Journal articles: 'Personal equity plans' – Grafiati (2024)

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AbstractFollowing the methodological approach taken by Ibbotson and Kaplan (2000), we provide evidence of a major contribution of strategic asset allocation to Spanish equity personal pension plan performance, finding that on average more than 90% of variability of returns over time, and about 70% of the variation of returns among plans, are explained by strategic policy.Furthermore, we also have evidence that survivor and look-ahead bias detected in previous research have very little impact on the conclusions about the importance of asset allocation on the variability of returns over time.The importance of asset allocation to explain the variability of returns over time is quite similar for the different investment vocations considered in our study, Euro zone and global equity. Very similar results are also found when we consider the size of the Spanish plans as an explanatory factor for the contribution of asset allocation to performance.Finally, the value that active management adds to the mere passive tracking of the strategic policy is not statistically different to the management costs of the plans.

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This paper examines the potential impact of government matching contributions on personal-account participation in the President's Commission on Strengthening Social Security's Model 3 for Social Security reform. Given the government's choice of four plan-design parameters, the magnitude of the match is determined solely by the differential return personal-account assets receive above the notional return, referred to as the ‘personal-account premium’, akin to the equity premium. The impact of matching on personal-account participation is simulated for older workers (ages 40 to 65) in the first wave of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) using empirical estimates from a structural model of the impact of employer matching on participation in corporate 401(k) plans. For a personal-account premium of three percentage points, which implies a match rate of 7.5% for middle- to lower-income workers, the simulations imply that 72% of mid-career and older workers would participate in voluntary personal accounts. The response of participation to matching is very inelastic; it seems not unlikely that participation by mid-career and older workers would achieve the mid-range assumption by the Commission of 67%. There is substantial heterogeneity in participation across subsets of older workers: participation would be the lowest for low-educated, minority, female, and unmarried mid-career and older workers.

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The market value of the shareholders’ equity depends on the implementation of management policies in relation to long-term plans and it will be on the upside if executives focus on implementing these policies. If past events follow a constant process based on prior planning, performance prediction through past events will result. In some cases, the performance of managers is based on increasing their own interests and based on their personal preferences, which causes misleading information about performance prediction to be shared with stakeholders and other beneficiaries. Managers try to predict unrealistic performance in order to increase their management fees by using intermediate and virtual variables which will reduce their professional validity and ultimately lead to a reduction in the market value of the equity. The market value of the shareholders’ equity is directly influenced by the conservative and courageous policies of managers. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of managers 'shift work and performance prediction on the market value of shareholders’ equity. This research is a library and analytical-causal study and is based on the analysis of panel data (data panel). In this research, the financial information of 102 companies listed in Tehran Stock Exchange during the period of 2008-2018 (612 companies - the year) has been investigated. The results of the research show that according to the analyzes carried out in relation to the confirmation of the first hypothesis of the research, the style of managers shift working has an adverse and inverse effect on the market value of the shareholders’ equity. Finally, with regard to the analysis made in relation to the confirmation of the second hypothesis of the research, we concluded that performance prediction has a positive and direct effect on the market value of the shareholders’ equity.

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Changes to Title IX allowing the growth of single-sex schools have garnered media attention promoting the benefits of separating boys and girls. Alternately, civil rights groups such as the ACLU continue to oppose any type of school segregation. Within this context, a private philanthropy, the Foundation for the Education of Young Women (FEYW) has established public-private partnerships with six Texas school districts to open all-girls’ public college prep magnet schools with plans to expand. This multi-year ethno-historical case study explores the meaning making of one community in the FEYW network as it attempts to make sense of federal policy at the local level. The topic is important to the field of education because it is timely: changes to Title IX and the growth in single-sex arrangements pose interesting legal and sociological questions about equity and justice since it links Title IX (an equity-driven policy) with the choice provisions in NCLB (a market-driven policy). The significance of this study lies in the unique use of ethnography as interpretive policy analysis to show how local communities (re)interpret federal policy to better align with their personal values and more adequately address contextual complexities in their attempts to do what they believe is best for students.

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Although mentored undergraduate research has been shown to deepen student engagement across various disciplines, this type of extended learning opportunity is not a prominent feature of research and practice in teacher education. Our article addresses this gap by analyzing the experiences and growth of a group of five preservice teachers engaged in a mentored undergraduate research experience in several sections of an introductory critical multicultural education course. Specifically, we examined how pre-service teachers’ personal, academic, and professional engagement with critical multicultural education is impacted when they are positioned as researchers and receive additional training outside the traditional class format. Our findings indicate that their involvement as student co-researchers fostered a new awareness, sensitivity, and emotional investment in issues of social justice beyond what they gained in their introductory multicultural education course. Pre-service teachers described navigating personal relationships with new awareness and sensitivity and adjusting future plans in accordance with their deeper understanding and commitment to educational equity. We argue that mentored research opportunities are an innovative way to address professor/student power differentials in teacher education research and offer a unique model of critical multicultural teacher education that promotes deep engagement with issues beyond the classroom setting.

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Subject area Marketing Management, Product & Brand Management, Entrepreneurship. Study level/applicability This case can be taught effectively to MBA/BBA students as part of Marketing Management, Product & Brand Management, Entrepreneurship. Case overview The case talks about the marketing mix strategy of India’s fastest growing fast moving consumer goods (FMCGs) brand Patanjali, with a tremendous revenue growth rate of 100 per cent for the past five years, leaving major FMCG companies insomniac. Patanjali Ayurved Limited riding on Baba Ramdev’s brand equity positioned itself as an authentic Ayurved brand with ancient Indian roots. Patanjali’s product line ranges from healthcare, personal care, home care, to food and more. Patanjali’s products were priced 10-40 per cent lower than that of its competitors. Run by franchisees, Patanjali had a three-tier distribution system. These included Patanjali Chikitsalayas which were franchise dispensaries and clinics along with doctors, Patanjali Arogya Kendra which were health and wellness centres and Swadeshi Kendra, non-medicine outlets. The company has 15,000 exclusive outlets across India and plans to grow to 1,00,000 exclusive outlets by 2020. Patanjali amazed the world by achieving phenomenal success without spending much on advertising in its nascent stage. Recently Patanjali adopted the multinational corporation (MNC) style of advertising by hiring two top advertising agencies McCann and DDB Mudra to prepare the company for the next phase of growth. Patanjali diversified into various segments of the market, ranging from FMCG products, Ayurvedic medicines, Ayurvedic hospitals and a medical college. Patanjali plans to enter various categories of products including the beauty products segment to compete with major MNCs, the baby care segment to compete with Johnson & Johnson, and the sports segment to compete with Nike and Adidas. Patanjali as a brand has a strong positioning in the minds of consumers as a natural and Ayurvedic brand. Will Patanjali’s foray into so many diversified segments lead to a brand extension trap and confused positioning? Because Patanjali as a brand, solely rides on Baba Ramdev’s image, if Baba Ramdev ever finds himself at the centre of a controversy, will Patanjali’s brand equity take a hit? Will it affect the brand Patanjali? Even if Baba Ramdev does not get into any controversy, what will happen to the brand Patanjali when Baba Ramdev is no more? Who should be the next face of Patanjali? Can the brand survive without a face? Expected learning outcomes The case is designed to enable students to understand the following key learning points: The concept of marketing mix. Product mix, Promotion mix branding (especially “Person as a Brand”), customer-based brand equity (CBBE) model or brand resonance pyramid. Supplementary materials Teaching Notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes. Subject code CSS 8: Marketing.

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Domestic water and sanitation provide examples of a situation where long-term, target-driven efforts have been launched with the objective of reducing the proportion of people who are water-insecure, most recently through the millennium development goals (MDGs) framework. Impacts of these efforts have been monitored by an increasingly evidence-based system, and plans for the next period of international policy, which are likely to aim at universal coverage with basic water and sanitation, are being currently developed. As distinct from many other domains to which the concept of water security is applied, domestic or personal water security requires a perspective that incorporates the reciprocal notions of provision and risk, as the current status of domestic water and sanitation security is dominated by deficiency This paper reviews the interaction of science and technology with policies, practice and monitoring, and explores how far domestic water can helpfully fit into the proposed concept of water security, how that is best defined, and how far the human right to water affects the situation. It is considered that they fit well together in terms both of practical planning of targets and indicators and as a conceptual framework to help development. The focus needs to be broad, to extend beyond households, to emphasize maintenance as well as construction and to increase equity of access. International and subnational monitoring need to interact, and monitoring results need to be meaningful to service providers as well as users.

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PurposeThis study explores how career training with mentoring (CTM) programs work in Nigerian higher education (HE) institutions to foster students' career development and employability of graduates. It also explores how Nigerian HE curriculum can be adequately used to facilitate CTM as well as possible constraints to effective implementation of CTM programs in Nigerian HE institutions.Design/methodology/approachThe study draws on interviews with well-qualified and experienced experts from six Nigerian public universities (each from the 6 geo-political zones of Nigeria), and 20 industries also within the same 6 geo-political zones of Nigeria that were selected for this study using a purposeful sampling technique. The study interviewed 33 experts comprising 21 senior academics at Nigerian universities and 12 industry executives to reveal substantial information about CTM programs in Nigerian HE institutions.FindingsDrawing on the three key themes that emerged during the thematic analysis and linked to social cognitive career theory, it is clear that participants are convinced that CTM can enhance clarity about students' career ambitions, career interests, personal development plans and employability. Findings show that there are some career-related programs or activities that Nigerian HE students are presented with, but the programs have not been effective as to offer graduates quality career guidance and employability skills that employers demand. Acknowledging these, participants recommend establishing CTM centres in all Nigerian HE institutions to provide students with the opportunity to receive quality career advice, coaching and mentoring services while schooling.Practical implicationsThe findings of this study shed light on varying resources required to cope with the demands of labour market in terms of supply of competent workforce that can contribute to Nigeria's economic growth and development. The findings are highly relevant for Nigeria and other developing countries' policy and research initiatives that aim to promote social inclusion and equity and improve better working conditions for all. The findings also have implications for career development and employability of HE graduates in developing world context.Originality/valueUnderstanding the role that CTM programs can play in facilitating career development and graduate employability can arguably be of importance within the developing world context. This study, therefore, provides significant suggestions on how to build sustained HEIs and labour market partnership to foster career development and employability of HE graduates through establishing CTM centres in every Nigerian HE institutions.

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Purpose Close to half of all privately held companies in the USA are owned by baby boomers, meaning 2.7m American businesses are owned by someone age 55 or older. In the coming decades, all of these businesses will either change owners or disappear. The median state has 34,000 businesses approaching an ownership transition. The effects of this generational shift will be felt in cities, small towns and rural areas. At the same time, state governments are struggling with the challenge of preserving jobs and stimulating local economies buffeted by larger economic trends. States currently spend an estimated $45bn to $70bn a year on efforts to attract and retain jobs. If even a fraction of these exiting owners pursued an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) as their business exit strategy, the potential positive impact on workers, communities and state economies would be substantial. Yet, many business owners are not even aware of ESOPs as an option. In light of this knowledge gap, many of these businesses will instead shut down or sell to outside investors who may not be interested in preserving and growing local jobs. This paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach Review of state information and statistics on employee ownership. Findings Currently, there are around 6,660 ESOPs in the USA holding total assets of nearly $1.4 trillion. These plans cover 14.2m participants. The Midwest is home to the greatest number of ESOPs, followed by the South. There is a least one ESOP headquartered in 4,131 distinct zip codes. Practical implications In order to increase the effectiveness and penetration of local outreach and education, states can: create an office of employee ownership with a dedicated staff person. The office could exist within a state agency or as a nonprofit receiving state funding; provide grants to one or more nonprofits to run an outreach program; hold seminars statewide in conjunction with professional, business, and trade publications and organizations; publish and disseminate brochures and other material; and work with the media to encourage stories on local ESOP companies. In order to promote ESOPs as an attractive alternative to private equity, outside competitors, and other potential purchasers of the business, ESOP outreach should: focus on business owners who are approaching retirement or a liquidity event, as opposed to start-ups or businesses who are interested in progressive management. Focus on the human side and emotional impact of employee ownership. Videos and other personal testimonials contrasting the storylines of a company that becomes employee-owned vs one that becomes owned by an outside investor can be powerful. Take advantage of the ESOP community by facilitating peer-to-peer connections, where company leaders talk with their peers who have sold to an ESOP. These connections are usually fostered based on location or industry. Take care to ensure that the center is seen as providing objective information as opposed to being perceived as trying to “sell” owners on the idea. Originality/value This is the first published review of ESOPs in the states.

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This research examines first-person personal pronouns which arise in political speeches given by Obama in his victory as American President in 2008 and 2012. Employing qualitative and quantitative methods, this research explores the occurrences of first personal pronouns to reveal the forms and its discourse function through political speeches. Abstracting from 458 personal pronouns found in Obama’s speeches, 272 pronouns are identified as first personal pronouns. The findings of the first personal pronouns employed in Obama speeches illustrated that Obama produced pronoun we and its variants, 183 times, and pronoun I and its variants, 89 times. Obama exploited singular personal pronoun to convey personally his deep appreciation and gratefulness, personal experiences, personal professional experiences, his personal argumentative opinions, hopes, and his commitment as well. The use of inclusive we and its variants indicate Obama’s desire to shares responsibility and construct nationalistic spirit, togetherness, equality, publicly assertion about the political situation, and any challenges they probably face in the future. Additionally, by employing exclusive we, Obama asserts his political plans, commitment, political experiences during the election, and serious concern of reconciliation.

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The purpose of this study is to determine and analyze the influence of STIKOM InterStudi promotion strategy to increase brand equity. The concept of promotional strategy according to Lamb, Hair, McDaniel (2001: 146), is a plan for optimal use of elements of advertising, public relations, personal sales and sales promotion ". Brand equity, according to David A. Aaker (1991), is "a series of brand assets and liabilities associated with a brand, its name and symbol, which add or subtract the value of a product or service to the company and / or its customer ". Aaker's definition implies that brand equity can be valuable to the company (company-based brand equity) and to the customer (customer-based brand equity). The approach used in this research is quantitative. The method used is explanative, and the type of research is survey. The population of this study are STIKOM InterStudi students as many as 1154 students and 92 sample students referring to Taro Yamane formula with Purposive Sampling technique. The data are processed by using SPSS 20.0 with Factor Analysis Menu, Alpha Cronbach, Descriptive Statistics and Inferential Statistics then presented in frequency table, mean value and regression analysis. Technique of data collecting done in primary and secondary. Primarily conducted through observation, questionnaire distribution, interview. While the secondary is done through literature and documentation. To analyze the data used Mixed Methods (Mixed Methods). Mixed method research is a good design to use if we try to base on the strength of both quantitative and qualitative data. The design of a mixed methods research design is a procedure for collecting, analyzing, "and mixing" quantitative and qualitative methods in a study or series of studies to understand the research problem (Cresswell & Plano Clark, 2011). The results showed that the promotional strategy undertaken by STIKOM InterStudi had an effect on increasing Brand Equity, but the effect was too low, only 14.3%. While the rest, as much as 85.7% influenced by other factors not examined in this study. Dimensions that have a significant influence in Brand Equity improvement are the dimensions of Word of Mouth (X2), while the other two dimensions: Advertising (X1) and Digital Advertising (X3), partially have no significant effect on Brand Equity STIKOM InterStudi. Tujuan penelitian ini adalah Untuk mengetahui dan menganalisis pengaruh strategi promosi STIKOM InterStudi terhadap peningkatan ekuitas merek. Konsep strategi promosi menurut Lamb, Hair, McDaniel (2001 : 146), adalah rencana untuk penggunaan yang optimal dari elemen-elemen periklanan, hubungan masyarakat, penjualan pribadi dan promosi penjualan”. Sedangkan Brand equity menurut David A. Aaker (1991) adalah “serangkaian asset dan kewajiban (liabilities) merek yang terkait dengan sebuah merek, nama dan simbolnya, yang menambah atau mengurangi nilai yang diberikan sebuah produk atau jasa kepada perusahaan dan /atau pelanggan perusahaan tersebut”. Definisi Aaker menyiratkan bahwa brand equity bisa bernilai bagi perusahaan (company based brand equity) dan bagi konsumen (customer-based brand equity). Pendekatan yang diguanakan dalam penelitian ini adalah kuantitatif. Metode yang digunakan eksplanatif, dan jenis penelitiannya adalah survey. Populasi penelitian ini adalah siswa STIKOM InterStudi sebanyak 1154 siswa dan 92 sampel siswa mengacu pada formula Taro Yamane dengan teknik Purposive Sampling. Data yang diolah dengan menggunakan SPSS 20.0 dengan Factor Analysis Menu, Alpha Cronbach, Statistik Deskriptif dan Statistik Inferensial kemudian disajikan pada tabel frekuensi, nilai mean dan analisis regresi. Teknik pengumpulan data dilakukan secara primer dan sekunder. Secara primer dilakukan melalui observasi, penyebaran kuesioner, wawancara. Sedangkan secara sekunder dilakukan melalui kepustakaan dan dokumentasi. Untuk menganalisis data digunakan Metode Campuran (Mixed Methods). Penelitian metode campuran adalah suatu rancangan yang baik untuk digunakan jika kita mencoba mendasarkan pada kekuatan data kuantitatif maupun kualitatif. Rancangan penelitian metode campuran (mixed methods research design) adalah suatu prosedur untuk mengumpulkan, menganalisis, “dan mencampur” metode kuantitatif dan kualitatif dalam suatu penelitian atau serangkaian penelitian untuk memahami permasalahan penelitian (Cresswell & Plano Clark, 2011). Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa strategi promosi yang dilakukan oleh STIKOM InterStudi berpengaruh dalam meningkatkan Brand Equity, namun pengaruhnya terlalu rendah, hanya memiliki 14,3%. Sedangkan sisanya, sebanyak 85,7% dipengaruhi oleh faktor lain yang tidak diteliti dalam penelitian ini. Dimensi yang memiliki pengaruh signifikan dalam peningkatan Brand Equity adalah dimensi Word of Mouth (X2), sedangkan dua dimensi lainnya: Periklanan (X1) dan Digital Advertising (X3), secara parsial tidak berpengaruh signifikan dalam peningkatan Brand Equity STIKOM InterStudi.

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OBJECTIVES/SPECIFIC AIMS: To mobilize and engage CHWs/promotores as stakeholders, we aim to promote the capacity for CHWs participate in patient centered research (PCOR) by locally implementing a structured research training curriculum for CHWs. Main Questions: How the process of mobilization and engagement would be implemented at local/state level? What would be project challenges, risks and barriers at each and across sites? What modifications would be made to the initial PCOR for CHWs training curriculum and toolkit based on local feedback from collaborators, in both English and Spanish? What would be lessons learned on mobilization, engagement of, and sustainability for CHW training organizations as partners in PCOR? METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: Measures: Monthly calls and quarterly reports from local organizations on activities, deliverables status, modifications, project implementation challenges/barriers and solutions (experienced and potential) to achieve goals of training 10 PCOR CHW Champions and a total of 360 CHWs/promotores trained in PCOR. Input from Note taker reports, Feedback and Evaluation Forms from training attendees at each session. Co-authorship of team members on dissemination activities (submissions for presentations, posters, blogs entries, webinars). Activities/Procedures: Via a highly participatory, consensus-driven decision-making approach, each of the organizations in the target states provide input into refining the toolkit for local use, select the training champions and develop CHW/promotor outreach and recruitment plans, and deliver the PCOR training to CHWs. In addition, the organizations will also set up a local stakeholder CHW/promotores advisory group. Environmental scan and literature review continues on training content areas to complement field experience in implementing the trainings at local sites. Project information tools developed (info sheet for local organizations, informational slide set to be used at calls and statewide seminars, a templates for flyer for training recruitment, agenda, certificates). FL and TN pilot of the translation of the curriculum, addressing problematic concepts and terms, collecting feedback forms eliciting input on terminology variations across Spanish speaking populations and literacy levels. Project Collaborators: Día de la Mujer Latina, a patient advocacy group in Texas with CHW trainings in several states and Puerto Rico Chula Vista Community Collaborative, a community health empowerment organization in Southern California Progresso Community Center, a Latino-focused health coalition based in Tennessee Florida Community Health Worker Coalition, a statewide partnership dedicated to the support and promotion of the CHW profession in Florida. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: Results: Trainings per State - Y1 Jan- October 2018 Totals: 11 PCOR Champions and 252 PCOR-Trained CHWs in CA-TX-TN Y2 Plans (October 2018-September 2019): Will continue to collect CHW trainee demographic data, CHW certification and patient/patient advocate status. Will conduct qualitative and quantitative analysis of all quarterly reports, Note taker, and trainee Feedback and Evaluation forms. Will reach goal of 360 PCOR-trained CHWs in FL, CA, TX and TN. Will continue to submit abstracts on our story on building patient and stakeholder capacity to participate as partners in patient-centered outcomes research, engagement and mobilization, from topic generation through the dissemination of research results. From evaluation analysis of content and process measures, we will discuss sustainability strategies as shared learning collaborative. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE OF IMPACT: Challenges/Decision Points Y1: On Mobilization and Engagement: Across partners, different levels of readiness/capacities/structures, and access to local resources Process application for request for content and guest instructor approvals to the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) for CHW and CHW Instructor credit Co-branding of informational products (recruitment flyers, agendas, certificates), slides of Welcome section On Content and Curriculum Development: Address different levels of literacy Format (1-day vs spread, in person/online, prescriptive vs open) Clear distinction between service provision and research; paradigm shift of transfer of skills Inserting examples of unethical health research past activities with both African American and Hispanic/Latino populations Reinstating phases of clinical studies basic information Creating a study research design activity in Chapter 1 CHW role as member of research team Adding PCORI-funded project summary fact sheet per state On translations: Diversity of nuances of meaning in vocabulary for concepts On sustainability: Different degrees of organizational and personal involvement Next for newly PCOR-trained CHWs Meaningfully engaging patients and other stakeholders is increasingly recognized as requisite to generate research findings that are trusted, meaningful, and useful to clinicians, patients, and their families. One key engagement strategy used for engaging specific patients/caregivers and patient advocates in underserved communities is leveraging our partnerships with Community Health Workers (CHWs). Moreover, there is a documented need for higher level of training skills to undertake activities such as community health assessments, program evaluations and clinical studies. University of Miami (UM) along FL partners has successfully developed a 7-hr specialized toolkit on patient-centered research for CHWs and trained 148 CHWs/promotores (original plans were for 100) across the six major statewide regions. Evaluation data resulted in 100% of attendees responses’ as excellent and 99% would recommend it to others. Qualitative comments included “even though the training was tailored for research, I feel that it applies to many other aspects of the CHW role” and “I feel more empowered in my role after hearing explicitly the opportunities…for a CHW to be more involved in the research process”. UM has partnered with stakeholders in FL, Texas, southern California and Tennessee to develop a Spanish version of the PCOR for CHWs Training Toolkit (including a slide deck, Facilitator’s Guide and Student Workbook) that can be culturally and linguistically appropriate, to train local CHWs/promotores as PCOR CHW Champions. Attendees will receive lunch and a certificate of participation upon completion of the module. In turn, they agree to train local CHWs in their region. These 7 credit hrs could be used as credits towards state certification requirements, in states with CHW certification programs. This partnership for the mobilization and engagement of CHWs/promotores aims to strengthen their capacity to be involved in PCOR at the local and national level and increase the organizational capacity of CHW representative organizations in their promotion of PCOR. This type of research aims to help patients and those who care for them make better-informed decisions about the healthcare choices they face every day, guided by those who will use that information. In doing so, CHWs/promotores are contributing to PCOR in addressing health disparities and achieving health equity as a more culturally and linguistically diverse healthcare workforce and PCOR research team members.

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Equine emergency shelters have an increased risk of infectious disease occurrences due to increased animal stress levels, excessive co-mingling, inconsistent worker base, and horses arriving from many and varied health management and stabling situations. Biosecurity policies should be in place ahead of time to prevent disease spread and outbreak situations and policies should be effectively conveyed to all shelter personnel. A veterinarian should be involved in the overall health management of an equine emergency shelter including working with public health officials regarding the overall animal and human safety issues associated with effectively managing an equine shelter. The veterinarian should work closely with the shelter manager and both need to be able to apply Incident Command System and National Incident Management Systems applications to maximize disease prevention. Mitigation tactics should include appropriate regular equine health maintenance including current vaccinations against tetanus, Equine Influenza I & II, Equine Herpes virus I & IV, and the encephalitides including Eastern, Western, and West Nile Viruses as part of horse owner emergency preparedness planning. Equine Infectious Anemia (EIA) is a federally regulated equine disease and during disaster situations it is unrealistic to assume that all horses will have a record of a current negative test. EIA testing should be considered a part of the plan for shelter animals depending on risk assessments. Appropriate personal hygiene, particularly hand hygiene, can assist in the prevention of disease transmission. Separate isolation areas are necessary for horses showing clinical signs of infectious disease including fever, nasal discharge, or diarrhea. Equine emergency shelter husbandry plans should include a plan for safe handling of feedstuffs, and water. An effective and implementable biosecurity plan for equine emergency sheltering is a key critical requirement for successful large animal emergency and disaster response outcome.

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This paper reports on an action research study that took place during a one-week professional development course focused on establishing gender equality in primary schools, held in a Teachers’ College in Southern Tanzania (June/July 2015), in which 28 educators and administrators participated. I draw upon Sarah Ahmed’s (2005) theoretical framework of gender orientations to explore understanding of gender. A feminist, participatory, action research methodology using multimodal methods (Jewitt, 2008; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001) was used to collect and analyze data. Highlighted are salient aspects activities and discussions in which the participants engaged concerned with constructions and orientations of gender, and gender-based oppression, violence, and discrimination and how these impact girls’ education. I also report on participants’ personal and professional knowledge, understanding, and insights into barriers to, and opportunities for gender equality and their proposed approaches for bringing about change through initiatives they articulated in the gender-responsive school action plans they began to develop. Findings indicate that despite the participants’ interest in learning more about gender constructions and orientations – conceptually as well as practically – and the implied expectation from policies than educators essential in bringing about transformative change leading to gender equality in society, the participants had had little, if any, exposure to policies, initiatives, resources, or professional development to guide and support them. Recommendations including provided professional development opportunities in gender-responsive pedagogy and programming at all schooling levels, and to include educators’ voices, as experts of their own contexts, in future policies, programming, and initiatives.

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One of the major misconceptions in contemporary society is the widespread belief that our food supply is unsafe. The public's perception of risk is quite different than scientific assessment of risk. While scientists see microbial contamination as the key issue (100 to 10,000X greater risk than from exposure to pesticide residues), consumers appear to be most concerned about the effects of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers in the food they buy. Consumers equate “synthetic” with harmful or bad and “natural” with safe or good, yet they ignore the fact that 99.9% of all pesticides humans are exposed to are naturally occurring. Americans eat approximately 1.5 g. of natural pesticides per person per day, or about 10,000 times more than synthetic pesticide residues. Although few plant toxins have been tested for carcinogenicity so far, of those tested about half are rodent carcinogens. Contrary to public perception, environmental pollution accounts for only 2% of all cancers. By contrast, smoking, diet and other personal lifestyle choices account for more than 75%.

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Resumen. Las mujeres ocupan en menor medida puestos directivos y se enfrentan a un suelo pegajoso que dificulta su promoción en el trabajo (por existencia de estereotipos, criterios de ascenso sexistas, redes formales e informales que facilitan la promoción de los hombres, etc.). Para revertir esta situación, es preciso adoptar medidas ambiciosas, entre las que destacan las acciones positivas que pudiesen establecerse en la negociación colectiva o en los planes de igual­dad para permitir el acceso de más mujeres a puestos de responsabilidad en aquellas empresas donde estén subrepresentadas. De igual modo, se insta a aprobar una reforma normativa que garantice un mayor número de mujeres consejeras en las empresas cotizadas. Ahora bien, en el caso de las mujeres de responsabilidades familiares, la asunción de labores de cuidado y la repercusión de esta función en sus trayectorias laborales es sobradamente contrastada no solo en materia de brecha salarial sino en el acceso a categorías o grupos profesionales de mayor responsabilidad. Para mitigar este efecto, se ha de abogar por una modificación normativa que permita conciliar la vida personal y familiar mediante una gestión flexible del tiempo de trabajo.Palabras clave: promoción profesional, igualdad, mujeres, responsabilidades familiares, acciones positivas.Abstract. Women occupy to a lesser extent managerial and responsible positions, and face a sticky floor that hinders their promotion at work (due to the existence of stereotypes, sexist promotion criteria, formal and informal networks that facilitate the promotion of men, etc..). At the same time, women may be compeled to leave the labor market or look for par-time work, wich carry negative consequences for their earnings, skill development and rights to voice and social protection. Policies and measures by governments and social partners to help workers reconcile work and family can make a difference.To reverse this situation, it is neces­sary to adopt ambitious measures, among which stand out the afirmative actions that could be established in collective bargaining or equality plans to allow more women to access positions of responsibility in those companies where they are underrepresented. In the same way, more interventionist reform must be advocated to guarantee a greater number of female advisors in listed companies. In this paper, we analyze the arguments for increasing gender diversity on boards of directors through quotas.Keywords: equality, afirmative accions, women, professional promotion, family respon­sabilities.

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A decade ago, access to technology was limited and wiring schools was one of the nation's highest education priorities (NCREL, 2005). Ten years of substantial investments have vastly improved this picture. According to the Secretary's Fourth Annual Report on Teacher Quality, virtually every school with access to computers has Internet access (99%), compared to only 35 percent of schools in 1994, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) (Parsad & Jones, 2005). The Office of Technology Assessment report to Congress in 1995 stated that "Technology is not central to the teacher preparation experience in most colleges of education. most new teachers graduate from teacher preparation institutions with limited knowledge of the ways technology can be used in their professional practice" (Office of Technology Assessment, 1995). The report, in which this statement appeared, titled Teachers and Technology: Making the Connection, was a wake-up call, and over the past years, much remunerative progress has been made. Many states are attempting to address educators technology skills through the creation of teacher or administrator standards that include technology; as of 2003, 40 states and the District of Columbia have such standards (Ansell & Park, 2003). A number of states have adopted technology requirements for initial licensure. For example, 13 states require teachers and/or administrators to complete technology-related coursework, and nine require them to pass technology-related assessments. In addition, a number of states have implemented policies to improve veteran teachers technological skills (Ansell &Park, 2003). Addressing the issues of technology integration into the curriculum, the Maryland State Department of Educations (MSDE) PT3 consortium infused technology into the state's teacher education programs in three ways. First, the consortium used the Maryland Teacher Technology Standards to redesign both arts and sciences and education courses so they incorporate technology-related knowledge and skills. The Maryland Teacher Technology Standards included learning outcomes and, core learning goals and skills for success; it also specifies what students in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade need to know and be able to do in English/Language Arts, mathematics, science, and social studies. The Maryland State Department of Education (1999) provided expectations for how technology can and should be used to support student learning and instruction. Second, the group developed performance assessments in order to measure the technological competence of teacher candidates. Third, the consortium developed a system for electronic portfolios that incorporates a student teacher's technology performance assessment. These portfolios can be made available to future employers to demonstrate technology-related proficiency. The consortium is statewide and diverse, including several public universities and two communities. According to a report titled, Tech-Savvy: Educating Girls in the New Computer Age (AAUW, 2000), Washington, DC; as violent electronic games and dull programming classes turn off increasing numbers of adolescent girls, the way information technology is used, applied, and taught in the nations classrooms must change. Furthermore, commensurate with rapid changes in technology, a remarkably consistent picture emerges: more boys than girls experience an early, passionate attachment to computers, whereas for most girls attachment is subdued. Margolis and Fisher (2002) reported that computing is claimed as male territory very early in life: from early childhood through college, computing is both actively claimed as guy stuff by boys and men and passively ceded by girls and women. Society and culture have linked interest and success with computers to boys and men. In the words of Margolis and Fisher (2002), curriculum, teachers expectations, and culture reflect boys pathways into computing, accepting both assumptions of male excellence and womens deficiencies in the field (p. 4). Social expectations towards educational leadership in academic and economics terms depend on the integration of technology in every facet of society. The American family survival depends on the abilities and incomes of all adults. The type of technical skills needed to be creative and to survive in the job market escalates daily. Educational leaders must be aware that gender equity among middle school students with respect to the use of computer technology should be grounded in the development of programs that not only address the educational aspect of schools, but also allow students to develop their appreciation for, and understanding of the interrelationship among computer usage, careers, and values. With the implementation of such programs, schools could operate as equalizers for the sexes regarding computer competency and attitudes. Educational leaders have the ability to direct resources to show how computer technology may release the creative impulse in children and allow them to think and learn. Educators need to link the curriculum and technology with student interests. Both male and female students use computer applications that can be linked to the educational setting, such as word processing, Internet, completing homework, reports, and projects, as well as communication through email, self-expression, and personal interest. Educators who are developing these programs must understand how girls lose interest in technology and recognize the different learning styles of each gender. The role of training district school teachers to effectively utilize computer technology within the classroom is important if strides are to be made in supporting girls and women in choosing computer-related careers and using computers as a medium of expression. Institutions of higher education would provide opportunities and hold the responsibility of reviewing the technical construction of each teachers plan. Educational leaders will meet frequently with university representatives to review, discuss, record experiences, develop, modify, and evaluate plans and performances to ensure that teachers receive the training necessary to instruct all students utilizing appropriate computer technology. Degree attainment, certification, and re-certification should be linked to the variation of experiences, the structure, depth, detail, and impact of the program developed by the practitioner in consultation with representatives from higher education and the school district. Partnerships with local school districts and institutions of higher learner should be established to develop programs, which incorporate many of the tenets discussed above.

