Journal articles on the topic 'Brand moral transgression'

This study investigates the impact of brand transgression on consumer trust, brand loyalty, and purchase intentions, while examining the moderating role of religiosity. Brand transgression, defined as a violation of consumer expectations or ethical standards, often leads to a significant loss of trust. Using a quantitative approach, we collected data from 200 participants via a scenario-based survey to explore these relationships. The results show that brand transgression negatively affects consumer trust, which, in turn, mediates the relationship between brand transgression and both brand loyalty and purchase intentions. Furthermore, religiosity significantly moderates the effect of brand transgression on consumer trust, with highly religious consumers exhibiting greater trust erosion following a brand transgression. These findings provide theoretical contributions by highlighting trust as a crucial mediator and religiosity as an important moderating factor. Practically, the study offers insights for managers, emphasizing the need to rebuild trust through transparent actions and ethical behavior, especially when addressing religiously sensitive audiences. Limitations of the study include the use of a cross-sectional design and hypothetical scenarios, which future research could address by employing longitudinal or real-world experimental designs. Additionally, future studies could examine other moderating variables, such as cultural values or moral identity, to expand the understanding of consumer responses to brand transgressions across diverse settings. Overall, this research underscores the importance of trust in brand-consumer relationships and offers valuable implications for managing brand transgressions in sensitive markets.

Purpose This study aims to examine how consumers use a moral reasoning process to defend preferred celebrity and celebrity brand images and specifically, the processes for supporting the celebrity’s comeback after a transgression. Design/methodology/approach Study 1 measures consumers’ preference for celebrities and their support for them after a transgression and tests whether the celebrity’s image moderates consumers’ preference for celebrities and their support of them to come back. Study 2 examines the effect of the specific moral reasoning processes and tests whether it leads to different levels of support after a transgression, depending on the primed celebrity image. Findings Results show celebrity preference is positively related to consumer support of a celebrity’s return after a wrongdoing. This relationship is moderated by the celebrity’s image (Study 1). The authors find that a celebrity primed with a role model image receives more support for a comeback in the moral rationalization condition, whereas a celebrity primed with a bad boy image receives more support in the moral decoupling condition (Study 2). Research limitations/implications First, in the empirical studies, using a pre-test, the authors chose transgressions that were unrelated to the celebrities’ profession and that had an intermediate level of severity. Moreover, these transgressions were manipulated using information about fictitious celebrities to control for pre-existing respondents’ differences on information or biases about them and confounding characteristics between identified celebrities. Despite the control benefits, the disadvantage of this approach could be that respondents’ involvement with the celebrities may be generally lower as compared to studies that use known celebrities (Fong and Wyer, 2012). The involvement or attachment with known celebrities by respondents may be a factor that determines the power of a specific human brand. By using fictitious celebrities, the effects related to human brands may have been bounded or based more on celebrity archetypes. Another limitation is that both Studies 1 and 2 collected data using an online panel. To make the results more generalizable, the authors can contemplate on-site experimental designs or a qualitative approach in future research. The latter may also facilitate the use of known human brands to understand how they interact with other mediating factors without having to worry about control of confounds between respondents. Finally, there is a potential inflation of moral sensitivity stemming from measuring moral reasoning in Study 1 after informing participants about a celebrity transgression. While the authors followed other studies in this procedure, for the effects related to measuring across different image groups this would be less critical, as all participants would be affected in a similar way. However, there remains the possibility that the inflation bias could be higher for one celebrity type and could be a limitation or even a topic considered for future research that delves into specific relationships between celebrity image type and morality judgment bias. Practical implications The results of this study have managerial implications for the various stakeholders involved. First, for celebrities, especially role models, living up to expectations congruent to the performances and brand images that they have developed is important. This will necessitate them to manage their consumers’ expectations, and perhaps, suggest that they do not create unrealistically high ones. Although consumer expectations have not often taken center stage as a theoretical issue in recent consumer research, they may still be important for consumers’ evaluations and choices (Howard and Sheth, 1969). In addition, this study offers implications for public relations agencies or management companies that promote and manage celebrities. Although consumers in many countries have a higher preference for celebrities with a role model image, the authors see that being such a human brand can be potentially counterproductive amid scandals. If the level of supporters’ commitment for a celebrity is high and the attachment relationship is strong, then constructing a diverse and flexible image spectrum may be more advantageous in the long term than adhering to just the role model image. In the event that a misbehavior has occurred, celebrities, to the extent that they can identify their brand image, need to assess more precisely the type of moral judgment and support they are likely or unlikely to receive after the transgressions. Based on that analysis, the misbehaving celebrities may have to adjust the rehabilitation period or act of redemption. Finally, the conventional wisdom used by advertising agencies or corporations that the bad boy image of celebrities is more vulnerable to a negative event, needs to be reconsidered (Aaker et al., 2004). This rethinking is aligned with other past research that have also argued that transgressions do not necessarily have an adverse impact on associated brands (Lee and Kwak, 2016). Thus, when advertising agencies use celebrities, they must consider the congruence between the human brand image and the company and review the source and depth of the reasons why supporters like celebrities using a broader perspective. Social implications Although consumers in many countries have a higher preference for celebrities with a role model image, the authors see that being such a human brand can be potentially counterproductive amid scandals. For them constructing a diverse and flexible image spectrum may be more advantageous in the long term than adhering to just the unrealistic role model image. Celebrities need to assess more precisely the type of moral judgment and support they are likely or unlikely to receive after the transgressions. Based on that analysis, the misbehaving celebrities may have to adjust the rehabilitation period or act of societal redemption. Originality/value The study makes three key contributions by combining celebrity image and moral psychology to assess how consumers pass moral judgment on celebrities who transgress according to different image types, examining the mediation effect of moral reasoning in the relationship between consumer preferences for a celebrity and their support for them after transgressions and looking at consumer support for a comeback of the transgressing celebrity as the dependent variable and not just the effects of the immediate fallout. The value of this study, therefore, lies in understanding the specific dynamics between consumer preference, celebrity image, moral reasoning processes and consumer support to accept a celebrity’s return after a transgression.

Purpose This paper aims to elucidate instances whereby celebrity endorsements by social media influencers (SMIs) embedded within online consumption communities are perceived as transgressive by their fellow community members. In doing so, this study provides insights into the new challenges and considerations that such community contexts present for celebrity endorsement. Design/methodology/approach The research team conducted a longitudinal, netnographic study of the YouTube beauty community, involving an initial phase of netnographic immersion followed by an investigative netnography that examined community members’ response to celebrity endorsements by 12 SMIs within the community. Findings This study identifies five recurring celebrity endorsement transgressions, each violating an established moral responsibility within the community. The paper explores how community members attribute responsibility for transgressive endorsements and identifies consequences for both the SMI and the endorsed brand. Research limitations/implications This study focused on a single consumption community, developing a deep understanding of the distinct moral responsibilities that shape the reception of celebrity endorsements within this context. Practical implications The paper presents managerial recommendations that will aid both SMIs and brands in implementing celebrity endorsements that avoid communal perceptions of transgression. Originality/value The analysis extends prior study on celebrity endorsement by SMIs by explaining when and why SMI endorsements are likely to be perceived as transgressive by the community and providing new insights into community member responses to transgressive SMI endorsements. It also extends wider theories of celebrity endorsement by highlighting the influence of consumption community contexts upon endorsement reception and examining consumer responses to celebrity endorsements perceived as transgressive in and of themselves.

There are a number of factors affecting consumers' purchase behavior. It is believed that celebrities can affect companies' sale positively or negatively by transferring their image to the endorsed brand product. Regardless of positive effects, scandal, transgression, and any kind of misbehaviors may destroy sponsor companies' economics. The present paper mainly aimed to explore the effect of doping phenomenon on sport marketing. Qualitative data collecting from eighteen in-depth interviews with undergraduate students of the college of physical education and sport sciences of Islamic Azad University-Central Tehran Branch (IAUCTB) were analyzed in three phases: open coding, axial coding, and selective coding. 297 open codes were achieved by 18 interviews. Grouping and comparing axial codes in each case, all identified codes were divided in five groups: brand image (athlete and endorsed product brands images), moral reasoning (moral coupling, moral decoupling, and moral rationalization), consumer behavioral consequences (word of mouth, purchase intention, and brand loyalty), attitude change (attitudes change toward athlete and brand), and moral emotions (moral evaluation, contempt, anger, disgust, and sympathy). The proposed qualitative model for the effect of doping phenomenon on sport marketing in Iran illustrated that moral emotions and product brand image affected by the doped athlete brand image and it resulted in attitudes change toward endorser athlete and endorsed brand and negative consumer behavioral consequences, however, moral reasoning strategies emerged by cognitive dissonance might protect consumers behavior from negative effects.

Purpose Corporate scandals involving senior executives plague many businesses. Although customers and noncustomers may be exposed to news of the same scandal, they may appraise dimensions of the transgression differently, thereby affecting post-scandal patronage intentions. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether and how consumer-firm affiliation affects future patronage intentions by examining nuances in customers’ vs noncustomers’ reactions toward the transgressor’s professional performance and immoral behavior. Design/methodology/approach Four between-subjects experimental studies were used to test whether performance-relevant and/or immorality-relevant pathways drive customers’ vs noncustomers’ post-scandal patronage intentions. The results were analyzed using analysis of variance, parallel mediation and serial mediation. Findings The results demonstrate that performance judgment, and not immorality judgment, drive the relationship between consumer-firm affiliation and post-scandal patronage intentions (Study 1a), regardless of the order of information presented (Study 1b). Customers form more positive performance judgments because they give more weight to performance-related information (Study 2), demonstrating a sequential effect of consumer-firm affiliation on post-scandal patronage intentions only through the performance-relevant, and not immorality-relevant, pathway (Study 3). Research limitations/implications This research contributes to the literature on social distance and moral judgments. Future research should examine other deleterious outcomes such as brand sabotage and negative word-of-mouth, as well as potential moderators including repeated transgressions and prevalence of the infraction in other firms. Practical implications This research offers important nuances for understanding how performance and immorality judgments differentially operate and affect post-scandal patronage intentions. The findings highlight the strategic value of communicating the leader’s performance (e.g. professional contributions) as a buffer against potential declining patronage. Originality/value Offering new insights into the extant literature and lay beliefs which contend that harsh moral judgment reduces patronage intentions, this research uncovers why and how exposure to the same scandal can result in varying moral judgments that subsequently influence patronage intentions. Importantly, this research shows that the performance-relevant pathway can explain why customers have higher post-scandal patronage intentions compared to noncustomers.

The landscape of youth religious participation is an underengaged area across both the humanities and social science. While the humanities lack empirical data on the changing religious life worlds of youths, existing empirical work in the social sciences suggests that institutional religion buffers criminality and delinquency—a brand of engagement the authors refer to as “buffering transgression.” This is a process that both conceives and privileges religion as an institutional and a moral force responsible for creating prosocial behavior. While empirical studies on youths and religion keep religion arrested to institutional and moral functions, scholars in the humanities work hard to legitimate youth cultural forms, such as hip hop, by conflating its rugged dimensions with a quest (and hope) for democratic sensibilities—a motif the authors suggest is rooted in ideologies of teleological progress. Using the tropes progress, peril, and change, this article explores the utility (and limitations) of empirical work and the often misguided efforts to moralize religion. Here the authors raise queries regarding youth cultural change and religion and quantitatively model youth religious change over 16 years. The implications of these theoretical and empirical interventions point toward future work at the social scientific intersections of religion in culture.

Marketing managers often face dilemmas when their athlete endorsers are accused of immoral behavior. However, research findings have been equivocal as to whether athletes’ transgressions damage endorsed brand evaluations. Using two experiments, we empirically demonstrate that consumers’ moral reasoning (i.e., moral rationalization, moral coupling, and moral decoupling) has differential effects on evaluations of a transgressor (Study 1). In Study 2, we examine the causal effect of moral reasoning choice on evaluations of the transgressor and the associated brand. Findings show that moral coupling has negative effects on the athlete and brand evaluations, whereas moral decoupling and moral rationalization positively affect brand attitude and purchase intent through positive evaluation of the athlete. Findings from this study provide empirical evidence to explain how and why some consumers continue or discontinue their support for a troubled athlete and associated brand.

Purpose In the context of celebrity endorsement, this study aims to demonstrate that the ways in which consumers adopt moral reasoning strategies (i.e. rationalization, decoupling and coupling) are largely dependent on the severity (i.e. high vs low) of celebrity transgressions and the degree to which they personally identify with the celebrity. Design/methodology/approach A between-subjects online experiment (N = 144) with two conditions, representing high- and low-severity celebrity transgressions, was conducted. Participants’ attitudes toward the celebrity and endorsed brand, their purchase intention for the endorsed product and the degrees to which they identified with the celebrity and adopted the three types of moral reasoning strategies were assessed. Findings The rationalization and decoupling strategies mediate the effects of highly negative information about a celebrity on consumer attitudes toward the celebrity and endorsed brand as well as on purchase intention for the endorsed product. In addition, consumers who identify strongly as fans of the celebrity in question are more likely to activate rationalization and decoupling strategies to process and evaluate transgressive behaviors than those with weaker fan identification. Originality/value By exploring the ways in which moral reasoning and fan identification work in processing negative information, this study provides insights into the psychological process through which negative news coverage of a celebrity endorser influences consumer attitudes and purchase intention.

Athlete endorsers’ transgressions pose a dilemma for loyal fans who have established emotional attachments toward the individual. However, little is known regarding how fans maintain their support for the wrongdoer. Drawing on moral psychology and social identity theory, the current study proposes and examines a conceptual model incorporating athlete identification, moral emotions, moral reasoning strategies, and consumer evaluations. By using an actual scandal involving an NFL player (i.e., Ray Rice), the results show that fan identification suppresses the experience of negative moral emotions but facilitates fans’ moral disengagement processes, which enables fans to support the wrongdoer. Moreover, negative moral emotions motivate the moral coupling process. Findings contribute to the sport consumer behavior literature that highly identified fans seem to regulate negative emotions but deliberately select moral disengagement reasoning strategies to maintain their positive stance toward the wrongdoer and associated brands.

Purpose Moral transgressions committed by person-brands can negatively impact consumers through the transgression’s diagnosticity (severity, centrality and consistency). This paper aims to test how a transgression’s centrality and consistency impact important consumer perceptions and behavioral intentions toward a person-brand, holding constant the transgression in question. These outcomes are crucial for person-brands to understand how to minimize and manage the impact of a given transgression. Design/methodology/approach This paper uses three online consumer experiments to manipulate transgression diagnosticity via centrality and consistency and identifies the resulting impact on consumer-brand identification, trustworthiness and consumer digital engagement intentions through PROCESS models. Findings High-diagnosticity transgressions lower consumer digital engagement intentions regarding the person-brand and their endorsed products. This effect is serially mediated by consumer-brand identification, as predicted by social identity theory, and by perceived trustworthiness of the person-brand. Practical implications Person-brands should emphasize the nondiagnostic nature of any transgressions in which they are involved, including a lack of centrality and consistency with their brand, and guard against the appearance of diagnostic transgressions. Originality/value This paper shows that transgression diagnosticity impacts consumer engagement through the pathway of consumer-brand identification and trustworthiness. It also manipulates aspects of diagnosticity that can be influenced by the person-brand (centrality and consistency) while holding the transgression constant. As such, this paper extends the literature on transgressions, on person-branding strategy, and on social identity theory.

Abstract Purpose This study aims to evaluate the impact of a sustainable production action on consumer trust and purchase intention by a company involved in moral transgression and also analyze the effect on consumer trust and purchase intention if a company, after green marketing, is identified as greenwashing spreader. Design/methodology/approach This quantitative nature (<em>n</em>&nbsp;= 121) study uses scale&rsquo;s discriminant and convergent validity analyses, structural equation modeling and Student&rsquo;s&nbsp;<em>t</em>-test. Findings Even for previously morally transgressive brands, actions of social legitimation, such as embracing environmental causes, positively impact consumer trust and purchase intention. However, consumers drop brand trust and purchase intention when verifying that this action was greenwashing. Research limitations/implications Mediating or moderating variables of ecological awareness, such as religiosity or political view, were not tested. Practical implications This article combines the impact of positive, sustainable management actions for morally transgressive companies and the effects of new transgression on their sustainable management action. Thus, it aims to reduce the gap between organizational practice and management research. Social implications This article shows that embracing society&rsquo;s emerging causes and helping the world be a better place to live, moving toward the 2030 United Nations agenda, have practical repercussions for organizations. Originality/value This article contributes both to the literature and managerial implications by combining the impact of positive, sustainable management actions for morally transgressive companies and the effects of new transgression on their sustainable management action, thus reducing the gap between management research and organizational practice by unveiling the relations between sustainable actions and their perceived consequences.

Purpose This study aims to evaluate the impact of a sustainable production action on consumer trust and purchase intention by a company involved in moral transgression and also analyze the effect on consumer trust and purchase intention if a company, after green marketing, is identified as greenwashing spreader. Design/methodology/approach This quantitative nature (n = 121) study uses scale’s discriminant and convergent validity analyses, structural equation modeling and Student’s t-test. Findings Even for previously morally transgressive brands, actions of social legitimation, such as embracing environmental causes, positively impact consumer trust and purchase intention. However, consumers drop brand trust and purchase intention when verifying that this action was greenwashing. Research limitations/implications Mediating or moderating variables of ecological awareness, such as religiosity or political view, were not tested. Practical implications This article combines the impact of positive, sustainable management actions for morally transgressive companies and the effects of new transgression on their sustainable management action. Thus, it aims to reduce the gap between organizational practice and management research. Social implications This article shows that embracing society’s emerging causes and helping the world be a better place to live, moving toward the 2030 United Nations agenda, have practical repercussions for organizations. Originality/value This article contributes both to the literature and managerial implications by combining the impact of positive, sustainable management actions for morally transgressive companies and the effects of new transgression on their sustainable management action, thus reducing the gap between management research and organizational practice by unveiling the relations between sustainable actions and their perceived consequences.

Purpose This study aims to investigate consumer perceptions of inauthenticity due to adulteration of a narrative brand ending by using the research context of the final season and ending of the television series, Game of Thrones. Design/methodology/approach Two data sets totalling 2,032 online comments detailing consumer reactions to the final season of Game of Thrones were analysed using thematic analysis and human interpretive analysis. The coding was an iterative and continuous process, and posts were returned to and re-examined to refine codes and groupings as the analysis progressed. Findings The results indicate consumers perceived the ending of the eighth and final season of the television series, Game of Thrones, did not meet their expectations and was not authentic due to rushed writing and illogical character and plot developments. Consumers judged this adulteration was so great that it was a moral violation and transgression. Consumers also sought to assign blame for the inauthenticity, which they attributed to the writers and showrunners, who became the subject of revenge behaviours. Originality/value This study indicates consumers of narrative brands, due to their strong emotional attachments to their characters and storyworlds, may perceive unexpected and extensive changes to them as moral violations and transgressions and thus inauthentic. Consumers establish the authenticity of a narrative brand by regularly scrutinising narrative and character development against their expectations as shaped by prior narrative content. Due to their emotional attachment, consumers may attempt to attribute blame for the inauthenticity. The findings have not been established in prior research, and inauthenticity in a narrative brand context is also explored for the first time.

Purpose As one of the largest industries in the global economy, the fashion industry has emphasized the symbolic and aspirational features of its products while maximizing the efficiency of its manufacturing processes. However, the labor-intensive and competitive nature of the industry has meant that brand moral transgressions often occur. This study aims to understand the role of moral emotions and concerns (i.e. perceived spillover) caused by different moral transgressions and explain consumer anti-brand behaviors (i.e. negative word of mouth [WOM] and patronage cessation). Design/methodology/approach Structural equation modeling was conducted to examine group differences (ethical vs social transgressions) in Study 1 (n = 584). Also, the moderation effect of moral disengagement was examined in Study 2 (n = 324). Findings The results indicate that, for ethical transgressions, both moral emotions and perceived spillovers explain negative behaviors while moral emotions alone explain negative WOM on social media for social transgressions. Additionally, for social transgressions, the results of Study 2 indicate a negative interaction effect of moral emotions and moral disengagement on anti-brand behavior of patronage cessation. Originality/value Based on the literature’s theoretical approach to moral crises, this paper examines the emotional and cognitive reactions of consumers to the fashion industry’s moral transgressions.

Purpose This paper aims to reconcile conflicting findings about the role of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in counteracting the negative impacts of brands’ ethical transgressions by testing the moderating role of self-brand connection (SBC). Design/methodology/approach Drawing on motivated reasoning theory, this paper posits that high- and low-SBC consumers’ information processing and moral judgment are driven by distinct goals: to reach desired versus accurate conclusions, respectively. Five experiments were conducted to test whether CSR efforts can mitigate the impact of blatant ethical transgressions. Findings CSR allows high-SBC consumers to evaluate brand transgressions more favorably, as CSR serves as counterfactual evidence that reinforces their beliefs in the brand’s morality. In contrast, low-SBC consumers view CSR as hypocritical, leading to more negative responses. Increased perceptions of brand morality (hypocrisy) mediate CSR’s buffering (backfiring) effects among high- (low-) SBC consumers. Research limitations/implications This paper does not control for the effect of the time gap between CSR and ethical transgressions even if buffering effects of CSR could be faded out as memories recede. Practical implications Brand transgressions may be inevitable events, but firms or managers can alleviate the negative impact of transgressions by engaging in CSR activities. In doing so, they need to make clear to whom they will appeal using CSR information considering its backfiring effects among low-SBC consumers. Originality/value Few studies have examined when and how CSR attenuates or exacerbates the negativity of brand transgressions with a strong theoretical framework. This paper, grounded in motivated reasoning theory, explains how the same CSR initiative can yield opposing outcomes based on the consumer’s self-brand connection. Rather than solely exploring how strong consumer-brand relationships buffer brand transgressions, this research shows how high-SBC consumers biasedly seize CSR information to justify brand transgressions, even when they are blatant.

