Journal articles on the topic 'Counterculture of violence'

ABSTRACTThis article analyses the emergence of politically motivated acts of left-wing terrorism in Britain between 1967 and 1972. Through the case of the ‘Angry Brigade’, an ill-defined grouping which claimed responsibility for a number of attacks against property between 1970 and 1971, it analyses how protest and political violence emerged from discourses and events in the British New Left, the anti-war protest movements, the counterculture, and the underground press. Against common interpretations of ’68 as a watershed of naïve hopes that waned into inaction, this article identifies a consistency of political activity that developed beyond traditional party and class politics towards a more internationally aware and diverse network of struggles for civil equality. Among the shared political and cultural commitments of the counterculture, campaigns around squatting, women's liberation, or the necessity of ‘armed propaganda’ each became possible and at times overlapped. It analyses the group's development, actions, communications, as well as surrounding media discourses, subsequent police investigation, and the criminal trials of ten individuals for their involvement in the Angry Brigade. The article reappraises their overlooked historical significance among the wider countercultural militancy and discourses of political violence of the late 1960s to early 1970s.

Abstract Coloniality and Eurocentrism are entrenched in the field of international justice, reproducing a harmful dominant culture within international justice non-governmental organizations (‘IJ NGOs’) that influences how practitioners behave, interact with each other, and respond to violence and harm. The article argues that this dominant culture prioritizes punitive approaches to violence over more life-affirming forms of justice and accountability that centre healing and community. Drawing on experiences and conceptual frameworks illustrating dominant oppressive global systems and corresponding social behaviours, the authors critically examine the harms caused by the dominant culture that prevents authentic engagement with a community-led vision of systemic justice that seeks to transform the systems of oppression at the root of violence. Writing from the vantage point of their collective process of co-learning and reorientation and drawing on critical and feminist thought and praxes — including embodiment, abolition, and transformative justice — the authors offer potential ideas and practices that could contribute towards a counterculture in international justice. The article provides initial reflections on a practical framework that could reorient international justice communities of practice towards life-affirming and transformative approaches to justice that centre community-building, collective care, and solidarity.

ABSTRACT Drawing from a 2015 interview with Ramona Africa, one of only two surviving members of the MOVE Organization following its 1985 bombing by the Philadelphia police department, this article critically explores the spiritual teachings of John Africa, specifically as they relate to black liberation and a back-to-nature religiosity that sought, in the midst of urban chaos, eutopia through a praxis of absolute responsibility. By focusing on the movement and not a single (albeit tragic) event, such an approach situates the significance of a social justice mentality that sought a middle way between the 1960s Black Power movement and hippie counterculture. More than the dystopian critique highlighted in historical literature, MOVE should be seen as a dialectical and spiritual by-product of the violence associated with modern America, the divisiveness of countercultural activism it inspired, and the need for a utopian vision more respective of and more responsive to the earth and each other.

Abstract Scottish author Irvine Welsh has crafted an internally cohesive cosmology, grounded in mapping a somewhat loosely defined “chemical generation” that helped spearhead a personal brand of anti-Thatcherite counterculture (with an especially heavy focus on the marginalized, disgruntled and boisterous youths of Edinburgh). Examining some of the writer’s most recent and lesser-known works, my essay will argue that a series of archaic mythical patterns, symbols and cosmological coordinates can be shown to guide a large number of the axioms that Welsh employs to refine his own vision of a modern, emergent mythos.

This research explores the relation between the aspect of free will in the novel A Clockwork Orange to the social and cultural phenomena in the era of counterculture movement. The writer uses descriptive qualitative method to analyze the structural elements of the novel and relate them to the supporting data from external references. The objectives of the research which are presented as follows: 1) to describe the way the importance of free will affect the characters’ behavior in A Clockwork Orange, and 2) to reveal the way the importance of free will in this novel reflect the social condition during the era of counterculture movement. The writer also applies the genetic structuralism approach to focus the analysis on the element of free will and the way it relates to the elements of counterculture. The result of this research shows that there are several structural relations that connect both the aspect of free will in the novel and those in the era of counter-culture movement which consist of youth subculture, resistance against the state, and police brutality. The implication of this research is to promote the improvement of youth’s behavior and social awareness by the implementation of free will and safe environment, not by force or violence.

Abstract. This paper presents new data and reviews the available evidence pointing to the existence of three main ingredients of militant extremist mindset (MEM). Three different methods of item development identified factors that we have labeled Nastiness, Grudge, and Excuse. In other words, there are in our midst nasty people who are more prepared than others to accept, approve, or even advocate the use of violence. When such people feel a grudge, in that they see somebody as threatening to themselves (or to members of the group they belong to) or think that the world is not a hospitable place in which to live, they may resort to violence. This violence is often accompanied by an excuse or justification that refers to a higher authority or a “noble” principle such as religiosity or utopianism. Although all three ingredients may be open to intervention, Grudge might be the most amenable. Social policies related to immigration and procedures for dealing with protest counterculture may be effective in reducing MEM. The most important, however, is the need to espouse principles of diversity and tolerance.


 
 
 The purpose of this analysis is to differentiate social movements. In this instance, we will be using the hippie/counterculture movements during the 1960s and 1970s in Canada, and those that are occurring in the second decade of the twenty-first century. In particular, this analysis distinguishes right-wing extremist movements in 2016 from groups like the Hippie Movement and the Black Panther Party Movement. Specific reference will be made to contrast the social movements of the twenty-first century that are non-political in nature but are identity-based, versus movements during the 60s and 70s that were political by design and intent. Due to the non-political nature of twenty-first century Violent Transnational Social Movements, they might be characterized as fifth generation warfare, which we identify as identity-based social movements in violent conflict with other identity based social movements, this violence may be soft or hard. ‘Soft violence damages the fabric of relationships between communities as entrenches or highlights the superiority of one group over another without kinetic impact. Soft violence is harmful activities to others which stops short of physical violence’. (Kelshall, 2019) Hard violence is then recognized as when soft violence tactics result in physical violence. Insurgencies are groups that challenge and/or resist the authority of the state. There are different levels of insurgencies; and on the extreme end, there is the resistance of systemic authority.
 
 

The article offers an original close reading of some of Marcucci's most famous works between the early 60s and late 70s, chosen as examples of a situated gendered specificity of the artist's poetics. Despite the self-declared distance from neo-feminist stances, Marcucci shines for originality and controversy in the themes and practices of creation in her contemporary landscape, mostly dominated by male artists. On the one hand, we observe Marcucci’s artistic and cultural operation in Italy amid an economic boom but still suffered from the retrograde nature of the still deviously dominant fascist thinking, in conjunction with the bigotry of the catholic church, concerning women’s emancipation. On the other hand, we also observe Marcucci’s productive singularity in the context of her contemporary counterculture, which had not freed itself at all — although preaching it — from sexist power dynamics. The article aims to present a feminist lens (from male gaze to self-objectification) not as the absolute and only way of interpreting Marcucci’s verbal-visual poems, but as useful in highlighting the specific qualities of Marcucci’s research and poetics. Through the analysis of “Il Fidanzato in Fuga” (The Runaway Bride; 1964), “Noxin” (1970), “AH!” (1972), “Aa Bb Cc” (1977), and “Culturae” (1978), an attempt will be made to offer a viable course of inquiry that does not isolate Marcucci’s work from that of her male contemporaries but considers its situated specificity as a necessary stand.

Abstract Street youth groups (syg) in Morocco represent underground urban counterculture where “class conflict” is being fed by lack of opportunities to climb the social ladder. Indefinable and tormenting globalization (Montgomery, 2019; Wacquant, 2009) has psychologically and socially transformed youth into social “victims”/dreamers of a “modern” wellbeing. Social inequalities exacerbated by covid-19 pandemic produced new precarious youths at the margins of “patronaged” neoliberal policies implemented for buying social peace policies. In this context, this paper is based on an ethnographic research with “Tcharmil” Street youth in the neighborhood of Sidi Moussa in Sale, twin city of the Capital Rabat known for urban violence in substandard housing. In this paper, I argue that these “Mcharmlin” youth are resisting marginalization through invading streets and imposing their “subculture” as a “non-movement” (Bayat, 2013) against inequalities. These humans of Sidi Moussa who are young and poor, facing the Atlantic and far from the Capital about 30 minutes behind walled ancient city of Sale of Corsairs, dreaming of a stable life, job and respect from society, living in “Zanqa 0”. Youth refusing nothingness are invading streets which do not have even a name as all streets are numbered from 0 to 14. each narrow street faces the Atlantic either you escape, or you get stuck if you turn your back on the Atlantic.

America, while emerging as a superpower in the post1945 world, tried itsbest to acknowledge the dream which was the basis of its Puritanic origin.This white American dream is very subtly challenged by Truman Capote inhis &lsquo;true crime novel&rsquo; In Cold Blood:A True Account of a Multiple Murderand its Consequences. Beneath the conventional storyline, Capotebrilliantly interweaves the multiple layers of complexities, ultimatelypointing towards a not-so-stable post Second World War America, whichexperienced deep anxiety, suspicion and violence under a flimsy layer ofstability and prosperity. The author punctures the image of the pristineAmerican man, debates on good and bad, complicates right and wrong,blurs the gross division of protagonist and antagonist, and diffuses thewatertight partition between Christ and Satan, by portraying murderers asmetaphors of the counterculture movement which questions the truth valuebehind the civilised, white, beautiful, docile America and counter questionsevery moral ethical value that the country boasts of. Through his narrativetechnique, Capote presents the liminal space that America had been livingin. The &lsquo;new journalistic novel&rsquo; also questions the American juridical spiritand thus exposes anxieties related to law and justice. America in the 1950swas fighting the cold war outside and the counter-culture inside, andCapote, by exploring a real incident, presents it from various angles to givethe readers a concrete alternative vision. This article thus intends tocritically analyse the &lsquo;non-fiction novel&rsquo; as a significant postwar narrativethat brilliantly sketches the spirit, anxieties and chaos characterisingpostwar America by looking at the possibilities of anti-establishment whiletalking about crime itself. <em>Keywords: anxiety, chaos, murder, postwar, spirit.</em>

In Colombia, the tumultuous second half of the twentieth century kicked off with a fierce conflict between the Liberal and Conservative parties known as La Violencia (The Violence, ca. 1948-1958). Following a brief period of military rule (1953-1957), a bipartisan system of shared governance, the National Front (1958-1974), brought about some respite to the sectarian bloodshed. However, the exclusionary two-party system precipitated new lines of conflict between the state and communist guerrillas. Along with the political turmoil, the nation was also undergoing an era of profound cultural change. This essay examines three countercultural-oppositional movements that captivated a wide swath of youth in Colombia’s biggest cities during the 1960s: the canción protesta (protest song) movement, the rock and roll subculture denominated as nueva ola (new wave), and nadaísmo, a rabblerousing avantgarde literary movement. I analyze the correspondences and discontinuities in the ways adherents of these movements conceived of the ideal means to carry out social, cultural, and political resistance. While there were fundamental tensions between the “discourses of resistance” linked to these three countercultural streams, I argue that their convergence in the late 1960s facilitated the emergence of a commercial form of canción protesta.

How is pleasure structured by violence and catastrophe? This essay provides reflections on an event profusely mentioned but little understood at the time of writing, the massacre of Israeli ravers in the attack on October 7, 2023, by Palestinian militants. It is important to sketch the countercultural specificities of psychedelic trance music to appreciate how it became singularly popular in the state of Israel. It turns out the spirituality and hedonism of psytrance do not stand in opposition to the militarism of Israel but form an articulation of its disavowed settler-colonial fabric.

En México, y particularmente en las ciudades fronterizas, el fenómeno del narcotráfico ha devenido ya un estilo de vida que se ha transformado en una contracultura poseedora de su propia estética, vestimenta e incluso devociones religiosas ligadas a la violencia como pilar de su configuración. Este ensayo demuestra cómo, en su obra Sol blanco (1997), el dramaturgo Antonio Zúñiga plasma dichos comportamientos a través de personajes arquetípicos y situaciones que responden a imaginarios sociales cuya construcción se gesta mediante la identidad sexual de los actantes. Desde la perspectiva de género, se analiza la construcción de personajes tanto femeninos como masculinos, enfrentados a una jerarquía sistémica y al hiperviolento dominio “viril” que se vale de la desmedida brutalidad. The Queen of the Dust Storms: Counterculture, Gender and Power in Sol BlancoAbstractIn Mexico and its border cities, drug trafficking has become a violent lifestyle and a counterculture that has its specific aesthetics, clothing codes and religious beliefs. This article addresses the way Antonio Zúñiga, in his play Sol blanco (1997), explores behaviors found in the narco world, by means of archetypical characters whose social constructions and sexual identity are inscribed in a systemic hierarchy. The play’s female and male characters are discussed in light of gender studies to explore the way they confront a system of hyper-violent “virility” that exerts dominion through extreme forms of brutality. Recibido: 02 de mayo de 2020Aceptado: 20 de agosto de 2020

The intense historical relationship linking Jamaica and Britain to 300 years of the transatlantic slave trade and 200 years of colonialism has left 2.7 million souls living in Jamaica, 80% of African origin, 15% of mixed Creole background and 5% of Asian Indian, Chinese and European ancestry. With a per capita gross domestic product of US$4104 in 2007, one-third of the population is impoverished, the majority struggling for economic survival. The prevailing religion is Protestant, although the presence of African retentions such as Obeah and Pocomania are still widely and profoundly experienced, and the powerful Rastafarian movement emerged as a countercultural religious force after 1930. The paradox and contradictions of five centuries of Jamaican resistance to slavery and colonial oppression have spawned a tiny, resilient, creative, multicultural island people, who have achieved a worldwide philosophical, political and religious impact, phenomenal sporting prowess, astonishing musical and performing creativity, and a criminal underworld that has stunned by its propensity for violence.

The subject of this article is the historical influence of mass culture, especially visual media and rock music, on the youth of Russia and China in the process of forming their value orientations. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of changes that have occurred since the late 1980s in the context of socio-political transformations: the collapse of the Soviet Union and the beginning of reforms in China. The study focuses on the replacement of traditional cultural archetypes with new symbols of consumption, which were actively promoted through cinema, television and music. The article provides a historical analysis of the transformations of cultural preferences of young people, including the dominance of violence and sexual aggression in films, as well as the negative impact of countercultural music genres such as heavy metal and punk rock. The research methodology includes a historical and cultural approach, analysis of mass cultural phenomena and a systematic study of the influence of visual and musical media on the formation of value orientations of young people. The scientific novelty of this research article lies in revealing the profound influence of mass culture, especially visual media and countercultural music genres, on the formation of value orientations of young people. The study also emphasizes the importance of cultural and environmental components of media influence, indicating a crisis of universal humanistic values &amp;#8203;&amp;#8203;among young people. The findings indicate the need to develop programs aimed at nurturing conscious consumption of cultural products and strengthening moral guidelines through closer interaction between educational institutions and cultural institutions, which is the key to the healthy development of society. In conclusion, the work emphasizes that young people's awareness of their cultural responsibility can be an important step towards positive changes in the socio-cultural environment.

This article focuses on the women who served as volunteers in the Republican anti-fascist militias during the Spanish Civil War. Using unpublished sources from army pension records, it aims to offer an understanding of the volume and global profile of these ‘militiawomen’ by analyzing their leading role on the front line and moving beyond their well-known symbolic and countercultural value in challenging the normative femininity of the 1930s. Their story forms part of the context of political violence of the first half of the twentieth century and the genealogy of female combatants which ranges from the Mexican ‘soldaderas’, to Russian and Finnish combatants in 1918 and on to the female guerrilla fighters and anti-Francoist Maquis. Ultimately, it intends to demonstrate that the link between women and armed action did not constitute an intrinsic element of the war of 1936–1939, but instead is best understood as a conscious decision of citizens who advocated revolutionary action based on their ideology and identity of class and gender.

Abstract: Despite its countercultural origins as a movement to "reclaim birth" from alienating and violent obstetrical practices, and its importance as Black and Indigenous radical care work, contemporary home birth midwifery tends to be a "boutique" option for white consumers, while midwives of color face systemic barriers and training has often relied on a colonizing relation to non-US citizen women of color. I argue that this paradox derives from the white home birth movement's originary investments in white settler reproductive futurity: the unspoken imperative to preserve US whites' entitlements to property, family, health, and wealth from generation to generation. In this article, I examine two key phenomena of 1970s and 1980s: training clinics on the US/Mexico border and home birth manuals. These reveal that white midwives' responses to obstetrical trauma, in addition to shaping radical care practices, also underpinned a historical amnesia about the reproductive violence at the heart of colonization and racial domination. Moreover, the trauma seems to have authorized these midwives to partake in colonial dispossession themselves, asserting entitlement to Indigenous birth practices as a sort of primal commons in the name of recovering natural birth for all.

Acknowledging the significance of the COVID-19 pandemic as an exacerbating factor for precarious US communities, this article reads Tony Kushner’s critically acclaimed play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (1992-95) and Michael Henson’s collection of short stories Maggie Boylan (2015) alongside Susan Sontag (Illness as Metaphor), Jasbir Puar (The Right to Maim) and Lauren Berlant (“Slow Death”). The play and the short story collection represent examples of critiques of a deep-rooted disorder that characterizes the precaritizing American social and political system. From the severely mishandled AIDS crisis in Reagan’s conservative United States to the equally disastrous management of the opioid and meth epidemics in the 21st century, American society and politicians are failing their citizens, a failure reflected in and critiqued by literary texts. Whereas Angels in America is an overtly political drama, in which marginalized people come together to respond to political erasure and violence with imaginative countercultural utopianism, Maggie Boylan traces the gradual decay and corruption of a contemporary American community, functioning as a microcosm of the Unites States as a whole. This society is plagued by several crippling “epidemics” and “crises” that leave bodies broken and communities in tatters. Despite glimmers of hope, Kushner and Henson paint a grim picture of a sickness at the core of American society.

Recent empirical research into humour and memory attests to the fact that people remember better when they perceive a word, phrase or image to be humorous. When the proximity of multiple ethnic groups engenders jokes displaying diverse perspectives and what Henri Bergson described as ‘corrective’ satire, such jokes can help remedy racism and fear of the other. Taking a humorous or satirical stance allows artists and writers to explore alternatives to contemporary reality and to uncover truths overlooked or consciously elided by government and mass media discourse. Such is the case with the recent publications on humour discussed here. Although they vary widely by topic and time period, all focus on how power struggles, oppression and violence are represented by means of humour and satire, as well as by the not necessarily jocular but nevertheless related genres of comics and the graphic novel. Recent historical research demonstrates how these creative genres not only critique political events and figures but also preserve, in a sophisticated cultural format, their readers’ short-term everyday working memory and long-term cultural memory of prejudice, subjugation and mass murder. In these texts the authors spotlight how the primary source creators commented on historical events, incorporated historical artefacts in their works and generated countercultural memories that fill gaps in historical narratives from other sources.

