Journal articles: 'Ruch gazu' – Grafiati (2024)

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W polityce Władimira Putina ważne miejsce zajmuje Arktyka. Znajdują się tam ogromne zasoby ropy i gazu. Ocenia się, że niemal czwarta część światowych złóż ropy i połowa globalnych złóż gazu mogą zalegać pod dnem morskim tego lodowatego pustkowia. Wzrost temperatury na Ziemi powoduje topnienie polarnej pokrywy lodowej, to zaś sprawia, że obszar Arktyki staje się łatwiejszy do eksploracji. Region ten budzi zainteresowanie wielu państw, między innymi: Kanady, Danii (i zależnej od niej Grenlandii), Norwegii, Rosji oraz Stanów Zjednoczonych. Obecnie w działania na obszarze arktycznym najbardziej jest zaangażowana Rosja i próbuje ona wciągnąć świat zachodni w arktyczny wyścig zbrojeń. Na wyspach szelfu kontynentalnego Europy, który stanowi północny skraj całego kontynentu, znajduje się 475 rosyjskich baz, od zachodniej granicy Federacji Rosyjskiej do Cieśniny Beringa na wschodzie. Rozlokowane są w nich systemy przeciwlotnicze S-400 oraz dodatkowo obrony powietrznej w pobliskiej lądowej bazie lotniczej. Środki te mogą pracować w temperaturze –50oC. Wojsko w bazach ma za zadanie radiolokacyjną kontrolę ruchu lotniczego i Północnej Drogi Morskiej oraz likwidowanie szkód ekologicznych. Zgodnie z decyzją prezydenta Putina do 2024 roku ruch żeglugowy na trasie północnomorskiej ma zwiększyć się dziesięciokrotnie. W rosyjskim rządzie powstało nowe ministerstwo, które odpowiada za rozwój Arktyki.

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W artykule stwierdza się, że działania organizacji Hamas mają wymiar globalny, bowiem to, co dzieje się w jednym końcu świata, wywiera niewątpliwy wpływ na sytuację nie tylko w miejscach i terenach ościennych, lecz także tych położonych w drugim zakątku świata, gdyż współczesny człowiek żyje w świecie globalnym. Dlatego działania terrorystów Hamasu naruszają prawa każdego człowieka, bez względu na miejsce pobytu. Wydarzenia, jakie toczą się w Strefie Gazy, stanowią nie tylko o stanie praw człowieka w tych właśnie miejscach, ale wywierają realny wpływ na to, jak prawa człowieka przestrzegane są na całym świecie. Islamski Ruch Oporu jest organizacją terrorystyczną, która od kilku lat rządzi państwem palestyńskim. Od momentu powstania do czasów współczesnych organizacja przeszła ewolucję, zwłaszcza w odniesieniu do metod działania. W ostatnich latach dramatycznie wzrosły role polityczna i społeczna organizacji Hamas. Zauważyć to można na przykładzie wprowadzanych przez organizację coraz bardziej restrykcyjnych przepisów wobec społeczeństwa, zwłaszcza wobec kobiet. Zmiana ról społecznej i politycznej Hamasu w regionie wpłynęła na zmianę metod i sposobów działania. Islamski Ruch Oporu w znacznym stopniu ograniczył krwawe zamachy terrorystyczne, porwania oraz inne techniki terroryzmu na rzecz rozmów, negocjacji oraz dialogu. Ponadto próby utworzenia rządu jedności narodowej oraz pokojowe konferencje zmierzają do uznania rządu przez społeczność międzynarodową.

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W pracy przedstawiono przegląd metod tomografii optycznej, stosowanych do badania przepływu dwufazowego gaz-ciecz. Wykorzystanie tomografii optycznej pozwala wyznaczać parametry ruchu fazy rozproszone (gazowej). W opracowaniu przedstawiono ideę pomiaru oraz opisano własne metody prześwietlania obiektów badanych. Przeprowadzono analizę możliwości zastosowania poszczególnych metod do pomiaru wybranych parametrów przepływu dwufazowego. Opisano metodę prześwietlania równoległą i rozproszoną wiązką światła oraz trójwymiarową metodę analizy obrazu. Prezentowane metody mogą posłużyć do pomiaru pęcherzyków w cieczach przeźroczystych, ale również ruchu kropli cieczy w gazie, ciał stałych w cieczy lub ciał stałych w gazie.

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This article offers an analysis of the documentary Land Rush by Osvalde Lewat and Hugo Berkeley. The study shows how the film is an example of the multiple points of view, particularly sensitive to people’s living conditions. This is the result of a dual gaze of the filmmakers and also of the specific positioning of Osvalde Lewat, a Cameroonian who navigates between various countries and lives in the space of the diaspora. From her ‘situated gaze’, she offers a particular perspective on the fragility of villagers confronting environmental issues, international market and economic rules. Far removed from stereotypes, she shows how rural communities are faced with choices that can change their lives. At the same time, she attests to the fact that no matter the condition, one can resist and define one’s own destiny. It is a contemporary practice of documentary that Osvalde Lewat uses her experiences as a journalist and then as a filmmaker, to fight against injustices of all kinds.

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The aim of this essay is to analyse Sarah Waters’s novel Affinity (1999) from the perspective of the panoptical system of surveillance, based on the controlling power of the gaze, that was widely employed as a system of represión in Victorian society. It seeks to explore Milbank prison as a perfect example of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon and Michel Foucault’s ideas about punishment and imprisonment. Drawing on Laura Mulvey’s notion of scopophilia, the essay goes on to explore the characteristics of the interaction and mutual attraction felt by two of the main characters, with the aim of proving that the gaze can be a powerful weapon to subjugate another person. Finally, it tackles the relevance of the third protagonist, Ruth Vigers, a lady’s maid whose job makes her invisible both to the readers and to other characters in the novel. The analysis shows that it is precisely her social invisibility that allows her to escape the gaze of this panoptical society and become the master puppeteer controlling everything from the shadows.

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For a concept that was largely outside of the public gaze a decade ago, “social economy” has, in a short time, captured the attention and imaginations of civil society organizations, mainstream institutions, and funders. Local and national governments, international agencies and foundations are embracing the social economy in an effort to generate new models for development and sustainability. This turn requires clarity and critical reflection on what “the social economy” entails and its possible future directions. In this Perspective, we shed light on these areas, focusing on issues of sustainability and food systems, and in the process, advance three arguments. First, context-dependent diversity is a defining characteristic of social economy. Second, though frequently positioned as a counter-point to neoliberalism, the social economy is far broader and more nuanced. Third, research in the social and informal economies of food has opened critical discussions on the appropriate pathways, effectiveness and viability of such initiatives to transform food systems that structurally promote marginalization, exclusion, food insecurity and ill-health for many. In the current rush to brand all things “social economy”, such critical reflection will play a valuable role in shaping the discussion around those transformative pathways. We conclude by suggesting that the study of social economy has to include deliberate consideration of its informal manifestations, and that food studies scholars are challenged now to develop a comprehensive body of scholarship that articulates impacts and value of social economy in creative and compelling ways.

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The article describes research related to detecting the feeling of premature fatigue while driving by disabled people. Based on the analysis of the literature on driving by drivers with a significant degree of disability, and based on the authors' experience, two groups of drivers were selected: with paraplegia and tetraplegia. The tests were carried out on vehicles equipped with devices of the following types: handle mounted on the steering wheel, the mechanism for manual operation of gas and brake, automatic gearbox. To identify the phenomenon of premature fatigue, we proposed its definition, measures, and two detection methods. Some measures were quantitative, for example, the number of occurrences of the phenomenon in a given statistical sample, while others were qualitative, for example, the time of occurrence since the beginning of driving. Test methods included driving in real traffic and on the maneuvering yard. Tests conducted in road traffic showed the actual time of occurrence of the studied phenomenon. On the other hand, experiments on the maneuvering area aimed at intensifying operations performed by the driver and, as a result, reducing the time of examination. The assessment of the correctness of the results of the presented method of detecting the feeling of premature fatigue consisted of (i) assessing the convergence of test results from road tests and the maneuvering yard, (ii) compliance of the assessment of the tested devices using individual measures of the studied phenomenon and (iii) comparison of the current test results with the reputation of devices on the market. The research allowed us to identify adaptive devices that caused the feeling of premature fatigue to the most significant and lowest extent. On this basis, in a properly selected research sample of drivers with disabilities, the ergonomics of individual devices can be assessed. At the same time, using the single-person method, you can evaluate the appropriateness of the device selection for a given driver. W artykule opisano badania związane z wykrywaniem odczucia przedwczesnego zmęczenia podczas prowadzenia pojazdu przez osoby niepełnosprawne. Na podstawie przeprowadzonej analizy literatury dotyczącej problematyki prowadzenia pojazdów przez niepełnosprawnych kierowców ze znacznym stopniem niepełnosprawności oraz na podstawie doświadczenia Autorów, wytypowano dwie grupy kierowców: z paraplegią i tetraplegią. Badania przeprowadzono na pojazdach wyposażonych w urządzenia następujących typów: uchwyt zamocowany na kole kierownicy, urządzenie do ręcznej obsługi gazu i hamulca, automatyczna skrzynia biegów. W celu identyfikacji zjawiska przedwczesnego zmęczenia opracowano: definicję zjawiska, jego miary możliwe do wykorzystania w badaniach oraz dwie metody wykrywania. Niektóre miary miały charakter ilościowy, na przykład liczba wystąpień zjawiska w określonej próbie statystycznej, a inne jakościowy, na przykład czas wystąpienia od momentu rozpoczęcia prowadzenia pojazdu. Metody badań obejmowały prowadzenie pojazdu w rzeczywistym ruchu drogowym oraz na placu manewrowym. Testy prowadzone w ruchu drogowym pokazywały rzeczywisty czas pojawiania się badanego zjawiska. Natomiast eksperymenty na placu manewrowym miały na celu intensyfikację wykonywanych przez kierowcę operacji i w efekcie skrócenie czasu badania. Ocena poprawności wyników prezentowanej metody wykrywania odczucia przedwczesnego zmęczenia polegała na: ocenie zbieżności wyników badań z testów drogowych i z placu manewrowego, zgodności oceny badanych urządzeń za pomocą poszczególnych miar badanego zjawiska oraz zbieżności wyników badań z renomą poszczególnych urządzeń na rynku. Przeprowadzone badania pozwoliły na identyfikację urządzeń adaptacyjnych, które w największym oraz najmniejszym stopniu powodowały odczucie przedwczesnego zmęczenia. Na tej podstawie, w odpowiednio dobranej próbie badawczej kierowców z niepełnosprawnościami można oceniać ergonomię poszczególnych urządzeń. Jednocześnie, przy zastosowaniu metody dla pojedynczej osoby, można oceniać słuszność indywidualnego doboru urządzeń dla danego kierowcy.

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Children’s lived experiences of movement indicate possibilities for teaching them to be at home in increasingly challenging domains of activity. Especially significant are movements that reflect landscape connection, that carry an intention not confined to individual purpose, and that are enhanced by observational glance. The first rush of movement is described phenomenologically as an essential feature of these movements and of the vital consciousness they engender. The phenomenon of the first rush of movement attests to a mimetic impulse towards otherness that overrides personal motive and moderates an otherwise containing gaze. Its intentionality is evident in an extended, inclusive and progressive range of human movements that affirm a natural, intimate relation with others and the world at large. The embrace, caress and kiss are described as primary, elemental gestures from which movement disciplines sustaining the first rush of moment and its mimetic impulse can be cultivated. Accordingly, this study prefaces a practice of education in which children’s movements, originating in responsiveness to landscape and motivated by a mimetic impulse, can be guided towards enhanced and sustaining world relations. Vital qualities of movement can be sustained from childhood to adulthood and from the most rudimentary contacts with the world to the most refined, skill-based encounters.

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What creative techniques of resistance are available to a female filmmaker when she is the victim of a violent event and filmed at her most vulnerable? This article uses an autoethnographic lens to discuss my experience of a serious car crash my family and I were inadvertently involved in due to police negligence and a criminal act. Employing Creative Analytical Practice (CAP) ethnography, a reflexive form of research which recognises that the creative process, producer and product are “deeply intertwined” (Richardson, “Writing: A Method” 930), I investigate how the crash’s violent affects crippled my agency, manifested in my creative praxis and catalysed my identification of latent forms of institutionalised violence in film culture, its discourse and pedagogy that also contributed to my inertia. The article maps my process of writing a feature length screenplay during the aftermath of the crash as I set out to articulate my story of survival and resistance. Using this narrative inquiry, in which we can “investigate how we construct the world, ourselves, and others, and how standard objectifying practices...unnecessarily limit us” (Richardson, “Writing: A Method” 924), I outline how I attempted to disrupt the entrenched power structures that exist in dominant narratives of violence in film and challenge my subjugated positioning as a woman within this canon. I describe my engagement with the deconstructionist practices of writing the body and militant feminist cinema, which suggest subversive opportunities for women’s self-determination by encouraging us to embrace our exiled positioning in dominant discourse through creative experimentation, and identify some of the possibilities and limitations of this for female agency. Drawing on CAP ethnography, existentialism, film feminism, and narrative reframing, I assert that these reconstructive practices are more effective for the creative enfranchisem*nt of women by not relegating us to the periphery of social systems and cultural forms. Instead, they enable us to speak back to violent structures in a language that has greater social access, context and impact.My strong desire to tell screen stories lies in my belief that storytelling is a crucial evolutionary mechanism of resilience. Narratives do not simply represent the social world but also have the ability to change it by enabling us to “try to figure out how to live our lives meaningfully” (Ellis 760). This conviction has been directly influenced by my personal story of trauma and survival when myself, my siblings, and our respective life partners became involved in a major car crash. Two police officers attending to a drunken brawl in an inner city park had, in their haste, left the keys in the ignition of their vehicle. We were travelling across a major intersection when the police car, which had subsequently been stolen by a man involved in the brawl – a man who was wanted on parole, had a blood alcohol level three times over the legal limit, and was driving at speeds exceeding 110kms per hour - ran a red light and crossed our path, causing us to crash into his vehicle. From the impact, the small four-wheel drive we were travelling in was catapulted metres into the air, rolling numerous times before smashing head on into oncoming traffic. My heavily pregnant sister was driving our vehicle.The incident attracted national media attention and our story became a sensationalist spectacle. Each news station reported erroneous and conflicting information, one stating that my sister had lost her unborn daughter, another even going so far as to claim my sister had died in the crash. This tabloidised, ‘if it bleeds, it leads’, culture of journalism, along with new digital technologies, encourages and facilitates the normalisation of violent acts, often inflicted on women. Moreover, in their pursuit of high-rating stories, news bodies motivate dehumanising acts of citizen journalism that see witnesses often inspired to film, rather than assist, victims involved in a violent event. Through a connection with someone working for a major news station, we discovered that leading news broadcasters had bought a tape shot by a group of men who call themselves the ‘Paparazzi of Perth’. These men were some of the first on the scene and began filming us from only a few metres away while we were still trapped upside down and unconscious in our vehicle. In the recording, the men are heard laughing and celebrating our tragedy as they realise the lucrative possibilities of the shocking imagery they are capturing as witnesses pull us out of the back of the car, and my pregnant sister incredibly frees herself from the wreckage by kicking out the window.As a female filmmaker, I saw the bitter irony of this event as the camera was now turned on me and my loved ones at our most vulnerable. In her discussion of the male gaze, a culturally sanctioned form of narrational violence against women that is ubiquitous in most mainstream media, Mulvey proposes that women are generally the passive image, trapped by the physical limits of the frame in a permanent state of powerlessness as our identity is reduced to her “to-be-looked-at-ness” (40). For a long period of time, the experience of performing the role of this commodified woman of a weaponised male gaze, along with the threat of annihilation associated with our near-death experience, immobilised my spirit. I felt I belonged “more to the dead than to the living” (Herman 34). When I eventually returned to my creative praxis, I decided to use scriptwriting as both my “mode of reasoning and a mode of representation” (Richardson, Writing Strategies 21), test whether I could work through my feelings of alienation and violation and reclaim my agency. This was a complex and harrowing task because my memories “lack[ed] verbal narrative and context” (Herman 38) and were deeply rooted in my body. Cixous confirms that for women, “writing and voice...are woven together” and “spring from the deepest layers of her psyche” (Moi 112). For many months, I struggled to write. I attempted to block out this violent ordeal and censor my self. I soon learnt, however, that my body could not be silenced and was slow to forget. As I tried to write around this experience, the trauma worked itself deeper inside of me, and my physical symptoms worsened, as did the quality of my writing.In the early version of the screenplay I found myself writing a female-centred film about violence, identity and death, using the fictional narrative to express the numbness I experienced. I wrote the female protagonist with detachment as though she were an object devoid of agency. Sartre claims that we make objects of others and of ourselves in an attempt to control the uncertainty of life and the ever-changing nature of humanity (242). Making something into an object is to deprive it of life (and death); it is our attempt to keep ourselves ‘safe’. While I recognise that the car crash’s reminder of my mortality was no doubt part of the reason why I rendered myself, and the script’s female protagonist, lifeless as agentic beings, I sensed that there were subtler operations of power and control behind my self-objectification and self-censorship, which deeply concerned me. What had influenced this dea(r)th of female agency in my creative imaginings? Why did I write my female character with such a red pen? Why did I seem so compelled to ‘kill’ her? I wanted to investigate my gender construction, the complex relationship between my scriptwriting praxis, and the context within which it is produced to discover whether I could write a different future for myself, and my female characters. Kiesinger supports “contextualizing our stories within the framework of a larger picture” (108), so as to remain open to the possibility that there might not be anything ‘wrong’ with us, per se, “but rather something very wrong with the dynamics that dominate the communicative system” (109) within which we operate: in the case of my creative praxis, the oppressive structures present in the culture of film and its pedagogy.Pulling FocusWomen are supposed to be the view and when the view talks back, it is uncomfortable.— Jane Campion (Filming Desire)It is a terrible thing to see that no one has ever taught us how to develop our vision as women neither in the history of arts nor in film schools.— Marie Mandy (Filming Desire)The democratisation of today’s media landscape through new technologies, the recent rise in female-run production companies (Zemler) in Hollywood, along with the ground-breaking #MeToo and Time’s Up movements has elevated the global consciousness of gender-based violence, and has seen the screen industry seek to redress its history of gender imbalance. While it is too early to assess the impact these developments may have on women’s standing in film, today the ‘celluloid ceiling’ still operates on multiple levels of indoctrination and control through a systemic pattern of exclusion for women that upholds the “nearly seamless dialogue among men in cinema” (Lauzen, Thumbs Down 2). Female filmmakers occupy a tenuous position of influence in the mainstream industry and things are not any better on the other side of the camera (Lauzen, The Celluloid Ceiling). For the most part, Hollywood’s male gaze and penchant for sexualising and (physically or figuratively) killing female characters, which normalises violence against women and is “almost inversely proportional to the liberation of women in society” (Mandy), continues to limit women to performing as the image rather than the agent on screen.Film funding bodies and censorship boards, mostly comprised of men, remain exceptionally averse to independent female filmmakers who go against the odds to tell their stories, which often violate taboos about femininity and radically redefine female agency through the construction of the female gaze: a narrational technique of resistance that enables reel woman to govern the point of view, imagery and action of the film (Smelik 51-52). This generally sees their films unjustly ghettoised through incongruent classification or censorship, and forced into independent or underground distribution (Sexton-Finck 165-182). Not only does censorship propose the idea that female agency is abject and dangerous and needs to be restrained, it prevents access to this important cinema by women that aims to counter the male gaze and “shield us from this type of violence” (Gillain 210). This form of ideological and institutional gatekeeping is not only enforced in the film industry, it is also insidiously (re)constituted in the epistemological construction of film discourse and pedagogy, which in their design, are still largely intrinsically gendered institutions, encoded with phallocentric signification that rejects a woman’s specificity and approach to knowledge. Drawing on my mutually informative roles as a former film student and experienced screen educator, I assert that most screen curricula in Australia still uphold entrenched androcentric norms that assume the male gaze and advocate popular cinema’s didactic three-act structure, which conditions our value systems to favour masculinity and men’s worldview. This restorative storytelling approach is argued to be fatally limiting to reel women (Smith 136; Dancyger and Rush 25) as it propagates the Enlightenment notion of a universal subjectivity, based on free will and reason, which neutralises the power structures of society (and film) and repudiates the influence of social positioning on our opportunity for agency. Moreover, through its omniscient consciousness, which seeks to efface the presence of a specific narrator, the three-act method disavows this policing of female agency and absolves any specific individual of responsibility for its structural violence (Dyer 98).By pulling focus on some of these problematic mechanisms in the hostile climate of the film industry and its spaces of learning for women, I became acutely aware of the more latent forms of violence that had conditioned my scriptwriting praxis, the ambivalence I felt towards my female identity, and my consequent gagging of the female character in the screenplay.Changing Lenses How do the specific circ*mstances in which we write affect what we write? How does what we write affect who we become?— Laurel Richardson (Fields of Play 1)In the beginning, there is an end. Don’t be afraid: it’s your death that is dying. Then: all the beginnings.— Helene Cixous (Cixous and Jensen 41)The discoveries I made during my process of CAP ethnography saw a strong feeling of dissidence arrive inside me. I vehemently wanted to write my way out of my subjugated state and release some of the anguish that my traumatised body was carrying around. I was drawn to militant feminist cinema and the French poststructuralist approach of ‘writing the body’ (l’ecriture feminine) given these deconstructive practices “create images and ideas that have the power to inspire to revolt against oppression and exploitation” (Moi 120). Feminist cinema’s visual treatise of writing the body through its departure from androcentric codes - its unformulaic approach to structure, plot, character and narration (De Lauretis 106) - revealed to me ways in which I could use the scriptwriting process to validate my debilitating experience of physical and psychic violence, decensor my self and move towards rejoining the living. Cixous affirms that, “by writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into…the ailing or dead figure” (Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa 880). It became clear to me that the persistent themes of death that manifested in the first draft of the script were not, as I first suspected, me ‘rehearsing to die’, or wanting to kill off the woman inside me. I was in fact “not driven towards death but by death” (Homer 89), the close proximity to my mortality, acting as a limit, was calling for a strengthening of my life force, a rebirth of my agency (Bettelheim 36). Mansfield acknowledges that death “offers us a freedom outside of the repression and logic that dominate our daily practices of keeping ourselves in order, within the lines” (87).I challenged myself to write the uncomfortable, the unfamiliar, the unexplored and to allow myself to go to places in me that I had never before let speak by investigating my agency from a much more layered and critical perspective. This was both incredibly terrifying and liberating and enabled me to discard the agentic ‘corset’ I had previously worn in my creative praxis. Dancyger and Rush confirm that “one of the things that happens when we break out of the restorative three-act form is that the effaced narrator becomes increasingly visible and overt” (38). I experienced an invigorating feeling of empowerment through my appropriation of the female gaze in the screenplay which initially appeased some of the post-crash turmoil and general sense of injustice I was experiencing. However, I soon, found something toxic rising inside of me. Like the acrimonious feminist cinema I was immersed in – Raw (Ducournau), A Girl Walks Home at Night (Amirpour), Romance (Breillat), Trouble Every Day (Denis), Baise-Moi (Despentes and Thi), In My Skin (Van), Anatomy of Hell (Breillat) – the screenplay I had produced involved a female character turning the tables on men and using acts of revenge to satisfy her needs. Not only was I creating a highly dystopian world filled with explicit themes of suffering in the screenplay, I too existed in a displaced state of rage and ‘psychic nausea’ in my daily life (Baldick and Sartre). I became haunted by vivid flashbacks of the car crash as abject images, sounds and sensations played over and over in my mind and body like a horror movie on loop. I struggled to find the necessary clarity and counterbalance of stability required to successfully handle this type of experimentation.I do not wish to undermine the creative potential of deconstructive practices, such as writing the body and militant cinema, for female filmmakers. However, I believe my post-trauma sensitivity to visceral entrapment and spiritual violence magnifies some of the psychological and physiological risks involved. Deconstructive experimentation “happens much more easily in the realm of “texts” than in the world of human interaction” (hooks 22) and presents agentic limitations for women since it offers a “utopian vision of female creativity” (Moi 119) that is “devoid of reality...except in a poetic sense” (Moi 122). In jettisoning the restorative qualities of narrative film, new boundaries for women are inadvertently created through restricting us to “intellectual pleasure but rarely emotional pleasure” (Citron 51). Moreover, by reducing women’s agency to retaliation we are denied the opportunity for catharsis and transformation; something I desperately longed to experience in my injured state. Kaplan acknowledges this problem, arguing that female filmmakers need to move theoretically beyond deconstruction to reconstruction, “to manipulate the recognized, dominating discourses so as to begin to free ourselves through rather than beyond them (for what is there ‘beyond’?)” (Women and Film 141).A potent desire to regain a sense of connectedness and control pushed itself out from deep inside me. I yearned for a tonic to move myself and my female character to an active position, rather than a reactive one that merely repeats the victimising dynamic of mainstream film by appropriating a reversed (female) gaze and now makes women the violent victors (Kaplan, Feminism and Film 130). We have arrived at a point where we must destabilise the dominance-submission structure and “think about ways of transcending a polarity that has only brought us all pain” (Kaplan, Feminism and Film 135). I became determined to write a screen narrative that, while dealing with some of the harsh realities of humanity I had become exposed to, involved an existentialist movement towards catharsis and activity.ReframingWhen our stories break down or no longer serve us well, it is imperative that we examine the quality of the stories we are telling and actively reinvent our accounts in ways that permit us to live more fulfilling lives.— Christine Kiesinger (107)I’m frightened by life’s randomness, so I want to deal with it, make some sense of it by telling a film story. But it’s not without hope. I don’t believe in telling stories without some hope.— Susanne Bier (Thomas)Narrative reframing is underlined by the existentialist belief that our spiritual freedom is an artistic process of self-creation, dependent on our free will to organise the elements of our lives, many determined out of our control, into the subjective frame that is to be our experience of our selves and the world around us (107). As a filmmaker, I recognise the power of selective editing and composition. Narrative reframing’s demand for a rational assessment of “the degree to which we live our stories versus the degree to which our stories live us” (Kiesinger 109), helped me to understand how I could use these filmmaking skills to take a step back from my trauma so as to look at it objectively “as a text for study” (Ellis 108) and to exercise power over the creative-destructive forces it, and the deconstructive writing methods I had employed, produced. Richardson confirms the benefits of this practice, since narrative “is the universal way in which humans accommodate to finitude” (Writing Strategies 65).In the script’s development, I found my resilience lay in my capacity to imagine more positive alternatives for female agency. I focussed on writing a narrative that did not avoid life’s hardships and injustices, or require them to be “attenuated, veiled, sweetened, blunted, and falsified” (Nietzsche and Hollingdale 68), yet still involved a life-affirming sentiment. With this in mind, I reintroduced the three-act structure in the revised script as its affectivity and therapeutic denouement enabled me to experience a sense of agentic catharsis that turned “nauseous thoughts into imaginations with which it is possible to live” (Nietzsche 52). Nevertheless, I remained vigilant not to lapse into didacticism; to allow my female character to be free to transgress social conventions surrounding women’s agency. Indebted to Kaplan’s writing on the cinematic gaze, I chose to take up what she identifies as a ‘mutual gaze’; an ethical framework that enabled me to privilege the female character’s perspective and autonomy with a neutral subject-subject gaze rather than the “subject-object kind that reduces one of the parties to the place of submission” (Feminism and Film 135). I incorporated the filmic technique of the point of view (POV) shot for key narrative moments as it allows an audience to literally view the world through a character’s eyes, as well as direct address, which involves the character looking back down the lens at the viewer (us); establishing the highest level of identification between the spectator and the subject on screen.The most pertinent illustration of these significant scriptwriting changes through my engagement with narrative reframing and feminist film theory, is in the reworking of my family’s car crash which became a pivotal turning point in the final draft. In the scene, I use POV and direct address to turn the weaponised gaze back around onto the ‘paparazzi’ who are filming the spectacle. When the central (pregnant) character frees herself from the wreckage, she notices these men filming her and we see the moment from her point of view as she looks at these men laughing and revelling in the commercial potential of their mediatised act. Switching between POV and direct address, the men soon notice they have been exposed as the woman looks back down the lens at them (us) with disbelief, reproaching them (us) for daring to film her in this traumatic moment. She holds her determined gaze while they glance awkwardly back at her, until their laughter dissipates, they stop recording and appear to recognise the culpability of their actions. With these techniques of mutual gazing, I set out to humanise and empower the female victim and neutralise the power dynamic: the woman is now also a viewing agent, and the men equally perform the role of the viewed. In this creative reframing, I hope to provide an antidote to filmic violence against and/or by women as this female character reclaims her (my) experience of survival without adhering to the culture of female passivity or ressentiment.This article has examined how a serious car crash, being filmed against my will in its aftermath and the attendant damages that prevailed from this experience, catalysed a critical change of direction in my scriptwriting. The victimising event helped me recognise the manifest and latent forms of violence against women that are normalised through everyday ideological and institutional systems in film and prevent us from performing as active agents in our creative praxis. There is a critical need for more inclusive modes of practice – across the film industry, discourse and pedagogy – that are cognisant and respectful of women’s specificity and our difference to the androcentric landscape of mainstream film. We need to continue to exert pressure on changing violent mechanisms that marginalise us and ghettoise our stories. As this article has demonstrated, working outside dominant forms can enable important emancipatory opportunities for women, however, this type or deconstruction also presents risks that generally leave us powerless in everyday spaces. While I advocate that female filmmakers should look to techniques of feminist cinema for an alternative lens, we must also work within popular film to critique and subvert it, and not deny women the pleasures and political advantages of its restorative structure. By enabling female filmmakers to (re)humanise woman though encouraging empathy and compassion, this affective storytelling form has the potential to counter violence against women and mobilise female agency. Equally, CAP ethnography and narrative reframing are critical discourses for the retrieval and actualisation of female filmmakers’ agency as they allow us to contextualise our stories of resistance and survival within the framework of a larger picture of violence to gain perspective on our subjective experiences and render them as significant, informative and useful to the lives of others. This enables us to move from the isolated margins of subcultural film and discourse to reclaim our stories at the centre.ReferencesA Girl Walks Home at Night. Dir. Ana Lily Amirpour. Say Ahh Productions, 2014.Anatomy of Hell. Dir. Catherine Breillat. Tartan Films, 2004. Baise-Moi. Dirs. Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi. FilmFixx, 2000.Baldick, Robert, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Nausea. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965.Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. London: Thames and Hudson, 1976.Citron, Michelle. Women’s Film Production: Going Mainstream in Female Spectators: Looking at Film and Television. Ed. E. Deidre Pribram. London: Verso, 1988.Cixous, Helene. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1.4 (1976): 875-893.Cixous, Helene, and Deborah Jenson. "Coming to Writing" and Other Essays. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991.Dancyger, Ken, and Jeff Rush. Alternative Scriptwriting: Successfully Breaking the Rules. Boston, MA: Focal Press, 2002.De Lauretis, Teresa. Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.Dyer, Richard. The Matter of Images: Essays on Representation. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2002.Ellis, Carolyn. The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about Autoethnography. California: AltaMira, 2004.Filming Desire: A Journey through Women's Cinema. Dir. Marie Mandy. Women Make Movies, 2000.Gillain, Anne. “Profile of a Filmmaker: Catherine Breillat.” Beyond French Feminisms: Debates on Women, Politics, and Culture in France, 1981-2001. Eds. Roger Célestin, Eliane Françoise DalMolin, and Isabelle de Courtivron. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 206.Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery. London: Pandora, 1994.Homer, Sean. Jacques Lacan. London: Routledge, 2005.hooks, bell. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1990.In My Skin. Dir. Marina de Van. Wellspring Media, 2002. Kaplan, E. Ann. Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera. New York: Routledge, 1988.———. Feminism and Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.Kiesinger, Christine E. “My Father's Shoes: The Therapeutic Value of Narrative Reframing.” Ethnographically Speaking: Autoethnography, Literature, and Aesthetics. Eds. Arthur P. Bochner and Carolyn Ellis. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2002. 107-111.Lauzen, Martha M. “Thumbs Down - Representation of Women Film Critics in the Top 100 U.S. Daily Newspapers - A Study by Dr. Martha Lauzen.” Alliance of Women Film Journalists, 25 July 2012. 4-5.———. The Celluloid Ceiling: Behind-the-Scenes Employment of Women on the Top 100, 250, and 500 Films of 2018. Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film San Diego State University 2019. <https://womenintvfilm.sdsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/2018_Celluloid_Ceiling_Report.pdf>.Mansfield, Nick. Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2000.Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. London: Methuen, 2002.Mulvey, Laura. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema in Feminism and Film. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. 34-47.Nietzsche, Friedrich W. The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Francis Golffing. New York: Doubleday, 1956.Nietzsche, Friedrich W., and Richard Hollingdale. Beyond Good and Evil. London: Penguin Books, 1990.Raw. Dir. Julia Ducournau. Petit Film, 2016.Richardson, Laurel. Writing Strategies: Reaching Diverse Audiences. Newbury Park, California: Sage Publications, 1990.———. Fields of Play: Constructing an Academic Life. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997.———. “Writing: A Method of Inquiry.” Handbook of Qualitative Research. Eds. Norman K Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2000.Romance. Dir. Catherine Breillat. Trimark Pictures Inc., 2000.Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. London: Routledge, 1969.Sexton-Finck, Larissa. Be(com)ing Reel Independent Woman: An Autoethnographic Journey through Female Subjectivity and Agency in Contemporary Cinema with Particular Reference to Independent Scriptwriting Practice. 2009. <https://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/id/eprint/1688/2/02Whole.pdf>.Smelik, Anneke. And the Mirror Cracked: Feminist Cinema and Film Theory. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998.Smith, Hazel. The Writing Experiment: Strategies for Innovative Creative Writing. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2005.Thomas, Michelle. “10 Years of Dogme: An Interview with Susanne Bier.” Future Movies, 5 Aug. 2005. <http://www.futuremovies.co.uk/filmmaking.asp?ID=119>.Trouble Every Day. Dir. Claire Denis. Wild Bunch, 2001. Zemler, Mily. “17 Actresses Who Started Their Own Production Companies.” Elle, 11 Jan. 2018. <https://www.elle.com/culture/movies-tv/g14927338/17-actresses-with-production-companies/>.

