Journal articles: 'Critical mediation, Feminist poststructural analysis' – Grafiati (2024)

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How teachers are engaging with a particular Ontario curriculum resource document, Me Read? No Way!, and the problem of boys’ literacy achievement in the context of a globalized neoliberal discourse of ‘failing boys’ has important implications for pedagogy and practice in the classroom. This investigation into teachers’ work adopts a feminist poststructural framework and uses critical discourse analysis to develop two case studies based on focus group interviews with a purposeful sampling of Intermediate level teachers. Not only are boys’ perceived needs and interests driving teacher choices in pedagogy and resource materials, but girls are perceived as not having any particular educational needs at all: boys will be boys and girls will be good. This investigation concludes that teacher professional knowledge must include a more developed understanding of how the social construction of gender is negotiated in the classroom.

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Purpose This paper aims to accomplish two things: to build on current research which interrogates the role of management history in the neglect of women leaders and labor programs and to draw attention to Hallie Flanagan and the Federal Theater Project and their lost contributions to management and organizational studies. Design/methodology/approach This paper adopts a feminist poststructural lens fused with critical discourse analysis to capture the role of discourses in concealing a more fragmented view of history. Findings The findings are openly discursive and aim to disrupt current knowledge and thinking in the practice of making history. The paper calls for an undoing of history and an examination of the powerful forces, which result in a gendered and limited understanding of the past. Originality/value The objective of this paper is to help scholarship continue to transform management and organizational studies and management history and to raise the profile of remarkable leaders, like Flanagan and similarly remarkable programs like the Federal Theater Project. Flanagan managed arguably the most ambitious and novel labor program under the New Deal, which resulted in an average of 10,000 workers in the arts being employed over four years, in a project which engaged audiences of over 30,000,000 Americans.

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Background and Purpose Child safety campaigns play an important role in disseminating injury prevention information to families. A critical discourse analysis of gender bias in child safety campaign marketing materials can offer important insights into how families are represented and the potential influence that gender bias may have on uptake of injury prevention information.Methods Our approach was informed by poststructural feminist theory, and we used critical discourse analysis to identify discourses within the poster materials. We examined the national Safe Kids Canada Safe Kids Week campaign poster material spanning twenty years (1997-2016). Specifically, we analyzed the posters’ typeface, colour, images, and language to identify gender bias in relation to discourses surrounding parenting, safety, and societal perceptions of gender.Results The findings show that there is gender bias present in the Safe Kids Week poster material. The posters represent gender as binary, mothers as primary caregivers, and showcase stereotypically masculine sporting equipment among boys and stereotypically feminine equipment among girls. Interestingly, we found that the colour and typeface of the text both challenge and perpetuate the feminization of safety.Discussion It is recommended that future child safety campaigns represent changing family dynamics, include representations of children with non-traditionally gendered sporting equipment, and avoid the representation of gender as binary. This analysis contributes to the discussion of the feminization of safety in injury prevention research and challenges the ways in which gender is represented in child safety campaigns.

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Mūsdienu kriminoloģija ir izteikti dinamiska un inovatīva zinātne, un savas izziņas lokā tā ietver aizvien jaunas jomas un virzienus. Kultūras kriminoloģija iezīmē jaunas īpašas perspektīvas, kā arī plašāku ievirzi, kas pēdējos gados parādījusies noziedzības un citu pretsabiedrisku parādību un to nosakošo faktoru izziņā. Kultūras kriminoloģijai ir teorētiska un praktiska nozīme noziedzības fenomena izpētē un jaunu pieeju konstruēšanā tās novēršanā. Noziedzība un noziedzības novēršanas subjekti var tikt uzskatīti arī par kultūras elementiem. Mūsdienu civilizācijā dažādās valstīs esošā kultūra, uzskati, paražas, reliģija un vērtības veido mūsdienu daudzveidīgo pasauli, kā arī eskalē kultūras konfliktus, turklāt var būt viens no faktoriem, kas nosaka kriminalitāti. Pašlaik ASV un daudzās citās valstīs notiek vandalisma akti, protesti, nemieri, masu nekārtības. Tas ir pietiekami jauns fenomens, kuram ir kulturoloģiskas, politiskas un kriminoloģiskas iezīmes. Tradicionālie kultūras un vēstures simboli tiek barbariski iznīcināti. Represīvi pasākumi un atbildība par vandalisma aktiem ir rets izpausmes veids. Kultūrvērtības var iegūt jaunu sabiedrisko vērtējumu ar kriminogēnu kontekstu. The concept of cultural criminology refers to both specific perspectives and broader trends that have emerged in criminology in recent years. The authors agree that cultural criminology is a theoretical and practical approach to cognition and prevention of the phenomenon of crime. Both crime and crime prevention are considered to be cultural elements. According to the authors, crime and crime prevention are influenced by the meanings given by culture. Cultural criminology reflects the developed perspective, which intertwines specific intellectual threads to explore the fusion of cultural and criminal processes in modern social life. The question remains whether we in Latvia are ready for the development of a new sub-branch of criminology, cultural criminology. Cultural criminology has a critical perspective that explores the fusion of culture and crime in everyday public life. Cultural criminology as an orientation is based on a variety of theoretical traditions, including subcultural and interactionist theories, cultural and media studies, and postmodern and feminist approaches. Cultural criminologists use a variety of methodologies, including ethnography and textual analysis, to study crime as culture and culture as crime. Crime as culture focuses on common meanings of subcultural style and rituals between subcultural groups, while culture as crime explores mediation structures and criminal liability of popular cultural artefacts. In different situations, culture, its elements and forms can be qualified as causes of crime and can act as contributing factors to crime. Therefore, in order to better understand the role of culture in the criminological detection system, it is necessary to identify cultural elements and operating models that not only contribute to crime, but also reduce it. Thus, it is important to discover both the criminogenic and the antichriminogenic potential of culture. Cultural criminology is the control of crime in a cultural context, it is the activity of crime prevention agents, the influence of society and cultural products – as creative constructs. The nature and content of the information forming the cultural environment, the mechanisms that ensure its operation and determine the nature of cultural processes, the impact of culture on the nature of crime.

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Marx’s concept of alienation, particularly as articulated in Dallas Smythe’s audience-commodity thesis, is central to critical studies of the political economy of digital media and its exploitation of user labour. However, in its application within critical studies of Internet economies, the concept often becomes limited to alienation from ‘species-being’ or autonomous self-actualisation. Drawing on mostly queer, but also some feminist, critiques this paper seeks to challenge this application of the alienation concept. It uses examples of the mediation of gay and queer sexualities through online hook-up apps to illustrate its position, concluding with some suggestions for how queering the subject of the alienation thesis may shape further analysis.

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This essay originates out of our shared interest in genres and media forms used for identity practices that do not cohere into a narrative or a fixed representation of who someone is. It takes the current heightened visibility of drag as a mode of performance that explicitly engages with identity as a product materialized—but not completed—by the ongoing process of performance. We consider the new drag, which we define below, as a form of playing with identity that combines bodily practices (comportment and use of voice) and adornment (make-up, clothing, wigs, and accessories) with an array of media (photography, live performance, social media and television). Given the limited space available, we will not be engaging with the propositions made during earlier feminist and queer thinking that drag is not inherently subversive and may reinscribe gender and race norms through their hyperbolic recitation (Butler 230-37; hooks 145-56). While we think there is much to be gained from revisiting these critiques in light of the changes in conceptualisations of gender in queer subcultures, we are not interested in framing drag as subversive or resistant in relation to the norms of masculinity and femininity. Instead, we follow Eve Sedgwick’s interest in reparative practices adopted by queer-identified subjects who must learn to survive in a hostile culture (“Paranoid”) and trace two lines of analysis we identify in drag’s new found visibility that demonstrate the reparative potential of automedia.At time of writing, RuPaul’s Drag Race (RPDR) has truly hit the big time. Pop icon Christina Aguilera was a guest judge for the first episode of its tenth season (Daw “Christina”), and the latest episode of RuPaul’s All-Stars season three spin-off show was the most-watched of any show in its network’s history (Crowley). RuPaul Charles, the producer and star of RPDR, has just been honoured with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, decades after he began his career as a drag performer (Daw “RuPaul”). Drag queens are finally becoming part of American mainstream media and drag as an art form and a cultural practice is on its way to becoming part of discourse about gender and identity around the world, via powerful systems of digital mediation and distribution. RPDR’s success is a good way to think about how drag, a long-standing performance art form, is having a “break out” moment in popular culture. We argue here that RPDR is doing this within an automedia framework.What does automedia mean in the context of drag on television and social media? We understand automedia to be about the mediation of identity when identity is both a product of representation and a process that is continually becoming, expressed in the double meaning of the word “life” as biography and as process (Poletti “Queer Collages” 362; Poletti and Rak 6-7). In this essay we build on our shared interest in developing a critical mode that can respond to forms of automedia that explore “the possibility of identity in the absence of narration” (Rak 172). What might artists who work with predominantly non-narrative forms such as drag performance show us about the ongoing interconnection between technologies and subjectivities as they represent and think through what “life” looks like, on stage and off?Automedia names life as a process and a product that has the potential to queer temporality and normative forms of identification, what Jack Halberstam has called “queer time” (1). We understand Halberstam’s evocation of queer time as suitable for being thought through automedia because of their characterisation of queer as “a form of self-description in the past decade or so … [that] has the potential to open up new life narratives and alternative relations to time and space” (2). Queer time, Halberstam explains, comes from the collapse of the past and shaky relation to futurity gay men experienced during the height of the American AIDs crisis, but they also see queer time, significantly, as exceeding the terms of its arrival. Queer time could be about the “potentiality of a life unscripted by the conventions of family, inheritance, and child rearing” (2). Queer time, then, evokes the possibility of making a life narrative that does not have to follow a straight line or stay “on script,” and does not have to feature conventional milestones or touchstones in its unfolding. If queer time can be thought alongside automedia, within drag performances that are not about straight lives, narrative histories and straight time can come into view.Much has been written about drag as a performance that creates a public, for example, as part of a queer world-building project that shoots unpredictably through spaces beyond performance locations (Berlant and Warner 558). Halberstam’s shift to thinking of queer time as an opening of new life narratives and a different relation to time has similar potential when considering the work of RPDR as automedia, because the shift of drag performance away from clubs, parades and other queer spaces to television and the internet is accompanied by a concern, manifested in the work of RuPaul himself, with drag history and the management of drag memory. We argue that a concern with the relationship between time and identity in RPDR is an attempt to open up, through digital networked media, a queer understanding of time that is in relation to drag of the past, but not always in a linear way. The performances of season nine winner Sasha Velour, and Velour’s own preoccupation with drag history in her performances and art projects, is an indicator of the importance of connecting the twin senses of “life” as process and product found in automedia to performance and narration.The current visibility of drag in popular culture is characterised by a shifting relationship between drag and media: what was once a location-based, temporally specific form of performance which occurred in bars, has been radically changed through the increased contact between the media forms of performance, television and social media. While local drag queens are often the celebrities (or “superstars”) of their local subcultural scene, reality television (in the form of RPDR) and social media (particularly Instagram) have radically increased the visibility of some drag queens, turning them into international celebrities with hundreds of thousands of fans. These queens now speak to audiences far beyond their local communities, and to audiences who may not have any knowledge of the queer subcultures that have nurtured generations of drag performers. Under the auspices of RPDR, drag queens have gained a level of cultural visibility that produces fascinating, and complex, encounters between subcultural identity practices and mainstream media tropes. Amongst her many tasks—being fierce, flawless, hilarious, and able to turn out a consummate lip sync performance—the newly visible drag queen is also a teacher. Enacting RuPaul’s theory of identity from his song title—“We’re all born naked and the rest is drag” (“Born”)—drag queens who in some way embody or make use of RuPaul’s ideas have the potential to advance a queer perspective on identity as a process in keeping with Judith Butler’s influential theory of identity performativity (Butler 7-16). In so doing they can provide fresh insights into the social function of media platforms and their genres in the context of queer lives. They are what we call “new” drag queens, because of their access to technology and digital forms of image distribution. They can refer to classic drag queen performance culture, and they make use of classic drag performance as a genre, but their transnational media presence and access to more recent forms of identification to describe themselves, such as trans, genderqueer or nonbinary, mark their identity presentations and performance presences as a departure from other forms of drag.While there is clearly a lot to be said about drag’s “break out,” in this essay we focus on two elements of the “new media” drag that we think speak directly, and productively, to the larger question of how cultural critics can understand the connection between identity and mediation as mutually emergent phenomena. As a particularly striking practitioner of automediality, the new drag queen draws our attention to the way that drag performance is an automedial practice that creates “queer time” (Halberstam), making use of the changing status of camp as a practice for constructing, and mediating identity. In what follows we examine the statements about drag and the autobiographical statements presented by RuPaul Charles and Sasha Velour (the winner of RPDR Season Nine) to demonstrate automediality as a powerful practice for queer world-making and living.No One Ever Wins Snatch Game: RuPaul and TimeAs we have observed at the opening of this essay, queer time is an oppositional practice, a refusal of those who belong to queer communities to fall into step with straight ideas about history, futurity, reproduction and the heteronormative idea of family, and a way to understand how communities mark occasions, conceptualize the history and traditions of subcultures. Queer time has the potential to rethink daily living and history differently and to tell accounts of lives in a different way, to “open up new life narratives,” as Halberstam says (2). RuPaul Charles’s own life story could be understood as a way to open up new life narratives literally by constructing what a queer life and career could mean in the aftermath of the AIDS epidemic in the United States. His 1995 memoir, Lettin It All Hang Out, details RuPaul’s early career in 1980s Atlanta, Georgia and in New York as an often-difficult search for what would make him a star. RuPaul did not at first conceptualize himself as a drag star, but as a punk musician in Atlanta and then as part of the New York Club Kid community, which developed when New York clubs were in danger of closing because of fear of the AIDS epidemic (Flynn). RuPaul became adept at self-promotion and image-building while he was part of these rebellious punk and dance club subcultures that refused gender and lifestyle norms (Lettin 62-5). It might seem to be an unusual beginning for a drag star, but as RuPaul writes, “I always knew I was going to be star [but] I never thought it was going to be as a drag queen” (Lettin 64). There was no narrative of mainstream success that RuPaul—a gay, gender non-binary African-American man from the American Midwest—could follow.Since he was a drag performer too, RuPaul eventually “had an epiphany. Why couldn’t I [he] become a mainstream pop star in drag? Who said it couldn’t be done?” (Workin’ It 159). And he decided that rather than look for a model of success to follow, he would queer the mainstream model for success. As he observes, “I looked around at my favorite stars and realized that they were drag queens too. In fact every celebrity is a drag queen” (Lettin 129). Proceeding from the idea that all people are in fact drag artists—the source of RuPaul’s aformentioned catch-phrase and song title “We’re all born naked and the rest is drag” (“Born”), RuPaul moved the show business trajectory into queer time, making the “formula” for success the labour required of drag queens to create personae, entertain, promote themselves and make a successful living (and a life) in dangerous work environments—a process presented in his song “Supermodel” and its widely-cited lyric “You better work!” (“Supermodel”). The video for “Supermodel” shows RuPaul in his persona as Supermodel of the World, “working” as a performer and a member of the public in New York to underscore the different kinds of labour that is involved, and that this labour is necessary for anyone to become successful (“Supermodel” video).When RuPaul’s Drag Race began in 2010, RuPaul modelled the challenges in the show on his own career in an instance of automedia, where the non-narrative aspects of drag performance and contest challenges were connected to the performance of RuPaul’s own story. According to one of RuPaul’s friends who produces the show: “The first season, all the challenges were ‘Ru did this, so you did this.’ It was Ru’s philosophy” (Snetiker). As someone who was without models for success, RuPaul intends for RPDR to provide a model for others to follow. The goal of the show is the replication of RuPaul’s own career trajectory: the winners of RPDR are each crowned “America’s Next Drag Superstar,” because they have successfully learned from RuPaul’s own experiences so that they too can develop their careers as drag artists. This pattern has persisted on RPDR, where the contestants are often asked to participate in challenges that reflect RuPaul’s own struggles to become a star as a way to “train” them to develop their careers. Contestants have, like RuPaul himself, starred in low-budget films, played in a punk band, marketed their own perfume, commemorated the work of the New York Club Kids, and even planned the design and marketing of their own memoirs.RPDR contestants are also expected to know popular culture of the past and present, and they are judged on how well they understand their own “herstory” of the drag communities and queer culture. Snatch Game, a popular segment where contestants have to impersonate celebrities on a queer version of the Match Game series, is a double test. To succeed, contestants must understand how to impersonate celebrities past and present within a camp aesthetic. But the segment also tests how well drag queens understand the genre of game show television, a genre that no longer exists on television (except in the form of Wheel of Fortune or Jeopardy), and that many of the RPDR contestants are not old enough to have seen, performing witty taglines and off-the-cuff jokes they hope will land in a very tight time frame. Sasha Velour, the winner of season nine, won praise for her work in the Snatch Game segment in episode six because, acting on advice from RuPaul, she played Marlene Dietrich and not her first choice, queer theorist Judith Butler (RuPaul’s). Sasha Velour was able to make Dietrich, a queer icon known for her film work in the 1920-1940s, humorous in the game show context, showing that she understands queer history, and that she is a skilful impersonator who understands how to navigate a genre that is part of RuPaul’s own life story. The queer time of RuPaul’s narrative is transmitted to a skill set future drag stars need to use: a narrative of a life becomes part of performance. RPDR is, in this sense, automedia in action as queens make their personae “live,” perform part of RuPaul’s “life” story, and get to “live” on the show for another week if they are successful. The point of Snatch Game is how well a queen can perform, how good she is at entertaining and educating audiences, and how well she deals with an archaic genre, that of the television game show. No one ever “wins” Snatch Game because that is not the point of it. But those who win the Snatch Game challenge often go on to win RPDR, because they have demonstrated improvisational skill, comic timing, knowledge of RuPaul’s own life narrative touchstones and entertained the audience.Performative Agency: The Drag Performance as Resource for Queer LivingVelour’s embodied performance in the Snatch Game of the love and knowledge of popular culture associated with camp, and its importance to the art of drag, highlights the multifaceted use of media as a resource for identity practices that characterizes drag as a form of automedia. Crucially, it exemplifies the complex way that media forms are heavily cited and replayed in new combinations in order to say something real about the ways of living of a specific artist or person. Sasha Velour’s impersonation of Dietrich is not one in which Velour’s persona disappears: indeed, she is highly commended by RuPaul, and fans, because her embodiment of Dietrich in the anachronous media environment of the Snatch Game works to further Velour’s unique persona and skill as a drag artist. Velour queers time with her Dietrich in order to demonstrate her unique sensibility and identity. Thus, reality TV, silent film, cabaret, improvisation and visual presentation are brought together in an embodied performance that advances Velour’s specific form of drag and is taken as a strong marker of who Sasha Velour is.But what exactly is Sasha Velour doing when she clarifies her identity by dressing as Marlene Dietrich and improvises the diva’s answers to questions on a game show? This element of drag is clearly connected to the aesthetics of camp that have a long tradition in gay and queer culture. Original theories of camp theorized it as a practice of taste and interpretation (Sontag)—camp described a relationship to the objects of popular culture that was subversive because it celebrated the artificiality of aesthetic forms, and was therefore ironizing. However, this understanding of camp does not adequately describe its role in postmodern culture or how some queer subcultures cultivate the use media forms for identity practices (O’Neill 21). In her re-casting of camp, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues:we need to [think of camp] not in terms of parody or even wit, but with more of an eye of its visceral, operatic power: the startling outcrops of overinvested erudition; the prodigal production of alternative histories; the ‘over’-attachment to fragmentary, marginal, waste, lost, or leftover cultural products; the richness of affective variety; and the irrepressible, cathartic fascination with ventriloquist forms of relation. (Sedgwick The Weather 66)This reframing of camp emphasises affect, attachment and forms of relation as ongoing processes for the making of queer life (a process), rather than as elements of queer identity (a product). For Sedgwick camp is a practice or process that mediates queerness in the context of a hostile mainstream media culture that does not connect queer ways of living with flourishing or positive outcomes (Sedgwick “Paranoid Reading” 28). In O’Neill’s account, camp does not involve attachment to the diva as a fixed identity whose characteristics can be adopted in irony or impersonation in which the individual disappears (16). Rather, it is the diva’s labour—her way of marshalling her talent to produce compelling performances, which come to be the hallmark of her career and identity—that is the site of queer identification. What RuPaul wittily refers to as a drag queen’s “charisma, uniqueness, nerve and talent” (the acronym is important), O’Neill refers to as the diva’s “performative agency”—the primary “power to perform” (16, emphasis in original). This is the positive power of camp as form of automediation for queer world making: media forms provide resources that queer subjects can draw on in assembling a performance of identity as modes of embodiment and ways of being that can be cited (the specific posture of Dietrich, for example, which Velour mimics) and in terms of the affect required to marshal the performance itself.When she was crowned the winner of season nine of RPDR, Sasha Velour emphasised the drag queen’s performative agency itself as a resource for queer identity practices. After being announced the winner, Velour said: “Let’s change sh*t up. Let’s get all inspired by all this beauty, all this beauty, and change the motherf*cking world” (Queentheban). This narrative of the world-changing power of the beauty of drag refers to the visibility of the new drag queens, who through television and social media now have thousands of fans across the world. Yet, this narrative of the collective potential of drag is accompanied by Velour presenting her own autobiographical narrative that posits drag as an automedial practice whose “richness of affective variety” has been central to her coming to terms with the death of her mother from cancer. In interviews and in her magazine about drag (Velour: The Drag Magazine) Velour narrates the evolution of her drag and her identity as a “bald queen” whose signature look includes a clean-shaven head which is often unadorned or revealed in her performances as directly linked to her mother’s baldness brought on by treatment for cancer (WBUR).In an autobiographical photo-essay titled “Gone” published in Velour, Velour poses in a series of eight photographs which are accompanied by handwritten text reflecting on the role of drag in Velour’s grieving for her mother. In the introduction, the viewer is told that the “books and clothes” used in the photos belonged to Velour’s mother, Jane. The penultimate image shows Velour lying on grass in drag without a wig, looking up at the camera and is accompanied by nineteen statements elucidating what drag is, all of which are in keeping with Sedgwick’s reframing of camp practices as reparative strategies for queer lives: “Drag is for danger / Drag is for safety / Drag is for remembering / Drag is for recovering.” Affect, catharsis, and operatic power are narrated and visually rendered in the photo-essay, presenting drag as a highly personal form of automediation for Velour. The twentieth line defining drag appears on the final page, accompanied by a photograph of Velour from behind, her arms thrown back and tensile: “Drag is for dressing up / And this is my mother’s dress.”Taken together, Velour’s generic and highly personal descriptions of drag as a process and product that empowers individual and collective queer lives define drag as a form of automedia in which identity and living are a constant process of creativity and invention “where ideas about the self and what it means to live are tested, played with, rejected, and embraced” (Rak 177).Velour’s public statements and autobiographical works foreground how the power, investment, richness and catharsis encapsulated in drag performance offers an important antidote to the hostility to queer ways of being embodied by an assimilationist gay politics. In a recent interview, Velour commented on the increased visibility of her drag beyond her localised performances in “dive bars” in New York:When Drag Race came on television I feel like the gay community in general was focussed on […] dare I say, a kind of assimilation politics, showing straight people and the world at large that we are just like everyone else and I think drag offered a radical different saying [sic] and reminded people that there’s been this grand tradition of queer people and gay people saying ‘actually we’re fabulously different and this is why.’ (PopBuzz)Velour suggests that in its newly visible forms outside localised queer cultures, drag as a media spectacle offers an important alternative to the pressure for queer people to assimilate to dominant forms of living, those practices, forms of attachment and relation Halberstam associates with straight time.ConclusionThe queer time and performative agency enacted in drag provides a compelling example of non-narrative forms of identity work in which identity is continuously emerging through labour, innovation, and creativity (or—in RuPaul’s formulation—charisma, uniqueness, nerve and talent). This creativity draws on popular culture as a resource and site of history for queer identities, an evocation of queer time. The queer time of drag as a performance genre has an increasing presence in media forms such as television, social media and print media, bringing autobiographical performances and narratives by drag artists into new venues. This multiple remediation of drag recasts queer cultural practices beyond localised subcultural contexts into the broader media cultures in order to amplify and celebrate queerness as a form of difference, and differing, as automediality.ReferencesBerlant, Lauren, and Michael Warner. “Sex in Public.” Critical Inquiry 24.2 (Winter 1998): 547-566.Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. 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New York: HarperCollins, 2010.RuPaul’s Drag Race. RuPaul. World of Wonder Productions. Season 9, 2017.Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Weather in Proust. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2011.———. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is about You.” Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction. Ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Durham: Duke UP, 1997. 1-37.Sontag, Susan. “Notes on ‘Camp’.” Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader. Ed. Fabio Cleto. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1991. 53-65.Snetiker, Mark. “The Oral History of RuPaul.” Entertainment Weekly (2016). <http://rupaul.ew.com/>.WBUR. “Sasha Velour on Why Drag Is a ‘Political and Historical Art Form’.” 24 July 2017. <http://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2017/07/24/sasha-velour>.Velour, Sasha. “Gone (with Daphne Chan).” sashavelour.com. <http://sashavelour.com/work/#/daphnechan/>.

