Academic literature on the topic 'Essais (Genre littéraire)'

Les romans de Milan Kundera ainsi que ses essais sur l’art du roman constituent un ensemble cohérent dont le but est de nous rappeler l’art moderne et européen par excellence, soit la tradition depuis Rabelais et Cervantes jusqu’à nos jours. En plus de cela, la vision du roman que Kundera défend dans ses travaux théoriques sert également à éviter des interprétations politiques de ses propres romans. Le roman est d’après cet auteur tchèque (français naturalisé aujourd’hui) un phénomène esthétique dont le but principal est d’examiner l’existence humaine à travers les personnages. C’est aussi la raison pour laquelle sa liberté idéologique (son indépendance de la morale imposée de l’extérieur) doit être perpétuellement protégée. Dans cet article, nous essayons d’expliquer ce qu’est cette sagesse romanesque et de quelle manière Kundera s’inscrit dans cette tradition littéraire.

Introduction Special effects (SFX) makeup has long been a powerful tool in the world of performance, used to transform, distort, and reimagine the human form in service of storytelling. From the eerie creatures of horror to the fantastical beings of science fiction, prosthetic makeup plays a crucial role in shaping the visual language of genre media. The American television show Face Off (2011-2018) brought this behind-the-scenes artistry to the forefront, offering viewers an in-depth look at the creative processes of professional special effects and prosthetic makeup artists. Running for 13 seasons, the competition-style reality series tasked contestants with complex challenges inspired by film and television genres, giving audiences a rare opportunity to witness the full arc of character creation—from initial brainstorming and conceptualisation to sculpting, moulding, and the climactic final reveal, known as “last looks”. Judged by industry veterans Glenn Hetrick, Ve Neill, and Neville Page, Face Off provided not just entertainment, but a compelling platform for examining the craft and imagination behind creature design. This article explores how Face Off represents the concept of mutation within the visual and narrative framework of special effects makeup. Focussing on two key episodes—Season 6, Episode 11 ("Freaks of Nature") and Season 11, Episode 9 ("Frightening Families")—the analysis considers how contestants interpreted and visualised the idea of mutation in their designs. By examining the aesthetic choices, symbolic meanings, and creative decisions made in these episodes, this article seeks to understand how the artists navigate the intersection of genre, biology, and imagination. Ultimately, this investigation highlights how the visual language of mutation is shaped not only by the demands of competition but also by deeper genre conventions and cultural anxieties about the body, transformation, and identity. Making and Moulding Mutants The two episodes in question focus on how SFX artists interpret the concept of mutation. In the episode “Freaks of Nature”, six participants are assigned a specific genetic mutation and tasked with representing it through special effects makeup. The mutations included: impenetrable skin, panoramic vision, elasticity, magnetism, wall-crawling, and tunneling. Before beginning their physical transformations, each artist collaborated with a visual effects designer to create a digital rendering of their intended look to ensure the “mutated DNA” produces a “radically alter[ed] physical appearance”. That is, the characters that are crafted needed to “physically manifest that [selected] trait”. As the collaboration begins, it becomes clear that, despite the fact that the assigned mutations were not inherently monstrous or disfiguring, all six artists independently chose to depict their creations as disfigured, or physically abnormal in some way, with the general consensus amongst the artists that mutation meant developing “villains”. The decision to equate mutation with monstrosity is telling and not entirely surprising given the structure of the competition. The time constraints under which these artists operate—often only having three days to design, sculpt, mould, paint, and apply complex prosthetics—encourage them to rely on core competencies and visual shorthand that are deeply rooted in genre conventions. Faced with limited time to conceptualise and execute a design, artists revert to what they know best and what has been normalised in the broader cultural and cinematic discourse. The choice to emphasise the monstrous of mutation, then, is evidence that, perhaps in response to heuristic processing, the SFX artists are leaning into the stereotypes that they have been exposed to through the production and consumption of popular culture. As Chaiken and Ledgerwood suggest, heuristic processing is where people rely on easily understood cues to interpret material, which can shape judgements that are easily accessed but not necessarily reliable. Applying such a perception to the SFX artists' work in Face Off, it would appear that the artists' creative instincts are shaped by a visual and narrative lexicon that equates mutation with the grotesque, even when mutation can be more broadly applied and understood. Rather than deeply engaging with the concept of mutation, the quick turnaround reinforces a kind of genre muscle memory, where certain visual metaphors become default modes of expression. Mutation, particularly in the realm of visual media and popular culture, then, is frequently equated with an error or monstrous body. As Mantle posits, discussions of the mutated body have tended to focus on “moral concerns” and more pressingly “a body that deviates from a norm”. Accordingly, scholarly discussions have pointed to how mutated characters can often be depicted as transgressive, deviant, or othered (Gittinger), engaging in body horror that marks the mutant as monstrous (Pheasant-Kelly). Discussing science fiction films as examples, Pheasant-Kelly contends that mutations can produce characters that are “almost beyond recognition as humanoid[s]” (238), citing Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly as typifying mutations that emphasise “fluidity, disgust, infiltration and physical decomposition” (239). Even when the mutated characters do reflect more human representations, such as the superhero mutants of the X-Men franchise, their otherness or difference is elevated, to show they diverge from the norm or expected (Lopez). Thus, the decision of the SFX artists in Face Off to create characters that emphasise abjection is not unexpected. Rather than portraying mutation as a neutral or even beneficial change in an organism’s DNA, the artists defaulted to representing it as something grotesque or unsettling. Their interpretations emphasise the social and cultural narratives that construct mutation as a form of deviance. In “Frightening Families”, the trend towards mutation being synonymous with otherness, abjection, and monstrosity continues. In this case, the task is even more explicitly coded as horrific: the makeup artists are asked to create “a sadistic family of three deranged mutants” that would be found in horror productions, and this is a tonal shift from the previous tasks of season eleven, which had largely been centred on light-hearted or “pretty” themes. Contestant Cig even expresses excitement at finally being able to create something “creepy and grotesque,” nine episodes into the season. This framing indicates that mutation, in this context, is not just creatively freeing but inherently tied to horror. One group designs a family disfigured by a nuclear incident, while the other team imagines a family mutated into grotesque circus performers due to genetic malformations. Both interpretations in the episode are steeped in visual horror and physical distortion, but what becomes particularly troubling is the decision by the circus-themed SFX team to construct a young character with the real-world condition of hydrocephalus. As Aschoff et al. explain, hydrocephalus is an “anatomical-pathological” (68) condition in which fluid collects in the brain, causing not only symptoms such as “headache, vomiting, visual disturbances … [and] epileptic seizures” (67), but also the potential for the brain to grow to “abnormal proportions” (69). Although the character design is praised by the judges—particularly the paint work that mimics the veiny, sallow texture of the skin and what guest judge Marcus describes as “nice radial stretching”—this praise, summarised as “disgusting and fantastic” by judge Ve, underlines a more insidious problem: the rendering of a real and often debilitating medical condition as a spectacle for entertainment. Scholarship has consistently demonstrated that disabilities have been appropriated by popular culture as mechanisms for delineating norms, marginalising those who do not ‘fit’ ideological constructs of normalcy (Diamond and Poharec; Hadley). While such portrayals have perpetuated stereotypes that do a disservice to individuals with disabilities, these representations were not always perceived negatively. Bogdan, for instance, argues that the ‘freak show’ was once an accepted form of popular culture in America, where displaying extraordinary bodies was not solely characterised by callous exploitation but also functioned as a means of interpreting difference. The “freak”, as scholars like Fielder and Garland-Thomson have examined, was constructed as a spectacle of the extraordinary: a figure that incited curiosity, fuelled speculation, and captivated audiences, functioning as both a spectacle of novelty and a lucrative commodity (Bogdan; Fielder). This duality allowed some performers with disabilities to achieve a measure of fame, suggesting that cultural perceptions of the freak body were complex and multifaceted. However, as society evolved and cultural narratives reshaped, the perception of the ‘freak’ or disabled body shifted from a symbol of “wonder to one of error” (Garland-Thomson, 3). This cultural shift is evident in the contemporary SFX competition show Face Off, where the depiction of a character with hydrocephalus draws upon early freak show portrayals by placing the character within a circus family—a narrative decision that evokes the historical spectacle of the freak while reinforcing contemporary stigmatising narratives. The dual-edged portrayal underlines how the exploitation of disability as spectacle persists in modern media, yet it is now reframed through a lens of exploitation, framing the affliction as a grotesque spectacle rather than presenting it as a complex human experience. Such a decision, whether intentional or not, however reinforces a long-standing cultural pattern in which the disabled body is framed as othered, uncanny, or monstrous. As Diamond and Poharec argue, “according to humanist ideals, human subjects are white, male, able-bodied, conventionally attractive, heterosexual and cisgender, and rationally mature citizens” (403). To deviate from this narrow standard is to be marked as abnormal, and in media representations, such divergence frequently becomes the object of spectacle. The audience is invited to gaze at the difference, not with empathy, but with fascination or horror, effectively reducing the disabled figure to an object of curiosity or fear (Diamond and Poharec). Portraying disabled people as spectacles or presenting their bodies as threatening to the ‘norm’ is what Hadley considers a consistent problem in media: that is, disabled individuals are often represented as either pitiable or terrifying, rather than as complex, fully realised human beings. These portrayals do not just misrepresent disability; they actively contribute to a social hierarchy in which disabled lives are seen as less valuable or less human. By turning a condition like hydrocephalus into a visual shorthand for otherness or horror, the show Face Off participates in a representational logic that perpetuates structures of inequity and maltreatment. Rather than challenging societal prejudices about disability, such depictions reinforce them—subtly teaching audiences that physical difference is something to be feared, fixed, or excluded, especially when the artists are applauded for the authentic dribbling and “creepy” tone of the character. In fact, judge Glenn goes as far as to say that it is contestant Ben’s best work, legitimising the treatment of disability and difference as laudable. The choice to focus on a medical condition as evidence of mutation may also reflect how, under pressure, artists draw from familiar representations that they know will have immediate visual impact. In a challenge that must be completed in a matter of days, the use of such an extreme visual cue may have felt like a practical decision to quickly convey a disturbing and memorable character, drawing perhaps from the stereotypes that they had gleaned from the myriad of popular cultural offerings that position mutation as abject (Domaradzki; Mantle; Peasant-Kelly). While this might raise important ethical concerns, it also illustrates how the time constraints of the competition push contestants to prioritize recognisable visual tropes over nuanced representations The Animal-Human Hybrid In “Freaks of Nature”, the fact that half of the Face Off artists deferred to animal traits in constructing their physical representations of mutation was not unexpected. Animal-human hybrids are a long-standing and culturally pervasive narrative device, especially within science fiction and horror genres, making them a familiar visual shorthand for transformation and difference (Cruz; Domaradzki). These hybrids are not merely imaginative constructs but are rooted in real-world scientific practices. Genetic testing on animals—including gene splicing and the deliberate induction of mutations—has long served as a foundation for medical advancement (Anderson; Dunn et al.; Singh