Cultural Studies @ Nottingham Trent

Queering Paradigms III, SUNY Oneonta, 7-9th April 2011

2011-04-20T16:51:00.003+01:00

Liz Morrish, Nottingham Trent University, U.K. reports on the Queering Paradigms 3 (QP3) conference, successful hosted by SUNY Oneonta, USA. This was the third in the Queering Paradigms series, and it was an excellent international conference which attracted leading researchers in the field as well as many inspiring emerging scholars.

As the title suggests, this conference was designed to bring together scholars from such disparate fields as: theology, public health, cultural studies, law, linguistics, ethnic studies, anthropology, history, philosophy, psychology, neurobiology and performance studies. Indeed, such is the relevance and embrace of queer theory that all these areas offered up paradigms to be queered.

Organisers Professor Kathleen O’Mara and Dr Betty Wambui of SUNY Oneonta took a broad definition of ‘queer’ from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's (1993: 7) in her essay “Queer and Now: … 'queer' can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signify monolithically”. 'Queer' is therefore conceptualized as querying and challenging heteronormativity (or homonormativity) while recognizing that the term does not resonate globally as it emerged from Western experience.

That definition was well demonstrated by the three plenary events. Dr Carlos Ulises Decena from Rutgers University gave the first plenary – ‘Code Swishing’ which called for a widening of linguistic norms tolerated within Latino gay male culture. Gay men from a Dominican culture can be unforgiving in their regulation of each other’s gay-signifying language use, he argued. Professor William Leap of American University gave a powerful lecture outlining Queer Linguistics as an International Project. As queer theory tell us, it is important not to import western categories into other cultures. Queer, we must recall, has no fixed assumptions, and identities emerge in context. Leap made an impassioned defense of queer linguistics and its appropriate objects of study. He provided perhaps the best line of the conference – in a retort to a British scholar who dismissed the study of language and sexual identity with the query, ‘What next, we study the language of gas-mask fetishists?’- Leap argued that the project of queer linguistics was precisely that, to make the world safe for the study of the language of gas-mask fetishists.

The third plenary was a panel which featured three activists: Ignacio Rivera, Victor/Viola Moncar & Charles Gueboguo, representing in sequence, Queers for Economic Justice (USA), BBUD, Bro2Bro in Unity & Diversity (Ghana) and Queer African Youth Network (Cameroon). It was fascinating and illuminating to hear the different approaches they took and difficulties they faced in their activism and outreach to same-sex desiring people in their respective cultural contexts. Talking with the students who attended, I know this was a rich learning experience for them.

The QP series of conferences are informed and structured by an ethic initiated by their founder, Burkhard Scherer, Reader in Theology, Canterbury Christchurch University, U.K, and a specialist in sexuality within Buddhism. He has sought to create an intellectual space which is not viciously competitive and full of academic stars, but genial and supportive so that emerging scholars feel accepted. The conferences aim to work as an extended workshop in which most panel sessions are available to all attending. The SUNY Oneonta team certainly operated within this spirit. In addition, Dr Kathleen O’Mara and Dr Betty Wambui ensured that every need was met: accommodation, transportation, entertainment and catering, which meant that participants stayed together, and this made talking and exchanging views much more likely. The operation was enhanced by an excellent website and cheerful, competent student volunteers from Students for Global Education, Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Latino Studies classes. Participants were also assisted with great care by Morris Hall staff and campus caterers.

For those of us who are queer (in whatever dimension), to step into a queer oasis offers a kind of mental and physical ease rarely attained in other contexts. But sometimes worlds collide…. there we all were, hanging out in Le Café downstairs in Morris Hall. Next door in the Otsego Grille was a kid’s baseball camp, with visiting parents. It was truly hilarious to watch the consternation of some of the latter, as they wandered through queer space on their way to the terrace, or found Burkhard in his pink leggings in the women’s bathroom. It reminded me of a piece by Sara Ahmed, on universalizing whiteness: “But of course whiteness is only invisible for those who inhabit it. For those who don’t, it is hard not to see whiteness; it even seems everywhere.” The same could be said for heterosexuality – it is everywhere, and in turn, the temporary appropriation of queer space merely underscores that difference.

I have to make one disappointing observation. I would have expected such a weighty international conference to feature prominently on the college website. However, it appears that the remarkable impact of QP3 was barely recognized by its host institution. There was no visible publicity on the website, and despite drafting a press release, the organizers and supporters were unable to persuade the college publicity officer to release this to the local media. As a result, there was little participation at the panels from the local community. I felt SUNY Oneonta had missed a valuable opportunity to reach out to the local LGBTQ community. This stands in contrast to the previous host universities (Canterbury Christchurch, UK and QUT, Australia), which were considerably more affirming of the presence of QP1 and QP2 respectively.

As I make a study of queer invisibility in university diversity statements, this is perhaps why the obscuring of QP3 has irked me. Even more ironically, as I read SUNY Oneonta’s Vision and Values, prominently accessible from the college website, those very values are exactly what was embodied in the conference themes.

Engaging students in exceptional learning experiences, within and beyond the classroom;
Nurturing the development of individuals who contribute to local and global communities;
Building an increasingly diverse, welcoming, and inclusive campus community.

When excellence is overlooked, despite resonating with the proclaimed mission of an institution, it suggests an intentional act. Many scholars at the conference would be aware of another SUNY college’s history of difficulties around issues of sexuality in the public sphere, and we would have hoped, in the intervening 15 years, that these had been overcome. However, SUNY Oneonta’s silence must be read as shame – a stance which is neither honorable nor in keeping with its inclusive pose.

To claim a commitment to diversity and inclusion should mean more than merely auditing its presence on an Equal Opportunities monitoring form. To observe and record difference categorically requires very little in the form of institutional transformation. As Bendix-Peterson and Davies (2010) point out, being open to difference, and encouraging students and faculty to realize difference (as in the sense of becoming), is a very different matter. Maybe SUNY Oneonta needs to queer its own paradigms before it can claim to embrace diversity.

References

Ahmed, Sara. 2004. Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism. Borderlands (e-journal). 3.2. http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol3no2_2004/ahmed_declarations.htm

Bendix-Peterson, E and Davies, B. 2010. In/Difference in the neoliberalised university. Learning and Teaching in the Social Sciences. 3.2. 92-109.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. 1993. Tendencies. Duke University Press.

Erotic capital ? Not in my workplace.

2010-06-05T22:05:00.009+01:00

I notice that postings on this blog have slowed somewhat in recent months. Yes, we’re all under pressure here in CCM, and will be even more so next year. But maybe the blog project has started to take itself more seriously than it was originally intended to be? Maybe it is time for a turn to levity, or as the newspapers would have it, let’s open silly season.
There were two things in my mind as I sat down to write this. Foremost was a piece I had read in the Times Higher this week (3-9th June) where Catherine Hakim urges academics to abandon their scruffily insouciant attitude to dress and concentrate on maximising their ‘erotic capital’. Another thought still preyed on my conscience from Friday – I had made a flippant and ill-judged remark on a colleague’s summer shorts. Apologies, and he knows who he is. The two concerns were not unrelated in my deliberations.
The article on ‘erotic capital’ is illustrated by various images of alpha males draped by feminine supplicants. Apologies to film studies colleagues, but I believe one of them to be Marilyn Monroe. Another image places Baroness Professor Susan Greenfield in a sultry and burlesque pose, perhaps deciding whether to deliver a lecture or strip for the audience. Hakim is suggesting that now that academics have a presence on websites, and often their photograph appears, that they should work harder to appear alluring - and reap the benefits. After all, haven’t the recent UK prime-ministerial debates shown the value of a well cut suit, teamed with a charismatic self-presentation? Moreover, their academic pulling power may be enhanced by showcasing their sexual allure, and prioritizing this dimension should not be seen as trivial. Hakim cites research that shows attractive people make more money, find partners, and are likely to be perceived as more competent. But the theory goes further than simply acknowledging the premium of beauty. We should also be trading on our social skills, sexual attractiveness and some other vague sexual ‘je ne sais quoi’ which might also be affected.
Now, I should know a thing or two about erotic capital, as the co-author of research on the language of lesbian erotica, and as one about to begin another project on the language of internet sex-blogging. One thing is that the erotic is context-specific rather than universal. The assumption in Hakim’s work is that there is a heterosexual imperative animating the academic workplace. But whereas the muscular and modestly-dressed contestants in the recent women’s French Open final might hold erotic salience for me as a lesbian, that might not hold true for a heterosexual male. What I am driving at with this point is that we reinforce rather than undermine existing power structures which hierarchize gender and sexual identities in a workplace if we adopt rather than resist these notions. Feminists have worked hard over many decades to allow public space generally, and the workplace in particular, to be free of sexual objectification. Perhaps that explains Hakim’s waspish and unnecessary aside denigrating the feminist contribution to debates over sexual expression, much of it emanating from her more progressive colleagues at the LSE.
Indeed the whole concept of erotic capital seems to be a cynical and misleading attempt to suggest an equivalence with Bourdieu’s notions of cultural and symbolic capital, so widely influential in the academic spaces patrolled by CCM. These latter can be accumulated to transform the self and society, not solely to self-interestedly reinforce inequalities within it.
But to return to my offhand remark to my colleague - had I been guilty of ridiculing him for failing, in my eyes, to achieve ‘erotic best practice’. Who am I to judge anyway? And there we have it. Erotic capital is nothing more than subjective judgement, inappropriately applied. In any case, the whole notion is guaranteed to work against the interests of women who will be pilloried if they enhance their attractiveness, and pilloried if they don’t. This was demonstrated in an article in the Guardian on Saturday 5th June, which convincingly destabilizes Hakim’s argument that only the gorgeous and seductive can be successful . The article is a report of a sex discrimination case in the US where a New York banker had lost her job. Apparently she had an excess of ‘erotic capital’ to the extent that her male colleagues found her distracting. Any woman who thinks she can succeed in manipulating structures where gender inequality is so deeply embedded is sure to experience a similar jarring dose of reality.
I put the article down and tried to imagine NTU’s Continuing Professional Development unit’s training seminar on erotic capital, and how much more fun it might be than some of the other offerings. Then I thought about who might attend, and the illusion was rapidly punctured. But hey, what’s so unlikely? Aren’t we the university that just launched a web presence for our academic experts on the World Cup? Does that qualify as some sort of collective, institutional erotic capital? It certainly stretches the notion of cultural capital. One can only hope that this idea never gains traction in the academy. We are already in the grip of marketization, media friendliness, consumer responsiveness, economic ‘impact’, student satisfaction surveys and other promiscuities. But as a witty and learned colleague of mine puts it, “they won’t rest until they have us going into lectures with titty tassles on”.

NTU Journals: Climate Change and Affect

2010-05-31T14:02:00.008+01:00

When Simon Dawes not working on his PhD thesis at NTU, he works as an editorial assistant for the sister journals Theory, Culture and Society and Body and Society, and is also responsible for the content on the website, blog, Facebook and Twitter sites. Here he reports on some recent issues of the journal.

To accompany the new TCS special issue on Changing Climates (TCS vol 27, issue 2-3, May 2010, edited by Bronislaw Szerszynski and John Urry), I’ve been busy working with the contributors to the issue on collating extra material for our website that could be of interest to readers. The double issue demonstrates how social science can help to illuminate the very nature of the challenge of climate change, and gathers papers by some of the world's leading authors working on climate and society (Ulrich Beck, Mike Hulme, Elizabeth Shove and Brian Wynne among them). The contributors trace the way that climate science has been produced, organised, mobilised and contested, and explore the relationships between climate change, politics, global inequity, financial turbulence and even life itself. For the extra material, we’ve so far got an extensive bibliography of climate change texts, and links to podcasts of interviews and talks, as well as a host of other material on related projects, events and articles. We’re hoping it will serve as a valuable resource to anyone in the social sciences interested in climate change.

We’ve also just published on the site an interview I conducted with Lisa Blackman, Mike Featherstone and Couze Venn, as a supplement to the current issue of Body and Society (vol 16, issue 1, March 2010, edited by Lisa Blackman and Couze Venn), which doubles as a special issue on Affect and as the relaunch issue of the journal. The issue focuses on the significance for body-studies of the ‘turn to affect’ that has taken place across the humanities and the social sciences, particularly in terms of a re-engagement with perception, sensation and memory, and explores the role of different versions of affect in the theorising of the body. Articles featured are by Constantina Papoulias & Felicity Callard, Julian Henriques, Valerie Walkerdine, Erin Manning and Patricia T. Clough, as well as those by Blackman, Featherstone and Venn. In the online interview, the editors discuss the significance of affect to their own research, as well as the future theoretical and methodological direction of the relaunched journal. I’ll be conducting more interviews with editorial board members and special issue editors of both journals in the near future.

Subsequent issues and sections in Body and Society on bodily integrity, medicine, and animation and automation, and in TCS on Ricoeur, Megacities, Simmel, and Code and Codings, are all in the pipeline, and there will be many more interviews and much more extra material available on the website to accompany them, so keep checking the website and blog for new developments.

The world cup, football-speak and national identity

2010-05-17T11:41:00.005+01:00

NTU linguist Dean Hardman reflects on the status of 'football talk' in anticipation of this years World Cup.

When the football world cup comes around once every four years, it seems like the nation is gripped by World Cup Fever. Not only is there wall-to-wall coverage of the actual matches; extra television programmes devoted to talking about the matches are aired, while football permeates every other televisual and media genre. Football, already the advertising vehicle of choice for a whole range of brands and products, is used to promote everything from soft drinks to washing powder, from credit cards to chocolate. There doesn’t seem to be a product or service whose brand managers don’t see the world cup as a prime opportunity to increase brand awareness.

Clearly these advertisers are drawing upon the high level of interest that the world cup generates among otherwise casual viewers of the game. Everyone during a World Cup, especially but not exclusively when a home nation is involved, has an opinion on football. These range from the team and game-specific: “Rooney’s injury holds the key, they’ve got to play 4-4-2”, to the more general: “England have got no chance”, and from the positive: “I’m so excited about tonight’s game”, to the negative: “I can’t believe they’ve cancelled Eastenders for this.” Whether the speaker or writer has any specialist knowledge or not, or whether their opinion or comment is positive or negative doesn’t really matter: all this shared focus on football and talking about the world cup helps to reinforce social identities and helps us to construct a shared sense of group identity. Ultimately this might be a shared sense of Englishness that talking about the England team creates. However, it might just as easily be a shared sense of Scottishness when talking about a strong desire to see England fail, or a shared anti-football agenda.

Casual viewers also begin to draw upon the footballing lexicon for the first time in four years. “Beating the offside trap” is inserted awkwardly into sentences, alongside the notion of “hitting a barn door with a banjo” or “making an impression early doors” as “squeaky bum time approaches”. The Ivory coast might need to “shut up shop”, while everyone wants to know who will survive the “group of death”. Again, having a shared national footballing lexicon to delve into also helps to oil the wheels of communication and reinforces a sense of national togetherness and cohesion.

Whatever one’s feelings are towards the world cup, it is absolutely unavoidable. It is going to be all but impossible to spend the month of June in the UK without being bombarded with images of footballers selling ice-creams, or hearing colleagues speak, sometimes inarticulately, about events in South Africa. At the same time, though, for one month only, talking about football becomes a key way in which vast swathes of the population signify membership of a whole range of social groupings and identities. For a limited time only you need never be stuck for something to say, it’s the event that we can all feel part of.

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Narratives on Migration and Transnational Media

2010-05-04T17:02:00.000+01:00

After a week in which immigration has surfaced as one of the key issues dominating election coverage in the UK, Olga Bailey offers an overview of her article on media representations of migration, 'Narratives on Migration and Transnational Media: crises of representation?', which she has co-written with Sonia De Nelson. The article will be published later this year in T. Threadgold, B. Gross and K. Moore (eds), Migration and the Media (New York: Peter Lang).

Debates on issues of migration have had perennial importance in national and international arenas and figure prominently in the political agendas of wealthy nations and in the transnational public media spheres. The migration debate was mainly reframed in the post 9/11 attacks interconnected to a ‘global crisis’, underpinned by economic and political issues, focusing concerns on national security, the threats to western culture and its economic impact on receiving western countries. The mainstream media has predominantly covered these debates echoing these concerns and constructing immigration as a national threat, thereby alienating and making alien populations who do not possess the necessary symbols of national belonging. Since 2008, due to the global economic crises, immigration coverage in the mainstream media has been mainly interlinked to the consequences of the economic crises in western societies. In discussing the effect of the economic crisis for international migration, Castles and Vezzoli point out that the media have widely reported on the visible effects on new migration, migrant employment, remittance flows and on attitudes of destination-country populations (2009: 69). The current rhetoric links migration debate to the economic crises in topics such as reducing recruitment of migrant workers because of growing unemployment, to governments’ actions on immigration management to regulate the borders and wider aspects of the life of immigrants, including access to jobs, welfare services, family reunification, and ultimately integration and the acquisition of citizenship. These measures aim to demonstrate to their political constituency they are acting in minimizing the crisis.

In this chapter we look at coverage of migration issues in the BBC news online services. Our focus is on the ways in which otherness interweaves with migration issues. Our assumption is that stories about immigration form an important arena through which ideas about the immigrant ‘other’ are expressed and reproduced.This in turn forms a wider context to our discussion as it is connected to the debate over the changes of the practices of transnational journalism generated by technological, economic and cultural factors. We have chosen the BBC News and BBC Mundo news online for two reasons: First, for its significant role as a public service in the transnational media landscape and its impact on public opinion and, consequently, on governmental policy processes. Second, for its high journalistic standards - accuracy and impartiality – which are recognised by a global audience. The aim is to provide a snapshot of the ways news on migration is presented in both sites. The paper first discusses the challenges faced by journalists working in transnational outlets, and then presents the BBC journalist’s news practices and its relevance to an understanding of the present production of migration stories. The last part provides examples of the representation of migration in BBC.

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Guest Paper: 'Invisible Television'

2010-04-27T09:09:00.000+01:00

In the final guest paper in the Cultural Studies Research Group series for the current academic year, Dr Brett Mills (Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies, University of East Anglia) talks about 'Invisible Television: The Programmes No-one Talks About Though Lots of People Watch Them'.

In his paper, Brett focuses on how There exists a disparity between the programmes that get repeatedly discussed and written about in television studies, and the programmes watched by the largest audiences. This paper argues that there is, as a consequence, invisible television. Or, more accurately, it argues there is television invisible to the academy. Through quantitative analysis of ratings and publications, the paper demonstrates this disparity. It then goes on to explore the reasons for its existence and demonstrates why it should be a matter of concern for us all.

The event takes place on from 4.00-5.30 pm on Wednesday 5th May in GEE019, Clifton Campus. Everyone welcome. For further information, please email Joanne Hollows.

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A Genealogy of Broadcasting Policy in the UK

2010-04-16T14:08:00.000+01:00

Simon Dawes, a research student in our team and Editorial Assistant for Theory, Culture and Society and Body and Society, explains the key ideas underpinning his current research on broadcasting policy.

I’m working on a genealogy of broadcasting policy in the

, looking specifically at the shifts in how the public have been constructed over time. This is set in the context of claims that broadcasting was regulated in terms of a public service ethos from the 1920s until the 1970s/1980s, since when it has been regulated as a market. A concomitant shift in the construction of the public from citizens to consumers accompanies these claims.

In research so far undertaken, I’ve used critical discourse analysis (CDA) to demonstrate the relationship between citizen- and consumer- signifiers in the Communications White Paper 2000 (the text that established the creation of Ofcom). My study showed that in addition to the predictable preference for the term ‘consumer’, there was an ambiguous distinction between citizen- and consumer- issues and a contradictory usage of the two terms. Consequently, emphasis was placed upon the collective agency of consumers, while the citizen was reconstructed as a passive and vulnerable individual. Further, the privatisation of public interest and the economisation of public service that I detected in the discourse led me to concur with the Habermasian critique of the depoliticisation of the public sphere. These preferences, ambiguities and contradictions have consequences for how Ofcom regulates the communications industries, and identifying them helps us understand how they will decide on the future of public service broadcasting in the

. You can see an article I wrote on this research here.

My thesis will offer a discursive history of broadcasting policy by extending this analysis to a range of committee reports, regulators’ reviews, government white papers, bills and acts that have been written in the UK since the 1920s. In the work I’m currently undertaking, I’m beginning to question the epistemological assumptions behind the theories and methodologies I’ve been using. Methodologically, I’m looking to link CDA with a more Foucauldian approach to discourse analysis, while in terms of theory I’m concentrating on recent problematisations of the public sphere concept. Once I’ve cleared all that up, it’ll be back to the archive for some more analysis.

Guest Paper: 'Beautiful Images, Spectacular Clarity'

2010-02-27T12:36:00.004Z

In our next guest paper in the seminar series organized by the Cultural Studies Research Group with ICAN, we welcome Dr Helen Wheatley from the University of Warwick. Helen will be delivering a paper entitled '"Beautiful images, spectacular clarity": Spectacular television, "landscape porn", and the question of (tele)visual pleasure'. The event takes place on Wednesday 3rd March 2010, from 4.00-5.30pm in in room GEE219 (George Eliot Building on the Clifton Campus of Nottingham Trent University). The abstract of the paper is as follows:

In establishing television’s difference from cinema, scholars have too quickly dismissed the medium’s spectacular qualities. Typically, arguments about television which emphasise comparison with cinema position the medium as visually inefficient (Williams, 1975 ) sound-led and lacking in visual detail (Ellis, 1982), or simply ‘less dense, less complex, less interesting’ (Lury, 2005). Theories of television’s liveness and distracted viewership also understand television as anti-spectacular. Considering the recent cycle of ‘landscape porn’[i] on British television, I will counter these arguments by discussing television’s spectacular aesthetic. The paper will explore the pictorial qualities of programmes such as Coast (BBC2/1, 2005-), A Picture of Britain (BBC1, 2005), Wainwrights Walks (Skyworks for BBC4, 2007), Britain’s Favourite View (ITV1, 2007) and Britain from Above (Lion for BBC1, 2008), and visual pleasure on television. I will argue that these programmes presume a contemplative mode of viewing more traditionally associated with the spectacular in other media (landscape painting, film). Whilst I reject a technologically determinist argument about the rise of HD shooting and viewing technologies and the advent of this genre of programming, I will also understand these recent programmes as post-digital revolution television. This is simultaneously ‘slow television’ which allows for a contemplative gaze on spectacular ‘natural’ landscapes, and also a heavily-CGI’d cycle of programming which draws on a ‘Google Earth’ aesthetic to produce a frenzy of dazzling topography, showcasing the spectacle of satellite technologies. The paper will be informed by interviews with production personnel working within this burgeoning field of programming.

Everyone is welcome but places are limited so if you would like to attend, please email Joanne Hollows.

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Symposium on The Body

2010-02-04T09:46:00.007Z

This year’s our annual Media and Cultural Studies Symposium takes place on Friday 19th February and centres around the theme of ‘The Body’. Alongside papers from staff in media and cultural studies, we are delighted to welcome two outside speakers, Ruth Holliday (Professor of Gender and Culture, University of Leeds) and Sharon Hayes (Senior Lecturer, School of Justice, Queensland University of Technology).

The event runs from 10.00-3.30 in GEE219, on the Clifton Campus of Nottingham Trent University. Attendance is free and everyone is welcome but places are strictly limited so please email Joanne Hollows to reserve a place if you wish to attend.

The Programme for the Event is as follows:
10.00-10.15: registration
10.15-10.30: welcome
10.30-11.45: session 1: the body, class and citizenship (Chair: Joanne Hollows)
Ruth Holliday, All Tits and Bum: Classing Feminist squeamishness at the 'plastic' body
Steve Jones, Cycling and Citizenship
11.45-12.00: break
12.00-1.15: session 2: the body, sound and music (Chair: Dave Woods)
Gary Needham, Donna Summer: disco and the embodiment of orgasm
Russell Murray, Body/Sound - Sound/Body
1.15-2.15: lunch break
2.15 – 3.30: session 3: ‘deviant’ bodies (Chair: Ben Taylor)
Simon Cross, Mad Bodies: Seeing and Reading the Historical Image of Insanity
Sharon Hayes, The moral temporality of sex, taboo and the body

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Accent and Identity: Where do the East Midlands fit in the North/South divide?

