Academic literature on the topic 'Boys' High School (Brooklyn, New York, N.Y.)'

This study aims to apply rational emotive behavior counseling as an effort to reduce cheating behavior of high school students. The design of this study was conducted using a quasi experimental method approach with a pretest-posttest non-equivalent control group design research design. Data analysis techniques using Wilcoxon mached-pairs signed test, with the Asymp.Sig (2-Tailed) 0.028 <0.05, which shows a significant difference. The Z test value is -0.730 with the Asymp.Sig (2-Tailed) number 0.466, because of the Asymp.Sig (2-Tailed) value> 0.05, it can be concluded that there is no significant difference between the posttest value and the experimental group value with the control group, Ho is rejected and Ha is accepted which means that rational emotive behavior counseling is effective in reducing student cheating behavior. The study was carried out starting from January to March 2018, which took place at Darul Hikmah High School. Based on the results of the study, the researchers proposed several suggestions, among others (1) BK teachers, counseling rational emotive behavior can be applied by BK teachers to reduce student cheating behavior practically and can be easily applied; (2) for researchers furthermore, this research uses the pretest and posttest control group design research models, for the next researcher can use other research designs such as action research in BK, or other experimental research. References Andrestia, M. (2010). Pengaruh locus of control goal orientation terhadap cheating mahasiwa Fakultas Psikologi UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta. Skripsi. Jakarta: UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta. Anitasari, L. (2012). Hubungan stres dan perilaku merokok pada remaja. Skripsi. Malang: Universitas Negeri Malang. Arabzadeh, S., Ameli, N., Zeinoddini, A., Rezaei, F., Farokhnia, M., Mohammadinejad, P., Ghaleiha, A., & Akhondzadeh, S. (2015). Celecoxib adjunctive therapy for acute bipolar mania: A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial. Bipolar Disorders, 17(6), 606-614. doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/bdi.12324 Bond, F. W., & Dryden, W. (1996). Why two central REBT hypotheses appear untestable. Journal of Rational-Emotive and Cognitive-Behavior Therapy, 14(1), 29-40. Corey, G. (2015). Theory and practice of counseling and psychotherapy. Canada: Nelson Education. Corey, G. (2012). Case approach to counseling and psychotherapy. Canada: Nelson Education. Dessy, D. A., Suranata, K. S., & Setuti, N. M. (2013). Penerapan konseling rasional emotif dengan teknik kognitif untuk meningkatkan self disclosure siswa kelas X. 6 SMA Negeri 1 Sukasada tahun pelajaran 2012/2013. Jurnal Ilmiah Bimbingan Konseling Undiksha, 1(1), 1-10. https://ejournal.undiksha.ac.id/index.php/JJBK/issue/view/91 Dryden, W. (2014). Rational emotive behaviour therapy: Distinctive features. London: Routledge. Dryden, W. (2003). Reason to change: A rational emotive behaviour therapy (REBT) workbook. London: Routledge. Fraenkel, J. R., Wallen, N. E., & Hyun, H. H. (1993). How to design and evaluate research in education (Vol. 7). New York: McGraw-Hill. Habsy, B. A. (2017a). Model konseling kelompok cognitive behavior untuk meningkatkan self esteem siswa SMK. Perspektif Ilmu Pendidikan, 31(1), 21-35. doi: https://doi.org/10.21009/PIP.311.4 Habsy, B. A. (2017b). Filosofi ilmu bimbingan dan konseling indonesia. Jurnal Pendidikan (Teori dan Praktik), 2(1), 1-11. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.26740/jp.v2n1.p1-11 Habsy, B. A. (2018a). Konseling rasional emotif perilaku: Sebuah tinjauan filosofis. Indonesian Journal of Educational Counseling, 2(1), 13-30. doi:https://doi.org/10.30653/001.201821.25 Habsy, B. A. (2018b). Model bimbingan kelompok PPPM untuk mengembangkan pikiran rasional korban bullying siswa SMK Etnis Jawa. Jurnal Pendidikan (Teori dan Praktik), 2(2), 91-99. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.26740/jp.v2n2.p91-99 Hartanto, D. (2012). Bimbingan & konseling menyontek: Mengungkap akar masalah dan solusinya. Jakarta: Indeks. Hetherington, E. M., & Feldman, S. E. (1964). College cheating as a function of subject and situationalvariables. Journal of Educational Psychology, 55(4), 212. McCabe, M., & Ricciardelli, L. (2001). Parent, peer and media influences on body image and strategies to both increase and decrease body size among adolescent boys and girls. Adolescence, 36(142), 225-240. https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1G1-79251794/parent-peer-and-mediainfluences-on-body-image-and Nurmayasari, K., & Murusdi, H. (2015). Hubungan antara Berpikir Positif dan Perilaku Menyontek pada Siswa Kelas X SMK Koperasi Yogyakarta. Empathy: Jurnal Fakultas Psikologi, 3(1), 8-15. http://journal.uad.ac.id/index.php/EMPATHY/ article/view/3009/1748 Santrock, J. W., & Curl, R. M. (2003). Adolescence (9th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill. Setyani, U. (2007). Hubungan antara konsep diri dengan intensi menyontek pada siswa SMA Negeri 2 Semarang. Disertasi. Semarang: Universitas Diponegoro. Sujana, Y. E., & Wulan, R. (1994). Hubungan antara kecenderungan pusat kendali dengan intensi menyontek. Jurnal Psikologi, 21(1994). http://i-lib.ugm.ac.id/jurnal/download.php?dataId=4298 Taylor, K.R. (2003). Bracing for cheating and plagiarism. Diakses melalui https://www.eddigest.com/sub.php Permatasari, D., & Muka, J. R. (2017). Correlation between self–efficacy and cheating behavior onvocational high school students. Prosiding 8th ICLICE 2017. Valiente, C., Eisenberg, N., Haugen, R., Spinrad, T. L., Hofer, C., Liew, J., & Kupfer, A. (2011). Children’s efforftul control and academic achievement: Mediation through social functioning. Early Education and Development, 22(3), 411-433. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/10409289.2010.505259

Introduction: One-fifth to one-third of students in high-poverty, urban school districts do not attend school regularly (missing ≥6 days per year). Health related fitness is shown to be associated with absenteeism, although this relationship may differ across poverty and gender subgroups. Hypothesis: We hypothesized that area poverty would be a stronger effect modifier on the association of fitness (cardiorespiratory, muscular endurance, and muscular strength fitness composite percentile scores) and subsequent absenteeism (one-year lagged days absent) in girls compared with boys. Methods: Six cohorts of New York City public school students were followed from grades 5-8 during 2006/7-2012/13 (n=349,381). Stratified three-level longitudinal generalized linear mixed models were used to test the modification of poverty on the association of fitness changes and one-year lagged child-specific days absent across gender. Results: The fitness-absenteeism association was not significant in boys attending schools in high/very high (p=0.075) or low/mid poverty (p=0.454) areas. In girls attending schools in high/very high poverty areas, greater improvements in fitness the prior year were associated with greater improvements in attendance (p=0.034). Relative to the reference group (>20% decrease in fitness composite percentile scores from the prior year), girls with a large increase in fitness (>20%) demonstrated 10.3% fewer days absent (IRR 95% CI: 0.834, 0.964), followed by those who had a 10-20% increase in fitness (9.2%, IRR 95% CI: 0.835, 0.987), no change (5.4%, IRR 95% CI: 0.887, 1.007) and a 10-20% decrease in fitness (3.8%, IRR 95% CI: 0.885, 1.045). In girls attending schools in low/mid poverty areas, the fitness-attendance relationship was also positive, but no clear trend emerged. Conclusions: Fitness improvements may be more important to attendance improvements in high/very high poverty girls compared with low/mid poverty girls, and both high/very high and low/mid poverty boys. In conclusion, expanding school-based physical activity programs for girls in high-poverty neighborhoods may increase student attendance.

By the time you read this, it will be wrong. Things seemed to be moving so fast in these first days after airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the Pennsylvania earth. Each certainty is as carelessly dropped as it was once carelessly assumed. The sounds of lower Manhattan that used to serve as white noise for residents—sirens, screeches, screams—are no longer signs without a referent. Instead, they make folks stare and stop, hurry and hustle, wondering whether the noises we know so well are in fact, this time, coefficients of a new reality. At the time of writing, the events themselves are also signs without referents—there has been no direct claim of responsibility, and little proof offered by accusers since the 11th. But it has been assumed that there is a link to US foreign policy, its military and economic presence in the Arab world, and opposition to it that seeks revenge. In the intervening weeks the US media and the war planners have supplied their own narrow frameworks, making New York’s “ground zero” into the starting point for a new escalation of global violence. We want to write here about the combination of sources and sensations that came that day, and the jumble of knowledges and emotions that filled our minds. Working late the night before, Toby was awoken in the morning by one of the planes right overhead. That happens sometimes. I have long expected a crash when I’ve heard the roar of jet engines so close—but I didn’t this time. Often when that sound hits me, I get up and go for a run down by the water, just near Wall Street. Something kept me back that day. Instead, I headed for my laptop. Because I cannot rely on local media to tell me very much about the role of the US in world affairs, I was reading the British newspaper The Guardian on-line when it flashed a two-line report about the planes. I looked up at the calendar above my desk to see whether it was April 1st. Truly. Then I got off-line and turned on the TV to watch CNN. That second, the phone rang. My quasi-ex-girlfriend I’m still in love with called from the mid-West. She was due to leave that day for the Bay Area. Was I alright? We spoke for a bit. She said my cell phone was out, and indeed it was for the remainder of the day. As I hung up from her, my friend Ana rang, tearful and concerned. Her husband, Patrick, had left an hour before for work in New Jersey, and it seemed like a dangerous separation. All separations were potentially fatal that day. You wanted to know where everyone was, every minute. She told me she had been trying to contact Palestinian friends who worked and attended school near the event—their ethnic, religious, and national backgrounds made for real poignancy, as we both thought of the prejudice they would (probably) face, regardless of the eventual who/what/when/where/how of these events. We agreed to meet at Bruno’s, a bakery on La Guardia Place. For some reason I really took my time, though, before getting to Ana. I shampooed and shaved under the shower. This was a horror, and I needed to look my best, even as men and women were losing and risking their lives. I can only interpret what I did as an attempt to impose normalcy and control on the situation, on my environment. When I finally made it down there, she’d located our friends. They were safe. We stood in the street and watched the Towers. Horrified by the sight of human beings tumbling to their deaths, we turned to buy a tea/coffee—again some ludicrous normalization—but were drawn back by chilling screams from the street. Racing outside, we saw the second Tower collapse, and clutched at each other. People were streaming towards us from further downtown. We decided to be with our Palestinian friends in their apartment. When we arrived, we learnt that Mark had been four minutes away from the WTC when the first plane hit. I tried to call my daughter in London and my father in Canberra, but to no avail. I rang the mid-West, and asked my maybe-former novia to call England and Australia to report in on me. Our friend Jenine got through to relatives on the West Bank. Israeli tanks had commenced a bombardment there, right after the planes had struck New York. Family members spoke to her from under the kitchen table, where they were taking refuge from the shelling of their house. Then we gave ourselves over to television, like so many others around the world, even though these events were happening only a mile away. We wanted to hear official word, but there was just a huge absence—Bush was busy learning to read in Florida, then leading from the front in Louisiana and Nebraska. As the day wore on, we split up and regrouped, meeting folks. One guy was in the subway when smoke filled the car. Noone could breathe properly, people were screaming, and his only thought was for his dog DeNiro back in Brooklyn. From the panic of the train, he managed to call his mom on a cell to ask her to feed “DeNiro” that night, because it looked like he wouldn’t get home. A pregnant woman feared for her unborn as she fled the blasts, pushing the stroller with her baby in it as she did so. Away from these heart-rending tales from strangers, there was the fear: good grief, what horrible price would the US Government extract for this, and who would be the overt and covert agents and targets of that suffering? What blood-lust would this generate? What would be the pattern of retaliation and counter-retaliation? What would become of civil rights and cultural inclusiveness? So a jumble of emotions came forward, I assume in all of us. Anger was not there for me, just intense sorrow, shock, and fear, and the desire for intimacy. Network television appeared to offer me that, but in an ultimately unsatisfactory way. For I think I saw the end-result of reality TV that day. I have since decided to call this ‘emotionalization’—network TV’s tendency to substitute analysis of US politics and economics with a stress on feelings. Of course, powerful emotions have been engaged by this horror, and there is value in addressing that fact and letting out the pain. I certainly needed to do so. But on that day and subsequent ones, I looked to the networks, traditional sources of current-affairs knowledge, for just that—informed, multi-perspectival journalism that would allow me to make sense of my feelings, and come to a just and reasoned decision about how the US should respond. I waited in vain. No such commentary came forward. Just a lot of asinine inquiries from reporters that were identical to those they pose to basketballers after a game: Question—‘How do you feel now?’ Answer—‘God was with me today.’ For the networks were insistent on asking everyone in sight how they felt about the end of las torres gemelas. In this case, we heard the feelings of survivors, firefighters, viewers, media mavens, Republican and Democrat hacks, and vacuous Beltway state-of-the-nation pundits. But learning of the military-political economy, global inequality, and ideologies and organizations that made for our grief and loss—for that, there was no space. TV had forgotten how to do it. My principal feeling soon became one of frustration. So I headed back to where I began the day—The Guardian web site, where I was given insightful analysis of the messy factors of history, religion, economics, and politics that had created this situation. As I dealt with the tragedy of folks whose lives had been so cruelly lost, I pondered what it would take for this to stop. Or whether this was just the beginning. I knew one thing—the answers wouldn’t come from mainstream US television, no matter how full of feelings it was. And that made Toby anxious. And afraid. He still is. And so the dreams come. In one, I am suddenly furloughed from my job with an orchestra, as audience numbers tumble. I make my evening-wear way to my locker along with the other players, emptying it of bubble gum and instrument. The next night, I see a gigantic, fifty-feet high wave heading for the city beach where I’ve come to swim. Somehow I am sheltered behind a huge wall, as all the people around me die. Dripping, I turn to find myself in a media-stereotype “crack house” of the early ’90s—desperate-looking black men, endless doorways, sudden police arrival, and my earnest search for a passport that will explain away my presence. I awake in horror, to the realization that the passport was already open and stamped—racialization at work for Toby, every day and in every way, as a white man in New York City. Ana’s husband, Patrick, was at work ten miles from Manhattan when “it” happened. In the hallway, I overheard some talk about two planes crashing, but went to teach anyway in my usual morning stupor. This was just the usual chatter of disaster junkies. I didn’t hear the words, “World Trade Center” until ten thirty, at the end of the class at the college I teach at in New Jersey, across the Hudson river. A friend and colleague walked in and told me the news of the attack, to which I replied “You must be fucking joking.” He was a little offended. Students were milling haphazardly on the campus in the late summer weather, some looking panicked like me. My first thought was of some general failure of the air-traffic control system. There must be planes falling out of the sky all over the country. Then the height of the towers: how far towards our apartment in Greenwich Village would the towers fall? Neither of us worked in the financial district a mile downtown, but was Ana safe? Where on the college campus could I see what was happening? I recognized the same physical sensation I had felt the morning after Hurricane Andrew in Miami seeing at a distance the wreckage of our shattered apartment across a suburban golf course strewn with debris and flattened power lines. Now I was trapped in the suburbs again at an unbridgeable distance from my wife and friends who were witnessing the attacks first hand. Were they safe? What on earth was going on? This feeling of being cut off, my path to the familiar places of home blocked, remained for weeks my dominant experience of the disaster. In my office, phone calls to the city didn’t work. There were six voice-mail messages from my teenaged brother Alex in small-town England giving a running commentary on the attack and its aftermath that he was witnessing live on television while I dutifully taught my writing class. “Hello, Patrick, where are you? Oh my god, another plane just hit the towers. Where are you?” The web was choked: no access to newspapers online. Email worked, but no one was wasting time writing. My office window looked out over a soccer field to the still woodlands of western New Jersey: behind me to the east the disaster must be unfolding. Finally I found a website with a live stream from ABC television, which I watched flickering and stilted on the tiny screen. It had all already happened: both towers already collapsed, the Pentagon attacked, another plane shot down over Pennsylvania, unconfirmed reports said, there were other hijacked aircraft still out there unaccounted for. Manhattan was sealed off. George Washington Bridge, Lincoln and Holland tunnels, all the bridges and tunnels from New Jersey I used to mock shut down. Police actions sealed off the highways into “the city.” The city I liked to think of as the capital of the world was cut off completely from the outside, suddenly vulnerable and under siege. There was no way to get home. The phone rang abruptly and Alex, three thousand miles away, told me he had spoken to Ana earlier and she was safe. After a dozen tries, I managed to get through and spoke to her, learning that she and Toby had seen people jumping and then the second tower fall. Other friends had been even closer. Everyone was safe, we thought. I sat for another couple of hours in my office uselessly. The news was incoherent, stories contradictory, loops of the planes hitting the towers only just ready for recycling. The attacks were already being transformed into “the World Trade Center Disaster,” not yet the ahistorical singularity of the emergency “nine one one.” Stranded, I had to spend the night in New Jersey at my boss’s house, reminded again of the boundless generosity of Americans to relative strangers. In an effort to protect his young son from the as yet unfiltered images saturating cable and Internet, my friend’s TV set was turned off and we did our best to reassure. We listened surreptitiously to news bulletins on AM radio, hoping that the roads would open. Walking the dog with my friend’s wife and son we crossed a park on the ridge on which Upper Montclair sits. Ten miles away a huge column of smoke was rising from lower Manhattan, where the stunning absence of the towers was clearly visible. The summer evening was unnervingly still. We kicked a soccer ball around on the front lawn and a woman walked distracted by, shocked and pale up the tree-lined suburban street, suffering her own wordless trauma. I remembered that though most of my students were ordinary working people, Montclair is a well-off dormitory for the financial sector and high rises of Wall Street and Midtown. For the time being, this was a white-collar disaster. I slept a short night in my friend’s house, waking to hope I had dreamed it all, and took the commuter train in with shell-shocked bankers and corporate types. All men, all looking nervously across the river toward glimpses of the Manhattan skyline as the train neared Hoboken. “I can’t believe they’re making us go in,” one guy had repeated on the station platform. He had watched the attacks from his office in Midtown, “The whole thing.” Inside the train we all sat