In my postgraduate formation during the last years of the 80’s, we had close to thirty hospital beds in a pavilion called “sépticas” (1). In Colombia, where abortion was completely penalized, the pavilion was mostly filled with women with insecure, complicated abortions. The focus we received was technical: management of intensive care; performance of hysterectomies, colostomies, bowel resection, etc. In those times, some nurses were nuns and limited themselves to interrogating the patients to get them to “confess” what they had done to themselves in order to abort. It always disturbed me that the women who left alive, left without any advice or contraceptive method. Having asked a professor of mine, he responded with disdain: “This is a third level hospital, those things are done by nurses of the first level”.&#x0D; Seeing so much pain and death, I decided to talk to patients, and I began to understand their decision. I still remember so many deaths with sadness, but one case in particular pains me: it was a woman close to being fifty who arrived with a uterine perforation in a state of advanced sepsis. Despite the surgery and the intensive care, she passed away. I had talked to her, and she told me she was a widow, had two adult kids and had aborted because of “embarrassment towards them” because they were going to find out that she had an active sexual life. A few days after her passing, the pathology professor called me, surprised, to tell me that the uterus we had sent for pathological examination showed no pregnancy. She was a woman in a perimenopausal state with a pregnancy exam that gave a false positive due to the high levels of FSH/LH typical of her age. SHE WAS NOT PREGNANT!!! She didn’t have menstruation because she was premenopausal and a false positive led her to an unsafe abortion. Of course, the injuries caused in the attempted abortion caused the fatal conclusion, but the real underlying cause was the social taboo in respect to sexuality.&#x0D; I had to watch many adolescents and young women leave the hospital alive, but without a uterus, sometime without ovaries and with colostomies, to be looked down on by a society that blamed them for deciding to not be mothers. I had to see situation of women that arrived with their intestines protruding from their vaginas because of unsafe abortions. I saw women, who in their despair, self-inflicted injuries attempting to abort with elements such as stick, branches, onion wedges, alum bars and clothing hooks among others. Among so many deaths, it was hard not having at least one woman per day in the morgue due to an unsafe abortion.&#x0D; During those time, healthcare was not handled from the biopsychosocial, but only from the technical (2); nonetheless, in the academic evaluations that were performed, when asked about the definition of health, we had to recite the text from the International Organization of Health that included these three aspects. How contradictory!&#x0D; To give response to the health need of women and guarantee their right when I was already a professor, I began an obstetric contraceptive service in that third level hospital. There was resistance from the directors, but fortunately I was able to acquire international donations for the institution, which facilitated its acceptance. I decided to undertake a teaching career with the hope of being able to sensitize health professionals towards an integral focus of health and illness.&#x0D; When the International Conference of Population and Development (ICPD) was held in Cairo in 1994, I had already spent various years in teaching, and when I read their Action Program, I found a name for what I was working on: Sexual and Reproductive Rights. I began to incorporate the tools given by this document into my professional and teaching life. I was able to sensitize people at my countries Health Ministry, and we worked together moving it to an approach of human rights in areas of sexual and reproductive health (SRH). This new viewpoint, in addition to being integral, sought to give answers to old problems like maternal mortality, adolescent pregnancy, low contraceptive prevalence, unplanned or unwanted pregnancy or violence against women. With other sensitized people, we began with these SRH issues to permeate the Colombian Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology, some universities, and university hospitals. We are still fighting in a country that despite many difficulties has improved its indicators of SRH.&#x0D; With the experience of having labored in all sphere of these topics, we manage to create, with a handful of colleagues and friend at the Universidad El Bosque, a Master’s Program in Sexual and Reproductive Health, open to all professions, in which we broke several paradigms. A program was initiated in which the qualitative and quantitative investigation had the same weight, and some alumni of the program are now in positions of leadership in governmental and international institutions, replicating integral models. In the Latin American Federation of Obstetrics and Gynecology (FLASOG, English acronym) and in the International Federation of Obstetrics and Gynecology (FIGO), I was able to apply my experience for many years in the SRH committees of these association to benefit women and girls in the regional and global environments.&#x0D; When I think of who has inspired me in these fights, I should highlight the great feminist who have taught me and been with me in so many fights. I cannot mention them all, but I have admired the story of the life of Margaret Sanger with her persistence and visionary outlook. She fought throughout her whole life to help the women of the 20th century to be able to obtain the right to decide when and whether or not they wanted to have children (3). Of current feminist, I have had the privilege of sharing experiences with Carmen Barroso, Giselle Carino, Debora Diniz and Alejandra Meglioli, leaders of the International Planned Parenthood Federation – Western Hemisphere Region (IPPF-RHO). From my country, I want to mention my countrywoman Florence Thomas, psychologist, columnist, writer and Colombo-French feminist. She is one of the most influential and important voices in the movement for women rights in Colombia and the region. She arrived from France in the 1960’s, in the years of counterculture, the Beatles, hippies, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre, a time in which capitalism and consumer culture began to be criticized (4). It was then when they began to talk about the female body, female sexuality and when the contraceptive pill arrived like a total revolution for women. Upon its arrival in 1967, she experimented a shock because she had just assisted in a revolution and only found a country of mothers, not women (5). That was the only destiny for a woman, to be quiet and submissive. Then she realized that this could not continue, speaking of “revolutionary vanguards” in such a patriarchal environment.&#x0D; In 1986 with the North American and European feminism waves and with her academic team, they created the group “Mujer y Sociedad de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia”, incubator of great initiatives and achievements for the country (6). She has led great changes with her courage, the strength of her arguments, and a simultaneously passionate and agreeable discourse. Among her multiple books, I highlight “Conversaciones con Violeta” (7), motivated by the disdain towards feminism of some young women. She writes it as a dialogue with an imaginary daughter in which, in an intimate manner, she reconstructs the history of women throughout the centuries and gives new light of the fundamental role of feminism in the life of modern women. Another book that shows her bravery is “Había que decirlo” (8), in which she narrates the experience of her own abortion at age twenty-two in sixty’s France.&#x0D; My work experience in the IPPF-RHO has allowed me to meet leaders of all ages in diverse countries of the region, who with great mysticism and dedication, voluntarily, work to achieve a more equal and just society. I have been particularly impressed by the appropriation of the concept of sexual and reproductive rights by young people, and this has given me great hope for the future of the planet. We continue to have an incomplete agenda of the action plan of the ICPD of Cairo but seeing how the youth bravely confront the challenges motivates me to continue ahead and give my years of experience in an intergenerational work.&#x0D; In their policies and programs, the IPPF-RHO evidences great commitment for the rights and the SRH of adolescent, that are consistent with what the organization promotes, for example, 20% of the places for decision making are in hands of the young. Member organizations, that base their labor on volunteers, are true incubators of youth that will make that unassailable and necessary change of generations. In contrast to what many of us experienced, working in this complicated agenda of sexual and reproductive health without theoretical bases, today we see committed people with a solid formation to replace us. In the college of medicine at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and the College of Nursing at the Universidad El Bosque, the new generations are more motivated and empowered, with great desire to change the strict underlying structures.&#x0D; Our great worry is the onslaught of the ultra-right, a lot of times better organized than us who do support rights, that supports anti-rights group and are truly pro-life (9). Faced with this scenario, we should organize ourselves better, giving battle to guarantee the rights of women in the local, regional, and global level, aggregating the efforts of all pro-right organizations. We are now committed to the Objectives of Sustainable Development (10), understood as those that satisfy the necessities of the current generation without jeopardizing the capacity of future generations to satisfy their own necessities. This new agenda is based on:&#x0D; - The unfinished work of the Millennium Development Goals&#x0D; - Pending commitments (international environmental conventions)&#x0D; - The emergent topics of the three dimensions of sustainable development: social, economic, and environmental.&#x0D; We now have 17 objectives of sustainable development and 169 goals (11). These goals mention “universal access to reproductive health” many times. In objective 3 of this list is included guaranteeing, before the year 2030, “universal access to sexual and reproductive health services, including those of family planning, information, and education.” Likewise, objective 5, “obtain gender equality and empower all women and girls”, establishes the goal of “assuring the universal access to sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights in conformity with the action program of the International Conference on Population and Development, the Action Platform of Beijing”. It cannot be forgotten that the term universal access to sexual and reproductive health includes universal access to abortion and contraception.&#x0D; Currently, 830 women die every day through preventable maternal causes; of these deaths, 99% occur in developing countries, more than half in fragile environments and in humanitarian contexts (12). 216 million women cannot access modern contraception methods and the majority live in the nine poorest countries in the world and in a cultural environment proper to the decades of the seventies (13). This number only includes women from 15 to 49 years in any marital state, that is to say, the number that takes all women into account is much greater. Achieving the proposed objectives would entail preventing 67 million unwanted pregnancies and reducing maternal deaths by two thirds. We currently have a high, unsatisfied demand for modern contraceptives, with extremely low use of reversible, long term methods (intrauterine devices and subdermal implants) which are the most effect ones with best adherence (14).&#x0D; There is not a single objective among the 17 Objectives of Sustainable Development where contraception does not have a prominent role: from the first one that refers to ending poverty, going through the fifth one about gender equality, the tenth of inequality reduction among countries and within the same country, until the sixteenth related with peace and justice. If we want to change the world, we should procure universal access to contraception without myths or barriers. We have the moral obligation of achieving the irradiation of extreme poverty and advancing the construction of more equal, just, and happy societies.&#x0D; In emergency contraception (EC), we are very far from reaching expectations. If in reversible, long-term methods we have low prevalence, in EC the situation gets worse. Not all faculties in the region look at this topic, and where it is looked at, there is no homogeneity in content, not even within the same country. There are still myths about their real action mechanisms. There are countries, like Honduras, where it is prohibited and there is no specific medicine, the same case as in Haiti. Where it is available, access is dismal, particularly among girls, adolescents, youth, migrants, afro-descendent, and indigenous. The multiple barriers for the effective use of emergency contraceptives must be knocked down, and to work toward that we have to destroy myths and erroneous perceptions, taboos and cultural norms; achieve changes in laws and restrictive rules within countries, achieve access without barriers to the EC; work in union with other sectors; train health personnel and the community. It is necessary to transform the attitude of health personal to a service above personal opinion.&#x0D; Reflecting on what has occurred after the ICPD in Cairo, their Action Program changed how we look at the dynamics of population from an emphasis on demographics to a focus on the people and human rights. The governments agreed that, in this new focus, success was the empowerment of women and the possibility of choice through expanded access to education, health, services, and employment among others. Nonetheless, there have been unequal advances and inequality persists in our region, all the goals were not met, the sexual and reproductive goals continue beyond the reach of many women (15). There is a long road ahead until women and girls of the world can claim their rights and liberty of deciding. Globally, maternal deaths have been reduced, there is more qualified assistance of births, more contraception prevalence, integral sexuality education, and access to SRH services for adolescents are now recognized rights with great advances, and additionally there have been concrete gains in terms of more favorable legal frameworks, particularly in our region; nonetheless, although it’s true that the access condition have improved, the restrictive laws of the region expose the most vulnerable women to insecure abortions.&#x0D; There are great challenges for governments to recognize SRH and the DSR as integral parts of health systems, there is an ample agenda against women. In that sense, access to SRH is threatened and oppressed, it requires multi-sector mobilization and litigation strategies, investigation and support for the support of women’s rights as a multi-sector agenda.&#x0D; Looking forward, we must make an effort to work more with youth to advance not only the Action Program of the ICPD, but also all social movements. They are one of the most vulnerable groups, and the biggest catalyzers for change. The young population still faces many challenges, especially women and girls; young girls are in particularly high risk due to lack of friendly and confidential services related with sexual and reproductive health, gender violence, and lack of access to services. In addition, access to abortion must be improved; it is the responsibility of states to guarantee the quality and security of this access. In our region there still exist countries with completely restrictive frameworks.&#x0D; New technologies facilitate self-care (16), which will allow expansion of universal access, but governments cannot detach themselves from their responsibility. Self-care is expanding in the world and can be strategic for reaching the most vulnerable populations. There are new challenges for the same problems, that require a re-interpretation of the measures necessary to guaranty the DSR of all people, in particular women, girls, and in general, marginalized and vulnerable populations. It is necessary to take into account migrations, climate change, the impact of digital media, the resurgence of hate discourse, oppression, violence, xenophobia, homo/transphobia, and other emergent problems, as SRH should be seen within a framework of justice, not isolated.&#x0D; We should demand accountability of the 179 governments that participate in the ICPD 25 years ago and the 193 countries that signed the Sustainable Development Objectives. They should reaffirm their commitments and expand their agenda to topics not considered at that time. Our region has given the world an example with the Agreement of Montevideo, that becomes a blueprint for achieving the action plan of the CIPD and we should not allow retreat. This agreement puts people at the center, especially women, and includes the topic of abortion, inviting the state to consider the possibility of legalizing it, which opens the doors for all governments of the world to recognize that women have the right to choose on maternity. This agreement is much more inclusive:&#x0D; Considering that the gaps in health continue to abound in the region and the average statistics hide the high levels of maternal mortality, of sexually transmitted diseases, of infection by HIV/AIDS, and the unsatisfied demand for contraception in the population that lives in poverty and rural areas, among indigenous communities, and afro-descendants and groups in conditions of vulnerability like women, adolescents and incapacitated people, it is agreed: &#x0D; 33- To promote, protect, and guarantee the health and the sexual and reproductive rights that contribute to the complete fulfillment of people and social justice in a society free of any form of discrimination and violence.&#x0D; 37- Guarantee universal access to quality sexual and reproductive health services, taking into consideration the specific needs of men and women, adolescents and young, LGBT people, older people and people with incapacity, paying particular attention to people in a condition of vulnerability and people who live in rural and remote zone, promoting citizen participation in the completing of these commitments.&#x0D; 42- To guarantee, in cases in which abortion is legal or decriminalized in the national legislation, the existence of safe and quality abortion for non-desired or non-accepted pregnancies and instigate the other States to consider the possibility of modifying public laws, norms, strategies, and public policy on the voluntary interruption of pregnancy to save the life and health of pregnant adolescent women, improving their quality of life and decreasing the number of abortions (17).

Background Research on children's play asserts that children's identities are performed and (re)formed in peer groups where they try out identities and make sense of their social worlds. Yet there are kinds of play (e.g., violence, gore, sexuality, and consumer culture) that are often hidden and taken underground, deemed inappropriate for public spaces. These underground spaces are potentially revolutionary (#playrevolution) as children disrupt power hierarchies and regulatory boundaries in both subtle and overt ways. These spaces are important for children who are consistently marginalized by intersecting identities, further complicated by negative perceptions attached to certain topics constituting dark play. Thus, what if we look beyond labeling certain play episodes “inappropriate” and consider how children produce and enact culture? What seems nonsensical and irrational to the adult gaze is about creative participation, agency, and autonomy for children. Focus Bakhtin described “carnival” as a countercultural space where folk ideologies dominated, hierarchies were removed, and people engaged in joyful laughter, playful mockery, and the enactment of various discourses. This unofficial space allowed for multiple voices, giving individuals an opportunity to (re)create identities in dialogue with others. For young children, free play can be considered carnivalesque—children learn to disrupt social structures and norms, question authority and power, test boundaries, and understand conflict. Taking up Bakhtin's notion of carnival, this study examines the lived experiences of young children as they construct (counter)cultural spaces of creativity, play, and resistance. Research Design Drawing from a five-month qualitative study in a Midwestern kindergarten classroom, I take up Bakhtin's notion of carnival, or the practices of everyday individuals when free from authority or boundaries. Data for this project were collected during writing workshop times, occurring 3 to 5 times per week for 45–90 minutes; the sessions were audio-recorded and transcribed, and writing samples were collected daily. The focus is on five children who sat together at the same table; limited to their table space, they navigated around curriculum while collectively cultivating their own cultural community. Through an analysis of artifacts, written texts, transcriptions, and popular media content, this study examines how children destabilize hierarchies and subvert the authority of traditional and “appropriate” genres. Conclusions Children actively took up tools and ideas from horror story genres (e.g., chainsaws, blood, and masks), while their local context served as the setting for their own stories: the nearby high school, Halloween parties, and popular costumes. They remixed stories to include curricular demands (e.g., true stories) with popular culture interests. However, they did not reveal these seemingly “inappropriate” topics to their teacher and the demands of school literacy. Their resulting written stories were not pictures of chainsaws, bloody deaths, and killer dolls: They were “masked” by attempts at writing letters underneath pictures of houses, trees, cars, rainbows, and people. Arguably, the children knew how to navigate the official space of school, understanding which ideas were appropriate for their secret conversations and which were appropriate for public sharing. In the midst of their play, children learned how to write from one another: Certain words were borrowed across the table, pictures (e.g., rainbows) symbolized common practices, and storylines were “copied” and reappropriated from others. These literacy attempts were trademarked and encoded on their written texts to signify belonging and participation at the intersection of popular culture and play.

Dalit politics in India has substantially influenced the emerging post-political discourse. They have reinstated their dialectical mode of functioning in order to circumvent the dispersed social power and the disciplinary effects of civil society, albeit in its selective celebration of identity politics. However, this writing departs from locating the Dalit category as naively synonymous with the notion of victimhood of upper-caste violence. Rather, we contend that it is more important to conceive of the Dalit category in symbolic sense: to stay critical to the effects of dominant culture, lest it covertly imposes itself, and simultaneously to build and promote own counterculture with all sorts of folk forms and symbolic representation of identity that nurtures the existence and dignity of the ‘other’.

Introduction The counterculture that arose during the 1960s and 1970s left lasting social and political reverberations in developed nations. This was a time of increasing affluence and liberalisation which opened up remarkable political opportunities for social change. Within this context, an array of new social movements were a vital ingredient of the ferment that saw existing norms challenged and the establishment of new rights for many oppressed groups. An expanding arena of concerns included the environmental damage caused by 200 years of industrial capitalism. This article examines one aspect of a current environment movement in Australia, the anti-Coal Seam Gas (CSG) movement, and the part played by participants. In particular, the focus is upon one action that emerged during the recent Bentley Blockade, which was a regional mobilisation against proposed unconventional gas mining (UGM) near Lismore, NSW. Over the course of the blockade, the conventional ritual of waving at passers-by was transformed into a mechanism for garnering broad community support. Arguably, this was a crucial factor in the eventual outcome. In this case, we contend that the wave, rather than a countercultural artefact being appropriated by the mainstream, represents an everyday behaviour that builds social solidarity, which is subverted to become an effective part of the repertoire of the movement. At a more general level, this article examines how counterculture and mainstream interact via the subversion of “ordinary” citizens and the role of certain cultural understandings for that purpose. We will begin by examining the nature of the counterculture and its relationship to social movements before discussing the character of the anti-CSG movement in general and the Bentley Blockade in particular, using the personal experience of one of the writers. We will then be able to explore our thesis in detail and make some concluding remarks. The Counterculture and Social Movements In this article, we follow Cox’s understanding of the counterculture as a kind of meta-movement within which specific social movements are situated. For Cox (105), the counterculture that flourished during the 1960s and 1970s was an overarching movement in which existing social relations—in particular the family—were rejected by a younger generation, who succeeded in effectively fusing previously separate political and cultural spheres of dissent into one. Cox (103-04) points out that the precondition for such a phenomenon is “free space”—conditions under which counter-hegemonic activity can occur—for example, being liberated from the constraints of working to subsist, something which the unprecedented prosperity of the post WWII years allowed. Hence, in the 1960s and 1970s, as the counterculture emerged, a wave of activism arose in the western world which later came to be referred to as new social movements. These included the civil rights movement, women’s liberation, pacifism and the anti-nuclear and environment movements. The new movements rejected established power and organisational structures and tended, some scholars argued, to cross class lines, basing their claims on non-material issues. Della Porta and Diani claim this wave of movements is characterised by: a critical ideology in relation to modernism and progress; decentralized and participatory organizational structures; defense of interpersonal solidarity against the great bureaucracies; and the reclamation of autonomous spaces, rather than material advantages. (9) This depiction clearly announces the countercultural nature of the new social movements. As Carter (91) avers, these movements attempted to bypass the state and instead mobilise civil society, employing a range of innovative tactics and strategies—the repertoire of action—which may involve breaking laws. It should be noted that over time, some of these movements did shift towards accommodation of existing power structures and became more reformist in nature, to the point of forming political parties in the case of the Greens. However, inasmuch as the counterculture represented a merging of distinctively non-mainstream ways of life with the practice of actively challenging social arrangements at a political level (Cox 18–19; Grossberg 15–18;), the tactic of mobilising civil society to join social movements demonstrates in fact a reverse direction: large numbers of people are transfigured in radical ways by their involvement in social movements. One important principle underlying much of the repertoire of action of these new movements was non-violence. Again, this signals countercultural norms of the period. As Sharp (583–86) wrote at the time, non-violence is crucial in that it denies the aggressor their rationale for violent repression. This principle is founded on the liberal notion, whose legacy goes back to Locke, that the legitimacy of the government rests upon the consent of the governed—that is, the people can withdraw their consent (Locke in Ball &amp; Dagger 92). Ghandi also relied upon this idea when formulating his non-violent approach to conflict, satyagraha (Sharp 83–84). Thus an idea that upholds the modern state is adopted by the counterculture in order to undermine it (the state), again demonstrating an instance of counterflow from the mainstream. Non-violence does not mean non-resistance. In fact, it usually involves non-compliance with a government or other authority and when practised in large numbers, can be very effective, as Ghandi and those in the civil rights movement showed. The result will be either that the government enters into negotiation with the protestors, or they can engage in violence to suppress them, which generally alienates the wider population, leading to a loss of support (Finley &amp; Soifer 104–105). Tarrow (88) makes the important point that the less threatening an action, the harder it is to repress. As a result, democratic states have generally modified their response towards the “strategic weapon of nonviolent protest and even moved towards accommodation and recognition of this tactic as legitimate” (Tarrow 172). Nevertheless, the potential for state violence remains, and the freedom to protest is proscribed by various laws. One of the key figures to emerge from the new social movements that formed an integral part of the counterculture was Bill Moyer, who, in conjunction with colleagues produced a seminal text for theorising and organising social movements (Moyer et al.). Many contemporary social movements have been significantly influenced by Moyer’s Movement Action Plan (MAP), which describes not only key theoretical concepts but is also a practical guide to movement building and achieving aims. Moyer’s model was utilised in training the Northern Rivers community in the anti-CSG movement in conjunction with the non-violent direct action (NVDA) model developed by the North-East Forest Alliance (NEFA) that resisted logging in the forests of north-eastern NSW during the late 1980s and 1990s (Ricketts 138–40). Indeed, the Northern Rivers region of NSW—dubbed the Rainbow Region—is celebrated, as a “‘meeting place’ of countercultures and for the articulation of social and environmental ideals that challenge mainstream practice” (Ward and van Vuuren 63). As Bible (6–7) outlines, the Northern Rivers’ place in countercultural history is cemented by the holding of the Aquarius Festival in Nimbin in 1973 and the consequent decision of many attendees to stay on and settle in the region. They formed new kinds of communities based on an alternative ethics that eschewed a consumerist, individualist agenda in favour of modes of existence that emphasised living in harmony with the environment. The Terania Creek campaign of the late 1970s made the region famous for its environmental activism, when the new settlers resisted the logging of Nightcap National Park using nonviolent methods (Bible 5). It was also instrumental in developing an array of ingenious actions that were used in subsequent campaigns such as the Franklin Dam blockade in Tasmania in the early 1980s (Kelly 116). Indeed, many of these earlier activists were key figures in the anti-CSG movement that has developed in the Rainbow Region over the last few years. The Anti-CSG Movement Despite opposition to other forms of UGM, such as tight sands and shale oil extraction techniques, the term anti-CSG is used here, as it still seems to attract wide recognition. Unconventional gas extraction usually involves a process called fracking, which is the injection at high pressure of water, sand and a number of highly toxic chemicals underground to release the gas that is trapped in rock formations. Among the risks attributed to fracking are contamination of aquifers, air pollution from fugitive emissions and exposure to radioactive particles with resultant threats to human and animal health, as well as an increased risk of earthquakes (Ellsworth; Hand 13; Sovacool 254–260). Additionally, the vast amount of water that is extracted in the fracking process is saline and may contain residues of the fracking chemicals, heavy metals and radioactive matter. This produced water must either be stored or treated (Howarth 273–73; Sovacool 255). Further, there is potential for accidents and incidents and there are many reports—particularly in the United States where the practice is well established—of adverse events such as compressors exploding, leaks and spills, and water from taps catching fire (Sovacool 255–257). Despite an abundance of anecdotal evidence, until recently authorities and academics believed there was not enough “rigorous evidence” to make a definitive judgment of harm to animal and human health as a result of fracking (Mitka 2135). For example, in Australia, the Queensland Government was unable to find a clear link between fracking and health complaints in the Tara gasfield (Thompson 56), even though it is known that there are fugitive emissions from these gasfields (Tait et al. 3099-103). It is within this context that grassroots opposition to UGM began in Australia. The largest and most sustained challenge has come from the Northern Rivers of New South Wales, where a company called Metgasco has been attempting to engage in UGM for a number of years. Stiff community opposition has developed over this time, with activists training, co-ordinating and organising using the principles of Moyer’s MAP and NEFA’s NVDA. Numerous community and affinity groups opposing UGM sprang up including the Lock the Gate Alliance (LTG), a grassroots organisation opposing coal and gas mining, which formed in 2010 (Lock the Gate Alliance online). The movement put up sustained resistance to Metgasco’s attempts to establish wells at Glenugie, near Grafton and Doubtful Creek, near Kyogle in 2012 and 2013, despite the use of a substantial police presence at both locations. In the event, neither site was used for production despite exploratory wells being sunk (ABC News; Dobney). Metgasco announced it would be withdrawing its operations following new Federal and State government regulations at the time of the Doubtful Creek blockade. However it returned to the fray with a formal announcement in February 2014 (Metgasco), that it would drill at Bentley, 12 kilometres west of Lismore. It was widely believed this would occur with a view to production on an industrial scale should initial exploration prove fruitful. The Bentley Blockade It was known well before the formal announcement that Metgasco planned to drill at Bentley and community actions such as flash mobs, media releases and planning meetings were part of the build-up to direct action at the site. One of the authors of this article was actively involved in the movement and participated in a variety of these actions. By the end of January 2014 it was decided to hold an ongoing vigil at the site, which was still entirely undeveloped. Participants, including one author, volunteered for four-hour shifts which began at 5 a.m. each day and before long, were lasting into the night. The purpose of a vigil is to bear witness, maintain a presence and express a point of view. It thus accords well with the principle of non-violence. Eventually the site mushroomed into a tent village with three gates being blockaded. The main gate, Gate A, sprouted a variety of poles, tripods and other installations together with colourful tents and shelters, peopled by protesters on a 24-hour basis. The vigils persisted on all three gates for the duration of the blockade. As the number of blockaders swelled, popular support grew, lending weight to the notion that countercultural ideas and practices were spreading throughout the community. In response, Metgasco called on the State Government to provide police to coincide with the arrival of equipment. It was rumoured that 200 police would be drafted to defend the site in late April. When alerts were sent out to the community warning of imminent police action, an estimated crowd of 2000 people attended in the early hours of the morning and the police called off their operation (Feliu). As the weeks wore on, training was stepped up, attendees were educated in non-violent resistance and protestors willing to act as police liaison persons were placed on a rotating roster. In May, the State Government was preparing to send up to 800 police and the Riot Squad to break the blockade (NSW Hansard in Buckingham). Local farmers (now a part of the movement) and activist leaders had gone to Sydney in an effort to find a political solution in order to avoid what threatened to be a clash that would involve police violence. A confluence of events, such as: the sudden resignation of the Premier; revelations via the Independent Commission against Corruption about nefarious dealings and undue influence of the coal industry upon the government; a radio interview with locals by a popular broadcaster in Sydney; and the reputed hesitation of the police themselves in engaging with a group of possibly 7,000 to 10,000 protestors, resulted in the Office for Coal Seam Gas suspending Metgasco’s drilling licence on 15 May (NSW Department of Resources &amp; Energy). The grounds were that the company had not adequately fulfilled its obligations to consult with the community. At the date of writing, the suspension still holds. The Wave The repertoire of contention at the Bentley Blockade was expansive, comprising most of the standard actions and strategies developed in earlier environmental struggles. These included direct blocking tactics in addition to the use of more carnivalesque actions like music and theatre, as well as the use of various media to reach a broader public. Non-violence was at the core of all actions, but we would tentatively suggest that Bentley may have provided a novel addition to the repertoire, stemming originally from the vigil, which brought the first protestors to the site. At the beginning of the vigil, which was initially held near the entrance to the proposed drilling site atop a cutting, occupants of passing vehicles below would demonstrate their support by sounding their horns and/or waving to the vigil-keepers, who at first were few in number. There was a precedent for this behaviour in the campaign leading up to the blockade. Activist groups such as the Knitting Nannas against Gas had encouraged vehicles to show support by sounding their horns. So when the motorists tooted spontaneously at Bentley, we waved back. Occupants of other vehicles would show disapproval by means of rude gestures and/or yelling and we would wave to them as well. After some weeks, as a presence began to be established at the site, it became routine for vigil keepers to smile and wave at all passing vehicles. This often elicited a positive response. After the first mass call-out discussed above, a number of us migrated to another gate, where numbers were much sparser and there was a perceived need for a greater presence. At this point, the participating writer had begun to act as a police liaison person, but the practice of waving routinely was continued. Those protecting this gate usually included protestors ready to block access, the police liaison person, a legal observer, vigil-keepers and a passing parade of visitors. Because this location was directly on the road, it was possible to see the drivers of vehicles and make eye contact more easily. Certain vehicles became familiar, passing at regular times, on the way to work or school, for example. As time passed, most of those protecting the gate also joined the waving ritual to the point where it became like a game to try to prise a signal of acknowledgement from the passing motorists, or even to win over a disapprover. Police vehicles, some of which passed at set intervals, were included in this game. Mostly they waved cheerfully. There were some we never managed to win over, but waving and making direct eye contact with regular motorists over time created a sense of community and an acknowledgement of the work we were doing, as they increasingly responded in kind. Motorists could hardly feel threatened when they encountered smiling, waving protestors. By including the disapprovers, we acted inclusively and our determined good humour seemed to de-escalate demonstrated hostility. Locals who did not want drilling to go ahead but who were nevertheless unwilling to join a direct action were thus able to participate in the resistance in a way that may have felt safe for them. Some of them even stopped and visited the site, voicing their support. Standing on the side of the road and waving to passers-by may seem peripheral to the “real” action, even trivial. But we would argue it is a valuable adjunct to a blockade (which is situated near a road) when one of the strategies of the overall campaign is to win popular backing. Hence waving, whilst not a completely new part of the repertoire, constitutes what Tilly (41–45) would call innovation at the margins, something he asserts is necessary to maintain the effectiveness and vitality of contentious action. In this case, it is arguable that the sheer size of community support probably helped to concentrate the minds of the state government politicians in Sydney, particularly as they contemplated initiating a massive, taxpayer-funded police action against the people for the benefit of a commercial operation. Waving is a symbolic gesture indicating acknowledgement and goodwill. It fits well within a repertoire based on the principle of non-violence. Moreover, it is a conventional social norm and everyday behaviour that is so innocuous that it is difficult to see how it could be suppressed by police or other authorities. Therein lies its subversiveness. For in communicating our common humanity in a spirit of friendliness, we drew attention to the fact that we were without rancour and tacitly invited others to join us and to explore our concerns. In this way, the counterculture drew upon a mainstream custom to develop and extend upon a new form of dissent. This constitutes a reversal of the more usual phenomenon of countercultural artefacts—such as “hippie clothing”—being appropriated or co-opted by the prevailing culture (see Reading). But it also fits with the more general phenomenon that we have argued was occurring; that of enticing ordinary residents into joining together in countercultural activity, via the pathway of a social movement. Conclusion The anti-CSG movement in the Northern Rivers was developed and organised by countercultural participants of previous contentious challenges. It was highly effective in building popular support whilst at the same time forging a loose coalition of various activist groups. We have surveyed one practice—the wave—that evolved out of mainstream culture over the course of the Bentley Blockade and suggested it may come to be seen as part of the repertoire of actions that can be beneficially employed under suitable conditions. Waving to passers-by invites them to become part of the movement in a non-threatening and inclusive way. It thus envelops supporters and non-supporters alike, and its very innocuousness makes it difficult to suppress. We have argued that this instance can be referenced to a similar reverse movement at a broader level—that of co-opting liberal notions and involving the general populace in new practices and activities that undermine the status quo. The ability of the counterculture in general and environment movements in particular to innovate in the quest to challenge and change what it perceives as damaging or unethical practices demonstrates its ingenuity and spirit. This movement is testament to its dynamic nature. References ABC News. Metgasco Has No CSG Extraction Plans for Glenugie. 2013. 30 July 2014 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-01-22/metgasco-says-no-csg-extraction-planned-for-glenugie/4477652›. Bible, Vanessa. 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Hand, Eric. “Injection Wells Blamed in Oklahoma Earthquakes.” Science 345.6192 (2014): 13–14. Howarth, Terry. “Should Fracking Stop?” Nature 477 (2011): 271–73. Kelly, Russell. “The Mediated Forest: Who Speaks for the Trees?” Belonging in the Rainbow Region: Cultural Perspectives on the NSW North Coast. Ed. Helen Wilson. Lismore: Southern Cross UP, 2003. 101–20. Lock the Gate Alliance. 2014. 15 July 2014 ‹http://www.lockthegate.org.au/history›. Locke, John. “Toleration and Government.” Ideals and Ideologies: A Reader. Eds. Terence Ball &amp; Richard Dagger. New York: Pearson Longman, 2004 (1823). 79–93. Metgasco. Rosella E01 Environment Approval Received 2104. 4 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.metgasco.com.au/asx-announcements/rosella-e01-environment-approval-received›. Mitka, Mike. “Rigorous Evidence Slim for Determining Health Risks from Natural Gas Fracking.” The Journal of the American Medical Association 307.20 (2012): 2135–36. 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Para Am&eacute;rica Latina la occidentalizaci&oacute;n constituye una primera ganancia: por medio de la concreci&oacute;n de ese proceso, las sociedades latinoamericanas le han impuesto una especie de h&aacute;ndicap al Primer Mundo, pues los Estados-Naci&oacute;n, al asumir el modelo de vida, de cultura y de gobierno occidental, le han plantado al Norte un modo de resistencia frente al pensamiento hegem&oacute;nico. Eso les ha posibilitado la sobrevivencia y el desarrollo como mecanismo dentro de los c&aacute;nones occidentales: el Sur con sus especificidades, pero en clave occidental. Esa realidad puede ser traducida en la occidentalizaci&oacute;n ancestral de Am&eacute;rica Latina como un proceso dial&eacute;ctico y ambivalente que consigue un acabado en la decisi&oacute;n de construir una regi&oacute;n que en cuestiones de producci&oacute;n simb&oacute;lica y de identidad entienda que existir y crecer es preciso parta de mirar de frente al Occidente desarrollado con las t&eacute;cnicas y la tecnolog&iacute;a del propio Occidente opulento.