2010-01-27T18:00:00.001Z

Natalie Braber reports back from the Borders and Identities Conference.

In the worst of the recent weather, I braved the snow and ice to travel to attend the Borders and Identities Conference (BIC2010) which took place 8-9 January at Newcastle University. This was the first BIC Conference, and has been started under the auspices of the Accent and Identity on the Scottish/English Border (AISEB) project. The main aim of this conference was to examine in more detail the current state of knowledge in this field of study and to relate linguistic studies to other fields of enquiry to further interdisciplinary with other disciplines. Although research on ‘borderlands’ is well-established in the social sciences, it is only within recent years that interest in has taken hold within the fields of sociolinguistics and the sociology of language.

I had been accepted to give a poster presentation on a project I’ve recently started work on which looks at the question ‘Where do the East Midlands fit in the North/South divide?’ Although this divide is a frequently talked about phenomenon, there is much disagreement about where this border can be placed – and Nottingham (and the East Midlands) fall right into this potential border area. From the sixteenth century onwards there have been references to the river Trent as being a cultural and linguistic divide between North and South. Linguistically, language in Nottingham and the East Midlands is a much neglected variety and much more needs to be learned about its particular features.

The work I have carried out so far (funded by SIS – Stimulating Innovation for Success at NTU) has collected a small sample of voices from Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire to examine the variation found within the East Midlands, comparing these findings with previous research. It also considers future work which needs to be carried out within this field – re-examining the perception of the North-South divide and how the East Midlands fit into such a division, as viewed both by those from the East Midlands and from around the UK.

The conference took place in The Assembly Rooms which was a great location for a conference – it had plenty of space for delegates to mingle and discuss projects during coffee and lunch breaks. Fortunately, most of the delegates made it through the bad weather and the conference was so successful that discussions about the next location are already taking place.

(photo credit: John the Scone; permissions)

Work in Progress Papers: the Guardian blogging community

2010-01-25T20:55:00.000Z

The next ICAn Work in Progress session from a member of the Communication, Culture and Media team is on Wednesday 27th January 2010 in GEE219 (Clifton Campus), 12.00-1.00 pm. In this session, Dean Hardman presents a paper called 'Below the Line But Over the Top: a preliminary look at the Guardian blogging community'. Dean describes the paper as 'very much a work in progress talk, where I'm hoping to instigate a discussion on the types of blog responses that can be seen on the Guardian sport blog. I'm also hoping to show where I'm headed with some work that is designed to categorise and hypothesise about the purpose behind direct critiques of journalists. It actually builds on something I did for the cultural studies blog in the very early days.'

(Photo credit: Jon Juan. Permissions.)

Guest Paper: Natasha Whiteman, Watching 'Good Television'

2010-01-22T15:36:00.001Z

The next guest paper in this year's seminar organized by the Cultural Studies Research Group with ICAn features Natasha Whiteman (University of Leicester) who will be speaking on 'Watching "Good Television": The Reception of Battlestar Gallactica and The Wire. The talk takes place on Wednesday 27th January 2010, from 4.00-5.30pm in room GEE219 (George Eliot Building on the Clifton Campus of Nottingham Trent University). The abstract of the paper is as follows:

This paper examines the reception of Battlestar Galactica and The Wire by critics and academics. Despite their differences, each series has received widespread critical acclaim and inspired a range of academic productivity. Each has been configured as an example of “good” television that it is acceptable to watch, and each has been contrasted to less “worthy” forms of television production. This paper examines the positioning involved in critical and academic discussion of these series, focusing attention on the distancing/affiliating moves made by critics and academics in their often fannish responses to these television products. What do these moves tell us about these series and those who celebrate it? What do they tell us about the relationship between fans, critics and academics? In exploring these issues the paper develops work that has examined modes of identification with media texts within online fan communities (Whiteman, 2007).

Everyone is welcome but places are limited so if you would like to attend, please email Joanne Hollows.
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Holiday reading: Bringing Home the Birkin

2010-01-07T20:23:00.006Z

The basic black Birkin.

Over Christmas i read Michael Tonello’s Bringing Home the Birkin (New York: Harper, 2009) which demystifies the most famous and most expensive handbag – the Hermes Birkin – as much a Holy Grail of luxury as it is a pop culture icon with prices as high as $60,000. A light read but significant in it’s exposing of the marketing myths of luxury brands and their inculcation of consumer desire based on false information. The Birkin probably entered popular culture in the late 1990s when Sex and the City (and later in episodes of the Gilmore Girls, Will and Grace and Gossip Girl) devoted an episode to the most coveted of bags and its notorious waiting list. There are even blogs devoted to random Birkin spotting. My first awareness of the brand name Hermes was the film Basic Instinct in 1992; Sharon Stone’s character uses Hermes scarves to tie her victims to the bedstead. She was a classy killer. The Birkin is copied the world over, often spoken of in relation to the smaller Hermes Kelly Bag (named after Grace Kelly) and mistaken for the larger Hermes Haut a Courrois which was originally for transporting horse saddles as befits the company’s 19th century origin. The Birkin name came about when on a flight sometime in 1984 Jane Birkin was seated next to the CEO of Hermes Jean-Louis Dumason when she bemoaned the need for more space in the Kelly and a design collaboration ensued.

Tonello’s book is as much a story of ebay entrepreneurship as it is the story of how he managed to procure hundreds of the impossible to purchase Birkin bags and sell them on for substantial profit. Anyone who has sold through ebay will recognise the same travails of online selling. Tonello explodes two pop culture fashion myths – firstly, the waiting list and secondly Hermes own claims to producing a limited number of Birkins a year. Even if you have the money to buy an entry level Birkin you can’t just go in to a Hermes store and buy one. It doesn’t work like that since it is the unobtainability that amplifies their desirability. You will be told that there’s a waiting list of approximately two years and that’s even if they bother to ever call you back. However, Tonello discovers what he calls ‘the formula’ for getting the Birkin in nearly every Hermes store he visits. His formula for a ‘same day Birkin’, one that bypasses the waiting list and thus reveals it as a fallacy, is buy lots of scarves and leather goods first, spending a few thousand, and then casually drop into conversation asking if they have any Birkins. With that first offering at the luxury altar the Hermes sales assistant (which he breaks down in to five stereotypes and how to deal with them) disappears in to the back of the shop and magically produces a Birkin. The profit on a Birkin re-sell is so high that Tonello is able to fly the world in search of more Birkins for rich American women and, exposing another fallacy, he alone manages to acquire more than the supposed annual production that the Hermes spiel suggests. In the end Tonello tires of the travel, Hermes and the world of luxury goods and no doubt Hermes cottons on and changes its tactics of sale when it comes to keeping the Birkin shrouded in legends of unobtainable.

Product placement: Carrie Bradshaw appears in Season 6 (Episode 16 - 'Out of the Frying Pan') of Sex and the City holding a Rouge H 30cm Matte Crocodile Birkin.

(photo credits: yumyumcherry; DVD screen grab; permissions)

Seeing and Reading Historical Images of Insanity

2009-12-23T12:54:00.001Z

In early January 2010, writes Simon Cross, I will be attending the annual Media Communication and Cultural Studies (MeCCSA) conference to be held this year at the London School of Economics. The annual get together of our subject association is an important opportunity to introduce new research ideas.

For this reason, I will use the MeCCSA conference to introduce an analytic strategy for reading historical images of madness that enables us to see that while forms and figures of madness change there are threads of continuity. My main argument is that we can only understand continuity in the visual image of madness in relation to change. I want to use this argument to show that how continuities and changes are read into historical images of madness depend on three interconnecting factors. They are: media technologies, cultural forms, and historical consciousness.

In the nineteenth century, these factors interconnected in visually significant ways when the development of photography and a changing pictorial aesthetic of madness fused with new theories of mental disorder. Through close analysis of three exemplary, historical forms of representations of madness, i.e. clinical photographs, lithograph engravings, and portraiture in oils, I want to show how they produce certain constructions of madness, with different truth-claims and forms of visual rhetoric being involved, each with attendant consequences for certain historically-based epistemological positions.

Those of you interested in pursuing these ideas more closely might be interested to read my forthcoming book, Mediating Madness: Mental Distress and Cultural Representation, to be published Palgrave Macmillan on 1 March 2010.

Feeling Backward (why queer theory still matters)

2009-12-13T18:19:00.007Z

I recently received a reader’s report for a book proposal in which the anonymous reviewer refers to queer theory as being ‘mid 1990s’ and ‘once cutting edge’. I was struck by the notion that queer theory was over, faddish and outdated and my first response to this was that queer theory will be over when homophobia, the closet, and so on is also over. In order to demonstrate the ongoing relevance of queer theory I would like to introduce a few ideas from a recent ‘queer theory’ book that also helped me make sense of pleasures that might be construed as wholly negative. The question then is why is Brokeback Mountain pleasurable when it also makes me feel bad?

In Heather Love's Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard University Press, 2007) she explains why hurtful, melancholic and depressing experiences constitute contemporary queer identity and thus need to be acknowledged, incorporated and negotiated since ‘many of these unlikely feelings are closely tied to the realities of queer experience past and present.’ (147) In this respect, Brokeback Mountain is a text that has a backward logic. It uses the past to speak to the present as it narrates a depressing story of historical injury and bad feeling in order to connect to a contemporary audience who may feel that they are still negotiating or finding it difficult to dispel a shameful and homophobic past – homosexuality is problematic! Love continues:

'Backwardness means many things here; shyness, ambivalence, failure, melancholia, loneliness, regression, victimhood, heartbreak, antimodernism, immaturity, self-hatred, despair, shame. I describe backwardness both as queer historical structure of feeling and as a model for queer historiography.' (146)

Many of the terms in Love’s quote may describe the characters and their narrative situations in Brokeback Mountain, as well as the spectator’s response to the film. It is important that the film does provoke negative and bad feeling. It is not a joyous experience; rather it is a film that leaves one feeling hurt and emotionally devastated in its backward turn. Yet, this is somehow what is rewarding about the film also. Brokeback Mountain’s stress on negative and depressive histories of the homosexual past help to constitute contemporary gay and lesbian identity and subjectivity since ‘the experience of queer historical subjects is not a safe distance from contemporary experience; rather, their social marginality and abjection mirror our own.’ (32)

The backward feeling and the pathos in the film articulate a refusal to see progress in the way it is often imagined by gay pride discourses. Brokeback Mountain demands us to accept that homosexuality is still impossible for many, that it is still permeated by tragedy and melancholia, and that it has a history that is still unresolved and needful of being properly negotiated in the present. Love’s work helps to unlock the process of understanding negative pleasures in political terms especially in relation to films like Brokeback Mountain. The film reminds queers that their modern subjectivity is constituted by a painful, closeted, homophobic history and that feeling backward and feeling bad are also important affective dimensions of queer subjectivity in the present.

(image: screen grab; permissions)

Iron Curtain

2009-12-07T20:46:00.000Z

Patrick Wright brings us his reflections on the Iron Curtain, recently broadcast on the BBC World Service's The Strand.

Did the fall of the Berlin Wall, twenty years ago last month, also mark the final disappearance of the Iron Curtain that had divided the world for nearly half a century? We may like to think that it did. For the length of the Cold War, after all, the Iron Curtain was closely associated with the militarized frontier dividing the blocs in Europe. Yet the true history of this powerful metaphor suggests a different conclusion.

The first iron curtains had nothing at all to do with geopolitics or international relations. Instead, they were anti-fire barriers installed in late eighteenth century theatres. Suspended between the stage and auditorium, these novel contrivances were proudly displayed to reassure audiences for whom theatre fires were an all too common horror.

The early versions were little more than props. By the late nineteenth century, however, these largely symbolic devices had been re-engineered.    Hydraulically powered in many cases and made of asbestos as well as iron, the new versions actually worked. So much so, that actors and other who worked backstage began to worry that, while the audience might indeed now be saved in the event of a fire, they themselves risked being trapped behind the lowered curtain and burned alive.

How, then, did the iron curtain get converted into a geopolitical metaphor? Throughout the Cold War, it would be widely believed that the man responsible was Winston Churchill, who famously spoke of the descent of an iron curtain dividing Europe in the famous speech he delivered in Fulton, Missouri, on 5 March 1946.

In fact, the originator was not Churchill at all, but a Liberal and cosmopolitan British born woman named Violet Paget, who wrote under the pen name of Vernon Lee.   Five or so months into the First World War, i.e. in the last days of 1914, she applied the phrase to the war between Britain and Germany – deploring how the conflict had cut off all communication between the opposed peoples, and surrendered them to the propaganda of their belligerent states. For Vernon Lee the iron curtain had little to do with any frontier or wall. It was instead a ‘psychological deadlock’ with which the warring states on both sides coerced their citizens into patriotic loyalty.

By 1920, Vernon Lee’s iron curtain, had been picked up by a number of her friends and associates – progressive, socialist, anti-war types - who removed it from its German location and applied it to the Allied blockade of Russia, where the Bolsheviks were still consolidating their seizure of power. It continued to be used to describe the western attempt to isolate Soviet Russia through the 1920s.

Why might it be useful to bear this prehistory in mind as we watch the endlessly replayed tumbling of the Berlin Wall? The iron curtain, in this earlier period, was never just another name for a frontier. It involved economic blockade and trade embargo. It entailed censorship and a state-driven use of propaganda to simplify the world into hostile camps – one of which, your own, was conceived as uniformly good while the other was imagined as wholly evil. The iron curtain also retained much of its theatrical origin, not least in the methods of scene-rigging and stage management that were found necessary to the maintenance of loyalty on both sides.

Did the iron curtain finally vanish with the Berlin Wall in November 1989?   I fear not. Look at the false information and manipulated imagery with which George Bush and Tony Blair justified their invasion of Iraq. Look at the way their most aggressive policy advisors applied the same polarized way of seeing to the Muslim world, whether in the name of the supposed ‘Clash of Civilisations’ or of the ‘War on Terror’. Except for a few yards preserved in various museums around the world, the Berlin Wall may be well and truly gone. But, as we look at the recent interaction between the western powers and Iraq and nowadays perhaps also Iran, we may surely recognise that many of the capabilities and habits of thought that came with the iron curtain survive to tempt the world’s leaders still.

Patrick Wright's Iron Curtain: from Stage to Cold War, published in paperback by Oxford University Press, on 29 October 2009.

Photo credit: Mike McHolm. Permissions)

What is so strange, lonely and troubling about Stephen Gately's death ?

2009-12-01T11:39:00.006Z

The recent death of Boyzone singer Stephen Gately inspired a number of generous obituaries and one shockingly vicious piece from Jan Moir in the Daily Mail (16th October 2009). The effect of this piece of writing was so painfully felt that it elicited a record number of 22,000 complaints to the Press Complaints Commission from Gately's fans, acutely tuned in to the nuances of homophobic discourse. Moir, of course, in a retraction a week later, denied that her intent was homophobic, but many of the readership, and 'overhearers' who were moved to read the original piece online, disagree. What, then, constitutes homophobic discourse?

There is little point in searching for obviously homophobic lexical items, but instead we must look at the discursive effect of texts. Leap's (2010 forthcoming) notion of a homophobic formation allows us to argue that although there are no recurrent formal properties which identify a homophobic text, there are several key characteristics which they share. Leap remarks that homophobic messages emerge from texts, rather than being contained within them. He is referring to the way in which language users may express homophobia indirectly or obliquely, through lexical items, idioms, metaphors, presuppositions, judgment markers and inference structures which reference homophobia. The homophobic formation appears not solely through explicitly homophobic language, but via a complex set of linguistic and social processes which work through context to deliver their message. I comment below on some examples of these in Moir's article.

Let's remind ourselves of the established facts of Gately's death. He had returned to his apartment after a night out, and was accompanied by his civil partner and a friend. Gately apparently went to sleep on the couch, and was later found dead by his partner.

The title of Moir's article, then, stands in contrast to this reality: “A strange, lonely and troubling death”. Troubling, yes, but why strange and lonely? These terms function here (using Martin and White's 2007 Appraisal framework) as linguistic markers of judgment, referencing some unstated, but assumed heterosexual norm. These reveal the point of view of the homophobe who judges gay men as essentially lonely, and strange. What troubles her, evidently, is her assumption that Gately's partner and their friend might have been having sex. To the homophobe, any gay male sex is distasteful, and the notion that a man may have sex outside a relationship disturbs the heteronormative ideal. These tropes of 1950s gay male sexual offenses are reinforced by the following characterisations, “shadowed by dark appetites or fractured by private vice. …..secret and not-so-secret troubles, or damaging habits”. Vice ? Damaging habits? These again imply negative judgment, and are modified by adjectives expressing negative reaction (Martin and White, 2007:56). It is unclear what she is alluding to – the nature of (unspecified but assumed) gay male sexual practice, or perhaps more scandalously and libellously, drug use. This becomes more evident when, without access to any evidence, and only her own prejudice to draw on, she writes of, “ the official reports point to a natural death, with no suspicious circumstances”. The emphasis on 'official' implies there are other unofficial reports which she has access to, but are concealed from us; 'point to' implies doubt and that the official reports are in fact inconclusive and tentative.

The reports, according to Moir's reading, serve only to obscure the self-evident and inevitable truth lying behind a gay man's early death, “The sugar coating on this fatality is so saccharine-thick that it obscures whatever bitter truth lies beneath. Healthy and fit 33-year-old men do not just climb into their pyjamas and go to sleep on the sofa, never to wake up again”. Sadly, this occurrence is far from unknown, but this doesn't prevent Moir asserting her ignorance with a modality choice of certainty, indicated by a universalising use of the verb 'do' governing the following infinitive clauses. Such is her certainty that no gay man could meet a natural death in these circumstances that Moir feels justified in contradicting the considered verdict of the coroner, and the verified cause of death of pulmonary oedema. The death, according to her “is not, by any yardstick, a natural one”. Gay men, in the world of the homophobe are strange, troubled and unnatural. And for confirmation that all gay men die early deaths, she mentions the former partner of Matt Lucas. This sad death was no more related to Gately's than the Queen Mother's was to Jade Goody's. The only common factor was that they are gay and dead, but the one condition leads inexorably to the other, is the inference.

Of course another characteristic of the gay 'lifestyle' is the use of drugs. Disregarding the evidence of toxicology reports, Moir concludes that “Gately's family have always maintained that drugs were not involved in the singer's death, but it has just been revealed that he at least smoked cannabis on the night he died”... “Nevertheless, his mother is still insisting that her son died from a previously undetected heart condition that has plagued the family”. The contrastive adverb 'nevertheless' suggests a deluded mother maintaining her son's innocence in the face of obvious corruption. The function of the adverbial 'at least' is to deliver the presupposition that it was probably more than just cannabis. This impression is further reinforced in the next paragraph where we find that the men are judged by Moir to be sleazy. What seems to have led her to that determination is that Gately's partner and their friend went into the bedroom together, leaving Gately in the lounge. Whatever they did or did not do is irrelevant to the circumstances of death. None of this was criminal, unusual or even sleazy behaviour. Two men wanted sex, perhaps. In the words of the Stonewall t-shirt – get over it. This, for Moir, though, invalidates the possibility that 'gay marriage' can be as happy or as valid as heterosexual ones. This is effectively a 'straw man' argument - the spurious contestation of a civil rights issue in order to impugn the whole category of 'gay'.

Of course, Moir's 'retraction' a week after publication of the original piece denied any homophobic intent, stating; “Absolutely none of this had anything to do with his sexuality. If he had been a heterosexual member of a boy band, I would have written exactly the same article”. But as Leap (2010) points out, homophobic messages may be inferred by some speaker/hearers, whilst others will perceive them as unproblematic. I view Moir's apology as insincere. It takes a close critical discourse analysis to trace the emergence of a homophobic formation from her original piece. None of the linguistic choices made in this text are exclusive to the repertoire of the homophobe, however, what reveals a homophobic formation is its defamatory, shaming intent, and its reception by the audience/ readership. I think Moir's purpose is transparent in this piece, and she has been justly vilified for it.
(Photo credit: MangakaMaiden. Permissions)

Guest Paper: David Wright, Making Tastes for Everything: 'Omnivorousness' and Cultural Abundance

2009-11-26T08:21:00.001Z

This is the latest guest paper in this year's seminar series organized by the Cultural Studies Research Group and ICAN and we are delighted to welcome David Wright from the Centre for Cultural Policy at the University of Warwick. The event takes place on Wednesday 2nd December, from 4.00-5.30 in room GEE219 on the Clifton campus of Nottingham Trent University. The abstract for the paper, 'Making Tastes for Everything: "Omnivorousness" and Cultural Abundance' is as follows

This paper argues that debates about the social patterning of tastes need to take greater account of changed practices of cultural production as well as consumption. It identifies two ‘stories of abundance’ in the cultural realm, firstly relating to the expanding and influential accounts of the cultural industries and secondly to the rich variety of widely available culture enabled by various technologies of distribution. Taking these into account, it argues that sociological analyses of cultural hierarchy might lag behind those that are mundane and everyday to both cultural producers and consumers. The rise of alternative sources of capital that have questions of cultural openness and tolerance at their core means that an orientation to culture that ranges across established hierarchies is increasingly unremarkable. Such a change is not solely related to age cohorts but the structural and discursive means through which culture is produced and valued. The paper concludes that cultural analysts need to modify their theoretical models and their methodological approaches to better reflect a variegated field of culture and a more fluid cultural hierarchy. In the tradition of both Peterson and Bourdieu, contemporary analyses of patterns of cultural consumption and taste need to take fuller account of the ways in which culture is produced, circulated and valued if they are to maintain their explanatory power.

If you would like to attend the event, please contact Joanne Hollows.
(Photo credit. Niels77. Permissions)

'I've Shaken Hands with Her': the Caravan Park and 'The Best Pair of Legs in the Business'

2009-11-19T10:51:00.000Z

Drawing on research completed for his PhD, Matt Kerry discusses The Best Pair of Legs in the Business (1973).

Britain in the early 1970s was a place of moral panics, strikes and power cuts. Stuart Hall comments that 1972 was a year of ‘sustained and open class conflict of a kind unparalleled since the end of the war’ (293). Terry Staples also points out that the miner’s strike of 1973 had a direct influence on the film industry in early 1974 when the ‘restrictions on the non-domestic use of electrical power’ during the ‘three-day week’ meant that cinemas had to ‘reduce the number of shows they put on’ (229).

British cinema itself was heading for a crisis. Most of the debt-ridden Hollywood companies had withdrawn funding from British films at the end of the 1960s. Filmmakers had to resort to tried and tested formulas, such as movie spin-offs of TV sitcoms, or sex comedies, in order to sustain a living. Although Best Pair is not based on a sitcom, it is a film adaptation of a TV play, both of which star Reg Varney in the central role of Sherry Sheridan. During this period there were a number of films released which looked back nostalgically to the traditional British holiday such as Holiday On The Buses (1973), That’ll Be The Day (1973) and Carry On Girls (1973). However, Best Pair appears to evoke the mood of the time more successfully, exposing the holiday on a cheap caravan park for the dismal experience it could be.

A lot of the action in the film takes place at night. This darkness adds to the gloomy atmosphere. It’s as if the lights have literally been turned off – pre-empting the blackouts of the early 1970s. As the campsite’s only resident entertainer, Sherry attempts to construct some sense of community in the half-empty clubhouse of Greenside Caravan Park, by starting sing-a-longs such as ‘Oh I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside’, but the merriment appears to be forced. The atmosphere is like the aftermath of a party where the guests have stayed too long – a hangover, perhaps from the affluence and optimism of the late 1950s and 1960s. It’s as if the decade before hasn’t lived up to its expectations, and the decade that has followed has seen both an economic and spiritual slump.