in silence. Up from the PATH train station on 9th street I came onto a carless 6th Avenue. At 14th street barricades now sealed off downtown from the rest of the world. I walked down the middle of the avenue to a newspaper stand; the Indian proprietor shrugged “No deliveries below 14th.” I had not realized that the closer to the disaster you came, the less information would be available. Except, I assumed, for the evidence of my senses. But at 8 am the Village was eerily still, few people about, nothing in the sky, including the twin towers. I walked to Houston Street, which was full of trucks and police vehicles. Tractor trailers sat carrying concrete barriers. Below Houston, each street into Soho was barricaded and manned by huddles of cops. I had walked effortlessly up into the “lockdown,” but this was the “frozen zone.” There was no going further south towards the towers. I walked the few blocks home, found my wife sleeping, and climbed into bed, still in my clothes from the day before. “Your heart is racing,” she said. I realized that I hadn’t known if I would get back, and now I never wanted to leave again; it was still only eight thirty am. Lying there, I felt the terrible wonder of a distant bystander for the first-hand witness. Ana’s face couldn’t tell me what she had seen. I felt I needed to know more, to see and understand. Even though I knew the effort was useless: I could never bridge that gap that had trapped me ten miles away, my back turned to the unfolding disaster. The television was useless: we don’t have cable, and the mast on top of the North Tower, which Ana had watched fall, had relayed all the network channels. I knew I had to go down and see the wreckage. Later I would realize how lucky I had been not to suffer from “disaster envy.” Unbelievably, in retrospect, I commuted into work the second day after the attack, dogged by the same unnerving sensation that I would not get back—to the wounded, humbled former center of the world. My students were uneasy, all talked out. I was a novelty, a New Yorker living in the Village a mile from the towers, but I was forty-eight hours late. Out of place in both places. I felt torn up, but not angry. Back in the city at night, people were eating and drinking with a vengeance, the air filled with acrid sicklysweet smoke from the burning wreckage. Eyes stang and nose ran with a bitter acrid taste. Who knows what we’re breathing in, we joked nervously. A friend’s wife had fallen out with him for refusing to wear a protective mask in the house. He shrugged a wordlessly reassuring smile. What could any of us do? I walked with Ana down to the top of West Broadway from where the towers had commanded the skyline over SoHo; downtown dense smoke blocked the view to the disaster. A crowd of onlookers pushed up against the barricades all day, some weeping, others gawping. A tall guy was filming the grieving faces with a video camera, which was somehow the worst thing of all, the first sign of the disaster tourism that was already mushrooming downtown. Across the street an Asian artist sat painting the street scene in streaky black and white; he had scrubbed out two white columns where the towers would have been. “That’s the first thing I’ve seen that’s made me feel any better,” Ana said. We thanked him, but he shrugged blankly, still in shock I supposed. On the Friday, the clampdown. I watched the Mayor and Police Chief hold a press conference in which they angrily told the stream of volunteers to “ground zero” that they weren’t needed. “We can handle this ourselves. We thank you. But we don’t need your help,” Commissioner Kerik said. After the free-for-all of the first couple of days, with its amazing spontaneities and common gestures of goodwill, the clampdown was going into effect. I decided to go down to Canal Street and see if it was true that no one was welcome anymore. So many paths through the city were blocked now. “Lock down, frozen zone, war zone, the site, combat zone, ground zero, state troopers, secured perimeter, national guard, humvees, family center”: a disturbing new vocabulary that seemed to stamp the logic of Giuliani’s sanitized and over-policed Manhattan onto the wounded hulk of the city. The Mayor had been magnificent in the heat of the crisis; Churchillian, many were saying—and indeed, Giuliani quickly appeared on the cover of Cigar Afficionado, complete with wing collar and the misquotation from Kipling, “Captain Courageous.” Churchill had not believed in peacetime politics either, and he never got over losing his empire. Now the regime of command and control over New York’s citizens and its economy was being stabilized and reimposed. The sealed-off, disfigured, and newly militarized spaces of the New York through which I have always loved to wander at all hours seemed to have been put beyond reach for the duration. And, in the new post-“9/11” post-history, the duration could last forever. The violence of the attacks seemed to have elicited a heavy-handed official reaction that sought to contain and constrict the best qualities of New York. I felt more anger at the clampdown than I did at the demolition of the towers. I knew this was unreasonable, but I feared the reaction, the spread of the racial harassment and racial profiling that I had already heard of from my students in New Jersey. This militarizing of the urban landscape seemed to negate the sprawling, freewheeling, boundless largesse and tolerance on which New York had complacently claimed a monopoly. For many the towers stood for that as well, not just as the monumental outposts of global finance that had been attacked. Could the American flag mean something different? For a few days, perhaps—on the helmets of firemen and construction workers. But not for long. On the Saturday, I found an unmanned barricade way east along Canal Street and rode my bike past throngs of Chinatown residents, by the Federal jail block where prisoners from the first World Trade Center bombing were still being held. I headed south and west towards Tribeca; below the barricades in the frozen zone, you could roam freely, the cops and soldiers assuming you belonged there. I felt uneasy, doubting my own motives for being there, feeling the blood drain from my head in the same numbing shock I’d felt every time I headed downtown towards the site. I looped towards Greenwich Avenue, passing an abandoned bank full of emergency supplies and boxes of protective masks. Crushed cars still smeared with pulverized concrete and encrusted with paperwork strewn by the blast sat on the street near the disabled telephone exchange. On one side of the avenue stood a horde of onlookers, on the other television crews, all looking two blocks south towards a colossal pile of twisted and smoking steel, seven stories high. We were told to stay off the street by long-suffering national guardsmen and women with southern accents, kids. Nothing happening, just the aftermath. The TV crews were interviewing worn-out, dust-covered volunteers and firemen who sat quietly leaning against the railings of a park filled with scraps of paper. Out on the West Side highway, a high-tech truck was offering free cellular phone calls. The six lanes by the river were full of construction machinery and military vehicles. Ambulances rolled slowly uptown, bodies inside? I locked my bike redundantly to a lamppost and crossed under the hostile gaze of plainclothes police to another media encampment. On the path by the river, two camera crews were complaining bitterly in the heat. “After five days of this I’ve had enough.” They weren’t talking about the trauma, bodies, or the wreckage, but censorship. “Any blue light special gets to roll right down there, but they see your press pass and it’s get outta here. I’ve had enough.” I fronted out the surly cops and ducked under the tape onto the path, walking onto a Pier on which we’d spent many lazy afternoons watching the river at sunset. Dust everywhere, police boats docked and waiting, a crane ominously dredging mud into a barge. I walked back past the camera operators onto the highway and walked up to an interview in process. Perfectly composed, a fire chief and his crew from some small town in upstate New York were politely declining to give details about what they’d seen at “ground zero.” The men’s faces were dust streaked, their eyes slightly dazed with the shock of a horror previously unimaginable to most Americans. They were here to help the best they could, now they’d done as much as anyone could. “It’s time for us to go home.” The chief was eloquent, almost rehearsed in his precision. It was like a Magnum press photo. But he was refusing to cooperate with the media’s obsessive emotionalism. I walked down the highway, joining construction workers, volunteers, police, and firemen in their hundreds at Chambers Street. No one paid me any attention; it was absurd. I joined several other watchers on the stairs by Stuyvesant High School, which was now the headquarters for the recovery crews. Just two or three blocks away, the huge jagged teeth of the towers’ beautiful tracery lurched out onto the highway above huge mounds of debris. The TV images of the shattered scene made sense as I placed them into what was left of a familiar Sunday afternoon geography of bike rides and walks by the river, picnics in the park lying on the grass and gazing up at the infinite solidity of the towers. Demolished. It was breathtaking. If “they” could do that, they could do anything. Across the street at tables military policeman were checking credentials of the milling volunteers and issuing the pink and orange tags that gave access to ground zero. Without warning, there was a sudden stampede running full pelt up from the disaster site, men and women in fatigues, burly construction workers, firemen in bunker gear. I ran a few yards then stopped. Other people milled around idly, ignoring the panic, smoking and talking in low voices. It was a mainly white, blue-collar scene. All these men wearing flags and carrying crowbars and flashlights. In their company, the intolerance and rage I associated with flags and construction sites was nowhere to be seen. They were dealing with a torn and twisted otherness that dwarfed machismo or bigotry. I talked to a moustachioed, pony-tailed construction worker who’d hitched a ride from the mid-west to “come and help out.” He was staying at the Y, he said, it was kind of rough. “Have you been down there?” he asked, pointing towards the wreckage. “You’re British, you weren’t in World War Two were you?” I replied in the negative. “It’s worse ’n that. I went down last night and you can’t imagine it. You don’t want to see it if you don’t have to.” Did I know any welcoming ladies? he asked. The Y was kind of tough. When I saw TV images of President Bush speaking to the recovery crews and steelworkers at “ground zero” a couple of days later, shouting through a bullhorn to chants of “USA, USA” I knew nothing had changed. New York’s suffering was subject to a second hijacking by the brokers of national unity. New York had never been America, and now its terrible human loss and its great humanity were redesignated in the name of the nation, of the coming war. The signs without a referent were being forcibly appropriated, locked into an impoverished patriotic framework, interpreted for “us” by a compliant media and an opportunistic regime eager to reign in civil liberties, to unloose its war machine and tighten its grip on the Muslim world. That day, drawn to the river again, I had watched F18 fighter jets flying patterns over Manhattan as Bush’s helicopters came in across the river. Otherwise empty of air traffic, “our” skies were being torn up by the military jets: it was somehow the worst sight yet, worse than the wreckage or the bands of disaster tourists on Canal Street, a sign of further violence yet to come. There was a carrier out there beyond New York harbor, there to protect us: the bruising, blustering city once open to all comers. That felt worst of all. In the intervening weeks, we have seen other, more unstable ways of interpreting the signs of September 11 and its aftermath. Many have circulated on the Internet, past the blockages and blockades placed on urban spaces and intellectual life. Karl-Heinz Stockhausen’s work was banished (at least temporarily) from the canon of avant-garde electronic music when he described the attack on las torres gemelas as akin to a work of art. If Jacques Derrida had described it as an act of deconstruction (turning technological modernity literally in on itself), or Jean Baudrillard had announced that the event was so thick with mediation it had not truly taken place, something similar would have happened to them (and still may). This is because, as Don DeLillo so eloquently put it in implicit reaction to the plaintive cry “Why do they hate us?”: “it is the power of American culture to penetrate every wall, home, life and mind”—whether via military action or cultural iconography. All these positions are correct, however grisly and annoying they may be. What GK Chesterton called the “flints and tiles” of nineteenth-century European urban existence were rent asunder like so many victims of high-altitude US bombing raids. As a First-World disaster, it became knowable as the first-ever US “ground zero” such precisely through the high premium immediately set on the lives of Manhattan residents and the rarefied discussion of how to commemorate the high-altitude towers. When, a few weeks later, an American Airlines plane crashed on take-off from Queens, that borough was left open to all comers. Manhattan was locked down, flown over by “friendly” bombers. In stark contrast to the open if desperate faces on the street of 11 September, people went about their business with heads bowed even lower than is customary. Contradictory deconstructions and valuations of Manhattan lives mean that September 11 will live in infamy and hyper-knowability. The vengeful United States government and population continue on their way. Local residents must ponder insurance claims, real-estate values, children’s terrors, and their own roles in something beyond their ken. New York had been forced beyond being the center of the financial world. It had become a military target, a place that was receiving as well as dispatching the slings and arrows of global fortune. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Deer, Patrick and Miller, Toby. "A Day That Will Live In … ?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.1 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/adaythat.php>. Chicago Style Deer, Patrick and Miller, Toby, "A Day That Will Live In … ?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 1 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/adaythat.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Deer, Patrick and Miller, Toby. (2002) A Day That Will Live In … ?. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(1). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/adaythat.php> ([your date of access]).

IntroductionThe 2009 American film Trash Humpers, directed by Harmony Korine, was released at a time when the hipster had become a ubiquitous concept, entering into the common vernacular of numerous cultures throughout the world, and gaining significant press, social media and academic attention (see Žižek; Arsel and Thompson; Greif et al.; Stahl; Ouellette; Reeve; Schiermer; Maly and Varis). Trash Humpers emerged soon after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis triggered Occupy movements in numerous cities, aided by social media platforms, reported on by blogs such as Gawker, and stylized by multi-national youth-subculture brands such as Vice, American Apparel, Urban Outfitters and a plethora of localised variants.Korine’s film, which is made to resemble found VHS footage of old-aged vandals, epitomises the ironic, retro stylizations and “counterculture-meets-kitsch” aesthetics so familiar to hipster culture. As a creative stereotype from 1940s and ‘50s jazz and beatnik subcultures, the hipster re-emerged in the twenty-first century as a negative embodiment of alternative culture in the age of the Internet. As well as plumbing the recent past for things not yet incorporated into contemporary marketing mechanisms, the hipster also signifies the blurring of irony and authenticity. Such “outsiderness as insiderness” postures can be regarded as a continuation of the marginality-from-the-centre logic of cool capitalism that emerged after World War Two. Particularly between 2007 and 2015, the post-postmodern concept of the hipster was a resonant cultural trope in Western and non-Western cultures alike, coinciding with the normalisation of the new digital terrain and the establishment of mobile social media as an integral aspect of many people’s daily lives. While Korine’s 79-minute feature could be thought of as following in the schlocky footsteps of the likes of Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects (2006), it is decidedly more arthouse, and more attuned to the influence of contemporary alternative media brands and independent film history alike – as if the love child of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963) and Vice Video, the latter having been labelled as “devil-may-care hipsterism” (Carr). Upon release, Trash Humpers was described by Gene McHugh as “a mildly hip take on Jackass”; by Mike D’Angelo as “an empty hipster pose”; and by Aaron Hillis as either “the work of an insincere hipster or an eccentric provocateur”. Lacking any semblance of a conventional plot, Trash Humpers essentially revolves around four elderly-looking protagonists – three men and a woman – who document themselves with a low-quality video camera as they go about behaving badly in the suburbs of Nashville, Tennessee, where Korine still lives. They cackle eerily to themselves as they try to stave off boredom, masturbating frantically on rubbish bins, defecating and drinking alcohol in public, fellating foliage, smashing televisions, playing ten-pin bowling, lighting firecrackers and telling gay “hate” jokes to camera with no punchlines. In one purposefully undramatic scene half-way through the film, the humpers are shown in the aftermath of an attack on a man wearing a French maid’s outfit; he lies dead in a pool of blood on their kitchen floor with a hammer at his feet. The humpers are consummate “bad” performers in every sense of the term, and they are joined by a range of other, apparently lower-class, misfits with whom they stage tap dance routines and repetitively sing nursery-rhyme-styled raps such as: “make it, make it, don’t break it; make it, make it, don’t fake it; make it, make it, don’t take it”, which acts as a surrogate theme song for the film. Korine sometimes depicts his main characters on crutches or in a wheelchair, and a baby doll is never too far away from the action, as a silent and Surrealist witness to their weird, sinister and sometimes very funny exploits. The film cuts from scene to scene as if edited on a video recorder, utilising in-house VHS titling sequences, audio glitches and video static to create the sense that one is engaging voyeuristically with a found video document rather than a scripted movie. Mainstream AlternativesAs a viewer of Trash Humpers, one has to try hard to suspend disbelief if one is to see the humpers as genuine geriatric peeping Toms rather than as hipsters in old-man masks trying to be rebellious. However, as Korine’s earlier films such as Gummo (1997) attest, he clearly delights in blurring the line between failure and transcendence, or, in this case, between pretentious art-school bravado and authentic redneck ennui. As noted in a review by Jeannette Catsoulis, writing for the New York Times: “Much of this is just so much juvenile posturing, but every so often the screen freezes into something approximating beauty: a blurry, spaced-out, yellow-green landscape, as alien as an ancient photograph”. Korine has made a career out of generating this wavering uncertainty in his work, polarising audiences with a mix of critical, cinema-verité styles and cynical exploitations. His work has consistently revelled in ethical ambiguities, creating environments where teenagers take Ritalin for kicks, kill cats, wage war with their families and engage in acts of sexual deviancy – all of which are depicted with a photographer’s eye for the uncanny.The elusive and contradictory aspects of Korine’s work – at once ugly and beautiful, abstract and commercial, pessimistic and nostalgic – are evident not just in films such as Gummo, Julien Donkey Boy (1999) and Mister Lonely (2007) but also in his screenplay for Kids (1995), his performance-like appearances on The Tonight Show with David Letterman (1993-2015) and in publications such as A Crackup at the Race Riots (1998) and Pass the Bitch Chicken (2001). As well as these outputs, Korine is also a painter who is represented by Gagosian Gallery – one of the world’s leading art galleries – and he has directed numerous music videos, documentaries and commercials throughout his career. More than just update of the traditional figure of the auteur, Korine, instead, resembles a contemporary media artist whose avant-garde and grotesque treatments of Americana permeate almost everything he does. Korine wrote the screenplay for Kids when he was just 19, and subsequently built his reputation on the paradoxical mainstreaming of alternative culture in the 1990s. This is exemplified by the establishment of music and film genres such “alternative” and “independent”; the popularity of the slacker ethos attributed to Generation