Abstract:

Neither mere flesh nor mere thing, the yellow woman, straddling the person-thing divide, applies tremendous pressures on politically treasured notions of agency, feminist enfleshment, and human ontology. — Anne Anlin Cheng, OrnamentalismIn this (apparently) very versatile piece of clothing, she [Michelle Zauner] smokes, sings karaoke, rides motorcycles, plays a killer guitar solo … and much more. Is there anything you can’t do in a hanbok?— Li-Wei Chu, commentary, From the Intercom IntroductionAnne Anlin Cheng describes the anomaly of being “the yellow woman”, women of Asian descent in Western contexts, by underlining the haunting effects of this artificial identity on multiple politically valent forms, especially through Asian women’s conceived ambivalent relations to subject- and object-hood. Due to the entangled constructiveness conjoining Asiatic identities with objects, things, and ornaments, Cheng calls for new ways to “accommodate the deeper, stranger, more intricate, and more ineffable (con)fusion between thingness and personness instantiated by Asiatic femininity and its unpredictable object life” (14). Following this call, this essay articulates a creative combination of José Esteban Muñoz’s disidentification and Avery Gordon’s haunting theory to account for some hauntingly disidentificatory ways that the performance of diaspora sensibilities reimagines Asian American life and femininity.This essay considers “Everybody Wants to Love You” (2016) (EWLY), the music video of Michelle Zauner’s solo musical project Japanese Breakfast, as a ghostly performance, which features a celebration of the Korean culture and identity of Zauner (Song). I analyse it as a site for identifying the confrontational moments and haunting effects of the diaspora sensibilities performed by Zauner who is in fact Jewish-Korean-American. Directed by Zauner and Adam Kolodny, the music video of EWLY features the persona that I call the Korean woman orchestrated by Zauner, singing in a restroom cubicle, eating a Dunkin Donuts sandwich, shotgunning a beer, shredding a Fender electric guitar on the hood of a truck, riding a motorcycle with her queer lover, and partying with a crowd all in the traditional Korean attire hanbok that used to belong to her late mother. The story ends with Zauner waking up on a bench with a hangover and fleeing from the scene, conjuring up a journey of self-discovery, self-healing, and self-liberation through multiple sites and scenes of everyday life.What I call a ghostly performance is concerned with Avery Gordon’s creative intervention of haunting as a method of social analysis to study the intricate lingering impact of ghostly matters from the past on the present. Jacques Derrida develops hauntology to describe how Marxism continues to haunt Western societies even after its so-called failure. It refers to a status that something is neither present nor absent. Gordon develops haunting as a way of knowing and a method of knowledge production, “forcing a confrontation, forking the future and the past” (xvii). A ghostly performance is thus where ghostly matters are mobilised in “confrontational moments”:when things are not in their assigned places, when the cracks and rigging are exposed, when the people who are meant to be invisible show up without any sign of leaving, when disturbed feelings cannot be put away, when something else, something different from before, seems like it must be done. (xvi)The interstitiality that transgresses and reconfigures the geographical and temporal borders of nation, culture, and Eurocentric discourses of progression is important for understanding the diverse experiences of diaspora sensibilities as critical double consciousness (Dayal 48, 53). As Gordon suggests, confrontational moments force us to confront and expose the interstitial state of objects, subjects, feelings, and conditions. Hence, to understand this study identifies the confrontational moments in Zauner’s performance as a method to identify and deconstruct the triggering moments of diaspora sensibilities.While deconstructing the ghostly performances of diaspora sensibilities, the essay also adopts an object-oriented approach to serve as a focused entry point. Not only does this approach designate a more focused scope with regard to applying Gordon’s hauntology and Muñoz’s disidentification theory, it also taps into a less attended territory of object theories such as Graham Harman’s and Ian Bogost’s object-oriented ontology due to the overlooking of the relationship between objects and racialisation that is much explored in Asian American and critical race and ethnic studies (Shomura). Moreover, while diaspora as, or not as, an object of study has been a contested topic (e.g., Axel; Cho), the objects of diaspora have been less studied.This essay elaborates on two ghostly matters: the hanbok and the manicured nails. It uncovers two haunting effects throughout the analysis: the conjuring-up of the Korean diaspora and the troubling of everyday post-racial America. By defying the objectification of Asian bodies with objects of diaspora and refusing to assimilate into the American nightlife, Zauner’s Korean woman persona haunts a multiculturalist post-racial America that fails to recognise the specificities and historicity of Korean America and performs an alternative reality. Disidentificatory ghostly performance therefore, I suggest, thrives on confrontations between the past and the present while gesturing toward the futurities of alternative Americas. Mobilising the critical lenses of disidentification and ghostly performance, finally, I aver that disidentificatory ghostly performances have great potential for envisioning a better politics of performing and representing Asian bodies through the ghostly play of haunting objects/ghostly matters.The Embodied (Objects) and the Disembodied (Ghosts) of DisidentificationThe sonic-visual lifeworld constructed in the music video of EWLY is, first of all, a cultural public sphere, through which social norms are contested, reimagined, and reconfigured. A cultural public sphere reveals the imbricated relations between the political, the public, and the personal as contested through affective (aesthetic and emotional) communications (McGuigan 15). Considering the sonic-visual landscape as a cultural public sphere foregrounds two dimensions of Gordon’s hauntology theory: the psychological and the sociopolitical states. The emphasis on its affective communicative capacities enables the psychological reach of a cultural production. Meanwhile, the multilayered articulation of the political, the public, and the personal shows the inner-network of acts of haunting even when they happen chiefly on the sociopolitical level. What is crucial about cultural public spheres for minoritarian subjects is the creative space offered for negotiating one’s position in capacious and flexible ways that non-cultural publics may not allow. One of the ways is through imagination and disputation (McGuigan 16). The idea that imagination and disputation may cause a temporal and spatial disjunction with the present is important for Muñoz’s theorisation of disidentification. With such disjunction, Muñoz believes, queer of colour performances create future-oriented visions and coterminous temporality of the present and the future. These future-oriented visions and the coterminous temporality can be thought through disidentifications, which Muñoz identifies asa performative mode of tactical recognition that various minoritarian subjects employ in an effort to resist the oppressive and normalizing discourse of dominant ideology. Disidentification resists the interpellating call of ideology that fixes a subject within the state power apparatus. It is a reformatting of self within the social. It is a third term that resists the binary of identification and counteridentification. (97)Disidentification offers a method to identify specific moments of imagination and disputation and moments of temporal and spatial disjunction. The most distinct example of the co-nature of imagination and disputation residing in the EWLY lifeworld is the persona of the Korean woman orchestrated by Zauner, as she intrudes into the everyday field of American life in a hanbok, such as a bar, a basketball court, and a convenience store. Gordon would call these moments “confrontational moments” (xvi). When performers don’t perform in ways they are supposed to perform, when they don’t operate objects in ways they are supposed to operate, when they don’t mobilise feelings in ways they are supposed to feel, they resist and disidentify with “the oppressive and normalizing discourse of dominant ideology” (Muñoz 97).In addition to Muñoz’s disidentification and Gordon’s confrontational moments, I adopt an object-oriented approach to guide my analysis of disidentificatory ghostly performances. Object theory departs from objects and matters to rediscover identity and experience. My object-oriented approach follows new materialism more closely than object-oriented ontology because it is less about debating the ontology of Asian American experiences through the lens of objects. Instead, it is more about how re-orienting our attention towards the formation and operation of objecthood reveals and reconfigures the vexed articulation between Asian American experiences and racialised objectification. To this end, my oriented-object approach aligns particularly well with politically engaged frameworks such as Jane Bennett’s vital materialism and Eunjung Kim’s ethics of objects.Taking an object-oriented approach in inquiring Asian American identities could be paradoxically intervening because “Asian Americans have been excluded, exploited, and treated as capital because they have been more closely associated to nonhuman objects than to human subjects” (Shomura). Furthermore, this objectification is doubly performed onto the bodies of Asian American women due to the Orientalist conflations of Asia as feminine (Huang 187). Therefore, applying object theory in the case of EWLY requires special attention to the interplay between subject- and object-hood and the line between objecthood and objectification. To avoid the risk of objectification when exploring the objecthood of ghostly matters, I caution against an objects-define-subjects chain of signification and instead suggest a subjects-operate-objects route of inquiry by attending to both the haunting effects of objects and how subjects mobilise such haunting effects in their performance. From a new materialist perspective, it is also important to disassociate problems of objectification from exploration of objecthood (Kim) while excavating the world-making abilities of objects (Bennett). For diasporic peoples, it means to see objects as affective and nostalgic vessels, such as toys, food, family photos, attire, and personal items (e.g., Oum), where traumas of displacement can be stored and rehearsed (Turan 54).What is revealing from a racialised subject-object relationship is what Christopher Bush calls “the ethnicity of things”: things can have ethnicity, an identification that hinges on the articulation that “thingliness can be constituted in ways analogous and related to structures of racialization” (85). This object-oriented approach to inquiry can expose the artificial nature of the affinity between Asian bodies and certain objects, behind which is a confession of naturalised racial order of signification. One way to disrupt this chain of signification is to excavate the haunting objects that disidentify with the norms of the present, that conjure up what the present wants to be done. This “something-to-be-done” characteristic is critical to acts of haunting (Gordon xvii). Such disruptive performances are what I term as “disidentificatory ghostly performances”, connecting the embodied objects with Gordon’s disembodied ghosts through the lens of Muñoz’s disidentificatory reading with a two-fold impact: first exposing such artificial affinity and then suggesting alternative ways of knowing.In what follows, I expand upon two haunting objects/ghostly matters: the manicured nails and the hanbok. I contend that Zauner operates these haunting objects to embody the “something-to-be-done” characteristic by curating uncomfortable, confrontational moments, where the constituted affinity between Koreanness/Asianness and anomaly is instantiated and unsettled in multiple snippets of the mundane post-racial, post-globalisation world.What Can the Korean Woman (Not) Do with Those Nails and in That Hanbok?The hanbok that Zauner wears throughout the music video might be the single most powerful haunting object in the story. This authentic hanbok belonged to Zauner’s late mother who wore it to her wedding. Dressing in the hanbok while navigating the nightlife, it becomes a mediated, trans-temporal experience for both Zauner and her mother. A ghostly journey, you could call it. The hanbok then becomes a ghostly matter that haunts both the Orientalist gaze and the grieving Zauner. This journey could be seen as a process of dealing with personal loss, a process of “reckoning with ghosts” (Gordon 190). The division between the personal and the public, the historical and the present cease to exist as linear and clear-cut forces. The important role of ghosts in the performance are the efforts of historicising and specifying the persona of the Korean woman, which is a strategy for minoritarian performers to resist “the pull of reductive multicultural pluralism” (Muñoz 147). These ghostly matters haunt a pluralist multiculturalist post-racial America that refuses to see minor specificities and historicity.The Korean woman in an authentic hanbok, coupled with other objects of Korean roots, such as a traditional hairdo and seemingly exotic makeup, may invite the Orientalist gaze or the assumption that Zauner is self-commodifying and self-fetishising Korean culture, risking what Cheng calls “Oriental female objectification” operating through “the lenses of commodity and sexual fetishism” (14). However, she “fails” to do any of these. The ways Zauner acts in the hanbok manifests a self-negotiation with her Korean identity through disidentificatory sensibilities with racial fetishism. For example, in various scenes, the Korean woman appears to be drunk in a bar, gorging a sandwich, shotgunning a beer, smoking in a restroom cubicle, messing with strangers in a basketball court, rocking on a truck, and falling asleep on a bench. Some may describe what she does as abnormal, discomforting, and even disgusting in a traditional Korean garment which is usually worn on formal occasions. The Korean woman not only subverts her traditional Koreanness but also disidentifies with what the Asian fetish requires of Asian bodies: obedient, well-behaved model minority or the hypersexualised dragon lady (e.g., Hsu; Shimizu). Zauner’s performance foregrounds the sentimental, the messy, the frenetic, the aggressive, and the carnivalesque as essential qualities and sensibilities of the Korean woman. These rarely visible figurations of Asian femininities speak to the normalised public disappearance of “unwanted” sides of Asian bodies.Wavering public disappearance is a crucial haunting effect. The public disappearance is an “organized system of repression” (Gordon 72) and a “state-sponsored procedure for producing ghosts to harrowingly haunt a population into submission” (115). While the journey of EWLY evolves through ups and downs, the Korean woman does not maintain the ephemeral joy and takes offence at the people and surroundings now and then, such as at an arcade in the bar, at some basketball players, or at the audience or the camera operator. The performed disaffection and the conflicts substantiate a theory of “positive perversity” through which Asian American women claim the representation of their sexuality and desires (Shimizu), engendering a strong and visible presence of the ghostly matters operated by the Korean woman. This noticeable arrival of bodies disorients how things are arranged (Ahmed 163), revealing and disrupting whiteness, which functions as a habit and a background to actions (149). The confrontational performances of the encounters between Zauner and others cast a critique of the racial politics of disappearing by reifying disappearing into confrontational moments in the everyday post-racial world.What is also integral to Zauner’s antagonistic performance of wavering public disappearing and failure of “Oriental female objectification” is a punk strategy of negativity through an aesthetic of nihilism and a mediation of performing objects. For example, in addition to the traditional hairdo that goes with her makeup, Zauner also wears a nose ring; in addition to partying with a crowd, she adopts a moshing style of dancing, being carried over people’s heads in the hanbok. All these, in addition to her disaffectionate, aggressive, and impolite body language, express a negative punk aesthetics. Muñoz describes such a negative punk aesthetics as an energy that can be described “as chaotic, as creating a life without rhyme or reason, as quintessentially self-destructive” (97). What lies at the heart of this punk dystopia is the desire for “something else”, something “not the present time or place” (Muñoz). Through this desire for impossible time and place, utopian is reimagined, a race riot, in Mimi Thi Nguyen’s term.On the other hand, the manicured fingernails are also a major operating force, reminiscent of Korean American immigrant history along with the racialised labor relations that have marked Korean bodies as an alien anomaly (Liu). With “Japanese Breakfast” being written on the screen in neon pink with some dazzling effect, the music video begins in a warm tone. The story begins with Zauner selecting EWLY with her finger on a karaoke operation screen, the first of many shots on her carefully manicured nails, decorated with transparent nail extensions, sparkly ornaments, and hanging fine chains. These nails conjure up the nail salon business in the US that heavily depended on immigrant labor and Korean women immigrants have made significant economic contributions through the manicure business. In particular, differently from Los Angeles where nail salons have been predominantly Vietnamese and Chinese owned, Korean women immigrants in the 1980s were the first ones to open nail salons in New York City and led to the rapid growth of the business (Kang 51). The manicured nails first of all conjure up these recent histories associated with the nail salon business.Moreover, these fingernails haunt post-racial and post-globalisation America by revealing and subverting the invisible, normalised racial and ethnic nature of the labor and objects associated with fingernails cosmetic treatment. Ghostly matters inform “a method of knowledge production and a way of writing that could represent the damage and the haunting of the historical alternatives” (Gordon xvii). They function as a reminder of the damage that seems forgotten or normalised in modern societies and as an alternative embodiment of what modern societies could have become. In the universe of EWLY, the fingernails become a forceful ghostly matter by reminding us of the damage done onto Korean bodies by fixing them as service performers instead customers. The nail salon business as performed by immigrant labor has been a business of “buying and selling of deference and attentiveness”, where white customers come to exercise their privilege while not wanting anything associated with Koreaness or Otherness (Kang 134). However, as a haunting force, the fingernails subvert such labor relations by acting as a versatile agent operating varied objects, such as a karaoke machine, cigarettes, a sandwich, a Fender guitar, and a can of beer. Through such operating, an alternative labor relation is formed. This alternative is not entirely without roots. As promoted in Japanese Breakfast’s Instagram (@jbrekkie), Zauner’s look was styled by a nail artist who appears to be a white female, Celeste Marie Welch from the DnA Salon based in Philadelphia. This is a snippet of a field that is now a glocalised industry, where the racial and gender makeup is more diverse. It is increasingly easier to see non-Asian and non-female nail salon workers, among whom white nail salon workers outnumbered any other non-Asian racial/ethnic groups (Preeti et al. 23). EWLY’s alternative worldmaking is not only a mere reflection of the changing makeup of an industry but also calling out the societal tendency of forgetting histories. To be haunted, as Gordon explains, is to be “tied to historical and social effects” (190). The ghostly matters of the manicure industry haunt its workers, artists, consumers, and businesspeople of a past that prescribes racialised labor divisions, consumption relations, and the historical and social effects inflicted on the Othered bodies. Performing with the manicured nails, Zauner challenges now supposedly multicultural manicure culture by fusing oppositional, trans-temporal identities into the persona of the Korean woman. Not only does she conjure up the racialised labor relations as the child of a Korean mother, she also disidentifies with the worker identity of early Korean women immigrants as a consumer who receives service from an artist who would otherwise never perform such labor in the past.Conclusion: Toward a Disidentificatory Ghostly PerformanceThis essay suggests seeing the disidentificatory ghostly performance of the Korean woman as an artistic incarnation of her lived Othering experience, which Zauner may or may not navigate on an everyday basis. As Zauner lives through what looks like a typical Friday night in an American town, the journey represents an interrogation of the present and the past. When the ghostly matters move through public spaces – when she drinks in a bar, walks down the street, and parties with a crowd – the Korean woman neither conforms to what she is expected to do in a hanbok nor does she get fully assimilated into this American nightlife.Derrida avers that haunting, repression, and hegemony are structurally interlocked and that “haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony” because “hegemony still organizes the repression” (46). This is why the creative capacity of disidentificatory performances is crucial for acts of haunting and for historically repressed groups of people. Conjoining the future-oriented performative mode of disidentification and the forking of the past and the present by ghostly performances, disidentificatory ghostly performances enable not only people of colour but also particularly diasporic populations of colour to challenge racial chains of signification and orchestrate future-oriented visions, where time is of the most compassion, at its utmost capacity.ReferencesAhmed, Sara. “A Phenomenology of Whiteness.” Feminist Theory 8.2 (2007): 149–168.Axel, Brian Keith. “Time and Threat: Questioning the Production of the Diaspora as an Object of Study.” History and Anthropology 9.4 (1996): 415–443.Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke UP, 2010.Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology, or, What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012.Bush, Christopher. “The Ethnicity of Things in America’s Lacquered Age.” Representations 99.1 (2007): 74–98. Cheng, Anne Anlin. Ornamentalism. 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Gimme Gimme That’: Annihilation and Innovation in the Punk Rock Commons.” Social Text 31.3 (2013): 95–110.Nguyen, Mimi Thi. “Riot Grrrl, Race, and Revival.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 22.2–3 (2012): 173–196. Oum, Young Rae. “Authenticity and Representation: Cuisines and Identities in Korean-American Diaspora.” Postcolonial Studies 8.1 (2005): 109–125.Sharma, Preeti, et al. “Nail File: A Study of Nail Salon Workers and Industry in the United States.” UCLA Labor Center and California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative, 2018.Shimizu, Celine Parrenas. The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2007.Shomura, Chad. “Object Theory and Asian American Literature.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. 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Abstract:

Sometimes a particular concept—a simple term—is the spark to a series of ideas. It might be ostentatious and perhaps hubristic that the editors of an issue on persona might imagine that their choice of the term persona has provided this intellectual spark. Fully aware of that risk, we want to announce that it has. The response to the call for papers related to persona was our first sign that something special was being initiated. The sheer number and interdisciplinary breadth of the abstracts and ultimate submissions was evidence that the term ‘persona’ was the catalyst to an explosion of ideas. As the responses flowed into the journal and to us, we became aware of the meme-like qualities of the many interpretations and history of the term, each with its own idiosyncratic coding of patterned similarity. The reality of this development is that it was not entirely unexpected. The editors have been developing the concept of persona and persona studies over the past four years, and persona studies has emerged from a congruence in our collective research interests as an interdisciplinary investigation of the presentation of the self in the contemporary moment. Together, we have been involved in the development of the Persona Celebrity Publics Research Group (PCP) at Deakin University. Within that group, we have concentrated ourselves in the Persona Research cluster, made up of a group of 15 or so academics along with another smaller group from other institutions. Emerging from our work is the forthcoming book entitled Persona Studies: Celebrity, Identity, and the Transformation of Public Culture (forthcoming Wiley 2015). Both the book and the research group are intent on exploring what has been altering in our worlds, our cultures, and our communities that make us think the new intensified play of the personal in public needs closer scrutiny. The impetus for us as a team of scholars is quite clearly linked to the uses of online culture and how greater aspects of our lives are now involved in public displays, mediated displays, and a peculiar new blend of interpersonal and presentational constructions of identities and selves. Persona as a specific area of inquiry has emerged from the close study of the public self. Its immediate intellectual past has its strongest links with research on celebrity. In the Celebrity Studies Reader collection, Marshall began forming the idea that a new public self was emerging through new media (New Media). In subsequent work, Marshall identifies celebrity culture as one of the pedagogic sources for how the wider population presented itself in online culture and social media (Marshall, Promotion). Barbour and Marshall expanded their thinking about the presentation of the self through a closer study of online academic persona and the different strategic ways individuals were managing and building reputations and prestige through these techniques. Terms such as the ‘comprehensive,’ ’networked’, and ‘uncontained’ self, mapped the various kinds of public personalities that were emerging through the most prominent academics (Barbour and Marshall). In a similar vein, Barbour’s research has looked closely at the online and public personas that fringe artists—specifically tattoo artists, craftivists, performance poets and street artists—produce and maintain in the contemporary moment (Hiding; Finding). Her work has advanced the concepts of “registers of performance” (Registers), where a closer analysis of how the personal, the professional, and sometimes the intimate registers are constructed and deployed to produce a public persona that demonstrates ‘artistness’. By analysing persona through registers of performance, Barbour is able to differentiate between the types of identity building activity that occurs online. This provides insight into the ways that impression management occurs in spaces that suffer from context collapse due to the intersection of friends, family, fans, and followers. Moore’s work (Hats; Magic; Invigorating) on the player’s assembly of a networked online ‘gamer’ persona considers the intersection of social media and video game culture and contributes analysis of the affective dimensions of player-oriented game objects and their public curation and display. His recent research visualising Twitter and Flickr data (Screenshots, forthcoming) advances an understanding of the accumulation and online presentation of the self through digital game artefacts, specifically video game screenshots. He is currently researching the interaction of social media activity, reputation management, and everyday identity ‘play’ within public game cultures and the larger dynamics of production and consumption of games and play in the video game industry. Most recently, Marshall called for what he titled a “persona studies manifesto”: the public presentation of the self demands a more extensive analysis of the play and deployment of persona in contemporary culture. Beyond popular culture, the development of reputation and persona and its intersection with online culture especially needs to be explored in those professions, disciplines and activities where this form of investigation has never been attempted (Marshall, Persona Studies). The initiative of persona studies then is in some ways turning the cultural studies’ approach to the study of the audience on its head: it is a study of agency and the processes by which agency has been individualized and assembled across contemporary culture, but highly privileged in online culture (Marshall, Personifying). Persona studies involves a close investigation of the personalized and negotiated presentation of the self. So, what is persona? The articles here assume different, but connected, understandings of the term, each with levels of deference to writers such as Jung, Goffman, Butler, and Foucault, along with some expected allusions to the ancient Greeks and Romans who coined the term. The Greek origins identify that persona is a mask and derived from performance and acting. From Hannah Arendt’s reading of the Greeks this mask of public identity was not seen in a derogatory way; rather it was natural to assume a public/political persona that was quite removed from the private and home sphere. A political persona defined by citizenry was a clearly conscious separation from the household of activity. Jung’s take on persona is that it was designed for collective experience and for the outside world and therapy would lead to an understanding of the individual that delved beneath the persona. The resurgence in interest in Goffman’s dramaturgical analogy allows us to consider persona as an everyday performance, where the purpose of the presentation of self is to convince the audience (and at times, the performer) that the performance is genuine and authentic. All of us know what it is like to act in a role, to wear a uniform or costume, to create a profile. More than a few of us know what it is to suffer through the ‘individualising’ categories of a social networking sign-up survey that do not adequately account for distinctions. Persona is all these things, or rather, through the various everyday activities of our work, social, and online selves we contribute to the accretion of the identity at the base of its structure. Persona functions like the construct or automated script that we assemble to interact with the world with on our behalf. This involves the technologies of computation and mediation and their interfaces that function to automate, produce and filter communication with us; email, blogs, Twitter accounts, and so on. These golems interconnect and can interact on their own in unpredictable ways on our behalf; connecting our Facebook account to a product, brand or petition; using Google as a portal to login into other web enabled services; or authorising an app to record our location. Then there are the traces that we leave scattered across digital networks, intranets, hard drives, and lost USB memory sticks, from scattered collections of digital photos to the contact lists of our mobile devices and the ‘achievements’ in our online gaming profiles. Persona can also be something that happens to us, as friends tag unflattering images via Facebook, or another Twitter user publicly addresses us with a unwanted, or unwarranted commentary, using the ‘@’ and the ‘#’ functions. We have an extensive degree of control over the ways we assemble ourselves online and yet the contemporary experience is one of constant negotiation with forces that seeks to disavow their responsibilities to us, and maximise the limitations under which we can act. Our personas serve as a buffer to these forces. We can strategically assemble our persona to participate in, influence and use to our advantage to transmit messages across the network and communicate a mediated form of ourselves. The many ways to account persona stands as a primary and apparently Sisyphean task for persona studies: no sooner than when we might assemble a complete topology of the many accounts, traditions, domains, methodologies and theories for account of for the self, we will have arrived at possibly entirely new way of conceptualising the presentation of online persona through some post-Facebook, Oculus Rift, or Google Glass augmented reality experience. One of the challenges of persona studies will be to provide a series of methodological and theoretical tools, as well as a common touchstone from which multiple perspectives may converge around the meme-like qualities of this dramatic term. It will be necessary to consider the future of the presentation of the self, as much as the past accounts for the understanding of the self and its compositions. In the contemporary moment we consider a series of common currents and features of the iterations of persona with which we might begin this endeavour. The collective objective of the ‘persona’ theme edition is to coalesce around the emerging significance of the public self, and to map that activity within disciplinary traditions, historical precedents and the cultural and technological predispositions that have made this kind of reading of the contemporary world valuable, important, and ultimately, sensible. This collection of articles on persona is innovative in terms of the diversity of issues it tackles through the term. Given the massive change in public identity that we have identified as an elemental part of online culture, it is not surprising that social media and online constructions of persona figure prominently throughout the issue. However, we are also pleased to include papers that consider fictional performances from both television and film and even character studies of public figures. Marshall’s feature article for the edition continues his theorisation of persona. Seriality is identified as one of the ways that a consistency of persona is developed and the article charts the usefulness in analogizing how the construction of a serial character or ‘personnage’ for an actor/performer provides insights into the relationship between the person and persona in other settings that are emerging in the contemporary moment. In ‘Darkly Dreaming (in) Authenticity: The Self/Persona Opposition in Dexter,’ Glenn D'Cruz uses Dexter Morgan, the novelised serial killer and Showtime TV anti-hero to examine the connections between self and persona and the discourse of authenticity. D’Cruz foresees a series of challenges for persona studies and considers key concerns ahead, in terms of the critical vocabulary and scholarly agenda and addresses the need for critical genealogy of the term ‘persona’. Talia Morag, in ‘Persons and Their Personas: Living with Yourself’, considers the tensions identified in the persona of the private domain, and examines the patterns of social interaction that work to affect an ‘endorsed’ private persona, compared to those patterns classified as ‘hidden’. She frames the negotiation of these tensions as a move to better understand the sphere of the private self, as well as the those strains which arise on the private persona and the grounds from which they come to occupy our time. Together these two approaches predict the convergence of the private, the performed and the public persona which occupies Neil Henderson’s ‘The Contingency of Online Persona and Its Tension with Relationship Development’. Henderson’s engagement with the dimensions of online persona in the short film, Noah, takes a position at the crossroads between Marshall’s celebrity-inscribed approach to persona studies and the application of actor-network theory in order to map the potential pitfalls of identity management through ubiquitous technologies and broader critical questions about the play of our online selves in the everyday. Moving to the multi-user virtual environment of Second Life, Lesley Procter draws on the symbolic interactionist theories of social identity and the role of the avatar in ‘A Mirror without a Tain: Personae, Avatars, and Selves in a Multi-User Virtual Environment’. Procter’s contribution to persona studies highlights the actual and conceptual mirroring involved in the sense of the self involved in the interaction with others online. Taina Bucher’s ‘About a Bot: Hoax, Fake, Performance Art’ is a revealing examination of the Twitter bot phenomenon. Bucher’s case study on ‘bot fakeness’ considers the automation and performance of persona and the interactions and relationships between people and bots. Brady Robards, in ‘Digital Traces of the Persona through Ten Years of Facebook’, offers a critical reading of the Facebook ‘look back’ video creation application made to celebrate the social network’s ten year. As with Bucher and Proctor, Robards is concerned with the ways persona is created through highly mediated social networking platforms, where the agency of the individual is countered by the intervention of the software itself. Robards considers in particular two functions of Facebook: first as a site for the performance of life narratives, and second as a location for reflection on public and private disclosure. Taking a specific element of this idea of disclosure—the sharing of one’s legal name—as a starting point, Ellen Moll’s ‘What’s in a Nym?: Gender, Race, Pseudonymity, and the Imagining of the Online Persona’ is a study of the reactions of feminist and anti-racist bloggers in the ongoing battles over pseudonymity online. Moll’s contribution centres around current concerns with the ‘real name policies’ of social media and web-based platforms and services. What is at stake here in the negotiation between the individuals, technologies and institutions over the rights of self-determination and agency in the digital and online environments. Narrowing the focus to a single case study, Emma Maguire’s study of author website as a site of self-presentation in ‘Home, About, Shop, Contact: Constructing an Authorial Persona via the Author Website’ examines the authorial persona produced for consumption within literary markets. Framing of the authorial website as ‘automedial text’, rather than as direct representations of a pre-existing self, Maguire employs authorship theory to understand the website as a genre of persona performance and textuality. Shifting away from the focus on social media, this issue concludes with a trio of character studies, each of which involves a detailed and critical account of the dimensions of a public assembly of a persona. Nathan Farrell’s ‘From Activist to Entrepreneur: Peace One Day and the Changing Persona of the Social Campaigner’ is the first, and considers the ways that an individual manages his persona for different audiences. Farrell’s focus is Jeremy Gilley, a documentary filmmaker and peace campaigner, and the paper speaks to the dimensions of overlapping audiences connected to an articulation of a socially aware entrepreneurial persona. Sally Totman and Mat Hardy have a very different figure in their contribution as they examine the many different public personas of Libya’s Colonel Muammar Qaddafi. In ‘The Many Personas of Colonel Qaddafi’, Totman and Hardy interrogate the multiple aspects of Qaddafi’s construction as a brotherly revolutionary, philosopher, liberator, leader, and clown. The authors chart the progression of his often conflicted and chaotic legacy, and of this political, ideological and even messianic presentation of the self to the Western and Arab worlds. Anastasia Denisova, completes the triptych of persona case studies for this collection, with ‘How Vladimir Putin's Divorce Story Was Constructed and Received, or When the President Divorced His Wife and Married the Country Instead’. Denisova contends Vladimir Putin’s divorce is representative of the degree to which political and private persona are mediated and merged across often competing channels of communication. The analysis contends with online discourse, images, and texts, which reveal the extensive personification of politics in Putin’s public persona in an environment of reception by an audience which also consider the values and attributes of their own country as a national persona. Conclusion We have structured the narrative flow of articles in this issue on persona from the fictional through to the online transformations of the self and then even further into the analyses of the public and political dimensions that are part of the constitution of public selves. No doubt, you as a reader will see different connections and intersections and will play with what makes the idea of persona so meaningful and valuable in understanding the strategic construction of a public identity and so central to comprehending the contemporary moment. We invite you to engage with this further with the issue editors’ planned 2015 launch of a journal called Persona Studies. Until then, this issue of M/C Journal certainly represents the most comprehensive and, we think, interesting, collection of writing on persona as we explore the implications behind the mask of public identity. We hope the issue stimulates discussion and with that hope, we hope to hear from you.AcknowledgmentsThe editors would like to thank Alison Bennett for creating an original gif for the cover image of this issue. More of Bennett's work, including her augmented reality images of tattoos from the internationally acclaimed exhibition Shifting Skin, can be found at her website, alisonbennett.com.au.Thanks also to Trent Griffiths for his copy-editing assistance. References Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Charles R. Walgreen Foundation Lectures. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1958. Barbour, Kim. “Hiding in Plain Sight: Street Artists Online.” Platform Journal of Media and Communication. 5.1 (2013). Barbour, Kim. “Registers of Performance: Negotiating the professional, personal, and intimate.” MeCCSA 2014. Bournemouth, 8-10 Jan. 2014. Barbour, Kim. “Finding the Edge: Online persona creation by fringe artists.” Contemporary Publics International Symposium. 24-25 Feb. 2014. Barbour, Kim, and P. David Marshall. "The Academic Online: Constructing Persona through the World Wide Web." First Monday 17.9 (2012). ‹http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/3969/3292›. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. USA: Anchor Books, 1959. Jung, Carl Gustav. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. Bollingen Series. 2nd ed. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966. Marshall, P. David. "New Media New Self, the Changing Power of the Celebrity." The Celebrity Culture Reader. Ed. P. David Marshall. London: Routledge, 2006. 634-44. Marshall, P. David. "The Promotion and Presentation of the Self: Celebrity as Marker of Presentational Media." Celebrity Studies 1.1 (2010): 35-48. Marshall, P. David. "Personifying Agency: The Public–Persona–Place–Issue Continuum." Celebrity Studies 4.3 (2013): 369-71.Marshall, P. David. "Persona Studies: Mapping the Proliferation of the Public Self." Journalism 15.2 (2014): 153-70. Marshall, P. David, Chris Moore and Kim Barbour, Persona Studies: Celebrity, Identity and the Transformation of Public Culture. Hoboken NJ: Wiley, forthcoming 2015. Moore, Chris. “Hats of Affect: A Study of Affect, Achievements and Hats in Team Fortress 2.” Game Studies 11 (2011). ‹http://gamestudies.org/1101/articles/moore›. Moore, Chris. “The Magic Circle and the Mobility of Play.” Convergence 17 (2011): 373-387. Moore, Chris. “Invigorating Play: The Role of Affect in Online Multiplayer FPS Game.” Guns, Grenades, and Grunts: First-Person Shooter Games. Ed. Gerald A. Voorhees, Josh Call, and Katie Whitlock. London: Continuum, 2012. 341-363. Moore, Chris. “Screenshots as Virtual Photography: Cybernetics, Remediation and Affect.” Advancing Digital Humanities. Ed. Paul Longley Arthur and Katherine Bode. Palgrave Macmillan. Forthcoming 2014. .