All history of this area and the general talk and all of that is that 1973 was a turning point and the Aquarius Festival is credited with having turned this region around in so many ways, but I think that is a myth ... and I have to honour the truth; and the truth is that old Dicke Donelly came and did a Welcome to Country the night before the festival. (Joseph in Joseph and Hanley)In 1973 the Australian Union of Students (AUS) held the Aquarius Arts and Lifestyle Festival in a small, rural New South Wales town called Nimbin. The festival was seen as the peak expression of Australian counterculture and is attributed to creating the “Rainbow Region”, an area with a concentration of alternative life stylers in Northern NSW (Derrett 28). While the Aquarius Festival is recognised as a founding historical and countercultural event, the unique and important relationships established with Indigenous people at this time are generally less well known. This article investigates claims that the 1973 Aquarius Festival was “the first event in Australian history that sought permission for the use of the land from the Traditional Owners” (Joseph and Hanley). The diverse international, national and local conditions that coalesced at the Aquarius Festival suggest a fertile environment was created for reconciliatory bonds to develop. Often dismissed as a “tree hugging, soap dodging movement,” the counterculture was radically politicised having sprung from the 1960s social revolutions when the world witnessed mass demonstrations that confronted war, racism, sexism and capitalism. Primarily a youth movement, it was characterised by flamboyant dress, music, drugs and mass gatherings with universities forming the epicentre and white, middle class youth leading the charge. As their ideals of changing the world were frustrated by lack of systematic change, many decided to disengage and a migration to rural settings occurred (Jacob; Munro-Clarke; Newton). In the search for alternatives, the counterculture assimilated many spiritual practices, such as Eastern traditions and mysticism, which were previously obscure to the Western world. This practice of spiritual syncretism can be represented as a direct resistance to the hegemony of the dominant Western culture (Stell). As the new counterculture developed, its progression from urban to rural settings was driven by philosophies imbued with a desire to reconnect with and protect the natural world while simultaneously rejecting the dominant conservative order. A recurring feature of this countercultural ‘back to the land’ migration was not only an empathetic awareness of the injustices of colonial past, but also a genuine desire to learn from the Indigenous people of the land. Indigenous people were generally perceived as genuine opposers of Westernisation, inherently spiritual, ecological, tribal and communal, thus encompassing the primary values to which the counterculture was aspiring (Smith). Cultures converged. One, a youth culture rebelling from its parent culture; the other, ancient cultures reeling from the historical conquest by the youths’ own ancestors. Such cultural intersections are rich with complex scenarios and politics. As a result, often naïve, but well-intended relations were established with Native Americans, various South American Indigenous peoples, New Zealand Maori and, as this article demonstrates, the Original People of Australia (Smith; Newton; Barr-Melej; Zolov). The 1960s protest era fostered the formation of groups aiming to address a variety of issues, and at times many supported each other. Jennifer Clarke says it was the Civil Rights movement that provided the first models of dissent by formulating a “method, ideology and language of protest” as African Americans stood up and shouted prior to other movements (2). The issue of racial empowerment was not lost on Australia’s Indigenous population. Clarke writes that during the 1960s, encouraged by events overseas and buoyed by national organisation, Aborigines “slowly embarked on a political awakening, demanded freedom from the trappings of colonialism and responded to the effects of oppression at worst and neglect at best” (4). Activism of the 1960s had the “profoundly productive effect of providing Aborigines with the confidence to assert their racial identity” (159). Many Indigenous youth were compelled by the zeitgeist to address their people’s issues, fulfilling Charlie Perkins’s intentions of inspiring in Indigenous peoples a will to resist (Perkins). Enjoying new freedoms of movement out of missions, due to the 1967 Constitutional change and the practical implementation of the assimilation policy, up to 32,000 Indigenous youth moved to Redfern, Sydney between 1967 and 1972 (Foley, “An Evening With”). Gary Foley reports that a dynamic new Black Power Movement emerged but the important difference between this new younger group and the older Indigenous leaders of the day was the diverse range of contemporary influences. Taking its mantra from the Black Panther movement in America, though having more in common with the equivalent Native American Red Power movement, the Black Power Movement acknowledged many other international struggles for independence as equally inspiring (Foley, “An Evening”). People joined together for grassroots resistance, formed anti-hierarchical collectives and established solidarities between varied groups who previously would have had little to do with each other. The 1973 Aquarius Festival was directly aligned with “back to the land” philosophies. The intention was to provide a place and a reason for gathering to “facilitate exchanges on survival techniques” and to experience “living in harmony with the natural environment.” without being destructive to the land (Dunstan, “A Survival Festival”). Early documents in the archives, however, reveal no apparent interest in Australia’s Indigenous people, referring more to “silken Arabian tents, mediaeval banners, circus, jugglers and clowns, peace pipes, maypole and magic circles” (Dunstan, “A Survival Festival”). Obliterated from the social landscape and minimally referred to in the Australian education system, Indigenous people were “off the radar” to the majority mindset, and the Australian counterculture similarly was slow to appreciate Indigenous culture. Like mainstream Australia, the local counterculture movement largely perceived the “race” issue as something occurring in other countries, igniting the phrase “in your own backyard” which became a catchcry of Indigenous activists (Foley, “Whiteness and Blackness”) With no mention of any Indigenous interest, it seems likely that the decision to engage grew from the emerging climate of Indigenous activism in Australia. Frustrated by student protestors who seemed oblivious to local racial issues, focusing instead on popular international injustices, Indigenous activists accused them of hypocrisy. Aquarius Festival directors, found themselves open to similar accusations when public announcements elicited a range of responses. Once committed to the location of Nimbin, directors Graeme Dunstan and Johnny Allen began a tour of Australian universities to promote the upcoming event. While at the annual conference of AUS in January 1973 at Monash University, Dunstan met Indigenous activist Gary Foley: Gary witnessed the presentation of Johnny Allen and myself at the Aquarius Foundation session and our jubilation that we had agreement from the village residents to not only allow, but also to collaborate in the production of the Festival. After our presentation which won unanimous support, it was Gary who confronted me with the question “have you asked permission from local Aboriginal folk?” This threw me into confusion because we had seen no Aboriginals in Nimbin. (Dunstan, e-mail) Such a challenge came at a time when the historical climate was etched with political activism, not only within the student movement, but more importantly with Indigenous activists’ recent demonstrations, such as the installation in 1972 of the Tent Embassy in Canberra. As representatives of the counterculture movement, which was characterised by its inclinations towards consciousness-raising, AUS organisers were ethically obliged to respond appropriately to the questions about Indigenous permission and involvement in the Aquarius Festival at Nimbin. In addition to this political pressure, organisers in Nimbin began hearing stories of the area being cursed or taboo for women. This most likely originated from the tradition of Nimbin Rocks, a rocky outcrop one kilometre from Nimbin, as a place where only certain men could go. Jennifer Hoff explains that many major rock formations were immensely sacred places and were treated with great caution and respect. Only a few Elders and custodians could visit these places and many such locations were also forbidden for women. Ceremonies were conducted at places like Nimbin Rocks to ensure the wellbeing of all tribespeople. Stories of the Nimbin curse began to spread and most likely captivated a counterculture interested in mysticism. As organisers had hoped that news of the festival would spread on the “lips of the counterculture,” they were alarmed to hear how “fast the bad news of this curse was travelling” (Dunstan, e-mail). A diplomatic issue escalated with further challenges from the Black Power community when organisers discovered that word had spread to Sydney’s Indigenous community in Redfern. Organisers faced a hostile reaction to their alleged cultural insensitivity and were plagued by negative publicity with accusations the AUS were “violating sacred ground” (Janice Newton 62). Faced with such bad press, Dunstan was determined to repair what was becoming a public relations disaster. It seemed once prompted to the path, a sense of moral responsibility prevailed amongst the organisers and they took the unprecedented step of reaching out to Australia’s Indigenous people. Dunstan claimed that an expedition was made to the local Woodenbong mission to consult with Elder, Uncle Lyle Roberts. To connect with local people required crossing the great social divide present in that era of Australia’s history. Amy Nethery described how from the nineteenth century to the 1960s, a “system of reserves, missions and other institutions isolated, confined and controlled Aboriginal people” (9). She explains that the people were incarcerated as a solution to perceived social problems. For Foley, “the widespread genocidal activity of early “settlement” gave way to a policy of containment” (Foley, “Australia and the Holocaust”). Conditions on missions were notoriously bad with alcoholism, extreme poverty, violence, serious health issues and depression common. Of particular concern to mission administrators was the perceived need to keep Indigenous people separate from the non-indigenous population. Dunstan described the mission he visited as having “bad vibes.” He found it difficult to communicate with the elderly man, and was not sure if he understood Dunstan’s quest, as his “responses came as disjointed raves about Jesus and saving grace” (Dunstan, e-mail). Uncle Lyle, he claimed, did not respond affirmatively or negatively to the suggestion that Nimbin was cursed, and so Dunstan left assuming it was not true. Other organisers began to believe the curse and worried that female festival goers might get sick or worse, die. This interpretation reflected, as Vanessa Bible argues, a general Eurocentric misunderstanding of the relationship of Indigenous peoples with the land. Paul Joseph admits they were naïve whites coming into a place with very little understanding, “we didn’t know if we needed a witch doctor or what we needed but we knew we needed something from the Aborigines to lift the spell!”(Joseph and Hanley). Joseph, one of the first “hippies” who moved to the area, had joined forces with AUS organisers. He said, “it just felt right” to get Indigenous involvement and recounted how organisers made another trip to Woodenbong Mission to find Dickee (Richard) Donnelly, a Song Man, who was very happy to be invited. Whether the curse was valid or not it proved to be productive in further instigating respectful action. Perhaps feeling out of their depth, the organisers initiated another strategy to engage with Australian Indigenous people. A call out was sent through the AUS network to diversify the cultural input and it was recommended they engage the services of South African artist, Bauxhau Stone. Timing aligned well as in 1972 Australia had voted in a new Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam. Whitlam brought about significant political changes, many in response to socialist protests that left a buoyancy in the air for the counterculturalist movement. He made prodigious political changes in support of Indigenous people, including creating the Aboriginal Arts Board as part of the Australian Council of the Arts (ACA). As the ACA were already funding activities for the Aquarius Festival, organisers were successful in gaining two additional grants specifically for Indigenous participation (Farnham). As a result We were able to hire […] representatives, a couple of Kalahari bushmen. ‘Cause we were so dumb, we didn’t think we could speak to the black people, you know what I mean, we thought we would be rejected, or whatever, so for us to really reach out, we needed somebody black to go and talk to them, or so we thought, and it was remarkable. This one Bau, a remarkable fellow really, great artist, great character, he went all over Australia. He went to Pitjantjatjara, Yirrkala and we arranged buses and tents when they got here. We had a very large contingent of Aboriginal people come to the Aquarius Festival, thanks to Whitlam. (Joseph in Joseph and Henley) It was under the aegis of these government grants that Bauxhau Stone conducted his work. Stone embodied a nexus of contemporary issues. Acutely aware of the international movement for racial equality and its relevance to Australia, where conditions were “really appalling”, Stone set out to transform Australian race relations by engaging with the alternative arts movement (Stone). While his white Australian contemporaries may have been unaccustomed to dealing with the Indigenous racial issue, Stone was actively engaged and thus well suited to act as a cultural envoy for the Aquarius Festival. He visited several local missions, inviting people to attend and notifying them of ceremonies being conducted by respected Elders. Nimbin was then the site of the Aquarius Lifestyle and Celebration Festival, a two week gathering of alternative cultures, technologies and youth. It innovatively demonstrated its diversity of influences, attracted people from all over the world and was the first time that the general public really witnessed Australia’s counterculture (Derrett 224). As markers of cultural life, counterculture festivals of the 1960s and 1970s were as iconic as the era itself and many around the world drew on the unique Indigenous heritage of their settings in some form or another (Partridge; Perone; Broadley and Jones; Zolov). The social phenomenon of coming together to experience, celebrate and foster a sense of unity was triggered by protests, music and a simple, yet deep desire to reconnect with each other. Festivals provided an environment where the negative social pressures of race, gender, class and mores (such as clothes) were suspended and held the potential “for personal and social transformation” (St John 167). With the expressed intent to “take matters into our own hands” and try to develop alternative, innovative ways of doing things with collective participation, the Aquarius Festival thus became an optimal space for reinvigorating ancient and Indigenous ways (Dunstan, “A Survival Festival”). With philosophies that venerated collectivism, tribalism, connecting with the earth, and the use of ritual, the Indigenous presence at the Aquarius Festival gave attendees the opportunity to experience these values. To connect authentically with Nimbin’s landscape, forming bonds with the Traditional Owners was essential. Participants were very fortunate to have the presence of the last known initiated men of the area, Uncle Lyle Roberts and Uncle Dickee Donnely. These Elders represented the last vestiges of an ancient culture and conducted innovative ceremonies, song, teachings and created a sacred fire for the new youth they encountered in their land. They welcomed the young people and were very happy for their presence, believing it represented a revolutionary shift (Wedd; King; John Roberts; Cecil Roberts). Images 1 and 2: Ceremony and talks conducted at the Aquarius Festival (people unknown). Photographs reproduced by permission of photographer and festival attendee Paul White. The festival thus provided an important platform for the regeneration of cultural and spiritual practices. John Roberts, nephew of Uncle Lyle, recalled being surprised by the reaction of festival participants to his uncle: “He was happy and then he started to sing. And my God … I couldn’t get near him! There was this big ring of hippies around him. They were about twenty deep!” Sharing to an enthusiastic, captive audience had a positive effect and gave the non-indigenous a direct Indigenous encounter (Cecil Roberts; King; Oshlak). Estimates of the number of Indigenous people in attendance vary, with the main organisers suggesting 800 to 1000 and participants suggesting 200 to 400 (Stone; Wedd; Oshlak: Joseph; King; Cecil Roberts). As the Festival lasted over a two week period, many came and left within that time and estimates are at best reliant on memory, engagement and perspectives. With an estimated total attendance at the Festival between 5000 and 10,000, either number of Indigenous attendees is symbolic and a significant symbolic statistic for Indigenous and non-indigenous to be together on mutual ground in Australia in 1973. Images 3-5: Performers from Yirrkala Dance Group, brought to the festival by Stone with funding from the Federal Government. Photographs reproduced by permission of photographer and festival attendee Dr Ian Cameron. For Indigenous people, the event provided an important occasion to reconnect with their own people, to share their culture with enthusiastic recipients, as well as the chance to experience diverse aspects of the counterculture. Though the northern NSW region has a history of diverse cultural migration of Italian and Indian families, the majority of non-indigenous and Indigenous people had limited interaction with cosmopolitan influences (Kijas 20). Thus Nimbin was a conservative region and many Christianised Indigenous people were also conservative in their outlook. The Aquarius Festival changed that as the Indigenous people experienced the wide-ranging cultural elements of the alternative movement. The festival epitomised countercultural tendencies towards flamboyant fashion and hairstyles, architectural design, fantastical art, circus performance, Asian clothes and religious products, vegetarian food and nudity. Exposure to this bohemian culture would have surely led to “mind expansion and consciousness raising,” explicit aims adhered to by the movement (Roszak). Performers and participants from Africa, America and India also gave attending Indigenous Australians the opportunity to interact with non-European cultures. Many people interviewed for this paper indicated that Indigenous people’s reception of this festival experience was joyous. For Australia’s early counterculture, interest in Indigenous Australia was limited and for organisers of the AUS Aquarius Festival, it was not originally on the agenda. The counterculture in the USA and New Zealand had already started to engage with their Indigenous people some years earlier. However due to the Aquarius Festival’s origins in the student movement and its solidarities with the international Indigenous activist movement, they were forced to shift their priorities. The coincidental selection of a significant spiritual location at Nimbin to hold the festival brought up additional challenges and countercultural intrigue with mystical powers and a desire to connect authentically to the land, further prompted action. Essentially, it was the voices of empowered Indigenous activists, like Gary Foley, which in fact triggered the reaching out to Indigenous involvement. While the counterculture organisers were ultimately receptive and did act with unprecedented respect, credit must be given to Indigenous activists. The activist’s role is to trigger action and challenge thinking and in this case, it was ultimately productive. Therefore the Indigenous people were not merely passive recipients of beneficiary goodwill, but active instigators of appropriate cultural exchange. After the 1973 festival many attendees decided to stay in Nimbin to purchase land collectively and a community was born. Relationships established with local Indigenous people developed further. Upon visiting Nimbin now, one will see a vibrant visual display of Indigenous and psychedelic themed art, a central park with an open fire tended by local custodians and other Indigenous community members, an Aboriginal Centre whose rent is paid for by local shopkeepers, and various expressions of a fusion of counterculture and Indigenous art, music and dance. While it appears that reconciliation became the aspiration for mainstream society in the 1990s, Nimbin’s early counterculture history had Indigenous reconciliation at its very foundation. The efforts made by organisers of the 1973 Aquarius Festival stand as one of very few examples in Australian history where non-indigenous Australians have respectfully sought to learn from Indigenous people and to assimilate their cultural practices. It also stands as an example for the world, of reconciliation, based on hippie ideals of peace and love. They encouraged the hippies moving up here, even when they came out for Aquarius, old Uncle Lyle and Richard Donnelly, they came out and they blessed the mob out here, it was like the hairy people had come back, with the Nimbin, cause the Nimbynji is the little hairy people, so the hairy people came back (Jerome). References Barr-Melej, Patrick. “Siloísmo and the Self in Allende’s Chile: Youth, 'Total Revolution,' and the Roots of the Humanist Movement.” Hispanic American Historical Review 86.4 (Nov. 2006): 747-784. Bible, Vanessa. Aquarius Rising: Terania Creek and the Australian Forest Protest Movement. BA (Honours) Thesis. University of New England, Armidale, 2010. Broadley, Colin, and Judith Jones, eds. Nambassa: A New Direction. Auckland: Reed, 1979. Bryant, Gordon M. Parliament of Australia. Minister for Aboriginal Affairs. 1 May 1973. Australian Union of Students. Records of the AUS, 1934-1991. National Library of Australia MS ACC GB 1992.0505. Cameron, Ian. “Aquarius Festival Photographs.” 1973. Clarke, Jennifer. Aborigines and Activism: Race, Aborigines and the Coming of the Sixties to Australia. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2008. Derrett, Ross. Regional Festivals: Nourishing Community Resilience: The Nature and Role of Cultural Festivals in Northern Rivers NSW Communities. PhD Thesis. Southern Cross University, Lismore, 2008. Dunstan, Graeme. “A Survival Festival May 1973.” 1 Aug. 1972. Pamphlet. MS 6945/1. Nimbin Aquarius Festival Archives. National Library of Australia, Canberra. ---. E-mail to author, 11 July 2012. ---. “The Aquarius Festival.” Aquarius Rainbow Region. n.d. Farnham, Ken. Acting Executive Officer, Aboriginal Council for the Arts. 19 June 1973. Letter. MS ACC GB 1992.0505. Australian Union of Students. Records of the AUS, 1934-1991. National Library of Australia, Canberra. Foley, Gary. “Australia and the Holocaust: A Koori Perspective (1997).” The Koori History Website. n.d. 20 May 2013 ‹http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/essays/essay_8.html›. ---. “Whiteness and Blackness in the Koori Struggle for Self-Determination (1999).” The Koori History Website. n.d. 20 May 2013 ‹http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/essays/essay_9.html›. ---. “Black Power in Redfern 1968-1972 (2001).” The Koori History Website. n.d. 20 May 2013 ‹http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/essays/essay_1.html›. ---. “An Evening with Legendary Aboriginal Activist Gary Foley.” Conference Session. Marxism 2012 “Revolution in the Air”, Melbourne, Mar. 2012. Hoff, Jennifer. Bundjalung Jugun: Bundjalung Country. Lismore: Richmond River Historical Society, 2006. Jacob, Jeffrey. New Pioneers: The Back-to-the-Land Movement and the Search for a Sustainable Future. Pennsylvania: Penn State Press, 1997. Jerome, Burri. Interview. 31 July 2012. Joseph, Paul. Interview. 7 Aug. 2012. Joseph, Paul, and Brendan ‘Mookx’ Hanley. Interview by Rob Willis. 14 Aug. 2010. Audiofile, Session 2 of 3. nla.oh-vn4978025. Rob Willis Folklore Collection. National Library of Australia, Canberra. Kijas, Johanna, Caravans and Communes: Stories of Settling in the Tweed 1970s &amp; 1980s. Murwillumbah: Tweed Shire Council, 2011. King, Vivienne (Aunty Viv). Interview. 1 Aug. 2012. Munro-Clarke, Margaret. Communes of Rural Australia: The Movement Since 1970. Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1986. Nethery, Amy. “Aboriginal Reserves: ‘A Modern-Day Concentration Camp’: Using History to Make Sense of Australian Immigration Detention Centres.” Does History Matter? Making and Debating Citizenship, Immigration and Refugee Policy in Australia and New Zealand. Eds. Klaus Neumann and Gwenda Tavan. Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2009. 4. Newton, Janice. “Aborigines, Tribes and the Counterculture.” Social Analysis 23 (1988): 53-71. Newton, John. The Double Rainbow: James K Baxter, Ngati Hau and the Jerusalem Commune. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2009. Offord, Baden. “Mapping the Rainbow Region: Fields of Belonging and Sites of Confluence.” Transformations 2 (March 2002): 1-5. Oshlak, Al. Interview. 27 Mar. 2013. Partridge, Christopher. “The Spiritual and the Revolutionary: Alternative Spirituality, British Free Festivals, and the Emergence of Rave Culture.” Culture and Religion: An Interdisciplinary Journal 7 (2006): 3-5. Perkins, Charlie. “Charlie Perkins on 1965 Freedom Ride.” Youtube, 13 Oct. 2009. Perone, James E. Woodstock: An Encyclopedia of the Music and Art Fair. Greenwood: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2005. Roberts, John. Interview. 1 Aug. 2012. Roberts, Cecil. Interview. 6 Aug. 2012. Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. New York: University of California Press,1969. St John, Graham. “Going Feral: Authentica on the Edge of Australian culture.” The Australian Journal of Anthropology 8 (1997): 167-189. Smith, Sherry. Hippies, Indians and the Fight for Red Power. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Stell, Alex. Dancing in the Hyper-Crucible: The Rite de Passage of the Post-Rave Movement. BA (Honours) Thesis. University of Westminster, London, 2005. Stone, Trevor Bauxhau. Interview. 1 Oct. 2012. Wedd, Leila. Interview. 27 Sep. 2012. White, Paul. “Aquarius Revisited.” 1973. Zolov, Eric. Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