X; the increased visibility of alternative press zines; the birth of grunge in fashion and music; and the coining of “cool hunting” – a bottom-up market research phenomenon that aimed to discover new trends in urban subcultures for the purpose of mass marketing. Key to “alternative culture”, and its related categories such as “indie” and “arthouse”, is the idea of evoking artistic authenticity while covertly maintaining a parasitic relationship with the mainstream. As Holly Kruse notes in her account of the indie music scenes of the 1990s, which gained tremendous popularity in the wake of grunge bands such as Nirvana: without dominant, mainstream musics against which to react, independent music cannot be independent. Its existence depends upon dominant music structures and practices against which to define itself. Indie music has therefore been continually engaged in an economic and ideological struggle in which its ‘outsider’ status is re-examined, re-defined, and re-articulated to sets of musical practices. (Kruse 149)Alternative culture follows a similar, highly contentious, logic, appearing as a nebulous, authentic and artistic “other” whose exponents risk being entirely defined by the mainstream markets they profess to oppose. Kids was directed by the artist cum indie-director Larry Clark, who discovered Korine riding his skateboard with a group of friends in New York’s Washington Square in the early 1990s, before commissioning him to write a script. The then subcultural community of skating – which gained prominence in the 1990s amidst the increased visibility of “alternative sports” – provides an important backdrop to the film, which documents a group of disaffected New York teenagers at a time of the Aids crisis in America. Korine has been active in promoting the DIY ethos, creativity and anti-authoritarian branding of skate culture since this time – an industry that, in its attempts to maintain a non-mainstream profile while also being highly branded, has become emblematic of the category of “alternative culture”. Korine has undertaken commercial projects with an array skate-wear brands, but he is particularly associated with Supreme, a so-called “guerrilla fashion” label originating in 1994 that credits Clark and other 1990s indie darlings, and Korine cohorts, Chloë Sevigny and Terry Richardson, as former models and collaborators (Williams). The company is well known for its designer skateboard decks, its collaborations with prominent contemporary visual artists, its hip-hop branding and “inscrutable” web videos. It is also well known for its limited runs of new clothing lines, which help to stoke demand through one-offs – blending street-wear accessibility with the restricted-market and anti-authoritarian sensibility of avant-garde art.Of course, “alternative culture” poses a notorious conundrum for analysis, involving highly subjective demarcations of “mainstream” from “subversive” culture, not to mention “genuine subversion” from mere “corporate alternatives”. As Pierre Bourdieu has argued, the roots of alternative culture lie in the Western tradition of the avant-garde and the “aesthetic gaze” that developed in the nineteenth century (Field 36). In analysing the modernist notion of advanced cultural practice – where art is presented as an alternative to bourgeois academic taste and to the common realm of cultural commodities – Bourdieu proposed a distinction between two types of “fields”, or logics of cultural production. Alternative culture follows what Bourdieu called “the field of restricted production”, which adheres to “art for art’s sake” ideals, where audiences are targeted as if like-minded peers (Field 50). In contrast, the “field of large-scale production” reflects the commercial imperatives of mainstream culture, in which goods are produced for the general public at large. The latter field of large-scale production tends to service pre-established markets, operating in response to public demand. Furthermore, whereas success in the field of restricted production is often indirect, and latent – involving artists who create niche markets without making any concessions to those markets – success in the field of large-scale production is typically more immediate and quantifiable (Field 39). Here we can see that central to the branding of “alternative culture” is the perceived refusal to conform to popular taste and the logic of capitalism more generally is. As Supreme founder James Jebbia stated about his brand in a rare interview: “The less known the better” (Williams). On this, Bourdieu states that, in the field of restricted production, the fundamental principles of all ordinary economies are inversed to create a “loser wins” scenario (Field 39). Profit and cultural esteem become detrimental attributes in this context, potentially tainting the integrity and marginalisation on which alternative products depend. As one ironic hipster t-shirt puts it: “Nothing is any good if other people like it” (Diesel Sweeties).Trash HipstersIn abandoning linear narrative for rough assemblages of vignettes – or “moments” – recorded with an unsteady handheld camera, Trash Humpers positions itself in ironic opposition to mainstream filmmaking, refusing the narrative arcs and unwritten rules of Hollywood film, save for its opening and closing credits. Given Korine’s much publicized appreciation of cinema pioneers, we can understand Trash Humpers as paying homage to independent and DIY film history, including Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, William Eggleston’s Stranded in Canton (1973), Andy Warhol’s and Paul Morrissey’s Lonesome Cowboys (1967) and Trash (1970), and John Waters’s Pink Flamingos (1972), all of which jubilantly embraced the “bad” aesthetic of home movies. Posed as fantasized substitutions for mainstream movie-making, such works were also underwritten by the legitimacy of camp as a form of counter-culture critique, blurring parody and documentary to give voice to an array of non-mainstream and counter-cultural identities. The employment of camp in postmodern culture became known not merely as an aesthetic subversion of cultural mores but also as “a gesture of self-legitimation” (Derrida 290), its “failed seriousness” regarded as a critical response to the specific historical problem of being a “culturally over-saturated” subject (Sontag 288).The significant difference between Korine’s film and those of his 1970s-era forbears is precisely the attention he pays to the formal aspects of his medium, revelling in analogue editing glitches to the point of fetishism, in some cases lasting as long as the scenes themselves. Consciously working out-of-step with the media of his day, Trash Humpers in imbued with nostalgia from its very beginning. Whereas Smith, Eggleston, Warhol, Morrissey and Waters blurred fantasy and documentary in ways that raised the social and political identities of their subjects, Korine seems much more interested in “trash” as an aesthetic trope. In following this interest, he rightfully pays homage to the tropes of queer cinema, however, he conveniently leaves behind their underlying commentaries about (hetero-) normative culture. A sequence where the trash humpers visit a whorehouse and amuse themselves by smoking cigars and slapping the ample bottoms of prostitutes in G-strings confirms the heterosexual tenor of the film, which is reiterated throughout by numerous deadpan gay jokes and slurs.Trash Humpers can be understood precisely in terms of Korine’s desire to maintain the aesthetic imperatives of alternative culture, where formal experimentation and the subverting of mainstream genres can provide a certain amount of freedom from explicated meaning, and, in particular, from socio-political commentary. Bourdieu rightly points out how the pleasures of the aesthetic gaze often manifest themselves curiously as form of “deferred pleasure” (353) or “pleasure without enjoyment” (495), which corresponds to Immanuel Kant’s notion of the disinterested nature of aesthetic judgement. Aesthetic dispositions posed in the negative – as in the avant-garde artists who mined primitive and ugly cultural stereotypes – typically use as reference points “facile” or “vulgar” (393) working-class tropes that refer negatively to sensuous pleasure as their major criterion of judgment. For Bourdieu, the pleasures provided by the aesthetic gaze in such instances are not sensual pleasures so much as the pleasures of social distinction – signifying the author’s distance from taste as a form of gratification. Here, it is easy to see how the orgiastic central characters in Trash Humpers might be employed by Korine for a similar end-result. As noted by Jeremiah Kipp in a review of the film: “You don't ‘like’ a movie like Trash Humpers, but I’m very happy such films exist”. Propelled by aesthetic, rather than by social, questions of value, those that “get” the obscure works of alternative culture have a tendency to legitimize them on the basis of the high-degree of formal analysis skills they require. For Bourdieu, this obscures the fact that one’s aesthetic “‘eye’ is a product of history reproduced by education” – a privileged mode of looking, estranged from those unfamiliar with the internal logic of decoding presupposed by the very notion of “aesthetic enjoyment” (2).The rhetorical priority of alternative culture is, in Bourdieu’s terms, the “autonomous” perfection of the form rather than the “heteronomous” attempt to monopolise on it (Field 40). However, such distinctions are, in actuality, more nuanced than Bourdieu sometimes assumed. This is especially true in the context of global digital culture, which makes explicit how the same cultural signs can have vastly different meanings and motivations across different social contexts. This has arguably resulted in the destabilisation of prescriptive analyses of cultural taste, and has contributed to recent “post-critical” advances, in which academics such as Bruno Latour and Rita Felski advocate for cultural analyses and practices that promote relationality and attachment rather than suspicious (critical) dispositions towards marginal and popular subjects alike. Latour’s call for a move away from the “sledge hammer” of critique applies as much to cultural practice as it does to written analysis. Rather than maintaining hierarchical oppositions between authentic versus inauthentic taste, Latour understands culture – and the material world more generally – as having agency alongside, and with, that of the social world.Hipsters with No AlternativeIf, as Karl Spracklen suggests, alternativism is thought of “as a political project of resistance to capitalism, with communicative oppositionality as its defining feature” (254), it is clear that there has been a progressive waning in relevance of the category of “alternative culture” in the age of the Internet, which coincides with the triumph of so-called “neoliberal individualism” (258). To this end, Korine has lost some of his artistic credibility over the course of the 2000s. If viewed negatively, icons of 1990s alternative culture such as Korine can be seen as merely exploiting Dada-like techniques of mimetic exacerbation and symbolic détournement for the purpose of alternative, “arty” branding rather than pertaining to a counter-hegemonic cultural movement (Foster 31). It is within this context of heightened scepticism surrounding alternative culture that the hipster stereotype emerged in cultures throughout the world, as if a contested symbol of the aesthetic gaze in an era of neoliberal identity politics. Whatever the psychological motivations underpinning one’s use of the term, to call someone a hipster is typically to point out that their distinctive alternative or “arty” status appears overstated; their creative decisions considered as if a type of bathos. For detractors of alternative cultural producers such as Korine, he is trying too hard to be different, using the stylised codes of “alternative” to conceal what is essentially his cultural and political immaturity. The hipster – who is rarely ever self-identified – re-emerged in the 2000s to operate as a scapegoat for inauthentic markers of alternative culture, associated with men and women who appear to embrace Realpolitik, sincerity and authentic expressions of identity while remaining tethered to irony, autonomous aesthetics and self-design. Perhaps the real irony of the hipster is the pervasiveness of irony in contemporary culture. R. J Magill Jnr. has argued that “a certain cultural bitterness legitimated through trenchant disbelief” (xi) has come to define the dominant mode of political engagement in many societies since the early 2000s, in response to mass digital information, twenty-four-hour news cycles, and the climate of suspicion produced by information about terrorism threats. He analyses the prominence of political irony in American TV shows including The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Simpsons, South Park, The Chappelle Show and The Colbert Report but he also notes its pervasiveness as a twenty-first-century worldview – a distancing that “paradoxically and secretly preserves the ideals of sincerity, honesty and authenticity by momentarily belying its own appearance” (x). Crucially, then, the utterance “hipster” has come to signify instances when irony and aesthetic distance are perceived to have been taken too far, generating the most disdain from those for whom irony, aesthetic discernment and cultural connoisseurship still provide much-needed moments of disconnection from capitalist cultures drowning in commercial hyperbole and grave news hype. Korine himself has acknowledged that Spring Breakers (2013) – his follow-up feature film to Trash Humpers – was created in response to the notion that “alternative culture”, once a legitimate challenge to mainstream taste, had lost its oppositional power with the decentralization of digital culture. He states that he made Spring Breakers at a moment “when there’s no such thing as high or low, it’s all been exploded. There is no underground or above-ground, there’s nothing that’s alternative. We’re at a point of post-everything, so it’s all about finding the spirit inside, and the logic, and making your own connections” (Hawker). In this context, we can understand Trash Humpers as the last of the Korine films to be branded with the authenticity of alternative culture. In Spring Breakers Korine moved from the gritty low-fi sensibility of his previous films and adopted a more digital, light-filled and pastel-coloured palette. Focussing more conventionally on plot than ever before, Spring Breakers follows four college girls who hold up a restaurant in order to fund their spring break vacation. Critic Michael Chaiken noted that the film marks a shift in Korine’s career, from the alternative stylings of the pre-Internet generation to “the cultural heirs [of] the doomed protagonists of Kids: nineties babies, who grew up with the Internet, whose sensibilities have been shaped by the sweeping technological changes that have taken place in the interval between the Clinton and Obama eras” (33).By the end of the 2000s, an entire generation came of age having not experienced a time when the obscure films, music or art of the past took more effort to track down. Having been a key participant in the branding of alternative culture, Korine is in a good position to recall a different, pre-YouTube time – when cultural discernment was still caught up in the authenticity of artistic identity, and when one’s cultural tastes could still operate with a certain amount of freedom from sociological scrutiny. Such ideas seem a long way away from today’s cultural environments, which have been shaped not only by digital media’s promotion of cultural interconnection and mass information, but also by social media’s emphasis on mobilization and ethical awareness. ConclusionI should reiterate here that is not Korine’s lack of seriousness, or irony, alone that marks Trash Humpers as a response to the scepticism surrounding alternative culture symbolised by the figure of the hipster. It is, rather, that Korine’s mock-documentary about juvenile geriatrics works too hard to obscure its implicit social commentary, appearing driven to condemn contemporary capitalism’s exploitations of youthfulness only to divert such “uncool” critical commentaries through unsubtle formal distractions, visual poetics and “bad boy” avant-garde signifiers of authenticity. Before being bludgeoned to death, the unnamed man in the French maid’s outfit recites a poem on a bridge amidst a barrage of fire crackers let off by a nearby humper in a wheelchair. Although easily overlooked, it could, in fact, be a pivotal scene in the film. Spoken with mock high-art pretentions, the final lines of the poem are: So what? Why, I ask, why? Why castigate these creatures whose angelic features are bumping and grinding on trash? Are they not spawned by our greed? Are they not our true seed? Are they not what we’ve bought for our cash? We’ve created this lot, of the ooze and the rot, deliberately and unabashed. Whose orgiastic elation and one mission in creation is to savagely fornicate TRASH!Here, the character’s warning of capitalist overabundance is drowned out by the (aesthetic) shocks of the fire crackers, just as the stereotypical hipster’s ethical ideals are drowned out by their aesthetic excess. The scene also functions as a metaphor for the humpers themselves, whose elderly masks – embodiments of nostalgia – temporarily suspend their real socio-political identities for the sake of role-play. It is in this sense that Trash Humpers is too enamoured with its own artifices – including its anonymous “boys club” mentality – to suggest anything other than the aesthetic distance that has come to mark the failings of the “alternative culture” category. In such instances, alternative taste appears as a rhetorical posture, with Korine asking us to gawk knowingly at the hedonistic and destructive pleasures pursued by the humpers while factoring in, and accepting, our likely disapproval.ReferencesArsel, Zeynep, and Craig J. Thompson. “Demythologizing Consumption Practices: How Consumers Protect Their Field-Dependent Identity Investments from Devaluing Marketplace Myths.” Journal of Consumer Research 37.5 (2011): 791-806.Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984.Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production Essays on Art and Literature. Edited by Randal Johnson. London: Polity Press, 1993.Carr, David. “Its Edge Intact, Vice Is Chasing Hard News.” New York Times 24 Aug. 2014. 12 Nov. 2016 <https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/25/business/media/its-edge-intact-vice-is-chasing-hard-news-.html>.Catsoulis, Jeannette. “Geriatric Delinquents, Rampaging through Suburbia.” New York Times 6 May 2010. 1` Nov. 2016 <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/movies/07trash.html>.Chaiken, Michael. “The Dream Life.” Film Comment (Mar./Apr. 2013): 30-33.D’Angelo, Mike. “Trash Humpers.” Not Coming 18 Sep. 2009. 12 Nov. 2016 <http://www.notcoming.com/reviews/trashhumpers>.Derrida, Jacques. Positions. London: Athlone, 1981.Diesel Sweeties. 1 Nov. 2016 <https://store.dieselsweeties.com/products/nothing-is-any-good-if-other-people-like-it-shirt>.Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.Greif, Mark. What Was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation. New York: n+1 Foundation, 2010.Hawker, Philippa. “Telling Tales Out of School.” Sydney Morning Herald 4 May 2013. 12 Nov. 2016 <http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/telling-tales-out-of-school-20130503-2ixc3.html>.Hillis, Aaron. “Harmony Korine on Trash Humpers.” IFC 6 May 2009. 12 Nov. 2016 <http://www.ifc.com/2010/05/harmony-korine-2>.Jay Magill Jr., R. Chic Ironic Bitterness. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007.Kipp, Jeremiah. “Clean Off the Dirt, Scrape Off the Blood: An Interview with Trash Humpers Director Harmony Korine.” Slant Magazine 18 Mar. 2011. 1 Nov. 2016 <http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/article/clean-off-the-dirt-scrape-off-the-blood-an-interview-with-trash-humpers-director-harmony-korine>.Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (2004): 225-248.Maly, Ico, and Varis, Piia. “The 21st-Century Hipster: On Micro-Populations in Times of Superdiversity.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 19.6 (2016): 637–653.McHugh, Gene. “Monday May 10th 2010.” Post Internet. New York: Lulu Press, 2010.Ouellette, Marc. “‘I Know It When I See It’: Style, Simulation and the ‘Short-Circuit Sign’.” Semiotic Review 3 (2013): 1–15.Reeve, Michael. “The Hipster as the Postmodern Dandy: Towards an Extensive Study.” 2013. 12 Nov. 2016. <http://www.academia.edu/3589528/The_hipster_as_the_postmodern_dandy_towards_an_extensive_study>.Schiermer, Bjørn. “Late-Modern Hipsters: New Tendencies in Popular Culture.” Acta Sociologica 57.2 (2014): 167–181.Sontag, Susan. “Notes on Camp.” Against Interpretation. New York: Octagon, 1964/1982. 275-92. Stahl, Geoff. “Mile-End Hipsters and the Unmasking of Montreal’s Proletaroid Intelligentsia; Or How a Bohemia Becomes BOHO.” Adam Art Gallery, Apr. 2010. 12 May 2015 <http://www.adamartgallery.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/adamartgallery_vuwsalecture_geoffstahl.pdf>.Williams, Alex. “Guerrilla Fashion: The Story of Supreme.” New York Times 21 Nov. 2012. 1 Nov. 2016 <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/22/fashion/guerrilla-fashion-the-story-of-supreme.html>.Žižek, Slavoj. “L’Etat d’Hipster.” Rhinocerotique. Trans. Henry Brulard. Sep. 2009. 3-10.