“Perhaps the only thing more counterfeit than Australian Idol co-host/FM radio jock Kyle Sandilands’s carotene tan is the myth of his significance.” So wrote Helen Razer in 2007 of radio host Kyle Sandilands in a piece entitled Kyle Sandilands, you are a big fake fake. In the years since Razer’s commentary, commentators and radio listeners have continued to question the legitimacy of Sandilands’s performance as a radio host, while his supporters have defended him on the basis that this performance is authentic (Wynn). References to him as “shock jock,” a term frequently associated with talkback radio, suggest Sandilands’s approach to performance is one of intended confrontation. However, the genre of radio to which his performance is associated is not talkback. It is chat-based programming, which relies on three tenets: orientation to the personal, use of wit, and risk of transgression. This paper examines the question: To what extent is Kyle Sandilands’s performance of authenticity oriented to the genre format? This paper argues that the overall success of Sandilands is supported by his mastery of the chat-based genre. The Radio Host, “Authenticity”, and PerformanceKyle Sandilands has been one of Australia’s most prominent and controversial radio hosts since the 1990s. In 2014, Sandilands was one half of Australia’s most successful breakfast team, hosting the nationally syndicated Kyle and Jackie O Show with fellow presenter Jacqueline Henderson on Kiis 1065 (Galvin, Top Radio). Sandilands’s persona has received significant attention within the mediasphere (Galvin, Kiss; Razer). Commentators argue that he is often “putting it on” or being overly dramatic in order to attract ratings. The following interaction is an example of on-air talk involving Sandilands (“Ronan Keating and Kyle Sandilands Fight On-Air”). Here, Sandilands and his co-host Jackie O are talking with singer Ronan Keating who is with them in the studio. Jackie plays Ronan a recording in which Sandilands makes fun of Keating:Kyle: ((On recorded playback)) Oh god. I don’t want to look like Ronan Keating, you two foot dwarf.((pause))Ronan K: ((laughs)) Right (.) I don’t know how to take that.Kyle: Well I’m glad it ended there because I think it went on and on didn’t it? ((Looks at Jackie O))Jackie O: I was being kind. ((Looks at Ronan)). He went on and on.Kyle: That says something about…Ronan: Play it, play it [let me hear it]Kyle: [no no] I don’t have the rest. I don’t have the rest of [it]Ronan: [No] you do. Kyle: No I don’t have it on me. It would be here somewhere.Jackie O: [Ok this…]Ronan: You go on like you’re my friend, you know you text me, you say you love me and are playing all these songs and then on radio you rip the crap out of me.Kyle: I was just joking. I think I said something like his little white arms hanging out of his singlet…and something like that.Jackie O: OK this is getting awkward and going on. I thought you guys would have a laugh, and…Kyle: [It’s tongue in cheek]Ronan: [That’s’ not cool man]. That’s not cool. Look I popped in to see you guys. I’m going to New Zealand, and I’ve got one night here (.) I’ve got one day in Sydney and that’s the crap that you’re dealing me.((silence from all))Kyle: ((Looking at Jackie)) Good one Jackie. ((Looking at Ronan)) That’s not crap. That’s just radio banter. This segment illustrates that Sandilands recognises talk as performance when he defends his criticism of Keating as “just radio banter”, inferring that his comments are not real because they are performed for radio. The argument between Keating and Sandilands, reported in media outlets such as The Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph the following day, was significant because the two had been friends, something referred to a few minutes later by Keating:Ronan: You’ve changed, man. You’ve changed. I come back and you’re on a new station and all this and that. But you’ve changed…I knew you when you were a nice guy.This segment may or may not have been staged to illicit publicity, and it is one of many possible examples that could have been selected that involve an altercation between Sandilands and a guest. Its inclusion in this paper is to illustrate orientation by co-participants, including Sandilands, to a “real self” (one that has changed) and performance (talk for radio) as an example of talk.If one is to be a fake, as Helen Razer suggested of Kyle Sandilands, one needs to be measured against that which is authentic. Authenticity is not a static concept and accordingly, can be difficult to define. Are we talking about being authentic (real) or being sincere (honest), and what really is the difference? This is an important point, because I suspect we sometimes confuse or blur the lines between these two concepts when considering authenticity and performance in media contexts. Erickson examines the difference between sincerity and authenticity, arguing “authenticity is a self-referential concept; unlike sincerity, it does not explicitly include any reference to others,” while sincerity reflects congruity between what one says and how one feels (123). Authenticity is more relevant than sincerity within the cultural space because it is self-referential: it is about “one’s relationship to oneself,” whereby actors “exist by the laws of one’s own being” (Erickson 124).Authenticity and performance by radio hosts has been central to broadcast talk analysis since the 1980s (Tolson, Televised; Tolson, ‘Authentic’ Talk; Tolson, New Authenticity; Scannell; Shingler and Wieringa; Montgomery; Crisell; Tolson, ‘Being Yourself’). The practice of “performing authenticity” by program hosts is, therefore, well-established and consistent with broadcast talk as a discursive genre generally. Sociologist Erving Goffman specifically considered performativity in radio talk in his work, and his consideration of theatrical performance written early in his career provides a good starting point for discussion. Performance, Goffman argued, “may be defined as all the activity of a given participant on a given occasion which serves to influence in any way any of the other participants” (8). In performing, actors play a part or present a routine in such a way that the audience believes the character (Goffman).This presents an interesting dilemma for radio hosts, who act as facilitators between the institution (program) and the audience. Hosts talk—or interact—with their co-hosts and listeners. This talk is a performance for an overhearing audience, achieved (or performed) by facilitating interpersonal talk between two or three people. This talk is conversational, and requires the host to play on “interpersonality”—creating the sense of a close personal relationship with audience members by talking to “anyone as someone” (Scannell). A host is required to embody the character of the radio station, represent listeners (Shingler and Wieringa), and perform in a way that appears natural through conversational talk, all at the same time. A host also needs to display personality, possibly the most critical element in the success of a program.Authenticity, Shock-Value, and Radio GenreThe radio economy revolves around the personality of a celebrity host, and audiences expect celebrity hosts to which they listen to be playing a role despite appearing to be authentic (Stiernstedt). At the same time, radio hosts are aware of the “performed nature of the displayed self” (215). The audience familiar with a host or hosts expect some inconsistency in this playing of role: “The uncertainty such performances generate among the audience is intentional, and the motive of the producers is that it will encourage audiences to find ‘evidence’ of what ‘really happened’ on other media platforms” (Stiernstedt). There is much evidence of this in the mediasphere generally, with commentary on Sandilands and other “shock jocks” often featuring in entertainment and media sections of the general press. This coverage is often focused on examining hosts’ true personality in a “what’s behind the person” type of story (Overington; Bearup; Masters). Most research into host performance on radio has been conducted within the genre of talkback radio, and the celebrity talkback “shock jock” features in the literature on talkback (Turner; Douglas; Appleton; Salter; Ward). Successful radio hosts within this genre have fostered dramatic, often polarising, and quick-witted personas to attract listeners. Susan Douglas, in an article reflecting on the male hysteric shock jock that emerged in the US during the 1980s, argued that the talk format emerged to be inflammatory: “Talk radio didn’t require stereo or FM fidelity. It was unpredictable. It was incendiary. And it was participatory.” The term “shock jock” is now routinely used to describe talk-based hosts who are deliberately inflammatory, and the term has been used to describe Kyle Sandilands.Authenticity has previously been considered in Australian talkback radio, where there is a recognised “grey area between news presentation and entertainment” (Barnard 161). In Australia, the “Cash for Comment” episode involving radio talkback hosts John Laws and Alan Jones specifically exposed radio as entertainment (Turner; Flew). Laws and Jones were exposed as having commercial relationships that influenced the manner in which they dealt with political topics. That is, the hosts presented their opinions on specific topics as being authentic, but their opinions were exposed as being influenced by commercial arrangements. The debate that surrounded the issue and expectations associated with being a commercial radio host revealed that their performance was measured against a set of public standards (ie. a journalist’s code of ethics) to which the hosts did not subscribe. For example, John Laws argued that he wasn’t really a journalist, and therefore, could not be held to the same ethical standard as would be the case if he was. This is an example of hosts being authentic within the “laws of their own being;” that is, they were commercial radio hosts and were being true to themselves in that capacity.“Cash for Comment” therefore highlighted that radio presenters do not generally work to any specific set of professional codes. Rather, in Australia, they work to more general sector-based codes, such as the commercial and community broadcasting codes of practice set by the Australian Communications and Media Authority. These codes are quite generic and give no specific direction as to the role of radio presenters. Professor Graeme Turner argued at the time that the debate about “Cash for Comment” was important because the hosts were engaging in public discussion about policy, often interviewing politicians, a role normally associated with journalists. There was limited fall-out for Laws and Jones, but changes were made to disclosure requirements for commercial radio. There have been a number of attempts since to discipline radio hosts who seemingly fail to meet community and sector standards. These attempts have appeared tokenistic and there remains acceptance that talkback radio hosts should be opinionated, controversial, and potentially inflammatory. Research also tells us that callers within this genre are aware of the rules of interaction (O'Sullivan). However, it is important to understand that not all talk-based programming is talkback.The Case of Sandilands and Adherence to GenreAlthough he is often referred to as a “shock-jock”, Kyle Sandilands is not a talkback radio host. He is the host on a chat-based radio program, and the difference in genre is important. Chat-based programming is a speech genre based on wit, orientation to the personal, and the risk of transgression. Chat-based programming was originally theorised in relation to television by Andrew Tolson (Televised), but more recently, it has been applied it to breakfast programs on commercial radio (Ames, Community). Talkback segments are incorporated into chat-based programming, but overall, the type of talk and the basis of interaction throughout the show is very different. In chat-based programming, hosts work to foster and maintain a sense of listening community by taking on different roles—being a friend, host, counsellor, entertainer—depending on the type of talk being engaged with at the time (Ames, Host/Host). Like all forms of broadcast programming, chat-based radio is driven by the need to entertain, but the orientation to the personal and risk of transgression alter the way in which “being real” or “true to oneself” (and therefore authentic) is performed. For example, chat-based hosts orient to callers in a way that prioritises sociability (Ames, Community), which is in contrast to studies on talkback interaction that reveal an orientation to conflict (Hutchby). The key point here is that talk on chat-based programming is different to the talk that occurs on talkback.Kyle Sandilands’s ability and desire to outrage has possibly always been part of his on-air persona. He has made a staff member masturbate live, questioned a 14-year-old about her sexual experiences, called a journalist a “fat slag”, and insulted members of the radio industry and listening public. In an interview with Andrew Denton, Sandilands categorised himself as a fellow victim. He talked of his difficulties as a teenager and largely justified his on-air behaviour by saying he did not think of the consequences of his actions in the heat of the live moment:I just didn’t even think about that. Back in those days I would only think about what I thought was funny and entertaining and it wasn’t until reflection once it had gone to air then everyone flipped out and everyone started saying you know, oh this could have gone horribly wrong. (Sandilands)Sandilands’s self-categorisation actually meets the description of being a radio presenter, described by Stephen Barnard in Studying Radio, one of the early “how to be a radio presenter” texts released in the UK in 2000:Unlike music presenters, phone-in presenters do not work within the comforting disciplines of a prescribed format but are hired for their ability to think on their feet. Phone-in presenters have as much or as little leeway as station heads allow them, leading to widely diverging approaches and a continual testing of the limits of tolerance. (Barnard 161)Sandilands made specific reference to this in his interview with Denton, when he referred to tension between his practice and what station management wanted:I like to cut the rubbish out of what everyone else thinks people want. So radio to me in Sydney was for example very boring. It was you know someone in another room would write out a joke, then someone would execute it and then you would hit the button and everyone would laugh and I just thought you know to me this isn’t, this isn’t real. I want to deal with real life stuff. The real life dramas that are going on in people's lives and a lot of the times radio station management will hate that cause they say no one wants to go to work in the morning and hear a woman crying her eyes out cause her husband’s cheated on her. But I do. I, I’d like to hear it. (Sandilands)Sandilands’s defence for his actions is based on wanting to be real and deal with “real” issues:this is the real society that we live in so you know I don’t and my interest is to let everyone know you know that yes, sometimes men do cheat; sometimes women cheat, sometimes kids are bad; sometimes kids get expelled. Sometimes a girl’s addicted to ice. (Sandilands)In one sense, his practice is consistent with what is expected of a radio host, but he pushes the limits when it comes to transgression. I would argue that this is part of the game, and it is one of the reasons people listen and engage with this particular format. However, what it is to be transgressive is very locally specific. What might be offensive to one person might not be to someone else. Humour is culturally specific, and while we don’t know whether listeners are laughing, the popularity of Kyle and Jackie O as a radio host team suggests that there is some attraction to their style—Sandilands’s antics included.The relationship between Sandilands and his audience and co-host is important to this discussion. Close analysis of anyKyle and Jackie O transcript can be revealing because it often highlights Sandilands’s overall deference and a self-effacing approach to his listeners. He makes excuses, and acknowledges he is wrong in a way that almost sets himself up as a “punching bag” for his co-host and listeners. He isdoing “being real.” We can see this in the interaction at the beginning of this paper, whereby his excuse was that the talk was “just radio banter.” The interaction between Sandilands and his co-host, and their listeners, serves to define the listening community of which they are a part (Ames, Host/Host). This community can be seen as “extraordinary”—based on “privatized isolation” that is a prerequisite for membership:The sense of universality of this condition, reflected in the lyrics of the music, the chatter of the DJs and the similarity of the concerns expressed by callers on phone-ins, ensures that solitary listening grants radio listeners membership to a unique type of club: a club where the members never meet or communicate directly. The club, of course, has its rules, its rituals, its codes of conduct and its abiding principles, beliefs and values. Club membership entails conformity to a consensual view. (Shingler and Wieringa 128)If you are not a listener of a particular listening community, then you’re not privy to those rules and rituals. The problem for Sandilands is that what is acceptable to his listening community can also be overheard by others. To his club, he might be acceptable—they know him for who he really is. As a host operating in chat-based formatting which relies on the possibility for transgression as a principle, he is expected to push boundaries as a performer. His persona is accepted by the station’s listeners who tune in every evening/afternoon (or whenever the program is broadcast across the network). His views and approach might be controversial, but they are normalised within the confines of the listening community:Radio presenters therefore do not construct a consensual view and impose it on their listeners. What they do is present what they perceive to be the views shared by the station and the listening community in general, and then make it as easy as possible for individual listeners to comply with these views (despite whatever specific reservations they may have). (Shingler and Wieringa 130)But to those who are not members of the listening community, his actions might be untenable. They do not hear the times when Sandilands takes on the role of “deviant host”, a host who will become an ally with a listener in a discussion if there is disagreement in talk which is a feature of this type of programming (Ames, Community). In picking out single elements of Sandilands’s awfulness, as happens when he oversteps the boundaries (and thus transgresses), there is potential to lose the sense of context that makes Sandilands acceptable to his program’s listeners. What we don’t hear, in the debates about whether his behaviour is or isn’t acceptable within the mediasphere, are the snippets of conversation where he demonstrates empathy, or is admonished by or defers to his co-host. The only time a non-listener hears about Kyle Sandilands is when he oversteps the boundary and his actions are questioned within the wider mediasphere. These questions are based on a broader sense of moral order than the moral order specifically applicable to the Kyle and Jackie O program.The debate about a listening community’s moral order that accepts Sandilands’s antics as normal is not one for this paper; the purpose of the paper is to explain the success of Sandilands’s approach in an environment where questions are raised about why he remains successful. Here we return to discussions of authenticity. Sandilands’s performance orients to being “real” in accordance with the “laws of one’s own being” (Erickson 124). The laws in this case are set by the genre being chat-based radio programming, and the moral order created within the program of which is a co-host.ConclusionRadio hosts have always “performed authenticity” as part of their role as a link between an audience and a station. Most research into the performance of radio hosts has been conducted within the talkback genre. Talkback is different, however, to chat-based programming which is increasingly popular, and the chat-based format in Australia is currently dominated by the host team known as Kyle and Jackie O. Kyle Sandilands’s performance is based on “being real”, and this is encouraged and suited to chat-based programming’s orientation to the personal, reliance on wit and humour, and the risk of transgression. While he is controversial, Sandliands’s style is an ideal fit for the genre, and his ability to perform to meet the genre provides some explanation for his success.ReferencesAmes, Kate. “Community Membership When ‘Telling Stories’ in Radio Talk: A Regional Case Study.” PhD Thesis. University of Sydney, 2012.———. “Host/Host Conversations: Analysing Moral and Social Order in Talk on Commercial Radio.” Media International Australia 142 (2012): 112–22.Appleton, Gillian. “The Lure of Laws: An Analysis of the Audience Appeal of the John Laws Program.” Media International Australia 91 (1999): 83–95.Barnard, Stephen. Studying Radio. London: Arnold, 2000.Bearup, Greg. “Laws unto Himself.” The Weekend Australian Magazine 25 May 2013. ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/laws-unto-himself/story-e6frg8h6-1226647696090›.Brand, David, and Paddy Scannell. "Talk, Identity and Performance: The Tony Blackburn Show." Broadcast Talk. Ed. Paddy Scannell. London: Sage Publications, 1991. 201–27.Crisell, Andrew. Understanding Radio. 2nd ed. London, UK: Routledge, 1994.Douglas, Susan. “Talk Radio: Letting Boys Be Boys.” El Dorado Sun 27 Jun. 2000.Erickson, Rebecca J. “The Importance of Authenticity for Self and Society.” Symbolic Interaction 18.2 (1995): 121–44.Flew, Terry. “Down by Laws: Commercial Talkback Radio and the ABA 'Cash for Comment' Inquiry.” Australian Screen Education 24 (Spring 2000): 10–15.Galvin, Nick. “Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O Finish Year in Top Radio Ratings Spot.” Sydney Morning Herald 16 Dec. 2014. ‹http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/kyle-sandilands-and-jackie-o-finish-year-in-top-radio-ratings-spot-20141216-127zyd.html›.———. “Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O Kiss and Make Up.”Sydney Morning Herald 12 Aug. 2014. ‹http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/kyle-sandilands-and-jackie-o-kiss-and-make-up-20140812-102zyh.html›.Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. U of E Social Sciences Research Centre Edinburgh: Open Library, 1956.Hutchby, Ian. Confrontation Talk: Arguments, Asymmetries, and Power on Talk Radio. Marwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1996.Masters, Chris. Jonestown: The Power and the Myth of Alan Jones. Crows Nest: Allen &amp; Unwin, 2006.Montgomery, Martin. “Our Tune: A Study of a Discourse Genre.” Broadcast Talk. Ed. Scannell, Paddy. London: Sage Publications, 1991. 138–77.O'Sullivan, Sara. “‘The Whole Nation Is Listening to You’: The Presentation of the Self on a Tabloid Talk Radio Show.” Media Culture Society 27.5 (2005): 719–38.Overington, Caroline. “The Trouble with Kyle Sandilands.” The Weekend Australian Magazine 28 Jan. 2012. ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/me-and-my-big-mouth/story-e6frg8h6-1226254068599?nk=3d9abe800533fc9a7e841eaee6a922da›.Razer, Helen. “Kyle Sandilands, You Are a Big Fake Fake.” Crikey 22 Aug. 2007.“Ronan Keating &amp; Kyle Sandilands Fight on-Air”. YouTube, 2014. (12 Feb. 2014.) KIIS 1065. ‹https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mjyobdHYdg›.Salter, David. “Who's for Breakfast, Alan Jones? Sydney’s Talkback Titan and His Mythical Power.” The Monthly 2006. ‹http://www.themonthly.com.au/monthly-essays-david-salter-whos-breakfast-mr-jones-sydney039s-talkback-titan-and-his-mythical-power?utm_content=bufferbd79f&amp;utm_medium=social&amp;utm_source=Twitter&amp;utm_campaign=buffer›.Sandilands, Kyle. Enough Rope. Ed. Denton, Andrew: ABC, 2007.Scannell, Paddy. “For-Anyone-as-Someone-Structures.” Media Culture Society 22 (2000): 5–24.Shingler, Martin, and Cindy Wieringa. On Air: Methods and Meanings of Radio. London: Arnold Publishers, 1998.Stiernstedt, Fredrik. “The Political Economy of the Radio Personality.” Journal of Radio &amp; Audio Media 21.2 (2014): 290–306.“The Prank That Even Fooled Jackie O: Ronan Keating Storms Out of Radio Interview after ‘Clash’ with Kyle Sandilands.” Daily Mail 13 Feb. 2013.Tolson, Andrew. “‘Authentic’ Talk in Broadcast News: The Construction of Community.” The Communication Review 4 (2001): 463–80.———. “‘Being Yourself’: The Pursuit of Authentic Celebrity.”Discourse Studies 3.4 (2001): 443–57.———. “A New Authenticity? Communicative Practices on Youtube.” Critical Discourse Studies 7.4 (2010): 277–89.———. “Televised Chat and the Synthetic Personality.” Broadcast Talk. Ed. Scannell, Paddy. London: Sage Publications, 1991. 178–200.Turner, Graeme. “Ethics, Entertainment, and the Tabloid: The Case of Talkback Radio in Australia.” Continuum: Journal of Media &amp; Cultural Studies 15.3 (2001): 349–57.Ward, Ian. “Talkback Radio, Political Communication, and Australian Politics.” Australian Journal of Communication 29.1 (2002): 21–38.Wynn, James. “Kyle Sandilands — A Better Place for a Real Talent.” LinkedIn, 2014.