The caravan holiday in Britain had originally been a middle-class pursuit in the 1920s and 1930s, as part of the fashion to ‘get back to nature’, just as the original pioneer holiday camps had been. Camping in a Romany style van had been a rare novelty for Bohemian types who wanted to get away from it all, the whole point of the holiday (as Angeloglou 49 - 50, explains) was to ‘rough it’, by digging your own toilet, cooking over an oil stove, and by looking after the horse, which most city folk were not used to. The static caravan parks of the post-war era, however, had little to do with the origins of middle-class camping, instead providing a cheap alternative to the holiday camp, with cut-price accommodation. As Walton points out, the number of people taking caravan holidays at the end of the 1960s had more than doubled to 4.5 million in comparison to the 2 million who took a similar holiday in 1955, and ‘The coastline of Lindsey (Lincolnshire) saw caravan numbers increasing at 1,000 per year throughout the 1950s and 1960s from the 3,000 already present in 1950’ (43). The rows of static caravans were seen by some traditionalists to be an eyesore. In his 1974 poem, ‘Delectable Duchy’ Betjeman expresses a wish for them to be swept ‘out to sea’ by a ‘tidal wave’ (21).

The crisis of the central character in The Best Pair appears to embody the crisis of Britain at the time the film was made. As an entertainer who has just been dropped by his agent, Sherry’s future job prospects look very bleak. In one scene he announces his options as “the Labour Exchange, National Assistance, and very shortly the old-age pension”, and as a last resort, he pessimistically hopes for death. Sherry belongs, suddenly, to another era. He sings Flanagan and Allen songs and does a terrible drag act that allows him the freedom to fill his gags with innuendo, when in actual fact he disapproves of the sexual revolution – in one particular scene he decries the world as a ‘filthy, dirty’ place, after discovering that his wife is having an affair. Not only has Sherry been stripped of his masculinity, but he has also lost his authority as head of the household. His son, Alan, for whom he paid to have a private education and then go on to university, is now effectively middle class and Sherry feels threatened by this. Sherry believes that Alan is also ashamed of his father for ‘making a living by being a lady’, even though his act is ‘good enough for Royalty’, as Sherry points out.

Sherry is a monarchist. His ‘idea of England’ as Stuart Hall refers to, is an imperial one, with ‘a commitment to what Britain has shown herself to be capable of, historically…rooted in ‘feelings about the flag, the Royal Family and the Empire’ (147). The film was made at a time when the Royal Family was relatively free from scandal, and it could be argued that the strong Royalist sentiments of the time were a reaction again to the crisis of the period. Princess Anne’s wedding was celebrated in the year of the film’s release, and the Jubilee came four years later. These celebrations were part of a trend of nostalgia, as Britain desperately looked back to the Coronation; a time when it was coming out of a period of austerity and rationing and was looking forward to better times.

Sherry constructs part of his national identity around his monarchist values, and name-drops the Queen at any given opportunity, his brief meeting with her, being the highpoint of his career, and a boost to what little ego he has left. He stretches the story, however, beyond credibility, telling two young campers that his Royal command performance was by special request from her Majesty, and that his job at the caravan park is merely a ‘paid holiday’. Later, we get a glimpse of a photograph of the occasion. The Queen is greeting a group of entertainers after their performance, but Sherry is on the back row, and not in close proximity to the monarch, which puts paid to his later claim that he’s shaken hands with her.

The culture clash between working-class entertainer and his educated son is brought to a head in a scene where Sherry and Mary go to have tea with Alan’s prospective in-laws. Their son is due to marry into an upper-middle class family who live in a Georgian vicarage. During his visit to the vicarage, Sherry modifies his regional accent and mimics the vicar’s body language by walking with his hands behind his back. When the vicar questions him about his job in a caravan park, Sherry disguises his shame about the job by saying that he has merely spent the summer there as a ‘try-out’, and that he intends to take over the site when he retires. Sherry feels that working in such a place is only acceptable if you are the owner, just as working as an entertainer is only acceptable if by Royal command.

The argument that ensues is triggered by Sherry’s not knowing the proper way to eat cake during middle-class ‘tea’. The vicar’s Georgian silver tea service, handed down from his grandmother is a symbol of inherited wealth. Mary expresses her admiration for it – she sees it as a symbol of ‘family’, whereas, Sherry is intimidated by it. He tries to go one better by saying that he has eaten off gold plates with the Queen. The claim is so ludicrous that no one believes him for a minute, and the lie is further compounded by Sherry’s saying that it happened first at Buckingham Palace, then Windsor Castle. Sherry wrongly believes that an association with Royalty gives him ‘class’, not realising that those who do have class might not necessarily give a damn whether he has met the monarch or not. He also attempts to speak of his relationship with the Queen in ‘show business’ terms by saying she has ‘warmth and star quality’. This is an attempt by Sherry to exclude the vicar and underline his allegiance to the Queen, and in turn demonstrate her supposed loyalty to entertainers.

Sherry’s façade then slips. He stops speaking in Received Pronunciation, throws down his pastry fork and eats the cake with his hands, much to the disgust of everyone else. By trying to break their pretence by disregarding the rituals of eating with a fork, plate and napkin, he reduces eating to its most basic function and makes it grotesque. He then also admits to his working class status by arguing that he has ‘slaved himself into the ground to make a gentleman’ of Alan. When his lie about having eaten with the Sovereign fails to convince, he desperately claims that he has ‘shaken hands with her’. Even this is a lie, and one which his wife refuses to back him up on. The bitterness of Sherry, and his lack of identity is fore-grounded in a scene which could have come as light relief, set as it is in an English country garden, away from the bleak and depressing campsite. The setting, however, throws Sherry’s inadequacies into relief. He doesn’t fit in with the middle-class traditions of the past, and without the support of his family, and uncertain job prospects, his future is uncertain too.

If earlier depictions of the holiday camp in films such as Sam Small Leaves Town (1937) and Holiday Camp (1947) attempt to construct an ideal working class community in the pre- and post- world war, in The Best Pair community falls apart, prefiguring an emergent pessimism, expressed in the crisis of the three-day week.

Academia-UK: the story continues

2009-11-13T12:01:00.007Z

Colleagues may have seen the news that the Sociology department at the University of Birmingham is under threat. Liz Morrish writes occasionally for the United University Professions newsletter, State University of New York. This is her view on the 'review' of the Sociology department.

Here in Academia-UK we mount another defense against the neoliberal insurgency. Colleagues in the department of Sociology at the University of Birmingham face redundancy after the university administration announced the results of a recent 'review'. No meaningful consultation with faculty or students has taken place, and yet administrators have made plans to transfer responsibility for the undergraduate degree program in Media and Cultural Studies to another department (Social Policy), with only three of the current teaching complement of 17 to deliver it. All this will happen behind the breastplate of 'quality assurance' vaunted by Birmingham and every other UK university, and almost certainly without any murmur of dissent from the discredited Quality Assurance Agency.

Let me put this controversy in some context. Academia-UK is governed by league table lottery, however, this operates in unpredictable ways, a bit like snakes-and-ladders. So, despite their excellent results in terms of teaching quality, student satisfaction, etc., Sociology at Birmingham performed less well than expected in the recent Research Assessment Exercises. Birmingham is a 'Russell Group' university, equivalent to US Research tier 1 universities. Since this group seeks to dominate the research rankings, and certainly the research grants awarded on the basis of RAE performance, no slippage is tolerated by university heads. Quite simply, Birmingham Sociology is being punished pour encourager les autres. To call this short-termism would be to miss several ironies. Firstly, Birmingham is a large multi-cultural city and the university makes a claim to be diversifying its student body through its 'widening participation' agenda. Sociology would seem to provide a resource and a natural home for many of the target demographic for such a mission. Secondly, the next RAE (which will be titled the REF) will place an emphasis (and allocate funding) partially on 'impact'. Impact is widely interpreted as economic, but in the arts, humanities and social sciences, impact on social and cultural policy will be assessed. Funding is likely to be bestowed on departments which 'transfer knowledge' to social policy agencies, NGOs, local government etc., - precisely the sort of work encapsulated by the department's Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Culture. The website offers this description of its work: “It is a focus for the department’s engagement with the local community (and wider policy agendas), while the community’s multi-ethnic character brings the global ‘home’”.

The loss of Sociology at the University of Birmingham will represent a loss to the wider world of research in the field and to the local community. Perhaps an enduring loss to the university will be to its recruitment of both staff and students. Who will now take the risk of planning a career at the University of Birmingham, whether that should be as a lecturer, researcher or as an undergraduate, if the structures within which you work are not likely to endure for the extent of your ambitions?

(Photo credit: SBishop. Permissions.)

Guest Paper: Professor Liesbet van Zoonen, 'Islam on the Popular Battlefield'

2009-11-12T16:24:00.006Z

The first guest paper in this year's seminar series organized by the Cultural Studies Research Group with ICAN, and we are delighted to welcome Professor Liesbet van Zoonen from Loughborough University. The talk takes place on Wednesday 18th November from 4.00-6.00 pm in room Gee219, in the George Elliot building on the Clifton Campus of Nottingham Trent University. The paper is entitled 'Islam on the Popular Battlefield'. The abstract of the paper is as follows:

In March 2008, Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders released a 16 minute anti-Islam movie called Fitna. Wilders had a hard time finding a broadcaster or internet provider willing to air the film, because his mere idea caused an immense global controversy, leading to death treats, violent protest, diplomatic incidents and fierce public debate. One of the reactions consisted of organised and unorganised video protest by young people from all over the world, who uploaded their reactions to websites such as YouTube or LiveLeak. Since then, Wilders has tried to export his video to the UK and the US, with a widely published refusal of entry in the spring of this year.
This talk will be about all the video reactions to Fitna, raising the question whether a 'video=sphere' has emerged on YouTube that offers a visual complement to more traditional manifestations of the public sphere. The project is funded by the AHRC Religion and Society Program. More info can be found here. If you are interested in this talk, please watch Fitna beforehand (on YouTube) since I will not be showing it in my presentation.

Everyone is welcome but there are a limited number of places, so if you would like to attend, please contact Joanne Hollows.

(Photo credit: zapdelight. Permissions)

Freeview and DRM: An update

2009-11-10T11:36:00.014Z

In an earlier blog I discussed how the BBC was requesting a form of digital rights management for its Freeview High Definition service, which is due to begin rolling out in December. In a submission to Ofcom, the BBC said so-called 'content providers', which is widely taken to mean principally US rights holders, would withhold content if such provisions weren’t put in place. Critics such as the Electronic Freedom Foundation argued that these rights holders were attempting to improperly influence the development of future TV hardware and the move would not be in the public interest.

Despite the brevity of the consultation period, in a letter to the BBC Ofcom yesterday put the proposals on hold. It said it had received a large number of submissions, mainly from consumer groups, who had ‘raised a number of potentially significant consumer “fair use” and competition issues that were not addressed in our original consultation.’ (Such groups included the Open Rights Group, a UK based organisation similar to the EFF that campaigns to ‘preserve and promote your rights in the digital age’.) Ofcom ordered that until these issues have been resolved no DRM requiring a licence, which is the critical point in all this, can be implemented.

Given the imminence of the HD rollout this is something of a cat among the pigeons, but then again the BBC only applied for the change in its broadcasting licence at the end of August. And it seems the BBC is suddenly left holding the baby. According to a contributor to the BBC’s ‘backstage’ mailing list, ‘The big shock was that (and I read all of the responses) no “content provider” was prepared to say why they asked the BBC for it in the first place. No PACT. No BSkyB.’

This strange state of affairs seems to speak ill of the whole exercise. Today would be an interesting one to be a fly on the wall in a number of boardrooms.

See also
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/nov/09/bbc-anti-piracy-freeview-turned-down
http://www.broadbandtvnews.com/2009/11/09/ofcom-holds-on-hd-licence-change/

Photo credit Ladybeames Permissions

Mosaic: Fragments in Search of the Bigger Picture in FlashForward

2009-11-06T15:28:00.000Z

We're delighted to welcome our second guest blogger to the site. Today's guest is Mark Jancovich (Film and Television Studies, University of East Anglia) who is currently working on a history of the 1940s horror film. Below, he takes time out to discuss some recent TV.

In FlashForward, the whole world experiences an unexpected and unprecedented event – everyone appears to lose consciousness for 2 minutes and 17 seconds. The event causes devastation and loss of life and, it soon transpires, that each person did not lose consciousness but rather had their consciousness shifted six months into the future. In other words, the world has seen its own future, if only a decontextualized 2 minutes and 17 seconds of that future. For some, this future offers hope and for others despair, and soon the Los Angeles FBI are trying to make sense of the event by piecing things together – literally. They set up a website called MOSAIC on which people can post their visions of the future and verify their experiences by cross-referencing them with the visions of others.

In this way, the series continually plays with the notion of fragments that are meaningless in themselves but form part of a larger picture – like most network television in the US, it follows a series of characters whose different narratives form a complex multi-layered broader narrative arc. More importantly, the larger arc is explicitly global.

In many ways, then, the series creators hope to emulate the global themes of Heroes and its frequent narrative globetrotting, but with the exception of one Asian-American character, Demetri Noh (John Cho), the series lacks the multi-national cast of characters that distinguishes Heroes, and remains firmly centred in the US. However, where it fails to replicate certain aspects of Heroes, the ways in which it borrows from other shows are rather more successful. Indeed, what is odd about FlashForward is how familiar and fresh it feels.

On the one hand, the series borrows heavily from the fan favorites of post-X-Files television in ways that are often surprisingly blatant but, on the other, it does so without seeming to be derivative. The show features FBI officers searching into an inexplicable and possibly paranormal event in ways that are clearly reminiscent of The X-Files. It is also features Brannon Braga as an executive producer, a figure whose presence is highly significant. Braga was not only a key figure behind Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Voyager, and Star Trek: Enterprise, but also, while Enterprise wandered off into a rather misguided post-9/11 storyline (see a forthcoming blog entry on this topic), he has since become associated with another key series to which FlashForward is greatly indebted. After Enterprise folded in 2005, Braga was hired to work on the post-9/11 counter-terrorism series, 24, and he had just finished working on season seven (the last episode of which aired on 18 May 2009 in the US) when he began working on FlashForward (the first episode of which aired on 24 September 2009 in the US).

Much like the Jack Bauer and his associates in 24, the FBI of FlashForward whizz around trying to explain the mysterious event and counter an increasingly bizarre conspiracy. Furthermore, the event itself is clearly likened to 9/11. While it is clearly presented as a global event, it is largely visualized in terms of urban devastation in which smoking skyscrapers figure prominently. Even the Mosaic website is strongly reminiscent of the numerous 9/11 memorials, with they collages of fragmentary photographs and testimonies that are supposedly unified by a common trauma. From these disparate details, it is hoped a pattern will emerge, and an enemy will be identified that can account for things.

Of course, another feature that is central to 24 is its use of time but, while 24 unfolds in ‘real time’ as Jack Bauer and his associates race against the clock, Flashforward’s use of time draws upon yet another key show, Lost. In its early seasons, Lost (which told the story of the survivors of Flight 815 after their plane had crashed on a mysterious island) dedicated each episode to a different character and not only told the story of their present but also features flashbacks to their previous lives before they arrived on the island. In later seasons, however, the time-line became increasingly complicated, with flash-forwards, and with the character’s literally jumping between different time periods. It is hardly any surprise then that by the end of episode four of FlashForward, Dominic Monaghan (who played the drug addicted musician, Charlie, in Lost) turns up as Simon, a character that seems to be central to the conspiracy behind the event.

In other words, while FlashForward imagines a world trying to make meaning and coherence out of fragmented experiences, the show itself tries to bring together bits and pieces from a range of other shows and, at least so far, has fashioned something fresh and coherent out of its raw materials. Of course, there is a very real question about what will happen once time catches up with the series itself, and its character’s visions of the future have become visions of the past.

(Photo credit: qbix08. Permissions)

Diasporas, Migration and Media: Crossing Boundaries, New Directions

2009-11-03T08:27:00.001Z

NTU is co-hosting the conference of the ECREA Diaspora, Migration and Media section with Utrecht University and the University of Thessaloniki. This year's conference takes place on November 6-7 and focuses on Diasporas, Migration and Media. With a key note speech by Kenan Malik, panels focus on a range of issues such as Concepts and Methods in Diasporic Film and TV Research; Social Media and Diasporas; Urban Environment and Multicultural Encounters; and Diasporic Audiences. The contact person at NTU is Olga Bailey.
(Photo credit for Window-cleaners at the University Library of Utrecht: .Storm. Permissions.)

Carry On Researching

2009-10-30T09:18:00.002Z

Matt Kerry who teaches media and cultural studies at NTU has also recently passed his PhD. As he explains below, his doctoral research explores the representations of holidays and their relationship to ideas of nation in British cinema.

The representation of the supposed free space of the holiday by a medium of mass entertainment offers a highly condensed image that demands analysis. In my thesis I question the ways in which the holiday film constructs a sense of Britishness based around the idea of community that is shaped and pressured by forces at different historical moments. Modern capitalist society offers us a structure where the holiday is presented to us as the ultimate contrast from work. It is commodified, and we choose to enter into this ideology, take our break, and return to work, refreshed. The holiday also offers a particular type of freedom, which distinguishes it from other forms of leisure. It can be considered as more of an ‘event’ than a weekend break from work, for instance.

The emergence of the holiday as a form of mass entertainment for the working class appears to coincide with the birth of cinema in the same respect. By studying the holiday film I reveal what it tells us about British culture, the nation and British life, and how cinema audiences may have engaged with and responded to these texts.

As well as providing textual analysis of the films, I also address the holiday as a liminal, carnivalesque space (Inglis 2000, Shields 2002), and also consider how the landscape is mediated through the tourist gaze (Urry 2002, Bell and Lyall 2002). I explore the ways in which the cinematic representation of the holiday shifts in relation to changing social contexts – in new formations of leisure, class and landscape. I also consider how audiences might actively respond to these films, and how these texts might construct an ideal working-class community pre- and post- World War II. Overall, I argue that representations of the traditional British holiday in these films are mostly white, working-class and raucous, but that these representations are not fixed.

Image from Carry On Cruising (1962)

Did Little Chef Change Heston?

2009-10-27T18:00:00.002Z

In the run-up to tomorrow’s Did Heston Change Little Chef? on Channel 4, Joanne Hollows and Steve Jones decide to reverse the question, exploring how Big Chef Tales on Little Chef, broadcast earlier this year, reworked elements of Heston Blumenthal’s brand image.

The culinary documentary Big Chef Takes on Little Chef (BCTOLC) marked Heston Blumenthal’s move from BBC2 to Channel 4. His previous series for the BBC saw him In Search of Perfection, combining a didactic approach to culinary skills with segments of travelogue as he deconstructed and then reconstructed classic meals in order to produce the ‘perfect’ version. BCTOLC marked a significant departure from this format. Focusing was on the reconstruction of a failing chain of British roadside diners Little Chef, the series employed many of the features of earlier culinary documentaries produced by the channel (associated with Jamie Oliver, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Gordon Ramsay) which revolved around a standard ‘problem-solving’ structure. Indeed, BCTOLC was aired within a two-week season of food-related programming – the Great British Food Fight – which worked to brand Blumenthal within the star chefs of the Channel 4 stable.

The series followed Blumenthal’s attempts to transform both the menu and the ambiance of a single Little Chef restaurant prior, he assumed, to rolling out a larger programme of change across the chain. However, the narrative is driven by a structuring conflict between the chef and the CEO of Little Chef, Ian Pegler. While Blumenthal seeks to make a deep transformation of Little Chef, conflict is provoked by Pegler’s assumptions that the ‘magic’ and ‘alchemy’ that had become central ingredients of Heston’s culinary image could be applied to the chain as a superficial marketing gimmick. In some ways this involves a reversal of the viewer’s assumptions about the chef: rather than engaging in the avant-garde culinary experimentation that was the hallmark of Perfection (and the later Feasts), Blumenthal’s recreation of Little Chef is based on ‘great ingredients’, a respect for both Little Chef’s own heritage and a wider British culinary heritage, and offering greater ‘value’ to the consumer. Paradoxically therefore Blumenthal never accepts Pegler’s sycophantic praise of his cuisine since it is based on a misrecognition of the chef’s value. Indeed, Pegler frequently appears to use Blumenthal as a ‘trophy chef’ whose celebrity adds value to the brand while the chef himself is shown to be engaged in the more serious work of breathing life into the ‘most iconic roadside restaurant chain in Britain’.

The opposition here isn’t simply one between art and commerce – indeed, Heston is frequently shown to be deeply concerned about such commercial imperatives as costings and staff training – but about the role of integrity in the conduct of business and management. The failure of Pegler as a good leader is frequently demonstrated though his clichéd use of management jargon such as ‘blue skies thinking’, ‘thinking outside the box’ and ‘when the rubber hits the road’, phrases familiar to many viewers from The Apprentice, The Armstrongs and The Office. Blumenthal’s own critical position in relation to such forms of discourse is literally built into the redesigned Little Chef which delivers Pegler his ‘blue skies’ in the form of a mural in the ceiling. This works to reaffirm Blumethal’s brand image, built around integrity and playfulness, within a show which is essentially a rebranding exercise for Little Chef.

While BCTOLC was therefore a departure from Blumenthal’s earlier television projects – and also not indicative of his future trajectory - the series deployed some important continuities. The chef’s willingness to resuscitate Little Chef is based on nostalgic memories of the brand’s centrality in the 1970s Britain he grew up in. His project was therefore to articulate this memory of place, and of the Little Chef brand, with people’s wider nostalgic memories of favourite meals (which had been a feature of Perfection). An important component of this nostalgia is its link to national identity: Little Chef is ‘part of the national fabric’ and ‘just sings British. I feel… [this] is about reinventing British classics for the Twenty First century’. This is reinforced in the first episode by Blumenthal’s road trip to Little Chefs scattered around England in an act of imaginative mapping. In this way, Blumenthal’s project of re-enchantment relates to other examples of ‘retro-futurism’ such as Martin Parr’s Boring Postcards (1999) with their shots of early motorway service stations (Moran 2005: 124).

Just as Parr’s found postcards simultaneously ask questions abut the recent past and work to reinforce the photographer’s ownership of a pure aesthetic, so Heston’s journey and project are both an intervention into the past and a demonstration of his own aesthetic distance from it. On the one hand, through the mournful memories of Little Chef employees, the series plays with a public memory of a promise of roadside modernity which was never quite achieved in England. On the other hand, the choice of Little Chef is a continuation of Heston’s ability, demonstrated in the Perfection series, to disrupt the opposition between ‘authenticity’ and ‘inauthenticity’, the maintenance of which boundary is widely assumed to be a key legitimating mechanism by which particular social groups make gains in distinction (May, 1999)

By adopting the position of a cultural omnivore who refuses the distinction between authentic and inauthentic foods, Blumenthal’s brand image is kept intact within the seemingly vulgar space of a Little Chef. While contemporary food discourse emphasize the virtues of the local, seasonal and freshly-made, there is little attempt within the show to steer Little Chef towards these values. As in his previous series, Blumenthal is respectful of artisanal ingredients but, unlike shows such as Jamie at Home and River Cottage in which the chef is seen growing or rearing produce, Heston maintains a clear distinction between artisanal and restaurant production. Instead, Heston uses his creativity within the world of industrial and mass-produced food rather than against it. As a route to legitimation this is a rarity within British culinary culture. While raiding the tastes of British and European ‘peasant’ cuisines is a well-worn route to making gains in culinary distinction, this is predicated on the assumption of their authenticity. The industrialized and mass-produced, by contrast, are marked by inauthenticity and consequently unavailable for translation into distinction. It is Heston’s investments in the scientific field that make this unpromising territory available to him (although not all modern technologies are created equal: scrambling eggs in a microwave is rejected in favour of the more cheffy technique of cooking vacuum packed eggs in a water bath.) Yet it is the confidence with which Blumenthal can embrace the inauthentic that marks both his difference and distinction from the contemporary culinary field which festishizes the authentic.