Biracial Phenotypes as Ambivalent SignifiersRacialisation is the process of imbuing a body with meaning (Ahmed). Rockquemore et al.’s study on American Black-White middle-class college youth emphasises the importance of phenotypes in interracial children because “physical appearance is the primary cue for racial group membership… and remains the greatest factor in how mixed-race children are classified by others” (114). Wilson’s work on British mixed race 6 to 9-year-olds argues that interracial children classify other children based on how “they locate themselves in the racial structure and how they feel about the various racial groups” (64).However, interracial children often struggle with claiming a racial identity that does not correspond to their obvious physical appearance because society is more likely to classify or perceive the child based on their corporeal manifestations than their self-identified racial master status. In instances where they are unacknowledged or rejected by homoethinc groups, interracial persons may be deemed ‘illegitimate’ trespassers within social contexts. In response, interracial bodies may selectively hyper/under-visibilise one racial identity depending on personal connotations of the social group in particular settings (Choudhry 119). Choudhry’s book on the ‘chameleon identities’ of mixed race Black-Asian and White-Asian British young people sets out four ‘interpretative repertoires’ that interracials cognitively adopt: ‘Identity in Transition’ where individuals are still coming to terms with their master status; ‘One Ethnic Identity’ where individuals always privilege one race over the other regardless of context; ‘Interethnic Identity’ where individuals consciously and equally express their dual race and parentage at all times; and ‘Situational/Chameleon-like Identity’ where individuals selectively emphasise one race over the other when it benefits them (112-116). This paper follows on a similar mode of enquiry among Malay-Chinese women in Singapore, whose racial master status is situationally-based.In ethnically heterogeneous and culturally diverse Singapore, an individual’s racial phenotype is convenient shorthand that demarcates Others’ appropriate interactions with and expectations of them. Malbon describes these brief encounters in crowded urban settings as ‘mismeetings’, in which a body’s visual markers allow for a quick assessment and situation of a person’s identity and status. A visibly racialised body thus informs Others on how to negotiate cross-cultural sensitivities and understandings with them in a shared social space. For instance, this visibility may help inform the Other of an appropriate choice of mother tongue to be adopted in conversation with a stranger, or whether to extend non-halal food to a ‘Malay-looking’ – and by extension in most parts of South East Asia, Muslim – person.Unlike previous studies, this paper is not focused on interracial individuals’ felt-race, cognitive development, or the ethnic influence in their upbringing. Instead, it concentrates on their praxis of enacting corporeal markers to enable homophilous interactions with homoethnic social groups. Some Malay-Chinese in Singapore have phenotypic features that may not distinctly reflect their ethnic diversity. Hence, they are not readily acknowledged or accepted into some homoethnic contexts and are deemed ‘illegitimate’ trespassers. It is important for Others to be able to situate them since this “brings with it privileges or deprivations that affect [their] relationships with others and [their] relation to the world” (Mohanty 109). Every day interactions that affirm or negate one’s biraciality then become micropolitics of legitimating one’s in-group status; in the words of one woman’s reactions to Malay classmates excluding her from conversations about Hari Raya, “I also Melayu ok”. These women thus find themselves under- or hyper-visibilising facets of their biracial corporeality to negotiate legitimacy and sense of belonging. Through in-depth interviews with five young Malay-Chinese women who have had to renegotiate their biraciality in educational institutions each school year, this paper seeks to document the intentional under/hyper-performativity of biraciality through visible bodily signifiers. It argues that these biracial women who are perceived as illegitimate inhabitants of social settings have agentically adopted the ambivalence others display towards them as everyday micro-actions to exercise their autonomy, and strategically reposition themselves favourably.The five women were contacted through snowball sampling among personal networks in polytechnics and universities, which are education settings where students have the liberty to dress themselves, and thus, visibilise facets of their identity. These settings were also places in which the women had to continually under/hyper-visibilise and remark their race and ethnicity in rotating tutorial and lecture groups every semester, therefore (re)constructing their identities through peer interactions (Wilson in Choudhry 112).They were aged between 18 and 23 at the time of the interview. Their state-documented ‘official’ race, self-identified religion, and state-assigned mother tongue are tabulated below. Pseudonyms are employed.Semi-structured open-ended interviews were conducted to draw out personal nuances and interpretations of their bodies as read by Others. Our face-to-face interaction proved to be especially useful when informants physically referenced bodily markers or performed verbal cues to convey their under/hyper-visibility strategies.InformantNadiaAtiqahSaraClaireWahidaSexFemaleFemaleFemaleFemaleFemaleAge2322221822‘Official’ raceMalayMalayMalayMalayChineseReligionChristianMuslimChristianChristianMuslimMother tongueMandarinMalayMandarin MandarinMalayThe Body BeingAmong primary phenotypic cues, the women acknowledged popular perceptions of Chinese as fair-skinned and Malay as darker-skinned. This shorthand has been ingrained into society through rampant media images, especially in annual national-wide initiatives based in educational institutes such as Racial Harmony Day, International Friendship Day, and National Day. These settings utilise a ‘racial colour code’ to represent the CMIO – Chinese, Malay, Indian, Others; the four racial categories all Singaporeans are officially categorised into by the state – multiracialism in Singapore. Media imagery employs four children of different skin tones clad in ethnic dress, holding hands as symbolic of unity across diversity. So normative was this image even at the level of Primary School (7-12 year-olds) that Sara found her legitimacy in Chinese lessons questioned: “I used to be quite tanned in Primary School, quite Malay-looking… during Chinese lessons, the teacher always explained [difficult things] to me in English, as if I don’t understand Mandarin. But I even took higher Chinese...”The non-congruence of Sara’s apparently Malay phenotype and Mandarin mother tongue was perceived by her teacher as incompetence; Sara was an ‘illegitimate’ pupil in Mandarin class. Despite having been qualified enough to enrol in the higher Chinese stream that she says only takes in 10% of her cohort annually, Sara felt her high performance was negated because the visual marker of her Malayness took precedence during interactions with the teacher. Instead, English was adopted as a ‘neutral’ third language for conversing.In other instances, the women reported that while their skin tone generally enabled an audience to assign them a race, closer observations of their facial features such as their eyes signposted their racial hybridity. Claire states: “People always ask if I’m mixed blood because my eyelashes are very long and thick.” Sara experienced similar questioning gazes from strangers: “… maybe it’s my big eyes, and thick eyebrows… and my double eyelids are also very ‘Malay’?"Both Claire and Sara pointed out anatomic subtleties such as the folds of their eyelids, the size of their eyes, the volume of their eyebrows, and the length of their eyelashes as markers of their racial hybridity. There also emerged a consensus based on personal experience that Malays are more likely to have double eyelids, larger eyes, thicker eyebrows, and longer lashes, than to Chinese.Visual emphases on subtle characteristics thus help audiences interpret the biraciality of these women despite the apparent ‘incongruence’ of their skin tone and facial features. However, since racial identity is “influenced by historical, cultural, and contextual factors” (Rockquemore et al. 121), corporeal indications only serve as a primary racial cue. The next segment places these women in the context of secondary cues where the body is actively engaged in performing biraciality.The Body SpeakingThe women code-switched with choice of language, mother tongue, and manner of accents and vocal inflexions to contest initial readings of their racial status. Atiqah shares: “People always think I’m Chinese, until I open my mouth and speak Malay to ‘shock’ them. After that, they just ‘get’ that I am Malay.”Atiqah’s raised vocal inflexions and increasingly enthusiastic body language – she was clenching her fist as if to symbolically convey her victory at this point of the interview – seemed to imply that she relished in the ‘shock value’ of her big racial ‘reveal’. In a setting where her racial status was misidentified, she responded by asserting her racial legitimacy by displaying her competency of the Malay language.However, this has not always had a lasting impact in her interactions. She adds that within familiar social groups where she has long asserted her racial identity, she does not always feel acknowledged. Atiqah then attempts to ‘fit in’ by quietly deciphering her peers’ verbal exchanges: “… sometimes my Chinese friends forget that I’m ‘different’ because I’m so fair. They always talk in Mandarin… and I’ll try to figure out what they are saying from facial expressions and gestures.”Given her fair skin tone, Atiqah finds herself hypervisiblising her Malayness by utilizing the Malay language among Malay friends, even though they often converse in English themselves. In contrast, among Chinese friends where she feels her phenotypic Chinese features are visually dominant, she appears to under-visibilise this same Malayness by not speaking up about her language barrier. Language’s potential to demarcate social boundaries thus becomes a negotiative tool for Malay-Chinese women, while they simultaneously “shift their involvement and alliances” (Choudhry 119) to exercise choice over their identity.In another instance, Wahida is a fair skinned, tudung-clad, officially documented Chinese woman who identifies more as Malay. Her apparent ‘incongruence’ is of particular concern because Wahida had been attending a Madrasah up till the age of 18. Madrasahs are Islamic learning schools which also provide full-time education from Kindergarten to Junior College level, as an alternative to the mainstream track offered by the Ministry of Education in Singapore; a vast majority of Madrasah students self-identify as Malay Muslims. The desire for a sense of belonging encouraged Wahida to undervisibilise her Chineseness when she was younger:There was once my father came to pick me up from Madrasah… I forgot why but he scolded me so loudly in Mandarin! Everybody stared at me… I was so embarrassed! I already tried so hard to hide my Chinese-ness, he ruined it.Although Wahida never spoke Mandarin in school to underplay her Chineseness, ‘passing’ as a Malay necessitated intimate Others to sustain the racial construct. In this instance, her father had broken the ‘Malay’ persona she had deliberately crafted by conversing fluently in Malay in the Madrasah.Butler’s work on ‘gender as performed’ may be applied here in that what she describes as the “sustained set of acts” or a “stylization of the body” (xv) is also necessary to enact a sustained visual signifier of one’s racial identity. Although portrayed as a natural, innate, or unquestioned heritage in CMIO media portrays for Singapore, race is in fact an intentional construction. It is the practice of a certain regime of actions that contributes to the establishment of one’s raced personality. One is not naturally ‘Malay’ or ‘Chinese’ for these identities have to be carefully rehearsed and performed in order to translate one’s hereditary race into an outward expression of visible-race as practiced. As evidenced, this constant performance of Wahida’s racial self is fragile and dialectic, especially when other actors (such as her father) do not respond favourably to her intended presentation of self.Within a supposedly neutral third language such as English, the women also demonstrated their manipulation of accents emphasising or underplaying what they deem to be Malay or Chinese intonations and syllabic stresses. Sara explains:When I’m with my Malay friends, I speak with the mat [shortened from the local colloquial term matrep which loosely stands for the Malay version of a chav or a redneck] accent. Sometimes it’s subconscious… but sometimes it’s on purpose... they all speak like that… when I speak my ‘proper’ English, I feel out of place.Sara then demonstrates that Malay-accented English nasally accentuates the ‘N’ consonant, where words such ‘morning’ and ‘action’ have weighted pronunciations as ‘mornang’ and ‘actione’. Words that begin with a ‘C’ consonant are also developed into a voiced plosive ‘K’ sound, where words such as ‘corner’ and ‘concept’ are articulated as ‘korner’ and ‘koncept’, similar to the Malay language. Claire, who demonstrated similar Malay-accented utterances, supported this.Claire also noted that within Singlish – the colloquial spoken Singaporean English – Malay-accented English also tends towards end-sentence inflexions such as “seh”, “sia”, and “siol” in place of the more Mandarin-accented English that employs the end-sentence inflexions “ba”, and “ma”.Racialising spoken English is a symbolic interaction that interracial bodies may utilise to gain recognition and acceptance into a racial group that has not yet acknowledged their ‘legitimate’ membership. This is a manifestation of Cooley’s ‘looking glass self’ where an individual’s presentation of the body is based how they think other actors’ perceive them. In doing so, biracial bodies are able to exaggerate or obscure some corporeal traits to convey their preferred racial master status.The Body DoingPhysical gestures that constitute a ‘racial code’ are mirrored and socialised among children during their upbringing, since these designate one’s bodily boundaries and limits of exchange. Thus, while unseen by outsiders, insiders of the racial group may appropriate subtle gesticulations to demarcate and legitimate each other’s membership. Atiqah contends: “We [the Malays] always salaam each other when we first meet, it’s like a signal to show that we are ‘the same’ you know, so as long as I ‘act’ Malay, then my [colour] doesn’t really matter.”The salaam is a salutation of Islamic origin, signifying ‘peace to you’. It usually involves taking the back of the hand of a senior and bringing it to one’s forehead, heart, or lips. It is commonly practiced among Malays and Muslims. However, when a body’s phenotypic markers do not adequately signify racial identity, insiders may not extend such affective body language to them. As Nadia laments:When I first came to uni, the Malay kampong [literally translates into ‘village’, but figuratively stands for a social group in which reciprocal Malay cultural relationality is attached] couldn’t tell I was one of them… when I tried to salaam one of [the boys], he asked me why I was shaking his hand!Butler illuminated the notion of bodily signifiers (skin tone) marking access and limitations of corporeal exchange (salaam). Visual signifiers on biracial bodies must thus be significant enough to signpost one’s racial master status, in order to be positively assessed, acknowledged, and legitimated by Others.Among the women, only Wahida had committed to wearing a tudung at the time of the interview. Although a religious Islamic practice (as opposed to a culturally Malay one), such ethnic dress as ethnic signifier takes precedence over one’s ambivalent bodily markers. Wahida expressed that dressing in her jubah hyper-visualised her Malayness, especially when she was schooling in a Madrasah where fellow students dressed similarly.Omar’s concept of Masuk Melayu – literally ‘to enter Malayness’ – describes non-ethnic Malays who ‘become’ Malay through converting into Islam and practising the religion. Despite Wahida’s ambivalent fair skin tone, donning a tudung publically signifies her religious inclination and signals to Other Malays her racial master status. This thus earns her legitimacy in the social group more so than other ambivalent Malay-Chinese women without such religious symbolism.Agentic IllegitimacyIn negotiating their biraciality within the setting of educational institutions, these five Malay-Chinese women expressed the body ‘being’, ‘speaking’, and ‘doing’ strategies in which selected traits more commonly associated with Malayness or Chineseness were hyper-visibilised or under-visibilised, depending on the setting in which they find themselves (Wilson), and social group in which they want to gain membership and favour. Sara recalls having to choose an ethnic dress to wear to her Primary School’s Racial Harmony Day. Her father suggested “a mix” such as “a red baju kurung” or a “green cheong sum” (in Singapore, red is associated with the festivities of Chinese New Year and green with Hari Raya) where she could express her biraciality. Owing to this childhood memory, she says she still attempts to convey her racial hybridity by dressing strategically at festive family gatherings. Atiqah similarly peppers conversations with Chinese friends with the few Mandarin phrases she knows, partly to solicit an affective response when they tease her for “trying”, and also to subtly remind them of her desire for acknowledgement and inclusivity. Despite expressing similar frustrations over their exclusion and ‘illegitimate’ status in homoethnic settings, the women reacted agentically by continuously asserting emic readings of their corporeal ambivalence, and entering into spaces that give them the opportunity to reframe Others’ readings of their visual markers through microactions. However, enacting this agentic ethnic repertoire necessitates an intimate understanding of both Malay and Chinese social markers (Choudhry 120).None of the women suggested completely dissociating themselves from either Malayness or Chineseness, although they may selectively hyper-visibilise one over the other to legitimate their group membership. Instead, they engage in a continuously dialectic repositioning that requires reflexivity, self-awareness, and an attentiveness to how they are perceived from the etic. By inculcating Malay and Chinese social cues into their repertoire, these biracial women can strategically enact their desired racial master status fluently, treating ethnic identity as fluid and in flux (Choudhry 120). In transgressing popular perceptions of CMIO imagery, Malay-Chinese women use their bodies as a sustained site for contesting visual racial stereotypes and reframe their everyday ‘illegitimacy’ into agentic ambivalence, albeit only selectively in spaces where their racial membership would be favourable.ReferencesAhmed, Sara. “Racialized Bodies.” Real Bodies: A Sociological Introduction. Ed. Mary Evans, and Ellie Lee. New York: Palgrave, 2002. 46-63.Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1999.Choudhry, Sultana. Multifaceted Identity of Interethnic Young People: Chameleon Identities. Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2010.Cooley, Charles. Human Nature and the Social Order. New York: Scribner's, 1902. Katz, Ilan. The Construction of Racial Identity in Children of Mixed Parentage – Mixed Metaphors. London: J. Kingsley Publishers, 1996.Malbon, Ben. “The Club. Clubbing: Consumption, Identity and the Spatial Practices of Every-Night Life.” Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures, Ed. Tracey Skelton, Gill Valentine. Routledge: London, 1997. 266-288.Mohanty, Satya P. “Epilogue. Colonial Legacies, Multicultural Futures: Relativism, Objectivity, and the Challenge of Otherness.” PMLA 110.1 (1995). 14 Sep 2014 ‹http://www.jstor.org/stable/463198›.Omar, Ariffin. Bangsa Melayu: Malay Concepts of Democracy and Community, 1945-1950. Oxford: Oxford University, 1993.Rockquemore, Kerry Ann, and Tracy A. Laszloffy. Raising Biracial Children. Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, 2005.Wilson, Anne. Mixed Race Children – A Study of Identity. London: Allen & Unwin, 1987.