The bodies of disordered women … offer themselves as an aggressively graphic text for the interpreter—a text that insists, actually demands, that it be read as a cultural statement, a statement about gender. (Bordo, 94)Violence is transgressive in fundamental ways. It erases boundaries, and imposes agency over others, or groups of others. The assumed social stance is to disapprove, morally and ethically, as a ‘good’ and ‘moral’ female subject. My current research has made me question the simplicity of this approach, to interrogate how aggression socialises power and how resistance to structural violence might look. I analyse three cultural practices to consider the social demarcations around aggression and gender, both within overt acts of violence and in less overt protocols. This research will focus on artistic practices as they offer unique embodied ways to “challenge our systems of representation and knowledge” (Szylak 2).The three creative works reviewed: the 2009 Swedish film the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the work Becoming an Image by Canadian non-binary/transgender artist Cassils, and Gambit Lines, by artist Carolyn Craig, each contest gendered modes of normativity within the space of the Cultural Screen (Silverman). The character of Lisbeth Salander in Girl with the Dragon Tattoo subverts the aggressor female/femme fatale trope in Western cinema by confusing and expanding visual repertoires around aggression, while artists Cassils and Carolyn Craig re-draw how their biologically assigned female bodies perform power in the Cultural Screen by activating bodily feedback loops for the viewer’s gaze.The Aggressor ModeThe discussion of these three works will centre on the ‘female aggressor trope’, understood here as the static coda of visual practices of female power/aggression in the western gaze. This article considers how subverting such representations of aggression can trigger an “epistemic crisis that allows gender categories to change,” in particular in the way protocols of power are performed over female and trans subjectivities (Butler, Athletic 105). The tran/non-binary subject state in the work of Cassils is included in this discussion of the female aggressor trope as their work directly subverts the biological habitus of the female body, that is, the artist’s birth/biologically assigned gender (Bourdieu). The transgender state they perform – where the body is still visibly female but refusing its constraints - offers a radical framework to consider new aggressive stances for non-biologically male bodies.The Cultural Screen and Visual RepresentationsI consider that aggression, when performed through the mediated position of a creative visual practice (as a fictional site of becoming) can deconstruct the textual citations that form normative tropes in the Cultural Screen. The Screen, for this article, is considered asthe site at which the gaze is defined for a particular society, and is consequently responsible both for the way in which the inhabitants of that society experience the gaze’s effects, and for much of the seeming particularity of that society’s visual regime. (Silverman 135)The Screen functions as a suite of agreed metaphors that constitute a plane of ‘reality’ that defines how we perform the self (Goffman). It comprises bodily performance, our internal gaze (of self and other) and the visual artefacts a culture produces. Each of the three works discussed here purposely intervenes with this site of gender production within the Cultural Screen, by creating new visual artefacts that expand permissible aggressive repertoires for female assigned bodies. Deconstructing the Cultural ScreenThe history of images … can be read as a cultural history of the human body. (Belting 17)Cinematic representations play a key role in producing the visual primers that generate social ‘acts’. For this reason I examine the Swedish film Män Som Hatar Kvinnor (Men Who Hate Women, 2009), released as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo for foreign audiences, as an example of an expanding range of female aggressor representations in film, and one of particular complexity in the way it expands on representational politics. I consider how specific scripting, dialogue and casting decisions in the lead female character of Lisbeth Salander (played by Noomi Rapace) serve to deconstruct the female aggressor trope (as criminal or sexual provocateur) to allow her character to engage in aggressive acts outside of the cliché of the deviant woman. This disrupts the fixity of assigned body protocols on the social grid to expand their gendered habitus (Bourdieu).Key semiotic relations in the film’s characterisation of Lisbeth prevent her performance of aggression from moving into the clichés of erotic or evil feminine typologies. Her character remains unfixed, moving between a continuous state of unfolding in response to necessity and desire. Here, she exhibits an agency usually denoting masculinity. This allows her violence a positive emancipatory affect, one that avoids the fixity of the representational tropes of the deviant woman or the femme fatale. Her character draws upon both tropes, but reformulates them into a postmodern hybridity, where aggression slips from its sexualised/deviant fetish state into an athletic political resistance. Signification is strategically confused as Lisbeth struts through the scaffolding of normalcy in her insurgent gender game. Her post-punk weaponised attire draws on the repertoire of super heroes, rock stars and bondage mistresses, without committing to any. The libidinal component of violence/aggression is not avoided, but acknowledged, both in its patriarchal formula and Lisbeth’s enactment of revenge as embodied pleasure.The visual representation of both lead actors is also of interest. Both Lisbeth and Mikael have visible acne scars. This small breach in aesthetic selection affects how we view and consume them as subjects and objects on the Screen. The standard social more for the appearance of male and female leads is to use faces modeled on ideas of symmetry and perfection. These tendencies draw upon the cultural legacies of physiognomy that linked moral character with attractiveness schedules and that continue to flourish in the Cultural Screen (Lavater; Principe and Langlois). This decision to feature faces with minor flaws appropriates the camera’s gaze to re-consider schedules of normalcy, in particular value and image index as they relate to gendered representations. This aesthetic erasure of the Western tradition of stereotyped representations permits transitional spaces to emerge within the binary onslaught. Technology is also appropriated in the film as a space for a performative ‘switching’ of the gender codes of fixity. In her role as undercover researcher, Lisbeth’s control of code gives her both a monetised agency and an informational agency. The way that she types takes on an almost aggressive assertion. Each stroke is active and purposeful, as she exerts control through her interface with digital space. This is made explicit early in the film when she appropriates the gaze of technology (a particularly male semiotic code) to extract agency from within the structural discourse of patriarchy itself. In this scene, she forces her guardian to watch footage of his own act of raping her. Here Lisbeth uses the apparatus of the gaze to re-inscribe it back over his body. This structural inversion of the devices of control is made even more explicit when Lisbeth then brands him with text. Here ‘writing on the body’ becomes manifest.The director also frames initial scenes of Lisbeth’s nude body in subtle ways that fracture the entrenched history of representations of women, where the female as object exists for the gaze of male desire (Berger). Initially all we see are her shoulders. They are powerful and she moves like a boxer, inhabiting space and flexing her sinew. When we do see her breasts, they are neutered from the dominant coda of the “breasted experience” (Young). Instead, they function as a necessary appendage that she acknowledges as part of the technology of her body, not as objectified male desire.These varied representational modes built within Lisbeth’s characterisation, inhabit and subvert the female aggressor trope (as deviant), to offer a more nuanced portrayal where the feminine is still worn, but as both a masquerade and an internal emancipatory dialogue. That is, the feminine is permitted to remain whilst the masculine (as aggressive code) is intertwined into non-binary relations of embodied agency. This fluidity refracts the male gaze from imposing spectatorial control via the gaze.Cassils The Canadian non-binary/transgender artist Cassils also uses the body as semiotic technology to deny submission to the dominant code of the Cultural Screen. They re-image the self with bodybuilding, diet and steroids to exit their biologically female structural discourse into a more fluid gendered state. This state remains transitive as their body is not surgically ‘reassigned ‘ back into normative codes (male or female assignations) but instead inhabits the trans pronoun of ‘they/their’. This challenges the Cultural Screen’s dependence on fixed binary states through which to allocate privilege. This visible reshaping also permits entry into more aggressive bodily protocols via the gaze (through the spectorial viewpoint of self and other).Cassils ruptures the restrictive habitus of female/trans subjectivity to enable more expansive gestures in the social sphere, and a more assertive bodily performance. This is achieved by appropriating the citational apparatus of male aggression via a visual reframing of its actions. Through daily repetitive athletic training Cassils activates the proprioceptive loops that inform their gendered schema and the presentation of self (Goffman). This training re-scripts their socially inscribed gender code with semiotically switched gender ‘acts’. This altered subjectivity is made visible for the viewer through performance to destablise the Screen of representation further via the observers’ gaze.In their work Becoming an Image (2012- current), Cassils performs against a nine hundred kilogram lump of clay for twenty minutes in complete darkness, fractured only by an intermittent camera flash that documents the action. This performance contests the social processes that formulate the subject as ‘image’. By using bodily force (aggressive power) against an inert lump of clay, Cassils enacts the frustration and affect that the disenfranchised Other feels from their own gender shaping (Bhaba). The images taken by the camera during this performance reflect a ferocious refusal, an animal intent, a state of battle. The marks and residues of their bodily ‘acts’ shape the clay in an endurance archive of resistance, where the body’s trace/print forms the material itself along with the semiotic residue of the violence against transgender and female bodies. In some ways, the body of Cassils and the body of clay confront each other through Cassils’s aggressive remolding of the material of social discourse itself.The complicity of photography in sustaining representational discourse is highlighted within Cassils’s work through the intertextual rupturing of the performance with the camera flash and through the title of the work. To Become an Image invokes the processes of the darkroom itself, where the photographer controls image development, whilst the aggressive flash reflects the snapshot of violence, where the gendered subject is ‘imaged’ (formulated and confined) without permission by the observer schedules of patriarchy. The flash also leaves a residual trace in the retinas of the viewer, a kind of image burn, perhaps chosen to mimic the fear, intrusion and coercion that normalcy’s violence impinges over Othered subjects. The artist converts these flash generated images into wallpaper that is installed into the gallery space, usually the day after the performance. Thus, Cassils’s corporeal space is re-inscribed onto the walls of the institutional archive of representations – to evoke both the domestic (wallpaper as home décor), the public domain (the white walls of institutional rhetoric) and the Cultural Screen.Carolyn Craig The work of Carolyn Craig also targets representations that substantiate the Cultural Screen. She uses performative modes in the studio to unravel her own subjective habitus, in particular targeting the codes that align female aggression with deviancy. Her work isolates the action of making a fist to re-inscribe how the aggression code is ‘read’ as embodied knowledge by women. Two key articles by Thomas Schubert that investigated how making a fist is perceived differently between genders (in terms of interiorised power) informed her research. Both studies found that when males make a fist they experience an enhanced sense of power, while women did not. In fact, in the studies, they experienced a slight decrease in their sense of comfort in the world (their embodied sense of agency). Schubert surmised this reflected gender-based protocols in relation to the permissible display of aggression, as “men are culturally less discouraged to use bodily force, which will frequently be associated with success and power gain [whilst women] are culturally discouraged from using bodily force” (Schubert 758). These studies suggest how anchored gestures of aggression are to male power schemas and their almost inaccessibility to women. When artists re-formulate such (existing) input algorithms by inserting new representations of female aggression into the Cultural Screen, they sever the display of aggression from the exclusive domain of the masculine. This circulates and incorporates a broader visual code that informs conceptual relations of power.Craig performs the fisting action in the studio to neuter this existing code using endurance, repetition and parody (fig. 1). Parody activates a Bakhtian space of Carnivalesque, a unique space in the western cultural tradition that permits transgressive inversions of gender, power and normativity (Hutcheon). By making and remaking a fist through an absurdist lens, the social scaffolding attached to the action (fear, anxiety, transgression) is diluted. Repetition and humour breaks down the existing code, and integrates new perceptual schema through the body itself. Parody becomes a space of slippage, one that is a precursor to a process of (re)constitution within the social screen, so that Craig can “produce representation” rather than be (re)presentation (Schneider 51). This transitory state of Carnivalesque produces new relational fields (both bodily and visual) that are then projected back into the Screen of normativity to further dislodge gender fixity. Figure 1: Carolyn Craig, Gambit Lines (Angles of Incidence #1), 2016. Etchings from performance on folded aluminium, 25.5 x 34 x 21cm. This nullifies the power of the static image of deviancy (the woman as specimen) and ferments leakages into broader representational fields. Craig’s fisting actions target the proprioceptive feedback loops that make women fear their own bodies’ potential of violence, that make us retreat from the citational acts of aggression. Her work tilts embodied retreat (as fear) through the distorted mimesis of parody to initiate a Deleuzian space of agentic potential (Deleuze and Guattari). This is re-inserted into the Cultural Screen as suites of etchings grounded in the representational politics, and historical genealogy of printed matter, to bring the historical conditions of formation of knowledge into review.Conclusion The aggressor trope as used within the works discussed, produces a more varied representational subject. This fosters subjectivities outside the restraints of normativity and its imposed gendered habitus. The performance of aggression by bodies not permissibly branded to script such acts forces static representations embedded through the Cultural Screen into “an unstable and troubled terrain, a crisis of knowledge, a situation of not-knowing”. This state of representational confusion leads to a “risking of gender itself … that exposes our knowledge about gender as tenuous, contested, and ungrounded in a thorough and productively disturbing sense” (Butler, Athletic 110). Tropes that define binary privilege, when dislodged in such a way, become accessible to fluidity or erasure. This allows more nuanced gender allocation to schedules of power.The Cultural Screen produces and projects the metaphors we live by and its relations to power are concrete (Johnson and Lakoff). Even small-scale incursions into masculine domains of agency (such as the visual display of aggression) have a direct correlation to the allocation of resources, both spatial, economic and subjective. The use of the visual can re-train the conceptual parameters of the cultural matrix to chip small ways forward to occupy space with our bodies and intellects, to assume more aggressive stances in public, to speak over people if I feel the need, and to be rewarded for such actions in a social context. I still feel unable to propose direct violence as a useful action but I do admit to having a small poster of Phoolan Devi in my home and my admiration for such women is deep.ReferencesBelting, Hans. An Anthropology of Images. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2011.Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin, 2008.Bhaba, Homi. "The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism.” Out There: Marginalisation and Contemporary Cultures. Eds. Russell Ferguson and Trinh T. Minh-ha. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1990. 71-89.Bordo, Susan. “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity.” Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. Eds. Katie Conboy et al. New York: Colombia UP, 1997. 90-110.Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.Butler, Judith. “Athletic Genders: Hyperbolic Instance and/or the Overcoming of Sexual Binarism.” Stanford Humanities Review 6 (1998): 103-111.———. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal (1988): 519–31.Cassils. Becoming an Image. ONE Archive, Los Angeles. Original performance. 2012.Craig, Carolyn. “Gambit Lines." The Deviant Woman. POP Gallery, Brisbane. 2016.Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1987.Girl with the Dragon Tattoo [Män Som Hatar Kvinnor]. Dir. Niels Arden Oplev. Stockholm: Yellowbird, 2009.Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Allen Lane, 1969.Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. New York: Methuen, 1985.Johnson, Mark, and George Lakoff. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980.Lavater, John Caspar. Essays in Physiognomy Designed to Promote the Knowledge and Love of Mankind. Vol. 1. London: Murray and Highley, 1789.Principe, Connor, and Judith Langlois. "Shifting the Prototype: Experience with Faces Influences Affective and Attractiveness Preferences." Social Cognition 30.1 (2012): 109-120.Schneider, Rebecca. The Explicit Body in Performance. New York: Routledge, 1997.Schubert, Thomas W., and Sander L. Koole. “The Embodied Self: Making a Fist Enhances Men’s Power-Related Self-Conceptions.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 45.4 (2009): 828–834.Schubert, Thomas W. “The Power in Your Hand: Gender Differences in Bodily Feedback from Making a Fist.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 30.6 (2004): 757–769.Silverman, Kaja. The Threshold of the Visible World. New York: Routledge, 1996.Szylak, Aneta. The Field Is to the Sky, Only Backwards. Brooklyn, NY: International Studio and Curatorial Program, 2013.Young, Iris Marion. “Breasted Experience: The Look and the Feeling.” On Female Body Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Closer examination of contemporary art forms including music videos in addition to the Gothic’s literature legacy is essential, “as it is virtually impossible to ignore the relationship the Gothic holds to popular culture” (Piatti-Farnell ii). This article critically examines how Gothic themes and modes are used in the music videos of Lana Del Rey; particularly the “ways in which Gothic is dispersed through contemporary non-literary media” (Spooner and McEvoy 2). This work follows the argument laid down by Edwards and Monnet who describe Gothic’s assimilation into popular culture —Pop Gothic— as a powerful pop cultural force, not merely a subcultural or cult expression. By interpreting Del Rey’s work as a both a component of, and a contributor to, the Pop Gothic advance, themes of social climate, consumer culture, gender identity, sexuality and the male gaze can be interrogated. Indeed the potential for a collective crisis of these issues in early 21st Century western culture is exposed, “the façade of carnivalised surfaces is revealed to hide the chaos and entropy of existential emptiness.” (Yeo 17). Gothic modes have been approximated by Pop Gothic into the mainstream (Edwards and Monnet) as a driving force behind these contradictions and destabilisations. The Gothic has become ubiquitous within popular culture and continues to exert influence. This is easily reflected in the $392 million the first Twilight movie grossed at the box office (Edwards and Monnet). Examples are abundant in pop culture across music, film and television. Edwards and Monnet cite the movies Zombieland and Blade in the Pop Gothic march, along with TV shows including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Being Human, True Blood as well as Lady Gaga’s Fame Monster music album. Edwards and Monnet observe that the Gothic aesthetics of the 1980s and 1990s, “melancholy and imagery associated with death, dying and the undead” (3), shifted from the corners of subculture to the mainstream of millennial popular culture. With this shift comes the rebelliousness and melancholy that characterises Gothic texts. This is evident when a pop star of Lana Del Rey’s popularity —her Summertime Sadness video alone has over 160 million views on youtube.com (YouTube)— narratively represents themes of death and suicide repeatedly in her videos. In two of Lana Del Rey’s music videos —Blue Jeans and Born to Die— either she or a representation of her persona dies. In a third video, Summertime Sadness, her companion takes her own life and Lana ultimately follows suit. Themes of death and loss are just the most obvious of Gothic elements present in Del Rey’s work. Del Rey’s songs and videos speak of the American dream, of aestheticised beauty, of being immaculately presented, well dressed and having hair “beauty queen style”, as in Summertime Sadness. She depicts an excess of hedonistic consumption and love that knows no bounds, not even death. Much of the delivery has resonance with the Gothic; performatively, visually and musically, and shows a subversion and fatalism that juxtaposes, contests and contradicts pop cultural tropes (Macfarlane). This contrary nature of the Gothic, as characterised by Botting, can provoke a sense of otherness; the uncanny, including “displays of uncontrolled passion, violent emotion or flights of fancy to portrayals of perversion or obsession” (Gothic 2). It is argued that these characteristics have been commodified into merchandisable and mainstream stylistic representations (Edwards and Monnet). Del Rey’s visual work uses this otherness and representation of repressed darkness as subversion or contestation to the bubble gum consumerist, fairy tale sexualisation of the Katy Perry brand of neo-liberal pop music that floods the mainstream (Macfarlane). Del Rey also harnesses the Gothic mode in her music, underscoring social anxieties through moments of sound which act as “a sonic imp, this music enters perception through the back door, and there it does its destabilising work” (van Elferen 137). As potential psychosocial sources of this otherness in the Gothic (Botting, Gothic), Jung argued that as a collective consciousness by repressing our darkest side, we can be dislocated from it. Further he argued that many modern ills —conflict, war, disenfranchisement, poverty— stem from culturally rationalised divisions of ‘good vs evil’ (Tacey). Providing a space for these dark sides to surface, Swirski comments that cultural product can act "as a social barometer and a cultural diagnostic tool. It identifies social trends and cultural patterns and weaves elaborate counterfactuals- literary fictions- that hang human faces on large-scale human abstractions such as society and culture" (1). Jung proposes the large-scale social abstraction; that to truly live with ourselves we need embrace the otherness inside us— to learn to live with it (Tacey). The Gothic may enable this living with, rather than living without. Jung asserts that we now rely so much on what we can touch, taste and own, that western culture has become a “creed without substance” (Tacey 32). In more concrete terms, Hoffie argues that popular media today tells stories: in terms of disaster and crisis: weather patterns: disastrous. Climate Change: disastrous. Global Financial Crisis: disastrous. Political situations: disastrous. Unemployment: disastrous. And so on. The high-pitched wail of this lament corrodes the peaks and troughs of potential emotional responsiveness; the vapours of benumbing apathy steam upwards like a bewitching spell. All stands still. Action, like in a bad dream, seems impossible. (14) This apathy in the face of crisis or disaster is well expressed in Del Rey’s work through the Gothic influenced lyrics and videos; she describes her partner as so good looking as to be “sick as cancer” in Blue Jeans and that her lover left her because he was “chasing paper”. Represented here is the social current that the need to acquire goods in late capitalism’s climate “of unrestrained consumerism” (Heine and Thakur 2) is her lover’s priority over companionship. Revealing more of the Gothic aesthetic is that her videos and songs represent this loss, they depict “disturbances of sanity and security” (Botting, Gothic 2) and thematically reflect the social climate of “disaster and crisis” (Hoffie 14). This sense of otherness through Gothic influences of the uncanny, death and melancholy have a significant impact on creative expression creating music videos that play like a kind of half remembered nightmare (Botting, Love Your Zombie; Macfarlane). In the black and white video for Blue Jeans the opening shot shows an image of Del Rey rippling and blurred, framed by circular waves of water as black as oil. The powerful Gothic aesthetic of the abyss is rendered here, “to convey the figurative meaning of a catastrophic situation seen as likely to occur whereby the individual will sink to immeasurable intellectual, ethical or moral depths” (Edwards and Monnet 9). This abyss is represented as Del Rey sings to her ghostly tattooed lover that she will love him until “the end of time” and climaxes in the suggestion that he drowns her. As in Edwards and Monnet‘s description of zombie films, Del Rey’s videos narratively “suggest that the postmodern condition is itself a form of madness that disseminates cultural trauma and erases historical memory” (8). This view is evident in contrasting Del Rey’s interview comment that she finds conversations about feminism boring (Cooper). Yet in her song delivery and lyrics she retains an ironic tone regards feminine power. This combination helps “produce a darkly funny and carnivalesque representation of sex and waste under late capitalism” (Edwards and Monnet 8). Further evidence of these ironies and distorted juxtapositions of loss and possession are evident in the song Radio. The video —a bricolage of retrospective fashion imagery— and lyrics hint at the persistent desire for goods in US western culture (Heine and Thakur). Simultaneously in her song Radio, she is corruptibly engorged by consumption and being consumed (Mulvey) as she sings that life is “sweet like cinnamon, a fucking dream on Ritalin”. The video itself represents distorted dreams hyper-real on Ritalin. Del Rey’s work speaks of an excess; the overflow of sensations, sexual excess, of buying, of having, of owning, and at the same time the absence; of loss or not knowing what to have (Botting, Love Your Zombie). Exemplified by the lyrics in What Makes Us Girls, “do I know what I want?” and again in Radio “American dreams came true somehow, I swore I’d chase until I was dead”. Increasingly it is evident that Del Rey sings “as a woman who does not know what she wants” (Vigier 5). She illustrates the “endemic narcissism” (Hoffie 15) of contemporary western culture. Del Rey therefore clearly delineates much of “the loneliness, emptiness, and alienation that results from rampant consumerism and materialism under advanced capitalism” (Edwards and Monnet 8). As a theme of this representation, Del Rey implies a sense of commodified female sexual energy through the male gaze (Mulvey), along with a sense of wasted youth and opportunity in the carnivalesque National Anthem. The video, shot as if on Super 8 film, tells the story of Del Rey’s ‘character’ married to a hedonistic style of president. It is reminiscent of the JFK story including authentic and detailed presentation of costume —especially Del Rey’s Jackie Onassis fashions— the couple posing in presidential gardens with handsome mixed-race children. Lavish lifestyles are depicted whilst the characters enjoy drinking, gambling and consumerist excess, Del Rey sings "It's a love story for the new age, For the six page, We're on a quick sick rampage, Wining and dining, Drinking and driving, Excessive buying, Overdose and dyin'". In National Anthem sexual excess is one of the strongest themes communicated. Repeatedly depicted are distinct close up shots of his hand on her thigh, and vice versa. Without being sexually explicit in itself, it is an overtly sexual reference, communicating something of sexual excess because of the sheer number of times it is highlighted in close-up shots. This links to the idea of the Gothic use of jouissance, a state of: excessive energies that burst in and beyond circuits of pleasure: intensities are read in relation to a form of subjectivity that finds itself briefly and paradoxically in moments of extreme loss. (Botting, Love Your Zombie 22) Del Rey represents these moments of loss —of herself, of her man, of her power, of her identity being subsumed by his— as intense pleasure, indicated in the video through sexual referencing. Botting argues that these excesses create anxieties; that in the pursuit of postmodern excess, of ownership, of consumption: the subject internalises the inconsistencies and contradictions of capitalism, manifesting pathologies not of privation but overabundance: stress, eating disorders, self-harming, and a range of anxieties. (Love Your Zombie 22) These anxieties are further expressed in National Anthem. Del Rey sings to her lover that he cannot keep his “pants on” and she must “hold you like a python”. The python in this tale simultaneously symbolises the exotic, erotic and dangerous entrapment by her male suitor. Edwards and Monnet argue for the Gothic monster, whose sign is further referenced as Del Rey swims with crocodiles in Blue Jeans. Here the male power, patriarchy and dominance is represented as monstrous. In the video she shares the pool with her beau yet we only see Del Rey swim and writhe with the crocodiles. Analogous of her murderous lover, this adds a powerful otherness to the scene and reinforces the symbols of threatening masculinity and impeding disaster. This expression of monstrousness creates a cathartic tension as it “puts the ‘pop’ in Pop Goth: its popularity is based on the frisson of selling simultaneous aversion from and attraction to self-destruction and cultural taboo” (Edwards and Monnet 9). In a further representation of anxieties Del Rey conforms to the sexual object persona in large part through her retro pin-up iconography —meticulous attention to costume, continuous posing and pouting— and song lyrics (Buszek). As in National Anthem her lyrics talk of devotion and male strength to protect and to “keep me safe in his bell tower”. Her videos, whilst they may show some of her strength, ultimately reside in patriarchal resolution (Mulvey). She is generally confounded by the male figures in her videos appearing to be very much alone and away from them: most notably in Blue Jeans, Born to Die and Video Games. In two cases it is suggested she is murdered by the male figures of her love. Her costume and appearance —iconic 1960’s swimsuits, pantsuits and big hairstyles in National Anthem— portray something of the retro pin-up. Buszek argues that at one time “young feminists may poke fun at the pin-up, but they do so in ways that betray affinities with, even affection for, the genre itself” (3). Del Rey simultaneously adheres to and confronts these normative gender roles, as is characteristic of the Gothic mode (Botting, Gothic). These very Gothic contradictions are also evident in Del Rey’s often ironic or mocking song delivery, undermining apparent heteronormative sexual and gender positioning. In National Anthem she sings, as if parodying women who might sincerely ask, “do you think he’ll buy me lots of diamonds?”. Her conformity is however, subverted. In Del Rey’s videos, clear evidence exists in her facial expressions where she consistently portrays Gothic elements of uncertainty, sorrow, grief and a pervading sense that she does not belong in this world (Botting, Gothic). Whilst depicted as a brooding and mourning widow —simultaneously playing the mistress luxuriating on a lion skin rug— in National Anthem Del Rey sings, “money is the anthem of success” without a smile or sense of any attachment to the lyrics. In the same song she sings “God you’re so handsome” without a trace of glee, pleasure or optimism. In the video for Blue Jeans she sings, “I will love you til the end of time” staring sorrowfully into the distance or directly at the camera. This confident yet ‘dead stare’ emphasises the overall juxtaposition of the largely positive lyrical expression, with the sorrowful facial expression and low sung notes. Del Rey signifies repeatedly that something is amiss; that the American dream is over and that even with apparent success within this sphere, there exists only emptiness and isolation (Botting, Love Your Zombie). Further contradictions exist as Lana Del Rey walks this blurred line —as is the Gothic mode— between heteronormative and ambiguous gender roles (Botting, Gothic; Edwards and Monnet). Lana Del Rey oscillates between positions of strength and independence —shown in her deadpan to-camera delivery— to that of weakness and subjugation. As she plays narrator, Del Rey symbolically reclaims some power as she retells the tragic story of Born to Die from her throne. Represented here Del Rey’s persona exerts a troubled malevolence, with two tigers calmly sat by her side: her benevolent pets, or symbols of contrived excess. She simultaneously presents the angelic —resplendent in sheer white dress and garland ‘crown’ headdress of the spurned bride in the story— and the stoic as she stares down the camera. Del Rey is powerful and in many senses threatening. At one point she draws a manicured thumbnail across her neck in a cut-throat gesture; a movement echoed later by her lover. Her character ultimately walks symbolically —and latently— to her death. She neither remedies her position as subservient, subordinate female nor revisits any kind of redemption for the excessive male dominance in her videos. The “excess is countered by greater excess” (Botting Love Your Zombie 27) and leads to otherness. In this reading of Del Rey’s work, there are representations that remain explicitly Pop Gothic, eliciting sensations of paranoia and fear, overloading her videos with these signs (Yeo). These signs elicit the otherness of the Gothic mode; expressed in visual symbols of violence, passion or obsession (Botting, Gothic). In our digital visual age, subjecting an eager viewer to this excess of signs creates the conditions for over-reading of a growing gender or consumerist paranoia, enabled by the Gothic, “paranoia stems from an excessive over-reading of signs and is a product of interpretation, misinterpretation and re-interpretation based on one’s knowledge or lack of it” (Yeo 22). Del Rey stimulates these sensations of paranoia partly through interlaying intertextual references. She does this thematically —Gothic melancholy— and pop culturally channelling Marilyn Monroe and other fashion iconography, as well as through explicit textual references, as in her most recent single Ultraviolence. In Ultraviolence, Del Rey sings “He hit me and it felt like a kiss”. Effortlessly and simultaneously she celebrates and lays bare her pain; however the intertextual reference to the violent controversy of the film A Clockwork Orange serves to aestheticise the domestic violence she describes. With Del Rey it may be that as meaning is sought amongst the texts as Macfarlane wrote about Lady Gaga, Del Rey’s “truth is ultimately irrelevant in the face of its interlayed performance” (130). Del Rey’s Gothic mode of ambiguity, of transgressed boundaries and unclear lines, shows “this ambience of perpetually deferred climax is no stranger to contemporary culture” (Hoffie 15) and may go some way to expressing something of the “lived experience of her audience” (Vigier 1). Hermes argues that in post-feminist pop culture, strong independent post-feminist women can be characterised by their ability to break traditional taboos, question or hold up for interrogation norms and traditions, but that ultimately narrative arches tend to restore the patriarchal norm. Edwards and Monnet assert that the Gothic in Pop Gothic cultural representation can become “post-race, post-sexuality, post-gender” (6). In places Del Ray exhibits this postmodernism but through the use of Gothic mode goes outside political debates and blurs clear lines of feminist discourse (Botting, Love Your Zombie). Whilst a duality in the texts exists; comments on consumerism, the emptiness of capitalist society and a suicidal expression of hopelessness, are undermined as she demonstrates conformity to subservient gender roles and her ambiguously ironic need to be “young and beautiful”. To be consumed by her man thus defines her value as an object within a consumerist neo-liberal trope (Jameson). This analysis goes some way to confirming Hermes’ assertion that in this post-feminist climate there has been a “loss of a political agenda, or the foundation for a new one, where it signposts the overcoming of unproductive old distinctions between feminist and feminine” (79). Hermes further argues, with reference to television shows Ally McBeal and Sex and the City, that presentation of female characters or personas has moved forward; the man is no longer the lone guarantor of a woman’s happiness. Yet many of the tropes in Del Rey’s work are familiar; overwhelming love for her companion equal only to the emphasis on physical appearance. Del Rey breaks taboos —she is powerful, sexual and a romantic predator, without being a demon seductress— and satirises consumerist excess and gender inequality; yet she remains sexually and politically subservient to the whim and sometimes violently expressed or implied male gaze (Mulvey). Del Rey may well represent something of Vigier’s assertion that whilst society has clear direction for the ‘success’ of women, “that real liberation and genuine satisfaction elude them” (1). In closing, there is no clear answer as to whether Del Rey is a Beauty Queen or Gothic Princess; she is neither and she is both. In Vigier’s words, “self-exploitation or self-destruction cannot be the only choices open to young women today” (13). Del Rey’s work is provocative on multiple levels. It hints at the pull of rampant consumerism and the immediacy of narcissistic desires, interlinked with contradictions which indicate the potential for social crises. This is shown in Del Rey’s use of the Gothic — otherness, the monstrous, darkness and death— and its juxtaposition with heteronormative gender representations which highlights the persistent commodification of the female body, its subjugation to male power and the potential for deep anxieties in 21st-century identity. References Blue Jeans. Dir. Yoann Lemoine. Perf. Lana Del Rey. Interscope Records, 2012. Botting, Fred. Gothic. New York: Routledge, 2014. Botting, Fred. "Love Your Zombie." The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture. Ed. Edwards, Justin and Agnieszka Monnet. New York: Routledge, 2012. 19-36. Buszek, Maria. Pin-Up Grrrls Feminism, Sexuality and Popular Culture. London: Duke University Press, 2006. Cooper, Duncan. "Lana Del Rey Cover Interview." Fader, June 2014. Edwards, Justin, and Agnieszka Monnet. "Introduction." The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture. Eds. Justin Edwards and A. Monnet. New York: Routledge, 2012. 1-18. Heine, Jorge, and Ramesh Thakur. The Dark Side of Globalisation. New York: UN UP, 2011. Hermes, Joke. "The Tragic Success of Feminism." Feminism in Popular Culture. Eds. Joanne Hollows and Rachel Moseley. New York: Berg, 2006. 79-95. Hoffie, Pat. "Deadly Ennui." Artlink Magazine 32.4 (2012): 15-16. Jameson, Fredric. "Globalisation and Political Strategy." New Left Review 2.4 (2000): 49-68. Lana Del Rey. "Radio." Born To Die. Interscope Records, 2012. "Lana Del Rey - Summertime Sadness" YouTube, n.d. 12 June 2014 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVjsGKrE6E8›. Lana Del Rey. "This Is What Makes Us Girls." Born To Die. Interscope Records, 2012. Macfarlane, K. "The Monstrous House of Gaga." The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture. Ed. Justin Edwards and A. Monnet. New York: Routledge, 2012. 114-134. Mestrovic, Stjepan. Postemotional Society. London: Sage, 1997. Mulvey, Laura. Visual and other Pleasures. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. National Anthem. Dir. Anthony Mandler. Perf. Lana Del Rey. Interscope Records, 2012. Paglia, Camille. Lady Gaga and the Death of Sex. 12 Sep. 2010. 2 June 2014 ‹http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/public/magazine/article389697.ece›. Piatti-Farnell, Lorna. "Introduction: a Place for Contemporary Gothic." Aeternum: the Journal of Contemporary Gothic Studies 1.1 (2014): i-iv. Spooner, Catherine, and Emma McEvoy. The Routledge Companion to Gothic. New York: Routledge, 2007. Summertime Sadness. Dir. Chris Sweeney. Perf. Lana Del Rey. Interscope Records, 2013. Swirski, Peter. American Utopia and Social Engineering in Literature, Social Thought, and Political History. New York: Routledge, 2011. Tacey, David. The Jung Reader. New York: Routledge, 2012. Van Elferen, Isabella. "Spectural Liturgy, Transgression, Ritual and Music in Gothic." The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture. Eds. Justin Edwards and A. Monnet. New York: Routledge, 2012. 135-147. Vigier, Catherine. "The Meaning of Lana Del Rey." Zeteo: The Journal of Interdisciplinary Writing Fall (2012): 1-16. Yeo, David. "Gothic Paranoia in David Fincher's Seven, The Game and Fight Club." Aeternum: The Journal Of Contemporary Gothic Studies 1.1 (2014): 16-25. Young and Beautiful. Dir. Chris Sweeney. Perf. Lana Del Rey. Interscope Records, 2013.

