sorry” is for, what it isn’t for, and who it is for, continues to uphold and legitimate existing inequalities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. From the very start of Nelson’s “We Are Sorry – Address to Parliament”, two specific clarifications were emphasised: the “sorry” was directed at a limited time period in history; and that there is an ‘us’ and a ‘them’. Nelson defines this distinction: “two cultures; one ancient, proud and celebrating its deep bond with this land for some 50,000 years. The other, no less proud, arrived here with little more than visionary hope deeply rooted in gritty determination to build an Australian nation.” This cultural division maintains colonising discourses that define and label, legitimate and exclude groups and communities. It draws from the binary oppositions of self and other, white and black, civilised and primitive. It maintains a divide between the two predominant ideas of history that this country struggles with and it silences those in that space in between, ignoring for example, the effects of colonisation and miscegenation in blurring the lines between ‘primitive’ and ‘civilised’. Although acknowledging that Indigenous Australians inhabited this land for a good few thousand decades before the proud, gritty, determined visionaries of a couple of hundred years ago, the “sorry” that is to be uttered is only in relation to “the first seven decades of the 20th century”. Nelson establishes from the outset that any forthcoming apology, on behalf of “us” – read as non-Indigenous Anglo-Australians – in reference to ‘them’ – “those Aboriginal people forcibly removed” – is only valid for the “period within which these events occurred [which] was one that defined and shaped Australia”. My reading of this sectioning of a period in Australia’s history is that while recognising that certain colonising actions were unjust, specifically in this instance the removal of Indigenous children, this period of time is also seen as influential and significant to the growth of the country. What this does is to allow the important colonial enterprise to subsume the unjust actions by the colonisers by other important colonial actions. Explicit in Nelson’s address is that this particular time frame saw the nation of Australia reach the heights of achievements and is a triumphant period – an approach which extends beyond taking the highs with the lows, and the good with the bad, towards overshadowing any minor ‘unfortunate’ mistakes that might have been made, ‘occasionally’, along the way. Throughout the address, there are continual reminders to the listeners that the “us” should not be placed at a disadvantage in the act of saying “sorry”: to do so would be to create injustice, whereas this “sorry” is strictly about attempting to “address another”. By sectioning off a specific period in the history of colonised Australia, the assumption is that all that happened before 1910 and all that happened after 1970 are “sorry” free. This not only ignores the lead up to the official policy of removal, how it was sanctioned and the aftermath of removal as outlined in The Bringing Them Home Report (1997); it also prevents Indigenous concepts of time from playing a legitimate and recognised role in the construct of both history and society. Aboriginal time is cyclical and moves around important events: those events that are most significant to an individual are held closer than those that are insignificant or mundane. Aleksendar Janca and Clothilde Bullen state that “time is perceived in relation to the socially sanctioned importance of events and is most often identified by stages in life or historic relevance of events” (41). The speech attempts to distinguish between moments and acts in history: firmly placing the act of removing children in a past society and as only one act of injustice amongst many acts of triumph. “Our generation does not own these actions, nor should it feel guilt for what was done in many, but not all cases, with the best of intentions” (Nelson). What was done is still being felt by Indigenous Australians today. And by differentiating between those that committed these actions and “our generation”, the address relies on a linear idea of time, to distance any wrongdoing from present day white Australians. What I struggle with here is that those wrongdoings continue to be felt according to Indigenous concepts of time and therefore these acts are not in a far away past but very much felt in the present. The need to not own these actions further entrenches the idea of separateness between Indigenous Australia and non-Indigenous Australia. The fear of being guilty or at blame evokes notions of wrong and right and this address is at pains not to do that – not to lay blame or evoke shame. Nelson’s address is relying on a national identity that has historically silenced and marginalised Indigenous Australians. If there is no blame to be accepted, if there is no attached shame to be acknowledged (“great pride, but occasionally shame” (Nelson)) and dealt with, then national identity is implicitly one of “discovery”, peaceful settlement and progress. Where are the Aboriginal perspectives of history in this idea of a national identity – then and now? And does this mean that colonialism happened and is now over? State and territory actions upon, against and in exclusion of Indigenous Australians are not actions that can be positioned as past discriminations; they continue today and are a direct result of those that preceded them. Throughout his address, Nelson emphasises the progressiveness of “today” and how that owes its success to the “past”: “In doing so, we reach from within ourselves to our past, those whose lives connect us to it and in deep understanding of its importance to our future”. By relying on a dichotomous approach – us and them, white and black, past and present – Nelson emphasises the distance between this generation of Australia and any momentary unjust actions in the past. The belief is that time moves on – away from the past and towards the future. That advancement, progression and civilisation are linear movements, all heading towards a more enlightened state. “We will be at our best today – and every day – if we pause to place ourselves in the shoes of others, imbued with the imaginative capacity to see this issue through their eyes with decency and respect”. But where is the recognition that today’s experiences, the results of what has been created by the past, are also attached to the need to offer an apology? Nelson’s “we” (Anglo-Australians) are being asked to stop and think about how “they” (Aborigines) might see things differently to the mainstream norm. The implication here also is that “they” – members of the Stolen Generations – must be prepared to understand the position white Australia is coming from, and acknowledge the good that white Australia has achieved. Anglo-Australian pride and achievement is reinforced throughout the address as the basis on which our national identity is understood. Ignoring its exclusion and silencing of the Indigenous Australians to whom his “sorry” is directed, Nelson perpetuates this ideology here in his address: “In brutally harsh conditions, from the small number of early British settlers our non Indigenous ancestors have given us a nation the envy of any in the world”. This gift of a nation where there was none before disregards the acts of invasion, segregation, protection and assimilation that characterise the colonisation of this nation. It also reverts to romanticised settler notions of triumph over great adversities – a notion that could just as easily be attached to Indigenous Australians yet Nelson specifically addresses “our non Indigenous ancestors”. He does add “But Aboriginal Australians made involuntary sacrifices, different but no less important, to make possible the economic and social development of our modern [my emphasis] Australia.” Indigenous Australians certainly made voluntary sacrifices, similar to and different from those made by non Indigenous Australians (Indigenous Australians also went to both World Wars and fought for this nation) and a great deal of “our modern” country’s economic success was achieved on the backs of Blackfellas (Taylor 9). But “involuntary sacrifices” is surely a contradiction in terms, either intellectually shoddy or breathtakingly disingenuous. To make a sacrifice is to do it voluntarily, to give something up for a greater good. “Involuntary sacrifices”, like “collateral damage” and other calculatedly cold-blooded euphemisms, conveniently covers up the question of who was doing what to whom – of who was sacrificed, and by whom. In the attempt to construct a basis of equal contribution between Indigenous and non-Indigenous, as well as equal acts of struggle and triumphing, Nelson’s account of history and nation building draws from the positioning of the oppressors but tries to suppress any notion of racial oppression. It maintains the separateness of Indigenous experiences of colonisation from the colonisers themselves. His reiteration that these occasional acts of unjustness came from benevolent and charitable white Australians privileges non-Indigenous ways of knowing and doing over Indigenous ones and attempts to present them as untainted and innate as opposed to repressive, discriminatory and racist. We honour those in our past who have suffered and all those who have made sacrifices for us by the way we live our lives and shape our nation. Today we recommit to do so – as one people. (Nelson) The political need to identify as “one people” drives assimilation policies (the attitude at the very heart of removing Aboriginal children on the basis that they were Aboriginal and needed to be absorbed into one society of whites). By honouring everyone, and therefore taking the focus off any act of unjustness by non-Indigenous peoples on Indigenous peoples, Nelson’s narrative again upholds an idea of contemporary national identity that has not only romanticised the past but ignores the inequalities of the present day. He spends a good few hundred words reminding his listeners that white Australia deserves to maintain its hard won position. And there is no doubt he is talking to white Australia – his focus is on Western constructs of patriotism and success. He reverts to settler/colonial discourse to uphold ideas of equity and access: These generations considered their responsibilities to their country and one another more important than their rights. They did not buy something until they had saved up for it and values were always more important than value. Living in considerably more difficult times, they had dreams for our nation but little money. Theirs was a mesh of values enshrined in God, King and Country and the belief in something greater than yourself. Neglectful indifference to all they achieved while seeing their actions in the separations only, through the values of our comfortable, modern Australia, will be to diminish ourselves. In “the separations only…” highlights Nelson’s colonial logic, which compartmentalises time, space, people and events and tries to disconnect one colonial act from another. The ideology, attitudes and policies that allowed the taking of Indigenous children were not separate from all other colonial and colonising acts and processes. The desire for a White Australia, a clear cut policy which was in existence at the same time as protection, removal and assimilation policies, cannot be disassociated from either the taking of children or the creation of this “comfortable, modern Australia” today. “Neglectful indifference to all they achieved” could aptly be applied to Indigenous peoples throughout Australian history – pre and post invasion. Where is the active acknowledgment of the denial of Indigenous rights so that “these generations [of non-Indigenous Australians could] consider their responsibilities