and Seed), and these experiments have in turn inspired screen narratives that explore the limits and ethics of biological manipulation. Face Off operates directly within this representational tradition. Even when the characters were not constructed as overtly monstrous, they were often designed as amalgamations or animal-human hybrids. These hybrids were used to communicate specific abilities linked to the assigned mutations—abilities that could have been represented in a variety of ways but were instead visually anchored in the non-human or the abject. For instance, an octopus—with its multiple tentacles—was used to convey elasticity, a fly’s capacity to climb vertical surfaces inspired another design, and a mole rat informed the concept of a tunnelling mutant. These choices suggest that even when monstrosity or non-human traits were not explicitly chosen as the aesthetic direction, the animalistic was still a dominant trope. Here, the hybrid becomes not just a symbol of altered biology but a marker of otherness, particularly when the boundaries around what constitutes the human becomes increasingly blurred in law and animal experimentation (Vining). The integration of animal traits into the characters developed by the SFX artists can subtly signal a tendency to use creativity to explore broader cultural anxieties around hybridity. As Cruz observes, “interspecies hybrids are abnormal and undesirable not only in the sense that their creation does not occur naturally, but also in that they are essentially evolutionary dead-ends” (162). Within this logic, hybrids do not represent progress or potential but aberration and stasis. In fact, Cruz argues that “the uncertainty of what will be produced by the unnatural union is what frightens” (162). It is precisely the unpredictability—the inability to control or fully know the outcome of genetic fusion—that makes such depictions so resonant within horror and sci-fi aesthetics. The animal-human hybrid becomes a vessel for projecting fears about scientific overreach and the destabilisation of natural order. As Cruz notes, “what is most frightening about genetics is our loss of power” (164). The Face Off artists' alignment with this darker lineage of hybrid representation accentuates how deeply entrenched these ideas about mutation and hybridity are in the cultural imagination. As Domaradzki argues, the preoccupation of popular culture with mutation and hybrid forms is closely tied to the rapid development of biotechnologies, which provoke both fascination and fear. Media texts, then, like Face Off, function as interpretive tools that help audiences navigate the ethical and existential uncertainties posed by these technologies. Yet even as they offer a space for creative exploration, they also tend to reproduce dominant narratives that equate difference—especially biological difference—with monstrosity or otherness. Creativity and the Mutant Agenda The decision of the SFX artists across both episodes to lean into the monstrous when interpreting mutation may also have been a strategic and creative one. By choosing to represent mutations through incongruous and transgressive forms, the special effects artists in “Freaks of Nature”, for example, had a wider range of aesthetic possibilities with which to respond to the request of judge, Neville Page, to “push themselves creatively”. The monstrous body, unlike a conventionally beautiful or subtle transformation, invites experimentation. As contestant George states in “Frightening Families”, “finally, we’ve done all this pretty shit and now we get to do something scary and bloody and snotty, which is so awesome”. It enables artists to work with exaggerated forms, unfamiliar textures, and extreme alterations to human anatomy that can produce hedonistic responses in audiences (Baltacioglu). These creative challenges allowed the participants to push the limits of their materials and methods, from prosthetics and latex shaping to airbrushing, sculpting, and layering. In this sense, the monstrous was not just a default aesthetic, but also a space for showcasing technical prowess. For example, the winner of the mutation challenge in ‘Freaks of Nature’, contestant Tyler, was conscious that his wall-crawler needed to visually reflect the unique characteristics of a fly, and thus, he opted to mimic hair follicles by burning rubber tubes that would then look stiff and spiky: a creative approach that was deemed a marker of authenticity by the judges. While grotesque designs were expected in a mutant makeup challenge, contestants were still encouraged to push creative boundaries. In “Frightening Families”, contestant Adam challenged his team’s “conceptually bland” direction by proposing a character swap—casting a six-foot man as the “little girl” and a shorter woman as the father. This risk, ultimately praised by the judges, exemplifies how artists were encouraged to break from conventional representations. Rather than being confined to more mundane or restrained depictions—such as minor physical anomalies or internal genetic shifts that might not lend themselves to visual storytelling—the artists were given the opportunity to expand the visual language of mutation. This freedom encouraged out-of-the-box thinking and provided a platform to challenge traditional aesthetic paradigms within their discipline. The pressure to engage in out-of-the-box thinking was central to the development of mutants in the Face Off episode “Freaks of Nature”. Contestants openly discussed how they could not play it “too safe” or “too simple,” emphasising that the judges would “appreciate originality”. Creativity was not just encouraged—it was expected as a professional standard. The demand for innovation meant that even within a theme as imaginative as mutation, artists were pushed to take conceptual and aesthetic risks. Simply defaulting to the familiar, even when it fits the brief, could result in elimination. This became evident in the case of contestant Graham, who chose to develop a mole rat-inspired design to represent a tunnelling mutant. Although his choice was conceptually logical—grounded in the real-world biology of an animal known for its burrowing—his execution was criticised for being too predictable. The judges were unanimous in their disappointment, calling the concept the “obvious choice” and the “lowest hanging fruit”. Despite technical competency, his failure to stretch the imaginative possibilities of mutation cost him his place in the competition. Graham’s experience signals what creativity scholars have long argued, that what constitutes creativity may be subjective (Caves), but ultimately, to have success is to generate novel ideas (Amabile). Professional expectations on Face Off required contestants to uphold high standards across multiple domains: innovative concept development, strong narrative cohesion, and meticulous technical execution. Risk-taking was a valued part of the process. Even when monstrosity and mutation already lent themselves to creativity, the bar was raised—contestants had to go beyond the expected, challenge the visual language of the grotesque, and surprise the judges with fresh interpretations. Bilton contends that creative people thrive on bounded creativity, where, for example, they are confined by genre or brief, but use that as a means to challenge parameters. These SFX artists typify Bilton’s thinking as they sought to push the boundaries of character design through cohesive storytelling, problem-solving on the fly, and aligning their work with the discipline’s aesthetic values: subtle paintwork, organic form, clean lines, and anatomical believability. SFX artists, then, were expected to not only craft compelling mutant characters but also to reinvent how mutation itself could be visualised. Failing to do so—even when working within a monstrous framework—was enough to be dismissed. While the monstrous or hybrid may be a reliable fallback under time pressure, contestants are still expected to push beyond those tropes. However, the show’s structure simultaneously demands rapid execution and novelty—a difficult balance that often leads artists to return to core motifs that are both professionally learned and socially reinforced. The result is a show where pushing aesthetic and conceptual boundaries was both a creative imperative and a professional necessity. Conclusion The depiction of mutation in Face Off offers an interesting window into how special effects artists grapple with the visual, narrative, and ideological dimensions of biological transformation. Across the two episodes analysed, mutation emerges not as a neutral or scientific concept, but as a rich aesthetic and cultural symbol—one that is frequently aligned with monstrosity, deviance, and otherness. Whether drawing on animal traits or real-world medical conditions, the artists consistently leaned into the grotesque, creating characters that disturb and transfix in equal measure. While this tendency reveals how entrenched certain genre tropes are, it also points out the professional and creative demands placed on SFX artists to innovate within those boundaries. The mutation challenges, much like the alien, monster-focussed, and creature-based challenges of the discussed seasons, emphasised the grotesque and deviated from conventional aesthetics. This contrast became particularly apparent when placed alongside the more visually pleasing and ethereal challenges, such as the Snow Queens, angels, and fantasy duos, where beauty and attractiveness served as constraining parameters. In contrast, the grotesque-themed challenges permitted greater exploration beyond the boundaries of normalcy. Despite these thematic differences, all challenges demanded similar techniques and approaches, reinforcing the expectation that special effects artists would expand their skill sets and refine their repertoires as the seasons progressed. Ultimately, Face Off becomes more than a reality competition; it is a site where contemporary anxieties about the body, identity, and transformation are played out through latex, prosthetics, and paint. The show’s mutant challenges highlight both the imaginative potential and the ethical complexities of visual storytelling in genre media. In making the monstrous beautiful—or at least compelling—the artists on Face Off not only expand the possibilities of special effects makeup but also offer insight into the cultural narratives that continue to shape our understanding of the altered body. References Amabile, Teresa M. "Entrepreneurial Creativity through Motivational Synergy." The Journal of Creative Behavior 31.1 (1997): 18-26. Anderson, W. French. "Prospects for Human Gene Therapy." Science 226.4673 (1984): 401-409. Baltacioglu, Yesim Alrsoy. “Views of State Theatre Actors on Theatrical Makeup.” New Trends and Issues Proceedings on Humanities and Social Sciences 5.6 (2018): 118–127. <http://www.prosoc.eu>. Bilton, Chris. Management and Creativity: From Creative Industries to Creative Management. Blackwell, 2007. Bogdan, Robert. Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit. U of Chicago P, 1988. Caves, Richard E. "Contracts between Art and Commerce." Journal of Economic Perspectives 17.2 (2003): 73-83. Chaiken, Shelly, and Alison Ledgerwood. “A Theory of Heuristic and Systematic Information Processing”. Handbook of Theories of Social Psychology, eds. P.A.M. van Lange, A.W. Kruglanski, and E.T. Higgins. Sage, 2012. 246-265. Cronenberg, David, dir. The Proteus Mutation [a.k.a. Proteus]. Lightning Pictures, 1995. Cruz, Ronald Allan Lopez. “Mutations and Metamorphoses: Body Horror Is Biological Horror.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 40.4 (2012): 160–168. <https://doi.org/10.1080/01956051.2012.654521>. Diamond, Aidan, and Lauranne Poharec. “Introduction: Freaked and Othered Bodies in Comics.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 8.5 (2017): 402–416. <https://doi.org/10.1080/21504857.2017.1355833>. Domaradzki, Jan. “Popular Culture and Genetics.” Polish Sociological Review 215 (2021): 281–310. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/27093115>. Dunn, David A., Matthew V. Cannon, Michael H. Irwin, and Carl A. Pinkert. “Animal Models of Human Mitochondrial DNA Mutations.” Biochomica et Biophysica Acta 1820.5 (2012): 839–848. DOI: 10.1016/j.mito.2011.06.004. Face Off. TV series. Exec. prods. D.J. Viola, Dwight D. Smith, and Michael Agbabian. Syfy, 2011–2018. Fielder, Leslie A. “Pity and Fear: Images of the Disabled in Literature and the Popular Arts.” Salmnagungi 57 (1982). Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. “Introduction: From Wonder to Error—A Genealogy of Freak Discourse in Modernity.” Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. R. Garland-Thomson. New York UP, 1996. 1-22. Gittinger, Judi L. Personhood in Science Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Hadley, Bree. Disability, Public Space Performance and Spectatorship: Unconscious Performers. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Lopez, Francesca. “X-Men: The Normative System Disguised as Mutant.” Interdisciplinary Essays on Monsters and the Monstrous, ed. M.S. Schotanus. Emerald, 2022. 121–139. Mantle, Martin. “‘Have You Tried Not Being a Mutant?’: Genetic Mutation and the Acquisition of Extra-Ordinary Ability.” M/C Journal 10.5 (2007). <https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2712>. Pheasant-Kelly, Frances. "Towards a Structure of Feeling: Abjection and Allegories of Disease in Science Fiction ‘Mutation’ Films." Medical Humanities 42.4 (2016): 238-245. Singh, Vijay K., and Thomas M. Seed. “How Necessary Are Animal Models for Modern Drug Discovery?” Expert Opinion on Drug Discovery 16.12 (2021): 1391–1397. <https://doi.org/10.1080/17460441.2021.1972255>. Vining, Joseph. "Human Identity: The Question Presented by Human-Animal Hybridization." Stanford Journal of Animal Law and Policy 1 (2008): 50-68.