The capability to enact devastation that defied borders of the nation-state begged larger ethical and existential questions of nuclear power. Iterations of these moral questions found a place at the epicentre of the anti-nuclear movement in Canada from the 1950s-1990s. The South Pacific People’s Foundation (SPPF) was established in 1975 in Victoria, British Columbia in response to the growing presence of nuclear violence in the Pacific world. It propagated tenets of Indigenous sovereignty, solidarity, anti-colonialism, and peace within the Pacific. While anti-nuclear activism was already well established in Canada, it was limited in its focus on the potential threat that nuclear power posed to Canadians and neglected to confront Canadian participation in nuclear testing throughout the world. In 1982, the SPPF began publishing the journal Tok Blong (talk belongs). This paper argues that the SPPF brought an acutely Pacific perspective to the anti-nuclear movement in Canada as demonstrated through their work in Tok Blong. Particular attention is given to the SPPF’s coverage of Canadian shelling of the sacred Hawaiian island, Kaho’olawe, and representations of the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific movement. The paper is situated within post-colonial scholarship on Kaho’olawe as well as secondary literature on the anti-nuclear movement within Canada drawing particular parallels with the movement to make Canada a Nuclear-Weapon-Free-Zone. The paper will disrupt the associations of youth, whiteness, and Canadian passivity that often get assigned to anti-nuclear activism in Canada and counterculture more broadly.

Introduction The first “Aquarius Festival” came together in Canberra, at the Australian National University, in the autumn of 1971 and was reprised in 1973 in the small rural town of Nimbin, in northern New South Wales. Both events reflected the Zeitgeist in what was, in some ways, an inchoate expression of the so-called “counterculture” (Roszak). Rather than attempting to analyse the counterculture as a discrete movement with a definable history, I enlist the theory of cultural memes to read the counter culture as a Dawkinsian cluster meme, with this paper offered as “testimonio”, a form of quasi-political memoir that views shifts in the culture through the lens of personal experience (Zimmerman, Yúdice). I track an evolving personal, “internal” topography and map its points of intersection with the radical social, political and cultural changes spawned by the “consciousness revolution” that was an integral part of the counterculture emerging in the 1970s. I focus particularly on the notion of “consciousness raising”, as a Dawkinsian memetic replicator, in the context of the idealistic notions of the much-heralded “New Age” of Aquarius, and propose that this meme has been a persistent feature of the evolution of the “meme cluster” known as the counterculture. Mimesis and the Counterculture Since evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins floated the notion of cultural memes as a template to account for the evolution of ideas within political cultures, a literature of commentary and criticism has emerged that debates the strengths and weaknesses of his proposed model and its application across a number of fields. I borrow the notion to trace the influence of a set of memes that clustered around the emergence of what writer Marilyn Ferguson called The Aquarian Conspiracy, in her 1980 book of that name. Ferguson’s text, subtitled Personal and Social Transformation in Our Time, was a controversial attempt to account for what was known as the “New Age” movement, with its late millennial focus on social and personal transformation. That focus leads me to approach the counterculture (a term first floated by Theodore Roszak) less as a definable historical movement and more as a cluster of aspirational tropes expressing a range of aspects or concerns, from the overt political activism through to experimental technologies for the transformation of consciousness, and all characterised by a critical interrogation of, and resistance to, conventional social norms (Ferguson’s “personal and social transformation”). With its more overtly “spiritual” focus, I read the “New Age” meme, then, as a sub-set of this “cluster meme”, the counterculture. In my reading, “New Age” and “counterculture” overlap, sharing persistent concerns and a broad enough tent to accommodate the serious—the combative political action of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), say, (see Elbaum)—to the light-hearted—the sport of frisbee for example (Stancil). The interrogation of conventional social and political norms inherited from previous generations was a prominent strategy across both movements. Rather than offering a sociological analysis or history of the ragbag counterculture, per se, my discussion here focuses in on the particular meme of “consciousness raising” within that broader set of cultural shifts, some of which were sustained in their own right, some dropping away, and many absorbed into the dominant mainstream culture. Dawkins use of the term “meme” was rooted in the Greek mimesis, to emphasise the replication of an idea by imitation, or copying. He likened the way ideas survive and change in human culture to the natural selection of genes in biological evolution. While the transmission of memes does not depend on a physical medium, such as the DNA of biology, they replicate with a greater or lesser degree of success by harnessing human social media in a kind of “infectivity”, it is argued, through “contagious” repetition among human populations. Dawkins proposed that just as biological organisms could be said to act as “hosts” for replicating genes, in the same way people and groups of people act as hosts for replicating memes. Even before Dawkins floated his term, French biologist Jacques Monod wrote that ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms. Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an important role. (165, emphasis mine) Ideas have power, in Monod’s analysis: “They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighbouring brains, and thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains” (Monod, cited in Gleick). Emblematic of the counterculture were various “New Age” phenomena such as psychedelic drugs, art and music, with the latter contributing the “Aquarius” meme, whose theme song came from the stage musical (and later, film) Hair, and particularly the lyric that runs: “This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius”. The Australian Aquarius Festivals of 1971 and 1973 explicitly invoked this meme in the way identified by Monod and the “Aquarius” meme resonated even in Australia. Problematising “Aquarius” As for the astrological accuracy of the “Age of Aquarius meme”, professional astrologers argue about its dating, and the qualities that supposedly characterise it. When I consulted with two prominent workers in this field for the preparation of this article, I was astonished to find their respective dating of the putative Age of Aquarius were centuries apart! What memes were being “hosted” here? According to the lyrics: When the moon is in the seventh house And Jupiter aligns with Mars Then peace will guide the planets And love will steer the stars. (Hair) My astrologer informants assert that the moon is actually in the seventh house twice every year, and that Jupiter aligns with Mars every two years. Yet we are still waiting for the outbreak of peace promised according to these astrological conditions. I am also informed that there’s no “real” astrological underpinning for the aspirations of the song’s lyrics, for an astrological “Age” is not determined by any planet but by constellations rising, they tell me. Most important, contrary to the aspirations embodied in the lyrics, peace was not guiding the planets and love was not about to “steer the stars”. For Mars is not the planet of love, apparently, but of war and conflict and, empowered with the expansiveness of Jupiter, it was the forceful aggression of a militaristic mind-set that actually prevailed as the “New Age” supposedly dawned. For the hippified summer of love had taken a nosedive with the tragic events at the Altamont speedway, near San Francisco in 1969, when biker gangs, enlisted to provide security for a concert performance by The Rolling Stones allegedly provoked violence, marring the event and contributing to a dawning disillusionment (for a useful coverage of the event and its historical context see Dalton). There was a lot of far-fetched poetic licence involved in this dreaming, then, but memes, according to Nikos Salingaros, are “greatly simplified versions of patterns”. “The simpler they are, the faster they can proliferate”, he writes, and the most successful memes “come with a great psychological appeal” (243, 260; emphasis mine). What could be retrieved from this inchoate idealism? Harmony and understanding Sympathy and trust abounding No more falsehoods or derisions Golden living dreams of visions Mystic crystal revelation And the mind’s true liberation Aquarius, Aquarius. (Hair) In what follows I want to focus on this notion: “mind’s true liberation” by tracing the evolution of this project of “liberating” the mind, reflected in my personal journey. Nimbin and Aquarius I had attended the first Aquarius Festival, which came together in Canberra, at the Australian National University, in the autumn of 1971. I travelled there from Perth, overland, in a Ford Transit van, among a raggedy band of tie-dyed hippie actors, styled as The Campus Guerilla Theatre Troupe, re-joining our long-lost sisters and brothers as visionary pioneers of the New Age of Aquarius. Our visions were fueled with a suitcase full of potent Sumatran “buddha sticks” and, contrary to Biblical prophesies, we tended to see—not “through a glass darkly” but—in psychedelic, pop-, and op-art explosions of colour. We could see energy, man! Two years later, I found myself at the next Aquarius event in Nimbin, too, but by that time I inhabited a totally different mind-zone, albeit one characterised by the familiar, intense idealism. In the interim, I had been arrested in 1971 while “tripping out” in Sydney on potent “acid”, or LSD (Lysergic acid diethylamide); had tried out political engagement at the Pram Factory Theatre in Melbourne; had camped out in protest at the flooding of Lake Pedder in the Tasmanian wilderness; met a young guru, started meditating, and joined “the ashram”—part of the movement known as the Divine Light Mission, which originated in India and was carried to the “West” (including Australia) by an enthusiastic and evangelical following of drug-toking drop-outs who had been swarming through India intent on escaping the dominant culture of the military-industrial complex and the horrors of the Vietnam War. Thus, by the time of the 1973 event in Nimbin, while other festival participants were foraging for “gold top” magic mushrooms in farmers’ fields, we devotees had put aside such chemical interventions in conscious awareness to dig latrines (our “service” project for the event) and we invited everyone to join us for “satsang” in the yellow, canvas-covered, geodesic dome, to attend to the message of peace. The liberation meme had shifted through a mutation that involved lifestyle-changing choices that were less about alternative approaches to sustainable agriculture and more about engaging directly with “mind’s true liberation”. Raising Consciousness What comes into focus here is the meme of “consciousness raising”, which became the persistent project within which I lived and worked and had my being for many years. Triggered initially by the ingestion of those psychedelic substances that led to my shocking encounter with the police, the project was carried forward into the more disciplined environs of my guru’s ashrams. However, before my encounter with sustained spiritual practice I had tried to work the shift within the parameters of an ostensibly political framework. “Consciousness raising” was a form of political activism borrowed from the political sphere. Originally generated by Mao Zedong in China during the revolutionary struggle to overthrow the vested colonial interests that were choking Chinese nationalism in the 1940s, to our “distant, foreign brains” (Monod), as Western revolutionary romantics, Chairman Mao and his Little Red Book were taken up, in a kind of international counterculture solidarity with revolutionaries everywhere. It must be admitted, this solidarity was a fairly superficial gesture. Back in China it might be construed as part of a crude totalitarian campaign to inculcate Marxist-Leninist political ideas among the peasant classes (see Compestine for a fictionalised account of traumatic times; Han Suyin’s long-form autobiography—an early example of testimonio as personal and political history—offers an unapologetic account of a struggle not usually construed as sympathetically by Western commentators). But the meme (and the processes) of consciousness raising were picked up by feminists in the United States in the late 1960s and into the 1970s (Brownmiller 21) and it was in this form I encountered it as an actor with the politically engaged theatre troupe, The Australian Performing Group, at Carlton’s Pram Factory Theatre in late 1971. The Performance Group I performed as a core member of the Group in 1971-72. Decisions as to which direction the Group should take were to be made as a collective, and the group veered towards anarchy. Most of the women were getting together outside of the confines of the Pram Factory to raise their consciousness within the Carlton Women’s Liberation Cell Group. While happy that the sexual revolution was reducing women’s sexual inhibitions, some of the men at the Factory were grumbling into their beer, disturbed that intimate details of their private lives—and their sexual performance—might be disclosed and raked over by a bunch of radical feminists. As they began to demand equal rights to orgasm in the bedroom, the women started to seek equal access within the performance group, too. They requested rehearsal time to stage the first production by the Women’s Theatre Group, newly formed under the umbrella of the wider collective. As all of the acknowledged writers in the Group so far were men—some of whom had not kept pace in consciousness raising—scripts tended to be viewed as part of a patriarchal plot, so Betty Can Jump was an improvised piece, with the performance material developed entirely by the cast in workshop-style rehearsals, under the direction of Kerry Dwyer (see Blundell, Zuber-Skerritt 21, plus various contributors at www.pramfactory.com/memoirsfolder/). I was the only male in the collective included in the cast. Several women would have been more comfortable if no mere male were involved at all. My gendered attitudes would scarcely have withstood a critical interrogation but, as my partner was active in launching the Women’s Electoral Lobby, I was given the benefit of the doubt. Director Kerry Dwyer liked my physicalised approach to performance (we were both inspired by the “poor theatre” of Jerzy Grotowski and the earlier surrealistic theories of Antonin Artaud), and I was cast to play all the male parts, whatever they would be. Memorable material came up in improvisation, much of which made it into the performances, but my personal favorite didn’t make the cut. It was a sprawling movement piece where I was “born” out of a symbolic mass of writhing female bodies. It was an arduous process and, after much heaving and huffing, I emerged from the birth canal stammering “SSSS … SSSS … SSMMMO-THER”! The radical reversioning of culturally authorised roles for women has inevitably, if more slowly, led to a re-thinking of the culturally approved and reinforced models of masculinity, too, once widely accepted as entirely biologically ordained rather than culturally constructed. But the possibility of a queer re-versioning of gender would be recognised only slowly. Liberation Meanwhile, Dennis Altman was emerging as an early spokesman for gay, or homosexual, liberation and he was invited to address the collective. Altman’s stirring book, Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation, had recently been published, but none of us had read it. Radical or not, the Group had shown little evidence of sensitivity to gender-queer issues. My own sexuality was very much “oppressed” rather than liberated and I would have been loath to use “queer” to describe myself. The term “homosexual” was fraught with pejorative, quasi-medical associations and, in a collective so divided across strict and sometimes hostile gender boundaries, deviant affiliations got short shrift. Dennis was unsure of his reception before this bunch of apparent “heteros”. Sitting at the rear of the meeting, I admired his courage. It took more self-acceptance than I could muster to confront the Group on this issue at the time. Somewhere in the back of my mind, “homosexuality” was still something I was supposed to “get over”, so I failed to respond to Altman’s implicit invitation to come out and join the party. The others saw me in relationship with a woman and whatever doubts they might have carried about the nature of my sexuality were tactfully suspended. Looking back, I am struck by the number of simultaneous poses I was trying to maintain: as an actor; as a practitioner of an Artaudian “theatre of cruelty”; as a politically committed activist; and as a “hetero”-sexual. My identity was an assemblage of entities posing as “I”; it was as if I were performing a self. Little gay boys are encouraged from an early age to hide their real impulses, not only from others—in the very closest circle, the family; at school; among one’s peers—but from themselves, too. The coercive effects of shaming usually fix the denial into place in our psyches before we have any intellectual (or political) resources to consider other options. Growing up trying to please, I hid my feelings. In my experience, it could be downright dangerous to resist the subtle and gross coercions that applied around gender normativity. The psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, of the British object-relations school, argues that when the environment does not support the developing personality and requires the person to sacrifice his or her own spontaneous needs to adapt to environmental demands, there is not even a resting-place for individual experience and the result is a failure in the primary narcissistic state to evolve an individual. The “individual” then develops as an extension of the shell rather than that of the core [...] What there is left of a core is hidden away and is difficult to find even in the most far-reaching analysis. The individual then exists by not being found. The true self is hidden, and what we have to deal with clinically is the complex false self whose function is to keep this true self hidden. (212) How to connect to that hidden core, then? “Mind’s true liberation...” Alienated from the performative version of selfhood, but still inspired by the promise of liberation, even in the “fuzzy” form for which my inchoate hunger yearned (sexual liberation? political liberation? mystical liberation?), I was left to seek out a more authentic basis for selfhood, one that didn’t send me spinning along the roller-coaster of psychedelic drugs, or lie to me with the nostrums of a toxic, most forms of which would deny me, as a sexual, moral and legal pariah, the comforts of those “anchorage points to the social matrix” identified by Soddy (cited in Mol 58). My spiritual inquiry was “counter” to these institutionalised models of religious culture. So, I began to read my way through a myriad of books on comparative religion. And to my surprise, rather than taking up with the religions of antique cultures, instead I encountered a very young guru, initially as presented in a simply drawn poster in the window of Melbourne’s only vegetarian restaurant (Shakahari, in Carlton). “Are you hungry and tired of reading recipe books?” asked the figure in the poster. I had little sense of where that hunger would lead me, but it seemed to promise a fulfilment in ways that the fractious politics of the APG offered little nourishment. So, while many of my peers in the cities chose to pursue direct political action, and others experimented with cooperative living in rural communes, I chose the communal lifestyle of the ashram. In these different forms, then, the conscious raising meme persisted when other challenges raised by the counterculture either faded or were absorbed in the mainstream. I finally came to realise that the intense disillusionment process I had been through (“dis-illusionment” as the stripping away of illusions) was the beginning of awakening, in effect a “spiritual initiation” into a new way of seeing myself and my “place” in the world. Buddhist teachers might encourage this very kind of stripping away of false notions as part of their teaching, so the aspiration towards the “true liberation” of the mind expressed in the Aquarian visioning might be—and in my case, actually has been and continues to be—fulfilled to a very real extent. Gurus and the entire turn towards Eastern mysticism were part of the New Age meme cluster prevailing during the early 1970s, but I was fortunate to connect with an enduring set of empirical practices that haven’t faded with the fashions of the counterculture. A good guitarist would never want to play in public without first tuning her instrument. In a similar way, it is now possible for me to tune my mind back to a deeper, more original source of being than the socially constructed sense of self, which had been so fraught with conflicts for me. I have discovered that before gender, and before sexuality, in fact, pulsing away behind the thicket of everyday associations, there is an original, unconditioned state of beingness, the awareness of which can be reclaimed through focused meditation practices, tested in a wide variety of “real world” settings. For quite a significant period of time I worked as an instructor in the method on behalf of my guru, or mentor, travelling through a dozen or so countries, and it was through this exposure that I was able to observe that the practices worked independently of culture and that “mind’s true liberation” was in many ways a de-programming of cultural indoctrinations (see Marsh, 2014, 2013, 2011 and 2007 for testimony of this process). In Japan, Zen roshi might challenge their students with the koan: “Show me your original face, before you were born!” While that might seem to be an absurd proposal, I am finding that there is a potential, if unexpected, liberation in following through such an inquiry. As “hokey” as the Aquarian meme-set might have been, it was a reflection of the idealistic hope that characterised the cluster of memes that aggregated within the counterculture, a yearning for healthier life choices than those offered by the toxicity of the military-industrial complex, the grossly exploitative effects of rampant Capitalism and a politics of cynicism and domination. The meme of the “true liberation” of the mind, then, promised by the heady lyrics of a 1970s hippie musical, has continued to bear fruit in ways that I could not have imagined. References Altman, Dennis. Homosexual Oppression and Liberation. Sydney: Angus &amp; Robertson, 1972. Blundell, Graeme. The Naked Truth: A Life in Parts. Sydney: Hachette, 2011. Brownmiller, Susan. In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution. New York: The Dial Press, 1999. Compestine, Ying Chang. Revolution Is Not a Dinner Party. New York: Square Fish, 2009. Dalton, David. “Altamont: End of the Sixties, Or Big Mix-Up in the Middle of Nowhere?” Gadfly Nov/Dec 1999. April 2014 ‹http://www.gadflyonline.com/archive/NovDec99/archive-altamont.html›. Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1976. Elbaum, Max. Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che. London and New York: Verso, 2002. Ferguson, Marilyn. The Aquarian Conspiracy. Los Angeles: Tarcher Putnam, 1980. Gleick, James. “What Defines a Meme?” Smithsonian Magazine 2011. April 2014 ‹http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/What-Defines-a Meme.html›. Hair, The American Tribal Love Rock Musical. Prod. Michael Butler. Book by Gerome Ragni and James Rado; Lyrics by Gerome Ragni and James Rado; Music by Galt MacDermot; Musical Director: Galt MacDermot. 1968. Han, Suyin. The Crippled Tree. 1965. Reprinted. Chicago: Academy Chicago P, 1985. ---. A Mortal Flower. 1966. Reprinted. Chicago: Academy Chicago P, 1985. ---. Birdless Summer. 1968. Reprinted. Chicago: Academy Chicago P, 1985. ---. The Morning Deluge: Mao TseTung and the Chinese Revolution 1893-1954. Boston: Little Brown, 1972. ---. My House Has Two Doors. New York: Putnam, 1980. Marsh, Victor. The Boy in the Yellow Dress. Melbourne: Clouds of Magellan Press, 2014. ---. “A Touch of Silk: A (Post)modern Faerie Tale.” Griffith Review 42: Once Upon a Time in Oz (Oct. 2013): 159-69. ---. “Bent Kid, Straight World: Life Writing and the Reconfiguration of ‘Queer’.” TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses 15.1 (April 2011). ‹http://www.textjournal.com.au/april11/marsh.htm›. ---. “The Boy in the Yellow Dress: Re-framing Subjectivity in Narrativisations of the Queer Self.“ Life Writing 4.2 (Oct. 2007): 263-286. Mol, Hans. Identity and the Sacred: A Sketch for a New Social-Scientific Theory of Religion. Oxford: Blackwell, 1976. Monod, Jacques. Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970. Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. New York: Doubleday, 1968. Salingaros, Nikos. Theory of Architecture. Solingen: Umbau-Verlag, 2006. Stancil, E.D., and M.D. Johnson. Frisbee: A Practitioner’s Manual and Definitive Treatise. New York: Workman, 1975 Winnicott, D.W. Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis: Collected Papers. 1958. London: Hogarth Press, 1975. Yúdice, George. “Testimonio and Postmodernism.” Latin American Perspectives 18.3 (1991): 15-31. Zimmerman, Marc. “Testimonio.” The Sage Encyclopedia of Social Science Research Methods. Eds. Michael S. Lewis-Beck, Alan Bryman and Tim Futing Liao. London: Sage Publications, 2003. Zuber-Skerritt, Ortrun, ed. Australian Playwrights: David Williamson. Amsterdam: Rodolpi, 1988.