to their country and one another more important than their rights”? Nelson adheres to the colonialist national narrative to focus on the “positive”, which Patrick Wolfe has argued in his critique of settler colonialism, is an attempt to mask disruptive moments that reveal the scope of state and national power over Aboriginal Australians (33). After consistently reinforcing the colonial/settler narrative, Nelson’s address moves on to insert Indigenous Australians into a well-defined and confined space within a specific chapter of that narrative. His perfunctory overview of the first seven decades of the 20th century alludes to Protection Boards and Reserves, assimilation policies and Christianisation, all underlined with white benevolence. Having established the innocent, inherently humane and decent motivations of “white families”, he resorts to appropriating Indigenous people’s stories and experiences. In the retelling of these stories, two prominent themes in Nelson’s text become apparent. White fellas were only trying to help the poor Blackfella back then, and one need only glance at Aboriginal communities today to see that white fellas are only trying to help the poor Blackfella again. It is reasonably argued that removal from squalor led to better lives – children fed, housed and educated for an adult world of [sic] which they could not have imagined. However, from my life as a family doctor and knowing the impact of my own father’s removal from his unmarried teenaged mother, not knowing who you are is the source of deep, scarring sorrows the real meaning of which can be known only to those who have endured it. No one should bring a sense of moral superiority to this debate in seeking to diminish the view that good was being sought to be done. (Nelson) A sense of moral superiority is what motivates colonisation: it is what motivated the enforced removal of children. The reference to “removal from squalor” is somewhat reminiscent of the 1909 Aborigines Protection Act. Act No. 25, 1909, section 11(1) which states: The board may, in accordance with and subject to the provisions of the Apprentices Act, 1901, by indenture bind or cause to be bound the child of any aborigine, or the neglected child of any person apparently having an admixture of aboriginal blood in his veins, to be apprenticed to any master, and may collect and institute proceedings for the recovery of any wages payable under such indenture, and may expend the same as the board may think fit in the interest of the child. Every child so apprenticed shall be under the supervision of the board, or of such person that may be authorised in that behalf by the regulations. (144) Neglect was often defined as simply being Aboriginal. The representation that being removed would lead to a better life relies on Western attitudes about society and culture. It dismisses any notion of Indigenous rights to be Indigenous and defines a better life according to how white society views it. Throughout most of the 1900s, Aboriginal children that were removed to experience this better life were trained in positions of servants. Nelson’s inclusion of his own personal experience as a non Indigenous Australian who has experienced loss and sorrow sustains his textual purpose to reduce human experiences to a common ground, an equal footing – to make all injustices equal. And he finishes the paragraph off with the subtle reminder that this “sorry” is only for “those” Aboriginal Australians that were removed in the first seven decades of last century. After retelling the experience of one Indigenous person as told to the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families, he retells the experience of an Indigenous woman as told to a non-Indigenous man. The appropriate protocols concerning the re-using of Indigenous knowledge and intellectual copyright appeared to be absent in this address. Not only does the individual remain unacknowledged but the potential for misappropriating Indigenous experiences for non Indigenous purposes is apparent. The insertion of the story dismisses the importance of the original act of telling, and the significance of the unspeakable through decades of silence. Felman presents the complexities of the survivor’s tale: “the victim’s story has to overcome not just the silence of the dead but the indelible coercive power of the oppressor’s terrifying, brutal silencing of the surviving, and the inherent speechless silence of the living in the face of an unthinkable, unknowable, ungraspable event” (227). In telling this story Nelson unravelled the foundation of equality he had attempted to resurrect. And his indication towards current happenings in the Northern Territory only served to further highlight the inequities that Indigenous peoples continue to face, resist and surpass. Nelson’s statement that “separation was then, and remains today, a painful but necessary part of public policy in the protection of children” is another reminder of the “indelible coercive power of the oppressor’s terrifying” potential to repeat history. The final unmasking of the hypocritical and contested nature of Nelson’s national ideology and narrative is in his telling of the “facts” – the statistics concerning Indigenous life expectancy, Indigenous infant mortality rates, “diabetes, kidney disease, hospitalisation of women from assault, imprisonment, overcrowding, educational underperformance and unemployment”. These statistics are a result not of what Nelson terms “existential aimlessness” (immediately preceding paragraph) but of colonisation – theft of land, oppression, abuse, discrimination, and lack of any rights whether citizenship or Aboriginal. These contemporary experiences of Indigenous peoples are the direct linear result of the last two hundred years of white nation building. The address is concluded with mention of Neville Bonner, portrayed here as the perfect example of what reading, writing, expressing yourself with dignity and treating people with decency and courtesy can achieve. Bonner is presented as the ‘ideal’ Blackfella, a product of the assimilation period: he could read and write and was dignified, decent and courteous (and, coincidentally, Liberal). The inclusion of this reference to Bonner in the address may hint at the “My best friend is an Aborigine” syndrome (Heiss 71), but it also provides a discursive example to the listener of the ways in which ‘equalness’ is suggested, assumed, privileged or denied. It is a reminder, in the same vein of Patten and Ferguson’s fights for rights, that what is equal has always been apparent to the colonised. Your present official attitude is one of prejudice and misunderstanding … we are no more dirty, lazy stupid, criminal, or immoral than yourselves. Also, your slanders against our race are a moral lie, told to throw all the blame for your troubles on to us. You, who originally conquered us by guns against our spears, now rely on superiority of numbers to support your false claims of moral and intellectual superiority. After 150 years, we ask you to review the situation and give us a fair deal – a New Deal for Aborigines. The cards have been stacked against us, and we now ask you to play the game like decent Australians. Remember, we do not ask for charity, we ask for justice. Nelson quotes Bonner’s words that “[unjust hardships] can only be changed when people of non Aboriginal extraction are prepared to listen, to hear what Aboriginal people are saying and then work with us to achieve those ends”. The need for non-Indigenous Australians to listen, to be shaken out of their complacent equalness appears to have gone unheard. Fiumara, in her philosophy of listening, states: “at this point the opportunity is offered for becoming aware that the compulsion to win is due less to the intrinsic difficulty of the situation than to inhibitions induced by a non-listening language that prevents us from seeing that which would otherwise be clear” (198). It is this compulsion to win, or to at least not be seen to be losing that contributes to the unequalness of this particular “sorry” and the need to construct an equal footing. This particular utterance of sorry does not come from an acknowledged place of difference and its attached history of colonisation; instead it strives to create a foundation based on a lack of anyone being positioned on the high moral ground. It is an irony that pervades the address considering it was the coloniser’s belief in his/her moral superiority that took the first child to begin with. Nelson’s address attempts to construct the utterance of “sorry”, and its intended meaning in this specific context, on ‘equal’ ground: his representation is that we are all Australians, “us” and ‘them’ combined, “we” all suffered and made sacrifices; “we” all deserve respect and equal acknowledgment of the contribution “we” all made to this “enviable” nation. And therein lies the unequalness, the inequality, the injustice, of this particular “sorry”. This particular “sorry” is born from and maintains the structures, policies, discourses and language that led to the taking of Indigenous children in the first place. In his attempt to create a “sorry” that drew equally from the “charitable” as well as the “misjudged” deeds of white Australia, Nelson’s “We Are Sorry – Address to Parliament” increased the experiences of inequality. Chow writes that in the politics of admittance the equal depends on “acceptance by permission … and yet, being ‘admitted’ is never simply a matter of possessing the right permit, for validation and acknowledgment must also be present for admittance to be complete” (36-37). References Augoustinos, Martha, Amanda LeCouteur, and John Soyland. “Self-Sufficient Arguments in Political Rhetoric: Constructing Reconciliation and Apologizing to the Stolen Generations.” Discourse and Society 13.1 (2002): 105-142.Bringing Them Home: National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families. Sydney: Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 1997.Aborigines Protection Act 1909: An Act to Provide for the Protection and Care of Aborigines; To Repeal the Supply of Liquors Aborigines Prevention Act; To Amend the Vagrancy Act, 1902, and the Police Offences (Amendment) Act, 1908; And for Purposes Consequent Thereon or Incidental Thereto. Assented to 20 Dec. 1909. Digital Collections: Books and Serial, National Library of Australia. 24 Mar. 2008 < http://www.nla.gov.au/apps/cdview?pi=nla.aus-vn71409-9x-s1-v >.Chow, Rey. “The Politics of Admittance: Female Sexual Agency, Miscegenation and the Formation of Community in Frantz Fanon.” In Anthony C. Alessandrini, ed. Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives. London: Routledge, 1999. 34-56.Felman, Shoshana. “Theaters of Justice: Arendt in Jerusalem, the Eichmann Trial and the Redefinition of Legal Meaning in the Wake of the Holocaust.” Critical Inquiry 27.2 (2001): 201-238.Fiumara, Gemma Corradi. The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.Heiss, Anita. I’m Not a Racist But… UK: Salt Publishing, 2007.Janca, Aleksandar, and Clothilde Bullen. “Aboriginal Concept of Time and Its Mental Health Implications.” Australian Psychiatry 11 (Supplement 2003): 40-44.Nelson, Brendan. “We Are Sorry – Address to Parliament.” 14 Feb. 2008 < http://www.liberal.org.au/info/news/detail/20080213_ WearesorryAddresstoParliament.php >.Patten, Jack, and William Ferguson. Aborigines Claim Citizen Rights! A Statement for the Aborigines Progressive Association. Sydney: The Publicist, 1938.Taylor, Martin, and James Francis. Bludgers in Grass Castles: Native Title and the Unpaid Debts of the Pastoral Industry. Chippendale: Resistance Books, 1997.William, Ross. “‘Why Should I Feel Guilty?’ Reflections on the Workings of White-Aboriginal Relations.” Australian Psychologist 35.2 (2000): 136-142.Wolfe, Patrick. Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event. London and New York: Cassell, 1999.