Literature—at least serious literature—is something that we work at. This is especially true within the academy. Literature departments are places where workers labour over texts carefully extracting and sharing meanings, for which they receive monetary reward. Specialised languages are developed to describe professional concerns. Over the last thirty years, the productions of mass culture, once regarded as too slight to warrant laborious explication, have been admitted to the academic workroom. Gothic studies—the specialist area that treats fearful and horrifying texts —has embraced the growing acceptability of devoting academic effort to texts that would once have fallen outside of the remit of “serious” study. In the seventies, when Gothic studies was just beginning to establish itself, there was a perception that the Gothic was “merely a literature of surfaces and sensations”, and that any Gothic of substantial literary worth had transcended the genre (Thompson 1). Early specialists in the field noted this prejudice; David Punter wrote of the genre’s “difficulty in establishing respectable credentials” (403), while Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick hoped her work would “make it easier for the reader of ‘respectable’ nineteenth-century novels to write ‘Gothic’ in the margin” (4). Gothic studies has gathered a modicum of this longed-for respectability for the texts it treats by deploying the methodologies used within literature departments. This has yielded readings that are largely congruous with readings of other sorts of literature; the Gothic text tells us things about ourselves and the world we inhabit, about power, culture and history. Yet the Gothic remains a production of popular culture as much as it is of the valorised literary field. I do not wish to argue for a reintroduction of the great divide described by Andreas Huyssen, but instead to suggest that we have missed something important about the ways in which popular Gothics—and perhaps other sorts of popular text—function. What if the popular Gothic were not a type of work, but a kind of play? How might this change the way we read these texts? Johan Huizinga noted that “play is not ‘ordinary’ or ‘real’ life. It is rather a stepping out of ‘real’ life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own. Every child knows perfectly well he is ‘only pretending’, or that it was ‘only for fun’” (8). If the Gothic sometimes offers playful texts, then those texts might direct readers not primarily towards the real, but away from it, at least for a limited time. This might help to account for the wicked spectacle offered by Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out, and in particular, its presentation of the black mass. The black mass is the parody of the Christian mass thought to be performed by witches and diabolists. Although it has doubtless been performed on rare occasions since the Middle Ages, the first black mass for which we have substantial documentary evidence was celebrated in Hampstead on Boxing Day 1918, by Montague Summers; it is a satisfying coincidence that Summers was one of the Gothic’s earliest scholars. We have record of Summer’s mass because it was watched by a non-participant, Anatole James, who was “bored to tears” as Summers recited tracts of Latin and practiced homosexual acts with a youth named Sullivan while James looked on (Medway 382-3). Summers claimed to be a Catholic priest, although there is some doubt as to the legitimacy of his ordination. The black mass ought to be officiated by a Catholic clergyman so the host may be transubstantiated before it is blasphemed. In doing so, the mass de-emphasises interpretive meaning and is an assault on the body of Christ rather than a mutilation of the symbol of Christ’s love and sacrifice. Thus, it is not conceived of primarily as a representational act but as actual violence. Nevertheless, Summers’ black mass seems like an elaborate form of sexual play more than spiritual warfare; by asking an acquaintance to observe the mass, Summers formulated the ritual as an erotic performance. The black mass was a favourite trope of the English Gothic of the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out features an extended presentation of the mass; it was first published in 1934, but had achieved a kind of genre-specific canonicity by the nineteen-sixties, so that many Gothics produced and consumed in the sixties and seventies featured depictions of the black mass that drew from Wheatley’s original. Like Summers, Wheatley’s mass emphasised licentious sexual practice and, significantly, featured a voyeur or voyeurs watching the performance. Where James only wished Summers’ mass would end, Wheatley and his followers presented the mass as requiring interruption before it reaches a climax. This version of the mass recurs in most of Wheatley’s black magic novels, but it also appears in paperback romances, such as Susan Howatch’s 1973 The Devil on Lammas Night; it is reimagined in the literate and genuinely eerie short stories of Robert Aickman, which are just now thankfully coming back into print; it appears twice in Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books. Nor was the black mass confined to the written Gothic, appearing in films of the period too; The Kiss of the Vampire (1963), The Witches (1966), Satan’s Skin, aka Blood on Satan’s Claw (1970), The Wicker Man (1973), and The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1974) all feature celebrations of the Sabbat, as, of course do the filmed adaptations of Wheatley’s novels, The Devil Rides Out (1967) and To the Devil a Daughter (1975). More than just a key trope, the black mass was a procedure characteristic of the English Gothic of the sixties; narratives were structured so as to lead towards its performance. All of the texts mentioned above repeat narrative and trope, but more importantly, they loosely repeat experience, both for readers and the characters depicted. While Summers’ black mass apparently made for tiresome viewing, textual representations of the black mass typically embrace the pageant and sensuality of the Catholic mass it perverts, involving music, incense and spectacle. Often animalistic sex, bestiality, infanticide or human sacrifice are staged, and are intended to fascinate rather than bore. Although far from canonical in a literary sense, by 1969 Wheatley was an institution. He had sold 27 million books worldwide and around 70 percent of those had been within the British market. All of his 55 books were in print. A new Wheatley in hardcover would typically sell 30,000 copies, and paperback sales of his back catalogue stood at more than a million books a year. While Wheatley wrote thrillers in a range of different subgenres, at the end of the sixties it was his ‘black magic’ stories that were far and away the most popular. While moderately successful when first published, they developed their most substantial audience in the sixties. When The Satanist was published in paperback in 1966, it sold more than 100,000 copies in the first ten days. By 1973, five of these eight black magic titles had sold more than a million copies. The first of these was The Devil Rides Out which, although originally published in 1934, by 1973, helped by the Hammer film of 1967, had sold more than one and a half million copies, making it the most successful of the group (“Pooter”; Hedman and Alexandersson 20, 73). Wheatley’s black magic stories provide a good example of the way that texts persist and accumulate influence in a genre field, gaining genre-specific canonicity. Wheatley’s apparent influence on Gothic texts and films that followed, coupled with the sheer number of his books sold, indicate that he occupied a central position in the field, and that his approach to the genre became, for a time, a defining one. Wheatley’s black magic stories apparently developed a new readership in the sixties. The black mass perhaps became legible as a salacious, nightmarish version of some imaginary hippy gathering. While Wheatley’s Satanists are villainous, there is a vaguely progressive air about them; they listen to unconventional music, dance in the nude, participate in unconventional sexual practice, and glut themselves on various intoxicants. This, after all, was the age of Hair, Oh! Calcutta! and Oz magazine, “an era of personal liberation, in the view of some critics, one of moral anarchy” (Morgan 149). Without suggesting that the Satanists represent hippies there is a contextual relevancy available to later readers that would have been missing in the thirties. The sexual zeitgeist would have allowed later readers to pornographically and pleasurably imagine the liberated sexuality of the era without having to approve of it. Wheatley’s work has since become deeply, embarrassingly unfashionable. The books are racist, sexist, homophobic and committed to a basically fascistic vision of an imperial England, all of which will repel most casual readers. Nor do his works provide an especially good venue for academic criticism; all surface, they do not reward the labour of careful, deep reading. The Devil Rides Out narrates the story of a group of friends locked in a battle with the wicked Satanist Mocata, “a pot-bellied, bald headed person of about sixty, with large, protuberant, fishy eyes, limp hands, and a most unattractive lisp” (11), based, apparently, on the notorious occultist Aleister Crowley (Ellis 145-6). Mocata hopes to start a conflict on the scale of the Great War by performing the appropriate devilish rituals. Led by the aged yet spry Duke de Richleau and garrulous American Rex van Ryn, the friends combat Mocata in three substantial set pieces, including their attempt to disrupt the black mass as it is performed in a secluded field in Wiltshire. The Devil Rides Out is a ripping story. Wheatley’s narrative is urgent, and his simple prose suggests that the book is meant to be read quickly. Likewise, Wheatley’s protagonists do not experience in any real way the crises and collapses that so frequently trouble characters who struggle against the forces of darkness in Gothic narratives. Even when de Richlieu’s courage fails as he observes the Wiltshire Sabbat, this failure is temporary; Rex simply treats him as if he has been physically wounded, and the Duke soon rallies. The Devil Rides Out is remarkably free of trauma and its sequelæ. The morbid psychological states which often interest the twentieth century Gothic are excluded here in favour of the kind of emotional fortitude found in adventure stories. The effect is remarkable. Wheatley retains a cheerful tone even as he depicts the appalling, and potentially repellent representations become entertainments. Wheatley describes in remarkable detail the actions that his protagonists witness from their hidden vantage point. If the Gothic reader looks forward to gleeful blasphemy, then this is amply provided, in the sort of sardonic style that Lewis’ The Monk manages so well. A cross is half stomped into matchwood and inverted in the ground, the Christian host is profaned in a way too dreadful to be narrated, and the Duke informs us that the satanic priests are eating “a stillborn baby or perhaps some unfortunate child that they have stolen and murdered”. Rex is chilled by the sound of a human skull rattling around in their cauldron (117-20). The mass offers a special quality of experience, distinct from the everyday texture of life represented in the text. Ostensibly waiting for their chance to liberate their friend Simon from the action, the Duke and Rex are voyeurs, and readers participate in this voyeurism too. The narrative focus shifts from Rex and de Richlieu’s observation of the mass, to the wayward medium Tanith’s independent, bespelled arrival at the ritual site, before returning to the two men. This arrangement allows Wheatley to extend his description of the gathering, reiterating the same events from different characters’ perspectives. This would be unusual if the text were simply a thriller, and relied on the ongoing release of new information to maintain narrative interest. Instead, readers have the opportunity to “view” the salacious activity of the Satanists a second time. This repetition delays the climactic action of the scene, where the Duke and Rex rescue Simon by driving a car into the midst of the ritual. Moreover, the repetition suggests that the “thrill” on offer is not necessarily related to plot —it offers us nothing new —but instead to simply seeing the rite performed. Tanith, although conveyed to the mass by some dark power, is delayed and she too becomes a part of the mass’ audience. She saw the Satanists… tumbling upon each other