Introduction Crime fiction is one of the world’s most popular genres. Indeed, it has been estimated that as many as one in every three new novels, published in English, is classified within the crime fiction category (Knight xi). These new entrants to the market are forced to jostle for space on bookstore and library shelves with reprints of classic crime novels; such works placed in, often fierce, competition against their contemporaries as well as many of their predecessors. Raymond Chandler, in his well-known essay The Simple Art of Murder, noted Ernest Hemingway’s observation that “the good writer competes only with the dead. The good detective story writer […] competes not only with all the unburied dead but with all the hosts of the living as well” (3). In fact, there are so many examples of crime fiction works that, as early as the 1920s, one of the original ‘Queens of Crime’, Dorothy L. Sayers, complained: It is impossible to keep track of all the detective-stories produced to-day [sic]. Book upon book, magazine upon magazine pour out from the Press, crammed with murders, thefts, arsons, frauds, conspiracies, problems, puzzles, mysteries, thrills, maniacs, crooks, poisoners, forgers, garrotters, police, spies, secret-service men, detectives, until it seems that half the world must be engaged in setting riddles for the other half to solve (95). Twenty years after Sayers wrote on the matter of the vast quantities of crime fiction available, W.H. Auden wrote one of the more famous essays on the genre: The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict. Auden is, perhaps, better known as a poet but his connection to the crime fiction genre is undisputed. As well as his poetic works that reference crime fiction and commentaries on crime fiction, one of Auden’s fellow poets, Cecil Day-Lewis, wrote a series of crime fiction novels under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake: the central protagonist of these novels, Nigel Strangeways, was modelled upon Auden (Scaggs 27). Interestingly, some writers whose names are now synonymous with the genre, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Raymond Chandler, established the link between poetry and crime fiction many years before the publication of The Guilty Vicarage. Edmund Wilson suggested that “reading detective stories is simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between crossword puzzles and smoking” (395). In the first line of The Guilty Vicarage, Auden supports Wilson’s claim and confesses that: “For me, as for many others, the reading of detective stories is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol” (406). This indicates that the genre is at best a trivial pursuit, at worst a pursuit that is bad for your health and is, increasingly, socially unacceptable, while Auden’s ideas around taste—high and low—are made clear when he declares that “detective stories have nothing to do with works of art” (406). The debates that surround genre and taste are many and varied. The mid-1920s was a point in time which had witnessed crime fiction writers produce some of the finest examples of fiction to ever be published and when readers and publishers were watching, with anticipation, as a new generation of crime fiction writers were readying themselves to enter what would become known as the genre’s Golden Age. At this time, R. Austin Freeman wrote that: By the critic and the professedly literary person the detective story is apt to be dismissed contemptuously as outside the pale of literature, to be conceived of as a type of work produced by half-educated and wholly incompetent writers for consumption by office boys, factory girls, and other persons devoid of culture and literary taste (7). This article responds to Auden’s essay and explores how crime fiction appeals to many different tastes: tastes that are acquired, change over time, are embraced, or kept as guilty secrets. In addition, this article will challenge Auden’s very narrow definition of crime fiction and suggest how Auden’s religious imagery, deployed to explain why many people choose to read crime fiction, can be incorporated into a broader popular discourse on punishment. This latter argument demonstrates that a taste for crime fiction and a taste for justice are inextricably intertwined. Crime Fiction: A Type For Every Taste Cathy Cole has observed that “crime novels are housed in their own section in many bookshops, separated from literary novels much as you’d keep a child with measles away from the rest of the class” (116). Times have changed. So too, have our tastes. Crime fiction, once sequestered in corners, now demands vast tracts of prime real estate in bookstores allowing readers to “make their way to the appropriate shelves, and begin to browse […] sorting through a wide variety of very different types of novels” (Malmgren 115). This is a result of the sheer size of the genre, noted above, as well as the genre’s expanding scope. Indeed, those who worked to re-invent crime fiction in the 1800s could not have envisaged the “taxonomic exuberance” (Derrida 206) of the writers who have defined crime fiction sub-genres, as well as how readers would respond by not only wanting to read crime fiction but also wanting to read many different types of crime fiction tailored to their particular tastes. To understand the demand for this diversity, it is important to reflect upon some of the appeal factors of crime fiction for readers. Many rules have been promulgated for the writers of crime fiction to follow. Ronald Knox produced a set of 10 rules in 1928. These included Rule 3 “Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable”, and Rule 10 “Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them” (194–6). In the same year, S.S. Van Dine produced another list of 20 rules, which included Rule 3 “There must be no love interest: The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar”, and Rule 7 “There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better” (189–93). Some of these directives have been deliberately ignored or have become out-of-date over time while others continue to be followed in contemporary crime writing practice. In sharp contrast, there are no rules for reading this genre. Individuals are, generally, free to choose what, where, when, why, and how they read crime fiction. There are, however, different appeal factors for readers. The most common of these appeal factors, often described as doorways, are story, setting, character, and language. As the following passage explains: The story doorway beckons those who enjoy reading to find out what happens next. The setting doorway opens widest for readers who enjoy being immersed in an evocation of place or time. The doorway of character is for readers who enjoy looking at the world through others’ eyes. Readers who most appreciate skilful writing enter through the doorway of language (Wyatt online). These doorways draw readers to the crime fiction genre. There are stories that allow us to easily predict what will come next or make us hold our breath until the very last page, the books that we will cheerfully lend to a family member or a friend and those that we keep close to hand to re-read again and again. There are settings as diverse as country manors, exotic locations, and familiar city streets, places we have been and others that we might want to explore. There are characters such as the accidental sleuth, the hardboiled detective, and the refined police officer, amongst many others, the men and women—complete with idiosyncrasies and flaws—who we have grown to admire and trust. There is also the language that all writers, regardless of genre, depend upon to tell their tales. In crime fiction, even the most basic task of describing where the murder victim was found can range from words that convey the genteel—“The room of the tragedy” (Christie 62)—to the absurd: “There it was, jammed between a pallet load of best export boneless beef and half a tonne of spring lamb” (Maloney 1). These appeal factors indicate why readers might choose crime fiction over another genre, or choose one type of crime fiction over another. Yet such factors fail to explain what crime fiction is or adequately answer why the genre is devoured in such vast quantities. Firstly, crime fiction stories are those in which there is the committing of a crime, or at least the suspicion of a crime (Cole), and the story that unfolds revolves around the efforts of an amateur or professional detective to solve that crime (Scaggs). Secondly, crime fiction offers the reassurance of resolution, a guarantee that from “previous experience and from certain cultural conventions associated with this genre that ultimately the mystery will be fully explained” (Zunshine 122). For Auden, the definition of the crime novel was quite specific, and he argued that referring to the genre by “the vulgar definition, ‘a Whodunit’ is correct” (407). Auden went on to offer a basic formula stating that: “a murder occurs; many are suspected; all but one suspect, who is the murderer, are eliminated; the murderer is arrested or dies” (407). The idea of a formula is certainly a useful one, particularly when production demands—in terms of both quality and quantity—are so high, because the formula facilitates creators in the “rapid and efficient production of new works” (Cawelti 9). For contemporary crime fiction readers, the doorways to reading, discussed briefly above, have been cast wide open. Stories relying upon the basic crime fiction formula as a foundation can be gothic tales, clue puzzles, forensic procedurals, spy thrillers, hardboiled narratives, or violent crime narratives, amongst many others. The settings can be quiet villages or busy metropolises, landscapes that readers actually inhabit or that provide a form of affordable tourism. These stories can be set in the past, the here and now, or the future. Characters can range from Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin to Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, from Agatha Christie’s Miss Jane Marple to Kerry Greenwood’s Honourable Phryne Fisher. Similarly, language can come in numerous styles from the direct (even rough) words of Carter Brown to the literary prose of Peter Temple. Anything is possible, meaning everything is available to readers. For Auden—although he required a crime to be committed and expected that crime to be resolved—these doorways were only slightly ajar. For him, the story had to be a Whodunit; the setting had to be rural England, though a college setting was also considered suitable; the characters had to be “eccentric (aesthetically interesting individuals) and good (instinctively ethical)” and there needed to be a “completely satisfactory detective” (Sherlock Holmes, Inspector French, and Father Brown were identified as “satisfactory”); and the language descriptive and detailed (406, 409, 408). To illustrate this point, Auden’s concept of crime fiction has been plotted on a taxonomy, below, that traces the genre’s main developments over a period of three centuries. As can be seen, much of what is, today, taken for granted as being classified as crime fiction is completely excluded from Auden’s ideal. Figure 1: Taxonomy of Crime Fiction (Adapted from Franks, Murder 136) Crime Fiction: A Personal Journey I discovered crime fiction the summer before I started high school when I saw the film version of The Big Sleep starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. A few days after I had seen the film I started reading the Raymond Chandler novel of the same title, featuring his famous detective Philip Marlowe, and was transfixed by the second paragraph: The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armour rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the visor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn’t seem to be really trying (9). John Scaggs has written that this passage indicates Marlowe is an idealised figure, a knight of romance rewritten onto the mean streets of mid-20th century Los Angeles (62); a relocation Susan Roland calls a “secular form of the divinely sanctioned knight errant on a quest for metaphysical justice” (139): my kind of guy. Like many young people I looked for adventure and escape in books, a search that was realised with Raymond Chandler and his contemporaries. On the escapism scale, these men with their stories of tough-talking detectives taking on murderers and other criminals, law enforcement officers, and the occasional femme fatale, were certainly a sharp upgrade from C.S. Lewis and the Chronicles of Narnia. After reading the works written by the pioneers of the hardboiled and roman noir traditions, I looked to other American authors such as Edgar Allan Poe who, in the mid-1800s, became the father of the modern detective story, and Thorne Smith who, in the 1920s and 1930s, produced magical realist tales with characters who often chose to dabble on the wrong side of the law. This led me to the works of British crime writers including Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy L. Sayers. My personal library then became dominated by Australian writers of crime fiction, from the stories of bushrangers and convicts of the Colonial era to contemporary tales of police and private investigators. There have been various attempts to “improve” or “refine” my tastes: to convince me that serious literature is real reading and frivolous fiction is merely a distraction. Certainly, the reading of those novels, often described as classics, provide perfect combinations of beauty and brilliance. Their narratives, however, do not often result in satisfactory endings. This routinely frustrates me because, while I understand the philosophical frameworks that many writers operate within, I believe the characters of such works are too often treated unfairly in the final pages. For example, at the end of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Frederick Henry “left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain” after his son is stillborn and “Mrs Henry” becomes “very ill” and dies (292–93). Another example can be found on the last page of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four when Winston Smith “gazed up at the enormous face” and he realised that he “loved Big Brother” (311). Endings such as these provide a space for reflection about the world around us but rarely spark an immediate response of how great that world is to live in (Franks Motive). The subject matter of crime fiction does not easily facilitate fairy-tale finishes, yet, people continue to read the genre because, generally, the concluding chapter will show that justice, of some form, will be done. Punishment will be meted out to the ‘bad characters’ that have broken society’s moral or legal laws; the ‘good characters’ may experience hardships and may suffer but they will, generally, prevail. Crime Fiction: A Taste For Justice Superimposed upon Auden’s parameters around crime fiction, are his ideas of the law in the real world and how such laws are interwoven with the Christian-based system of ethics. This can be seen in Auden’s listing of three classes of crime: “(a) offenses against God and one’s neighbor or neighbors; (b) offenses against God and society; (c) offenses against God” (407). Murder, in Auden’s opinion, is a class (b) offense: for the crime fiction novel, the society reflected within the story should be one in “a state of grace, i.e., a society where there is no need of the law, no contradiction between the aesthetic individual and the ethical universal, and where murder, therefore, is the unheard-of act which precipitates a crisis” (408). Additionally, in the crime novel “as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time) are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder” (408). Thus, as Charles J. Rzepka notes, “according to W.H. Auden, the ‘classical’ English detective story typically re-enacts rites of scapegoating and expulsion that affirm the innocence of a community of good people supposedly ignorant of evil” (12). This premise—of good versus evil—supports Auden’s claim that the punishment of wrongdoers, particularly those who claim the “right to be omnipotent” and commit murder (409), should be swift and final: As to the murderer’s end, of the three alternatives—execution, suicide, and madness—the first is preferable; for if he commits suicide he refuses to repent, and if he goes mad he cannot repent, but if he does not repent society cannot forgive. Execution, on the other hand, is the act of atonement by which the murderer is forgiven by society (409). The unilateral endorsement of state-sanctioned murder is problematic, however, because—of the main justifications for punishment: retribution; deterrence; incapacitation; and rehabilitation (Carter Snead 1245)—punishment, in this context, focuses exclusively upon retribution and deterrence, incapacitation is achieved by default, but the idea of rehabilitation is completely ignored. This, in turn, ignores how the reading of crime fiction can be incorporated into a broader popular discourse on punishment and how a taste for crime fiction and a taste for justice are inextricably intertwined. One of the ways to explore the connection between crime fiction and justice is through the lens of Emile Durkheim’s thesis on the conscience collective which proposes punishment is a process allowing for the demonstration of group norms and the strengthening of moral boundaries. David Garland, in summarising this thesis, states: So although the modern state has a near monopoly of penal violence and controls the administration of penalties, a much wider population feels itself to be involved in the process of punishment, and supplies the context of social support and valorization within which state punishment takes place (32). It is claimed here that this “much wider population” connecting with the task of punishment can be taken further. Crime fiction, above all other forms of literary production, which, for those who do not directly contribute to the maintenance of their respective legal systems, facilitates a feeling of active participation in the penalising of a variety of perpetrators: from the issuing of fines to incarceration (Franks Punishment). Crime fiction readers are therefore, temporarily at least, direct contributors to a more stable society: one that is clearly based upon right and wrong and reliant upon the conscience collective to maintain and reaffirm order. In this context, the reader is no longer alone, with only their crime fiction novel for company, but has become an active member of “a moral framework which binds individuals to each other and to its conventions and institutions” (Garland 51). This allows crime fiction, once viewed as a “vice” (Wilson 395) or an “addiction” (Auden 406), to be seen as playing a crucial role in the preservation of social mores. It has been argued “only the most literal of literary minds would dispute the claim that fictional characters help shape the way we think of ourselves, and hence help us articulate more clearly what it means to be human” (Galgut 190). Crime fiction focuses on what it means to be human, and how complex humans are, because stories of murders, and the men and women who perpetrate and solve them, comment on what drives some people to take a life and others to avenge that life which is lost and, by extension, engages with a broad community of readers around ideas of justice and punishment. It is, furthermore, argued here that the idea of the story is one of the more important doorways for crime fiction and, more specifically, the conclusions that these stories, traditionally, offer. For Auden, the ending should be one of restoration of the spirit, as he suspected that “the typical reader of detective stories is, like myself, a person who suffers from a sense of sin” (411). In this way, the “phantasy, then, which the detective story addict indulges is the phantasy of being restored to the Garden of Eden, to a state of innocence, where he may know love as love and not as the law” (412), indicating that it was not necessarily an accident that “the detective story has flourished most in predominantly Protestant countries” (408). Today, modern crime fiction is a “broad church, where talented authors raise questions and cast light on a variety of societal and other issues through the prism of an exciting, page-turning story” (Sisterson). Moreover, our tastes in crime fiction have been tempered by a growing fear of real crime, particularly murder, “a crime of unique horror” (Hitchens 200). This has seen some readers develop a taste for crime fiction that is not produced within a framework of ecclesiastical faith but is rather grounded in reliance upon those who enact punishment in both the fictional and real worlds. As P.D. James has written: [N]ot by luck or divine intervention, but by human ingenuity, human intelligence and human courage. It confirms our hope that, despite some evidence to the contrary, we live in a beneficent and moral universe in which problems can be solved by rational means and peace and order restored from communal or personal disruption and chaos (174). Dorothy L. Sayers, despite her work to legitimise crime fiction, wrote that there: “certainly does seem a possibility that the detective story will some time come to an end, simply because the public will have learnt all the tricks” (108). Of course, many readers have “learnt all the tricks”, or most of them. This does not, however, detract from the genre’s overall appeal. We have not grown bored with, or become tired of, the formula that revolves around good and evil, and justice and punishment. Quite the opposite. Our knowledge of, as well as our faith in, the genre’s “tricks” gives a level of confidence to readers who are looking for endings that punish murderers and other wrongdoers, allowing for more satisfactory conclusions than the, rather depressing, ends given to Mr. Henry and Mr. Smith by Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell noted above. Conclusion For some, the popularity of crime fiction is a curious case indeed. When Penguin and Collins published the Marsh Million—100,000 copies each of 10 Ngaio Marsh titles in 1949—the author’s relief at the success of the project was palpable when she commented that “it was pleasant to find detective fiction being discussed as a tolerable form of reading by people whose opinion one valued” (172). More recently, upon the announcement that a Miles Franklin Award would be given to Peter Temple for his crime novel Truth, John Sutherland, a former chairman of the judges for one of the world’s most famous literary awards, suggested that submitting a crime novel for the Booker Prize would be: “like putting a donkey into the Grand National”. Much like art, fashion, food, and home furnishings or any one of the innumerable fields of activity and endeavour that are subject to opinion, there will always be those within the world of fiction who claim positions as arbiters of taste. Yet reading is intensely personal. I like a strong, well-plotted story, appreciate a carefully researched setting, and can admire elegant language, but if a character is too difficult to embrace—if I find I cannot make an emotional connection, if I find myself ambivalent about their fate—then a book is discarded as not being to my taste. It is also important to recognise that some tastes are transient. Crime fiction stories that are popular today could be forgotten tomorrow. Some stories appeal to such a broad range of tastes they are immediately included in the crime fiction canon. Yet others evolve over time to accommodate widespread changes in taste (an excellent example of this can be seen in the continual re-imagining of the stories of Sherlock Holmes). Personal tastes also adapt to our experiences and our surroundings. A book that someone adores in their 20s might be dismissed in their 40s. A storyline that was meaningful when read abroad may lose some of its magic when read at home. Personal events, from a change in employment to the loss of a loved one, can also impact upon what we want to read. Similarly, world events, such as economic crises and military conflicts, can also influence our reading preferences. Auden professed an almost insatiable appetite for crime fiction, describing the reading of detective stories as an addiction, and listed a very specific set of criteria to define the Whodunit. Today, such self-imposed restrictions are rare as, while there are many rules for writing crime fiction, there are no rules for reading this (or any other) genre. People are, generally, free to choose what, where, when, why, and how they read crime fiction, and to follow the deliberate or whimsical paths that their tastes may lay down for them. Crime fiction writers, past and present, offer: an incredible array of detective stories from the locked room to the clue puzzle; settings that range from the English country estate to city skyscrapers in glamorous locations around the world; numerous characters from cerebral sleuths who can solve a crime in their living room over a nice, hot cup of tea to weapon wielding heroes who track down villains on foot in darkened alleyways; and, language that ranges from the cultured conversations from the novels of the genre’s Golden Age to the hard-hitting terminology of forensic and legal procedurals. Overlaid on these appeal factors is the capacity of crime fiction to feed a taste for justice: to engage, vicariously at least, in the establishment of a more stable society. Of course, there are those who turn to the genre for a temporary distraction, an occasional guilty pleasure. There are those who stumble across the genre by accident or deliberately seek it out. There are also those, like Auden, who are addicted to crime fiction. So there are corpses for the conservative and dead bodies for the bloodthirsty. There is, indeed, a murder victim, and a murder story, to suit every reader’s taste. References Auden, W.H. “The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on The Detective Story, By an Addict.” Harper’s Magazine May (1948): 406–12. 1 Dec. 2013 ‹http://www.harpers.org/archive/1948/05/0033206›. Carter Snead, O. “Memory and Punishment.” Vanderbilt Law Review 64.4 (2011): 1195–264. Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976/1977. Chandler, Raymond. The Big Sleep. London: Penguin, 1939/1970. ––. The Simple Art of Murder. New York: Vintage Books, 1950/1988. Christie, Agatha. The Mysterious Affair at Styles. London: HarperCollins, 1920/2007. Cole, Cathy. Private Dicks and Feisty Chicks: An Interrogation of Crime Fiction. Fremantle: Curtin UP, 2004. Derrida, Jacques. “The Law of Genre.” Glyph 7 (1980): 202–32. Franks, Rachel. “May I Suggest Murder?: An Overview of Crime Fiction for Readers’ Advisory Services Staff.” Australian Library Journal 60.2 (2011): 133–43. ––. “Motive for Murder: Reading Crime Fiction.” The Australian Library and Information Association Biennial Conference. Sydney: Jul. 2012. ––. “Punishment by the Book: Delivering and Evading Punishment in Crime Fiction.” Inter-Disciplinary.Net 3rd Global Conference on Punishment. Oxford: Sep. 2013. Freeman, R.A. “The Art of the Detective Story.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1924/1947. 7–17. Galgut, E. “Poetic Faith and Prosaic Concerns: A Defense of Suspension of Disbelief.” South African Journal of Philosophy 21.3 (2002): 190–99. Garland, David. Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. London: Random House, 1929/2004. ––. in R. Chandler. The Simple Art of Murder. New York: Vintage Books, 1950/1988. Hitchens, P. A Brief History of Crime: The Decline of Order, Justice and Liberty in England. London: Atlantic Books, 2003. James, P.D. Talking About Detective Fiction. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. Knight, Stephen. Crime Fiction since 1800: Death, Detection, Diversity, 2nd ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2010. Knox, Ronald A. “Club Rules: The 10 Commandments for Detective Novelists, 1928.” Ronald Knox Society of North America. 1 Dec. 2013 ‹http://www.ronaldknoxsociety.com/detective.html›. Malmgren, C.D. “Anatomy of Murder: Mystery, Detective and Crime Fiction.” Journal of Popular Culture Spring (1997): 115–21. Maloney, Shane. The Murray Whelan Trilogy: Stiff, The Brush-Off and Nice Try. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1994/2008. Marsh, Ngaio in J. Drayton. Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime. Auckland: Harper Collins, 2008. Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Penguin Books, 1949/1989. Roland, Susan. From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction. London: Palgrave, 2001. Rzepka, Charles J. Detective Fiction. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. Sayers, Dorothy L. “The Omnibus of Crime.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1928/1947. 71–109. Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction: The New Critical Idiom. London: Routledge, 2005. Sisterson, C. “Battle for the Marsh: Awards 2013.” Black Mask: Pulps, Noir and News of Same. 1 Jan. 2014 http://www.blackmask.com/category/awards-2013/ Sutherland, John. in A. Flood. “Could Miles Franklin turn the Booker Prize to Crime?” The Guardian. 1 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jun/25/miles-franklin-booker-prize-crime›. Van Dine, S.S. “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1928/1947. 189-93. Wilson, Edmund. “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1944/1947. 390–97. Wyatt, N. “Redefining RA: A RA Big Think.” Library Journal Online. 1 Jan. 2014 ‹http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2007/07/ljarchives/lj-series-redefining-ra-an-ra-big-think›. Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2006.