While Heston refuses the legitimation offered by Ian Pegler, the series built towards an event to re-launch the Popham branch of the Little Chef, and to launch Blumenthal as a Channnel 4 chef, attended by celebrities and, more particularly, a group of food writers. While Blumenthal has been active in theorizing his own work and does not simply rely on the validation of the critic for legitimation, the stellar nature of this coterie of food writers (including Fay Maschler and Matthew Fort) is an approximation to the ‘recognition of those [able to] recognise’ identified by Bourdieu. However, the presence of these critics at the relaunch of a Little Chef is not only a testament to Heston’s status within the hierarchy of restaurant chefs but they also operate as a chorus who experience the meal on behalf of the viewer (prefiguring his next series, Heston’s Feasts). It is also the critics who therefore affirm the success of Heston’s makeover of the Little Chef. However, unlike the makeovers that are associated with lifestyle television, the audience is not offered guidance on how to makeover the self. Indeed, in many ways, the show can be understood as delifestyling project because of the centrality of standardized production and industrial technique, necessitated by the requirements of a mass-market chain.

While BCTOLC established important continuities with Blumenthal’s reputation as a restaurant chef and his persona in his earlier TV output, the documentary format played a key role in further disseminating and nuancing his brand image, promising the audience access to the ‘real’ Heston and his vision as a restauranteur as well as a chef.
(Photo credits: trixie. Permissions.)

Game play and social networking.

2009-10-21T20:45:00.008+01:00

Joost Van Loon's encounter with the MMORPG Runescape engages some questions in relation to Derrida's reworking of the gift.

As an avid gamer myself, I have started to consider how I might combine my so called ‘addiction’ (passion sounds too much like ‘X-Factor talk’) and my professional role as an academic researcher. Being a member of the steering committee of NTU’s Centre for Contemporary Play, I am involved in attempts to bring game-research into a truly interdisciplinary field. The CCP already has a footing in four key areas of gaming: computing science, art and design, social science and humanities. This enables us to develop a unique platform to create truly exciting cross-disciplinary research projects.

My own research focuses on one particular MMORPG (Massively Muliplayer On Line Role Playing Game) called Runescape. Quite recently, I have finished a bit of research on the role of the gift and reciprocity in engendering associations. This is to be published in the journal Parallax in 2010.

This article reflects on the coming into being of ‘networked actors’. Its aim is to provide some reflections on what could be a more productive way of conceptualizing ‘action’ in relation to questions over embodiment and disembodiment. Rather than engaging with questions about subjectivity and agency, or the nature of authenticity in virtual worlds, or the ontology of virtual bodies, it simply asks what happens if we start thinking about the gift as constitutive of actors (rather than the other way round)? Starting with a critical engagement with Derrida’s reworking of Mauss’ theory of the gift, it seeks to distantiate itself from the implicit subjectivism that underpins the axiom that gifts and commodities are different in essence. Instead, it provides an understanding of gifts and reciprocity that does not treat gifts as ‘mere objects’, but instead shifts attention to the central roles played by gift-objects as modes of enactment. It thereby posits in place of the ever-deferred subject, a net¬-worked¬ being whose existence is always already heterogeneous and dispersed.

It is this ‘networked being’ that I would now like to encounter in a larger variety of empirical situations. I am particularly interested in the ambivalent relationship between on-line and off-line transactions and associations.

(Photo credit: marti macg, permissions)

Recent Calls for Papers

2009-10-14T17:45:00.004+01:00

Below is a round-up of some recent notices about upcoming conferences that might interest people working in cultural studies.

First up is the recent call for papers for the MeCCSA postgraduate conference to be held at the University of Glasgow, 30 June - 1 July 2010. The organizers invite papers from postgraduate students working on any topic relevant to media, communication and cultural studies with a deadline for abstracts of 15 March 2010. The Screen conference also takes place at its usual home of the University of Glasgow, 2-4 July 2010. Although a strand of the conference will focus on performance, the conference welcomes papers from any area of Screen studies. The deadline for abstracts is 8 January 2010.

Finally, the next Console-ing Passions conference will be held at the University of Oregon, 22-24 April 2010. This major international conference focuses on feminist research in television, aural and new media. The deadline for abstracts is 2 November 2010.

(Totally gratuitous use of picture of Vitra conference centre credits: alan.2008. Permissions)

On the art of not asking the right political question

2009-10-09T15:00:00.004+01:00

In this post Simon Cross examines last week's announcement that The Sun is backing David Cameron in the next General Election.

The Sun newspaper, Britain’s biggest selling national daily tabloid, last week announced that it was no longer backing Gordon Brown and the Labour Party in the next General Election (to be held by early June 2010 at the latest). The decision by The Sun about which leader and party to support in the General Election is often taken to be a huge symbolic moment in the political life and death of government.

However, it takes no great political insight to have foreseen this withdrawal of support. The Sun has been attacking Brown for a long time now. Nor should anyone give much credence to the notion that The Sun’s decision to withdraw support from Gordon Brown will actually decide the election when it comes. At best, the paper’s influence will be marginal though this does not negate the point that the paper seeks to curry influence with the likely government in waiting – look no further than Rupert Murdoch’s all too real telephone hotline to Tony Blair in the run up to the Iraq War.

But the real story here is Rupert Murdoch’s brazen attempt to set the agenda of intense anti-Brown/Labour rhetoric that will be intensified from now on. With this in mind, when I watched The Sun’s political editor Trevor Kavanagh being interviewed on BBC1’s political coverage of the Labour Party conference in Brighton. He confirmed that the central decision to switch allegiance from Labour (the paper will back David Cameron’s Conservative leadership) had been taken by Rupert Murdoch in his capacity as Sun proprietor.

Again, this is no surprise. What is a surprise however is that the interviewer viewed this admission as the end-point of the debate when it surely should have been the beginning. The next obvious question to ask Kavanagh should have been the democratic illegitimacy of an Australian-born US citizen using his privately owned newspaper in a blatant attempt to influence the outcome of a General Election of a sovereign nation of which he is not a citizen!

Why did the interviewer not ask this question? Incompetence is one answer. Poor political savvy is another. However, journalists rarely possess the intellectual rigour needed for exercising ‘joined up thinking’ and which makes for the art of asking the right question. Meanwhile, we can expect Rupert Murdoch to invite David Cameron (ala Tony Blair in 1996) to appear before his senior executives in the Cayman Islands (or wherever) and for the Etonian-educated leader of the Tory Party to drop everything to curry favour with a man who regularly pronounces hatred for the British class system. Should make for an interesting relationship over the coming years but as always these relationships are maintained far from the democratic gaze.

(photo credit: just.luc, permissions)

Freeview Retune Day Part II

2009-10-05T15:08:00.017+01:00

The second part of Dave Woods’ report on last week’s Freeview retune. Part I is immediately below.

At present the restrictions on Freeview HD seem pretty modest. As Graham Plumb, the BBC’s head of distribution technology explains, ‘Even in its most restrictive state [the system] still allows one HD copy to be made to Blu-ray […] (and for most content there will be no restriction whatsoever on the number of Blu-ray copies permitted)’. This hardly seems like the end of the world, then. (A less well known consequence is that if your set top box dies so do your recordings because they are paired with that particular box, but again this is only going to be a rare occurrence.) So why are the critics getting so heated? There are two recurring reasons. First, attempts to close distribution systems in the name of protecting content holders’ interests are identified with a stifling of creativity and competition. As Danny O’Brien puts it elsewhere,

It was the very lack of control by big media over what citizens plugged into their TV aerials that got us video-recorders, video rental stores and digital video recorders. With a pre-emptive veto, no broadcaster or movie company would have ever let those happen. In fact, the movie companies sued to have VCRs banned in the US. Yet it was those innovations that led to movie rental stores, a widening of ‘prime time’ and a vibrant TV industry.

In particular, open source solutions—a prime source of technological innovation that has more complex relationships with capitalism than conventional, proprietary rights-based production—would be outlawed.

The second issue is a consequence of the first. Critics point out that once the viewer’s control over their own media use is in principle taken out of their hands, other perhaps more invasive types of control become possible, such as disabling the skipping of adverts and the automatic deletion of recordings after a set time. It’s important to be clear that there is no hint of such measures in the current proposal, but the critics are arguing for the long term. After all, probably all mainstream TV will be HD one day; whatever is set in place now will have lasting effects upon the public broadcasting landscape. And that landscape looks set to be one where Ofcom effectively cedes control to rights owners to specify what sorts of technology will be allowed to develop, and what sorts of restrictions they will require and be able to impose. In this context, the fact that, as Paidcontent puts it, ‘it’s taken just 21 days to go from broadcaster request to the end of a public consultation’, does look somewhat precipitate. Writing in The Guardian online, anti-DRM campaigner Cory Doctorow puts it in perhaps extreme terms:

The BBC's cosy negotiation with big rightsholders and offshore manufacturers excluded the public and the free/open source software community – the very groups that blew the whistle on previous attempts to lock up the public airwaves. It's almost as though it wanted to limit the "stakeholders" in the room to people who wouldn't cause any trouble, so that it could present Ofcom with a neat and tidy agreement with no dissenting voices.

Trying to step back from the detail, of course none of the above is to say that content holders don’t have a legitimate interest in protecting their rents and that piracy doesn’t have real consequences. Nevertheless, a familiar pattern I’ve found in other new media forms seems to be playing out once again. On the one hand, large media corporations or bodies representing them lobby, predict industry collapse and threaten boycotts to secure their media content. They propose DRM as a means of doing so. Their actions provoke more or less well founded suspicion on the part of critics such as Robert McChesney who points to ever-increasing concentration of media ownership and the power that accrues therewith, or Kembrew McLeod who highlights the overweening ambitions of rights owners to extend control over their content. On the other, as outlined above, DRM—least of all the token version of it proposed here—doesn’t prevent illegal uploads and thus downloads. It does however make greater or lesser impositions on ‘normal’ users, who may thus become motivated to explore ways of getting around them. This seems to be a vicious circle where no-one really wins.

Another point rather closer to home for academics is that these measures could impact upon existing copyright agreements. The MP Tom Watson had an early blog on this issue. (This at first got something of the wrong end of the stick, condemning the fact that millions of existing set-top boxes would be made useless, which isn’t true, as he later clarified. However, he’s definitely on target when he asks ‘If implemented this will make it difficult to view or record HDTV broadcasts with free software. Where’s the consumer interest in that settlement?’) The comments on the blog are a rich source for critiques of the issues, and I recommend a read of them. Amongst them is David Newman’s observation that

Once again, the proposed technical changes will overrule existing copyright licensing arrangements, like the one offered by the CLA to all schools and universities to use for education all over-the-air broadcasts forever.

In light of Graham Plumb’s comments it’s unlikely we’ll see copying restrictions being implemented for the BBC, but the system will be in place and there is no guarantee the other public service broadcasters will follow suit. UK librarians may feel obliged to follow their American counterparts. Except by then it might be too late.

Latest: Graham Plumb posted a response to Doctorow’s article on the BBC blog on Friday, with Doctorow in turn providing a counter (post #13). This blog and its comments is also recommended (and lively!) reading.

photo credit: jbonnain, permissions

Freeview retune day: the thin end of a long wedge? Part I

2009-09-30T21:52:00.022+01:00

In a two-part post Dave Woods reports on the Freeview update that happened earlier today.

As of lunchtime today, approximately 18 million UK households will have to retune their digital televisions and set-top boxes in order to keep receiving certain Freeview digital television channels. The main changes are to Channel Five and some channels in the ITV bouquet, along with the arrival of a new Discovery channel, Quest. After the retune, little will be different for most people apart from the appearance of Quest, though there will some loss of services to a small percentage of households. (See here for more details.) Behind the scenes, however, this reshuffle is part of the technical preparation for Digital Switch Over, the turning off of the analogue TV signals that makes terrestrial TV reception entirely dependent on possessing digital receivers. There are two main outcomes from the changes. First, Channel Five will become available ‘universally’ (which means about 98.5% of homes) to Freeview viewers, the same proportion as the other public service broadcasters (BBC, ITV and Channel 4). But the changes also pave the way for the introduction of high definition (HD) TV reception via the rooftop aerial, and it’s here that controversial measures that could affect the viewing habits of the nation are being pushed through, and rather speedily at that.

The big issue is Digital Rights Management (DRM). Or perhaps more accurately, DRM is the technological expression of a wider struggle over the future of UK television. On Sept 3, Ofcom began a consultation stating that it was ‘minded’ to allow for ‘the protection of intellectual property rights in High Definition television services’ on the public service channels. The consultation itself was a response to a letter from the BBC sent at the end of August requesting such measures, in which the BBC made it clear that the pressure to implement some sort of content management system (i.e. restrictions on copying programmes) for HD was coming not from itself but from ‘[t]hird party content owners’.

Trying to introduce a system to control the copying of television content for public service television is a legally tricky business since it is a condition of the broadcasting licence that the signals be available ‘free to air’, i.e. cannot be encrypted so that proprietary hardware is needed to receive them. Ofcom duly rejected this suggestion. As a way of coping with this, the BBC proposal suggested encrypting not the video and audio signals themselves, but the Electronic Programme Guide (EPG) needed to make a set-top box usable. Hardware manufacturers who were willing to produce equipment that obeyed the copying controls embedded in the signal would be given access to the keys to unlock the EPG.

There are several crucial implications in this development, reflected in the rapidly growing number of responses to it. First and foremost, we have been here before. From the early 2000s in the US, the ‘content owners’ (which broadly means the film and television production complex based mainly in Hollywood) started pressing for a legally enforceable ‘broadcast flag’ for digital TV, which would have had similar effects to the proposals currently before Ofcom. The demand was taken up by the Federal Communications Commission. Due to the efforts of librarians and public interest groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, such measures were found to overstep the remit of the FCC and rejected. As Danny O’Brien of the EFF puts it, ‘Veterans of the broadcast flag battle in the United States will recognise [the language of the BBC proposal]: rightsholders are once again attempting to use the power of the public regulators to force universal DRM on the general public, and place their veto power over the next generation of HD digital TV technology’.

To expand this point a bit further, while the explicit aim of these measures is to help to ‘prevent mass piracy’ as the BBC proposal puts it, this has been argued to be a rather implausible reason. At least it needs some clarification. The sort of encryption (in fact a sort of compression) envisaged is very weak, and as the BBC acknowledges is unlikely to deter for long anyone intending to overcome it. Perhaps it would be better to describe it as deterring casual piracy, i.e. preventing a non-technically minded person from copying a programme onto a DVD and giving it to their friend. As a defence against uploading material to the internet (whence relatively technically unsophisticated people can acquire it easily) it is barely a token gesture. And that is all it needs to be; once it is in place hardware manufacturers, in order to be legal, will be obliged to implement whatever DRM the content owners specify. For O’ Brien this is precisely the point: ‘In Britain, as in the United States, this proposal isn't about piracy. It's about creating a rightsholder veto over new consumer technologies in DTV’. In other words, the technologically enforced modification of ordinary people’s habits without the option of other hardware becoming available to allow the old habits to continue.

But to try to be more specific, what habits are going to be modified? What are these restrictions on copying? Why is there widespread criticism of these measures?

Part two coming soon.

(photo credit: Lee Jordan, permissions)

Palestine: Culture, Conflict, Representation

2009-09-24T16:58:00.004+01:00

This interdisciplinary one-day symposium at NTU takes place on 2nd October 2009 and brings together scholars working within a range of academic and cultural perspectives to explore the complex relationships between culture, conflict and representation in the context of Palestine. The symposium poses two key questions. How might the various conflicts faced by Palestinian society be adequately represented? Conversely, what are the conflicts entailed in the act of representation, whether of a political, cultural, artistic or scholarly nature?

The keynote address, 'Edward Said and Rethinking the Question of Palestine', will be offered by Professor Nur Masalha of St Mary's University College. Across a range of panels, participants will discuss topics relating to the representation of space, territory and nation; questions of media representation and coverage; conflicts of cultural identity and belonging; the politics of transnational scholarly representation; the potential and pitfalls of (post)colonial studies and other forms of theorization as modes of representation; Said's legacy in the representation of the Palestinian struggle; and the ethics of representing conflict itself.

The symposium runs from 10.15 to 5.00 on Friday 2 October 2009 in room GEE219 (located in the George Eliot building on the Clifton Campus of NTU). The event is free to attend but it is essential that you register your interest in advance as space is limited. If you would like to attend, please email Anna Ball at NTU to reserve a place.
(Photo credit: Takver. Permissions)

The Silence of Sound

2009-09-24T11:00:00.001+01:00

The concept of the silent disco is gaining ground and business is booming for several UK companies at the forefront of the technology. The concept is simple: DJ equipment is wired not into speakers, but into a radio transmitter which broadcasts to multiple sets of radio headphones worn by the audience.

The practical advantages are several – no complaints about sound levels from neighbours being the most obvious, which allows the party to continue well after normal licences for music events expire (most famously exploited in late night sessions at the 2005 Glastonbury festival which launched the concept of the silent disco into the public eye). Individuals can also alter the volume of their headsets allowing a customised experience, and headphone volume can be limited to conform to emerging standards for safe listening (although this might be seen as a disadvantage by hardcore clubbers). The most intriguing advantage is that the provision of multi-channel broadcast and reception technology means that two or more DJs can play to the same audience, who can flick a switch on their headphones to select which DJ they want to hear at any given moment.

My recent experience of silent DJing at the Off the Tracks festival suggests that this provides a new twist to the old DJ tradition of the ‘soundclash.’ This originated in Jamaica but also became central in American hip-hop as the ‘battle,’ in which two separate soundsystems or DJs alternate tunes, fighting it out to win the approval of a crowd. Similarly, at the silent disco a friendly rivalry emerges as each DJ ties to capture the audience, although canny programming - which for best effect puts DJs playing radically different music together - means that the audience don’t really see it like that, and simply enjoy the fact that they can switch back and forth between different styles as their mood suits.

Potential disadvantages include a loss of the physicality of sound: dance music is designed with a strongly visceral experience in mind, in which sub-bass frequencies are felt in the body rather than simply heard through the ears. Interestingly, an obvious further worry - that the communality of the listening experience, in which crowds enjoy a transcendent togetherness, might be eroded by the isolating effect of headphones - proves misplaced: it seems that the mind quickly ‘edits out’ the headphones and a powerful sensation of shared sound persists, with the twist being that you are not sure if your grinning companions are actually dancing to the same thing as you! Additionally, the headphones seem to have a disinhibiting effect, with an enhanced willingness to sing along in evidence (it is quite a strange experience to enter the room without headphones and to hear people singing along to two different tunes at once in an otherwise silent space, whilst they dance out of synch with each other to the beat of different drummers).

Technical issues for the DJ include above all the challenge of mixing in headphones (normal beatmatching technique involves listening to the front-of-house tune with one ear whilst a headphone cup delivers the next tune to the other ear, allowing for the synchronisation of the incoming and outgoing tune). However, it is possible for the DJ to use a small personal monitor speaker as a workaround for this problem, although this does somewhat undermine the purity of the silent concept, and some DJ mixers already allow a ‘split-cue’ in which one ear cup plays the live tune and the other delivers the cue. A more subtle issue is that it becomes harder to respond to the dancefloor - trying to work out how well your choices are going down, and in what musical direction to travel next is complicated by the difficulty of knowing who is grooving to which DJ. In practice, as the set goes on, it becomes possible to attune yourself to that segment of the audience dancing to what you are playing through an attention to the rhythm of their dance – or, easier, the sound of any singing or whooping along that might be in evidence if you remove your own headphones.

(photo credit: damian scott, creative commons)

Conference Report: Language and (New) Media

2009-09-20T11:24:00.006+01:00

Dean Hardman reports back from The Language and New (Media) Conference that took place at the University of Washington in Seattle between the 3rd and 5th of September.

This was the third conference in a series that has examined the role of the media in relation to the construction or representation of language, with the two previous incarnations taking place in Leeds in 2005 and 2007. While those conferences were built around themes of ideology in relation to how the media represented, constructed and produced language, this conference purported to take a step further and invited delegates to look more closely at the roles that new technologies and ideologies associated with new media play in the construction and representation of language.

As it turned out, the papers presented were an eclectic mix of studies and theories that discussed not only the discourses of blogs, wikis, texting, instant messaging, internet art, video games, virtual worlds, websites, emails, podcasting, hypertext fiction and graphical user interfaces, but also how these discourses affect the world in which we live and how new technologies have changed the ways in which we communicate and live our lives.

In general terms, the conference showed that the analysis of media discourse has well and truly embraced the electronic age, with a number of papers examining the role that social networking websites play in people’s lives and, by extension, how the language of these new genres has developed alongside the development of new technologies. Indeed, this was the thrust of one of the plenary speakers’ presentations, Jannis Androutsopoulos of Kings College London, who discussed computer mediated communication (CMC) and how processes of multimodality, intertextuality and heteroglossia can be used to describe and explain the generic features of web 2.0 sites such as Facebook and Myspace.

Another interesting plenary talk was given by Naomi Baron (American University) who focused upon how mobile phone use has reshaped social encounters. She presented data from a study involving university students from the USA, Japan, Italy, Sweden and Korea, which described how use of mobile phones has resulted in people feeling as though they have lost control of social encounters.

Clearly it is impossible in a blog entry such as this to discuss all of the 60 papers presented, but one other session that was particularly worthwhile was the special panel on the BBC voices project. Bethan Davies (University of Leeds) talked about how the BBC’s voices season had sought to utilise the internet to “stimulate a national conversation about language use in the UK”. She discussed how users had submitted their thoughts about their own languages, accents and dialects, and described some of the limitations of the project, such as the selection of specific languages and the availability of discussion forums. The paper offered evidence of a new way of examining accents and dialects as well as attitudes towards them through CMC.

(photo credit: kendrya, permissions)

Neoliberal U – Australian version.

2009-09-17T20:42:00.004+01:00

It is always interesting to be an onlooker at the internal workings of another university, as opposed to viewing the public face of an institution at a conference, and I was fortunate this summer to spend time at an Australian university which has frequently been cited as a trailblazer for the neoliberal academy. Through a local contact, I managed to secure a place on a staff development workshop, designed to groom mid-career academics in the image of the ideal university employee. Normally, at my own institution, I would have scorned such an opportunity. However, this was a chance to be a fly on the wall and to decode the culture of another university's management.

The presenter was offering the participants the benefit of his experience in effective networking and collaboration. The advice he extended seemed to be geared to the rather younger academic than the assembled mid-career constituency rather reluctantly gathered before him, as he revealed that, early on, he had decided to “surround myself with excellence”. How to do this? One brief role play required us to imagine this scenario – you are at a conference and find yourself at lunch standing next to the keynote speaker. What 'chat up' line would you use, in order to make yourself memorable to this heavyweight, who might subsequently facilitate your self promotion strategy? Apparently, the route to advancement is mediated through high quality academic partners who “make you look good”. I listened with my jaw progressively slackening; I had never been exposed before to such shamelessly direct exhortations to actualise self-serving sycophancy.

Building your network should feature high on your one-page career plan, which should be complemented with evidence of your esteem indicators. Your network should be viewed as an asset, and as essential to your CV as any actual professional accomplishments. However, networking and collaboration were defined in extremely limited ways. Partnerships were only viable if they led to outcomes – publications, grant application etc. There seemed to be no room for conversation, mentoring, interest groups, blogging etc. Instead, you were to be measured by the size and geographical spread of your network, and critically, by the status of its participants.

This presenter viewed networking as purely strategic. On the other hand, for many of us , it is experienced as a series of happy accidents, fortuitous collisions of minds, and sometimes bodies, at conferences. Collaborations are driven as often by personal or romantic liaisons as they are by pure intellectual attraction. Seminars, collegiate encounters and academic partnerships are as often organic as they are planned. I was startled at the apparent contradiction between the stated aim of the workshop – collaboration – and the rather vulgar focus on individualism which animated this particular model of the developing academic career. I wondered how this sat with the HR representative in charge of the academic development program, positioned at the back of the room – how was this aligning with the wider mission of the university which surely is not just a vehicle for furthering the priorities of the individual?