Introduction This paper offers a survey of familiar popular music performers and songwriters who reference coffee in their work. It examines three areas of discourse: the psychoactive effects of caffeine, coffee and courtship rituals, and the politics of coffee consumption. I claim that coffee carries a cultural and musicological significance comparable to that of the chemical stimulants and consumer goods more readily associated with popular music. Songs about coffee may not be as potent as those featuring drugs and alcohol (Primack; Schapiro), or as common as those referencing commodities like clothes and cars (Englis; McCracken), but they do feature across a wide range of genres, some of which enjoy archetypal associations with this beverage. m.o.m.m.y. Needs c.o.f.f.e.e.: The Psychoactive Effect of Coffee The act of performing and listening to popular music involves psychological elements comparable to the overwhelming sensory experience of drug taking: altered perceptions, repetitive grooves, improvisation, self-expression, and psychological empathy—such as that between musician and audience (Curry). Most popular music genres are, as a result, culturally and sociologically identified with the consumption of at least one mind-altering substance (Lyttle; Primack; Schapiro). While the analysis of lyrics referring to this theme has hitherto focused on illegal drugs and alcoholic beverages (Cooper), coffee and its psychoactive ingredient caffeine have been almost entirely overlooked (Summer). The most recent study of drugs in popular music, for example, defined substance use as “tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine and other stimulants, heroin and other opiates, hallucinogens, inhalants, prescription drugs, over-the-counter drugs, and nonspecific substances” (Primack 172), thereby ignoring a chemical stimulant consumed by 90 per cent of adult Americans every day (Lovett). The wide availability of coffee and the comparatively mild effect of caffeine means that its consumption rarely causes harm. One researcher has described it as a ubiquitous and unobtrusive “generalised public activity […] ‘invisible’ to analysts seeking distinctive social events” (Cooper 92). Coffee may provide only a relatively mild “buzz”—but it is now accepted that caffeine is an addictive substance (Juliano) and, due to its universal legality, coffee is also the world’s most extensively traded and enthusiastically consumed psychoactive consumer product (Juliano 1). The musical genre of jazz has a longstanding relationship with marijuana and narcotics (Curry; Singer; Tolson; Winick). Unsurprisingly, given its Round Midnight connotations, jazz standards also celebrate the restorative impact of coffee. Exemplary compositions include Burke/Webster’s insomniac torch song Black Coffee, which provided hits for Sarah Vaughan (1949), Ella Fitzgerald (1953), and Peggy Lee (1960); and Frank Sinatra’s recordings of Hilliard/Dick’s The Coffee Song (1946, 1960), which satirised the coffee surplus in Brazil at a time when this nation enjoyed a near monopoly on production. Sinatra joked that this ubiquitous drink was that country’s only means of liquid refreshment, in a refrain that has since become a headline writer’s phrasal template: “There’s an Awful Lot of Coffee in Vietnam,” “An Awful Lot of Coffee in the Bin,” and “There’s an Awful Lot of Taxes in Brazil.” Ethnographer Aaron Fox has shown how country music gives expression to the lived social experience of blue-collar and agrarian workers (Real 29). Coffee’s role in energising working class America (Cooper) is featured in such recordings as Dolly Parton’s Nine To Five (1980), which describes her morning routine using a memorable “kitchen/cup of ambition” rhyme, and Don't Forget the Coffee Billy Joe (1973) by Tom T. Hall which laments the hardship of unemployment, hunger, cold, and lack of healthcare. Country music’s “tired truck driver” is the most enduring blue-collar trope celebrating coffee’s analeptic powers. Versions include Truck Drivin' Man by Buck Owens (1964), host of the country TV show Hee Haw and pioneer of the Bakersfield sound, and Driving My Life Away from pop-country crossover star Eddie Rabbitt (1980). Both feature characteristically gendered stereotypes of male truck drivers pushing on through the night with the help of a truck stop waitress who has fuelled them with caffeine. Johnny Cash’s A Cup of Coffee (1966), recorded at the nadir of his addiction to pills and alcohol, has an incoherent improvised lyric on this subject; while Jerry Reed even prescribed amphetamines to keep drivers awake in Caffein [sic], Nicotine, Benzedrine (And Wish Me Luck) (1980). Doye O’Dell’s Diesel Smoke, Dangerous Curves (1952) is the archetypal “truck drivin’ country” song and the most exciting track of its type. It subsequently became a hit for the doyen of the subgenre, Red Simpson (1966). An exhausted driver, having spent the night with a woman whose name he cannot now recall, is fighting fatigue and wrestling his hot-rod low-loader around hairpin mountain curves in an attempt to rendezvous with a pretty truck stop waitress. The song’s palpable energy comes from its frenetic guitar picking and the danger implicit in trailing a heavy load downhill while falling asleep at the wheel. Tommy Faile’s Phantom 309, a hit for Red Sovine (1967) that was later covered by Tom Waits (Big Joe and the Phantom 309, 1975), elevates the “tired truck driver” narrative to gothic literary form. Reflecting country music’s moral code of citizenship and its culture of performative storytelling (Fox, Real 23), it tells of a drenched and exhausted young hitchhiker picked up by Big Joe—the driver of a handsome eighteen-wheeler. On arriving at a truck stop, Joe drops the traveller off, giving him money for a restorative coffee. The diner falls silent as the hitchhiker orders up his “cup of mud”. Big Joe, it transpires, is a phantom trucker. After running off the road to avoid a school bus, his distinctive ghost rig now only reappears to rescue stranded travellers. Punk rock, a genre closely associated with recreational amphetamines (McNeil 76, 87), also features a number of caffeine-as-stimulant songs. Californian punk band, Descendents, identified caffeine as their drug of choice in two 1996 releases, Coffee Mug and Kids on Coffee. These songs describe chugging the drink with much the same relish and energy that others might pull at the neck of a beer bottle, and vividly compare the effects of the drug to the intense rush of speed. The host of “New Music News” (a segment of MTV’s 120 Minutes) references this correlation in 1986 while introducing the band’s video—in which they literally bounce off the walls: “You know, while everybody is cracking down on crack, what about that most respectable of toxic substances or stimulants, the good old cup of coffee? That is the preferred high, actually, of California’s own Descendents—it is also the subject of their brand new video” (“New Music News”). Descendents’s Sessions EP (1997) featured an overflowing cup of coffee on the sleeve, while punk’s caffeine-as-amphetamine trope is also promulgated by Hellbender (Caffeinated 1996), Lagwagon (Mr. Coffee 1997), and Regatta 69 (Addicted to Coffee 2005). Coffee in the Morning and Kisses in the Night: Coffee and Courtship Coffee as romantic metaphor in song corroborates the findings of early researchers who examined courtship rituals in popular music. Donald Horton’s 1957 study found that hit songs codified the socially constructed self-image and limited life expectations of young people during the 1950s by depicting conservative, idealised, and traditional relationship scenarios. He summarised these as initial courtship, honeymoon period, uncertainty, and parting (570-4). Eleven years after this landmark analysis, James Carey replicated Horton’s method. His results revealed that pop lyrics had become more realistic and less bound by convention during the 1960s. They incorporated a wider variety of discourse including the temporariness of romantic commitment, the importance of individual autonomy in relationships, more liberal attitudes, and increasingly unconventional courtship behaviours (725). Socially conservative coffee songs include Coffee in the Morning and Kisses in the Night by The Boswell Sisters (1933) in which the protagonist swears fidelity to her partner on condition that this desire is expressed strictly in the appropriate social context of marriage. It encapsulates the restrictions Horton identified on courtship discourse in popular song prior to the arrival of rock and roll. The Henderson/DeSylva/Brown composition You're the Cream in My Coffee, recorded by Annette Hanshaw (1928) and by Nat King Cole (1946), also celebrates the social ideal of monogamous devotion. The persistence of such idealised traditional themes continued into the 1960s. American pop singer Don Cherry had a hit with Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye (1962) that used coffee as a metaphor for undying and everlasting love. Otis Redding’s version of Butler/Thomas/Walker’s Cigarettes and Coffee (1966)—arguably soul music’s exemplary romantic coffee song—carries a similar message as a couple proclaim their devotion in a late night conversation over coffee. Like much of the Stax catalogue, Cigarettes and Coffee, has a distinctly “down home” feel and timbre. The lovers are simply content with each other; they don’t need “cream” or “sugar.” Horton found 1950s blues and R&amp;B lyrics much more sexually explicit than pop songs (567). Dawson (1994) subsequently characterised black popular music as a distinct public sphere, and Squires (2002) argued that it displayed elements of what she defined as “enclave” and “counterpublic” traits. Lawson (2010) has argued that marginalised and/or subversive blues artists offered a form of countercultural resistance against prevailing social norms. Indeed, several blues and R&amp;B coffee songs disregard established courtship ideals and associate the product with non-normative and even transgressive relationship circumstances—including infidelity, divorce, and domestic violence. Lightnin’ Hopkins’s Coffee Blues (1950) references child neglect and spousal abuse, while the narrative of Muddy Waters’s scorching Iodine in my Coffee (1952) tells of an attempted poisoning by his Waters’s partner. In 40 Cups of Coffee (1953) Ella Mae Morse is waiting for her husband to return home, fuelling her anger and anxiety with caffeine. This song does eventually comply with traditional courtship ideals: when her lover eventually returns home at five in the morning, he is greeted with a relieved kiss. In Keep That Coffee Hot (1955), Scatman Crothers supplies a counterpoint to Morse’s late-night-abandonment narrative, asking his partner to keep his favourite drink warm during his adulterous absence. Brook Benton’s Another Cup of Coffee (1964) expresses acute feelings of regret and loneliness after a failed relationship. More obliquely, in Coffee Blues (1966) Mississippi John Hurt sings affectionately about his favourite brand, a “lovin’ spoonful” of Maxwell House. In this, he bequeathed the moniker of folk-rock band The Lovin’ Spoonful, whose hits included Do You Believe in Magic (1965) and Summer in the City (1966). However, an alternative reading of Hurt’s lyric suggests that this particular phrase is a metaphorical device proclaiming the author’s sexual potency. Hurt’s “lovin’ spoonful” may actually be a portion of his seminal emission. In the 1950s, Horton identified country as particularly “doleful” (570), and coffee provides a common metaphor for failed romance in a genre dominated by “metanarratives of loss and desire” (Fox, Jukebox 54). Claude Gray’s I'll Have Another Cup of Coffee (Then I’ll Go) (1961) tells of a protagonist delivering child support payments according to his divorce lawyer’s instructions. The couple share late night coffee as their children sleep through the conversation. This song was subsequently recorded by seventeen-year-old Bob Marley (One Cup of Coffee, 1962) under the pseudonym Bobby Martell, a decade prior to his breakthrough as an international reggae star. Marley’s youngest son Damian has also performed the track while, interestingly in the context of this discussion, his older sibling Rohan co-founded Marley Coffee, an organic farm in the Jamaican Blue Mountains. Following Carey’s demonstration of mainstream pop’s increasingly realistic depiction of courtship behaviours during the 1960s, songwriters continued to draw on coffee as a metaphor for failed romance. In Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain (1972), she dreams of clouds in her coffee while contemplating an ostentatious ex-lover. Squeeze’s Black Coffee In Bed (1982) uses a coffee stain metaphor to describe the end of what appears to be yet another dead-end relationship for the protagonist. Sarah Harmer’s Coffee Stain (1998) expands on this device by reworking the familiar “lipstick on your collar” trope, while Sexsmith &amp; Kerr’s duet Raindrops in my Coffee (2005) superimposes teardrops in coffee and raindrops on the pavement with compelling effect. Kate Bush’s Coffee Homeground (1978) provides the most extreme narrative of relationship breakdown: the true story of Cora Henrietta Crippin’s poisoning. Researchers who replicated Horton’s and Carey’s methodology in the late 1970s (Bridges; Denisoff) were surprised to find their results dominated by traditional courtship ideals. The new liberal values unearthed by Carey in the late 1960s simply failed to materialise in subsequent decades. In this context, it is interesting to observe how romantic coffee songs in contemporary soul and jazz continue to disavow the post-1960s trend towards realistic social narratives, adopting instead a conspicuously consumerist outlook accompanied by smooth musical timbres. This phenomenon possibly betrays the influence of contemporary coffee advertising. From the 1980s, television commercials have sought to establish coffee as a desirable high end product, enjoyed by bohemian lovers in a conspicuously up-market environment (Werder). All Saints’s Black Coffee (2000) and Lebrado’s Coffee (2006) identify strongly with the culture industry’s image of coffee as a luxurious beverage whose consumption signifies prominent social status. All Saints’s promotional video is set in a opulent location (although its visuals emphasise the lyric’s romantic disharmony), while Natalie Cole’s Coffee Time (2008) might have been itself written as a commercial. Busting Up a Starbucks: The Politics of Coffee Politics and coffee meet most palpably at the coffee shop. This conjunction has a well-documented history beginning with the establishment of coffee houses in Europe and the birth of the public sphere (Habermas; Love; Pincus). The first popular songs to reference coffee shops include Jaybird Coleman’s Coffee Grinder Blues (1930), which boasts of skills that precede the contemporary notion of a barista by four decades; and Let's Have Another Cup of Coffee (1932) from Irving Berlin’s depression-era musical Face The Music, where the protagonists decide to stay in a restaurant drinking coffee and eating pie until the economy improves. Coffee in a Cardboard Cup (1971) from the Broadway musical 70 Girls 70 is an unambiguous condemnation of consumerism, however, it was written, recorded and produced a generation before Starbucks’ aggressive expansion and rapid dominance of the coffee house market during the 1990s. The growth of this company caused significant criticism and protest against what seemed to be a ruthless homogenising force that sought to overwhelm local competition (Holt; Thomson). In response, Starbucks has sought to be defined as a more responsive and interactive brand that encourages “glocalisation” (de Larios; Thompson). Koller, however, has characterised glocalisation as the manipulative fabrication of an “imagined community”—whose heterogeneity is in fact maintained by the aesthetics and purchasing choices of consumers who make distinctive and conscious anti-brand statements (114). Neat Capitalism is a more useful concept here, one that intercedes between corporate ideology and postmodern cultural logic, where such notions as community relations and customer satisfaction are deliberately and perhaps somewhat cynically conflated with the goal of profit maximisation (Rojek). As the world’s largest chain of coffee houses with over 19,400 stores in March 2012 (Loxcel), Starbucks is an exemplar of this phenomenon. Their apparent commitment to environmental stewardship, community relations, and ethical sourcing is outlined in the company’s annual “Global Responsibility Report” (Vimac). It is also demonstrated in their engagement with charitable and environmental non-governmental organisations such as Fairtrade and Co-operative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere (CARE). By emphasising this, Starbucks are able to interpellate (that is, “call forth”, “summon”, or “hail” in Althusserian terms) those consumers who value environmental protection, social justice and ethical business practices (Rojek 117). Bob Dylan and Sheryl Crow provide interesting case studies of the persuasive cultural influence evoked by Neat Capitalism. Dylan’s 1962 song Talkin’ New York satirised his formative experiences as an impoverished performer in Greenwich Village’s coffee houses. In 1995, however, his decision to distribute the Bob Dylan: Live At The Gaslight 1962 CD exclusively via Starbucks generated significant media controversy. Prominent commentators expressed their disapproval (Wilson Harris) and HMV Canada withdrew Dylan’s product from their shelves (Lynskey). Despite this, the success of this and other projects resulted in the launch of Starbucks’s in-house record company, Hear Music, which released entirely new recordings from major artists such as Ray Charles, Paul McCartney, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon and Elvis Costello—although the company has recently announced a restructuring of their involvement in this venture (O’Neil). Sheryl Crow disparaged her former life as a waitress in Coffee Shop (1995), a song recorded for her second album. “Yes, I was a waitress. I was a waitress not so long ago; then I won a Grammy” she affirmed in a YouTube clip of a live performance from the same year. More recently, however, Crow has become an avowed self-proclaimed “Starbucks groupie” (Tickle), releasing an Artist’s Choice (2003) compilation album exclusively via Hear Music and performing at the company’s 2010 Annual Shareholders’s Meeting. Songs voicing more unequivocal dissatisfaction with Starbucks’s particular variant of Neat Capitalism include Busting Up a Starbucks (Mike Doughty, 2005), and Starbucks Takes All My Money (KJ-52, 2008). The most successful of these is undoubtedly Ron Sexsmith’s Jazz at the Bookstore (2006). Sexsmith bemoans the irony of intense original blues artists such as Leadbelly being drowned out by the cacophony of coffee grinding machines while customers queue up to purchase expensive coffees whose names they can’t pronounce. In this, he juxtaposes the progressive patina of corporate culture against the circumstances of African-American labour conditions in the deep South, the shocking incongruity of which eventually cause the old bluesman to turn in his grave. Fredric Jameson may have good reason to lament the depthless a-historical pastiche of postmodern popular culture, but this is no “nostalgia film”: Sexsmith articulates an artfully framed set of subtle, sensitive, and carefully contextualised observations. Songs about coffee also intersect with politics via lyrics that play on the mid-brown colour of the beverage, by employing it as a metaphor for the sociological meta-narratives of acculturation and assimilation. First popularised in Israel Zangwill’s 1905 stage play, The Melting Pot, this term is more commonly associated with Americanisation rather than miscegenation in the United States—a nuanced distinction that British band Blue Mink failed to grasp with their memorable invocation of “coffee-coloured people” in Melting Pot (1969). Re-titled in the US as People Are Together (Mickey Murray, 1970) the song was considered too extreme for mainstream radio airplay (Thompson). Ike and Tina Turner’s Black Coffee (1972) provided a more accomplished articulation of coffee as a signifier of racial identity; first by associating it with the history of slavery and the post-Civil Rights discourse of African-American autonomy, then by celebrating its role as an energising force for African-American workers seeking economic self-determination. Anyone familiar with the re-casting of black popular music in an industry dominated by Caucasian interests and aesthetics (Cashmore; Garofalo) will be unsurprised to find British super-group Humble Pie’s (1973) version of this song more recognisable. Conclusion Coffee-flavoured popular songs celebrate the stimulant effects of caffeine, provide metaphors for courtship rituals, and offer critiques of Neat Capitalism. Harold Love and Guthrie Ramsey have each argued (from different perspectives) that the cultural micro-narratives of small social groups allow us to identify important “ethnographic truths” (Ramsey 22). Aesthetically satisfying and intellectually stimulating coffee songs are found where these micro-narratives intersect with the ethnographic truths of coffee culture. Examples include the unconventional courtship narratives of blues singers Muddy Waters and Mississippi John Hurt, the ritualised storytelling tradition of country performers Doye O’Dell and Tommy Faile, and historicised accounts of the Civil Rights struggle provided by Ron Sexsmith and Tina Turner. References Argenti, Paul. “Collaborating With Activists: How Starbucks Works With NGOs.” California Management Review 47.1 (2004): 91–116. Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. London: Monthly Review Press, 1971. Bridges, John, and R. Serge Denisoff. “Changing Courtship Patterns in the Popular Song: Horton and Carey revisited.” Popular Music and Society 10.3 (1986): 29–45. Carey, James. “Changing Courtship Patterns in the Popular Song.” The American Journal of Sociology 74.6 (1969): 720–31. Cashmere, Ellis. The Black Culture Industry. London: Routledge, 1997. “Coffee.” Theme Time Radio Hour hosted by Bob Dylan, XM Satellite Radio. 31 May 2006. Cooper, B. Lee, and William L. Schurk. “You’re the Cream in My Coffee: A Discography of Java Jive.” Popular Music and Society 23.2 (1999): 91–100. Crow, Sheryl. “Coffee Shop.” Beacon Theatre, New York City. 17 Mar. 1995. YouTube 1 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_-bDAjASQI ›. Curry, Andrew. “Drugs in Jazz and Rock Music.” Clinical Toxicology 1.2 (1968): 235–44. Dawson, Michael C. “A Black Counterpublic?: Economic Earthquakes, Racial Agenda(s) and Black Politics.” Public Culture 7.1 (1994): 195–223. de Larios, Margaret. “Alone, Together: The Social Culture of Music and the Coffee Shop.” URC Student Scholarship Paper 604 (2011). 1 Feb. 2012 ‹http://scholar.oxy.edu/urc_student/604›. Englis, Basil, Michael Solomon and Anna Olofsson. “Consumption Imagery in Music Television: A Bi-Cultural Perspective.” Journal of Advertising 22.4 (1993): 21–33. Fox, Aaron. Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture. Durham: Duke UP, 2004. Fox, Aaron. “The Jukebox of History: Narratives of Loss and Desire in the Discourse of Country Music.” Popular Music 11.1 (1992): 53–72. Garofalo, Reebee. “Culture Versus Commerce: The Marketing of Black Popular Music.” Public Culture 7.1 (1994): 275–87. Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989. Hamilton, Andy. Aesthetics and Music. London: Continuum, 2007. Harris, Craig. “Starbucks Opens Hear Music Shop in Bellevue.” Seattle Post Intelligencer 23 Nov. 2006. 1 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/Starbucks-opens-Hear-Music-shop-in-Bellevue-1220637.php›. Harris, John. “Lay Latte Lay.” The Guardian 1 Jul. 2005. 1 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2005/jul/01/2?INTCMP=SRCH›. Holt, Douglas. “Why Do Brands Cause Trouble? A Dialectical Theory of Consumer Culture and Branding.” Journal of Consumer Research 29 (2002): 70–90. Horton, Donald. “The Dialogue of Courtship in Popular Songs.” American Journal of Sociology 62.6 (1957): 569–78. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. Juliano, Laura, and Roland Griffiths. “A Critical Review of Caffeine Withdrawal: Empirical Validation of Symptoms and Signs, Incidence, Severity, and Associated Features.” Psychopharmacology 176 (2004): 1–29. Koller, Veronika. “‘The World’s Local Bank’: Glocalisation as a Strategy in Corporate Branding Discourse.” Social Semiotics 17.1 (2007): 111–31. Lawson, Rob A. Jim Crow’s Counterculture: The Blues and Black Southerners, 1890-1945 (Making the Modern South). Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2010. Love, Harold. “How Music Created A Public.” Criticism 46.2 (2004): 257–72. “Loxcel Starbucks Map”. Loxcel.com 1 Mar. 2012 ‹loxcel.com/sbux-faq.hmtl›. Lovett, Richard. “Coffee: The Demon Drink?” New Scientist 2518. 24 Sep. 2005. 1 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18725181.700›. Lynskey, Dorian. “Stir It Up: Starbucks Has Changed the Music Industry with its Deals with Dylan and Alanis. What’s Next?”. The Guardian 6 Oct. 2005: 18. 1 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2005/oct/06/popandrock.marketingandpr›. Lyttle, Thomas, and Michael Montagne. “Drugs, Music, and Ideology: A Social Pharmacological Interpretation of the Acid House Movement.” The International Journal of the Addictions 27.10 (1992): 1159–77. McCracken, Grant. “Culture and Consumption: A Theoretical Account of the Structure and Movement of the Cultural Meaning of Consumer Goods.” Journal of Consumer Research 13.1 (1986): 71–84. McNeil, Legs, and Gillian McCain. Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk. London: Abacus, 1997. “New Music News” 120 Minutes MTV 28 Sep. 1986. 1 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnqjqXztc0o›. O’Neil, Valerie. “Starbucks Refines its Entertainment Strategy.” Starbucks Newsroom 24 Apr. 2008. 1 Feb. 2012 ‹http://news.starbucks.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=48›. Pincus, Steve. “‘Coffee Politicians Does Create’: Coffeehouses and Restoration Political Culture.” The Journal of Modern History 67 (1995): 807–34. Primack, Brian, Madeline Dalton, Mary Carroll, Aaron Agarwal, and Michael Fine. “Content Analysis of Tobacco, Alcohol, and Other Drugs in Popular Music.” Archives of Pediatrics &amp; Adolescent Medicine 162.2 (2008): 169–75. 1 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3004676/›. Ramsey, Guthrie P. Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003. Rojek, Chris. Cultural Studies. Cambridge: Polity P, 2007. Rosenbaum, Jill, and Lorraine Prinsky. “Sex, Violence and Rock ‘N’ Roll: Youths’ Perceptions of Popular Music.” Popular Music and Society 11.2 (1987): 79–89. Shapiro, Harry. Waiting for the Man: The Story of Drugs and Popular Music. London: Quartet Books, 1988. Singer, Merrill, and Greg Mirhej. “High Notes: The Role of Drugs in the Making of Jazz.” Journal of Ethnicity in Substance Abuse 5.4 (2006):1–38. Squires, Catherine R. “Rethinking the Black Public Sphere: An Alternative Vocabulary for Multiple Public Spheres.” Communication Theory 12.4 (2002): 446–68. Thompson, Craig J., and Zeynep Arsel. “The Starbucks Brandscape and Consumers’ (Anticorporate) Experiences of Glocalization.” Journal of Consumer Research 31 (2004.): 631–42. Thompson, Erik. “Secret Stash Records Releases Forgotten Music in Stylish Packages: Meet Founders Cory Wong and Eric Foss.” CityPages 18 Jan. 2012. 1 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.citypages.com/2012-01-18/music/secret-stash-records-releases-forgotten-music-in-stylish-packages/›.Tickle, Cindy. “Sheryl Crow Performs at Starbucks Annual Shareholders Meeting.” Examiner.com24 Mar. 2010. 1 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.examiner.com/starbucks-in-national/sheryl-crow-performs-at-starbucks-annual-shareholders-meeting-photos›.Tolson, Gerald H., and Michael J. Cuyjet. “Jazz and Substance Abuse: Road to Creative Genius or Pathway to Premature Death?”. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 30 (2007): 530–38. Varma, Vivek, and Ben Packard. “Starbucks Global Responsibility Report Goals and Progress 2011”. Starbucks Corporation 1 Apr. 2012 ‹http://assets.starbucks.com/assets/goals-progress-report-2011.pdf›. Werder, Olaf. “Brewing Romance The Romantic Fantasy Theme of the Taster’s Choice ‘Couple’ Advertising Campaign.” Critical Thinking About Sex, Love, And Romance In The Mass Media: Media Literacy Applications. Eds. Mary-Lou Galician and Debra L. Merskin. New Jersey: Taylor &amp; Francis, 2009. 35–48. Wilson, Jeremy “Desolation Row: Dylan Signs With Starbucks.” The Guardian 29 Jun. 2005. 1 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/jun/29/bobdylan.digitalmedia?INTCMP=SRCH›. Winick, Charles. “The Use of Drugs by Jazz Musicians.” Social Problems 7.3 (1959): 240–53.