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Abstract:

Sensei claps his hands and calls “hai douzo!”, and it is as if I woke up from a daydream, though I wasn’t daydreaming. I’m sitting seiza (traditional Japanese kneeling posture) in an aikidō seminar taking place in Jerusalem. In the large mirror, which is installed on the opposite wall, I can see my friends sitting near me in a row that extends to my left and to my right. At the center of the hall, sensei is demonstrating a technique. We observe his physical movements closely, while at the same time we also follow his verbal explanations. Yelena, my colleague and student, is assisting him: as she attacks he performs the correct defensive set of movements. Sometimes his movements with Yelena strike me as so aesthetic, so beautiful, that I become emotional and my eyes become wet. “Hai douzo!” is a cue: we quickly rise from seiza and pair-up. Now it is for us to perform the technique that sensei has taught, attempting to do so as effortlessly and as perfectly as he has. In this paper I inquire into knowledge as a social, embodied and interactional accomplishment. Following phenomenological and interactional theories, I address knowledge not as an abstract notion that exists over and above felt experience and feeling persons, but as felt/sensed and situational action. Interactional studies and theories in particular (Dewey; Garfinkel; Goffman) have stressed not only how inspiring it can be to think with the body, rather than about it or perhaps without it altogether, but also how society and the social are interactional through and through. Further along these lines, social life is seen as essentially (re)assembled (Latour Reassembling), and is continuously (re)created in and through interconnected interactions.Many social theories of the twentieth century are of static nature. If Popperian science sought to ‘capture’, ‘isolate’ and ‘fix’ reality, even momentarily, in order to examine it in a laboratory (be it concrete or metaphorical), emerging mobile and non-representational sensibilities suggest that it is social science that should adapt rather than social life. The notion of mobilities for instance, rests on an approach “which is not limited to representational thinking and feeling, but a different sort of thinking-feeling altogether. It is a recognition that mobilities such as dance involve various combinations of thought, action, feeling and articulation” (Adey 149). Thrift’s non-representational theory too asks social science to move beyond the representational order and beyond acts of ‘interpretation’ of ‘reality-as-text’, and inquire instead into “skills and knowledges [people] get from being embodied beings” (Thrift 127). Latour appealingly suggests that, “to have a body is to learn to be affected, meaning ‘effectuated’, moved, put into motion by other entities” (How to Talk 205). The question then is how the body becomes what it knows, and how and where such skill-ful learning takes place, where, together, bodies learn to sense each other and interact in innovative ways, performing new somatic knowledges, sensitivities, and interactions. I use the notion of a kinesthetic community of practice to address these questions, and to inquire into the (inter-)somatic environments where knowledge is both embodied and performed. I suggest that somatic knowledge is gained within a community, whereby “[a]cquiring a body is thus a progressive enterprise that produces at once a sensory medium and a sensitive world” (Latour, How to Talk 207), can be observed in an instructive way. The point here is not only the social nature of knowledge, but also its somatic and performed nature; “The action of knowledge”, as Latour (Latour, How to Talk 214) puts it. With the performative turn, to which I wish to contribute, I contend that we find ourselves less in times of hermeneutics of interpretation, and more in times of intervention and performance.For the purpose of studying a community of kinesthetic practice, I reflect on an occasion of aikidō training, which took place during a seminar given by Doug Wedell sensei during June, 2010, in Jerusalem. More generally, Aikidō is a modern Japanese martial art, which was developed by Morihei Ueshiba (1883-1969) during the 1920s and 1930s. The term’s meaning resides in the kanji: Ai (合) meaning blending or harmonizing; Ki (気) meaning spirit, vitality or energy; and Dō (道) meaning way and also ‘discipline of’ or ‘art of’. Hence literally the meaning of aikidō, which is told to newcomers and reiterated to experienced aikidōka (practitioners), is the way of blending and harmonizing with the energy. Indeed, aikidōka view accomplishing the state of aiki, or of “being (one) with” not as a means but as an ends; a case of perfect time and movement, the performance of which means that aggression and risk, pain and injury, have been avoided. Research into bodies and mobilities in aikidō is part of the larger inquiry into systems of embodiment in and of Eastern bodily arts and of course other systems of movements and mobilities. My personal association here concerns practicing aikidō for over two decades, mostly in the dōjō (training hall and community) affiliated with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.Interspersed Embodied AutoethnographyThe ethnographic text below is what I call an interspersed autoethnography, referring to two points that characterize it as a research method. First, it is an autoethnographic text as it is composed from my own embodied and emotional perspective, as an experienced aikidō practitioner or aikidōka. It is not a typical ‘participant observation’ description because my aikidō practice is deeply personal and has commenced a few years before my practice in academic disciplines began. Articulating my aikidō practice is necessarily for me a personal matter, touching on meaningful social and spiritual nexuses. In doing so my pleasure is twofold, as I am able to bring together my aikidō and my academic life-spheres. Second, the term interspersed describes a reluctance on my behalf to write in a straightforward, seemingly unproblematic, ethnographic genre. While I am completely in accord with works which decenter positivistic scientific writing and offer reflexivity and personal voice (eg. Young), I nonetheless acknowledge the strong claim for authenticity made at times by neat ethnographic extracts ‘from the field’. My preference is for a hybrid text that conveys experience and bodily praxis as they unfold, allowing the interspersing of real-life activity with academic reflection. Such autoethnographic writing is a hybrid genre, simultaneously de- or re-contextualizing academic knowledge and illuminating it via my practice/knowledge of aikidō. Writing in the personal voice of the researcher’s body, and sense of embodiedness, has of course its own history within and outside academic communities. In the type or research produced by colleagues who work on bodily practices and somatic communities, addressing one’s own body is inevitable. The more recent voices in this tradition remind us that “[s]ocial scientists who have gotten deeply involved in kinesthetic cultures have discovered they can analyze cultural information recorded in their own bodies” (Samudra 667). The interspersed embodied autoethnography offered in this paper aims to do just that, to share an embodied experience of actual aikidō training. Your Hands. Extended.Now Doug Wedell sensei slightly bows in my direction, and I, sitting seiza, immediately bow back and run to assist him. He faces me and extends both of his hands forward slightly. This marks for me an invitation. It is an opening, a cue marking that something is (already) going on between us. When Doug sensei raises his hands slightly and extends both of them forward a tension is established, and now it is my turn: I rush in the direction of his hands, seeking to grab both of them with mine. The grab is a type of an attack called ryotedori (lit. in Japanese ‘two-hand-grab’). My hands are extended as my body moves forward, focusing on grabbing Doug’s extended arms powerfully. I would have liked at this point to write that I am experiencing a ‘Zen state of mind’ and that my mind is clear of thoughts, and there are no words humming in me; or that I am experiencing a sensation of ‘flow’. But, alas, the fact is that I am thinking, and quite intensely. More accurately, I am speculating and wondering what will happen to me/my body as my arms approach sensei’s extended arms. Surely, I will not be able to grab his hands, and before physical contact between our limbs will materialize, he will move away swiftly and evade my approach. In terms of the discourse of the Martial Arts, I’m thinking about the technique that Doug sensei might perform with/on me, which will shape our expected embodied interaction. Not so much thinking as sensing: I imagine embodied possible trajectories that might span out from when and where our hands will nearly touch. As I rush in sensei’s direction I’m also aware of my breathing and sweating (both seem too heavy to me, and I repeatedly remind myself that I need to work out more often), of the coolness of the tatami (mattresses) under my feet, and somewhere in the back of my mind I’m concerned that I haven’t arranged my white training shirt (the thick training wear called gi) tidily enough. I’m also registering an anxiety. It has to do with the possible consequences of the technique that he will execute: will it be painful? Will I be hurt? Do I know that technique? Will I perform competently when he executes it? (I wouldn’t want to disappoint him, and in addition there are people watching us). Once, in a seminar in another style of aikidō, the Sensei smacked me on the tatami so powerfully and painfully that my eyes immediately filled with tears, but I bowed and said “domo arigato Sensei!” (“thank you very much, teacher”). Storming at Doug sensei, then, is not without words and many sensations, it is the easy part of this tango; the unexpected moments are very brief and amount to the actual duration of the performance of the technique. In this demonstration, Doug sensei is nagè or the one who performs the technique. In the capacity of teaching a technique, defined as a series of interactional moves that affects the attacker and neutralizes the threat embodied in the attack, nagè is the one exhibiting the technique for students and others to see and learn (which in the martial arts essentially means to try to repeat and imitate). Everyone’s eyes are set on nagè, sometimes with a technical gaze that seeks to unravel the proficient skills he is demonstrating (“how did he move his legs, did you get that? That was subtle!”), and sometimes with an impressionistic gaze that is inspired with his mastery of Ki, and how he connects and blends so effortlessly and effectively with the uke, who is presently myself (“wow, you can really see the Ki”). In aikidō, uke’s role – which I am now embodying – is mainly helping nagè perform the technique correctly, and in the case it is also clearly a demonstration. This is done by approaching Doug sensei (‘attacking’) energetically and effectively. I am generating motility and extending not only my arms and my body in the direction of sensei’s arms and body, but I am also ‘extending Ki’, an intention, an orientation, an invisible energy. Paraphrasing the ethnomethodological dictum “seen but unnoticed” (Garfinkel), for aikidōka Ki is the reverse: noticed but unseen. In fact, it is precisely the noticing of and awareness to Ki that makes a person into an aikidōka; into a member of a community of kinesthetic practice. The notion of community of practice has much more to do with learning in real-life situations and interactions, rather than in classroom contexts where knowledge is commonly presented in an abstracted and decontextualized form. Yet in aikidō training it could be said that “a community of practice is different from the traditional community, primarily because it is defined simultaneously by its membership and by the practice in which that membership engages” (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 464). I add the notion of a kinesthetic community of practice to these practices. Following Samudra, I acknowledge that kinesthetic sensitivities and sensibilities are essential in and for martial arts in general, and more prominently for aikidō. The practice that defines the community, then, has to do with developing and enhancing kinesthetic sensitivities.Rushing at sensei Doug, I’m imagining what might/will happen to my body and where will it go. Ryotedori tenchi-nagè (lit. two-hand-grab heaven-and-earth-through) engulfs one possibility, whereby sensei will side-step a little and then raise one hand and lower the other – a movement which will have a particular effect on my body: my feet will be in the air, my body will be more or less horizontal to the tatami, and I will then fall and land on my back. Or he might do a ryotedori enkei-nagè (two-hand-grab circular-throw), whereby he will side-step and then quickly lower and raise his body in a graceful yet abrupt dipping movement, while performing a vertical circular motion with his hands. In this case my body will rhythmically follow his body’s movements, bend and straighten a little and finally bend again beyond my ability to maintain stability. At this point I will lose my balance and fall, either forward or backward, depending on the fleeting subtleties of a particular occasion. Or sensei might choose to do ryotedori irimi-nagè (two-hand-grab forward-thrust), or ryotedori shiho-nagè (two-hand-grab four-directions-throw), which is one of his favorites and one of my most dreaded techniques… My mind is conjuring these associations of names and movements, of techniques and somatic trajectories. Which are now coupled. There is nothing more that I can do about all of this at this stage, besides what I am already doing, which is storming at Doug sensei and committing an “attack”, not allowing my hesitations, anxieties and visualizations to interfere or distract my motility. I know that regardless of the specific technique that he will eventually perform, I will not be able to actually capture his hands, and it is precisely this time-space interval which is the creative opportunity for nagè to execute the technique at the ideal timing. He will begin the technique just before I capture his hands. Not too far or too early; not close or too late. In precisely the right time. What is left for me now to do as uke-in-interaction is to allow my body to be centered and relaxed; try to keep my body attentive and reactive and least rigid as possible, which are the somatic-kinesthetic qualities that ukemi – doing uke – demands (to my understanding). Indeed, as I close in on sensei’s hands, about a foot away or so, at the exact point where I cannot anymore retract my movement, he begins moving. He slides unnoticingly sideways and his hands do a similar motion to that of tenchi-nagè, but not precisely. It’s a different technique: I think it’s ryotedori zepo-nagè (two-hand-grab forward-throw). His sidestepping draws my body low and near his body quickly and powerfully. I’m inside a whirlpool and now really do not have time to ponder or simulate trajectories. There is a split of a second there that the air is drawn out of my lungs. My hands follow sensei’s hands attentively, and my body stays ‘with’ my hands, connected to his movements. Everyone is observing sensei; the nagè. The uke is perceived as a helper; a sideshow. Yet my skills are developed and subtle, and as nagè performs various movements swiftly and minutely, my limbs and body must reflect these movements in a highly attuned manner. My movements are as swift and minute as his. Otherwise, the connection will be asynchronous and uke will fail to follow or be engaged by nagè’s technique. Uke’s embodied abilities (acquired skills) at following through nagè’s leads allows uke’s body to move in a fashion that reflects nagè’s movements in a magnified way. Observers’ correct gaze then should not be set only or even primarily on Nagè, the ‘performer’; it should include the uke, which supplies a type of an embodied mirror to or echo of nagè’s movements. I identify with Samudra’s (671) observation, that “[k]nowing the structure of movement is not the same as experiencing the sensation of movement, however. After more than two decades of training, I know when I am executing a besi correctly: not by the shape of the form but by subtle sensations.” Uke is attending to nagè. It is less a matter of attacking the nagè, if attack is taken simplistically to mean striking/kicking/grabbing the other. More dialectical and interactional, in the nagè-uke dyad the uke supplies the gesture of the audience. Uke audiences nagè – the latter must appreciate (must have acquired the sensitivities and the ‘taste’ to appreciate) nagè, hence to audience nagè and complement her. If we take the notion of audience not as a passive receptor, but as an active, committed and engaged actor, then uke is an active and involved audience. This is how art is consumed, and indeed at stake here is a martial art. The next thing I feel are a variety of sensations, taking place more or less at the same time in different bodily parts, both at the skin level and inside the body. Then my body is suspended in mid-air: two feet up in the air and for a distance of some nine feet. Thanks to Doug sensei I’m micro-flying. This is the last part performed by uke: after the attack and after nagè has performed the technique, uke must make sure that she or he are unharmed while taking the appropriate fall. Relieved, I land softly on the tatami. Conclusions I could have concluded by saying that as it takes two to tango, it also takes two to perform an aikidō technique. But this would have been an over-simplification. It takes two roles to perform a technique, that of the nagè and that of the uke, and in addition it also takes a community of kinesthetic practice in order to learn to perform ‘doing being a nagè’ and also ‘doing being a uke’ (following Garfinkel). It might take two to tango but it takes more (inter)connections and more (inter)actions to learn to tango. Moreover, it is never completely clear, nor can it ever be, whether the occasion at hand is that of learning (training, rehearsing) or that or performing (accomplishing). When I rush at Doug sensei during a seminar class, it seems like a performance: students and others are watching and taking pictures, and the seminar is video-recorded and then uploaded to YouTube and to our websites. But at the same time I am also thinking of the practice I gained with ‘doing being a uke for/with Doug Sensei’. So any performance is also a training session, a rehearsal for an occasion that is known or unknown but nonetheless anticipated. And of course vice versa: every training session or rehearsal is also a performance; an aesthetic and meaningful interaction that stands for itself. In these occasions, kinesthetic and somatic knowledge is simultaneously created, shared, and performed, as are also the sensitivities and sensibilities that are acquired and required in order to reciprocate it; to ‘understand it’ via mobilities. With the interspersed autoethnography presented I have sought to show how, in Latour’s terms, the body learns to be affected with and to the uke in the uke-nagè dyad in aikidō. The skills and sensitivities in and of aikidō are learned through the roles performed during actual practice. What is called ‘the work of the uke’, or ukemi, is an ongoing process of acquiring and refining skills in and for interaction. ReferencesAdey, Peter. Aerial Life: Spaces, Mobilities, Affects. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Dewey, John. Reconstruction in Philosophy. New York: Henry Holt, 1920.Eckert, Penelope, and Sally McConnell-Ginet. "Think Practically and Look Locally: Language and Gender as Community-Based Practice." Annual Review of Anthropology 21 (1992): 461-90. Garfinkel, Harold. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967. Goffman, Erving. Interaction Ritual: Essays in Face-to-Face Behavior. Chicago: Aldine Pub. Co., 1967.Latour, Bruno. "How to Talk about the Body? The Normative Dimension of Science Studies." Body & Society 10.2-3 (2004): 205-29. ---. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Samudra, Jaida Kim. "Memory in Our Body: Thick Participation and the Translation of Kinesthetic Experience." American Ethnologist 35.4 (2008): 665-81. Thrift, Nigel. J. Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. New York: Routledge, 2007. Young, Katharine Galloway. "Perspectives on Embodiment: The Uses of Narrativity in Ethnographic Writing." Journal of Narrative and Life History 1.1 (1991): 213-43.

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Abstract:

Sarah Phelps’s screenplay The Witness for the Prosecution (2016) does more than simply rekindle interest in Agatha Christie’s original short story; rather, it points to its salvation. My understanding of adaptation follows Armelle Blin-Rolland’s model, which refuses to privilege either the source or the adapted text, considering both instead to form part of a textual multiplicity. The relationship between the two resembles, for Blin-Rolland, a vortex. Thus, the meanderings of Phelps’s adapted text cause us to take stock and to read the original itself as loiterature (Chambers) and thus as a text that eschews self-coincidence, that offers more to the idle reader than an efficient delivery of truth. Christie’s text, in other words, if I may myself adapt a term from Walter Benjamin, has an inherent adaptability. Rather than simply conjuring its own adaptation in a virtual future, “The Witness for the Prosecution” contains, in an immediate pre-diegetic past, the original source of itself as adaptation. This source text is not an alternative solution, but runs parallel to the actual reading—appealing, almost subliminally, for readers to produce it; it also runs idly, however, and, unlike its hasty corollary, is content to wait to catch a distracted eye.Before shifting the focus more squarely from the 2016 adaptation to the original text (and its status as auto-adaptation), I should like to draw attention to the format of Phelps’s screenplay. As a mini-series, and thus an adaptation for television rather than a feature film, Phelps’s text presents something of a readerly paradox in and of itself. The series was originally aired by the BBC on two consecutive nights over the 2016 Christmas period (26 and 27 December). Thus, viewers were forced to pause for thought, but not over a week, which has traditionally been the cadence for episodes of television mini-series; instead, the 24-hour pause represented something of an extended intermission. For this reason, it is not clear whether the effect of the pause was to heighten anticipation, and thus to madden readers, or to enable them to take time out to review the case and to ask questions that the reader of the short story may not have time to ask. For, of course, the story is a short one, on the shorter side even by the standards of Christie’s shorter fiction. The mini-series does not present an abridged version, therefore, which is often the case for feature film adaptations; rather, it lengthens the story considerably. The whole experience is drawn out, not condensed. And yet, it is not clear whether this change of pace significantly alters the viewer/reader’s experience.I shall argue here that what it in fact does is to draw out elements of the source text that otherwise pass by unseen. Thus, whether or not the experience that one has of the television mini-series is loiterly per se, it certainly causes the reader who is aware of the short story to reread the latter and, I argue here, to see it as itself an adaptation, and further as an adaptation of itself. Lastly, it is perhaps worth reflecting that, after this initial airing of the mini-series on BBC television, The Witness for the Prosecution became available on DVD and for online streaming. In these formats, the hiatus of the episode break can readily be skipped. The binge-viewer has the ability to view in haste. In addition to erasing, to some degree at least, the difference between a feature film and a television series, such viewing practices recall the perceived generic differences between literature, with its descriptive passages and detours, and crime fiction, with its tendency to be highly plot-, and especially end-, driven. In either case therefore, to apprehend crime fiction in a loiterly fashion is a learned activity, a process that may seem somewhat counterintuitive, but one that Christie’s texts reflexively promote even as they ensnare the reader in the cleverness of their plots.The short story is famous for its twist in the tale: the person who appears the most likely murderer and who is tried for the crime turns out, in fact, to be guilty, much to the surprise of his solicitor, Mr Mayherne. Phelps’s adaptation, for its part, ends with the solicitor, John Mayhew (an alternative surname already used in Christie’s own adaptation for the stage in 1953), walking into the sea off the French coast, determined, or so it would appear, to take his own life, having been informed by his client’s partner that she has known all along that Leonard Vole was guilty. In addition to a new ending, the mini-series also receives a substantial new beginning: Leonard and Romaine receive a back-story; so too, over the course of the mini-series, does Mayhew himself. His determination to save Leonard is set against the death of his own son, who left to fight in the First World War despite being too young for service. Mayhew’s wife, we learn, has never forgiven him for the loss of her son. Saving the innocent Leonard is Mayhew’s way of redeeming himself. When he discovers that he has been duped and that he has saved a guilty man, the only atonement he can see is his own death.While Mayhew’s probity is made ambiguous by Phelps, Leonard and Romaine’s common back-story serves to some degree to explain, if not to justify, their callous behaviour. Phelps’s dramatic first scene shows a soldier drifting almost literally blindly across no-man’s land between the trenches of a First World War battlefield, taking cover from exploding shells and finding refuge in a crater where he finds his future partner Romaine. What is staged here is a looking back to the past, but not in the kind of nostalgic longing for times gone by associated with Christie; instead, Phelps points back to the trauma of war, in the light of which the present is to be survived and negotiated. In her introduction to the edition of the short story republished following the success of the mini-series, Phelps discusses her expectations when being commissioned to adapt Christie’s works, with which she claimed to be familiar without having previously read them. She labels Christie the “epitome of a particular nostalgia-laden Englishness” and mentions, for example, having to step out of the way of people queuing to see The Mousetrap in London’s West End (Christie v). In the light of such comments, it is tempting to see Phelps’s mini-series as a means of circumnavigating popular conceptions of Christie and combating this nostalgia for things past (not only better times, perhaps, but also better detective fiction).A vortical reading of The Witness for the Prosecution as multiplicity, however, in no way works against the original short story; in fact, rather than stepping around it, Phelps’s extended diegetic frame causes us to reflect on the way in which the story itself looks back, making room for, and even conjuring, an unseen pre-diegetic space. Thus, the battleground scene serves a reflexive end, not simply excusing Leonard and Romaine’s subsequent behaviour, but also graphically staging the textual no man’s land of adaptation—the space between the entrenched positions of two authorial powers. The bomb craters suggest both the violence done to the source text and the possibility for a new start and an end to the dominion of previous masters. Not only Leonard and Romaine, but Sarah Phelps, the reader, and even John Mayhew—who steps out of the shadows of Mr Mayherne—all escape the certainties of an era, an empire, and embrace a new future. My argument here is not simply that Christie benefits from the new beginning of another’s adaptation, but that she herself adapted what precedes Mr Mayherne’s first interview with Leonard Vole in her original text.In the story’s final revelation, Romaine opposes Mr Mayherne’s purchase on the truth to her own: he, she states, “thought [Leonard] was innocent”, whereas she “knew – he was guilty!” (29). This is the truth that Phelps’s adaptation appears to mitigate with its staging of extenuating circ*mstances and casting of Mr Mayherne as the ultimate victim of the story. I do not wish to argue here that Leonard Vole is innocent; rather, what I shall argue is that Romaine and generations of readers have misunderstood the dynamics of the narrative, for the fundamental binary at play is not “thinking versus knowing” but “knowing versus believing”. In this case, therefore, I almost, but not quite, agree with Phelps’s statement that “it’s not the truth that matters […] but performance” (Christie viii). While the text is very much a performance, it is one that serves to “screen” a truth in the Freudian sense, as well as in the cinematic one: the truth that is showcased in the last line of the story also hides another truth, which is, paradoxically, the same one. By revealing the truth in the form of Romaine’s victory, the text hides the fact that Mr Mayherne has known the truth from the very start, and indeed, before that. The story is a performance therefore, but a fetishistic one that points to the truth precisely in order to keep it just out of view. In this way, what Mr Mayhew knows to be true is neither stated explicitly nor entirely repressed; instead, it is disavowed, and what the short story performs is a screen memory.Read vortically, Christie’s and Phelps’s texts both displace the element that separates knowledge from belief, which, as Ellen Lee McCallum notes (xii), is desire. In Phelps’s adaptation, John Mayhew desires to save Leonard Vole in order to redeem his son’s death; in Christie’s text, Mr Mayherne desires to save Leonard in order to save the text. This is salvation as theorised by Shoshana Felman, who famously considered that Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw could only be saved from the critical binary of ghost story versus psychoanalytical tale by having its ambiguity preserved. If Phelps’s adaptation becomes something of a ghost story (it is, at least, a tale of people haunted by the past), Christie’s original text uses a psychoanalytic move to disavow its own psychoanalytical mechanics. Whereas detective fiction is typically end-oriented, with its focus on the ultimate revelation of truth, the psychoanalytic text locates truth in a pre-text. Thus, to save “The Witness for the Prosecution”, the reader must adopt a beginning-oriented lens and establish the original shape of its pre-diegetic revelation. This means loitering (and enacting that paradoxical mix of idle resistance advanced by Chambers) at that very point where the logics of detective fiction are seemingly designed to fast-track the reader’s pursuit of the ultimate solution. For, while reading to discover the ending is still promoted by the crime narrative here, a counter-logics of hesitation and retrospection always accompanies the reader’s progress forwards. If chances to meander down side-alleys are limited, given the brevity of the story, it is this double movement, this walking with a backwards gaze, with half an eye on the present and half on the past, that forces even that reader most pre-disposed to task-focused digestion of the text to slow down and to wander. What is so striking in “The Witness for the Prosecution” is arguably how Christie makes space for wandering in such a restricted narrative, in a creative format that is, of course, all about punch and economy.This space is created as early as the story’s opening sentence. “Mr Mayherne”, it begins, “adjusted his pince-nez and cleared his throat with a little dry-as-dust cough that was wholly typical of him” (1). Whether or not we can be sure that Mr Mayherne’s cough was typical of him before the story begins is uncertain. His habit of adjusting his pince-nez, on the other hand, which is here associated with the cough, is certainly recently acquired. This we learn at the end of the story: “He found himself polishing his pince-nez vigorously, and checked himself. His wife had told him only the night before that he was getting a habit of it” (27). It is my contention that this habit is a response to a traumatic revelation of truth, which requires Mr Mayherne henceforth to adjust his perspective.Habits, as Mr Mayherne’s wife points out, are born of repetition. The story, too, begins with a repeated act. Indeed, the solicitor’s next action is to look at his client, whom the reader is seeing for the first time at this initial point of the text, but whom Mr Mayherne has already seen: “Then he looked again at the man opposite him” (1, my emphasis). At the outset therefore, this habit of adjusting his pince-nez is proleptic, insofar as it will enable him to realise (albeit apparently, but only apparently, too late) that Romaine and the old woman who gives him the letters that condemn her are one and the same, but also analeptic, as it looks back to a previous contemplation of a disguise. The habit that he detects in Romaine is one of clenching and unclenching her right hand. That he sees this without initially being fully conscious of it and then later understands the gesture’s significance is due to his own fetishistic response to the truth of Leonard’s guilt. When he first sees his client, he recognises his guilt, either in his eyes, which then causes him to avert his gaze and look down to his hands, or in his murderer’s hands, which causes him to displace his gaze and to look instead at his own hands, which he occupies by adjusting his pince-nez. Either way, his failure to look at Romaine’s hands and see them immediately for what they are is itself a displacement of his dual state—of knowing his client to be guilty and believing in his innocence “in spite of the multitude of facts arrayed against [him]” (13).Repetition blunts the reader’s awareness of its fundamental role in the story. The weight of evidence against Leonard Vole is repeated again and again. This is one of the key devices, even a cliché, of detective fiction: the most obviously guilty character must be innocent. At its most basic level, this is how “The Witness for the Prosecution” surprises its readers. My suggestion, however, is that this knowledge serves merely to screen the book’s original, or other, meaning, which is that Mr Mayherne knows the truth. It is not truth, but the knowledge of the truth, that the reader is tasked to discover. To this extent, Phelps is right: “it is not the truth that matters, but performance”. And in this case, it is the performance of the truth of Leonard’s guilt in the actualised story that hides the knowledge of the truth that is its pre-text and whose form is not taken by the story while nonetheless being analeptically staged and virtually formed, or (auto-)adapted, as pre-text. In reflexive terms, the highlighting of repeated gestures, and especially Mr Mayherne’s cleaning of his lenses, can usefully be considered signals for the reader to pause for thought. And yet, as reflexive signals, they are both provocative and provocatively hesitant, for however clearly they are displayed, they fail to check the pace and end-orientation of the short story because the reader’s own habit—the compulsion to read in haste, to read for the solution—is not so easily broken.Leonard’s first words in the story are simply, “I know”, which is, in the framework of the present reading, a pure reflection of what the man sitting opposite him is trying to disavow. What Leonard knows is that his situation is grave and that he must be frank. He knows this because, as he says to Mr Mayherne, “You keep telling me so” (1). But it is this response that in fact causes the story to become a tale of repetition. First, there is Mr Mayherne’s conviction: “we shall succeed—we shall succeed” (2). Romaine then repeats her desire when she first meets Mr Mayherne, twice stating the words, “I want to know the worst” (14). Leonard is nonetheless responding to a prior repetition, which, is predicated on the story’s initial “looking again”. In other words, the story itself is a screen memory, a fetish-made-diegesis. The result, in an apparent paradox, is that the desire to hasten the ending, to bring on the final verdict, however terrible, is at the same time a signal for the reader to look back. Again, to look back to that initial second look is to inscribe circles on circles, and to enforce wandering even at this reflexively-staged moment of end-orientation.Certainly, Romaine’s comment, “I want to know”, performs fetishism’s combination of knowledge and desire. And yet, unlike Mr Mayherne’s desire (to save Leonard), which is opposed to his knowledge (that Leonard is guilty), Romaine’s desire appears aligned with knowledge: she does not say that she knows the worst, but that she wants to know it. She has another secret desire, of course, as she reveals to Mr Mayherne in what is a paradoxical display of secrecy. When he asks why she hates her husband so much, she retorts: “Yes, you would like to know. But I shall not tell you. I will keep my secret” (17). Further, she mocks him for honestly believing Leonard to be innocent.Both characters are honest, then: Romaine wants to know that Leonard is guilty (and certainly does not believe him to be innocent) and openly has a secret that she will not divulge; Mr Mayherne, for his part, knows the case against his client is ironclad but also honestly believes him to be innocent. Their stated aims may well be opposed—she wants Leonard to hang; he wants him to go free. Their “true” aims are nonetheless aligned: she knows Leonard is guilty and will sacrifice her own credibility in court to save her husband; he believes Leonard is innocent and will sacrifice her in court to save his client. Both tell the truth in public when performing their official duties (he as solicitor, she as wife). The only difference between them lies in the nature of their other performance: she lies to him by performing the role of an old woman who knows secrets about her past; he knows Leonard to be guilty but partially represses this by taking up his narrative only after he has erected a fetish to protect himself from this traumatic truth (and the reader from the secret past of the text). This disavowal means that he can honestly believe in his client’s innocence while still knowing him to be guilty. Again then, Phelps’s statement—that it is not the truth that matters, but performance—is itself both true and not true. Romaine performs in the story in order for the truth that she knows to be said and then discredited; Mr Mayherne, on the other hand, performs the story in order for his knowledge of the truth to be disavowed, which it to say, repressed within the form that is given to the reader to see, but also available, and able to take form (for the reader prepared to digress) in what lies just beyond the limits of what is said.The conversation in which Romaine repeats her desire to know also ends in a repetition, this time with one of the solicitor’s signature moves: “Mr Mayherne gave his dry little cough and rose” (17). This cough repeats the one that opened the story. In that first instance, it distracted the reader, allowing the adverb “again” to rush through, seen and unseen. In this way, the first cough, accompanied by Mr Mayherne’s cleaning of his lenses, causes the reader to focus their own gaze on him rather than on what he had been looking at. This is a cough designed to open the narrative on Mr Mayherne’s terms. In this second example, it closes down dialogue. This second cough is motivated by precisely the same traumatic revelation of the truth, except that in this repetition it is displaced onto Romaine. With the words, “I shall not tell you. I will keep my secret”, she says to him in the text what Mr Mayherne said to himself in the pre-text. This is a repetition therefore in a story of repetition and of a story of repetition. Repeating what was said before with different words and, at the same time, repeating with the same words what was not said before, the text here presents itself to the reader in the form of an auto-adaptation, a second look at an original text whose form is otherwise virtual.In this way, words unsaid are repressed partially: they are not said in the diegesis (which stands as a screen memory, simultaneously standing in place of the text and tracing in the present the contours of its form as absence) but are said, instead, by proxy, through displacement, in the reflexively staged performance of another text. The disavowal at play here is such that readers find themselves in two spaces at once, on two lines of flight, with the one being opposed to the other. Steps forwards and backwards are taken in equal measure. We are therefore witnesses to “The Witness for the Prosecution”, looking on as the story follows onwards, but this very act of witnessing counteracts this prosecution, adding the idleness of the gaze to the purposefulness of pursuit (of truth). The result is not so much somewhere between a stalled, or false, start, and a race to the end, as both at the same time. In this way, Christie’s story, despite appearances to the contrary, is the very embodiment of wandering.At the origins of both Christie’s story and Phelps’s adaptation is a common truth. It serves as a pre-text for both texts, for both performances. In both cases, this pre-text privileges performance over truth. Each text also has a pre-text, which precedes and predicates the performance. We may consider that Phelps’s adaptation captures the essence (of truth) of Christie’s original. In this way, it values that truth and holds it necessary to its own performance, without being derivative in relation to it. Again, the same holds for Christie’s text, whose pre-text protects its truth beneath its performance: while the performance partially represses this pre-textual truth (with its gaudy staging of its own truth, which we may perhaps this time consider derivative), it also preserves it. For without the performance (of truth), the knowledge at its origin cannot exist. To read “The Witness for the Prosecution” as an adaptation of itself requires a fetishistic eye, and the fetishist is nothing if not a digressive observer. If you’re quick, you can catch the performance; but if you’re content to wander, the audacity of what Christie does not reveal is well worth the wait.ReferencesBlin-Rolland, Armelle. “Adaplastics: Forming the Zazie dans le métro Network.” Modern and Contemporary France (2019): forthcoming.Chambers, Ross. Loiterature. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.Christie, Agatha. The Witness for the Prosecution and Other Stories. London: Harper, 2016.Felman, Shoshana. “Turning the Screw of Interpretation.” Yale French Studies. 55–56 (1977): 94–207.McCallum, Ellen Lee. Object Lessons: How to Do Things with Fetishism. New York: SUNY Press, 1992.The Witness for the Prosecution. Dir. Julian Jarrold. BBC One, 2016.

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Abstract:

Over the last two decades the female forensic pathologist investigator has become a prominent figure in crime fiction. Her presence causes suspicion on a number of levels in the narrative and this article will examine the reasons for that suspicion and the manner in which it is presented in two texts: Patricia Cornwell’s Postmortem and Tess Gerritsen’s The Sinner. Cornwell and Gerritsen are North American crime writers whose series of novels both feature female forensic pathologists who are deeply involved in homicide investigation. Cornwell’s protagonist is Dr Kay Scarpetta, then-Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond, Virginia. Gerritsen’s is Dr Maura Isles, a forensic pathologist in the Boston Medical Examiner’s office. Their jobs entail attending crime scenes to assess bodies in situ, performing examinations and autopsies, and working with police to solve the cases.In this article I will first examine Western cultural attitudes towards dissection and autopsy since the twelfth century before discussing how the most recent of these provoke suspicion in the selected novels. I will further analyse this by drawing on Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject. I will then consider how female pathologist protagonists try to deflect their colleagues’ suspicion of their professional choices, drawing in part on Judith Butler’s ideas of gender as a performative category. I define ‘gender’ as the socially constructed roles, activities, attributes, and behaviours that Western culture considers appropriate for women and men, and ‘sex’ as the physical biological characteristics that differentiate women and men. I argue that the female forensic pathologist investigator is portrayed as suspicious in the chosen novels for her occupation of the abject space caused by her sex in her roles as investigator and pathologist, her identification with the dead, and her performance of elements of both masculine and feminine conventional gender roles. Scholars such as Barthes, Rolls, and Grauby have approached detective fiction by focusing on intertextuality, the openness of the text, and the possibility of different meanings, with Vargas being one example of how this can operate; however, this article focuses on examining how the female forensic pathologist investigator is represented as suspicious in mainstream crime novels that attract a readership seeking resolution and closure.A significant part of each of these novels focuses on the corpse and its injuries as the site at which the search for truth commences, and I argue that the corpse itself, those who work most closely with it and the procedures they employ in this search are all treated with suspicion in the crime fiction in this study. The central procedures of autopsy and dissection have historically been seen as abominations, in some part due to religious views such as the belief of Christians prior to the thirteenth century that the resurrection of the soul required an intact body (Klaver 10) and the Jewish and Muslim edicts against disfigurement of the dead (Davis and Peterson 1042). In later centuries dissection was made part of the death sentence and was perceived “as an abhorrent additional post-mortem punishment” that “promised the exposure of nakedness, dismemberment, and the deliberate destruction of the corpse,” which was considered “a gross assault on the integrity and the identity of the body, and upon the repose of the soul” (Richardson 154). While now a mainstay of many popular crime narratives, the autopsy as a procedure in real life continues to appall much of the public (Klaver 18). This is because “the human body—especially the dead human body—is an object still surrounded by taboos and prohibitions” (Sawday 269). The living are also reluctant to “yield the subjecthood of the other-dead to object status” (Klaver 18), which often produces a horrified response from some families to doctors seeking permission to dissect for autopsy. According to Gawande, when doctors suggest an autopsy the victim’s family commonly asks “Hasn’t she been through enough?” (187). The forensic pathologists who perform the autopsy are themselves linked with the repugnance of the act (Klaver 9), and in these novels that fact combined with the characters’ willingness to be in close proximity with the corpse and their comfort with dissecting it produces considerable suspicion on the part of their police colleagues.The female sex of the pathologists in these novels causes additional suspicion. This is primarily because women are “culturally associated [...] with life and life giving” (Vanacker 66). While historically women were also involved in the care of the sick and the dead (Nunn and Biressi 200), the growth of medical knowledge and the subsequent medicalisation of death in Western culture over the past two centuries has seen women relegated to a stylised kind of “angelic ministry” (Nunn and Biressi 201). This is an image inconsistent with these female characters’ performance of what is perceived as a “violent ‘reduction’ into parts: a brutal dismemberment” (Sawday 1). Drawing on Butler’s ideas about gender as a culturally constructed performance, we can see that while these characters are biologically female, in carrying out tasks that are perceived as masculine they are not performing their traditional gender roles and are thus regarded with suspicion by their police colleagues. Both Scarpetta and Isles are aware of this, as illustrated by the interior monologue with which Gerritsen opens her novel:They called her the Queen of the Dead. Though no one ever said it to her face, Dr. Maura Isles sometimes heard the nickname murmured in her wake as she travelled the grim triangle of her job between courtroom and death scene and morgue. [...] Sometimes the whispers held a tremolo of disquiet, like the murmurs of the pious as an unholy stranger passes among them. It was the disquiet of those who could not understand why she chose to walk in Death’s footsteps. Does she enjoy it, they wonder? Does the touch of cold flesh, the stench of decay, hold such allure for her that she has turned her back on the living? (Gerritsen 6)The police officers’ inability to understand why Isles chooses to work with the dead leads them to wonder whether she takes pleasure in it, and because they cannot comprehend how a “normal” person could act that way she is immediately marked as a suspicious Other. Gerritsen’s language builds images of transgression: words such as murmured, wake, whispers, disquiet, unholy, death’s footsteps, cold, stench, and decay suggest a fearful attitude towards the dead and the abjection of the corpse itself, a topic I will explore shortly. Isles later describes seeing police officers cast uneasy glances her way, noting details that only reinforce their beliefs that she is an odd duck: The ivory skin, the black hair with its Cleopatra cut. The red slash of lipstick. Who else wears lipstick to a death scene? Most of all, it’s her calmness that disturbs them, her coolly regal gaze as she surveys the horrors that they themselves can barely stomach. Unlike them, she does not avert her gaze. Instead she bends close and stares, touches. She sniffs. And later, under bright lights in her autopsy lab, she cuts. (Gerritsen 7) While the term “odd duck” suggests a somewhat quaintly affectionate tolerance, it is contrasted by the rest of the description: the red slash brings to mind blood and a gaping wound perhaps also suggestive of female genitalia; the calmness, the coolly regal gaze, and the verb “surveys” imply detachment; the willingness to move close to the corpse, to touch and even smell it, and later cut it open, emphasise the difference between the police officers, who can “barely stomach” the sight, and Isles who readily goes much further.Kristeva describes the abject as that which is not one thing or another (4). The corpse is recognisable as once-human, but is no-longer; the body was once Subject, but we cannot make ourselves perceive it yet as fully Object, and thus it is incomprehensible and abject. I suggest that the abject is suspicious because of this “neither-nor” nature: its liminal identity cannot be pinned down, its meaning cannot be determined, and therefore it cannot be trusted. In the abject corpse, “that compelling, raw, insolent thing in the morgue’s full sunlight [...] that thing that no longer matches and therefore no longer signifies anything” (Kristeva 4), we see the loss of borders between ourselves and the Other, and we are simultaneously “drawn to and repelled” by it; “nausea is a biological recognition of it, and fear and adrenalin also acknowledge its presence” (Pentony). In these novels the police officers’ recognition of these feelings in themselves emphasises their assumptions about the apparent lack of the same responses in the female pathologist investigators. In the quote from The Sinner above, for example, the officers are unnerved by Isles’ calmness around the thing they can barely face. In Postmortem, the security guard who works for the morgue hides behind his desk when a body is delivered (17) and refuses to enter the body storage area when requested to do so (26) in contrast with Scarpetta’s ease with the corpses.Abjection results from “that which disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules” (Kristeva 4), and by having what appears to be an unnatural reaction to the corpse, these women are perceived as failing to respect systems and boundaries and therefore are viewed as abject themselves. At the same time, however, the female characters strive against the abject in their efforts to repair the disturbance caused by the corpse and the crime of murder that produced it by locating evidence leading to the apprehension of the culprit. Ever-present and undermining these attempts to restore order is the evidence of the crime itself, the corpse, which is abject not only for its “neither-nor” status but also because it exposes “the fragility of the law” (Kristeva 4). In addition, these female pathologist characters’ sex causes abjection in another form through their “liminal status” as outsiders in the male hierarchy of law enforcement (Nunn and Biressi 203); while they are employed by it and work to maintain its dominance over law-breakers and society in general, as biological females they can never truly belong.Abjection also results from the blurring of boundaries between investigator and victim. Such blurring is common in crime fiction, and while it is most likely to develop between criminal and investigator when the investigator is male, when that investigator is female it tends instead to involve the victim (Mizejewski 8). In these novels this is illustrated by the ways in which the female investigators see themselves as similar to the victims by reason of gender plus sensibility and/or work. The first victim in Cornwell’s Postmortem is a young female doctor, and reminders of her similarities to Scarpetta appear throughout the novel, such as when Scarpetta notices the pile of medical journals near the victim's bed (Cornwell 12), and when she considers the importance of the woman's fingers in her work as a surgeon (26). When another character suggests to Scarpetta that, “in a sense, you were her once,” Scarpetta agrees (218). This loss of boundaries between self and not-self can be considered another form of abjection because the status and roles of investigator and victim become unclear, and it also results in an emotional bond, with both Scarpetta and Isles becoming sensitive to what lies in wait for the bodies. This awareness, and the frisson it creates, is in stark contrast to their previous equanimity. For example, when preparing for an autopsy on the body of a nun, Isles finds herself fighting extreme reluctance, knowing that “this was a woman who had chosen to live hidden from the eyes of men; now she would be cruelly revealed, her body probed, her orifices swabbed. The prospect of such an invasion brought a bitter taste to [Isles’s] throat and she paused to regain her composure” (Gerritsen 57). The language highlights the penetrative nature of Isles’s contact with the corpse through words such as revealed, orifices, probed, and invasion, which all suggest unwanted interference, the violence inherent in the dissecting procedures of autopsy, and the masculine nature of the task even when performed by a female pathologist. This in turn adds to the problematic issue here of gender as performance, a subject I will discuss shortly.In a further blurring of those boundaries, the female characters are often perceived as potential victims by both themselves and others. Critic Lee Horsley describes Scarpetta as “increasingly giv[ing] way to a tendency to see herself in the place of the victim, her interior self exposed and open to inspection by hostile eyes” (154). This is demonstrated in the novel when plot developments see Scarpetta’s work scrutinised (Cornwell 105), when she feels she does not belong to the same world as the living people around her (133), and when she almost becomes a victim in a literal sense at the climax of the novel, when the perpetrator breaks into her home to torture and kill her but is stopped by the timely arrival of a police officer (281).Similarly, Gerritsen’s character Isles comes to see herself as a possible victim in The Sinner. When it is feared that the criminal is watching the Boston police and Isles realises he may be watching her too, she thinks about how “she was accustomed to being in the eye of the media, but now she considered the other eyes that might be watching her. Tracking her. And she remembered what she had felt in the darkness at [a previous crime scene]: the prey’s cold sense of dread when it suddenly realises it is being stalked” (Gerritsen 222). She too almost becomes a literal victim when the criminal enters her home with intent to kill (323).As investigators, these characters’ sex causes suspicion because they are “transgressive female bod[ies] occupying the spaces traditionally held by a man” (Mizejewski 6). The investigator in crime fiction has “traditionally been represented as a marginalized outsider” (Mizejewski 11), a person who not only needs to think like the criminal in order to apprehend them but be willing to use violence or to step outside the law in their pursuit of this goal, and is regarded as suspicious as a result. To place a woman in this position then makes that investigator’s role doubly suspicious (Mizejewski 11). Judith Butler’s work on gender as performance provides a useful tool for examining this. Because “the various acts of gender create the gender itself” (Butler 522), these female characters are judged as woman or not-woman according to what they do. By working as investigators in the male-dominated field of law-enforcement and particularly by choosing to spend their days handling the dead in ways that involve the masculine actions of penetrating and dismembering, each has “radically crossed the limits of her gender role, with her choice of the most unsavoury and ‘unfeminine’ of professions” (Vanacker 65). The suspicion this attracts is demonstrated by Scarpetta being compared to her male predecessor who got on so well with the police, judges, and lawyers with whom she struggles (Cornwell 91). This sense of marginalisation and unfavourable comparison is reinforced through her recollections of her time in medical school when she was one of only four women in her class and can remember vividly the isolating tactics the male students employed against the female members (60). One critic has estimated the dates of Scarpetta’s schooling as putting her “on the leading edge of women moving into professionals schools in the early 1970s” (Robinson 97), in the time of second wave feminism, when such changes were not welcomed by all men in the institutions. In The Sinner, Isles wants her male colleagues to see her as “a brain and a white coat” (Gerritsen 175) rather than a woman, and chooses strategies such as maintaining an “icy professionalism” (109) and always wearing that white coat to ensure she is seen as an intimidating authority figure, as she believes that once they see her as a woman, sex will get in the way (175). She wants to be perceived as a professional with a job to do rather than a prospective sexual partner. The white coat also helps conceal the physical indicators of her sex, such as breasts and hips (mirroring the decision of the murdered nun to hide herself from the eyes of men and revealing their shared sensibility). Butler’s argument that “the distinction between appearance and reality [...] structures a good deal of populist thinking about gender identity” (527) is appropriate here, for Isles’s actions in trying to mask her sex and thus her gender declare to her colleagues that her sex is irrelevant to her role and therefore she can and should be treated as just another colleague performing a task.Scarpetta makes similar choices. Critic Bobbie Robinson says “Scarpetta triggers the typical distrust of powerful women in a male-oriented world, and in that world she seems determined to swaddle her lurking femininity to construct a persona that keeps her Other” (106), and that “because she perceives her femininity as problematic for others, she intentionally misaligns or masks the expectations of gender so that the masculine and feminine in her cancel each other out, constructing her as an androgyne” (98). Examples of this include Scarpetta’s acknowledgement of her own attractiveness (Cornwell 62) and her nurturing of herself and her niece Lucy through cooking, an activity she describes as “what I do best” (109) while at the same time she hides her emotions from her colleagues (204) and maintains that her work is her priority despite her mother’s accusations that “it’s not natural for a woman” (34). Butler states that “certain kinds of acts are usually interpreted as expressive of a gender core or identity, and that these acts either conform to an expected gender identity or contest that expectation in some way” (527). Scarpetta’s attention to her looks and her enjoyment of cooking conform to a societal assumption of female gender identity, while her construction of an emotionless facade and focus on her work falls more in the area of expected male gender identity.These characters deliberately choose to perform in a specific manner as a way of coping and succeeding in their workplace: by masking the most overt signs of their sex and gender they are attempting to lessen the suspicion cast upon them by others for not being “woman.” There exists, however, a contradiction between that decision and the clear markers of femininity demonstrated on occasion by both characters, for example, the use by Isles of bright red lipstick and a smart Cleopatra haircut, and the performance by both of the “feminised role as caretaker of, or alignment with, the victim’s body” (Summers-Bremner 133). While the characters do also perform the more masculine role of “rendering [the body’s] secrets in scientific form” (Summers-Bremner 133), a strong focus of the novels is their emotional connection to the bodies and so this feminised role is foregrounded. The attention to lipstick and hairstyle and their overtly caring natures fulfill Butler’s ideas of the conventional performance of gender and may be a reassurance to readers about the characters’ core femininity and their resultant availability for romance sub-plots, however they also have the effect of emphasising the contrasting performative gender elements within these characters and marking them once again in the eyes of other characters as neither one thing nor another, and therefore deserving of suspicion.In conclusion, the female forensic pathologist investigator is portrayed in the chosen novels as suspicious for her involvement in the abject space that results from her comfort around and identification with the corpse in contrast to the revulsion experienced by her police colleagues; her sex in her roles as investigator and pathologist where these roles are conventionally seen as masculine; and her performance of elements of both masculine and feminine conventional gender roles as she carries out her work. This, however, sets up a further line of inquiry about the central position of the abject in novels featuring female forensic pathologist investigators, as these texts depict this character’s occupation of the abject space as crucial to the solving of the case: it is through her ability to perform the procedures of her job while identifying with the corpse that clues are located, the narrative of events reconstructed, and the criminal identified and apprehended.ReferencesBarthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. London: Jonathan Cape. 1975. Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal. 40.4 (1988): 519–31. 5 October 2011 ‹http://www.jstor.org/stable/3207893›Cornwell, Patricia. Postmortem. London: Warner Books, 1994. Davis, Gregory J. and Bradley R. Peterson. “Dilemmas and Solutions for the Pathologist and Clinician Encountering Religious Views of the Autopsy.” Southern Medical Journal. 89.11 (1996): 1041–44. Gawande, Atul. Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science. London: Profile Books, 2003.Gerritsen, Tess. The Sinner. Sydney: Random House, 2003. Grauby, Francois. “‘In the Noir’: The Blind Detective in Bridgette Aubert’s La mort des bois.” Mostly French: French (in) detective fiction. Modern French Identities, v.88. Ed. Alistair Rolls. Oxford: Peter Lang. 2009.Horsley, Lee. Twentieth Century Crime Fiction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.Klaver, Elizabeth. Sites of Autopsy in Contemporary Culture. Albany: State U of NYP, 2005.Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: Essays on Abjection. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.Mizejewski, Linda. “Illusive Evidence: Patricia Cornwell and the Body Double.” South Central Review. 18.3/4 (2001): 6–20. 19 March 2010. ‹http://www.jstor.org/stable/3190350›Nunn, Heather and Anita Biressi. “Silent Witness: Detection, Femininity, and the Post Mortem Body.” Feminist Media Studies. 3.2 (2003): 193–206. 18 January 2011. ‹http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1468077032000119317›Pentony, Samantha. “How Kristeva’s Theory of Abjection Works in Relation to the Fairy Tale and Post Colonial Novel: Angela Carter’s The Blood Chamber and Keri Hulme’s The Bone People.” Deep South. 2.3 (1996): n.p. 13 November 2011. ‹http://www.otago.ac.nz/DeepSouth/vol2no3/pentony.html›Richardson, Ruth. “Human Dissection and Organ Donation: A Historical Background.” Mortality. 11.2 (2006): 151–65. 13 May 2011. ‹http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13576270600615351›Robinson, Bobbie. “Playing Like the Boys: Patricia Cornwell Writes Men.” The Journal of Popular Culture. 39.1 (2006): 95–108. 2 August 2010. ‹http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1540-5931.2006.00205.x/full›Rolls, Alistair. “An Uncertain Place: (Dis-)Locating the Frenchness of French and Australian Detective Fiction.” in Mostly French: French (in) Detective Fiction. Modern French Identities, v.88. Ed. Alistair Rolls. Oxford: Peter Lang. 2009.---. “What Does It Mean? Contemplating Rita and Desiring Dead Bodies in Two Short Stories by Raymond Carver.” Literature and Aesthetics: The Journal of the Sydney Society of Literature and Aesthetics. 18.2 (2008): 88-116. Sawday, Jonathon. The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture. London: Routledge, 1996.Summers-Bremner, Eluned. “Post-Traumatic Woundings: Sexual Anxiety in Patricia Cornwell’s Fiction.” New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics. 43 (2001): 131–47. Vanacker, Sabine. “V.I Warshawski, Kinsey Millhone and Kay Scarpetta: Creating a Feminist Detective Hero.” Criminal Proceedings: The Contemporary American Crime Novel. Ed. Peter Messent. London: Pluto P, 1997. 62–87. Vargas, Fred. This Night’s Foul Work. Trans. Sian Reynolds. London: Harvill Secker, 2008.