At Neoliberal U the individual academic is also responsible for managing their time so that the proliferation of demands must be accommodated unproblematically. In the presenter's own department, he has forbidden staff to claim they are too busy to take on new projects, organise seminars, work with new partnerships. The individual should just learn to 'work smart'. The self-managing academic must become the over-worked academic apparently.

I was also concerned that institutional impediments to networking were discussed, but I felt they were unlikely to be addressed. University managers have, for some years, sought to dismantle academic culture and sense of community. It is threatening to managerialist governmentality, and subject affiliations are seen as dangerously off-message. Part of this strategy has been the removal of social spaces where academics might actually mingle and coincidentally realise commonalities and opportunities for research. RAE culture in the UK has, because of the inbuilt competition, set limits on inter-unit collaboration.

I did come away with some good ideas and a recognition of a few truths about networking and collaboration. Go to conferences and talk to people you don't know, not the other people from your institution. Look for collaborations outside of your own department within your university. I think I knew this already, but maybe I'll go ahead and do it. Look for me on the NTU website as employee of the month sometime soon.

Dunlop to Dsquared: The Return of the Wellington Boot

2009-09-15T17:24:00.005+01:00

This year has seen a conspicuous number of designers and luxury brands offering their version of the Wellington boot. Chanel (with rubber camellias attached), Gucci, Ralph Lauren, Vivienne Westwood (in iconic squiggle print), Dsquared (with built in socks), to name only a few, have all launched rubber boots, or rain boots as some prefer to call them. Even shoe designer Jimmy Choo, a name popularised by Sex and the City, has teamed up with the British brand Hunter to offer a fake crocodile print pair. What interests me here is that, as far as I am aware, this is the first time top-end designers have ventured to offer a type footwear that most would assume is antithetical to high fashion and luxury. Can Wellies actually be a fashion ‘statement’?

It is difficult for me to disassociate the Wellington boot from memories of childhood. I vividly remember that on rainy days I was always forced to wear a pair of black Dunlops to school. The rubber seemed really tough and it was necessary to keep your trousers tucked in. Annoyingly, your socks always seemed to fall down and get crumpled up making them even more uncomfortable to wear. They were rain proof but somehow Wellies always made you want to jump in puddles or anywhere water gathered, testing their effectiveness.

riginally a leather boot, the Wellington is so named after the Duke of Wellington who ordered from his shoemaker a pair of boots in the style of the German military officer’s Hesse boot – as a note they are also the basis for the cowboy boot. As a dandified figure, the aristocracy emulated Wellington’s style in the eighteenth century and they in turn popularised the style of boot that we still call the Wellington. The popularity of the boots was soon translated into a cheaper rubber form through the recent invention of vulcanisation, a process of heating natural rubber discovered by Charles Goodyear the tyre manufacturer in 1839. The rubber Wellington boot became a cheap alternative to more expensive leather footwear. The rubber boot also became an important element of military wear during the first and second world wars because of its waterproof qualities and still continues to be a staple of industry and farming. For such a ubiquitous and rather unglamorous piece of footwear why should it prove to be a popular choice for fashionistas?

I have two speculations that may account for the emergence of the designer Wellington boot. Firstly, the recession has hit the designer and luxury good sector quite hard. [1] Take the Gucci Wellington boot as an example – it retails at £175, which makes it one of the cheapest items you can purchase from Gucci except maybe a key ring. Gucci Wellies do not require the boots to be made by craftspeople in the protected Italian shoe and leather industry: a pair of leather boots from Gucci normally starts at around £550. Therefore, rubber is probably the cheapest fabric that a designer can currently offer. Having just bought a pair of Raf Simon’s neoprene high-tops, I can tell you that neoprene (usually reserved for diving suits and sports), surprisingly, is astronomically priced! The New York Times recently reported that a number designers (such as Vera Wang) are also opting for cheaper fabrics for their collections during these leaner times in order to keep costs down and customers still buying. [2] The designer Wellington offers an affordable alternative to leather boots and means one can still go Gucci at a third of the cost.

My second speculation is a bit more ropey but I do think the increase and popularity of music festivals, especially their endless airing on BBC3, makes Wellington boots the ideal choice for the fashion-sensed as they wade through muddy fields and grassy raves: the fashion blogs were full of summer festival snaps this year. The designer Wellington and fancy rain boot perhaps gestures towards the ongoing gentrification and trend-factor taking root in music festivals (with their more expensive VIP areas). As music festivals increase in number and increase in price they are attracting a new type of festival-goer who cares what they have on their feet, not to mention those who likes to flaunt the fabric bracelets given upon entry that says ‘I went to such and such a festival…’ because going to right festivals in the right fashions now seems to matter.

[1] Though not all designers and luxury brands it would seem. The past few years have actually seen the re-emergence of a number of almost dormant couturiers offering ready-to-wear collections designed by cutting edge designers. Balmain, Balenciaga, and Lanvin have all recently made a return to fashion producing some of the most creative, expensive and desirable items.

[2] Cathy Horyn (2009) 'High Fashion Faces a Redefining Moment', New York Times, September 11th.

(Photo credit: lomokev, permissions)

Gremlins....

2009-09-15T14:52:00.004+01:00

A few gremlins appear to have crept into the appearance of the blog so we're taking this as the opportunity to do a planned redesign. If things look a little odd over the next few days, normal service should hopefully return soon.
(Photo credit: Inti. Permissions)

Toys and the Commercial Battlefield in a Time of War

2009-09-10T09:30:00.002+01:00

Simon Cross explores the meaning of the new Ministry of Defence-approved Action Man.

Every former schoolboy of a certain age played with or coveted ‘action men’ figures. For the uninitiated out there, what are they? Well, basically, they are play figures based on the British armed forces and thus sanctioned for playing with by boys. I spent many a long hour throwing my action man around as I imagined single-handedly pulverising the Nazis (I was born in 1964 so World War 2 games were my thing). I haven’t thought about action men for a long time; until recently that is.

Why? Well, earlier this year, the first ever Ministry of Defence-approved toys went on sale. You guessed it: action men are back! These dolls-for-boys are an updated version of ‘action men’ figures based on the modern British armed forces. They now trade on their verisimilitude to the uniform and equipment of the real-life infantryman, commando and pilot (‘action women’ don’t get a look in here I’m afraid; presumably the makers view them as unappealing to their target audience of young and not so young boys).

Launched on VE (Victory in Europe) day (of course) the new action men are trying to capture (military metaphors could be rife here, but I’ll resist) the commercial environment left empty by the demise of the original action men figures in 2006 when the toy makers Hambro discontinued the product. Why are they being brought back now though?

I suggest that there is a new media-promoted mindfulness about ‘our brave boys’ fighting and dying in far flung places like Iraq and Afghanistan in relation to which Character Group, the makers of the new action men, want to exploit for their own commercial purposes. But why are they being licensed by the Ministry of Defence? What is in it for the MOD? How might we think about these toys more broadly?

Firstly, the MOD has clearly stated their optimism that the new toy will help promote the military (see The Guardian 7 May 2009, financial section, p. 28). I would want to add here that promoting the military is part of a wider strategy to garner public support for the role of the military in a time of war.

Secondly, the battle for Afghanistan and Iraq is a battle for the hearts and minds of the British public (we are beginning to see this more clearly now with every media image of dead repatriated soldiers) and I want to suggest that a small plastic figurine with officially licensed insignia forms part of an ideological struggle to legitimise war in the popular imagination at the same time as many people question its legal legitimacy.

Thirdly, war sells. From film to figurines, war is a good commercial opportunity and Character Group clearly see the potential for shifting hundreds of thousands of these figures on the back of heightened attempts to support the activites of the troops in the field. Later this year, the toy makers will be launching their villain against which the new action men can kill and kill again. It will be interesting to see who are what the villain looks like and of course the toy makers hope it will make them a killing. I want to suggest that in a time of global recession and banking crisis perhaps the villain can look like an international mercenary such as hedge fund managers and the like.

Promoting the military in a time of war is a tricky thing but looks to me like the new action men will be doing ‘their bit’. To view the new MOD action men follow this link.
(Photo credit: Pikaluk. Permissions)

University mission statements

2009-09-09T16:57:00.002+01:00

Universities, Marketization and Missions
Over the past two decades, universities have been encouraged to serve the needs of the economy, and also to reposition themselves as simulacra of business. Indeed, so far has the association cemented itself in the governmental mind, that universities in 2009 have become the provenance of the newly-formed Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS). Part of pretending to be a business has been the espousal of a mission statement.

The work that I have been doing with Helen Sauntson, of the University of Birmingham, aims to examine the impact of mutually reinforcing discourses of neoliberalism and marketization on universities in the UK. We take as a particular case study mission statements – what they represent and what they communicate, and we present as evidence the linguistic analysis of three electronic corpora of all of the available mission statements for UK universities in the (elite, research-focussed) Russell Group, (smaller research-intensive) 1994 Group and Million + group (comprised of ‘new’ post 1992 universities). We hope to show the extent to which mission statements represent uniqueness, or whether this claim is tempered by findings of discursive uniformity and standardization.

What is a Mission Statement?
Pearce and David (1987: 109) provide the following definition of a mission statement, “An effective mission statement defines the fundamental, unique purpose that sets a business apart from other firms of its type and identifies the scope of the business's operations in product and market terms….. It specifies the fundamental reason why an organization exists”. As we know, hardly anyone, especially not academics, pays any attention to the university’s mission statement – so why do they exist?

What are we finding?
There are apparently just 21 frequently occurring nouns (more than 10 occurrences in each corpus) from which Russell Group universities construct their mission statements. !994 Group universities make do with 22 frequent nouns, while creativity rests among the members of the Million + Group who recycle 35 frequent nouns. This evidence would lead us to agree with another commentator who describes mission statements as “promotional ‘discourse kits’ with which to construct a brand” (Atkinson, 2008). Surely such standardization must compromise universities’ claims to ‘distinctiveness’ and ‘unique selling points’ that are so fearlessly marketed to students.

There are cheeringly still a few relatively enlightened mission statements, and by that I mean that they portray values that most academics would raise a hat to. Honourable mentions, then, to Kingston University which claims to be liberal, critical leaning, radical and public; University of Birmingham which is the only Russell Group university describing its (historic) mission as radical; and Goldsmiths University which mentions intellectual, freedom.

There are also, of course, some neoliberal nightmares, so let us enjoy the embarrassment of the following anonymised universities, which can be identified by a simple Google search for these publically available documents, produced with public money. All of these belong to the Million + Group of new universities. A controversial university in London appeals to the following abstractions: benchmarked, seedcorn, sustainable, corporate, robust, stakeholders, supradepartmental. Despite Laurie Taylor’s ridicule in the Times Higher, only one university describes itself fawningly as business-facing. Another university, with campuses lining the M4 corridor, styles itself as the “foremost employer-engagement university”. But the prize goes to a Scottish institution, characterized by “Exploring and exploiting the ‘whitespace’ interfaces between disciplines so as to create and transmit new knowledge and learning in new ways”. What an aspiration!

Skills aren’t mentioned as often as we might suppose in these times when universities are administered under the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. Predictably, most mentions come from within the Million + Group, with the fewest mentions in the academically aspirational 1994 Group. The Russell group has no customers at all, but even this buzzword only occurs twice among the missions of the Million + group. However, the latter do recognise stakeholders.

An interesting adjective is sustainable and its related nominal sustainability. It appears to be trading on a kind of eco-friendly acceptability (just in case any potential students might be reading), but this is often a smokescreen for its neoliberal function, since it frequently collocates with, or refers to financial management!

We have to conclude that universities construct mission statements simply because they feel they have to. It is part of what Richard Johnson calls their ‘corporate boast’. No doubt there are committees of highly paid university managers who are almost permanently engaged in this, as it is clear that these mission statements are constantly under revision. As government behests change, universities must comply, at least discursively, even though these discourses fail to be internalized by the majority of people who work within their walls.

Julie & Julia

2009-09-04T10:01:00.010+01:00

With next week's UK release of Nora Ephron's Julie & Julia, Joanne Hollows reflects on the movie's roots and what the cookery writer and TV cook Julia Child might be able to offer feminism.

The first blog I ever read was The Julie/Julia Project. I can no longer remember how I found it – I may have read about it or I may have been idly googling Julia Child. But I spent hours messing around on a rather unforgiving website following Julie Powell’s epic quest to cook her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year. A ‘government drone by day, renegade foodie by night’ in a ‘crappy outer borough kitchen’ with a fondness for Buffy and a nice line in digs at the Bush administration, Julie may not have pleased the purists but she made me a hell of a lot more interested in Julia Child and gave me a significant number of laughs along the way. And when I read about Child’s death, Julie’s site was my first port of call where (with a developing tear in my eye) I read Julie’s response to the news and her celebration of what Julia meant to her.

'Julia was so impressive, so instructive, so exhilarating, because she was a woman, not a goddess. Julia didn’t create armies of drones, mindlessly equating her name with taste and muttering ‘It’s a Good Thing’ under their minty breath. Instead she created feisty, buttery adventurous cooks, always diving into the next possible disaster because, goddammit, if Julia did it, so could we.'

If this was my introduction to blogging, then I now find myself blogging about next week’s release in the UK of the film (Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia) of the book (Julie and Julia) of the Julie/Julia Project. Not being the kind of blogger who gets invited to movie premieres I haven’t seen it – and I fear it because its a Meryl Streep star vehicle which might threaten to be more about the actress than Julie or Julia.

My own route out of the Julie/Julia Project was rather different. I’d been thinking about why second-wave feminism had refused domesticity rather than attempting to re-think what it might mean for feminism. One of the most obvious answers (although not the only one) lay in one of the foundational texts of second-wave feminism, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), published two years after Mastering and the same year Child first appeared on TV in The French Chef. Both Friedan and Child had clear, but very different, ideas about the role of domestic consumption but were unified in their dislike of the figure of the housewife. So (in a Carrie Bradshaw-esque way) I got to thinking about whether feminism could learn something about domesticity from Julia Child (and – at the risk of product placement - a rather more extensive comparison of the two women appears here).

Although Camille Paglia has called Julia Child ‘a great feminist’, my interest in her was how she imagined a form of domestic femininity that could inhabit the kitchen without being a housewife. Child’s opening gambit in Mastering is: ‘This is a book for the servantless cook who can be unconcerned on occasion with budgets, waistlines, timetables, children’s meals, or anything else which might interfere with the enjoyment of producing something wonderful to eat.’ (Beck et al: 13) In this way, Child disidentifies with the need to care for others and maintain an appropriately feminine body that characterized the work of the housewife.

Betty Friedan attacked the trend (closely associated with Child) for ‘elaborate recipes with the puréed chestnuts, water-cress and almonds take longer than broiling lamb chops’ (p. 231), arguing that it not only sapped the housewife’s energy but also tied her more closely into what she saw as the housewife’s key role, consuming. But while Friedan saw gourmet cookery as a means of masking the drudgery of housework, Child saw it as its antidote. Rather than a form of alienated labour, Child saw cooking as a labour of love of cooking itself rather than love for other people. Whereas Friedan saw people like Child as catering to the housewife, Child strongly disidentified with the role. When asked to reflect on her early audience, Child denied that she had been addressing what she called ‘the stupid housewife’, claiming that ‘my audience is not la ménagére, but anyone interested in cooking, no matter the sex or age or profession.’ (cited in Fitch: 293). Indeed, she also claimed on another occasion that ‘our programme is for people who really like to cook… plain old housewives get plenty of encouragement and recipes from the daily newspapers.’ (cited in Drake Mcfeeley, 122).

Nonetheless, Julia Child differs from second-wave feminist constructions of domesticity. While she presents a mode of femininity based on a refusal of the housewife, she does not refuse domestic femininity. Furthermore, through her conception of culinary practice, she blurs the distinction between public and private, and between labour and consumption, divorcing domestic practice from the singular gendered identity of the housewife. Betty Friedan was clearly an important figure in shaping assumptions about domestic consumption within second-wave feminism. However, if contemporary feminism is to find a means of thinking about domestic femininity and domestic consumption without continual recourse to the figure of the housewife, then we might have something to learn from Julia Child.
(Photo credit: mamichan. Permissions)

Crafty Magician or Bad Accountant? Identity and Ideology in British Newspaper Discourse

2009-09-01T10:26:00.006+01:00

Dean Hardman offers an outline of his paper for the conference on Language in the (New) Media: Technologies and Ideologies that is about to take place at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Newspaper editorials perform a special role within the pages of the press, as they, unlike other news texts, are openly persuasive and there is usually less emphasis on objectivity (Lee and Lin, 2006). They represent the participation of the newspaper in public debate (Le, 2003) and are sites where ideological stances can often be found (Hackett and Zhao, 1994). This paper examines a selection of British newspaper editorials that focus upon British politicians and British party politics, in order to examine the relationship between the newspaper, its readers (idealised or otherwise) and the political parties and politicians represented.

The paper forms part of a wider study into how the ways in which newspapers construct identities for individual politicians can reflect political ideology, and utilises an analytical method which combines the approaches of critical discourse analysis with the concepts of performed identities and communities of practice. The study highlights how, by constructing identities for politicians, newspapers reveal their own political identities that are closely aligned to political parties, while simultaneously encouraging readers to conceptualise events in such a way that serves the ideology in question.

In this paper, editorials about financial policy from four British newspapers (The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Mail and The Daily Mirror) are examined in detail. The paper highlights both the ways in which newspapers construct identities for politicians, alongside the effects of doing so - how this serves to construct identities for the newspapers themselves and orients readers towards sharing a particular point of view.

The paper will identify the role of metaphors, modality and other linguistic markers of stance in identity construction, and will compare and contrast the ways in which broadsheets and tabloids and the left and right-wing press orientate towards politicians and encode political ideologies.

(Photo credit: floongle. Permissions.)

The Use of Online Social Networks by Mexicans in the Context of Globalization

2009-08-28T10:02:00.007+01:00

Lorena Nessi is studying for a PhD at Nottingham Trent University. Here she discusses her research into the use of online social networks.

My research engages with current Internet studies by analysing the use of online communication through online social networks (OSN) such as MySpace, Hi5 and Facebook amongst young Mexicans. It aims at gaining an in-depth understanding of the relationship between the use of these networks, the representation of personal profiles and the creation of groupings online. In doing so, its principal objectives are the following:

To analyse how young Mexicans represent their identities in their online profiles.

To analyse how OSN and online groupings joined by young Mexicans are related to social, cultural and economic capital.

To explore how young Mexicans use these spaces to negotiate identities within a local and a global context.

One of the authors who has paid great attention to the study of networks and globalisation, situating the internet as the most important of these networks, is Manuel Castells, who argues that we are actually living in a 'Network Society', a society in which the key social structures and activities are organized around electronically processed information networks (Castells, 2001). OSNs seem to play an increasingly important role in the Network Society described by this author, in which interaction, interconnectedness, communication and information technologies (ICTs) are all interrelated. However, despite the growing use of the Internet in Mexico, and the popularity of OSNs among young Mexicans (MySpace even having created a special version for Mexican users, and Facebook having recently developed a version in Spanish) the academic analysis of these networks, and indeed cultural and social analysis of the Internet in general, is still rather lacking amongst Latin American academics. Most of the research of cultural and social practices on the Internet, specifically of OSNs, has been developed in developed Western countries. In Latin American, academics are predominantly focused on more general, often cultural questions related to information and communication technologies. One of my motivations is to contribute to this field of knowledge through analysing the use of OSNs.

These spaces are web based services which provide a range of ways for users to connect to and interact with each other. They contain large amounts of first hand information, consisting of symbolic content produced directly by individuals negotiate ways of representing their identities electronically and interact using these representations. (Have cut a sentence here) In the virtual world, personal images and information about our selves can become fantasies that find an online place to be presented to others. Some core social practices and values of specific groups, in this case, Mexican OSN users could be found in this space.

These dynamics raise questions related to the possible existence of common aspirations among Mexican OSN users. Can we analyse these aspirations through studying the construction of identities online? Are the Western models of success becoming aspirations for Mexicans? Beauty, fame, sex, a perfect figure, a nice house, health, and a good job and income, are amongst the common characteristics of the Western model of personal success. Happiness, defined according to a Western perception of it, is a common goal. The cultural, social and economic capital described by Bourdieu, are some of the main resources required to reach such goals, and are produced according to cultural models which are constantly reproduced in social spaces on the Internet and in other media. My research will analyse the extent to which these online representations on OSNs are related to global and local contexts.

Bourdieu’s work is a very original attempt to break with traditional academic use of research in its combining of aesthetic and philosophic analyses, using statistics, surveys, and ethnographic research. The complexity of his analysis and research is one of many obstacles that academics have to face when using his theories as a foundation for cultural or social research. Most of Bourdieu’s books have not yet been translated into Spanish. Nevertheless, many Latin American academics are interested in Bourdieu’s legacy and have attempted to apply his suggestions in anthropology, sociology, communication and cultural studies. The role of the Internet, and specifically whether OSNs increase or decrease our social capital, has also been explored by some academics within Anglo-Saxon traditions. His is an innovative contribution to the field of Internet studies. However, until now the question of how we can progress in studying other forms of capital represented in these spaces has remained open, and I am interested in elaborating on this concern. I will explore how the social, cultural and economic forms of capital of Mexican OSN users are constructed online, and how they can be studied through analysing online profiles and groupings in these networks.

Since Internet studies is a relatively new field of research, some of the main challenges for this investigation are concerned with the methodological and ethical issues which need to be addressed. However, this also situates this work in a unique and challenging position, since such a wide variety of innovative material is available for research. In addition many different approaches exist which have attempted to explore online communications and interactions, and these must also be examined.

(Photo credit: AJC1. Permissions)

Palestine, Culture and Politics: Mahmoud Darwish

2009-08-24T08:28:00.005+01:00

Mahmoud Darwish, the great Palestinian poet (best known in parts of western academia through having been championed by his friend Edward Said) died in August 2008 writes Patrick Williams.

The University of York organised a conference in his memory earlier this year, with a keynote by Barbara Harlow from the University of Texas, (another long-time friend of Said) and contributions from academics from Palestine, Egypt and Lebanon, as well as the UK. I gave the final paper, on Darwish and ‘Late Style’, the Adorno-derived concept which Said had been thinking about in his final years and which is the subject of his posthumous book of the same name. The papers were interspersed with bi-lingual readings of Darwish’s poems by students and academics – and there was a very impressive (unscripted) performance of a long poem entirely from memory by one of the Egyptian contributors. Papers from the conference will form a special issue of the Routledge postcolonial journal Interventions.
(Photo credit: Yemisi Blake. Permissions.)

9:58 - Why Usain Bolt Matters

2009-08-20T08:25:00.001+01:00

Dean Hardman discusses what Usain Bolt's 9:58 in Berlin means for athletics.

The sport of track and field athletics has meant a lot to me for as long as I can remember. I just about recall as a four year-old running in the pre-school race at my primary school’s annual sports day – my mother tells me that I did shuttle runs in the back garden as a “warm-up” for the event – and throughout my teenage years I could be found spending evenings and weekends running around (or, more often, sitting besides) a local track. For me, it has always been the purest of sporting endeavours – people simply pitting themselves against others using nothing but their own bodies to propel themselves or simple implements faster, further or higher. It’s democratic, too. You don’t need lots of fancy equipment; you just need determination and somewhere to run, so the poorest in society can compete against the richest. It’s one of only a handful of sports where women’s events share the spotlight with the men’s and the geographical spread of participating nations means that countries as diverse as the USA and Ethiopia, Namibia and Japan have had success on the global stage in recent years. It should then, be the most popular sport in the world, after the all-conquering football.