IntroductionWhat can we learn about anomaly from the strangeness of a puppet, a lifeless object, that can both bleed and die? How does the filming process of a puppet’s death engage across media and produce a new media genre that is not easily classified within traditional conventions? Why do these fighting and bleeding puppets’ scenes consistently attract audiences? This study examines how Pili puppetry (1984-present), a popular TV series depicting martial arts-based narratives and fight sequences, interacts with digital technologies and constructs a new media genre. The transmedia constitution of a virtual world not only challenges the stereotype of puppetry’s target audience but also expands the audience’s bodily imagination and desires through the visual component of death scenes. Hence, the show does not merely represent or signify an anomaly, but even creates anomalous desires and imaginary bodies.Cultural commodification and advancing technologies have motivated the convergence and displacement of traditional boundaries, genres, and media, changing the very fabric of textuality itself. By exploring how new media affect the audience’s visual reception of fighting and death, this article sheds light on understanding the metamorphoses of Taiwanese puppetry and articulates a theoretical argument regarding the show’s artistic practice to explain how its form transverses traditional boundaries. This critical exploration focusses on how the form represents bleeding puppets, and in doing so, explicates the politics of transmedia performing and viewing. Pili is an example of an anomalous media form that proliferates anomalous media viewing experiences and desires in turn.Beyond a Media Genre: Taiwanese Pili PuppetryConverging the craft technique of puppeteering and digital technology of filmmaking and animation, Pili puppetry creates a new media genre that exceeds any conventional idea of a puppet show or digital puppet, as it is something in-between. Glove puppetry is a popular traditional theatre in Taiwan, often known as “theatre in the palm” because a traditional puppet was roughly the same size as an adult’s palm. The size enabled the puppeteer to easily manipulate a puppet in one hand and be close to the audience. Traditionally, puppet shows occurred to celebrate the local deities’ birthday. Despite its popularity, the form was limited by available technology. For instance, although stories with vigorous battles were particularly popular, bleeding scenes in such an auspicious occasion were inappropriate and rare. As a live theatrical event featuring immediate interaction between the performer and the spectator, realistic bleeding scenes were rare because it is hard to immediately clean the stage during the performance. Distinct from the traditional puppet show, digital puppetry features semi-animated puppets in a virtual world. Digital puppetry is not a new concept by any means in the Western film industry. Animating a 3D puppet is closely associated with motion capture technologies and animation that are manipulated in a digitalised virtual setting (Ferguson). Commonly, the target audience of the Western digital puppetry is children, so educators sometimes use digital puppetry as a pedagogical tool (Potter; Wohlwend). With these young target audience in mind, the producers often avoid violent and bleeding scenes.Pili puppetry differs from digital puppetry in several ways. For instance, instead of targeting a young audience, Pili puppetry consistently extends the traditional martial-arts performance to include bloody fight sequences that enrich the expressiveness of traditional puppetry as a performing art. Moreover, Pili puppetry does not apply the motion capture technologies to manipulate the puppet’s movement, thus retaining the puppeteers’ puppeteering craft (clips of Pili puppetry can be seen on Pili’s official YouTube page). Hence, Pili is a unique hybrid form, creating its own anomalous space in puppetry. Among over a thousand characters across the series, the realistic “human-like” puppet is one of Pili’s most popular selling points. The new media considerably intervene in the puppet design, as close-up shots and high-resolution images can accurately project details of a puppet’s face and body movements on the screen. Consequently, Pili’s puppet modelling becomes increasingly intricate and attractive and arguably makes its virtual figures more epic yet also more “human” (Chen). Figure 1: Su Huan-Jen in the TV series Pili Killing Blade (1993). His facial expressions were relatively flat and rigid then. Reproduced with permission of Pili International Multimedia Company.Figure 2: Su Huan-Jen in the TV series Pili Nine Thrones (2003). The puppet’s facial design and costume became more delicate and complex. Reproduced with permission of Pili International Multimedia Company.Figure 3: Su Huan-Jen in the TV series Pili Fantasy: War of Dragons (2019). His facial lines softened due to more precise design technologies. The new lightweight chiffon yarn costumes made him look more elegant. The multiple-layer costumes also created more space for puppeteers to hide behind the puppet and enact more complicated manipulations. Reproduced with permission of Pili International Multimedia Company.The design of the most well-known Pili swordsman, Su Huan-Jen, demonstrates how the Pili puppet modelling became more refined and intricate in the past 20 years. In 1993, the standard design was a TV puppet with the size and body proportion slightly enlarged from the traditional puppet. Su Huan-Jen’s costumes were made from heavy fabrics, and his facial expressions were relatively flat and rigid (fig. 1). Pili produced its first puppetry film Legend of the Sacred Stone in 2000; considering the visual quality of a big screen, Pili refined the puppet design including replacing wooden eyeballs and plastic hair with real hair and glass eyeballs (Chen). The filmmaking experience inspired Pili to dramatically improve the facial design for all puppets. In 2003, Su’s modelling in Pili Nine Thrones (TV series) became noticeably much more delicate. The puppet’s size was considerably enlarged by almost three times, so a puppeteer had to use two hands to manipulate a puppet. The complex costumes and props made more space for puppeteers to hide behind the puppet and enrich the performance of the fighting movements (fig. 2). In 2019, Su’s new modelling further included new layers of lightweight fabrics, and his makeup and props became more delicate and complex (fig. 3). Such a refined aesthetic design also lends to Pili’s novelty among puppetry performances.Through the transformation of Pili in the context of puppetry history, we see how the handicraft-like puppet itself gradually commercialised into an artistic object that the audience would yearn to collect and project their bodily imagination. Anthropologist Teri Silvio notices that, for some fans, Pili puppets are similar to worship icons through which they project their affection and imaginary identity (Silvio, “Pop Culture Icons”). Intermediating with the new media, the change in the refined puppet design also comes from the audience’s expectations. Pili’s senior puppet designer Fan Shih-Ching mentioned that Pili fans are very involved, so their preferences affect the design of puppets. The complexity, particularly the layer of costumes, most clearly differentiates the aesthetics of traditional and Pili puppets. Due to the “idolisation” of some famous Pili characters, Shih-Ching has had to design more and more gaudy costumes. Each resurgence of a well-known Pili swordsman, such as Su Huan-Jen, Yi Ye Shu, and Ye Hsiao-Chai, means he has to remodel the puppet.Pili fans represent their infatuation for puppet characters through cosplay (literally “costume play”), which is when fans dress up and pretend to be a Pili character. Their cosplay, in particular, reflects the bodily practice of imaginary identity. Silvio observes that most cosplayers choose to dress as characters that are the most visually appealing rather than characters that best suit their body type. They even avoid moving too “naturally” and mainly move from pose-to-pose, similar to the frame-to-frame techne of animation. Thus, we can understand this “cosplay more as reanimating the character using the body as a kind of puppet rather than as an embodied performance of some aspect of self-identity” (Silvio 2019, 167). Hence, Pili fans’ cosplay is indicative of an anomalous desire to become the puppet-like human, which helps them transcend their social roles in their everyday life. It turns out that not only fans’ preference drives the (re)modelling of puppets but also fans attempt to model themselves in the image of their beloved puppets. The reversible dialectic between fan-star and flesh-object further provokes an “anomaly” in terms of the relationship between the viewers and the puppets. Precisely because fans have such an intimate relationship with Pili, it is important to consider how the series’ content and form configure fans’ viewing experience.Filming Bleeding PuppetsDespite its intricate aesthetics, Pili is still a series with frequent fighting-to-the-death scenes, which creates, and is the result of, extraordinary transmedia production and viewing experiences. Due to the market demand of producing episodes around 500 minutes long every month, Pili constantly creates new characters to maintain the audience’s attention and retain its novelty. So far, Pili has released thousands of characters. To ensure that new characters supersede the old ones, numerous old characters have to die within the plot.The adoption of new media allows the fighting scenes in Pili to render as more delicate, rather than consisting of loud, intense action movements. Instead, the leading swordsmen’s death inevitably takes place in a pathetic and romantic setting and consummates with a bloody sacrifice. Fighting scenes in early Pili puppetry created in the late 1980s were still based on puppets’ body movements, as the knowledge and technology of animation were still nascent and underdeveloped. At that time, the prestigious swordsman mainly relied on the fast speed of brandishing his sword. Since the early 1990s, as animation technology matured, it has become very common to see Pili use CGI animation to create a damaging sword beam for puppets to kill target enemies far away. The sword beam can fly much faster than the puppets can move, so almost every fighting scene employs CGI to visualise both sword beams and flame. The change in fighting manners provokes different representations of the bleeding and death scenes. Open wounds replace puncture wounds caused by a traditional weapon; bleeding scenes become typical, and a special feature in Pili’s transmedia puppetry.In addition to CGI animation, the use of fake blood in the Pili studio makes the performance even more realistic. Pili puppet master Ting Chen-Ching recalled that exploded puppets in traditional puppetry were commonly made by styrofoam blocks. The white styrofoam chips that sprayed everywhere after the explosion inevitably made the performance seem less realistic. By contrast, in the Pili studio, the scene of a puppet spurting blood after the explosion usually applies the technology of editing several shots. The typical procedure would be a short take that captures a puppet being injured. In its injury location, puppeteers sprinkle red confetti to represent scattered blood clots in the following shot. Sometimes the fake blood was splashed with the red confetti to make it further three-dimensional (Ting). Bloody scenes can also be filmed through multiple layers of arranged performance conducted at the same time by a group of puppeteers. Ting describes the practice of filming a bleeding puppet. Usually, some puppeteers sprinkle fake blood in front of the camera, while other puppeteers blasted the puppets toward various directions behind the blood to make the visual effects match. If the puppeteers need to show how a puppet becomes injured and vomits blood during the fight, they can install tiny pipes in the puppet in advance. During the filming, the puppeteer slowly squeezes the pipe to make the fake blood flow out from the puppet’s mouth. Such a bloody scene sometimes accompanies tears dropping from the puppet’s eyes. In some cases, the puppeteer drops the blood on the puppet’s mouth prior to the filming and then uses a powerful electric fan to blow the blood drops (Ting). Such techniques direct the blood to flow laterally against the wind, which makes the puppet’s death more aesthetically tragic. Because it is not a live performance, the puppeteer can try repeatedly until the camera captures the most ideal blood drop pattern and bleeding speed. Puppeteers have to adjust the camera distance for different bleeding scenes, which creates new modes of viewing, sensing, and representing virtual life and death. One of the most representative examples of Pili’s bleeding scenes is when Su’s best friend, Ching Yang-Zi, fights with alien devils in Legend of the Sacred Stone. (The clip of how Ching Yang-Zi fights and bleeds to death can be seen on YouTube.) Ting described how Pili prepared three different puppets of Ching for the non-fighting, fighting, and bleeding scenes (Ting). The main fighting scene starts from a low-angle medium shot that shows how Ching Yang-Zi got injured and began bleeding from the corner of his mouth. Then, a sharp weapon flies across the screen; the following close-up shows that the weapon hits Ching and he begins bleeding immediately. The successive shots move back and forth between his face and the wound in medium shot and close-up. Next, a close-up shows him stepping back with blood dripping on the ground. He then pushes the weapon out of his body to defend enemies; a final close-up follows a medium take and a long take shows the massive hemorrhage. The eruption of fluid plasma creates a natural effect that is difficult to achieve, even with 3D animation. Beyond this impressive technicality, the exceptional production and design emphasise how Pili fully embraces the ethos of transmedia: to play with multiple media forms and thereby create a new form. In the case of Pili, its form is interactive, transcending the boundaries of what we might consider the “living” and the “dead”.Epilogue: Viewing Bleeding Puppets on the ScreenThe simulated, high-quality, realistic-looking puppet designs accompanying the Pili’s featured bloody fighting sequence draw another question: What is the effect of watching human-like puppets die? What does this do to viewer-fans? Violence is prevalent throughout the historical record of human behaviour, especially in art and entertainment because these serve as outlets to fulfill a basic human need to indulge in “taboo fantasies” and escape into “realms of forbidden experience” (Schechter). When discussing the visual representations of violence and the spectacle of the sufferings of others, Susan Sontag notes, “if we consider what emotions would be desirable” (102), viewing the pain of others may not simply evoke sympathy. She argues that “[no] moral charge attaches to the representation of these cruelties. Just the provocation: can you look at this? There is the satisfaction of being able to look at the image without flinching. There is the pleasure of flinching” (41). For viewers, the boldness of watching the bloody scenes can be very inviting. Watching human-like puppets die in the action scenes similarly validates the viewer’s need for pleasure and entertainment. Although different from a human body, the puppets still bears the materiality of being-object. Therefore, watching the puppets bleeding and die as distinctly “human-like’ puppets further prevent viewers’ from feeling guilty or morally involved. The conceptual distance of being aware of the puppet’s materiality acts as a moral buffer; audiences are intimately involved through the particular aesthetic arrangement, yet morally detached. The transmedia filming of puppetry adds another layer of mediation over the human-like “living” puppets that allows such a particular experience. Sontag notices that the media generates an inevitable distance between object and subject, between witness and victim. For Sontag, although images constitute “the imaginary proximity” because it makes the “faraway sufferers” be “seen close-up on the television screen”, it is a mystification to assume that images serve as a direct link between sufferers and viewers. Rather, Sontag insists: the distance makes the viewers feel “we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence” (102). Echoing Sontag’s argument, Jeffrey Goldstein points out that “distancing” oneself from the mayhem represented in media makes it tolerable. Media creates an “almost real” visuality of violence, so the audience feels relatively safe in their surroundings when exposed to threatening images. Thus, “violent imagery must carry cues to its unreality or it loses appeal” (280). Pili puppets that are human-like, thus not human, more easily enable the audience to seek sensational excitement through viewing puppets’ bloody violence and eventual death on the screen and still feel emotionally secure. Due to the distance granted by the medium, viewers gain a sense of power by excitedly viewing the violence with an accompanying sense of moral exemption. Thus, viewers can easily excuse the limits of their personal responsibility while still being captivated by Pili’s boundary-transgressing aesthetic.The anomalous power of Pili fans’ cosplay differentiates the viewing experience of puppets’ deaths from that of other violent entertainment productions. Cosplayers physically bridge viewing/acting and life/death by dressing up as the puppet characters, bringing them to life, as flesh. Cosplay allows fans to compensate for the helplessness they experience when watching the puppets’ deaths on the screen. They can both “enjoy” the innocent pleasure of watching bleeding puppets and bring their adored dead idols “back to life” through cosplay. The onscreen violence and death thus provide an additional layer of pleasure for such cosplayers. They not only take pleasure in watching the puppets—which are an idealized version of their bodily imagination—die, but also feel empowered to revitalise their loved idols. Therefore, Pili cosplayers’ desires incite a cycle of life, pleasure, and death, in which the company responds to their consumers’ demands in kind. The intertwining of social, economic, and political factors thus collectively thrives upon media violence as entertainment. Pili creates the potential for new cross-media genre configurations that transcend the traditional/digital puppetry binary. On the one hand, the design of swordsman puppets become a simulation of a “living object” responding to the camera distance. On the other hand, the fighting and death scenes heavily rely on the puppeteers’ cooperation with animation and editing. Therefore, Pili puppetry enriches existing discourse on both puppetry and animation as life-giving processes. What is animated by Pili puppetry is not simply the swordsmen characters themselves, but new potentials for media genres and violent entertainment. AcknowledgmentMy hearty gratitude to Amy Gaeta for sharing her insights with me on the early stage of this study.ReferencesChen, Jasmine Yu-Hsing. “Transmuting Tradition: The Transformation of Taiwanese Glove Puppetry in Pili Productions.” Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia 51 (2019): 26-46.Ferguson, Jeffrey. “Lessons from Digital Puppetry: Updating a Design Framework for a Perceptual User Interface.” IEEE International Conference on Computer and Information Technology, 2015.Goldstein, Jeffrey. “The Attractions of Violent Entertainment.” Media Psychology 1.3 (1999): 271-282.Potter, Anna. “Funding Contemporary Children’s Television: How Digital Convergence Encourages Retro Reboot.” International Journal on Communications Management 19.2 (2017): 108-112.Schechter, Harold. Savage Pastimes: A Cultural History of Violent Entertainment. New York: St. Martin’s, 2005.Silvio, Teri. “Pop Culture Icons: Religious Inflections of the Character Toy in Taiwan.” Mechademia 3.1 (2010): 200-220.———. Puppets, Gods, and Brands: Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan. Honolulu: U Hawaii P, 2019. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004.Ting, Chen-Ching. Interview by the author. Yunlin, Taiwan. 24 June 2019.Wohlwend, Karen E. “One Screen, Many Fingers: Young Children's Collaborative Literacy Play with Digital Puppetry Apps and Touchscreen Technologies.” Theory into Practice 54.2 (2015): 154-162.