Fan cultural production, be it in the form of fan fiction, art or videos are often celebrated in fan studies as evidence of fan creativity, fans’ skills in adopting technology and their expert knowledge of the texts. As Jenkins argues, “the pleasure of the form centers on the fascination in watching familiar images wrenched free from their previous contexts and assigned alternative meanings” (227). However, can fan mash-up videos can also offer an alternative view, not of one’s fandom, but of anti-fandom? Fan pleasure is often seen as declaring love for a text through juxtaposing images to sound in a mash-up video, but this paper will argue that it can also demonstrate hate. Specifically, can these videos affirm anti-fandom readings of a particular text, when clips from two (or more) different texts, seemingly of the same genre and targeting the same demographics, are edited together to offer an alternative story? In 2009, a video entitled Buffy vs Edward: Twilight Remixed (hereafter BvE) (See Video 1) was uploaded to YouTube, juxtaposing clips from across the seven series of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and the first film of the Twilight series. Twilight is a series of novels written by Stephenie Meyer which was adapted into a successful series of five films between the period of 2008 and 2012. Its vampire-centric romance story has resulted in numerous comparisons to, among others, the cult and popular television series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (hereafter Buffy) created by Joss Whedon, which aired from 1997 to 2003. In BvE, which has over three million views to date and reportedly has been translated into thirty different languages, Jonathan McIntosh, the video’s creator, “changes Edward Cullen from a smouldering, sparkly antihero into a self-obsessed stalker who's prone to throwing tantrums. Buffy Summers reacts to him with disdain and dwindling patience, assertively rebuking his every self-indulgence” (Leduc). By editing together clips from two texts seemingly of the same genre and targeting the same demographics, this video affirms an anti-fandom reading of Twilight. Video 1: Buffy vs Edward: Twilight RemixedOn the first viewing of the video, I was struck by how accurately it portrayed my own misgivings about Twilight, and by how I had wished Bella Swan was more like Buffy Summers and been a positive role model for girls and women. The content of the video mash-up—along with fan reactions to it—suggests and perpetuates an anti-fandom reading of Twilight via Buffy, by positioning the latter as a text with higher cultural value, in terms of its influence and representations of female characters. As McIntosh himself clarifies in an interview, “the audience is not supposed to go “Oh, see how TV is stupid?” They’re supposed to go “Oh, see how Buffy was awesome!”” (ikat381). As such, the BvE mash-up can be read, not just as a criticism of popular commercial texts, but also as an anti-fan production. Much work surrounding fan culture extrapolates on fans’ love for a text, but I’d like to propose that mash-ups such as BvE reaffirms anti-fandom readings of derided texts via another that is deemed—and presented—as culturally more valuable. In this essay, BvE will be used as an example of how anti-fandom productions can reinforce the audience’s opinion of a despised text. When BvE first launched, it was circulated widely among Buffy fandom, and the narrative of the mash-up, and its implications were debated rather fiercely on Whedonesque.com [http://whedonesque.com/comments/20883], one of the main sites for Joss Whedon’s fandom. Comparisons between the two texts, despite existing in different mediums (film vs. television), were common among general media—some survey respondents reveal they were persuaded to read the books or watch the first film by its assumed similarities to Buffy— as both feature somewhat similar storylines on the surface: a young, teenaged (human) girl falling in love with a vampire, and were presumably aimed at the same demographics of teenaged and college-aged girls. The similarities seem to end there though, for while Buffy is often hailed as a feminist text, Twilight is dismissed as anti-feminist, down to its apparently rabid and overly-emotional (female) fanbase. As one Buffy fan on Whedonesque clarifies: Buffy was more real than Bella ever thought of being. Buffy was flawed, made mistakes, bad decisions and we never saw her sort out a healthy romantic relationship but she was still a tremendous role model not for just teen girl but teen boys as well. […] Bella's big claim to fame seems to be she didn't sleep with her boyfriend before marriage but that was his choice, not hers. BvE appears to reflect the above comparison, as McIntosh justifies the video as “a pro-feminist visual critique of Edward’s character and generally creepy behaviour”—essentially a problem that Buffy, as a vampire slayer and a feminist icon can solve (for the greater good). For the purpose of this paper, I was interested to see if those who are active in fandom in general are aware of the BvE video, and if it informs or reaffirms their anti-fandom views of Twilight. Methodology A short online survey was devised with this in mind and a link to the survey was provided via Twitter (the link was retweeted 27 times), with the explanation that it is on Twilight anti-fandom and the BvE mash-up video. It was further shared on Facebook, by friends and peers. At the same time, I also requested for the link to be posted by the administrators of Whedonesque.com. Despite the posting at Whedonesque, the survey was not particularly aimed at Buffy fans, but rather fans in general who are familiar with both texts. The survey received 419 responses in the span of 24 hours, suggesting that the topic of (Twilight) anti-fandom is one that fans—or anti-fans—are passionately engaged with. Out of the 419 responses, 357 people have seen BvE, and 208 have read the book(s) and/or saw the film(s). The other 211 respondents came into contact with Twilight through paratexts, “semi-textual fragments that surround and position the work” (Gray New 72), such as trailers, word-of-mouth and news outlets. Anti-Fandom, Twilight, and the Buffy vs Edward Mash-Up Fan studies have given us insights into the world of fandom, informing us about the texts that fans love, what fans do with those texts and characters, and how fans interact with one another within the context of fandom. As Henry Jenkins explains: Fan culture finds that utopian dimension within popular culture a site for constructing an alternative culture. Its society is responsive to the needs that draw its members to commercial entertainment, most especially the desire for affiliation, friendship, community (282). Fan studies has obviously progressed from Jenkins’s initial observations as fan scholars subsequently proceed to complicate and augment the field. However, many gaps and silences remain to be filled: Hills (2002) […] argued that fandom is ‘not a thing that can be picked over analytically’ (pp. xi-xii) and separated into neat categories, but is a performative, psychological action that differs according to person, fandom, and generation (Sheffield and Merlo 209). In a 2003 article, Jonathan Gray reflects that in fan scholars’ enthusiasm to present the many interesting facets of fan culture, “reception studies are distorting our understanding of the text, the consumer and the interaction between them” (New Audiences 68). So while there is the friendship, affiliation and sense of community where fans share their mutual affection for their favourite texts and characters, there are also those who engage critically with the texts that they dislike. Gray identifies them as the anti-fans, arguing that these anti-fans are not “against fandom per se, […] but they strongly dislike a given text or genre, considering it inane, stupid, morally bankrupt and/or aesthetic drivel” (New New Audiences 70). Most anti-fans’ encounter with their hated text will not merely be through the text itself, but also through its surrounding paratexts, such as trailers and press articles. These paratextual pieces inform the anti-fan about the text, as much as the original text itself, and together they add to the formation of the anti-fannish identity: Rather than engaging the text directly, […] anti-fans often respond to a “text” they construct from paratextual fragments such as news coverage or word-of-mouth, reading, watching, and learning all they can about a show, book, or person in order to better understand and criticize the text (and, very often, its fans) (Sheffield and Merlo 209). Media attention directed at the Twilight franchise, as well as the attention Twilight fans receive has made it a popular subject in both fan and anti-fan studies. Dan Haggard, in a 2010 online posting, commented on the fascinating position of Twilight fans in popular culture: The Twilight fan is interesting because of reports (however well substantiated) of a degree of extremism that goes beyond what is acceptable, even when considered from a perspective relative to standard fan obsession. The point here is not so much whether Twilight fans are any more extreme than standard fans, but that there is a perception that they are so. (qtd. in Pinkowitz) Twilight fans are more often than not, described as “rabid” and “frenzied” (Click), particularly by the media. This is, of course, in total opposition to the identity of the fan as effective consumer or productive (free) labourer, which scholars like Baym and Burnett, for example, have observed. The anti-fandom in this case seems to go beyond the original text (both the books and the film franchises), extending to the fans themselves. Pinkowitz explains that the anti-fans she examined resent the success Twilight has amassed as they consider the books to be poorly written and they “strongly dislike the popular belief that the Twilight books are good literature and that they deserve the fanaticism its rabid fans demonstrate”. Some survey respondents share this view, criticising that the “writing is horrible”, the books have “awful prose” and “melodramatic characterisations”. Sheffield and Merlo demonstrate that the “most visible Twilight anti-fan behaviors are those that mock or “snark” about the “rabid” Twilight fans, who they argue, “give other fans a bad name”” (210). However, BvE presents another text with which Twilight can be compared to in the form of Buffy. As one survey respondent explains: Bella is a weak character who lacks agency. She lacks the wit, will-power, and determination that makes Buffy such a fun character. […] She is a huge step back especially compared to Buffy, but also compared to almost any modern heroine. Paul Booth argues that for mash-ups, or remixes, to work, as audiences, we are expected to understand—and identify—the texts that are referenced, even if they may be out of context: “we as audiences must be knowledgeable about both sources, as well as the convergence of them, in order to make sense of the final product”. Survey respondents have commented that the mash-up was “more about pleasing Buffy fans”, and that it was “created with an agenda, by someone who hates Twilight and loves Buffy,” which gives “a biased introduction to Buffy”. On the other hand, others have commented that the mash-up “makes [Twilight] seem better than it actually is”, and that it “reinforced [their] perceptions” of Twilight as a weaker text. Booth also suggests that mash-ups create new understandings of taste, of which I would argue that is reinforced through BvE, which McIntosh describes as a “metaphor for the ongoing battle between two opposing visions of gender roles in the 21st century”. In fact, many of the survey respondents share McIntosh’s view, criticising Twilight as an anti-feminist text that, for all its supposed cultural influence, is sending a dangerous message to young girls who are the target demographic of the franchise. As they reflect: It bothers me that so many people (and especially women) love and embrace the story, when at its crux it is about a woman trying to choose between two men. Neither men are particularly good/safe for her, but the book romanticizes the possible violence toward Bella. The idea that Bella is nothing without Edward, that her entire life is defined by this man. She gives up her life—literally—to be with him. It is unhealthy and obsessive. It also implies to women that stalking behaviour like Edward's is romantic rather than illegal. I think what bothers me the most is how Meyers presents an abusive relationship where the old guy (but he's sparkly and pretty, so it's ok) in question stalks the heroine, has her kidnapped, and physically prevents her from seeing whom she wants to see is portrayed as love. In a good way. These testimonials show that fans take a moral stand towards Twilight’s representation of women, specifically Bella Swan. Twilight acts in counterpoint to a text like Buffy, which is critically acclaimed and have been lauded for its feminist representation (the idea that a young, petite girl has the power to fight vampires and other supernatural creatures). The fact that Buffy is a chronological older text makes some fans lament that the girl-power and empowerment that was showcased in the 1990s has now regressed down to the personification of Bella Swan. Gray argues that anti-fandom is also about expectations of quality and value: “of what a text should be like, of what is a waste of media time and space, of what morality or aesthetics texts should adopt, and of what we would like to see others watch or read” (New 73). This notion of taste, and cultural value comes through again as respondents who are fans of Buffy testify: It's not very well-written. I strongly dislike the weak parallels one could draw between the two. Yes Angel and Spike went through a creepy stalking phase with Buffy, and yes for a while there was some romantic triangle action but there was so much more going on. […] My biggest issue is with Bella's characterization. She has flaws and desires but she is basically a whiney, mopey blob. She is a huge step back especially compared to Buffy, but also compared to almost any modern heroine. There is tremendous richness in Buffy—themes are more literate, historically allusive and psychologically deeper than boy-meets-girl, girl submits, boy is tamed. Edward Cullen is white-faced and blank; Spike and Angel are white-faced and shadowed, hollowed, sculpted—occasionally tortured. Twilight invites teen girls to project their desires; Spike and Angel have qualities which are discovered. Buffy the character grows and evolves. Her environment changes as she experiences the world around her. Decisions that she made in high school were re-visited years later, and based on her past experiences, she makes different choices. Bella, however, loses nothing. There's no consequence to her being turned. There's no growth to her character. The final act in the mash-up video, of Buffy slaying Edward can be seen as a re-empowerment for those who do not share the same love for Twilight as its fans do. In the follow-up to his 2003 article that launched the concept of anti-fandom, Gray argues that: Hate or dislike of a text can be just as powerful as can a strong and admiring, affective relationship with a text, and they can produce just as much activity, identification, meaning, and “effects” or serve just as powerfully to unite and sustain a community or subculture (Antifandom 841). Conclusion The video mash-up, in this case, can be read as an anti-fandom reading of Twilight via Buffy, in which the superiority of Buffy as a text is repeatedly reinforced. When asked if the mash-up video would encourage the survey respondents to consider watching Twilight (if they have not before), the respondents’ answers range from a repeated mantra of “No”, to “It makes me want to burn every copy”, to “Not unless it is to mock, or for the purpose of a drinking game”. Not merely resorting to mocking, what McIntosh’s mash-up video has given Twilight anti-fans is yet another paratextual fragment with which to read the text (as in, Edward Cullen is creepy and controlling, therefore he deserves to be slayed, as should have happened if he was in the Buffy universe instead of Twilight). In other words, what I am suggesting here is that anti-fandom can be enforced through the careful framing of a mash-up video, such as that of the Buffy vs Edward: Twilight Remixed mash-up, where the text considered more culturally valuable is used to read and comment on the one considered less valuable. References Baym, Nancy, and Robert Burnett. Amateur Experts: International Fan Labour in Swedish Independent Music. Copenhagen, Denmark, 2008. Booth, Paul. “Mashup as Temporal Amalgam: Time, Taste, and Textuality.” Transformative Works and Cultures 9 (2012): n. pag. 3 Apr. 2013 < http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/297/285 >. Click, Melissa. “‘Rabid’, ‘Obsessed’, and ‘Frenzied’: Understanding Twilight Fangirls and the Gendered Politics of Fandom.” Flow 11.4 (2009): n. pag. 18 June 2013 < http://flowtv.org/2009/12/rabid-obsessed-and-frenzied-understanding-twilight-fangirls-and-the-gendered-politics-of-fandom-melissa-click-university-of-missouri/ >. Gray, Jonathan. “Antifandom and the Moral Text: Television without Pity and Textual Dislike.” American Behavioral Scientist 48 (2005): 840–858. ———. “New Audiences, New Textualities: Anti-Fans and Non-Fans.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 6.1 (2003): 64–81. Hills, Matt. Fan Cultures. London: Routledge, 2002. ikat381. “Total Recut Interviews Jonathan McIntosh about Buffy vs. Edward.” Total Recut 24 Dec. 2009. 20 July 2013 < http://www.totalrecut.com/permalink.php?perma_id=265 >. Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992. Leduc, Martin. “The Two-Source Illusion: How Vidding Practices Changed Jonathan McIntosh’s Political Remix Videos.” Transformative Works and Cultures 9 (2012): n. pag. 19 July 2013 < http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/379/274 >. McIntosh, Jonathan. “Buffy vs Edward: Twilight Remixed.” Rebelliouspixels 20 June 2009. 2 Apr. 2013 < http://www.rebelliouspixels.com/2009/buffy-vs-edward-twilight-remixed >. Pinkowitz, Jacqueline. “‘The Rabid Fans That Take [Twilight] Much Too Seriously’: The Construction and Rejection of Excess in Twilight Antifandom.” Transformative Works and Cultures 7 (2011): n. pag. 21 June 2013 < http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/247/253 >. Sheffield, Jessica, and Elyse Merlo. “Biting Back: Twilight Anti-Fandom and the Rhetoric of Superiority.” Bitten by Twilight: Youth Culture, Media and the Vampire Franchise. Eds. Melissa Click, Jessica Stevens Aubrey, & Elizabeth Behm-Morawitz. New York: Peter Lang Publishers, 2010. 207–224.