But it isn’t. And the reason it isn’t, is because of performance enhancing drugs. Not so long ago, the television viewing figures for athletics in Britain were fantastic, as millions of people (in pre multi-channel days) tuned in to see the exploits of the likes of Seb Coe, Steve Ovett, Steve Cram, Daley Thompson, Tessa Sanderson and Linford Christe. The Seoul Olympics in 1988 were a turning point. Ben Johnson, the Canadian winner of the 100m was found to have taken anabolic steroids and over the subsequent 20 years the sport has found itself embroiled in drugs scandal after drugs scandal. Media coverage and interest ceased to focus upon performances – by the middle of this decade the back pages of newspapers barely mentioned athletics results, let alone reports of meetings – and instead devoted space to track and field only when the likes of Dwain Chambers, Marian Jones and Justin Gatlin had found themselves in disgrace. The sport, up until recently, had become the preserve of the aficionados only. Nobody else seemed interested.

That is why Usain Bolt is so important. His recent world record of 9.58s, accompanied by his Beijing Olympic records in the 100m and 200m completely obliterated Ben Johnson’s drug fuelled times of the 1980s and have made athletics front and back page news for the right reasons once again. Globally, media coverage has shifted from the ultra negative to, as Colin Jackson might say, the 'super positive'. Bolt has become the poster boy for the sport, a global icon to match and maybe even supersede the likes of Roger Federer and Tiger Woods. His exuberant behaviour and incredible athletic feats make him, and the sport, something that people want to see, and through him the sport can hopefully recover a place in the sporting public’s affections through increased positive media coverage. Most importantly, his precocious performances as a 16 year-old make his performances believable for the media and the viewing public, and that should help to restore a once great sport to what would be, in my opinion, its rightful place.
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Summer Reading: Domination and the Arts of Resistance

2009-08-14T07:57:00.000+01:00

Martin O'Shaughnessy discusses James C. Scott's Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (Yale University Press, 1990).

There are books that you feel should have made more of a stir than they did, or that maybe made a stir in another field without you noticing from the field you were in, hedges sometimes being over-high. For me, Domination and the Arts of Resistance is one of these. If power and resistance are the stock-in-trade of Cultural Studies, then this is surely a work that its practitioners should look at, not least because of its implicit or explicit disagreement with key figures like Gramsci or Bourdieu.

At the heart of Scott’s book lie the core concepts of the ‘public transcript’ and the ‘hidden transcript’. The former is constituted by those practices and discourses through which the dominant perform their powerfulness and the subordinate seem to pay homage to it. The latter consists essentially of those covert practices (poaching, pilfering, tax evasion, vandalism etc.) and discursive forms (gossip, calumny, pamphlets etc.) by which dominated groups oppose their subordination. Between the two lies a third layer consisting of coded and evasive texts or gestures (silences, ironic consent) which suggest a resistance that can rarely be openly stated. Because only the public transcript leaves hard and easily visible traces, it is often mistaken for the whole picture, producing a misleading sense of more or less willing compliance to power. But, as Scott notes, even the public transcript can be a site of negotiation and struggle, as when the subordinate try to turn power’s flattering self-image to their own advantage.

Part of the importance of Scott’s work lies in its methodological implications: the need to read between the lines of the public transcript and to find ways to access a hidden transcript that by definition resists visibility. Part of its importance is theoretical, its opposition to strong and weak versions of the dominant ideology thesis whereby the dominated are fully incorporated by the ideology of the dominant group (unable even to think resistance), resigned to their subordination (unable to conceive of an alternative order as realistic) or actively complicit with it (hard-wiring their inferiority into the practices, spaces and discourses through which they live their lives). Disagreeing with these different versions of incorporation, Scott sees the dominated as both conscious of their subordination and able to express their resistance to it by coded negotiations in the public transcript and underground opposition in the hidden one. One of the benefits of such a position, not the least, is that rather than casting himself in the superior position of the one who knows the subordinates’ true position in a way they never can, Scott takes on the more modest role of decoder of the implicit and excavator of the buried.

One of the reasons his writing appealed to me was in the way it helps us think about the relationship between periods of calm and periods of rebellion. If we only pay attention to the public transcript and take it at face value, we can never see where rebellions come from, nor how their agents can imagine a different, more just set of social arrangements. Revolt simply seems to spring from nowhere creating its own self-aware, resistant subject in the process. But if we deploy the concept of the hidden transcript and hold onto the many signs of coded or covert resistance it entails, we are much better placed to understand how, in particular circumstances, the masks and gloves may come off and apparently compliant subjects rebel. Cultural analysts are much attracted to the idea of the Carnival as a time when hierarchies are inverted, the powerful are mocked and the repressed rises to the surface. While some would define the Carnival as a safety valve, a letting off of steam, that helps preserve a social order it only seems to threaten, Scott sees it much more as an authentic expression of resistance, a kind of rehearsal for real rebellions. In the same way, he sees the pan-European tradition of ‘world-upside-down’ prints as an expression of the capacity of even those who have never known anything different to imagine an alternative social order. His work might seem unduly optimistic, finding resistance everywhere from the prison to the plantation. Yet he also recognises that resistance can only arise when there is communication and co-ordination amongst subordinate groups and when ‘sequestered’ spaces where the dominated can speak freely (the tavern, the chapel etc.) can be found and maintained.

His work seems particularly relevant to current times, in negative and positive ways. On the negative side, we might find it hard to see how practices and spaces of resistance might be built and defended in the face of social atomisation, enforced individualisation and ever more prevalent surveillance. On the more positive side, the one we might prefer to hold onto, his work might encourage us to seek out and delineate the covert and implicit practices and discourses of resistance that persist beneath the surface of apparent consensus.

Conference Round-up

2009-08-10T08:04:00.004+01:00

Many of the big cultural studies conferences have recently announced calls for papers for 2010. Here is our round-up of them.

The huge international conference Crossroads in Cultural Studies is heading to Hong Kong in July 2010. Invited speakers include Andrew Ross and Tony Bennett. The deadline for proposals is December 2009.

The next Cultural Studies Association (US) conference is in Berkeley in March 2010 with the deadline for proposals on 15 September 2009.

Also in California and (rather bizarrely) at the same time, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies 2010 conference is in Los Angeles (indeed, at the Bonaventure Hotel for that 'authentic' postmodern experience). With a conference theme of 'Celebrating 50 Years: Archiving/Screening/Mobilizing the Pasts and Futures of SCMS', the deadline for proposals is 1 September 2009.

Closer to home, the MeCCSA's 2010 conference is in London with a focus on 'Media Communication, Policy and Practice'. Among numerous invited speakers are (the seemingly much in demand) Tony Bennett, Georgina Born, Paul du Gay and Sylvia Harvey. With the conference scheduled for January 2010, the deadline for proposals is 18th September 2009.
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On the deadly beauty of Screapadal, Raasay

2009-08-05T08:51:00.002+01:00

Patrick Wright reflects on literary landscapes, exploring Sorley Maclean's 'Screapadal'.

The easiest way to reach the site of Sorley Maclean’s poem ‘Screapadal’ (1982) is to drive towards a place named Brochel, on the inner-Hebridean island of Raasay, and then walk in a southerly direction along the island’s eastern coast. After struggling through through the wreckage of a felled Forestry Commission conifer plantation, you arrive at a bright area of grassland, which comes sweeping down from a towering inland crag to the rocky shore below. Without the guidance of Maclean’s poem, you might easily mistake the ridges and grassy mounds in this entrancing wilderness for prehistoric residues. Yet the crofting settlement known as Screapadal was actually only extinguished in the 19th century, its people turfed out by a landowner named Rainy, who ‘cleared fourteen townships’on Raasay in order to make way for sheep, and who also, as Maclean writes, ‘left Screapadal beautiful’.

Maclean’s poem reserves its bardic cadences for Gaelic readers, but his English translation still thunders through this emptied scene like an earthquake: shaking up the birches and bracken; galvanising the deer, the soaring golden eagles and the quick-flowing burn. In Maclean’s poem, every element of this place mourns a Gaelic history apparently reduced to residues. Maclean was, perforce, an elegist, yet he was also a veteran of El Alamein, and by no means inclined to overlook the modern installations to be found on the rocky shore beneath Screapadal. Like many of Britain’s wilder places, the Inner Sound between Raasay and the mainland is now a military resource. The basking sharks have had to adjust to the coming of a torpedo testing range. The ancient tower of Brochel, that teetering relic of clan warfare, now looks out onto the ‘sleek black sides’ of the submarine conning tower. As for the infamous Rainy’s evictions, the Cold War turned them into an anticipation of the more devastating clearance that might come with ‘deadly rocket,/ hydrogen and neutron bomb’.

Edible Regeneration

2009-07-31T11:44:00.006+01:00

Today marks the first of what we hope will be a series of posts from a range of guest bloggers whose research we find exciting. We're delighted to welcome our first guest blog from David Bell (University of Leeds) who has written numerous books on subjects ranging from food, cultural policy and lifestyle to cybercultures, queer geographies and technology.

On Sunday July 19th this year, a reported two million people participated in The Big Lunch, a nationwide street party scheme organized by the Eden Project. You may have seen the associated Mastercard commercial – Mastercard was one of the key corporate sponsors – with its byline, 'Turning our streets into neighbourhoods'. Across the UK, it seems, the shy and isolated occupants of normally desolate streetscapes enacted a very particular form of hospitality, and reclaimed their streets as sociable spaces.

The Big Lunch belongs to a growing tradition of using cooking, eating and drinking as agents of regeneration. As the project of regeneration has become 'softer' and more concerned with people than buildings, so new tools are being co-opted by regeneration agencies. These tools aim to fix the 'problems' of communities and to encourage people to meet, mix and mend their broken social spaces and social lives.

We have already seen the many ways in which 'culture' has been used as an agent of community rebuilding; the DCMS report Culture at the Heart of Regeneration makes bold claims for art’s power to bring people together, raise self-esteem and civic pride, and address socio-economic problems. Of course, culture is also comparatively cheap (the bill for 2012 notwithstanding). Arts projects have therefore long been seen as quick and cost-effective ways to address certain 'problems'.

Now joining the arts is food and drink. I have been exploring the logic behind some of the numerous community regeneration projects that have centrally used cooking, eating and drinking together as agents of change. There have of course been some high profile campaigns, such as Jamie Oliver’s Pass It On, seen as offering the possibility of fixing 'Broken Britain', and indeed The Big Lunch. Less caught up in the media spotlight, other projects are also doing interesting things with food. Here’s just a couple of examples.

Middlesbrough’s Town Meal, for example, grew out of a scheme across the northeast which supported community projects. The Middlesbrough scheme, initiated by David Barrie, also a key broker in the Castleford regeneration project featured on Channel 4’s Kevin’s Big Town Plan, began as an urban farming initiative, encouraging various local groups to grow their own food on any patches of underused land that could be found in the town. At the end of the year, a Town Meal provided food that the urban farmers had grown, accompanied by various other projects.

In the USA, the group Spurse establishes what it calls provisional restaurants, using abandoned buildings and locally sourced (often foraged) foods to produce free meals in an 'artsy' setting. Spurse’s broader aim is to ask questions about waste and excess, and its Public Table provisional restaurants draw attention to the 'waste' that can be creatively reused – wasted buildings, wasted food, wasted skills, wasted people. Spurse is unequivocal in seeing Public Table as a public art project, cementing the food-art-regeneration equation.

Part of what interests me about this work is this food-art-regeneration equation itself; the ways in which both food and art are seen as magic solutions to seemingly intractable socio-economic problems. In a policy context, this gets boiled down to measures of 'success', benchmarks and key indicators, but no-one in that realm pays too much attention to deeper issues. Food, like art, 'works', and nothing more needs to be known. Just as swimming reduces crime, according to the DCMS, so eating together can rebuild community feeling and a sense of belonging.

But I am interested in this regenerative role of food (and art), and thinking about it through the lens of hospitality. While work on hospitality and regeneration has tended to focus on commercial hospitality (bars, restaurants, hotels), these food projects are based around a different notion of the hospitable city, as a site of generosity and reciprocity, and of the role of cooking, eating and drinking in binding people together – turning our streets into neighbourhoods. Exploring in more detail the 'social work' of hospitality gives us a new way of thinking about the uses and meanings of the seemingly mundane acts of cooking, eating, drinking and sharing.

(Photo credit: The Ginger Gourmand. Permissions)

Citizen Journalism and Child Rights in Brazil

2009-07-28T08:54:00.001+01:00

Olga Bailey discusses her recent research into these issues which has recently been published in Stuart Allan and Einar Thorsen's edited collection, Citizen Journalism: global perspectives (Peter Lang 2009).

Brazil is a country marked by social inequalities. The children of poor families are the first to suffer the consequences of economic and social disparities. Although Brazil has one of the most advanced laws designed to protect the rights of the child – the Statute on the Child and Adolescent (1990) - the current government has invested very little in a programme benefiting children. In some parts of the country, a great proportion of the child population, 62 million under the age of 18, live in conditions of poverty and their lives are marked by the lack of (among other things) a proper education, health care, and dignity; many are victims of prejudice, crime and violence.

In the last decade, this issue – child rights – has been debated in the public sphere, including the mainstream media, the government, politicians, and civil society – NGOs. In part, this public debate has produced several non-governmental initiatives that aims to guarantee that children’s rights are protected - from their basic needs, a decent life, to their rights to information, communication and participation, as citizens in the ‘making’.

My research discusses the potential of citizen-journalism in facilitating social changes in the lives of the vulnerable Brazilian children who have no knowledge of their rights, no visible possibility of inclusion in a society that has relegated them to the second-class status of ‘non-citizen’, with no perspective beyond the world of poverty.

In the framework of a child’s right to communication, children can be viewed as social actors who have a voice in interpersonal communication’ in the family, in the community, as well as in the media. From this perspective, since they have a very restricted access to the mainstream media and are often misrepresented, they can become producers of alternative media, putting across their own views on issues of relevance to their lives thus participating in democratic, pluralistic debates.
This discussion is based on an analysis of a project developed to change the lives of poor children. The project is produced by a non-governmental organization ‘communication and culture’ and funded by national and international organizations.

‘Communication and culture’ has two projects of media literacy carried out in public schools in two states of Brazil – Ceara and Pernambuco. O Clube do Jornal (The Newspaper Club) has been developed in 125 schools. The children are trained in basic journalistic skills and are responsible for producing their ‘newspaper’, which is distributed in the community. Primeira Letras (First Letter) has been developed in 809 public schools and aims to train a couple of teachers in each school to integrate the production of the children’s newspaper into the activities of the classroom. The project aims to generate political awareness towards practices of participation and citizenship and to encourage children to position themselves as social actors with power of agency to work towards individual and social transformation.

My research analyzes the role of citizen-journalism in fostering political participation in the daily lives of young, poor Brazilians in a democratic society that, to date, has not fulfilled its obligation to them. The practice of ‘citizenship’ through alternative media might improve their chances of social recognition and inclusion as citizens in the ‘making’, and in the process improve their quality of life.

The End of an Era? Graduation 2009

2009-07-23T09:11:00.004+01:00

Congratulations to the last cohort of graduates from the BA (hons) Media & Cultural Studies at Nottingham Trent University who were awarded their degrees at yesterday's graduation ceremony. Our congratulations also go to those students who received their Joint Honours degrees in Media & Cultural Studies.

This is also quite a sad day for those of us who developed and worked on the degree as it feels like the end of a particular chapter of our history. As the first course leader back in 1996, I am perhaps one of the people who feels this particularly keenly. Back then our degree marked a new stage in the development of cultural studies at NTU, taking the traditional strengths in textual analysis and combining them with a new emphasis on lived practice and everyday life. However, these interests live on in the new BA Media which started in 2007, most obviously in the pathway in Popular Culture. And, of course, cultural studies also lives on in our research which is perhaps less easily shaped by market forces. (Or maybe not? But my opinions about the media-ization of cultural studies as a field are perhaps best left for another day!)

So along with our congratulations, we wish this year's graduates the very best of luck with their future. And we'd like to take the opportunity to extend our thanks and our best wishes to those graduates throughout the degree's history.

Mediating Madness

2009-07-21T08:45:00.008+01:00

Simon Cross talks about his recent work on how madness is mediated.

Well, I may as well write my first ever blog entry about my new book, Mediating Madness: Mental Distress and Public Representation. Its almost finished – though some wit recently told me that for authors, books are never finished, just abandoned. That seems somehow appropriate not least because there is always something else that you think needs to be said. Anyway, the book is no longer my baby, it has grown and grown, and now needs to stand on its own legs, for better or worse. So, within a month I’ll be delivering the manuscript to Mediating Madness to Palgrave Macmillan. So what topics will the book cover?

The six main chapters range across: The contemporary cultural politics of madness/mental distress (including the question of why I have chosen to retain the 'non-clinical' notion of madness); Reading historical images of madness: change and continuity in the image of madness; Investigative and campaigning journalism and 'suffering images' of mad folk abandoned to their fate in the asylum; The criminally insane and tabloid tales – which includes discussion of the Yorkshire Ripper case; Visualizing madness: mental illness and public representation; and Speaking of Voices: mediating public talk about mental madness and mental distress.

The reader (perhaps you?) will undertake a journey and see how mediations of madness emerge, disappear, and interleave, only to re-emerge at unexpected moments. I’ll post another blog about the book when its about to go to print. I hope you read it. If you do, please let me know what you think!
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Summer Reading: Bad Girls Go Everywhere

2009-07-17T09:05:00.003+01:00

In the first of a new series of pieces which we've called Summer Reading (our thoughts on things we're reading during the 'vacation' which inform our teaching and research rather than tips for the beach!), Joanne Hollows discusses Jennifer Scanlon's new biography of Helen Gurley Brown.

As I try to ease myself into a new research project about second-wave feminist identities, I’ve been reading Jennifer Scanlon’s Bad Girls Go Everywhere (Oxford 2009), a biography of Helen Gurley Brown (author of Sex and the Single Girl, long-term editor of the US edition of Cosmopolitan). While the story of Brown’s life is a great read, there is also another story here about histories of feminism. Identifying herself as a feminist, Brown nonetheless has been written out of histories of second-wave feminism and Cosmo, along with Brown herself, was frequently represented as the ‘other’ of feminism during the 1960s and 1970s. The book therefore represents an important intervention in debates about feminism and/in popular culture. While many narratives of ‘popular feminism’ identify how feminism entered the mainstream from the 1980s onwards, Scanlon identifies how many of the issues associated with feminism were promoted within Cosmo in the 1960s. The kind of popular feminism developed by Brown might have been deeply problematic in the eyes of second-wave feminists but it also managed to bring feminist concerns – about the workplace, sexuality and financial independence - to a much wider audience (and this makes good reading alongside Megan Le Masurier’s recent work on the history of Cleo magazine in Australia).

Scanlon also identifies a clear relationship between the Gurley Brown brand of feminism and more recent forms of ‘girly’ feminism, identified with the ‘third-wave’ and located in what are often referred to as ‘post-feminist’ texts such as Sex and the City. From such a perspective, while Carrie and her friends might represent ‘feminism undone’ to some feminist critics, they might also represent a continuation of the earlier forms of ‘popular feminism’ that have their roots in publications such as Cosmo. While this might not meet the rigorous demands of second-wave feminism – and Scanlon clearly identifies some of the more problematic aspects of Brown’s politics – Brown had a key role to play in the mainstreaming of feminist demands for reproductive rights, equal pay, independence and the right to sexual pleasure. Furthermore, Scanlon suggests that Brown’s imagined audience of ‘Cosmo girls’ reached a wider audience – in terms of class if not perhaps ‘race’ – than more ‘official’ forms of feminism did in the period.

There is some useful stuff here too for people interested in feminist debates about sexuality, the magazine industry, fashion and beauty (and there are productive parallels between Scanlon’s position and Linda Scott’s arguments in Fresh Lipstick on the latter). I found the chapter which compared Gurley Brown’s brand of feminism with Betty Friedan particularly illuminating. A lot has been written in recent years about Friedan in feminist cultural studies but Scanlon not only made this fresh but she also made some great points about the different women’s positions in relation to both consumption and domesticity. While Friedan’s critique of consumer culture is well-known (and became something of a commonsense in second-wave feminism), Gurley Brown advocated that women should enjoy the rewards of working in their ability to spend money on themselves (although she was far more strict about how single girls approached money management!) In many ways this parallels some of the debates currently taking place within feminist media studies about consumer culture and post-feminism. Some of these pieces are currently on my ‘to read’ pile (e.g. McRobbie’s recent article, ‘Young Women and Consumer Culture’) alongside Scanlon’s reflections on Gurley Brown’s legacy in Feminist Media Studies and Women’s Studies.

But given that this is also a really readable and enjoyable biography, you could also probably take it to the seaside too!
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Of Screen, Glasgow and Gortex

2009-07-14T19:33:00.008+01:00

Martin O'Shaughnessy reports back from the (very rainy) annual Screen Conference in Glasgow.

I went up to Glasgow last week for the Screen Studies conference. which takes its name from the seminal journal Screen. Screen was at its height of fame / notoriety back in the 1970s when, drawing on a powerful, heady and often tyrannical mix of Althusserian Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis, it was right at the cutting edge of screen theorising. It is now celebrating its fiftieth anniversary and has just brought out a special number that maps out where screen theorising is today. Working in the same vein, this year’s conference sought to map where screen theorising has come from and where it needs to go. Conference plenaries delivered by conference luminaries tended to emphasise the ‘coming from’ angle and looked back to the intense, heady days of the seventies with a mixture of relief that it was over and a sense of nostalgia for its lost passion, excitement and political radicalism. Conference panels, of which there were many this year (meaning one missed much more than one heard) were more likely to look at the contemporary period. The panels helped the conference open up to screen theorising and not simply Screen Theory while taking it away from a narrowly UK-centred understanding of screen studies (I heard, for example, a very good panel on African screens).

A conference is a multi-bodied, multi-voiced beast so that what was said in it always defies easy summation. One insistent note that did emerge however was a sense that the object of screen studies had changed so profoundly over the years that we were no longer sure what we should be looking at or how. Screen had once existed in a world where cinema studies was only an emerging discipline and where television struggled to achieve recognition as a worthy object of study. Now the talk is more likely to be of the ‘death’ of cinema and the demise of television as a core national entertainment with a mass and sometimes family audience. Faced with the proliferation of screens big and small, the multiplicity of TV channels, the fragmentation of audiences, the dematerialisation of the digital image and the diversification of viewing practices, it is no longer clear what we should study or how. Can those of us who teach film and television even know any more what our students might be watching and what grounds we can meet them on? One way to respond to this frighteningly shifting terrain is clearly nostalgia: nostalgia for the old concentrated communion between film spectator and sacred cinematic texts; nostalgia for the days when the nation sat in front of Dennis Potter or Coronation Street; nostalgia for the solid materiality of the cinematic image and its indexical relationship to the real. But nostalgia doesn’t take you very far. The past is best used as a resource for comparison and critical distance rather than as a place of retreat.

Glasgow, when we arrived, was in the midst of a deluge, as the Scottish clouds perhaps shed tears for Andy Murray’s sad, semi-final defeat. It was then that my trusty blue Gortex, not as old as Screen, but more useful in a rainstorm, came to my rescue, keeping me dry from the knees up. I was nonetheless drenched from the knees down. Should I confess that my first act on arriving at the conference was to retreat to the bathroom to try to dry my trouser bottoms with the hand dryer? Thankfully no-one came in while I was doing this. Trying to explain to an eager conference goer why you are standing on one leg in the washroom is not the easiest thing to do. Explaining Screen theory, on balance, is probably easier (and much dryer).

(Photo credit: garybirnie; permissions)

Blood on the Side

2009-07-10T17:06:00.005+01:00

Viv Chadder explores what we can learn about representations of madness from Robert Rossen's film Lilith.