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At the beginning of his recent collection of essays in queer studies, Jeffrey Escoffier makes the assertion at once portentous and banal that “the moment of acknowledging to oneself hom*osexual desires and feelings … and then licensing oneself to act ... is the central drama of the hom*osexual self.” That “moment of self-classification,” he explains, “is an emergency – sublime, horrible, wonderful – in the life of anyone who must confront it.” (1) In the theatre of my own biography, I am unsure how or when I first played out this epiphanic drama of queer self-acknowledgment, but I can vividly recall the first time someone else enacted it for me. In elementary school, at the age of ten, a fellow pupil cornered me in the school playground and announced with calculated precocity to anyone who cared to listen that I was, as he put it, “a hom*o.” Unlike some of my congregated peers whose chorus of “what’s a hom*o?” provoked a dizzying exchange of infantile misinformation, I was only too well aware of the term’s meaning and, shocked that my queerness should not only be revealed but also be so transparently legible that even a boorish bully might detect it, slid away in fearful embarrassment. What proved most unsettling to me, however, was that my nascent hom*osexuality should have been evidenced in this playground spectacle of queer exposure, not on the basis of same-sex desire but, rather, on that of passionate devotion to a woman. Earlier that day, our schoolteacher had directed us to write and then read aloud to the class a composition entitled, “My Hero.” Where most of my classmates wrote predictable tributes to normative role models of the time like Neil Armstrong, Greg Chappell, Muhammad Ali, and even Jesus Christ, I penned an effusive homage to, what I described in the essay as, that “radiant star of stage and screen, Miss Julie Andrews”. It was this profession of ardent affection for a female film star that led directly to my schoolyard outing. As my accuser put it when explicating the deductive rationale behind his sexual detection, “Only a hom*o would love Julie Andrews!” Even at age ten, the paradoxical (il)logic of this formulation was so glaring as to all but slap me hard across the face – an action transposed from the metaphoric to the literal by my playground adversary who, not content to let “the hom*o” escape too readily or lightly, pursued me across the schoolyard and pushed me face-first into the asphalt. How could my declaration of desire for a female star – which in strictly definitional terms should have seemed, if anything, eminently heterosexual – be taken so assuredly as a marker of hom*osexuality? Why and how could my loving Julie Andrews provoke such an explosive manifestation of juvenile hom*ophobia? The answers to these questions were already known, if only intuitively and, thus, only partially, to the ten-year old me. Like many other elements of my childhood, my love for Julie Andrews formed part of what I was fast recognizing was an ever-expanding and ever-consolidating category of bad object-choices – a diverse array of cultural and social cathexes variously abjectified, proscribed or deemed otherwise inconsonant with dominant modes of sexual selfhood. Redefined as a symptom of sexual dissonance, my devotion to Andrews suddenly became a catalytic signifier of shame, a palpable marker of my failure to achieve heteronormality and, thus, another attachment to cache away in the cavernous closet of protogay childhood. That this scenario will sound instantly familiar to many is evidence of the extent to which a politics of shame is routinely mobilized – most potently, though by no means exclusively, in childhood – to stigmatize and thus discipline queer subjectivities. Much of the breathtaking success with which mainstream culture is able to install and mandate a heteronormative economy depends directly on its ability to foster a correlative economy of queer shame through which to disgrace and thus delegitimate all that falls outside the narrow purview of straight sexualities. Not that such processes of juridical stigmatization are necessarily successful. Shameful and shameless are, after all, but a suffix apart and a good deal of the productivity of queer cultures – as of queer lives – resides precisely in the extraordinary capacity they obtain for not only clinging stubbornly and defiantly to the outlawed objects of their desire but investing these objects with a near-inexhaustible source of vitalizing energy. The scene of my schoolyard shaming may have effected a public occlusion of my love for Julie Andrews, but it in no way quelled or attenuated that love. Indeed, transformed into a sign of my developing hom*osexuality, my attachment to Andrews became more than ever an integral component of my subjectivity and an indefatigable resource for survival in the face of what I perceived to be an unaccommodating social world. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick dubs these survivalist dynamics of queer culture “reparative” in the sense given the term by object-relations theory as an affirmative impulse to repair or make good the losses of subjective constitution. Unlike the competing paranoid positionality which in object-relations theory is understood to fracture the world into colliding part-objects and is marked by “hatred, envy, and anxiety”, the reparative dynamic is marked by love and seeks to reassemble or repair the subject’s world into “something like a whole” that is “available both to be identified with and to offer one nourishment and comfort in turn.” (Sedgwick, 8) For Sedgwick, this idea of a reparative impulse speaks powerfully to the inventive and obstinate ways in which queer subjects negotiate spaces of self-affirmation in the face of a hostile environment, or as she evocatively puts it, the ways in which queer “selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from ... a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them.” (35) As a paradigmatic example of and governing trope for this reparative tradition of queer survivalism, Sedgwick offers, significantly for my purposes, the image of the proto-queer child or adolescent ardently (over)attached to a cultural text or object, passionately investing that text or object with almost talismanic properties to repair or make good a damaged socius . “Such a child,” she writes, “is reading for important news about herself, [even] without knowing what form that news will take; with only the patchiest familiarity with its codes; without, even, more than hungrily hypothesizing to what questions this news may proffer an answer.” (2-3) This characterization of a reparatively positioned proto-queer reader resonates profoundly with my own fiercely loving attachments to Julie Andrews. Much of the energy of these attachments – certainly in childhood and, perhaps less urgently but no less decisively, in adulthood – springs directly from the reparative performances to which this particular star has been cast in the playhouse of my own imaginary. To wit: a cherished ritual from childhood. In the days when I was growing up, the days before VCRs and cable television, my Andrews fandom was of necessity organized not so much around her film texts as around her recordings. While I had seen her films and these were vital, generative sites for my fan passions, the primary focus for those passions – where they were practised, indulged, nurtured – was her vocal recordings. On long, listless afternoons, returned home from school, I would rush to the living room, position myself firmly in front of the family hi-fi and blissfully listen my way through my expansive collection of Julie Andrews LPs. My favourite, without doubt, was the soundtrack recording for The Sound of Music, which I would play and replay for hours on end. I can still recall the palpable sense of breathless anticipation when, unsheathed from its cover and reverently placed on the turntable, the disc would crackle to life. A whispering breath of wind, an echo of birdsong, a rapid swell of violins, and Julie’s inimitable voice would break forth in fortissimo triumph, leaping through the speakers and enveloping the room with melodic abundance. To augment the sense of excitement, I would, while listening, gaze intently at the record cover with its celebrated image of Julie leaping in mid-flight like a preternatural oread, her skirt billowing up with carefree delight, arms swinging open in joyous welcome, effortlessly holding aloft a guitar case and a travelling bag, twin symbols of musical expressivity and liberating escape. Projecting myself into the scene, I would twirl with Julie in imaginary freedom, riding the crest of her crystalline voice in rapturous transport from the suburban mundanity of family, school, and straightness. Invested with the attentive love and astonishing creativity of juvenile fandom, Andrews provided not just the promissory vision of a life different from and infinitely freer than the one I knew, but the fantasmatic means through which to achieve and sustain this process of transcendence. If I loved Julie Andrews as a child it was because that love functioned as a process through which to resist and transfigure the oppressive banalities of the heteronormative everyday. Though unaware of it at the time, my childhood mobilization of a female star as a vehicle of, and for, quotidian transcendence has a long and rich pedigree in queer cultures, especially gay male cultures. From the enthusiasms of the nineteenth century dandies for operatic primi donne and the fervent gay cult followings in the mid-twentieth century of Hollywood stars such as Judy Garland and Bette Davis, to contemporary queer celebrations of dancefloor goddesses, diva worship has been a staple of gay male cultural production where it has sustained a spectacularly diverse array of insistently queer pleasures. While loath to generalize its heterogeneous functions and values, I submit that much of the enduring vitality of diva worship in gay male cultures resides in the commodious scope it affords for reparative cultural labour. Indeed, most critical discussions of gay diva worship posit in some fashion that gay men engage divas as imaginary figures of therapeutic empowerment. “At the very heart of gay diva worship”, opines Daniel Harris, is “the almost universal hom*osexual experience of ostracism and insecurity” and the desire to “elevate [one]self above [one’s] antagonistic surroundings.” (Harris, 10) Wayne Koestenbaum similarly claims that "gay culture has perfected the art of mimicking a diva – of pretending, inside, to be divine – to help the stigmatized self imagine it is received, believed, and adored." (Koestenbaum, 133) Tuned to the chord of reparative amelioration, diva worship emerges here as a vital practice of affective queer enfranchisem*nt: the restoration of a functional selfhood and the provision of emotional resources through which to transcend – and survive – the often violent deformations of a heteronormative world. That such processes of male hom*osexual affirmation should be articulated through ardent devotion to a woman might seem a strange paradox. But just as love and sex are never inevitable correspondents, the presence of a heterosexual passion inscribed at the very heart of gay male culture by its long histories of diva worship is a sure – and welcome – sign of the irrepressible waywardness of desire and its stubborn refusal to fit the impoverished scripts that we nominate sexuality. Works Cited Escoffier, Jeffrey. American hom*o: Community and Perversity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Harris, Daniel. The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture. New York: Hyperion, 1997. Koestenbaum, Wayne. The Queen's Throat: Opera, hom*osexuality, and the Mystery of Desire. New York: Poseidon Press, 1993. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is About You.” Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Farmer, Brett. "Loving Julie Andrews" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.6 (2002). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/lovingjulie.php>. APA Style Farmer, B., (2002, Nov 20). Loving Julie Andrews. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 5,(6). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/lovingjulie.html

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The advent of the #MeToo movement and the scale of participation in 85 countries (Gill and Orgad; see Google Trends) has greatly expanded debate about the revival of feminism (Winch Littler and Keeler) and the contribution of digital media to a “reconfiguration” of feminism (Jouet). Insofar as these campaigns are concerned with sexual harassment and related forms of sexual abuse, the longer history of sexual harassment in which this practice was named by women’s movement activists in the 1970s has gone largely unremarked except in the broad sense of the recharging or “techno-echo[es]” (Jouet) of earlier “waves” of feminism. However, #MeToo and its companion movement #TimesUp, and its fighting fund timesupnow.org, stemmed directly from the allegations in 2017 against the media mogul Harvey Weinstein by Hollywood professionals and celebrities. The naming of prominent, powerful men as harassers and the celebrity sphere of activism have become features of #MeToo that warrant comparison with the naming of sexual harassment in the earlier era of feminism.While the practices it named were not new, the term “sexual harassment” was new, and it became a defining issue in second wave feminism that was conceptualised within the continuum of sexual violence. I outline this history, and how it transformed the private, individual experiences of many women into a shared public consciousness about sexual coercion in the workplace, and some of the debate that this generated within the women’s movement at the time. It offers scope to compare the threshold politics of naming names in the 21st century, and its celebrity vanguard which has led to some ambivalence about the lasting impact. For Kathy Davis (in Zarkov and Davis), for instance, it is atypical of the collective goals of second wave feminism.In comparing the two eras, Anita Hill’s claims against Clarence Thomas in the early 1990s is a bridging incident. It dates from closer to the time in which sexual harassment was named, and Hill’s testimony is now recognised as a prototype of the kinds of claims made against powerful men in the #MeToo era. Lauren Berlant’s account of “Diva Citizenship”, formulated in response to Hill’s testimony to the US Senate, now seems prescient of the unfolding spectacle of feminist subjectivities in the digital public sphere and speaks directly to the relation between individual and collective action in making lasting change. The possibility of change, however, descends from the intervention of the women’s movement in naming sexual harassment.The Name Is AllI found my boss in a room ... . He was alone ... . He greeted me ... touched my hair and ... said ... “Come, Ruth, sit down here.” He motioned to his knee. I felt my face flush. I backed away towards the door ... . Then he rose ... and ... put his hand into his pocket, took out a roll of bills, counted off three dollars, and brought it over to me at the door. “Tell your father,” he said, “to find you a new shop for tomorrow morning.” (Cohen 129)Sexual coercion in the workplace, such as referred to in this workplace novel published in 1918, was spoken about among women in subcultures and gossip long before it was named as sexual harassment. But it had no place in public discourse. Women’s knowledge of sexual harassment coalesced in an act of naming that is reputed to have occurred in a consciousness raising group in New York at the height of the second wave women’s movement. Lin Farley lays claim to it in her book, Sexual Shakedown, first published in 1978, in describing the coinage of the term from a workshop on women and work in 1974 at Cornell University. The group of participants was made up, she says, of near equal numbers of black and white women with “economic backgrounds ranging from very affluent to poor” (11). She describes how, “when we had finished, there was an unmistakable pattern to our employment ... . Each one of us had already quit or been fired from a job at least once because we had been made too uncomfortable by the behaviour of men” (11–12). She claims to have later devised the term “sexual harassment” in collaboration with others from this group (12).The naming of sexual harassment has been described as a kind of “discovery” (Leeds TUCRIC 1) and possibly “the only concept of sexual violence to be labelled by women themselves” (Hearn et al. 20). Not everyone agrees that Farley’s group first coined the term (see Herbert 1989) and there is some evidence that it was in use from the early 1970s. Catherine Mackinnon accredits its first use to the Working Women United Institute in New York in connection with the case of Carmita Wood in 1975 (25). Yet Farley’s account gained authority and is cited in several other contemporary radical feminist works (for instance, see Storrie and Dykstra 26; Wise and Stanley 48), and Sexual Shakedown can now be listed among the iconic feminist manifestoes of the second wave era.The key insight of Farley’s book was that sexual coercion in the workplace was more than aberrant behaviour by individual men but was systemic and organised. She suggests how the phrase sexual harassment “is the first verbal description of women’s feelings about this behaviour and it unstintingly conveys a negative perception of male aggression in the workplace” (32). Others followed in seeing it as organised expression of male power that functions “to keep women out of non-traditional occupations and to reinforce their secondary status in the workplace” (Pringle 93), a wisdom that is now widely accepted but seemed radical at the time.A theoretical literature on sexual harassment grew rapidly from the 1970s in which the definition of sexual harassment was a key element. In Sexual Shakedown, Farley defines it with specific connection to the workplace and a woman’s “function as worker” (33). Some definitions attempted to cover a range of practices that “might threaten a woman’s job security or create a stressful or intimidating working environment” ranging from touching to rape (Sedley and Benn 6). In the wider radical feminist discussion, sexual harassment was located within the “continuum of sexual violence”, a paradigm that highlighted the links between “every day abuses” and “less common experiences labelled as crimes” (Kelly 59). Accordingly, it was seen as a diminished category of rape, termed “little rape” (Bularzik 26), or a means whereby women are “reminded” of the “ever present threat of rape” (Rubinstein 165).The upsurge of research and writing served to document the prevalence and history of sexual harassment. Radical feminist accounts situated the origins in the long-standing patriarchal assumption that economic responsibility for women is ultimately held by men, and how “women forced to earn their own living in the past were believed to be defenceless and possibly immoral” (Rubinstein 166). Various accounts highlighted the intersecting effects of racism and sexism in the experience of black women, and women of colour, in a way that would be now termed intersectional. Jo Dixon discussed black women’s “least advantaged position in the economy coupled with the legacy of slavery” (164), while, in Australia, Linda Rubinstein describes the “sexual exploitation of aboriginal women employed as domestic servants on outback stations” which was “as common as the better documented abuse of slaves in the American South” (166).In The Sexual Harassment of Working Women, Catherine Mackinnon provided a pioneering legal argument that sexual harassment was a form of sex discrimination. She defined two types: the quid pro quo, when “sexual compliance is exchanged, or proposed to be exchanged, for an employment opportunity” (32); and sexual harassment as a “persistent condition of work” that “simply makes the work environment unbearable” (40). Thus the feminist histories of sexual harassment became detailed and strategic. The naming of sexual harassment was a moment of relinquishing women’s experience to the gaze of feminism and the bureaucratic gaze of the state, and, in the legal interventions that followed, it ceased to be exclusively a feminist issue.In Australia, a period of bureaucratisation and state intervention commenced in the late 1970s that corresponded with similar legislative responses abroad. The federal Sex Discrimination Act was amended in 1984 to include a definition of sexual harassment, and State and Territory jurisdictions also framed legislation pertaining to sexual harassment (see Law Council of Australia). The regimes of redress were linked with Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action frameworks and were of a civil order. Under the law, there was potential for employers to be found vicariously liable for sexual harassment.In the women’s movement, legislative strategies were deemed reformist. Radical and socialist feminists perceived the de-gendering effects of these policies in the workplace that risked collusion with the state. Some argued that naming and defining sexual harassment denies that women constantly deal with a range of harassment anywhere, not only in the workplace (Wise and Stanley 10); while others argued that reformist approaches effectively legitimate other forms of sex discrimination not covered by legislation (Game and Pringle 290). However, in feminism and in the policy realm, the debate concerned sexual harassment in the general workplace. In contrast to #MeToo, it was not led by celebrity voices, nor galvanised by incidents in the sphere of entertainment, nor, by and large, among figures of public office, except for a couple of notable exceptions, including Anita Hill.The “Spectacle of Subjectivity” in the “Scene of Public Life”Through the early 1990s as an MA candidate at the University of Queensland, I studied media coverage of sexual harassment cases, clipping newspapers and noting electronic media reports on a daily basis. These mainly concerned incidents in government sector workplaces or small commercial enterprises. While the public prominence of the parties involved was not generally a factor in reportage, occasionally, prominent individuals were affected, such as the harassment of the athlete Michelle Baumgartner at the Commonwealth Games in 1990 which received extensive coverage but the offenders were never publicly named or disciplined. Two other incidents stand out: the Ormond College case at the University of Melbourne, about which much has been written; and Anita Hill’s claims against Clarence Thomas during his nomination to the US Supreme Court in 1991.The spectacle of Hill’s testimony to the US Senate is now an archetype of claims against powerful men, although, at the time, her credibility was attacked and her dignified presentation was criticised as “too composed. Too cool. Too censorious” (Legge 31). Hill was also seen to counterpose the struggles of race and gender, and Thomas himself famously described it as “a hi-tech lynching of an uppity black” (qtd in Stephens 1). By “hi-tech”, Thomas alluded to the occasion of the first-ever live national broadcast of the United States Senate hearings in which Hill’s claims were aired directly to the national public, and re-broadcast internationally in news coverage. Thus, it was not only the claims but the scale and medium of delivery to a global audience that set it apart from other sexual harassment stories.Recent events have since prompted revisiting of the inequity of Hill’s treatment at the Senate hearings. But well before this, in an epic and polemical study of American public culture, Berlant reflected at length on the heroism of Hill’s “witnessing” as paradigmatic of citizenship in post-Reaganite America’s “shrinking” public sphere. It forms part of her much wider thesis regarding the “intimate public sphere” and the form of citizenship “produced by personal acts and values” (5) in the absence of a context that “makes ordinary citizens feel they have a common public culture, or influence on a state” (3), and in which the fundamental inequality of minority cultures is assumed. For Berlant, Hill’s testimony becomes the model of “Diva Citizenship”; the “strange intimacy” in which the Citizen Diva, “the subordinated person”, believes in the capacity of the privileged ones “to learn and to change” and “trust[s] ... their innocence of ... their obliviousness” of the system that has supported her subjugation (222–223). While Berlant’s thesis pertains to profound social inequalities, there is no mistaking the comparison to the digital feminist in the #MeToo era in the call to identify with her suffering and courage.Of Hill’s testimony, Berlant describes how: “a member of a stigmatised population testifies reluctantly to a hostile public the muted and anxious history of her imperiled citizenship” (222). It is an “act of heroic pedagogy” (223) which occurs when “a person stages a dramatic coup in a public sphere in which she does not have privilege” (223). In such settings, “acts of language can feel like explosives” and put “the dominant story into suspended animation” (223). The Diva Citizen cannot “change the world” but “challenges her audience” to identify with her “suffering” and the “courage she has had to produce” in “calling on people to change the practices of citizenship into which they currently consent” (223). But Berlant cautions that the strongest of Divas cannot alone achieve change because “remaking the scene of public life into a spectacle of subjectivity” can lead to “a confusion of ... memorable rhetorical performance with sustained social change itself” (223). Instead, she argues that the Diva’s act is a call; the political obligation for the action of change lies with the collective, the greater body politic.The EchoIf Acts of Diva Citizenship abound in the #MeToo movement, relations between the individual and the collective are in question in a number of ways. This suggests a basis of comparison between past and present feminisms which have come full circle in the renewed recognition of sexual harassment in the continuum of sexual violence. Compared with the past, the voices of #MeToo are arguably empowered by a genuine, if gradual, change in the symbolic status of women, and a corresponding destabilization of the images of male power since the second wave era of feminism. The one who names an abuser on Twitter symbolises a power of individual courage, backed by a responding collective voice of supporters. Yet there are concerns about who can “speak out” without access to social media or with the constraint that “the sanctions would be too great” (Zarkov and Davis). Conversely, the “spreadability” — as Jenkins, Ford and Green term the travelling properties of digital media — and the apparent relative ease of online activism might belie the challenge and courage of those who make the claims and those who respond.The collective voice is also allied with other grassroots movements like slu*tWalk (Jouet), the women’s marches in the US against the Trump presidency, and the several national campaigns — in India and Egypt, for instance (Zarkov and Davis) — that contest sexual violence and gender inequality. The “sheer numbers” of participation in #MeToo testify to “the collectivity of it all” and the diversity of the movement (Gill and Orgad). If the #MeToo hashtag gained traction with the “experiences of white heterosexual women in the US”, it “quickly expanded” due to “broad and inclusive appeal” with stories of queer women and men and people of colour well beyond the Global North. Even so, Tarana Burke, who founded the #MeToo hashtag in 2006 in her campaign of social justice for working class women and girls of colour, and endorsed its adoption by Hollywood, highlights the many “untold stories”.More strikingly, #MeToo participants name the names of the alleged harassers. The naming of names, famous names, is threshold-crossing and as much the public-startling power of the disclosures as the allegations and stimulates newsworthiness in conventional media. The resonance is amplified in the context of the American crisis over the Trump presidency in the sense that the powerful men called out become echoes or avatars of Trump’s monstrous manhood and the urgency of denouncing it. In the case of Harvey Weinstein, the name is all. A figure of immense power who symbolised an industry, naming Weinstein blew away the defensive old Hollywood myths of “casting couches” and promised, perhaps idealistically, the possibility for changing a culture and an industrial system.The Hollywood setting for activism is the most striking comparison with second wave feminism. A sense of contradiction emerges in this new “visibility” of sexual harassment in a culture that remains predominantly “voyeuristic” and “sexist” (Karkov and Davis), and not least in the realm of Hollywood where the sexualisation of women workers has long been a notorious open secret. A barrage of Hollywood feminism has accompanied #MeToo and #TimesUp in the campaign for diversity at the Oscars, and the stream of film remakes of formerly all-male narrative films that star all-female casts (Ghostbusters; Oceans 11; Dirty, Rotten Scoundrels). Cynically, this trend to make popular cinema a public sphere for gender equality in the film industry seems more glorifying than subversive of Hollywood masculinities. Uneasily, it does not overcome those lingering questions about why these conditions were uncontested openly for so long, and why it took so long for someone to go public, as Rose McGowan did, with claims about Harvey Weinstein.However, a reading of She Said, by Jodie Kantor and Megan Tuohey, the journalists who broke the Weinstein story in the New York Times — following their three year efforts to produce a legally water-tight report — makes clear that it was not for want of stories, but firm evidence and, more importantly, on-the-record testimony. If not for their (and others’) fastidious journalism and trust-building and the Citizen Divas prepared to disclose their experiences publicly, Weinstein might not be convicted today. Yet without the naming of the problem of sexual harassment in the women’s movement all those years ago, none of this may have come to pass. Lin Farley can now be found on YouTube retelling the story (see “New Mexico in Focus”).It places the debate about digital activism and Hollywood feminism in some perspective and, like the work of journalists, it is testament to the symbiosis of individual and collective effort in the action of change. The tweeting activism of #MeToo supplements the plenum of knowledge and action about sexual harassment across time: the workplace novels, the consciousness raising, the legislation and the poster campaigns. In different ways, in both eras, this literature demonstrates that names matter in calling for change on sexual harassment. But, if #MeToo is to become the last long take on sexual harassment, then, as Berlant advocates, the responsibility lies with the body politic who must act collectively for change in ways that will last well beyond the courage of the Citizen Divas who so bravely call it on.ReferencesBerlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. 1997. Durham: Duke UP, 2002.Bularzik, Mary. “Sexual Harassment at the Workplace: Historical Notes.” Radical America 12.4 (1978): 25-43.Cohen, Rose. Out of the Shadow. NY: Doran, 1918.Dixon, Jo. “Feminist Reforms of Sexual Coercion Laws.” Sexual Coercion: A Sourcebook on Its Nature, Causes and Prevention. Eds. Elizabeth Grauerholz and Mary A. Karlewski. Massachusetts: Lexington, 1991. 161-171.Farley, Lin. Sexual Shakedown: The Sexual Harassment of Women in the Working World. London: Melbourne House, 1978.Game, Ann, and Rosemary Pringle. “Beyond Gender at Work: Secretaries.” Australian Women: New Feminist Perspectives. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1986. 273–91.Gill, Rosalind, and Shani Orgad. “The Shifting Terrain of Sex and Power: From the ‘Sexualisation of Culture’ to #MeToo.” Sexualities 21.8 (2018): 1313–1324. <https://doi-org.elibrary.jcu.edu.au/10.1177/1363460718794647>.Google Trends. “Me Too Rising: A Visualisation of the Movement from Google Trends.” 2017–2020. <https://metoorising.withgoogle.com>.Hearn, Jeff, Deborah Shepherd, Peter Sherrif, and Gibson Burrell. The Sexuality of Organization. London: Sage, 1989.Herbert, Carrie. Talking of Silence: The Sexual Harassment of Schoolgirls. London: Falmer, 1989.Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: New York UP, 2013.Jouet, Josiane. “Digital Feminism: Questioning the Renewal of Activism.” Journal of Research in Gender Studies 8.1 (2018). 1 Jan. 2018. <http://dx.doi.org.elibrary.jcu.edu.au/10.22381/JRGS8120187>.Kantor, Jodi, and Megan Twohey. She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement. London: Bloomsbury, 2019.Kelly, Liz. “The Continuum of Sexual Violence.” Women, Violence, and Social Control. Eds. Jalna Hanmer and Mary Maynard. London: MacMillan, 1989. 46–60.Legge, Kate. “The Harassment of America.” Weekend Australian 19–20 Oct. 1991: 31.Mackinnon, Catherine. The Sexual Harassment of Working Women. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.New Mexico in Focus, a Production of NMPBS. 26 Jan. 2018. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlO5PiwZk8U>.Pringle, Rosemary. Secretaries Talk. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1988.Rubinstein, Linda. “Dominance Eroticized: Sexual Harassment of Working Women.” Worth Her Salt. Eds. Margaret Bevege, Margaret James, and Carmel Shute. Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1982. 163–74.Sedley, Ann, and Melissa Benn. Sexual Harassment at Work. London: NCCL Rights for Women Unit, 1986.Stephens, Peter. “America’s Sick and Awful Farce.” Sydney Morning Herald 14 Oct. 1991: 1.Storrie, Kathleen, and Pearl Dykstra. “Bibliography on Sexual Harassment.” Resources for Feminist Research/Documentation 10.4 (1981–1982): 25–32.Wise, Sue, and Liz Stanley. Georgie Porgie: Sexual Harassment in Every Day Life. London: Pandora, 1987.Winch, Alison, Jo Littler, and Jessalyn Keller. “Why ‘Intergenerational Feminist Media Studies’?” Feminist Media Studies 16.4 (2016): 557–572. <https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2016.1193285>.Zarkov, Dubravka, and Kathy Davis. “Ambiguities and Dilemmas around #MeToo: #ForHowLong and #WhereTo?” European Journal of Women's Studies 25.1 (2018): 3–9. <https://doi.org/10.1177/1350506817749436>.