Introduction I am a transmigrant who has moved back and forth between the West and the Rest. I was born and raised in a Muslim family in a predominantly Muslim country, Bangladesh, but I spent several years of my childhood in Pakistan. After my marriage, I lived in the United States for a year and a half, the Middle East for 5 years, Australia for three years, back to the Middle East for another 5 years, then, finally, in Australia for the last 12 years. I speak Bengali (my mother tongue), Urdu (which I learnt in Pakistan), a bit of Arabic (learnt in the Middle East); but English has always been my medium of instruction. So where is home? Is it my place of origin, the Muslim umma, or my land of settlement? Or is it my ‘root’ or my ‘route’ (Blunt and Dowling)? Blunt and Dowling (199) observe that the lives of transmigrants are often interpreted in terms of their ‘roots’ and ‘routes’, which are two frameworks for thinking about home, homeland and diaspora. Whereas ‘roots’ might imply an original homeland from which people have scattered, and to which they might seek to return, ‘routes’ focuses on mobile, multiple and transcultural geographies of home. However, both ‘roots’ and ‘routes’ are attached to emotion and identity, and both invoke a sense of place, belonging or alienation that is intrinsically tied to a sense of self (Blunt and Dowling 196-219). In this paper, I equate home with my root (place of birth) and route (transnational homing) within the context of the ‘diaspora and belonging’. First I define the diaspora and possible criteria of belonging. Next I describe my transnational homing within the framework of diaspora and belonging. Finally, I consider how Australia can be a ‘home’ for me and other Muslim Australians. The Diaspora and Belonging Blunt and Dowling (199) define diaspora as “scattering of people over space and transnational connections between people and the places”. Cohen emphasised the ethno-cultural aspects of the diaspora setting; that is, how migrants identify and position themselves in other nations in terms of their (different) ethnic and cultural orientation. Hall argues that the diasporic subjects form a cultural identity through transformation and difference. Speaking of the Hindu diaspora in the UK and Caribbean, Vertovec (21-23) contends that the migrants’ contact with their original ‘home’ or diaspora depends on four factors: migration processes and factors of settlement, cultural composition, structural and political power, and community development. With regard to the first factor, migration processes and factors of settlement, Vertovec explains that if the migrants are political or economic refugees, or on a temporary visa, they are likely to live in a ‘myth of return’. In the cultural composition context, Vertovec argues that religion, language, region of origin, caste, and degree of cultural homogenisation are factors in which migrants are bound to their homeland. Concerning the social structure and political power issue, Vertovec suggests that the extent and nature of racial and ethnic pluralism or social stigma, class composition, degree of institutionalised racism, involvement in party politics (or active citizenship) determine migrants’ connection to their new or old home. Finally, community development, including membership in organisations (political, union, religious, cultural, leisure), leadership qualities, and ethnic convergence or conflict (trends towards intra-communal or inter-ethnic/inter-religious co-operation) would also affect the migrants’ sense of belonging. Using these scholarly ideas as triggers, I will examine my home and belonging over the last few decades. My Home In an initial stage of my transmigrant history, my home was my root (place of birth, Dhaka, Bangladesh). Subsequently, my routes (settlement in different countries) reshaped my homes. In all respects, the ethno-cultural factors have played a big part in my definition of ‘home’. But on some occasions my ethnic identification has been overridden by my religious identification and vice versa. By ethnic identity, I mean my language (mother tongue) and my connection to my people (Bangladeshi). By my religious identity, I mean my Muslim religion, and my spiritual connection to the umma, a Muslim nation transcending all boundaries. Umma refers to the Muslim identity and unity within a larger Muslim group across national boundaries. The only thing the members of the umma have in common is their Islamic belief (Spencer and Wollman 169-170). In my childhood my father, a banker, was relocated to Karachi, Pakistan (then West Pakistan). Although I lived in Pakistan for much of my childhood, I have never considered it to be my home, even though it is predominantly a Muslim country. In this case, my home was my root (Bangladesh) where my grandparents and extended family lived. Every year I used to visit my grandparents who resided in a small town in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan). Thus my connection with my home was sustained through my extended family, ethnic traditions, language (Bengali/Bangla), and the occasional visits to the landscape of Bangladesh. Smith (9-11) notes that people build their connection or identity to their homeland through their historic land, common historical memories, myths, symbols and traditions. Though Pakistan and Bangladesh had common histories, their traditions of language, dress and ethnic culture were very different. For example, the celebration of the Bengali New Year (Pohela Baishakh), folk dance, folk music and folk tales, drama, poetry, lyrics of poets Rabindranath Tagore (Rabindra Sangeet) and Nazrul Islam (Nazrul Geeti) are distinct in the cultural heritage of Bangladesh. Special musical instruments such as the banshi (a bamboo flute), dhol (drums), ektara (a single-stringed instrument) and dotara (a four-stringed instrument) are unique to Bangladeshi culture. The Bangladeshi cuisine (rice and freshwater fish) is also different from Pakistan where people mainly eat flat round bread (roti) and meat (gosh). However, my bonding factor to Bangladesh was my relatives, particularly my grandparents as they made me feel one of ‘us’. Their affection for me was irreplaceable. The train journey from Dhaka (capital city) to their town, Noakhali, was captivating. The hustle and bustle at the train station and the lush green paddy fields along the train journey reminded me that this was my ‘home’. Though I spoke the official language (Urdu) in Pakistan and had a few Pakistani friends in Karachi, they could never replace my feelings for my friends, extended relatives and cousins who lived in Bangladesh. I could not relate to the landscape or dry weather of Pakistan. More importantly, some Pakistani women (our neighbours) were critical of my mother’s traditional dress (saree), and described it as revealing because it showed a bit of her back. They took pride in their traditional dress (shalwar, kameez, dopatta), which they considered to be more covered and ‘Islamic’. So, because of our traditional dress (saree) and perhaps other differences, we were regarded as the ‘Other’. In 1970 my father was relocated back to Dhaka, Bangladesh, and I was glad to go home. It should be noted that both Pakistan and Bangladesh were separated from India in 1947 – first as one nation; then, in 1971, Bangladesh became independent from Pakistan. The conflict between Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) and Pakistan (then West Pakistan) originated for economic and political reasons. At this time I was a high school student and witnessed acts of genocide committed by the Pakistani regime against the Bangladeshis (March-December 1971). My memories of these acts are vivid and still very painful. After my marriage, I moved from Bangladesh to the United States. In this instance, my new route (Austin, Texas, USA), as it happened, did not become my home. Here the ethno-cultural and Islamic cultural factors took precedence. I spoke the English language, made some American friends, and studied history at the University of Texas. I appreciated the warm friendship extended to me in the US, but experienced a degree of culture shock. I did not appreciate the pub life, alcohol consumption, and what I perceived to be the lack of family bonds (children moving out at the age of 18, families only meeting occasionally on birthdays and Christmas). Furthermore, I could not relate to de facto relationships and acceptance of sex before marriage. However, to me ‘home’ meant a family orientation and living in close contact with family. Besides the cultural divide, my husband and I were living in the US on student visas and, as Vertovec (21-23) noted, temporary visa status can deter people from their sense of belonging to the host country. In retrospect I can see that we lived in the ‘myth of return’. However, our next move for a better life was not to our root (Bangladesh), but another route to the Muslim world of Dhahran in Saudi Arabia. My husband moved to Dhahran not because it was a Muslim world but because it gave him better economic opportunities. However, I thought this new destination would become my home – the home that was coined by Anderson as the imagined nation, or my Muslim umma. Anderson argues that the imagined communities are “to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined” (6; Wood 61). Hall (122) asserts: identity is actually formed through unconscious processes over time, rather than being innate in consciousness at birth. There is always something ‘imaginary’ or fantasized about its unity. It always remains incomplete, is always ‘in process’, always ‘being formed’. As discussed above, when I had returned home to Bangladesh from Pakistan – both Muslim countries – my primary connection to my home country was my ethnic identity, language and traditions. My ethnic identity overshadowed the religious identity. But when I moved to Saudi Arabia, where my ethnic identity differed from that of the mainstream Arabs and Bedouin/nomadic Arabs, my connection to this new land was through my Islamic cultural and religious identity. Admittedly, this connection to the umma was more psychological than physical, but I was now in close proximity to Mecca, and to my home of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Mecca is an important city in Saudi Arabia for Muslims because it is the holy city of Islam, the home to the Ka’aba (the religious centre of Islam), and the birthplace of Prophet Muhammad [Peace Be Upon Him]. It is also the destination of the Hajj, one of the five pillars of Islamic faith. Therefore, Mecca is home to significant events in Islamic history, as well as being an important present day centre for the Islamic faith. We lived in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia for 5 years. Though it was a 2.5 hours flight away, I treasured Mecca’s proximity and regarded Dhahran as my second and spiritual home. Saudi Arabia had a restricted lifestyle for women, but I liked it because it was a Muslim country that gave me the opportunity to perform umrah Hajj (pilgrimage). However, Saudi Arabia did not allow citizenship to expatriates. Saudi Arabia’s government was keen to protect the status quo and did not want to compromise its cultural values or standard of living by allowing foreigners to become a permanent part of society. In exceptional circumstances only, the King granted citizenship to a foreigner for outstanding service to the state over a number of years. Children of foreigners born in Saudi Arabia did not have rights of local citizenship; they automatically assumed the nationality of their parents. If it was available, Saudi citizenship would assure expatriates a secure and permanent living in Saudi Arabia; as it was, there was a fear among the non-Saudis that they would have to leave the country once their job contract expired. Under the circumstances, though my spiritual connection to Mecca was strong, my husband was convinced that Saudi Arabia did not provide any job security. So, in 1987 when Australia offered migration to highly skilled people, my husband decided to migrate to Australia for a better and more secure economic life. I agreed to his decision, but quite reluctantly because we were again moving to a non-Muslim part of the world, which would be culturally different and far away from my original homeland (Bangladesh). In Australia, we lived first in Brisbane, then Adelaide, and after three years we took our Australian citizenship. At that stage I loved the Barossa Valley and Victor Harbour in South Australia, and the Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast in Queensland, but did not feel at home in Australia. We bought a house in Adelaide and I was a full time home-maker but was always apprehensive that my children (two boys) would lose their culture in this non-Muslim world. In 1990 we once again moved back to the Muslim world, this time to Muscat, Sultanate of Oman. My connection to this route was again spiritual. I valued the fact that we would live in a Muslim country and our children would be brought up in a Muslim environment. But my husband’s move was purely financial as he got a lucrative job offer in Muscat. We had another son in Oman. We enjoyed the luxurious lifestyle provided by my husband’s workplace and the service provided by the housemaid. I loved the beaches and freedom to drive my car, and I appreciated the friendly Omani people. I also enjoyed our frequent trips (4 hours flight) to my root, Dhaka, Bangladesh. So our children were raised within our ethnic and Islamic culture, remained close to my root (family in Dhaka), though they attended a British school in Muscat. But by the time I started considering Oman to be my second home, we had to leave once again for a place that could provide us with a more secure future. Oman was like Saudi Arabia; it employed expatriates only on a contract basis, and did not give them citizenship (not even fellow Muslims). So after 5 years it was time to move back to Australia. It was with great reluctance that I moved with my husband to Brisbane in 1995 because once again we were to face a different cultural context. As mentioned earlier, we lived in Brisbane in the late 1980s; I liked the weather, the landscape, but did not consider it home for cultural reasons. Our boys started attending expensive private schools and we bought a house in a prestigious Western suburb in Brisbane. Soon after arriving I started my tertiary education at the University of Queensland, and finished an MA in Historical Studies in Indian History in 1998. Still Australia was not my home. I kept thinking that we would return to my previous routes or the ‘imagined’ homeland somewhere in the Middle East, in close proximity to my root (Bangladesh), where we could remain economically secure in a Muslim country. But gradually I began to feel that Australia was becoming my ‘home’. I had gradually become involved in professional and community activities (with university colleagues, the Bangladeshi community and Muslim women’s organisations), and in retrospect I could see that this was an early stage of my ‘self-actualisation’ (Maslow). Through my involvement with diverse people, I felt emotionally connected with the concerns, hopes and dreams of my Muslim-Australian friends. Subsequently, I also felt connected with my mainstream Australian friends whose emotions and fears (9/11 incident, Bali bombing and 7/7 tragedy) were similar to mine. In late 1998 I started my PhD studies on the immigration history of Australia, with a particular focus on the historical settlement of Muslims in Australia. This entailed retrieving archival files and interviewing people, mostly Muslims and some mainstream Australians, and enquiring into relevant migration issues. I also became more active in community issues, and was not constrained by my circumstances. By circumstances, I mean that even though I belonged to a patriarchally structured Muslim family, where my husband was the main breadwinner, main decision-maker, my independence and research activities (entailing frequent interstate trips for data collection, and public speaking) were not frowned upon or forbidden (Khan 14-15); fortunately, my husband appreciated my passion for research and gave me his trust and support. This, along with the Muslim community’s support (interviews), and the wider community’s recognition (for example, the publication of my letters in Australian newspapers, interviews on radio and television) enabled me to develop my self-esteem and built up my bicultural identity as a Muslim in a predominantly Christian country and as a Bangladeshi-Australian. In 2005, for the sake of a better job opportunity, my husband moved to the UK, but this time I asserted that I would not move again. I felt that here in Australia (now in Perth) I had a job, an identity and a home. This time my husband was able to secure a good job back in Australia and was only away for a year. I no longer dream of finding a home in the Middle East. Through my bicultural identity here in Australia I feel connected to the wider community and to the Muslim umma. However, my attachment to the umma has become ambivalent. I feel proud of my Australian-Muslim identity but I am concerned about the jihadi ideology of militant Muslims. By jihadi ideology, I mean the extremist ideology of the al-Qaeda terrorist group (Farrar 2007). The Muslim umma now incorporates both moderate and radical Muslims. The radical Muslims (though only a tiny minority of 1.4 billion Muslims worldwide) pose a threat to their moderate counterparts as well as to non-Muslims. In the UK, some second- and third-generation Muslims identify themselves with the umma rather than their parents’ homelands or their country of birth (Husain). It should not be a matter of concern if these young Muslims adopt a ‘pure’ Muslim identity, providing at the same time they are loyal to their country of residence. But when they resort to terrorism with their ‘pure’ Muslim identity (e.g., the 7/7 London bombers) they defame my religion Islam, and undermine my spiritual connection to the umma. As a 1st generation immigrant, the defining criteria of my ‘homeliness’ in Australia are my ethno-cultural and religious identity (which includes my family), my active citizenship, and my community development/contribution through my research work – all of which allow me a sense of efficacy in my life. My ethnic and religious identities generally co-exist equally, but when I see some Muslims kill my fellow Australians (such as the Bali bombings in 2002 and 2005) my Australian identity takes precedence. I feel for the victims and condemn the perpetrators. On the other hand, when I see politics play a role over the human rights issues (e.g., the Tampa incident), my religious identity begs me to comment on it (see Kabir, Muslims in Australia 295-305). Problematising ‘Home’ for Muslim Australians In the European context, Grillo (863) and Werbner (904), and in the Australian context, Kabir (Muslims in Australia) and Poynting and Mason, have identified the diversity within Islam (national, ethnic, religious etc). Werbner (904) notes that in spite of the “wishful talk of the emergence of a ‘British Islam’, even today there are Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Arab mosques, as well as Turkish and Shia’a mosques”; thus British Muslims retain their separate identities. Similarly, in Australia, the existence of separate mosques for the Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Arab and Shia’a peoples indicates that Australian Muslims have also kept their ethnic identities discrete (Saeed 64-77). However, in times of crisis, such as the Salman Rushdie affair in 1989, and the 1990-1991 Gulf crises, both British and Australian Muslims were quick to unite and express their Islamic identity by way of resistance (Kabir, Muslims in Australia 160-162; Poynting and Mason 68-70). In both British and Australian contexts, I argue that a peaceful rally or resistance is indicative of active citizenship of Muslims as it reveals their sense of belonging (also Werbner 905). So when a transmigrant Muslim wants to make a peaceful demonstration, the Western world should be encouraged, not threatened – as long as the transmigrant’s allegiances lie also with the host country. In the European context, Grillo (868) writes: when I asked Mehmet if he was planning to stay in Germany he answered without hesitation: ‘Yes, of course’. And then, after a little break, he added ‘as long as we can live here as Muslims’. In this context, I support Mehmet’s desire to live as a Muslim in a non-Muslim world as long as this is peaceful. Paradoxically, living a Muslim life through ijtihad can be either socially progressive or destructive. The Canadian Muslim feminist Irshad Manji relies on ijtihad, but so does Osama bin Laden! Manji emphasises that ijtihad can be, on the one hand, the adaptation of Islam using independent reasoning, hybridity and the contesting of ‘traditional’ family values (c.f. Doogue and Kirkwood 275-276, 314); and, on the other, ijtihad can take the form of conservative, patriarchal and militant Islamic values. The al-Qaeda terrorist Osama bin Laden espouses the jihadi ideology of Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), an Egyptian who early in his career might have been described as a Muslim modernist who believed that Islam and Western secular ideals could be reconciled. But he discarded that idea after going to the US in 1948-50; there he was treated as ‘different’ and that treatment turned him against the West. He came back to Egypt and embraced a much more rigid and militaristic form of Islam (Esposito 136). Other scholars, such as Cesari, have identified a third orientation – a ‘secularised Islam’, which stresses general beliefs in the values of Islam and an Islamic identity, without too much concern for practices. Grillo (871) observed Islam in the West emphasised diversity. He stressed that, “some [Muslims were] more quietest, some more secular, some more clamorous, some more negotiatory”, while some were exclusively characterised by Islamic identity, such as wearing the burqa (elaborate veils), hijabs (headscarves), beards by men and total abstinence from drinking alcohol. So Mehmet, cited above, could be living a Muslim life within the spectrum of these possibilities, ranging from an integrating mode to a strict, militant Muslim manner. In the UK context, Zubaida (96) contends that marginalised, culturally-impoverished youth are the people for whom radical, militant Islamism may have an appeal, though it must be noted that the 7/7 bombers belonged to affluent families (O’Sullivan 14; Husain). In Australia, Muslim Australians are facing three challenges. First, the Muslim unemployment rate: it was three times higher than the national total in 1996 and 2001 (Kabir, Muslims in Australia 266-278; Kabir, “What Does It Mean” 63). Second, some spiritual leaders have used extreme rhetoric to appeal to marginalised youth; in January 2007, the Australian-born imam of Lebanese background, Sheikh Feiz Mohammad, was alleged to have employed a DVD format to urge children to kill the enemies of Islam and to have praised martyrs with a violent interpretation of jihad (Chulov 2). Third, the proposed citizenship test has the potential to make new migrants’ – particularly Muslims’ – settlement in Australia stressful (Kabir, “What Does It Mean” 62-79); in May 2007, fuelled by perceptions that some migrants – especially Muslims – were not integrating quickly enough, the Howard government introduced a citizenship test bill that proposes to test applicants on their English language skills and knowledge of Australian history and ‘values’. I contend that being able to demonstrate knowledge of history and having English language skills is no guarantee that a migrant will be a good citizen. Through my transmigrant history, I have learnt that developing a bond with a new place takes time, acceptance and a gradual change of identity, which are less likely to happen when facing assimilationist constraints. I spoke English and studied history in the United States, but I did not consider it my home. I did not speak the Arabic language, and did not study Middle Eastern history while I was in the Middle East, but I felt connected to it for cultural and religious reasons. Through my knowledge of history and English language proficiency I did not make Australia my home when I first migrated to Australia. Australia became my home when I started interacting with other Australians, which was made possible by having the time at my disposal and by fortunate circumstances, which included a fairly high level of efficacy and affluence. If I had been rejected because of my lack of knowledge of ‘Australian values’, or had encountered discrimination in the job market, I would have been much less willing to embrace my host country and call it home. I believe a stringent citizenship test is more likely to alienate would-be citizens than to induce their adoption of values and loyalty to their new home. Conclusion Blunt (5) observes that current studies of home often investigate mobile geographies of dwelling and how it shapes one’s identity and belonging. Such geographies of home negotiate from the domestic to the global context, thus mobilising the home beyond a fixed, bounded and confining location. Similarly, in this paper I have discussed how my mobile geography, from the domestic (root) to global (route), has shaped my identity. Though I received a degree of culture shock in the United States, loved the Middle East, and was at first quite resistant to the idea of making Australia my second home, the confidence I acquired in residing in these ‘several homes’ were cumulative and eventually enabled me to regard Australia as my ‘home’. I loved the Middle East, but I did not pursue an active involvement with the Arab community because I was a busy mother. Also I lacked the communication skill (fluency in Arabic) with the local residents who lived outside the expatriates’ campus. I am no longer a cultural freak. I am no longer the same Bangladeshi woman who saw her ethnic and Islamic culture as superior to all other cultures. I have learnt to appreciate Australian values, such as tolerance, ‘a fair go’ and multiculturalism (see Kabir, “What Does It Mean” 62-79). My bicultural identity is my strength. With my ethnic and religious identity, I can relate to the concerns of the Muslim community and other Australian ethnic and religious minorities. And with my Australian identity I have developed ‘a voice’ to pursue active citizenship. Thus my biculturalism has enabled me to retain and merge my former home with my present and permanent home of Australia. References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London, New York: Verso, 1983. Australian Bureau of Statistics: Census of Housing and Population, 1996 and 2001. Blunt, Alison. Domicile and Diaspora: Anglo-Indian Women and the Spatial Politics of Home. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. Home. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Cesari, Jocelyne. “Muslim Minorities in Europe: The Silent Revolution.” In John L. Esposito and Burgat, eds., Modernising Islam: Religion in the Public Sphere in Europe and the Middle East. London: Hurst, 2003. 251-269. Chulov, Martin. “Treatment Has Sheik Wary of Returning Home.” Weekend Australian 6-7 Jan. 2007: 2. Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. Seattle: University of Washington, 1997. Doogue, Geraldine, and Peter Kirkwood. Tomorrow’s Islam: Uniting Old-Age Beliefs and a Modern World. Sydney: ABC Books, 2005. Esposito, John. The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? 3rd ed. New York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Farrar, Max. “When the Bombs Go Off: Rethinking and Managing Diversity Strategies in Leeds, UK.” International Journal of Diversity in Organisations, Communities and Nations 6.5 (2007): 63-68. Grillo, Ralph. “Islam and Transnationalism.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 30.5 (Sep. 2004): 861-878. Hall, Stuart. Polity Reader in Cultural Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994. Huntington, Samuel, P. The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of World Order. London: Touchstone, 1998. Husain, Ed. The Islamist: Why I Joined Radical Islam in Britain, What I Saw inside and Why I Left. London: Penguin, 2007. Kabir, Nahid. Muslims in Australia: Immigration, Race Relations and Cultural History. London: Kegan Paul, 2005. ———. “What Does It Mean to Be Un-Australian: Views of Australian Muslim Students in 2006.” People and Place 15.1 (2007): 62-79. Khan, Shahnaz. Aversion and Desire: Negotiating Muslim Female Identity in the Diaspora. Toronto: Women’s Press, 2002. Manji, Irshad. The Trouble with Islam Today. Canada:Vintage, 2005. Maslow, Abraham. Motivation and Personality. New York: Harper, 1954. O’Sullivan, J. “The Real British Disease.” Quadrant (Jan.-Feb. 2006): 14-20. Poynting, Scott, and Victoria Mason. “The Resistible Rise of Islamophobia: Anti-Muslim Racism in the UK and Australia before 11 September 2001.” Journal of Sociology 43.1 (2007): 61-86. Saeed, Abdallah. Islam in Australia. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2003. Smith, Anthony D. National Identity. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991. Spencer, Philip, and Howard Wollman. Nationalism: A Critical Introduction. London: Sage, 2002. Vertovec, Stevens. The Hindu Diaspora: Comparative Patterns. London: Routledge. 2000. Werbner, Pnina, “Theorising Complex Diasporas: Purity and Hybridity in the South Asian Public Sphere in Britain.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 30.5 (2004): 895-911. Wood, Dennis. “The Diaspora, Community and the Vagrant Space.” In Cynthia Vanden Driesen and Ralph Crane, eds., Diaspora: The Australasian Experience. New Delhi: Prestige, 2005. 59-64. Zubaida, Sami. “Islam in Europe: Unity or Diversity.” Critical Quarterly 45.1-2 (2003): 88-98. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Kabir, Nahid. "Why I Call Australia ‘Home’?: A Transmigrant’s Perspective." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/15-kabir.php>. APA Style Kabir, N. (Aug. 2007) "Why I Call Australia ‘Home’?: A Transmigrant’s Perspective," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/15-kabir.php>.