One significant outcome of the heteronormative symbolic violence experienced by Chinese gay people is their symbolic erasure from public discourse. Such symbolic violence is sustained by state-sponsored heteronormative ideology, adding to the weight gender minorities have to bear under non-authoritarian political contexts. Since late 2025, a novel form of resistance has gained popularity wherein gay people post and widely circulate videos that mockingly boast the idea of taking traditional Chinese medicine to “cure” their deviant sexuality on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok. This study discusses how Chinese gay people use satire to make themselves, their critique of state propaganda for traditional Chinese medicine, and disdain for heteronormative culture visible in the highly censored digital environment, thereby countering the symbolic violence that silences the gay community in public life. The analysis also invites reflection on the role and impact of satire as a tool of digital resistance.

The creation and development of a tropical gothic is arguably the most important legacy of El Grupo de Cali, an interdisciplinary collective led by writer and film critic Andrés Caicedo Estela, and filmmakers Carlos Mayolo and Luis Ospina, during the 1970s in Colombia. In El Grupo’s tropical gothic, the conventions of the literary and cinematic gothic undergo a process of transculturation and tropicalization. With this transformation, Caicedo, Mayolo and Ospina postulate a dark reality that is urban and violent, and in which youth have protagonist roles both as agents and victims of violence. The revival of the monster within this tropical gothic reveals itself as intrinsically linked not only to the influence of cinematic tropes such as Hollywood B-series vampire films, but also to the connections between local myths and legends and forms of structural violence rooted in socioeconomic, political, racial and sexual oppression. Beyond the development of a tropical gothic aesthetic, the innovations of Caicedo’s literary writing include the insistence in locating youthful characters in urban, countercultural scenarios defined by elements of popular culture such as film, popular music, or drugs. These characteristics effectively locate his writings on the flip side of magical realism and act as complements to the Grupo’s tropical gothic in their efforts to narrate the experience of the modern tropical Latin American city.

&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; The text describes the practice of the Anartist, which consists of interventions that subvert the urban space with an antagonist and countercultural spin inspired by the Black Bloc. The evil aura and the symbolic violence of the Black Blocks, a sort of magical Black Mana, are folded into a subversive aesthetic expressiveness that opens a line of escape in the urban space and provokes a viral infection in the Integrated Spectacle of Capitalism. The Anartist, a masked transpersona that can be embodied by anybody, extends the counter-spectacle of the Black Bloc destructive actions in disruptive line of flights that actualize their telluric subversion in site-specific situations of the urban space. The Anartist is a sort of simulacrum that decentralizes, remodulates and intensifies the counter-cultural mythology of Black Blocks. The practice of the Anartist, which can be defined as Disturbanism, unworks the money-form of the space, unleashing an event that is out of capitalist design but which arises from within itself as a virus that causes a negative diarrhea of dissensus. In fact, the Anarchist Disturbanist intervention can be considered as the unappropriated other that cannot be expelled outside by a totalitarian system that has no outside and returns as a viral scatological hauntology. The Anartist produces chaos, symbols and experiences through Black shit, ghosts and antagonist viruses to operate witchcraft rituals, which not only cannot be subsumed by the Capitalist Spectacle but continue to infect it in an eternal return producing a counter-culture and a counter-spell.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D;