Abstract:

During his speech in Plato’s The Symposium, Aristophanes explains that humans were originally round, composed of two people joined together in a perfect sphere with four arms, four legs, and two faces. Unfortunately, humans grew arrogant and ambitious; as a result, Zeus punished them by cleaving them in two. Now altered from their natural form, humans yearn for their former selves: “It is from this situation, then, that love for one another developed in human beings. Love collects the halves of our original nature, and tries to make a single thing out of the two parts so as to restore our natural condition. Thus, each of us is the matching half of a human being, since we have been severed like a flatfish, two coming from one, and each part is always seeking its other half” (191d). So it is that what we call “love” is but the “desire for wholeness” (193a). Love is not, for Aristophanes, a union but a re-union/reuniting. While Aristophanes’ account is simultaneously comedic and horrific, and consequently also absurdly ridiculous, there persists an undercurrent of some nebulous tickle, a recognition of something tangibly familiar in his myth, even now. Were space-time not linear and Plato could have Barbara Streisand speak next at that Athenian table (though of course he wouldn’t, as she’s a woman), he would undoubtedly have her sing “People”: “Lovers are very special people. They’re the luckiest people in the world. With one person, one very special person, a feeling deep in your soul, says you were half, now you’re whole.” “You complete me,” Jerry (played by Tom Cruise) says to Dorothy (played by Renée Zellweger) in the movie Jerry Maguire. How many lovers today claim their relationship with their beloved was meant to be? Even in a postmodern world, we seemingly have not strayed far from the Platonic ideal in which “lovers are incomplete halves of a single puzzle, searching for each other in order to become whole” (Ackerman 95). Implied by this model—described by Irving Singer as the “idealist tradition” (Modern 12)—is an uncomplicated conception of self. A self posited as fundamentally incomplete must be viewed as fixed and virtually invariable; otherwise, a multiplicity of ways in addition to a soul mate might be found to give the impoverished self what it needs. Viewed as yearning for his or her “other half,” the individual is positioned outside of/separated from the wider culture because only the “one true love” can make the person “whole.” Even biological impulses and psychological factors can be dismissed as irrelevant or possibly even dangerous distractions when all that truly matters is finding one’s “better half.” A self thus conceived also suggests a rather simplistic view of romantic love, which becomes merely the desire to achieve wholeness by connecting—or reconnecting, as Plato’s Aristophanes would have it—with a complementary lover. Unfortunately, the idealist model’s emphasis on deficiency codifies an ontology of lack that tends to foster omissions, oversimplifications, and misinterpretations. But, as numerous influential thinkers have convincingly argued, identity is neither uniform nor stable—nor even uncontested. Subjectivity is more accurately characterised by complexity and multiplicity than by simplicity and singularity. What, then, of romantic love? Is romantic love in contemporary Western cultures similarly complex, and if so, so what? How would (re)conceptualising romantic love as complex extend our knowledge and understanding of complex systems? I want to contribute to this themed issue of M/C Journal on complex by approaching romantic love as a point of departure, as an analytical methodology. I maintain that a critical study of romantic love—one that begins rather than concludes with romantic love’s complexity—helps illustrate the productive nature of complex and the utility of employing complex as a conceptual/theoretical point of origin and inquiry. Crucially, my formulation configures complex as a productive process that is itself a product. In other words, complex can be usefully defined as an effect that produces other effects—including potentially subversive ones. While other definitions are certainly valid, conceiving complex as an outcome that generates further outcomes not only emphasises the dynamic, multifaceted nature of systems but also helps to explain that multifaceted dynamism. Romantic love illustrates well this conception of complex (as productive product) because romantic love only has meaning, only works, because it is complex to begin with. In this manner, romantic love is a process of creating complexity from complexity. An examination that begins from a point of complexity gains much, I feel, by beginning with a historicisation of that complexity, for complex, as outcome/effect, is always already contextualised, situated, and diachronic. Historicising romantic love is particularly crucial because the idealist model tends to dismiss the past (what matters the past once one has finally met the love of one’s life?) and confuse history—especially its own—with nature (as with the supposedly natural passivity of the feminine). According to Singer, the idealist tradition, first codified by Plato, was taken up by medieval theologians who, drawn by the tradition’s ideal of merging, sought to produce a mystical oneness with the divine (Courtly 23). Emphasis eventually moved from merging to the experience of merging, a move that facilitated the rise of courtly love. Transmuting religious reverence into human devotion, courtly love introduced such revolutionary and potentially heretical notions as the belief that “love is an intense, passionate relationship that establishes a holy oneness between man and woman” (23). The desire for oneness appears even more prominently in the Romanticism of the 19th century (288). Importantly, erotic love becomes for the first time conjoined with romantic love in a causal rather than antithetical or consequential relation: “To the Romantic, sexual desire is usually more than just a vehicle or concomitant of love; it is a prerequisite” (Modern 10). Little wonder, given such a trajectory, that romantic love today has virtually no meaning independent of sexual love (though sexual desire may or may not be linked to romantic love). Little wonder as well that romantic love is so complex. But there’s more. As Stephanie Coontz explains, marriage in the West was until only about two centuries ago a political and economic institution having little or nothing to do with romantic love (33). Anthony Giddens also points out the relatively recent shift from an economic to a romantic basis for marriage (26). Giddens associates this shift with the emergence of what he terms “plastic sexuality”: “decentered sexuality, freed from the needs of reproduction” (2). Plastic sexuality resulted from a combination of factors, most notably societal trends toward limiting family size coupled with advances in contraceptive and reproductive technologies (27). Allowing for greater freedom and pleasure (especially for women), plastic sexuality is for Giddens linked not only to romantic love but also, intrinsically, to self-identity (2, 40). This connection—along with the plastic sexuality that undergirds it—creates narratives of self (and other) that can project “a course of future development” (45), lead to greater reflexivity for the body and the self (31), and transform intimacy in ways potentially subversive and emancipative (3, 194). In any case, our (inter)personal existence is currently undergoing active transfiguration, Giddens asserts, to the point that “personal life has become an open project, creating new demands and anxieties” (8). My reading of Giddens places this continuous, reflexive project of self (what one might alternatively term the ongoing production of selves-in-process) against the plastic sexuality and pure relationships that engendered the project. Only a view of romantic love as productive, evolving, and full—in other words, complex—can account for the complex transformations of intimacy and self described by Giddens. Viewed more broadly, romantic love corresponds—in both the analogous and communicative meanings of the term—to/with the very poststructural/postmodern subject it helps to enact. Tamsin Lorraine’s lucid articulation of embodied subjectivity is worth quoting at length in this context: I assume that the selves we experience as our own are the product of a historically conditioned process involving both corporeal and psychic aspects of existence, that this process needs to be instituted and continually reiterated in a social context in order to give birth to and maintain the subject at the corporeal level of embodiment as well as the psychic level of self, and that language and social positioning within a larger social field play a crucial role in this process. In taking up a position in the social field as a speaker of language, a human being takes up a perspective from which to develop a narrative of self. (ix-x) Others have theorised identity as a narrative construct (Holstein and Gubrium; Rosenwald and Ochberg). What is significant here in reading Lorraine’s embodied subjectivity through the interpretative lens provided by Giddens is the particular kind of narrative suggested by such a reading. After all, not just any narrative will do. The “perspective” taken up by the reflexive subject (as described by Giddens) in the process of constructing a storied self necessarily requires a productive integration of the many “aspects of existence.” Otherwise, no such “position” could be taken, no agency established; the particular self would not even be. As such, the perspective is a product of complexity even as it attempts to compose its own complex product (a narrative identity). Additionally, romantic love conceived as complex, as a productive force, opens up possibilities for new stories and new selves, even when, as in Lacanian theory, desire is correlated with lack. Lacan maintains that “desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction nor the demand for love, but the difference which results from the subtraction of the first from the second—the very phenomenon of their splitting” (287). Lack presented thusly is positive inasmuch as lack causes desire, which in turn produces the subject as a subjectivity. “Without lack,” Bruce Fink asserts, “the subject can never come into being, and the whole efflorescence of the dialectic of desire is squashed” (103). For clarification, Fink provides a simple illustration: “Why would a child even bother to learn to speak if all its needs were anticipated?” (103). Desire here is correlated with lack in a manner that suggests movement and change, bringing to mind Anne Carson’s famous quip, “Desire moves. Eros is a verb” (17). Keeping in mind that romantic love has become inextricably entwined with sexual desire in the West, designs that interrogate desire vis-à-vis lack (a strategy that also characterises the approaches taken by Hegel and Sartre) operate equally well in regards to self-identities formed via romantic love. Certainly, then, if desire constituted as lack can produce complexity by remaining unsatisfied and unfilled, what then of an approach that configures desire itself as production? Such a theoretical grounding is central to the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. For them, “everything is production” (Anti-Oedipus 4). In this view, life, the self, and even the body are not unified things but rather processes characterised by flow and multiplicity. Deleuze and Guattari emphasise the dynamic process of various sorts of “becoming” (Thousand 279). Becoming, in relation to romantic love and to other processes, involves not just individuals but assemblages. In this, Deleuze and Guattari present a collaborative conception of self involving the multiplicity of the two selves as well as the multiplicity “formed through the collaboration” (Lorraine 134). As Deleuze and Guattari explain, multiplicity “is continually transforming itself into a string of other multiplicities” (Thousand 249). To my mind, this “string” of multiplicities directly parallels the complex. Luce Irigaray’s project similarly views subjectivity as embodied, potentially collaborative, and creative. Specifically, however, Irigaray seeks to challenge the masculine specular subjectivity that fosters divisive dualisms and a sexual division of labour that privileges the masculine. She critiques the subject-object distinction that has always defined female sexuality “on the basis of masculine parameters” (This 204) and relegated the feminine to the role of other to the masculine subject. One of the more interesting aspects of Irigaray’s enterprise is her project of symbolic transformation, an attempt to symbolise an alternative feminine subjectivity: “Irigaray insists that we need to acknowledge two genders and work on providing the hitherto impoverished gender the symbolic support it needs to become more than the counterpart of masculinity. If the feminine were given the support of a gender in its own right, then feminine subjectivity could finally emerge” (Lorraine 91). What Irigaray advocates is a dialectical interaction between subjects that embraces both difference and corporeality, that is temporal, playful, reciprocal, and mutually nourishing (I Love 148). Elizabeth Grosz’s refiguring of desire somewhat echoes Irigaray’s stance. Drawing upon Deleuze and Guattarai, Grosz also conceptualises desire as productive and full. She insists that in order to understand this expanded conception of desire we must first “abandon our habitual understanding of entities as the integrated totality of parts, and instead focus on the elements, the parts, outside their integration or organisation; we must look beyond the organism to the organs comprising it” (78). Totalities remain and must be recognised, but an understanding of the dynamics of those totalities is better accomplished through an investigation of the parts rather the whole. In her privileging of parts I see reflections of Irigaray’s respect for difference and dialectical creation. Indeed, one can easily see themes of fluidity and multiplicity running through the work of the theorists we have examined. This thematic/analytical consistency, I would argue, is at least partially explained by their active engagement in the complexity of romantic love. How not to theorise subjectivities formed via narratives of romantic love in a manner that resists dualisms when romantic love itself overflows with multiplicities? This is not, of course, to downplay the role of other factors, contingencies, and motivations. Still, that some feminists are critical of certain aspects of Foucauldian theory (his failure to adequately account for unequal power relations; his seeming denial that one group or class may dominate another) strikes me as directly related to issues located (if not exclusively) within the contemporary concept of romantic love (see Hartsock; Ramazanoğlu; Sedgwick). That such is the case is, for me, no surprise. Ultimately, in spite of its long history of repression and inequity, romantic love’s ever-increasing complexity points to possible future transformations (as Giddens details). My optimism stems from the fact that romantic love’s productive force can potentially open up whole new ranges of (complex) possibilities. In the theories of Giddens, Deleuze, Irigaray, Grosz, and numerous others, we witness some of these emerging possibilities. Framing complex as an outcome that produces other complex outcomes allows me to envision the possibility of even more possibilities—something akin to Irigaray’s “expanding universe” (This 209). In the final (for now) analysis, let us follow Grosz’s lead and privilege parts over the whole. Viewed from this perspective, a given system cannot be considered as a complex thing, as though it were an isolated singularity. Focusing on the specific, the particular, and the concrete serves to highlight the contingencies, fragments, flows, shifts, multiplicities, instabilities, and relations that constitute and produce the complex. In saying this, I am not simply asserting a tautology: the complex is complex. Because the components of something complex interact in ways both provisional and productive, the complex must inevitably produce new components, parts that constitute and change the system, as well as other parts that eventually form and/or alter other complex systems. Put another way, the individual parts of a complex are themselves complex. Consequently, a deeper understanding can be gained by stepping back and re-visioning the parts-to-the-whole paradigm as complexoutcomes-ofcomplex-outcomes. Romantic love, I believe, is such an example, and an especially ubiquitous and influential one at that. Only by beginning with an understanding of love as complex can we adequately explain how it operates and produces the kinds of effects that it does. Nothing simple could produce such profoundly complex effects as identities, discourses, and material objects. Something simple may very well produce simple outcomes that eventually conjoin into something complex, a whole composed of many individual parts. But only something already complex (i.e., an existing outcome of outcomes) can produce complex outcomes instantly and automatically as a matter of course in an intricate unfolding of relationships that, like love, circulate, bond, motivate, and potentially transform. References Ackerman, Diane. A Natural History of Love. New York: Random House, 1994. Carson, Anne. Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1986. Coontz, Stephanie. Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage. New York: Viking, 2005. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 1972. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. ———. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 1980. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1995. Giddens, Anthony. The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1992. Grosz, Elizabeth. “Refiguring Lesbian Desire.” The Lesbian Postmodern. Ed. Laura Doan. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. 67-84. Hartsock, Nancy. “Foucault on Power: A Theory for Women?” Feminism/Postmodernism. Ed. Linda J. Nicholson. New York: Routledge, 1990. 157-175. Hegel, G. W. F. The Phenomenology of Mind. Trans. J. B. Baillie. New York: Harper, 1967. Holstein, James A., and Jaber F. Gubrium. The Self We Live By: Narrating Identity in a Postmodern World. New York: Oxford UP, 2000. Irigaray, Luce. I Love to You: Sketch of a Possible Felicity in History. Trans. Alison Martin. New York: Routledge, 1996. ———. “This Sex Which Is Not One.” 1985. A Reader in Feminist Knowledge. Ed. Sneja Gunew. New York: Routledge, 1991. 204-211. Jerry Maguire. Dir. Cameron Crowe. Columbia/Tristar, 1996. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. 1966. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977. Lorraine, Tamsin. Irigaray and Deleuze: Experiments in Visceral Philosophy. Ithaca, New York: Cornell UP, 1999. Plato. The Symposium and The Phaedrus. Trans. William Cobb. New York: SUNY P, 1993. Ramazanoğlu, Caroline, ed. Up against Foucault: Explorations of Some Tensions between Foucault and Feminism. New York: Routledge, 1993. Rosenwald, George C., and Richard L. Ochberg, eds. Storied Lives: The Cultural Politics of Self-Understanding. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1992. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press, 1956. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003. Singer, Irving. The Nature of Love: Courtly and Romantic. Vol. 2. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1984. ———. The Nature of Love: The Modern World. Vol. 3. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1987. Streisand, Barbra. “People.” By Bob Merrill and Jule Styne. People. Columbia, 1964. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Carpenter, Richard. "The Heart of the Matter: Complex as Productive Force." M/C Journal 10.3 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/02-carpenter.php>. APA Style Carpenter, R. (Jun. 2007) "The Heart of the Matter: Complex as Productive Force," M/C Journal, 10(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/02-carpenter.php>.

Abstract:

In Australia the “intimacy” of citizenship (Berlant 2), is often used to reinforce subscription to heteronormative romantic and familial structures. Because this framing promotes discourses of moral failure, recent political attention to sexuality and same-sex couples can be filtered through insights into coalitional affiliations. This paper uses contemporary shifts in Australian politics and culture to think through the concept of coalition, and in particular to analyse connections between sexuality and governmentality (or more specifically normative bias and same-sex relationships) in what I’m calling post-coalitional Australia. Against the unpredictability of changing parties and governments, allegiances and alliances, this paper suggests the continuing adherence to a heteronormatively arranged public sphere. After the current Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard deposed the previous leader, Kevin Rudd, she clung to power with the help of independents and the Greens, and clichés of a “rainbow coalition” and a “new paradigm” were invoked to describe the confused electorate and governmental configuration. Yet in 2007, a less confused Australia decisively threw out the Howard–led Liberal and National Party coalition government after eleven years, in favour of Rudd’s own rainbow coalition: a seemingly invigorated party focussed on gender equity, Indigenous Australians, multi-cultural visibility, workplace relations, Austral-Asian relations, humane refugee processing, the environment, and the rights and obligations of same-sex couples. A post-coalitional Australia invokes something akin to “aftermath culture” (Lambert and Simpson), referring not just to Rudd’s fall or Howard’s election loss, but to the broader shifting contexts within which most Australian citizens live, and within which they make sense of the terms “Australia” and “Australian”. Contemporary Australia is marked everywhere by cracks in coalitions and shifts in allegiances and belief systems – the Coalition of the Willing falling apart, the coalition government crushed by defeat, deposed leaders, and unlikely political shifts and (re)alignments in the face of a hung parliament and renewed pushes toward moral and cultural change. These breakdowns in allegiances are followed by swift symbolically charged manoeuvres. Gillard moved quickly to repair relations with mining companies damaged by Rudd’s plans for a mining tax and to water down frustration with the lack of a sustainable Emissions Trading Scheme. And one of the first things Kevin Rudd did as Prime Minister was to change the fittings and furnishings in the Prime Ministerial office, of which Wright observed that “Mr Howard is gone and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has moved in, the Parliament House bureaucracy has ensured all signs of the old-style gentlemen's club… have been banished” (The Age, 5 Dec. 2007). Some of these signs were soon replaced by Ms. Gillard herself, who filled the office in turn with memorabilia from her beloved Footscray, an Australian Rules football team. In post-coalitional Australia the exile of the old Menzies’ desk and a pair of Chesterfield sofas works alongside the withdrawal of troops from Iraq and renewed pledges for military presence in Afghanistan, apologising to stolen generations of Indigenous Australians, the first female Governor General, deputy Prime Minister and then Prime Minister (the last two both Gillard), the repealing of disadvantageous workplace reform, a focus on climate change and global warming (with limited success as stated), a public, mandatory paid maternity leave scheme, changes to the processing and visas of refugees, and the amendments to more than one hundred laws that discriminate against same sex couples by the pre-Gillard, Rudd-led Labor government. The context for these changes was encapsulated in an announcement from Rudd, made in March 2008: Our core organising principle as a Government is equality of opportunity. And advancing people and their opportunities in life, we are a Government which prides itself on being blind to gender, blind to economic background, blind to social background, blind to race, blind to sexuality. (Rudd, “International”) Noting the political possibilities and the political convenience of blindness, this paper navigates the confusing context of post-coalitional Australia, whilst proffering an understanding of some of the cultural forces at work in this age of shifting and unstable alliances. I begin by interrogating the coalitional impulse post 9/11. I do this by connecting public coalitional shifts to the steady withdrawal of support for John Howard’s coalition, and movement away from George Bush’s Coalition of the Willing and the War on Terror. I then draw out a relationship between the rise and fall of such affiliations and recent shifts within government policy affecting same-sex couples, from former Prime Minister Howard’s amendments to The Marriage Act 1961 to the Rudd-Gillard administration’s attention to the discrimination in many Australian laws. Sexual Citizenship and Coalitions Rights and entitlements have always been constructed and managed in ways that live out understandings of biopower and social death (Foucault History; Discipline). The disciplining of bodies, identities and pleasures is so deeply entrenched in government and law that any non-normative claim to rights requires the negotiation of existing structures. Sexual citizenship destabilises the post-coalitional paradigm of Australian politics (one of “equal opportunity” and consensus) by foregrounding the normative biases that similarly transcend partisan politics. Sexual citizenship has been well excavated in critical work from Evans, Berlant, Weeks, Richardson, and Bell and Binnie’s The Sexual Citizen which argues that “many of the current modes of the political articulation of sexual citizenship are marked by compromise; this is inherent in the very notion itself… the twinning of rights with responsibilities in the logic of citizenship is another way of expressing compromise… Every entitlement is freighted with a duty” (2-3). This logic extends to political and economic contexts, where “natural” coalition refers primarily to parties, and in particular those “who have powerful shared interests… make highly valuable trades, or who, as a unit, can extract significant value from others without much risk of being split” (Lax and Sebinius 158). Though the term is always in some way politicised, it need not refer only to partisan, multiparty or multilateral configurations. The subscription to the norms (or normativity) of a certain familial, social, religious, ethnic, or leisure groups is clearly coalitional (as in a home or a front, a club or a team, a committee or a congregation). Although coalition is interrogated in political and social sciences, it is examined frequently in mathematical game theory and behavioural psychology. In the former, as in Axelrod’s The Evolution of Cooperation, it refers to people (or players) who collaborate to successfully pursue their own self-interests, often in the absence of central authority. In behavioural psychology the focus is on group formations and their attendant strategies, biases and discriminations. Experimental psychologists have found “categorizing individuals into two social groups predisposes humans to discriminate… against the outgroup in both allocation of resources and evaluation of conduct” (Kurzban, Tooby and Cosmides 15387). The actions of social organisation (and not unseen individual, supposedly innate impulses) reflect the cultural norms in coalitional attachments – evidenced by the relationship between resources and conduct that unquestioningly grants and protects the rights and entitlements of the larger, heteronormatively aligned “ingroup”. Terror Management Particular attention has been paid to coalitional formations and discriminatory practices in America and the West since September 11, 2001. Terror Management Theory or TMT (Greenberg, Pyszczynski and Solomon) has been the main framework used to explain the post-9/11 reassertion of large group identities along ideological, religious, ethnic and violently nationalistic lines. Psychologists have used “death-related stimuli” to explain coalitional mentalities within the recent contexts of globalised terror. The fear of death that results in discriminatory excesses is referred to as “mortality salience”, with respect to the highly visible aspects of terror that expose people to the possibility of their own death or suffering. Naverette and Fessler find “participants… asked to contemplate their own deaths exhibit increases in positive evaluations of people whose attitudes and values are similar to their own, and derogation of those holding dissimilar views” (299). It was within the climate of post 9/11 “mortality salience” that then Prime Minister John Howard set out to change The Marriage Act 1961 and the Family Law Act 1975. In 2004, the Government modified the Marriage Act to eliminate flexibility with respect to the definition of marriage. Agitation for gay marriage was not as noticeable in Australia as it was in the U.S where Bush publicly rejected it, and the UK where the Civil Union Act 2004 had just been passed. Following Bush, Howard’s “queer moral panic” seemed the perfect decoy for the increased scrutiny of Australia’s involvement in the Iraq war. Howard’s changes included outlawing adoption for same-sex couples, and no recognition for legal same-sex marriages performed in other countries. The centrepiece was the wording of The Marriage Amendment Act 2004, with marriage now defined as a union “between a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others”. The legislation was referred to by the Australian Greens Senator Bob Brown as “hateful”, “the marriage discrimination act” and the “straight Australia policy” (Commonwealth 26556). The Labor Party, in opposition, allowed the changes to pass (in spite of vocal protests from one member) by concluding the legal status of same-sex relations was in no way affected, seemingly missing (in addition to the obvious symbolic and physical discrimination) the equation of same-sex recognition with terror, terrorism and death. Non-normative sexual citizenship was deployed as yet another form of “mortality salience”, made explicit in Howard’s description of the changes as necessary in protecting the sanctity of the “bedrock institution” of marriage and, wait for it, “providing for the survival of the species” (Knight, 5 Aug. 2003). So two things seem to be happening here: the first is that when confronted with the possibility of their own death (either through terrorism or gay marriage) people value those who are most like them, joining to devalue those who aren’t; the second is that the worldview (the larger religious, political, social perspectives to which people subscribe) becomes protection from the potential death that terror/queerness represents. Coalition of the (Un)willing Yet, if contemporary coalitions are formed through fear of death or species survival, how, for example, might these explain the various forms of risk-taking behaviours exhibited within Western democracies targeted by such terrors? Navarette and Fessler (309) argue that “affiliation defences are triggered by a wider variety of threats” than “existential anxiety” and that worldviews are “in turn are reliant on ‘normative conformity’” (308) or “normative bias” for social benefits and social inclusions, because “a normative orientation” demonstrates allegiance to the ingroup (308-9). Coalitions are founded in conformity to particular sets of norms, values, codes or belief systems. They are responses to adaptive challenges, particularly since September 11, not simply to death but more broadly to change. In troubled times, coalitions restore a shared sense of predictability. In Howard’s case, he seemed to say, “the War in Iraq is tricky but we have a bigger (same-sex) threat to deal with right now. So trust me on both fronts”. Coalitional change as reflective of adaptive responses thus serves the critical location of subsequent shifts in public support. Before and since September 11 Australians were beginning to distinguish between moderation and extremism, between Christian fundamentalism and productive forms of nationalism. Howard’s unwavering commitment to the American-led war in Iraq saw Australia become a member of another coalition: the Coalition of the Willing, a post 1990s term used to describe militaristic or humanitarian interventions in certain parts of the world by groups of countries. Howard (in Pauly and Lansford 70) committed Australia to America’s fight but also to “civilization's fight… of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom”. Although Bush claimed an international balance of power and influence within the coalition (94), some countries refused to participate, many quickly withdrew, and many who signed did not even have troops. In Australia, the war was never particularly popular. In 2003, forty-two legal experts found the war contravened International Law as well as United Nations and Geneva conventions (Sydney Morning Herald 26 Feb. 2003). After the immeasurable loss of Iraqi life, and as the bodies of young American soldiers (and the occasional non-American) began to pile up, the official term “coalition of the willing” was quietly abandoned by the White House in January of 2005, replaced by a “smaller roster of 28 countries with troops in Iraq” (ABC News Online 22 Jan. 2005). The coalition and its larger war on terror placed John Howard within the context of coalitional confusion, that when combined with the domestic effects of economic and social policy, proved politically fatal. The problem was the unclear constitution of available coalitional configurations. Howard’s continued support of Bush and the war in Iraq compounded with rising interest rates, industrial relations reform and a seriously uncool approach to the environment and social inclusion, to shift perceptions of him from father of the nation to dangerous, dithery and disconnected old man. Post-Coalitional Change In contrast, before being elected Kevin Rudd sought to reframe Australian coalitional relationships. In 2006, he positions the Australian-United States alliance outside of the notion of military action and Western territorial integrity. In Rudd-speak the Howard-Bush-Blair “coalition of the willing” becomes F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “willingness of the heart”. The term coalition was replaced by terms such as dialogue and affiliation (Rudd, “Friends”). Since the 2007 election, Rudd moved quickly to distance himself from the agenda of the coalition government that preceded him, proposing changes in the spirit of “blindness” toward marginality and sexuality. “Fix-it-all” Rudd as he was christened (Sydney Morning Herald 29 Sep. 2008) and his Labor government began to confront the legacies of colonial history, industrial relations, refugee detention and climate change – by apologising to Aboriginal people, timetabling the withdrawal from Iraq, abolishing the employee bargaining system Workchoices, giving instant visas and lessening detention time for refugees, and signing the Kyoto Protocol agreeing (at least in principle) to reduce green house gas emissions. As stated earlier, post-coalitional Australia is not simply talking about sudden change but an extension and a confusion of what has gone on before (so that the term resembles postcolonial, poststructural and postmodern because it carries the practices and effects of the original term within it). The post-coalitional is still coalitional to the extent that we must ask: what remains the same in the midst of such visible changes? An American focus in international affairs, a Christian platform for social policy, an absence of financial compensation for the Aboriginal Australians who received such an eloquent apology, the lack of coherent and productive outcomes in the areas of asylum and climate change, and an impenetrable resistance to the idea of same-sex marriage are just some of the ways in which these new governments continue on from the previous one. The Rudd-Gillard government’s dealings with gay law reform and gay marriage exemplify the post-coalitional condition. Emulating Christ’s relationship to “the marginalised and the oppressed”, and with Gillard at his side, Rudd understandings of the Christian Gospel as a “social gospel” (Rudd, “Faith”; see also Randell-Moon) to table changes to laws discriminating against gay couples – guaranteeing hospital visits, social security benefits and access to superannuation, resembling de-facto hetero relationships but modelled on the administering and registration of relationships, or on tax laws that speak primarily to relations of financial dependence – with particular reference to children. The changes are based on the report, Same Sex, Same Entitlements (HREOC) that argues for the social competence of queer folk, with respect to money, property and reproduction. They speak the language of an equitable economics; one that still leaves healthy and childless couples with limited recognition and advantage but increased financial obligation. Unable to marry in Australia, same-sex couples are no longer single for taxation purposes, but are now simultaneously subject to forms of tax/income auditing and governmental revenue collection should either same-sex partner require assistance from social security as if they were married. Heteronormative Coalition Queer citizens can quietly stake their economic claims and in most states discreetly sign their names on a register before becoming invisible again. Mardi Gras happens but once a year after all. On the topic of gay marriage Rudd and Gillard have deferred to past policy and to the immoveable nature of the law (and to Howard’s particular changes to marriage law). That same respect is not extended to laws passed by Howard on industrial relations or border control. In spite of finding no gospel references to Jesus the Nazarene “expressly preaching against hom*osexuality” (Rudd, “Faith”), and pre-election promises that territories could govern themselves with respect to same sex partnerships, the Rudd-Gillard government in 2008 pressured the ACT to reduce its proposed partnership legislation to that of a relationship register like the ones in Tasmania and Victoria, and explicitly demanded that there be absolutely no ceremony – no mimicking of the real deal, of the larger, heterosexual citizens’ “ingroup”. Likewise, with respect to the reintroduction of same-sex marriage legislation by Greens senator Sarah Hanson Young in September 2010, Gillard has so far refused a conscience vote on the issue and restated the “marriage is between a man and a woman” rhetoric of her predecessors (Topsfield, 30 Sep. 2010). At the same time, she has agreed to conscience votes on euthanasia and openly declared bi-partisan (with the federal opposition) support for the war in Afghanistan. We see now, from Howard to Rudd and now Gillard, that there are some coalitions that override political differences. As psychologists have noted, “if the social benefits of norm adherence are the ultimate cause of the individual’s subscription to worldviews, then the focus and salience of a given individual’s ideology can be expected to vary as a function of their need to ally themselves with relevant others” (Navarette and Fessler 307). Where Howard invoked the “Judaeo-Christian tradition”, Rudd chose to cite a “Christian ethical framework” (Rudd, “Faith”), that saw him and Gillard end up in exactly the same place: same sex relationships should be reduced to that of medical care or financial dependence; that a public ceremony marking relationship recognition somehow equates to “mimicking” the already performative and symbolic heterosexual institution of marriage and the associated romantic and familial arrangements. Conclusion Post-coalitional Australia refers to the state of confusion borne of a new politics of equality and change. The shift in Australia from conservative to mildly socialist government(s) is not as sudden as Howard’s 2007 federal loss or as short-lived as Gillard’s hung parliament might respectively suggest. Whilst allegiance shifts, political parties find support is reliant on persistence as much as it is on change – they decide how to buffer and bolster the same coalitions (ones that continue to privilege white settlement, Christian belief systems, heteronormative familial and symbolic practices), but also how to practice policy and social responsibility in a different way. Rudd’s and Gillard’s arguments against the mimicry of heterosexual symbolism and the ceremonial validation of same-sex partnerships imply there is one originary form of conduct and an associated sacred set of symbols reserved for that larger ingroup. Like Howard before them, these post-coalitional leaders fail to recognise, as Butler eloquently argues, “gay is to straight not as copy is to original, but as copy is to copy” (31). To make claims to status and entitlements that invoke the messiness of non-normative sex acts and romantic attachments necessarily requires the negotiation of heteronormative coalitional bias (and in some ways a reinforcement of this social power). As Bell and Binnie have rightly observed, “that’s what the hard choices facing the sexual citizen are: the push towards rights claims that make dissident sexualities fit into heterosexual culture, by demanding equality and recognition, versus the demand to reject settling for heteronormativity” (141). The new Australian political “blindness” toward discrimination produces positive outcomes whilst it explicitly reanimates the histories of oppression it seeks to redress. The New South Wales parliament recently voted to allow same-sex adoption with the proviso that concerned parties could choose not to adopt to gay couples. The Tasmanian government voted to recognise same-sex marriages and unions from outside Australia, in the absence of same-sex marriage beyond the current registration arrangements in its own state. In post-coalitional Australia the issue of same-sex partnership recognition pits parties and allegiances against each other and against themselves from within (inside Gillard’s “rainbow coalition” the Rainbow ALP group now unites gay people within the government’s own party). Gillard has hinted any new proposed legislation regarding same-sex marriage may not even come before parliament for debate, as it deals with real business. Perhaps the answer lies over the rainbow (coalition). As the saying goes, “there are none so blind as those that will not see”. References ABC News Online. “Whitehouse Scraps Coalition of the Willing List.” 22 Jan. 2005. 1 July 2007 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200501/s1286872.htm›. Axelrod, Robert. The Evolution of Cooperation. New York: Basic Books, 1984. Berlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. Bell, David, and John Binnie. The Sexual Citizen: Queer Politics and Beyond. Cambridge, England: Polity, 2000. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Commonwealth of Australia. Parliamentary Debates. House of Representatives 12 Aug. 2004: 26556. (Bob Brown, Senator, Tasmania.) Evans, David T. Sexual Citizenship: The Material Construction of Sexualities. London: Routledge, 1993. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. A. Sheridan. London: Penguin, 1991. ———. The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. Trans. Robert Hurley. London: Penguin, 1998. Greenberg, Jeff, Tom Pyszczynski, and Sheldon Solomon. “The Causes and Consequences of the Need for Self-Esteem: A Terror Management Theory.” Public Self, Private Self. Ed. Roy F. Baumeister. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1986. 189-212. Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. Same-Sex: Same Entitlements Report. 2007. 21 Aug. 2007 ‹http://www.hreoc.gov.au/human_rights/samesex/report/index.html›. Kaplan, Morris. Sexual Justice: Democratic Citizenship and the Politics of Desire. New York: Routledge, 1997. Knight, Ben. “Howard and Costello Reject Gay Marriage.” ABC Online 5 Aug. 2003. Kurzban, Robert, John Tooby, and Leda Cosmides. "Can Race Be Erased? Coalitional Computation and Social Categorization." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 98.26 (2001): 15387–15392. Lambert, Anthony, and Catherine Simpson. "Jindabyne’s Haunted Alpine Country: Producing (an) Australian Badland." M/C Journal 11.5 (2008). 20 Oct. 2010 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/81›. Lax, David A., and James K. Lebinius. “Thinking Coalitionally: Party Arithmetic Process Opportunism, and Strategic Sequencing.” Negotiation Analysis. Ed. H. Peyton Young. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1991. 153-194. Naverette, Carlos, and Daniel Fessler. “Normative Bias and Adaptive Challenges: A Relational Approach to Coalitional Psychology and a Critique of Terror Management Theory.” Evolutionary Psychology 3 (2005): 297-325. Pauly, Robert J., and Tom Lansford. Strategic Preemption: US Foreign Policy and Second Iraq War. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Randall-Moon, Holly. "Neoliberal Governmentality with a Christian Twist: Religion and Social Security under the Howard-Led Australian Government." Eds. Michael Bailey and Guy Redden. Mediating Faiths: Religion and Socio- Cultural Change in the Twenty-First Century. Farnham: Ashgate, in press. Richardson, Diane. Rethinking Sexuality. London: Sage, 2000. Rudd, Kevin. “Faith in Politics.” The Monthly 17 (2006). 31 July 2007 ‹http://www.themonthly.com.au/monthly-essays-kevin-rudd-faith-politics--300›. Rudd, Kevin. “Friends of Australia, Friends of America, and Friends of the Alliance That Unites Us All.” Address to the 15th Australian-American Leadership Dialogue. The Australian, 24 Aug. 2007. 13 Mar. 2008 ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/climate/kevin-rudds-address/story-e6frg6xf-1111114253042›. Rudd, Kevin. “Address to International Women’s Day Morning Tea.” Old Parliament House, Canberra, 11 Mar. 2008. 1 Oct. 2010 ‹http://pmrudd.archive.dpmc.gov.au/node/5900›. Sydney Morning Herald. “Coalition of the Willing? Make That War Criminals.” 26 Feb. 2003. 1 July 2007 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/02/25/1046064028608.html›. Topsfield, Jewel. “Gillard Rules Out Conscience Vote on Gay Marriage.” The Age 30 Sep. 2010. 1 Oct. 2010 ‹http://www.theage.com.au/national/gillard-rules-out-conscience-vote-on-gay-marriage-20100929-15xgj.html›. Weeks, Jeffrey. "The Sexual Citizen." Theory, Culture and Society 15.3-4 (1998): 35-52. Wright, Tony. “Suite Revenge on Chesterfield.” The Age 5 Dec. 2007. 4 April 2008 ‹http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/suite-revenge-on-chesterfield/2007/12/04/1196530678384.html›.

Abstract:

Introduction The research from which this piece derives explores political remix video (PRV), a genre in which remixers critique dominant discourses and power structures through guerrilla remixing of copyrighted footage (“What Is Political Remix Video?”). Specifically, I examined the works of political video remixer Elisa Kreisinger, whose queer remixes of shows such as Sex and the City and Mad Men received considerable attention between 2010 and the present. As a rhetoric scholar, I am attracted not only to the ways that remix functions discursively but also the ways in which remixers are constrained in their ability to argue, and what recourse they have in these situations of legal and technological constraint. Ultimately, many of these struggles play out on YouTube. This is unsurprising: many studies of YouTube and other user-generated content (UGC) platforms focus on the fact that commercial sites cannot constitute utopian, democratic, or free environments (Hilderbrand; Hess; Van Dijck). However, I find that, contrary to popular belief, YouTube’s commercial interests are not the primary factor limiting remixer agency. Rather, United States copyright law as enacted on YouTube has the most potential to inhibit remixers. This has led to many remixers becoming advocates for fair use, the provision in the Copyright Act of 1976 that allows for limited use of copyrighted content. With this in mind, I decided to delve more deeply into the framing of fair use by remixers and other advocates such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Center for Social Media. In studying discourses of fair use as they play out in the remix community, I find that the framing of fair use bears a striking similarity to what rhetoric scholars have termed vernacular discourse—a discourse emanating from a small segment of the larger civic community (Ono and Sloop 23). The vernacular is often framed as that which integrates the institutional or mainstream while simultaneously asserting its difference through appropriation and subversion. A video qualifies as fair use if it juxtaposes source material in a new way for the purposes of critique. In turn, a vernacular text asserts its “vernacularity” by taking up parts of pre-existing dominant institutional discourses in a way that resonates with a smaller community. My argument is that this tension between institutional and vernacular gives political remix video a multivalent argument—one that presents itself both in the text of the video itself as well as in the video’s status as a fair use of copyrighted material. Just as fair use represents the assertion of creator agency against unfair copyright law, vernacular discourse represents the assertion of a localised community within a world dominated by institutional discourses. In this way, remixers engage rights holders and other institutions in a pleasurable game of cat and mouse, a struggle to expose the boundaries of draconian copyright law. YouTube’s Commercial InterestsYouTube’s commercial interests operate at a level potentially invisible to the casual user. While users provide YouTube with content, they also provide the site with data—both metadata culled from their navigations of the site (page views, IP addresses) as well as member-provided data (such as real name and e-mail address). YouTube mines this data for a number of purposes—anything from interface optimisation to targeted advertising via Google’s AdSense. Users also perform a certain degree of labour to keep the site running smoothly, such as reporting videos that violate the Terms of Service, giving videos the thumbs up or thumbs down, and reporting spam comments. As such, users involved in YouTube’s participatory culture are also necessarily involved in the site’s commercial interests. While there are legitimate concerns regarding the privacy of personal information, especially after Google introduced policies in 2012 to facilitate a greater flow of information across all of their subsidiaries, it does not seem that this has diminished YouTube’s popularity (“Google: Privacy Policy”).Despite this, some make the argument that users provide the true benefit of UGC platforms like YouTube, yet reap few rewards, creating an exploitative dynamic (Van Dijck, 46). Two assumptions seem to underpin this argument: the first is that users do not desire to help these platforms prosper, the second is that users expect to profit from their efforts on the website. In response to these arguments, it’s worth calling attention to scholars who have used alternative economic models to account for user-platform coexistence. This is something that Henry Jenkins addresses in his recent book Spreadable Media, largely by focusing on assigning alternate sorts of value to user and fan labour—either the cultural worth of the gift, or the satisfaction of a job well done common to pre-industrial craftsmanship (61). However, there are still questions of how to account for participatory spaces in which labours of love coexist with massively profitable products. In service of this point, Jenkins calls up Lessig, who posits that many online networks operate as hybrid economies, which combine commercial and sharing economies. In a commercial economy, profit is the primary consideration, while a sharing economy is composed of participants who are there because they enjoy doing the work without any expectation of compensation (176). The strict separation between the two economies is, in Lessig’s estimation, essential to the hybrid economy’s success. While it would be difficult to incorporate these two economies together once each had been established, platforms like YouTube have always operated under the hybrid principle. YouTube’s users provide the site with its true value (through their uploading of content, provision of metadata, and use of the site), yet users do not come to YouTube with these tasks in mind—they come to YouTube because it provides an easy-to-use platform by which to share amateur creativity, and a community with whom to interact. Additionally, YouTube serves as the primary venue where remixers can achieve visibility and viral status—something Elisa Kreisinger acknowledged in our interviews (2012). However, users who are not concerned with broad visibility as much as with speaking to particular viewers may leave YouTube if they feel that the venue does not suit their content. Some feminist fan vidders, for instance, have withdrawn from YouTube due to what they perceived as a community who didn’t understand their work (Kreisinger, 2012). Additionally, Kreisinger ended up garnering many more views of her Queer Men remix on Vimeo due simply to the fact that the remix’s initial upload was blocked via YouTube’s Content ID feature. By the time Kreisinger had argued her case with YouTube, the Vimeo link had become the first stop for those viewing and sharing the remix, which received 72,000 views to date (“Queer Men”). Fair Use, Copyright, and Content IDThis instance points to the challenge that remixers face when dealing with copyright on YouTube, a site whose processes are not designed to accommodate fair use. Specifically, Title II, Section 512 of the DMCA (the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, passed in 1998) states that certain websites may qualify as “safe harbours” for copyright infringement if users upload the majority of the content to the site, or if the site is an information location service. These sites are insulated from copyright liability as long as they cooperate to some extent with rights holders. A common objection to Section 512 is that it requires media rights holders to police safe harbours in search of infringing content, rather than placing the onus on the platform provider (Meyers 939). In order to cooperate with Section 512 and rights holders, YouTube initiated the Content ID system in 2007. This system offers rights holders the ability to find and manage their content on the site by creating archives of footage against which user uploads are checked, allowing rights holders to automatically block, track, or monetise uses of their content (it is also worth noting that rights holders can make these responses country-specific) (“How Content ID Works”). At the current time, YouTube has over 15 million reference files against which it checks uploads (“Statistics - YouTube”). Thus, it’s fairly common for uploaded work to get flagged as a violation, especially when that work is a remix of popular institutional footage. If an upload is flagged by the Content ID system, the user can dispute the match, at which point the rights holder has the opportunity to either allow the video through, or to issue a DMCA takedown notice. They can also sue at any point during this process (“A Guide to YouTube Removals”). Content ID matches are relatively easy to dispute and do not generally require legal intervention. However, disputing these automatic takedowns requires users to be aware of their rights to fair use, and requires rights holders to acknowledge a fair use (“YouTube Removals”). This is only compounded by the fact that fair use is not a clearly defined right, but rather a vague provision relying on a balance between four factors: the purpose of the use, character of the work, the amount used, and the effect on the market value of the original (“US Copyright Office–Fair Use”). As Aufderheide and Jaszi observed in 2008, the rejection of videos for Content ID matches combined with the vagaries of fair use has a chilling effect on user-generated content. Rights Holders versus RemixersRights holders’ objections to Section 512 illustrate the ruling power dynamic in current intellectual property disputes: power rests with institutional rights-holding bodies (the RIAA, the MPAA) who assert their dominance over DMCA safe harbours such as YouTube (who must cooperate to stay in business) who, in turn, exert power over remixers (the lowest on the food chain, so to speak). Beyond the observed chilling effect of Content ID, remix on YouTube is shot through with discursive struggle between these rights-holding bodies and remixers attempting to express themselves and reach new communities. However, this has led political video remixers to become especially vocal when arguing for their uses of content. For instance, in the spring of 2009, Elisa Kreisinger curated a show entitled “REMOVED: The Politics of Remix Culture” in which blocked remixes screened alongside the remixers’ correspondence with YouTube. Kreisinger writes that each of these exchanges illustrate the dynamic between rights holders and remixers: “Your video is no longer available because FOX [or another rights-holding body] has chosen to block it (“Remixed/Removed”). Additionally, as Jenkins notes, even Content ID on YouTube is only made available to the largest rights holders—smaller companies must still go through an official DMCA takedown process to report infringement (Spreadable 51). In sum, though recent technological developments may give the appearance of democratising access to content, when it comes to policing UGC, technology has made it easier for the largest rights holders to stifle the creation of content.Additionally, it has been established that rights holders do occasionally use takedowns abusively, and recent court cases—specifically Lenz v. Universal Music Corp.—have established the need for rights holders to assess fair use in order to make a “good faith” assertion that users intend to infringe copyright prior to issuing a takedown notice. However, as Joseph M. Miller notes, the ruling fails to rebalance the burdens and incentives between rights holders and users (1723). This means that while rights holders are supposed to take fair use into account prior to issuing takedowns, there is no process in place that either effectively punishes rights holders who abuse copyright, or allows users to defend themselves without the possibility of massive financial loss (1726). As such, the system currently in place does not disallow or discourage features like Content ID, though cases like Lenz v. Universal indicate a push towards rebalancing the burden of determining fair use. In an effort to turn the tables, many have begun arguing for users’ rights and attempting to parse fair use for the layperson. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), for instance, has espoused an “environmental rhetoric” of fair use, casting intellectual property as a resource for users (Postigo 1020). Additionally, they have created practical guidelines for UGC creators dealing with DMCA takedowns and Content ID matches on YouTube. The Center for Social Media has also produced a number of fair use guides tailored to different use cases, one of which targeted online video producers. All of these efforts have a common goal: to educate content creators about the fair use of copyrighted content, and then to assert their use as fair in opposition to large rights-holding institutions (though they caution users against unfair uses of content or making risky legal moves that could lead to lawsuits). In relation to remix specifically, this means that remixers must differentiate themselves from institutional, commercial content producers, standing up both for the argument contained in their remix as well as their fair use of copyrighted content.In their “Code of Best Practices for Fair Use in Online Video,” the Center for Social Media note that an online video qualifies as a fair use if (among other things) it critiques copyrighted material and if it “recombines elements to make a new work that depends for its meaning on (often unlikely) relationships between the elements” (8). These two qualities are also two of the defining qualities of political remix video. For instance, they write that work meets the second criteria if it creates “new meaning by juxtaposition,” noting that in these cases “the recombinant new work has a cultural identity of its own and addresses an audience different from those for which its components were intended” (9). Remixes that use elements of familiar sources in unlikely combinations, such as those made by Elisa Kreisinger, generally seek to reach an audience who are familiar with the source content, but also object to it. Sex and the City, for instance, while it initially seemed willing to take on previously “taboo” topics in its exploration of dating in Manhattan, ended with each of the heterosexual characters paired with an opposite sex partner, and forays from this heteronormative narrative were contained either within in one-off episodes or tokenised gay characters. For this reason, Kreisinger noted that the intended audience for Queer Carrie were the queer and feminist viewers of Sex and the City who felt that the show was overly normative and exclusionary (Kreisinger, Art:21). As a result, the target audience of these remixes is different from the target audience of the source material—though the full nuance of the argument is best understood by those familiar with the source. Thus, the remix affirms the segment of the viewing community who saw only tokenised representations of their identity in the source text, and in so doing offers a critique of the original’s heteronormative focus.Fair Use and the VernacularVernacular discourse, as broadly defined by Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, refers to discourses that “emerge from discussions between members of self-identified smaller communities within the larger civic community.” It operates partially through appropriating dominant discourses in ways better suited to the vernacular community, through practices of pastiche and cultural syncretism (23). In an effort to better describe the intricacies of this type of discourse, Robert Glenn Howard theorised a hybrid “dialectical vernacular” that oscillates between institutional and vernacular discourse. This hybridity arises from the fact that the institutional and the vernacular are fundamentally inseparable, the vernacular establishing its meaning by asserting itself against the institutional (Howard, Toward 331). When put into use online, this notion of a “dialectical vernacular” is particularly interesting as it refers not only to the content of vernacular messages but also to their means of production. Howard notes that discourse embodying the dialectical vernacular is by nature secondary to institutional discourse, that the institutional must be clearly “structurally prior” (Howard, Vernacular 499). With this in mind it is unsurprising that political remix video—which asserts its secondary nature by calling upon pre-existing copyrighted content while simultaneously reaching out to smaller segments of the civic community—would qualify as a vernacular discourse.The notion of an institutional source’s structural prevalence also echoes throughout work on remix, both in practical guides such as the Center for Social Media’s “Best Practices” as well as in more theoretical takes on remix, like Eduardo Navas’ essay “Turbulence: Remixes + Bonus Beats,” in which he writes that:In brief, the remix when extended as a cultural practice is a second mix of something pre-existent; the material that is mixed for a second time must be recognized, otherwise it could be misunderstood as something new, and it would become plagiarism […] Without a history, the remix cannot be Remix. An elegant theoretical concept, this becomes muddier when considered in light of copyright law. If the history of remix is what gives it its meaning—the source text from which it is derived—then it is this same history that makes a fair use remix vulnerable to DMCA takedowns and other forms of discipline on YouTube. However, as per the criteria outlined by the Center for Social Media, it is also from this ironic juxtaposition of institutional sources that the remix object establishes its meaning, and thus its vernacularity. In this sense, the force of a political remix video’s argument is in many ways dependent on its status as an object in peril: vulnerable to the force of a law that has not yet swung in its favor, yet subversive nonetheless.With this in mind, YouTube and other UGC platforms represent a fraught layer of mediation between institutional and vernacular. As a site for the sharing of amateur video, YouTube has the potential to affirm small communities as users share similar videos, follow one particular channel together, or comment on videos posted by people in their networks. However, YouTube’s interface (rife with advertisem*nts, constantly reminding users of its affiliation with Google) and cooperation with rights holders establish it as an institutional space. As such, remixes on the site are already imbued with the characteristic hybridity of the dialectical vernacular. This is especially true when the remixers (as in the case of PRV) have made the conscious choice to advocate for fair use at the same time that they distribute remixes dealing with other themes and resonating with other communities. ConclusionPolitical remix video sits at a fruitful juncture with regard to copyright as well as vernacularity. Like almost all remix, it makes its meaning through juxtaposing sources in a unique way, calling upon viewers to think about familiar texts in a new light. This creation invokes a new audience—a quality that makes it both vernacular and also a fair use of content. Given that PRV is defined by the “guerrilla” use of copyrighted footage, it has the potential to stand as a political statement outside of the thematic content of the remix simply due to the nature of its composition. This gives PRV tremendous potential for multivalent argument, as a video can simultaneously represent a marginalised community while advocating for copyright reform. This is only reinforced by the fact that many political video remixers have become vocal in advocating for fair use, asserting the strength of their community and their common goal.In addition to this argumentative richness, PRV’s relation to fair use and vernacularity exposes the complexity of the remix form: it continually oscillates between institutional affiliations and smaller vernacular communities. However, the hybridity of these remixes produces tension, much of which manifests on YouTube, where videos are easily responded to and challenged by both institutuional and vernacular authorities. In addition, a tension exists in the remix text itself between the source and the new, remixed message. Further research should attend to these areas of tension, while also exploring the tenacity of the remix community and their ability to advocate for themselves while circumventing copyright law.References“About Political Remix Video.” Political Remix Video. 15 Feb. 2012. ‹http://www.politicalremixvideo.com/what-is-political-remix/›.Aufderheide, Patricia, and Peter Jaszi. Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. Kindle.“Code of Best Practices for Fair Use in Online Video.” The Center For Social Media, 2008. Van Dijck, José. “Users like You? Theorizing Agency in User-Generated Content.” Media Culture Society 31 (2009): 41-58.“A Guide to YouTube Removals,” The Electronic Frontier Foundation, 15 June 2013 ‹https://www.eff.org/issues/intellectual-property/guide-to-YouTube-removals›.Hilderbrand, Lucas. “YouTube: Where Cultural Memory and Copyright Converge.” Film Quarterly 61.1 (2007): 48-57.Howard, Robert Glenn. “The Vernacular Web of Participatory Media.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 25.5 (2008): 490-513.Howard, Robert Glenn. “Toward a Theory of the World Wide Web Vernacular: The Case for Pet Cloning.” Journal of Folklore Research 42.3 (2005): 323-60.“How Content ID Works.” YouTube. 21 June 2013. ‹https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2797370?hl=en›.Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: New York U P, 2013. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York U P, 2006. Kreisinger, Elisa. Interview with Nick Briz. Art:21. Art:21, 30 June 2011. 21 June 2013.Kreisinger, Elisa. “Queer Video Remix and LGBTQ Online Communities,” Transformative Works and Cultures 9 (2012). 19 June 2013 ‹http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/395/264›.Kreisinger, Elisa. Pop Culture Pirate. < http://www.popculturepirate.com/ >.Lessig, Lawrence. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. New York: Penguin Books, 2008. PDF.Meyers, B.G. “Filtering Systems or Fair Use? A Comparative Analysis of Proposed Regulations for User-Generated Content.” Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal 26.3: 935-56.Miller, Joseph M. “Fair Use through the Lenz of § 512(c) of the DMCA: A Preemptive Defense to a Premature Remedy?” Iowa Law Review 95 (2009-2010): 1697-1729.Navas, Eduardo. “Turbulence: Remixes + Bonus Beats.” New Media Fix 1 Feb. 2007. 10 June 2013 ‹http://newmediafix.net/Turbulence07/Navas_EN.html›.Ono, Kent A., and John M. Sloop. Shifting Borders: Rhetoric, Immigration and California’s Proposition 187. Philadelphia: Temple U P, 2002.“Privacy Policy – Policies & Principles.” Google. 19 June 2013 ‹http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/›.Postigo, Hector. “Capturing Fair Use for The YouTube Generation: The Digital Rights Movement, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the User-Centered Framing of Fair Use.” Information, Communication & Society 11.7 (2008): 1008-27.“Statistics – YouTube.” YouTube. 21 June 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html›.“US Copyright Office: Fair Use,” U.S. Copyright Office. 19 June 2013 ‹http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html›.“YouTube Help.” YouTube FAQ. 19 June 2013 ‹http://support.google.com/youtube/?hl=en&topic=2676339&rd=2›.

Abstract:

Unlike some current discourse on automediality, this essay eschews most of the analysis concerning the adoption or modification of avatars to deliberately enhance, extend or distort the self. Rather than the automedial enabling of alternative, virtual selves modified by playful, confronting or disarming avatars we concentrate instead on emerging efforts to present the self in hyper-realist, interactive modes. In doing so we ask, what is the relationship between traumatic forms of automediation and the affective impact on and response of the audience? We argue that, while on the one hand there are promising avenues for valuable individual and social engagements with traumatic forms of automediation, there is an overwhelming predominance of suffering as a theme in such virtual depictions, comingled with uncritically asserted promises of empathy, which are problematic as the technology assumes greater mainstream uptake.As Smith and Watson note, embodiment is always a “translation” where the body is “dematerialized” in virtual representation (“Virtually” 78). Past scholarship has analysed the capacity of immersive realms, such as Second Life or online games, to highlight how users can modify their avatars in often spectacular, non-human forms. Critics of this mode of automediality note that users can adopt virtually any persona they like (racial, religious, gendered and sexual, human, animal or hybrid, and of any age), behaving as “identity tourists” while occupying virtual space or inhabiting online communities (Nakamura). Furthermore, recent work by Jaron Lanier, a key figure from the 1980s period of early Virtual Reality (VR) technology, has also explored so-called “homuncular flexibility” which describes the capacity for humans to seemingly adapt automatically to the control mechanisms of an avatar with multiple legs, other non-human appendages, or for two users to work in tandem to control a single avatar (Won et. al.). But this article is concerned less with these single or multi-player online environments and the associated concerns over modifying interactive identities. We are principally interested in other automedial modes where the “auto” of autobiography is automated via Artificial Intelligences (AIs) to convincingly mimic human discourse as narrated life-histories.We draw from case studies promoted by the 2017 season of ABC television’s flagship science program, Catalyst, which opened with semi-regular host and biological engineer Dr Jordan Nguyen, proclaiming in earnest, almost religious fervour: “I want to do something that has long been a dream. I want to create a copy of a human. An avatar. And it will have a life of its own in virtual reality.” As the camera followed Nguyen’s rapid pacing across real space he extolled: “Virtual reality, virtual human, they push the limits of the imagination and help us explore the impossible […] I want to create a virtual copy of a person. A digital addition to the family, using technology we have now.”The troubling implications of such rhetoric were stark and the next third of the program did little to allay such techno-scientific misgivings. Directed and produced by David Symonds, with Nguyen credited as co-developer and presenter, the episode “Meet the Avatars” immediately introduced scenarios where “volunteers” entered a pop-up inner city virtual lab, to experience VR for the first time. The volunteers were shown on screen subjected to a range of experimental VR environments designed to elicit fear and/or adverse and disorienting responses such as vertigo, while the presenter and researchers from Sydney University constantly smirked and laughed at their participants’ discomfort. We can only wonder what the ethics process was for both the ABC and university researchers involved in these broadcast experiments. There is little doubt that the participant/s experienced discomfort, if not distress, and that was televised to a national audience. Presenter Nguyen was also shown misleading volunteers on their way to the VR lab, when one asked “You’re not going to chuck us out of a virtual plane are you?” to which Nguyen replied “I don't know what we’re going to do yet,” when it was next shown that they immediately underwent pre-programmed VR exposure scenarios, including a fear of falling exercise from atop a city skyscraper.The sweat-inducing and heart rate-racing exposures to virtual plank walks high above a cityscape, or seeing subjects haptically viewing spiders crawl across their outstretched virtual hands, all elicited predictable responses, showcased as carnivalesque entertainment for the viewing audience. As we will see, this kind of trivialising of a virtual environment’s capacity for immersion belies the serious use of the technology in a range of treatments for posttraumatic stress disorder (see Rizzo and Koenig; Rothbaum, Rizzo and Difede).Figure 1: Nguyen and researchers enjoying themselves as their volunteers undergo VR exposure Defining AutomedialityIn their pioneering 2008 work, Automedialität: Subjektkonstitution in Schrift, Bild und neuen Medien, Jörg Dünne and Christian Moser coined the term “automediality” to problematise the production, application and distribution of autobiographic modes across various media and genres—from literary texts to audiovisual media and from traditional expression to inter/transmedia and remediated formats. The concept of automediality was deployed to counter the conventional critical exclusion of analysis of the materiality/technology used for an autobiographical purpose (Gernalzick). Dünne and Moser proffered a concept of automediality that rejects the binary division of (a) self-expression determining the mediated form or (b) (self)subjectivity being solely produced through the mediating technology. Hence, automediality has been traditionally applied to literary constructs such as autobiography and life-writing, but is now expanding into the digital domain and other “paratextual sites” (Maguire).As Nadja Gernalzick suggests, automediality should “encourage and demand not only a systematics and taxonomy of the constitution of the self in respectively genre-specific ways, but particularly also in medium-specific ways” (227). Emma Maguire has offered a succinct working definition that builds on this requirement to signal the automedial universally, noting it operates asa way of studying auto/biographical texts (of a variety of forms) that take into account how the effects of media shape the kinds of selves that can be represented, and which understands the self not as a preexisting subject that might be distilled into story form but as an entity that is brought into being through the processes of mediation.Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson point to automediality as a methodology, and in doing so emphasize how the telling or mediation of a life actually shapes the kind of story that can be told autobiographically. They state “media cannot simply be conceptualized as ‘tools’ for presenting a preexisting, essential self […] Media technologies do not just transparently present the self. They constitute and expand it” (Smith and Watson “Virtually Me” 77).This distinction is vital for understanding how automediality might be applied to self-expression in virtual domains, including the holographic avatar dreams of Nguyen throughout Catalyst. Although addressing this distinction in relation to online websites, following P. David Marshall’s description of “the proliferation of the public self”, Maguire notes:The same integration of digital spaces and platforms into daily life that is prompting the development of new tools in autobiography studies […] has also given rise to the field of persona studies, which addresses the ways in which individuals engage in practices of self-presentation in order to form commoditised identities that circulate in affective communities.For Maguire, these automedial works operate textually “to construct the authorial self or persona”.An extension to this digital, authorial construction is apparent in the exponential uptake of screen mediated prosumer generated content, whether online or theatrical (Miller). According to Gernalzick, unlike fictional drama films, screen autobiographies more directly enable “experiential temporalities”. Based on Mary Anne Doane’s promotion of the “indexicality” of film/screen representations to connote the real, Gernalzick suggests that despite semiotic theories of the index problematising realism as an index as representation, the film medium is still commonly comprehended as the “imprint of time itself”:Film and the spectator of film are said to be in a continuous present. Because the viewer is aware, however, that the images experienced in or even as presence have been made in the past, the temporality of the so-called filmic present is always ambiguous” (230).When expressed as indexical, automedial works, the intrinsic audio-visual capacities of film and video (as media) far surpass the temporal limitations of print and writing (Gernalzick, 228). One extreme example can be found in an emergent trend of “performance crime” murder and torture videos live-streamed or broadcast after the fact using mobile phone cameras and FaceBook (Bender). In essence, the political economy of the automedial ecology is important to understand in the overall context of self expression and the governance of content exhibition, access, distribution and—where relevant—interaction.So what are the implications for automedial works that employ virtual interfaces and how does this evolving medium inform both the expressive autobiographical mode and audiences subjectivities?Case StudyThe Catalyst program described above strove to shed new light on the potential for emerging technology to capture and create virtual avatars from living participants who (self-)generate autobiographical narratives interactively. Once past the initial gee-wiz journalistic evangelism of VR, the episode turned towards host Nguyen’s stated goal—using contemporary technology to create an autonomous virtual human clone. Nguyen laments that if he could create only one such avatar, his primary choice would be that of his grandfather who died when Nguyen was two years old—a desire rendered impossible. The awkward humour of the plank walk scenario sequence soon gives way as the enthusiastic Nguyen is surprised by his family’s discomfort with the idea of digitally recreating his grandfather.Nguyen next visits a Southern California digital media lab to experience the process by which 3D virtual human avatars are created. Inside a domed array of lights and cameras, in less than one second a life-size 3D avatar is recorded via 6,000 LEDs illuminating his face in 20 different combinations, with eight cameras capturing the exposures from multiple angles, all in ultra high definition. Called the Light Stage (Debevec), it is the same technology used to create a life size, virtual holocaust survivor, Pinchas Gutter (Ziv).We see Nguyen encountering a life-size, high-resolution 2D screen version of Gutter’s avatar. Standing before a microphone, Nguyen asks a series of questions about Gutter’s wartime experiences and life in the concentration camps. The responses are naturalistic and authentic, as are the pauses between questions. The high definition 4K screen is photo-realist but much more convincing in-situ (as an artifact of the Catalyst video camera recording, in some close-ups horizontal lines of transmission appear). According to the project’s curator, David Traum, the real Pinchas Gutter was recorded in 3D as a virtual holograph. He spent 25 hours providing 1,600 responses to a broad range of questions that the curator maintained covered “a lot of what people want to say” (Catalyst).Figure 2: The Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan presented an installation of New Dimensions in Testimony, featuring Pinchas Gutter and Eva SchlossIt is here that the intersection between VR and auto/biography hybridise in complex and potentially difficult ways. It is where the concept of automediality may offer insight into this rapidly emerging phenomenon of creating interactive, hyperreal versions of our selves using VR. These hyperreal VR personae can be questioned and respond in real-time, where interrogators interact either as casual conversers or determined interrogators.The impact on visitors is sobering and palpable. As Nguyen relates at the end of his session, “I just want to give him a hug”. The demonstrable capacity for this avatar to engender a high degree of empathy from its automedial testimony is clear, although as we indicate below, it could simply indicate increased levels of emotion.Regardless, an ongoing concern amongst witnesses, scholars and cultural curators of memorials and museums dedicated to preserving the history of mass violence, and its associated trauma, is that once the lived experience and testimony of survivors passes with that generation the impact of the testimony diminishes (Broderick). New media modes of preserving and promulgating such knowledge in perpetuity are certainly worthy of embracing. As Stephen Smith, the executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation suggests, the technology could extendto people who have survived cancer or catastrophic hurricanes […] from the experiences of soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder or survivors of sexual abuse, to those of presidents or great teachers. Imagine if a slave could have told her story to her grandchildren? (Ziv)Yet questions remain as to the veracity of these recorded personae. The avatars are created according to a specific agenda and the autobiographical content controlled for explicit editorial purposes. It is unclear what and why material has been excluded. If, for example, during the recorded questioning, the virtual holocaust survivor became mute at recollecting a traumatic memory, cried or sobbed uncontrollably—all natural, understandable and authentic responses given the nature of the testimony—should these genuine and spontaneous emotions be included along with various behavioural ticks such as scratching, shifting about in the seat and other naturalistic movements, to engender a more profound realism?The generation of the photorealist, mimetic avatar—remaining as an interactive persona long after the corporeal, authorial being is gone—reinforces Baudrillard’s concept of simulacra, where a clone exists devoid of its original entity and unable to challenge its automedial discourse. And what if some unscrupulous hacker managed to corrupt and subvert Gutter’s AI so that it responded antithetically to its purpose, by denying the holocaust ever happened? The ethical dilemmas of such a paradigm were explored in the dystopian 2013 film, The Congress, where Robyn Wright plays herself (and her avatar), as an out of work actor who sells off the rights to her digital self. A movie studio exploits her screen persona in perpetuity, enabling audiences to “become” and inhabit her avatar in virtual space while she is limited in the real world from undertaking certain actions due to copyright infringement. The inability of Wright to control her mimetic avatar’s discourse or action means the assumed automedial agency of her virtual self as an immortal, interactive being remains ontologically perplexing.Figure 3: Robyn Wright undergoing a full body photogrammetry to create her VR avatar in The Congress (2013)The various virtual exposures/experiences paraded throughout Catalyst’s “Meet the Avatars” paradoxically recorded and broadcast a range of troubling emotional responses to such immersion. Many participant responses suggest great caution and sensitivity be undertaken before plunging headlong into the new gold rush mentality of virtual reality, augmented reality, and AI affordances. Catalyst depicted their program subjects often responding in discomfort and distress, with some visibly overwhelmed by their encounters and left crying. There is some irony that presenter Ngyuen was himself relying on the conventions of 2D linear television journalism throughout, adopting face-to-camera address in (unconscious) automedial style to excitedly promote the assumed socio-cultural boon such automedial VR avatars will generate.Challenging AuthenticityThere are numerous ethical considerations surrounding the potential for AIs to expand beyond automedial (self-)expression towards photorealist avatars interacting outside of their pre-recorded content. When such systems evolve it may be neigh impossible to discern on screen whether the person you are conversing with is authentic or an indistinguishable, virtual doppelganger. In the future, a variant on the Turning Test may be needed to challenge and identify such hyperreal simulacra. We may be witnessing the precursor to such a dilemma playing out in the arena of audio-only podcasts, with some public intellectuals such as Sam Harris already discussing the legal and ethical problems from technology that can create audio from typed text that convincingly replicate the actual voice of a person by sampling approximately 30 minutes of their original speech (Harris). Such audio manipulation technology will soon be available to anybody with the motivation and relatively minor level of technological ability in order to assume an identity and masquerade as automediated dialogue. However, for the moment, the ability to convincingly alter a real-time computer generated video image of a person remains at the level of scientific innovation.Also of significance is the extent to which the audience reactions to such automediated expressions are indeed empathetic or simply part of the broader range of affective responses that also include direct sympathy as well as emotions such as admiration, surprise, pity, disgust and contempt (see Plantinga). There remains much rhetorical hype surrounding VR as the “ultimate empathy machine” (Milk). Yet the current use of the term “empathy” in VR, AI and automedial forms of communication seems to be principally focused on the capacity for the user-viewer to ameliorate negatively perceived emotions and experiences, whether traumatic or phobic.When considering comments about authenticity here, it is important to be aware of the occasional slippage of technological terminology into the mainstream. For example, the psychological literature does emphasise that patients respond strongly to virtual scenarios, events, and details that appear to be “authentic” (Pertaub, Slater, and Barker). Authentic in this instance implies a resemblance to a corresponding scenario/activity in the real world. This is not simply another word for photorealism, but rather it describes for instance the experimental design of one study in which virtual (AI) audience members in a virtual seminar room designed to treat public speaking anxiety were designed to exhibit “random autonomous behaviours in real-time, such as twitches, blinks, and nods, designed to encourage the illusion of life” (Kwon, Powell and Chalmers 980). The virtual humans in this study are regarded as having greater authenticity than an earlier project on social anxiety (North, North, and Coble) which did not have much visual complexity but did incorporate researcher-triggered audio clips of audience members “laughing, making comments, encouraging the speaker to speak louder or more clearly” (Kwon, Powell, and Chalmers 980). The small movements, randomly cued rather than according to a recognisable pattern, are described by the researchers as creating a sense of authenticity in the VR environment as they seem to correspond to the sorts of random minor movements that actual human audiences in a seminar can be expected to make.Nonetheless, nobody should regard an interaction with these AIs, or the avatar of Gutter, as in any way an encounter with a real person. Rather, the characteristics above function to create a disarming effect and enable the real person-viewer to willingly suspend their disbelief and enter into a pseudo-relationship with the AI; not as if it is an actual relationship, but as if it is a simulation of an actual relationship (USC). Lucy Suchman and colleagues invoke these ideas in an analysis of a YouTube video of some apparently humiliating human interactions with the MIT created AI-robot Mertz. Their analysis contends that, while it may appear on first glance that the humans’ mocking exchange with Mertz are mean-spirited, there is clearly a playfulness and willingness to engage with a form of AI that is essentially continuous with “long-standing assumptions about communication as information processing, and in the robot’s performance evidence for the limits to the mechanical reproduction of interaction as we know it through computational processes” (Suchman, Roberts, and Hird).Thus, it will be important for future work in the area of automediated testimony to consider the extent to which audiences are willing to suspend disbelief and treat the recounted traumatic experience with appropriate gravitas. These questions deserve attention, and not the kind of hype displayed by the current iteration of techno-evangelism. Indeed, some of this resurgent hype has come under scrutiny. From the perspective of VR-based tourism, Janna Thompson has recently argued that “it will never be a substitute for encounters with the real thing” (Thompson). Alyssa K. Loh, for instance, also argues that many of the negatively themed virtual experiences—such as those that drop the viewer into a scene of domestic violence or the location of a terrorist bomb attack—function not to put you in the position of the actual victim but in the position of the general category of domestic violence victim, or bomb attack victim, thus “deindividuating trauma” (Loh).Future work in this area should consider actual audience responses and rely upon mixed-methods research approaches to audience analysis. 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Abstract:

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

As a scholarly discourse, transmedia storytelling relies heavily on conservative constructions of authorship that laud corporate architects and patriarchs such as George Lucas and J.J. Abrams as exemplars of “the creator.” This piece argues that transmedia theory works to construct patriarchal ideals of individual authorship to the detriment of alternative conceptions of transmediality, storyworlds, and authorship. The genesis for this piece was our struggle to find a transmedia storyworld that we were both familiar with, that also qualifies as “legitimate” transmedia in the eyes of our prospective scholarly readers. After trying to wrangle our various interests, fandoms, and areas of expertise into harmony, we realized we were exerting more effort in this process of validating stories as transmedia than actually examining how stories spread across various platforms, how they make meanings, and what kinds of pleasures they offer audiences. Authorship is a definitive criterion of transmedia storytelling theory; it is also an academic red herring. We were initially interested in investigating the possible overdeterminations between the healthcare industry and Breaking Bad (2008-2013). The series revolves around a high school chemistry teacher who launches a successful meth empire as a way to pay for his cancer treatments that a dysfunctional US healthcare industry refuses to fund. We wondered if the success of the series and the timely debates on healthcare raised in its reception prompted any PR response from or discussion among US health insurers. However, our concern was that this dynamic among medical and media industries would not qualify as transmedia because these exchanges were not authored by Vince Gilligan or any of the credited creators of Breaking Bad. Yet, why shouldn’t such interfaces between the “real world” and media fiction count as part of the transmedia story that is Breaking Bad? Most stories are, in some shape or form, transmedia stories at this stage, and transmedia theory acknowledges there is a long history to this kind of practice (Freeman). Let’s dispense with restrictive definitions of transmediality and turn attention to how storytelling behaves in a digital era, that is, the processes of creating, disseminating and amending stories across many different media, the meanings and forms such media and communications produce, and the pleasures they offer audiences.Can we think about how health insurance companies responded to Breaking Bad in terms of transmedia storytelling? Defining Transmedia Storytelling via AuthorshipThe scholarly concern with defining transmedia storytelling via a strong focus on authorship has traced slight distinctions between seriality, franchising, adaptation and transmedia storytelling (Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling;” Johnson, “Media Franchising”). However, the theoretical discourse on authorship itself and these discussions of the tensions between forms are underwritten by a gendered bias. Indeed, the very concept of transmediality may be a gendered backlash against the rising prominence of seriality as a historically feminised mode of storytelling, associated with television and serial novels.Even with the move towards traditionally lowbrow, feminized forms of trans-serial narrative, the majority of academic and popular criticism of transmedia storytelling reproduces and reinstates narratives of male-centred, individual authorship that are historically descended from theorizations of the auteur. Auteur theory, which is still considered a legitimate analytical framework today, emerged in postwar theorizations of Hollywood film by French critics, most prominently in the journal Cahiers du Cinema, and at the nascence of film theory as a field (Cook). Auteur theory surfaced as a way to conceptualise aesthetic variation and value within the Fordist model of the Hollywood studio system (Cook). Directors were identified as the ultimate author or “creative source” if a film sufficiently fitted a paradigm of consistent “vision” across their oeuvre, and they were thus seen as artists challenging the commercialism of the studio system (Cook). In this way, classical auteur theory draws a dichotomy between art and authorship on one side and commerce and corporations on the other, strongly valorising the former for its existence within an industrial context dominated by the latter. In recent decades, auteurist notions have spread from film scholarship to pervade popular discourses of media authorship. Even though transmedia production inherently disrupts notions of authorship by diffusing the act of creation over many different media platforms and texts, much of the scholarship disproportionately chooses to vex over authorship in a manner reminiscent of classical auteur theory.In scholarly terms, a chief distinction between serial storytelling and transmedia storytelling lies in how authorship is constructed in relation to the text: serial storytelling has long been understood as relying on distributed authorship (Hilmes), but transmedia storytelling reveres the individual mastermind, or the master architect who plans and disseminates the storyworld across platforms. Henry Jenkins’ definition of transmedia storytelling is multifaceted and includes, “the systematic dispersal of multiple textual elements across many channels, which reflects the synergies of media conglomeration, based on complex story-worlds, and coordinated authorial design of integrated elements” (Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling”). Jenkins is perhaps the most pivotal figure in developing transmedia studies in the humanities to date and a key reference point for most scholars working in this subfield.A key limitation of Jenkins’ definition of transmedia storytelling is its emphasis on authorship, which persists in wider scholarship on transmedia storytelling. Jenkins focuses on the nature of authorship as a key characteristic of transmedia productions that distinguishes them from other kinds of intertextual and serial stories:Because transmedia storytelling requires a high degree of coordination across the different media sectors, it has so far worked best either in independent projects where the same artist shapes the story across all of the media involved or in projects where strong collaboration (or co-creation) is encouraged across the different divisions of the same company. (Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling”)Since the texts under discussion are commonly large in their scale, budget, and the number of people employed, it is reductive to credit particular individuals for this work and implicitly dismiss the authorial contributions of many others. Elaborating on the foundation set by Jenkins, Matthew Freeman uses Foucauldian concepts to describe two “author-functions” focused on the role of an author in defining the transmedia text itself and in marketing it (Freeman 36-38). Scott, Evans, Hills, and Hadas similarly view authorial branding as a symbolic industrial strategy significant to transmedia storytelling. Interestingly, M.J. Clarke identifies the ways transmedia television texts invite audiences to imagine a central mastermind, but also thwart and defer this impulse. Ultimately, Freeman argues that identifiable and consistent authorship is a defining characteristic of transmedia storytelling (Freeman 37), and Suzanne Scott argues that transmedia storytelling has “intensified the author’s function” from previous eras (47).Industry definitions of transmediality similarly position authorship as central to transmedia storytelling, and Jenkins’ definition has also been widely mobilised in industry discussions (Jenkins, “Transmedia” 202). This is unsurprising, because defining authorial roles has significant monetary value in terms of remuneration and copyright. In speaking to the Producers Guild of America, Jeff Gomez enumerated eight defining characteristics of transmedia production, the very first of which is, “Content is originated by one or a very few visionaries” (PGA Blog). Gomez’s talk was part of an industry-driven bid to have “Transmedia Producer” recognised by the trade associations as a legitimate and significant role; Gomez was successful and is now recognised as a transmedia producer. Nevertheless, his talk of “visionaries” not only situates authorship as central to transmedia production, but constructs authorship in very conservative, almost hagiographical terms. Indeed, Leora Hadas analyses the function of Joss Whedon’s authorship of Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D (2013-) as a branding mechanism and argues that authors are becoming increasingly visible brands associated with transmedia stories.Such a discourse of authorship constructs individual figures as artists and masterminds, in an idealised manner that has been strongly critiqued in the wake of poststructuralism. It even recalls tired scholarly endeavours of divining authorial intention. Unsurprisingly, the figures valorised for their transmedia authorship are predominantly men; the scholarly emphasis on authorship thus reinforces the biases of media industries. Further, it idolises these figures at the expense of unacknowledged and under-celebrated female writers, directors and producers, as well as those creative workers labouring “below the line” in areas like production design, art direction, and special effects. Far from critiquing the biases of industry, academic discourse legitimises and lauds them.We hope that scholarship on transmedia storytelling might instead work to open up discourses of creation, production, authorship, and collaboration. For a story to qualify as transmedia is it even necessary to have an identifiable author? Transmedia texts and storyworlds can be genuinely collaborative or authorless creations, in which the harmony of various creators’ intentions may be unnecessary or even undesirable. Further, industry and academics alike often overlook examples of transmedia storytelling that might be considered “lowbrow.” For example, transmedia definitions should include Antonella the Uncensored Reviewer, a relatively small-scale, forty-something, plus size, YouTube channel producer whose persona is dispersed across multiple formats including beauty product reviews, letter writing, as well as interactive sex advice live casts. What happens when we blur the categories of author, celebrity, brand, and narrative in scholarship? We argue that these roles are substantially blurred in media industries in which authors like J.J. Abrams share the limelight with their stars as well as their corporate affiliations, and all “brands” are sutured to the storyworld text. These various actors all shape and are shaped by the narrative worlds they produce in an author-storyworld nexus, in which authorship includes all people working to produce the storyworld as well as the corporation funding it. Authorship never exists inside the limits of a single, male mind. Rather it is a field of relations among various players and stakeholders. While there is value in delineating between these roles for purposes of analysis and scholarly discussion, we should acknowledge that in the media industry, the roles of various stakeholders are increasingly porous.The current academic discourse of transmedia storytelling reconstructs old social biases and hierarchies in contexts where they might be most vulnerable to breakdown. Scott argues that,despite their potential to demystify and democratize authorship between producers and consumers, transmedia stories tend to reinforce boundaries between ‘official’ and ‘unauthorized’ forms of narrative expansion through the construction of a single author/textual authority figure. (44)Significantly, we suggest that it is the theorisation of transmedia storytelling that reinforces (or in fact constructs anew) an idealised author figure.The gendered dimension of the scholarly distinction between serialised (or trans-serial) and transmedial storytelling builds on a long history in the arts and the academy alike. In fact, an important precursor of transmedia narratives is the serialized novel of the Victorian era. The literature of Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Harriet Beecher Stowe was published in serial form and among the most widely read of the Victorian era in Western culture (Easley; Flint 21; Hilmes). Yet, these novels are rarely given proportional credit in what is popularly taught as the Western literary canon. The serial storytelling endemic to television as a medium has similarly been historically dismissed and marginalized as lowbrow and feminine (at least until the recent emergence of notions of the industrial role of the “showrunner” and the critical concept of “quality television”). Joanne Morreale outlines how trans-serial television examples, like The Dick Van Dyke Show, which spread their storyworlds across a number of different television programs, offer important precursors to today’s transmedia franchises (Morreale). In television’s nascent years, the anthology plays of the 1940s and 50s, which were discrete, unconnected hour-length stories, were heralded as cutting-edge, artistic and highbrow while serial narrative forms like the soap opera were denigrated (Boddy 80-92). Crucially, these anthology plays were largely created by and aimed at males, whereas soap operas were often created by and targeted to female audiences. The gendered terms in which various genres and modes of storytelling are discussed have implications for the value assigned to them in criticism, scholarship and culture more broadly (Hilmes; Kuhn; Johnson, “Devaluing”). Transmedia theory, as a scholarly discourse, betrays similarly gendered leanings as early television criticism, in valorising forms of transmedia narration that favour a single, male-bodied, and all-powerful author or corporation, such as George Lucas, Jim Henson or Marvel Comics.George Lucas is often depicted in scholarly and popular discourses as a headstrong transmedia auteur, as in the South Park episode ‘The China Problem’ (2008)A Circle of Men: Fans, Creators, Stories and TheoristsInterestingly, scholarly discourse on transmedia even betrays these gendered biases when exploring the engagement and activity of audiences in relation to transmedia texts. Despite the definitional emphasis on authorship, fan cultures have been a substantial topic of investigation in scholarly studies of transmedia storytelling, with many scholars elevating fans to the status of author, exploring the apparent blurring of these boundaries, and recasting the terms of these relationships (Scott; Dena; Pearson; Stein). Most notably, substantial scholarly attention has traced how transmedia texts cultivate a masculinized, “nerdy” fan culture that identifies with the male-bodied, all-powerful author or corporation (Brooker, Star Wars, Using; Jenkins, Convergence). Whether idealising the role of the creators or audiences, transmedia theory reinforces gendered hierarchies. Star Wars (1977-) is a pivotal corporate transmedia franchise that significantly shaped the convergent trajectory of media industries in the 20th century. As such it is also an anchor point for transmedia scholarship, much of which lauds and legitimates the creative work of fans. However, in focusing so heavily on the macho power struggle between George Lucas and Star Wars fans for authorial control over the storyworld, scholarship unwittingly reinstates Lucas’s status as sole creator rather than treating Star Wars’ authorship as inherently diffuse and porous.Recent fan activity surrounding animated adult science-fiction sitcom Rick and Morty (2013-) further demonstrates the macho culture of transmedia fandom in practice and its fascination with male authors. The animated series follows the intergalactic misadventures of a scientific genius and his grandson. Inspired by a seemingly inconsequential joke on the show, some of its fans began to fetishize a particular, limited-edition fast food sauce. When McDonalds, the actual owner of that sauce, cashed in by promoting the return of its Szechuan Sauce, a macho culture within the show’s fandom reached its zenith in the forms of hostile behaviour at McDonalds restaurants and online (Alexander and Kuchera). Rick and Morty fandom also built a misogynist reputation for its angry responses to the show’s efforts to hire a writer’s room that gave equal representation to women. Rick and Morty trolls doggedly harassed a few of the show’s female writers through 2017 and went so far as to post their private information online (Barsanti). Such gender politics of fan cultures have been the subject of much scholarly attention (Johnson, “Fan-tagonism”), not least in the many conversations hosted on Jenkins’ blog. Gendered performances and readings of fan activity are instrumental in defining and legitimating some texts as transmedia and some creators as masterminds, not only within fandoms but also in the scholarly discourse.When McDonalds promoted the return of their Szechuan Sauce, in response to its mention in the story world of animated sci-fi sitcom Rick and Morty, they contributed to transmedia storytelling.Both Rick and Morty and Star Wars are examples of how masculinist fan cultures, stubborn allegiances to male authorship, and definitions of transmedia converge both in academia and popular culture. While Rick and Morty is, in reality, partly female-authored, much of its media image is still anchored to its two male “creators,” Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon. Particularly in the context of #MeToo feminism, one wonders how much female authorship has been elided from existing storyworlds and, furthermore, what alternative examples of transmedia narration are exempt from current definitions of transmediality.The individual creator is a social construction of scholarship and popular discourse. This imaginary creator bears little relation to the conditions of creation and production of transmedia storyworlds, which are almost always team written and collectively authored. Further, the focus on writing itself elides the significant contributions of many creators such as those in production design (Bevan). Beyond that, what creative credit do focus groups deserve in shaping transmedia stories and their multi-layered, multi-platformed reaches? Is authorship, or even credit, really the concept we, as scholars, want to invest in when studying these forms of narration and mediation?At more symbolic levels, the seemingly exhaustless popular and scholarly appetite for male-bodied authorship persists within storyworlds themselves. The transmedia examples popularly and academically heralded as “seminal” centre on patrimony, patrilineage, and inheritance (i.e. Star Wars [1977-] and The Lord of the Rings [1937-]). Of course, Harry Potter (2001-2009) is an outlier as the celebrification of J.K. Rowling provides a strong example of credited female authorship. However, this example plays out many of the same issues, albeit the franchise is attached to a woman, in that it precludes many of the other creative minds who have helped shape Harry Potter’s world. How many more billions of dollars need we invest in men writing about the mysteries of how other men spread their genetic material across fictional universes? Moreover, transmedia studies remains dominated by academic men geeking out about how fan men geek out about how male creators write about mostly male characters in stories about … men. There are other stories waiting to be told and studied through the practices and theories of transmedia. These stories might be gender-inclusive and collective in ways that challenge traditional notions of authorship, control, rights, origin, and property.Obsession with male authorship, control, rights, origin, paternity and property is recognisible in scholarship on transmedia storytelling, and also symbolically in many of the most heralded examples of transmedia storytelling, such as the Star Wars saga.Prompting Broader DiscussionThis piece urges the development of broader understandings of transmedia storytelling. A range of media scholarship has already begun this work. Jonathan Gray’s book on paratexts offers an important pathway for such scholarship by legitimating ancillary texts, like posters and trailers, that uniquely straddle promotional and feature content platforms (Gray). A wave of scholars productively explores transmedia storytelling with a focus on storyworlds (Scolari; Harvey), often through the lens of narratology (Ryan; Ryan and Thon). Scolari, Bertetti, and Freeman have drawn together a media archaeological approach and a focus on transmedia characters in an innovative way. We hope to see greater proliferation of focuses and perspectives for the study of transmedia storytelling, including investigations that connect fictional and non-fictional worlds and stories, and a more inclusive variety of life experiences.Conversely, new scholarship on media authorship provides fresh directions, models, methods, and concepts for examining the complexity and messiness of this topic. A growing body of scholarship on the functions of media branding is also productive for reconceptualising notions of authorship in transmedia storytelling (Bourdaa; Dehry Kurtz and Bourdaa). Most notably, A Companion to Media Authorship edited by Gray and Derek Johnson productively interrogates relationships between creative processes, collaborative practices, production cultures, industrial structures, legal frameworks, and theoretical approaches around media authorship. Its case studies begin the work of reimagining of the role of authorship in transmedia, and pave the way for further developments (Burnett; Gordon; Hilmes; Stein). In particular, Matt Hills’s case study of how “counter-authorship” was negotiated on Torchwood (2006-2011) opens up new ways of thinking about multiple authorship and the variety of experiences, contributions, credits, and relationships this encompasses. Johnson’s Media Franchising addresses authorship in a complex way through a focus on social interactions, without making it a defining feature of the form; it would be significant to see a similar scholarly treatment of transmedia. At the very least, scholarly attention might turn its focus away from the very patriarchal activity of discussing definitions among a coterie and, instead, study the process of spreadability of male-centred transmedia storyworlds (Jenkins, Ford, and Green). Given that transmedia is not historically unique to the digital age, scholars might instead study how spreadability changes with the emergence of digitality and convergence, rather than pontificating on definitions of adaptation versus transmedia and cinema versus media.We urge transmedia scholars to distance their work from the malignant gender politics endemic to the media industries and particularly global Hollywood. The confluence of gendered agendas in both academia and media industries works to reinforce patriarchal hierarchies. The humanities should offer independent analysis and critique of how media industries and products function, and should highlight opportunities for conceiving of, creating, and treating such media practices and texts in new ways. As such, it is problematic that discourses on transmedia commonly neglect the distinction between what defines transmediality and what constitutes good examples of transmedia. This blurs the boundaries between description and prescription, taxonomy and hierarchy, analysis and evaluation, and definition and taste. Such discourses blinker us to what we might consider to be transmedia, but also to what examples of “good” transmedia storytelling might look like.Transmedia theory focuses disproportionately on authorship. This restricts a comprehensive understanding of transmedia storytelling, limits the lenses we bring to it, obstructs the ways we evaluate transmedia stories, and impedes how we imagine the possibilities for both media and storytelling. Stories have always been transmedial. What changes with the inception of transmedia theory is that men can claim credit for the stories and for all the work that many people do across various sectors and industries. It is questionable whether authorship is important to transmedia, in which creation is most often collective, loosely planned (at best) and diffused across many people, skill sets, and sectors. While Jenkins’s work has been pivotal in the development of transmedia theory, this is a ripe moment for the diversification of theoretical paradigms for understanding stories in the digital era.ReferencesAlexander, Julia, and Ben Kuchera. “How a Rick and Morty Joke Led to a McDonald’s Szechuan Sauce Controversy.” Polygon 4 Apr. 2017. <https://www.polygon.com/2017/10/12/16464374/rick-and-morty-mcdonalds-szechuan-sauce>.Aristotle. Aristotle's Poetics. New York: Hill and Wang, 1961. Barsanti, Sami. “Dan Harmon Is Pissed at Rick and Morty Fans Harassing Female Writers.” The AV Club 21 Sep. 2017. <https://www.avclub.com/dan-harmon-is-pissed-at-rick-and-morty-fans-for-harassi-1818628816>.Bevan, Alex. “Nostalgia for Pre-Digital Media in Mad Men.” Television & New Media 14.6 (2013): 546-559.Boddy, William. Fifties Television: The Industry and Its Critics. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1993.Bourdaa, Mélanie. “This Is Not Marketing. 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Abstract:

Staples of early United States Internet meme culture were sold via digital auctions for cryptocurrency (except one, which was sold for cash) throughout 2021. Through these transactions, Internet memes, or “the linguistic, image, audio, and video texts created, circulated, and transformed by countless cultural participants across vast networks and collectives” (Milner 1), were “minted” as non-fungible tokens—a marker within cryptocurrency economy that denotes the level of originality or irreplaceability of an (often digital) artifact (Wired). Early 2021 saw Internet memes (memes, hereafter) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs, hereafter) articulated to one another when a series of trades ignited a “buying frenzy”. In February 2021, the original animation file of the Nyan Cat meme (a rendering of a flying cat with a Pop-Tart body) was sold for 300 Ethereum, or US$600,000 (Griffith; Kay); in April 2021, the original photo file of the Disaster Girl meme (an image of a smiling child in front of a burning home) sold for 180 ETH, or nearly US$500,000 (BBC News); in May 2021, the original video file of the viral YouTube video “Charlie Bit My Finger” (wherein an infant bites the finger of their older sibling with glee) was sold for US$760,999, but no cryptocurrency was exchanged for this auction (Evans); in June 2021, the original image of the Shiba Inu who became Doge (image of a dog looking contemplative, often with text around the dog’s face) was sold for a record-breaking (for memes) 1,696.9 ETH, or US$4 million (Rosenblatt). Other notable memes were sold around this time, such as Bad Luck Brian (an unflattering school picture of a teenager who became synonymous with embarrassing social situations), Overly Attached Girlfriend (wide-eyed teenager who was portrayed as obsessive over their significant other), and Success Kid (an infant clenching their fist with a sense of achievement), but for lower prices (Wired; Dash; Gallagher). All the memes sold during this frenzy feature either animals or white individuals, and none of the creators or subjects of the original files are Black. That said, mainstream Internet culture, specifically within the United States, is predicated upon the Othering and exploitation of Black cultural production (Brock 97, 124; Benjamin). The fungible constitution of US Black culture is replete within digital cultures, from contemporary discussions of digital blackface in white use of memes featuring Black folks to express emotion (J.L. Green; Jackson, “Digital Blackface”, White Negroes) and/or using imagery featuring Black folks without permission (J.L. Green; Nakamura; Matamoros-Fernández). The advent of meme-based NFTs, however, offers new areas of inquiry into the triangulation of race, fungibility, and US digital cultures. I approach this cultural phenomenon with two general queries: What cultural and racial legacies of non/fungibility are present in the dynamics of memes becoming NFTs? What are the implications in digital media and US culture? Fungibility and Black Cultural Production As this issue explores, fungibility is a quality of interchangeable, performing persons or objects, but a turn to US Afro-pessimism illustrates how fungibility is a central quality to racialisation. (Continental African scholars coined Afro-pessimism, and its original formulation was markedly different from the US counterpart, which emerged with little to no engagement with the existing African canon. Afropessimism 1.0, as Greg Thomas names it, focusses on the postcolonial economic conditions across the continent. Importantly, there is an undergirding optimism, “the urge to positive social change”, to the inquiries into the poverty, colonial extractivism, and more; Amrah qtd. in Thomas 283; Rieff; de B’béri and Louw.) Fungibility, in US-borne Afro-pessimist literature, is used to describe (1) a major tenet of slavery wherein Black bodies are treated as interchangeable objects rather than human actors, and (2) how the afterlife of slavery continues to structure everyday experiences for Black folks (Bilge; Hartman; Wilderson, III et al.). US Afro-pessimism argues that slavery instantiated an ontological structure that articulates humanity as irreconcilable with Blackness and further articulates whiteness as for what (or whom) the Black body performs and labours (Bilge; Douglass et al.; Wilderson, III and Soong). Within the US, the fungibility of the Black body means it is always already vulnerable to and violable by “the whims of the [non-Black] world” (Wilderson, III 56; see also: Hartman; Lindsey). Indeed, Wilderson, building off Hartman, asserts, “the violence-induced fungibility of Blackness allows for its appropriation by White psyches as ‘property of enjoyment’” (89). The fungibility of Blackness aides in white “transpos[ition of Black] cultural gestures, the stuff of symbolic intervention onto another worldly good, a commodity of style” (Wilderson, III 56). This expropriation of Black digital “imaginative labour” by US white mainstream culture is part and parcel to Internet practices (Iloh; Lockett; Jackson). bell hooks argues white US mainstream culture treats Black cultural production as the “spice, [the] seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture” (21). By the same token, US white mainstream culture “desire[s] … sustained ‘labor’ … of a dark Other” that seeks to contiunously exploit fungible Black production (31). The constitutive fungibility of Blackness enriches, even if just affectively, the non-fungibility of whiteness; this parasitic relationship has extended to digital culture, with white actors extracting Black meme culture. Internet memes, until the advent of NFTs, did not necessarily provide monetary gain for the creators or original owners. For example, the creator of the iconic phrase “on fleek”, Kayla Newman (aka Peaches Monroee) is regularly discussed when considering the exploitation of Black digital culture (Parham; Maguire; Hazlehurst). The term came from a Vine of Newman hyping herself up in the front-facing camera of her smartphone—“We in this bitch! Finna get crunk. Eyebrows on fleek. Da fuq”—and quickly went viral. Maguire’s insightful analysis of Newman’s viral fame underscores the exploitation and appropriation of Black girl cultural production within the US. Maguire turns toward the legal intricacies of copyright and property as Newman sought ownership of her iconic phrase; however, Vats’s work on the legal rhetorics of intellectual property note its racial exclusivity in the US. (Moreton-Robinson traces similar white supremacist ownership within Australian contexts.) Meaning, only white actors benefit from such legal rhetorics. These forbearances point to the larger cultural legacies of fungibility that alienate Black bodies from their cultural production. US Black digital culture is alienated from the individuals who perform the imaginative labour that benefits and enriches whiteness (Wilderson, III; hooks). The legacies of mass enslavement fundamentally structured the capital and libidinal economies of US culture (Wilderson, III et al.; Spillers; Brock), therefore it stands to reason, like other forms of hegemonic ideologies, that such structuring logics of anti-Blackness are foundational to digital US culture (Benjamin; Brock; Towns; Matamoros-Fernández). Iloh, Williams, and Michele Jackson separately argue that the foundation of mainstream US Internet culture is indebted to the labour of Black users. However, as Brock argues, US Internet culture is a medium by which whiteness marks itself as the default even though Black labour, individuals, and culture are regularly exploited to perpetuate white engagement. Jackson specifically notes that the white performance of US Black culture “financially, artistically, socially, and intellectually” rewards white and other non-Black actors for demonstrating their understanding of Black cultural productions (Jackson, White Negroes 5; see also: hooks; Nakamura). Black individuals are not (fairly) compensated for this labour, even as white individuals gain clout. Newman’s term “on fleek” became a staple of US Vine and broader Internet culture, spawning a hashtag (#EyebrowsOnFleek) and being featured in multiple brand commercials (Maguire). Newman notes that she did not consider trademarking the term because she did not realise how quickly it would spread, allowing corporations and other actors to capitalise on her term free of charge (Hazlehurst; Maguire). Usage of the term became a signpost of the in-crowd within US millennial popular culture (Maguire). However, when Newman later launched a hair extensions company utilising her phrase (On Fleek Hair Extensions), she was resoundingly criticised. During a GoFundMe campaign to jumpstart the business, white digital actors accused Newman of milking her fame (Parham; Hazlehurst; Maguire). Mainstream digital actors forbade Newman’s ownership of her own labour after exploiting her creation throughout its popularity, marking her imaginative labour as fungible. These cultural dynamics exemplify of how anti-Blackness proliferates US digital culture, marking Black cultural labour as fungible and as the (shared) property of white actors. Whiteness regularly dichotomises itself against Blackness, needing the denigration and de-humanisation of Blackness to constitute whiteness’s perceived racial superiority (Wilderson, III et al.; Hartman; Thomas). Since Blackness has been constituted as fungible, alienating the labouring bodies from their production, whiteness (implicitly) constitutes itself as non-fungible. Thus, under this paradigm, white actors, their bodies, and their (property’s) cultural production are constituted as non-fungible, as the foil to fungible Blackness. Of course, anti-Blackness uses fungibility as a means of enriching whiteness, first evidenced by the logics of the Atlantic Slave Trade and extending throughout contemporary US culture. Newman’s iconic “on fleek” was easily detached from her (removing product from labourer) for the benefit of celebrities and companies. I argue that NFTs further these logics; as the next section explores, non-fungible tokens capacitate white monetisation of Black cultural labour. Non-Fungibility and Non-Black Cultural Agency The sale of meme-based NFTs offers a modern illustration of the fungibility of Black cultural production. Importantly, every seller of meme-based NFTs has been non-Black, with most being white or white-passing. NFTs, thus, seemingly give non-Black actors the agency to “reclaim” meme imagery via monetisation. Contemporary US meme culture is directly created by, influenced by, and appropriated from US Black (digital) culture (Jackson, White Negroes; Iloh; Brock; J.L. Green; Nakamura). Black cultural actors used memes largely as a space to share the joys and pains of Black US life (Brock); however, the connectivity of the Internet offered avenues for extraction and appropriation by non-Black actors (Iloh; Nakamura; J.L. Green; Matamoros-Fernández). Meme-based NFTs extend these anti-Black logics by monetising the cultural impact of certain memes. Specifically, memes are considered valuable only when minted as an NFT, which seeks to transform the fungible by a non-fungible agent. This section turns to the tensions between non-Black cultural agency over Black cultural influence within US Internet culture, using the Disaster Girl meme as an illustration. Memes, because of their participatory nature, require a certain level of fungibility to perpetuate circulation (Milner; Moreno-Almeida; Shifman). While certain digital actors proffer the original textual (e.g. #UKnowUrBlackWhen, a popular hashtag for Black users sharing experiences specific to US Black culture), graphic (e.g. Fail/Win, a popular meme genre for posting images of everyday chores tagged as Fail or Win), and/or contextual (e.g. Pepper Spray Cop, a meme genre where a police officer is pepper spraying protestors is photoshopped into different scenes) facets of a meme, these same characteristics must be manipulable for the meme to flourish (Parham; Jenkins; Huntington). Further, original creators must have an alienable relation to their cultural production, a “letting go” of the meme, so it may become part of broader cultural milieu, ever-evolving (Shifman; Jenkins). Minting memes into NFTs, however, reverses and obfuscates this cultural and imaginative labour by minting the original image. The sale of the Disaster Girl meme photograph as an NFT exhibits this erasure. The meme orginates from a photo Dave Roth took of his daughter, Zoë Roth, at a 2005 control-burn of a home in their neighbourhood (Fazio; Staff). D. Roth eventually submitted the image of his white, brown-haired daughter slyly smiling as the house burns in the background to a handful of photo contests, winning them (ibid.). The image was published online in 2008 and quickly circulated among social media platforms. Memes emerged as Internet users remixed the original image, either with text or by photoshopping Z. Roth into new disasters, thus dubbing her Disaster Girl (Green, Refinery). Since, Z. Roth’s four-year-old self has been “endlessly repurposed as a vital part of meme canon” (Fazio). Gesturing to the fungibility of meme culture, Z. Roth said she “love[s] seeing them because [she]’d never make any of them [her]self” (qtd in Fazio), meaning she (and her father) had willingly alienated themselves from the meme imagery. The agency to willingly turn over cultural production is solely attributable to non-Black bodies within the logics of fungible Blackness. Z. Roth’s non-participation did not prevent her from monetising the original meme, however. On 17 April 2021, Z. Roth sold the original photo file of the Disaster Girl meme (Fazio). Roth notes the creation and selling of an NFT is “the only thing memes can do to take control” (qtd. in Fazio). To exhibit agency of minting an NFT, Z. Roth collapses memes’ identities into the original image rather than the participation, remix, and becoming that meme culture involves. Memes, by nature, require the repeated and continual labour of digital public actors to continue circulating (Shifman; Milner; Jenkins). The stronger the meme’s circulatory impact, the more cultural heft it carries. However, the Roth family could only ever sell the original image. The minting of an NFT, for Z. Roth, “was a way for her to take control over a situation that she has felt powerless over since elementary school” (Fazio). Here, Z. Roth is further exerting non-Black agency to wilfully reclaim the previously fungible object. Ironically, the very thing Z. Roth is wanting to exert control over is what gives value to the meme in the first place. The virality and longevity of the Disaster Girl meme is its value, but given the fungibility of meme culture, this labour is easily obfuscated. As noted, memes must exhibit a certain level of fungibility to regenerate throughout digital cultures in various iterations; memes also require the fungible Black cultural production, especially within the US. Brock argues the capacity to laugh through pain or chaos is a characteristic of US Black humour and foundational to contemporary US meme humour. The Disaster Girl meme exemplifies the influences of US Black cultural humour both in the comedic frame—smiling in the face of disaster—and the composition of image—looking directly into the camera as if to break the fourth wall (Outley et al.; Brock). These facets influence the affectivity of the Disaster Girl image, or its capacity to move audiences to add their own remix to the meme. Remix is not only an inherently Black practice (Navas et al.), but it is also the lifeblood of meme culture and Internet culture more broadly. Iloh, Jackson, and Williams separately argue the proliferation of Black digital culture in the US means much of what enters mainstream US culture was shaped by Black users. Therefore, Black imaginative labour is an absent presence at the heart of Disaster Girl (or any) meme’s popularity—the popularity that made it valuable as an NFT. Minting the original image as a meme-based NFT consumes the labour of digital public actors to realise a value for the image owner. According to Cervenak, “NFTs can be seen as a tool for creators to be made whole for the work they put in” creating the original image (qtd. in Notopoulos). However, in memes the “work [being] put in”, the imaginative labour generating the memes, is that of various digital public actors. Neither the digital public actors, specifically Black public actors, nor the US Black cultural production and labour are recognised within the NFT economy. The reversion of memes back to the original image attempts to erase the Black cultural labour that generated the meme’s value. The work of digital public actors must be seen as both interchangeable and working in the service of the original “owner” of meme imagery to facilitate the trade of meme-based NFTs. Unlike Newman, Z. Roth was lauded for the monetisation of her meme-fame. Indeed, Newman’s imaginative labour needed to be obfuscated for the appropriation of “on fleek” by non-Black US culture. Z. Roth did very little labour in the invention and circulation of the Disaster Girl meme; however, her agency within anti-Black US culture created the conditions of possibility for her minting of the NFT. The dynamics of NFTs, Black US cultural labour, and anti-Blackness allow for the simultaneous obfuscation and appropriation of fungible meme-culture. Just as enslavement alienated Black bodies from the profits of their labour, NFTs similarly erase Black cultural production from the monetary benefit; NFTs (further) digitise these paradigms of anti-Blackness in US digital culture. Conclusion This essay has just barely chipped the surface on the articulations of race, fungibility, and NFTs. The arguments contained within demonstrate the legacies of fungible Blackness, which US Afro-pessimism links to the structuring logics of the Atlantic Slave Trade, and their manifestation in contemporary digital culture, specifically via meme-based NFTs. First, the essay traced the needed alienation and appropriation of Black cultural labour within US culture. Translating these practices to meme culture, the essay argues the minting of meme-based NFTs is a non-fungible agency only available to non-Black actors. There remains much to be explored, especially regarding equitable cultural practices. 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