I am concerned here with the last film of Robert Rossen, Lilith (1964). This is an enigmatic and intriguing film with an impressive cast, that goes to the edge of defying analysis. At first glance it would appear to be a response to the anti-psychiatry movement, at least, it departs markedly from earlier films such as The Snake Pit (1948) in their clear condemnation of the brutality of the state asylum system. Gender politics appears confined to the observation that ‘insanity always appears more sinister in a woman than in a man’.

The plot appears to defy logic at times and to depend on the improbability of an unqualified and vulnerable young man (Vincent Bruce) being employed in a plush private asylum as occupational therapist. Residents appear free to come and go at will, causing some almost inexplicable change of scene, though there is some minimal rationale for an abrupt change of scene to a jousting tournament, where the by now infatuated hero gets to crown his Lady Queen of Love and beauty. Not the first daring exploit from within her thrall, Lilith clearly feeds on his obedience and willingness to interpret and fulfil her demands at whatever cost to others’ lives and his own sanity. This mythical creature is ruler of her universe peopled by gods who weep at her disobedience. Her will is to leave the mark of her desire on every living thing. Our hero seeks to protect her in her quest to fulfil this aim, whether it be another woman, small boys, a colleague. HERE Rossen clearly risks much to be true to the novelist Salamanca’s ideas (upon which the film is based). Vincent wrenches a fairy doll from its place in the collection of Lilith’s trophies. He installs it in an aquarium of fishes, submerged in a watery grave. We share in a lecture delivered by the asylum physician to an enrapt group of staff. The psychotic spins the asymmetrical fractured web of the mad spider. The sufferers experience immense catastrophe due to their superior spirits and sensibilities. All of us, he says, are involved in ‘rapture’, in its fullest meaning of course. Vincent is congratulated on his success in achieving the transference with Lilith, staff seemingly oblivious to the manifest impropriety of the relationship that entails, and in denial concerning his admission of willingness to succumb to her seduction.

Both novel and film are heavily laden with Freudian clues, but this is no oedipal space. Jung’s anima might assist us? I am tempted to follow Mladen Dolar’s suggestion that psychoanalysis enables us to identify and encircle the space where meaning collapses. Our first view of the horrors of psychosis comes in the tour of the asylum to introduce Vincent. A woman, catatonic, sits on the floor draped over her bed in a lascivious pose? Finally it is Lilith we see through the mesh-covered viewing window. A woman we have witnessed to be expressive, animated, full of joy and passion, cunning, duplicitous, mercurial (shape-shifting), carelessly demanding the servitude of her knight of Poplar Lodge, greedy for conquests and pleasure. Careless of the lives of others , vulnerable only to psychosis at the previous death of her brother from her incestuous desires. Finally we see this dangerous weaving woman once trapped in her loom by her hair, a vacant, motionless, catatonic void. Her kingdom in ruins depredated, her loom in pieces, her vitality and creativity, her duplicitous viewpoint voided, an object of the gaze, ‘her’ language annulled, a vanished woman, no longer capable of transformation, frozen and remote.

This film has little to share with the past, more with the future. To retreat to a more specific context, I discovered that the film was shot at Chestnut Lodge Maryland, where Salamanca had worked after World War 2, and which was presided over by Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. The improbable freedom of the patients, the emphasis on the transference, impose new meaning on this film with this association. So we should look to I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, rather than absorb this text in a spurious undiscoverable history.

Rossen would appear to refuse the more melodramatic representations of the mad. There is emotional but little physical violence. I do not ignore the suicide of the young man whose gift Lilith appears to refuse. He falls on his sword. The event is denied us, but its emotional power is not. We are left with the medieval trappings of Salamanca’s novel, and little hint of Macdonald’s Lilith. Her visions or her hallucinations, we do not share. Vincent orders her blood on the side with her whisky. We share just her POV through steel mesh, with a predatory hand clutching it, and look out over the splendid grounds of Poplar/Chestnut Lodge, Rockville/Stonemont, Maryland, grounds which rarely yield to the ‘threatening’, but normally remind us of the affluent, rather than the refuge of our world’s catastrophes. Touched, only on the inside with a hint of gothic shadow, as we are touched by the mark of Lilith and her rebellion against the dead hand of the joyless and undesiring. Depleted as well of the violence of Frieda Reichmann’s patients but intricate and sensitive in its depiction of the emotional dangers of the work, espousing a neo Romantic view of the work of the therapist Rossen’s film seems to be a testimony to the temptations suffered by the masochist to betray the weak to satisfy the greed of the Lady and to enjoy her favours.

Doubtless overshadowed by the publication of Joanne Greeberg’s book, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, in the same year I believe this film to be an unostentatious testimony to the work of Frieda Fromm Reichmann, without the spectacular cure, and dwelling scarcely at all on the traumatic symptoms of the patient eschewing also overt deployment of the myth of Lilith. Rossen and Salamanca (they co-scripted the film) are clearly as fascinated as Vincent Bruce by the captivating lure of the patient.

Mladen Dolar, ‘I Shall be with You on Your Wedding-Night: Lacan and the Uncanny’, October, 58 (Fall) 1991
(Photo credit: PlingPlong. Permissions.)

Re-Reading a scene from Red River

2009-07-06T17:46:00.007+01:00

Retrospectatorship after Brokeback Mountain

Patricia White in her book unInvited proposes the concept of retro-spectatorship. Retro-spectatorship is a way of negotiating the history of Hollywood through contemporary practices of spectatorship and the identities and cultural politics we now bring to our viewing of the past. Through retro-spectatorship, Brokeback Mountain solicits us to re-view the classical Hollywood western ‘that belongs to the past but is experienced in a present that affords us new ways of seeing’ (97). Therefore, as a contemporary western Brokeback Mountain’s helps us to shape a retrospective reading of older westerns, particularly those westerns such as Red River and Calamity Jane that have either struggled to disavow their homoerotic underpinnings or made obvious a range of queer possibilities. Its not that re-reading the classic western is an appropriating practice or subversive re-imagining rather, no reading of the text is the correct one its just that straightness is the default position of culture that we have all some point internalised as a practice. The point here is that Brokeback Mountain answers the call to all those elided and hinted at stories of same sex desire in the Hollywood western by retrospectively prompting a return back to films like Red River from a vaulted position of contemporary spectatorship. Brokeback Mountain engenders a privileging of being able to un-think assumptions about westerns in relation to sexuality. As Patricia White brilliantly demonstrates in her re-reading of lesbianism in classical Hollywood cinema, our spectatorial vantage point as queer subjects is steeped in knowingness about how Hollywood edited out homosexuality and cast it to the realm of the merely connotative. D. A. Miller in his analysis of Hitchcock’s Rope, suggests that the eliding of homosexuality’s denotation ‘exploits the particular aptitude of connotation for allowing homosexual meaning to be elided even as it is also being elaborated’ which, explains how homosexuality by its absence is made meaningful throughout classical Hollywood cinema.

A contemporary viewing of Red River, armed with the knowledge that one of its central stars Montgomery Clift was gay, provides the insight that retrospectatorship reveals in the films homoerotics that are barely contained in ‘the shadow kingdom of connotation’. (Miller: 125) The spectator’s first introduction to Montgomery Clift’s as the Matthew Garth character is startling in its invitation to look at his handsome boyish looks, standing aloof he seems to be gazing down towards John Wayne’s crotch while sucking on a piece of straw (shot 1).

Shot 1

The camera cuts from the medium shot to a close-up of Clift’s face as he looks towards Wayne that instantly constructs him in relation to a relay of desiring looks. In the facial close-up Clift looks on, tonguing the single piece of straw that dangles from his mouth.(Shot 2 and 3) The shot of Clift’s face seems to linger for an extra beat but it’s the minor detail in the piece of straw where a queer reading of Clift’s body and performance values such minutiae as it suddenly jumps out retrospectively as a signifier of Clift’s queerness, his character’s desire for Wayne and our desire for him. He plays with the piece of straw in a way that hints and suggests sex, an oral tease, delicately phallic but undeniable in its capacity to be read as homoerotic.

Shot 2

Shot 3

Steve Cohan also discusses Clift’s performance in Red River describing how he ‘uses physical gestures to draw attention to his presence in a shot, rubbing his face, caressing his nose, holding his chin, sitting side-saddle on his horse’ to the extent that it ‘implies Matthew’s passivity as erotic spectacle’. (216) Cohan’s reading of film emphasis ‘the trope of boyishness’ in Montgomery Clift in contradistinction to the manliness of John Wayne as the film sets out working through its opposition between the soft boy and the hard man. Clift’s softness in Red River helps to define his erotic appeal and Cohan points out that its precisely this aspect of his performance which challenges the hegemonic forms of masculinity typified in the film by John Wayne.

References
Steve Cohan (1997) Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties. New York and London: Routledge
D. A. Miller (1991) ‘Anal Rope’ in Diana Fuss (ed) Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. London and New York: Routledge.
Patricia White (1999) unInvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

(Images: screen grabs; permissions)

Palestine: Culture and Politics

2009-07-02T08:05:00.006+01:00

As the first in what is intended as as an ongoing series of events, Patrick Williams and Anna Ball are organising a one-day symposium on Culture & Politics in Palestine, to be held at NTU on October 2nd. Details of the call for papers are below:

Palestine: Culture, Conflict and Representation
An Interdisciplinary Symposium

Friday 2nd October 2009

Nottingham Trent University

Keynote address by Professor Nur Masalha, Director of the Centre for Religion, History and Holy Land Studies, St Mary’s, Surrey

As a site of complex and enduring conflict, Palestine – conceived as a cultural entity – poses many challenges to those who wish to engage in the task of its meaningful representation. Nevertheless, a desire to confront these challenges continues to flourish – among political thinkers, activists, scholars, creative practitioners, writers and critics both within and beyond the Palestinian territories.

This interdisciplinary, one-day symposium invites scholars working from a range of academic and cultural perspectives to explore the complex relationships between culture, conflict and representation in the context of Palestine, as posed to them in their own research. The symposium poses two key questions: how might the various conflicts faced by Palestinian society and culture be adequately represented? Conversely, what are the conflicts entailed in the act of representation, whether of a political, cultural, artistic or scholarly nature?

Topics might include, but are not limited to:

Conflicts relating to space, territory, nation and their representation
Questions of media representation and coverage
Conflicts of cultural identity and belonging – including statelessness, citizenship, exile and diaspora
Conflicting subject-positions of a national, ethnic, gendered, class-based or generational nature
The roles of culture and cultural initiatives within conflict: literature, film, art, media, or initiatives such as the literary festival Palfest or the women’s filmmaking NGO Shashat
The politics of culture, representation and resistance
The politics of culture, representation and conflict resolution
The politics of transnational scholarly representation
The potentials and pitfalls of (post)colonial studies or other forms of theorization as modes of representation
Said’s legacy in the representation of the Palestinian struggle
The ethics of representing conflict itself

The symposium will include a series of roundtable panels, a keynote address and film screening.

Abstracts are invited for 20-minute papers from across the disciplines. Abstracts should be no more than 500 words in length. The deadline for submission of abstracts is 7th August 2009, and should be sent to: anna.ball@ntu.ac.uk.

Those whose papers are accepted will be notified no later than 14th August.

Fair game?

2009-06-30T06:45:00.000+01:00

Dean Hardman questions the relationship between public funding for sport and the reaction in the British press to the performance of UK players at Wimbledon who have 'failed' to live up to Andy Murray.

If you witnessed much of the British media reaction to the first round of Wimbledon last week, like me, you probably weren’t too surprised at some of the comments aimed at Britain’s tennis players, as they ‘crashed out’ of the tournament. They were invariably described as a national disgrace, as pathetic and, most tellingly, as a waste of public money and funding.

Alex Bogdanovic seemed to be the most harshly criticized, described by the Mirror as ‘serial loser Alex Bogdanovic’, with the opening to its news report of the first round pretty much summing up its stance, and that of the media as a whole:

‘King of the bottlers Alex Bogdanovic became Wimbledon's biggest all-time loser as the Brits equaled their worst wipe-out in history.
On a day of crying shame which left the Union Jack at half-mast, Anne Keothavong broke down in tears after her shock defeat by Patricia Mayr as the strawberry fields of SW19 became a showcase for Britain's Rot Talent.’ (Mirror)

I think that it’s pretty safe to assume that the British media, especially the tabloid press, have always been committed to a nationalist ideology, and that the fortunes of British players have always been a subject of fierce debate. However, I wonder whether the collective sense of shame that we are encouraged to feel, and the sense of outrage that is palpable, is partly to do with the level of public funding that tennis (and most other sports) receives.

There seems to be a growing sense that sportsmen and women should be accountable to the public and, when they fail to live up to the expectations that are partly created by an increase in funding, they should expect similar treatment to MPs who have built duck ponds and had moats cleaned – strong criticism for having wasted ‘our’ money.

Sports like tennis and athletics used to be individual endeavors in which athletes competed primarily for themselves. If ‘we’, as the media and public, wanted to share in any success or commiserate in failure, then great, but I don’t feel that there was the same sense of outright hostility towards athletes who performed to below expectations. The questions are whether this hostility and level accountability is fair and whether it is indeed related to the level of public funding directed towards sport.
(Photo credit: E01. Permissions.)

Gastronomy, TV and 'Culinary Texts of Indirection' II

2009-06-25T08:10:00.003+01:00

The second part of a discussion by Joanne Hollows and Steve Jones which thinks about Heston's Feasts as a televisual form of the 'culinary text of indirection'.

In her work on the establishment of the culinary field in France following the 1789 Revolution, Parkhust Ferguson argues that in order to redefine the prosaic activity of dining out as a phenomenon of a higher moral and intellectual order it was essential for gastronomic writers to produce ‘culinary texts of indirection’ which aestheticized the dining experience by transforming food into literature. Therefore, at this stage, gastronomy emerged as part of the literary field.

We have been thinking about how Heston’s Feasts might operate as a televisual form of the ‘culinary text of indirection’ which enables Blumenthal to aestheticize his own work. In this way we can think of Heston’s Feasts as enabling the chef to engage in the practice of ‘self-theorization’ that Svejenova et al associate with his contemporary Ferran Adria. In this process, the chef theorizes their own culinary practice as an aesthetic practice rather than simply being dependent on food critics for recognition. As Bourdieu notes in his discussion of the creative ‘break’ established by Modern Art, the conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp altered the rules of the game: while previous artists had to be ‘made by the field’, the modern artist is self-creating and self-theorising, ‘producing art objects in which the production of the producer as artist is the precondition for the production of these objects as works of art’ (1993: 61). While the celebrity diners in Heston’s Feasts act as a chorus who affirm Heston’s achievement, it is his own commentary that legitimates his practice as art.

For Mennell (1996: 266), in origin both the writers and readers of gastronomic literature were members of an elite. This literature laid ‘down canons of “correct” taste for those who were wealthy enough to meet them’. However, over time ‘whether they intended to or not’, these texts ‘also performed a democratizing function’ by disseminating knowledge ‘of elite standards beyond the elite’. To an extent, this judgment would hold true for Heston’s Feasts. The cuisine on offer unashamedly draws on aristocratic traditions in its conception, ingredients and its service. At the same time, it performs some kind of democratizing function by disseminating knowledge of the practices and techniques of high-end cuisine to a wider audience, using some of the conventions of both popular history and arts programming. This is anticipated in the programme through the choice of celebrities, some of whom are drawn from popular entertainment. Indeed, the very appearance of such a show on a popular medium such as television could be read as essentially democratic (and evidence of Blumenthal’s ability to transgress boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural forms).

However, as David Bell argues, television chefs – like gourmands in general – inhabit the paradoxical position of ‘marking distinction while democratizing tastes’ (Bell 2002). Indeed, we would suggest that HF – in which the audience is witness to a one-off spectacular event rather than encouraged to ‘try this at home’ – makes very little attempt to democratize anything but Heston’s brand image. So while much tv cookery might seen as both a televisual equivalent of the cookery book and also an extended advert for the book of the series, HF transforms the relationship between television and written texts. Indeed, with no book of the series to date, the show can be seen to perform two functions. First, the only product being publicized is Heston and the experience offered at his restaurant, The Fat Duck. Second, by breaking the relationship between the tv cookery programme and the written recipe book, the series gestures towards television as a proper medium for producing ‘culinary texts of indirection’.
(Photo credit: robertpaulyoung. Permissions.)

Gastronomy, TV and 'Culinary Texts of Indirection' I

2009-06-23T09:00:00.000+01:00

Since writing a quick response to the Channel 4 cookery show Heston’s Feasts in an earlier blog entry, Joanne Hollows and Steve Jones have been thinking in more depth about the show. In the first of two entries, they explore the idea that the show drew on some of the conventions of gastronomic writing to produce a televisual form of the ‘culinary text of indirection’.

Each episode of Heston’s Feasts saw Heston Blumenthal creating a memorable meal for celebrity diners which evoked a particular historical period: the Victorians, the Middle Ages, the Tudors and the Romans. At the outset of each episode, he says that ‘the future of cooking lies in the secrets of the past. I’m on a mission to use myth, science and history to create the greatest feasts ever seen’. These features give the programmes a scholarly feel that is accentuated by his use of the literary: for example the first episode on The Victorians is inspired by the spirit of the age but mediated through Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. In this indebtedness to literature, Blumenthal plays with the connections between the gastronomic and literary fields identified by Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson and Stephen Mennell.

Of Mennell’s four characteristics of gastronomic writing, two concern us here: first, gastronomic literature aims to provide ‘a brew of history, myth and history serving of myth’ and second, it is a nostalgic ‘evocation of memorable meals’ (1996: 271). Blumenthal’s characterization of his own practice as using ‘myth, science and history’ corresponds with Mennell’s first definition while his continual emphasis on the meal as the source of memory corresponds with the second. In this way, HF draws on the conventions of gastronomic literature to reconceptualize cookery TV. Like Mennell’s gastronomes, Heston’s role is to transform the creation of food into an activity of a higher order. For example, he experiments with a Victorian recipe for Mock Turtle soup. While the result is enjoyed volunteers on the street, Heston concludes that this incarnation of the soup lacks the element of the sublime he demands from his creations. In order to perfect his take on Mock Turtle Soup, Blumethal subjects it to further processes of refinement:

All I’ve done is made consommé, froze it, ice-filtered it over night… then I just froze it again, put it in a centrifuge… spun all of the clear broth from the ice, and then I froze it again in a minus 80 freezer and all I needed to do after that was pop it in the freeze-dryer and then simply add gelatine and Madeira.

However, even this does not exhaust the process: Heston makes a soup cube from this using a ‘Mad Hatter’ fob-watch shaped silicone mould before wrapping it in gold-leaf to form the basis of his Mock Turtle Soup. The ingot is places like a tea-bag in a tea-pot where the resultant brew is then poured over a turnip and swede gel ‘Mock Turtle egg’ adorned with minute enoki mushrooms, a terrine of cured pork fat and braised ox tongue served with ‘lightly-pickled’ turnip, cubes of black truffle gel, a scattering of mustard seeds and a few micro-leaves.

The original recipe for mock turtle soup that Blumenthal located in an old cookbook is merely an inspiration for the chef-artist’s creativity. Furthermore, it is not the sole inspiration as his culinary process is also infused with literary sources, scientific experimentation and historical research. Across the series, historical recipes serve as an inspiration in terms of what they signify (theatre, fun, experimentation, naughtiness) as much as their actual ingredient and techniques. Indeed, the recipes usually go through a series of versions and refinements as Blumenthal and various guinea pigs reject the ‘authentic’ recipe in favour of a series of improvements. While Heston’s Feasts seems to be an exercise in grounding his practice in tradition, the series is a demonstration of the ways in which tradition can be ‘invented’. Just as Duchamp’s intervention was necessary to create the modern artwork from found objects, so the series demonstrates how it is the production of the chef as artist and theoretician that is ‘the precondition for the production of these object [meals] as works of art’ (Bourdieu 1993: 61).

Actor Network Theory and Journalism Studies: 'clearly' incompatible???

2009-06-18T19:04:00.002+01:00

Can Actor Network Theory have anything to say about journalism? Joost van Loon wants to open up a discussion about the place of ANT in media, communication and cultural studies.

‘Actor Network Theory is clearly unsuited to the field of journalism studies; in fact, journalists themselves will find it strange… This theory is clearly out of place in trying to explain and explore the cut and thrust of newsroom dynamics’ (anon).

The downside of anonymous reviewing of proposals for research funding is that reviewers can exercise judgment without being held accountable. This statement, taken from a review of a research proposal of a friend of mine, is able to invoke the adjective ‘clearly’ twice without having to reveal from what light this clearness comes. In addition, the knee-jerk reaction that ‘journalists will find it strange’ was very revealing. Having spent about 7 years around practicing journalists I can safely state that many journalists find most things that academics write at best ‘strange’, but more often pedantic, pointless and irrelevant waffle. On that count, perhaps being found merely strange is a huge compliment!

But on the bright side, we have blogs now and the gauntlet has been laid down. Journalism studies, claiming to be a ‘field’, has nothing to learn from actor network theory. Why would this be the case? What is so special about journalism studies? What is so unique about ‘news room dynamics’ that these can be granted a priori immunity (because this was only a research proposal) against empirical philosophy? Where are the empirical studies that tell us that ANT has nothing interesting to say about journalism? In what court have the advocates of immunity made the conclusive case for their special status?

I have been making some preliminary enquiries amongst those closer to cultural studies and they stated that whereas there was perhaps not much interest in ANT (outside a few places in the UK), there were some areas where closer contact is easier to facilitate, for example in the area of material culture. There seems to be less of a sense that ANT is ‘clearly’ unsuitable.

I, for one, would welcome an opportunity for an open, rather than semi-anonymous, debate about this. Perhaps a blog such as this one can kick something off; as I suspect that the irritations invoked by ANT have not only ruffled the feathers of those colonizing a field with the name journalism studies, but probably also dwellers of the wider constituencies of communication studies, cultural studies and media studies. We would like to hear from you.

"Macho Types Wanted: Must Dance And Have A Moustache"

2009-06-16T11:47:00.011+01:00

While researching my book on Brokeback Mountain I am also exploring the multiple connections between the western (as a genre) and the West (as a mythic concept) in relation to gay culture. The concept of the West as a space of homosocial freedom and the fantasy of the cowboy are ongoing fascinations and it’s interesting how they are transformed and made meaningful in relation cultural identity. ‘The West’ in US gay culture is also a reference to the movement Westward to California in the 1970s, San Francisco in particular, and is a migratory moment resonant in the history of American post-Stonewall gay male identity; it’s the implicit subject of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City series and the recent film Milk. This idea also finds its widespread expression in the Village People’s over-exposed disco anthem Go West (1979) that explicitly connects discourses of liberation and self-discovery with the movement Westward, in fact, their very first release was titled San Francisco (You got Me). Go West reworks the nineteenth century expression ‘go west young man’ coined by US politician and newspaper editor Horace Greeley. While the sentiment of Greeley’s phrase is rooted in colonial conquest and expansion in the move Westward along the Mississippi River, the Village People’s lyrics instead signify that other movement of men West, the so-called 1970s ‘gay flight’. However, the Village people are a rather problematic group when it comes to sexual politics and it’s a misnomer to think of them as in any way ‘a gay band’ or even properly representative of disco despite their self-conscious fashioning through the iconography of gay machismo and the four-to-the-floor beat. The genesis of the band was a response to an advert in a music paper that read "Macho Types Wanted: Must Dance And Have A Moustache". As an eventual pop realisation of disco the Village People were eschewed by gay culture proper and would rarely if ever be heard in the legendary discos because the Village People was actually a bit naff and rather embarrassing. More importantly, the Village People were often tight lipped on homosexuality in interviews (most of them it turns out were straight) despite being sold as an idolatory vision of popular gay macho stereotypes. Thus, despite being explicitly if parodisitic in their visual presentation of gayness and macho vocal posturing, a band name that alludes to New York’s Greenwich Village, and suggestive lyrics focusing on gay culture (Cruisin') and gay positive expressions (I am what I am), the Village People’s apparent homosexuality (which I imagine is axiomatic of how most people interpret the act) was nothing more than smoke and mirrors with good musical production.