Introduction The year 2018 saw drastic shifts in fan spaces where fan works, such as art, fiction, and videos, were once widely, openly shared, including those containing sexually explicit content, a.k.a. porno. Major catalysts were the highly contested United States legislations Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) and Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA), which addressed the liability of host sites for content shared by users. Shortly after, similar legislation appeared around the world, including Australia’s Online Safety Act 2021. In response, Websites once popular with adolescents, which were well known for the proliferation of fan works, reconfigured their terms and conditions to exclude porno. This ousted previously thriving communities, especially lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other related communities (LGBTQ+), who feared overcorrections would be exclusionary of content about sexuality and gender, broadly. This begs the questions, what drives this kind of legislation and how might it impact LGBTQ+ adolescents who often have fewer spaces for identity exploration? Building upon work by other researchers, this article asserts that there may even be potential benefits to the types of personalised and progressive pornos shared in online fan spaces, related specifically to identity development, sex education, and representation. Fandom and Porno Fan works make up a critical portion of the digital landscape that adolescents around the globe interact with every day. While not all fan works are pornos, sexually explicit material does exist on many platforms used by fans to share these transformative works (TW), including platforms which largely appeal to young people despite an overall mixed-age user base (McLelland 108–109). A fan work is considered transformative when it alters canonical events (what actually happened) in a franchise, or real life, in some meaningful way (Jenkins 47–48). TWs, unlike mainstream porno, have the benefit of being more personalisable, as they are created by fans, for fans, usually with some ability to interact with the material via embedded engagement features on the social media sites where works are hosted (McInroy and Craig, It’s Like 242–243). Also, unlike mainstream porno, fan-produced porno (FPP) has historically been created and shared by women, often utilising third-wave feminist critique to address sexual agency and shift away from the male gaze, thus creating more space for discussions about consent and sexual freedom (McLelland 111). FPP is additionally more likely to explore transformative elements that are more inclusive of LGBTQ+ content creators (McInroy et al. 632–633). While fan-produced TWs, including FPP, can be based on anything around which fandoms form, media properties most likely to inspire these works typically hold less connection to the real world, such as those based in fantasy, science fiction, and the supernatural (Hardin). This is because media properties already removed from reality more easily lend themselves to transformation. Further, the worldbuilding elements of these genres already address themes of body, agency, and belonging that women and LGBTQ+ fans are unlikely to find in other mainstream media, porno or otherwise. In spaces where adolescents are consuming FPP, they are not just passively being imprinted upon by sexually explicit material. Rather, adolescent fans contribute towards critical discussion and self-exploration via their own active production and distribution of porno through TWs (McLelland 103; McInroy and Craig, It’s Like 240). This differs from mainstream porno, which is produced by studios for adult-only audiences, often relying heavily on the male gaze and regressive tropes about sex, gender, and sexuality which do not explore agency, nor emotional or physical safety. This is not to lambast mainstream porno, simply to state that most of it is not produced with women or LGBTQ+ people’s specific wants and needs in mind. Mainstream porno, unlike fan works, is also not made with intent to heavily interact with its fans in the same way, in most cases. It certainly does not intend to interact with young fans, as that would clearly violate related legislation. There are porno conventions, just as there are pop-culture fan conventions, but fannish behaviour and critique is culturally distinct in both. FPP, by contrast, is both interactive and benefits from being about fictional characters, meaning it has the potential to subvert some, though not all, labour and obscenity laws (McLelland 109). Ostensibly, if the subjects of the work are not real, they cannot be exploited, creating a different ethical landscape from that of mainstream porno, including ethics related to consumption by minors. Fan-Produced Porno and Law Laws related to youth and porno are relatively new, showing up en masse in the 1970s and evolving based on contextual factors dictating the role of children in social life (McLelland 103–107). Legislation is also commonly intertwined with anti-porno social movements, with the dawn of laws against porno in the 1970s occurring, in part, through the split of anti-porno and pro-porno feminism (Bracewell). According to Lim et al., several academics have noted that “supporters of censorship of pornography historically have been more likely to be older, female, religious, sexually or politically conservative, more likely to show gender role stereotyping, and less likely to have ever seen pornography” (669). This is important because, as previously noted, fan works may be intended to directly challenge moralistic discourse in favour of third wave, pro-porno, feminist schools of thought, which tends to run counter to viewpoints of the above groups of people in every way except the overlap with higher interactivity of women. One of the first high-profile cases brought to court involved imagery fitting the definition of a TW. The image in question was a sexualised illustration of Rupert the Bear, a then-popular children’s character, published in Oz Magazine in an issue for young people by young people (McLelland 102–103). The artist, a fifteen-year-old boy, noted during the 1971 court case against the magazine’s editors that he drew it specifically as a countercultural statement designed to challenge the hypocrisy of the very adults it appeared to offend (McLelland 103). A major criticism of obscenity laws, in addition to being anti-feminist or anti-counterculture, is they are too contextual, and thus may over-reach without actually protecting youth at all (Al-Alosi 159), as was critiqued in the above case (McLelland). Consequently, recent attempts at legislation have focussed heavily on trafficking and other potential harms that are less politically divisive. The early 2000s and 2010s saw moral panics and Website-specific strikethroughs related to minors’ online citizenship and FPP (Hunting, McLelland), but without sweeping, associated legislation until 2018. While new laws were implemented throughout the world, over several years, the beginning of the end for Websites hosting FPP, specifically, started in the US with SESTA/FOSTA. The original intent of both acts was said to be reduction in human rights violations, specifically human trafficking. In her review of the history and implementation of SESTA/FOSTA, Cotterill notes that proponents claim exorbitant decreases in trafficking as a result of the legislation, yet fail to look at the full picture, ignoring ways in which business simply moved from one site to the next (28). She also points out the reality that the biggest drop came when Backpage.com, a main focus of the legislation, was taken down, something that occurred before SESTA/FOSTA were passed, accomplished through existing legal actions that did not require additional legislation. Despite this, similar laws were enacted elsewhere, including Australia’s Online Safety Act 2021. One of the Websites impacted upon the most by anti-porno and trafficking legislation around the globe was Tumblr. In 2018, Tumblr was one of the most heavily utilised sites for fanworks and LGBTQ+ communities (Byron 338–347). The implementation of SESTA/FOSTA led to Tumblr overhauling their terms and conditions to ban FPP (Pilipets &amp; Paasonen 472). While Tumblr does still exist at the time of writing this article, it no longer occupies the same space in the cultural milieu of fandom communities, which now favour newer sites like Archive of Our Own (Ao3) and Discord, with features created to bypass legislation (Floegel 90). While these sites evolved to subvert government censorship, it is important to note that their design approaches do not always do well to protect adolescents against other potentially harmful biopolitics, such as racism (Floegel 92). More recent debate about laws impacting on FPP, especially in online spaces, centres on laws which target the use of fictional characters specifically. Given that TWs, by definition, utilise pre-existing characters and sometimes depictions of real people, it is difficult to detangle fan works from the intended target of many of these laws, which have largely arisen in response to anonymous deep-fakes, or other imagery created using artificial intelligence (Popova, Reading). Certainly, there are ethical dilemmas worthy of public and legal debate with regards to the likenesses of celebrities and other public figures, used without permission, in sexually explicit renderings. However, when overly restrictive laws are put into place, especially with regards to fictional characters, adults may, intentionally or unintentionally, limit the agency of young people and adults alike to engage in meaningful social commentary and discourse (McLelland 113–115). Retrospective analysis of existing laws also suggests that they are largely ineffective due to underutilisation, as well as legal loopholes that stop prosecutors from successfully charging social media and Internet sites (Cotterill 27–28). Further, sex workers’ rights and advocacy groups assert that SESTA/FOSTA do more harm than good, taking down Websites these workers use to maintain social networks which can be leveraged to improve safety on the job (Cotterill 28). Legislation also does not appear to recognise, nor express interest in, the voices of young people in online content creation and dissemination, creating legislation based on dominant moral interests of adults as opposed to seeking evidentiary support of real harm (McLelland 107–114). Investigating Harms of Porno Perhaps one of the most important questions about porno, including FPP, is whether it actually causes harm, necessitating legislation. Attwood et al. note relatively little academic evidence that access to porno is universally harmful to young people, and identify ways anti-porno discourse misses opportunities to delve into responsible consumption as part of normative sexual development (3753). In a systematic review, Vertongen et al. found that “research has functioned under highly homogenised presumptions about adolescent pornography use and its effects”, meaning results about the potential harms of porno are inconclusive at best (430). These authors discuss that what has been found suggests that adolescent engagement with porno is variable across time, as well as interrelated with sexual and social maturation (433). They also note that, while some adolescents appear to use porno to inform real-life sex practices, this is not without the same speculation and critique used by adults who purport youth need to be protected from that which they do not yet understand (438). On the contrary, youth seem to understand the difference between porno and real-life sex just fine. Lastly, the authors note that when harm is present in the research, it is most often correlated with pre-existing comorbidities and dispositions in relation to violent behaviors (436). In other words, some young people probably shouldn’t consume violent porno, but risk is most prevalent for those who are already predisposed to enact violence for other reasons. There does appear to be some correlation between age of first sex and exposure to porno, though in a recent systematic analysis, Pathmendra et al. explain that most studies showing this contain substantial enough limitations, in both design and measurement, that causal inference cannot be made (5). It is also important to consider what young people themselves are saying about porno. In a synthesis of thirty qualitative studies on young people and porno, Peterson et al. found use of porno by young people was considered normative, with utilities related to “pleasure, information, and instruction in the absence of sufficient sexuality education” (171). Distress caused by porno was specific to microaggressive, misogynistic, and violent content (195). Youth in the studies analysed reported a lack of spaces to discuss what they viewed with trusted adults, thus leaving little room for corrective experiences when harm did occur (195). To be clear, the issue here was not consumption of porno, but the inability to then discuss with trusted adults. According to Lim et al., in a survey of Australian youth, the majority do believe in some, reasonable legislation, and do recognise that pornography may be harmful to some, but not all, people (668). The majority of support for legislation in the study centred on reducing depictions of violence and increasing the visible use of safer sex practices (668). It should be noted that violence is sometimes a recurring theme in certain genres of FPP. However, in many cases, violence in these pornos is more contextualised (Popova, Dubcon) than it would be in mainstream porno, and can be largely avoided by utilising filters on newer host sites. With little evidence of universal harm caused by porno, one might ask a secondary question – whether social media, through which FPP is shared, are harmful. Despite popular discourse suggesting they are, research findings are nuanced. According to Valkenburg et al., there is some consensus that active social media use (e.g., engagement) may have benefits over passive social media use (e.g., scrolling), with passive social media use being more apt to cause harm (530–531). Similar to studies about the harms of pornography, however, these authors note that studies about social media use are theoretically flawed and fail to capture the full scope and diversity of use (544). In a qualitative investigation of social media use by young people in Australia, Cooper et al. note scholarly work recognising that “adolescents and young adults develop their identities, aspirations, social supports, and autonomy via online social networks, and nurture intimate peer relationships” (536). These authors also note that online and offline relationships appear interrelated (549–551). All this suggests that social media, like porno, may be playing a normative role in the lives of adolescents, which adults should seek to better understand as opposed to broadly legislating against. Investigating Benefits of Fan Produced Porno One potential benefit of FPP is its utility as an educational tool, especially among LGBTQ+ young people. Delmonaco and Haimson found that youth already rely on online spaces, such as those containing FPP, to obtain accurate information about sexual health (832). Gameson et al. investigated the roles of online sex self-education by teens through use of porno vs. classroom education, and found that while straight participants were more likely to search for information on pleasure and entertainment, LGBTQ+ teens were more likely to search for information related to identity discovery, confirmation, and affirmation, things not necessarily covered by school curriculum on sex education (461). Importantly, teens in this study also explored material within both spheres in dynamic ways which built off one another (481–484). This suggests a role for FPP as a dynamic tool, rather than an obstacle to formal education. McInroy et al. found additional evidence that LGBTQ+ youth utilise online fandoms to more safely explore identities, as well as challenge/transform popular narratives about identities, both through social media discourse and TWs such as FPP. McInroy and Craig found LGBTQ+ youth who participate in fandom also reach identity milestones earlier and quicker and use a broader variety of sexual and gender identity labels (Online 187–191). Further, due to widespread challenges to healthcare access for LGBTQ+ youth, social networks like these appear to be important in circumventing geopolitics in order to receive necessary health care (Edenfield et al.). Dym et al. found that online fanfic spaces also self-organise in a way that supports trauma recovery through the construction of shared narratives, thus additionally offering a structure for informal mental health support (5). Through qualitative analysis of 3,665 survey respondents, McInroy et al. discovered that, while imperfect, those engaged in online fandom communities found they offered more realistic depictions of queer life and sex than mainstream media (637–638). Using the same data set, McInroy and Craig found that fandom specifically offered LGBTQ+ people safe, customisable experiences which greatly benefit this marginalised population (It’s Like 239–240). These authors noted, even for those who reported fandom did not contribute to LGBTQ+ identity development, fandom participation was seen as valuable (242). Transgender and gender-diverse people specifically appear, through fandom communities and TWs, to explore beyond the “wrong body narrative” to more holistically explore body politics and transgressive experiences of bodies not otherwise represented broadly in media or the classroom (Duggan &amp; Fasekas). This ability to safely explore has real-world implications that translate into medical and mental health interventions, which often rely on an individual’s ability to explore gender and body in order to make informed medical decisions. There also appears to be a broader societal benefit to FPP. Enriquez and Lippert argue FPP is worthy of both study and archiving, especially given the role of women and gender-diverse people in producing content which presents important dialogues about sexuality and gender, and unquestionably contributes to the proliferation of genres like science fiction in popular media. They specifically cite how once-banned pornographies in the US are now considered commodities among book archivists, arguing that FPP has similar cross-cultural value as an artifact (193). Like others, they note ways in which fandoms increase diverse representation through the production of fan works, something Cook and Joseph note can translate into real-world fan activism that results in changes to mainstream media (56–57). Conclusion With little evidence of widespread harm caused by porno broadly, and emerging evidence of the importance of FPP in normative development, education, and representation in the digital age, especially for LGBTQ+ youth, legislators and researchers alike should consider who the rule of law in anti-porno legislation is really protecting. We encourage more reasonable legislation and other safeguards based on evidence, not emotions, drawing on needs expressed by young people themselves, who should be seen as both active consumers and producers of FPP. To accomplish this, better research is needed which considers nuances of porno use, the role of TWs, and the collective perspectives of adolescents who engage with porno. With this, safe consumption of porno, including FPPs, could be incorporated into classrooms and other dialogues with trusted adults, offering a nonpunitive option that may be more effective than legislation which has largely failed. References Al-Alosi, Hadeel. “Australia’s Child Abuse Material Legislation: What’s the Artistic Merit Defense Got to Do with It?.” Criminal Law Journal 42.3 (2018): 147-159. &lt;https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/agispt.20180904001254&gt;. Australian Government Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts. “Online Safety Act 2021.” Federal Register of Legislation 23 Jan. 2022. &lt;https://www.legislation.gov.au/C2021A00076/latest/text&gt;. Attwood, Feona, et al. “‘I’m Just Curious and Still Exploring Myself’: Young People and Pornography.” New Media &amp; Society 20.10 (2018): 3738–3759. &lt;https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818759271&gt;. Cook, Tanya, and Kaela Joseph. 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Introduction Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow (ISTTVG) is a psychological science fiction/horror film which draws upon audiences’ associations between serialised television and queer identity development to ask a terrifying question: would you bury yourself alive to solve the mystery of a parallel life not yet lived? The film is an allegory for queer experiences of internalised heteronormativity and concealment in which the villain is not the typical monster of the week, but our own selves, suffocating under the mundanity of surroundings we have yet to break free from. Neon noir elements are used throughout, including dark and mysterious subject matter explored through expressionist cinematography and neon lighting, grim settings utilised to foster anxiety and paranoia, and morally ambiguous characters who embody archetypes such as the femme fatale and anti-hero. Neon noir as a framing device is simultaneously immersive and subversive, engrossing the audience in something familiar, while warping it until it feels unequivocally queer and immeasurably horrific. It trades the neon lights of the city for those of television sets and makes its setting the suburbs, acknowledging that it is the typicality of high school gymnasiums that feels dangerous to queer people, not back alleys. The overall dreamlike quality of queer temporality tells us “there is still time”, while constantly reminding us that time is running out. The femme fatale does not tempt the protagonist with her feminine wiles but with the allure of the protagonist’s own, suppressed femininity. The protagonist then is not an anti-hero due to physical violence enacted towards others, but for emotional violence enacted towards the self. This article explores neon noir as a major device in ISTTVG through cinematography, setting, and character, and explains the connection between noir’s broader roots in the Hays Code and the evolution of the trope ‘bury your gays’. Noir and Queer Storytelling To understand noir’s usage in ISTTVG, it is necessary to first understand the shared histories of noir and queer storytelling, with “queer” used for the purposes of this article as a broad umbrella under which all non-heteronormative sexualities and genders are encapsulated. Noir as a genre originated in the United States shortly following the establishment of the Hollywood Production Code, colloquially known as the Hays Code (Smith). The Hays Code placed several prohibitions on depictions of queerness, and sexuality in general, forcing queer storytelling in Hollywood-produced media to become subtextual (Russo 31) or coded (Hulan 17). This was something noir storytelling embraced. Noir, after all, has been described as paranoia put to screen (Gürkan 17), and sometimes it is what audiences do not see which stokes their deepest, underlying fears, thus achieving consternation through imagination (Smith). Paranoia during the time of the Hays Code was also something audiences already had in spades. While classic noir, like all media of the time, was inarguably influenced by the Hays Code (Pavés 360), it is also inseparable from post-World War II anxieties about morality and social change (Gürkan 17). Noir has many definitions; however, the original noir films of the 1940s and 1950s are typically recognised by their expressionistic depictions of that which was considered at the time to be socially deviant but potentially alluring (Gürkan 20). Noir films served as cautionary tales, especially about the dangerous temptation of urban life (Gürkan 20). Noir thus adhered to the Hays Code by depicting ‘deviant’ characters facing major consequences for their actions, including death (Smith). For queer characters, this often meant punishment for simply being queer (Hulan 21). While more complex and nuanced depictions of queer characters were certainly attempted in classic noir films, these attempts were routinely rejected by censors, either heavily edited or outright repudiated by the Production Code Administration responsible for upholding the Hays Code (Pavés 370). This trend of punishing queer characters, especially by death, simply for being queer has continued well beyond the Hays Code (Hulan 21), which ended in 1968 (Rosenfeld). In fact, while a fair amount of scholarship about this trope, sometimes referred to as ‘bury your gays’, does focus on the code’s influence, the trope is older by a considerable number of years, originating in at least the late nineteenth century and still present in media to this day (Hulan 17-9). The trope more recently became part of non-academic, popular discourse, in the early twentyfirst century, following an increase in dedicated spaces for fans to discuss trends in queer media representation online, with a focus on lesbian deaths in serialised television in shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) and The 100 (2014-2020; Hulan 23-4). Noir’s successors, neo-noir and neon noir, however, have largely subverted this trope by letting the gays be the ones who hold the metaphorical shovel, enacting violence rather than only being victims of it. Examples include Bound (1996), in which women lovers stage a heist towards their shared freedom, dropping bodies in their wake, and Love Lies Bleeding (2024), in which women lovers enact similar, violent revenge before driving off to their new lives together (Smith). Another recent film, Femme (2021), pits queer characters against one another, illustrating the ways in which internalised shame sometimes causes queer people to attempt to bury one another, socially or through acts of violence (Tadeo). ISTTVG is unique in that it is not rooted in violent revenge or repentance, but in violent liberation, requiring its protagonists to bury themselves, literally, in order to become who they truly are. ISTTVG follows teenage characters Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Jack Haven) through their shared fixation on a science-fiction/horror genre television show, The Pink Opaque, which itself depicts teenage characters Isabel (Helena Howard) and Tara (Lindsey Jordan) in supernatural conflict with a seemingly ever-present villain named Mr. Melancholy (Emma Portner). The film’s first act ends with Maddy’s strange and somewhat unexplained disappearance. When she resurfaces in the second act, Maddy declares that she and Owen are, in fact, Tara and Isabela respectively. She further states that the pair were buried in separate graves by Mr. Melancholy, causing them to slowly suffocate, making the world they have been living in as Maddy and Owen a shared delusion they must escape in order to survive. Maddy/Tara tells Owen/Isabela that the only solution to their survival is self-burial, something Maddy/Tara has already undergone once. Given the seeming absurdity of self-interment, the audience and Owen are left sceptical of Maddy/Tara’s proposal, despite some evidence that she may be telling the truth. Owen ultimately decides the risk is too high, and abandons Maddy/Tara’s insistence to return to the dirt, and their other lives, leaving Maddy/Tara to complete the act alone. With an entire act still left in the film, however, the audience is reminded by a chalk scrawl across the sidewalk that “there is still time”, and the remainder of the film focusses on Owen, haunted by the possibility of Isabela, appearing to slowly suffocate into old age. The audience and Owen/Isabela never definitively learn whether Maddy/Tara’s version of reality is the correct one, but it is the uncertainty about this which is used effectively as queer allegory – that it may be scary by necessity for queer people to bury an inauthentic version of themselves and the lives they have led in the hope that something better lies beyond that ego death. ISTTVG Cinematography ISTTVG, like original noir, uses paranoia, especially about that which remains unseen or only partially seen, to drive its central allegory. ISTTVG, however, is better classified as a neon-noir due to its place in time (produced following the 1950s) and its specific use of neon lighting to achieve the light/dark, or dramatic chiaroscuro lighting effect that is characteristic of noir, neo-noir, and neon-noir cinematography alike (Miller). When applied specifically to science fiction and gothic fantasy, from which ISTTVG clearly draws influence, this has also been characterised as “neon-gothic” (Pop 190). Neon-noir is typically neon-lit to accentuate a foreboding or futuristic urban landscape as both setting and character, but in the technicolour of modern film as opposed to the black and white of classic noir (Miller). Other techniques such as stylised framing and camera angles are additionally used to create an immersive, “dreamlike state” which adds to audience anxieties, especially in science fiction/horror neon-noir films that tackle fears about modern or futuristic technologies (Miller). It is unsurprising that ISTTVG’s writer/director, Jane Schoenbrun, would use such techniques, as Schoenbrun has themself identified noir (Night of the Hunter 1955), neo-noir (Southland Tales 2006), and neon-noir (Blade Runner 1982) as influences on their own directorial and storytelling style. What is somewhat unique, however, about ISTTVG is its use of the television, and other technologies such as projectors and arcade games to achieve chiaroscuro and dreamlike effect that is not necessarily critical of these technologies. Typically, in neon-noir/neon-gothic films, neon lighting is used to highlight that which is fake, inauthentic, or non-human (Pop 207-8). Take, for example, the film Videodrome (1983), which also explores television as an alternate reality, but as a cautionary reality that is intended to cause unease (Thierbach-McLean 1-5), or Blade Runner (1982), with its exploration of the seemingly thin line between humanity and artificial intelligence (Pop 203). Unlike these examples, ISTTVG “validates” (Daschke 2) its audience’s draw towards TVland, recognising the comfort that queer people especially may find amidst the television’s glow and representations of queerness, especially in serialised television where parasocial relationships may be formed with characters depicted on screen. In other words, the simulacra, or imitation, of queerness as seen on television constitute a hyperreality that is the amalgamation of the real and the virtual (Baudrillard 67), which Schoenbrun paints as somewhat of an ideal. It is a contentious but sometimes safer space between and of two worlds, inextricably combined in queer collective consciousness. ISTTVG further achieves this tension of tranquility vs. terror by playing upon millennial nostalgia, such as by paying homage to Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003; Thierbach-McLean 1) or inserting time-specific imagery like the glow of a Fruitopia vending machine in a school cafeteria to create a sense of being outside of time. That feeling of living outside of linear time further encapsulates the queer experience by creating a sense of queer temporality (Seller 195), or the lived experience of queer people as being outside of heteronormative definitions of time due to the stigma placed on queer identities and relationships, which often necessitated navigating time differently. When queer temporality is applied to the transgender gaze, as it is in ISTTVG, there is additionally a sense of “appearing and disappearing, knowing and not knowing” (Judith Halberstam 77), which Schoenbrun conveys through flashes between reality and unreality without distinguishing clearly between the two. The dysphoria of this untethered state of time and space mirrors the navigation of real-world boundaries people like Owen/Isabela would likely traverse in negotiations of visibility vs. safety in a hostile society. ISTTVG Setting ISTTVG’s setting is also important. Unlike other neon-noirs, ISTTVG is not based in an urban setting. This makes sense considering that urban settings tend to be more heavily associated with queer safety as opposed to queer anxieties. Instead, it is the mundanity of the suburb that feels appropriately suffocating as the audience watches Owen progressively struggle to breathe following the revelation that Owen may actually be Isabela. This makes it such that the other-worldly elements are not what elicits fear, traded instead for those which are painfully ordinary, such as sucking on an inhaler or watching an unremarkable birthday celebration in the private room of an arcade. The suburban setting, being non-descript in exact geographic location, also lends itself to increased immersive possibilities as the audience can project onto it their own experiences with any suburban setting with which they are familiar. One key example of setting and cinematography blended to curate a noir-specific audience experience is during Maddy/Tara’s speech to Owen/Isabela about what it feels like to be buried alive, and to be resurrected in The Pink Opaque. The speech is set in a relatively non-descript planetarium room across which constellations are being projected. The room, like the suburban landscape the film is otherwise primarily set in, appears non-descript, the kind of room any audience member could readily recall having once been in. The lights of the projector are what then create the chiaroscuro effect, but themselves remain rather non-descript until the crescendo of the speech, at which time the full details of the constellations are filled in, creating a sense that Maddy/Tara in the climax of the speech is more fully realised. This also creates a further distance between the journeys of Maddy/Tara and Owen/Isabela, who were already depicted as being dissimilar in age and experience from the film’s start. As a result, there is a sense of fear about Owen/Isabela possibly being led astray by Maddy/Tara, while also horror at the idea that Owen/Isabela may not enact the burial, or put more simply, may not survive or thrive in metaphorical outness. ISTTVG Character Maddy/Tara creates a sense of danger as a character because she retains qualities of a femme fatale, such as being alluring in her perceived deviance while also using feminine wiles (Horbury 113-5) to tempt Owen/Isabela. She, however, is not a typical femme fatale in that she is 1) actually attempting to save Owen/Isabela and 2) is not using her own femininity as a tool. Rather, Maddy/Tara appears to tempt Owen with the suppressed femininity that is Isabela. In so doing, Maddy/Tara calls upon Owen/Isabela to remember what it felt like in The Pink Opaque, a reality in which Owen/Isabela was powerful, beautiful, and happy. Thus, it is Isabela and not Maddy/Tara who ultimately haunts Owen throughout the third act of the film, as the audience is left to desperately hope that the two will become one again. Isabela is the embodiment of Owen’s failure to thrive, but said failure is not depicted as morally punishable so much as morally grey, consistent with queer theorists’ views of failure as a sometimes necessary, liberative counterculture, despite being painful (Jack Halberstam 146; Muñoz 27). This makes Owen/Isabela an anti-hero. Moral ambiguity, and thus anti-heroism, are key traits of most noir and neon-noir protagonists (Gürkan 20), who, like Owen/Isabela, are neither wholly right nor wrong in the context of the story. As is the lived experience of real-world queer people, Owen/Isabela’s reluctance towards burial (i.e., identity acceptance and outness) in this context can be seen as rational, albeit simultaneously tragic. While Mr. Melancholy and the unremarkableness of suburban life, as proxies for depression and complacency enabled by heteronormativity, are always looming, it is Owen/Isabela’s own private struggle with internalised stigma/fear of the unknown which serves as the film’s main antagonist and Owen/Isabela’s ultimate undoing. Put another way, “queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing” (Muñoz 1), and Owen is missing something without Isabela that becomes the central conflict of the film. The audience is left without a clear answer as to whether Owen eventually embraces Isabela, though it is heavily implied that the character at least realises in the final moments of the film that not doing so is, in fact, slowly killing them both. Conclusion ISTTVG works as a powerful allegory for the queer experience because the application of neon-noir techniques causes it to feel simultaneously familiar and outside of time, much like the feeling of compulsory heteronormativity and binary gender roles would feel familiar, emotionally and temporally, to queer audiences. The cinematography, setting, and character arcs of the film further immerse queer audiences in the familiar feeling of paranoia that comes with questioning one’s identity in the shadows of society and in plain sight of that which is otherwise mundane but not without consequence or danger. In focussing the neon of the TV’s glow, the film brings to mind queer experiences of watching other gays be buried alive for all the wrong reasons. This both harkens back to noir’s roots in Hays Code era Hollywood, while also subverting the all-too-familiar ‘bury your gays’ trope to create an experience akin to queer community, as though the audience might be able to reach through the screen and help Owen/Isabela along through shared experience, much as Maddy/Tara attempts to do. The allegory is especially timely as queer audiences and filmmakers grapple with new wartime anxieties (e.g. Ukraine/Russia and Palestine/Israel conflicts), nuclear threat, global climate change, and the re-emergence of nationalism and fascism in influential parts of the world. Like Owen/Isabela, queer audiences are living outside of time, with the freedom to be depicted in media well beyond the restrictions of Hays Code era Hollywood, and yet still facing the same threats to our shared existence which have always driven noir at its core. By subverting audience expectations of the neon-noir genre, ISTTVG acts as a celebration of what is possible and a warning about what may come if we as a society do not bury realities which no longer serve us in fostering connection and safety. Like Owen/Isabela, ISTTVG’s audience is left wondering – is there still time? References Baudrillard, Jean. The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Trans. and with an introduction by Paul Patton. Indiana UP, 1995. Daschke, Dereck. "I Saw the TV Glow." Journal of Religion &amp; Film 28.1 (2024): 55. DOI: 10.32873/uno.dc.jrf.28.01.55. Gürkan, Hasan. "Is Film Noir a Genre, or a Style?" Online Journal of Art and Design 3.4 (2015): 17-25. Horbury, Alison. "Postfeminism and the Fatale Figure in Neo Noir Cinema." Australian Feminist Studies 31 (2016): 113-15. DOI: 10.1080/08164649.2016.1175053. Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure. Duke UP, 2011. Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York UP, 2005. Hulan, Haley. "Bury Your Gays: History, Usage, and Context." McNair Scholars Journal 21.1 (2017): 6. I Saw the TV Glow. Dir. Jane Schoenbrun. A24, 2024. Pavés, Gonzalo M. "Unacceptable Matters: The Hays Code, Family, Film Noir and RKO Radio Pictures." Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 43.2 (2023): 359-379. DOI: 10.1080/01439685.2022.2116858. Pop, Doru. "A Replicant Walks into the Desert of the Real and Tells Unfunny Jokes in the Flickering Lights of Neon-Gothic Fantasy." Caietele Echinox 35 (2018): 190-211. &lt;https://doi.org/10.24193/cechinox.2018.35.12&gt; Miller, Alyssa. “What Is the Neon Noir Genre?” No Film School, 3 Jan. 2024. 21 Nov. 2024 &lt;https://nofilmschool.com/neon-noir&gt;. Muñoz, José Esteban. "Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity." Cruising Utopia. 10th anniversary ed. New York UP, 2019. Rosenfeld, Jordan. “Hays Code.” Encyclopedia Britannica, 2024. &lt;https://www.britannica.com/art/Hays-Code&gt;. Russo, Vito. The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies. Revised ed. New York: Harper and Row, 1995. Rooney, David. “‘Love Lies Bleeding’ Review: Kristen Stewart Is Pure Magnetism in Ultra-Violent Neo-Noir Romance.” Hollywood Reporter, 21 Jan. 2024. 21 Nov. 2024 &lt;https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/love-lies-bleeding-review-kristen-stewart-1235794464/&gt;. Seller, Merlyn. "Genesis Noir and Cosmological Time: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Big Bang." Unbound Queer Time in Literature, Cinema, and Video Games. Routledge, 2024. 193-209. Smith, Brian. “Film Noir and the Production Code Were Unlikely Allies.” Stage 32 Scripts, 23 July 2020. 21 Nov. 2024 &lt;https://www.stage32.com/lounge/screenwriting/Film-Noir-and-the-Production-Code-Were-Unlikely-Allies&gt;. Schoenbrun, Jane. “‘I Saw the TV Glow’ Director Jane Schoenbrun’s Top 5.” The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. 21 Nov. 2024 &lt;https://newsletter-stg.oscars.org/what-to-watch/post/jane-schoenbrun-top-5-exclusive&gt;. Tadeo, Jericho. “Femme Review: An Edge-of-Your-Seat Queering of the Neo-Noir Crime Thriller.” Movieweb, 27 Mar. 2024. 21 Nov. 2024 &lt;https://movieweb.com/femme-review/&gt;. Thierbach-McLean, Olga. "Living in ‘Overstimulated Times’: Revisiting the Social Criticism of Videodrome in the Internet Era." Film Journal 9 (2024). &lt;https://doi.org/10.4000/11yjj&gt;.