&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; In the last three years a new filthy vocabulary of social class has emerged in Britain. The word “chav”, and its various synonyms and regional variations, has become a ubiquitous term of abuse for white working class subjects. An entire slang vocabulary has emerged around chav. Acronyms, such as “Council Housed and Vile” have sprung up to explain the term. Folk etymologies and some scholarly sources suggest that the term chav might derive from a distortion of a Romany word for a child, while others suggests it is a derivative of the term charver, long used in the North East of England to describe the disenfranchised white poor (see Nayak). In current parlance, the term chav is aligned “with stereotypical notions of lower-class” and is above all “a term of intense class-based abhorrence” (Haywood and Yar 16). Routinely demonized within news media, television comedy programmes, and internet sites (such as the chavscum) the level of disgust mobilized by the figure of the chav is suggestive of a heightened class antagonism that marks a new episode of class struggle in Britain. Social class is often represented through highly caricatured figures—the toff, the chav—figures that are referred to in highly emotive terms. One of the ways in which social class is emotionally mediated is through repeated expressions of disgust at the habits and behaviour of those deemed to belong to a lower social class. An everyday definition of disgust would be: an emotion experienced and expressed as a sickening feeling of revulsion, loathing, or nausea. The physicality of disgust reactions means that the communication of disgust draws heavily on metaphors of sensation. As William Miller notes, disgust “needs images of bad taste, foul smells, creepy touchings, ugly sights, bodily secretions and excretions to articulate the judgments it asserts” (218). Our disgust reactions are often revealing of wider social power relations. As Sara Ahmed notes: When thinking about how bodies become objects of disgust, we can see that disgust is crucial to power relations. … Disgust at “that which is below” functions to maintain the power relations between above and below, through which “aboveness” and “belowness” become properties of particular bodies, objects and spaces (89). Ahmed’s account of the connection between disgust and power relations echoes Beverly Skeggs’ influential account of “class making”. As Skeggs suggests, class as a concept, and as a process of classification and social positioning, is not pre-given but is always in production and is continually re-figured (3). Social class virtually disappeared as a central site of analysis within cultural and media studies in the late 1980s, a disappearance that was mirrored by a similar retreat from the taxonomy of class within wider social and political discourse (Skeggs 45). This is not to say that class distinctions, however we measure them, have been eroded or are in decline. On the contrary, class disappeared as a central site of analysis at precisely the same time that “economic polarization” reached “unparalleled depths” in Britain (ibid.). As the term “working class” has been incrementally emptied of meaning, teaching and researching issues of class inequality is now often seen as “paranoid” and felt to be embarrassing and shameful (see Sayer). (Roland Barthes uses the concept of ‘ex-nomination’ to explain how (and why) social class is emptied of meaning in this way. According to Barthes, this process is one of the central mechanisms through which dominant classes naturalise their values.) In the last two decades academics from working class backgrounds and, perhaps most perversely, those who work within disciplines that were founded upon research on class, have increasingly experienced their own class origins as a “filthy secret”. If social class “directly articulated” and as “the object of analysis, has largely disappeared” (Skeggs 46) within the academy and within wider social and political discourses, portrayals of class differences have nevertheless persisted within popular media. In particular, the emergence of the grotesque and comic figure of the chav within a range of contemporary British media, primarily television comedy, reality-genre television, Internet forums and newspapers, has made class differences and antagonisms explicitly visible in contemporary Britain. Class-based discrimination and open snobbery is made socially acceptable through claims that this vicious name-calling has a ‘satirical’ function. Laughing at something is “an act of expulsion” that closely resembles the rejecting movement of disgust reactions (Menninghaus 11). In the case of laughter at those of a lower class, laughter is boundary-forming; it creates a distance between “them” and “us”, and asserts moral judgments and a higher class position. Laughter at chavs is a way of managing and authorizing class disgust, contempt, and anxiety. Popular media can be effective means of communicating class disgust and in so doing, work to produce ‘class communities’ in material, political and affective senses. In the online vocabulary of chav hate, we can further discern the ways in which class disgust is performed in ways that are community-forming. The web site, urbandictionary.com is an online slang dictionary that functions as an unofficial online authority on English language slang. Urbandictionary.com is modelled on an internet forum in which (unregistered) users post definitions of new or existing slang terms, which are then reviewed by volunteer editors. Users vote on definitions by clicking a thumb up or thumb down icon and posts are then ranked according to the votes they have accrued. Urbandictionary currently hosts 300,000 definitions of slang terms and is ranked as one of the 2000 highest web traffic sites in the world. There were 368 definitions of the term chav posted on the site at the time of writing and I have extracted below a small number of indicative phrases taken from some of the most highly ranked posts. all chavs are filth chavs …. the cancer of the United Kingdom filthy, disgusting, dirty, loud, ugly, stupid arseholes that threaten, fight, cause trouble, impregnate 14 year olds, ask for money, ask for fags, ….steal your phones, wear crap sports wear, drink cheap cider and generally spread their hate. A social underclass par excellence. The absolute dregs of modern civilization The only good chav is dead one. The only thing better than that is a mass grave full of dead chavs and a 24 hour work crew making way for more… This disgust speech generates a set of effects, which adhere to and produce the filthy figure and qualities of chav. The dictionary format is significant here because, like the accompanying veneer of irony, it grants a strange authority to the dehumanising bigotry of the posts. Urbandictionary illustrates how class disgust is actively made through repetition. Through the repetition of disgust reactions, the negative properties attributed to chav make this figure materialize as representative of a group who embodies those disgusting qualities – a group who are “lower than human or civil life” (Ahmed 97). As users add to and build the definition of “the chav” within the urban dictionary site, they interact with one another and a conversational environment emerges. The voting system works on this site as a form of peer authorization that encourages users to invoke more and more intense and affective disgust reactions. As Ngai suggests, disgust involves an expectation of concurrence, and disgust reactions seek “to include or draw others into its exclusion of its object, enabling a strange kind of sociability” (336). This sociability has a particular specificity within online communities in which anonymity gives community members license to express their disgust in extreme and virulent ways. The interactivity of these internet forums, and the real and illusory immediacy they transmit, makes online forums intensely affective communal spaces/places within which disgust reactions can be rapidly shared and accrued. As the web becomes more “writable”, through the development and dissemination of shared annotation software, web users are moving from consuming content to creating it ‘in the form of discussion boards, weblogs, wikis, and other collaborative and conversational media” (Golder 2). Within new media spaces such as urbandictionary, we are not only viewers but active users who can go into, enter and affect representational spaces and places. In the case of chavs, users can not only read about them, but have the power to produce the chav as a knowable figure. The chav thread on urbandictionary and similar chav hate forums work to constitute materially the exaggerated excessive corporeality of the chav figure. These are spaces/places in which class disgust is actively generated – class live. With each new post, there is an accruement of disgust. Each post breathes life into the squalid and thrillingly affective imaginary body of the filthy chav. Class disgust is intimately tied to issues of racial difference. These figures constitute an unclean “sullied urban “underclass”“, “forever placed at the borders of whiteness as the socially excluded, the economically redundant” (Nayak 82, 102-3). Whilst the term chav is a term of abuse directed almost exclusively towards the white poor, chavs are not invisible normative whites, but rather hypervisible “filthy whites”. In a way that bears striking similarities to US white trash figure, and the Australian figure of the Bogan, the chav figure foregrounds a dirty whiteness – a whiteness contaminated with poverty. This borderline whiteness is evidenced through claims that chavs appropriate black American popular culture through their clothing, music, and forms of speech, and have geographical, familial and sexual intimacy with working class blacks and Asians. This intimacy is represented by the areas in which chavs live and their illegitimate mixed race children as well as, more complexly, by their filthy white racism. Metaphors of disease, invasion and excessive breeding that are often invoked within white racist responses to immigrants and ethnic minorities are mobilized by the white middle-class in order to differentiate their “respectable whiteness” from the whiteness of the lower class chavs (see Nayak 84). The process of making white lower class identity filthy is an attempt to differentiate between respectable and non-respectable forms of whiteness (and an attempt to abject the white poor from spheres of white privilege). Disgust reactions work not only to give meaning to the figure of the chav but, more complicatedly, constitute a category of being – chav being. So whilst the figures of the chav and chavette have a virtual existence within newspapers, Internet forums and television shows, the chav nevertheless takes symbolic shape in ways that have felt material and physical effects upon those interpellated as “chav”. We can think here of the way in which” signs of chavness”, such as the wearing of certain items or brands of clothing have been increasingly used to police access to public spaces, such as nightclubs and shopping centres since 2003. The figure of the chav becomes a body imbued with negative affect. This affect travels, it circulates and leaks out into public space and shapes everyday perceptual practices. The social policing of chavs foregrounds the disturbing ease with which imagined “emotional qualities slide into corporeal qualities” (Ngai 573). Chav disgust is felt and lived. Experiencing the frisson of acting like a chav has become a major leisure occupation in Britain where middle class students now regularly hold “chav nites”, in which they dress up as chavs and chavettes. These students dress as chavs, carry plastic bags from the cut-price food superstores, drink cider and listen to ‘chav music’, in order to enjoy the affect of being an imaginary chav. In April 2006 the front page of The Sun featured Prince William dressed up as a chav with the headline, “Future Bling of England”, The story details how the future king: “joined in the fun as his platoon donned chav-themed fancy dress to mark the completion of their first term” at Sandhurst military academy. William, we were told, “went to a lot of trouble thinking up what to wear” (white baseball cap, sweatshirt, two gold chains), and was challenged to “put on a chavvy accent and stop speaking like a royal”. These examples of ironic class–passing represent a new era of ‘slumming it’ that recalls the 19th century Victorian slummers, who descended on the East End of London in their many thousands, in pursuit of abject encounters – touristic tastes of the illicit pleasures associated with the immoral, urban poor. This new chav ‘slumming it’ makes no pretence at any moral imperative, it doesn’t pretend to be sociological, there is no “field work”, no ethnography, no gathering of knowledge about the poor, no charity, no reaching out to touch, and no liberal guilt, there is nothing but ‘filthy pleasure’. The cumulative effect of disgust at chavs is the blocking of the disenfranchised white poor from view; they are rendered invisible and incomprehensible. Nevertheless, chav has become an increasingly complex identity category and some of those interpellated as filthy chavs have now reclaimed the term as an affirmative sub-cultural identity. This trans-coding of chav is visible within popular music acts, such as white teenage rapper Lady Sovereign and the acclaimed pop icon and urban poet Mike Skinner (who releases records as The Streets). Journalist Julie Burchill has repeatedly attempted both to defend, and claim for herself, a chav identity and in 2005, the tabloid newspaper The Sun, a propagator of chav hate, ran a ‘Proud to be Chav’ campaign. Nevertheless, this ‘chav pride’ is deceptive, for like the US term ‘white trash’ – now widely adopted within celebrity culture – this ‘pride’ works as an enabling identity category only for those who have acquired enough cultural capital and social mobility to ‘rise above the filth’. Since the publication in English of Julia Kristeva’s Power’s of Horror: An Essay on Abjection in 1982, an entire theoretical paradigm has emerged that celebrates the ‘transgressive’ potential of encounters with filth. Such theoretical ‘abject encounters’ are rarely subversive but are on the contrary an increasingly normative and problematic feature of a media and cultural studies devoid of political direction. Instead of assuming that confrontations with ‘filth’ are ‘necessarily subversive and disruptive’ we need to rethink abjection as a violent exclusionary social force. As Miller notes, ‘disgust does not so much solve the dilemma of social powerlessness as diagnose it powerfully’ (353). Theoretical accounts of media and culture that invoke ‘the transformative potential of filth’ too often marginalize the real dirty politics of inequality. References Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP and New York: Routledge, 2004. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972 [1949]. Birchill, Julie. “Yeah But, No But, Why I’m Proud to Be a Chav.” The Times 18 Feb. 2005. Chav Scum. 31 Oct. 2006 http://www.chavscum.co.uk&gt;. Golder, Scott. “Webbed Footnotes: Collaborative Annotation on the Web.” MA Thesis 2003. 31 Oct. 2006 http://web.media.mit.edu/~golder/projects/webbedfootnotes/ golder-thesis-2005.pdf&gt;. Hayward, Keith, and Majid Yar. “The ‘Chav’ Phenomenon: Consumption, Media and the Construction of a New Underclass.” Crime, Media, Culture 2.1 (2006): 9-28. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Larcombe, Duncan. “Future Bling of England.” The Sun 10 April 2006. Menninghaus, Winfried. Disgust: Theory and History of a Strong Sensation. Trans. Howard Eiland and Joel Golb. State University of New York Press, 2003. Miller, William. The Anatomy of Disgust. Harvard UP, 1998. Nayak, Anoop. Race, Place and Globalization: Youth Cultures in a Changing World. Oxford: Berg, 2003. Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings: Literature, Affect, and Ideology. Harvard UP, Cambridge, 2005. “Proud to be Chav.” The Sun. 31 Oct. 2006 http://www.thesun.co.uk&gt;. Sayer, Andrew. “What Are You Worth? Why Class Is an Embarrassing Subject.” Sociological Research Online 7.3 (2002). 31 Oct. 2006 http://www.socresonline.org.uk/7/3/sayer.html&gt;. Skeggs, Beverly. Class, Self and Culture. London. Routledge, 2005. Urbandictionary. “Chav.” 31 Oct. 2006 http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=chav&gt;. Wray, Matt, and Annalee Newitz, eds. White Trash: Race and Class in America. London: Routledge, 1997. &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; Citation reference for this article&#x0D; &#x0D; MLA Style&#x0D; Tyler, Imogen. "Chav Scum: The Filthy Politics of Social Class in Contemporary Britain." M/C Journal 9.5 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?&gt; &lt;http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/09-tyler.php&gt;. APA Style&#x0D; Tyler, I. (Nov. 2006) "Chav Scum: The Filthy Politics of Social Class in Contemporary Britain," M/C Journal, 9(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?&gt; from &lt;http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/09-tyler.php&gt;. &#x0D;