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PurposeThe study aims to construct an understanding of professional academic writing network structures to inform organisational strategic investment in academic staff development.Design/methodology/approachLongitudinal social network analysis is used to examine the personal-networks evident in the publication portfolios of a purposive sample of four international academics across each quartile of the SCOPUS defined area of General Nursing's top 100 authors.FindingsTrends in the publication portfolios of elite academics across gender, sector and geographic location are presented. In the first years of successful writing for publication, authors collaborate within a single highly connected co-author network. This network will typically expand to include new co-authors, before additional separate co-author collaborations emerge (three- to four- years). Authors experience steady growth in co-author numbers four- to seven- years from first co-authored publication. After a period of rapid expansion, these collaborations coalesce into a smaller number of highly connected groups (eight- to ten- years). Most collaborations occur within the higher education sector and across multiple disciplines including medicine, social sciences and psychology. Male co-authors are disproportionately represented in what is a predominantly female profession.Practical implicationsThe development of extended co-author networks, locally, internationally and across the higher education sector, enable authors to attain the marker of achievement required by universities and government funding bodies, namely sustained output of academic publications. Identified trends support the inclusion of investment in academic time and resources in higher education institutions strategic and operational plans to enable academic staff to develop interdisciplinary professional networks. In focussing this investment on gender equality, female academics will experience parity of opportunity in achieving their organisational and personal goals relating to professional academic writing. Medium-term investment may be required before the impact of that investment becomes apparent.Originality/valueThis is the first example of social network analysis used to determine characteristics of professional academic writing portfolios over time. Findings inform the type and range of investment required to facilitate academic staff writing activities, specifically those publishing in the area of General Nursing.

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The primary objective of this study was to investigate the migration intentions of foreign students and to have a better understanding of their life experiences in eastern China with a focus to Anhui province. A questionnaire survey sent to foreign students studying in Anhui province and depth interviews were used to investigate these migration intentions. Screening method was employed to all 527 participants and only464respondents were considered for further analysis. The results show that few students arrive in Anhui with the intention of immigrating permanently. Various factors including business opportunities, security and personal factors among many others influence them in decision- making process. The results reveal that there is no significant intentions to stay permanently however, there exist instances with a slight increase in the length of stay from 0% (initial) to 1.9% (after two years) and a steady variation of 30% of all respondents who wish to stay for short -period ranging between 2-3 years was noted. On the other hand, family and societal factors as well as length of stay was seen to be the high contributing factors leading to 58% of all respondents’ decision to go back to their home countries immediately after completion of studies. Furthermore, results show that there is a gap in Chinese education system on human racial equality leading to lower satisfaction of African students living in China which may threaten China’s sustainable economic growth image in African market. This study is helpful for policy makers and education system upgrade plans. However, following the area limitation used herein, there remains need for further studies on the subject using large scale to avoid generalizations made in this study.

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RESUMENEl propósito de este artículo es analizar, desde una aproximación documental, cuál es la oferta de servicios y actividades innovadoras en el contexto de orientación de las universidades públicas finlandesas. Este estudio está enmarcado en el paradigma cualitativo de investigación, identificando (a) qué servicios de orientación y asesoramiento ofrecen a sus estudiantes y (b) qué actividades innovadoras desarrollan en el ámbito de la orientación que puedan aplicarse al contexto español, mejorando nuestro sistema de orientación universitaria.Se han analizando las trece universidades finlandesas mediante la importación de la información de las páginas webs (n=125) al software profesional para el análisis de datos cualitativos MAXQDA 2018. Partiendo de este análisis previo, así como de la consulta a expertos en orientación en la Universidad de Turku (Finlandia), se identificaron buenas prácticas del sistema de orientación universitaria español, seleccionando aquellas con mejores beneficios para los estudiantes y mayor transferibilidad y proyección internacional a nivel institucional. Los principales resultados obtenidos reflejan una tendencia en Finlandia a promover acciones dirigidas al bienestar de los estudiantes desde una unidad común e incluir la orientación como parte intrínseca del well-being de la universidad. Existen asimismo comités de igualdad y bienestar de los estudiantes para abordar estas dos cuestiones, aspecto que se podría trasladar a las universidades españolas. Por último, se destaca la transferibilidad de los planes personalizados de estudio para los estudiantes, la coordinación y la interacción entre los recursos existentes de orientación, y una mayor flexibilidad en las adaptaciones a realizar a los estudiantes.ABSTRACT The purpose of this article is to analyse, from a documentary approach, which is the offer of innovative services and activities in the context in which guidance is developed in Finnish public universities. This study is framed within the qualitative paradigm of research, identifying (a) what guidance and counselling services they offer to their students and (b) what innovative activities they develop in the field of guidance that can be applied to the Spanish context, improving our university guidance systems. The thirteen existing universities in Finland have been analysed by importing the websites (n=125) into the professional software for the analysis of qualitative data MAXQDA 2018. Starting from this previous analysis as well as from the consultation with experts in guidance at the University of Turku, good practices transferable to the Spanish university orientation system were identified, selecting those with the best benefits for students and greater transferability and international projection at an institutional level. The main results obtained offer a tendency in Finland to promote actions aimed at the well-being of students from a common unit and to include guidance as an intrinsic part of the well-being of the university, existing also committees on equality or well-being of students, an aspect that could be transferred to Spanish universities. The transferability of Personal Study Plans for students, the coordination and interaction between existing guidance resources, and greater flexibility in the arrangements to be made to students are also highlighted.

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Ontario education providers have a responsibility to accommodate the needs of their students and employees with disabilities (Ontario Human Rights Commission, 2008). Under the 2001 Ontarians with Disabilities Act, the Ministry of Education along with school boards are required to prepare, update, and make public accessibility plans that address the identification, removal, and prevention of barriers for people with disabilities (Valeo, 2010). However, in 2012, physical, architectural, and attitudinal impediments frequently fail to meet basic accessibility and equity standards. The purpose of this paper is to juxtapose my own personal narrative as a disabled teacher candidate, with literature about the roles and responsibilities of principals and administrators in creating inclusive school environments for people with disabilities. Administrators’ roles in leadership, mediation, and collaboration, crucially influence the success of inclusive school organizations (Goddard & Hart, 2007; Irvine et al., 2010; Ross & Berger, 2009; Valeo, 2010), and directly affect the experiences of individuals therein. This paper highlights the need for principals to be knowledgeable about disability issues such as recognizing barriers, using preventative instead of reactive strategies toward physical disability concerns, and addressing challenges administrators face when trying to create integrative, inclusive school environments.

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The Canadian tax system is based on principles informed by the Carter report, and these principles have been challenged as circ*mstances have changed and ideas about tax policy have evolved. The personal tax system pays only lip service to the comprehensive income tax ideal, and the corporate tax is designed as a complement to a comprehensive tax system that does not exist. Canadian policy makers face the unprecedented challenges of (1) globalization, (2) an economy increasingly based on services and technology, and (3) growing inequality of income, wealth, and opportunity. Modern principles of tax design are reflected in recent tax reform proposals recommended by the Mirrlees review in the United Kingdom. Major tax reforms have been undertaken in other member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Some piecemeal innovations in tax policy have been implemented in Canada, such as registered retirement savings plans, tax-free savings accounts, the goods and services tax/harmonized sales tax, and refundable tax credits, but these measures have not been coordinated. The corporate tax structure has changed only modestly. This paper explores options for feasible reform of the Canadian tax system that might enhance equity and efficiency.

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The rapid expansion across sectors of global economy has changed the way we should educate and train our future engineering professionals. Upholding of the old standards by engineering institutions can not help much to improve the quality of engineers as well as impose difficulty in adapting to the rapidly changing global market. This paper addresses various holistic development models such as internships, self / online / blended / design-based learning through goal oriented activities, adopted worldwide and what we propose and implemented at TCET, the challenges we faced and the learning we developed. Embedding Diversity, Equity, and Excellence to the institute is critical. Further, stating future plans for the same which consists of selfefficacy beliefs, Intrinsic growth and Confidence in students. Major focus for over all development should be on work ethics, time management, team work and taking personal responsibility, conduct basic research, critical thinking skills and lack of interest in reading beyond curriculum. Through various tests and trials in order to develop engineering graduates on all front, it has been observed that beyond component learning cannot be imposed and different category of students are to be treated differentially to groom them. With that, positive feedback system helps student to understand his/her passion and identify the future scope in that domain. In all, online courses, project development and internships have shown acceptance by student community. The goal is to enhance personal, physical, emotional, and creative potential of students. They further appreciate hands on sessions and industry exposure through Industrial visits and Alumni Connect Programmes

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Abstract This commentary addresses the critically important role of health workers in their countries’ more immediate responses to COVID-19 outbreaks and provides policy recommendations for more sustainable health workforces. Paradoxically, pandemic response plans in country after country, often fail to explicitly address health workforce requirements and considerations. We recommend that policy and decision-makers at the facility, regional and country-levels need to: integrate explicit health workforce requirements in pandemic response plans, appropriate to its differentiated levels of care, for the short, medium and longer term; ensure safe working conditions with personal protective equipment (PPE) for all deployed health workers including sufficient training to ensure high hygienic and safety standards; recognise the importance of protecting and promoting the psychological health and safety of all health professionals, with a special focus on workers at the point of care; take an explicit gender and social equity lens, when addressing physical and psychological health and safety, recognising that the health workforce is largely made up of women, and that limited resources lead to priority setting and unequitable access to protection; take a whole of the health workforce approach—using the full skill sets of all health workers—across public health and clinical care roles—including those along the training and retirement pipeline—and ensure adequate supervisory structures and operating procedures are in place to ensure inclusive care of high quality; react with solidarity to support regions and countries requiring more surge capacity, especially those with weak health systems and more severe HRH shortages; and acknowledge the need for transparent, flexible and situational leadership styles building on a different set of management skills.

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Disability is a natural part of the human experience and therefore should not affect the rights of individuals to live independently, contribute to society, enjoy full inclusion in education and pursue a meaningful career. However, youth with disabilities (YWDs) in Elgeyo Marakwet Kenya face socio-economic discrimination communally. Exclusion, isolation, abuse and lack of educational opportunities exist in Elgeyo-Marakwet County, Kenya. They do not enjoy the same human rights or equal access to goods and services as their peers without disabilities. The main objective of this study was to assess the influence of employment on personal development of youth with disabilities in Elgeyo-Marakwet County Kenya. Two theories, Catherine Sanderson’s (2010) theory of socio-cultural perspective and Adams Stacy’s (1965) equity theory were studied to enable an understanding of the influence of the socio-cultural support services on personal development of youth with disabilities. A mixed methodology, using a triangulation design with both quantitative and qualitative research was employed in this study to realize the objectives. The study targeted a total population of 492 of youth with disabilities, 320 parents of youth with disabilities in and out of school and 19 government officers. Sample size determination formula by Krejcie and Morgan (1970) was used to obtain the required sample of the youth with disabilities and their parents. Simple random sampling was used to select youth with disabilities and parents while purposive sampling was used to select government officers (key informants). A sample of 289 youth with disabilities, 175 parents and 19 government officers were picked for the study. Data was collected using questionnaires, interview schedule and an observation checklist. To determine content validity of the instruments, the supervisors were presented with the research instruments prior to the actual study. Their comments were adopted in modifying the instruments. The reliability of the instruments was established through a pilot study where a coefficient of Cronbach’s Alpha was determined, which was 0.741. Quantitative data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, while qualitative data were analysed thematically as the themes emerged. Employment contributed 19.7% to personal development of youth with disabilities. The study recommended, among others, funding of youth with disabilities support groups, initiating follow up support programs for youth with disabilities and wholly focusing on services that ensure that the ‘best’ is offered to the youth with disabilities as per government’s policies. The findings of this study may help in improving the education policy to have a focus on transition plans for youth with disabilities after school. <p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0789/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

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Abstract Background An increase in the uptake of skilled birth attendance is expected to reduce maternal mortality in low- and middle-income countries. In Tanzania, the proportion of deliveries assisted by a skilled birth attendant is only 64% and the maternal mortality ratio is still 398/100.000 live births. This article explores different aspects of quality of care and respectful care in relation to maternal healthcare. It then examines the influence of these aspects of care on the uptake of skilled birth attendance in Tanzania in order to offer recommendations on how to increase the skilled birth attendance rate. Methods This narrative review employed the “person-centered care framework for reproductive health equity” as outlined by Sudhinaraset (2017). Academic databases, search engines and websites were consulted, and snowball sampling was used. Full-text English articles from the last 10 years were included. Results Uptake of skilled birth attendance was influenced by different aspects of technical quality of maternal care as well as person-centred care, and these factors were interrelated. For example, disrespectful care was linked to factors which made the working circ*mstances of healthcare providers more difficult such as resource shortages, low levels of integrated care, inadequate referral systems, and bad management. These issues disproportionately affected rural facilities. However, disrespectful care could sometimes be attributed to personal attitudes and discrimination on the part of healthcare providers. Dissatisfied patients responded with either quiet acceptance of the circ*mstances, by delivering at home with a traditional birth attendant, or bypassing to other facilities. Best practices to increase respectful care show that multi-component interventions are needed on birth preparedness, attitude and infrastructure improvement, and birth companionship, with strong management and accountability at all levels. Conclusions To further increase the uptake of skilled birth attendance, respectful care needs to be addressed within strategic plans. Multi-component interventions are required, with multi-stakeholder involvement. Participation of traditional birth attendants in counselling and referral can be considered. Future advances in information and communication technology might support improved quality of care.

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Abstract In this article we consider the discursive production of status as it relates to democratic ideals of environmental equity and community responsibility, orienting specifically to food discourse and ‘elite authenticity’ (Mapes 2018), as well as to recent work concerning normativity and class inequality (e.g. Thurlow 2016; Hall, Levon, & Milani 2019). Utilizing a dataset comprised of 150 Instagram posts, drawn from three different acclaimed chefs’ personal accounts, we examine the ways in which these celebrities emphasize local/sustainable food practices while simultaneously asserting their claims to privileged eating. Using multimodal critical discourse analysis, we document three general discursive tactics: (i) plant-based emphasis, (ii) local/community terroir, and (iii) realities of meat consumption. Ultimately, we establish how the chefs’ claims to egalitarian/environmental ideals paradoxically diminish their eliteness, while simultaneously elevating their social prestige, pointing to the often complicated and covert ways in which class inequality permeates the social landscape of contemporary eating. (Food discourse, elite authenticity, normativity, social class, locality/sustainability)*

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RESUMEN: En el marco del derecho a la formación permanente, la formación en ética profesional representa un paso en la educación moral de las personas, cuyo espacio más lógico de aprendizaje coincide con la formación profesional inicial (en la universidad, diremos en adelante tomando la parte por el todo). En lo que respecta a la relevancia de este aprendizaje, a la importancia social de la ética profesional hay que añadir su importancia para la realización y el vivir con sentido del profesional. Para la elucidación de los principios/ valores de esta ética profesional hay que acudir a dos fuentes: la tradicional de los filósofos éticos y pensadores afines y la de los colectivos de profesionales que elaboran los códigos éticos o deontológicos. De la conjunción de ambas resultan cinco principios/ valores principales: 1) dignidad, libertad, igualdad y derechos humanos, 2) justicia conmutativa y social, 3) autonomía profesional y deontológica, 4) beneficencia y 5) responsabilidad profesional. La enseñanza-aprendizaje de la ética profesional interpela al conjunto del profesorado, lo que no excusa de su inclusión como asignatura en los planes de estudio. Para esta asignatura se proponen cuatro bloques de contenidos y algunas sugerencias metodológicas. El artículo termina con algunas informaciones sobre la enseñanza de la ética profesional en la universidad española.ABSTRACT: Within the framework of Continuing Education, the study of professional Ethics appears as a natural step towards the moral development of every person. This should logically happen at the start of professional formation (within the University, as will be explained later in more detail). The importance of this type of learning bears upon the social aspects of professional Ethics and also upon the personal meaning of professional activity. To clarify the principles and values of professional Ethics we must study two sources: the traditional work of philosophers of Ethics and related thinkers, and the contributions of people involved in the professions, who develop ethical norms and codes of conduct. The interaction of both sources brings up five main principles or values: 1) Personal dignity, freedom, equality and human rights, 2) Social and commutative justice, 3) Professional autonomy and codes of behavior, 4) Beneficence, 5) Professional responsibility. Teaching and learning professional Ethics involves the entire Faculty, but this fact does not imply its absence as a subject in the academic curriculum. To include it as a specific topic, four main areas to be developed are proposed, as well as some methodological guideliness. This paper finally gives some actual information about the teaching of professional Ethics in Spanish Universities.SOMMAIRE: Dans le cadre du droit à la formation tout au long de la vie, la formation en éthique professionnelle represente un pas important vers l'éducation morale des personnes, dont l'espace le plus logique pour l'apprentissage coincide avec la formation professionnelle initiale (dorénavant l'université, tout en appliquant le principe de la partie pour l'ensemble). En ce qui concerne á la valeur de cet apprentissage, á l'importance sociale de l'éthique professionnelle faut-il ajouter son importance pour l'épanouissem*nt personnel et le fait de vivre avec le sens du professionnel. Si l'on veut éclaircir les principes/valeurs de cette éthique professionnelle il faut consulter deux sources: la source traditionnelle des philosophes éthiques et penseurs analogues ainsi que celle des collectifs de profesionnels élaborant les codes éthiques ou déontologiques, dont cinq principes/valeurs principales se sont conjugués: 1) dignité, liberté, égalité et droits de l'homme, 2) justice commutative et sociale, 3) autonomie professionnelle et déontologique, 4) bienfaisance 5) responsabilité professionnelle. L'enseignement-apprentissage de l'éthique professionnelle interpelle l'ensemble des enseignants, étant inéludable son inclusion en tant que matière aux plans d'études. Pour cette matière on propose quatre groupes de contenus et quelques propositions méthodologiques. Finalement, le travail presente des informations sur l'enseignement de l'éthique professionnelle dans l'Université espagnole.

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Introduction One in three Australian marriages ends in divorce (ABS, Parental Divorce). While such statistics may be interpreted to mean that marriage is becoming less significant to Australians, many Australians continue to invest heavily in marriage as a constitutive mode of subjectification. Recently released first-wave data from a longitudinal study being conducted with seven thousand high school students in Queensland indicates that the majority of high schoolers expect to get married (Skrbis et al. 76). Significant political attention and debate in Australia has centred on the issue of marriage “equality” in relation to legislating same-sex marriage. Many accounts problematise marriage in Australia today by focussing on the current inequities involved in who can and cannot legally get married, which are important debates to be had in the process of understanding the persistent importance of marriage as a social institution. This paper, however, provides a critical account of “equality” in contemporary heterosexual marriages or heteronormative monogamous relationships. I argue that, far from being a mundane “old” debate, the distribution of unpaid work between spouses has a significant effect on women’s spousal satisfaction, and it calls into question the notion of “marriage equality” in everyday heterosexual marriages whether these are civil or common law relationships. I suggest that the contemporary “Hollywood” fantasy about marriage, which informs the same-sex marriage movement, sets up expectations that belie most people’s lived realities.Project Overview This paper draws on data from a larger research project that explores the impact of globalised ideas about good womanhood and good motherhood on Western Australian women, and how local context shapes these women’s personal ideals about their own life trajectories. Interviews were conducted with a series of women living in regional Western Australia. While more women were interviewed as part of the larger research project, this paper draws on interviews with seven intending-to-mother women and fifteen mothers. Through several open-ended questions, the women were asked about either their plans for motherhood or their experiences of motherhood, in relation to additional expectations of women’s lives, such as participation in the paid sector and body ideals. Married women were also asked about how unpaid labour—that is, domestic and, where relevant, childcare labour—is divided between themselves and their husbands. Women’s responses to these questions provide a critical account of how marriage and the notion of “equality” is currently lived out in Australia. To ensure confidentiality, their real names have been replaced by pseudonyms. My purpose in drawing on my own data in conjunction with literature on the gendered division of unpaid labour is to emphasise that while the theoretical insights are not new, the fact that a gendered disparity continues to exist is of concern because of women’s dissatisfaction with the situation, particularly in the context of frequent claims that equality is already achieved, and given that it queries the fantasy of marriage continuing to circulate in contemporary culture. The women I interviewed responded openly to questions about the division of domestic, and where relevant, childcare labour and the affects of this on their relationships. Feminist approaches to the research process highlight the importance of being reflexive about the relationship(s) between researcher and researched to make the presence of the researcher in the research process explicit (Ramazanoglu and Holland 156). Ramazanoglu and Holland argue “producing knowledge through empirical research is not the same as acting as a conduit for the voices of others” (116). While the power dynamic between researcher and researched is not generally an equal one, the fact that I am younger than all of my participants bar one (who is the same age) I believe went some way towards diffusing my position of power in the interviews. Some of my participants were also either already known to me, or had been referred to me by another participant prior to the interview, which may have made the process of interview less intimidating and more comfortable. Importantly, in many instances, my participants’ reflections about the division of unpaid labour in their marriages, their expectations, hopes for the future, and feelings about it mirrored my own feelings and realities. I related personally to their experiences, and empathise with their dilemmas. This is significant methodologically because “emotional connectedness” (Coffey 158–9) including a close identification with participants (Conle 53–4) influences the process of interpretation. However, in Scott’s terms, power operated through my assessment of participants’ dilemmas being similar to my own and my writing up of their interviews (780). The findings presented in this paper are based on my interpretation of the voices of others, and are unavoidably influenced by my personal context as the researcher. Two predominate themes emerged from women’s accounts of unpaid domestic and childcare labour. Women anticipated their partner’s participation in domestic care activities, although in most cases, this expectation was not met. Further, women held these expectations for “when they had children,” even though their partners did not presently participate in domestic activities. At the same time, the women accepted that, while their husband’s should participate more in unpaid work, this participation would not be equal to their own responsibilities regardless of what other activities either were engaged in outside of the domestic and familial sphere. I found that while women expect a fairer division of domestic labour, they do not expect it to be “50/50.” I argue that the gendered division of labour has changed less than most couples readily admit, as seen through the following overview. Gender Relations: Changes and Stases In Western societies, women’s roles in the public sphere have changed considerably over the last fifty plus years. Women now constitute a significant percentage of the paid workforce. Today, couple families where both partners work in the paid sector are the most common of all families (ABS, Family Functioning). However, there has not been a corresponding shift in the way that unpaid labour is divided between partners. Only one half of the historical gendered division of labour has undergone change; while women as well as men now operate in the paid (and thus valued) sector (traditionally available only to men), women still predominately perform most of the unpaid (and undervalued) domestic work. Gender researchers have been reporting on the unequal division of domestic labour between couples, and the material and emotional consequences for women, for a long time (see Hochschild; DeVault; Coltrane), yet I argue that it remains largely unchanged, and dismissed as an important issue in the Australian community. Hochschild’s work, in particular, made a significant contribution to research into the gendered division of unpaid labour between couples by analysing and reporting on interview data collected from fifty couples, both working full-time in the paid sector, with young children. Hochschild identified and reported on couples justifications for the way they divide domestic and care, which, as I will demonstrate, are still common today (17, see also Hochschild with Machung 128). Several contemporary studies (Meisenbach; Shelton and Johnson) report that women perform the majority of domestic and care duties, despite women’s long established presence in the paid workforce. Indeed, historically, the majority of women participated in the workforce, with only middle and upper-class women experiencing a delayed entry to paid work. In their review of current research into the division of household labour in the United States Lachance-Grzela and Bouchard find that: In spite of women’s increased commitment to the labour force market and their associated political and social achievements, their advances have not been paralleled in the familiar sphere…the gains women have made outside the home have not translated directly into an egalitarian allocation of household labour…[American] women continue to perform the vast majority of unpaid tasks performed to satisfy the needs of family members or to maintain the home. (767) Exchange theories predicted that women’s increased participation in paid work would stimulate an increase in the time men spent performing domestic work (Carter 16). However, various studies including Lupton’s investigation into the distinctions, or indeed, commonalities, between the roles of “mother” and “father” find that women still perform the majority of childcare and domestic labour, even those who are also engaged in paid employment. Time use studies conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics also suggest that this prediction has not eventuated, and that whilst some women may have an improved capacity to negotiate with their partners about domestic labour division because of their income, this is not always the case (Carter 17). Ella (aged 32, mother of one) described “quite enjoying it” when her partner was away on business because it was less work not having to deal with his mess on top of other tasks. This is consistent with earlier research findings that single mothers spend less time on domestic work than women with children who live with men (Carter 17). It is common for men to do less domestic work than they create (Bittman 3). All of the women I interviewed who were in partnerships and intending to mother sometime in the future were either employed full-time in the paid sector, seeking full-time employment after completing graduate degrees, or combining paid work with tertiary study. One participant had recently dropped her hours from full-time to part-time because she was pregnant. All of the partnered women who were already mothering at the time of the interview were in full-time employment before the birth of their first child, and seven of them were still in paid employment; one full-time, one three-quarter time and five part time. Most women reported doing the majority, if not all, of the domestic and childcare labour regardless of whether they combined this work with paid work outside of the home. Whilst some women were indifferent to the inequity in their domestic labour and childcare responsibilities, most identified it as a source of tension, conflict, and disappointment in their spousal relationships. These women had anticipated greater participation by their husbands in the home, an optimism derived from some other source than those women with whom they interact.Anticipating Participation In their in-depth psychological study into the specific temporal disruptions and occasions of social dislocation ensuing from the birth of a child in the United States, Monk et al. found that the disruption to daily events and the reduction of social activities were more discernible for women than for men. Other research (Arendell; Hays; Mauthner; Nicolson) conducted at this time concurred with these findings. Similar results are found over a decade later. Choi et al. found most women feel at least some resentment about the impact of parenthood on their lives being “far greater for them than for their partner” (174). Influenced by reports of a supposed ideological shift in the late 1990s wherein fathers were encouraged to take a more active role in the raising of their children in ways previously considered maternal (Lupton 51), women today tend to anticipate that their husband’s will participate more in domestic and care activities, which predominately, does not eventuate. Consequently, feeling “let down” by partners has been identified as a key factor in the presentation of postnatal depression (Choi et al. 175). The women I interviewed who were planning to mother sometime in the future anticipated that their husbands would participate more in the home after the birth of a child. Gabrielle (aged 25, married for three years) hoped that this would be an 80/20 split. The idea of an 80/20 split as an “improvement” may be confronting, but this is Gabrielle’s reality, and her predicament—shared by many other women today—captures the prevailing importance of discussions around the gendered division of domestic labour. Several interviewees who were already mothering had also anticipated that their husbands would participate alongside them in household and childcare related activities. For most, this kind of participation had not eventuated and women were left with feelings of disappointment, and tensions and conflicts in their marriages. Grainne (aged 30, married for five years, mother of one) had expected her husband to be reasonably supportive and helpful around the house when they started their family. Yet she was unpleasantly surprised and intensely disappointed by how participation in the home had worked out since she and her husband had become parents six months ago. Grainne explained that she: expected that my husband would be more supportive and more helpful…I’ve been even more disappointed because he hasn’t followed through with…how I thought he would be…I almost despair a bit…we have actually struggled more in our relationship in the last six months than in the five and a half years. Grainne spoke about the impact of this inequity on the intimacy in her relationship. This is consistent with Poco*ck who identifies inequity in the division of unpaid work as one of “two work-related spokes in the wheel” (106–107) of spousal intimacy; the other being time and energy to communicate. According to Poco*ck intimacy, not necessarily sexual, is lacking in many Australian spousal relationships with unequal divisions of unpaid labour (107). While the loss of intimacy results in feelings of loss and regret, for some women, it is characterised as a past concern in their overworked and stressed lives (Poco*ck 107). Several women from professional backgrounds, in particular Lena and Freya, identified the inequity in their partnerships when it came to home duties and childcare as a significant, and even as the “main,” source of tension and conflict in their spousal relationships. Lena (aged 30, married for five years, mother of two) described having “great debates” with her husband about the division of domestic labour and childcare in their partnership. From her husband’s perspective, it is her “job…to do all the kids and the housework and everything else,” whereas from Lena’s perspective, “he should be able to feed the kids and clean up” on the weekend if she needs to go out. Freya (aged 30, married for ten years, mother of three) also talked about the “various rows” she had had with her husband about her domestic and childcare load. She described herself as “not coping” with the workload. For all of these women, domestic inequality in their marriages has real emotional consequences for them as individuals, and is a significant source of marital discontent. Women’s decisions about whether and when to have children, and how many to have, are influenced by the inequity experienced in marital relationships. Although I suggest that women’s desire to become mothers may eventually outweigh these immediate and everyday concerns, reports from already mothering women suggest that this source of conflict does not dissipate. The evidence gathered from my interviews demonstrates that trying to change dynamics in a relationship, when it comes to domestic tasks, is even more difficult when it is compounded with the emotional, mental and physical demands of motherhood, as Choi et al. also suggest (177).Accepting Inequality The findings of my study suggest that women intending to mother and those already mothering continue to expect to do more domestic and childcare labour than their partners. However, even with this concession, some women are still over-optimistic in their estimations about the amount of domestic labour their partner’s will perform. Fetterolf and Eagly find similar patterns in gender equality expectations in the United States amongst female college undergraduates planning to mother sometime in the future (90–91). Some women I interviewed who were planning to mother sometime in the future described their own attempts to negotiate with their partner to make them do more work. For instance, Gabrielle (aged 25, married for three years), who, as discussed earlier, hoped that her husband will participate more in the home after the birth of a child, said: Once we’ve had kids he might change and realise he might have to help out a little bit more, I can’t actually do everything…I don’t think it’ll be 50/50 just from experience of how we’ve been married so far… I do hope that it’ll be maybe 80/20 or something like that. When asked about whether their current division of house work was a concern for her, particularly in relation to having children, Gabrielle replied that she just “nagged” about it. Putting her discontent in the frame of “nagging” trivialises the issue. While it is men who tend to characterise women’s discontent as “nagging,” women can also internalise, and use this language to minimise their own feelings. That men “just don’t see mess and dirt” in the same way that women do is a popular idea drawn on to account for women’s acceptance of inequity in the home as evidenced in numerous statements from the women I interviewed. Commentaries like these align with Carter’s (1) observations that generally accepted ideas about women and men (for example, that women see dirt and men do not) are drawn on to explain and justify domestic labour arrangements. In response to how domestic labour is divided between her husband and herself, Marguerite (aged 25, married for ten months), like Gabrielle (aged 25, married for three years), described an “80/20 split,” with her as the 80%. Marguerite commented that “it’s not that he’s lazy, it’s just that he doesn’t see it, he doesn’t realise that a house needs cleaning.” Fallding described these ideas, and the behaviours that ensue, as a type of patriarchal family model, specifically “rightful patriarchy” (69) that includes the idea that women naturally pay more attention to detail than men. Conclusion “Falling in love” and “getting married” remains an important cultural narrative in Australian society. As Gabrielle (aged 25, married for three years) described, people ask you “when are you getting married? When are you having kids?” because “that’s just what you do.” I argue that offering critical accounts of heteronormative monogamous relationships/marriage equality from a variety of positions is important to understandings of these relationships in contemporary Australia. Accounts of the division of unpaid labour in the home between spouses provide one forum through which equality within marriage/heteronormative monogamous relationships can be examined. A tension exists between an expectation of participation on the part of women about their partner’s role in the home, and a latent acceptance by most women that equality in the division of unpaid work is unrealistic and unachievable. Men remain largely removed from work in the home and appear to have a degree of choice about their level of participation in domestic and care duties. The consistency of these findings with earlier work, some of which is over a decade old, suggests that the way families divide unpaid domestic and care labour remains gendered, despite significant changes in other aspects of gender relations. Many of the current discussions about marriage idealise it in ways that are not borne out in this research. This idealisation feeds into the romance of marriage, which maintains women’s investment in it, and thus the likelihood that they will find themselves in a relationship that disappoints them in significant and easily dismissed ways.ReferencesAustralian Bureau of Statistics. Australian Social Trends, 2003, Family Functioning: Balancing Family and Work. 4102.0 (2010). ‹http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/7d12b0f6763c78caca257061001cc588/c8647f1dd5f36f42ca2570eb00835397!OpenDocument›. Australian Bureau of Statistics. Australian Social Trends, 2010, Parental Divorce or Death During Childhood. 4102.0 (2010). ‹http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/Lookup/4102.0Main+Features40Sep+2010›. Arendell, Terry. “Conceiving and Investigating Motherhood: The Decade's Scholarship.” Journal of Marriage and the Family 62.4 (2000): 1192–207. Bittman, Michael. Juggling Time: How Australian Families Use Time. Office of the Status of Women, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet: Canberra, 1991. 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Abstract:

In its preamble, The Western Australian Charter of Multiculturalism (WA) commits the state to becoming: “A society in which respect for mutual difference is accompanied by equality of opportunity within a framework of democratic citizenship”. One of the principles of multiculturalism, as enunciated in the Charter, is “equality of opportunity for all members of society to achieve their full potential in a free and democratic society where every individual is equal before and under the law”. An important element of this principle is the “equality of opportunity … to achieve … full potential”. The implication here is that those who start from a position of disadvantage when it comes to achieving that potential deserve more than ‘equal’ treatment. Implicitly, equality can be achieved only through the recognition of and response to differential needs and according to the likelihood of achieving full potential. This is encapsulated in Kymlicka’s argument that neutrality is “hopelessly inadequate once we look at the diversity of cultural membership which exists in contemporary liberal democracies” (903). Yet such a potential commitment to differential support might seem unequal to some, where equality is constructed as the same or equal treatment regardless of differing circ*mstances. Until the past half-century or more, this problematic has been a hotly-contested element of the struggle for Civil Rights for African-Americans in the United States, especially as these rights related to educational opportunity during the years of racial segregation. For some, providing resources to achieve equal outcomes (rather than be committed to equal inputs) may appear to undermine the very ethos of liberal democracy. In Australia, this perspective has been the central argument of Pauline Hanson and her supporters who denounce programs designed as measures to achieve equality for specific disadvantaged groups; including Indigenous Australians and humanitarian refugees. Nevertheless, equality for all on all grounds of legally-accepted difference: gender, race, age, family status, sexual orientation, political conviction, to name a few; is often held as the hallmark of progressive liberal societies such as Australia. In the matter of religious freedoms the situation seems much less complex. All that is required for religious equality, it seems, is to define religion as a private matter – carried out, as it were, between consenting parties away from the public sphere. This necessitates, effectively, the separation of state and religion. This separation of religious belief from the apparatus of the state is referred to as ‘secularism’ and it tends to be regarded as a cornerstone of a liberal democracy, given the general assumption that secularism is a necessary precursor to equal treatment of and respect for different religious beliefs, and the association of secularism with the Western project of the Enlightenment when liberty, equality and science replaced religion and superstition. By this token, western nations committed to equality are also committed to being liberal, democratic and secular in nature; and it is a matter of state indifference as to which religious faith a citizen embraces – Wiccan, Christian, Judaism, etc – if any. Historically, and arguably more so in the past decade, the terms ‘democratic’, ‘secular’, ‘liberal’ and ‘equal’ have all been used to inscribe characteristics of the collective ‘West’. Individuals and states whom the West ascribe as ‘other’ are therefore either or all of: not democratic; not liberal; or not secular – and failing any one of these characteristics (for any country other than Britain, with its parliamentary-established Church of England, headed by the Queen as Supreme Governor) means that that country certainly does not espouse equality. The West and the ‘Other’ in Popular Discourse The constructed polarisation between the free, secular and democratic West that values equality; and the oppressive ‘other’ that perpetuates theocracies, religious discrimination and – at the ultimate – human rights abuses, is a common theme in much of the West’s media and popular discourse on Islam. The same themes are also applied in some measure to Muslims in Australia, in particular to constructions of the rights of Muslim women in Australia. Typically, Muslim women’s dress is deemed by some secular Australians to be a symbol of religious subjugation, rather than of free choice. Arguably, this polemic has come to the fore since the terrorist attacks on the United States in September 2001. However, as Aly and Walker note, the comparisons between the West and the ‘other’ are historically constructed and inherited (Said) and have tended latterly to focus western attention on the role and status of Muslim women as evidence of the West’s progression comparative to its antithesis, Eastern oppression. An examination of studies of the United States media coverage of the September 11 attacks, and the ensuing ‘war on terror’, reveals some common media constructions around good versus evil. There is no equal status between these. Good must necessarily triumph. In the media coverage, the evil ‘other’ is Islamic terrorism, personified by Osama bin Laden. Part of the justification for the war on terror is a perception that the West, as a force for good in this world, must battle evil and protect freedom and democracy (Erjavec and Volcic): to do otherwise is to allow the terror of the ‘other’ to seep into western lives. The war on terror becomes the defence of the west, and hence the defence of equality and freedom. A commitment to equality entails a defeat of all things constructed as denying the rights of people to be equal. Hutcheson, Domke, Billeaudeaux and Garland analysed the range of discourses evident in Time and Newsweek magazines in the five weeks following September 11 and found that journalists replicated themes of national identity present in the communication strategies of US leaders and elites. The political and media response to the threat of the evil ‘other’ is to create a monolithic appeal to liberal values which are constructed as being a monopoly of the ‘free’ West. A brief look at just a few instances of public communication by US political leaders confirms Hutcheson et al.’s contention that the official construction of the 2001 attacks invoked discourses of good and evil reminiscent of the Cold War. In reference to the actions of the four teams of plane hijackers, US president George W Bush opened his Address to the Nation on the evening of September 11: “Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts” (“Statement by the President in His Address to the Nation”). After enjoining Americans to recite Psalm 23 in prayer for the victims and their families, President Bush ended his address with a clear message of national unity and a further reference to the battle between good and evil: “This is a day when all Americans from every walk of life unite in our resolve for justice and peace. America has stood down enemies before, and we will do so this time. None of us will ever forget this day. Yet, we go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world” (“Statement by the President in His Address to the Nation”). In his address to the joint houses of Congress shortly after September 11, President Bush implicated not just the United States in this fight against evil, but the entire international community stating: “This is the world’s fight. This is civilisation’s fight” (cited by Brown 295). Addressing the California Business Association a month later, in October 2001, Bush reiterated the notion of the United States as the leading nation in the moral fight against evil, and identified this as a possible reason for the attack: “This great state is known for its diversity – people of all races, all religions, and all nationalities. They’ve come here to live a better life, to find freedom, to live in peace and security, with tolerance and with justice. When the terrorists attacked America, this is what they attacked”. While the US media framed the events of September 11 as an attack on the values of democracy and liberalism as these are embodied in US democratic traditions, work by scholars analysing the Australian media’s representation of the attacks suggested that this perspective was echoed and internationalised for an Australian audience. Green asserts that global media coverage of the attacks positioned the global audience, including Australians, as ‘American’. The localisation of the discourses of patriotism and national identity for Australian audiences has mainly been attributed to the media’s use of the good versus evil frame that constructed the West as good, virtuous and moral and invited Australian audiences to subscribe to this argument as members of a shared Western democratic identity (Osuri and Banerjee). Further, where the ‘we’ are defenders of justice, equality and the rule of law; the opposing ‘others’ are necessarily barbaric. Secularism and the Muslim Diaspora Secularism is a historically laden term that has been harnessed to symbolise the emancipation of social life from the forced imposition of religious doctrine. The struggle between the essentially voluntary and private demands of religion, and the enjoyment of a public social life distinct from religious obligations, is historically entrenched in the cultural identities of many modern Western societies (Dallmayr). The concept of religious freedom in the West has evolved into a principle based on the bifurcation of life into the objective public sphere and the subjective private sphere within which individuals are free to practice their religion of choice (Yousif), or no religion at all. Secularism, then, is contingent on the maintenance of a separation between the public (religion-free) and the private or non- public (which may include religion). The debate regarding the feasibility or lack thereof of maintaining this separation has been a matter of concern for democratic theorists for some time, and has been made somewhat more complicated with the growing presence of religious diasporas in liberal democratic states (Charney). In fact, secularism is often cited as a precondition for the existence of religious pluralism. By removing religion from the public domain of the state, religious freedom, in so far as it constitutes the ability of an individual to freely choose which religion, if any, to practice, is deemed to be ensured. However, as Yousif notes, the Western conception of religious freedom is based on a narrow notion of religion as a personal matter, possibly a private emotional response to the idea of God, separate from the rational aspects of life which reside in the public domain. Arguably, religion is conceived of as recognising (or creating) a supernatural dimension to life that involves faith and belief, and the suspension of rational thought. This Western notion of religion as separate from the state, dividing the private from the public sphere, is constructed as a necessary basis for the liberal democratic commitment to secularism, and the notional equality of all religions, or none. Rawls questioned how people with conflicting political views and ideologies can freely endorse a common political regime in secular nations. The answer, he posits, lies in the conception of justice as a mechanism to regulate society independently of plural (and often opposing) religious or political conceptions. Thus, secularism can be constructed as an indicator of pluralism and justice; and political reason becomes the “common currency of debate in a pluralist society” (Charney 7). A corollary of this is that religious minorities must learn to use the language of political reason to represent and articulate their views and opinions in the public context, especially when talking with non-religious others. This imposes a need for religious minorities to support their views and opinions with political reason that appeals to the community at large as citizens, and not just to members of the minority religion concerned. The common ground becomes one of secularism, in which all speakers are deemed to be indifferent as to the (private) claims of religion upon believers. Minority religious groups, such as fundamentalist Mormons, invoke secular language of moral tolerance and civil rights to be acknowledged by the state, and to carry out their door-to-door ‘information’ evangelisation/campaigns. Right wing fundamentalist Christian groups and Catholics opposed to abortion couch their views in terms of an extension of the secular right to life, and in terms of the human rights and civil liberties of the yet-to-be-born. In doing this, these religious groups express an acceptance of the plurality of the liberal state and engage in debates in the public sphere through the language of political values and political principles of the liberal democratic state. The same principles do not apply within their own associations and communities where the language of the private religious realm prevails, and indeed is expected. This embracing of a political rhetoric for discussions of religion in the public sphere presents a dilemma for the Muslim diaspora in liberal democratic states. For many Muslims, religion is a complete way of life, incapable of compartmentalisation. The narrow Western concept of religious expression as a private matter is somewhat alien to Muslims who are either unable or unwilling to separate their religious needs from their needs as citizens of the nation state. Problems become apparent when religious needs challenge what seems to be publicly acceptable, and conflicts occur between what the state perceives to be matters of rational state interest and what Muslims perceive to be matters of religious identity. Muslim women’s groups in Western Australia for example have for some years discussed the desirability of a Sharia divorce court which would enable Muslims to obtain divorces according to Islamic law. It should be noted here that not all Muslims agree with the need for such a court and many – probably a majority – are satisfied with the existing processes that allow Muslim men and women to obtain a divorce through the Australian family court. For some Muslims however, this secular process does not satisfy their religious needs and it is perceived as having an adverse impact on their ability to adhere to their faith. A similar situation pertains to divorced Catholics who, according to a strict interpretation of their doctrine, are unable to take the Eucharist if they form a subsequent relationship (even if married according to the state), unless their prior marriage has been annulled by the Catholic Church or their previous partner has died. Whereas divorce is considered by the state as a public and legal concern, for some Muslims and others it is undeniably a religious matter. The suggestion by the Anglican Communion’s Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, that the adoption of certain aspects of Sharia law regarding marital disputes or financial matters is ultimately unavoidable, sparked controversy in Britain and in Australia. Attempts by some Australian Muslim scholars to elaborate on Dr Williams’s suggestions, such as an article by Anisa Buckley in The Herald Sun (Buckley), drew responses that, typically, called for Muslims to ‘go home’. A common theme in these responses is that proponents of Sharia law (and Islam in general) do not share a commitment to the Australian values of freedom and equality. The following excerpts from the online pages of Herald Sun Readers’ Comments (Herald Sun) demonstrate this perception: “These people come to Australia for freedoms they have never experienced before and to escape repression which is generally brought about by such ‘laws’ as Sharia! How very dare they even think that this would be an option. Go home if you want such a regime. Such an insult to want to come over to this country on our very goodwill and our humanity and want to change our systems and ways. Simply, No!” Posted 1:58am February 12, 2008 “Under our English derived common law statutes, the law is supposed to protect an individual’s rights to life, liberty and property. That is the basis of democracy in Australia and most other western nations. Sharia law does not adequately share these philosophies and principles, thus it is incompatible with our system of law.” Posted 12:55am February 11, 2008 “Incorporating religious laws in the secular legal system is just plain wrong. No fundamentalist religion (Islam in particular) is compatible with a liberal-democracy.” Posted 2:23pm February 10, 2008 “It should not be allowed in Australia the Muslims come her for a better life and we give them that opportunity but they still believe in covering them selfs why do they even come to Australia for when they don’t follow owe [our] rules but if we went to there [their] country we have to cover owe selfs [sic]” Posted 11:28am February 10, 2008 Conflicts similar to this one – over any overt or non-private religious practice in Australia – may also be observed in public debates concerning the wearing of traditional Islamic dress; the slaughter of animals for consumption; Islamic burial rites, and other religious practices which cannot be confined to the private realm. Such conflicts highlight the inability of the rational liberal approach to solve all controversies arising from religious traditions that enjoin a broader world view than merely private spirituality. In order to adhere to the liberal reduction of religion to the private sphere, Muslims in the West must negotiate some religious practices that are constructed as being at odds with the rational state and practice a form of Islam that is consistent with secularism. At the extreme, this Western-acceptable form is what the Australian government has termed ‘moderate Islam’. The implication here is that, for the state, ‘non-moderate Islam’ – Islam that pervades the public realm – is just a descriptor away from ‘extreme’. The divide between Christianity and Islam has been historically played out in European Christendom as a refusal to recognise Islam as a world religion, preferring instead to classify it according to race or ethnicity: a Moorish tendency, perhaps. The secular state prefers to engage with Muslims as an ethnic, linguistic or cultural group or groups (Yousif). Thus, in order to engage with the state as political citizens, Muslims must find ways to present their needs that meet the expectations of the state – ways that do not use their religious identity as a frame of reference. They can do this by utilizing the language of political reason in the public domain or by framing their needs, views and opinions exclusively in terms of their ethnic or cultural identity with no reference to their shared faith. Neither option is ideal, or indeed even viable. This is partly because many Muslims find it difficult if not impossible to separate their religious needs from their needs as political citizens; and also because the prevailing perception of Muslims in the media and public arena is constructed on the basis of an understanding of Islam as a religion that conflicts with the values of liberal democracy. In the media and public arena, little consideration is given to the vast differences that exist among Muslims in Australia, not only in terms of ethnicity and culture, but also in terms of practice and doctrine (Shia or Sunni). The dominant construction of Muslims in the Australian popular media is of religious purists committed to annihilating liberal, secular governments and replacing them with anti-modernist theocratic regimes (Brasted). It becomes a talking point for some, for example, to realise that there are international campaigns to recognise Gay Muslims’ rights within their faith (ABC) (in the same way that there are campaigns to recognise Gay Christians as full members of their churches and denominations and equally able to hold high office, as followers of the Anglican Communion will appreciate). Secularism, Preference and Equality Modood asserts that the extent to which a minority religious community can fully participate in the public and political life of the secular nation state is contingent on the extent to which religion is the primary marker of identity. “It may well be the case therefore that if a faith is the primary identity of any community then that community cannot fully identify with and participate in a polity to the extent that it privileges a rival faith. Or privileges secularism” (60). Modood is not saying here that Islam has to be privileged in order for Muslims to participate fully in the polity; but that no other religion, nor secularism, should be so privileged. None should be first, or last, among equals. For such a situation to occur, Islam would have to be equally acceptable both with other religions and with secularism. Following a 2006 address by the former treasurer (and self-avowed Christian) Peter Costello to the Sydney Institute, in which Costello suggested that people who feel a dual claim from both Islamic law and Australian law should be stripped of their citizenship (Costello), the former Prime Minister, John Howard, affirmed what he considers to be Australia’s primary identity when he stated that ‘Australia’s core set of values flowed from its Anglo Saxon identity’ and that any one who did not embrace those values should not be allowed into the country (Humphries). The (then) Prime Minister’s statement is an unequivocal assertion of the privileged position of the Anglo Saxon tradition in Australia, a tradition with which many Muslims and others in Australia find it difficult to identify. Conclusion Religious identity is increasingly becoming the identity of choice for Muslims in Australia, partly because it is perceived that their faith is under attack and that it needs defending (Aly). They construct the defence of their faith as a choice and an obligation; but also as a right that they have under Australian law as equal citizens in a secular state (Aly and Green). Australian Muslims who have no difficulty in reconciling their core Australianness with their deep faith take it as a responsibility to live their lives in ways that model the reconciliation of each identity – civil and religious – with the other. In this respect, the political call to Australian Muslims to embrace a ‘moderate Islam’, where this is seen as an Islam without a public or political dimension, is constructed as treating their faith as less than equal. Religious identity is generally deemed to have no place in the liberal democratic model, particularly where that religion is constructed to be at odds with the principles and values of liberal democracy, namely tolerance and adherence to the rule of law. Indeed, it is as if the national commitment to secularism rules as out-of-bounds any identity that is grounded in religion, giving precedence instead to accepting and negotiating cultural and ethnic differences. Religion becomes a taboo topic in these terms, an affront against secularism and the values of the Enlightenment that include liberty and equality. In these circ*mstances, it is not the case that all religions are equally ignored in a secular framework. What is the case is that the secular framework has been constructed as a way of ‘privatising’ one religion, Christianity; leaving others – including Islam – as having nowhere to go. Islam thus becomes constructed as less than equal since it appears that, unlike Christians, Muslims are not willing to play the secular game. In fact, Muslims are puzzling over how they can play the secular game, and why they should play the secular game, given that – as is the case with Christians – they see no contradiction in performing ‘good Muslim’ and ‘good Australian’, if given an equal chance to embrace both. Acknowledgements This paper is based on the findings of an Australian Research Council Discovery Project, 2005-7, involving 10 focus groups and 60 in-depth interviews. The authors wish to acknowledge the participation and contributions of WA community members. References ABC. “A Jihad for Love.” Life Matters (Radio National), 21 Feb. 2008. 11 March 2008. < http://www.abc.net.au/rn/lifematters/stories/2008/2167874.htm >.Aly, Anne. “Australian Muslim Responses to the Discourse on Terrorism in the Australian Popular Media.” Australian Journal of Social Issues 42.1 (2007): 27-40.Aly, Anne, and Lelia Green. “‘Moderate Islam’: Defining the Good Citizen.” M/C Journal 10.6/11.1 (2008). 13 April 2008 < http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/08aly-green.php >.Aly, Anne, and David Walker. “Veiled Threats: Recurrent Anxieties in Australia.” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 27.2 (2007): 203-14.Brasted, Howard.V. “Contested Representations in Historical Perspective: Images of Islam and the Australian Press 1950-2000.” Muslim Communities in Australia. Eds. Abdullah Saeed and Akbarzadeh, Shahram. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2001. 206-28.Brown, Chris. “Narratives of Religion, Civilization and Modernity.” Worlds in Collision: Terror and the Future of Global Order. Eds. Ken Booth and Tim Dunne. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. 293-324. Buckley, Anisa. “Should We Allow Sharia Law?” Sunday Herald Sun 10 Feb. 2008. 8 March 2008 < http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,231869735000117,00.html >.Bush, George. W. “President Outlines War Effort: Remarks by the President at the California Business Association Breakfast.” California Business Association 2001. 17 April 2007 < http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/10/20011017-15.html >.———. “Statement by the President in His Address to the Nation”. Washington, 2001. 17 April 2007 < http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010911-16.html >.Charney, Evan. “Political Liberalism, Deliberative Democracy, and the Public Sphere.” The American Political Science Review 92.1 (1998): 97- 111.Costello, Peter. “Worth Promoting, Worth Defending: Australian Citizenship, What It Means and How to Nurture It.” Address to the Sydney Institute, 23 February 2006. 24 Apr. 2008 < http://www.treasurer.gov.au/DisplayDocs.aspx?doc=speeches/2006/004.htm &pageID=05&min=phc&Year=2006&DocType=1 >.Dallmayr, Fred. “Rethinking Secularism.” The Review of Politics 61.4 (1999): 715-36.Erjavec, Karmen, and Zala Volcic. “‘War on Terrorism’ as Discursive Battleground: Serbian Recontextualisation of G. W. Bush’s Discourse.” Discourse and Society 18 (2007): 123- 37.Green, Lelia. “Did the World Really Change on 9/11?” Australian Journal of Communication 29.2 (2002): 1-14.Herald Sun. “Readers’ Comments: Should We Allow Sharia Law?” Herald Sun Online Feb. 2008. 8 March 2008. < http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/comments/0,22023,23186973-5000117,00.html >.Humphries, David. “Live Here, Be Australian.” The Sydney Morning Herald 25 Feb. 2006, 1 ed.Hutcheson, John S., David Domke, Andre Billeaudeaux, and Philip Garland. “U.S. National Identity, Political Elites, and Patriotic Press Following September 11.” Political Communication 21.1 (2004): 27-50.Kymlicka, Will. “Liberal Individualism and Liberal Neutrality.” Ethics 99.4 (1989): 883-905.Modood, Tariq. “Establishment, Multiculturalism and British Citizenship.” The Political Quarterly (1994): 53-74.Osuri, Goldie, and Subhabrata B. Banerjee. “White Diasporas: Media Representations of September 11 and the Unbearable Whiteness of Being in Australia.” Social Semiotics 14.2 (2004): 151- 71.Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1971.Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books 1978.Western Australian Charter of Multiculturalism. WA: Government of Western Australia, Nov. 2004. 11 March 2008 < http://www.equalopportunity.wa.gov.au/pdf/wa_charter_multiculturalism.pdf >.Yousif, Ahmad. “Islam, Minorities and Religious Freedom: A Challenge to Modern Theory of Pluralism.” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 20.1 (2000): 30-43.

Abstract:

We Break Up, I Publish: Theorising and Emotional Processing like Taylor Swift In 2007 after the rather painful end of my first long-term same-sex relationship I asked myself two questions (and like a good graduate student wrote a paper about it that was subsequently published): (1) what is love; (2) and if love exists, are queer and straight love somehow different. I asked myself the second question because, unlike my previous “straight” breakups (back when I honestly thought I was straight), this one was different, was far more messy, and seemed to have a lot to do with the fact that my then fresh ex-boyfriend and I had dramatically different ideas about how the relationship should look, work, be codified, or if it should or could be codified. It was an eye-opening experience since the truth that these different ideas existed—basically his point of view—really only “came out” in my mind through the act and learning involved in that breakup. Until then, from a Queer Theory perspective, you could have described me as a “man who had sex with men,” called himself hom*osexual, but was so hom*onormative that if you’d approached me with even a light version of Michel Foucault’s thoughts on “Friendship as a Way of Life” I’d have looked at you as queerly, and cluelessly, as possible. Mainstream Queer Theory would have put the end of the relationship down to the difference and conflict between what is pejoratively called the “marriage-chasing-Gay-normaliser,” represented by me, and the “radical-Queer(ness)-of-difference” represented by my ex-boyfriend, although like a lot of theory, that misses the personal (which I recall being political...), and a whole host of non-theoretical problems that plagued that relationship. Basically I thought Queer/hom*osexual/Lesbian/Transgendered and the rest of the alphabet soup was exactly the same as Straight folks both with respect to a subjective understanding of the self, social relations and formations, and how you acted or enacted yourself in public and private except in the bedroom.. I thought, since Canada had legalised same-sex marriage, all was well and equal (other than the occasional hate-crime which would then be justly punished). Of course I understood that at that point Canada was the exception and not the rule with respect to same-sex rights and same-sex marriage, so it followed in my mind that most of our time collectively should be spent supporting those south of the border or overseas who still faced restrictions on these basic rights, or out-and-out violence, persecution and even state-sanctioned death for just being who they are and/or trying to express it. And now, five years on, stating that Canada is the exception as opposed to the rule with respect to the legalisation of same-sex marriage and the codification of same-sex rights in law has the potential to be outdated as the recent successes of social movements, court rulings and the tenor of political debate and voting has shifted internationally with rapid speed. But it was only because of that breakup that these theoretical and practical issues had come out of my queer closet and for the first time I started to question some necessary link between love and codification (marriage), and how the queer in Queer relationships does or potentially can disrupt this link. And not just for Queers, but for Straight folk too, which is the primary point that should be underlined now and is addressed at the end of this paper. Because, embittered as I was at the time, I still basically agree with the theoretical position that I came to in that paper on love—based on a queering of the terms of Alain Badiou—where I affirmed that love resisted codification, especially in its queer form, because it is fidelity to an act and truth between two or more partners which resists the rigid walls of State-based codification (Potts, Love Hurts; Badiou, Ethics and Saint Paul). But as one of the peer reviewers for this paper rightly pointed out, the above distinctions between my ex and myself implicitly rely upon a State-centric model of rights and freedoms, which I attacked in the first paper, but which I freely admit I am guilty of utilising and arguing in favour of here. But that is because I am interested, here, not in talking about love as an abstract concept towards which we should work in our personal relationships, but as the state of things, and specifically the state of same-sex marriage and the discourse and images which surrounds it, which means that the State does matter. This is specifically so given the lack of meaningful challenges to the State System in Canada and the US. I maintain, following Butler, that it is through power, and our response to the representatives of power “hailing us,” that we become bodies that matter and subjects (Bodies That Matter; The Psychic Life of Power; and Giving An Account of Oneself). While her re-reading of Althusser in these texts argues that we should come to a philosophical and political position which challenges this State-based form of subject creation and power, she also notes that politically and philosophically we have yet to articulate such a position clearly, and I’d say that this is especially the case for what is covered and argued in the mainstream (media) debate on same-sex marriage. So apropos what is arguably Foucault’s most mature analysis of “power,” and while agreeing that my State-based argument for inclusion and rights does indeed strengthen the “biopolitical” (The History of Sexuality 140 and 145) control over, in this case, Queer populations, I argue that this is nonetheless the political reality with which we are working in and analyzing, and that is my concern here. Despite a personal desire that this not be the case, the State or state sanctioned institutions do continue to hold a monopoly of power in conferring subjecthood and rights. To take a page from Jeremy Bentham, I would say that arguing from a position which does not start from or seriously consider the State as the current basis for rights and subjecthood, though potentially less ethically problematic and more in line with my personal politics, is tantamount to talking and arguing about “nonsense on stilts.” “Caught in a Bad Romance?” Comparing hom*onationalist Trajectories and the Appeal of Militarist Discourse to LGBT Grassroots Organisations In comparing the discourses and enframings of the debate over same-sex marriage between Canada in the mid 1990s and early 2000s and in the US today, one might presume that how it came to say “I do” in Canada and how it might or might not get “left at the altar” in the US, is the result of very different national cultures. But this would just subscribe to one of a number of “cultural explanations” for perceived differences between Canada and the US that are usually built upon straw-man comparisons which then pillorise the US for something or other. And in doing so it would continue an obscuration that Canada, unlike the US, is unproblematically open and accepting when it comes to multicultural, multiracial and multisexual diversity and inclusion. Which Canada isn’t nor has it ever been. When you look at the current discourse in both countries—by their key political representatives on the international stage—you find the opposite. In the US, you have President Barack Obama, the first sitting President to come out in favour of same-sex marriage, and the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, setting same-sex rights at home and abroad as key policy planks (Gay Rights are Human Rights). Meanwhile, in Canada, you have Prime Minister Stephen Harper, in office since 2006, openly support his Conservative Party’s “traditional marriage” policy which is thankfully made difficult to implement because of the courts, and John Baird, the badly closeted Minister of Foreign Affairs, who doesn’t mention same-sex rights at home or with respect to foreign relations—unless it is used as supplementary evidence to further other foreign policy goals (c.f. Seguin)—only showing off his sexuality outside of the press-gallery to drum up gay-conservative votes or gay-conservative fundraising at LGBTQ community events which his government is then apt to pull funding for (c.f. Bradshaw). Of course my point is not to just reverse the stereotypes, painting an idyllic picture of the US and a grim one of Canada. What I want to problematise is the supposed national cultural distinctions which are naturalised when arguments are made through them as to why same-sex marriage was legalised in Canada, while the Defense of Marriage Act still stands in the US. To follow and extend Jasbir Puar’s argument from Terrorist Assemblages, what we see in both same-sex marriage debates and discourses is really the same phenomenon, but, so far, with different outcomes and having different manifestations. Puar contends that same-sex rights, like most equalising rights for minority groups, are only granted when all three of the following conditions prevail: (1) in a state or narrative of exception, where the nation grants a minority group equal rights because “the nation” feels threatened from without; (2) only on the condition that normalisation (or hom*onormalisation in the case of the Queer community) occurs, with those who don’t conform pushed further from a place in the national-subject; (3) and that the price of admission into being the “allowed Queer” is an ultra-patriotic identification with the Nation. In Canada, the state or narrative of exception was an “attack” from within which resulted in the third criterion being downplayed (although it is still present). Court challenges in a number of provinces led in each case to a successful ruling in favour of legalising same-sex marriage. Appeals to these rulings made their way to the Supreme Court, who likewise ruled in favour of the legalisation of same-sex marriage. This ruling came with an order to the Canadian Parliament that it had to change the existing marriage laws and definition of marriage to make it inclusive of same-sex marriage. This “attack” was performed by the judiciary who have traditionally (c.f. Makin) been much less partisan in appointment or ruling than their counterparts in the US. When new marriage laws were proposed to take account of the direction made by the courts, the governing Liberal Party and then Prime Minister Paul Martin made it a “free vote” so members of his own party could vote against it if they chose. Although granted with only lacklustre support by the governing party, the Canadian LGBTQ community rejoiced and became less politically active, because we’d won, right? International Queers flocked to Canada—one in four same-sex weddings since legalisation in Canada have been to out of country residents (Postmedia News)—as long as they had the proper socioeconomic profile (which is also a racialised profile) to afford the trip and wedding. This caused a budding same-sex marriage tourism and queer love normalisation industry to be built around the Canada Queer experience because especially at the time of legalisation Canada was still one of the few countries to allow for same-sex marriages. What this all means is that hom*onationalism in Canada is much less charged. It manifests itself as fitting in and not just keeping up with the Joneses when it comes to things like community engagement and Parent Teacher Association (PTA) meetings, but trying to do them one better (although only by a bit so as not to offend). In essence, the comparatively bland process in the 1990s by which Canada slowly underwent a state of exception by a non-politically charged and non-radical professional judiciary simply interpreting the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms at the provincial and then the federal level is mirrored in the rather bland and non-radical hom*onationalism which resulted. So unlike the US, the rhetoric of the LGBT community stays subdued unless there’s a hint that the right to same-sex divorce might get hit by Conservative Party guns, in which case all hell breaks loose (c.f. Ha). While the US is subject to the same set of logics for the currently in-progress enactment of legalising same-sex marriage, the state of exception is dramatically different. Puar argues it is the never-ending War on Terror. This also means that the enframings and debate in the US are exceptionally charged and political, leading to a very different type of hom*onationalism and hom*onationalist subject than is found in Canada. American hom*onationalism has not radically changed from Puar’s description, but due to leadership from the top (Obama, Clinton and Lady Gaga) the intensity and thereby structured confinement of what is an acceptable Queer-American subject has become increasingly rigid. What is included and given rights is the hyper-patriotic queer-soldier, the defender of the nation. And what reinforces the rigidity of what amounts to a new “glass closet” for queers is that grassroots organisations have bought into the same rhetoric, logic, and direction as to how to achieve equality as the Homecoming advertisem*nt from the Equal Love Campaign in Britain shows. For the other long-leading nation engaged in the War on Terror narrative, Homecoming provides the imagery of a gay member of the armed services draped in the flag proposing to his partner at the end of duty overseas that ends with the following text: “All men can be heroes. All men can be husbands. End discrimination.” Can’t get more patriotic—and heteronormative with the use of the term “husbands”—than that. Well, unless you’re Lady Gaga. Now Lady Gaga stands out as a public figure whom has taken an explicitly pro-queer and pro-LGBT stance from the outset of her career. And I do not want to diminish the fact that she has been admirably effective in her campaigning and consistent pro-queer and pro-LGBT stance. While above I characterised her input above as leadership from the top, she also, in effect, by standing outside of State Power unlike Obama and Clinton, and being able to be critical of it, is able to push the State in a more progressive direction. This was most obviously evidenced in her very public criticism of the Democratic Party and President Obama for not moving quickly enough to adopt a more pro-queer and pro-LGBT stance after the 2008 election where such promises were made. So Lady Gaga plays a doubled role whereby she also acts as a spokesperson for the grassroots—some would call this co-opting, but that is not the charge made here as she has more accurately given her pre-existing spotlight and Twitter and Facebook presence over to progressive campaigns—and, given her large mainstream media appeal and willingness to use this space to argue for queer and LGBT rights, performs the function of a grassroots organisation by herself as far as the general public is concerned. And in her recent queer activism we see the same sort of discourse and images utilised as in Homecoming. Her work over the first term of Obama’s Presidency—what I’m going to call “The Lady Gaga Offensive”—is indicative: she literally and metaphorically wrapped herself in the American flag, screaming “Obama, ARE YOU LISTENING!!! Repeal ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ and [have the hom*ophobic soldiers] go home, go home, go home!” (Lady Gaga Rallies for Repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell). And presumably to the same home of otherness that is occupied by the terrorist or anything that falls under the blanket of “anti-American” in Puar’s critique of this approach to political activism. This speech was modelled on her highly successful one at the National Equality March in 2009, which she ended with “Bless God and Bless the Gays.” When the highly watched speeches are taken together you literally can’t top them for Americanness, unless it is by a piece of old-fashioned American apple-pie bought at a National Rifle Association (NRA) bake-sale. And is likely why, after Obama’s same-sex “evolution,” the pre-election ads put out by the Democratic Party this year focused so heavily on the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and the queer patriotic soldier or veteran’s obligation to or previous service in bearing arms for the country. Now if the goal is to get formal and legal equality quickly, then as a political strategy, to get people onside with same-sex marriage, and from that place to same-sex rights and equal social recognition and respect, this might be a good idea. Before, that is, moving on to a strategy that actually gets to the roots of social inequality and doesn’t rely on “hate of ‘the other’” which Puar’s analysis points out is both a byproduct of and rooted in the base of any nationalist based appeal for minoritarian rights. And I want to underline that I am here talking about what strategy seems to be appealing to people, as opposed to arguing an ethically unproblematic and PC position on equality that is completely inclusive of all forms of love. Because Lady Gaga’s flag-covered and pro-military scream was answered by Obama with the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and the extension of some benefits to same-sex couples, and has Obama referring to Gaga as “your leader” in the pre-election ads and elsewhere. So it isn’t really surprising to find mainstream LGBT organisations adopting the same discourse and images to get same-sex rights including marriage. One can also take recent poll numbers from Canada as indicative as well. While only 10 percent of Canadians have trust in political parties, and 17 and 16 percent have trust in Parliament and Prime Minister Harper respectively, a whopping 53 percent have trust in the Canadian Forces (Leblanc). One aspect that undergirds Puar’s argument is that especially at a "time of war," more than average levels of affection or trust is shown for those institutions that defend “us,” so that if the face of that institution is reinscribed to the look of the hyper-patriotic queer-soldier (by advertising of the Homecoming sort which is produced not by the State but by grassroots LGBT organisations), then it looks like these groups seem to be banking that support for Gays and Lesbians in general, and same-sex marriage in specific, will further rise if LGBT and Queer become substantively linked in the imagination of the general public with the armed forces. But as 1980s Rockers Heart Asked: “But There’s Something That You Forgot. What about Love?” What these two hom*onationalist trajectories and rhetorics on same-sex marriage entirely skip over is how exactly you can codify “love.” Because isn’t that the purpose of marriage? Saying you can codify it is like grasping at a perfectly measured and exact cubic foot of air and telling it to stay put in the middle of a hurricane. So to return to how I ended my earlier exploration of love and if it could or should be codified: it means that as I affirm love, and as I remain in fidelity to it, I subject myself in my fundamental weakness constantly to the "not-known;" to constant heartbreak; to affirmations which I cannot betray as it would be a betrayal of the truth process itself. It's as if at the very moment the Beatles say the words 'All you need is love' they were subjected to wrenching heartbreak and still went on: 'All you need is love...' (Love Hurts) Which is really depressing when I look back at it now. But it was a bad breakup, and I can tend to the morose in word choice and cultural references when depressed. But it also remains essentially my position. If you impose “till death or divorce do us part” on to love you’re really only just participating in the chimera of static love and giving second wind to a patriarchal institution which has had a crappy record when it comes to equality. It also has the potential to preserve asymmetrical roles “traditional marriage” contains from when the institution was only extended to straight couples. And isn’t equality the underlying philosophical principle and political position that we’re supposedly fighting for if we’re arguing for an equal right to get married? Again, it’s important to try and codify the same rights for everyone through the State at the present time because I honestly don’t see major changes confronting the nation state system in Canada or the US in the near future. We remain the play-children of a digitally entrenched form of Foucaultian biopower that is State and Capital directed. Because while the Occupy Wall Street movements got a lot of hay in the press, I’ve yet to see any substantive or mainstreamed political change come out of them—if someone can direct me to their substantive contribution to the recent US election I’d be happy to revise my position—which is likely to our long term detriment. So this is a pragmatic analysis, one of locating one node in the matrices of power relations, of seeing how mainstream LGBT political organisations and Lady Gaga are applying the “theoretical tool kits” given to us by Foucault and Puar, and seeing how these organisations and Gaga are applying them, but in this case in a way that is likely counter to authorial intention(s) and personal politics (Power/Knowledge 145, 193; Terrorist Assemblages). So what this means is that we’re likely to continue to see, in mainstream images of same-sex couples put out by grassroots LGBT organisations, a hom*onationalism and ideological construction that grows more and more out of touch with Queer realities—the “upper-class house-holding PTA Gay”; although on a positive note I should point out that the Democratic Party in the US seems to be at least including both white and non-white faces in their pre-election same-sex marriage ads—and one that most Queers don’t or can’t fit themselves into especially when it comes down to the economic aspect of that picture, which is contradictory and problematic (c.f. Christopher). It also means that in the US the hom*onationalism on the horizon looks the same as in Canada except with a healthy dose of paranoia of outsiders and “the other” and a flag draped membership in the NRA, that is, for when the queer super-soldier is not in uniform. It’s a straightjacket for a closet that is becoming smaller because it seeks, through the images projected, inclusion for only a smaller and smaller social sub-set of the Lesbian and Gay community and leaves out more and more of the Queer community than it was five years ago when Puar described it. So instead of trying to dunk the queer into the institution of patriarchy, why not, by showing how so many Queers, their relationships, and their loving styles don’t fit into these archetypes help give everyone, including my “marriage-chasing-Gay-normaliser” former self a little “queer eye, for all eyes.” To look at and see modern straight marriage through the lenses and reasons LGBT and Queer communities (by-and-large) fought for years for access to it: as the codification and breakdown of some rights and responsibilities (i.e. taking care of children); as an act which gives you straightforward access to health benefits and hospital visitation rights; as an easy social signifier for others of a commitment to another person that doesn’t use diluted language like “special friend;” and because when it comes down to it that “in sickness and in health” part of the vow—in the language of a queered Badiou, a vow can be read as the affirmation of a universal and disinterested truth (love) and a moment which can’t be erased retrospectively, say, by divorce—seems like a sincere way to value at least one of those you really care for in the world. And hopefully it, as a side-benefit, it acts as a reminder but is not the actuality of that first fuzzy feeling which (hopefully) doesn’t go away. But I learned my lesson the first time and know that the fuzzy feeling might disappear as it often does. It doesn’t matter how far we try and cram it into any variety of hom*onationalist closets, since it’ll always find a way to not be there, no matter how tight you thought you’d locked the door to keep it in for good if it wants out. Because you can’t keep emotions by contract: so at the end of the day the logical, ethical and theoretically sound position is to argue for the abolition of marriage as an institution. However, Plato and others have been making that argument for thousands of years, and it still doesn’t seem to have gained popular traction. And we also need to realise, contrary to the opinion of my former self and The Beatles, that you really do need more than love as fidelity to an event of you and your partner’s making when you are being denied your partners health benefits just because you are a same-sex couple, especially when those health benefits could be saving your life. And if same-sex marriage codification is a quick fix for that and similar issues for those who can fit into the State sanctioned same-sex marriage walls, which admittedly leaves some members of the Queer community who don’t overlap out, as part of an overall and more inclusive strategy that does include them then I’m in favour of it. That is, till the time comes that Straight and Queer can, over time and with a lot of mutual social learning, explore how to recognise and give equal rights with or without State based codification to the multiple queer and sometimes polyamorous relationship models that already populate the Gay and Straight worlds right now. So in the meantime continue to count me down as a “marriage-chasing-Gay.” But just pragmatically, not to normalise, as one of a diversity of political strategies for equality and just for now. References Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. New York: Verso, 2001. ———. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003. Bradshaw, James. “Pride Toronto Denied Federal Funding.” The Globe and Mail. 7 May. 2012 ‹http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/pride-toronto-denied-federal-funding/article1211065/›. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge,1990. ———. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York: Routledge, 1993. ———. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge, 1997. ———. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997. ———. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham UP, 2005. Christopher, Nathaniel. “Openly Gay Men Make Less money, Survey Shows.” Xtra! .5 Nov. 2012 ‹http://www.xtra.ca/public/Vancouver/Openly_gay_men_make_less_money_survey_shows-12756.aspx›. Clinton, Hillary. “Gay Rights Are Human Rights, And Human Rights Are Gay Rights.” United Nations General Assembly. 26 Dec. 2011 ‹http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2011/12/06/383003/sec-clinton-to-un-gay-rights-are-human-rights-and-human-rights-are-gay-rights/?mobile=nc›. Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. Trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, Kate Soper. New York: Random House,1980. —. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Toronto: Random House, 1977. —. The History of Sexuality Volume One: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Random House, 1978. Heart. “What About Love.” Heart. Capitol Records, 1985. CD. Ha, Tu Thanh. “Dan Savage: ‘I Had Been Divorced Overnight’.” The Globe and Mail. 12 Jan. 2012 ‹http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/dan-savage-i-had-been-divorced-overnight/article1358211/›. “Homecoming.” Equal Love Campaign. ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a54UBWFXsF4›. Leblanc, Daniel. “Harper Among Least Trusted Leaders, Poll Shows.” The Globe and Mail. 12 Nov. 2012 ‹http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/harper-among-least-trusted-leaders-poll-shows/article5187774/#›. Makin, Kirk. “The Coming Conservative Court: Harper to Reshape Judiciary.” The Globe and Mail. 24 Aug. 2012 ‹http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/the-coming-conservative-court-harper-to-reshape-judiciary/article595398/›. “Lady Gaga Rallies for Repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ in Portland, Maine.” 9 Sep. 2010 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4rGla6OzGc›. “Lady Gaga Speaks at Gay Rights Rally in Washington DC as Part of the National Equality March.” 11 Oct. 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jepWXu-Z38›. “Obama’s Stirring New Gay Rights Ad.” Newzar.com. 24 May. 2012 ‹http://newzar.com/obamas-stirring-new-gay-rights-ad/›. Postmedia News. “Same-sex Marriage in Canada will not be Revisited, Harper Says.” 12 Jan. 2012 ‹http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/01/12/same-sex-marriage-in-canada-will-not-be-revisited-harper-says/›. Potts, Graham. “‘Love Hurts’: Hunter S. Thompson, the Marquis de Sade and St. Paul Queer Alain Badiou’s Truth and Fidelity.” CTheory. rt002: 2009 ‹http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=606›. Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: hom*onationalism in Queer Times. London: Duke UP, 2007. Seguin, Rheal. “Baird Calls Out Iran on Human Rights Violations.” The Globe and Mail. 22 Oct. 2012 ‹http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/baird-calls-out-iran-on-human-rights-violations/article4628968/›.

Abstract:

…love is queered not when we discover it to be resistant to or more than its known forms, but when we see that there is no world that admits how it actually works as a principle of living. Lauren Berlant – “Love, A Queer Feeling” As the sun beats down on a very dusty Musgrave Park, the crowd is hushed in respect for the elder addressing us. It is Pride Fair Day and we are listening to the story of how this place has been a home for queer and black people throughout Brisbane’s history. Like so many others, this park has been a place of refuge in times when Boundary Streets marked the lines aboriginal people couldn’t cross to enter the genteel heart of Brisbane’s commercial district. The street names remain today, and even if movements across territory are somewhat less constrained, a manslaughter trial taking place nearby reminds us of the surveillance aboriginal people still suffer as a result of their refusal to stay off the streets and out of sight in homes they don’t have. In the past few years, Fair Day has grown in size. It now charges an entry fee to fence out unwelcome guests, so that those who normally live here have been effectively uninvited from the party. On this sunny Saturday, we sit and talk about these things, and wonder at the number of spaces still left in this city for spontaneous, non-commercial encounters and alliances. We could hardly have known that in the course of just a few weeks, the distance separating us from others would grow even further. During the course of Brisbane’s month-long Pride celebrations in 2007, two events affected the rights agendas of both queer and black Australians. First, The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Report, Same Sex, Same Entitlements, was tabled in parliament. Second, the Federal government decided to declare a state of emergency in remote indigenous communities in the Northern Territory in response to an inquiry on the state of aboriginal child abuse. (The full title of the report is “Ampe Akelyernemane Meke Mekarle”: Little Children are Sacred, and the words are from the Arrandic languages of the Central Desert Region of the Northern Territory. The report’s front cover also explains the title in relation to traditional law of the Yolngu people of Arnhem Land.) While the latter issue has commanded the most media and intellectual attention, and will be discussed later in this piece, the timing of both reports provides an opportunity to consider the varying experiences of two particularly marginalised groups in contemporary Australia. In a period when the Liberal Party has succeeded in pitting minority claims against one another as various manifestations of “special interests” (Brett, Gregg) this essay suggests there is a case to be made for queer and black activists to join forces against wider tendencies that affect both communities. To do this I draw on the work of American critic, Lauren Berlant, who for many years has offered a unique take on debates about citizenship in the United States. Writing from a queer theory perspective, Berlant argues that the conservative political landscape in her country has succeeded in convincing people that “the intimacy of citizenship is something scarce and sacred, private and proper, and only for members of families” (Berlant Queen 2-3). The consequence of this shift is that politics moves from being a conversation conducted in the public sphere about social issues to instead resemble a form of adjudication on the conduct of others in the sphere of private life. In this way, Berlant indicates how heteronormative culture “uses cruel and mundane strategies both to promote change from non-normative populations and to deny them state, federal, and juridical supports because they are deemed morally incompetent to their own citizenship” (Berlant, Queen 19). In relation to the so-called state of emergency in the Northern Territory, coming so soon after attempts to encourage indigenous home-ownership in the same region, the compulsion to promote change from non-normative populations currently affects indigenous Australians in ways that resonate with Berlant’s argument. While her position reacts to an environment where the moral majority has a much firmer hold on the national political spectrum, in Australia these conservative forces have no need to be so eloquent—normativity is already embedded in a particular form of “ordinariness” that is the commonsense basis for public political debate (Allon, Brett and Moran). These issues take on further significance as home-ownership and aspirations towards it have gradually become synonymous with the demonstration of appropriate citizenship under the Coalition government: here, phrases like “an interest rate election” are assumed to encapsulate voter sentiment while “the mortgage belt” has emerged as the demographic most keenly wooed by precariously placed politicians. As Berlant argues elsewhere, the project of normalization that makes heterosexuality hegemonic also entails “material practices that, though not explicitly sexual, are implicated in the hierarchies of property and propriety” that secure heteronormative privilege (Berlant and Warner 548). Inhabitants of remote indigenous communities in Australia are invited to desire and enact normal homes in order to be accepted and rewarded as valuable members of the nation; meanwhile gay and lesbian couples base their claims for recognition on the adequate manifestation of normal homes. In this situation black and queer activists share an interest in elaborating forms of kinship and community that resist the limited varieties of home-building currently sanctioned and celebrated by the State. As such, I will conclude this essay with a model for this alternative process of home-building in the hope of inspiring others. Home Sweet Home Ever since the declaration of terra nullius, white Australia has had a hard time recognising homes it doesn’t consider normal. To the first settlers, indigenous people’s uncultivated land lacked meaning, their seasonal itinerancy challenged established notions of property, while their communal living and wider kinship relations confused nuclear models of procreative responsibility and ancestry. From the homes white people still call “camps” many aboriginal people were moved against their will on to “missions” which even in name invoked the goal of assimilation into mainstream society. So many years later, white people continue to maintain that their version of homemaking is the most superior, the most economically effective, the most functional, with government policy and media commentators both agreeing that “the way out of indigenous disadvantage is home ownership.”(The 1 July broadcast of the esteemed political chat show Insiders provides a representative example of this consensus view among some of the country’s most respected journalists.) In the past few months, low-interest loans have been touted as the surest route out of the shared “squalor” (Weekend Australian, June 30-July1) of communal living and the right path towards economic development in remote aboriginal communities (Karvelas, “New Deal”). As these references suggest, The Australian newspaper has been at the forefront of reporting these government initiatives in a positive light: one story from late May featured a picture of Tiwi Islander Mavis Kerinaiua watering her garden with the pet dog and sporting a Tigers Aussie Rules singlet. The headline, “Home, sweet home, for Mavis” (Wilson) was a striking example of a happy and contented black woman in her own backyard, especially given how regularly mainstream national news coverage of indigenous issues follows a script of failed aboriginal communities. In stories like these, communal land ownership is painted as the cause of dysfunction, and individual homes are crucial to “changing the culture.” Never is it mentioned that communal living arrangements clearly were functional before white settlement, were an intrinsic part of “the culture”; nor is it acknowledged that the option being offered to indigenous people is land that had already been taken away from them in one way or another. That this same land can be given back only on certain conditions—including financially rewarding those who “prove they are doing well” by cultivating their garden in recognisably right ways (Karvelas, “New Deal”)— bolsters Berlant’s claim that government rhetoric succeeds by transforming wider structural questions into matters of individual responsibility. Home ownership is the stunningly selective neoliberal interpretation of “land rights”. The very notion of private property erases the social and cultural underpinnings of communal living as a viable way of life, stigmatising any alternative forms of belonging that might form the basis for another kind of home. Little Children Are Sacred The latest advance in efforts to encourage greater individual responsibility in indigenous communities highlights child abuse as the pivotal consequence of State and Local government inaction. The innocent indigenous child provides the catalyst for a myriad of competing political positions, the most vocal of which welcomes military intervention on behalf of powerless, voiceless kids trapped in horrendous scenarios (Kervalas, “Pearson’s Passion”). In these representations, the potentially abused aboriginal child takes on “supericonicity” in public debate. In her North American context, Berlant uses this concept to explain how the unborn child figures in acrimonious arguments over abortion. The foetus has become the most mobilising image in the US political scene because: it is an image of an American, perhaps the last living American, not yet bruised by history: not yet caught up in the processes of secularisation and centralisation… This national icon is too innocent of knowledge, agency, and accountability and thus has ethical claims on the adult political agents who write laws, make culture, administer resources, control things. (Berlant, Queen 6) In Australia, the indigenous child takes on supericonicity because he or she is too young to formulate a “black armband” view of history, to have a point of view on why their circ*mstance happens to be so objectionable, to vote out the government that wants to survey and penetrate his or her body. The child’s very lack of agency is used as justification for the military action taken by those who write laws, make the culture that will be recognized as an appropriate performance of indigeneity, administer (at the same time as they cut) essential resources; those who, for the moment, control things. However, and although a government perspective would not recognize this, in Australia the indigenous child is always already bruised by conventional history in the sense that he or she will have trouble accessing the stories of ancestors and therefore the situation that affects his or her entry into the world. Indeed, it is precisely the extent to which the government denies its institutional culpability in inflicting wounds on aboriginal people throughout history that the indigenous child’s supericonicity is now available as a political weapon. Same-Sex: Same Entitlements A situation in which the desire for home ownership is pedagogically enforced while also being economically sanctioned takes on further dimensions when considered next to the fate of other marginalised groups in society—those for whom an appeal for acceptance and equal rights pivots on the basis of successfully performing normal homes. While indigenous Australians are encouraged to aspire for home ownership as the appropriate manifestation of responsible citizenship, the HREOC report represents a group of citizens who crave recognition for already having developed this same aspiration. In the case studies selected for the Same-Sex: Same Entitlements Report, discrimination against same-sex couples is identified in areas such as work and taxation, workers’ compensation, superannuation, social security, veterans’ entitlements and childrearing. It recommends changes to existing laws in these areas to match those that apply to de facto relationships. When launching the report, the commissioner argued that gay people suffer discrimination “simply because of whom they love”, and the report launch quotes a “self-described ‘average suburban family’” who insist “we don’t want special treatment …we just want equality” (HREOC). Such positioning exercises give some insight into Berlant’s statement that “love is a site that has perhaps not yet been queered enough” (Berlant, “Love” 433). A queer response to the report might highlight that by focussing on legal entitlements of the most material kind, little is done to challenge the wider situation in which one’s sexual relationship has the power to determine intimate possessions and decisions—whether this is buying a plane ticket, getting a loan, retiring in some comfort or finding a nice nursing home. An agenda calling for legislative changes to financial entitlement serves to reiterate rather than challenge the extent to which economically sanctioned subjectivities are tied to sexuality and normative models of home-building. A same-sex rights agenda promoting traditional notions of procreative familial attachment (the concerned parents of gay kids cited in the report, the emphasis on the children of gay couples) suggests that this movement for change relies on a heteronormative model—if this is understood as the manner in which the institutions of personal life remain “the privileged institutions of social reproduction, the accumulation and transfer of capital, and self-development” (Berlant and Warner 553). What happens to those who do not seek the same procreative path? Put another way, the same-sex entitlements discourse can be seen to demand “intelligibility” within the hegemonic understanding of love, when love currently stands as the primordial signifier and ultimate suturing device for all forms of safe, reliable and useful citizenly identity (Berlant, “Love”). In its very terminology, same-sex entitlement asks to access the benefits of normativity without challenging the ideological or economic bases for its attachment to particular living arrangements and rewards. The political agenda for same-sex rights taking shape in the Federal arena appears to have chosen its objectives carefully in order to fit existing notions of proper home building and the economic incentives that come with them. While this is understandable in a conservative political environment, a wider agenda for queer activism in and outside the home would acknowledge that safety, security and belonging are universal desires that stretch beyond material acquisitions, financial concerns and procreative activity (however important these things are). It is to the possibilities this perspective might generate that I now turn. One Size Fits Most Urban space is always a host space. The right to the city extends to those who use the city. It is not limited to property owners. (Berlant and Warner, 563) The affective charge and resonance of a concept like home allows an opportunity to consider the intimacies particular to different groups in society, at the same time as it allows contemplation of the kinds of alliances increasingly required to resist neoliberalism’s impact on personal space. On one level, this might entail publicly denouncing representations of indigenous living conditions that describe them as “squalor” as some kind of hygienic short-hand that comes at the expense of advocating infrastructure suited to the very different way of living that aboriginal kinship relations typically require. Further, as alternative cultural understandings of home face ongoing pressure to fit normative ideals, a key project for contemporary queer activism is to archive, document and publicise the varied ways people choose to live at this point in history in defiance of sanctioned arrangements (eg Gorman-Murray 2007). Rights for gay and lesbian couples and parents need not be called for in the name of equality if to do so means reproducing a logic that feeds the worst stereotypes around non-procreating queers. Such a perspective fares poorly for the many literally unproductive citizens, queer and straight alike, whose treacherous refusal to breed banishes them from the respectable suburban politics to which the current government caters. Which takes me back to the park. Later that afternoon on Fair Day, we’ve been entertained by a range of performers, including the best Tina Turner impersonator I’ll ever see. But the highlight is the festival’s special guest, Vanessa Wagner who decides to end her show with a special ceremony. Taking the role of celebrant, Vanessa invites three men on to the stage who she explains are in an ongoing, committed three-way relationship. Looking a little closer, I remember meeting these blokes at a friend’s party last Christmas Eve: I was the only girl in an apartment full of gay men in the midst of some serious partying (and who could blame them, on the eve of an event that holds dubious relevance for their preferred forms of intimacy and celebration?). The wedding takes place in front of an increasingly boisterous crowd that cannot fail to appreciate the gesture as farcically mocking the sacred bastion of gay activism—same-sex marriage. But clearly, the ceremony plays a role in consecrating the obvious desire these men have for each other, in a safe space that feels something like a home. Their relationship might be a long way from many people’s definition of normal, but it clearly operates with care, love and a will for some kind of longevity. For queer subjects, faced with a history of persecution, shame and an unequal share of a pernicious illness, this most banal of possible definitions of home has been a luxury difficult to afford. Understood in this way, queer experience is hard to compare with that of indigenous people: “The queer world is a space of entrances, exits, unsystematised lines of acquaintance, projected horizons, typifying examples, alternate routes, blockages, incommensurate geographies” (Berlant and Warner 558). In many instances, it has “required the development of kinds of intimacy that bear no necessary relation to domestic space, to kinship, to the couple form, to property, or to the nation” (ibid) in liminal and fleeting zones of improvisation like parties, parks and public toilets. In contrast, indigenous Australians’ distinct lines of ancestry, geography, and story continue through generations of kin in spite of the efforts of a colonising power to reproduce others in its own image. But in this sense, what queer and black Australians now share is the fight to live and love in more than one way, with more than one person: to extend relationships of care beyond the procreative imperative and to include land that is beyond the scope of one’s own backyard. Both indigenous and queer Australians stand to benefit from a shared project “to support forms of affective, erotic and personal living that are public in the sense of accessible, available to memory, and sustained through collective activity” (Berlant and Warner 562). To build this history is to generate an archive that is “not simply a repository” but “is also a theory of cultural relevance” (Halberstam 163). A queer politics of home respects and learns from different ways of organising love, care, affinity and responsibility to a community. This essay has been an attempt to document other ways of living that take place in the pockets of one city, to show that homes often exist where others see empty space, and that love regularly survives beyond the confines of the couple. In learning from the history of oppression experienced in the immediate territories I inhabit, I also hope it captures what it means to reckon with the ongoing knowledge of being an uninvited guest in the home of another culture, one which, through shared activism, will continue to survive much longer than this, or any other archive. References Allon, Fiona. “Home as Cultural Translation: John Howard’s Earlwood.” Communal/Plural 5 (1997): 1-25. Berlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. ———. “Love, A Queer Feeling.” hom*osexuality and Psychoanalysis. Eds. Tim Dean and Christopher Lane. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2001. 432-51. ———, and Michael Warner. “Sex in Public.” Critical Inquiry 24.2 (1998): 547-566. Brett, Judith. Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class: From Alfred Deakin to John Howard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ———, and Anthony Moran. Ordinary People’s Politics: Australians Talk About Politics, Life and the Future of Their Country. Melbourne: Pluto Press, 2006. Gorman-Murray, Andrew. “Contesting Domestic Ideals: Queering the Australian Home.” Australian Geographer 38.2 (2007): 195-213. Gregg, Melissa. “The Importance of Being Ordinary.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 10.1 (2007): 95-104. Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York and London: NYU Press, 2005 Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. Same-Sex: Same Entitlements Report. 2007. 21 Aug. 2007 http://www.hreoc.gov.au/human_rights/samesex/report/index.html>. ———. Launch of Final Report of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s Same-Sex: Same Entitlements Inquiry (transcript). 2007. 5 July 2007 . Insiders. ABC TV. 1 July 2007. 5 July 2007 http://www.abc.net.au/insiders/content/2007/s1966728.htm>. Karvelas, Patricia. “It’s New Deal or Despair: Pearson.” The Weekend Australian 12-13 May 2007: 7. ———. “How Pearson’s Passion Moved Howard to Act.” The Australian. 23 June 2007. 5 July 2007 http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21952951-5013172,00.html>. Northern Territory Government Inquiry Report into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse. Ampe Akelyernemane Meke Mekarle: Little Children Are Sacred. 2007. 5 July 2007 http://www.nt.gov.au/dcm/inquirysaac/pdf/bipacsa_final_report.pdf>. Wilson, Ashleigh. “Home, Sweet Home, for Mavis.” The Weekend Australian 12-13 May 2007: 7. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Gregg, Melissa. "Normal Homes." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/02-gregg.php>. APA Style Gregg, M. (Aug. 2007) "Normal Homes," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/02-gregg.php>.