The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires. — William Arthur WardIntroductionThe first documented use of the term Mentor can be traced back to the 8th century BC poem by Homer entitled Odyssey (Hay, Gerber and Minichiello). Although this original representation of Mentor is contested in the literature (Colley), historically the term mentor has evolved to imply a wise and trusted other who advises, teaches, protects and supports someone younger who is inexperienced and not so knowledgeable with the ways of the world. The mentor within a 21st century construct still aligns to this historical portrayal, however the evolution of society, the influence of technology, the growth of entrepreneurship, and a greater understanding of the impact of our interactions with others has forced us to consider mentoring in contemporary ways. As such, popular culture, through books, film and images, provide many impressions of the mentor and what it means to mentor in both historical and contemporary circumstances. Similarly, popular culture provides us with a variety of impressions of the teacher. Throughout old and new history, teaching is considered to be a honourable profession, one that is complex and involves specific skills and knowledge to be effective (Marsh). Society has high expectations of teachers as they are entrusted with shaping the future generation (Parkay). Although the levels of respect and trust of teachers changes within different cultural circumstances, society allows teachers to be one of the most influential figures in a child’s life. Popular film often picks up on this theme and portrays teachers as inspirational figures, pillars of society and those that can have a major influence over the development of the student’s in their care. Within the brief story that a film provides, teachers are more often than not, positioned as a ‘mentor type’ figure to the students entrusted in their care, who guides and supports them to become who they want to be. This paper explores the constructs of the mentor and mentorship through a popular culture lens. Culture is broadly described as the “bricks and mortar of our most commonplace understandings” (Willis 185) and our understandings are shaped by what we see, hear and do. The paper is framed by and seeks to answer the following question: To what extent is the teacher as mentor portrayed in popular film a realistic image? Accordingly this paper will examine the rise of the teacher as mentor and determine what images are portrayed through the medium of film. In order to answer the question, the paper will briefly examine current literature for the characteristics and roles of mentors and teachers. The paper will then delve into the way that teachers are portrayed in film and will be followed by an examination of a selection of films that portray teachers as mentors. A comparison will be made between the characteristics of mentors and the characteristics that the movie teachers display. Analysis through the use of reader-response theory will provide insight into the extent of the reality of the teacher as mentor that are portrayed. Mentors and Teachers: A Review of Selected Literature Mentoring consists of a series of interactions that can be of a social, intellectual or emotional nature (Lentz and Allen). Mentoring can be described as a helping relationship whereby two or more people work together in order to achieve personal and professional goals (Johnson and Ridley). Effective mentoring is also known to be mutually beneficial to all participants (Ambrosetti, Knight and Dekkers). When scanning the literature there are a number of common descriptors that are used consistently to situate the interactions a mentor undertakes: supporter, guide, advisor, teacher, protector and counselor (Sundli; Hall et al.). Such descriptors indicate that a mentor performs a series of roles that change according to the needs of those being mentored (Ambrosetti and Dekkers). If the mentor has a series of roles to perform, then it is logical that the mentee also will also have a number of roles to play, however these are lnot well documented in the literature. The roles that both mentors and mentees play during a relationship can be identified and underpinned through the three dimensions of mentoring: the relationship itself, the developmental needs of the participants and the integration of the context in which the mentoring is situated (Ambrosetti, Knight and Dekkers). The interactions that a mentor engages in with a mentee span over a number of dimensions and are often reactive in nature. The three dimensions of mentoring can assist in describing a mentor and the roles they play. The relational dimension includes such roles as supporter, protector, friend and counselor. The roles of guide, teacher/trainer, collaborator, facilitator and reflector can be classified as developmental whereas being a role model can be both a developmental role and contextual role (230). There are a number of characteristics that are common to a mentor. Johnson and Ridley summarize them to include the following traits: exuding warmth, listening actively, showing unconditional regard, tolerating idealization, embracing humor, not expecting perfection, being trustworthy, having interpersonal competence, respecting another’s values and not being jealous of the mentee (43-62). The above list of traits are personal and often linked to personality, thus can be connected explicitly to the relational dimension of mentoring. The possession (or non-possession) of such traits can impact on the interactions that occur within mentorship. Accordingly it can be assumed that the characteristics, in conjunction with the roles that mentors play, that not everyone is suited to the role of mentor. Most people have experienced schooling at some stage in their life and is therefore familiar with the role of a teacher. Teaching is one most well known professions and can be described as a “creative act in which teachers continually shape and reshape lessons, events and the experiences of their students”(Parkay 45). The role of a teacher is to teach both knowledge and skills to their learners in order to prepare them as citizens for the future. More specifically, the role of the teacher is to design and deliver learning experiences that cater for and challenge the learners, that develop skills and knowledge both inside and outside of the classroom, and help them become confident, creative and responsible citizens. Despite this important role, the image of teachers is split between two types: one that is bitter, spiteful and egocentric, and the other being caring, accepting and reflective (Connell). We remember teachers according to such categories. The types of characteristics that teachers hold are extensive, however the following encompasses those that are key within the literature. Teachers generally have compassion, empathy and a caring nature. They can be flexible, creative, personable, humorous, positive, knowledgeable, motivational and dependable. Teachers are often well organised people, fair minded and resourceful (Howell). When examining the characteristics of teachers and the traits of mentors, similarities can be seen indicating that a particular type of person may be more suited to being a teacher and/or mentor. Teachers as Mentors in Film Teachers seem to be a popular subject of feature films. Films such as Goodbye Mr Chips (1939), Blackboard Jungle (1955) and To Sir with Love (1967) provide us with insight into the way teachers are portrayed in society and the role they play. Film however, has the specific ability to shape the cultural understanding we develop and allows us to make comparisons to our own experiences and those that are played out in fictional circumstances (Delamarter). While there are some films that provide a negative portrayal of teachers, generally they provide a view that teachers are positive influences on the students in their care.A search of the World Wide Web about the teacher as mentor brings up a treasure trove of film titles that span from the 1930s to the present day. Despite such a choice of titles, the following films have been selected to examine in this paper: Dead Poets Society (1989), Dangerous Minds (1995), Freedom Writers (2007) and the Harry Potter series of films (2001-2011). Selection of these films was based on the following two criteria: 1) they occurred within in a school setting and 2) are embedded within a contemporary theme of struggle where rebellion and/or other teenage angst are highlighted. Reader-response theory will underpin the analysis of the teachers in each of the films selected, so that an answer to the earlier posed question can be illuminated. Broadly speaking, reader-response theory is concerned with how readers, or in this case viewers, “make meaning from their experience with the text” (Beach 1). There are many perspectives on reader-response theory and how one might focus upon when responding to a text. In this instance the author will highlight the transaction that occurs between the reader, the text and the context. The transactions will include the social, cultural, experiential, psychological and textual viewpoints (Beach 8). Firstly, each film will be briefly described. This will be followed by an analysis of the teachers portrayed in the films. Dead Poets Society (1989) is set at a conservative secondary boys academy in the late 1950s and focuses on a group of students completing their senior year. Mr Keating is a new English teacher who uses unconventional teaching methods in the classroom. He inspires his students to ‘seize the day’ and ‘make your lives extraordinary’ and does this through the teaching of poetry. He encourages them to stand on desks during his lessons and to throw out tradition. It is Keating’s messages to his students to question what they believe that permeates the film and inspires his students to pursue what they want to do and become. The film Dangerous Minds (1995) is set in a low socio-economic area, where un-privilege and protecting yourself is a way of life. The teacher in this film is new and young, but is an ex US Marine. The class the film centres on is a difficult one to teach. This teacher uses unorthodox methods to gain the attention and trust of her students. The film makes a point to show us that she makes particular effort to relate the curriculum to the students’ interests in order to engage them in learning. Emphasis is also on the fact that she takes an interest in the students and many become her ‘personal projects’ and helping them to realize who they can become. Freedom Writers (2007) is set in the years directly following the Los Angeles riots of 1992 whereby issues of racism, segregation and inequality along with the changing view of the world is the focus. The students in the classrooms of this film are from diverse backgrounds and un-trusting of the education system. Their teacher is new and young and her first attempts to earn their trust fail until she begins to get to know the students and make links between what is being taught to their own lives. She inspires her class to learn tolerance, apply themselves and pursue further education. In the Harry Potter (2001-2011) series of films, there are several teachers who make an impact upon the young wizards. Although set in a fantasy world, the audience is treated to both inspirational teachers looking to nurture, protect and develop their charges, and teachers who are painted as egocentric and suspicious. Inspirational teachers include Dumbledore and McGonagall who offer subtle life lessons, specific skills and knowledge and protect the young wizards from danger. Egocentric and somewhat suspicious teachers include Snape and Quirrell who look to thwart the wizard’s time at school, however they too offer subtle life lessons to their students. The theme of good versus evil is paramount throughout the film series and the teachers are aligned with this theme.Teachers as Mentors – An AnalysisAlthough only a brief description of each film has been offered, the teachers as mentors to their students is the focus. Mr Keating (Dead Poets Society) and LouAnne Johnson (Dangerous Minds) are both described as unorthodox as they each use teaching methods that are frowned upon by others. However their purposeful and different teaching methods draw their students into their lessons so that life learning can occur. In each film, the unorthodox teaching touches the students in ways unknown to them before and in both cases the students demonstrate intellectual and personal growth. The unorthodox methods provide an avenue for a different relationship that is far from the traditional. In some scenes friendship is hinted at where guiding and supporting the students towards their hopes and dreams is highlighted. Aspects of mentoring can be seen through relational, developmental and contextual domains as the students are supported, guided and provided explicit role modeling. The young teacher in Freedom Writers, Erin Gruwell, uses a teaching approach that includes taking time to get to know her students. This approach, like Keating and Johnson, provides the opportunity to tweak the curriculum to the interests of the students and thus engage them in academic learning. They teach skills and knowledge in ways which relate to the students’ lives and interests. They guide, support the students towards the unfamiliar and facilitate opportunities for success. They help them to set goals and make them realise that they have a future and can be successful in their lives. The transformations that occur due to the teaching approaches used by the teachers cause their students admire and want to be like them. In Harry Potter, teachers Dumbledore and McGonagall are wise in years and life experience. They offer wisdom, protection and guidance to the young wizards throughout the series. These teachers, like Keating, Johnson and Gruwell, are role models in that they represent what life can be like and how best to achieve that life. Snape and Quirell also take an interest in their students, but represent an alternative view of life and learning. The difference between the four Harry Potter teachers can be drilled down to the traits of effective teachers. Two of which emulate the traits and two whom do not readily display any of the traits. Dumbledore and McGonagall can be considered as teacher mentors whereas Snape and Quirell cannot. In each film the student can be seen as central to the teacher as mentor and this in turn influences the way in which they behave. The teachers in these films pass on life lessons through their teaching. Throughout the films the teachers are guiding, supporting, befriending, protecting and training their charges. Interactions that occur between the teachers and the students are followed by a reflective phase by the teachers, whereby solutions to problems are sought or self-realisation occurs. In many instances the films show the teacher learning from the student and thus learning their own life lessons through reflection. From a social and cultural perspective, what is portrayed within the storylines are often close to the reality of what is expected from teachers. In many instances these lead towards a stereotyping of who teachers are and how they behave. However, from an experiential point of view, our expectations of the actions that teachers undertake do not usually take such form. In reality, teachers are busy people with a complex job to do (Connell) and often do not have time to take personal interest in all of their students individually. The teachers within the films chosen seem to have one class to prepare for, whereas in reality, a school teacher will have many classes to consider. Psychologically, some teachers and the style they embrace appeal to a particular a type of student or group of students. In the case of Dead Poets Society, Dangerous Minds and Freedom Writers, the storyline painted the students as those needing a particular type of teacher, someone who would save them from their circumstance and visa versa. The textual perspective was well highlighted by the teachers in the Harry Potter films as the viewer expects to see teachers with rather unusual but interesting teaching styles. However the text (within all films) included insight into mentor characteristics such as warmth, humour, tolerance, respect and unconditional regards. Generally, the films examined highlight two different types of teachers, challenging the categories written about by Connell. The first type of teacher highlighted was one who was seen as being more contemporary. One who is individual, unorthodox, and maybe a little rebellious; this teacher highlights that you need to be ‘different’ to make a difference. The second type was one who aligns to the traditional form of teacher; one who uses their knowledge, wisdom and life experience to break through to their student. Each of the films were underpinned by the relationship, the developmental needs and the context in which the narrative was played out, however the relationship between the students and the teacher was highlighted as being central to the storyline. Thus films of this nature often portray teachers as those who help their students in the emotional sense rather than the intellectual sense (Delamarter). Conclusion Several understandings about the teacher as mentor have been brought to light through the examination of the teacher as mentor in film. Firstly, in revisiting the mentoring definitions offered within this paper, it can be said that the teachers highlighted in the discussed films were mentoring their students in a way unique to the relationship developed between teacher and student. In each instance the teacher worked with their students to identify teaching approaches that would be successful in the context in which they were situated. Each film demonstrated that the teachers were committed to creating a relationship that met the developmental needs of their students. Interestingly, it was observed that the relationships were mutually beneficial in that the teachers grew along with the students with many coming to realisations about themselves through reflection and self thought. Secondly, the teachers within the films were portrayed as playing several important roles within their students’ lives. The teachers were role models inside and outside of the classroom. Each film’s storyline positioned the teacher as an influential other, whether they be portrayed as rebellious and unorthodox, evil and suspicious or inspirational and wise. The teachers in these films can be considered as mentors as they were supporting, guiding, protecting and nurturing the students to become better versions of themselves. However, the question that this article sought to answer was: to what extent is the teacher as mentor portrayed in popular film a realistic image? In looking back at the image the teacher in society and the role that they play in developing citizens of the future, it can be said the image presented has slivers of realism. In the real world, teachers must conform to society’s expectations, educational policies and codes of professionalism. Professional relationships with students do not encompass them in behave a student as a ‘personal project’, although catering to their needs is encouraged within the curriculum. It would be thought that if teachers did not encourage their students to be the best they can be, then they would not be doing their job. Many figures throughout our cultural history have been viewed as a mentor due to the role they play and how these roles align to societal beliefs and values. Thus, the portrayal of mentors and mentorship through a popular culture lens provides insight into our understanding about what mentorship is and how this may develop in the future. Both in the past and present, teachers are seen as inspirational figures and pillars of society, and are often considered a mentor by default. Films portray teachers in a variety of fashions, however there are many films that subtly position the teacher as a mentor to their students and it is this that this article has focused on. 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