Abstract:

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

Abstract:

Introduction Food has always been an essential component of daily life. Today, thinking about food is a much more complicated pursuit than planning the next meal, with food studies scholars devoting their efforts to researching “anything pertaining to food and eating, from how food is grown to when and how it is eaten, to who eats it and with whom, and the nutritional quality” (Duran and MacDonald 234). This is in addition to the work undertaken by an increasingly wide variety of popular culture researchers who explore all aspects of food (Risson and Brien 3): including food advertising, food packaging, food on television, and food in popular fiction. In creating stories, from those works that quickly disappear from bookstore shelves to those that become entrenched in the literary canon, writers use food to communicate the everyday and to explore a vast range of ideas from cultural background to social standing, and also use food to provide perspectives “into the cultural and historical uniqueness of a given social group” (Piatti-Farnell 80). For example in Oliver Twist (1838) by Charles Dickens, the central character challenges the class system when: “Child as he was, he was desperate with hunger and reckless with misery. He rose from the table, and advancing basin and spoon in hand, to the master, said, somewhat alarmed at his own temerity–‘Please, sir, I want some more’” (11). Scarlett O’Hara in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936) makes a similar point, a little more dramatically, when she declares: “As God is my witness, I’m never going to be hungry again” (419). Food can also take us into the depths of another culture: places that many of us will only ever read about. Food is also used to provide insight into a character’s state of mind. In Nora Ephron’s Heartburn (1983) an item as simple as boiled bread tells a reader so much more about Rachel Samstat than her preferred bakery items: “So we got married and I got pregnant and I gave up my New York apartment and moved to Washington. Talk about mistakes [...] there I was, trying to hold up my end in a city where you can’t even buy a decent bagel” (34). There are three ways in which writers can deal with food within their work. Firstly, food can be totally ignored. This approach is sometimes taken despite food being such a standard feature of storytelling that its absence, be it a lonely meal at home, elegant canapés at an impressively catered co*cktail party, or a cheap sandwich collected from a local café, is an obvious omission. Food can also add realism to a story, with many authors putting as much effort into conjuring the smell, taste, and texture of food as they do into providing a backstory and a purpose for their characters. In recent years, a third way has emerged with some writers placing such importance upon food in fiction that the line that divides the cookbook and the novel has become distorted. This article looks at cookbooks and cookery in popular fiction with a particular focus on crime novels. Recipes: Ingredients and Preparation Food in fiction has been employed, with great success, to help characters cope with grief; giving them the reassurance that only comes through the familiarity of the kitchen and the concentration required to fulfil routine tasks: to chop and dice, to mix, to sift and roll, to bake, broil, grill, steam, and fry. Such grief can come from the breakdown of a relationship as seen in Nora Ephron’s Heartburn (1983). An autobiography under the guise of fiction, this novel is the first-person story of a cookbook author, a description that irritates the narrator as she feels her works “aren’t merely cookbooks” (95). She is, however, grateful she was not described as “a distraught, rejected, pregnant cookbook author whose husband was in love with a giantess” (95). As the collapse of the marriage is described, her favourite recipes are shared: Bacon Hash; Four Minute Eggs; Toasted Almonds; Lima Beans with Pears; Linguine Alla Cecca; Pot Roast; three types of Potatoes; Sorrel Soup; desserts including Bread Pudding, Cheesecake, Key Lime Pie and Peach Pie; and a Vinaigrette, all in an effort to reassert her personal skills and thus personal value. Grief can also result from loss of hope and the realisation that a life long dreamed of will never be realised. Like Water for Chocolate (1989), by Laura Esquivel, is the magical realist tale of Tita De La Garza who, as the youngest daughter, is forbidden to marry as she must take care of her mother, a woman who: “Unquestionably, when it came to dividing, dismantling, dismembering, desolating, detaching, dispossessing, destroying or dominating […] was a pro” (87). Tita’s life lurches from one painful, unjust episode to the next; the only emotional stability she has comes from the kitchen, and from her cooking of a series of dishes: Christmas Rolls; Chabela Wedding Cake; Quail in Rose Petal Sauce; Turkey Mole; Northern-style Chorizo; Oxtail Soup; Champandongo; Chocolate and Three Kings’s Day Bread; Cream Fritters; and Beans with Chilli Tezcucana-style. This is a series of culinary-based activities that attempts to superimpose normalcy on a life that is far from the everyday. Grief is most commonly associated with death. Undertaking the selection, preparation and presentation of meals in novels dealing with bereavement is both a functional and symbolic act: life must go on for those left behind but it must go on in a very different way. Thus, novels that use food to deal with loss are particularly important because they can “make non-cooks believe they can cook, and for frequent cooks, affirm what they already know: that cooking heals” (Baltazar online). In Angelina’s Bachelors (2011) by Brian O’Reilly, Angelina D’Angelo believes “cooking was not just about food. It was about character” (2). By the end of the first chapter the young woman’s husband is dead and she is in the kitchen looking for solace, and survival, in cookery. In The Kitchen Daughter (2011) by Jael McHenry, Ginny Selvaggio is struggling to cope with the death of her parents and the friends and relations who crowd her home after the funeral. Like Angelina, Ginny retreats to the kitchen. There are, of course, exceptions. In Ntozake Shange’s Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982), cooking celebrates, comforts, and seduces (Calta). This story of three sisters from South Carolina is told through diary entries, narrative, letters, poetry, songs, and spells. Recipes are also found throughout the text: Turkey; Marmalade; Rice; Spinach; Crabmeat; Fish; Sweetbread; Duck; Lamb; and, Asparagus. Anthony Capella’s The Food of Love (2004), a modern retelling of the classic tale of Cyrano de Bergerac, is about the beautiful Laura, a waiter masquerading as a top chef Tommaso, and the talented Bruno who, “thick-set, heavy, and slightly awkward” (21), covers for Tommaso’s incompetency in the kitchen as he, too, falls for Laura. The novel contains recipes and contains considerable information about food: Take fusilli […] People say this pasta was designed by Leonardo da Vinci himself. The spiral fins carry the biggest amount of sauce relative to the surface area, you see? But it only works with a thick, heavy sauce that can cling to the grooves. Conchiglie, on the other hand, is like a shell, so it holds a thin, liquid sauce inside it perfectly (17). Recipes: Dishing Up Death Crime fiction is a genre with a long history of focusing on food; from the theft of food in the novels of the nineteenth century to the utilisation of many different types of food such as chocolate, marmalade, and sweet omelettes to administer poison (Berkeley, Christie, Sayers), the latter vehicle for arsenic receiving much attention in Harriet Vane’s trial in Dorothy L. Sayers’s Strong Poison (1930). The Judge, in summing up the case, states to the members of the jury: “Four eggs were brought to the table in their shells, and Mr Urquhart broke them one by one into a bowl, adding sugar from a sifter [...he then] cooked the omelette in a chafing dish, filled it with hot jam” (14). Prior to what Timothy Taylor has described as the “pre-foodie era” the crime fiction genre was “littered with corpses whose last breaths smelled oddly sweet, or bitter, or of almonds” (online). Of course not all murders are committed in such a subtle fashion. In Roald Dahl’s Lamb to the Slaughter (1953), Mary Maloney murders her policeman husband, clubbing him over the head with a frozen leg of lamb. The meat is roasting nicely when her husband’s colleagues arrive to investigate his death, the lamb is offered and consumed: the murder weapon now beyond the recovery of investigators. Recent years have also seen more and more crime fiction writers present a central protagonist working within the food industry, drawing connections between the skills required for food preparation and those needed to catch a murderer. Working with cooks or crooks, or both, requires planning and people skills in addition to creative thinking, dedication, reliability, stamina, and a willingness to take risks. Kent Carroll insists that “food and mysteries just go together” (Carroll in Calta), with crime fiction website Stop, You’re Killing Me! listing, at the time of writing, over 85 culinary-based crime fiction series, there is certainly sufficient evidence to support his claim. Of the numerous works available that focus on food there are many series that go beyond featuring food and beverages, to present recipes as well as the solving of crimes. These include: the Candy Holliday Murder Mysteries by B. B. Haywood; the Coffeehouse Mysteries by Cleo Coyle; the Hannah Swensen Mysteries by Joanne Fluke; the Hemlock Falls Mysteries by Claudia Bishop; the Memphis BBQ Mysteries by Riley Adams; the Piece of Cake Mysteries by Jacklyn Brady; the Tea Shop Mysteries by Laura Childs; and, the White House Chef Mysteries by Julie Hyzy. The vast majority of offerings within this female dominated sub-genre that has been labelled “Crime and Dine” (Collins online) are American, both in origin and setting. A significant contribution to this increasingly popular formula is, however, from an Australian author Kerry Greenwood. Food features within her famed Phryne Fisher Series with recipes included in A Question of Death (2007). Recipes also form part of Greenwood’s food-themed collection of short crime stories Recipes for Crime (1995), written with Jenny Pausacker. These nine stories, each one imitating the style of one of crime fiction’s greatest contributors (from Agatha Christie to Raymond Chandler), allow readers to simultaneously access mysteries and recipes. 2004 saw the first publication of Earthly Delights and the introduction of her character, Corinna Chapman. This series follows the adventures of a woman who gave up a career as an accountant to open her own bakery in Melbourne. Corinna also investigates the occasional murder. Recipes can be found at the end of each of these books with the Corinna Chapman Recipe Book (nd), filled with instructions for baking bread, muffins and tea cakes in addition to recipes for main courses such as risotto, goulash, and “Chicken with Pineapple 1971 Style”, available from the publisher’s website. Recipes: Integration and Segregation In Heartburn (1983), Rachel acknowledges that presenting a work of fiction and a collection of recipes within a single volume can present challenges, observing: “I see that I haven’t managed to work in any recipes for a while. It’s hard to work in recipes when you’re moving the plot forward” (99). How Rachel tells her story is, however, a reflection of how she undertakes her work, with her own cookbooks being, she admits, more narration than instruction: “The cookbooks I write do well. They’re very personal and chatty–they’re cookbooks in an almost incidental way. I write chapters about friends or relatives or trips or experiences, and work in the recipes peripherally” (17). Some authors integrate detailed recipes into their narratives through description and dialogue. An excellent example of this approach can be found in the Coffeehouse Mystery Series by Cleo Coyle, in the novel On What Grounds (2003). When the central protagonist is being questioned by police, Clare Cosi’s answers are interrupted by a flashback scene and instructions on how to make Greek coffee: Three ounces of water and one very heaped teaspoon of dark roast coffee per serving. (I used half Italian roast, and half Maracaibo––a lovely Venezuelan coffee, named after the country’s major port; rich in flavour, with delicate wine overtones.) / Water and finely ground beans both go into the ibrik together. The water is then brought to a boil over medium heat (37). This provides insight into Clare’s character; that, when under pressure, she focuses her mind on what she firmly believes to be true – not the