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Abstract:

I was born illegitimate. Born on an existential precipice. My unwed mother was 36 years old when she relinquished me. I was the fourth baby she was required to give away. After I emerged blood stained and blue tinged – abject, liminal – not only did the nurses refuse me my mother’s touch, I also lost the sound of her voice. Her smell. Her heart beat. Her taste. Her gaze. The silence was multi-sensory. When they told her I was dead, I also lost, within her memory and imagination, my life. I was adopted soon after but not told for over four decades. It was too shameful for even me to know. Imprinted at birth with a psychological ‘death’, I fell, as a Late Discovery Adoptee (LDA), into a socio-cultural and psychological abyss, frozen at birth at the bottom of a parturitive void from where, invisible within family, society, and self I was unable to form an undamaged sense of being.Throughout the 20th century (and for centuries before) this kind of ‘social abortion’ was the dominant script. An adoptee was regarded as a bastard, born of sin, the mother blamed, the father exonerated, and silence demanded (Lynch 28-74). My adoptive mother also sinned. She was infertile. But, in taking me on, she assumed the role of a womb worthy woman, good wife, and, in her case, reluctant mother (she secretly didn’t want children and was privately overwhelmed by the task). In this way, my mother, my adoptive mother, and myself are all the daughters of bereavement, all of us sacrificed on the altar of prejudice and fear that infertility, sex outside of marriage, and illegitimacy were unspeakable crimes for which a price must be paid and against which redemptive protection must be arranged. If, as Thomas Keneally (5) writes, “original sin is the mother fluid of history” then perhaps all three of us all lie in its abject waters. Grotevant, Dunbar, Kohler and Lash Esau (379) point out that adoption was used to ‘shield’ children from their illegitimacy, women from their ‘sexual indiscretions’, and adoptive parents from their infertility in the belief that “severing ties with birth family members would promote attachment between adopted children and parents”. For the adoptee in the closed record system, the socio/political/economic vortex that orchestrated their illegitimacy is born out of a deeply, self incriminating primal fear that reaches right back into the recesses of survival – the act of procreation is infested with easily transgressed life and death taboos within the ‘troop’ that require silence and the burial of many bodies (see Amanda Gardiner’s “Sex, Death and Desperation: Infanticide, Neonaticide, and Concealment of Birth in Colonial Western Australia” for a palpable, moving, and comprehensive exposition on the links between 'illegitimacy', the unmarried mother and child murder). As Nancy Verrier (24) states in Coming Home to Self, “what has to be understood is that separation trauma is an insidious experience, because, as a society, we fail to see this experience as a trauma”. Indeed, relinquishment/adoption for the baby and subsequent adult can be acutely and chronically painful. While I was never told the truth of my origins, of course, my body knew. It had been there. Sentient, aware, sane, sensually, organically articulate, it messaged me (and anyone who may have been interested) over the decades via the language of trauma, its lexicon and grammar cellular, hormonal, muscular (Howard & Crandall, 1-17; Pert, 72), the truth of my birth, of who I was an “unthought known” (Bollas 4). I have lived out my secret fatality in a miasmic nebula of what I know now to be the sequelae of adoption psychopathology: nausea, physical and psychological pain, agoraphobia, panic attacks, shame, internalised anger, depression, self-harm, genetic bewilderment, and generalised anxiety (Brodzinsky 25-47; Brodzinsky, Smith, & Brodzinsky 74; Kenny, Higgins, Soloff, & Sweid xiv; Levy-Shiff 97-98; Lifton 210-212; Verrier The Primal Wound 42-44; Wierzbicki 447-451) – including an all pervading sense of unreality experienced as dissociation (the experience of depersonalisation – where the self feels unreal – and derealisation – where the world feels unreal), disembodiment, and existential elision – all characteristics of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). In these ways, my body intervened, acted out, groaned in answer to the social overlay, and from beyond “the dermal veil” tried to procure access, as Vicky Kirby (77) writes, to “the body’s opaque ocean depths” through its illnesses, its eloquent, and incessantly aching and silent verbosities deepened and made impossibly fraught because I was not told. The aim of this paper is to discuss one aspect of how my body tried to channel the trauma of my secret fatality and liminality: my pre-disclosure art work (the cellular memory of my trauma also expressed itself, pre-disclosure, through my writings – poetry, journal entries – and also through post-coital glossolalia, all discussed at length in my Honours research “Womb Tongues” and my Doctoral Dissertation “The Womb Artist – A Novel: Translating Pre-verbal Late Discovery Adoption Trauma into Narrative”). From the age of thirty onwards I spent twelve years in therapy where the cause of my childhood and adult psychopathology remained a mystery. During this time, my embodied grief and memories found their way into my art work, a series of 5’ x 3’ acrylic paintings, some of which I offer now for discussion (figures 1-4). These paintings map and express what my body knew but could not verbalise (without language to express my grief, my body found other ways to vent). They are symptom and sign of my pre-verbal adoption trauma, evidence that my body ‘knew’ and laboured ceaselessly and silently to find creative ways to express the incarcerated trauma. Post disclosure, I have used my paintings as artefacts to inform, underpin, and nourish the writing of a collection of poetry “Womb Tongues” and a literary novel/memoir “The Womb Artist” (TWA) in an ongoing autoethnographical, performative, and critical inquiry. My practice-led research as a now conscious and creative witness, fashions the recontextualisation of my ‘self’ into my ‘self’ and society, this time with cognisant and reparative knowledge and facilitates the translation of my body’s psychopathology and memory (explicit and implicit) into a healing testimony that explores the traumatised body as text and politicizes the issues surrounding LDAs (Riley 205). If I use these paintings as a memoirist, I use them second hand, after the fact, after they have served their initial purpose, as the tangible art works of a baby buried beneath a culture’s prejudice, shame, and judgement and the personal cries from the illegitimate body/self. I use them now to explore and explain my subclinical and subterranean life as a LDA.My pre-disclosure paintings (Figures 1-4) – filled with vagin*l, fetal, uterine, and umbilical references – provide some kind of ‘evidence’ that my body knew what had happened to me as if, with the tenacity of a poltergeist, my ‘spectral self’ found ways to communicate. Not simply clues, but the body’s translation of the intra-psychic landscape, a pictorial and artistic séance into the world, as if my amygdala – as quasar and signal, homing device and history lesson (a measure, container, and memoir) – knew how to paint a snap shot or an x-ray of the psyche, of my cellular marrow memories (a term formulated from fellow LDA Sandy McCutcheon’s (76) memoir, The Magician’s Son when he says, “What I really wanted was the history of my marrow”). If, as Salveet Talwar suggests, “trauma is processed from the body up”, then for the LDA pre-discovery, non-verbal somatic signage is one’s ‘mother tongue’(25). Talwar writes, “non-verbal expressive therapies such as art, dance, music, poetry and drama all activate the sub-cortical regions of the brain and access pre-verbal memories” (26). In these paintings, eerily divinatory and pointed traumatic, memories are made visible and access, as Gussie Klorer (213) explains in regard to brain function and art therapy, the limbic (emotional) system and the prefrontal cortex in sensorimotor integration. In this way, as Marie Angel and Anna Gibbs (168) suggest, “the visual image may serve as a kind of transitional mode in thought”. Ruth Skilbeck in her paper First Things: Reflections on Single-lens Reflex Digital Photography with a Wide-angled Lens, also discusses (with reference to her photographic record and artistic expression of her mother’s death) what she calls the “dark matter” – what has been overlooked, “left out”, and/or is inexplicable (55) – and the idea of art work as the “transitional object” as “a means that some artists use, conceptually and yet also viscerally, in response to the extreme ‘separation anxiety’ of losing a loved one, to the void of the Unknown” (57). In my case, non-disclosure prevented my literacy and the evolution of the image into language, prevented me from fully understanding the coded messages left for me in my art work. However, each of my paintings is now, with the benefit of full disclosure, a powerful, penetrating, and comprehensible intra and extra sensory cry from the body in kinaesthetic translation (Lusebrink, 125; Klorer, 217). In Figure 1, ‘Embrace’, the reference to the umbilical is palpable, described in my novel “The Womb Artist” (184) this way; “two ropes tightly entwine as one, like a dark and dirty umbilical cord snaking its way across a nether world of smudged umbers”. There is an ‘abject’ void surrounding it. The cord sapped of its colour, its blood, nutrients – the baby starved of oxygen, breath; the LDA starved of words and conscious understanding. It has two parts entwined that may be seen in many ways (without wanting to reduce these to static binaries): mother/baby; conscious/unconscious; first person/third person; child/adult; semiotic/symbolic – numerous dualities could be spun from this embrace – but in terms of my novel and of the adoptive experience, it reeks of need, life and death, a text choking on the poetic while at the same time nourished by it; a text made ‘available’ to the reader while at the same narrowing, limiting, and obscuring the indefinable nature of pre-verbal trauma. Figure 1. Embrace. 1993. Acrylic on canvas.The painting ‘Womb Tongues’ (Figure 2) is perhaps the last (and, obviously, lasting) memory of the infinite inchoate universe within the womb, the umbilical this time wrapped around in a phallic/cl*torial embrace as the baby-self emerges into the constrictions of a Foucauldian world, where the adoptive script smothers the ‘body’ encased beneath the ‘coils’ of Judeo-Christian prejudice and centuries old taboo. In this way, the reassigned adoptee is an acute example of power (authority) controlling and defining the self and what knowledge of the self may be allowed. The baby in this painting is now a suffocated cl*tor*s, a bound subject, a phallic representation, a gagged ‘tongue’ in the shape of the personally absent (but socially imposing) omni-present and punitive patriarchy. Figure 2. Womb Tongues. 1997. Acrylic on canvas.‘Germination’ (Figure 3) depicts an umbilical again, but this time as emerging from a seething underworld and is present in TWA (174) this way, “a colony of night crawlers that writhe and slither on the canvas, moving as one, dozens of them as thin as a finger, as long as a dream”. The rhizomic nature of this painting (and Figure 4), becomes a heaving horde of psychosomatic and psychopathological influences and experiences, a multitude of closely packed, intense, and dendridic compulsions and symptoms, a mass of interconnected (and by nature of the silence and lie) subterranean knowledges that force the germination of a ‘ghost baby/child/adult’ indicated by the pale and ashen seedling that emerges above ground. The umbilical is ghosted, pale and devoid of life. It is in the air now, reaching up, as if in germination to a psychological photosynthesis. There is the knot and swarm within the unconscious; something has, in true alien fashion, been incubated and is now emerging. In some ways, these paintings are hardly cryptic.Figure 3. Germination.1993. Acrylic on canvas.In Figure 4 ‘The Birthing Tree’, the overt symbolism reaches ‘clairvoyant status’. This could be read as the family ‘tree’ with its four faces screaming out of the ‘branches’. Do these represent the four babies relinquished by our mother (the larger of these ‘beings’ as myself, giving birth to the illegitimate, silenced, and abject self)? Are we all depicted in anguish and as wraithlike, grotesquely simplified into pure affect? This illegitimate self is painted as gestating a ‘blue’ baby, near full-term in a meld of tree and ‘self’, a blue umbilical cord, again, devoid of blood, ghosted, lifeless and yet still living, once again suffocated by the representation of the umbilical in the ‘bowels’ of the self, the abject part of the body, where refuse is stored and eliminated: The duodenum of the damned. The Devil may be seen as Christopher Bollas’s “shadow of the object”, or the Jungian archetypal shadow, not simply a Judeo-Christian fear-based spectre and curmudgeon, but a site of unprocessed and, therefore, feared psychological material, material that must be brought to consciousness and integrated. Perhaps the Devil also is the antithesis to ‘God’ as mother. The hell of ‘not mother’, no mother, not the right mother, the reluctant adoptive mother – the Devil as icon for the rich underbelly of the psyche and apophatic to the adopted/artificial/socially scripted self.Figure 4. The Birthing Tree. 1995. Acrylic on canvas.These paintings ache with the trauma of my relinquishment and LDA experience. They ache with my body’s truth, where the cellular and psychological, flesh and blood and feeling, leak from my wounds in unspeakable confluence (the two genital lips as the site of relinquishment, my speaking lips that have been sealed through non-disclosure and shame, the psychological trauma as Verrier’s ‘primal wound’) just as I leaked from my mother (and society) at birth, as blood and muck, and ooze and pus and death (Grosz 195) only to be quickly and silently mopped up and cleansed through adoption and life-long secrecy. Where I, as translator, fluent in both silence and signs, disclose the baby’s trauma, asking for legitimacy. My experience as a LDA sets up an interesting experiment, one that allows an examination of the pre-verbal/pre-disclosure body as a fleshed and breathing Rosetta Stone, as an interface between the language of the body and of the verbalised, painted, and written text. As a constructed body, written upon and invented legally, socially, and psychologically, I am, in Hélène Cixous’s (“To Live the Orange” 83) words, “un-forgetting”, “un-silencing” and “unearthing” my ‘self’ – I am re-writing, re-inventing and, under public scrutiny, legitimising my ‘self’. I am a site of inquiry, discovery, extrapolation, and becoming (Metta 492; Poulus 475) and, as Grosz (vii) suggests, a body with “all the explanatory power” of the mind. I am, as I embroider myself and my LDA experience into literary and critical texts, authoring myself into existence, referencing with particular relevance Peter Carnochan’s (361) suggestion that “analysis...acts as midwife to the birth of being”. I am, as I swim forever amorphous, invisible, and unspoken in my mother’s womb, fashioning a shore, landscaping my mind against the constant wet, my chronic liminality (Rambo 629) providing social landfall for other LDAs and silenced minorities. As Catherine Lynch (3) writes regarding LDAs, “Through the creation of text and theory I can formulate an intimate space for a family of adoptive subjects I might never know via our participation in a new discourse in Australian academia.” I participate through my creative, self-reflexive, process fuelled (Durey 22), practice-led enquiry. I use the intimacy (and also universality and multiplicity) and illegitimacy of my body as an alterative text, as a site of academic and creative augmentation in the understanding of LDA issues. The relinquished and silenced baby and LDA adult needs a voice, a ‘body’, and a ‘tender’ place in the consciousness of society, as Helen Riley (“Confronting the Conspiracy of Silence” 11) suggests, “voice, validation, and vindication”. Judith Herman (3) argues that, “Survivors challenge us to reconnect fragments, to reconstruct history, to make meaning of their present symptoms in the light of past events”. I seek to use the example of my experience – as Judith Durey (31) suggests, in “support of evocative, creative modes of representation as valid forms of research in their own right” – to unfurl the whole, to give impetus and precedence for other researchers into adoption and advocate for future babies who may be bought, sold, arranged, and/or created by various means. The recent controversy over Gammy, the baby boy born with Down Syndrome in Thailand, highlights the urgent and moral need for legislation with regard to surrogacy (see Kajsa Ekis Ekman’s Being and Being Bought: Prostitution, Surrogacy and the Split Self for a comprehensive examination of surrogacy issues). Indeed, Catherine Lynch in her paper Doubting Adoption Legislation links the experiences of LDAs and the children of born of surrogacy, most effectively arguing that, “if the fate that closed record adoptees suffered was a misplaced solution to the question of what to do with children already conceived how can you justify the deliberate conception of a child with the intention even before its creation of cruelly removing that child from their mother?” (6). Cixous (xxii) confesses, “All I want is to illustrate, depict fragments, events of human life and death...each unique and yet at the same time exchangeable. Not the law, the exception”. I, too, am a fragment, an illustration (a painting), and, as every individual always is – paradoxically – a communal and, therefore, deeply recognisable and generally applicable minority and exception. In my illegitimacy, I am some kind of evidence. Evidence of cellular memory. Evidence of embodiment. Evidence that silenced illegitimacies will manifest in symptom and non-verbal narratives, that they will ooze out and await translation, verification, and witness. This paper is offered with reverence and with feminist intention, as a revenant mouthpiece for other LDAs, babies born of surrogacy, and donor assisted offspring (and, indeed, any) who are marginalised, silenced, and obscured. It is also intended to promote discussion in the psychological and psychoanalytic fields and, as Helen Riley (202-207) advocates regarding late discovery offspring, more research within the social sciences and the bio-medical field that may encourage legislators to better understand what the ‘best interests of the child’ are in terms of late discovery of origins and the complexity of adoption/conception practices available today. As I write now (and always) the umbilical from my paintings curve and writhe across my soul, twist and morph into the swollen and throbbing organ of tongues, my throat aching to utter, my hands ready to craft latent affect into language in translation of, and in obedience to, my body’s knowledges. It is the art of mute witness that reverses genesis, that keeps the umbilical fat and supple and full of blood, and allows my conscious conception and creation. Indeed, in the intersection of my theoretical, creative, psychological, and somatic praxis, the heat (read hot and messy, insightful and insistent signage) of my body’s knowledges perhaps intensifies – with a ripe bouquet – the inevitably ongoing odour/aroma of the reproductive world. ReferencesAngel, Maria, and Anna Gibbs. “On Moving and Being Moved: The Corporeality of Writing in Literary Fiction and New Media Art.” Literature and Sensation, eds. Anthony Uhlmann, Helen Groth, Paul Sheehan, and Stephan McLaren. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009: 162-172. Bollas, Christopher. The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known. New York: Columbia UP, 1987. Brodzinsky, David. “Adjustment to Adoption: A Psychosocial Perspective.” Clinical Psychology Review 7 (1987): 25-47. doi: 10.1016/0272-7358(87)90003-1.Brodzinsky, David, Daniel Smith, and Anne Brodzinsky. Children’s Adjustment to Adoption: Developmental and Clinical Issues. California: Sage Publications, 1998.Carnochan, Peter. “Containers without Lids”. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 16.3 (2006): 341-362.Cixous, Hélène. “To Live the Orange”. The Hélène Cixous Reader: With a Preface by Hélène Cixous and Foreword by Jacques Derrida, ed. Susan Sellers. Oxford, UK: Routledge, 1979/1994. 81-92. ---. “Preface.” The Hélène Cixous Reader: With a Preface by Hélène Cixous and Foreword by Jacques Derrida, ed. Susan Sellers. Oxford, UK: Routledge, 1994. xv-xxii.Coull, Kim. “Womb Tongues: A Collection of Poetry.” Honours Thesis. Perth, WA: Edith Cowan University, 2007. ---. “The Womb Artist – A Novel: Translating Late Discovery Adoptee Pre-Verbal Trauma into Narrative”. Dissertation. Perth, WA: Edith Cowan University, 2014. Durey, Judith. Translating Hiraeth, Performing Adoption: Art as Mediation and Form of Cultural Production. Dissertation. Perth, WA: Murdoch University, 2010. 22 Sep. 2011 .Ekis Ekman, Kajsa. Being and Being Bought: Prostitution, Surrogacy and the Split Self. Trans. S. Martin Cheadle. North Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 2013. Gardiner, Amanda. “Sex, Death and Desperation: Infanticide, Neonaticide, and Concealment of Birth in Colonial Western Australia”. Dissertation. Perth, WA: Edith Cowan University, 2014. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies. NSW: Allen &. Unwin, 1994. Grotevant, Harold D., Nora Dunbar, Julie K. Kohler, and Amy. M. Lash Esau. “Adoptive Identity: How Contexts within and beyond the Family Shape Developmental Pathways.” Family Relations 49.3 (2000): 79-87.Herman, Judith L. Trauma and Recovery: From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. London: Harper Collins, 1992. Howard, Sethane, and Mark W. Crandall. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: What Happens in the Brain. Washington Academy of Sciences 93.3 (2007): 1-18.Keneally, Thomas. Schindler’s List. London: Serpentine Publishing Company, 1982. Kenny, Pauline, Daryl Higgins, Carol Soloff, and Reem Sweid. Past Adoption Experiences: National Research Study on the Service Response to Past Adoption Practices. Research Report 21. Australian Institute of Family Studies, 2012.Kirby, Vicky. Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal. New York and London: Routledge, 1997. Klorer, P. Gussie. “Expressive Therapy with Severely Maltreated Children: Neuroscience Contributions.” Journal of the American Art Therapy Association 22.4 (2005): 213-220. doi:10.1080/07421656.2005.10129523.Levy-Shiff, Rachel. “Psychological Adjustment of Adoptees in Adulthood: Family Environment and Adoption-Related Correlates. International Journal of Behavioural Development 25 (2001): 97-104. doi: 1080/01650250042000131.Lifton, Betty J. “The Adoptee’s Journey.” Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless 11.2 (2002): 207-213. doi: 10.1023/A:1014320119546.Lusebrink, Vija B. “Art Therapy and the Brain: An Attempt to Understand the Underlying Processes of Art Expression in Therapy.” Journal of the American Art Therapy Association 21.3 (2004): 125-135. doi:10.1080/07421656. 2004.10129496.Lynch, Catherine. “An Ado/aptive Reading and Writing of Australia and Its Contemporary Literature.” Australian Journal of Adoption 1.1 (2009): 1-401.---. Doubting Adoption Legislation. n.d.McCutcheon, Sandy. The Magician’s Son: A Search for Identity. Sydney, NSW: Penguin, 2006. Metta, Marilyn. “Putting the Body on the Line: Embodied Writing and Recovery through Domestic Violence.” Handbook of Autoethnography, eds. Stacy Holman Jones, Tony Adams, and Carolyn Ellis. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2013: 486-509.Pert, Candace. Molecules of Emotion: The Science behind Mind-body Medicine. New York: Touchstone, 2007. Rambo, Carol. “Twitch: A Performance of Chronic Liminality.” Handbook of Autoethnography, eds. Stacy Holman Jones, Tony Adams, and Carolyn Ellis. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2013: 627-638.Riley, Helen J. Identity and Genetic Origins: An Ethical Exploration of the Late Discovery of Adoptive and Donor-insemination Offspring Status. Dissertation. Brisbane: Queensland University of Technology, 2012.---. “Confronting the Conspiracy of Silence and Denial of Difference for Late Discovery Persons and Donor Conceived People.” Australian Journal of Adoption 7.2 (2013): 1-13.Skilbeck, Ruth. “First Things: Reflection on Single-Lens Reflex Digital Photography with a Wide-Angle Lens.” International Journal of the Image 3 (2013): 55-66. Talwar, Savneet. “Accessing Traumatic Memory through Art Making: An Art Therapy Trauma Protocol (ATTP)." The Arts in Psychotherapy 34 (2007): 22-25. doi:10.1016/ j.aip.2006.09.001.Verrier, Nancy. The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child. Baltimore, MD: Gateway Press, 1993.---. The Adopted Child Grows Up: Coming Home to Self. Baltimore, MD: Gateway Press, 2003. Wierzbicki, Michael. “Psychological Adjustment of Adoptees: A Meta-Analysis.” Journal of Clinical Child Psychology 22.4 (1993): 447-454. doi:10.1080/ 01650250042000131.