The meaning of the Village People’s later songs were expressed in a double-voiced strategy (lyrics mean different things to different people) but the group were certainly anchored through the stereotypical way in which different iconic forms of American masculinity such as the cowboy become a fancy dress version of gay erotica in popular culture writ large. However, when images of cloned up cowboys are couched in lyrics that celebrate the West as a gay utopia it continues to foment the West and the cowboy through liberation and freedom. California was the new frontier for gay America and it just so happens that some of those men were free to dress in ways that channel the apparent freedom the cowboy represents recasting the horizon as a sexual frontier. What is important here is that the Village People’s song that suggests going West ‘where the air is free, we'll be what we want to be’ is grounded in discourses of the West and the cowboy thus bringing together a historical moment in American post-stonewall gay identity, the continuing movement of men westward, and an ongoing tradition of a male-male relations in Western lore. Furthermore, this western dance music fantasy continues well after disco to include Divine’s Walk Like A Man (1984) Erasure’s Who Needs Love Like That (1985), and more recently the knowingly homoerotic rodeo styling (clothes by Dsquared - S/S 2006 picture below) of Madonna’s Don’t Tell Me (2000).

(Image Credits - Casablanca Records; Dsquared; Permissions)

ICAn Work In Progress Seminar: Viv Chadder

2009-06-12T08:20:00.003+01:00

After an ill-timed fire alarm disrupted this session earlier in the term, Viv Chadder's paper 'On Irma's Recalcitrance or "The Lure of Lilith" by Rossen and Salamanca' has been rescheduled. The ICAn Work in Progress seminar series offers an opportunity for members of the Communication, Culture and Media team at NTU to discuss their current research.

This event will be held on Wednesday 24 June from 12.00-1.00 in GEE215, Clifton Campus of NTU.
(Photo credit: PlingPlong. Permissions)

Could Sociology Have a Future?

2009-06-10T08:57:00.000+01:00

Joost van Loon explores how we might conceptualize 'the social' today.

One cannot do ‘sociological theory’ without paying attention to forces that bring into being what we commonly think of as ‘the social’. A sociological theory that does not take into account the fundamentally historical nature of ‘the social’ is doomed to fail in explaining how the world we live in today is ordered and organized. More specifically, I want to claim that practices of social ordering today have been fundamentally re-arranged due to the arrival of digital technology. This is not in itself very spectacular, however, I want to add that in this ‘digital age’ something peculiar is taking shape: namely an empirical falsification of two major pillars of modernist thought: (1) the Cartesian separation of res cogitans and res extensa (with the first being primordial) and (2) the Kantian doctrine of the radical unintelligibility of Dingen an sich. The first is easily recognizable in the massive expansion of ‘the virtual’; the second is clearly manifested in the undeniable performative capacity of technology.

As the discipline of sociology is in essence a modernist project, the crumbling of its foundations will therefore also necessarily put into question what sociology is. Whereas until recently, it could be defended that sociology should exclusively concern itself with human behaviour and with the social structures that both emerge out of patterns of that behaviour but in turn also condition these patterns, there are now substantial challenges to these anthropocentric axioms. That is not to say that sociology is not about humans, but merely to indicate that it now has to justify itself if it wants to exclusively be that.

The key question for socio-logy remains the same as it always was, however. It still needs to be concerned with ‘the social’. Obviously, the question of what is the social is a defining one for contemporary sociology. It is that which has pre-occupied the works of, for example, Luhmann (e.g. the impossibility of communication), Bourdieu (the logic of practice) and Latour (actor networks). It has also resurfaced in, for example, the work of Beck on risk and individualization and Habermas’ theory of communicative action as a response to his earlier work on transformations of the public sphere.

Luhmann provided a useful intervention in the prevailing Durkheimian dogma of the seemingly self-evident existence of ‘society’. Although this intervention has been wrongly dismissed as a-political or even reactionary, it has made a huge impact on social theory over the last three decades, especially in German speaking countries. I believe that this was because it did something that is logical and common sensical: If we want to explain what society is, we cannot rely on the assumption that society already exists. Instead we have to ask: what is that makes it possible for us to speak of ‘society?’. Luhmann’s answer is well known: it is communication.

The University of Utopia: Radicalising Higher Education

2009-06-08T22:38:00.001+01:00

Thursday 4th June 2009, University of Lincoln

This conference echoed Thomas More’s (1516) call for universal civic education, where the highest pleasures are those of the mind. The conference asked whether there are alternatives to the current culture of vocationalism and academic capitalism in universities, and the questions of whether universities should serve the needs of the economy, or whether they should produce responsible, critical citizens.

The conference was organised by Prof. Michael Neary, Dean of Teaching and Learning at the University of Lincoln. This institution, he claims, has committed itself to a Humboldtian concept of a university where social considerations shape the university and the individual commits themselves to shaping the world around them as a result of their education.

Keynote speakers at the day conference were:
Ron Barnett, Institute of Education - who offered optimism based on the fact that universities have been around for centuries, and they are survivors. He argued for feasible utopias and the institution of four critical concepts which can take us into these utopian spaces: the therapeutic university (it should provide students with succour); the liquid university (it should enable us to deal with fluidity and change); the authentic university (as society encourages the inauthentic, the university should encourage authenticity); the university as an ethical space.

Antonia Darder, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana: “Breaking the Silence: A study into the pervasiveness of oppression”. This was a moving talk on a theme familiar to students and faculty from the cultural margins of the academy in the United States. Universities very often pay lip service to the notions of equal opportunity and diversity. Meanwhile the student body, faculty and administrations of those universities remain predominantly white in demographic and in ethos. The kind of radical scholarship which might transform them is often the object of suspicion, and its practitioners deemed irrational. Power structures in the university are not dislodged by their policies of diversity, rather the university itself is a vehicle of containment of oppositional voices. Just as long as marginal subjects conceal their social, historical and spatial origins, and alternative ways of being and thinking, then they are acceptable. If they challenge the prevailing structures, then they are viewed as renegades. Furthermore, within the curriculum or university structures, if there are attempts to acknowledge difference, these will be seen as indoctrination – so called ‘political correctness’. Professor Darder showed a movie, made by UIU-C students and faculty that captures some of the constraints and instances of resistance on that campus.

A Conference Report on American Independent Cinema

2009-06-05T20:54:00.012+01:00

At the beginning of May (8 -10th) an international conference on American Independent Cinema organised by Yannis Tzioumakis (University of Liverpool) and Claire Molloy (Liverpool John Moores) took place at the Liverpool Screen School. American Independent Cinema was the first conference of its kind devoted to the subject and not surprisingly it turned out to be a highly focused, intellectually stimulating and hotly contested topic that provided many friendly disagreements on what might constitute the independence of the title. If anything the debate over definitions and discourses proves what a vibrant subject area this is and no doubt will be for years to come. The conference also served to house the launch of the book series American Indies that I co-edit with conference organiser Yannis Tzioumakis.

The conference was spread over three days with parallel panels punctuated by keynotes from a roster of scholars on American cinema including Janet Staiger (University of Texas – Austin), Peter Kramer (University of East Anglia), Warren Buckland (Oxford Brookes), and Geoff King (Brunel). Conference paper topics and keynotes were diverse in their topics and methodologies from poverty row Tarzans to mumblecore, archival research, data mining, and good old-fashioned textual analysis. Most participants topics gestured towards a number of tensions and topoi upon which the future study of American Independent Cinema might find direction. The major, yet overlapping, division was between on the one hand, a perspective that sees American independent cinema in terms of art and authorship, and the other hand, one that sees American Independent Cinema as inseparable from industrial and institutional machinations. Of course both positions have their own merit and synthesize quite well although the latter was where the mature scholarship was mostly demonstrated. What did surprise me most was the waning of identity politics since the cultural and ideological framing that once defined independent luminaries like John Sayles and Todd Haynes (neither it turns out were mentioned) seemed no longer on the agenda therefore, nothing on New Queer Cinema, only two papers on race, a few on women and feminism; but maybe that’s because the identity issue is fairly exhausted in relation to this topic. What the conference did suggest is that there are so many different accounts of what independence means, that its not just industrial, political, and aesthetic but also epistemological since the meaning of American Independent Cinema and what constitutes knowledge about it is always shifting. In many ways the conference also proves that the concept of American Independent Cinema is a bit like the way we think of genre – a triangulated field of meaning between text, audience and industry that (depending on your position) either aligns awkwardly or monolithically.

Two lakes, a rock, some gravestones and many ghosts …

2009-06-02T09:57:00.003+01:00

Martin O'Shaughnessy reports back from a colloquium on film at Dartmouth College.

I was recently lucky enough to attend a colloquium on the topic of committed (French) film, hosted by Dartmouth College and held in Dartmouth's lake house on Squam lake, famous, among other things for having been the location of On Golden Pond, a film that brought together Henry and Jane Fonda and Katharine Hepburn. It was to be Henry Fonda's last big-screen appearance. Although the schedule of the colloquium was demanding (if highly stimulating and enjoyable), time was found for a boat trip during which our guide showed us locations associated with the film. We learned that shooting was moved from the original 'Golden Pond' to Squam lake because the former was too inaccessible. We saw the famous wooden house at the centre of the action: an extra floor had to be added to it for the shooting and was retained by the owner as a free and attractive extension, Hollywood thus accidentally initiating the make-over culture. We also saw the little wooden dressing room built for Hepburn so that the aged star would not have to muck in with the rest of the cast. The owner has also kept this, perhaps to commune with the ghost of the Diva, perhaps to store his gardening tools. We saw too the rock that Jane Fonda back-flipped off and discovered that a pool had had to be dug behind it so that the actress would not crack her head on the bottom. Since the film, the rock has had to be moved into the shore! The pool has been filled in by the movement of the water and people seeking to imitate Fonda's dive risked breaking their neck, it always being dangerous to imitate Hollywood stunts. We found out that the sequence when the boat ran aground on a rock had to be filmed several times because the bottom of the over-sturdy boat had refused to split: eventually a charge had to be used. This was blown a fraction early so that a hole appears in the boat’s bottom just before it hits the rock. Not perceptible in the film when it was released, this premature detonation may be visible on the DVD. You can’t always believe what you see and hear.

Time was also found in the packed schedule to meet committed film-maker John Gianvito who showed us his lovely film Profit motive and the whispering wind, a tribute to Howard Zinn's celebrated People's History of the United States, a legendary oppositional text. The film provides a series of shots of graves of union organisers, native Americans, civil rights activists and so on which together constitute a low key but very moving counter history of the United States. Many of the figures remembered were, of course, murdered. An eclectic document, Gianvito's film also uses inscriptions on head-stones, monuments and signs, alongside some animation and a song (‘The ballad of Joe Hill’), to narrate its counter history. Interspersed with shots of trees and landscapes through which the wind is blowing, the film is deliberately slow-paced. Its fixed shots of monuments and graveyards invite a contemplative engagement with past struggles while the wind embodies the spirit of resistance and opposition that still haunts America. But the film is not simply peopled by ghosts. Refusing to consign opposition to the past, it ends with a montage of contemporary mobilisations that suggests a people still able to arouse themselves, not necessarily the America that we see from this side of the ‘pond’.

Gianvito also showed us another work, An Injury to One by Travis Wilkerson, a powerful film-essay centred on the story of Frank Little, an inspirational organiser for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), also known as the ‘Wobblies’. Having come to the mining town of Butte, Montana to help lead striking miners, Little was dragged from his lodging by masked men, beaten and lynched. Many other activists were rounded up and arrested as a prelude to a nationwide assault on the Wobblies designed to arrest their attempt at mass unionisation. Wishing like Gianvito to restore a hidden and violent history to visibility, Wilkerson asks us to read between the lines of official accounts of Little’s murder. His film includes shots of Butte today and shows images of ‘Lake’ Berkeley, the massive man-made hole left by the mining that has filled with polluted water to create the largest body of toxic water in the United States today. Wilkerson tells us how a flock of geese that landed on the water were all found dead day a day or two later, the town still producing corpses even after the mining company has moved on. Hollywood’s ‘Golden Pond’ and ‘Lake’ Berkeley are both haunted, but by very different ghosts. Another illustrious phantom, the great ‘noir’ novelist Dashiell Hammett also traverses Wilkerson’s film. He had apparently told Lillian Hellman that, while working for the Pinkerton detective agency at the time of the Great War, he had been offered money to kill Little, something that had helped him see how corrupt his country was and which had in turn fed into his writing. His novel Red Harvest is set in ‘Poisonville’, a fictional version of Butte.

The question that structured our colloquium was ‘what can cinema do?’ My own provisional response to this question is inspired by the writings of French political philosopher, Jacques Rancière. Rancière argues that cinema and politics are fundamentally different activities that nonetheless overlap in that both struggle over the ‘sensorium’, over what is visible and audible in the world and the place and meaning we give to bodies and things. Not a substitute for, or an equivalent of, political action (if we ask cinema to ‘do’ politics directly, we’ll always be disappointed), film is nonetheless political insofar as it changes what and how we see and hear. Trying to make us see and hear American history and landscape very differently, Gianvito and Wilkerson make their own kind of political intervention in the ‘sensorium.’
(Photo credit: MertzFerdler: Permissions)

Goldilocks (aka Amanda Holden) and the Three Bears.

2009-05-30T11:29:00.010+01:00

Last night (Friday 29th) I was privy with millions of other television viewer’s to a camp spectacle on ITV’s Britain’s Got Talent. This spectacle was called The Dreambears. Three twenty-something chubby gay men camping about on stage doing all manner of pirouettes, arrières, and changement de pieds; all this is choreographed to the Weather Girls Its Raining Men. Why is it worth blogging about? My answer is not The Dreambears attempt at ballet (or burlesque or Bob Fosse) which of course is fine rather, I’m bothered by the way in which prime-time television negotiates and mutes the subcultural aspects of their bear-ness in order to make gayness hyper-legible to the audiences through terms they are more familiar with. The Dreambears are not off the hook either since they are in part complicit in their own camp debasement as the first prime-time bears. This legibility in their performance is achieved through the erasure of the bear’s subcultural aspects that then work to contain the potential of bear masculinity to be viewed as completely ordinary, unfussy, and ultimately boring for TV. The way Britain’s Got Talent erases the bear, except in name, was manifold in three strategies that disrupt the bears’ literal masculine definition of themselves as the man’s man version of gayness. Here are a few observations.

Strategy 1. Make them look as camp as possible. Dress all the bears up as Daffyd from Little Britain in ultra tight PVC shorts and sparkly union jack vests. The Dreambears mention the costume department’s role in bringing us this tired vision. As an extra note one should observe that known gay presenters on television (the BBC holy trinity of Graham Norton, Dale Winton and John Barrowman) are compelled to wear sparkly, glittery, reflective, and garishly patterned suits as a semiotic articulation of their prime-time gayness which otherwise remains unspeakable.

Strategy 2. Deal with their fatness. Since the bear’s chubbiness is considered to be erotically appealing within the subculture it’s important to disavow this central aspect of bear identity by making them look silly as fat bodies out of place. Put them in camp outfits five sizes too small and make them do ballet that ought to do the trick. Did I mention that the connection to the Weather Girls It’s Raining Men is not just about music also but also corpulent excess?

Strategy 3. It’s really got nothing to do with sex. Bear subculture is also predicated on a sexual hierarchy based on age, size and ways of communicating within those hierarchized relations through terms such as ‘daddy’ and verbs like ‘to paw’ and ‘to maul’. In the first instance, The Dreambears look like cubs to me and have not yet graduated to being fully-fledged big daddy bears. If you didn’t know already bears tend to be stout gay men, preferable hirsute but not essential, accommodating of a wide but hierarchical age range (which is then divided into cubs, otters, wolves, polar bears etc). An oversimplification of their self-promotion would suggest that bears often shun the apparent narcissistic, sissified, slender, fashionable, and consumption-led gays that have often come to represent the stereotypical gay as if bears themselves were not just as regulated as the next queer.

What ITV’s strategies do here (but not forgetting the complicity of The Dreambears) is to work against the potential for these prime-time bears to destabilize normative assumptions between certain alignments of homosexuality and masculinity. In turn, Britain’s Got Talent confirms what people already think they know about homosexuality on television, light entertainment in particular, that is, its only meaningful and acceptable as risible de-sexed camp spectacle (with soaps being the alternative). Something Richard Dyer once wrote is applicable here – “In taking the signs of masculinity and eroticizing them in a blatantly homosexual context, much mischief is done to the security with which ‘men’ are defined in society, and by which their power is secured” (167). It’s precisely this potential for mischief that Britain’s Got Talent attempts to contain in its camping up and desexualisation of a modern gay subculture.

Though Amanda Holden does make a good Goldilocks!

Reference: Richard Dyer (1992) ‘Getting over the rainbow’ in Only Entertainment. London: Routledge.

(Photo credits: frame grab; pinups mag; permissions)

Irigaray and Sexual Morality II

2009-05-28T09:06:00.001+01:00

The second and final part of Joost van Loon's discussion of Irigaray and sexual morality in which he thinks more about the implications of her work for conceptualizing virginity.

For Irigaray, virginity is not merely an tool of paternalism, but also a ‘potentiality’, or promise of (female) autonomy. There are two forces at work here: objectification, in which virginity becomes commodified in terms of exchange value, and (inter-) subjectification, in which virginity becomes an assertion of being-in-the-world that is articulated as ‘existent’, i.e. ‘there’ (Dasein), which is always a being-with the Other (hence the inter-). The potentiality of virginity is of course not restricted to women only, but because in patriarchal systems, the integrity of women’s bodies is always denied (one could say this more positively: female subjectivity is superior in terms of its capacity to develop relational identities), it becomes a more acute political and moral issue. In this sense, a purely objectified virginity does not affirm the potentiality of integrity, but instead of its exchange value. An inter-subjectified virginity, however, affirms something quite different: a notion of ‘integrity’ that corresponds with what Heidegger referred to as ‘authentic being’, one that acknowledges its full dependence on an openness to ‘otherness’ (for Heidegger, this otherness was Being itself; for Levinas, it is God). In her essay, Irigaray (1999: 108-110) does not go that far; she merely equates this notion of virginity as authentic being with ‘autonomy’ in relation to the Other (which is neither being, nor God, but a (human?) person). However, when reading this in terms the broader framework of her philosophy it becomes obvious that her sense of autonomy, or self-determination, of women is not an advocacy of the liberal concept of the unified Subject, but a mode of being that always-already acknowledges that it is not One (in-dividual).

The inscription of the rights of the couple in civil law would have the effect of converting individual morality into a collective ethic, of transforming relations between genres within the family, or its substitute, into rights and duties concerning culture in general. Religion could then recover its meaning as a relationship with the divine for both genres (Irigaray, 1991: 202).

Irigaray’s project, an advocacy of an ethic of ‘being two’ (e.g. Irigaray, 2000), could be seen as one of the most sustained attempts to relocate a feminist politics within an ethical domain of intersubjectivity, or between-ness. ‘Sex’ for Irigaray, is the most universal and pervasive difference, that transcends the either or of biological essentialism and social constructionism. Her ethic focuses on responsiveness: listening, silence, touch, communication-between. This also entails a negative dialectic, rather than moving towards full assimilation into a discourse of totality, she suggests that ethical being entails an entering into a relationship between two in which the two remain two, that is, to some degree incomprehensible to each other, i.e. ‘we must renounce to be (as) the other’. This communicative action based on non-appropriation is thus not Habermas’ ‘reasoned’ deliberation, but an intimacy that enables both me and you to return to ourselves.

Irigaray’s ethic is thus radically concerned with ‘openness’ in terms of relational being. It is remarkable, however that whereas she understands this openness in terms of relational identity, she does not want to accept that relational identities thus also imply a dependence. Instead, her insistence on autonomy points towards a ‘singularity’ that never fully accomplishes its relationality. Perhaps it is a latent individualism in her philosophy that prevents her from this final radical move – to declare an ethic of intersubjectivity which involves a virginity of both dependence and openness, rather than either/or. Only when I realize that I need you, can I begin to see that you need me; that, surely, must be the inaugural moment of between-ness, of a movement-towards. However, her thinking does enable us to resist the temptation of equating intersubjective between-ness with an Oedipal desire for becoming-One; intersubjectivity based on both dependence on and openness to the Other entails a respect for limits and an attentiveness to remaining two.
References:
Irigaray, L. (1987) This Sex which is not One
Irigaray, L. (1991) ‘The Necessity for Sexuate Rights’ in Witford (ed.) The Irigaray Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, p. 198-203
Irigaray, L. (1993) Je, Tu, Nous. Toward a Culture of Difference. London: Routledge.
Irigaray, L. (2000) To Be Two. London: Athlone.

Irigaray and Sexual Morality I

2009-05-26T09:03:00.003+01:00

Joost van Loon explores the implications of Irigaray's conceptualization of sexual morality.

It is through the female body that Luce Irigaray wants to conceptualise sexual morality as more than an inscription of patriarchal discourse. Using the example of Antigone, she contrasts a paternal concept of law as grounded in the authority of the state with a maternal concept of law which is highly attuned to ‘natural rights’, that is, in communion with the primordial being of ‘the soil’ and kinship-lineages (Irigaray, 1991: 199). Following a theme that she already set out in her earlier works, she contrasts the violent singularity of ‘phallogocentrism’ with the multiplicity of the feminine, as ‘the sex that is not one’ (1987). On this basis, she discusses heterosexual intercourse in terms of a violation, which objectifies the female body as a commodity within the dual structure of the law of the father and the logic of capital.

Whether or not one agrees with the implicit ‘essentialism’ of her account of ‘sex’, it does adequately describe the impossible situation many women find themselves in, in contemporary patriarchal capitalism, as far as maintaining an in-dividual, integral notion of self as subject. The point she stresses is that as soon as a woman enter into a sexual relationship with men in terms of the masculine form of engagement (i.e. objectification), there is an implicit violation of integrity, even if this takes place with her full consent. This leads her to consider virginity as a domain of struggle, rather than an ‘overrated virtue’ constructed by patriarchy (as liberal feminists prefer to see it). She therefore advocates ‘the right to virginity’ (1991: 209).

References:
Irigaray, L. (1987) This Sex which is not One
Irigaray, L. (1991) ‘The Necessity for Sexuate Rights’ in Witford (ed.) The Irigaray Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, p. 198-203

Translation Deficits

2009-05-21T08:54:00.001+01:00

Joost van Loon examines the 'translation deficit' between Actor Network Theory and Science and Technology Studies.

Although Actor Network Theory (ANT) is now a well-established, albeit often misunderstood, domain within the social sciences, it has not travelled very well beyond Science and Technology Studies (STS). Using a phrase from Latour himself, one could argue that ANT suffers from a 'translation deficit' when it comes to social science research beyond STS. It is not very interesting to dwell too long on the reasons for this translation deficit but it helps to distinguish three possible factors:

The radical nature of the philosophical roots of Latour’s ANT which are an unusual mixture of William James’ radical empiricism, A.N. Whitehead’s philosophy of organism and Friedrich Nietzsche’s accomplished nihilism (or relativism as Latour prefers to call it).
The fundamentally empirical nature of ANT-analyses, which forces one to do ANT rather than talk about it.
A reluctance of social theorists, in particular, to separate critique from prejudice and thereby to start taking actors and action seriously. That is to say, when attempts are being made to ‘export’ ANT-analyses across boundaries, there are significant numbers of gatekeepers blocking the passageways like security guards at airports.

As Latour himself has insisted over and over again, Actor Network Theory is deceptive and therefore perhaps not a very good phrase to describe what is done under that heading. It has led to the suggestion that it is merely a theoretical position that aims to describe networks of actors and in that way it has been interpreted as another version of network theory along the lines of, for example, Ohmae and Castells. In order to avoid such confusion, Latour has toyed with a number of phrases that better describe what ANT might be, such as ‘sociology of translation’ and more recently, ‘sociology of associations’ (Latour, 2005). I prefer Annemarie Mol’s label: ‘empirical philosophy’.