information that she is doubtful of or a situation that she is struggling to understand. Yet breaking up the action within a novel in this way–particularly within crime fiction, a genre that is predominantly dependant upon generating tension and building the pacing of the plotting to the climax–is an unusual but ultimately successful style of writing. Inquiry and instruction are comfortable bedfellows; as the central protagonists within these works discover whodunit, the readers discover who committed murder as well as a little bit more about one of the world’s most popular beverages, thus highlighting how cookbooks and novels both serve to entertain and to educate. Many authors will save their recipes, serving them up at the end of a story. This can be seen in Julie Hyzy’s White House Chef Mystery novels, the cover of each volume in the series boasts that it “includes Recipes for a Complete Presidential Menu!” These menus, with detailed ingredients lists, instructions for cooking and options for serving, are segregated from the stories and appear at the end of each work. Yet other writers will deploy a hybrid approach such as the one seen in Like Water for Chocolate (1989), where the ingredients are listed at the commencement of each chapter and the preparation for the recipes form part of the narrative. This method of integration is also deployed in The Kitchen Daughter (2011), which sees most of the chapters introduced with a recipe card, those chapters then going on to deal with action in the kitchen. Using recipes as chapter breaks is a structure that has, very recently, been adopted by Australian celebrity chef, food writer, and, now fiction author, Ed Halmagyi, in his new work, which is both cookbook and novel, The Food Clock: A Year of Cooking Seasonally (2012). As people exchange recipes in reality, so too do fictional characters. The Recipe Club (2009), by Andrea Israel and Nancy Garfinkel, is the story of two friends, Lilly Stone and Valerie Rudman, which is structured as an epistolary novel. As they exchange feelings, ideas and news in their correspondence, they also exchange recipes: over eighty of them throughout the novel in e-mails and letters. In The Food of Love (2004), written messages between two of the main characters are also used to share recipes. In addition, readers are able to post their own recipes, inspired by this book and other works by Anthony Capella, on the author’s website. From Page to Plate Some readers are contributing to the burgeoning food tourism market by seeking out the meals from the pages of their favourite novels in bars, cafés, and restaurants around the world, expanding the idea of “map as menu” (Spang 79). In Shannon McKenna Schmidt’s and Joni Rendon’s guide to literary tourism, Novel Destinations (2009), there is an entire section, “Eat Your Words: Literary Places to Sip and Sup”, dedicated to beverages and food. The listings include details for John’s Grill, in San Francisco, which still has on the menu Sam Spade’s Lamb Chops, served with baked potato and sliced tomatoes: a meal enjoyed by author Dashiell Hammett and subsequently consumed by his well-known protagonist in The Maltese Falcon (193), and the Café de la Paix, in Paris, frequented by Ian Fleming’s James Bond because “the food was good enough and it amused him to watch the people” (197). Those wanting to follow in the footsteps of writers can go to Harry’s Bar, in Venice, where the likes of Marcel Proust, Sinclair Lewis, Somerset Maugham, Ernest Hemingway, and Truman Capote have all enjoyed a drink (195) or The Eagle and Child, in Oxford, which hosted the regular meetings of the Inklings––a group which included C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien––in the wood-panelled Rabbit Room (203). A number of eateries have developed their own literary themes such as the Peaco*cks Tearooms, in Cambridgeshire, which blends their own teas. Readers who are also tea drinkers can indulge in the Sherlock Holmes (Earl Grey with Lapsang Souchong) and the Doctor Watson (Keemun and Darjeeling with Lapsang Souchong). Alternatively, readers may prefer to side with the criminal mind and indulge in the Moriarty (Black Chai with Star Anise, Pepper, Cinnamon, and Fennel) (Peaco*cks). The Moat Bar and Café, in Melbourne, situated in the basem*nt of the State Library of Victoria, caters “to the whimsy and fantasy of the fiction housed above” and even runs a book exchange program (The Moat). For those readers who are unable, or unwilling, to travel the globe in search of such savoury and sweet treats there is a wide variety of locally-based literary lunches and other meals, that bring together popular authors and wonderful food, routinely organised by book sellers, literature societies, and publishing houses. There are also many cookbooks now easily obtainable that make it possible to re-create fictional food at home. One of the many examples available is The Book Lover’s Cookbook (2003) by Shaunda Kennedy Wenger and Janet Kay Jensen, a work containing over three hundred pages of: Breakfasts; Main & Side Dishes; Soups; Salads; Appetizers, Breads & Other Finger Foods; Desserts; and Cookies & Other Sweets based on the pages of children’s books, literary classics, popular fiction, plays, poetry, and proverbs. If crime fiction is your preferred genre then you can turn to Jean Evans’s The Crime Lover’s Cookbook (2007), which features short stories in between the pages of recipes. There is also Estérelle Payany’s Recipe for Murder (2010) a beautifully illustrated volume that presents detailed instructions for Pigs in a Blanket based on the Big Bad Wolf’s appearance in The Three Little Pigs (44–7), and Roast Beef with Truffled Mashed Potatoes, which acknowledges Patrick Bateman’s fondness for fine dining in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (124–7). Conclusion Cookbooks and many popular fiction novels are reflections of each other in terms of creativity, function, and structure. In some instances the two forms are so closely entwined that a single volume will concurrently share a narrative while providing information about, and instruction, on cookery. Indeed, cooking in books is becoming so popular that the line that traditionally separated cookbooks from other types of books, such as romance or crime novels, is becoming increasingly distorted. The separation between food and fiction is further blurred by food tourism and how people strive to experience some of the foods found within fictional works at bars, cafés, and restaurants around the world or, create such experiences in their own homes using fiction-themed recipe books. Food has always been acknowledged as essential for life; books have long been acknowledged as food for thought and food for the soul. Thus food in both the real world and in the imagined world serves to nourish and sustain us in these ways. References Adams, Riley. Delicious and Suspicious. New York: Berkley, 2010. –– Finger Lickin’ Dead. New York: Berkley, 2011. –– Hickory Smoked Homicide. New York: Berkley, 2011. Baltazar, Lori. “A Novel About Food, Recipes Included [Book review].” Dessert Comes First. 28 Feb. 2012. 20 Aug. 2012 ‹http://dessertcomesfirst.com/archives/8644›. Berkeley, Anthony. The Poisoned Chocolates Case. London: Collins, 1929. Bishop, Claudia. Toast Mortem. New York: Berkley, 2010. –– Dread on Arrival. New York: Berkley, 2012. Brady, Jacklyn. A Sheetcake Named Desire. New York: Berkley, 2011. –– Cake on a Hot Tin Roof. New York: Berkley, 2012. Calta, Marialisa. “The Art of the Novel as Cookbook.” The New York Times. 17 Feb. 1993. 23 Jul. 2012 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/1993/02/17/style/the-art-of-the-novel-as-cookbook.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm›. Capella, Anthony. The Food of Love. London: Time Warner, 2004/2005. Carroll, Kent in Calta, Marialisa. “The Art of the Novel as Cookbook.” The New York Times. 17 Feb. 1993. 23 Jul. 2012 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/1993/02/17/style/the-art-of-the-novel-as-cookbook.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm›. Childs, Laura. Death by Darjeeling. New York: Berkley, 2001. –– Shades of Earl Grey. New York: Berkley, 2003. –– Blood Orange Brewing. New York: Berkley, 2006/2007. –– The Teaberry Strangler. New York: Berkley, 2010/2011. Collins, Glenn. “Your Favourite Fictional Crime Moments Involving Food.” The New York Times Diner’s Journal: Notes on Eating, Drinking and Cooking. 16 Jul. 2012. 17 Jul. 2012 ‹http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/16/your-favorite-fictional-crime-moments-involving-food›. Coyle, Cleo. On What Grounds. New York: Berkley, 2003. –– Murder Most Frothy. New York: Berkley, 2006. –– Holiday Grind. New York: Berkley, 2009/2010. –– Roast Mortem. New York: Berkley, 2010/2011. Christie, Agatha. A Pocket Full of Rye. London: Collins, 1953. Dahl, Roald. Lamb to the Slaughter: A Roald Dahl Short Story. New York: Penguin, 1953/2012. eBook. Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist, or, the Parish Boy’s Progress. In Collection of Ancient and Modern British Authors, Vol. CCXXIX. Paris: Baudry’s European Library, 1838/1839. Duran, Nancy, and Karen MacDonald. “Information Sources for Food Studies Research.” Food, Culture and Society: An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research 2.9 (2006): 233–43. Ephron, Nora. Heartburn. New York: Vintage, 1983/1996. Esquivel, Laura. Trans. Christensen, Carol, and Thomas Christensen. Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Instalments with Recipes, romances and home remedies. London: Black Swan, 1989/1993. Evans, Jeanne M. The Crime Lovers’s Cookbook. City: Happy Trails, 2007. Fluke, Joanne. Fudge Cupcake Murder. New York: Kensington, 2004. –– Key Lime Pie Murder. New York: Kensington, 2007. –– Cream Puff Murder. New York: Kensington, 2009. –– Apple Turnover Murder. New York: Kensington, 2010. Greenwood, Kerry, and Jenny Pausacker. Recipes for Crime. Carlton: McPhee Gribble, 1995. Greenwood, Kerry. The Corinna Chapman Recipe Book: Mouth-Watering Morsels to Make Your Man Melt, Recipes from Corinna Chapman, Baker and Reluctant Investigator. nd. 25 Aug. 2012 ‹http://www.allenandunwin.com/_uploads/documents/minisites/Corinna_recipebook.pdf›. –– A Question of Death: An Illustrated Phryne Fisher Treasury. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2007. Halmagyi, Ed. The Food Clock: A Year of Cooking Seasonally. Sydney: Harper Collins, 2012. Haywood, B. B. Town in a Blueberry Jam. New York: Berkley, 2010. –– Town in a Lobster Stew. New York: Berkley, 2011. –– Town in a Wild Moose Chase. New York: Berkley, 2012. Hyzy, Julie. State of the Onion. New York: Berkley, 2008. –– Hail to the Chef. New York: Berkley, 2008. –– Eggsecutive Orders. New York: Berkley, 2010. –– Buffalo West Wing. New York: Berkley, 2011. –– Affairs of Steak. New York: Berkley, 2012. Israel, Andrea, and Nancy Garfinkel, with Melissa Clark. The Recipe Club: A Novel About Food And Friendship. New York: HarperCollins, 2009. McHenry, Jael. The Kitchen Daughter: A Novel. New York: Gallery, 2011. Mitchell, Margaret. Gone With the Wind. London: Pan, 1936/1974 O’Reilly, Brian, with Virginia O’Reilly. Angelina’s Bachelors: A Novel, with Food. New York: Gallery, 2011. Payany, Estérelle. Recipe for Murder: Frightfully Good Food Inspired by Fiction. Paris: Flammarion, 2010. Peaco*cks Tearooms. Peaco*cks Tearooms: Our Unique Selection of Teas. 23 Aug. 2012 ‹http://www.peaco*ckstearoom.co.uk/teas/page1.asp›. Piatti-Farnell, Lorna. “A Taste of Conflict: Food, History and Popular Culture In Katherine Mansfield’s Fiction.” Australasian Journal of Popular Culture 2.1 (2012): 79–91. Risson, Toni, and Donna Lee Brien. “Editors’ Letter: That Takes the Cake: A Slice Of Australasian Food Studies Scholarship.” Australasian Journal of Popular Culture 2.1 (2012): 3–7. Sayers, Dorothy L. Strong Poison. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1930/2003. Schmidt, Shannon McKenna, and Joni Rendon. Novel Destinations: Literary Landmarks from Jane Austen’s Bath to Ernest Hemingway’s Key West. Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2009. Shange, Ntozake. Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo: A Novel. New York: St Martin’s, 1982. Spang, Rebecca L. “All the World’s A Restaurant: On The Global Gastronomics Of Tourism and Travel.” In Raymond Grew (Ed). Food in Global History. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1999. 79–91. Taylor, Timothy. “Food/Crime Fiction.” Timothy Taylor. 2010. 17 Jul. 2012 ‹http://www.timothytaylor.ca/10/08/20/foodcrime-fiction›. The Moat Bar and Café. The Moat Bar and Café: Welcome. nd. 23 Aug. 2012 ‹http://themoat.com.au/Welcome.html›. Wenger, Shaunda Kennedy, and Janet Kay Jensen. The Book Lover’s Cookbook: Recipes Inspired by Celebrated Works of Literature, and the Passages that Feature Them. New York: Ballantine, 2003/2005.