in the disgusting nudity of their ritual dance. Old Madame D’Urfé, huge-buttocked and swollen, prancing by some satanic power with all the vigour of a young girl who had only just reached maturity; the Babu, dark-skinned, fleshy, hideous; the American woman, scraggy, lean-flanked and hag-like with empty, hanging breasts; the Eurasian, waving the severed stump of his arm in the air as he gavotted beside the unwieldy figure of the Irish bard, whose paunch stood out like the grotesque belly of a Chinese god. (132) The reader will remember that Madame D’Urfé is French, and that the cultists are dancing before the Goat of Mendes, who masquerades as Malagasy, earlier described by de Richlieu as “a ‘bad black’ if ever I saw one” (11). The human body is obsessively and grotesquely racialized; Wheatley is simultaneously at his most politically vile and aesthetically Goya-like. The physically grotesque meshes with the crudely sexual and racist. The Irishman is typed as a “bard” and somehow acquires a second racial classification, the Indian is horrible seemingly because of his race, and Madame D’Urfé is repulsive because her sexuality is framed as inappropriate to her age. The dancing crone is defined in terms of a younger, presumably sexually appealing, woman; even as she is denigrated, the reader is presented with a contrary image. As the sexuality of the Satanists is excoriated, titillation is offered. Readers may take whatever pleasure they like from the representations while simultaneously condemning them, or even affecting revulsion. A binary opposition is set up between de Richlieu’s company, who are cultured and moneyed, and the Satanists, who might masquerade as civilised, but reveal their savagery at the Sabbat. Their race becomes a further symptom of their lack of civilised qualities. The Duke complains to Rex that “there is little difference between this modern Satanism and Voodoo… We might almost be witnessing some heathen ceremony in an African jungle!” (115). The Satanists become “a trampling mass of bestial animal figures” dancing to music where, “Instead of melody, it was a harsh, discordant jumble of notes and broken chords which beat into the head with a horrible nerve-racking intensity and set the teeth continually on edge” (121). Music and melody are cultural constructions as much as they are mathematical ones. The breakdown of music suggests a breakdown of culture, more specifically, of Western cultural norms. The Satanists feast, with no “knives, forks, spoons or glasses”, but instead drink straight from bottles and eat using their hands (118). This is hardly transgression on the scale of devouring an infant, but emphasises that Satanism is understood to represent the antithesis of civilization, specifically, of a conservative Englishness. Bad table manners are always a sign of wickedness. This sort of reading is useful in that it describes the prejudices and politics of the text. It allows us to see the black mass as meaningful and places it within a wider discursive tradition making sense of a grotesque dance that combines a variety of almost arbitrary transgressive actions, staged in a Wiltshire field. This style of reading seems to confirm the approach to genre text that Fredric Jameson has espoused (117-9), which understands the text as reinforcing a hegemonic worldview within its readership. This is the kind of reading the academy often works to produce; it recognises the mass as standing for something more than the simple fact of its performance, and develops a coherent account of what the mass represents. The labour of reading discerns the work the text does out in the world. Yet despite the good sense and political necessity of this approach, my suggestion is that these observations are secondary to the primary function of the text because they cannot account for the reading experience offered by the Sabbat and the rest of the text. Regardless of text’s prejudices, The Devil Rides Out is not a book about race. It is a book about Satanists. As Jo Walton has observed, competent genre readers effortlessly grasp this kind of distinction, prioritising certain readings and elements of the text over others (33-5). Failing to account for the reading strategy presumed by author and audience risks overemphasising what is less significant in a text while missing more important elements. Crucially, a reading that emphasises the political implications of the Sabbat attributes meaning to the ritual; yet the ritual’s ability to hold meaning is not what is most important about it. By attributing meaning to the Sabbat, we miss the fact of the Sabbat itself; it has become a metaphor rather than a thing unto itself, a demonstration of racist politics rather than one of the central necessities of a black magic story. Seligman, Weller, Puett and Simon claim that ritual is usually read as having a social purpose or a cultural meaning, but that these readings presume that ritual is interested in presenting the world truthfully, as it is. Seligman and his co-authors take exception to this, arguing that ritual does not represent society or culture as they are and that ritual is “a subjunctive—the creation of an order as if it were truly the case” (20). Rather than simply reflecting history, society and culture, ritual responds to the disappointment of the real; the farmer performs a rite to “ensure” the bounty of the harvest not because the rite symbolises the true order of things, but as a consolation because sometimes the harvest fails. Interestingly, the Duke’s analysis of the Satanists’ motivations closely accords with Seligman et al.’s understanding of the need for ritual to console our anxieties and disappointments. For the cultists, the mass is “a release of all their pent-up emotions, and suppressed complexes, engendered by brooding over imagined injustice, lust for power, bitter hatred of rivals in love or some other type of success or good fortune” (121). The Satanists perform the mass as a response to the disappointment of the participant’s lives; they are ugly, uncivil outsiders and according to the Duke, “probably epileptics… nearly all… abnormal” (121). The mass allows them to feel, at least for a limited time, as if they are genuinely powerful, people who ought to be feared rather than despised, able to command the interest and favour of their infernal lord, to receive sexual attention despite their uncomeliness. Seligman et al. go on to argue ritual “must be understood as inherently nondiscursive—semantic content is far secondary to subjunctive creation.” Ritual “cannot be analysed as a coherent system of beliefs” (26). If this is so, we cannot expect the black mass to necessarily say anything coherent about Satanism, let alone racism. In fact, The Devil Rides Out tends not to focus on the meaning of the black mass, but on its performance. The perceivable facts of the mass are given, often in instructional detail, but any sense of what they might stand for remains unexplicated in the text. Indeed, taken individually, it is hard to make sense or meaning out of each of the Sabbat’s components. Why must a skull rattle around a cauldron? Why must a child be killed and eaten? If communion forms the most significant part of the Christian mass, we could presume that the desecration of the host might be the most meaningful part of the rite, but given the extensive description accorded the mass as a whole, the parody of communion is dealt with surprisingly quickly, receiving only three sentences. The Duke describes the act as “the most appalling sacrilege”, but it is left at that as the celebrants stomp the host into the ground (120). The action itself is emphasised over anything it might mean. Most of Wheatley’s readers will, I think, be untroubled by this. As Pierre Bourdieu noted, “the regularities inherent in an arbitrary condition… tend to appear as necessary, even natural, since they are the basis of the schemes of perception and appreciation through which they are apprehended” (53-4). Rather than stretching towards an interpretation of the Sabbat, readers simply accept it a necessary condition of a “black magic story”. While the genre and its tropes are constructed, they tend to appear as “natural” to readers. The Satanists perform the black mass because that is what Satanists do. The representation does not even have to be compelling in literary terms; it simply has to be a “proper” black mass. Richard Schechner argues that, when we are concerned with ritual, “Propriety”, that is, seeing the ritual properly executed, “is more important than artistry in the Euro-American sense” (178). Rather than describing the meaning of the ritual, Wheatley prefers to linger over the Satanist’s actions, their gluttonous feasting and dancing, their nudity. Again, these are actions that hold sensual qualities for their performers that exceed the simply discursive. Through their ritual behaviour they enter into atavistic and ecstatic states beyond everyday human consciousness. They are “hardly human… Their brains are diseased and their mentality is that of the hags and the warlocks of the middle ages…” and are “governed apparently by a desire to throw themselves back into a state of bestiality…” (117-8). They finally reach a state of “maniacal exaltation” and participate in an “intoxicated nightmare” (135). While the mass is being celebrated, the Satanists become an undifferentiated mass, their everyday identities and individuality subsumed into the subjunctive world created by the ritual. Simon, a willing participant, becomes lost amongst them, his individual identity given over to the collective, subjunctive state created by the group. Rex and the Duke are outside of this subjunctive world, expressing revulsion, but voyeuristically looking on; they retain their individual identities. Tanith is caught between the role played by Simon, and the one played by the Duke and Rex, as she risks shifting from observer to participant, her journey to the Sabbat being driven on by “evil powers” (135). These three relationships to the Sabbat suggest some of the strategies available to its readers. Like Rex and the Duke, we seem to observe the black mass as voyeurs, and still have the option of disapproving of it, but like Simon, the act of continuing to read means that we are participating in the representation of this perversity. Having committed to reading a “black magic story”, the reader’s procession towards the black mass is inevitable, as with Tanith’s procession towards it. Yet, just as Tanith is compelled towards it, readers are allowed to experience the Sabbat without necessarily having to see themselves as wanting to experience it. This facilitates a ludic, undiscursive reading experience; readers are not encouraged to seriously reflect on what the Sabbat means or why it might be a source of vicarious pleasure. They do not have to take responsibility for it. As much as the Satanists create a subjunctive world for their own ends, readers are creating a similar world for themselves to participate in. The mass—an incoherent jumble of sex and violence—becomes an imaginative refuge from the everyday world which is too regulated, chaste and well-behaved. Despite having substantial precedent in folklore and Gothic literature (see Medway), the black mass as it is represented in The Devil Rides Out is largely an invention. The rituals performed by occultists like Crowley were never understood by their participants as being black masses, and it was not until the foundation of the Church of Satan in San Francisco in the later nineteen-sixties that it seems the black mass was performed with the regularity or uniformity characteristic of ritual. Instead, its celebration was limited to eccentrics and dabblers like Summers. Thus, as an imaginary ritual, the black mass can be whatever its writers and readers need it to be, providing the opportunity to stage those actions and experiences required by the kind of text in which it appears. Because it is the product of the requirements of the text, it becomes a venue in which those things crucial to the text are staged; forbidden sexual congress, macabre ceremony, violence, the appearance of intoxicating and noisome scents, weird violet lights, blue candle flames and the goat itself. As we observe the Sabbat, the subjunctive of the ritual aligns with the subjunctive of the text itself; the same ‘as if’ is experienced by both the represented worshippers and the readers. The black mass offers an analogue for the black magic story, providing, almost in digest form, the images and experiences associated with the genre at the time. Seligman et al. distinguish between modes that they term the sincere and the ritualistic. Sincerity