Disclaimer: The situation on PixelCanvas is constantly changing due to raids from both sides. The figures in this article represent the state as of April 2020. In the politicized digital environment, the superiority of the alt-right’s weaponization of memes is often taken for granted. As summarized in the buzzword-phrase “the left can’t meme”, the digital engagements of self-identified leftist activists are usually seen as less effective than the ones of the right: their attempts at utilizing Internet culture described as too “politically correct” and “devoid of humour”. This supposedly “immutable law of the Internet” (Dankulous Memeulon) often found confirmation in research.Described by Phillips and Milner, Internet culture – “a highly insular clique”, now seeping into popular culture – is by design rooted in liberalism and fetishized sight. Through its principles of “free speech”, “harmless fun”, and dehumanizing detachment of memes from real-life production and consequence, meme-sharing was enabling deception, “bigoted pollution”, and reinforcing white racial frames, regardless of intentions (Phillips and Milner). From Andersson to Nagle, many come to the conclusion that the left’s presence online is simply not organized, not active, not transgressive enough to appeal to the sensibilities of Internet culture. Meanwhile, the playful, deceptive online engagements of the alt-right are found to be increasingly viral, set to recruit numerous young rebels, hence upholding a cultural hegemony which has already transcended over to the offline world. This online right style is one where a rejection of morality and nihilistic nonconformity reign supreme – all packaged in carnivalesque laughter and identity-bending “trolling” (Nagle 28-39). Even if counterculture and transgression used to be domains of the left, nowadays the nihilistic, fetishizing landscape of online humour is popularized via alt-right aligned message boards like 4chan (Nagle 28-39).Left-wing alternatives, encompassed by Nagle in the term “Tumblr liberalism”, were often described as “fragmented” through identitarianism and call-out-culture, enclosed in echo chambers, “nannying, language policing, and authoritarian” (68-85). This categorization has been rightfully criticized for reductionism that lumps together diverse political strands, focuses on form only, and omits the importance of subcultural logic in its caricature of the censorious left (Davies). However, it would be difficult to deny that this is exactly how the online left is, unfortunately, often perceived by the right and liberals/centrists alike, evidenced by its niche quality.The solutions to the problem of the right’s dominance in the memeosphere – and their Gramscian cultural hegemony – offered by Phillips and Milner could include disavowing fetishized sight while maintaining “slapdash, quippy, and Internet Ugly” qualities to deconstruct meme culture’s whiteness; Davies suggests that “if the left is to have the same degree of success in translating online cultures into political movements then it needs to understand both the online world and its own IRL history”.Nonetheless, some strands of the online left have been rather close in style and form to the ones of the alt-right, despite their clear difference of “stance” (Shifman 367). In this article, I demonstrate an example of a multi-faceted, united, witty, and countercultural meme leftism on PixelCanvas.io (PixelCanvas): a nearly unlimited online canvas, where anyone can place coloured pixels with an obligatory cooldown time after each. Intended for creative expression, PixelCanvas became a site of click-battles between organized dichotomous extremes of the left and the alt-right, and is swarmed with political imagery. The right’s use of this platform has been already examined by Thibault, well-fitting into the consensus about the efficiency of right-wing online activity. My focus is the rebuttal of alt-right imagery that the radical left replaces with their own.With a brief account of PixelCanvas’s affordances and recounting the recent history of its culture wars, I trace the hybrid leftist activity on PixelCanvas to argue that it is comparably grounded in dissimulation and transgression to the alt-right’s. Based on the case study, I explore how certain strands of online left might reappropriate the carnivalesque, deceptive, and countercultural meme culture sensibilities and forms, while simultaneously rejecting its “bigoted pollution” (Phillips and Milner) aspects. While arguably problematic, these new strategies might be necessary to combat the alt-right’s hegemony in the meme environment – and by extension, in popular culture.PixelCanvas as a Metapolitical Platform of Culture WarsPixelCanvas affords a blend of 4chan-style open-access, no-login anonymity and the importance of organized collective effort. As described by Thibault, it is an “online ‘game’ that allows players to colour pixels ..., either collaborating or competing for the control of the shared space” (102). The obligatory cooldown period on PixelCanvas results in most of the works requiring either dedication of long periods of time or collaboration: as such, the majority of canvas art has a “shared authorship” (102). As a space for creative expression, PixelCanvas encourages expressing aspects of genuine personal identity (political views, sexuality, etc.) albeit reduced to symbols and memes that rarely remain personal. Although the primary medium of information transfer on the platform is visual, brief written catchphrases are also utilized. While the canvas is not lacking in free areas, competition for space is prevalent: between political viewpoints, nationalist groups (Bakalım), and other communities (PixelCanvas.io).Given this setup, it might be expected that battling for hegemony took over the game. The affordances of PixelCanvas as accepting anonymous unmoderated expressions of identity/political views encourage dissimulation similarly to boards such as 4chan; its immediate visual/one-liner focus overlaps with the prerequisites of meme culture. Meanwhile, the game’s competition aspect leads to large-scale organization of polarized metapolitical groups and to imagery that is increasingly larger, more taboo-breaking, and playful: meant to catch the eye of a viewer before the opponents do. PixelCanvas, as such, is a platform fitting into transgressive, trolling, fetishizing, and “liberal” affordances of Internet culture: the same affordances that made it, according to Nagle or Phillips and Milner, into a space of desensitized white supremacy and right-wing dominance.Such a setup may seem to work in favour of the 4chan-style raids and against the supposed identitarianism of “Tumblr liberalism”. One could recall the importance of united collective efforts on 4chan: from meme-sharing to Gamergate raids (Beran). Meanwhile, suggested by Citarella, a problem of the online left is its fragmentation, and its “poorly organized and smaller followings” (10). As he observed on Politigram, “DemSocs, Syndicalists, ML’s, AnComs, … and so on, all hated each other. The online right was equally divided but managed to coordinate cultural agitations” (Citarella 10).Indeed, the platform displayed the effects of alt-right virality multiple times, involving creations of self-identified Kekistanis (KnowYourMeme), anarcho-capitalists, 4chan-aligned “bronies” (My Little Pony fans), etc. However, since 2017, the left joined the game, becoming another example of a united, well-organized and strongly participatory group, which continuously resists alt-right attacks and establishes its own raids, often gaining an upper hand.Named “Battle of Pixelgrad”, the influx of leftist activity began to combat the forming Reich Iron Cross posted by “a user on 4chan's /pol/” which has caught the attention of Leftbook/meme groups and subreddits (PLK Wiki) (Wrigley). The groups involved spanned “all beliefs under a unified socialist umbrella” (Pixel Liberation Front) ranging from communism through anarchism subtypes to identity politics: all associating with the “left unity” flag that they replaced the Iron Cross with. Their efforts against alt-right raids were coordinated through Discord servers and a public Facebook group. Soon, a Facebook page for Left Unity Fighting Front (LUFF) was set up, with the PixelCanvas flag in the banner and the description: “We decided to form the new rival of 4chan, LUFF. We are the new united front of the internet. Promoting left unity, trolling Nazis, and taking on sectarianism.”Figure 1: The ’Left Unity’ flag. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@-1554,3594.The concept of left unity has been criticised before, as one that would lead to “the co-optation of anarchism under a Marxist leadership”, charged with the history of anarchist-Bolshevik clashes in USSR, and marred by a “lack of willingness among some Marxists to actually engage with anarchists in legitimate debate” (Springer). Still, the PixelCanvas left unity is one of the rare instances of Marxist, anarchist, and other leftist online groups working together on rather equal grounds, without cracking down on discourse and historical contexts: which is afforded by a subcultural logic and focus on combating a common enemy. The PixelCanvas leftists support common projects, readily bending their beliefs/ identity to create an efficient community that can resist 4chan: self-identifying as an “allyship” with anonymous “soldiers”/comrades belonging together on the left side of the pixel “war” (Pixel Liberation Front). While the diversity of their beliefs is made clear through the variously aligned flags/thinkers they choose to represent with pixels, the union stands without in-fighting, emulating simplistic versions of history as a dichotomous struggle between left and right (which deliberately rejects centrism): from Nazi/communist battles to Cold War imagery. Although reductionist, this us/them thinking is especially necessary in the visual, time-sensitive, and competitive space of PixelCanvas. No matter how extreme the common projects are, what matters in the pixel war is camaraderie and defeating the enemy in the most striking manner possible. After all, the setup of the platform (and the immediacy of Internet culture) supports attention- grabbing transgression and memes better than nuanced discourse. Figure 2: Representation of the left uniting against Nazism and anarcho-capitalism. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@-143,-782.As of April 2020, hardly any Nazi/4chan/ancap imagery on PixelCanvas stands without being challenged by the Left Unity. Although some of the groups involved in Pixelgrad do not exist anymore, Discord servers (e.g. RedPixel) and Pixel Liberation Front (PLF) Facebook group remain, defending the platform from continued raids. These coordinating bodies are easily accessible to anyone willing to contribute (shall one wish for complete anonymity, they are also free to participate without joining the servers). Their efforts could be understood as “clicktivism” (Halupka); however, the involved leftists view it as a “war” (PLF) or “Memeolution” (Wrigley), an important way in which the “virality of right-wing populism” (Thibault) must be resisted. This use of language highlights their serious awareness of the need for combating the right’s digital hegemony, no matter how playful their activity seems.Even if this phenomenon is specific to PixelCanvas, one should acknowledge that the identity-bending unity of the left has been enough to challenge continued raids. Niche practices, as seen through 4chan, might break into the mainstream: according to Hobson and Modi, online spaces “are a rich recruiting ground for previously antithetical/apolitical young people” (345) who find refuge in memes and trolling. The agenda of the PixelCanvas left (counterplatforming activism) in this case differs from 4chan’s. However, the forms they assume to reach their goal are often “pithy, funny, or particularly striking” enough to potentially make one “pause to think, and/or laugh” (Hobson and Modi 345) regardless of political alignment.The Form, Content, and Stance of PixelCanvas Left ActivityDespite the unity in the organization of the PixelCanvas left, the approaches/strategies of its various pixel artworks are far from uniform. At the first sight, the creations of RedPixel members already appear as a multi-faceted (and potentially confusing) mixture of serious real-life agenda and playful Internet culture. Guided by Shifman’s communication-oriented typology of memes, I analyze the different “contents, forms, and stances” (367) that the PixelCanvas left displays in its creations. For analytical clarity, I distinguish three main approaches which overlap and play various roles in contributing to the collective image of RedPixel as simultaneously activist, serious, inclusive, and Internet-culture-savvy, transgressive, deceptive.The first approach of PixelCanvas leftist creations is most serious and least grounded in Internet culture. A portion of RedPixel activity directly reproduces real-life protest chants, posters, flags, murals, movement symbols, and portraits of leftist icons, with little alteration to the form other than pixelating. The contents of such creations vary, however, they remain serious and focused on real-life issues: voicing support for contemporary leftist movements (Black Lives Matter, pro-refugee, Rojava liberation, etc.), celebrating the countercultural, class-centric leftist history (anarchist, communist, socialist victories, thinkers, and revolutionaries), and representing a plethora of identities within hyper-inclusive flag clusters (of various sexualities, genders, and ethnicities). The stance of these images can be plausibly interpreted as charged with serious/genuine “keying” (Shifman 367), and “conative” (imperative) or “emotive” (367) functions. Within those images, the meme culture’s problematic affordances (“fetishization” and “liberalism” (Phillips and Milner)) are disavowed clearly: exemplified by a banner on the site suggesting that “just a meme” mentality created a shield for “meme Nazis” that led to the 2019 Christchurch mosque shooting. Although this strand of RedPixel’s works could be criticized as “humourless” and rather detached from the platform’s affordances, its role lies in displaying the connection to the real world with potential suggestions for mobilization, the awareness of meme culture’s problematic nature, and the image of radical left cooperation. Figure 3: The Christchurch memorial. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@-2815,3321. Figure 4: Posters and symbols in support of Rojava, Palestine liberation, and Black Lives Matter. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@5340,4121. Figure 5: Early Paris Commune poster reproduced on PixelCanvas. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@7629,2134. Figure 6: Example of a PixelCanvas hyper-inclusive flag cluster. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@2741,-3508.The second approach, while similar in the diversity of content, adopts memetic forms, and the light-hearted “harmless fun” of Internet culture. Through popular meme formats (molded to call for action), slang expressions, pop-cultural references (anime/cartoon/video game characters), to adopting “cutesy” aesthetics, these creations present identity politics, anti-fascism, and anti-capitalism in a light, aestheticized form. Popular characters, colourful art, and repetitive base colour schemes (red, black, rainbow) are likely to attract attention; recognition of the pop-cultural references, and of known meme formats might sustain it, urging one to focus on the only uncertain element: the politics behind it. Being visually and contextually appealing to online youth, this political-memetic imagery is well-adapted to the platform. Simultaneously, the carnivalesque forms contrast with the frequently more transgressive contents this approach employs. As a result, the tone of their work seems lighthearted even in its incitement to “kill the Nazis” and “eat the rich”. Clearly aware of the language of its opposition, RedPixel reacts similarly to how 4chan reacted to Tumblr liberalism: responding to “lightly thrown accusations” (Nagle) by intensifying them to the point where they can be seen as “owning” the labels they have been given – instead of “getting offended”. Through memes and reappropriated posters they present themselves as “Red Menace,” as a direct threat to 4channers, and as a “trigger-warning” club, using the existing criticisms to self-identify as formidable enemies of the right. While the transgression in RedPixel style often remains acceptable by radical left standards, it is certainly not the same as “virtue signalling”, “hypersensitive”, “vulnerable” Tumblr liberalism (Nagle 68–85); and it might be shocking or amoral to some. Much of their imagery is provocative: inciting violence, glorifying deeply problematic parts of communist history, using religious symbols in a potentially blasphemous way, supporting occultism/ Satanism, and explicitly amplifying (queer) sexuality. In the mix of (sometimes) extreme contents and forms that suggest a light-hearted attitude, it might be difficult to determine the keying of their stance. Although it is unlikely that RedPixel would avow politics they do not actually believe (given the activist, anti-fetishizing agenda of their first approach), their political choices are frequently amplified to their full “tankie” form, and even up to Stalin support: raising the question how much of it is serious intent masked with humour, and what could be written off as deliberate identity play, deceptive “trolling” and jokes, similar in style to 4chan’s. Figure 7: Revolution-inciting appropriation of a popular meme format. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@-1765,3376. Figure 8: Fictional characters Stevonnie (Steven Universe) and Cirno (Touhou) with leftist captions. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@-847,-748. Figure 9: Call for fighting fascism referencing a Pacman video game and Karl Marx. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@-712,-395. Figure 10: Joseph Stalin reimagined as a My Little Pony character. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@-1197,966. Figure 11: “A spectre is haunting Kekistan.” Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@-2196,3248. Figure 12: “Trigger Warning Gun Club” badge. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@2741,-3508.Figure 13: “Have you heard that Nazis get vored?” anime catgirl. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@1684,928. Figure 14: Rainbow genitals on a former Kekistan flag. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@-2513,3221. Figure 15: “Eat the Rich — OK Boomer” wizard ghost. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@-4390,-697.The third approach can be read as a subset of the second: however, what distinguishes it is a clearly parodic stance and reappropriating of 4chan’s forms. The PixelCanvas activists, unlike the supposed “anti-free speech” left (Lukianoff and Haidt) do not try to get the alt-right imagery removed by others, and do not fully erase it. Instead, they repurpose 4chan memes and flags, ridiculing them or making them stand for leftist views. An unaware viewer could mistake their parodies of 4chan for parodies of the left made by 4chaners; the true stance sometimes only suggested by their placement within RedPixel-reclaimed areas. Communist and LGBTQ+ Pepes or Ponies, modified Kekistan flags, and even claiming that “the right can’t meme” all point to an interesting trend that instead of banning symbols associated with alt-right groups wants to exploit the malleability of memes: confusing and parodying their original content and stance while maintaining the form and style. This aim is perhaps best exemplified in the image The Greatest Game of Capture the Flag where Pepes in anarcho-communist, communist, and transgender Pride hoodies are escaping from a crying white man while carrying a 4chan flag. Interpreted in context, this image summarizes the new direction that leftists take against 4chan. This is a direction of left unity (with various strands of radical left maintaining their identities but establishing an overarching collective “allyship” identification), of mixing identity politics with classic ideologies, of reconciling Internet culture with IRL socio-political awareness, and finally, of reappropriating proven-effective play, dissimulation, and transgression from 4chan. Figure 16: Pride flag cluster with Pride-coloured Pepes. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@-1599,3516. Figure 17: Communist/anarchist thinkers and leaders reimagined as Pepes. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@-1885,3203. Figure 18: “The Right Can’t Meme.” Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@-1885,3203. Figure 19: The reclaimed Kekistan area. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@-2439,3210. Figure 20: “The Greatest Game of Capture the Flag.” Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@-1885,3203.ConclusionThe PixelCanvas left can serve as an example of a united stronghold which managed to counterplatform the alt-right: assuming dominance in 2017 to later rebuild and expand their pixel spheres of influence after each 4chan raid. Online culture wars are nowadays recognized as Gramscian in their roots: according to Burton, “the young people confronting this reactionary shift head-on with memes normalizing are … on the front lines of a culture war with global repercussions” (13). By far, this “war” for digital hegemony has been overwhelmingly evaluated as one that the alt-right is simply better at, due to the natural affordances of Internet culture. However, the “united front of the internet” “promoting left unity and trolling Nazis” (LUFF) exemplifies a possible direction which the online radical left could follow to take on 4chan’s digital dominance. This direction is complex and hybrid: with overlapping/combined approaches. The activities of PixelCanvas left include practices that are well-adapted to the immediate meme culture and those based on IRL movements; practices similar to 4chan’s problematic transgression and those that are activist, disavowing fetishized sight; serious practices and deceptive/ironic ones. Their 2017 PixelCanvas victory and later resistance persisting despite continuing raids might suggest that this strategy works, with the key to its coordination laying in the subcultural logic of an “allyship” that privileges fast-paced mobilization and swift comebacks over careful nuance: necessitated by meme culture affordances. Although only time can prove if this new left digital language will become more widespread, it has the potential to become an alternative to “hypersensitive Tumblr liberalism” and to challenge the idea that meme culture is doomed to be right-wing.ReferencesAndersson, Linus. “No Digital ‘Castles in the Air’: Online Non-Participation and the Radical Left.” Media and Communication 4.4 (2016): 53–62.Bakalım, Seyret. “Pixel io Türkiye vs Brezilya [Turkey vs Brazil] Pixel War.” YouTube, 23 June 2017. &lt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsPHVNpB8Hg&gt;.Beran, Dale. “4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump.” Medium, 14 Feb. 2017. &lt;https://medium.com/@DaleBeran/4chan-the-skeleton-key-to-the-rise-of-trump-624e7cb798cb&gt;.Burton, Julian. “Look at Us, We Have Anxiety: Youth, Memes, and the Power of Online Cultural Politics.” Journal of Childhood Studies 44.3 (2019): 3–17.Dankulous Memeulon. “The Left Can’t Meme.” UrbanDictionary, 11 May 2018. &lt;https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=The%20Left%20can%27t%20Meme&gt;.Davies, Josh. “Tumblr Liberalism’ vs the Serious Authentic Left: On Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies.” Ceasefire Magazine, 8 Sep. 2017. &lt;https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/tumblr-liberalism-authentic-left-review-kill-normies/&gt;.Halupka, Max. “Clicktivism: A Systematic Heuristic.” Policy &amp; Internet 6.2 (2014): 115–32.Hobson, Thomas, and Kaajal Modi. “Socialist Imaginaries and Queer Futures: Memes as Sites of Collective Imagining.” Post Memes: Seizing the Memes of Production. 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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. 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Stand-up is a global phenomenon. It is Australia’s most significant form of advocatorial theatre and a major platform for challenging stigma and prejudice. In the twenty-first century, Australian stand-up is transforming into a more culturally diverse form and extending the spectrum of material addressing human rights. Since the 1980s Australian stand-up routines have moved beyond the old colonial targets of England and America, and Indigenous comics such as Kevin Kopinyeri, Andy Saunders, and Shiralee Hood have gained an established following. Additionally, the turn to Asia is evident not just in trade agreements and the higher education market but also in cultural exchange and in the billing of emerging Asian stand-ups at mainstream events. The major cultural driver for stand-up is the Melbourne International Comedy Festival (MICF), Australia’s largest cultural event, now over 30 years old, and an important site for dissecting constructs of democracy and nationhood. As John McCallum has observed, popular humour in post-World War II Australia drew on widespread feelings of “displacement, migration and otherness—resonant topics in a country of transplanted people and a dispossessed indigenous population arguing over a distinct Australian identity” (205–06). This essay considers the traditional comic strategies of first and second generation immigrant stand-ups in Australia and compares them with the new wave of post 9/11 Asian-Australian and Middle-Eastern-Australian stand-ups whose personas and interrogations are shifting the paradigm. Self-identifying Muslim stand-ups challenge myths of dominant Australian identity in ways which many still find confronting. Furthermore, the theories of incongruity, superiority, and psychological release re-rehearsed in traditional humour studies, by figures such as Palmer (1994) and Morreall (2009), are predicated on models of humour which do not always serve live performance, especially stand-up with its relational dependence on audience interaction.Stand-ups who immigrated to Australia as children or whose parents immigrated and struggled against adversity are important symbols both of the Australian comedy industry and of a national self-understanding of migrant resilience and making good. Szubanski and Berger hail from earlier waves of European migrants in the 1950s and 1960s. Szubanski has written eloquently of her complex Irish-Polish heritage and documented how the “hand-me-down trinkets of family and trauma” and “the culture clash of competing responses to calamity” have been integral to the development of her comic success and the making of her Aussie characters (347). Rachel Berger, the child of Polish holocaust survivors, advertises and connects both identities on her LinkedIn page: “After 23 years as a stand-up comedian, growing up with Jewish guilt and refugee parents, Rachel Berger knows more about survival than any idiot attending tribal council on reality TV.”Anh Do, among Australia’s most famous immigrant stand-ups, identifies as one of the Vietnamese “boat people” and arrived as a toddler in 1976. Do’s tale of his family’s survival against the odds and his creation of a persona which constructs the grateful, happy immigrant clown is the staple of his very successful routine and increasingly problematic. It is a testament to the power of Do’s stand-up that many did not perceive the toll of the loss of his birth country; the grinding poverty; and the pain of his father’s alcoholism, violence, and survivor guilt until the publication of Do’s ironically titled memoir The Happiest Refugee. In fact, the memoir draws on many of the trauma narratives that are still part of his set. One of Do’s most legendary routines is the story of his family’s sea journey to Australia, told here on ABC1’s Talking Heads:There were forty of us on a nine metre fishing boat. On day four of the journey we spot another boat. As the boat gets closer we realise it’s a boatload of Thai pirates. Seven men with knives, machetes and guns get on our boat and they take everything. One of the pirates picks up the smallest child, he lifts up the baby and rips open the baby’s nappy and dollars fall out. And the pirate decides to spare the kid’s life. And that’s a good thing cos that’s my little brother Khoa Do who in 2005 became Young Australian of the Year. And we were saved on the fifth day by a big German merchant ship which took us to a refugee camp in Malaysia and we were there for around three months before Australia says, come to Australia. And we’re very glad that happened. So often we heard Mum and Dad say—what a great country. How good is this place? And the other thing—kids, as you grow up, do as much as you can to give back to this great country and to give back to others less fortunate.Do’s strategy is apparently one of genuflection and gratitude, an adoption of what McCallum refers to as an Australian post-war tradition of the comedy of inadequacy and embarrassment (210–14). Journalists certainly like to bill Do as the happy clown, framing articles about him with headlines like Rosemary Neill’s “Laughing through Adversity.” In fact, Do is direct about his gallows humour and his propensity to darkness: his humour, he says, is a means of countering racism, of “being able to win people over who might have been averse to being friends with an Asian bloke,” but Neill does not linger on this, nor on the revelation that Do felt stigmatised by his refugee origins and terrified and shamed by the crippling poverty of his childhood in Australia. In The Happiest Refugee, Do reveals that, for him, the credibility of his routines with predominantly white Australian audiences lies in the crafting of himself as an “Aussie comedian up there talking about his working-class childhood” (182). This is not the official narrative that is retold even if it is how Do has endeared himself to Australians, and ridding himself of the happy refugee label may yet prove difficult. Suren Jayemanne is well known for his subtle mockery of multiculturalist rhetoric. In his 2016 MICF show, Wu-Tang Clan Name Generator, Jayemanne played on the supposed contradiction of his Sri Lankan-Malaysian heritage against his teenage years in the wealthy suburb of Malvern in Melbourne, his private schooling, and his obsession with hip hop and black American culture. Jayemanne’s strategy is to gently confound his audiences, leading them slowly up a blind alley. He builds up a picture of how to identify Sri Lankan parents, supposedly Sri Lankan qualities such as an exceptional ability at maths, and Sri Lankan employment ambitions which he argues he fulfilled in becoming an accountant. He then undercuts his story by saying he has recently realised that his suburban background, his numerical abilities, his love of black music, and his rejection of accountancy in favour of comedy, in fact prove conclusively that he has, all along, been white. He also confesses that this is a bruising disappointment. Jayemanne exposes the emptiness of the conceits of white, brown, and black and of invented identity markers and plays on his audiences’ preconceptions through an old storyteller’s device, the shaggy dog story. The different constituencies in his audiences enjoy his trick equally, from quite different perspectives.Diana Nguyen, a second generation Vietnamese stand-up, was both traumatised and politicised by Pauline Hanson when she was a teenager. Hanson described Nguyen’s community in Dandenong as “yellow Asian people” (Filmer). Nguyen’s career as a community development worker combating racism relates directly to her activity as a stand-up: migrant stories are integral to Australian history and Nguyen hypothesises that the “Australian psyche of being invaded or taken over” has reignited over the question of Islamic fundamentalism and expresses her concern to Filmer about the Muslim youths under her care.Nguyen’s alarm about the elision of Islamic radicalism with Muslim culture drives an agenda that has led the new generation of self-identified Muslim stand-ups since 9/11. This post 9/11 world is described by Wajahat as gorged with “exaggerated fear, hatred, and hostility toward Islam and Muslim [. . . ] and perpetuated by negative discrimination and the marginalisation and exclusion of Muslims from social, political, and civic life in western societies.” In Australia, Aamer Rahman, Muhamed Elleissi, Khaled Khalafalla, and Nazeem Hussain typify this newer, more assertive form of second generation immigrant stand-up—they identify as Muslim (whether religious or not), as brown, and as Australian. They might be said to symbolise a logical response to Ghassan Hage’s famous White Nation (1998), which argues that a white supremacism underlies the mindset of the white elite in Australia. Their positioning is more nuanced than previous generations of stand-up. Nazeem Hussain’s routines mark a transformation in Australian stand-up, as Waleed Aly has argued: “ethnic comedy” has hitherto been about the parading of stereotypes for comfortable, mainstream consumption, about “minstrel characters” [. . .] but Hussain interrogates his audiences in every direction—and aggravates Muslims too. Hussain’s is the world of post 9/11 Australian Muslims. It’s about more than ethnic stereotyping. It’s about being a consistent target of political opportunism, where everyone from the Prime Minister to the Foreign Minister to an otherwise washed-up backbencher with a view on burqas has you in their sights, where bombs detonate in Western capitals and unrelated nations are invaded.Understandably, a prevalent theme among the new wave of Muslim comics, and not just in Australia, is the focus on the reading of Muslims as manifestly linked with Islamic State (IS). Jokes about mistaken identity, plane crashes, suicide bombing, and the Koran feature prominently. English-Pakistani Muslim, Shazia Mirza, gained comedy notoriety in the UK in the wake of 9/11 by introducing her routine with the words: “My name’s Shazia Mirza. At least that’s what it says on my pilot’s licence” (Bedell). Stand-ups Negin Farsad, Ahmed Ahmed, and Dean Obeidalla are all also activists challenging prevailing myths about Islam, skin colour and terrorism in America. Egyptian-American Ahmed Ahmed acquired prominence for telling audiences in the infamous Axis of Evil Comedy Tour about how his life had changed much for the worse since 9/11. Ahmed Ahmed was the alias used by one of Osama Bin Laden’s devotees and his life became on ongoing struggle with anti-terrorism officials doing security checks (he was once incarcerated) and with the FBI who were certain that the comedian was among their most wanted terrorists. Similarly, Obeidalla, an Italian-Palestinian-Muslim, notes in his TEDx talk that “If you have a Muslim name, you are probably immune to identity theft.” His narration of a very sudden experience of becoming an object of persecution and of others’ paranoia is symptomatic of a shared understanding of a post 9/11 world among many Muslim comics: “On September 10th 2001 I went to bed as a white American and I woke up an Arab,” says Obeidalla, still dazed from the seismic shift in his life.Hussain and Khalafalla demonstrate a new sophistication and directness in their stand-up, and tackle their majority white audiences head-on. There is no hint of the apologetic or deferential stance performed by Anh Do. Many of the jokes in their routines target controversial or taboo issues, which up until recently were shunned in Australian political debate, or are absent or misrepresented in mainstream media. An Egyptian-Australian born in Saudi Arabia, Khaled Khalafalla arrived on the comedy scene in 2011, was runner-up in RAW, Australia’s most prestigious open mic competition, and in 2013 won the best of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival for Devious. Khalafalla’s shows focus on racist stereotypes and identity and he uses a range of Middle Eastern and Indian accents to broach IS recruitment, Muslim cousin marriages, and plane crashes. His 2016 MICF show, Jerk, was a confident and abrasive routine exploring relationships, drug use, the extreme racism of Reclaim Australia rallies, controversial visa checks by Border Force’s Operation Fortitude, and Islamophobia. Within the first minute of his routine, he criticises white people in the audience for their woeful refusal to master Middle Eastern names, calling out to the “brown woman” in the audience for support, before lining up a series of jokes about the (mis)pronunciation of his name. Khalafalla derives his power on stage by what Oliver Double calls “uncovering.” Double contends that “one of the most subversive things stand-up can do is to uncover the unmentionable,” subjects which are difficult or impossible to discuss in everyday conversation or the broadcast media (292). For instance, in Jerk Khalafalla discusses the “whole hating halal movement” in Australia as a metaphor for exposing brutal prejudice: Let me break it down for you. Halal is not voodoo. It’s just a blessing that Muslims do for some things, food amongst other things. But, it’s also a magical spell that turns some people into fuckwits when they see it. Sometimes people think it’s a thing that can get stuck to your t-shirt . . . like ‘Oh fuck, I got halal on me’ [Australian accent]. I saw a guy the other day and he was like Fuck halal, it funds terrorism. And I was like, let me show you the true meaning of Islam. I took a lamb chop out of my pocket and threw it in his face. And, he was like Ah, what was that? A lamb chop. Oh, I fucking love lamb chops. And, I say you fool, it’s halal and he burst into flames.In effect, Khalafalla delivers a contemptuous attack on the white members of his audience, but at the same time his joke relies on those same audience members presuming that they are morally and intellectually superior to the individual who is the butt of the joke. Khalafalla’s considerable charm is a help in this tricky send-up. In 2015 the Australian Department of Defence recognised his symbolic power and invited him to join the Afghanistan Task Force to entertain the troops by providing what Doran describes as “home-grown Australian laughs” (7). On stage in Australia, Khalafalla constructs a persona which is an outsider to the dominant majority and challenges the persecution of Muslim communities. Ironically, on the NATO base, Khalafalla’s act was perceived as representing a diverse but united Australia. McCallum has pointed to such contradictions, moments where white Australia has shown itself to be a “culture which at first authenticates emigrant experience and later abrogates it in times of defiant nationalism” (207). Nazeem Hussain, born in Australia to Sri Lankan parents, is even more confrontational. His stand-up is born of his belief that “comedy protects us from the world around us” and is “an evolutionary defence mechanism” (8–9). His ground-breaking comedy career is embedded in his work as an anti-racism activist and asylum seeker supporter and shaped by his second-generation migrant experiences, law studies, community youth work, and early mentorship by American Muslim comic trio Allah Made Me Funny. He is well-known for his pioneering television successes Legally Brown and Salam Café. In his stand-up, Hussain often dwells witheringly on the failings and peculiarities of white people’s attempts to interact with him. Like all his routines, his sell-out show Fear of the Brown Planet, performed with Aamer Rahman from 2004–2008, explored casual, pathologised racism. Hussain deliberately over-uses the term “white people” in his routines as a provocation and deploys a reverse racism against his majority white audiences, knowing that many will be squirming. “White people ask me how can Muslims have fun if they don’t drink? Muslims have fun! Of course we have fun! You’ve seen us on the news.” For Hussain stand-up is “fundamentally an art of protest,” to be used as “a tool by communities and people with ideas that challenge and provoke the status quo with a spirit of counterculture” (Low 1–3). His larger project is to humanise Muslims to white Australians so that “they see us firstly as human beings” (1–3). Hussain’s 2016 MICF show, Hussain in the Membrane, both satirised media hype and hysterical racism and pushed for a better understanding of the complex problems Muslim communities face in Australia. His show also connected issues to older colonial traditions of racism. In a memorable and beautifully crafted tirade, Hussain inveighed against the 2015 Bendigo riots which occurred after local Muslims lodged an application to Bendigo council to build a mosque in the sleepy Victorian town. [YELLING in an exaggerated Australian accent] No we don’t want Muslims! NO we don’t want Muslims—to come invade Bendigo by application to the local council! That is the most bureaucratic invasion of all times. No place in history has been invaded by lodging an application to a local council. Can you see ISIS running around chasing town planners? Of course not, Muslims like to wait 6–8 months to invade! That’s a polite way to invade. What if white people invaded that way? What a better world we’d be living in. If white people invaded Australia that way, we’d be able to celebrate Australia Day on the same day without so much blood on our hands. What if Captain Cook came to Australia and said [in a British accent] Awe we would like to apply to invade this great land and here is our application. [In an Australian accent] Awe sorry, mate, rejected, but we’ll give you Bendigo.As Waleed Aly sees it, the Australian cultural majority is still “unused to hearing minorities speak with such assertiveness.” Hussain exposes “a binary world where there’s whiteness, and then otherness. Where white people are individuals and non-white people (a singular group) are not” (Aly). Hussain certainly speaks as an insider and goes so far as recognising his coloniser’s guilt in relation to indigenous Australians (Tan). Aly well remembers the hate mail he and Hussain received when they worked on Salam Café: “The message was clear. We were outsiders and should behave as such. We were not real Australians. We should know our place, as supplicants, celebrating the nation’s unblemished virtue.” Khalafalla, Rahman, Elleissi, and Hussain make clear that the new wave of comics identify as Muslim and Australian (which they would argue many in the audiences receive as a provocation). They have zero tolerance of racism, their comedy is intimately connected with their political activism, and they have an unapologetically Australian identity. No longer is it a question of whether the white cultural majority in Australia will anoint them as worthy and acceptable citizens, it is a question of whether the audiences can rise to the moral standards of the stand-ups. The power has been switched. For Hussain laughter is about connection: “that person laughs because they appreciate the point and whether or not they accept what was said was valid isn’t important. What matters is, they’ve understood” (Low 5). ReferencesAhmed, Ahmed. “When It Comes to Laughter, We Are All Alike.” TedXDoha (2010). 16 June 2016 &lt;http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/TEDxDoha-Ahmed-Ahmed-When-it-Co&gt;.Aly, Waleed. “Comment.” Sydney Morning Herald 24 Sep. 2013."Anh Do". Talking Heads with Peter Thompson. ABC1. 4 Oct. 2010. Radio.Bedell, Geraldine. “Veiled Humour.” The Guardian (2003). 8 Aug. 2016 &lt;https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2003/apr/20/comedy.artsfeatures?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other&gt;.Berger, Rachel. LinkedIn [Profile page]. 14 June 2016 &lt;http://www.linkedin.com/company/rachel-berger&gt;.Do, Anh. The Happiest Refugee. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2010. Doran, Mark. "Service with a Smile: Entertainers Give Troops a Taste of Home.” Air Force 57.21 (2015). 12 June 2016 &lt;http://www.defence.gov.au/Publications/NewsPapers/Raaf/editions/5721/5721.pdf&gt;.Double, Oliver. Getting the Joke: The Inner Workings of Stand-Up Comedy. 2nd ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.Filmer, Natalie. "For Dandenong Comedian and Actress Diana Nguyen The Colour Yellow has a Strong Meaning.” The Herald Sun 3 Sep. 2013.Hage, Ghassan. White Nation: Fantasies of a White Supremacy in a Multicultural Age. Sydney: Pluto Press, 1998.Hussain, Nazeem. Hussain in the Membrane. Melbourne International Comedy Festival, 2016.———. "The Funny Side of 30.” Spectrum. The Age 12 Mar. 2016.Khalafalla, Khaled. Jerk. Melbourne International Comedy Festival, 2016.Low, Lian. "Fear of a Brown Planet: Fight the Power with Laughter.” Peril: Asian Australian Arts and Culture (2011). 12 June 2016 &lt;http://peril.com.au/back-editions/edition10/fear-of-a-brown-planet-fight-the-power-with-laughter&gt;. McCallum, John. "Cringe and Strut: Comedy and National Identity in Post-War Australia.” Because I Tell a Joke or Two: Comedy, Politics and Social Difference. Ed. Stephen Wagg. New York: Routledge, 1998. Morreall, John. Comic Relief. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.Neill, Rosemary. "Laughing through Adversity.” The Australian 28 Aug. 2010.Obeidalla, Dean. "Using Stand-Up to Counter Islamophobia.” TedXEast (2012). 16 June 2016 &lt;http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/TEDxEast-Dean-Obeidalla-Using-S;TEDxEast&gt;.Palmer, Jerry. Taking Humour Seriously. London: Routledge, 1994. Szubanski, Magda. Reckoning. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2015. Tan, Monica. "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie! Allahu Akbar! Nazeem Hussain's Bogan-Muslim Army.” The Guardian 29 Feb. 2016. "Uncle Sam.” Salam Café (2008). 11 June 2016 &lt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeQPAJt6caU&gt;.Wajahat, Ali, et al. "Fear Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America.” Center for American Progress (2011). 11 June 2016 &lt;https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/religion/report/2011/08/26/10165/fear-inc&gt;.