Abstract:

Elizabeth Wilmot, Countess of Rochester, is best known to most modern readers as the woman John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, abducted and later wed. As Samuel Pepys memorably records in his diary entry for 28 May 1665:Thence to my Lady Sandwich’s, where, to my shame, I had not been a great while before. Here, upon my telling her a story of my Lord Rochester’s running away on Friday night last with Mrs Mallet, the great beauty and fortune of the North, who had supped at Whitehall with Mrs Stewart, and was going home to her lodgings with her grandfather, my Lord Haly, by coach; and was at Charing Cross seized on by both horse and footmen, and forcibly taken from him, and put into a coach with six horses, and two women provided to receive her, and carried away. Upon immediate pursuit, my Lord of Rochester (for whom the King had spoke to the lady often, but with no success) was taken at Uxbridge; but the lady is not yet heard of, and the King mighty angry and the Lord sent to the Tower. (http://www.pepysdiary.com/)Here Pepys provides an anecdote that offers what Helen Deutsch has described in another context as “the elusive possibility of truth embodied by ‘things in themselves,’ by the things, that is, preserved in anecdotal form” (28). Pepys’s diary entry yields up an “elusive possibility” of embodied truth; his version of Wilmot’s abduction solidifies what he perceives to be the most notable features of her identity: her beauty, her wealth, and her sexual trajectory.Pepys’s conclusion that “the lady is not yet heard of” complicates this idea of anecdotal preservation, for he neatly ties up his story of Wilmot’s body by erasing her from it: she is removed, voiceless and disembodied, from even this anecdote of her own abduction. Pepys’s double maneuver demonstrates the complex set of interactions surrounding the preservation of early modern women’s sexual and textual selves. Written into Pepys’s diary and writing in conversation with her husband, Wilmot has generally been treated as a subordinate historical and literary figure—a character rather than an agent or an author. The richness of Wilmot’s own writing has been largely ignored; her manuscript poetry has been treated as an artefact and a source of autobiographical material, whereas Rochester’s poetry—itself teeming with autobiographical details, references to material culture, and ephemera—is recognised and esteemed as literary. Rochester’s work provides a tremendous resource, a window through which we can read and re-read his wife’s work in ways that enlighten and open up readings rather than closing them down, and her works similarly complicate his writings.By looking at Wilmot as a case study, I would like to draw attention to some of the continued dilemmas that scholars face when we attempt to recover early modern women’s writing. With this study, I will focus on distinct features of Wilmot’s sexual and textual identity. I will consider assumptions about female docility; the politics and poetics of erotic espionage; and Wilmot’s construction of fugitive desires in her poetry. Like the writings of many early modern women, Wilmot’s manuscript poetry challenges assumptions about the intersections of gender, sexuality, and authorship. Early Modern Women’s Docile Bodies?As the entry from Pepys’s diary suggests, Wilmot has been constructed as a docile female body—she is rendered “ideal” according to a set of gendered practices by which “inferior status has been inscribed” on her body (Bartky 139). Contrasting Pepys’s references to Wilmot’s beauty and marriageability with Wilmot’s own vivid descriptions of sexual desire highlights Wilmot’s tactical awareness and deployment of her inscribed form. In one of her manuscript poems, she writes:Nothing ades to Loves fond fireMore than scorn and cold disdainI to cherish your desirekindness used but twas in vainyou insulted on your SlaveTo be mine you soon refusedHope hope not then the power to haveWhich ingloriously you used. (230)This poem yields up a wealth of autobiographical information and provides glimpses into Wilmot’s psychology. Rochester spent much of his married life having affairs with women and men, and Wilmot represents herself as embodying her devotion to her husband even as he rejects her. In a recent blog entry about Wilmot’s poetry, Ellen Moody suggests that Wilmot “must maintain her invulnerable guard or will be hurt; the mores damn her whatever she does.” Interpretations of Wilmot’s verse typically overlay such sentiments on her words: she is damned by social mores, forced to configure her body and desire according to rigorous social codes that expect women to be pure and inviolable yet also accessible to their lovers and “invulnerable” to the pain produced by infidelity. Such interpretations, however, deny Wilmot the textual and sexual agency accorded to Rochester, begging the question of whether or not we have moved beyond reading women’s writing as essential, natural, and embodied. Thus while these lines might in fact yield up insights into Wilmot’s psychosocial and sexual identities, we continue to marginalise her writing and by extension her author-self if we insist on taking her words at face value. Compare, for example, Wilmot’s verse to the following song by her contemporary Aphra Behn:Love in Fantastique Triumph satt,Whilst Bleeding Hearts a round him flow’d,For whom Fresh paines he did Create,And strange Tyranick power he show’d;From thy Bright Eyes he took his fire,Which round about, in sports he hurl’d;But ’twas from mine, he took desire,Enough to undo the Amorous World. (53) This poem, which first appeared in Behn’s tragedy Abdelazer (1677) and was later printed in Poems upon Several Occasions (1684), was one of Behn’s most popular lyric verses. In the 1920s and 1930s Ernest Bernbaum, Montague Summers, Edmund Gosse, and others mined Behn’s works for autobiographical details and suggested that such historical details were all that her works offered—a trend that continued, disturbingly, into the later half of the twentieth century. Since the 1980s, Paula R. Backscheider, Ros Ballaster, Catherine Gallagher, Robert Markley, Paul Salzman, Jane Spencer, and Janet Todd have shown that Behn’s works are not simple autobiographical documents; they are the carefully crafted productions of a literary professional. Even though Behn’s song evokes a masoch*stic relationship between lover and beloved much like Wilmot’s song, critics treat “Love Arm’d” as a literary work rather than a literal transcription of female desire. Of course there are material differences between Wilmot’s song and Behn’s “Love Arm’d,” the most notable of which involves Behn’s self-conscious professionalism and her poem’s entrenchment in the structures of performance and print culture. But as scholars including Kathryn King and Margaret J. M. Ezell have begun to suggest, print publication was not the only way for writers to produce and circulate literary texts. King has demonstrated the ways in which female authors of manuscripts were producing social texts (563), and Ezell has shown that “collapsing ‘public’ into ‘publication’” leads modern readers to “overlook the importance of the social function of literature for women as well as men” (39). Wilmot’s poems did not go through the same material, ideological, and commercial processes as Behn’s poems did, but they participated in a social and cultural network of exchange that operated according to its own rules and that, significantly, was the same network that Rochester himself used for the circulation of his verses. Wilmot’s writings constitute about half of the manuscript Portland PwV 31, held by Hallward Library, University of Nottingham—a manuscript catalogued in the Perdita Project but lacking a description and biographical note. Teresa D. Kemp has discussed the impact of the Perdita Project on the study of early modern women’s writing in Feminist Teacher, and Jill Seal Millman and Elizabeth Clarke (both of whom are involved with the project) have also written articles about the usability of the database. Like many of the women writers catalogued by the Perdita Project, Wilmot lacks her own entry in the Dictionary of National Biography and is instead relegated to the periphery in Rochester’s entry.The nineteen-page folio includes poems by both Rochester and Wilmot. The first eight poems are autograph manuscript poems by Rochester, and a scene from a manuscript play ‘Scaene 1st, Mr. Daynty’s chamber’ is also included. The remaining poems, excluding one without attribution, are by Wilmot and are identified on the finding aid as follows:Autograph MS poem, entitled ‘Song’, by Elizabeth WilmotAutograph MS poem, entitled ‘Song’, by Elizabeth WilmotAutograph MS poem, entitled ‘Song’, by Elizabeth WilmotMS poem, untitled, not ascribed Autograph MS poem, entitled ‘Song’, by Elizabeth WilmotAutograph MS poem, untitled, by Elizabeth WilmotAutograph MS poem, untitled, by Elizabeth WilmotAutograph MS poem, untitled, by Elizabeth Wilmot Autograph MS poem, untitled, by Elizabeth WilmotTwo of the songs (including the lyric quoted above) have been published in Kissing the Rod with the disclaimer that marks of revision reveal that “Lady Rochester was not serving as an amanuensis for her husband” yet the editors maintain that “some sort of literary collaboration cannot be ruled out” (230), implying that Rochester helped his wife write her poetry. Establishing a non-hierarchical strategy for reading women’s collaborative manuscript writing here seems necessary. Unlike Behn, who produced works in manuscript and in print and whose maximization of the slippages between these modes has recently been analyzed by Anne Russell, Wilmot and Rochester both wrote primarily in manuscript. Yet only Rochester’s writings have been accorded literary status by historians of the book and of manuscript theory such as Harold Love and Arthur Marotti. Even though John Wilders notes that Rochester’s earliest poems were dialogues written with his wife, the literariness of her contributions is often undercut. Wilders offers a helpful suggestion that the dialogues set up by these poems helps “hint … at further complexities in the other” (51), but the complexities are identified as sexual rather than textual. Further, the poems are treated as responses to Rochester rather than conversations with him. Readers like Moody, moreover, draw reflections of marital psychology from Wilmot’s poems instead of