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Connecting I’ve moved house on the weekend, closer to the centre of an Australian capital city. I had recently signed up for broadband, with a major Australian Internet company (my first contact, cf. Turner). Now I am the proud owner of a larger modem than I have ever owned: a white cable modem. I gaze out into our new street: two thick black cables cosseted in silver wire. I am relieved. My new home is located in one of those streets, double-cabled by Telstra and Optus in the data-rush of the mid-1990s. Otherwise, I’d be moth-balling the cable modem, and the thrill of my data percolating down coaxial cable. And it would be off to the computer supermarket to buy an ASDL modem, then to pick a provider, to squeeze some twenty-first century connectivity out of old copper (the phone network our grandparents and great-grandparents built). If I still lived in the country, or the outskirts of the city, or anywhere else more than four kilometres from the phone exchange, and somewhere that cable pay TV will never reach, it would be a dish for me — satellite. Our digital lives are premised upon infrastructure, the networks through which we shape what we do, fashion the meanings of our customs and practices, and exchange signs with others. Infrastructure is not simply the material or the technical (Lamberton), but it is the dense, fibrous knotting together of social visions, cultural resources, individual desires, and connections. No more can one easily discern between ‘society’ and ‘technology’, ‘carriage’ and ‘content’, ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’, or ‘infrastructure’ and ‘applications’ (or ‘services’ or ‘content’). To understand telecommunications in action, or the vectors of fibre, we need to consider the long and heterogeneous list of links among different human and non-human actors — the long networks, to take Bruno Latour’s evocative concept, that confect our broadband networks (Latour). The co-ordinates of our infrastructure still build on a century-long history of telecommunications networks, on the nineteenth-century centrality of telegraphy preceding this, and on the histories of the public and private so inscribed. Yet we are in the midst of a long, slow dismantling of the posts-telegraph-telephone (PTT) model of the monopoly carrier for each nation that dominated the twentieth century, with its deep colonial foundations. Instead our New World Information and Communication Order is not the decolonising UNESCO vision of the late 1970s and early 1980s (MacBride, Maitland). Rather it is the neoliberal, free trade, market access model, its symbol the 1984 US judicial decision to require the break-up of AT&T and the UK legislation in the same year that underpinned the Thatcherite twin move to privatize British Telecom and introduce telecommunications competition. Between 1984 and 1999, 110 telecommunications companies were privatized, and the ‘acquisition of privatized PTOs [public telecommunications operators] by European and American operators does follow colonial lines’ (Winseck 396; see also Mody, Bauer & Straubhaar). The competitive market has now been uneasily installed as the paradigm for convergent communications networks, not least with the World Trade Organisation’s 1994 General Agreement on Trade in Services and Annex on Telecommunications. As the citizen is recast as consumer and customer (Goggin, ‘Citizens and Beyond’), we rethink our cultural and political axioms as well as the axes that orient our understandings in this area. Information might travel close to the speed of light, and we might fantasise about optical fibre to the home (or pillow), but our terrain, our band where the struggle lies today, is narrower than we wish. Begging for broadband, it seems, is a long way from warchalking for WiFi. Policy Circuits The dreary everyday business of getting connected plugs the individual netizen into a tangled mess of policy circuits, as much as tricky network negotiations. Broadband in mid-2003 in Australia is a curious chimera, welded together from a patchwork of technologies, old and newer communications industries, emerging economies and patterns of use. Broadband conjures up grander visions, however, of communication and cultural cornucopia. Broadband is high-speed, high-bandwidth, ‘always-on’, networked communications. People can send and receive video, engage in multimedia exchanges of all sorts, make the most of online education, realise the vision of home-based work and trading, have access to telemedicine, and entertainment. Broadband really entered the lexicon with the mass takeup of the Internet in the early to mid-1990s, and with the debates about something called the ‘information superhighway’. The rise of the Internet, the deregulation of telecommunications, and the involuted convergence of communications and media technologies saw broadband positioned at the centre of policy debates nearly a decade ago. In 1993-1994, Australia had its Broadband Services Expert Group (BSEG), established by the then Labor government. The BSEG was charged with inquiring into ‘issues relating to the delivery of broadband services to homes, schools and businesses’. Stung by criticisms of elite composition (a narrow membership, with only one woman among its twelve members, and no consumer or citizen group representation), the BSEG was prompted into wider public discussion and consultation (Goggin & Newell). The then Bureau of Transport and Communications Economics (BTCE), since transmogrified into the Communications Research Unit of the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (DCITA), conducted its large-scale Communications Futures Project (BTCE and Luck). The BSEG Final report posed the question starkly: As a society we have choices to make. If we ignore the opportunities we run the risk of being left behind as other countries introduce new services and make themselves more competitive: we will become consumers of other countries’ content, culture and technologies rather than our own. Or we could adopt new technologies at any cost…This report puts forward a different approach, one based on developing a new, user-oriented strategy for communications. The emphasis will be on communication among people... (BSEG v) The BSEG proposed a ‘National Strategy for New Communications Networks’ based on three aspects: education and community access, industry development, and the role of government (BSEG x). Ironically, while the nation, or at least its policy elites, pondered the weighty question of broadband, Australia’s two largest telcos were doing it. The commercial decision of Telstra/Foxtel and Optus Vision, and their various television partners, was to nail their colours (black) to the mast, or rather telegraph pole, and to lay cable in the major capital cities. In fact, they duplicated the infrastructure in cities such as Sydney and Melbourne, then deciding it would not be profitable to cable up even regional centres, let alone small country towns or settlements. As Terry Flew and Christina Spurgeon observe: This wasteful duplication contrasted with many other parts of the country that would never have access to this infrastructure, or to the social and economic benefits that it was perceived to deliver. (Flew & Spurgeon 72) The implications of this decision for Australia’s telecommunications and television were profound, but there was little, if any, public input into this. Then Minister Michael Lee was very proud of his anti-siphoning list of programs, such as national sporting events, that would remain on free-to-air television rather than screen on pay, but was unwilling, or unable, to develop policy on broadband and pay TV cable infrastructure (on the ironies of Australia’s television history, see Given’s masterly account). During this period also, it may be remembered, Australia’s Internet was being passed into private hands, with the tendering out of AARNET (see Spurgeon for discussion). No such national strategy on broadband really emerged in the intervening years, nor has the market provided integrated, accessible broadband services. In 1997, landmark telecommunications legislation was enacted that provided a comprehensive framework for competition in telecommunications, as well as consolidating and extending consumer protection, universal service, customer service standards, and other reforms (CLC). Carrier and reseller competition had commenced in 1991, and the 1997 legislation gave it further impetus. Effective competition is now well established in long distance telephone markets, and in mobiles. Rivalrous competition exists in the market for local-call services, though viable alternatives to Telstra’s dominance are still few (Fels). Broadband too is an area where there is symbolic rivalry rather than effective competition. This is most visible in advertised ADSL offerings in large cities, yet most of the infrastructure for these services is comprised by Telstra’s copper, fixed-line network. Facilities-based duopoly competition exists principally where Telstra/Foxtel and Optus cable networks have been laid, though there are quite a number of ventures underway by regional telcos, power companies, and, most substantial perhaps, the ACT government’s TransACT broadband network. Policymakers and industry have been greatly concerned about what they see as slow takeup of broadband, compared to other countries, and by barriers to broadband competition and access to ‘bottleneck’ facilities (such as Telstra or Optus’s networks) by potential competitors. The government has alternated between trying to talk up broadband benefits and rates of take up and recognising the real difficulties Australia faces as a large country with a relative small and dispersed population. In March 2003, Minister Alston directed the ACCC to implement new monitoring and reporting arrangements on competition in the broadband industry. A key site for discussion of these matters has been the competition policy institution, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, and its various inquiries, reports, and considerations (consult ACCC’s telecommunications homepage at http://www.accc.gov.au/telco/fs-telecom.htm). Another key site has been the Productivity Commission (http://www.pc.gov.au), while a third is the National Office on the Information Economy (NOIE - http://www.noie.gov.au/projects/access/access/broadband1.htm). Others have questioned whether even the most perfectly competitive market in broadband will actually provide access to citizens and consumers. A great deal of work on this issue has been undertaken by DCITA, NOIE, the regulators, and industry bodies, not to mention consumer and public interest groups. Since 1997, there have been a number of governmental inquiries undertaken or in progress concerning the takeup of broadband and networked new media (for example, a House of Representatives Wireless Broadband Inquiry), as well as important inquiries into the still most strategically important of Australia’s companies in this area, Telstra. Much of this effort on an ersatz broadband policy has been piecemeal and fragmented. There are fundamental difficulties with the large size of the Australian continent and its harsh terrain, the small size of the Australian market, the number of providers, and the dominant position effectively still held by Telstra, as well as Singtel Optus (Optus’s previous overseas investors included Cable & Wireless and Bell South), and the larger telecommunications and Internet companies (such as Ozemail). Many consumers living in metropolitan Australia still face real difficulties in realising the slogan ‘bandwidth for all’, but the situation in parts of rural Australia is far worse. Satellite ‘broadband’ solutions are available, through Telstra Countrywide or other providers, but these offer limited two-way interactivity. Data can be received at reasonable speeds (though at far lower data rates than how ‘broadband’ used to be defined), but can only be sent at far slower rates (Goggin, Rural Communities Online). The cultural implications of these digital constraints may well be considerable. Computer gamers, for instance, are frustrated by slow return paths. In this light, the final report of the January 2003 Broadband Advisory Group (BAG) is very timely. The BAG report opens with a broadband rhapsody: Broadband communications technologies can deliver substantial economic and social benefits to Australia…As well as producing productivity gains in traditional and new industries, advanced connectivity can enrich community life, particularly in rural and regional areas. It provides the basis for integration of remote communities into national economic, cultural and social life. (BAG 1, 7) Its prescriptions include: Australia will be a world leader in the availability and effective use of broadband...and to capture the economic and social benefits of broadband connectivity...Broadband should be available to all Australians at fair and reasonable prices…Market arrangements should be pro-competitive and encourage investment...The Government should adopt a National Broadband Strategy (BAG 1) And, like its predecessor nine years earlier, the BAG report does make reference to a national broadband strategy aiming to maximise “choice in work and recreation activities available to all Australians independent of location, background, age or interests” (17). However, the idea of a national broadband strategy is not something the BAG really comes to grips with. The final report is keen on encouraging broadband adoption, but not explicit on how barriers to broadband can be addressed. Perhaps this is not surprising given that the membership of the BAG, dominated by representatives of large corporations and senior bureaucrats was even less representative than its BSEG predecessor. Some months after the BAG report, the Federal government did declare a broadband strategy. It did so, intriguingly enough, under the rubric of its response to the Regional Telecommunications Inquiry report (Estens), the second inquiry responsible for reassuring citizens nervous about the full-privatisation of Telstra (the first inquiry being Besley). The government’s grand $142.8 million National Broadband Strategy focusses on the ‘broadband needs of regional Australians, in partnership with all levels of government’ (Alston, ‘National Broadband Strategy’). Among other things, the government claims that the Strategy will result in “improved outcomes in terms of services and prices for regional broadband access; [and] the development of national broadband infrastructure assets.” (Alston, ‘National Broadband Strategy’) At the same time, the government announced an overall response to the Estens Inquiry, with specific safeguards for Telstra’s role in regional communications — a preliminary to the full Telstra sale (Alston, ‘Future Proofing’). Less publicised was the government’s further initiative in indigenous telecommunications, complementing its Telecommunications Action Plan for Remote Indigenous Communities (DCITA). Indigenous people, it can be argued, were never really contemplated as citizens with the ken of the universal service policy taken to underpin the twentieth-century government monopoly PTT project. In Australia during the deregulatory and re-regulatory 1990s, there was a great reluctance on the part of Labor and Coalition Federal governments, Telstra and other industry participants, even to research issues of access to and use of telecommunications by indigenous communicators. Telstra, and to a lesser extent Optus (who had purchased AUSSAT as part of their licence arrangements), shrouded the issue of indigenous communications in mystery that policymakers were very reluctant to uncover, let alone systematically address. Then regulator, the Australian Telecommunications Authority (AUSTEL), had raised grave concerns about indigenous telecommunications access in its 1991 Rural Communications inquiry. However, there was no government consideration of, nor research upon, these issues until Alston commissioned a study in 2001 — the basis for the TAPRIC strategy (DCITA). The elision of indigenous telecommunications from mainstream industry and government policy is all the more puzzling, if one considers the extraordinarily varied and significant experiments by indigenous Australians in telecommunications and Internet (not least in the early work of the Tanami community, made famous in media and cultural studies by the writings of anthropologist Eric Michaels). While the government’s mid-2003 moves on a ‘National Broadband Strategy’ attend to some details of the broadband predicament, they fall well short of an integrated framework that grasps the shortcomings of the neoliberal communications model. The funding offered is a token amount. The view from the seat of government is a glance from the rear-view mirror: taking a snapshot of rural communications in the years 2000-2002 and projecting this tableau into a safety-net ‘future proofing’ for the inevitable turning away of a fully-privately-owned Telstra from its previously universal, ‘carrier of last resort’ responsibilities. In this aetiolated, residualist policy gaze, citizens remain constructed as consumers in a very narrow sense in this incremental, quietist version of state securing of market arrangements. What is missing is any more expansive notion of citizens, their varied needs, expectations, uses, and cultural imaginings of ‘always on’ broadband networks. Hybrid Networks “Most people on earth will eventually have access to networks that are all switched, interactive, and broadband”, wrote Frances Cairncross in 1998. ‘Eventually’ is a very appropriate word to describe the parlous state of broadband technology implementation. Broadband is in a slow state of evolution and invention. The story of broadband so far underscores the predicament for Australian access to bandwidth, when we lack any comprehensive, integrated, effective, and fair policy in communications and information technology. We have only begun to experiment with broadband technologies and understand their evolving uses, cultural forms, and the sense in which they rework us as subjects. Our communications networks are not superhighways, to invoke an enduring artefact from an older technology. Nor any longer are they a single ‘public’ switched telecommunications network, like those presided over by the post-telegraph-telephone monopolies of old. Like roads themselves, or the nascent postal system of the sixteenth century, broadband is a patchwork quilt. The ‘fibre’ of our communications networks is hybrid. To be sure, powerful corporations dominate, like the Tassis or Taxis who served as postmasters to the Habsburg emperors (Briggs & Burke 25). Activating broadband today provides a perspective on the path dependency of technology history, and how we can open up new threads of a communications fabric. Our options for transforming our multitudinous networked lives emerge as much from everyday tactics and strategies as they do from grander schemes and unifying policies. We may care to reflect on the waning potential for nation-building technology, in the wake of globalisation. We no longer gather our imagined community around a Community Telephone Plan as it was called in 1960 (Barr, Moyal, and PMG). Yet we do require national and international strategies to get and stay connected (Barr), ideas and funding that concretely address the wider dimensions of access and use. We do need to debate the respective roles of Telstra, the state, community initiatives, and industry competition in fair telecommunications futures. Networks have global reach and require global and national integration. Here vision, co-ordination, and resources are urgently required for our commonweal and moral fibre. To feel the width of the band we desire, we need to plug into and activate the policy circuits. Thanks to Grayson Cooke, Patrick Lichty, Ned Rossiter, John Pace, and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments. Works Cited Alston, Richard. ‘ “Future Proofing” Regional Communications.’ Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Canberra, 2003. 17 July 2003 <http://www.dcita.gov.au/Article/0,,0_1-2_3-4_115485,00.php> —. ‘A National Broadband Strategy.’ Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Canberra, 2003. 17 July 2003 <http://www.dcita.gov.au/Article/0,,0_1-2_3-4_115486,00.php>. Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC). Broadband Services Report March 2003. Canberra: ACCC, 2003. 17 July 2003 <http://www.accc.gov.au/telco/fs-telecom.htm>. —. Emerging Market Structures in the Communications Sector. Canberra: ACCC, 2003. 15 July 2003 <http://www.accc.gov.au/pubs/publications/utilities/telecommu... ...nications/Emerg_mar_struc.doc>. Barr, Trevor. new media.com: The Changing Face of Australia’s Media and Telecommunications. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2000. Besley, Tim (Telecommunications Service Inquiry). Connecting Australia: Telecommunications Service Inquiry. Canberra: Department of Information, Communications and the Arts, 2000. 17 July 2003 <http://www.telinquiry.gov.au/final_report.php>. Briggs, Asa, and Burke, Peter. A Social History of the Internet: From Gutenberg to the Internet. Cambridge: Polity, 2002. Broadband Advisory Group. Australia’s Broadband Connectivity: The Broadband Advisory Group’s Report to Government. Melbourne: National Office on the Information Economy, 2003. 15 July 2003 <http://www.noie.gov.au/publications/NOIE/BAG/report/index.htm>. Broadband Services Expert Group. Networking Australia’s Future: Final Report. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service (AGPS), 1994. Bureau of Transport and Communications Economics (BTCE). Communications Futures Final Project. Canberra: AGPS, 1994. Cairncross, Frances. The Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution Will Change Our Lives. London: Orion Business Books, 1997. Communications Law Centre (CLC). Australian Telecommunications Regulation: The Communications Law Centre Guide. 2nd edition. Sydney: Communications Law Centre, University of NSW, 2001. Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (DCITA). Telecommunications Action Plan for Remote Indigenous Communities: Report on the Strategic Study for Improving Telecommunications in Remote Indigenous Communities. Canberra: DCITA, 2002. Estens, D. Connecting Regional Australia: The Report of the Regional Telecommunications Inquiry. Canberra: DCITA, 2002. <http://www.telinquiry.gov.au/rti-report.php>, accessed 17 July 2003. Fels, Alan. ‘Competition in Telecommunications’, speech to Australian Telecommunications Users Group 19th Annual Conference. 6 March, 2003, Sydney. <http://www.accc.gov.au/speeches/2003/Fels_ATUG_6March03.doc>, accessed 15 July 2003. Flew, Terry, and Spurgeon, Christina. ‘Television After Broadcasting’. In The Australian TV Book. Ed. Graeme Turner and Stuart Cunningham. Allen & Unwin, Sydney. 69-85. 2000. Given, Jock. Turning Off the Television. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2003. Goggin, Gerard. ‘Citizens and Beyond: Universal service in the Twilight of the Nation-State.’ In All Connected?: Universal Service in Telecommunications, ed. Bruce Langtry. Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press, 1998. 49-77 —. Rural Communities Online: Networking to link Consumers to Providers. Melbourne: Telstra Consumer Consultative Council, 2003. Goggin, Gerard, and Newell, Christopher. Digital Disability: The Social Construction of Disability in New Media. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. House of Representatives Standing Committee on Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (HoR). Connecting Australia!: Wireless Broadband. Report of Inquiry into Wireless Broadband Technologies. Canberra: Parliament House, 2002. <http://www.aph.gov.au/house/committee/cita/Wbt/report.htm>, accessed 17 July 2003. Lamberton, Don. ‘A Telecommunications Infrastructure is Not an Information Infrastructure’. Prometheus: Journal of Issues in Technological Change, Innovation, Information Economics, Communication and Science Policy 14 (1996): 31-38. Latour, Bruno. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Luck, David. ‘Revisiting the Future: Assessing the 1994 BTCE communications futures project.’ Media International Australia 96 (2000): 109-119. MacBride, Sean (Chair of International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems). Many Voices, One World: Towards a New More Just and More Efficient World Information and Communication Order. Paris: Kegan Page, London. UNESCO, 1980. Maitland Commission (Independent Commission on Worldwide Telecommunications Development). The Missing Link. Geneva: International Telecommunications Union, 1985. Michaels, Eric. Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition, Media, and Technological Horizons. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994. Mody, Bella, Bauer, Johannes M., and Straubhaar, Joseph D., eds. Telecommunications Politics: Ownership and Control of the Information Highway in Developing Countries. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1995. Moyal, Ann. Clear Across Australia: A History of Telecommunications. Melbourne: Thomas Nelson, 1984. Post-Master General’s Department (PMG). Community Telephone Plan for Australia. Melbourne: PMG, 1960. Productivity Commission (PC). Telecommunications Competition Regulation: Inquiry Report. Report No. 16. Melbourne: Productivity Commission, 2001. <http://www.pc.gov.au/inquiry/telecommunications/finalreport/>, accessed 17 July 2003. Spurgeon, Christina. ‘National Culture, Communications and the Information Economy.’ Media International Australia 87 (1998): 23-34. Turner, Graeme. ‘First Contact: coming to terms with the cable guy.’ UTS Review 3 (1997): 109-21. Winseck, Dwayne. ‘Wired Cities and Transnational Communications: New Forms of Governance for Telecommunications and the New Media’. In The Handbook of New Media: Social Shaping and Consequences of ICTs, ed. Leah A. Lievrouw and Sonia Livingstone. London: Sage, 2002. 393-409. World Trade Organisation. General Agreement on Trade in Services: Annex on Telecommunications. Geneva: World Trade Organisation, 1994. 17 July 2003 <http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/serv_e/12-tel_e.htm>. —. Fourth protocol to the General Agreement on Trade in Services. Geneva: World Trade Organisation. 17 July 2003 <http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/serv_e/4prote_e.htm>. Links http://www.accc.gov.au/pubs/publications/utilities/telecommunications/Emerg_mar_struc.doc http://www.accc.gov.au/speeches/2003/Fels_ATUG_6March03.doc http://www.accc.gov.au/telco/fs-telecom.htm http://www.aph.gov.au/house/committee/cita/Wbt/report.htm http://www.dcita.gov.au/Article/0,,0_1-2_3-4_115485,00.html http://www.dcita.gov.au/Article/0,,0_1-2_3-4_115486,00.html http://www.noie.gov.au/projects/access/access/broadband1.htm http://www.noie.gov.au/publications/NOIE/BAG/report/index.htm http://www.pc.gov.au http://www.pc.gov.au/inquiry/telecommunications/finalreport/ http://www.telinquiry.gov.au/final_report.html http://www.telinquiry.gov.au/rti-report.html http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/serv_e/12-tel_e.htm http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/serv_e/4prote_e.htm Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Goggin, Gerard. "Broadband" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0308/02-featurebroadband.php>. APA Style Goggin, G. (2003, Aug 26). Broadband. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0308/02-featurebroadband.php>

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Abstract:

Until the mid 1980s, Bordo writes, anorexia was considered only in pathological terms (45-69). Since then, many theorists such as Malson and Orbach have described how the anorexic individual is formed in and out of culture, and how, according to this line of argument, eating disorders exist in a spectrum of “dis-order” that primarily affects women. This theoretical approach, however, has been criticised for leaving open the possibility of a more general pathologising of female media consumers (Bray 421). There has been some argument, too, about how to read the agency of the anorexic individual: about whether she or he is protesting against or operating “as if in collusion with,” as Bordo puts it (177), the system of power relations that orients us, as she writes, to the external gaze (27). Ferreday argues that what results from this “spectacular regime of looking” (148) is that western discourse has abjected not only the condition of anorexia but also the anorectic, which in practical terms means that, among other measures, the websites and blogs of anorectics are constantly being removed from the Internet (Dias 36). How, then, might anorexia operate in relation to itself?In the clinical fields the subjectivity of the anorectic has become an important area of study. Norwegian eating disorder specialist Skårderud has discussed what he calls an anorectic’s “impaired mentalisation,” which describes a difficulty, as a result of transgenerationally transmitted attachment patterns, in regulating the self in terms of “understanding other people’s mind, one’s own mind and also minding one’s own body” (86). He explains: “Not being able to feel themselves from within, the patients are forced to experience the self from without” (86). While a Foucauldian approach to eating disorders like Bordo’s might be considered a useful tool for analysing this externalised aspect of the anorexic predicament, anorectics’ difficulty with feeling “themselves from within” remains unexamined in this model. Ferreday has described the efforts, in more recent discourse, to engage with the subjective experience of “anorexic embodiment” (140). She is conscious, however, that an enduring preoccupation with “the relation between bodies and images” has made the relations between embodied selves “almost entirely under-theorized”, and an understanding of the lived experience of eating disorders too often reduced to the totalising representations of “abject spectacle” or “heroic myth” (153). In this context Ferreday has welcomed the publication of Warin’s ethnographic study Abject Relations: Everyday Worlds of Anorexia for providing a point of access to the subjective experience of anorectics. One important aspect of Warin’s findings, though, remains unremarked upon in Ferreday’s review: this is Warin’s astonishing conclusion from her investigations that anorexic practices successfully “removed the threat of abjection” for her participants (127). It is exactly at this point in the current debate about eating disorders and subjectivity, and the role of abjection in that subjectivity, that I wish to draw upon the Gothic. As Hogle maintains, abjection has a significant role to play in the Gothic. Like Warin, he refers to Kristeva’s notion of the abject when he describes the “throwing off” whereby we might achieve, in Hogle’s paraphrasing of Kristeva, “a oneness with ourselves instead of an otherness from ourselves in ourselves” (“Ghost” 498-499). He describes how the Gothic becomes a “site of ‘abjection’” (“Cristabel” 22), where it “depicts and enacts these very processes of abjection, where fundamental interactions of contrary states and categories are cast off into antiquated and ‘othered’ beings” (“Ghost” 499). This plays out, he writes, in a process of what he calls a “re-faking of fakery” that serves “both to conceal and confront some of the more basic conflicts in Western culture” (“Ghost” 500). Here, Hogle might be describing how the abject anorexic body functions in the “spectacular regime of looking” that comprises western discourse, as Ferreday has portrayed it. Skårderud, however, as noted above, has suggested that the difficulty experienced by those with eating disorders is a difficulty that involves a regulation of the self that is understood to occur prior to the more organised possibility of casting off contrary states onto “othered” beings. In short, the eating disordered individual seems to be already an embodied site of abjection, which suggests, in light of Hogle’s work on abjection in the Gothic, that eating disordered experience might be understood as in some way analogous to an experience of the Gothic. Following Budgeon, who has stressed the importance of engaging with individual “accounts of embodiment” as means of moving beyond the current representation-bound impasses in our thinking about eating disorders (51), in this paper I will be touching briefly on “pro-ana” or pro-anorexic Internet material before proceeding to a more detailed analysis of Marya Hornbacher's Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia. Punter, drawing on trauma theorists Abraham and Torok through Derrida, writes that “Gothic tests what it might be like to be a shell […] a shell which has been filled to the brim with something that looks like ourselves but is irremediably other, to the point that we are driven out, exiled from our home, removed from the body” (Pathologies16). In response, I will be suggesting that the eating disordered voice enacts the Gothic by dramatising “what it might be like to be a shell” since that embodied voice finds itself to be the site of abjection: the site where behind its distractingly visible “shell”, the ego, using anorexic idealisation, is compelled to use anorexic practices that “throw off” in an effort to achieve an ever-elusive sense of oneness. Due to Punter's long familiarity and shared vocabulary with a wide range of post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory, I will be particularly referring to his evocations of the Gothic, which he has characterised as a “kind of cultural threshold” (Introduction 9), to demonstrate how an examination of eating disordered experience alongside the Gothic might promise a more nuanced access to eating disordered subjectivity than has been available hitherto. Marya Hornbacher maintains in her memoir Wasted that anorectics, far from hating food, are in fact thinking about it constantly (151). If anorectics always think about food, the visual content of their Internet sites might seem to suggest otherwise: that their thoughts are mostly occupied by bodies—particularly thin, emaciated bodies—which form the material that these sites call “thinspiration” for the “pro-ana” writer and reader. Thinspiration, although not yet recognised by the Oxford English Dictionary, is understood to designate inspiring words or images of thinness that, further to Hornbacher's observations, might be understood as helping the food-obsessed anorectic to manage that obsession. Many pro-ana sites have their own thinspiration pages which, aside from the disturbing frame of the pro-ana verbal content that can include specifying dangerous techniques for abstaining, vomiting and purging, might be little more distressing to a viewer than any readily accessible fashion imagery. On the pro-ana site, however, whether mixed among the seemingly ordinary images or in a section all on its own,the spectre of the walking dead will often intrude. A “pro ana thinspiration” Google image search might yield, similarly, a small cadaverous corner to the purportedly inspiring imagery. It might also yield a tweeted response, from a pro-ana tweeter, to what might have been similar images of thinspiration which, far from affording inspiration, seem to have prompted intense anxiety: “I see the pictures I put up, then I see the morning thinspo everyone tweets, and I just feel gross ..[sic]”. This admission of despair sends a fearful, anxious affect loose among the otherwise serene uniformity of the “thinspo” imagery from which it had ricocheted, apparently, in the first place. Thinspiration, it seems, might threaten just as often as it assists the eating disordered subject to achieve self-regulation through their anorexic practices and, as this screen shot suggests, the voice can offer the researcher a small but potent insight into the drama of the eating disordered struggle.Psychologists Goldsmith and Widseth have stated that Hornbacher’s Wasted “gives the reader a feel for what it is like to live in an anorexic client’s head” (32). Although the book was a bestseller, newspaper reviews, on the whole, were ambivalent. There was a sense of danger inherent in the turbulent, “lurid” details (Zitin), and unresolved nature of the narrative (MacDonald). Goldsmith and Widseth even refer to Hornbacher's reported relapse and rehospitalisation that followed a “re-immersing” in “the narrative” of her own book (32). Kilgour has observed that the Gothic is a space where effects come into being without agents and creations prosper without their creators (221). While Radcliffe's novels might tend to contradict this claim, it is important to note that it is at the borders between explication and a seeming impossibility of explication that the Gothic imaginary draws its power. Miles, for example, has argued that Radcliffe is concerned not so much with dispelling the supernatural per se but with “‘equivocal phenomena of the mind’” (99-102). In Wasted, Hornbacher writes of her fear of “unsafe” foods whose uncanny abilities include the way they “will not travel through my body in the usual biological fashion but will magically make me grow” (20). Clearly, Hornbacher is not referring here to reasoned premises. Her sense, however, of the ambiguous nature of foodstuffs bears an important relation to Radcliffe's “equivocal phenomena”, and indeed the border-defying aspects of Kristevan abjection. In Abject Relations, Warin discovered that her anorexic participants shared what seemed to be magical beliefs in the ability of foodstuffs to penetrate the body through skin or through the nose via smells (106-127). The specific irrationality of these beliefs were not at issue except that they prompted the means, such as the washing of hands after touching food or shoving towels under doors to impede the intrusion of smells that, along with the anorexic practices of starving, purging and vomiting, served to protect these participants from abjection. When Hornbacher describes her experience of bulimia, the force, textures and sheer weight of the food that she eats in unimaginable, enormous quantities so that it bursts the sewer and floods the basem*nt as vomit (223) become all the more disconcerting when the disgusting effects, whose course through the sewer system cannot be ignored, are preceded by evocations of occasions when she anxiously searches for, buys, consumes and vomits or purges food: “one day you find yourself walking along, and you impulsively stop in a restaurant, order an enormous dinner, and puke in the woods” (120-1). Hornbacher’s eating disorder in fact is figured as an insidious double: “It and I live in an uncomfortable state of mutual antagonism. That is, to me, a far cry better than once upon a time, when it and I shared a bed, a brain, a body” (4). This sense of the diabolical double is most evident when the narrative is traversed by the desperation of an agitated protagonist who seems to be continually moving between the constricted upper spaces of dormitories, rooms and bathrooms, and gaping, sewerage filled basem*nts, and whose identity as either the original or the double to that original is difficult to determine. For Hornbacher, even at the end of her memoir when she is presented as almost recovered from her eating disorders, the protagonist not only continues to be doubled, but also exists in fragments: she speaks to herself "as if [she] were a horse", speaking "severely to [her] heart" who will pull her down "by the hair" into a nightmarish sleep (288-289). Punter has elaborated on the way dream landscapes in the Gothic open space into paradoxically constricted but labyrinthine infinities that serve to complicate what he has referred to as the two dimensions of our quotidian experience (Pathologies 123). In Wasted, beds give way to icy depths of watery sleeps, and numerous mirrors either fragment the body into parts or alienated other selves, or yield so that the narrator might step, suddenly, into “the neverworld” (10). Out of the two in the doubling, it is not so much the eating disorder—the “It”—but the “I” that becomes most monstrous as occasionally this “I” escapes onto the empty streets where, glimpsed crouching, anxious and confused in a beam of headlights, she reminds us of Frankenstein’s creature on the mountainsides or in the wastes since, as her capacity to articulate is lost in that moment, she becomes an “othered” object in the landscape (173). When, one winter, Hornbacher develops an obsession with running up and down the hall at her school at five am, she sprouts fine fur all over her translucent white skin and begins “to look a bit haunted” (109); later, in a moment of horrifying self-awareness, she realises that she “looked like a monster, most of [her] hair gone, [her] skin the gray color of rotten meat” (266). Punter writes that it is in the “dizzying heights and depths” of the Gothic that such agitation can become frantic: “in vertigo, the sense that there is indeed nowhere to go, not up, not down, and also that staying where you are has its own imponderable but terrible dangers” (Pathologies 10). Hornbacher states that the “worst night of [her] entire life” was spent with “the old familiar adrenaline rush pumping through [her] [….] running through the town, stopping here and there and eating and throwing up in alleyways and eating and blacking out” (273). This ceaseless, anxious, movement, where it is not clear who or what is doing the pursuing, but clear that it is a flight from the condition of abjection, is echoed in the very structure of Hornbacher’s memoir, which moves back and forth in time, seemingly at random, always searching for the decisive event that might, at last, explain or give a definitive beginning point to her disorders. Not only is the “beginning” of the disorders—an ultimate explanation or initiating event—sought but never found, but the narrative also concludes with an Afterword in which the narrator is, demonstrably, yet to recover, and even as she lies in bed next to her husband, is unable to rest (289). As Punter writes: “In Gothic, we do not directly ask, What happened? We ask, Where are we, where have we come from—not in the sense of a birth question, but as a question of how it is that we have ‘come adrift’” (Pathologies 209)—a question which, as Hornbacher finds, she is unable to answer, but nonetheless is obsessed with pursuing—to the point where the entire narrative seems to participate in the very pursuit that comprises the agitated perambulations of her eating disordered body. Although the narrator in Hornbacher’s Wasted, is strikingly alone—even at the end of the memoir, when she is represented as married, her husband is little more than a comforting body—throughout the text she is haunted by the a/effects of others. Hornbacher’s family is shown to be a community where the principle of nurturing is turned on its head. The narrator’s earliest evocation of herself presents a monstrous inversion of the expected maternal relationship: “My mother was unable to breast-feed me because it made her feel as if she were being devoured” (12). The mother’s drive to restrict her own eating is implicated in the narrator’s earliest difficulties with food, and the mother’s denials and evasions make it all the harder for the narrator to make any sense of her own experience (156). A fear of becoming fat haunts all of the family on her mother’s side (137, 240-1); the father, conversely, is figured in terms of excess (22). When the two grandmothers care for the narrator, behind their contradictory attentions towards the young Hornbacher—one to put her on a diet, the other to feed her up (24)—lies a dearth of biographical material. The narrator’s attempts to make sense of her predicament, where her assertion, “there were no events in my life that were overly traumatic” (195), sounds the edges of this void and only serves to signal that this discomforting contested empty space is traversed, as Punter might suggest, by “the hidden narrative of abuse” (Pathologies 15). Certainly the vague awareness of a great-grandmother who, “a hefty person, was mocked” (98) hints at the kind of emotional trauma that might be considered too abject to be remembered. Punter observes that in the Gothic we are in the wake of the effects of events that we cannot know have even happened (Pathologies 208), and the remains of history that assault us “are not to be obviously or readily learned from; for they are the remains of the body, they are the imaginary products of vulnerability and fragility, they are the ‘remains’ of that which still ‘remains to us’; or not” (Pathologies 12). Hornbacher’s sense of disassociation from her self as a body, and the specificity of her own feelings, which she is only ever able to describe as “pissed or fine” (203), evokes an over-smooth shell, like the idealised images of thinspiration that both belie and reveal their anxious nether sides. Even at the conclusion of the memoir, the narrator still does not “yet” know what it might mean for her to be “well” or “normal” (283). Hornbacher writes: “I always had this mental image of me, spilling out of the shell of my skin, flooding the room with tears” (25). In eating disorders, the self, which has never been whole and entire, or self-regulated in Skårderud’s terms, struggles to self-regulate against the ever threatening encroachment of the abject in a way that suggests essentially Gothic scenarios; in eating disordered self-narratives like Hornbacher’s Wasted, this struggle is evident in the very Gothic dynamics of the text. Without the Gothic, which affords us a means of perceiving eating disordered subjectivity in all of its detailed and dramatic dimensions—a subjectivity that theorists to date have found difficult to grasp—neither the abjection inherent in the “spilling” nor the anxious idealisation of the very somatic sense of the ego in the “shell” in Hornbacher's statement can be, I would suggest, sufficiently understood. ReferencesAbraham, Nicolas, Maria Torok, and Nicholas T. Rand. The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis. Tr. Nicholas T. Rand. Vol. 1, Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994. Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993. Bray, Abigail. “The Anorexic Body: Reading Disorders.” Cultural Studies 10.3 (1996): 413-29. Budgeon, Shelley. “Identity as an Embodied Event.” Body and Society 9.1 (2003): 35-55. Dias, Karen. “The Ana Sanctuary: Women's Pro-Anorexia Narratives in Cyberspace.” Journal of International Women's Studies 4.2 (2003): 31-45. Ferreday, Debra. “Anorexia and Abjection: A Review Essay.” Body and Society 18.2 (2012): 139-55. Goldsmith, Barbara L., and Jane C. Widseth. “Digesting Wasted.” Journal of College Student Psychotherapy 15.1 (2000): 31-34. Hogle, Jerrold E. “‘Cristabel’ as Gothic: The Abjection of Instability.” Gothic Studies 7.1 (2005): 18-28. Hogle, Jerrold E. “The Gothic Ghost of the Counterfeit and the Progress of Abjection.” A New Companion to the Gothic. Ed. David Punter. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012: 496-509. Hornbacher, Marya. Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1998. Kilgour, Maggie. The Rise of the Gothic Novel. London: Routledge, 1995. MacDonald, Marianne. “Her Parents Always Argued at Meal Times. So, Perched in Her High Chair, She Decided Not to Eat. At all. Marianne MacDonald reviews Wasted: Coming Back from an Addiction to Starvation.” The Observer: Books, 22 Mar. 1998: 016. Malson, Helen. “Womæn under Erasure: Anorexic Bodies in Postmodern Context.” Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology 9.2 (1999): 137-53. Orbach, Susie. Bodies. London: Profile Books, 2009. Orbach, Susie. Hunger Strike: The Anorectic’s Struggle as a Metaphor for Our Age. New York: Norton, 1986. Punter, David. Gothic Pathologies: The Text, the Body and the Law. Houndsmill: MacMillan P, 1998. Punter, David. Introduction. A New Companion to the Gothic. Ed. David Punter. Chichester: Wiley- Blackwell, 2012: 1-9. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (the 1818 Text). Ed. James Rieger. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974. Skårderud, Finn. “Bruch Revisited and Revised.” European Eating Disorders Review 17.2 (2009): 83-88. Warin, Megan. Abject Relations: Everyday Worlds of Anorexia. New Brunswick: Rutgers U P, 2010. Zitin, Abigail. “The Hungry Mind.” The Village Voice: Books, 3 Feb. 1998: 135.