Abstract:

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

Abstract:

In the summer of 1999, four ships carrying 599 Fujianese people arrived on the west coast of Canada. They survived a desperate and dangerous journey only for the Canadian Government to put them in prison. After numerous deportations, there are still about 40 of these people in Canadian prisons as of January 2001. They have been in jail for over a year and a half under mere suspicion of flight risk. About 24 people have been granted refugee status. Most people deported to China have been placed in Chinese prisons and fined. It is worth remembering that these migrants may have been undocumented but they are not "illegal" in that they have mobility rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes everyone's right to leave any country and to seek asylum. It can be argued that it is not the migrants who are illegal, but the unjust laws that criminalize their freedom of movement. In considering people's rights, we need to keep in mind not only the civil and political rights that the West tends to privilege, but equally important social and economic rights as well. As a local response to a global phenomenon, Direct Action Against Refugee Exploitation (DAARE) formed in Vancouver to support the rights of the Fujianese women, eleven of whom at the time of writing are still being held in the Burnaby Correctional Centre for Women (BCCW). In DAARE’s view, Immigration Canada's decision to detain all these people is based on a racialized group-profiling policy which violates basic human rights and ignores Canadian responsibility in the creation of the global economic and societal conditions which give rise to widespread migration. In light of the Canadian government's plans to implement even more punitive immigration legislation, DAARE endorses the Coalition for a Just Immigration and Refugee Policy's "Position Paper on Bill C31." They call for humanitarian review and release for the remaining Fujianese people. This review would include a few released refugee claimants who are still in Canada, children, women who were past victims of family planning, people facing religious persecution and, of course, those who are still in prison after 18 months and who have never been charged with any crime. Suspicion of flight risk is not a valid reason to incarcerate people for such a long time. Who Is a Migrant? The lines between "voluntary" and "forced" migration are no longer adequate to explain the complexities of population movements today. Motives for forced displacement include political, economic, social and environmental factors. This spectrum runs from the immediate threats to life, safety and freedom due to war or persecution, to situations where economic conditions make the prospects of survival marginal and non-existent. (Moussa 2000). Terms like "economic migrant" and "bogus refugee" have been used in the media to discredit migrants such as the Fujianese and to foster hostility against them. This scapegoating process oversimplifies the situation, for all refugees and all migrants are entitled to the basic respect due all human beings as enshrined in the UN Declaration of Human Rights. There can be multiple reasons for an individual to migrate—ranging from family reunification to economic pressures to personal survival; to fear of government corruption and of political persecution, to name just a few. The reduction of everything to merely the economic does not allow one to understand why migration is occurring and likely to increase in the future. Most immigrants to Canada could also be described as economic migrants. Conrad Black is an economic migrant. The privileging of rich migrants over poor ones romanticizes globalization as corporate progress and ignores the immense human suffering it entails for the majority of the world's population as the gap between the wealthy and the poor rapidly increases. Hundreds of years ago, when migrants came to this aboriginal territory we now call Canada, they came in order to survive—in short, they too were "economic migrants." Many of those migrants who came from Europe would not qualify to enter Canada today under its current immigration admissions guidelines. Indeed, over 50% of Canadians would not be able to independently immigrate to Canada given its current elitist restrictions. One of the major reasons for an increase in migration is the destruction of rural economies in Asia and elsewhere in the world. Millions of people have been displaced by changes in agriculture that separate people from the land. These waves of internal migration also result in the movement of peoples across national borders in order to survive. Chinese provinces such as Fujian and Guangdong, whose people have a long history of overseas travel, are particularly common sources of out-migration. In discussing migration, we need to be wary of how we can inadvertently reinforce the colonization of First Nations people unless we consciously work against that by actively supporting aboriginal self-determination. For example, some First Nations people have been accused of "smuggling" people across borders—this subjects them to the same process of criminalization which the migrants have experienced, and ignores the sovereign rights of First Nations people. We need ways of relating to one another which do not reenact domination, but which work in solidarity with First Nations' struggles. This requires an understanding of the ways in which racism, colonialism, classism, and other tactics through which "dividing and conquering" take place. For those of us who are first, second, third, fourth, fifth generation migrants to this land, our survival and liberation are intimately connected to that of aboriginal people. History Repeating Itself? The arrival of the Fujianese people met with a racist media hysteria reminiscent of earlier episodes of Canadian history. Front page newspaper headlines such as "Go Home" increased hostility against these people. In Victoria, people were offering to adopt the dog on one of the ships at the same time that they were calling to deport the Chinese. From the corporate media accounts of the situation, one would think that most Canadians did not care about the dangerous voyage these people had endured, a voyage during which two people from the second ship died. Accusations that people were trying to enter the country "illegally" overlooked how historically, the Chinese, like other people of colour, have had to find ways to compensate for racist and classist biases in Canada's immigration system. For example, from 1960 to 1973, Canada granted amnesty to over 12,000 "paper sons," that is, people who had immigrated under names other than their own. The granting of "legal" status to the "paper sons" who arrived before 1960 finally recognized that Canada's legislation had unfairly excluded Chinese people for decades. From 1923 to 1947, Canada's Chinese Exclusion Act had basically prevented Chinese people from entering this country. The xenophobic attitudes that gave rise to the Chinese Exclusion Act and the head tax occurred within a colonial context that privileged British migrants. Today, colonialism may no longer be as rhetorically attached to the British empire, but its patterns—particularly the globally inequitable distribution of wealth and resources—continue to accelerate through the mechanism of transnational corporations, for example. As Helene Moussa has pointed out, "the interconnections of globalisation with racist and colonialist ideology are only too clear when all evidence shows that globalisation '¼ legitimise[s] and sustain[s] an international system that tolerates an unbelievable divide not only between the North and the South but also inside them'" (2000). Moreover, according to the United Nations Development Programme, the income gap between people in the world's wealthiest nations and the poorest nations has shifted from 30:1 in 1960 to 60:1 in 1990 and to 74:1 in 1997. (Moussa 2000) As capital or electronic money moves across borders faster than ever before in what some have called the casino economy (Mander and Goldsmith), change and instability are rapidly increasing for the majority of the world's population. People are justifiably anxious about their well-being in the face of growing transnational corporate power; however, "protecting" national borders through enforcement and detention of displaced people is a form of reactive, violent, and often racist, nationalism which scapegoats the vulnerable without truly addressing the root causes of instability and migration. In short, reactive nationalism is ineffective in safe-guarding people's survival. Asserting solidarity with those who are most immediately displaced and impoverished by globalization is strategically a better way to work towards our common survival. Substantive freedom requires equitable economic relations; that is, fairly shared wealth. Canadian Response Abilities The Canadian government should take responsibility for its role in creating the conditions that displace people and force them to migrate within their countries and across borders. As a major sponsor of efforts to privatize economies and undertake environmentally devastating projects such as hydro-electric dams, Canada has played a significant role in the creation of an unemployed "floating population" in China which is estimated to reach 200 million people this year. Punitive tactics will not stop the movement of people, who migrate to survive. According to Peter Kwong, "The well-publicized Chinese government's market reforms have practically eliminated all labor laws, labour benefits and protections. In the "free enterprise zones" workers live virtually on the factory floor, laboring fourteen hours a day for a mere two dollars—that is, about 20 cents an hour" (136). As Sunera Thobani has phrased it, "What makes it alright for us to buy a t-shirt on the streets of Vancouver for $3, which was made in China, then stand up all outraged as Canadian citizens when the woman who made that t-shirt tries to come here and live with us on a basis of equality?" Canada should respond to the urgent situations which cause people to move—not only on the grounds upon which Convention refugees were defined in 1949 (race, religion, nationality, social group, political opinion) which continue to be valid—but also to strengthen Canada's system to include a contemporary understanding that all people have basic economic and environmental survival rights. Some migrants have lives that fit into the narrow definition of a UN Convention refugee and some may not. Those who do not fit this definition have nonetheless urgent needs that deserve attention. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has pointed out that there are at least 18 million people working in 124 export zones in China. A living wage in China is estimated to be 87 cents per hour. Canadians benefit from these conditions of cheap labour, yet when the producers of these goods come to our shores, we hypocritically disavow any relationship with them. Responsibility in this context need not refer so much to some stern sense of duty, obligation or altruism as to a full "response"—intellectual, emotional, physical, and spiritual—that such a situation provokes in relations between those who "benefit"—materially at least—from such a system and those who do not. References Anderson, Sarah, et al. Field Guide to the Global Economy. New York: New Press, 2000. Canadian Council of Refugees. "Migrant Smuggling and Trafficking in Persons." February 20, 2000. Canadian Woman Studies: Immigrant and Refugee Women. 19.3 (Fall 1999). Chin, Ko-lin. Smuggled Chinese. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999. Coalition for a Just Immigration and Refugee Policy. "Position Paper on Bill C31." 2000. Davis, Angela. The Angela Davis Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1998. Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women, Foundation Against Trafficking in Women, and International Human Rights Law Group. "Human Rights Standards for the Treatment of Trafficked Persons." January 1999. Henry, Frances and Tator, Carol. Racist Discourses in Canada's English Print Media. Toronto: Canadian Foundation for Race Relations, 2000. Jameson, Fredric and Miyoshi, Masao, Eds. The Cultures of Globalization. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. Kwong, Peter. Forbidden Workers. New York: New Press, 1997. Mander, Jerry and Goldsmith, Edward, Eds. The Case Against the Global Economy. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1996. Moussa, Helene. "The Interconnections of Globalisation and Migration with Racism and Colonialism: Tracing Complicity." 2000. ---. "Violence against Refugee Women: Gender Oppression, Canadian Policy, and the International Struggle for Human Rights." Resources for Feminist Research 26 (3-4). 1998 Migrant Forum statement (from Asia Pacific People's Assembly on APEC) 'Occasional Paper Migration: an economic and social analysis.' Pizarro, Gabriela Rodriguez. "Human Rights of Migrants." United Nations Report. Seabrook, Jeremy. "The Migrant in the Mirror." New Internationalist 327 (September 2000): 34-5. Sharma, Nandita. "The Real Snakeheads: Canadian government and corporations." Kinesis. October/November (1999): 11. Spivak, Gayatri. "Diasporas Old and New: Women in the Transnational World." Class Issues. Ed. Amitava Kumar. New York: New York University Press, 1997. States of Disarray: The Social Effects of Globalization. London: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UN RISD), 1995. Thobani, Sunera. "The Creation of a ‘Crisis’." Kinesis October/November (1999): 12-13. whor*s, Maids and Wives: Making Links. Proceedings of the North American Regional Consultative Forum on Trafficking in Women, 1997.

Abstract:

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

Abstract:

This story not for myself … all over Australia story.No matter Aborigine, White-European, secret before,Didn’t like im before White-European…This time White-European must come to Aborigine,Listen Aborigine and understand it.Understand that culture, secret, what dreaming.— Senior Lawman Neidjie, Story about Feeling (78)IntroductionIn Senior Lawman Neidjie’s beautiful little book, with big knowledge, Story about Feeling (1989), he shares with us, his readers, the importance of feeling our connectedness with the land around us. We have heard his words and this is our effort to articulate our respect and responsibility in return. We are a small group of undergraduate students and a lecturer at the University of Newcastle (a mixed “mob” with non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal heritages) participating in an English course designed around listening to the knowledge stories of Country, in the context of Country as the energy and agency of the lands around us and not just a physical setting, as shared by those who know it best. We are a diverse group of people. We have different, individual, purposes for taking this course, but with a common willingness to listen which has been strengthened through our exposure to Aboriginal literature. This paper is the result of our lived experience of practice-led research. We have written this paper as a collective group and therefore we use “we” to represent and encompass our distinct voices in this shared learning journey. We write this paper within the walls, physically and psychologically, of western academia, built on the lands of the Darkinjung peoples. Our hope is to rethink the limits of epistemic boundaries in western discourses of education; to engage with Aboriginal ways of knowing predominantly through the pedagogical and personal act of listening. We aspire to reimagine our understanding of, and complicity with, public memory while simultaneously shifting our engagement with the land on which we stand, learn, and live. We ask ourselves: can we re-imagine the institutionalised space of our classroom through a dialogic pedagogy? To attempt to do this we have employed intersubjective dialogues, where our role is mostly that of listeners (readers) of stories of Country shared by Aboriginal voices and knowledges such as Neidjie’s. This paper is an articulation of our learning journey to re-imagine the tertiary classroom, re-imagine the relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australian knowledges, perspectives and peoples, re-imagine our collective consciousness on Aboriginal lands and, ultimately, to re-imagine ourselves. Re-imagining the Tertiary English Literature Classroom Our intersubjective dialogues have been built around listening to the stories (reading a book) from Aboriginal Elders who share the surface knowledge of stories from their Countries. These have been the voices of Neidjie, Max Dulumunmun Harrison in My People’s Dreaming (2013), and Laklak Burarrwanga et al. in Welcome to My Country (2013). Using a talking circle format, a traditional method of communication based upon equality and respect, within the confines of the four-walled institute of Western education, our learning journey moved through linear time, meeting once a week for two hours for 13 weeks. Throughout this time we employed Joshua Guilar’s notion of an intersubjective dialogue in the classroom to re-imagine our tertiary journey. Guilar emphasises the actions of “listening and respect, direction, character building and authority” (para 1). He argues that a dialogic classroom builds an educative community that engages both learners and teachers “where all parties are open to learning” (para 3). To re-imagine the tertiary classroom via talking circles, the lecturer drew from dialogic instruction which privileges content as:the major emphasis of the instructional conversation. Dialogic instruction includes a sharing of power. The actions of a dialogic instructor can be understood on a continuum with an autocratic instructional style at one end and an overly permissive style on the other. In the middle of the continuum are dialogic-enabling behaviors, which make possible a radical pedagogy. (para 1) Re-imaging the lecturer’s facilitating role has not been without its drawbacks and issues. In particular, she had to examine her own subjectivity and role as teacher while also adhering to the expectations of her job as an academic employee in the University. Assessing students, their developing awareness of Aboriginal ways of knowing, was not without worry. Advocating a paradigm shift from dominant ways of teaching and learning, while also adhering to expected tertiary discourses and procedures (such as developing marking rubrics and providing expectations regarding the format of an essay, referencing information, word limits, writing in standard Australian English and being assessed according to marks out of 100 that are categorised as Fails, Passes, Credits, Distinctions, or High Distinctions) required constant self-reflexivity and attempts at pedagogical transparency, for instance, the rubrics for assessing assignments were designed around the course objectives and then shared with the students to gauge understanding of, and support for, the criteria. Ultimately it was acknowledged that the lecturer’s position within the hierarchy of western learning carried with it an imbalance of power, that is, as much as she desired to create a shared and equal learning space, she decided and awarded final grades. In an effort to continually and consciously work through this, the work of Gayatri Spivak on self-reflexivity was employed: she, the lecturer, has “attempted to foreground the precariousness of [her] position throughout” although she knows “such gestures can never suffice” (271). Spivak’s work on the tendency of dominant discourses and institutions to ignore or deny the validity of non-western knowledges continues to be influential. We acknowledge the limits of our ability to engage in such a radical dialogical pedagogy: there are limits to the creativity and innovativeness that can be produced within a dominant Eurocentric academic framework. Sharing knowledge and stories cannot be a one-way process; all parties have to willingly engage in order to create meaningful exchange. This then, requires that the classroom, and this paper, reflect a space of heterogeneous voices (or “ears” required for listening) that are self-sufficiently open to hearing the stories of knowledge from the traditional custodians. Listening becomes a mode of thought where we are also aware of the impediments in our ability to hear: to hear across cultures, across histories, across generations, and across time and space. The intersubjective dialogues taking place, between us and the stories and also between each other in the classroom, allow us to deepen our understanding of the literature of Country by listening to each other’s voices. Even if they offer different opinions from our own they still contribute to our broader conception of what Country is and can mean to people. By extension, this causes us to re-evaluate the lands upon which we stand, entering a dialogue with place to reinterpret/negotiate our position within the “story” of Country. This learning and listening was re-emphasised with the words of Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann’s explanation of “Dadirri”: an inner, deep, contemplative listening and awareness (para 4). To be able to hear these stories has required a radical shift in the way we are listening. To create a space for an intersubjective dialogue to occur between the knowledge stories of Aboriginal peoples who know their Country, and us as individual and distinct listeners, Marcia Langton’s third category of an intersubjective dialogue was used. This type of dialogue involves an exchange between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians where both are positioned as subjects rather than, as historically has been the case, non-Aboriginal peoples speaking about Aboriginality positioned as “object” and “other” (81). Langton states that: ‘Aboriginality’ arises from the subjective experience of both Aboriginal people and non-Aboriginal people who engage in any intercultural dialogue, whether in actual lived experience or through a mediated experience such as a white person watching a program about Aboriginal people on television or reading a book. Moreover, the creation of ‘Aboriginality’ is not a fixed thing. It is created from out histories. It arises from the intersubjectivity of black and white in dialogue. (31)Langton states that historically the ways Aboriginality has been represented by the ethnographic gaze has meant that “Aboriginality” and what it means is a result of colonisation: Aboriginal peoples did not refer to themselves or think of themselves in such ways before colonisation. Therefore, we respectfully tried to listen to the knowledge stories shared by Aboriginal people through Aboriginal ways of knowing Country. Listening to Stories of Country We use the word “stories” to represent the knowledge of a place that traditional custodians of their land know and willingly share through the public publication of literature. Stories, in our understanding, are not “made-up” fictional narratives but knowledge documents of and from specific places that are physically manifested in the land while embodying metaphysical meaning as well. Stories are connected to the land and therefore they are connected to its people. We use the phrase “surface (public) knowledge” to distinguish between knowledges that anyone can hear and have access to in comparison with more private, deeper layered, secret/sacred knowledge that is not within our rights to possess or even within our ability to understand. We are, however, cognisant that this knowledge is there and respect those who know it. Finally, we employ the word Country, which, as noted above means the energy and agency of the lands around us. As Burarrwanga et al. share:Country has many layers of meaning. It incorporates people, animals, plants, water and land. But Country is more than just people and things, it is also what connects them to each other and to multiple spiritual and symbolic realms. It relates to laws, customs, movement, song, knowledges, relationships, histories, presents, future and spirits. Country can be talked to, it can be known, it can itself communicate, feel and take action. Country for us is alive with story, Law, power and kinship relations that join not only people to each other but link people, ancestors, place, animals, rocks, plants, stories and songs within land and sea. So you see, knowledge about Country is important because it’s about how and where you fit in the world and how you connect to others and to place. (129) Many colonists denied, and many people continue to deny today, the complexity of Aboriginal cultures and ways of knowing: “native traditions” are recorded according to Western epistemology and perceptions. Roslyn Carnes has argued that colonisation has created a situation in Australia, “where Aboriginal voices are white noise to the ears of many non-Indigenous people. […] white privilege and the resulting white noise can be minimised and greater clarity given to Aboriginal voices by privileging Indigenous knowledge and ways of working when addressing Indigenous issues. To minimise the interference of white noise, non-Indigenous people would do well to adopt a position that recognises, acknowledges and utilises some of the strengths that can be learned from Aboriginal culture and Indigenous authors” (2). To negotiate through this “white noise”, to hear the stories of Country beneath it and attempt to decolonise both our minds and the institutional discourses we work and study in (Langton calls for an undermining of the “colonial hegemony” [8]) and we have had to acknowledge and position our subjectivity as Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples and try to situate ourselves as “allied listeners” (Carnes 184). Through allied listening in intersubjective dialogues, we are re-learning (re-imagining) history, reviewing dominant ideas about the world and ways of existing in it and re-situating our own positions of Aboriginality and non-Aboriginality. Rereading the Signs Welcome to My Country by Burarrwanga et al. emphasises that knowledge is embedded in Country, in everything on, in, above, and moving through country. While every rock, tree, waterhole, hill, and animal has a story (stories), so do the winds, clouds, tides, and stars. These stories are layered, they overlap, they interconnect and they remain. A physical representation such as a tree or rock, is a manifestation of a metaphysical moment, event, ancestor. The book encourages us (the readers) to listen to the knowledge that is willingly being shared, thus initiating a layer of intersubjectivity between Yolngu ways of knowing and the intended reader; the book itself is a result of an intersubjective relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal women and embedded in both of these intersubjective layers is the relationship between us and this land. The book itself offers a way of engaging with the physical environment that combines western processes (standard Australian written English for instance) with Aboriginal ways of knowing, in this instance, Yolngu ways. It is an immediate way of placing oneself in time and space, for instance it was August when we first read the book so it was the dry season and time for hunting. Reading the environment in such a way means that we need to be aware of what is happening around us, allowing us to see the “rules” of a place and “feel” it (Neidjie). We now attempt to listen more closely to our own environments, extending our understanding of place and reconsidering our engagement with Darkinjung land. Neidjie, Harrison, and Burarrwanga et al. share knowledge that helps us re-imagine our way of reading the signs around us—the physical clues (when certain plants flower it might signal the time to catch certain fish or animals; when certain winds blow it might signal the time to perform certain duties) that the land provides but there is also another layer of meaning—explanations for certain animal behaviours, for certain sites, for certain rights. Beneath these layers are other layers that may or may not be spoken of, some of them are hinted at in the text and others, it is explained, are not allowed to be spoken of or shared at this point in time. “We use different language for different levels: surface, middle and hidden. Hidden languages are not known to everyone and are used for specific occasions” (Burarrwanga et al. 131). “Through language we learn about country, about boundaries, inside and outside knowledge” (Burarrwanga et al. 132). Many of the esoteric (knowledge for a certain few) stories are too different from our dominant discourses for us to understand even if they could be shared with us. Laklak Burarrwanga happily shares the surface layer though, and like Neidjie, refers to the reader as “you”. So this was where we began our intersubjective dialogue with Aboriginality, non-Aboriginality and Country. In Harrison’s My People’s Dreaming he explains how Aboriginal ways of knowing are built on watching, listening, and seeing. “If we don’t follow these principles then we don’t learn anything” (59). Engaging with Aboriginal knowledges such as Harrison’s three principles, Neidjie’s encouragement to listen, and Burarrwanga et al.’s welcoming into wetj (sharing and responsibility) has impacted on our own ideas and practices regarding how we learn. We have had to shelve our usual method of deconstructing or analysing a text and instead focus on simply hearing and feeling the stories. If we (as a collective, and individually) perceive “gaps” in the stories or in our understanding, that is, the sense that there is more information embodied in Country than what we are receiving, rather than attempting to find out more, we have respected the act of the surface story being shared, realising that perhaps deeper knowledge is not meant for us (as outsiders, as non-Aboriginal peoples or even as men or as women). This is at odds with how we are generally expected to function as tertiary students (that is, as independent researchers/analytical scholars). We have identified this as a space in which we can listen to Aboriginal ways of knowing to develop our understanding of Aboriginal epistemologies, within a university setting that is governed by western ideologies. Neidjie reminds us that a story might be, “forty-two thousand [years]” old but in sharing a dialogue with each other, we keep it alive (101). Kwaymullina and Kwaymullina argue that in contrast, “the British valued the wheel, but they did not value its connection to the tree” (197), that is, western ways of knowing and being often favour the end result, disregarding the process, the story and the cycle where the learning occurs. Re-imagining Our Roles and Responsibility in Discourses of ReconciliationSuch a space we see as an alternative concept of spatial politics: “one that is rooted not solely in a politics of the nation, but instead reflects the diverse spaces that construct the postcolonial experience” (Upstone 1). We have almost envisioned this as fragmented and compartmentalised palimpsestic layers of different spaces (colonial, western, national, historical, political, topographical, social, educational) constructed on Aboriginal lands and knowledges. In this re-imagined learning space we are trying to negotiate through the white noise to listen to the voices of Aboriginal peoples. The transformative power of these voices—voices that invite us, welcome us, into their knowledge of Country—provide powerful messages for the possibility of change, “It is they who not only present the horrors of current circ*mstances but, gesturing towards the future, also offer the possibility of a way to move forward” (Upstone 184). In Harrison’s My People’s Dreaming, his chapter on Forgiveness both welcomes the reader into his Country while acknowledging that Australia’s shared history of colonisation is painful to confront, but only by confronting it, can we begin to heal and move forward. While notions of social reconciliation revolve around rebuilding social relations between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians, “ecological reconciliation involves restoring ecological connectivity, sustaining ecological services, sustaining biodiversity, and making tough decisions from an eco-centric point of view that will not always prioritise human desire” (Rose 7). Deborah Bird Rose identifies four reasons why ecological reconciliation must occur simultaneously with social reconciliation. First, “without an imaginable world for the future, there is no point even to imagining a future for ourselves” (Rose 2). Second, for us to genuinely embrace reconciliation we must work to respond to land rights, environmental restoration and the protection of sacred sites. Third, we must recognise that “society and environment are inextricably connected” (Rose 2) and that this is especially so for Aboriginal Australians. Finally, Aboriginal ways of knowing could provide answers to postcolonial environmental degradation. By employing Guilar’s notion of the dialogic classroom as a method of critical pedagogy designed to promote social justice, we recognise our own responsibilities when it comes to issues such as ecology due to these stories being shared with us about and from Country via the literature we read. We write this paper in the hope of articulating our experience of re-imagining and enacting an embodied cognisance (understood as response and responsibility) tuned towards these ways of knowing. We have re-imagined the classroom as a new space of learning where Aboriginal ways of knowing are respected alongside dominant educational discourses. That is, our reimagined classroom includes: the substance of [...] a transactive public memory [...] informed by the reflexive attentiveness to the retelling or representation of a complex of emotionally evocative narratives and images which define not necessarily agreement but points of connection between people in regard to a past that they both might acknowledge the touch of. (Simon 63) Through an intersubjective dialogic classroom we have attempted to reimagine our relationships with the creators of these texts and the ways of knowing they represent. In doing so, we move beyond dominant paradigms of the land around us, re-assessing our roles and responsibilities in ways that are both practical and manageable in our own lives (within and outside of the classroom). Making conscious our awareness of Aboriginal ways of knowing, we create a collective consciousness in our little circle within the dominant western space of academic discourse to, wilfully and hopefully, contribute to transformative social and educational change outside of it. Because we have heard and listened to the stories of Country: We know White-European got different story.But our story, everything dream,Dreaming, secret, ‘business’…You can’t lose im.This story you got to hang on for you,Children, new children, no-matter new generationAnd how much new generation.You got to hang on this old story because the earth, This ground, earth where you brought up, This earth e grow, you growing little by little, Tree growing with you too, grass…I speaking storyAnd this story you got to hang on, no matter who you, No-matter what country you.You got to understand…this world for us.We came for this world. (Neidjie 166) Acknowledgements The authors acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands upon which this paper was researched and written. References Burarrwanga, Laklak, Ritjilili Ganambarr, Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, Banbapuy Ganambarr, Djawundil Maymuru, Sarah Wright, Sandie Suchet-Pearson, and Kate Lloyd. Welcome to My Country. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2013. Carnes, Roslyn. “Changing Listening Frequency to Minimise White Noise and Hear Indigenous Voices.” Journal of Australian Indigenous Issues 14.2-3 (2011): 170-84. Guilar, Joshua D. “Intersubjectivity and Dialogic Instruction.” Radical Pedagogy 8.1 (2006): 1. Harrison, Max D. My People’s Dreaming: An Aboriginal Elder Speaks on Life, Land, Spirit and Forgiveness. Sydney: HarperCollins Australia, 2013. Kwaymullina, Ambelin, and Blaze Kwaymullina. “Learning to Read the Signs: Law in an Indigenous Reality.” Journal of Australian Studies 34.2 (2010): 195-208.Langton, Marcia. Well, I Saw It on the Television and I Heard It on the Radio. Sydney: Australian Film Commission, 1993. Neidjie, Bill. Story about Feeling. Broome: Magabala Books, 1989. Rose, Deborah Bird. “The Ecological Power and Promise of Reconciliation.” National Institute of the Environment Public Lecture Series, 20 Nov. 2002. Speech. Parliament House. Simon, Roger. “The Touch of the Past: The Pedagogical Significance of a Transactional Sphere of Public Memory.” Revolutionary Pedagogies: Cultural Politics, Instituting Education, and the Discourse of Theory (2000): 61-80. Spivak, Gayatri. C. “'Can the Subaltern Speak?' Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture.” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Eds. Nelson, Cary and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, 1988. 271-313. Ungunmerr-Baumann, Miriam-Rose. Dadirri: Inner Deep Listening and Quiet Still Awareness. Emmaus Productions, 2002. 14 June 2015 ‹http://nextwave.org.au/wp-content/uploads/Dadirri-Inner-Deep-Listening-M-R-Ungunmerr-Bauman-Refl.pdf›.Upstone, Sara. Spatial Politics in the Postcolonial Novel. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2013.

Abstract:

There is a moment in Al Gore’s 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth devised to expose the sheer audacity of fossil fuel lobby groups in the United States. In their attempts to address significant scientific consensus and growing public concern over climate change, these groups are resorting to what Gore’s film suggests are grotesque distortions of fact. A particular example highlighted in the film is the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s (CPE—a lobby group funded by ExxonMobil) “pro” energy industry advertisem*nt: “Carbon dioxide”, the ad states. “They call it pollution, we call it life.” While on the one hand employing rhetoric against the “inconvenient truth” that carbon dioxide emissions are ratcheting up the Earth’s temperature, these advertisem*nts also pose a question – though perhaps unintended – that is worth addressing. Where does life reside? This is not an issue of essentialism, but relates to the claims, materials and technologies through which life as a political object emerges. The danger of entertaining the vested interests of polluting industry in a discussion of climate change and its biopolitics is countered by an imperative to acknowledge the ways in which multiple positions in the climate change debate invoke and appeal to ‘life’ as the bottom line, or inviolable interest, of their political, social or economic work. In doing so, other questions come to the fore that a politics of climate change framed in terms of moral positions or competing values will tend to overlook. These questions concern the manifold practices of life that constitute the contemporary terrain of the political, and the actors and instruments put in this employ. Who speaks for life? And who or what produces it? Climate change as a matter of concern (Latour) has gathered and generated a host of experts, communities, narratives and technical devices all invested in the administration of life. It is, as Malcom Bull argues, “the paradigmatic issue of the new politics,” a politics which “draws people towards the public realm and makes life itself subject to the caprices of state and market” (2). This paper seeks to highlight the politics of life that have emerged around climate change as a public issue. It will argue that these politics appear in incremental and multiple ways that situate an array of actors and interests as active in both contesting and generating the terms of life: what life is and how we come to know it. This way of thinking about climate change debates opposes a prevalent moralistic framework that reads the practices and discourses of debate in terms of oppositional positions alone. While sympathies may flow in varying directions, especially when it comes to such a highly charged and massively consequential issue as climate change, there is little insight to be had from charging the CPE (for example) with manipulating consumers, or misrepresenting well-known facts. Where new and more productive understandings open up is in relation to the fields through which these gathering actors play out their claims to the project of life. These fields, from the state, to the corporation, to the domestic sphere, reveal a complex network of strategies and devices that seek to secure life in constantly renovated terms. Life Politics Biopolitical scholarship in the wake of Foucault has challenged life as a pre-given uncritical category, and sought to highlight the means through which it is put under question and constituted through varying and composing assemblages of practitioners and practices. Such work regards the project of human well-being as highly complex and technical, and has undertaken to document this empirically through close attention to the everyday ecologies in which humans are enmeshed. This is a political and theoretical project in itself, situating political processes in micro, as well as macro, registers, including daily life as a site of (self) management and governance. Rabinow and Rose refer to biopolitical circuits that draw together and inter-relate the multiple sites and scales operative in the administration of life. These involve not just technologies, rationalities and regimes of authority and control, but also politics “from below” in the form of rights claims and community formation and agitation (198). Active in these circuits, too, are corporate and non-state interests for whom the pursuit of maximising life’s qualities and capabilities has become a concern through which “market relations and shareholder value” are negotiated (Rabinow and Rose 211). As many biopolitical scholars argue, biopower—the strategies through which biopolitics are enacted—is characteristic of the “disciplinary neo-liberalism” that has come to define the modern state, and through which the conduct of conduct is practiced (Di Muzio 305). Foucault’s concept of governmentality describes the devolution of state-based disciplinarity and sovereignty to a host of non-state actors, rationalities and strategies of governing, including the self-managing subject, not in opposition to the state, but contributing to its form. According to Bratich, Packer and McCarthy, everyday life is thus “saturated with governmental techniques” (18) in which we are all enrolled. Unlike regimes of biopolitics identified with what Agamben terms “thanopolitics”—the exercise of biopower “which ultimately rests on the power of some to threaten the death of others” (Rabinow and Rose 198), such as the Nazi’s National Socialism and other eugenic campaigns—governmental arts in the service of “vitalist” biopolitics (Rose 1) are increasingly diffused amongst all those with an “interest” in sustaining life, from organisations to individuals. The integration of techniques of self-governance which ask the individual to work on themselves and their own dispositions with State functions has broadened the base by which life is governed, and foregrounded an unsettled terrain of life claims. Rose argues that medical science is at the forefront of these contemporary biopolitics, and to this effect “has […] been fully engaged in the ethical questions of how we should live—of what kinds of creatures we are, of the kinds of obligations that we have to ourselves and to others, of the kinds of techniques we can and should use to improve ourselves” (20). Asking individuals to self-identify through their medical histories and bodily specificities, medical cultures are also shaping new political arrangements, as communities connected by shared genetics or physical conditions, for instance, emerge, evolve and agitate according to the latest medical knowledge. Yet it is not just medicine that provokes ethical work and new political forms. The environment is a key site for life politics that entails a multi-faceted discourse of obligations and entitlements, across fields and scales of engagement. Calculating Environments In line with neo-liberal logic, environmental discourse concerned with ameliorating climate change has increasingly focused upon the individual as an agent of self-monitoring, to both facilitate government agendas at a distance, and to “self-fashion” in the mode of the autonomous subject, securing against external risks (Ong 501). Climate change is commonly represented as such a risk, to both human and non-human life. A recent letter published by the Royal Australasian College of Physicians in two leading British medical journals, named climate change as the “biggest global health threat of the twenty-first century” (Morton). As I have argued elsewhere (Potter), security is central to dominant cultures of environmental governance in the West; these cultures tie sustainability goals to various and interrelated regimes of monitoring which attach to concepts of what Clark and Stevenson call “the good ecological citizen” (238). Citizenship is thus practiced through strategies of governmentality which call on individuals to invest not just in their own well-being, but in the broader project of life. Calculation is a primary technique through which modern environmental governance is enacted; calculative strategies are seen to mediate risk, according to Foucault, and consequently to “assure living” (Elden 575). Rationalised schemes for self-monitoring are proliferating under climate change and the project of environmentalism more broadly, something which critics of neo-liberalism have identified as symptomatic of the privatisation of politics that liberal governmentality has fostered. As we have seen in Australia, an evolving policy emphasis on individual practices and the domestic sphere as crucial sites of environmental action – for instance, the introduction of domestic water restrictions, and the phasing out of energy-inefficient light bulbs in the home—provides a leading discourse of ethico-political responsibility. The rise of carbon dioxide counting is symptomatic of this culture, and indicates the distributed fields of life management in contemporary governmentality. Carbon dioxide, as the CPE is keen to point out, is crucial to life, but it is also—in too large an amount—a force of destruction. Its management, in vitalist terms, is thus established as an effort to protect life in the face of death. The concept of “carbon footprinting” has been promoted by governments, NGOs, industry and individuals as a way of securing this goal, and a host of calculative techniques and strategies are employed to this end, across a spectrum of activities and contexts all framed in the interests of life. The footprinting measure seeks to secure living via self-policed limits, which also—in classic biopolitical form—shift previously private practices into a public realm of count-ability and accountability. The carbon footprint, like its associates the ecological footprint and the water footprint, has developed as a multi-faceted tool of citizenship beyond the traditional boundaries of the state. Suggesting an ecological conception of territory and of our relationships and responsibilities to this, the footprint, as a measure of resource use and emissions relative to the Earth’s capacities to absorb these, calculates and visualises the “specific qualities” (Elden 575) that, in a spatialised understanding of security, constitute and define this territory. The carbon footprint’s relatively simple remit of measuring carbon emissions per unit of assessment—be that the individual, the corporation, or the nation—belies the ways in which life is formatted and produced through its calculations. A tangled set of devices, practices and discourses is employed to make carbon and thus life calculable and manageable. Treading Lightly The old environmental adage to “tread lightly upon the Earth” has been literalised in the metaphor of the footprint, which attempts both to symbolise environmental practice and to directly translate data in order to meaningfully communicate necessary boundaries for our living. The World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Report 2008 exemplifies the growing popularity of the footprint as a political and poetic hook: speaking in terms of our “ecological overshoot,” and the move from “ecological credit to ecological deficit”, the report urges an attendance to our “global footprint” which “now exceeds the world’s capacity to regenerate by about 30 per cent” (1). Angela Crombie’s A Lighter Footprint, an instruction manual for sustainable living, is one of a host of media through which individuals are educated in modes of footprint calculation and management. She presents a range of techniques, including carbon offsetting, shifting to sustainable modes of transport, eating and buying differently, recycling and conserving water, to mediate our carbon dioxide output, and to “show […] politicians how easy it is” (13). Governments however, need no persuading from citizens that carbon calculation is an exercise to be harnessed. As governments around the world move (slowly) to address climate change, policies that instrumentalise carbon dioxide emission and reduction via an auditing of credits and deficits have come to the fore—for example, the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme and the Chicago Climate Exchange. In Australia, we have the currently-under-debate Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, a part of which is the Australian Emissions Trading Scheme (AETS) that will introduce a system of “carbon credits” and trading in a market-based model of supply and demand. This initiative will put a price on carbon dioxide emissions, and cap the amount of emissions any one polluter can produce without purchasing further credits. In readiness for the scheme, business initiatives are forming to take advantage of this new carbon market. Industries in carbon auditing and off-setting services are consolidating; hectares of trees, already active in the carbon sequestration market, are being cultivated as “carbon sinks” and key sites of compliance for polluters under the AETS. Governments are also planning to turn their tracts of forested public land into carbon credits worth billions of dollars (Arup 7). The attachment of emission measures to goods and services requires a range of calculative experts, and the implementation of new marketing and branding strategies, aimed at conveying the carbon “health” of a product. The introduction of “food mile” labelling (the amount of carbon dioxide emitted in the transportation of the food from source to consumer) in certain supermarkets in the United Kingdom is an example of this. Carbon risk analysis and management programs are being introduced across businesses in readiness for the forthcoming “carbon economy”. As one flyer selling “a suite of carbon related services” explains, “early action will give you the edge in understanding and mitigating the risks, and puts you in a prime position to capitalise on the rewards” (MGI Business Solutions Worldwide). In addition, lobby groups are working to ensure exclusions from or the free allocation of permits within the proposed AETS, with degrees of compulsion applied to different industries – the Federal Government, for instance, will provide a $3.9 billion compensation package for the electric power sector when the AETS commences, to enable their “adjustment” to this carbon regime. Performing Life Noortje Mares provides a further means of thinking through the politics of life in the context of climate change by complicating the distinction between public and private interest. Her study of “green living experiments” describes the rise of carbon calculation in the home in recent years, and the implementation of technologies such as the smart electricity meter that provides a constantly updating display of data relating to amounts and cost of energy consumed and the carbon dioxide emitted in the routines of domestic life. Her research tracks the entry of these personal calculative regimes into public life via internet forums such as blogs, where individuals notate or discuss their experiences of pursing low-carbon lifestyles. On the one hand, these calculative practices of living and their public representation can be read as evidencing the pervasive neo-liberal governmentality at work in contemporary environmental practice, where individuals are encouraged to scrupulously monitor their domestic cultures. The rise of auditing as a technology of self, and more broadly as a technique of public accountability, has come under fire for its “immunity-granting role” (Charkiewicz 79), where internal audits become substituted for external compliance and regulation. Mares challenges this reading, however, by demonstrating the ways in which green living experiments “transform everyday material practices into practices of public involvement” that (118) don’t resolve or pin down relations between the individual, the non-human environment, and the social, or reveal a mappable flow of actions and effects between the public realm and the home. The empirical modes of publicity that these individuals employ, “the careful recording of measurements and the reliable descriptions of sensory observation, so as to enable ‘virtual witnessing’ by wider audiences”, open up to much more complex understandings than one of calculative self-discipline at work. As “instrument[s] of public involvement” (120), the experiments that Mares describe locate the politics of life in the embodied socio-material entanglements of the domestic sphere, in arrangements of humans and non-human technologies. Such arrangements, she suggests, are ontologically productive in that they introduce “not only new knowledge, but also new entities […] to society” (119), and as such these experiments and the modes of calculation they employ become active in the composition of reality. Recent work in economic sociology and cultural studies has similarly contended that calculation, far from either a naturalised or thoroughly abstract process, relies upon a host of devices, relations, and techniques: that is, as Gay Hawkins explains, calculative processes “have to be enacted” (108). Environmental governmentality in the service of securing life is a networked practice that draws in a host of actors, not a top-down imposition. The institution of carbon economies and carbon emissions as a new register of public accountability, brings alternative ways to calculate the world into being, and consequently re-calibrates life as it emerges from these heterogeneous arrangements. All That Gathers Latour writes that we come to know a matter of concern by all the things that gather around it (Latour). This includes the human, as well as the non-human actors, policies, practices and technologies that are put to work in the making of our realities. Climate change is routinely represented as a threat to life, with predicted (and occurring) species extinction, growing numbers of climate change refugees, dispossessed from uninhabitable lands, and the rise of diseases and extreme weather scenarios that put human life in peril. There is no doubt, of course, that climate change does mean death for some: indeed, there are thanopolitical overtones in inequitable relations between the fall-out of impacts from major polluting nations on poorer countries, or those much more susceptible to rising sea levels. Biosocial equity, as Bull points out, is a “matter of being equally alive and equally dead” (2). Yet in the biopolitical project of assuring living, life is burgeoning around the problem of climate change. The critique of neo-liberalism as a blanketing system that subjects all aspects of life to market logic, and in which the cynical techniques of industry seek to appropriate ethico-political stances for their own material ends, are insufficient responses to what is actually unfolding in the messy terrain of climate change and its biopolitics. What this paper has attempted to show is that there is no particular purchase on life that can be had by any one actor who gathers around this concern. Varying interests, ambitions, and intentions, without moral hierarchy, stake their claim in life as a constantly constituting site in which they participate, and from this perspective, the ways in which we understand life to be both produced and managed expand. This is to refuse either an opposition or a conflation between the market and nature, or the market and life. It is also to argue that we cannot essentialise human-ness in the climate change debate. For while human relations with animals, plants and weathers may make us what we are, so too do our relations with (in a much less romantic view) non-human things, technologies, schemes, and even markets—from carbon auditing services, to the label on a tin on the supermarket shelf. As these intersect and entangle, the project of life, in the new politics of climate change, is far from straightforward. References An Inconvenient Truth. Dir. Davis Guggenheim. Village Roadshow, 2006. Arup, Tom. “Victoria Makes Enormous Carbon Stocktake in Bid for Offset Billions.” The Age 24 Sep. 2009: 7. Bratich, Jack Z., Jeremy Packer, and Cameron McCarthy. “Governing the Present.” Foucault, Cultural Studies and Governmentality. Ed. Bratich, Packer and McCarthy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. 3-21. Bull, Malcolm. “Globalization and Biopolitics.” New Left Review 45 (2007): 12 May 2009 . < http://newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2675 >. Charkiewicz, Ewa. “Corporations, the UN and Neo-liberal Bio-politics.” Development 48.1 (2005): 75-83. Clark, Nigel, and Nick Stevenson. “Care in a Time of Catastrophe: Citizenship, Community and the Ecological Imagination.” Journal of Human Rights 2.2 (2003): 235-246. Crombie, Angela. A Lighter Footprint: A Practical Guide to Minimising Your Impact on the Planet. Carlton North, Vic.: Scribe, 2007. Di Muzio, Tim. “Governing Global Slums: The Biopolitics of Target 11.” Global Governance. 14.3 (2008): 305-326. Elden, Stuart. “Governmentality, Calculation and Territory.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25 (2007): 562-580. Hawkins, Gay. The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2006. Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?: From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (2004): 225-248. Mares, Noortje. “Testing Powers of Engagement: Green Living Experiments, the Ontological Turn and the Undoability and Involvement.” European Journal of Social Theory 12.1 (2009): 117-133. MGI Business Solutions Worldwide. “Carbon News.” Adelaide. 2 Aug. 2009. Ong, Aihwa. “Mutations in Citizenship.” Theory, Culture and Society 23.2-3 (2006): 499-505. Potter, Emily. “Footprints in the Mallee: Climate Change, Sustaining Communities, and the Nature of Place.” Landscapes and Learning: Place Studies in a Global World. Ed. Margaret Somerville, Kerith Power and Phoenix de Carteret. Sense Publishers. Forthcoming. Rabinow, Paul, and Nikolas Rose. “Biopower Today.” Biosocieties 1 (2006): 195-217. Rose, Nikolas. “The Politics of Life Itself.” Theory, Culture and Society 18.6 (2001): 1-30. World Wildlife Fund. Living Planet Report 2008. Switzerland, 2008.

Abstract:

IntroductionThis article investigates how local studies collections in public libraries can help people explore the experiences of regional Australia. Some of this discovery can be done online, but as not all local studies material has been catalogued, is online or available in a digital format, some of this exploration will need to be onsite at public libraries throughout Australia. This exploration could be combined with other investigations into regional areas. What are local studies collections in public libraries? These collections are defined as beinginclusive of local history and so the local collection should support studies that look at the historical past, both distant and recent, or at current concerns in the community, such as local environmental issues, or plans for the future development of a locality. (Dewe 1–2)This broader look at the context of a place should provide information in a range of formats to help explore an area, and to find out about the history, geography and the environment as well as other local concerns and issues. Local studies collections should contain recent as well as older material. Each local studies collection will be different (McCausland; Bateman; Johnston; Gregg; Heap and Pymm) with some of these differences simply being because each area has a unique collection of stories which can be told about it. Other differences will be in how each public library interprets their remit to collect information and stories about a community, and which stories are included or excluded from the collection. There are budget constraints as well because each public library has to choose how to fund local studies as part of their overall library provision which means there are tensions and competing priorities in what is collected and how it is made available for research as well as information and entertainment. Some areas have more research activity so there is more being written, photographed, drawn, or otherwise recorded about an area, but no matter how small an area is, there is usually new local studies material being continually created.Local Studies CollectionsLocal studies collections are important as they provide key information about an area. For professional scholars, even in social history, the local becomes interesting only within a larger context, however. Local case studies may throw light on wider questions (Reid and Macafee 127).This highlights the value which local studies can contribute as part of research as these collections may provide case studies to explore, or different avenues to investigate. It also shows the importance of information in many local studies collections being brought together so the separate, local information can be connected to other local information. This bringing together can be as a result of research or through an aggregation system such as Trove (“Trove”).Peter Reid and Caroline Macafee have stated that becausethe potential is always there for local history to be pulled into issues of wider concern, it could be said to occupy a liminal space, a borderland between knowledge that is personal, and therefore academically trivial, and knowledge that is generalizable and therefore worthy of scientific attention. (127)This seems a harsh description, but it shows how these collections can be undervalued and that this undervaluing can risk them being overlooked by biographers, historians, and other researchers. Despite this thinking, local studies collections can offer unique and valuable insights into people and places; including for regional areas. The skilled library staff who manage these collections are also key resources in the history of regional areas, as they can help connect the local studies information to other local collections. As well as connecting people to the resources, the unwritten knowledge of staff is a separate and very important resource.How to Discover Local Studies CollectionsA good way to start exploring local studies collections is by searching Trove. Trove had, around the time of writing, “over 457,524,491 Australian and online resources” (online) and is an Australia-wide database, managed by the National Library of Australia. It enables you to search many library catalogues with one search tool which means that you can search once, in one place, rather than by individual library or museum catalogues. Trove brings together metadata including catalogue records, mostly from library catalogues, from organisations who choose to contribute access to their information. Some of the resources you can search for on Trove are in local studies collections in public libraries or held by other organisations which collect local information such as state and national libraries. Start your search by the name of the location which you are exploring. Be as specific as possible, as you can always broaden your search later. If the item has been digitised, or is already digital, you are often able to view or listen to this material online.As well as providing access to library catalogues, many local newspapers have been digitised and are searchable and viewable on Trove. Some newspapers have been digitised up to 1955, while some titles have fewer years available online, and microfilm will need to be used to find more recently produced information. Public libraries often hold the microfilm for their local newspapers. State libraries may hold them as well. This timeline of digital access is important to keep in mind as searching newspapers on Trove is very easy and searching on microfilm is not so appealing because of having to work through each newspaper page by page, microfilm roll by microfilm roll. You need to check the information about what issues of a newspaper have been digitised so you know when you need to start looking at microfilm copies rather than digitised ones. Older newspapers often include syndicated stories, so an event may have occurred in an area you are interested in but be reported in the newspaper from another area. You could also use the Trove API (application programming interface) to explore high volume digitised newspaper or catalogue data (Sherratt).This method of starting with Trove can also be a helpful way to find out which public library is in the area you are looking for, as the name of the organisation which holds the resources is listed online. You can click on a link to take you to their catalogue. While public libraries are often named for the town they are in, you may be looking for a place with a different name, so this method can be helpful. It can also show resources held in other libraries which may relate to the area of your research. Trove Mosaic by Mitchell Whitelaw (online), although an older interface, is a visual way to explore Trove and clearly highlights the different organisations contributing photographs.Libraries include local studies photographs in their social media and a very small number of them are collecting social media about their community (Forsyth et al.). Searching social media for terms such as #flashbackFriday or #throwbackThursday may also provide a way to discover local studies material online, although depending on your research topic, this method could be too haphazard an approach. There are still some local studies blogs to follow (MacRitchie) and searching for these can also provide information about local studies material in public libraries.Public Libraries and Local StudiesYou can also start at the public library. Depending on where in Australia you are searching there are different tools to help find your local public library. Rather than list them all, a useful starting point is to go to your favourite search engine and search for the name of town/suburb followed by public library. This should connect you with information about the local library through the library website, the regional library website (where two or more councils work together to provide a public library service), or via the council website. This is likely to provide sufficient information to be able to contact the library. However, before you contact the library, search the library catalogue. They may even have a separate local studies database for some or all of the local studies collection. This is why is it a good idea to start with Trove, before going to a local library search, as Trove should be aggregating collection information from a variety of sources bringing together the local public library as well as other organisations (sometimes some unexpected ones) which have material of relevance.Work from the State Library of New South Wales had demonstrated that not everything in local studies collection is catalogued (State Library of New South Wales) which makes it impossible to search for everything online. Quite a few (but not all) public libraries have a webpage where they describe their local studies collections and services. This can provide helpful information so that if you do not find something online you can telephone or email the library seeking further information. If the library is nearby you could simply visit it, but it is best to ring or email first if your time is limited, as it can be helpful to make an appointment to ensure that staff will be able to assist you with using the library collection. For searching the catalogues for local studies information, again, be as specific as possible, knowing you can always broaden your search terms. Helpfully, most (but not all) library catalogues have a sort by date option once material has been found, and some even have local studies specific search help. Often you can view or listen to digitised material online, but some libraries only make low resolution images available, which is rarely of good enough quality for research. When you have searched the catalogue or other online local studies database and not found anything, contact the library as they will be able to provide further information.Library staff will help you use their collections. Some public libraries charge a fee for more detailed research, others, quite reasonably, require you to do this more detailed research yourself.There are many variables, and it really depends on what and where you are researching. Perhaps you are looking for a written history of each area you plan to visit when exploring regional areas of Australia, or you might be planning to visit local studies collections to see how they lead you to areas and stories of local interest, or there is a particular research question you want to explore in several regional areas. How local studies books and other materials are written will depend on the time they were written, and the purpose for them. They can depict ideas and priorities which are outdated and/or offensive.Not Everything Is on TroveWhile Trove is a suggested starting place, given that every item in local studies collections is not catalogued, visiting the local public library can be an important step to take. Always check if the local studies area has different opening hours to the rest of the library. If part or all of the local studies collection is in a locked room, visiting the library at a very busy time is unwise as it may make it harder for the staff to assist you as they will have many other priorities and you may not be able to access the collection.Visiting the Library Visiting a public library and looking at how their local studies collection is arranged can help you see the collecting priorities. It also makes it very clear as to which public libraries have prioritised their local studies information. Occasionally the local studies area will be a partnership with both the library and the local family or local history society providing resources or the collection. This can result in different access conditions being applied to different collections.Visiting the collection means you can talk with the library staff about the history of the area as part of your experience of regional Australia. It is interesting to see how different local studies collections are arranged and how the local area is promoted through the collection and any displays or merchandise for sale. Often local publications will be for sale in the library so that you can purchase titles about the history of the area. Some councils commission histories of their areas, other times niche histories will be written by people in the community and the local studies collection can be a helpful way to discover these.Keep in mind that local government boundaries change (Leigh) and this may mean that resources you are looking for could be in a neighbouring area, rather than the location you are exploring. This is another reason to start with Trove.You May Not Be Able to See Everything Even If You Visit...For reasons of preservation you may not be able to see everything in the local studies collection even if you visit. Sometimes you need to watch out for special tours, which may not coincide with your visit to the area. There may be parts of the collection stored but not fully explored by staff, waiting their time in the queue to be catalogued and made available for research. Generally public library staff will be very helpful for you in your research, particularly if you have specific questions about the area.Know about CopyrightKnow the information about duration of copyright as some libraries say on their catalogues that everything which has been digitised is in copyright. This may be accidental as a result of some bulk cataloguing processes linked with digitisation. Stating something is in copyright is not the same as it being in copyright. The Australian Copyright Council has a helpful information sheet on the duration of copyright to help you understand what is in copyright and how long it is likely to continue to be in copyright.ChallengesThere will be collection gaps. The risk of bias is highlighted by the statement that libraries “are not, and have never been, socially or politically neutral institutions” (Gibson et al. 753). There has not been detailed research exploring these collection gaps, so the exact extent of exclusion or omission of information is not yet able to be quantified. There is arenewed professional imperative to position information centers as central locations for social justice work [which] has also turned our attention to the need to preserve materials that support a diverse and pluralistic society … [and] as a duty to steward unexplored histories. (Sheffield 573)Material may not be in the collection because it was not collected, or because it was not created. For example, in the past not everyone could afford a camera which means they may not have photographed or videoed their family, or public events. Not every grave had a headstone so someone may not have their grave recorded. Public libraries recognise these gaps, and in some areas library staff create or commission content to help with these omissions. For example, oral histories can be recorded to include stories which were not available in other ways, and photographs can be taken of current events to make sure a wider exploration of local stories are recorded in the local studies collection.Conclusion (and Opportunities)Grant White states, in relation to local studies that thesurvival of the artefact is only ever significant when it can be accessed by someone who can see meaning in it. The collection is in fact much more than the material sitting upon the shelves, it is access to it. Access which keeps it current in the community memory rather than as a separated, isolated adjunct. It is also the participation of the community in the creation of the collection, feeding it with its experience, reflections and memories. (98)This access is crucial, and with digitisation and digital collecting the access can increasingly be at a distance, without actually visiting a library. This increasing online access, especially through aggregated sites such as Trove, will hopefully enable research exploring the similarities and differences of regional areas, as connections can be made, and not only by people who can afford to travel to different places to do research. Digitisation, digital collecting, effective cataloguing and use of metadata can open up access to collections, just as digital preservation, preservation of other formats and conservation can help make sure that these materials are available into the future. Connecting to skilled staff who manage these collections is another way of exploring access as there will be information not recorded anywhere you can find, but which the staff may know because of their experience and knowledge of the collection as well as their knowledge of the community they work in.If you have been using public library local studies collections for research, it is helpful if you can share this research back with the public library, helping to build their collection for other people who are researching the region, even if they are exploring different topics. It may be a printed book you are providing, but more public libraries are able to accept donations of ebooks, or other online content. This can be a helpful way for you to contribute to the collections which have assisted in your research.ReferencesBateman, Shirley. “Innovation in Local Studies Collections and Programs: How Melbourne Library Service Is Fostering Community Pride.” Australasian Public Libraries and Information Services 25.1 (2012): 12–18.Dewe, Michael. Ed. Local Studies Collection Management. London: Ashgate, 2002.Forsyth, Ellen, Ngarie Macqueen, and Daniel Nitsikopoulos. Contemporary Collecting: Collecting Instagram for Local Studies. ALIA Information Online, 2019.Gibson, Amelia N., Renate L. Chancellor, Nicole A. Cooke, Sarah Park Dahlen, Shari A. Lee, and Yasmeen L. Shorish. “Libraries on the Frontlines: Neutrality and Social Justice.” Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal 36.8 (2017): 751–66.Gregg, Alison. “Our Heritage: The Role of Archives and Local Studies Collections.” Australasian Public Libraries and Information Services 15.3 (2002): 126–32.Heap, Amy, and Bob Pymm. “Wagga Wagga Women’s Wireless and the Web: Local Studies and New Technologies.” The Australian Library Journal 58.1 (2009): 5–16.Johnston, Clinton. “Capture and Release: Cataloguing Cultural Heritage at Marrickville Library and History Services.” The Australian Library Journal 62.3 (2013): 218–23.Leigh, Carol. “From Filing Cabinet to Cultural Centre: Creating a Community History Centre in Wanneroo Western Australia.” Australasian Public Libraries and Information Services 25.2 (2012): 83–88.MacRitchie, John. “The Manly Art of Local Studies Blogging: A New Approach to Old Stories.” Australasian Public Libraries and Information Services 25.2 (2012): 89–93.McCausland, Sigrid. “Archives for the People: Public Libraries and Archives in New South Wales.” The Australian Library Journal 64.4 (2015): 270.Reid, Peter H., and Caroline Macafee. “The Philosophy of Local Studies in the Interactive Age.” Journal of Librarianship and Information Science 39.3 (2007): 126–41.Sheffield, Rebecka T. “More than Acid-Free Folders: Extending the Concept of Preservation to Include the Stewardship of Unexplored Histories.” Library Trends 64.3 (2016): 572.Sherratt, Tim. “Asking Better Questions: History, Trove and the Risks That Count.” Copyfight. Ed. Phillipa McGuinness. Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2015. 112–24.State Library of New South Wales. NSW Public Libraries Local Studies Audit. 2014.“Trove.” Trove 7 Apr. 2019 <https://trove.nla.gov.au/>.White, Grant. “Message in a Bottle: Community Memory in the Local Studies Collection.” APLIS 13.3 (2000): 6.Whitelaw, Mitchell. “TroveMosaic: Exploring Trove Images.” TroveMosaic: Exploring Trove Images 7 Apr. 2019 <http://mtchl.net/TroveMosaic/>.

Abstract:

The release of the film Fight Club (Dir. David Fincher, 1999) was met with an outpouring of contradictory reviews. From David Ansen’s [Newsweek] claim that “Fight Club is the most incendiary movie to come out of Hollywood in a long time” (Fight Club DVD insert) to LA Times’s Kenneth Turan who proclaimed Fight Club to be “…a witless mishmash of whiny, infantile philosophising and bone-crushing violence that actually thinks it’s saying something of significance” (Fight Club DVD insert), everyone, it seemed, needed to weigh in with their views. Whether you think the film is a piece of witless and excessive trash, or believe, as Fight Club novelist Chuck Palahniuk hopes “it would offer more people the idea that they could create their own lives outside the existing blueprint for happiness offered by society,” this is a film that people react strongly to (Fight Club DVD insert). Whether or not the film is successful in the new ‘blueprint’ area is debatable and one focus of this essay. It isn’t difficult to spot the focus of the film Fight Club. The title and the graphic, edgy trailers for the film leave no doubt in the viewer’s mind that this film is about fighting. But fighting what and why are the questions that unveil the deeper edge to the film, an edge that skirts the abyss of deep psychological schism: man’s alienation from man, society and self, and the position of the late twentieth century male whose gendered potentialities have become muted thanks to corporate cookie-cutter culture and the loss of a ‘hunter-gatherer’ role for men. In a nutshell, the film explores the psychic rift of the main character, unnamed for the film, but conventionally referred to as “Jack” (played by Ed Norton). Jack leads a life many late twentieth century males can identify with, a life without real grounding, focus or passion. It is the kind of life that has become a by-product of the “me” generation and corporate/consumer culture. Aside from Jack’s inability to find real satisfaction in his love life, friendships, job, or sense of self, he also suffers from an identity disorder. While there are few people who are unaware of the mind-numbing (and in some cases, audience-alienating) “twist” offered near the end of the film, it bears repeating that the compelling character of Tyler Durden (played by Brad Pitt) who shapes and influences the changes in Jack’s life is actually revealed near the end of the film as a manifestation of Jack’s alter ego. Jack and Tyler are the same person. The two conspire to start ‘Fight Club’, where men hit other men. Hard. The Club becomes an underground sensation, expanding to other communities and cities and eventually spawns the offshoot Project Mayhem whose goal it is to ultimately erase individual debt so everyone (all consumers) can start at zero. In order to manage this affair, several large buildings are slated for destruction by the Mayhem team. Of course no people will be in the buildings at the time, but all the records will be destroyed. This is the core of the film, but there are several other interesting sidelights that will become important to this discussion, including the lone female character Marla who becomes the love interest of Jack/Tyler, and the friend Bob, whom Jack meets during his insomniac foray into the seedy underworld of the self help meeting. The film itself seems to cry out for a psychoanalytic reading. Its thinly veiled references to Freudian concepts and subliminal tricks aside, it also makes the inner world of the protagonist its landscape and backdrop. In a film dominated by a psychological and psychical problem, psychoanalysis seems an excellent tool for delving more deeply into the symbols and attitudes of the piece. I have chosen both Kleinian object relations and Julia Kristeva’s understanding of abjection to help illuminate some issues in the film. Object relations helps to make clear both the divergence of personality and the emergence of a ‘repaired’ protagonist at the end of the film as Jack first creates and then destroys his alter ego. Kristeva initially explored abjection theory via literature in Powers of Horror (1982), but Barbara Creed’s Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis (1993) opened wide the door for applications of the theory to film studies. Creed uses abjection to explore issues of gender in the horror film, focusing on the role and depiction of women as abject. Here, I have adapted some of her ideas and intend to explore the role of abjection in the male identification process. In this film fighting operates as both reality and metaphor, on both the physical and psychical levels, encompassing the internal and external fight within the mind and body of the protagonist. Jack’s main problem is a lack of concrete identity and self-realization. Numbed by his willing and eager participation in consumer culture and his tacit compliance with the gritty underworld of his job as an automotive ‘recall coordinator’, his life’s work is estimating the cost effectiveness of saving lives by calculating the cost of death. In Jack’s world, meaning is derived solely through the external—external products he consumes and collects. Jack’s consumer-based emasculation is expressed when he states, “Like so many others I had become a slave to the Ikea nesting instinct.” In this sentence he clarifies his disempowerment and feminisation in one swoop. Having few, if any, relationships with human beings, meaningful or otherwise, Jack never reaches a level of social maturity. His only solace comes from visiting anonymous help groups for the terminally ill. Although Jack is physically fine (aside from his insomnia) a part of him is clearly dying, as his sense of who he is in a postmodern culture is hopelessly mediated by advertisem*nts that tell him what to be. In the absence of a father, Jack appears to have had no real role models. Made ‘soft’ by his mother, Jack exhibits a not so subtle misogyny that is illustrated through his relationship with fellow ‘tourist’ in the self-help circles, Marla Singer. Jack’s identity issues unfold via various conflicts, each of which is enmeshed in the club he starts that revolves around the physical pain of hand-to-hand, man-on-man combat. Jack’s conflicts with himself, others and society at large are all compressed within the theme and practice of fighting and the fight clubs he institutes. Fighting for Jack (and the others who join) seems the answer to life’s immediate problems. This essay looks deeply into Jack’s identity conflict, viewing it as a moment of psychic crisis in which Jack creates an alternate personality deeply steeped in and connected to the ‘abject’ in almost every way. Thus, Jack forces himself to confront the abject in himself and the world around him, dealing with abjection on several levels all with a view to expelling it to restore the ‘clean and proper’ boundaries necessary in the ‘whole’ self. Viewed though the lens of psychoanalysis, particularly Klein’s work on object relations and Kristeva’s work with abjection, allows a reading in which the film expresses the need for and accomplishment of a self-activated encounter with the abject in order to redraw ‘clean and proper’ boundaries of self. This film’s tag lines, ‘Mischief, Mayhem and Soap’—illustrate both the presence (Mischief, Mayhem) and function (Soap) of the abject—the interaction with the abject will lead to a ‘clean’ subject—a proper subject, a restored subject. Before continuing, a brief discussion of abjection and object relations and the ways in which they are utilized in this essay is essential here. One of Klein’s major propositions is that “the neonate brings into the world two main conflicting impulses: love and hate” (Mitchell 19). Each of these conflicting impulses must be dealt with, usually by either “bringing them together in order to modify the death drive along with the life drive or expelling the death drive into the outside world” (19). Along with this conflict arises the conflict of a primary relationship with the mother, which is seen as both satisfying and frustrating, and then later complicated with the addition of the father. The main conflicting love/hate binary is reflective of a number of ‘sets’ of dualities that surface when looking into the mother/child relationship. Besides love and hate, there is the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mother, the mother as symbolic of both life and death, the symbolic (paternal) and semiotic (maternal), total oneness and total autonomy. The curious ‘split’ nature of the infant’s perception of the maternal figure recalls a kind of doppelganger, a doubling of the maternal (in positive and negative incarnations), that can be seen as abject. In the film, this informs the relationship between both Jack and Marla and Jack and Tyler, as I argue Tyler and Marla serve as parental substitutes at one part in the film. This is clarified in Jack’s statements about his relationship with the two of them: “My parents pulled this exact same act for years” and “I am six years old again, passing messages between parents.” This imaginary relationship allows Jack to re-experience some of his early identification processes, while effectively trading out the gender responsibilities to the point where Tyler symbolically takes the place of the ‘mother’ and Marla the place of the ‘father’. The result of this action is an excess of male gendered experiences in which Jack in crisis (emasculated) is surrounded by phalluses. Kristeva’s work with abjection is also important here. I am especially interested in her understanding of the mother/child relationship as connected with abjection, particularly the threat the mother represents to the child as wanting to return to a state of oneness. The abject functions in Fight Club as a means for the protagonist to re-configure his own autonomy. For Kristeva, the abject is that which is cast out in order that “I” may exist. It exists at the borders of the self and continually draws the subject into it. As the subject revolts and pulls away, its resistance cues the process of defining itself as separate, proper and autonomous. When the narrative of Jack’s life refuses to make sense to him, and his experiences seem like “a copy of a copy of a copy,” Jack turns inward for help. Kristeva says that the abject is “experienced at the peak of its strength when that subject, weary of fruitless attempts to identify with something on the outside, finds the impossible within” (5). Thus Jack ‘finds’ Tyler. The abject, [represented by Bob, Tyler and Marla in the film] is that which disturbs “identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules” (Kristeva 4). As the abject is that which blurs boundaries borders and classification, the film itself is steeped in abject images and ideas. The discrete categories of inside/outside, asleep/awake, male/female, and self/other are continually troubled throughout the narrative. The two most confused binaries are male/female and self/other. As the film is about Jack’s own experience of emasculation it is not until the male/female gender issues are resolved that his self/other issues can be resolved. Through the re-ordering of gender he is able to take his place in society alongside Marla, finally viewed as not his mother or friend but lover. Jack Versus Himself: A Cult Of One Jack is able to re-vamp his personality through exposure to the abject and the replaying of certain key object relations moments in his childhood. He engages with this ‘inner child’ to reconnect with psychically difficult moments in which his ‘self’ emerged. Jack, however, twists the typical plot of maternal and paternal bonding in ways that speak to the underlying misogyny of the film and of late twentieth century society as well. While the story begins with both male and female characters in unnatural roles with unnatural and abject body parts, by the end of the film, these ‘abnormalities’ or abject objects are erased, ejected from the text so Jack is restored to the ‘safety’ of a compulsory heterosexuality. Bob, Tyler and Marla’s characters are three examples of gender twisting expressed in the film. In psychoanalytic literature, the child bonds first to the mother (via feeding from the breast and in-utero existence) and experiences a feeling of total oneness impossible to duplicate. Eventually the child seeks autonomy and breaks from the mother and her clinging ways with the help of the father and the phallus. So in basic terms, the female is abject, representing infantile regression and oneness, and the male represents taking the proper place in the symbolic order. When the female (mother) is denied, the male accepts his natural place in culture and society. However, in this film, Tyler (the male) is the abject presence in the text, that which threatens to consume and subsume the narrator’s personality. It is Marla, the phallic woman, who interposes herself in this dyad and becomes the correct choice for Jack, allowing him to proceed into ‘normal relations.’ Early in the film, Jack is unable to envision a female partner with whom he can open up and share, instead substituting Bob—and his doubly signified ‘bitch-tit*’—as a locus of comfort. In Bob’s ample bosom, Jack finds the release he is looking for, though it is unnatural in more ways than one. The feminised Bob [testicular cancer patient] comforts and coddles Jack so much that he feels the same idyllic bliss experienced by the infant at the mother’s breast; Jack feels “lost in oblivion, dark and silent and complete.” That night he is able for the first time in months to sleep: “Babies don’t sleep this well.” This illustrates Jack’s longing for the safety and security of the mother, complicated by his inability to bond with a female, replaced with his deep need for identification with a male. Continuing the twist, it is Marla who foils Jack’s moment of infantile bliss: “She ruined everything” with her presence, Jack sneers. Jack’s regression to this infantile bliss with either man or woman would be perceived as abject, (disrupting system and order) but this particular regression is at least doubly abject because of Bob’s unnatural breasts and lack of testicl*s. Both Bob, and to some degree Tyler, offer abjection to Jack as a way of dealing with this complexities of autonomous living. While my argument is that Tyler takes the traditional ‘female’ role in the drama, as a figure (like Bob) who lures Jack into an unnatural oneness that must ultimately be rejected, it is true that even in his position as abject ‘female’ (mother), Tyler is overwhelmingly phallic. His ‘jobs’ consist of splicing shots of penises into films, urinating and masturbating into restaurant food and engaging in acrobatic sex with Marla. Since Marla, who occupies the position of father bringing Jack into society away from the influence of Tyler, is also coded phallic, Jack’s world is overwhelmingly symbolically male. This appears to be a response to the overwhelming physical presence of Jack’s mother of which Tyler comments, “We’re a generation of men raised by women. I am wondering if another woman is really the answer we need?” During this same scene, Jack clarifies his regressive dilemma: “I can’t get married, I am a thirty year old boy.” Thus while Tyler campaigns for a world without women, Jack must decide if this is the correct way to go. Immersion in the world of uber-maleness only seems to make his life worse. It is only after he ‘kills’ Tyler and accepts Marla as a partner that he can feel successful. In another help meeting, one of the guided meditations emphasizes his regression by asking him to go to his “cave” and locate his “power animal.” This early in the film, Jack can only envision his power animal as a rather silly penguin, which, although phallic to some extent, is undercut by the fact that it speaks with a child’s voice. In the next visualization of the ‘power animal’, the animal becomes Marla—clarifying her influence over Jack’s subconscious. The threat of Marla’s sexuality is on one level explored with Jack’s counterpart Tyler, the one who dares to go where Jack will not, but their encounters are not shown in a ‘natural’ or fully mature light. They are instead equated with childhood experimentation and regressive fantasies as Marla responds that she “hasn’t been f*cked like that since grade school” and Tyler proclaims the relationship is mere “sportf*cking.” It is Tyler who discovers Marla’s oversized dild* proudly displayed on a dresser, of which she states “Don’t worry its not a threat to you.” This phallicized Marla refers to herself as “infectious human waste,” clearly abject. Marla’s power must be muted before Jack can truly relate to her. This is illustrated in two separate ‘visions’ of sexual intercourse—one between Marla and Tyler early in the film in which Marla assumes the dominant position, and then later near the end of the film when the same encounter is replayed with Jack taking Tyler’s place, Marla now in the standard missionary position on her back: Proper. Jack’s struggle with self is played out via his relationship with Tyler (and Marla to some degree). Once Jack has been exposed to the various levels of abject behaviour offered by Tyler and Project Mayhem, he chooses to go it alone, no longer needing the double he himself created. After experiencing and rejecting the abject, Jack redraws his boundaries and cleanses his soul. Jack Versus Society—The Personal Is Political Jack’s personal struggle becomes political—and communal. Another attempt at forming identity, Fight Club is bound to fail because it offers not autonomy but a group identity substituted for an individual one. While Jack loathes his ‘single serving life’ before Fight Club, he must come to realize that a group identity brings more problems than solutions in an identity crisis. While the comfort of ‘oneness’ is alluring, it is also abject. As Jack is able to finally refuse the safely and oneness offered by Tyler’s existence, he must also deny the safety in numbers offered by Fight Club itself. The cult he creates swallows members whole, excreting them as the “all singing all dancing crap of the world.” They eat, drink and sleep Fight Club and eventually its ‘evolutionary’ offshoot, Project Mayhem. During his involvement with Fight Club and Project Mayhem, Jack is exposed to three levels of abjection including food loathing, bodily wastes, and the corpse, each of which threaten to draw him to the “place where meaning collapses” (Kristeva 2). Jack’s first experience involves Tyler’s (a)vocation as a waiter who urinates and probably masturbat*s into patrons’ food. This mingling of bodily wastes and nourishment represents the most elementary form of abjection: food loathing. While Jack appears amused at Tyler’s antics in the beginning, by the end of the film, he illustrates his movement closer to self-identification, by calling for “clean food, please” signalling his alliance with the clean and proper. Bodily wastes, the internal made visible, represent the most extended contact Jack has with the abject. These experiences, when what is properly outside ends up inside and vice versa, begin with bloody hand-to-hand combat, including Tyler’s vomiting of blood into the mouth of an unwilling Fight Club participant “Lou”, causing another witness to vomit as well. The physical aversion to abject images (blood, pus, excrement) is part of the redrawing of self—the abject is ejected –via nausea/vomiting. Kristeva explains: “I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit” (3). The images continue to pile up as Jack describes life in the Paper Street house: “What a sh*t hole.” The house slowly decomposes around them, leaking and mouldy, releasing its own special smell: the rot of a “warm stale refrigerator” mixed with the “fart smell of steam” from a nearby industrial plant. While at Paper Street, Tyler decides to make soap. Soap in itself is an agent of cleanliness, but in this context it is abject and defiled by being composed of human waste. In a deeply abject moment, Jack is accidentally covered in refuse that spills from a ripped bag full of human fat pilfered from a liposuction clinic. Even at this profoundly disturbing moment, Jack is unwilling to give up his associations with Tyler and Project Mayhem. It is only after his encounter with a corpse that he changes his tune. While Fight Club attempted to blur physical boundaries via hand-to-hand combat and exchange of blood and blows, Project Mayhem threatens the psychic boundaries of self, a deeper danger. While a loud speaker drones “we are all part of the same compost heap” and a fellow occupant reminds Jack “In project mayhem we have no names,” Jack realizes he is truly losing himself, not gaining strength. Mayhem’s goal of ‘oneness’, like the maternal and infant experience, is exposed via slogans like “you are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else.” Tyler finally puts his cards on the table and asks Jack to “stop trying to control everything and just let go.” For Kristeva, “If dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything”(3). The corpse of Bob causes Jack to confront the boundaries of life and death, both spiritual and physical, as he opens his eyes to the damaging effects of the cult-like environment into which he has fallen. Jack’s momentary indecision morphs into action after Bob’s death becomes just one more mantra for the zombie-like Project Mayhemers to chant: “His name was Robert Paulson.” Jack’s internal and external struggles are compressed into one moment when he commits hom*o(sui)cide. Placing a gun in his mouth, he attempts to rid himself of Tyler forever, his final words to Tyler: “My eyes are open now”. At this point, Jack is psychically ready to take charge of his life and confidently eject the abject from the narrative of his life. He wants no more to do with Project Mayhem gang and is reunited with Marla with whom he finally appears ready to have a fully realized relationship. His masculinity and identity restoration are made blindingly apparent by the final splice in the film—the image of Marla and Jack hand in hand overlooking the new view out of the tower, spliced with the shot of a semi-erect penis—back to shot of Marla and Jack. The message is clear: Jack is a man, he has a woman, and he knows who he is because of it. While Fight Club novelist Palahniuk hopes the film offers options for life “outside the existing blueprint offered by society” (Fight Club DVD insert). On the other hand, it’s unclear how well the film pulls this off. On one hand, its lambasting of the numbing effects of blind and excessive consumerism seems well explored, it’s unclear what options really surface by the end of the film. Although many targeted buildings have been destroyed, through which the viewer can assume some or even most records of individual debt were erased, the building in which Marla and Jack stand (initially slated for destruction) remains. Perhaps this is meant to signify the impossibility of true financial equality in American society. But it seems to me that the more pressing issues are not the ones openly addressed in the film (that of money and consumerism) but rather the more internalised issues of self-actualisation, gender identity and contentment. In a postmodern space ripe for the redrawing and redefinition of gender stereotypes, this film carefully reinscribes not only compulsory heterosexuality but also the rigid boundaries of acceptable male and female behaviour. For this film, the safest route to repairing male identity and self-hood threatened by the emasculating practices of a consumer culture is a route back. Back to infantile and childhood fantasy. While it dances provocatively around the edges of accepting a man with ‘bitch tit*’ and a woman with a dick, ultimately Bob is killed and Marla reclaimed by Jack in an ‘I’m ok you’re ok’ final scene: “Look at me Marla, I am really OK”. Jack’s immersion in an all male cult(ure) is eschewed for the comfort of real breasts. Works Cited Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1993. Fight Club. Dir. David Fincher. 1999. Fight Club DVD edition. Dir. David Fincher. 2000. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay On Abjection. New York: Columbia Press: 1982. Mitchell, Juliet. The Selected Melanie Klein. New York: The Free Press, 1986. Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Caldwell, Tracy M.. "Identity Making from Soap to Nuts" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 6.1 (2003). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/10-identitymaking.php>. APA Style Caldwell, T. M., (2003, Feb 26). Identity Making from Soap to Nuts. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,(1). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/10-identitymaking.html