considering their polysemic qualities and other literary traits. Instead of approaching the lines quoted above from Wilmot’s song as indications of her erotic and conjugal desire for her husband, we can consider her confident deployment of metaphysical conceits, her careful rhymes, and her visceral imagery. Furthermore, we can locate ways in which Wilmot and Rochester use the device of the answer poem to build a complex dialogue rather than a hierarchical relationship in which one voice dominates the other. The poems comprising Portland PwV 31 are written in two hands and two voices; they complement one another, but neither contains or controls the other. Despite the fact that David Farley-Hills dismissively calls this an “‘answer’ to this poem written in Lady Rochester’s handwriting” (29), the verses coexist in playful exchange textually as well as sexually. Erotic Exchange, Erotic EspionageBut does a reorientation of literary criticism away from Wilmot’s body and towards her body of verse necessarily entail a loss of her sexual and artefactual identity? Along with the account from Pepys’s diary mentioned at the outset of this study, letters from Rochester to his wife survive that provide a prosaic account of the couple’s married life. For instance, Rochester writes to her: “I love not myself as much as you do” (quoted in Green 159). Letters from Rochester to his wife typically showcase his playfulness, wit, and ribaldry (in one letter, he berates the artist responsible for two miniatures of Wilmot in strokes that are humorous yet also charged with a satire that borders on invective). The couple’s relationship was beleaguered by the doubts, infidelities, and sexual double standards that an autobiographical reading of Wilmot’s songs yields up, therefore it seems as counterproductive for feminist literary theory, criticism, and recovery work to entirely dispense with the autobiographical readings as it seems reductive to entirely rely on them. When approaching works like these manuscript poems, then, I propose using a model of erotic exchange and erotic espionage in tandem with more text-bound modes of literary criticism. To make this maneuver, we might begin by considering Gayle Rubin’s proposition that “If women are the gifts, then it is men who are the exchange partners. And it is the partners, not the presents, upon whom reciprocal exchange confers its quasi-mystical power of social linkage” (398). Wilmot’s poetry relentlessly unsettles the binary set up between partner and present, thereby demanding a more pluralistic identification of sexual and textual economies. Wilmot constructs Rochester as absent (“Thats caused by absence norished by despaire”), which is an explicit inversion of the gendered terms stereotypically deployed in poetry (the absent woman in works by Rochester as well as later satirists like Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope often catalyzes sexual desire) that also registers Wilmot’s autobiographical contexts. She was, during most of her married life, living with his mother, her own mother, and Rochester’s nieces in his house at Adderbury while he stayed in London. The desire in Wilmot’s poetry is textualised as much as it is sexualised; weaving this doublebraid of desires and designs together ultimately provides the most complete interpretation of the verses. I read the verses as offering a literary form of erotic espionage in which Wilmot serves simultaneously as erotic object and author. That is, she both is and is not the Cloris of her (and Rochester’s) poetry, capable of looking on and authorizing her desired and desiring body. The lyric in which Wilmot writes “He would return the fugitive with Shame” provides the clearest example of the interpretive tactic that I am proposing. The line, from Wilmot’s song “Cloris misfortunes that can be exprest,” refers to the deity of Love in its complete context:Such conquering charmes contribute to my chainAnd ade fresh torments to my lingering painThat could blind Love juge of my faithful flameHe would return the fugitive with ShameFor having bin insenceable to loveThat does by constancy it merritt prove. (232)The speaker of the poem invokes Cupid and calls on “blind Love” to judge “my faithful flame.” The beloved would then be returned “fugitive with Shame” because “blind Love” would have weighed the lover’s passion and the beloved’s insensibility. Interestingly, the gender of the beloved and the lover are not marked in this poem. Only Cupid is marked as male. Although the lover is hypothetically associated with femaleness in the final stanza (“She that calls not reason to her aid / Deserves the punishmentt”), the ascription could as easily be gendering the trait of irrationality as gendering the subject/author of the poem. Desire, complaint, and power circulate in the song in a manner that lacks clear reference; the reader receives glimpses into an erotic world that is far more ornately literary than it is material. That is, reading the poem makes one aware of tropes of power and desire, whereas actual bodies recede into the margins of the text—identifiable because of the author’s handwriting, not a uniquely female perspective on sexuality or (contrary to Moody’s interpretation) a specifically feminine acquiescence to gender norms. Strategies for Reading a Body of VerseWilmot’s poetry participates in what might be described as two distinct poetic and political modes. On one hand, her writing reproduces textual expectations about Restoration answer poems, songs and lyrics, and romantic verses. She crafts poetry that corresponds to the same textual conventions that men like Rochester, John Dryden, Abraham Cowley, and William Cavendish utilised when they wrote in manuscript. For Wilmot, as for her male contemporaries, such manuscript writing would have been socially circulated; at the same time, the manuscript documents had a fluidity that was less common in print texts. Dryden and Behn’s published writings, for instance, often had a more literary context (“Love Arm’d” refers to Abdelazer, not to Behn’s sexual identity), whereas manuscript writing often referred to coteries of readers and writers, friends and lovers.As part of the volatile world of manuscript writing, Wilmot’s poetry also highlights her embodied erotic relationships. But over-reading—or only reading—the poetry as depicting a conjugal erotics limits our ability to recover Wilmot as an author and an agent. Feminist recovery work has opened many new tactics for incorporating women’s writing into existing literary canons; it has also helped us imagine ways of including female domestic work, sexuality, and other embodied forms into our understanding of early modern culture. By drawing together literary recovery work with a more material interest in recuperating women’s sexual bodies, we should begin to recuperate women like Wilmot not simply as authors or bodies but as both. The oscillations between the sexual and textual body in Wilmot’s poetry, and in our assessments of her life and writings, should help us approach her works (like the works of Rochester) as possessing a three-dimensionality that they have long been denied. ReferencesBartky, Sandra Lee. “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power.” In Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. Ed. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. 129-54.Behn, Aphra. “Song. Love Arm’d.” The Works of Aphra Behn. Volume 1: Poetry. Ed. Janet Todd. London: William Pickering, 1992. 53.Clarke, Elizabeth. “Introducing Hester Pulter and the Perdita Project.” Literature Compass 2.1 (2005). ‹http://www.blackwell-compass.com/subject/literature/article_view?article_id=lico_articles_bsl159›. Deutsch, Helen. Loving Doctor Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.Diamond, Irene, Ed. Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988.Ezell, Margaret J. M. Social Authorship and the Advent of Print. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.Farley-Hill, David. Rochester’s Poetry. Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1978. Greene, Graham. Lord Rochester’s Monkey. New York: Penguin, 1974. Greer, Germaine, Susan Hastings, Jeslyn Medoff, and Melinda Sansone, Ed. Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women’s Verse. New York: Noonday Press, 1988. Kemp, Theresa D. “Early Women Writers.” Feminist Teacher 18.3 (2008): 234-39.King, Kathryn. “Jane Barker, Poetical Recreations, and the Sociable Text.” ELH 61 (1994): 551-70.Love, Harold, and Arthur F. Marotti. "Manuscript Transmission and Circulation." The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 55-80. Love, Harold. "Systemizing Sigla." English Manuscript Studies 1100-1700. 11 (2002): 217-230. Marotti, Arthur F. "Shakespeare's Sonnets and the Manuscript Circulation of Texts in Early Modern England." A Companion to Shakespeare's Sonnets. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. 185-203.McNay, Lois. Foucault And Feminism: Power, Gender, and the Self. Boston: Northeastern, 1992.Moody, Ellen. “Elizabeth Wilmot (neé Mallet), Countess of Rochester, Another Woman Poet.” Blog entry 16 March 2006. 11 Nov. 2008 ‹http://server4.moody.cx/index.php?id=400›. Pepys, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Pepys. 23 Aug. 2008 ‹http://www.pepysdiary.com/archive/1665/05/28/index.php›. Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism: A Norton Reader, ed. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, 392-413. New York: Norton, 2007.Russell, Anne. “Aphra Behn, Textual Communities, and Pastoral Sobriquets.” English Language Notes 40.4 (June 2003): 41-50.———. “'Public' and 'Private' in Aphra Behn's Miscellanies: Women Writers, Print, and Manuscript.” Write or Be Written: Early Modern Women Poets and Cultural Constraints. Ed. Barbara Smith and Ursula Appelt. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001. 29-48. Sawicki, Jana. Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power and the Body. New York: Routledge, 1991.Seal, Jill. "The Perdita Project—A Winter's Report." Early Modern Literary Studies 6.3 (January, 2001): 10.1-14. ‹http://purl.oclc.org/emls/06-3/perdita.htm›.Wilders, John. “Rochester and the Metaphysicals.” In Spirit of Wit: Reconsiderations of Rochester. Ed. Jeremy Treglown. Hamden: Archon, 1982. 42-57.Wilmot, Elizabeth, Countess of Rochester. “Song” (“Nothing Ades to Love's Fond Fire”) and “Song” (“Cloris Misfortunes That Can Be Exprest”) in Kissing the Rod. 230-32.