describes an approach to reading the world that emphasises the individual subject, authenticity, and the need to get at “real” thought and feeling. Ritual, on the other hand, prefers community, convention and performance. The “sincere mode of behavior seeks to replace the ‘mere convention’ of ritual with a genuine and thoughtful state of internal conviction” (103). Where the sincere is meaningful, the ritualistic is practically oriented. In The Devil Rides Out, the black mass, a largely unreal practice, must be regarded as insincere. More important than any “meaning” we might extract from the rite is the simple fact of participation. The individuality and agency of the participants is apparently diminished in the mass, and their regular sense of themselves is recovered only as the Duke and Rex desperately drive the Duke’s Hispano into the ritual so as to halt it. The car’s lights dispel the subjunctive darkness and reduce the unified group to a gathering of confused individuals, breaking the spell of naughtily enabling darkness. Just as the meaningful aspect of the mass is de-emphasised for ritual participants, for readers, self and discursive ability are de-emphasised in favour of an immersive, involving reading experience; we keep reading the mass without pausing to really consider the mass itself. It would reduce our pleasure in and engagement with the text to do so; the mass would be revealed as obnoxious, unpleasant and nonsensical. When we read the black mass we tend to put our day-to-day values, both moral and aesthetic, to one side, bracketing our sincere individuality in favour of participation in the text. If there is little point in trying to interpret Wheatley’s black mass due to its weakly discursive nature, then this raises questions of how to approach the text. Simply, the “work” of interpretation seems unnecessary; Wheatley’s black mass asks to be regarded as a form of play. Simply, The Devil Rides Out is a venue for a particular kind of readerly play, apart from the more substantial, sincere concerns that occupy most literary criticism. As Huizinga argued that, “Play is distinct from ‘ordinary’ life both as to locality and duration… [A significant] characteristic of play [is] its secludedness, its limitedness” (9). Likewise, by seeing the mass as a kind of play, we can understand why, despite the provocative and transgressive acts it represents, it is not especially harrowing as a reading experience. Play “lies outside the antithesis of wisdom and folly, and equally outside those of truth and falsehood, good and evil…. The valuations of vice and virtue do not apply...” (Huizinga 6). The mass might well offer barbarism and infanticide, but it does not offer these to its readers “seriously”. The subjunctive created by the black mass for its participants on the page is approximately equivalent to the subjunctive Wheatley’s text proposes to his readers. The Sabbat offers a tawdry, intoxicated vision, full of strange performances, weird lights, queer music and druggy incenses, a darkened carnival apart from the real that is, despite its apparent transgressive qualities and wretchedness, “only playing”. References Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. Ellis, Bill. Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religions, and the Media. Lexington: The UP of Kentucky, 2000. Hedman, Iwan, and Jan Alexandersson. Four Decades with Dennis Wheatley. DAST Dossier 1. Köping 1973. Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1986. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. London: Routledge, 1989. Huizinga, J. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. International Library of Sociology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949. Medway, Gareth J. The Lure of the Sinister: The Unnatural History of Satanism. New York: New York UP, 2001. “Pooter.” The Times 19 August 1969: 19. Punter, David. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. London: Longman, 1980. Schechner, Richard. Performance Theory. Revised and Expanded ed. New York: Routledge, 1988. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. 1980. New York: Methuen, 1986. Seligman, Adam B, Robert P. Weller, Michael J. Puett and Bennett Simon. Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Thompson, G.R. Introduction. “Romanticism and the Gothic Imagination.” The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism. Ed. G.R. Thompson. Pullman: Washington State UP, 1974. 1-10. Wheatley, Dennis. The Devil Rides Out. 1934. London: Mandarin, 1996.

At a time when almost every human transgression, illness, profession and other personal aspect of life has been chronicled in autobiographical writing (Rak)—in 1998 Zinsser called ours “the age of memoir” (3)—writing about fat is one of the most recent subjects to be addressed in this way. This article surveys a range of contemporary autobiographical texts that are titled with, or revolve around, that powerful and most evocative word, “fat”. Following a number of cultural studies of fat in society (Critser; Gilman, Fat Boys; Fat: A Cultural History; Stearns), this discussion views fat in socio-cultural terms, following Lupton in understanding fat as both “a cultural artefact: a bodily substance or body shape that is given meaning by complex and shifting systems of ideas, practices, emotions, material objects and interpersonal relationships” (i). Using a case study approach (Gerring; Verschuren), this examination focuses on a range of texts from autobiographical cookbooks and memoirs to novel-length graphic works in order to develop a preliminary taxonomy of these works. In this way, a small sample of work, each of which (described below) explores an aspect (or aspects) of the form is, following Merriam, useful as it allows a richer picture of an under-examined phenomenon to be constructed, and offers “a means of investigating complex social units consisting of multiple variables of potential importance in understanding the phenomenon” (Merriam 50). Although the sample size does not offer generalisable results, the case study method is especially suitable in this context, where the aim is to open up discussion of this form of writing for future research for, as Merriam states, “much can be learned from […] an encounter with the case through the researcher’s narrative description” and “what we learn in a particular case can be transferred to similar situations” (51). Pro-Fat Autobiographical WritingAlongside the many hundreds of reduced, low- and no-fat cookbooks and weight loss guides currently in print that offer recipes, meal plans, ingredient replacements and strategies to reduce fat in the diet, there are a handful that promote the consumption of fats, and these all have an autobiographical component. The publication of Jennifer McLagan’s Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes in 2008 by Ten Speed Press—publisher of Mollie Katzen’s groundbreaking and influential vegetarian Moosewood Cookbook in 1974 and an imprint now known for its quality cookbooks (Thelin)—unequivocably addressed that line in the sand often drawn between fat and all things healthy. The four chapter titles of this cookbook— “Butter,” subtitled “Worth It,” “Pork Fat: The King,” “Poultry Fat: Versatile and Good For You,” and, “Beef and Lamb Fats: Overlooked But Tasty”—neatly summarise McLagan’s organising argument: that animal fats not only add an unreplaceable and delicious flavour to foods but are fundamental to our health. Fat polarised readers and critics; it was positively reviewed in prominent publications (Morris; Bhide) and won influential food writing awards, including 2009 James Beard Awards for Single Subject Cookbook and Cookbook of the Year but, due to its rejection of low-fat diets and the research underpinning them, was soon also vehemently criticised, to the point where the book was often described in the media as “controversial” (see Smith). McLagan’s text, while including historical, scientific and gastronomic data and detail, is also an outspokenly personal treatise, chronicling her sensual and emotional responses to this ingredient. “I love fat,” she begins, continuing, “Whether it’s a slice of foie gras terrine, its layer of yellow fat melting at the edges […] hot bacon fat […] wilting a plate of pungent greens into submission […] or a piece of crunchy pork crackling […] I love the way it feels in my mouth, and I love its many tastes” (1). Her text is, indeed, memoir as gastronomy / gastronomy as memoir, and this cookbook, therefore, an example of the “memoir with recipes” subgenre (Brien et al.). It appears to be this aspect – her highly personal and, therein, persuasive (Weitin) plea for the value of fats – that galvanised critics and readers.Molly Chester and Sandy Schrecengost’s Back to Butter: A Traditional Foods Cookbook – Nourishing Recipes Inspired by Our Ancestors begins with its authors’ memoirs (illness, undertaking culinary school training, buying and running a farm) to lend weight to their argument to utilise fats widely in cookery. Its first chapter, “Fats and Oils,” features the familiar butter, which it describes as “the friendly fat” (22), then moves to the more reviled pork lard “Grandma’s superfood” (22) and, nowadays quite rarely described as an ingredient, beef tallow. Grit Magazine’s Lard: The Lost Art of Cooking with Your Grandmother’s Secret Ingredient utilises the rhetoric that fat, and in this case, lard, is a traditional and therefore foundational ingredient in good cookery. This text draws on its publisher’s, Grit Magazine (published since 1882 in various formats), long history of including auto/biographical “inspirational stories” (Teller) to lend persuasive power to its argument. One of the most polarising of fats in health and current media discourse is butter, as was seen recently in debate over what was seen as its excessive use in the MasterChef Australia television series (see, Heart Foundation; Phillipov). It is perhaps not surprising, then, that butter is the single fat inspiring the most autobiographical writing in this mode. Rosie Daykin’s Butter Baked Goods: Nostalgic Recipes from a Little Neighborhood Bakery is, for example, typical of a small number of cookbooks that extend the link between baking and nostalgia to argue that butter is the superlative ingredient for baking. There are also entire cookbooks dedicated to making flavoured butters (Vaserfirer) and a number that offer guides to making butter and other (fat-based) dairy products at home (Farrell-Kingsley; Hill; Linford).Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef is typical among chef’s memoirs in using butter prominently although rare in mentioning fat in its title. In this text and other such memoirs, butter is often used as shorthand for describing a food that is rich but also wholesomely delicious. Hamilton relates childhood memories of “all butter shortcakes” (10), and her mother and sister “cutting butter into flour and sugar” for scones (15), radishes eaten with butter (21), sautéing sage in butter to dress homemade ravoli (253), and eggs fried in browned butter (245). Some of Hamilton’s most telling references to butter present it as an staple, natural food as, for instance, when she describes “sliced bread with butter and granulated sugar” (37) as one of her family’s favourite desserts, and lists butter among the everyday foodstuffs that taste superior when stored at room temperature instead of refrigerated—thereby moving butter from taboo (Gwynne describes a similar process of the normalisation of sexual “perversion” in erotic memoir).Like this text, memoirs that could be described as arguing “for” fat as a substance are largely by chefs or other food writers who extol, like McLagan and Hamilton, the value of fat as both food and flavouring, and propose that it has a key role in both ordinary/family and gourmet cookery. In this context, despite plant-based fats such as coconut oil being much lauded in nutritional and other health-related discourse, the fat written about in these texts is usually animal-based. An exception to this is olive oil, although this is never described in the book’s title as a “fat” (see, for instance, Drinkwater’s series of memoirs about life on an olive farm in France) and is, therefore, out of the scope of this discussion.Memoirs of Being FatThe majority of the other memoirs with the word “fat” in their titles are about being fat. Narratives on this topic, and their authors’ feelings about this, began to be published as a sub-set of autobiographical memoir in the 2000s. The first decade of the new millennium saw a number of such memoirs by female writers including Judith Moore’s Fat Girl (published in 2005), Jen Lancaster’s