Abstract:

She's the dollars, she's my protection; she's a promise, in the year of election. Sister, I can't let you go; I'm like a preacher, stealing hearts at a traveling show. For love or money, money, money... Desire -- U2, "Desire" (1988) For the love of money. In the worship of things. Desire has traditionally been employed by advertising as a means of selling product. Regardless of culture, more powerful than context, desire is invoked as one of capitalism's iron-clad codes of quality. The Uses of Desire in Advertising Specifically, two variants have been most common. That in which desire is: (1) stimulated or (2) sated by a product. Crucial to advertisers, in both cases the product is more powerful than the thing the audience finds most powerful: the physical surge, the emotional rush, the chemical compulsion we label "desire". In the case of the former, a typical approach has been to create an equation in which product intervenes in the relationship between man and woman (and it is always man and woman), stimulating the psycho-physiological desire of one for the other. A classic pre-post design. Absent the product, desire would not arise, ad text often alleges. This tack is well captured in this ad for a perfume. Implicit in this approach is the assumption that the ad reader will desire desire. If so, he or she -- equally desirous of this turn of events -- will insert him or herself into the scenario, engaging in a symbolic, if not actual purchase of the product1. As we saw above, desire is often depicted via substitute symbols -- flashing red neon, burning matches, flame-blowers, stifling heat and raging brush fires2. The product is then used to extinguish such signs -- metaphorically quenching desire. This is the satiation variant identified at the outset. Standardised Desire? This last is an Australian ad, but in a wide variety of contexts, the same formula of product/desire appears. A recent Malaysian ad, for instance, plays out like this: a motorbike roars up to a doorstep; its leather-clad rider dismounts. Removing the helmet we find beneath a ... beautiful long-haired woman. Cut to a medium shot of the front door opening. A similarly-clad male leans against the molding. Rugged, firm, slightly aloof. Cut to product name: Dashing for Men. Followed by a picture of the cologne. "The Dashing Sensation" is then posted -- ripe with the implication that the cologne has worked its magical, magnetic attraction uniting female and male. It should be pointed out that Malaysia is a market with a significant western presence. Its top advertising firms are American, British and Italian. Thus, if one were curious as to whether desire was inherently a "cultural universal" or rather due to accession (i.e. the movement of intellectual and corporate capital), Euro-American presence would certainly be a factor to consider 3. Innovating Desire Bringing us to Japan. Desire is also a major theme there, as well. However, there, Japanese firms dominate ad production. And, interestingly, though the above-mentioned formulations do appear, desire in Japan also has its own specialised discourse. Rather than a relationship between the consumable and the consumer's emotional/physical state, discourse about desire can transpire independent of the product. Desire is often simply about desire. This is in keeping with a trend (or, more formally, a stage) of development Japanese advertising has achieved -- what I call "product-least advertising"; a condition in which discourse is about many things other than consumption. One of these things being desire. In closing I will wonder what this might say about Japanese society. Japanese Approaches to Desire As noted above, it is not the case that messages of product-induced desire do not appear in Japan. They are certainly more pervasive than in their Islamic neighbor, Malaysia. And, like America, desire is treated in an array of ways. Object-Mediated Desire One approach, admittedly less conventional, posits the product as medium. Only through the product will desire be manifested. In this ad, though verbal substitutes are invoked -- "lust", "love", "lick", "pinch", bite", "touch" -- desire is the guiding force as the figures trapped inside the product's bar code move mechanically toward physical consummation. Of particular note is the product's multi-faceted relationship to desire: it subsumes desire, stimulates it, provides a forum and means for its expression, and is the device securing its culmination ... the ad text is ambiguous as to which is controlling. This is a definitive "postmodern ad", pregnant with shifting perspective, situational action, oppositional signs and interpretive possibilities. The kind of text so-called "cultural studies" intends by the term "polysemy" (the notion that multiple meanings are contained in any sign -- see Fiske). In the case of desire, postmodern ads tell us not that desire is multiple. Rather, it is a singular (i.e. universally experienced) condition which may be differentially manifested and variously interpretable vis-à-vis singular object/products. Object-Induced Desire For instance, in this ad, again for instant noodles, two salarymen contemplate the statement "this summer's new product is stimulating". Each conjures a different image of just what "stimulating" means. For the younger man, a veritable deluge of sexual adoration; for his elder, an assault by a gang of femmes toughs. And while the latter man's fantasy would not qualify as the conventional definition of "desire", the former would. Thus, despite its polysemic trappings, the ad varies little from the standard approach outlined at the outset (plates 1 and 2). It posits that the product possesses sufficient power to stimulate desire for its consumer in external, unrelated others. Object-Directed Desire One of sociology's earliest complaints about capitalism was its reduction of people to the status of things. Social relations became instrumental acts aimed at achieving rational ends; the personalities, thoughts and qualities of those human agents engaged in the exchange become secondary to the sought good. Advertising, according to early semiotic critiques (see for instance Williamson), has only intensified this predilection, though in a different way. Ads instrumentalise by creating equality between the product presented and the person doing the presenting. When the presenter and product are conflated -- as in the case where a major star clasps the product to her bosom and addresses the camera with: "it's my Nice Once" (the product name) -- the objectification of the human subject may be unavoidable. The material and corporeal meld. She cherishes the drink. If we desire her (her status, her style, her actual physical being) but are realistic (and thus willing to settle for a substitute) ... we can settle for the simulation (her drink). This kind of vicarious taking, this symbolic sharing is common in advertising. Played out over and over the audience quickly learns to draw an equal sign between the two depicted objects (product and star). Purchasing one enables us to realise our desire (however incompletely) for the other. Sometimes the product and person are separated, but in a way that the discourse is about longing. The product is consumed because the human can't be -- perhaps a less satisfactory substitute, but a replacement, nonetheless. Or, as in the ad below, the two might be interchangeable. Interior. Bright yellow room without any discernible features. No walls, windows or furniture. Tight shot of black fishnet stockings, barely covered by a yellow dress. The legs swivel in a chair, allowing a fleeting shot of the model's crotch. Cut to a darkened interior. The product sits next to a set of wrenches. Cut back to first interior. Medium tight of the model's bare shoulders. She spins in her chair. Cut to the mechanic working on the engine of a car. Female voiceover: "Hey! Work AGAIN? ... Let's play!" Cut to tight shot of her pursed lips. "Hey! ... let's go for a drive", accompanying consecutive shots of the mechanic wiping sweat from his brow and the vamp's derriere. Next, a sequence of fast, tight images: mechanic revving the engine, the model's face, then her upper body viewed through heavily-ventilated apparel. "Oh", she says, "cars are cuter, huh?" The mechanic pauses to consider. Walks over to the product, pops the top. "When it comes to that sort of man..." her VO says as he gulps the drink, "women are suckers". Tight on woman's face: "(he's a) rake", she pouts. To better appreciate this endemic correspondence between objectification and desire, consider this ad for a car named "Rosso" ("red" in Italian, "aka" in Japanese). The model, "Anna", is tinted head to toe in red (red, of course, being the universal signifier for passion and desire)4. She and/or the car rouse enough passion in a male by-stander to literally make his blood boil. This, in turn, produces steam which, in turn, sends air current of sufficient force to propel Anna's skirt skyward. This, in turn, converts the man's face into an embarrassed and/or impassioned red. "Rosso!" he gushes enthusiastically -- reference to car, his condition, Anna and, presumably, her panties5. Thus, the desire for things -- people included -- is by no means disappearing in Japanese advertising. The name of the game is still to sell that which has been produced. Although Japanese ads have moved toward a decentring of product -- an introduction of consumption-least discourse, with a concomitant increase in popular cultural and societal content -- the great majority still speak in the language of "here it is, buy it!" The prevailing tenor is still object-oriented. And the spill-over, as we just saw, is a tendency to depict humans and their interactions in objectified terms. A recent ad, for the discount store LLAOX, is rather stark in this regard. A young man displays photos of the many items (guitars, television, appliances) he found at LLAOX. In the final shot, of an attractive woman standing in front of the items, he proudly boasts: "I found her at LLAOX, too!" Subject-Oriented Desire Like ads in other countries, then, Japanese ads tend to place the object ahead of the subject. Desire for the person depicted in the ad is either ancillary to the desire expressed for the product, or else exists as a function of the subject's objectified status. However, an accreting number of Japanese ads have begun orienting desire toward one or both of the subjects in the ad, over or independent of the object for sale. A man and woman in their early thirties sit at a table sipping whiskey. The woman leans toward the man and in a perky voice utters: "Hey, let's turn in soon." The man protests, pointing to the drink: "we haven't finished this, yet." The woman tilts her head. She insists "let's head home." Then in a conspiratorial undertone "it's that day" and winks. The man's elbow falls off the tabletop. The woman blows him a kiss. Cut to a cat hiding beneath one of his paws in embarrassment. (Source: Nikka All Malt Whiskey -- Japan, 1993) Admittedly, not all ad discourse involves desire. But of late considerable ad space has been devoted to human relations and longing6. Consider this promo for a health drink. A man stands on his verandah in his t-shirt and pyjama bottoms. He looks groggy. Cut to a young woman watering her plants on the adjacent porch. "Hey!" she coos to her bushes, "are you lively?" She tends the pots along the centre divider. Is she addressing her foliage or the young man on the other side? He cranes his neck to steal a peek. She seems unaware. He lays his head on his forearms, admiring her. Cut to a shot of her regarding the product; drinking it; savouring the taste. The text reads: "With Lactia you will bloom beautifully." The woman enthuses audibly: "happiness!" Her voyeur, still in thrall, emits a sigh, suddenly straightens and declares aloud (in English): "Nice!" The previous two examples feature desire by adults. Considerable contemporary desire-centred discourse, however, focuses on teens. In these cases the product is sometimes introduced as a symbol for desire -- as in this case of a potato chip which snaps crisply each time a boy's romantic advance is repelled. A boy and girl walk along a boardwalk. The boy tentatively reaches for his partner's hand. Just then an approaching bicyclist toots his horn and cleaves a path between the two. A superimposed chip snaps. Next, seated on the shoreline, the boy reaches out again. Suddenly, a wind-blown ball rolls past, prompting his intended to abruptly vacate her position. He is left, literally clutching air. Another chip snaps again. The boy reaches out to touch the girl's handprint in the sand. He utters "I like you". The girl turns and asks "what did you say?" He impotently shrugs "nothing at all." Cut to a box of the chips. This youthful obsession with desire plays prominently in ads. First, because it fits well with the "mini-drama" format currently favoured in Japanese advertising. Second, because it is an effective technique for capturing viewer interest. The emotional tugs keep the audience attending to the ad beyond the first viewing. In the following ad, while desire for the product is the punch line, the entire ad is structured around unrequited desire. The confusion of the former for the latter not only redounds to product value, but predisposes the audience toward empathy and engagement. A teenage girl in her plaid uniform steers her bike into its berth outside school. Her voiceover identifies the bike name, shows how one touch locks the wheel in place and the seat in the vertical position. "Oh!" a quavering male voice utters off camera. "Can I ask name?" Japanese being a language that often operates without articles and pronouns, we aren't sure which name he means. Quick zoom in on the girl's expectant expression. "Eh?" she asks breathlessly. Her narration stops, her heart soars, glowing a vibrant red over her white sweater. "The bike's name", her interlocutor clarifies. All at once, the throbbing red heart is extinguished, fading to a black circular smudge. Her expectant smile dissolves into disappointment. Not all scenarios are downers, however. In the following case the product is a prop -- at best an accoutrement -- in the teenage game of expressing desire. A spry girl pours hot water into two cups. Off camera an older female voice asks whether she isn't supposed to be resting. "Don't worry about it", the girl replies. Cut to exterior shot. She's wearing a short coat, backing through the front door with the two cups in her hands. Cut to an angled reaction shot: a handsome boy leans across his bike, placing a letter in the post. He holds the letter up. "This", he says. Cut to the girl, now leaning against the entryway of the building, sipping her drink. Haltingly, in a breathy voice, she utters: "To... tomorrow... would have been... okay. But..." Japanese being the language of implication we read this as "it's fine the way it is working out." With the girl in the foreground, we see the boy leaning against the entryway on the opposite side contemplating his drink. Cut to a long angled shot from high above. The two teens sup in the cool evening air, alone, intimate, yet separated by the building's bright entrance. The narrator closes with a message about the nutritional value of the drink -- wholly unrelated to the unequivocal web of intimacy spun by these two youths. This ad offers us a perfect take on how desire is constructed and reproduced in contemporary ads in Japan. A perfect place for us to close. Evolving Desire? Desire is not new to advertising, but the form in which it is currently being expressed is. In Japan, at least, where commercials strive for polysemy in the volatile, evanescent and ultimately quixotic struggle for audience attention, communication is increasingly about things unrelated to the product. High on the list are affection, intimacy and sexuality -- aspects of human existence which bear considerable connection to desire. Reproduced in a variety of forms, played out in an array of contexts, by a variety of demographic "types", such commercial communications have the effect of centralising desire as a major theme in contemporary Japanese society7. The increase in so-called "secondary discourse"8 about human longing is palpable. But what to make of it? Clear explanations lie in "social evolution" -- factors such as: Japan's remarkable achievement of its postwar economic goals; its subsequent economic meltdown and accreting political malaise; the dramatic decline in corporate loyalty; disintegration of the family; increased urbanisation, atomisation and anomie; the stratification of generations and economic classes; increased materialism and attention to status; the concomitant loss of a personal raison d'être and collective moral beacon. In fact, all the reasons that Emile Durkheim diagnosed in fin de siècle France in inventing the discipline of sociology and Murakami Ryu has recently discerned a century later in fin de siècle Japan. Desire is a manifestation of social breakdown, as well as a plea for its resolution. As we enter a new century -- indeed a new millenium -- it is an empirical question worth monitoring whether the Japanese obsession with desire will continue to swell. Footnotes 1. Although the claims in this paper are qualitative, rather than quantitative, without question it is true that both men and women in Japanese television advertising are depicted as desiring. In this way, one could claim that desire exists independent of gender in ads. At the same time, it is almost certain that desire is often depicted as being manifested differentially by men and women. However, as one can infer from the data below, this is not always so (viz. "True Love"). Moreover, while women (or men) might more often fit one or another of the constructs below (i.e. object-mediated, object-induced, object-directed, subject-oriented) than their opposite number, cases can generally be found in which both (male and female) are depicted desiring in each of the stated relationships. 1. Thinking of this (fire-desire) symbol-set generally (and this ad specifically), one is reminded of the Springsteen lyric: At night I wake up with the sheets soaking wet and a freight train running through the middle of my head; Only you can cool my desire. I'm on fire. -- Bruce Springsteen: "I'm on Fire" (1984) Reminding one of the lyric by Shocking Blue from their decade-spanning Number 1 single (1970 by the Dutch band as well as the 1986 cover version by Bananarama): I'm your Venus, I'm your fire at your desire. If not the Earth, Wind and Fire phrasing from "That's the Way of the World" (1975): Hearts of fire, creates love desire... Of course, the fire/desire combo might also have become a universal association due to the easy opportunity (at least in English) to commit a rhyme (no matter how cloddish). 2. It has yet to be determined that desire is a cultural universal. However, the universal presence and relatively uniform logic of the "machinery of capitalism" (a major aspect of which is advertising) certainly serves as a powerful prod. That machinery overlaps culture and tends to act on it in relatively similar ways (one of which may just be the discourse about desire). This, of course, makes no claims about universal outcomes. I have addressed the interaction of capitalism and context and the themes of global/local, hom*ogeneity/heterogeneity, universal/particular in a series of articles concerning information transfer, body, color, and advertising form in comparative context. Please see my home page for references to and greater detail on this work. 3. Regarding red as signifier, see Branston & Stafford (7). Also see my work on color universals ("The Color of Meaning") and culture-specific colour conventions ("The Color of Difference"). 4. Support for this interpretation can be found in other ads, as ideas and practices in Japanese advertising tend to travel in twos or threes. During this same period, Suzuki Move placed Leonardo DiCaprio behind the wheel. As he tooled around the city, his accelleration was such as to raise the skirts of two by-standers. DiCaprio promptly braked, placed the car in reverse, rolled astride the two women, and impishly pointing at each, identified the shade of underpants ("white and strawberry") they were sporting. 5. And let me reiterate: All such depictions are exclusively about sexual/emotional longing between men and women. 6. As I am mainly working with Japanese data in this article, I feel comfortable only seeking to draw conclusions about Japanese society. Certainly, one could fathom conducting the same sort of analysis and arriving at the same general conclusions about other postmodern, capitalist, commercial-centred, consumer-oriented societies. 7. The word is O'Barr's. It bears considerable similarity to Barthes's "second order signification". Plates 1 Caliente perfume (USA, 1994) 9 Georgia canned coffee (Japan, 1999) 2 Old Spice cologne (USA, 1994) 10 Rosso (Japan, 1998) 3 co*ke (Australia, 1994) 11 LLAOX (Japan, 1999) 4 Dashing cologne (Malaysia, 1997) 12 Lactia (Japan, 1997) 5 Cup Noodles (Japan, 1998) 13 5/8 and 3/5 Chips (Japan, 1993) 6 Cup Noodles (Japan, 1998) 14 Gachyarinko (Japan, 1999) 7 Nescafe Excella (ice coffee; Japan, 1999) 15 Hotpo (health drink; Japan 1999) 8 Various ads References Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Jonathan Cape, 1972 (1957). Branston, G., and R. Stafford. The Media Student's Book. London: Routledge, 1996. Fiske, John. Television Culture. London: Methuen, 1987. Holden, Todd. "The Color of Meaning: The Significance of Black and White in Television Commercials." Interdisciplinary Information Sciences 3.2 (1997): 125-146. ---. "The Color of Difference: Critiquing Cultural Convergence via Television Advertising" Interdisciplinary Information Sciences 5.1 (1999): 15-36. O'Barr. Culture and the Ad: Exploring Otherness in the World of Advertising. Boulder, Co.: Westview Press, 1994. Williamson, Judith. Decoding Advertisem*nts: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising. London: Marion Boyers, 1979. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Todd Joseph Miles Holden. "The Evolution of Desire in Advertising: From Object-Obsession to Subject-Affection." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.5 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/adverts.php>. Chicago style: Todd Joseph Miles Holden, "The Evolution of Desire in Advertising: From Object-Obsession to Subject-Affection," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 5 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/adverts.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Todd Joseph Miles Holden. (1999) The evolution of desire in advertising: from object-obsession to subject-affection. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(5). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/adverts.php> ([your date of access]).

Abstract:

Introduction There is much to be said about house and home and about our media’s role in defining, enabling, as well as undermining it. […] For we can no longer think about home, any longer than we can live at home, without our media. (Silverstone, “Why Study the Media” 88) For lesbians, inhabiting the queer slant may be a matter of everyday negotiation. This is not about the romance of being off line or the joy of radical politics (though it can be), but rather the everyday work of dealing with the perception of others, with the “straightening devices” and the violence that might follow when such perceptions congeal into social forms. (Ahmed 107) Picture this. Once or twice a week a small, black, portable TV set goes on a journey; down from the lofty heights of the top shelf of the built in storage cupboard into the far corner of the living room. A few hours later, it is being stuffed back into the closet. Not far away across town, another small TV set sits firmly in the corner of a living room. Yet, it remains inanimate for days on end. What do you see? The techno-stories conveyed in this paper are presented through – and anchored to – the idea of the cultural biography of things (Kopytoff 1986), revealing how objects (more specifically media technologies) produce and become part of an articulation of particular and conflicting moral economies of households (Silverstone, “Domesticating Domestication”; Silverstone, Hirsch and Morley, “Information and Communication”; Green). In this context, the concept of the domestication of ICTs has been widely applied in Media Studies during the 1990s and, more recently, been updated to account for the changes in technology, household composition, media regulation, and in fact the dislocation of domesticity itself (Berker, Hartmann, Punie and Ward). Remarkable as these mainstream techno-stories are in their elucidation of contemporary techno-practices, what is still absent is the consideration of how gender and sexuality intersect and are being done through ICT consumption at home, work and during leisure practices in alternative or queer households and families. Do lesbians ‘make’ house and home and in what ways are media and ICTs implicated in the everyday work of queer home-making strategies? As writings on queer subjects and cyberspace have proliferated in recent years, we can now follow a move to contextualize queer virtualities across on and offline experiences, mapping ‘complex geographies of un/belonging’ (Bryson, MacIntosh, Jordan and Lin) and a return to consider online media as part of a bigger ICT package that constitutes our queer everyday life-worlds (Karl). At the same time, fresh perspectives are now being developed with regards to the reconfiguration of domestic values by gay men and lesbians, demonstrating the ongoing processes of probing and negotiation of ‘home’ and the questioning of domesticity itself (Gorman-Murray). By aligning ideas and concepts developed by media theorists in the field of media domestication and consumption as well as (sexual) geographers, this paper makes a contribution towards our understanding of a queer sense of home and domesticity through the technological and more specifically television. It is based on two case studies, part of a larger longitudinal ethnographic study of women-centred households in Brighton, UK. Gill Valentine has identified the home and workplaces as spaces, which are encoded as heterosexual. Sexual identities are being constrained by ‘regulatory regimes’, promoting the normalcy of heterosexuality (4). By recounting the techno-stories of lesbian women, we can re-examine notions of the home as a stable, safe, given entity; the home as a particular feminine sphere as well as the leaky boundaries between public and private. As media and ICTs are also part of a (hetero)sexual economy where they, in their materiality as well as textual significance become markers of sexual difference, we can to a certain extent perceive them as ‘straightening devices’, to borrow a phrase from Sara Ahmed. Here, we will find the articulation of a host of struggles to ‘fight the norms’, but not necessarily ‘step outside the system completely, full-time’ (Ben, personal interview [all the names of the interviewees have been changed to protect their anonymity]). In this sense, the struggle is not only to counter perceived heterosexual home-making and techno-practices, but also to question what kinds of practices to adopt and repeat as ‘fitting in’ mechanism. Significantly, these practices leave neither ‘hom*onormative’ nor ‘heteronormative’ imaginaries untouched and remind us that: In the case of sexual orientation, it is not simply that we have it. To become straight means that we not only have to turn towards the objects that are given to us by heterosexual culture, but also that we must “turn away” from objects that take us off this line. (Ahmed 21) In this sense then, we are all part of drawing and re-drawing the lines of belonging and un-belonging within the confines of a less than equal power-economy. Locating Dys-Location – Is There a Lesbian in the Home? In his effort to re-situate the perspective of media domestication in the 21st century, David Morley points us to ‘the process of the technologically mediated dislocation of domesticity itself’ (“What’s ‘home’” 22). He argues that ‘under the impact of new technologies and global cultural flows, the home nowadays is not so much a local, particular “self-enclosed” space, but rather, as Zygmunt Bauman puts it, more and more a “phantasmagoric” place, as electronic means of communication allow the radical intrusion of what he calls the “realm of the far” (traditionally, the realm of the strange and potentially troubling) into the “realm of the near” (the traditional “safe space” of ontological security) (23). The juxtaposition of home as a safe, ‘given’ place of ontological security vis a vis the more virtual and mediated realm of the far and potentially intrusive is itself called into question, if we re-consider the concepts of home and (dis)location in the light of lesbian geographies and ‘the production and regulation of heterosexual space’ (Valentine 1). The dislocation of home and domesticity experienced through consumption of (mobile) media technologies has always already been under-written by the potential feeling of dys-location and ‘trouble’ by lesbians on the grounds of sexual orientation. The lesbian experience disrupts the traditionally modern and notably western ideal of home as a safe haven and refuge by making visible the leaky boundaries between private seclusion and public surveillance, as much as it may (re)invest in the production of ideas and ideals of home-making and domesticity. This is illustrated for example by the way in which the heterosexuality of a parental home ‘can inscribe the lesbian body by restricting the performative aspects of a lesbian identity’, which may be subverted by covert acts of resistance (Johnston and Valentine 111; Elwood) as well as by the potentially greater freedoms of lesbian identity within a ‘lesbian home’, which may nevertheless come under scrutiny and ‘surveillance of others, especially close family, friends and neighbours’ (112). Nevertheless, more recently it has also been demonstrated how even overarching structures of familial heteronormativity are opportune to fissures and thereby queered, as Andrew Gorman-Murray illustrates in his study of Australian gay, lesbian and bisexual youth in supportive family homes. So what is, or rather, what can constitute a ‘lesbian home’ and how is it negotiated through everyday techno-practices? In and Out of the Closet – The Straight-Speaking ‘Telly’ As places go, the city of Brighton and Hove in the south-east of England fetches the prize for the highest ratio of LGBT people amongst its population in the UK, sitting at about 15%. In this sense, the home-making stories to which I will refer, of a white, lesbian single mother in her early 40s from a working-class background and a white lesbian/dyke couple in their 30s (from middle-/working-class backgrounds), are already engendered in the sense that Brighton (to them) represented in part a kind of ‘home-coming’ in itself. Helen and Ben, a lesbian butch-femme couple (‘when it takes our fancy’, Helen), had recently bought a terraced 1930s three-bedroom house with a sizeable garden in a soon to be up and coming residential area of Brighton. The neighbours are a mix of elderly, long-standing residents and ‘hetero’ families, or ‘breeders’, as Ben sometimes referred to them. Although they had lived together before, the new house constituted their first purchase together. This was significant especially for Helen, as it made their lives more ‘equal’ in terms of what goes where and the input on the overall interior decoration. Ben had shifted from London to Brighton a few years previously for a ‘quieter life’, but wished to remain connected to a queer community. Helen had made the move to Brighton from Germany – to study and enjoy the queer feel, and never left. Both full-time professionals, Helen worked in the publishing industry and Ben as a social worker. Already considering Brighton their ‘home’ town, the house purchase itself constituted another home-making challenge: as a lesbian/dyke couple on equal footing they were prepared to accept to live in a pre-dominantly straight neighbourhood, as it afforded them more space for money compared to the more visibly gay male living areas in the centre of town. The relative invisibility of queer women (and their neighbourhoods) compared to queer men in Brighton may, as it does elsewhere, be connected to issues of safety (Elwood) as well as the comparative lack of financial capacity (Bell and Valentine). Walking up to this house on the first night of my stay with them, I am struck by just how inconspicuous it appears – one of many in a long street, up a steep hill: ‘Most housing in contemporary western societies is “designed, built, financed and intended for nuclear families”’ (Bell in Bell and Valentine 7). I cannot help but think – more as a reflection on myself than of what I am about to experience – is this it? Is this the ‘domesticated lesbian’? What I see appears ‘familiar’, ‘tamed’, re-tracing the straight lines of heterosexual culture. Helen opens the door and orders me directly into the kitchen. She says ‘Ben is in the living room, watching television… Ben takes great pleasure in watching “You’ve been Framed”’. (Fieldnotes) In this context, it is appropriate to focus on the television and its place within their home-making strategies. Television, in its historical and symbolic significance, could be deemed the technological co-terminus to the ideal nuclear family home. Lynn Spigel has shown through her examination of the cultural history of TV’s formative years in post World War America how television became central to providing representations of family life, but also how the technology itself, as an object, informed material and symbolic transformations within the domestic sphere and beyond. Over the past fifty years as Morley points out, the TV has moved from its fixed place in the living room to become more personalised and encroach on other spaces in house and home and has now, in fact, re-entered the public realm (see airports and shopping malls) where it originated. At present, ‘the home itself can seen as having become … the “last vehicle”, where comfort, safety and stability can happily coexist with the possibility of instantaneous digitalised “flight” to elsewhere – and the instantaneous importation of desired elements of the “elsewhere” into the home’ (Morley, “Media, Modernity” 200). Importantly, as Morley confirms, today’s high-tech discourse is often still framed by a nostalgic vision of ‘family values’. There was only one TV set in Helen and Ben’s house: a black plastic cube with a 16” screen. It was decidedly ‘unglamorous’ as Helen pointed out. During the first round of ‘home-making’ efforts, it had found its way into a corner in the front room, with the sofa and armchair arranged in viewing distance. It was a very ‘traditional’ living room set-up. During my weeklong stay and for some weeks after, it was mostly Ben on her own ‘watching the telly’ in the early evenings ‘vegging out’ after work. Helen, meanwhile, was in the kitchen with the radio on or a CD playing, or in her ‘ICT free’ bedroom, reading. Then, suddenly, the TV had disappeared. During one of our ‘long conversations’ (Silverstone, Hirsch and Morley, “Listening”, 204) it transpired that it was now housed for most of the time on the top shelf of a storage cupboard and only ‘allowed out’ ever so often. As a material object, it had easily found its place as a small, but nevertheless quite central feature in the living room. Imbued with the cultural memory of their parents’ and that of many other living rooms, it was ‘tempting’ and easy for them to ‘accept’ it as part of a setting up home as a couple. Ben explained that they both fell into a habit, an everyday routine, to sit around it. However, settling into their new home with too much ‘ease’, they began to question their techno-practice around the TV. For Helen in particular, the aesthetics of the TV set did not fit in with her plans to re-decorate the house loosely in art deco style, tethered to her femme identity. They did not envisage creating a home that would potentially signal that a family with 2.4 children lives here. ‘The “normality” of [working] 9-5’ (Ben), was sufficient. Establishing a perceived visual difference in their living room, partly by removing the TV set, Helen and Ben aimed to ‘draw a line’ around their home and private sphere vis a vis the rest of the street and, metaphorically speaking, the straight world. The boundaries between the public and private are nevertheless porous, as it is exactly that the public perceptions of a mostly private, domesticated media technology prevent Helen and Ben from feeling entirely comfortable in its presence. It was not only the TV set’s symbolic function as a material object that made them restrict and consciously control the presence of the TV in their home space. One of Helen and Ben’s concerns in this context was that TV, as a broadcast medium, is utterly ‘conservative’ in its content and as such, very much ‘straight speaking’. To paraphrase Helen – you can only read so much between the lines and shout at the telly, it can get tiring. ‘I like watching nature programmes, but they somehow manage even here to make it sound like a hetero narrative’. Ben: ‘yeah – mind the lesbian swans’. The employment of the VCR and renting movies helps them to partly re-dress this perceived imbalance. At the same time, TV’s ‘water-cooler’ effect helps them to stay in tune with what is going on around them and enables them, for example, to participate and intervene in conversations at work. In this sense, watching TV can turn into home-work, which affords a kind of entry ticket to shared life-worlds outside the home and as such can be controlled, but not necessarily abandoned altogether. TV as a ‘straightening device’ may afford the (dis)comfort of a sense of participation in mainstream discourses and the (dis)comfort of serving as a reminder of difference at the same time. ‘It just sits there … apart from Sundays’ – and when the girls come round… Single-parent households are on the rise in the US (Russo Lemor) as well as in the UK. However, the attention given to single-parent families so far focuses pre-dominantly on single mothers and fathers after separation or divorce from a heterosexual marriage (Russo Lemor; Silverstone, “Beneath the Bottom Line”). As (queer) sociologists have began to map the field of ‘families of choice and other life experiments’ (Weeks, Heaphy and Donovan), a more concerted effort to bring together the literatures and to shed more light on the queer techno-practices of alternative families seems necessary. Liz and her young son Tim had moved to Brighton from London. As a lesbian working single mother, she raises Tim pre-dominantly on her own: ‘we are a small family, and that’s fine’. Liz’s home-making narrative is very much driven by her awareness of what she sees as her responsibilities as a mother, a lesbian mother. The move to Brighton was assessed by being able to keep her clients in London (she worked as a self-employed communication and PR person for various London councils) – ‘this is what feeds us’, and the fact that she did not want Tim to go to a ‘badly performing’ school in London. The terraced three-bedroom house she found was in a residential area, not too far from the station and in need of updating and re-decorating. The result of the combined efforts of builders, her dad (‘for some of the DIY’) and herself produced a ‘conventional’ set-up with a living room, a kitchen-diner, a small home-office (for tele-working) and Tim’s and her bedroom. Inconspicuous in its appearance, it was clearly child-oriented with a ‘real jelly bean arch’ in the hallway. The living room is relatively bare, with a big sofa, table and chairs, ‘an ancient stereo-system’ and a ‘battered TV and Video-recorder’ in the corner. ‘We hardly use it’, Liz exclaims. ‘We much rather spend time out and about if there is a chance … quality time, rather than watching TV … or I read him stories in bed. I hate the idea of TV as a baby sitter … I have very deliberately chosen to have Tim and I want to make the most of it’. For Liz, the living room with the TV set in it appears as a kind of gesture to what family homes ‘look like’. As such, the TV and furniture set-up function as a signal and symbol of ‘normality’ in a queer household – perhaps a form of ‘passing’ for visitors and guests. The concern for the welfare of her son in this context is a sign and reflection of a constant negotiation process within a pre-dominantly heterosexual system of cultural symbols and values, which he, of course, is already able to ‘compare’ and evaluate when he is out and about at school or visiting friends in their homes. Unlike in Helen and Ben’s home, the TV is therefore allowed to stay out of the closet. Still, Liz rarely watches TV at all, for reasons not dissimilar to those of Helen and Ben. Apart from this, she shares a lack of spare time with many other single parents. Significantly, the living room and TV do receive a queer ‘make-over’ now and then, when Tim is in bed or with his father on a weekend and ‘the girls’ come over for a drink, chat and video viewing (noticeably, the living room furniture and TV get pushed around and re-arranged to accommodate the crowd). In this sense, Liz, in her home-making practices, carefully manages and performs ‘object relationships’ that allow her and her son to ‘fit in’ as much as to advocate ‘difference’ within the construction of ‘normalcy’. The pressures of this negotiation process are clearly visible. Conclusion – Re-Engendering Home and Techno-Practices As women as much as lesbians, Helen, Ben and Liz are, like so many others, part of a historical and much wider struggle regarding visibility, equality and justice. If this article had been dedicated to gay/queer men and their techno- and home-making sensibilities, it would have read somewhat differently to be sure. Of course, questions of gender and sexual identities would have remained equally paramount, as they always should, enfolding questions of class, race and ethnicity (Pink 2004). The concept and practice of home have a deeply engendered history. Queer practices ‘at home’ are always already tied up with knowledges of gendered practices and spaces. As Morley has observed, ‘space is gendered on a variety of scales … the local is often associated with femininity and seen as the natural basis of home and community, into which an implicitly masculine realm intrudes’ (“Home Territories” 59). As the public and private realms have been gendered masculine and feminine respectively, so have media and ICTs. Although traditional ideas of home and gender relations are beginning to break down and the increasing personalization and mobilization of ICTs blur perceptions of the public and private, certain (idealized, heterosexualized and gendered) images of home, domesticity and family life seem to be recurring in popular discourse as well as mainstream academic writing. As feminist theorists have illustrated the ways in which gender needs to be seen as performative, feminist and queer theorists also ought to work further on finding vocabularies and discourses that capture and highlight diversity, without re-invoking the spectre of the nuclear family (home) itself (Weeks, Heaphy and Donovan). What I found was not the ‘domesticated’ lesbian ‘at home’ in a traditional feminine sphere. Rather, I experienced a complex set of re-negotiations and re-inscriptions of the domestic, of gender and sexual values and identities as well as techno-practices, leaving a trace, a mark on the system no matter how small (Helen: ‘I do wonder what the neighbours make of us’). The pressure and indeed desire to ‘fit in’ is often enormous and therefore affords the re-tracing of certain trodden paths of domesticity and ICT consumption. Nevertheless, I am looking forward to the day when even Liz can put that old telly into the closet as it has lost its meaning as a cultural signifier of a particular kind. References Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology – Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2006. Bell, David, and Gill Valentine. “Introduction: Orientations.” mapping desire. Eds. David Bell and Gill Valentine. London: Routledge, 1995. 1-27. Berker, Thomas, Maren Hartmann, Yves Punie and Katie J. Ward, eds. Domestication of Media and Technology. Maidenhead: Open UP, 2006. Bryson, Mary, Lori MacIntosh, Sharalyn Jordan, Hui-Ling Lin. “Virtually Queer?: Homing Devices, Mobility, and Un/Belongings.” Canadian Journal of Communication 31.3 (2006). Elwood, Sarah A.. “Lesbian Living Spaces: Multiple Meanings of Home.” From Nowhere to Everywhere – Lesbian Geographies. Ed. Gill Valentine. New York and London: Harrington Park Press, 2000. 11-27. 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London: Routledge, 2007. Pink, Sarah. Home Truths – Gender, Domestic Objects and Everyday Life. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2004. Russo Lemor, Anna Maria. “Making a ‘Home’. The Domestication of Information and Communication Technologies in Single Parents’ Households.” Domestication of Media and Technology. Eds. Thomas Berker, Maren Hartmann, Yves Punie and Katie J. Ward. Maidenhead: Open UP, 2006. 165-184. Silverstone, Roger. “Beneath the Bottom Line: Households and Information and Communication Technologies in an Age of the Consumer.” PICT Policy Papers 17. Swindon: ESRC, 1991. ———. Television and Everyday Life. London: Routledge, 1994. ———. Why Study the Media. London: Sage, 1999. ———. “Domesticating Domestication: Reflections on the Life of a Concept.” Domestication of Media and Technology. Eds. Thomas Berker, Maren Hartmann, Yves Punie and Katie J. Ward. Maidenhead: Open UP, 2006. 229-48. 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Citation reference for this article MLA Style Karl, Irmi. "Domesticating the Lesbian?: Queer Strategies and Technologies of Home-Making." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/06-karl.php>. APA Style Karl, I. (Aug. 2007) "Domesticating the Lesbian?: Queer Strategies and Technologies of Home-Making," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/06-karl.php>.

Abstract:

Introduction: Bubbles and Sport The ephemeral materiality of bubbles – beautiful, spectacular, and distracting but ultimately fragile – when applied to protect or conserve in the interests of sport-media profit, creates conditions that exacerbate existing inequalities in sport and society. Bubbles are usually something to watch, admire, and chase after in their brief yet shiny lives. There is supposed to be, technically, nothing inside them other than one or more gasses, and yet we constantly refer to people and objects being inside bubbles. The metaphor of the bubble has been used to describe the life of celebrities, politicians in purpose-built capital cities like Canberra, and even leftist, environmentally activist urban dwellers. The metaphorical and material qualities of bubbles are aligned—they cannot be easily captured and are liable to change at any time. In this article we address the metaphorical sporting bubble, which is often evoked in describing life in professional sport. This is a vernacular term used to capture and condemn the conditions of life of elite sportspeople (usually men), most commonly after there has been a sport-related scandal, especially of a sexual nature (Rowe). It is frequently paired with connotatively loaded adjectives like pampered and indulged. The sporting bubble is rarely interrogated in academic literature, the concept largely being left to the media and moral entrepreneurs. It is represented as involving a highly privileged but also pressurised life for those who live inside it. A sporting bubble is a world constructed for its most prized inhabitants that enables them to be protected from insurgents and to set the terms of their encounters with others, especially sport fans and disciplinary agents of the state. The Covid-19 pandemic both reinforced and reconfigured the operational concept of the bubble, re-arranging tensions between safety (protecting athletes) and fragility (short careers, risks of injury, etc.) for those within, while safeguarding those without from bubble contagion. Privilege and Precarity Bubble-induced social isolation, critics argue, encourages a loss of perspective among those under its protection, an entitled disconnection from the usual rules and responsibilities of everyday life. For this reason, the denizens of the sporting bubble are seen as being at risk to themselves and, more troublingly, to those allowed temporarily to penetrate it, especially young women who are first exploited by and then ejected from it (Benedict). There are many well-documented cases of professional male athletes “behaving badly” and trying to rely on institutional status and various versions of the sporting bubble for shelter (Flood and Dyson; Reel and Crouch; Wade). In the age of mobile and social media, it is increasingly difficult to keep misbehaviour in-house, resulting in a slew of media stories about, for example, drunkenness and sexual misconduct, such as when then-Sydney Roosters co-captain Mitchell Pearce was suspended and fined in 2016 after being filmed trying to force an unwanted kiss on a woman and then simulating a lewd act with her dog while drunk. There is contestation between those who condemn such behaviour as aberrant and those who regard it as the conventional expression of youthful masculinity as part of the familiar “boys will be boys” dictum. The latter naturalise an inequitable gender order, frequently treating sportsmen as victims of predatory women, and ignoring asymmetries of power between men and women, especially in hom*osocial environments (Toffoletti). For those in the sporting bubble (predominantly elite sportsmen and highly paid executives, also mostly men, with an array of service staff of both sexes moving in and out of it), life is reflected for those being protected via an array of screens (small screens in homes and indoor places of entertainment, and even smaller screens on theirs and others’ phones, as well as huge screens at sport events). These male sport stars are paid handsomely to use their skill and strength to perform for the sporting codes, their every facial expression and bodily action watched by the media and relayed to audiences. This is often a precarious existence, the usually brief career of an athlete worker being dependent on health, luck, age, successful competition with rivals, networks, and club and coach preferences. There is a large, aspirational reserve army of athletes vying to play at the elite level, despite risks of injury and invasive, life-changing medical interventions. Responsibility for avoiding performance and image enhancing drugs (PIEDs) also weighs heavily on their shoulders (Connor). Professional sportspeople, in their more reflective moments, know that their time in the limelight will soon be up, meaning that getting a ticket to the sporting bubble, even for a short time, can make all the difference to their post-sport lives and those of their families. The most vulnerable of the small minority of participants in sport who make a good, short-term living from it are those for whom, in the absence of quality education and prior social status, it is their sole likely means of upward social mobility (Spaaij). Elite sport performers are surrounded by minders, doctors, fitness instructors, therapists, coaches, advisors and other service personnel, all supporting athletes to stay focussed on and maximise performance quality to satisfy co-present crowds, broadcasters, sponsors, sports bodies and mass media audiences. The shield offered by the sporting bubble supports the teleological win-at-all-costs mentality of professional sport. The stakes are high, with athlete and executive salaries, sponsorships and broadcasting deals entangled in a complex web of investments in keeping the “talent” pivotal to the “attention economy” (Davenport and Beck)—the players that provide the content for sale—in top form. Yet, the bubble cannot be entirely secured and poor behaviour or performance can have devastating effects, including permanent injury or disability, mental illness and loss of reputation (Rowe, “Scandals and Sport”). Given this fragile materiality of the sporting bubble, it is striking that, in response to the sudden shutdown following the economic and health crisis caused by the 2020 global pandemic, the leaders of professional sport decided to create more of them and seek to seal the metaphorical and material space with unprecedented efficiency. The outcome was a multi-sided tale of mobility, confinement, capital, labour, and the gendering of sport and society. The Covid-19 Gilded Cage Sociologists such as Zygmunt Bauman and John Urry have analysed the socio-politics of mobilities, whereby some people in the world, such as tourists, can traverse the globe at their leisure, while others remain fixed in geographical space because they lack the means to be mobile or, in contrast, are involuntarily displaced by war, so-called “ethnic cleansing”, famine, poverty or environmental degradation. The Covid-19 global pandemic re-framed these matters of mobilities (Rowe, “Subjecting Pandemic Sport”), with conventional moving around—between houses, businesses, cities, regions and countries—suddenly subjected to the imperative to be static and, in perniciously unreflective technocratic discourse, “socially distanced” (when what was actually meant was to be “physically distanced”). The late-twentieth century analysis of the “risk society” by Ulrich Beck, in which the mysterious consequences of humans’ predation on their environment are visited upon them with terrifying force, was dramatically realised with the coming of Covid-19. In another iteration of the metaphor, it burst the bubble of twenty-first century global sport. What we today call sport was formed through the process of sportisation (Maguire), whereby hyper-local, folk physical play was reconfigured as multi-spatial industrialised sport in modernity, becoming increasingly reliant on individual athletes and teams travelling across the landscape and well over the horizon. Co-present crowds were, in turn, overshadowed in the sport economy when sport events were taken to much larger, dispersed audiences via the media, especially in broadcast mode (Nicholson, Kerr, and Sherwood). This lucrative mediation of professional sport, though, came with an unforgiving obligation to generate an uninterrupted supply of spectacular live sport content. The pandemic closed down most sports events and those that did take place lacked the crucial participation of the co-present crowd to provide the requisite event atmosphere demanded by those viewers accustomed to a sense of occasion. Instead, they received a strange spectacle of sport performers operating in empty “cathedrals”, often with a “faked” crowd presence. The mediated sport spectacle under the pandemic involved cardboard cut-out and sex doll spectators, Zoom images of fans on large screens, and sampled sounds of the crowd recycled from sport video games. Confected co-presence produced simulacra of the “real” as Baudrillardian visions came to life. The sporting bubble had become even more remote. For elite sportspeople routinely isolated from the “common people”, the live sport encounter offered some sensory experience of the social – the sounds, sights and even smells of the crowd. Now the sporting bubble closed in on an already insulated and insular existence. It exposed the irony of the bubble as a sign of both privileged mobility and incarcerated athlete work, both refuge and prison. Its logic of contagion also turned a structure intended to protect those inside from those outside into, as already observed, a mechanism to manage the threat of insiders to outsiders. In Australia, as in many other countries, the populace was enjoined by governments and health authorities to help prevent the spread of Covid-19 through isolation and immobility. There were various exceptions, principally those classified as essential workers, a heterogeneous cohort ranging from supermarket shelf stackers to pharmacists. People in the cultural, leisure and sports industries, including musicians, actors, and athletes, were not counted among this crucial labour force. Indeed, the performing arts (including dance, theatre and music) were put on ice with quite devastating effects on the livelihoods and wellbeing of those involved. So, with all major sports shut down (the exception being horse racing, which received the benefit both of government subsidies and expanding online gambling revenue), sport organisations began to represent themselves as essential services that could help sustain collective mental and even spiritual wellbeing. This case was made most aggressively by Australian Rugby League Commission Chairman, Peter V’landys, in contending that “an Australia without rugby league is not Australia”. In similar vein, prominent sport and media figure Phil Gould insisted, when describing rugby league fans in Western Sydney’s Penrith, “they’re lost, because the football’s not on … . It holds their families together. People don’t understand that … . Their life begins in the second week of March, and it ends in October”. Despite misgivings about public safety and equality before the pandemic regime, sporting bubbles were allowed to form, re-form and circulate. The indefinite shutdown of the National Rugby League (NRL) on 23 March 2020 was followed after negotiation between multiple entities by its reopening on 28 May 2020. The competition included a team from another nation-state (the Warriors from Aotearoa/New Zealand) in creating an international sporting bubble on the Central Coast of New South Wales, separating them from their families and friends across the Tasman Sea. Appeals to the mental health of fans and the importance of the NRL to myths of “Australianness” notwithstanding, the league had not prudently maintained a financial reserve and so could not afford to shut down for long. Significant gambling revenue for leagues like the NRL and Australian Football League (AFL) also influenced the push to return to sport business as usual. Sport contests were needed in order to exploit the gambling opportunities – especially online and mobile – stimulated by home “confinement”. During the coronavirus lockdowns, Australians’ weekly spending on gambling went up by 142 per cent, and the NRL earned significantly more than usual from gambling revenue—potentially $10 million above forecasts for 2020. Despite the clear financial imperative at play, including heavy reliance on gambling, sporting bubble-making involved special licence. The state of Queensland, which had pursued a hard-line approach by closing its borders for most of those wishing to cross them for biographical landmark events like family funerals and even for medical treatment in border communities, became “the nation's sporting hub”. Queensland became the home of most teams of the men’s AFL (notably the women’s AFLW season having been cancelled) following a large Covid-19 second wave in Melbourne. The women’s National Netball League was based exclusively in Queensland. This state, which for the first time hosted the AFL Grand Final, deployed sport as a tool in both national sports tourism marketing and internal pre-election politics, sponsoring a documentary, The Sporting Bubble 2020, via its Tourism and Events arm. While Queensland became the larger bubble incorporating many other sporting bubbles, both the AFL and the NRL had versions of the “fly in, fly out” labour rhythms conventionally associated with the mining industry in remote and regional areas. In this instance, though, the bubble experience did not involve long stays in miners’ camps or even the one-night hotel stopovers familiar to the popular music and sport industries. Here, the bubble moved, usually by plane, to fulfil the requirements of a live sport “gig”, whereupon it was immediately returned to its more solid bubble hub or to domestic self-isolation. In the space created between disciplined expectation and deplored non-compliance, the sporting bubble inevitably became the scrutinised object and subject of scandal. Sporting Bubble Scandals While people with a very low risk of spreading Covid-19 (coming from areas with no active cases) were denied entry to Queensland for even the most serious of reasons (for example, the death of a child), images of AFL players and their families socialising and enjoying swimming at the Royal Pines Resort sporting bubble crossed our screens. Yet, despite their (players’, officials’ and families’) relative privilege and freedom of movement under the AFL Covid-Safe Plan, some players and others inside the bubble were involved in “scandals”. Most notable was the case of a drunken brawl outside a Gold Coast strip club which led to two Richmond players being “banished”, suspended for 10 matches, and the club fined $100,000. But it was not only players who breached Covid-19 bubble protocols: Collingwood coaches Nathan Buckley and Brenton Sanderson paid the $50,000 fine imposed on the club for playing tennis in Perth outside their bubble, while Richmond was fined $45,000 after Brooke Cotchin, wife of team captain Trent, posted an image to Instagram of a Gold Coast day spa that she had visited outside the “hub” (the institutionally preferred term for bubble). She was subsequently distressed after being trolled. Also of concern was the lack of physical distancing, and the range of people allowed into the sporting bubble, including babysitters, grandparents, and swimming coaches (for children). There were other cases of players being caught leaving the bubble to attend parties and sharing videos of their “antics” on social media. Biosecurity breaches of bubbles by players occurred relatively frequently, with stern words from both the AFL and NRL leaders (and their clubs) and fines accumulating in the thousands of dollars. Some people were also caught sneaking into bubbles, with Lekahni Pearce, the girlfriend of Swans player Elijah Taylor, stating that it was easy in Perth, “no security, I didn’t see a security guard” (in Barron, Stevens, and Zaczek) (a month later, outside the bubble, they had broken up and he pled guilty to unlawfully assaulting her; Ramsey). Flouting the rules, despite stern threats from government, did not lead to any bubble being popped. The sport-media machine powering sporting bubbles continued to run, the attendant emotional or health risks accepted in the name of national cultural therapy, while sponsorship, advertising and gambling revenue continued to accumulate mostly for the benefit of men. Gendering Sporting Bubbles Designed as biosecurity structures to maintain the supply of media-sport content, keep players and other vital cogs of the machine running smoothly, and to exclude Covid-19, sporting bubbles were, in their most advanced form, exclusive luxury camps that illuminated the elevated socio-cultural status of sportsmen. The ongoing inequalities between men’s and women’s sport in Australia and around the world were clearly in evidence, as well as the politics of gender whereby women are obliged to “care” and men are enabled to be “careless” – or at least to manage carefully their “duty of care”. In Australia, the only sport for women that continued during the height of the Covid-19 lockdown was netball, which operated in a bubble that was one of sacrifice rather than privilege. With minimum salaries of only $30,000 – significantly less than the lowest-paid “rookies” in the AFL – and some being mothers of small children and/or with professional jobs juggled alongside their netball careers, these elite sportswomen wanted to continue to play despite the personal inconvenience or cost (Pavlidis). Not one breach of the netballers out of the bubble was reported, indicating that they took their responsibilities with appropriate seriousness and, perhaps, were subjected to less scrutiny than the sportsmen accustomed to attracting front-page headlines. National Netball League (also known after its Queensland-based naming rights sponsor as Suncorp Super Netball) players could be regarded as fortunate to have the opportunity to be in a bubble and to participate in their competition. The NRL Women’s (NRLW) Premiership season was also completed, but only involved four teams subject to fly in, fly out and bubble arrangements, and being played in so-called curtain-raiser games for the NRL. As noted earlier, the AFLW season was truncated, despite all the prior training and sacrifice required of its players. Similarly, because of their resource advantages, the UK men’s and boy’s top six tiers of association football were allowed to continue during lockdown, compared to only two for women and girls. In the United States, inequalities between men’s and women’s sports were clearly demonstrated by the conditions afforded to those elite sportswomen inside the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) sport bubble in the IMG Academy in Florida. Players shared photos of rodent traps in their rooms, insect traps under their mattresses, inedible food and blocked plumbing in their bubble accommodation. These conditions were a far cry from the luxury usually afforded elite sportsmen, including in Florida’s Walt Disney World for the men’s NBA, and is just one of the many instances of how gendered inequality was both reproduced and exacerbated by Covid-19. Bursting the Bubble As we have seen, governments and corporate leaders in sport were able to create material and metaphorical bubbles during the Covid-19 lockdown in order to transmit stadium sport contests into home spaces. The rationale was the importance of sport to national identity, belonging and the routines and rhythms of life. But for whom? Many women, who still carry the major responsibilities of “care”, found that Covid-19 intensified the affective relations and gendered inequities of “home” as a leisure site (Fullagar and Pavlidis). Rates of domestic violence surged, and many women experienced significant anxiety and depression related to the stress of home confinement and home schooling. During the pandemic, women were also more likely to experience the stress and trauma of being first responders, witnessing virus-related sickness and death as the majority of nurses and care workers. They also bore the brunt of much of the economic and employment loss during this time. Also, as noted above, livelihoods in the arts and cultural sector did not receive the benefits of the “bubble”, despite having a comparable claim to sport in contributing significantly to societal wellbeing. This sector’s workforce is substantially female, although men dominate its senior roles. Despite these inequalities, after the late March to May hiatus, many elite male sportsmen – and some sportswomen - operated in a bubble. Moving in and out of them was not easy. Life inside could be mentally stressful (especially in long stays of up to 150 days in sports like cricket), and tabloid and social media troll punishment awaited those who were caught going “over the fence”. But, life in the sporting bubble was generally preferable to the daily realities of those afflicted by the trauma arising from forced home confinement, and for whom watching moving sports images was scant compensation for compulsory immobility. The ethical foundation of the sparkly, ephemeral fantasy of the sporting bubble is questionable when it is placed in the service of a voracious “media sports cultural complex” (Rowe, Global Media Sport) that consumes sport labour power and rolls back progress in gender relations as a default response to a global pandemic. Covid-19 dramatically highlighted social inequalities in many areas of life, including medical care, work, and sport. For the small minority of people involved in sport who are elite professionals, the only thing worse than being in a sporting bubble during the pandemic was not being in one, as being outside precluded their participation. Being inside the bubble was a privilege, albeit a dubious one. But, as in wider society, not all sporting bubbles are created equal. Some are more opulent than others, and the experiences of the supporting and the supported can be very different. The surface of the sporting bubble may be impermanent, but when its interior is opened up to scrutiny, it reveals some very durable structures of inequality. Bubbles are made to burst. They are, by nature, temporary, translucent structures created as spectacles. As a form of luminosity, bubbles “allow a thing or object to exist only as a flash, sparkle or shimmer” (Deleuze, 52). In echoing Deleuze, Angela McRobbie (54) argues that luminosity “softens and disguises the regulative dynamics of neoliberal society”. The sporting bubble was designed to discharge that function for those millions rendered immobile by home confinement legislation in Australia and around the world, who were having to deal with the associated trauma, risk and disadvantage. Hence, the gender and class inequalities exacerbated by Covid-19, and the precarious and pressured lives of elite athletes, were obscured. We contend that, in the final analysis, the sporting bubble mainly serves those inside, floating tantalisingly out of reach of most of those outside who try to grasp its elusive power. Yet, it is a small group beyond who wield that power, having created bubbles as armoured vehicles to salvage any available profit in the midst of a global pandemic. References AAP. “NRL Makes Desperate Plea to Government as It Announces Season Will Go Ahead.” 7News.com.au 15 Mar. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://7news.com.au/sport/rugby-league/nrl-makes-desperate-plea-to-government-as-it-announces-season-will-go-ahead-c-745711>. Al Jazeera English. “Sports TV: Faking Spectators and Spectacles.” The Listening Post 26 Sep. 2020 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AlD63s26sQ&feature=youtu.be&t=827>. 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