In a 1999 interview with the online magazine The AV Club, a subsidiary of satirical news website, The Onion, Bret Easton Ellis claimed: “I’ve never written a single scene that I can say took place, I’ve never written a line of dialogue that I’ve heard someone say or that I have said” (qtd. in Klein). Ten years later, in the same magazine, Ellis was reminded of this quote and asked why most of his novels have been perceived as veiled autobiographies. Ellis responded:Well, they are autobiographical in the sense that they reflect who I was at a particular moment in my life. There was talk of a memoir, and I realized why I couldn’t write a memoir, because the books are the memoir—they completely sum up how I was feeling, what I was thinking about, what my obsessions were, what I was fantasizing about, who I was, in a fictional context over the last 25 years or so (qtd. in Tobias).Despite any protestations to the contrary, Bret Easton Ellis’s novels have included various intentional and unintentional disclosures which reflect the author’s personal experiences. This pattern of self-disclosure became most overt in his most recent novel, Lunar Park (2005), in which the narrator shares a name, vocation and many aspects of his personal history with Ellis himself. After two decades and many assumptions made about Ellis’s personal life in the public media, it seems on the surface as if this novel uses disclosure as the site of closure for several rumours and relationships which have haunted his career. It is possible to see how this fictional text transgresses the boundaries between fiction and fact in an attempt to sever the feedback loop between the media’s representation of Ellis and the interpretation of his fictional texts. Yet it is important to note that with Ellis, there is always more beneath the surface. This is evident after only one chapter of Lunar Park when the novel changes form from an autobiography into a fictional ghost story, both of which are told by Bret Easton Ellis, a man who simultaneously reflects and refracts aspects of the real life author.Before analysing Lunar Park, it is helpful to consider the career trajectory which led to its creation. Bret Easton Ellis made his early fame writing semi-fictional accounts of rich, beautiful, young, yet ambitionless members of generation-X, growing up in the 1980s in America. His first novel, Less Than Zero (1985), chronicled the exploits of his protagonists as they drifted from party to party, from one meaningless sexual encounter to another; all while anesthetised on a cocktail of Valium, Prozac, Percocet and various illegal drugs. The brutal realism of his narrative, coupled with the structure—short vignettes like snapshots and short chapters told in simplistic style—led the text to be hailed as the first “MTV Novel” (Annesley 90; see also: Freese).It is not difficult to discover the many similarities that exist between the creator of Less Than Zero and his fictional creation, Clay, the novel’s narrator-protagonist. Both grew up in Los Angeles and headed east to attend a small liberal-arts college. Both Ellis’s and Clay’s parents were divorced and both young men grew up living in a house with their mother and their two sisters. Ellis’s relationship with his father was, by all accounts, as strained as what is represented in the few meetings Clay has with his own father in Less Than Zero. In these scenes, Clay describes a brief, perfunctory lunch meeting in an expensive restaurant in which Clay’s father is too preoccupied by work to acknowledge his son’s presence.Ellis’s second novel, The Rules of Attraction (1987), is set at Camden College, the same college that Clay attends in Less Than Zero. At one point, Clay even guest-narrates a chapter of The Rules of Attraction; the phrase, “people are afraid to walk across campus after midnight” (205) recalls the opening line of Less Than Zero, “people are afraid to merge on highways in Los Angeles” (5). Camden bears quite a few similarities with Bennington College, the college which Ellis himself was attending when Less Than Zero was published and Ellis was catapulted into the limelight. Even Ellis himself has admitted that the book is, “a completely fictionalized portrait of a group of people, all summations of friends I knew” (qtd. in Tobias).The authenticity of Ellis’s narrative voice was considered as an insight which came from participation (A Conversation with Bret Easton Ellis). The depiction of disenfranchised youth in the Reagan era in America was so compelling because Ellis seemed to personify and even embody the malaise and listlessness of his narrators in his public performances and interviews. In the minds of many readers and critics, Ellis’s narrators were a fictional extrapolation of Ellis himself. The association of Ellis to his fictional narrators backfired when Ellis’s third novel, American Psycho (1991), was published. The novel was criticised for its detached depiction of Patrick Bateman, who narrates in minute detail his daily routine which includes an extensive beauty regime, lunchtimes and dinnertimes spent in extravagant New York restaurants, a relationship with a fiancée and a mistress, a job on Wall Street in which he seems to do no real “work,” and his night-time hobby where brutally murders women, homeless men, gay men and even a small child. Bateman’s choice of victims can be interpreted as unconsciously aimed at anyone why may threaten his dominant position as a wealthy, white, heterosexual male. While Bateman kills as many men as he does women, his male victims are killed quickly in sudden bursts of violence. Bateman’s female victims are the subject of brutal torture, prolonged violent sexualized attacks, and in many cases inhumane post-mortem disfigurement and dismemberment.The public reception of American Psycho has been analysed as much as the text itself, (see: Murphet; Brien). Because American Psycho is narrated in the first-person voice of Bateman, there is no escape from his subjectivity. Many, including the National Organization of Women, interpreted this lack of authorial comment as Ellis’s tacit agreement and acceptance of Bateman’s behaviour. Another similar interpretation was made by Roger Rosenblatt in his pre-publication review of American Psycho in which he forthrightly encourages readers to “Snuff this Book” (Rosenblatt). Rosenblatt finds no ironic critique in Ellis’s representation of Bateman, instead finding himself at a loss to understand Ellis’s intention in writing American Psycho, saying “one only assumes, Mr. Ellis disapproves. It's a bit hard to tell what Mr. Ellis intends exactly, because he languishes so comfortably in the swamp he purports to condemn” (n.p.).In much the same way as Ellis’s previous narrators had reflected his experience and opinions, Ellis was considered as accepting and even glorifying the actions of a misogynistic serial killer. Ellis himself has commented on the popularised “misreading” of his novel: “Because I never step in anywhere and say, ‘Hey, this is all wrong,’ people get upset. That’s outrageous to me! Who’s going to say that serial killing is wrong?! Isn’t that a given? There’s no need to say that” (qtd. in. Klein)Ellis himself was treated as if he had committed the actual crimes that Patrick Bateman describes. The irony being that, as I have argued elsewhere (Phillips), there are numerous signs within the text which point to the possibility that Patrick Bateman did not commit the crimes as he claims: he can be interpreted as an unreliable narrator. Although the unreliability is Bateman’s narration doesn’t remove the effect which the reader experiences, it does indicate a distance between the author and the narrator. This distance was overlooked by many critics who interpreted Ellis as agreeing and condoning Bateman’s views and actions.When Ellis’s fourth novel, Glamorama was published, the decadent lifestyle represented in the text was again considered to be a reflection of Ellis’s personal experience. The star-studded parties and glamorous night clubs seemed to be lifted straight out of Ellis’s experience (although, no-one would ever claim that Ellis was a fashion-model-turned-international-terrorist like his narrator, Victor). One reviewer notes that “even when Bret Easton Ellis writes about killer yuppies and terrorist fashion models, a lot of people still think he's writing about himself” (Waldren).With the critical tendency to read an autobiographical confession out of Ellis’s fictional works firmly in place, it is not hard to see why Ellis decided to make the narrator of his fifth novel, Lunar Park, none other than Bret Easton Ellis himself. It is my contention that Lunar Park is the site of disclosures based on the real life of Bret Easton Ellis. I believe that Ellis chose the form of a mock-autobiography-turned-ghost-story as the site of exorcism for the many ghosts which have haunted his career, namely, his public persona and the publication of American Psycho. Ultimately, it is the exorcism of a more personal ghost, namely his father Robert Martin Ellis which provides the most private disclosure in the text and therefore the most touching, truthful and abiding site of closure for the entire novel and for Ellis himself. For ease, I will refer to the narrator of Lunar Park as Bret and the author of Lunar Park as Ellis.On the surface, it appears that Lunar Park is an autobiographical memoir. In one of the many mixed reviews of the novel (see: Murray; "Behind Bret's Mask"; Hand), Steve Almond’s title describes how Ellis masquerading as Ellis “is not a pretty sight” (Almond). The opening chapter is told in autobiographical style and charts Bret’s meteoric rise from college student to member of the literary brat pack (alongside Jay McInerney and Tama Jancowitz), to reviled author of American Psycho (1991) reaching his washed-up, drug-addled and near-death nadir during the Glamorama (1998) book tour. However, careful reading of this chapter reveals that the real-life Ellis is obscuring as much about himself as he appears to be revealing. Although it takes the form of a candid disclosure of his personal life, there are elements of the narrator’s story which do not agree with the public record of the author Ellis.The fictional Bret claims to have attended Camden College, and that his manuscript for Less Than Zero was a college project, discovered by his professor. While the plot of this story does reflect Ellis’s actual experience, he has set Bret’s story at Camden College, the fictional setting of The Rules of Attraction. By adding an element of fiction into the autobiographical account, Ellis is indicating that he is not identical to his narrating counterpart. It also signifies the Bret that exists in the fictional space whereas Ellis resides in the “real world.”In Lunar Park, Bret also talks about his relationship with Jayne Dennis. Jayne is described as a model-turned-actress, an up and coming Hollywood superstar who in the 1980s performed in films alongside Keanu Reeves. Jayne is one of the truly fictional characters in Lunar Park. She doesn’t exist outside of the text, except in two websites which were established to promote the publication of Lunar Park in 2005 (www.jaynedennis.com and www.jayne-dennis.com). While Bret and Jayne are dating, Jayne falls pregnant. Bret begs her to have an abortion. When Jayne decides to keep the child, her relationship with Bret falls apart. Bret meets his son Robby only twice from birth until the age of 10. The relationship between the fictional Bret and the fictional Jayne creates Robby, a fictional offspring who shares a name with Robert Martin Ellis (Bret and Ellis’s father).Many have been tempted to participate in Ellis’s game, to sift fact from fiction in the opening chapter of Lunar Park. Holt and Abbot published a two page point-by-point analysis of where the real-life Ellis diverged from the fictional Bret. The promotional website established by Ellis’s publisher was named www.twobrets.com to invite such a comparison. Although this game is invited by Ellis, he has also publicly stated that there is more to Lunar Park than the comparison between himself and his fictional counterpart:My worry is that people will want to know what’s true and what’s not […] All the things that are in the book—my quote-unquote autobiography—I just don’t want to answer any of those questions. I don’t like demystifying the text (qtd. in Wyatt n.p.)Although Ellis refuses to demystify the text, one of the purposes of inserting himself into the text is to trap readers in this very game, and to confuse fact with fiction. Although the text opens with a chapter which reads like Ellis’s autobiography, careful reading of the textual Bret against the extra-textual Ellis reveals that this chapter contains almost as much fiction as the “ghost story” which fills the remaining 400-odd pages. This ghost story could have been told by any first-person narrator. By writing himself into the text, Ellis is writing his public persona into the fictional character of Bret. One of the effects of blurring the lines between public and private, reality and fiction is that Ellis’s real-life disclosures invite the reader to read the fictional text against their extra-textual knowledge of Ellis himself. In this way, Ellis is able to address the many ghosts which have haunted his career—most importantly the public reception of American Psycho and his public persona. A more personal ghost is the ghost of Ellis’s father who has been written into the text, literally haunting Bret’s home with messages from beyond the grave. Closure occurs when these ghosts have been exorcised. The question is: is Lunar Park Ellis’s attempt to close down the public debates, or to add more fuel to the fire?One of the areas in which Ellis seeks to find closure is in the controversy surrounding American Psycho. Ellis uses his fictional voice to re-write the discourse surrounding the creation and reception of the text. There are deliberate contradictions in Bret’s version of writing American Psycho. In Lunar Park, Bret describes the writing process of American Psycho. In an oddly ornate passage for Ellis (who seldom uses adverbs), Bret describes how he would “fearfully watch my hands as the pen swept across the yellow legal pads” (19) blaming the “spirit” of Patrick Bateman for visiting and causing the book to be written. When it was finished, the “spirit” was “disgustingly satisfied” and stopped “gleefully haunting” Bret’s dreams. This shift in writing style may be an indication of a shift from reality into a fictionalised account of the writing of American Psycho. Much of the plot of Lunar Park is taken up with the consequences of American Psycho, when a madman starts replicating crimes exactly as they appear in the novel. It is almost as if Patrick Bateman is haunting Bret and his family. When informed that his fictional violence has disrupted his quiet suburban existence, Bret laments, “this was the moment that detractors of the book had warned me about: if anything happened to anyone as a result of the publication of this novel, Bret Easton Ellis was to blame” (181-2). By the end of Lunar Park Bret decides to “kill” Patrick Bateman once and for all, by writing an epilogue in which Bateman is burnt alive.On the surface, it appears that Lunar Park is the site of an apology about American Psycho. However, this is not entirely the case. Much of Bret’s description of writing American Psycho is contradictory to Ellis’s personal accounts where he consciously researched the gruesome details of Bateman’s crimes using an FBI training manual (Rose). Although Patrick Bateman is destroyed by the end of Lunar Park, extra-textually, neither Bret nor Ellis is not entirely apologetic for his creation. Bret argues that American Psycho was “about society and manners and mores, and not about cutting up women. How could anyone who read the book not see this?” (182). Extra-textually, in an interview Ellis admitted that when he re-read “the violence sequences I was incredibly upset and shocked […] I can't believe that I wrote that. Looking back, I realize, God, you really sort of stepped over a line there” (qtd. in Wyatt n.p.). However, in that same interview, Ellis admits to lying to reporters if he feels that the reporter is “out to get” him. Therefore, Ellis’s apology may not actually be an apology at all.Lunar Park presents an explanation about how and why American Psycho was written. This explanation is much akin to claiming that “the devil made me do it”, by arguing that Bret was possessed by “the spirit of this madman” (18). While it may seem that this explanation is an attempt to close the vast amount of discussion surrounding why American Psycho was written, Ellis is actually using his fictional persona to address the public outcry about his most controversial novel, providing an apology for a text, which is really no apology at all. Ultimately, the reliability of Bret’s account depends on the reader’s knowledge of Ellis’s public persona. This interplay between the fictional Bret and the real-life Ellis can be seen in Lunar Park’s account of the Glamorama publicity tour. In Lunar Park, Bret describes his own version of the Glamorama book tour. For Bret, this tour functions as his personal nadir, the point in his life where he hits rock bottom and looks to Jayne Dennis as his saviour. Throughout the tour, Bret describes taking all manner of drugs. At one point, threatened by his erratic behaviour, Bret’s publishers asked a personal minder to join the book tour, reporting back on Bret’s actions which include picking at nonexistent scabs, sobbing at his appearance in a hotel mirror and locking himself in a bookstore bathroom for over an hour before emerging and claiming that he had a snake living in his mouth (32-33).The reality of the Glamorama book tour is not anywhere near as wild as that described by Bret in Lunar Park. In reviews and articles addressing the real-life Glamorama book tour, there are no descriptions of these events. One article, from the The Observer (Macdonald), does describe a meeting over lunch where Ellis admits to drinking way too much the night before and then having to deal with phone calls from fans he can’t remember giving his phone-number to. However, as previously mentioned, in that same article a friend of Ellis’s is quoted as saying that Ellis frequently lies to reporters. Bret’s fictional actions seem to confirm Ellis’s real life “party boy” persona. For Moran, “the name of the author [him]self can become merely an image, either used to market a literary product directly or as a kind of free floating signifier within contemporary culture” (61). Lunar Park is about all of the connotations of the name Bret Easton Ellis. It is also a subversion of those expectations. The fictional Glamorama book tour shows Ellis’s media persona taken to an extreme until it becomes a self-embodying parody. In Lunar Park, Ellis is deliberately amplifying his public persona, accepting that no amount of truthful disclosure will erase the image of Bret-the-party-boy. However, the remainder of the novel turns this image on its head by removing Bret from New York and placing him in middle-American suburbia, married, and with two children in tow.Ultimately, although the novel appears as a transgression of fact and fiction, Bret may be the most fictional of all of Ellis’s narrators (with the exception of Patrick Bateman). Bret is married where Ellis is single. Bret is heterosexual whereas Ellis is homosexual, and used the site of Lunar Park to confirm his homosexuality. Bret has children whereas Ellis is childless. Bret has settled down into the heartland of American suburbia, a wife and two children in tow whereas Ellis has made it clear that this lifestyle is not one he is seeking. The novel is presented as the site of Ellis’s personal disclosure, and yet only creates more fictional fodder for the public image of Ellis, there are elements of true and personal disclosures from Ellis life, which he is using the text as the site for his own brand of closure. The most genuine and heartfelt closure is achieved through Ellis’s disclosure of his relationship with his father.The death of Ellis’s father, Robert Martin Ellis has an impact on both the textual and extra-textual levels of Lunar Park. Textually, the novel takes the form of a ghost story, and it is Robert himself who is haunting Bret. These spectral disturbances manifest themselves in Bret’s house which slowly transforms into a representation of his childhood home. Bret also receives nightly e-mails from the bank in which his father’s ashes have been stored in a safe-deposit box. These e-mails contain an attached video file showing the last few moments of Robert Martin Ellis’s life. Bret never finds out who filmed the video. Extra-textually, the death of Robert Martin Ellis is clearly signified in the fact that Lunar Park is dedicated to him as well as Michael Wade Kaplan, two men close to Ellis who have died. The trope of fathers haunting their sons is further highlighted by Ellis’s inter-textual references to Shakespeare’s Hamlet including a quote in the epigraph: “From the table of my memory / I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, / all saws of books, all forms, all pressures past / that youth and observation copied there” (1.5.98-101). The names of various geographical locations in Bret’s neighbourhood: Bret and Jayne live on Elsinore Lane, named for Elsinore castle, Bret also visits Fortinbras Mall, Osric hotel and Ophelia Boulevard. In Hamlet, the son is called upon by the ghost of his father to avenge his death. In Lunar Park, Bret is called upon to avenge himself against the wrongs inflicted upon him by his own father.The ambiguity of the relationships between fathers and sons is summarised in the closing passage of the novel. So, if you should see my son, tell him I say hello, be good, that I am thinking of him and that I know he’s watching over me somewhere, and not to worry: that he can always find me here, whenever he wants, right here, my arms held out and waiting, in the pages, behind the covers, at the end of Lunar Park (453).Although Bret earlier signals the reader to interpret this passage as a message from Bret to his son Robby (45), it is also possible to interpret is as a message from the fictional Robert Martin Ellis to the fictional Bret. In this reading, Lunar Park is not just a novel, a game or a post-modern deconstruction of the fact and fiction binary, it instead becomes an exorcism for the author. The process of writing Lunar Park to casts the spectre of the real-life Robert Martin Ellis out of his life to a place where Bret (and Ellis) can always find him. This relationship is the site not only of disclosure – reflecting Ellis’s own personal angst with his late father – but of closure, where Ellis has channelled his relationship and indeed exorcised his father into the text.Lunar Park contains several forms of disclosures, most of which transgress the line between fiction and fact. Lunar Park does not provide a closure from the tendency to read autobiography into Ellis’s texts, instead, chapter one provides as much fiction as fact, as evident in the discussions of American Psycho and the Glamorama book tour. Although chapter one presents in an autobiographical form, the remainder of the text reveals how fictional “Bret Easton Ellis” really is. Much of Lunar Park can be interpreted as a puzzle whose answer depends on the reader’s knowledge and understanding of the public perception, persona and profile of Bret Easton Ellis himself. Although seeming to provide closure on the surface, by playing with fiction and fact, Lunar Park only opens up more ground for discussion of Ellis, his novels, his persona and his fictional worlds. These are discussions I look forward to participating in, particularly as 2010 will see the publication of Ellis’s sixth novel (and sequel to Less Than Zero), Imperial Bedrooms.Although much of Ellis’s game in Lunar Park is to tease the reader by failing to provide true disclosures or meaningful and finite closure, the ending of the Lunar Park indicates the most honest, heartfelt and abiding closure for the text and for Ellis himself. Devoid of games and extra-textual riddles, the end of the novel is a message from a father to his son. By disclosing details of his troubled relationship with his father, both Ellis and his fictional counterpart Bret are able to exorcise the ghost of Robert Martin Ellis. As the novel closes, the ghost who haunts the text has indeed been exorcised and is now standing, with “arms held out and waiting, in the pages, behind the covers, at the end of Lunar Park” (453). ReferencesAlmond, Steve. "Ellis Masquerades as Ellis, and It Is Not a Pretty Sight." Boston Globe 14 Aug. 2005.Annesley, James. Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture and the Contemporary American Novel. London: Pluto Press, 1998."Behind Bret's Mask." Manchester Evening News 10 Oct. 2005.Brien, Donna Lee. "The Real Filth in American Psycho: A Critical Reassessment." M/C Journal 9.5 (2006). 30 Nov. 2009 &lt; http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/01-brien.php &gt;.Ellis, Bret Easton. Less than Zero. London: Vintage, 1985.–––. The Rules of Attraction. London: Vintage, 1987.–––. American Psycho. London: Picador, 1991.–––. Glamorama. New York: Knopf, 1998.–––. Lunar Park. New York: Knopf, 2005.Freese, Peter. "Bret Easton Ellis, Less than Zero; Entropy in the 'Mtv Novel'?" Modes of Narrative: Approaches to American, Canadian and British Fiction. Eds. Reingard Nishik and Barbara Korts. Wurzburg: Konighausen and Naumann, 1990. 68–87. Hand, Elizabeth. "House of Horrors; Bret Easton Ellis, the Author of 'American Psycho,' Rips into His Most Frightening Subject Yet—Himself." The Washington Post 21 Aug. 2005.Klein, Joshua. "Interview with Bret Easton Ellis." The Onion AV Club 17 Mar.(1999). 5 Sep. 2009 &lt; http://www.avclub.com/articles/bret-easton-ellis,13586/ &gt;.Macdonald, Marianna. “Interview—Bret Easton Ellis—All Cut Up.” The Observer 28 June 1998.Moran, Joe. Star Authors. London: Pluto Press, 2000.Murphet, Julian. Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho: A Reader's Guide. New York: Continuum, 2002.Murray, Noel. "Lunar Park [Review]." The Onion AV Club 2 Aug. 2005. 1 Nov. 2009 &lt; http://www.avclub.com/articles/lunar-park,4393/ &gt;.Phillips, Jennifer. "Unreliable Narration in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho: Interaction between Narrative Form and Thematic Content." Current Narratives 1.1 (2009): 60–68.Rose, Charlie. “A Conversation with Bret Easton Ellis”. The Charlie Rose Show. Prod. Charlie Rose and Yvette Vega. PBS. 7 Sep. 1994. Rosenblatt, Roger. "Snuff This Book! Will Bret Easton Ellis Get Away with Murder?" The New York Times 16 Dec. 1990: Arts.Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughrey. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992.Tobias, Scott. "Bret Easton Ellis (Interview)". The Onion AV Club 22 Apr. 2009. 31 Aug. 2009 &lt; http://www.avclub.com/articles/bret-easton-ellis%2C26988/1/ &gt;.Wyatt, Edward. "Bret Easton Ellis: The Man in the Mirror." The New York Times 7 Aug. 2005: Arts.