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Abstract:

IntroductionIn Britain, hunger is often hidden in the privacy of the home. Yet otherwise private hunger is currently being rendered public and visible in the growing queues at charity-run food banks, where emergency food parcels are distributed directly to those who cannot afford to feed themselves or their families adequately (Downing et al.; Caplan). Food banks, in providing emergency relief to those in need, are responses to crisis moments, actualised through an embodied feeling of hunger that cannot be alleviated. The growing queues at food banks not only render hidden hunger visible, but also serve as reminders of the corporeal vulnerability of the human body to political and socio-economic shifts.A consideration of corporeality allows us to view the world through the lived experiences of the body. Human beings are “creatures of the flesh” who understand and reason, act and interact with their environments through the body (Johnson 81). The growing academic interest in corporeality signifies what Judith Butler calls a “new bodily ontology” (2). However, as Butler highlights, the body is also vulnerable to injury and suffering. An application of this ontology to hunger draws attention to eating as essential to life, so the denial of food poses an existential threat to health and ultimately to survival. The body’s response to threat is the physiological experience of hunger as a craving or longing that is the “most bodily experience of need […] a visceral desire locatable in a void” in which an empty stomach “initiates” a series of sounds and pangs that “call for action” in the form of eating (Anderson 27). Food bank queues serve as visible public reminders of this precariousness and of how social conditions can limit the ability of individuals to feed themselves, and so respond to an existential threat.Corporeal vulnerability made visible elicits responses that support societal interventions to feed the hungry, or that stigmatise hungry people by withdrawing or disparaging what limited support is available. Responses to vulnerability therefore evoke nurture and care or violence and abuse, and so in this sense are ambiguous (Butler; Cavarero). The responses are also normative, shaped by social and cultural understandings of what hunger is, what its causes are, and whether it is seen as originating in personal or societal failings. The stigmatising of individuals by blaming them for their hunger is closely allied to the feelings of shame that lie at the “irreducible absolutist core” of the idea of poverty (Sen 159). Shame is where the “internally felt inadequacies” of the impoverished individual and the “externally inflicted judgments” of society about the hungry body come together in a “co-construction of shame” (Walker et al. 5) that is a key part of the lived experience of hunger. The experience of shame, while common, is far from inevitable and is open to resistance (see Pickett; Foucault); shame can be subverted, turned from the hungry body and onto the society that allows hunger to happen. Who and what are deemed responsible are shaped by shifting ideas and contested understandings of hunger at a particular moment in time (Vernon).This exploration of corporeal vulnerability through food banks as a historically located response to hunger offers an alternative to studies which privilege representations, objectifying the body and “treating it as a discursive, textual, iconographic and metaphorical reality” while neglecting understandings derived from lived experiences and the responses that visible vulnerabilities elicit (Hamilakis 99). The argument made in this paper calls for a critical reconsideration of classic political economy approaches that view hunger in terms of a class struggle against the material conditions that give rise to it, and responses that ultimately led to the construction of the welfare state (Vernon). These political economy approaches, in focusing on the structures that lead to hunger and that respond to it, are more closed than Butler’s notion of ambiguous and constantly changing social responses to corporeal vulnerability. This paper also challenges the dominant tradition of nutrition science, which medicalises hunger. While nutrition science usefully draws attention to the physiological experiences and existential threat posed by acute hunger, the scientific focus on the “anatomical functioning” of the body and the optimising of survival problematically separates eating from the social contexts in which hunger is experienced (Lupton 11, 12; Abbots and Lavis). The focus in this article on the corporeal vulnerability of hunger interweaves contested representations of, and ideas about, hunger with the physiological experience of it, the material conditions that shape it, and the lived experiences of deprivation. Food banks offer a lens onto these experiences and their complexities.Food Banks: Deprivation Made VisibleSince the 1980s, food banks have become the fastest growing charitable organisations in the wealthiest countries of North America, Europe, and Australasia (Riches), but in Britain they are a recent phenomenon. The first opened in 2000, and by 2014, the largest operator, the Trussell Trust, had over 420 franchised food banks, and more recently was opening more than one per week (Lambie-Mumford et al.; Lambie-Mumford and Dowler). British food banks hand out emergency food relief directly to those who cannot afford to feed themselves or their families adequately, and have become new sites where deprivation is materialised through a congregation of hungry people and the distribution of food parcels. The food relief parcels are intended as short-term immediate responses to crisis moments felt within the body when the individual cannot alleviate hunger through their own resources; they are for “emergency use only” to ameliorate individual crisis and acute vulnerability, and are not intended as long-term solutions to sustained, chronic poverty (Perry et al.). The need for food banks has emerged with the continued shrinkage of the welfare state, which for the past half century sought to mediate the impact of changing individual and social circ*mstances on those deemed to be most vulnerable to the vicissitudes of life. The proliferation of food banks since the 2009 financial crisis and the increased public discourse about them has normalised their presence and naturalised their role in alleviating acute food poverty (Perry et al.).Media images of food bank queues and stacks of tins waiting to be handed out (Glaze; Gore) evoke collective memories from the early twentieth century of hunger marches in protest at government inaction over poverty, long queues at soup kitchens, and the faces of gaunt, unemployed war veterans (Vernon). After the Second World War, the spectre of communism and the expansionist agenda of the Soviet Union meant such images of hunger could become tools in a propaganda war constructed around the failure of the British state to care for its citizens (Field; Clarke et al; Vernon). The 1945 Labour government, elected on a social democratic agenda of reform in an era of food rationing, responded with a “war on want” based on the normative premise that no one should be without food, medical care, shelter, warmth or work. Labour’s response was the construction of the modern welfare state.The welfare state signified a major shift in ideational understandings of hunger. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ideas about hunger had been rooted in a moralistic account of divine punishment for individual failure (Vernon). Bodily experiences of hunger were seen as instruments for disciplining the indigent into a work ethic appropriate for a modern industrialised economy. The infamous workhouses, finally abolished in 1948, were key sites of deprivation where restrictions on how much food was distributed served to punish or discipline the hungry body into compliance with the dominant work ethic (Vernon; Foucault). However, these ideas shifted in the second half of the nineteenth century as the hungry citizen in Britain (if not in its colonies) was increasingly viewed as a victim of wider forces beyond the control of the individual, and the notion of disciplining the hungry body in workhouses was seen as reprehensible. A humanitarian treatment of hunger replaced a disciplinarian one as a more appropriate response to acute need (Shaw; Vernon). Charitable and reformist organisations proliferated with an agenda to feed, clothe, house, and campaign on behalf of those most deprived, and civil society largely assumed responsibility for those unable to feed themselves. By the early 1900s, ideas about hunger had begun to shift again, and after the Second World War ideational changes were formalised in the welfare state, premised on a view of hunger as due to structural rather than individual failure, hence the need for state intervention encapsulated in the “cradle to grave” mantra of the welfare state, i.e. of consistent care at the point of need for all citizens for their lifetime (see Clarke and Newman; Field; Powell). In this context, the suggestion that Britons could go to bed hungry because they could not afford to feed themselves would be seen as the failure of the “war on want” and of an advanced modern democracy to fulfil its responsibilities for the welfare of its citizens.Since the 1980s, there has been a retreat from these ideas. Successive governments have sought to rein in, reinvent or shrink what they have perceived as a “bloated” welfare state. In their view this has incentivised “dependency” by providing benefits so generous that the supposedly work-shy or “skivers” have no need to seek employment and can fund a diet of takeaways and luxury televisions (Howarth). These stigmatising ideas have, since the 2009 financial crisis and the 2010 election, become more entrenched as the Conservative-led government has sought to renew a neo-liberal agenda to shrink the welfare state, and legitimise a new mantra of austerity. This mantra is premised on the idea that the state can no longer afford the bloated welfare budget, that responsible government needs to “wean” people off benefits, and that sanctions imposed for not seeking work or for incorrectly filling in benefit claim forms serve to “encourage” people into work. Critics counter-argue that the punitive nature of sanctions has exacerbated deprivation and contributed to the growing use of food banks, a view the government disputes (Howarth; Caplan).Food Banks as Sites of Vulnerable CorporealityIn these shifting contexts, food banks have proliferated not only as sites of deprivation but also as sites of vulnerable corporeality, where people unable to draw on individual resources to respond to hunger congregate in search of social and material support. As growing numbers of people in Britain find themselves in this situation, the vulnerable corporeality of the hungry body becomes more pervasive and more visible. Hunger as a lived experience is laid bare in ever-longer food bank queues and also through the physiological, emotional and social consequences graphically described in personal blogs and in the testimonies of food bank users.Blogger Jack Monroe, for example, has recounted giving what little food she had to her child and going to bed hungry with a pot of ginger tea to “ease the stomach pains”; saying to her curious child “I’m not hungry,” while “the rumblings of my stomach call me a liar” (Monroe, Hunger Hurts). She has also written that her recourse to food banks started with the “terrifying and humiliating” admission that “you cannot afford to feed your child” and has expressed her reluctance to solicit the help of the food bank because “it feels like begging” (Monroe, Austerity Works?). Such blog accounts are corroborated in reports by food bank operators and a parliamentary enquiry which told stories of mothers not eating for days after being sanctioned under the benefit system; of children going to school hungry; of people leaving hospital after a major operation unable to feed themselves since their benefits have been cut; of the elderly having to make “hard choices” between “heat or eat” each winter; and of mixed feelings of relief and shame at receiving food bank parcels (All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry; Beattie; Cooper and Dumpleton; Caplan; Perry et al.). That is, two different visibilities have emerged: the shame of standing or being seen to stand in the food bank queue, and blogs that describe these feelings and the lived experience of hunger – both are vulnerable and visible, but in different ways and in different spaces: the physical or material, and the virtual.The response of doctors to the growing evidence of crisis was to warn that there were “all the signs of a public health emergency that could go unrecognised until it is too late to take preventative action,” that progress made against food poverty since the 1960s was being eroded (Ashton et al. 1631), and that the “robust last line of defence against hunger” provided by the welfare state was failing (Loopstra et al. n.p). Medical professionals thus sought to conscript the rhetorical resources of their professional credibility to highlight that this is a politically created public health crisis.This is not to suggest that acute hunger was absent for 50 years of the welfare state, but that with the closure of the last workhouses, the end of hunger marches, and the shutting of the soup kitchens by the 1950s, it became less visible. Over the past decade, hunger has become more visible in images of growing queues at food banks and stacked tins ready to be handed out by volunteers (Glaze; Gore) on production of a voucher provided on referral by professionals. Doctors, social workers or teachers are therefore tasked with discerning cases of need, deciding whose need is “genuine” and so worthy of food relief (see Downing et al.). The voucher system is regulated by professionals so that food banks are open only to those with a public identity constructed around bodily crisis. The sense of something as intimate as hunger being defined by others contrasts to making visible one’s own hunger through blogging. It suggests again how bodies become caught up in wider political struggles where not only is shame a co-construction of internal inadequacies and external judgements, but so too is hunger, albeit in different yet interweaving ways. New boundaries are being established between those who are deprived and those who are not, and also between those whose bodies are in short-term acute crisis, and those whose bodies are in long-term and chronic crisis, which is not deemed to be an emergency. It is in this context that food banks have also become sites of demarcation, shame, and contestation.Public debates about growing food bank queues highlight the ambiguous nature of societal responses to the vulnerability of hunger made visible. Government ministers have intensified internal shame in attributing growing food bank queues to individual inadequacies, failure to manage household budgets (Gove), and profligate spending on luxury (Johnston; Shipton). Civil society organisations have contested this account of hunger, turning shame away from the individual and onto the government. Austerity reforms have, they argue, “torn apart” the “basic safety net” of social responses to corporeal vulnerability put in place after the Second World War and intended to ensure that no-one was left hungry or destitute (Bingham), their vulnerability unattended to. Furthermore, the benefit sanctions impose punitive measures that leave families with “nothing” to live on for weeks. Hungry citizens, confronted with their own corporeal vulnerability and little choice but to seek relief from food banks, echo the Dickensian era of the workhouse (Cooper and Dumpleton) and indict the UK government response to poverty. Church leaders have called on the government to exercise “moral duty” and recognise the “acute moral imperative to act” to alleviate the suffering of the hungry body (Beattie; see also Bingham), and respond ethically to corporeal vulnerability with social policies that address unmet need for food. However, future cuts to welfare benefits mean the need for relief is likely to intensify.ConclusionThe aim of this paper was to explore the vulnerable corporeality of hunger through the lens of food banks, the twenty-first-century manifestations of charitable responses to acute need. Food banks have emerged in a gap between the renewal of a neo-liberal agenda of prudent government spending and the retreat of the welfare state, between struggles over resurgent ideas about individual responsibility and deep disquiet about wider social responsibilities. Food banks as sites of deprivation, in drawing attention to a newly vulnerable corporeality, potentially pose a threat to the moral credibility of the neo-liberal state. The threat is highlighted when the taboo of a hungry body, previously hidden because of shame, is being challenged by two new visibilities, that of food bank queues and the commentaries on blogs about the shame of having to queue for food.ReferencesAbbots, Emma-Jayne, and Anna Lavis. Eds. Why We Eat, How We Eat: Contemporary Encounters between Foods and Bodies. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013.All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry. “Feeding Britain.” 2014. 6 Jan. 2016 <https://foodpovertyinquiry.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/food>.Anderson, Patrick. “So Much Wasted:” Hunger, Performance, and the Morbidity of Resistance. Durham: Duke UP, 2010.Ashton, John R., John Middleton, and Tim Lang. “Open Letter to Prime Minister David Cameron on Food Poverty in the UK.” The Lancet 383.9929 (2014): 1631.Beattie, Jason. “27 Bishops Slam David Cameron’s Welfare Reforms as Creating a National Crisis in Unprecedented Attack.” Mirror 19 Feb. 2014. 6 Jan. 2016 <http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/27-bishops-slam-david-camerons-3164033>.Bingham, John. “New Cardinal Vincent Nichols: Welfare Cuts ‘Frankly a Disgrace.’” Telegraph 14 Feb. 2014. 6 Jan. 2016 <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/10639015/>.Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009.Cameron, David. “Why the Archbishop of Westminster Is Wrong about Welfare.” The Telegraph 18 Feb. 2014. 6 Jan. 2016 <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/david-cameron/106464>.Caplan, Pat. “Big Society or Broken Society?” Anthropology Today 32.1 (2016): 5–9.Cavarero, Adriana. Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence. New York: Columbia UP, 2010.Chase, Elaine, and Robert Walker. “The Co-Construction of Shame in the Context of Poverty: Beyond a Threat to the Social Bond.” Sociology 47.4 (2013): 739–754.Clarke, John, Sharon Gewirtz, and Eugene McLaughlin (eds.). New Managerialism, New Welfare. London: Sage, 2000.Clarke, John, and Janet Newman. The Managerial State: Power, Politics and Ideology in the Remaking of Social Welfare. London: Sage, 1997.Cooper, Niall, and Sarah Dumpleton. “Walking the Breadline.” Church Action on Poverty/Oxfam May (2013): 1–20. 6 Jan. 2016 <http://policy-practice.oxfam.org.uk/publications/walking-the-breadline-the-scandal-of-food-poverty-in-21st-century-britain-292978>.Crossley, Nick. “The Politics of the Gaze: Between Foucault and Merleau-Ponty.” Human Studies 16.4 (1996): 399–419.Downing, Emma, Steven Kennedy, and Mike Fell. Food Banks and Food Poverty. London: House of Commons, 2014. 6 Jan. 2016 <http://www.parliament.uk/briefing-papers/SN06657/food-banks-and-food-poverty>.Field, Frank. “The Welfare State – Never Ending Reform.” BBC 3 Oct. 2011. 6 Jan. 2016 <http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/modern/field_01.shtml>.Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in an Age of Reason. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Random House, 1996.Glaze, Ben. “Tens of Thousands of Families Will Only Eat This Christmas Thanks to Food Banks.” The Mirror 23 Dec. 2015. 6 Jan. 2016 <http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/tens-thousands-families-only-eat-705>.Gore, Alex. “Schools Teach Cookery on Fridays So Hungry Children from Families Too Poor to Eat Have Food for the Weekend.” The Daily Mail 28 Oct. 2012. 6 Jan. 2016. <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2224304/Schools-teach-cookery-Friday>.Gove, Michael. “Education: Topical Questions.” Oral Answers to Questions 2 Sep. 2013.Hamilakis, Yannis. “Experience and Corporeality: Introduction.” Thinking through the Body: Archaeologies of Corporeality. Eds. Yannis Hamilakis, Mark Pluciennik, and Sarah Tarlow. New York: Kluwer Academic, 2002. 99-105.Howarth, Anita. “Hunger Hurts: The Politicization of an Austerity Food Blog.” International Journal of E-Politics 6.3 (2015): 13–26.Johnson, Mark. “Human Beings.” The Journal of Philosophy LXXXIV.2 (1987): 59–83.Johnston, Lucy. “Edwina Currie’s Cruel Jibe at the Poor.” Sunday Express Jan. 2014. 6 Jan. 2016 <http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/454730/Edwina-Currie-s-cruel-jibe-at-poor>.Lambie-Mumford, Hannah, Daniel Crossley, and Eric Jensen. Household Food Security in the UK: A Review of Food Aid Final Report. February 2014. Food Ethics Council and the University of Warwick. 6 Jan. 2016 <https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/283071/household-food-security-uk-140219.pdf>.Lambie-Mumford, Hannah, and Elizabeth Dowler. “Rising Use of ‘Food Aid’ in the United Kingdom.” British Food Journal 116 (2014): 1418–1425.Loopstra, Rachel, Aaron Reeves, David Taylor-Robinson, Ben Barr, Martin McKee, and David Stuckler. “Austerity, Sanctions, and the Rise of Food Banks in the UK.” BMJ 350 (2015).Lupton, Deborah. Food, the Body and the Self. London: Sage, 1996.Monroe, Jack. “Hunger Hurts.” A Girl Called Jack 30 July 2012. 6 Jan. 2016 <http://agirlcalledjack.com/2012/07/30/hunger-hurts/>.———. “Austerity Works? We Need to Keep Making Noise about Why It Doesn’t.” Guardian 10 Sep. 2013. 6 Jan. 2016 <http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/10/austerity-poverty-frugality-jack-monroe>.Perry, Jane, Martin Williams, Tom Sefton and Moussa Haddad. “Emergency Use Only: Understanding and Reducing the Use of Food Banks in the UK.” Child Poverty Action Group, The Church of England, Oxfam and The Trussell Trust. Nov. 2014. 6 Jan. 2016 <http://www.cpag.org.uk/sites/default/files/Foodbank Report_web.pdf>.Pickett, Brent. “Foucault and the Politics of Resistance.” Polity 28.4 (1996): 445–466.Powell, Martin. “New Labour and the Third Way in the British Welfare State: A New and Distinctive Approach?” Critical Social Policy 20.1 (2000): 39–60. Riches, Graham. “Food Banks and Food Security: Welfare Reform, Human Rights and Social Policy: Lessons from Canada?” Social Policy and Administration 36.6 (2002): 648–663.Sen, Amartya. “Poor, Relatively Speaking.” Oxford Economic Papers 35.2 (1983): 153–169. Shaw, Caroline. Britannia’s Embrace: Modern Humanitarianism and the Imperial Origins of Refugee Relief. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015.Shipton, Martin. “Vale of Glamorgan MP Alun Cairns in Food Bank Row after Claims Drug Addicts Use Them.” Wales Online Sep. 2015. 6 Jan. 2016. <http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/vale-glamorgan-tory-mp-alun-6060730>. Vernon, James. Hunger: A Modern History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2009.Walker, Robert, Sarah Purcell, and Ruth Jackson “Poverty in Global Perspective: Is Shame a Common Denominator?” Journal of Social Policy 42.02 (2013): 215–233.