Abstract:

Refereed publications (also known as peer-reviewed) are the currency of academia, yet many PhD theses in Australia result in only one or two such papers. Typically, a doctoral thesis requires the candidate to present (and pass) a public Confirmation Seminar, around nine to twelve months into candidacy, in which a panel of the candidate’s supervisors and invited experts adjudicate upon whether the work is likely to continue and ultimately succeed in the goal of a coherent and original contribution to knowledge. A Final Seminar, also public and sometimes involving the traditional viva voce or oral defence of the thesis, is presented two or three months before approval is given to send the 80,000 to 100,000 word tome off for external examination. And that soul-destroying or elation-releasing examiner’s verdict can be many months in the delivery: a limbo-like period during which the candidate’s status as a student is ended and her or his receipt of any scholarship or funding guerdon is terminated with perfunctory speed. This is the only time most students spend seriously writing up their research for publication although, naturally, many are more involved in job hunting as they pin their hopes on passing the thesis examination.There is, however, a slightly more palatable alternative to this nail-biting process of the traditional PhD, and that is the PhD by Published Papers (also known as PhD by Publications or PhD by Published Works). The form of my own soon-to-be-submitted thesis, it permits the submission for examination of a collection of papers that have been refereed and accepted (or are in the process of being refereed) for publication in academic journals or books. Apart from the obvious benefits in getting published early in one’s (hopefully) burgeoning academic career, it also takes away a lot of the stress come final submission time. After all, I try to assure myself, the thesis examiners can’t really discredit the process of double-blind, peer-review the bulk of the thesis has already undergone: their job is to examine how well I’ve unified the papers into a cohesive thesis … right? But perhaps they should at least be wary, because, unfortunately, the requirements for this kind of PhD vary considerably from institution to institution and there have been some cases where the submitted work is of questionable quality compared to that produced by graduates from more demanding universities. Hence, this paper argues that in my subject area of interest—film and television studies—there is a huge range in the set requirements for doctorates, from universities that award the degree to film artists for prior published work that has undergone little or no academic scrutiny and has involved little or no on-campus participation to at least three Australian universities that require candidates be enrolled for a minimum period of full-time study and only submit scholarly work generated and published (or submitted for publication) during candidature. I would also suggest that uncertainty about where a graduate’s work rests on this continuum risks confusing a hard-won PhD by Published Papers with the sometimes risible honorary doctorate. Let’s begin by dredging the depths of those murky, quasi-academic waters to examine the occasionally less-than-salubrious honorary doctorate. The conferring of this degree is generally a recognition of an individual’s body of (usually published) work but is often conferred for contributions to knowledge or society in general that are not even remotely academic. The honorary doctorate does not usually carry with it the right to use the title “Dr” (although many self-aggrandising recipients in the non-academic world flout this unwritten code of conduct, and, indeed, Monash University’s Monash Magazine had no hesitation in describing its 2008 recipient, musician, screenwriter, and art-school-dropout Nick Cave, as “Dr Cave” (O’Loughlin)). Some shady universities even offer such degrees for sale or ‘donation’ and thus do great damage to that institution’s credibility as well as to the credibility of the degree itself. Such overseas “diploma mills”—including Ashwood University, Belford University, Glendale University and Suffield University—are identified by their advertising of “Life Experience Degrees,” for which a curriculum vitae outlining the prospective graduand’s oeuvre is accepted on face value as long as their credit cards are not rejected. An aspiring screen auteur simply specifies film and television as their major and before you can shout “Cut!” there’s a degree in the mail. Most of these pseudo-universities are not based in Australia but are perfectly happy to confer their ‘titles’ to any well-heeled, vanity-driven Australians capable of completing the online form. Nevertheless, many academics fear a similarly disreputable marketplace might develop here, and Norfolk Island-based Greenwich University presents a particularly illuminating example. Previously empowered by an Act of Parliament consented to by Senator Ian Macdonald, the then Minister for Territories, this “university” had the legal right to confer honorary degrees from 1998. The Act was eventually overridden by legislation passed in 2002, after a concerted effort by the Australian Universities Quality Agency Ltd. and the Australian Vice-Chancellors’ Committee to force the accreditation requirements of the Australian Qualifications Framework upon the institution in question, thus preventing it from making degrees available for purchase over the Internet. Greenwich University did not seek re-approval and soon relocated to its original home of Hawaii (Brown). But even real universities flounder in similarly muddy waters when, unsolicited, they make dubious decisions to grant degrees to individuals they hold in high esteem. Although meaning well by not courting pecuniary gain, they nevertheless invite criticism over their choice of recipient for their honoris causa, despite the decision usually only being reached after a process of debate and discussion by university committees. Often people are rewarded, it seems, as much for their fame as for their achievements or publications. One such example of a celebrity who has had his onscreen renown recognised by an honorary doctorate is film and television actor/comedian Billy Connolly who was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters by The University of Glasgow in 2006, prompting Stuart Jeffries to complain that “something has gone terribly wrong in British academia” (Jeffries). Eileen McNamara also bemoans the levels to which some institutions will sink to in search of media attention and exposure, when she writes of St Andrews University in Scotland conferring an honorary doctorate to film actor and producer, Michael Douglas: “What was designed to acknowledge intellectual achievement has devolved into a publicity grab with universities competing for celebrity honorees” (McNamara). Fame as an actor (and the list gets even weirder when the scope of enquiry is widened beyond the field of film and television), seems to be an achievement worth recognising with an honorary doctorate, according to some universities, and this kind of discredit is best avoided by Australian institutions of higher learning if they are to maintain credibility. Certainly, universities down under would do well to follow elsewhere than in the footprints of Long Island University’s Southampton College. Perhaps the height of academic prostitution of parchments for the attention of mass media occurred when in 1996 this US school bestowed an Honorary Doctorate of Amphibious Letters upon that mop-like puppet of film and television fame known as the “muppet,” Kermit the Frog. Indeed, this polystyrene and cloth creation with an anonymous hand operating its mouth had its acceptance speech duly published (see “Kermit’s Acceptance Speech”) and the Long Island University’s Southampton College received much valuable press. After all, any publicity is good publicity. Or perhaps this furry frog’s honorary degree was a cynical stunt meant to highlight the ridiculousness of the practice? In 1986 a similar example, much closer to my own home, occurred when in anticipation and condemnation of the conferral of an honorary doctorate upon Prince Philip by Monash University in Melbourne, the “Members of the Monash Association of Students had earlier given a 21-month-old Chihuahua an honorary science degree” (Jeffries), effectively suggesting that the honorary doctorate is, in fact, a dog of a degree. On a more serious note, there have been honorary doctorates conferred upon far more worthy recipients in the field of film and television by some Australian universities. Indigenous film-maker Tracey Moffatt was awarded an honorary doctorate by Griffith University in November of 2004. Moffatt was a graduate of the Griffith University’s film school and had an excellent body of work including the films Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (1990) and beDevil (1993). Acclaimed playwright and screenwriter David Williamson was presented with an Honorary Doctorate of Letters by The University of Queensland in December of 2004. His work had previously picked up four Australian Film Institute awards for best screenplay. An Honorary Doctorate of Visual and Performing Arts was given to film director Fred Schepisi AO by The University of Melbourne in May of 2006. His films had also been earlier recognised with Australian Film Institute awards as well as the Golden Globe Best Miniseries or Television Movie award for Empire Falls in 2006. Director George Miller was crowned with an Honorary Doctorate in Film from the Australian Film, Television, and Radio School in April 2007, although he already had a medical doctor’s testamur on his wall. In May of this year, filmmaker George Gittoes, a fine arts dropout from The University of Sydney, received an honorary doctorate by The University of New South Wales. His documentaries, Soundtrack to War (2005) and Rampage (2006), screened at the Sydney and Berlin film festivals, and he has been employed by the Australian Government as an official war artist. Interestingly, the high quality screen work recognised by these Australian universities may have earned the recipients ‘real’ PhDs had they sought the qualification. Many of these film artists could have just as easily submitted their work for the degree of PhD by Published Papers at several universities that accept prior work in lieu of an original exegesis, and where a film is equated with a book or journal article. But such universities still invite comparisons of their PhDs by Published Papers with honorary doctorates due to rather too-easy-to-meet criteria. The privately funded Bond University, for example, recommends a minimum full-time enrolment of just three months and certainly seems more lax in its regulations than other Antipodean institution: a healthy curriculum vitae and payment of the prescribed fee (currently AUD$24,500 per annum) are the only requirements. Restricting my enquiries once again to the field of my own research, film and television, I note that Dr. Ingo Petzke achieved his 2004 PhD by Published Works based upon films produced in Germany well before enrolling at Bond, contextualized within a discussion of the history of avant-garde film-making in that country. Might not a cynic enquire as to how this PhD significantly differs from an honorary doctorate? Although Petzke undoubtedly paid his fees and met all of Bond’s requirements for his thesis entitled Slow Motion: Thirty Years in Film, one cannot criticise that cynic for wondering if Petzke’s films are indeed equivalent to a collection of refereed papers. It should be noted that Bond is not alone when it comes to awarding candidates the PhD by Published Papers for work published or screened in the distant past. Although yet to grant it in the area of film or television, Swinburne University of Technology (SUT) is an institution that distinctly specifies its PhD by Publications is to be awarded for “research which has been carried out prior to admission to candidature” (8). Similarly, the Griffith Law School states: “The PhD (by publications) is awarded to established researchers who have an international reputation based on already published works” (1). It appears that Bond is no solitary voice in the academic wilderness, for SUT and the Griffith Law School also apparently consider the usual milestones of Confirmation and Final Seminars to be unnecessary if the so-called candidate is already well published. Like Bond, Griffith University (GU) is prepared to consider a collection of films to be equivalent to a number of refereed papers. Dr Ian Lang’s 2002 PhD (by Publication) thesis entitled Conditional Truths: Remapping Paths To Documentary ‘Independence’ contains not refereed, scholarly articles but the following videos: Wheels Across the Himalaya (1981); Yallambee, People of Hope (1986); This Is What I Call Living (1988); The Art of Place: Hanoi Brisbane Art Exchange (1995); and Millennium Shift: The Search for New World Art (1997). While this is a most impressive body of work, and is well unified by