The Walt Disney Company has been creating magical fairy tales since the early 1900s and is a trusted brand synonymous with wholesome, family entertainment (Wasko). Over time, this reputation has resulted in the Disney brand’s huge financial growth and influence on audiences worldwide. (Wohlwend). As the largest global media powerhouse in the Western world (Beattie), Disney uses its power and influence to shape the perceptions and ideologies of its audience. In the twenty-first century there has been a proliferation of retellings of Disney fairy tales, and Kilmer suggests that although the mainstream perception is that these new iterations promote gender equity, new cultural awareness around gender stereotypes, and cultural insensitivity, this is illusory. Tangled, for example, was a popular film selling over 10 million DVD copies and positioned as a bold new female fairy tale character; however, academics took issue with this position, writing articles entitled “Race, Gender and the Politics of Hair: Disney’s Tangled Feminist Messages”, “Tangled: A Celebration of White Femininity”, and “Disney’s Tangled: Fun, But Not Feminist”, berating the film for its lack of any true feminist examples or progressiveness (Kilmer). One way to assess the impact of Disney is to look at the use of shape shifting and transformation in the narratives – particularly those that include women and young girls. Research shows that girls and women are often stereotyped and sexualised in the mass media (Smith et al.; Collins), and Disney regularly utilises body modification and metamorphosis within its narratives to emphasise what good and evil ‘look’ like. These magical transformations evoke what Marina Warner refers to as part of the necessary surprise element of the fairy tale, while creating suspense and identity with storylines and characters. In early Disney films such as the 1937 version of Snow White, the queen becomes the witch who brings a poison apple to the princess; and in the 1959 film Sleeping Beauty the ‘bad’ fairy Maleficent shapeshifts into a malevolent dragon. Whilst these ‘good to evil’ (and vice versa) tropes are easily recognised, there are additional transformations that are arguably more problematic than those of the increasingly terrifying monsters or villains. Disney has created what we have coined the ‘princess bubble’, where the physique and behaviour of the leading women in the tales has become a predictor of success and good fortune, and the impression is created of a link between their possession of beauty and the ‘happily-ever-after’ outcome received by the female character. The value, or worth, of a princess is shown within these stories to often increase according to her ability to attract men. For example, in Brave, Queen Elinor showcases the extreme measures taken to ‘present’ her daughter Merida to male suitors. Merida is preened, dressed, and shown how to behave to increase her value to her family, and whilst she manages to persuade them to set aside their patriarchal ideologies in the end, it is clear what is expected from Merida in order to gain male attention. Similarly, Cinderella, Aurora, and Snow White are found to be of high ‘worth’ by the princes on account of their beauty and form. We contend, therefore, that the impression often cast on audiences by Disney princesses emphasises that beauty = worth, no matter how transgressive Disney appears to be on the surface. These princesses are flawlessly beautiful, capable of winning the heart of the prince by triumphing over their less attractive rivals – who are often sisters or other family members. This creates the illusion among young audiences that physical attractiveness is enough to achieve success, and emphasises beauty as the priority above all else. Therefore, the Disney ‘princess bubble’ is highly problematic. It presents a narrow range of acceptability for female characters, offers a distorted view of gender, and serves to further engrain into popular culture a flawed stereotype on how to look and behave that negates a fuller representation of female characters. In addition, Armando Maggi argues that since fairy tales have been passed down through generations, they have become an intrinsic part of many people’s upbringing and are part of a kind of universal imaginary and repository of cultural values. This means that these iconic cultural stories are “unlikely to ever be discarded because they possess both a sentimental value and a moral ‘soundness’” (Rutherford 33), albeit that the lessons to be learnt are at times antiquated and exclusionary in contemporary society. The marketing and promotion of the Disney princess line has resulted in these characters becoming an extremely popular form of media and merchandise for young girls (Coyne et al. 2), and Disney has received great financial benefit from the success of its long history of popular films and merchandise. As a global corporation with influence across multiple entertainment platforms, from its streaming channel to merchandise and theme parks, the gender portrayals therefore impact on culture and, in particular, on how young audiences view gender representation. Therefore, it could be argued that Disney has a social responsibility to ensure that its messages and characters do not skew or become damaging to the psyche of its young audiences who are highly impressionable. When the representation of gender is examined, however, Disney tends to create highly gendered performances in both the early and modern iterations of fairy tales, and the princess characters remain within a narrow range of physical portrayals and agency. The Princess Bubble Although there are twelve official characters within the Disney princess umbrella, plus Elsa and Anna from the Disney Frozen franchise, this article examines the eleven characters who are either born or become royalty through marriage, and exhibit characteristics that could be argued to be the epitome of feminine representation in fairy tales. The characters within this ‘princess bubble’ are Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora, Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Tiana, Rapunzel, Merida, Elsa, and Anna. The physical appearance of those in the princess bubble also connects to displays around the physical aspects of ethnicity. Nine out of eleven are white skinned, with Jasmine having lightened in skin tone over time, and Tiana now having a tanned look rather than the original dark African American complexion seen in 2009 (Brucculieri). This reinforces an ideology that being white is superior. Every princess in our sample has thick and healthy long hair, the predominant colour being blonde. Their eyes are mostly blue, with only three possessing a dark colour, a factor which reinforces the characteristics and representation of white ethnic groups. Their eyes are also big and bulbous in shape, with large irises and pupils, and extraordinarily long eyelashes that create an almost child-like look of innocence that matches their young age. These princesses have an average age of sixteen years and are always naïve, most without formal education or worldly experience, and they have additional distinctive traits which include poise, elegance and other desired feminine characteristics – like kindness and purity. Ehrenreich and Orenstein note that the physical attributes of the Disney princesses are so evident that the creators have drawn criticism for over-glamorising them, and for their general passiveness and reliance on men for their happiness. Essentially, these women are created in the image of the ultimate male fantasy, where an increased value is placed on the virginal look, followed by a perfect tiny body and an ability to follow basic instructions. The slim bodies of these princesses are disproportionate, and include long necks, demure shoulders, medium- to large-sized perky breasts, with tiny waists, wrists, ankles and feet. Thus, it can be argued that the main theme for those within the princess bubble is their physical body and beauty, and the importance of being attractive to achieve success. The importance of the physical form is so valued that the first blessing given by the fairies to Aurora from Sleeping Beauty is the gift of physical beauty (Rutherford). Furthermore, Tanner et al. argue that the "images of love at first sight in the films encourage the belief that physical appearance is the most important thing", and these fairy tales often reflect a pattern that the prince cannot help but to instantly fall in love with these women because they are so striking. In some instances, like the stories of Cinderella and Snow White, these princesses have not uttered a single word to their prince before these men fall unconditionally and hopelessly in love. Cinderella need only to turn up at the ball as the best dressed (Parks), while Snow White must merely “wait prettily, because someday her prince will come" (Inge) to reestablish her as royalty. Disney emphasises that these princesses win their man solely on the basis that they are the most beautiful girls in the land. In Sleeping Beauty, the prince overhears Aurora’s singing and that sets his heart aflame to the point of refusing to wed the woman chosen for him at birth by the king. Fortunately, she is one and the same person, so the patriarchy survives, but this idea of beauty, and of 'love at first sight', continues to be a central part of Disney movies today, and shows that “Disney Films are vehicles of powerful gender ideologies” (Hairianto). These princesses within the bubble of perfection have priority placed on their physical and sexual beauty (Dietz), formulating a kind of ‘beauty contest motif’. Examples include Gaston, who does not love Belle in Beauty and the Beast, but simply wants her as his trophy wife because he deems her to be the most beautiful girl in the town. Ariel, from The Little Mermaid, looks as if she "was modeled after a slightly anorexic Barbie doll with thin waist and prominent bust. This representation portrays a dangerous model for young women" (Zarranz). The sexualisation of the characters continues as Jasmine has “a delicate nose and small mouth" (Lacroix), with a dress that can be considered as highly sexualised and unsuitable for a girl of sixteen (Lacroix). In Tangled, Rapunzel is held hostage in the tower by Mother Gothel because she is ‘as fragile as a flower’ and needs to be ‘kept safe’ from the harms in the world. But it is her beauty that scares the witch the most, because losing Rapunzel would leave the old woman without her magical anti-aging hair. She uses scare tactics to ensure that Rapunzel remains unseen to the world. These examples are all variations of the beauty theme, as the princesses all fall within narrow and predictable tropes of love at first sight where the woman is rescued and initiated into womanhood by being chosen by a man. Disney’s Progressive Representation? At times Disney’s portrayal of princesses appears illusively progressive, by introducing new and different variations of princesses into the fold – such as Merida in the 2012 film Brave. Unfortunately, this is merely an illusion as the ‘body-perfect’ image remains an all-important ideal to snare a prince. Merida, the young and spirited teenage princess, begins her tale determined not to conform to the desired standards set for a woman of her standing; however, when the time comes for her to be married, there is no negotiating with her mother, the queen, on dress compliance. Merida is clothed against her will to re-identify her in the manner which her parents deem appropriate. Her ability to express her identity and individuality removed, now replaced by a masked version, and thus with the true Merida lost in this transformation, her parents consider Merida to be of renewed merit and benefit to the family. This shows that Disney remains unchanged in its depiction of who may ‘fit’ within the princess bubble, because the rubric is unchanged on how to win the heart of the man. In fact, this film is possibly more troublesome than the rest because it clearly depicts her parents to deem her to be of more value only after her mother has altered her physical appearance. It is only after the total collapse of the royal family that King Fergus has a change of patriarchal heart, and in fact Disney does not portray this rumpled, ripped-sleeved version of the princess in its merchandising campaign. While the fantasy of fairy tales provides enthralling adventures that always end in happiness for the pretty princesses that encounter them, consideration must be given to all those women who have not met the standard and are left in their wake. If women do not conform to the standards of representation, they are presented as outcasts, and happiness eludes them. Cinderella, for example, has two ugly stepsisters, who, no matter how hard they might try, are unable to match her in attractiveness, kindness, or grace. Disney has embraced and not shunned Perrault’s original retelling of the tale, by ensuring that these stepsisters are ugly. They have not been blessed with any attributes whatsoever, and cannot sing, dance, or play music; nor can they sew, cook, clean, or behave respectably. These girls will never find a suitor, let alone a prince, no matter how eager they are to do so. On the physical comparison, Anastasia and Drizella have bodies that are far more rounded and voluptuous, with feet, for example, that are more than double the size of Cinderella’s magical slipper. These women clearly miss the parameters of our princess bubble, emphasising that Disney is continuing to promote dangerous narratives that could potentially harm young audience conceptions of femininity at an important period in their development. Therefore, despite the ‘progressive’ strides made by Disney in response to the vast criticism of their earlier films, the agency afforded to their new generation of princesses does not alter the fact that success comes to those who are beautiful. These beautiful people continue to win every time. Furthermore, Hairianto has found that it is not uncommon for the media to directly or indirectly promote “mental models of how a woman should look, speak and interact with others”, and that Disney uses its pervasive princess influence “to shape perceptions of female identity and desirability. Females are made to measure themselves against the set of values that are meted out by the films” (Hairianto). In the 2017 film Beauty and the Beast, those outside of the princess bubble are seen in the characters of the three maidens from the village who are always trying to look their very best in the hope of attracting Gaston (Rutherford). Gaston is not only disinterested but shows borderline contempt at their glances by permitting his horse to spray mud and dirt all over their fine clothing. They do not meet the beauty standard set, and instead of questioning his cruelty, the audience is left laughing at the horse’s antics. Interestingly, the earlier version of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast portrays these maidens as blonde, slim, and sexy, closely fitting the model of beauty displayed in our princess bubble; however, none match the beauty of Belle, and are therefore deemed inferior. In this manner, Disney is being irresponsible, placing little interest in the psychological ‘safety’ or affect the messages have upon young girls who will never meet these expectations (Ehrenreich; Best and Lowney; Orenstein). Furthermore, bodies are shaped and created by culture. They are central to self-identity, becoming a projection of how we see ourselves. Grosz (xii) argues that our notions of our bodies begin in physicality but are forever shaped by our interactions with social realities and cultural norms. The media are constantly filled with images that “glorify and highlight some kinds of bodies (for example, the young, able-bodied and beautiful) while ignoring or condemning others” (Jones 193), and these influences on gender, ethnicity, sexuality, race, and religion within popular culture therefore play a huge part in identity creation. In Disney films, the princess bubble constantly sings the same song, and “children view these stereotypical roles as the right and only way to behave” (Ewert). In The Princess and the Frog, Tiana’s friend Charlotte is so desperate to ‘catch’ a prince that "she humorously over-applies her makeup and adjusts her ball gown to emphasize her cleavage" (Breaux), but the point is not lost. Additionally, “making sure that girls become worthy of love seems central to Disney’s fairy tale films” (Rutherford 76), and because their fairy tales are so pervasive and popular, young viewers receive a consistent message that being beautiful and having a tiny doll-like body type is paramount. “This can be destructive for developing girls’ views and images of their own bodies, which are not proportioned the way that they see on screen” (Cordwell 21). “The strongly gendered messages present in the resolutions of the movies help to reinforce the desirability of traditional gender conformity” (England et al. 565). Conclusion The princess bubble is a phenomenon that has been seen in Disney’s representation of female characters for decades. Within this bubble there is a narrow range of representation permitted, and attempts to make the characters more progressive have instead resulted in narrow and restrictive constraints, reinforcing dangerous female stereotypes. Kilmer suggests that ultimately these representations fail to break away from “hegemonic assumptions about gender norms, class boundaries, and Caucasian privileging”. Ultimately this presents audiences with strong and persuasive messages about gender performance. Audiences conform their bodies to societal ‘rules’: “as to how we ‘wear’ and ‘use’ our bodies” (Richardson and Locks x), including for example how we should dress, what we should weigh, and how to become popular. In our global hypermediated society, viewers are constantly exposed to princesses and other appropriate bodies. These become internalised ideals and aid in positive and negative thoughts and self-identity, which in turn creates additional pressure on the female body in particular. The seemingly innocent stories with happy outcomes are therefore unrealistic and ultimately excluding of those who cannot or will not ‘fit into the princess bubble’. The princess bubble, we argue, is therefore predictable and restrictive, promoting female passiveness and a reliance of physical traits over intelligence. The dominance of beauty over all else remains the road to female success in the Disney fairy tale film. References Beauty and the Beast. Dirs. Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise. Walt Disney Productions, 1991. Film. Beauty and the Beast. Dir. Bill Condon. Walt Disney Pictures, 2017. Film. Best, Joel, and Kathleen S. Lowney. “The Disadvantage of a Good Reputation: Disney as a Target for Social Problems Claims.” The Sociological Quarterly 50 (2009): 431–449. doi:10.1111/j.1533-8525.2009.01147.x. Brave. Dirs. Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman. Walt Disney Pictures, 2012. Film. Breaux, Richard, M. “After 75 Years of Magic: Disney Answers Its Critics, Rewrites African American History, and Cashes in on Its Racist Past.” Journal of African American Studies 14 (2010): 398-416. Cinderella. Dirs. Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, and Hamilton Luske. Walt Disney Productions, 1950. Film. Collins, Rebecca L. “Content Analysis of Gender Roles in Media: Where Are We Now and Where Should We Go?” Sex Roles 64 (2011): 290–298. doi:10.1007/s11199-010-9929-5. Cordwell, Caila Leigh. The Shattered Slipper Project: The Impact of the Disney Princess Franchise on Girls Ages 6-12. Honours thesis, Southeastern University, 2016. Coyne, Sarah M., Jennifer Ruh Linder, Eric E. Rasmussen, David A. Nelson, and Victoria Birkbeck. “Pretty as a Princess: Longitudinal Effects of Engagement with Disney Princesses on Gender Stereotypes, Body Esteem, and Prosocial Behavior in Children.” Child Development 87.6 (2016): 1–17. Dietz, Tracey, L. “An Examination of Violence and Gender Role Portrayals in Video Games: Implications for Gender Socialization and Aggressive Behavior.” Sex Roles 38 (1998): 425–442. doi:10.1023/a:1018709905920. England, Dawn Elizabeth, Lara Descartes, and Melissa A. Collier-Meek. "Gender Role Portrayal and the Disney Princesses." Sex Roles 64 (2011): 555-567. Ewert, Jolene. “A Tale as Old as Time – an Analysis of Negative Stereotypes in Disney Princess Movies.” Undergraduate Research Journal for the Human Sciences 13 (2014). Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies. London, Routledge, 1994. Inge, M. Thomas. “Art, Adaptation, and Ideology: Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 32.3 (2004): 132-142. Jones, Meredith. “The Body in Popular Culture.” Being Cultural. Ed. Bruce M.Z. Cohen. Auckland University, 2012. 193-210. Kilmer, Alyson. Moving Forward? Problematic Ideology in Twenty-First Century Fairy Tale Films. Central Washington University, 2015. Lacroix, Celeste. “Images of Animated Others: The Orientalization of Disney's Cartoon Heroines from The Little Mermaid to The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” Popular Communications 2.4 (2004): 213-229. Little Mermaid, The. Dirs. Ron Clements and John Musker. Walt Disney Pictures, 1989. Film. Maggi, Armando. Preserving the Spell: Basile's "The Tale of Tales" and Its Afterlife in the Fairy-Tale Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Orenstein, Peggy. Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture. New York: HarperCollins, 2011. Parks, Kari. Mirror, Mirror: A Look at Self-Esteem &amp; Disney Princesses. Honours thesis. Ball State University, 2012. Pinocchio. Dirs. Hamilton Luske, Ben Sharpsteen, Wilfred Jackson, Jack Kinney, Norm Ferguson, Bill Roberts, and T. Lee. Walt Disney Productions, 1940. Film. Princess and the Frog, The. Dirs. Ron Clements and John Musker. Walt Disney Pictures, 2009. Film. Richardson, Niall, and Adam Locks. Body Studies: The Basics. Routledge, 2014. Rutherford, Amanda M. Happily Ever After? A Critical Examination of the Gothic in Disney Fairy Tale Films. Auckland University of Technology, 2020. Sleeping Beauty. Dirs. Clyde Geronimi, Eric Larson, Wolfgang Reitherman, and Les Clark. Walt Disney Productions, 1959. Film. Smith, Stacey L., Katherine M. Pieper, Amy Granados, and Mark Choueite. “Assessing Gender-Related Portrayals in Topgrossing G-Rated Films.” Sex Roles 62 (2010): 774–786. Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs. Dirs. David Hand, Wilfred Jackson, Ben Sharpsteen, William Cottrell, Perce Pearce, and Larry Morey. Walt Disney Productions, 1937. Film. Tangled. Dirs. Nathan Greno and Byron Howard. Walt Disney Pictures, 2010. Film. Tanner, Litsa RenÉe, Shelley A. Haddock, Toni Schindler Zimmerman, and Lori K. Lund. “Images of Couples and Families in Disney Feature-Length Animated Films.” The American Journal of Family Therapy 31 (2003): 355-373. Warner, Marina. Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds. London: Oxford UP, 2002. Wasko, Janet. Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy. Polity Press, 2001. Wohlwend, Karen E. “Damsels in Discourse: Girls Consuming and Producing Identity Texts through Disney Princess Play.” Reading Research Quarterly 44.1 (2009): 57-83. Zarranaz, L. Garcia. “Diswomen Strike Back? The Evolution of Disney's Femmes in the 1990s.” Atenea 27.2 (2007) 55-65.

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