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If Continental social theory emerges from a climate of intensely cold winters and short mild summers, how does Australia (or any nation defined by its large masses of aridity) function as an environment in which to produce critical theory and new knowledge? Climate and weather are intrinsic to ambience, but what impact might they have on the conditions of producing academic work? How is ambience relevant to thinking and writing and research? Is there an ambient epistemology? This paper argues that the ambient is an unacknowledged factor in the production of critical thinking, and draws on examples of academics locating their writing conditions as part of their thinking. This means paying attention to the embodied work of thinking, and so I locate myself in order to explore what it might mean to acknowledge the conditions of intellectual work. Consequently I dwell on the impact of heat and light as qualities specific to where I work, but (following Bolt) I also argue that they are terms that are historically associated with new knowledge. Language, then, is already a factor in shaping the way we can think through such conditions, and the narratives available to write about them. Working these conditions into critical narratives may involve mobilising fictional tropes, and may not always be ambient, but they are potent in the academic imaginary and impact the ways in which we can think through location. Present Tense As I sit in Perth right now in a balmy 27 degrees Celsius with the local afternoon sea-breeze (fondly known as the Fremantle Doctor) clearing the stuffiness and humidity of the day, environmental conditions are near perfect for the end of summer. I barely notice them. Not long ago though, it was over 40 degrees for three days in a row. These were the three days I had set aside to complete an academic paper, the last days available before the university opened and normal work would resume. I’d arranged to have the place to myself, but I hadn’t arranged for cooling technologies. As I immersed myself in photocopies and textbooks the intellectual challenges and excitement were my preoccupation. It was hot, but I was almost unreceptive to recognising the discomforts of the weather until sweat began to drip onto pages and keyboards. A break in the afternoon for a swim at the local beach was an opportunity to clarify and see the bigger picture, and as the temperature began to slide into the evening cool it was easier to stay up late working and then sleep in late. I began to work around the weather. What impact does this have on thinking and writing? I remember it as a haze. The paper though, still seems clear and reasoned. My regimen might be read as working despite the weather, but I wonder if the intensity of the heat extends thinking in different directions—to go places where I wouldn’t have imagined in an ambiently cooled office (if I had one). The conditions of the production of knowledge are often assumed to be static, stable and uninteresting. Even if your work is located in exciting Other places, the ‘writing up’ is expected to happen ‘back home’, after the extra-ordinary places of fieldwork. It can be written in the present tense, for a more immediate reading experience, but the writing cannot always happen at the same time as the events being described, so readers accept the use of present tense as a figment of grammar that cannot accommodate the act of writing. When a writer becomes aware of their surroundings and articulates those conditions into their narrative, the reader is lifted out of the narrative into a metaframe; out of the body of writing and into the extra-diegetic. In her essay “Me and My Shadow” (1987), Jane Tompkins writes as if ‘we’ the reader are in the present with her as she makes connections between books, experiences, memories, feelings, and she also provides us with a writing scene in which to imagine her in the continuous present: It is a beautiful day here in North Carolina. The first day that is both cool and sunny all summer. After a terrible summer, first drought, then heat-wave, then torrential rain, trees down, flooding. Now, finally, beautiful weather. A tree outside my window just brushed by red, with one fully red leaf. (This is what I want you to see. A person sitting in stockinged feet looking out of her window – a floor to ceiling rectangle filled with green, with one red leaf. The season poised, sunny and chill, ready to rush down the incline into autumn. But perfect, and still. Not going yet.) (128)This is a strategy, part of the aesthetics and politics of Tompkins’s paper which argues for the way the personal functions in intellectual thinking and writing even when we don’t recognise or acknowledge it. A little earlier she characterises herself as vulnerable because of the personal/professional nexus: I don’t know how to enter the debate [over epistemology] without leaving everything else behind – the birds outside my window, my grief over Janice, just myself as a person sitting here in stockinged feet, a little bit chilly because the windows are open, and thinking about going to the bathroom. But not going yet. (126)The deferral of autumn and going to the bathroom is linked through the final phrase, “not going yet”. This is a kind of refrain that draws attention to the aesthetic architecture of locating the self, and yet the reference to an impending toilet trip raised many eyebrows. Nancy Millar comments that “these passages invoke that moment in writing when everything comes together in a fraction of poise; that fragile moment the writing in turn attempts to capture; and that going to the bathroom precisely, will end” (6). It spoils the moment. The aesthetic green scene with one red leaf is ruptured by the impending toilet scene. Or perhaps it is the intimacy of bodily function that disrupts the ambient. And yet the moment is fictional anyway. There must surely always be some fiction involved when writing about the scene of writing, as writing usually takes more than one take. Gina Mercer takes advantage of this fictional function in a review of a collection of women’s poetry. Noting the striking discursive differences between the editor’s introduction and the poetry collected in the volume, she suggestively accounts for this by imagining the conditions under which the editor might have been working: I suddenly begin to imagine that she wrote the introduction sitting at her desk in twin-set and pearls, her feet constricted by court shoes – but that the selection took place at home with her lying on a large beautifully-linened bed bestrewn by a cat and the poems… (4)These imaginary conditions, Mercer implies, impact on the ways we do our intellectual work, or perhaps different kinds of work require different conditions. Mercer not only imagines the editor at work, but also suggests her own preferred workspace when she mentions that “the other issue I’ve been pondering as I lay on my bed in a sarong (yes it’s hot here already) reading this anthology, has been the question of who reads love poetry these days?” (4). Placing herself as reader (of an anthology of love poetry) on the bed in a sarong in a hot climate partially accounts for the production of the thinking around this review, but probably doesn’t include the writing process. Mercer’s review is written in epistolary form, signaling an engagement with ‘the personal’, and yet that awareness of form and setting performs a doubling function in which scenes are set and imagination is engaged and yet their veracity doesn’t seem important, and may even be part of the fiction of form. It’s the idea of working leisurely that gains traction in this review. Despite the capacity for fiction, I want to believe that Jane Tompkins was writing in her study in North Carolina next to a full-length window looking out onto a tree. I’m willing to suspend my disbelief and imagine her writing in this place and time. Scenes of Writing Physical conditions are often part of mythologising a writer. Sylvia Plath wrote the extraordinary collection of poems that became Ariel during the 1962/63 London winter, reputed to have been the coldest for over a hundred years (Gifford 15). The cold weather is given a significant narrative role in the intensity of her writing and her emotional desperation during that period. Sigmund Freud’s writing desk was populated with figurines from his collection of antiquities looking down on his writing, a scene carefully replicated in the Freud Museum in London and reproduced in postcards as a potent staging of association between mythology, writing and psychoanalysis (see Burke 2006). Writer’s retreats at the former residences of writers (like Varuna at the former home of Eleanor Dark in the Blue Mountains, and the Katherine Susannah Pritchard Centre in the hills outside of Perth) memorialise the material conditions in which writers wrote. So too do pilgrimages to the homes of famous writers and the tourism they produce in which we may gaze in wonder at the ordinary places of such extraordinary writing. The ambience of location is one facet of the conditions of writing. When I was a doctoral student reading Continental feminist philosophy, I used anything at hand to transport myself into their world. I wrote my dissertation mostly in Townsville in tropical Queensland (and partly in Cairns, even more tropical), where winter is blue skies and mid-twenties in temperature but summers are subject to frequent build-ups in pressure systems, high humidity, no breeze and some cyclones. There was no doubt that studying habits were affected by the weather for a student, if not for all the academics who live there. Workplaces were icily air-conditioned (is this ambient?) but outside was redolent with steamy tropical evenings, hot humid days, torrential downpours. When the weather breaks there is release in blood pressure accompanying barometer pressure. I was reading contemporary Australian literature alongside French feminist theories of subjectivity and their relation through écriture féminine. The European philosophical and psychoanalytic tradition and its exquisitely radical anti-logical writing of Irigaray, Cixous and Kristeva seemed alien to my tropical environs but perversely seductive. In order to get ‘inside’ the theoretical arguments, my strategy was to interpolate myself into their imagined world of writing, to emulate their imagined conditions. Whenever my friend went on a trip, I caretook her 1940s unit that sat on a bluff and looked out over the Coral Sea, all whitewashed and thick stone, and transformed it into a French salon for my intellectual productivity. I played Edith Piaf and Grace Jones, went to the grocer at the bottom of the hill every day for fresh food and the French patisserie for baguettes and croissants. I’d have coffee brewing frequently, and ate copious amounts of camembert and chocolate. The Townsville flat was a Parisian salon with French philosophers conversing in my head and between the piles of book lying on the table. These binges of writing were extraordinarily productive. It may have been because of the imagined Francophile habitus (as Bourdieu understands it); or it may have been because I prepared for the anticipated period of time writing in a privileged space. There was something about adopting the fictional romance of Parisian culture though that appealed to the juxtaposition of doing French theory in Townsville. It intensified the difference but interpolated me into an intellectual imaginary. Derrida’s essay, “Freud and the Scene of Writing”, promises to shed light on Freud’s conditions of writing, and yet it is concerned moreover with the metaphoric or rather intellectual ‘scene’ of Freudian ideas that form the groundwork of Derrida’s own corpus. Scenic, or staged, like Tompkins’s framed window of leaves, it looks upon the past as a ‘moment’ of intellectual ferment in language. Peggy Kamuf suggests that the translation of this piece of Derrida’s writing works to cover over the corporeal banishment from the scene of writing, in a move that privileges the written trace. In commenting, Kamuf translates Derrida herself: ‘to put outside and below [metre dehors et en bas] the body of the written trace [le corps de la trace écrite].’ Notice also the latter phrase, which says not the trace of the body but the body of the trace. The trace, what Derrida but before him also Freud has called trace or Spur, is or has a body. (23)This body, however, is excised, removed from the philosophical and psychoanalytic imaginary Kamuf argues. Australian philosopher Elizabeth Grosz contends that the body is “understood in terms that attempt to minimize or ignore altogether its formative role in the production of philosophical values – truth, knowledge, justice” (Volatile 4): Philosophy has always considered itself a discipline concerned primarily or exclusively with ideas, concepts, reason, judgment – that is, with terms clearly framed by the concept of mind, terms which marginalize or exclude considerations of the body. As soon as knowledge is seen as purely conceptual, its relation to bodies, the corporeality of both knowers and texts, and the ways these materialities interact, must become obscure. (Volatile 4)In the production of knowledge then, the corporeal knowing writing body can be expected to interact with place, with the ambience or otherwise in which we work. “Writing is a physical effort,” notes Cixous, and “this is not said often enough” (40). The Tense Present Conditions have changed here in Perth since the last draft. A late summer high pressure system is sitting in the Great Australian Bite pushing hot air across the desert and an equally insistent ridge of low pressure sits off the Indian Ocean, so the two systems are working against each other, keeping the weather hot, still, tense, taut against the competing forces. It has been nudging forty degrees for a week. The air conditioning at work has overloaded and has been set to priority cooling; offices are the lowest priority. A fan blasts its way across to me, thrumming as it waves its head from one side to the other as if tut-tutting. I’m not consumed with intellectual curiosity the way I was in the previous heatwave; I’m feeling tired, and wondering if I should just give up on this paper. It will wait for another time and journal. There’s a tension with chronology here, with what’s happening in the present, but then Rachel Blau DuPlessis argues that the act of placing ideas into language inevitably produces that tension: Chronology is time depicted as travelling (more or less) in a (more or less) forward direction. Yet one can hardly write a single sentence straight; it all rebounds. Even its most innocent first words – A, The, I, She, It – teem with heteroglossias. (16)“Sentences structure” DuPlessis points out, and grammar necessitates development, chronological linearity, which affects the possibilities for narrative. “Cause and effect affect” DuPlessis notes (16), as do Cixous and Irigaray before her. Nevertheless we must press on. And so I leave work and go for a swim, bring my core body temperature down, and order a pot of tea from the beach café while I read Barbara Bolt in the bright afternoon light. Bolt is a landscape painter who has spent some time in Kalgoorlie, a mining town 800km east of Perth, and notes the ways light is used as a metaphor for visual illumination, for enlightening, and yet in Kalgoorlie light is a glare which, far from illuminating, blinds. In Kalgoorlie the light is dangerous to the body, causing cancers and cataracts but also making it difficult to see because of its sheer intensity. Bolt makes an argument for the Australian light rupturing European thinking about light: Visual practice may be inconceivable without a consideration of light, but, I will argue, it is equally ‘inconceivable’ to practice under European notions of light in the ‘glare’ of the Australian sun. Too much light on matter sheds no light on the matter. (204)Bolt frequently equates the European notions of visual art practice that, she claims, Australians still operate under, with concomitant concepts of European philosophy, aesthetics and, I want to add, epistemology. She is particularly adept at noting the material impact of Australian conditions on the body, arguing that, the ‘glare’ takes apart the Enlightenment triangulation of light, knowledge, and form. In fact, light becomes implicated bodily, in the facts of the matter. My pterygiums and sun-beaten skin, my mother and father’s melanomas, and the incidence of glaucoma implicate the sun in a very different set of processes. From my optic, light can no longer be postulated as the catalyst that joins objects while itself remaining unbent and unimplicated … (206).If new understandings of light are generated in Australian conditions of working, surely heat is capable of refiguring dominant European notions as well. Heat is commonly associated with emotions and erotics, even through ideas: heated debate, hot topics and burning issues imply the very latest and most provocative discussions, sizzling and mercurial. Heat has a material affect on corporeality also: dehydrating, disorienting, dizzying and burning. Fuzzy logic and bent horizons may emerge. Studies show that students learn best in ambient temperatures (Pilman; Graetz), but I want to argue that thought and writing can bend in other dimensions with heat. Tensions build in blood pressure alongside isometric bars. Emotional and intellectual intensities merge. Embodiment meets epistemology. This is not a new idea; feminist philosophers like Donna Haraway have been emphasizing the importance of situated knowledge and partial perspective for decades as a methodology that challenges universalism and creates a more ethical form of objectivity. In 1987 Haraway was arguing for politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims. These are claims on people’s lives. I am arguing for the view from a body, always a complex contradictory structuring and structured body versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity. (Haraway 588)Working in intellectual conditions when the specificities of ambience is ignored, is also, I suggest, to work in a privileged space, in which there are no distractions like the weather. It is also to work ‘from nowhere, from simplicity’ in Haraway’s words. It is to write from within the pure imaginary space of the intellect. But to write in, and from, weather conditions no matter what they might be is to acknowledge the affect of being-in-the-world, to recognise an ontological debt that is embodied and through which we think. I want to make a claim for the radical conditions under which writing can occur outside of the ambient, as I sit here sweating over theory again. Drawing attention to the corporeal conditions of the scene of writing is a way of situating knowledge and partial perspective: if I were in Hobart where snow still lies on Mount Wellington I may well have a different perspective, but the metaphors of ice and cold also need transforming into productive and generative conditions of particularised knowledge. To acknowledge the location of knowledge production suggests more of the forces at work in particular thinking, as a bibliography indicates the shelf of books that have inflected the written product. This becomes a relation of immanence rather than transcendence between the subject and thought, whereby thinking can be understood as an act, an activity, or even activism of an agent. This is proposed by Elizabeth Grosz in her later work where she yokes together the “jagged edges” (Time 165) of Deleuze and Irigaray’s work in order to reconsider the “future of thought”. She calls for a revision of meaning, as Bolt does, but this time in regard to thought itself—and the task of philosophy—asking whether it is possible to develop an understanding of thought that refuses to see thought as passivity, reflection, contemplation, or representation, and instead stresses its activity, how and what it performs […] can we deromanticize the construction of knowledges and discourses to see them as labor, production, doing? (Time 158)If writing is to be understood as a form of activism it seems fitting to conclude here with one final image: of Gloria Anzaldua’s computer, at which she invites us to imagine her writing her book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), a radical Chicana vision for postcolonial theory. Like Grosz, Anzaldua is intent on undoing the mind/body split and the language through which the labour of thinking can be articulated. This is where she writes her manifesto: I sit here before my computer, Amiguita, my altar on top of the monitor with the Virgen de Coatalopeuh candle and copal incense burning. My companion, a wooden serpent staff with feathers, is to my right while I ponder the ways metaphor and symbol concretize the spirit and etherealize the body. (75) References Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. Bolt, Barbara. “Shedding Light for the Matter.” Hypatia 15.2 (2000): 202-216. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity, 1990. [1980 Les Edition de Minuit] Burke, Janine. The Gods of Freud: Sigmund Freud’s Art Collection. Milsons Point: Knopf, 2006. Cixous, Hélène, and Mireille Calle-Gruber. Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing. London: Routledge, 1997. [1994 Photos de Racine]. Derrida, Jacques, and Jeffrey Mehlman. "Freud and the Scene of Writing." Yale French Studies 48 (1972): 74-117. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work. Tuscaloosa: Alabama UP, 2006. Gifford, Terry. Ted Hughes. Abingdon: Routledge, 2009. Graetz, Ken A. “The Psychology of Learning Environments.” Educause Review 41.6 (2006): 60-75. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1994. Grosz, Elizabeth. Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 2005. Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14.3 (1988): 575-99. Kamuf, Peggy. “Outside in Analysis.” Mosaic 42.4 (2009): 19-34. Mercer, Gina. “The Days of Love Are Lettered.” Review of The Oxford Book of Australian Love Poems, ed. Jennifer Strauss. LiNQ 22.1 (1995): 135-40. Miller, Nancy K. Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts. New York: Routledge, 1991. Pilman, Mary S. “The Effects of Air Temperature Variance on Memory Ability.” Loyola University Clearinghouse, 2001. ‹http://clearinghouse.missouriwestern.edu/manuscripts/306.php›. Tompkins, Jane. “Me and My Shadow.” New Literary History 19.1 (1987): 169-78.

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IntroductionBallarat’s Theatre Royal was the first permanent theatre built in inland Australia. Upon opening in 1858, it was acclaimed as having “the handsomest theatrical exterior in the colony” (Star, “Editorial” 7 Dec. 1889) and later acknowledged as “the grandest playhouse in all Australia” (Spielvogel, Papers Vol. 1 160). Born of Gold Rush optimism, the Royal was loved by many, yet the over-arching story of its ill-fated existence has failed to surface, in any coherent fashion, in official history. This article takes some first steps toward retrieving lost knowledge from fragmented archival records, and piecing together the story of why this purpose-built theatre ceased operation within a twenty-year period. A short history of the venue will be provided, to develop context. It will be argued that while a combination of factors, most of which were symptomatic of unfortunate timing, destroyed the longevity of the Royal, the principal problem was one of stigmatisation. This was an era in which the societal pressure to visibly conform to conservative values was intense and competition in the pursuit of profits was fierce.The cultural silence that befell the story of the Royal, after its demise, is explicable in relation to history being written by the victors and a loss of spokespeople since that time. As theatre arts historiographer McConachie (131) highlights, “Theatres, like places for worship and spectator sports, hold memories of the past in addition to providing a practical and cognitive framework for performance events in the present.” When that place, “a bounded area denoted by human agency and memory” (131), is lost in time, so too may be the socio-cultural lessons from the period, if not actively recalled and reconsidered. The purpose of this article is to present the beginning of an investigation into the disjointed narrative of Ballarat’s Theatre Royal. Its ultimate failure demonstrates how dominant community based entertainment became in Ballarat from the 1860s onwards, effectively crushing prospects for mid-range professional theatre. There is value in considering the evolution of the theatre’s lifespan and its possible legacy effects. The connection between historical consciousness and the performing arts culture of by-gone days offers potential to reveal specks of cross-relevance for regional Australian theatrical offerings today.In the BeginningThe proliferation of entertainment venues in Ballarat East during the 1850s was a consequence of the initial discovery of surface alluvial gold and the ongoing success of deep-lead mining activities in the immediate area. This attracted extraordinary numbers of people from all over the world who hoped to strike it rich. Given the tough nature of life on the early gold diggings, most disposable income was spent on evening entertainment. As a result, numerous venues sprang into operation to cater for demand. All were either canvas tents or makeshift wooden structures: vibrant in socio-cultural activity, however humble the presentation values. It is widely agreed (Withers, Bate and Brereton) that noteworthy improvements occurred from 1856 onwards in the artistry of the performers, audience tastes, the quality of theatrical structures and living standards in general. Residents began to make their exit from flood and fire prone Ballarat East, moving to Ballarat West. The Royal was the first substantial entertainment venture to be established in this new, affluent, government surveyed township area. Although the initial idea was to draw in some of the patronage which had flourished in Ballarat East, Brereton (14) believed “There can be no doubt that it was [primarily] intended to attract those with good taste and culture”. This article will contend that how society defined ‘good taste’ turned out to be problematic for the Royal.The tumultuous mid-1850s have attracted extensive academic and popular attention, primarily because they were colourful and politically significant times. The period thereafter has attracted little scholarly interest, unless tied to the history of surviving organisations. Four significant structures designed to incorporate theatrical entertainment were erected and opened in Ballarat from 1858 onwards: The Royal was swiftly followed by the Mechanics Institute 1859, Alfred Hall 1867 and Academy of Music 1874-75. As philosopher Albert Borgmann (41) highlighted, the erection of “magnificent settings in which the public could gather and enjoy itself” was the dominant urban aspiration for cultural consumption in the nineteenth century. Men of influence in Victorian cities believed strongly in progress and grand investments as a conscious demonstration of power, combined with Puritan vales, teetotalism and aggressive self-assertiveness (Briggs 287-88). At the ceremonial laying of the foundation stone for the Royal on 20 January 1858, eminent tragedian, Gustavos Brooke, announced “… may there be raised a superstructure perfect in all its parts, and honourable to the builder.” He proclaimed the memorial bottle to be “a lasting memento of the greatness of Ballarat in erecting such a theatre” and philosophised that “the stage not only refines the manners, but it is the best teacher of morals, for it is the truest and most intelligible picture of life. It stamps the image of virtue on the mind …” (Star, “Laying” 21 Jan. 1858). These initial aspirations seem somewhat ambitious when viewed with the benefit of hindsight. Ballarat’s Theatre Royal opened in December 1858, ironically with Jerrold’s comedy ‘Time Works Wonders’. The large auditorium holding around 1500 people “was crowded to overflowing and was considered altogether brilliant in its newness and beauty” by all in attendance (Star, “Local and General” 30 Dec. 1858). Generous descriptions abound of how splendid it was, in architectural terms, but also in relation to scenery, decorations and all appointments. Underneath the theatre were two shops, four bars, elegant dining rooms, a kitchen and 24 bedrooms. A large saloon was planned to be attached soon-after. The overall cost of the build was estimated at a substantial 10,000 pounds.The First Act: 1858-1864In the early years, the Royal was deemed a success. The pleasure-seeking public of Ballarat came en masse and the glory days seemed like they might continue unabated. By the early 1860s, Ballarat was known as a great theatrical centre for performing arts, its population was famous both nationally and internationally for an appreciation of good acting, and the Royal was considered the home of the best dramatic art in Ballarat (Withers 260). Like other theatres of the 1850s diggings, it had its own resident company of actors, musicians, scenic artists and backstage crew. Numerous acclaimed performers came to visit and these were prosperous and happy times for the Royal’s lively theatrical community. As early as 1859, however, there was evident rivalry between the Royal and the Mechanics Institute, as suggested on numerous occasions in the Ballarat Star. As a multi-purpose venue for education and the betterment of the working classes, the latter venue had the distinct advantage of holding the moral high ground. Over time this competition increased as audiences decreased. As people shifted to family-focussed entertainments, these absorbed their time and attention. The transformation of a transient population into a township of families ultimately suffocated prospects for professional entertainment in Ballarat. Consumer interest turned to the growth of strong amateur societies with the establishment of the Welsh Eisteddfod 1863; Harmonic Society 1864; Bell Ringers’ Club 1866 and Glee and Madrigal Union 1867 (Brereton 38). By 1863, the Royal was reported to have “scanty patronage” and Proprietor Symonds was in financial trouble (Star, “News and Notes” 15 Sep. 1864). It was announced that the theatre would open for the last time on Saturday, 29 October 1864 (Australasian). On that same date, the Royal was purchased by Rowlands & Lewis, the cordial makers. They promptly on-sold it to the Ballarat Temperance League, who soon discovered that there was a contract in place with Bouchier, the previous owner, who still held the hotel next door, stating that “all proprietors … were bound to keep it open as a theatre” (Withers 260-61). Having invested immense energy into the quest to purchase it, the Temperance League backed out of the deal. Prominent Hotelier Walter Craig bought it for less than 3,000 pounds. It is possible that this stymied effort to quell the distribution of liquor in the heart of the city evoked the ire of the Protestant community, who were on a dedicated mission “to attack widespread drunkenness, profligacy, licentiousness and agnosticism,” and forming an interdenominational Bible and Tract Society in 1866 (Bate 176). This caused a segment of the population to consider the Royal a ‘lost cause’ and steer clear of it, advising ‘respectable’ families to do the same, and so the stigma grew. Social solidarity of this type had significant impact in an era in which people openly demonstrated their morality by way of unified public actions.The Second Act: 1865-1868The Royal closed for renovations until May 1865. Of the various alterations made to the interior and its fittings, the most telling was the effort to separate the ladies from the ‘town women’, presumably to reassure ‘respectable’ female patrons. To this end, a ladies’ retiring room was added, in a position convenient to the dress circle. The architectural rejuvenation of the Royal was cited as an illustration of great progress in Sturt Street (Ballarat Star, “News and Notes” 27 May 1865). Soon after, the Royal hosted the Italian Opera Company.However, by 1866 there was speculation that the Royal may be converted into a dry goods store. References to what sort of impression the failing of theatre would convey to the “old folks at home” in relation to “progress in civilisation'' and "social habits" indicated the distress of loyal theatre-goers. Impassioned pleas were written to the press to help preserve the “Temple of Thespus” for the legitimate use for which it was intended (Ballarat Star, “Messenger” and “Letters to the Editor” 30 Aug. 1866). By late 1867, a third venue materialised. The Alfred Hall was built for the reception of Ballarat’s first Royal visitor, the Duke of Edinburgh. On the night prior to the grand day at the Alfred, following a private dinner at Craig’s Hotel, Prince Alfred was led by an escorted torchlight procession to a gala performance at Craig’s very own Theatre Royal. The Prince’s arrival caused a sensation that completely disrupted the show (Spielvogel, Papers Vol. 1 165). While visiting Ballarat, the Prince laid the stone for the new Temperance Hall (Bate 159). This would not have been required had the League secured the Royal for their use three years earlier.Thereafter, the Royal was unable to reach the heights of what Brereton (15) calls the “Golden Age of Ballarat Theatre” from 1855 to 1865. Notably, the Mechanics Institute also experienced financial constraints during the 1860s and these challenges were magnified during the 1870s (Hazelwood 89). The late sixties saw the Royal reduced to the ‘ordinary’ in terms of the calibre of productions (Brereton 15). Having done his best to improve the physical attributes and prestige of the venue, Craig may have realised he was up against a growing stigma and considerable competition. He sold the Royal to R.S. Mitchell for 5,500 pounds in 1868.Another New Owner: 1869-1873For the Saturday performance of Richard III in 1869, under the new Proprietor, it was reported that “From pit to gallery every seat was full” and for many it was standing room only (Ballarat Star, “Theatre Royal” 1 Feb. 1869). Later that year, Othello attracted people with “a critical appreciation of histrionic matters” (Ballarat Star, “News and Notes” 19 July 1869). The situation appeared briefly promising. Unfortunately, larger economic factors were soon at play. During 1869, Ballarat went ‘mad’ with mine share gambling. In 1870 the economic bubble burst, and hundreds of people in Ballarat were financially ruined. Over the next ten years the population fell from 60,000 to less than 40,000 (Spielvogel, Papers Vol. 3 39). The last surviving theatre in Ballarat East, the much-loved Charles Napier, put on its final show in September 1869 (Brereton 15). By 1870 the Royal was referred to as a “second-class theatre” and was said to be such bad repute that “it would be most difficult to draw respectable classes” (Ballarat Star, “News and Notes” 17 Jan. 1870). It seems the remaining theatre patrons from the East swung over to support the Royal, which wasn’t necessarily in the best interests of its reputation. During this same period, family-oriented crowds of “the pleasure-seeking public of Ballarat” were attending events at the newly fashionable Alfred Hall (Ballarat Courier, “Theatre Royal” June 1870). There were occasional high points still to come for the Royal. In 1872, opera drew a crowded house “even to the last night of the season” which according to the press, “gave proof, if proof were wanting, that the people of Ballarat not only appreciate, but are willing to patronise to the full any high-class entertainment” (Ballarat Courier, “Theatre Royal” 26 Aug. 1872). The difficulty, however, lay in the deterioration of the Royal’s reputation. It had developed negative connotations among local temperance and morality movements, along with their extensive family, friendship and business networks. Regarding collective consumption, sociologist John Urry wrote “for those engaged in the collective tourist gaze … congregation is paramount” (140). Applying this socio-cultural principle to the behaviour of Victorian theatre-going audiences of the 1870s, it was compelling for audiences to move with the masses and support popular events at the fresh Alfred Hall rather than the fading Royal. Large crowds jostling for elbow room was perceived as the hallmark of a successful event back then, as is most often the case now.The Third Act: 1874-1878An additional complication faced by the Royal was the long-term effect of the application of straw across the ceiling. Acoustics were initially poor, and straw was intended to rectify the problem. This caused the venue to develop a reputation for being stuffy and led to the further indignity of the Royal suffering an infestation of fleas (Jenkins 22); a misfortune which caused some to label it “The Royal Bug House” (Reid 117). Considering how much food was thrown at the stage in this era, it is not surprising that rotten debris attracted insects. In 1873, the Royal closed for another round of renovations. The interior was redesigned, and the front demolished and rebuilt. This was primarily to create retail store frontage to supplement income (Reid 117). It was reported that the best theatrical frontage in Australasia was lost, and in its place was “a modestly handsome elevation” for which all play-goers of Ballarat should be thankful, as the miracle required of the rebuild was that of “exorcising the foul smells from the old theatre and making it bright and pretty and sweet” (Ballarat Star, “News and Notes” 26 Jan. 1874). The effort at rejuvenation seemed effective for a period. A “large and respectable audience” turned out to see the Fakir of Oolu, master of the weird, mystical, and strange. The magician’s show “was received with cheers from all parts of the house, and is certainly a very attractive novelty” (Ballarat Courier, “Theatre Royal” 29 Mar. 1875). That same day, the Combination Star Company gave a concert at the Mechanics Institute. Indicating the competitive tussle, the press stated: “The attendance, however, doubtless owing to attractions elsewhere, was only moderately large” (Courier, “Concert at the Mechanics’” 29 Mar. 1875). In the early 1870s, there had been calls from sectors of society for a new venue to be built in Ballarat, consistent with its status. The developer and proprietor, Sir William Clarke, intended to offer a “higher class” of entertainment for up to 1700 people, superior to the “broad farces” at the Royal (Freund n.p.) In 1875, the Academy of Music opened, at a cost of twelve thousand pounds, just one block away from the Royal.As the decade of decreasing population wore on, it is intriguing to consider an unprecedented “riotous” incident in 1877. Levity's Original Royal Marionettes opened at the Royal with ‘Beauty and the Beast’ to calamitous response. The Company Managers, Wittington & Lovell made clear that the performance had scarcely commenced when the “storm” arose and they believed “the assault to be premeditated” (Wittington and Lovell in Argus, “The Riot” 6 Apr. 1877). Paid thuggery, with the intent of spooking regular patrons, was the implication. They pointed out that “It is evident that the ringleaders of the riot came into the theatre ready armed with every variety of missiles calculated to get a good hit at the figures and scenery, and thereby create a disturbance.” The mob assaulted the stage with “head-breaking” lemonade bottles, causing costly damage, then chased the frightened puppeteers down Sturt Street (Mount Alexander Mail, “Items of News” 4 Apr. 1877). The following night’s performance, by contrast, was perfectly calm (Ballarat Star, “News and Notes” 7 Apr. 1877). Just three months later, Webb’s Royal Marionette pantomimes appeared at the Mechanics’ Institute. The press wrote “this is not to be confounded, with the exhibition which created something like a riot at the Theatre Royal last Easter” (Ballarat Star, “News and Notes” 5 July 1877).The final performance at the Royal was the American Rockerfellers’ Minstrel Company. The last newspaper references to the Royal were placed in the context of other “treats in store” at The Academy of Music, and forthcoming offerings at the Mechanics Institute (Star, “Advertising” 3 July 1878). The Royal had experienced three re-openings and a series of short-term managements, often ending in loss or even bankruptcy. When it wound up, investors were left to cover the losses, while the owner was forced to find more profitable uses for the building (Freund n.p.). At face value, it seemed that four performing arts venues was one too many for Ballarat audiences to support. By August 1878 the Royal’s two shop fronts were up for lease. Thereafter, the building was given over entirely to retail drapery sales (Withers 260). ReflectionsThe Royal was erected, at enormous expense, in a moment of unbridled optimism, after several popular theatres in Ballarat East had burned to the ground. Ultimately the timing for such a lavish investment was poor. It suffered an inflexible old-fashioned structure, high overheads, ongoing staffing costs, changing demographics, economic crisis, increased competition, decreased population, the growth of local community-based theatre, temperance agitation and the impact of negative rumour and hear-say.The struggles endured by the various owners and managers of, and investors in, the Royal reflected broader changes within the larger community. The tension between the fixed nature of the place and the fluid needs of the public was problematic. Shifting demographics meant the Royal was negatively affected by conservative values, altered tastes and competing entertainment options. Built in the 1850s, it was sound, but structurally rigid, dated and polluted with the bacterial irritations of the times. “Resident professional companies could not compete with those touring from Melbourne” by whom it was considered “… hard to use and did not satisfy the needs of touring companies who required facilities equivalent to those in the metropolitan theatres” (Freund n.p.). Meanwhile, the prevalence of fund-raising concerts, created by charitable groups and member based community organisations, detracted from people’s interest in supporting professional performances. After-all, amateur concerts enabled families to “embrace the values of British middle class morality” (Doggett 295) at a safe distance from grog shops and saloons. Children aged 5-14 constituted only ten percent of the Ballarat population in 1857, but by 1871 settler families had created a population in which school aged children comprised twenty-five of the whole (Bate 146). This had significant ramifications for the type of theatrical entertainments required. By the late sixties, as many as 2000 children would perform at a time, and therefore entrance fees were able to be kept at affordable levels for extended family members. Just one year after the demise of the Royal, a new secular improvement society became active, holding amateur events and expanding over time to become what we now know as the Royal South Street Society. This showed that the appetite for home-grown entertainment was indeed sizeable. It was a function that the Royal was unable to service, despite several ardent attempts. Conclusion The greatest misfortune of the Royal was that it became stigmatised, from the mid 1860s onwards. In an era when people were either attempting to be pure of manners or were considered socially undesirable, it was hard for a cultural venue to survive which occupied the commercial middle ground, as the Royal did. It is also conceivable that the Royal was ‘framed’, by one or two of its competitor venues, or their allies, just one year before its closure. The Theatre Royal’s negative stigma as a venue for rough and intemperate human remnants of early Ballarat East had proven insurmountable. The Royal’s awkward position between high-class entrepreneurial culture and wholesome family-based community values, both of which were considered tasteful, left it out-of-step with the times and vulnerable to the judgement of those with either vested interests or social commitments elsewhere. This had long-term resonance for the subsequent development of entertainment options within Ballarat, placing the pendulum of favour either on elite theatre or accessible community based entertainments. The cultural middle-ground was sparse. The eventual loss of the building, the physical place of so much dramatic energy and emotion, as fondly recalled by Withers (260), inevitably contributed to the Royal fading from intergenerational memory. The telling of the ‘real story’ behind the rise and fall of the Ballarat Theatre Royal requires further exploration. If contemporary cultural industries are genuinely concerned “with the re-presentation of the supposed history and culture of a place”, as Urry believed (154), then untold stories such as that of Ballarat’s Theatre Royal require scholarly attention. This article represents the first attempt to examine its troubled history in a holistic fashion and locate it within a context ripe for cultural analysis.ReferencesBate, Weston. Lucky City: The First Generation at Ballarat 1851–1901. Carlton South: Melbourne UP, 1978.Brereton, Roslyn. Entertainment and Recreation on the Victorian Goldfields in the 1850s. BA (Honours) Thesis. 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