The Netflix/BBC eight-part limited true crime series The Serpent (2021) provides a commentary on the impact of the tourist industry in South-East Asia in the 1970s. The series portrays the story of French serial killer Charles Sobhraj (played by Tahar Rahim)—a psychopathic international con artist of Vietnamese-Indian descent—who regularly targeted Western travellers, especially the long-term wanderers of the legendary “Hippie Trail” (or the “Overland”), running between eastern Europe and Asia. The series, which was filmed on location in Thailand—in Bangkok and the Thai town of Hua Hin—is set in a range of travel destinations along the route of the Hippie Trail, as the narrative follows the many crimes of Sobhraj. Cities such as Kathmandu, Goa, Varanasi, Hong Kong, and Kabul are featured on the show. The series is loosely based upon Australian writers Richard Neville and Julie Clarke’s true crime biography The Life and Crimes of Charles Sobhraj (1979). Another true crime text by Thomas Thompson called Serpentine: Charles Sobhraj’s Reign of Terror from Europe to South Asia (also published in 1979) is a second reference. The show portrays the disappearance and murders of many young victims at the hands of Sobhraj. Certainly, Sobhraj is represented as a monstrous figure, but what about the business of tourism itself? Arguably, in its reflective examination of twentieth-century travel, the series also poses the hedonism of tourism as monstrous. Here, attention is drawn to Western privilege and a neo-orientalist gaze that presented Asia as an exotic playground for its visitors. The television series focuses on Sobhraj, his French-Canadian girlfriend Marie-Andrée Leclerc (played by Jenna Coleman), and the glamourous life they lead in Bangkok. The fashionable couple’s operation presents Sobhraj as a legitimate gem dealer: outwardly, they seem to embody the epitome of fun and glamour, as well as the cross-cultural sophistication of the international jet set. In reality, they drug and then steal from tourists who believe their story. Sobhraj uses stolen passports and cash to travel internationally and acquire more gems. Then, with an accomplice called Ajay Chowdhury (played by Amesh Adireweera), Sobhraj murders his victims if he thinks they could expose his fraud. Often depicted as humourless and seething with anger, the Sobhraj of the series often wears dark aviator sunglasses, a detail that enhances the sense of his impenetrability. One of the first crimes featured in The Serpent is the double-murder of an innocent Dutch couple. The murders lead to an investigation by Dutch diplomat Herman Knippenberg (played by Billy Howle), wanting to provide closure for the families of the victims. Knippenberg enlists neighbours to go undercover at Sobhraj’s home to collect evidence. This exposes Sobhraj’s crimes, so he flees the country with Marie-Andrée and Ajay. While they were apprehended, Sobhraj would be later given pardon from a prison in India: he would only received a life sentence for murder when he is arrested in Nepal in 2003. His ability to evade punishment—and inability to admit to and atone for his crimes—become features of his monstrosity in the television series. Clearly, Sobhraj is represented as the “serpent” of this drama, a metaphor regularly reinforced both textually and visually across the length of the series. As an example, the opening credit sequence for the series coalesces shots of vintage film in Asia—including hitchhiking backpackers, VW Kombi vans, swimming pools, religious tourist sites, corrupt Asian police forces—against an animated map of central and South-East Asia and the Hippie Trail. The map is encased by the giant, slithering tail of some monstrous, reptilian creature. Situating the geographic context of the narrative, the serpentine monster appears to be rising out of continental Asia itself, figuratively stalking and then entrapping the tourists and travellers who move along its route. So, what of the other readings about the monstrosity of the tourism industry that appears on the show? The Hippie Trail was arguably a site—a serpentine cross-continental thoroughfare—of Western excess. The Hippie Trail emerged as the result of the ease of travel across continental Europe and Asia. It was an extension of a countercultural movement that first emerged in the United States in the mid 1960s. Agnieszka Sobocinska has suggested that the travellers of the Hippie Trail were motivated by “widespread dissatisfaction with the perceived conservatism of Western society and its conventions”, and that it was characterised by “youth, rebellion, self-expression and the performance of personal freedom” (par. 8). The Trail appealed to a particular subcultural group who wanted to differentiate themselves from other travellers. Culturally, the Hippie Trail has become a historical site of enduring fascination, written about in popular histories and Western travel narratives, such as A Season in Heaven: True Tales from the Road to Kathmandu (Tomory 1998), Magic Bus: On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to India (MacLean 2007), The Hippie Trail: A History (Gemie and Ireland 2017), and The Hippie Trail: After Europe, Turn Left (Kreamer 2019). Despite these positive memoirs, the route also has a reputation for being destructive and even neo-imperialist: it irrevocably altered the politics of these Asian regions, especially as crowds of Western visitors would party at its cities along the way. In The Serpent, while the crimes take place on its route, on face value the Hippie Trail still appears to be romanticised and nostalgically re-imagined, especially as it represents a stark difference from our contemporary world with its heavily-policed international borders. Indeed, the travellers seem even freer from the perspective of 2021, given the show’s production phase and release in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, when international travel was halted for many. As Kylie Northover has written in a review for the series in the Sydney Morning Herald, the production design of the programme and the on-location shoot in Thailand is affectionately evocative and nostalgic. Northover suggests that it “successfully evokes a very specific era of travel—the Vietnam War has just ended, the Summer of Love is over and contact with family back home was usually only through the post restante” (13). On the show, there is certainly critique of the tourist industry. For example, one scene demonstrates the “dark side” of the Hippie Trail dream. Firstly, we see a psychedelic-coloured bus of travellers driving through Nepal. The outside of the bus is covered with its planned destinations: “Istanbul. Teheran. Kabul. Delhi”. The Western travellers are young and dressed in peasant clothing and smoking marijuana. Looking over at the Himalayas, one hippie calls the mountains a “Shangri-La”, the fictional utopia of an Eastern mountain paradise. Then, the screen contracts to show old footage of Kathmandu— using the small-screen dimensions of a Super-8 film—which highlights a “hashish centre” with young children working at the front. The child labour is ignored. As the foreign hippie travellers—American and English—move through Kathmandu, they seem self-absorbed and anti-social. Rather than meeting and learning from locals, they just gather at parties with other hippies. By night-time, the series depicts drugged up travellers on heroin or other opiates, disconnected from place and culture as they stare around aimlessly. The negative representation of hippies has been observed in some of the critical reviews about The Serpent. For example, writing about the series for The Guardian, Dorian Lynskey cites Joan Didion’s famous “serpentine” interpretation of the hippie culture in the United States, applying this to the search for meaning on the Hippie Trail: the subculture of expats and travellers in south-east Asia feels rather like Joan Didion’s 60s California, crisscrossed by lost young people trying to find themselves anew in religion, drugs, or simply unfamiliar places. In Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Didion writes of those who “drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins”. (Lynskey) We could apply cultural theories about tourism to a critique of the industry in the series too. Many cultural researchers have critiqued tourists and the tourism industry, as well as the powers that tourists can wield over destination cultures. In Time and Commodity Culture, John Frow has suggested that the logic of tourism is “that of a relentless extension of commodity relations, and the consequent inequalities of power, between centre and periphery, First and Third World, developed and undeveloped regions, metropolis and countryside”, as well as one that has developed from the colonial era (151). Similarly, Derek Gregory’s sensitive analyses of cultural geographies of postcolonial space showed that Nineteenth-century Orientalism is a continuing process within globalised mass tourism (114). The problem of Orientalism as a Western travel ideology is made prominent in The Serpent through Sobhraj’s denouncement of Western tourists, even though there is much irony at play here, as the series itself arguably is presenting its own retro version of Orientalism to Western audiences. Even the choice of Netflix to produce this true crime story—with its two murderers of Asian descent—is arguably a way of reinforcing negative representations about Asian identity. Then, Western characters take on the role of hero and/or central protagonist, especially the character of Knippenberg. One could ask: where is the Netflix show that depicts a positive story about a central character of Vietnamese-Indian descent? Edward Said famously defined Orientalism as “a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western experience” (1). It became a way for Western cultures to interpret and understand the East, and for reducing and homogenising it into a more simplistic package. Orientalism explored discourses that grew to encompass India and the Far East in tandem with the expansion of Western imperialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It examined a dualistic ideology: a way of looking that divided the globe into two limited types without any room for nuance and diversity. Inclusive and exclusive, Orientalism assumed and promoted an “us and them” binary, privileging a Western gaze as the normative cultural position, while the East was relegated to the ambiguous role of “other”. Orientalism is a field in which stereotypes of the East and West have power: as Said suggests, “the West is the actor, the Orient is a passive reactor… . The West is the spectator, the judge and jury, of every facet of Oriental behaviour” (109). Interestingly, despite the primacy in which Sobhraj is posited as the show’s central monster, he is also the character in the series most critical of the neo-colonial oppression caused by this counter-cultural tourism, which indicates ambiguity and complexity in the representation of monstrosity. Sobhraj appears to have read Said. As he looks scornfully at a stoner hippie woman who has befriended Ajay, he seems to perceive the hippies as drop-outs and drifters, but he also connects them more thoroughly as perpetrators of neo-imperialist processes. Indicating his contempt for the sightseers of the Hippie Trail as they seek enlightenment on their travels, he interrogates his companion Ajay: why do you think these white children deny the comfort and wealth of the life they were given to come to a place like this? Worship the same gods. Wear the same rags. Live in the same filth. Each experience is only then taken home to wear like a piece of fake tribal jewellery. They travel only to acquire. It’s another form of imperialism. And she has just colonised you! Sobhraj’s speech is political but it is also menacing, and he quickly sets upon Ajay and physically punishes him for his tryst with the hippie woman. Yet, ultimately, the main Western tourists of the Hippie Trail are presented positively in The Serpent, especially as many of them are depcited as naïve innocents within the story—hopeful, idealistic and excited to travel—and simply in the wrong place, at the wrong time. In this way, the series still draws upon the conventions of the true crime genre, which is to differentiate clearly between good/evil and right/wrong, and to create an emotional connection to the victims as symbols of virtue. As the crimes and deaths accumulate within the series, Sobhraj’s opinions are deceptive, designed to manipulate those around him (such as Ajay) rather than being drawn from genuine feelings of political angst about the neo-imperialist project of Western tourism. The uncertainty around Sobhraj’s motivation for his crimes remains one of the fascinating aspects of the series. It problematises the way that the monstrosity of this character is constructed within the narrative of the show. The character of Sobhraj frequently engages with these essentialising issues about Orientalism, but he appears to do so with the aim to remove the privilege that comes from a Western gaze. In the series, Sobhraj’s motivations for targeting Western travellers are often insinuated as being due to personal reasons, such as revenge for his treatment as a child in Europe, where he says he was disparaged for being of Asian heritage. For example, as he speaks to one of his drugged French-speaking victims, Sobhraj suggests that when he moved from Vietnam to France as a child, he was subject to violence and poor treatment from others: “a half-caste boy from Saigon. You can imagine how I was bullied”. In this instance, the suffering French man placed in Sobhraj’s power has been promoted as fitting into one of these “us and them” binaries, but in this set-up, there is also a reversal of power relations and Sobhraj has set himself as both the “actor” and the “spectator”. Here, he has reversed the “Orientalist” gaze onto a passive Western man, homogenising a “Western body”, and hence radically destabilising the construct of Orientalism as an ideological force. This is also deeply troubling: it goes on to sustain a problematic and essentialising binary that, no matter which way it faces, aims to denigrate and stereotype a cultural group. In this way, the character of Sobhraj demonstrates that while he is angry at the way that Orientalist ideologies have victimised him in the past, he will continue to perpetrate its basic ideological assumptions as a way of administering justice and seeking personal retribution. Ultimately, perhaps one of the more powerful readings of The Serpent is that it is difficult to move away from the ideological constructs of travel. We could also suggest that same thing for the tourists. In her real-life analysis of the Hippie Trail, Agnieszka Sobocinska has suggested that while it was presented and understood as something profoundly different from older travel tours and expeditions, it could not help but be bound up in the same ideological colonial and imperial impulses that constituted earlier forms of travel: Orientalist images and imperial behaviours were augmented to suit a new generation that liked to think of itself as radically breaking from the past. Ironically, this facilitated the view that ‘alternative’ travel was a statement in anti-colonial politics, even as it perpetuated some of the inequalities inherent to imperialism. This plays out in The Serpent. We see that this supposedly radically different new group – with a relaxed and open-minded identity—is bound within the same old ideological constructs. Part of the problem of the Hippie Trail traveller was a failure to recognise the fundamentally imperialist origins of their understanding of travel. This is the same kind of concern mapped out by Turner and Ash in their analysis of neo-imperial forms of travel called The Golden Hordes: International Tourism and the Pleasure Periphery (1976), written and published in the same era as the events of The Serpent. Presciently gauging the effect that mass tourism would have on developing nations, Turner and Ash used the metaphor of “hordes” of tourists taking over various poorer destinations to intend a complete reversal of the stereotype of a horde of barbaric and non-Western hosts. By inferring that tourists are the “hordes” reverses Orientalist conceptions of de-personalised non-Western cultures, and shows the problem that over-tourism and unsustainable visitation can pose to host locations, especially with the acceleration of mass travel in the late Twentieth century. Certainly, the concept of a touristic “horde” is one of the monstrous ideas in travel, and can signify the worst aspects contained within mass tourism. To conclude, it is useful to return to the consideration of what is presented as monstrous in The Serpent. Here, there is the obvious monster in the sinister, impassive figure of serial killer Charles Sobhraj. Julie Clarke, in a new epilogue for The Life and Crimes of Charles Sobhraj (2020), posits that Sobhraj’s actions are monstrous and unchangeable, demonstrating the need to understand impermeable cases of human evil as a part of human society: one of the lessons of this cautionary tale should be an awareness that such ‘inhuman humans’ do live amongst us. Many don’t end up in jail, but rather reach the highest level in the corporate and political spheres. (Neville and Clarke, 2020) Then, there is the exploitational spectre of mass tourism from the Hippie Trail that has had the ability to “invade” and ruin the authenticity and/or sustainability of a particular place or location as it is overrun by the “golden hordes”. Finally, we might consider the Orientalist, imperialist and globalised ideologies of mass tourism as one of the insidious and serpentine forces that entrap the central characters in this television series. 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