appropriate discussion within the thesis, the cynic who raised eyebrows at Petzke’s thesis might also be questioning this thesis: Dr Lang’s videos all preceded enrolment at GU and none have been refereed or acknowledged with major prizes. Certainly, the act of releasing a film for distribution has much in common with book publishing, but should these videos be considered to be on a par with academic papers published in, say, the prestigious and demanding journal Screen? While recognition at awards ceremonies might arguably correlate with peer review there is still the question as to how scholarly a film actually is. Of course, documentary films such as those in Lang’s thesis can be shown to be addressing gaps in the literature, as is the expectation of any research paper, but the onus remains on the author/film-maker to demonstrate this via a detailed contextual review and a well-written, erudite argument that unifies the works into a cohesive thesis. This Lang has done, to the extent that suspicious cynic might wonder why he chose not to present his work for a standard PhD award. Another issue unaddressed by most institutions is the possibility that the publications have been self-refereed or refereed by the candidate’s editorial colleagues in a case wherein the papers appear in a book the candidate has edited or co-edited. Dr Gillian Swanson’s 2004 GU thesis Towards a Cultural History of Private Life: Sexual Character, Consuming Practices and Cultural Knowledge, which addresses amongst many other cultural artefacts the film Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean 1962), has nine publications: five of which come from two books she co-edited, Nationalising Femininity: Culture, Sexuality and Cinema in Britain in World War Two, (Gledhill and Swanson 1996) and Deciphering Culture: Ordinary Curiosities and Subjective Narratives (Crisp et al 2000). While few would dispute the quality of Swanson’s work, the persistent cynic might wonder if these five papers really qualify as refereed publications. The tacit understanding of a refereed publication is that it is blind reviewed i.e. the contributor’s name is removed from the document. Such a system is used to prevent bias and favouritism but this level of anonymity might be absent when the contributor to a book is also one of the book’s editors. Of course, Dr Swanson probably took great care to distance herself from the refereeing process undertaken by her co-editors, but without an inbuilt check, allegations of cronyism from unfriendly cynics may well result. A related factor in making comparisons of different university’s PhDs by Published Papers is the requirements different universities have about the standard of the journal the paper is published in. It used to be a simple matter in Australia: the government’s Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) held a Register of Refereed Journals. If your benefactor in disseminating your work was on the list, your publications were of near-unquestionable quality. Not any more: DEST will no longer accept nominations for listing on the Register and will not undertake to rule on whether a particular journal article meets the HERDC [Higher Education Research Data Collection] requirements for inclusion in publication counts. HEPs [Higher Education Providers] have always had the discretion to determine if a publication produced in a journal meets the requirements for inclusion in the HERDC regardless of whether or not the journal was included on the Register of Refereed Journals. As stated in the HERDC specifications, the Register is not an exhaustive list of all journals which satisfy the peer-review requirements (DEST). The last listing for the DEST Register of Refereed Journals was the 3rd of February 2006, making way for a new tiered list of academic journals, which is currently under review in the Australian tertiary education sector (see discussion of this development in the Redden and Mitchell articles in this issue). In the interim, some university faculties created their own rankings of journals, but not the Faculty of Creative Industries at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) where I am studying for my PhD by Published Papers. Although QUT does not have a list of ranked journals for a candidate to submit papers to, it is otherwise quite strict in its requirements. The QUT University Regulations state, “Papers submitted as a PhD thesis must be closely related in terms of subject matter and form a cohesive research narrative” (QUT PhD regulation 14.1.2). Thus there is the requirement at QUT that apart from the usual introduction, methodology and literature review, an argument must be made as to how the papers present a sustained research project via “an overarching discussion of the main features linking the publications” (14.2.12). It is also therein stated that it should be an “account of research progress linking the research papers” (4.2.6). In other words, a unifying essay must make an argument for consideration of the sometimes diversely published papers as a cohesive body of work, undertaken in a deliberate journey of research. In my own case, an aural auteur analysis of sound in the films of Rolf de Heer, I argue that my published papers (eight in total) represent a journey from genre analysis (one paper) to standard auteur analysis (three papers) to an argument that sound should be considered in auteur analysis (one paper) to the major innovation of the thesis, aural auteur analysis (three papers). It should also be noted that unlike Bond, GU or SUT, the QUT regulations for the standard PhD still apply: a Confirmation Seminar, Final Seminar and a minimum two years of full-time enrolment (with a minimum of three months residency in Brisbane) are all compulsory. Such milestones and sine qua non ensure the candidate’s academic progress and intellectual development such that she or he is able to confidently engage in meaningful quodlibets regarding the thesis’s topic. Another interesting and significant feature of the QUT guidelines for this type of degree is the edict that papers submitted must be “published, accepted or submitted during the period of candidature” (14.1.1). Similarly, the University of Canberra (UC) states “The articles or other published material must be prepared during the period of candidature” (10). Likewise, Edith Cowan University (ECU) will confer its PhD by Publications to those candidates whose thesis consists of “only papers published in refereed scholarly media during the period of enrolment” (2). In other words, one cannot simply front up to ECU, QUT, or UC with a résumé of articles or films published over a lifetime of writing or film-making and ask for a PhD by Published Papers. Publications of the candidate prepared prior to commencement of candidature are simply not acceptable at these institutions and such PhDs by Published Papers from QUT, UC and ECU are entirely different to those offered by Bond, GU and SUT. Furthermore, without a requirement for a substantial period of enrolment and residency, recipients of PhDs by Published Papers from Bond, GU, or SUT are unlikely to have participated significantly in the research environment of their relevant faculty and peers. Such newly minted doctors may be as unfamiliar with the campus and its research activities as the recipient of an honorary doctorate usually is, as he or she poses for the media’s cameras en route to the glamorous awards ceremony. Much of my argument in this paper is built upon the assumption that the process of refereeing a paper (or for that matter, a film) guarantees a high level of academic rigour, but I confess that this premise is patently naïve, if not actually flawed. Refereeing can result in the rejection of new ideas that conflict with the established opinions of the referees. Interdisciplinary collaboration can be impeded and the lack of referee’s accountability is a potential problem, too. It can also be no less nail-biting a process than the examination of a finished thesis, given that some journals take over a year to complete the refereeing process, and some journal’s editorial committees have recognised this shortcoming. Despite being a mainstay of its editorial approach since 1869, the prestigious science journal, Nature, which only publishes about 7% of its submissions, has led the way with regard to varying the procedure of refereeing, implementing in 2006 a four-month trial period of ‘Open Peer Review’. Their website states, Authors could choose to have their submissions posted on a preprint server for open comments, in parallel with the conventional peer review process. Anyone in the field could then post comments, provided they were prepared to identify themselves. Once the usual confidential peer review process is complete, the public ‘open peer review’ process was closed and the editors made their decision about publication with the help of all reports and comments (Campbell). Unfortunately, the experiment was unpopular with both authors and online peer reviewers. What the Nature experiment does demonstrate, however, is that the traditional process of blind refereeing is not yet perfected and can possibly evolve into something less problematic in the future. Until then, refereeing continues to be the best system there is for applying structured academic scrutiny to submitted papers. With the reforms of the higher education sector, including forced mergers of universities and colleges of advanced education and the re-introduction of university fees (carried out under the aegis of John Dawkins, Minister for Employment, Education and Training from 1987 to 1991), and the subsequent rationing of monies according to research dividends (calculated according to numbers of research degree conferrals and publications), there has been a veritable explosion in the number of institutions offering PhDs in Australia. But the general public may not always be capable of differentiating between legitimately accredited programs and diploma mills, given that the requirements for the first differ substantially. From relatively easily obtainable PhDs by Published Papers at Bond, GU and SUT to more rigorous requirements at ECU, QUT and UC, there is undoubtedly a huge range in the demands of degrees that recognise a candidate’s published body of work. The cynical reader may assume that with this paper I am simply trying to shore up my own forthcoming graduation with a PhD by Published papers from potential criticisms that it is on par with a ‘purchased’ doctorate. Perhaps they are right, for this is a new degree in QUT’s Creative Industries faculty and has only been awarded to one other candidate (Dr Marcus Foth for his 2006 thesis entitled Towards a Design Methodology to Support Social Networks of Residents in Inner-City Apartment Buildings). But I believe QUT is setting a benchmark, along with ECU and UC, to which other universities should aspire. In conclusion, I believe further efforts should be undertaken to heighten the differences in status between PhDs by Published Papers generated during enrolment, PhDs by Published Papers generated before enrolment and honorary doctorates awarded for non-academic published work. Failure to do so courts cynical comparison of all PhD by Published Papers with unearnt doctorates bought from Internet shysters. References Brown, George. “Protecting Australia’s Higher Education System: A Proactive Versus Reactive Approach in Review (1999–2004).” Proceedings of the Australian Universities Quality Forum 2004. Australian Universities Quality Agency, 2004. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.auqa.edu.au/auqf/2004/program/papers/Brown.pdf>. Campbell, Philip. “Nature Peer Review Trial and Debate.” Nature: International Weekly Journal of Science. December 2006. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.nature.com/nature/peerreview/> Crisp, Jane, Kay Ferres, and Gillian Swanson, eds. Deciphering Culture: Ordinary Curiosities and Subjective Narratives. London: Routledge, 2000. Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST). “Closed—Register of Refereed Journals.” Higher Education Research Data Collection, 2008. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.dest.gov.au/sectors/research_sector/online_forms_services/ higher_education_research_data_ collection.htm>. Edith Cowan University. “Policy Content.” Postgraduate Research: Thesis by Publication, 2003. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.ecu.edu.au/GPPS/policies_db/tmp/ac063.pdf>. Gledhill, Christine, and Gillian Swanson, eds. Nationalising Femininity: Culture, Sexuality and Cinema in Britain in World War Two. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996. Griffith Law School, Griffith University. Handbook for Research Higher Degree Students. 24 March 2004. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.griffith.edu.au/centre/slrc/pdf/rhdhandbook.pdf>. Jeffries, Stuart. “I’m a celebrity, get me an honorary degree!” The Guardian 6 July 2006. 11 June 2008 ‹http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/comment/story/0,,1813525,00.html>. 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