Such a Pretty Fat: One Narcissist’s Quest to Discover If Her Life Makes Her Ass Look Big, or Why Pie Is Not the Answer, and Stephanie Klein’s Moose: A Memoir (both published in 2008) and Jennifer Joyne’s Designated Fat Girl in 2010. These were followed into the new decade by texts such as Celia Rivenbark’s bestselling 2011 You Don’t Sweat Much for a Fat Girl, and all attracted significant mainstream readerships. Journalist Vicki Allan pulled no punches when she labelled these works the “fat memoir” and, although Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s influential categorisation of 60 genres of life writing does not include this description, they do recognise eating disorder and weight-loss narratives. Some scholarly interest followed (Linder; Halloran), with Mitchell linking this production to feminism’s promotion of the power of the micro-narrative and the recognition that the autobiographical narrative was “a way of situating the self politically” (65).aken together, these memoirs all identify “excess” weight, although the response to this differs. They can be grouped as: narratives of losing weight (see Kuffel; Alley; and many others), struggling to lose weight (most of these books), and/or deciding not to try to lose weight (the smallest number of works overall). Some of these texts display a deeply troubled relationship with food—Moore’s Fat Girl, for instance, could also be characterised as an eating disorder memoir (Brien), detailing her addiction to eating and her extremely poor body image as well as her mother’s unrelenting pressure to lose weight. Elena Levy-Navarro describes the tone of these narratives as “compelled confession” (340), mobilising both the conventional understanding of confession of the narrator “speaking directly and colloquially” to the reader of their sins, failures or foibles (Gill 7), and what she reads as an element of societal coercion in their production. Some of these texts do focus on confessing what can be read as disgusting and wretched behavior (gorging and vomiting, for instance)—Halloran’s “gustatory abject” (27)—which is a feature of the contemporary conceptualisation of confession after Rousseau (Brooks). This is certainly a prominent aspect of current memoir writing that is, simultaneously, condemned by critics (see, for example, Jordan) and popular with readers (O’Neill). Read in this way, the majority of memoirs about being fat are about being miserable until a slimming regime of some kind has been undertaken and successful. Some of these texts are, indeed, triumphal in tone. Lisa Delaney’s Secrets of a Former Fat Girl is, for instance, clear in the message of its subtitle, How to Lose Two, Four (or More!) Dress Sizes—And Find Yourself Along the Way, that she was “lost” until she became slim. Linden has argued that “female memoir writers frequently describe their fat bodies as diseased and contaminated” (219) and “powerless” (226). Many of these confessional memoirs are moving narratives of shame and self loathing where the memoirist’s sense of self, character, and identity remain somewhat confused and unresolved, whether they lose weight or not, and despite attestations to the contrary.A sub-set of these memoirs of weight loss are by male authors. While having aspects in common with those by female writers, these can be identified as a sub-set of these memoirs for two reasons. One is the tone of their narratives, which is largely humourous and often ribaldly comic. There is also a sense of the heroic in these works, with male memoirsts frequently mobilising images of battles and adversity. Texts that can be categorised in this way include Toshio Okada’s Sayonara Mr. Fatty: A Geek’s Diet Memoir, Gregg McBride and Joy Bauer’s bestselling Weightless: My Life as a Fat Man and How I Escaped, Fred Anderson’s From Chunk to Hunk: Diary of a Fat Man. As can be seen in their titles, these texts also promise to relate the stratgies, regimes, plans, and secrets that others can follow to, similarly, lose weight. Allen Zadoff’s title makes this explicit: Lessons Learned on the Journey from Fat to Thin. Many of these male memoirists are prompted by a health-related crisis, diagnosis, or realisation. Male body image—a relatively recent topic of enquiry in the eating disorder, psychology, and fashion literature (see, for instance, Bradley et al.)—is also often a surprising motif in these texts, and a theme in common with weight loss memoirs by female authors. Edward Ugel, for instance, opens his memoir, I’m with Fatty: Losing Fifty Pounds in Fifty Miserable Weeks, with “I’m haunted by mirrors … the last thing I want to do is see myself in a mirror or a photograph” (1).Ugel, as that prominent “miserable” in his subtitle suggests, provides a subtle but revealing variation on this theme of successful weight loss. Ugel (as are all these male memoirists) succeeds in the quest be sets out on but, apparently, despondent almost every moment. While the overall tone of his writing is light and humorous, he laments every missed meal, snack, and mouthful of food he foregoes, explaining that he loves eating, “Food makes me happy … I live to eat. I love to eat at restaurants. I love to cook. I love the social component of eating … I can’t be happy without being a social eater” (3). Like many of these books by male authors, Ugel’s descriptions of the food he loves are mouthwatering—and most especially when describing what he identifies as the fattening foods he loves: Reuben sandwiches dripping with juicy grease, crispy deep friend Chinese snacks, buttery Danish pastries and creamy, rich ice cream. This believable sense of regret is not, however, restricted to male authors. It is also apparent in how Jen Lancaster begins her memoir: “I’m standing in the kitchen folding a softened stick of butter, a cup of warmed sour cream, and a mound of fresh-shaved Parmesan into my world-famous mashed potatoes […] There’s a maple-glazed pot roast browning nicely in the oven and white-chocolate-chip macadamia cookies cooling on a rack farther down the counter. I’ve already sautéed the almonds and am waiting for the green beans to blanch so I can toss the whole lot with yet more butter before serving the meal” (5). In the above memoirs, both male and female writers recount similar (and expected) strategies: diets, fasts and other weight loss regimes and interventions (calorie counting, colonics, and gastric-banding and -bypass surgery for instance, recur); consulting dieting/health magazines for information and strategies; keeping a food journal; employing expert help in the form of nutritionists, dieticians, and personal trainers; and, joining health clubs/gyms, and taking up various sports.Alongside these works sit a small number of texts that can be characterised as “non-weight loss memoirs.” These can be read as part of the emerging, and burgeoning, academic field of Fat Studies, which gathers together an extensive literature critical of, and oppositional to, dominant discourses about obesity (Cooper; Rothblum and Solovay; Tomrley and Naylor), and which include works that focus on information backed up with memoir such as self-described “fat activist” (Wann, website) Marilyn Wann’s Fat! So?: Because You Don’t Have to Apologise, which—when published in 1998—followed a print ’zine and a website of the same title. Although certainly in the minority in terms of numbers, these narratives have been very popular with readers and are growing as a sub-genre, with well-known actress Camryn Manheim’s New York Times-bestselling memoir, Wake Up, I'm Fat! (published in 1999) a good example. This memoir chronicles Manheim’s journey from the overweight and teased teenager who finds it a struggle to find friends (a common trope in many weight loss memoirs) to an extremely successful actress.Like most other types of memoir, there are also niche sub-genres of the “fat memoir.” Cheryl Peck’s Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs recounts a series of stories about her life in the American Midwest as a lesbian “woman of size” (xiv) and could thus be described as a memoir on the subjects of – and is, indeed, catalogued in the Library of Congress as: “Overweight women,” “Lesbians,” and “Three Rivers (Mich[igan]) – Social life and customs”.Carol Lay’s graphic memoir, The Big Skinny: How I Changed My Fattitude, has a simple diet message – she lost weight by counting calories and exercising every day – and makes a dual claim for value of being based on both her own story and a range of data and tools including: “the latest research on obesity […] psychological tips, nutrition basics, and many useful tools like simplified calorie charts, sample recipes, and menu plans” (qtd. in Lorah). The Big Skinny could, therefore, be characterised with the weight loss memoirs above as a self-help book, but Lay herself describes choosing the graphic form in order to increase its narrative power: to “wrap much of the information in stories […] combining illustrations and story for a double dose of retention in the brain” (qtd. in Lorah). Like many of these books that can fit into multiple categories, she notes that “booksellers don’t know where to file the book – in graphic novels, memoirs, or in the diet section” (qtd. in O’Shea).Jude Milner’s Fat Free: The Amazing All-True Adventures of Supersize Woman! is another example of how a single memoir (graphic, in this case) can be a hybrid of the categories herein discussed, indicating how difficult it is to neatly categorise human experience. Recounting the author’s numerous struggles with her weight and journey to self-acceptance, Milner at first feels guilty and undertakes a series of diets and regimes, before becoming a “Fat Is Beautiful” activist and, finally, undergoing gastric bypass surgery. Here the narrative trajectory is of empowerment rather than physical transformation, as a thinner (although, importantly, not thin) Milner “exudes confidence and radiates strength” (Story). ConclusionWhile the above has identified a number of ways of attempting to classify autobiographical writing about fat/s, its ultimate aim is, after G. Thomas Couser’s work in relation to other sub-genres of memoir, an attempt to open up life writing for further discussion, rather than set in placed fixed and inflexible categories. Constructing such a preliminary taxonomy aspires to encourage more nuanced discussion of how writers, publishers, critics and readers understand “fat” conceptually as well as more practically and personally. It also aims to support future work in identifying prominent and recurrent (or not) themes, motifs, tropes, and metaphors in memoir and autobiographical texts, and to contribute to the development of a more detailed set of descriptors for discussing and assessing popular autobiographical writing more generally.References Allan, Vicki. “Graphic Tale of Obesity Makes for Heavy Reading.” Sunday Herald 26 Jun. 2005. Alley, Kirstie. How to Lose Your Ass and Regain Your Life: Reluctant Confessions of a Big-Butted Star. Emmaus, PA: Rodale, 2005.Anderson, Fred. From Chunk to Hunk: Diary of a Fat Man. USA: Three Toes Publishing, 2009.Bhide, Monica. “Why You Should Eat Fat.” Salon 25 Sep. 2008.Bradley, Linda Arthur, Nancy Rudd, Andy Reilly, and Tim Freson. “A Review of Men’s Body Image Literature: What We Know, and Need to Know.” International Journal of Costume and Fashion 14.1 (2014): 29–45.Brien, Donna Lee. “Starving, Bingeing and Writing: Memoirs of Eating Disorder as Food Writing.” TEXT: Journal of Writers and Writing Courses Special Issue 18 (2013).Brien, Donna Lee, Leonie Rutherford, and Rosemary Williamson. “Hearth and Hotmail: The Domestic Sphere as Commodity and Community in Cyberspace.” M/C Journal 10.4 (2007).Brooks, Peter. Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.Chester, Molly, and Sandy Schrecengost. Back to Butter: A Traditional Foods Cookbook – Nourishing Recipes Inspired by Our Ancestors. Vancouver: Fair Winds Press, 2014.Cooper, Charlotte. “Fat Studies: Mapping the Field.” Sociology Compass 4.12 (2010): 1020–34.Couser, G. Thomas. “Genre Matters: Form, Force, and Filiation.” Lifewriting 2.2 (2007): 139–56.Critser, Greg. Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World. New York: First Mariner Books, 2004. Daykin, Rosie. Butter Baked Goods: Nostalgic Recipes from a Little Neighborhood Bakery. New York: Random House, 2015.Delaney, Lisa. Secrets of a Former Fat Girl: How to Lose Two, Four (or More!) Dress Sizes – and Find Yourself along the Way. New York: Plume/Penguin, 2008.Drinkwater, Carol. The Olive Farm: A Memoir of Life, Love and Olive Oil in the South of France. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2001.Farrell, Amy Erdman. Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2011.Farrell-Kingsley, Kathy. The Home Creamery: Make Your Own Fresh Dairy Products; Easy Recipes for Butter, Yogurt, Sour Cream, Creme Fraiche, Cream Cheese, Ricotta, and More! North Adams, MA: Storey Publishing, 2008.Gerring, John. Case Study Research: Principles and Practices. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Gill, Jo. “Introduction.” Modern Confessional Writing: New Critical Essays, ed. Jo Gill. London: Routledge, 2006. 1–10.Gilman, Sander L. Fat Boys: A Slim Book. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2004.———. Fat: A Cultural History of Obesity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008.Grit Magazine Editors. Lard: The Lost Art of Cooking with Your Grandmother’s Secret Ingredient. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel, 2012.Gwynne, Joel. Erotic Memoirs and Postfeminism: The Politics of Pleasure. Houndsmills, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013.Halloran, Vivian Nun. “Biting Reality: Extreme Eating and the Fascination with the Gustatory Abject.” Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 4 (2004): 27–42.Hamilton, Gabrielle. Blood, Bones and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef. New York: Random House, 2013.Heart Foundation [Australia]. “To Avoid Trans Fat, Avoid Butter Says Heart Foundation: Media Release.” 27 Sep. 2010.Hill, Louella. Kitchen Creamery: Making Yogurt, Butter & Cheese at Home. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2015.Jordan, Pat. “Dysfunction for Dollars.” New York Times 28 July 2002.Joyne, Jennifer. Designated Fat Girl: A Memoir. Guilford, CT: Skirt!, 2010.Katzen, Mollie. The Moosewood Cookbook. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1974.Klein, Stephanie. Moose: A Memoir. New York: HarperCollins, 2008.Kuffel, Frances. Passing for Thin: Losing Half My Weight and Finding My Self. New York: Broadway, 2004. Lancaster, Jen. Such a Pretty Fat: One Narcissist’s Quest to Discover If Her Life Makes Her Ass Look Big, or Why Pie Is Not the Answer. New York: New American Library/Penguin, 2008.Lay, Carol. The Big Skinny: How I Changed My Fattitude. New York: Villard Books, 2008.Levy-Navarro, Elena. “I’m the New Me: Compelled Confession in Diet Discourse.” The Journal of Popular Culture 45.2 (2012): 340–56.Library of Congress. Catalogue record 200304857. Linder, Kathryn E. “The Fat Memoir as Autopathography: Self-Representations of Embodied Fatness.” Auto/biography Studies 26.2 (2011): 219–37.Linford, Jenny. The Creamery Kitchen. London: Ryland Peters & Small, 2014.Lorah, Michael C. “Carol Lay on The Big Skinny: How I Changed My Fattitude.” Newsarama 26 Dec. 2008. Lupton, Deborah. Fat. Milton Park, UK: Routledge, 2013.Manheim, Camryn. Wake Up, I’m Fat! New York: Broadway Books, 2000.Merriam, Sharan B. Qualitative Research: A Guide to Design and Implementation. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009.McBride, Gregg. Weightless: My Life as a Fat Man and How I Escaped. Las Vegas, NV: Central Recovery Press, 2014.McLagan, Jennifer. Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes. 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This article treads a fine line. I want to discuss the way that particular contemporary pop soloists talk about, and are talked about in terms of, authentic identity. And I want to use this to make an argument about the significance of those claims within a broader cultural dialogue about identity; specifically: that they demonstrate the persistent popular desirability of “authentic identity” in the face of its perceived theoretical indefensibility and supposed loss of significance. But I want to do all this without perpetuating the tendency for popular music scholarship to engage “authenticity” as the basis for assessing the relative merits of different musical forms. Rather than adjudicating on competing claims to authenticity, I want to ask: when specifically attached to identity, what does the claim to authenticity do? This paper investigates popular ways of speaking about the identities of three soloists: Britney Spears; Christina Aguilera; and Jennifer Lopez. All three combine aurally undemanding mass-market pop with a public persona organised under a rubric of authenticity. Irrespective of whether the claims made about the authenticity of their identities could be judged illegitimate, the repeated references to authenticity within this context engenders a taken-for-grantedness about its significance with regard to identity. As a way of describing this operation it seems useful to liberally adapt ideas advanced by Meaghan Morris and describe pop celebrities as operating like sites where anecdotes accumulate to establish a specific discursive context for identity. Morris writes that anecdotes are ‘functional’ in that they are: orientated futuristically towards the construction of a precise, local and social discursive context, of which the anecdote then functions as a mise en abyme (Morris 150). This is complex and parts of it require some re-engineering before it can be usefully adapted as a model for discussing celebrity. The “future orientation” operates somewhat differently in this context from how it operates within the kind of writing practice that Morris was seeking to promote. For Morris, the anecdote grounds an academic writing practice by smuggling in a day-to-day way of conceiving of the workings of the world. The “future orientation” is an invitation for a writing practice to engage in the kind of explication that could draw currently marginal or impossible ideas and experiences into a precise discursive context. This is different from the kind of operation that I want to describe. In the stories told about the authenticity of these pop celebrities there is similarly a “future orientation” but here it is one where constant evocation works toward amassing significance around a particular idea. Specifically, I am arguing that constant repetition of “authentic” and its cognates in thinking and speaking of these pop soloists makes that term appear crucial for identity. So this is a situation where very many anecdotes, derived from a common model of the way that identity could be said to be working, construct by virtue of their similarity a particular discursive context for identity. They work to actually form that context rather than simply inviting it. While each alone can serve as that discursive context’s mise en abyme, their role is not restricted to that. Each anecdote is less important in its singularity than it is as part of an accumulation. Spears, Aguilera and Lopez are repeatedly the subjects of anecdotes themed around the idea of authenticity — anecdotes which regularly employ the terms “real” or “realness.” The examples which I am about to give I am using advisedly, being aware of popular music scholarship’s repeated warnings about the dangers of the kind of scholarly analysis that gives too much regard to what musicians sing or say. I am not using these examples in order to seek to challenge or verify the truthfulness of the claims made in lyrics or interviews. My interest is more in examining the kinds of claims that are made. A Rolling Stone profile of Spears reveals that: “Real” is very important to Britney. Her upcoming movie, tentatively titled Not a Girl [released as Crossroads], is, in her estimation, “really real.” Sarandon is one of Britney’s favourite actresses because she “has a realness about her.” And one of her biggest pet peeves, she says after a moment’s thought, is “fake people.” (Eliscu 58) Similarly, Aguilera has observed of the content of her song “I’m OK” (2002) — which seems to address the domestic abuse she suffered in childhood — that ‘everything’s really real’ (quoted in Heath 55). In fact, she introduces her album with the part spoken, part sung “Stripped – Part One” (2002), which begins: Allow me to introduce myself I want you to come a little closer I’d like you to get to know me a little bit better Meet the real me. And Lopez has commented, while discussing her debut album On The 6 (1999): Someone said to me: “it’s so you. It couldn’t be anything but that. It’s natural – you’re not faking anything. This is who you are.” (Jennifer Lopez: Feelin’ So Good 2000) Whether or not each woman speaks or sings these words in earnest — irrespective of whether the words represent what she “really” thinks or feels — there is a persistent and significant reiteration of the idea of the “real” self. Morris observes that ‘anecdotes need not be true stories’ in order to operate but it is necessary that they ‘be functional in a given exchange’ (150). Adopting this idea, it is possible to circumvent the question of the truthfulness of these claims to being “real.” This is useful because it enables a description of how each anecdote need not itself be a true story in order to posit the “real” or the “authentic.” It is precisely this somewhat paradoxical potential that makes the anecdote so versatile a tool for the celebrity to claim “authentic” identity. Lopez, for example, sings in “Jenny From the Block” (2002) that staying real is so effortless for her that ‘it’s like breathing.’ She is simply asserting that she embodies a qualitatively better, more authentic way of being a person. At one level it is a patently ridiculous statement. But at another it is quite an effective mobilisation of “real” as a self-descriptive term, coming as it does in a context where there is no scope to argue the point. Had she written a philosophical paper on how real she was, there would be a clearer basis on which to challenge her claim. But instead she is using a medium — pop music — with obvious links neither to veracity nor “realness.” The supposed “inauthenticity” of the context is no bar on her claim and in fact has the effect of making it difficult to challenge. To claim, as Morris does, that ‘anecdotes need not be true stories’ (150) is, however, somewhat disingenuous. Certainly an anecdote can function allegorically even if its truthfulness is doubtful, but it is precisely a sense of the possibility that “it actually happened” that differentiates an anecdote from overtly fictional kinds of story. It is this possibility that enables anecdotes to function as what Morris describes as ‘allegorical expositions of a model of the way that the world can be said to be working’ (150). The actual person associated with the pop soloist’s story about authenticity enables that story to appear as an allegorical exposition of the real workings of the world. There is, for example, an actual person “Jennifer Lopez” who at least appears to embody “Jenny from the block.” This actual person is the guarantee of the allegory’s potential applicability to other actual people — people who might potentially include ourselves. I have chosen to focus on pop music soloists because they seem specially equipped to engender these kinds of anecdotes that work to allegorise what an identity might be. Their individuation is a constantly present and pressing issue. The appearance of unique identity is felt to be commercially necessary as a means for differentiating between the work of different soloists. Elaborate individuation is employed to guarantee this differentiation, encouraging the prevalence of anecdotes of authentically distinct identity. In addition to this, the lack of the group identity that a band might provide means that there is relatively little apparent mediation between the soloist’s personal identity and their music’s form and content. Lopez has described how: The music is just you. It’s you out there on your own… As a solo artist it’s you – very solo. (Jennifer Lopez: Feelin’ So Good 2000) While her comment is rather circular, that circularity usefully expresses how the ‘music’, the ‘you’ and the ‘artist’ appear indivisible when she is ‘out there’ on her own. The singularity of the source of the voice — it at least appears to come from just one person — adds to the hyper-individuation of the pop star; it makes her appear ‘very solo.’ This means that the songs do not even have to be explicitly about the self in order to appear as symptomatic of singular identity. The anecdotes told about the authentic identities of Spears, Aguilera and Lopez tend to associate authenticity either with their own control over their representation or with the lifelong persistence of childhood characteristics. These aspects are encapsulated in an interview in Esquire magazine, which is worth quoting extensively, in which Lopez describes how: People always ask me, “Have you changed from what you were?” And I’m always like, “No way!” And they find it so hard to believe. And I go, “Look, I’m not saying my life hasn’t changed. But I am still the person I started off as.” Has it affected me? Do things get weird? Yes. But I am still Jennifer. I did grow up poor… And now it’s different. It’s different because I worked hard to get here. And I never take it for granted. I really do realize, like, oh my gosh, I wanted to do this my whole life and now I’m able to do it. It feels amazing, you know what I mean? (Lopez in Sager 60) The implication of this kind of anecdote is that being authentic has made Lopez successful and now, her dreams having come true, she can revel in her success. Authenticity promises enviable kinds of pleasure. Even if this is a myth, it is a powerful and powerfully attractive one. This puts these anecdotes quite clearly at odds with a general tendency within cultural theory, where “authentic” has lost favour as a descriptive term and an alternative set of terms have been developed for describing identity as, variously; mobile, flexible, changeable, or performative. At the risk of dangerously complicating my argument at this late stage, it appears that these anecdotes about authentic identity serve for this academic tendency a function not dissimilar to Morris’s original intention for anecdotes. What I mean by this is that they invite the attempt to develop a discursive context for identity that could incorporate an account of what appears to be a persistent cultural attachment to authenticity. In serving this function, these anecdotes raise a series of questions with which I will conclude: Does the persistent desirability of authentic identity mean that the shift toward avowedly postmodern identities has been less pervasive than has been suggested elsewhere (that stopping to be certain kinds of selves is not happening all that quickly)? Or does it mean that despite the shift toward avowedly postmodern identities, ideals of identity are still imagined in ‘outdated’ terms (that the ways of describing things hasn’t caught up to the way things are)? Or is the maintenance of a mythical ideal of authenticity necessary to make palatable an existence within a changeable, temporary or mobile identity? Footnote What I am avoiding is the unproductive question: is the music “authentic”? Popular music scholarship has been profoundly influenced — haunted, perhaps — by the work of Theodor Adorno, who was profoundly antithetical towards popular music. Adorno’s main bone of contention was that, despite its regular and varied claims to authenticity, popular music was invariably — even inevitably — inauthentic (1976). Due in no small part to Adorno’s influence, the question of the relative authenticity of different musicians or musical forms has operated as a kind of touchstone in writing about popular music (Leppert 346-47). Charles Hamm provides a useful history and an explicit critique of the discourse of authenticity within writing about popular music (1995). The creation of hierarchies of authenticity serve partly, he writes, as a means of differentiating the author’s taste from the relative ignorance in which mass taste is seen to be formed (15). Hamm views this theoretical preoccupation as the result of the persistence of modernist narratives — particularly neo-Marxism — within popular music scholarship (23-27), underpinned by an assumption that ‘capitalist production negates “authentic” expression by certain groups’ (25). Popular music scholarship, he observes, has consequently privileged ‘marginal, oppositional, or so-called authentic genres or repertoires… Commercially viable music, if studied at all, is usually placed in an oppositional context’ (36). References Adorno, Theodor W. Introduction to the Sociology of Music. New York: Seabury Press, 1976. Aguilera, Christina. “Stripped – Part One.” Stripped. New York: RCA, 2002. —. “I’m OK.” Stripped. New York: RCA, 2002. Eliscu, Jenny. “Britney’s Just like a Woman But She Breaks Just like a Little Girl.” Rolling Stone, 13 Sep. 2001: 56. Hamm, Charles. Putting Popular Music in Its Place. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Heath, Chris. “Has Anyone Seen Christina?” Rolling Stone, 14 Nov. 2002, 50-5. Leppert, Richard. Essays on Music / Theodor W. Adorno. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002. Lopez, Jennifer. “Jenny from The Block.” This Is Me… Then. New York: Epic, 2002. Lopez, Jennifer. On the 6. New York: Sony, 1999. Morris, Meaghan. “Banality in Cultural Studies.” What is Cultural Studies?: A Reader. Ed. John Storey. London: Arnold, 1997. 147-67. Sager, Mike. “What Does It Feel Like to Be Jennifer Lopez?” Esquire Aug. 2003: 60. Jennifer Lopez: Feelin’ So Good. Videorecording. Dir. Benny Medina. New York: Sony, 2000. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Tregoning, William. "'Very Solo': Anecdotes of Authentic Identity." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/04-tregoning.php>. APA Style Tregoning, W. (Nov. 2004) "'Very Solo': Anecdotes of Authentic Identity," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/04-tregoning.php>.

In 2019, Netflix released the first season of its highly anticipated show The Witcher. Based on the books of Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski, the fantasy show tells the intersecting stories of the Witcher Geralt of Rivia (Henry Cavill), the princess of Cintra Ciri (Freya Allan), and sorceress Yennefer of Vengerberg (Anya Chalotra), who is commonly referred to as a ‘mage’. Although not as popular among critics as its original book incarnations and adapted game counterparts, the show went on to achieve an 89% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes and was subsequently renewed for more seasons. Although the general success of the show is clear among viewers, The Witcher was not without its detractors, who accused creator Lauren Hissrich of developing a woke series with a feminist agenda (Worrall), especially because of her desire to emphasise strong female characters (Crow). The latter is, of course, a direction that the Netflix series inherited from the video game version of The Witcher – especially The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – even if the portrayal is often considered to be biased and “problematic” (Heritage). Supporting the view that the show focusses on the character trajectories of independent and capable women is the analysis offered by Worrow (61), who attests that “the female representations in season one of The Witcher offer prominent female characters who are imbued with agency, institutional power and well-developed narrative arcs”. Although Worrow’s analysis offers a clear critical account of Yennefer’s story arc – among the other female characters – what it does not consider is the relationship between women and magic, which has historically seen the mistreatment and ostracising of women as practitioners, and which tacitly informs representation in The Witcher by providing a gendered view of magical power. In response to this, the purpose of our article is to consider how Yennefer’s pursuit of magic both maintains and challenges gender stereotypes, particularly as they pertain to sorceresses and witches. The analysis will focus primarily on the episodes of Season One. Through the course of Season One, audiences are introduced to the character of Yennefer as she transitions from a deformed woman into a ‘beautiful’ sorceress. Alienated by her community because of a hunched back and cleft palate, Yennefer remains mistreated until she exhibits magical tendencies – or “the ability to conduct Chaos” (Guimarães). This is an aptitude that will later be revealed to be a direct outcome of her Elvin heritage (Worrow). Having gained the attention of Tissaia (MyAnna Buring), the Rectress of the magical school Aretuza, Yennefer is purchased from her family and relocated to Aretuza to train as a mage. Initially, Yennefer struggles with the magic training, where magic itself is referred to as “chaos”. In particular, she specifically finds it hard to “control [her] chaos”, as the series puts it, because of her emotional tendencies. After a short period of time, however, Yennefer develops into a strong, talented sorceress who is later instrumental in the final battle of Season One against the Nilfgaardian forces that are at war with the city-state of Cintra (Chitwood); the conflict with the kingdom of Nilfgaard is a central plot development in The Witcher, running across multiple seasons of the series. Throughout Season One, audiences view Yennefer’s character development, as she sheds her kind, naïve personality in favour of becoming an agent of chaos, who is fully immersed in the political intrigue that influences the Continent – the broader geographical land where the events of The Witcher take place. What It Means to Be a Sorceress For the purpose of this article, we will be using the terms “sorceress” and “witch” interchangeably (Stratton). It is important to mention here that several strands of anthropological research contend that the two terms are not synonymous, with “sorcery” referring to the ability to “manipulate supernatural forces for malicious or deviant purposes” (Moro, 2); the term “witch”, on the other hand, would preferably be used for “people suspected of practising, either deliberately or unconsciously, socially prohibited forms of magic“ (Moro, 1). Nonetheless, historians and sociologists have long equated the two because of their prepotency to describe magic users who channel power for productive and nefarious purposes (Godsend; Lipscomb). We cite our understanding of these important terminologies in the latter critical area, seeing the important social, cultural, and political interconnections concomitantly held by the terms “sorceress” and “witch” in the context of magical practices within The Witcher series. ‘Mage’, for its part, seems to be used in the series as a gender-neutral term, openly recalling a well-known narrative trajectory from both fantasy novels and games. Regardless of whether they were deemed witches, sorceresses, mages, or enchantresses, and despite historical records that prove the contrary, practitioners of magic, as such, have predominantly been gendered as female (Godwin; Stratton). Such a misconception has meant that stereotypes and representations of magic and witchcraft in popular culture have continued to show a penchant for depicting witches not only as female but also as powerful and intimidating beings that continuously challenge hegemonic power structures (Burger & Mix; Stratton). Historically, and especially so in the Western context, individuals labelled as witches and sorceresses have been ostracised, in some instances eradicated through mass killings, to ostensibly contain their power and remove the threat of the evil they inevitably embodied and represented (Johnson). This established historical framework is tacitly embedded in the narrative structure of The Witcher, with examples such as Yennefer often being portrayed as out of control because of her magical powers. The series, however, acknowledges unspoken historical truths and reinforces its own canon, as it is made clear throughout that men can also be magic users; indeed, the show includes a variety of male druids, sorcerers, and mages. Where a potential gender divide exists, however, is in reference to the Brotherhood of Sorcerers, who seemingly control the activities and powers of magical practitioners. Although there is a female equivalent in Sapkowski’s novels, called the Lodge of Sorceresses, the first season of The Witcher does not openly engage with it. Such an omission could be construed as a gender concern in the Netflix show, as a patriarchal group seemingly oversees the activities of mages. As Worrow argues, the show implies that “The Brotherhood controls and legitimizes the use of magic” (66), and by being referred to as a ‘brotherhood’, creates a gender imbalance within the series. This interpretation is not unexpected, bearing in mind that gender studies scholars have consistently pointed out how structural inequalities exist, even in fictitious offerings. In social, cultural, and media contexts alike, these offerings subordinate women in favour of maintaining ideologies that advantage hegemonic masculinity (Connell; Butler). Where the stereotypes of women diverge in The Witcher, however, is in the general characterisation of these powerful witches and sorceresses as empathetic and compassionate individuals. Across the history of representation, witches have been portrayed as cruel, evil, manipulative, and devious, making witches one of the most recognisable tropes of evil women in storytelling, from fairy tales to film, TV, novels, and games (Zipes). While a number of notable exceptions exist – one should only think here of Practical Magic, both in its book and film adaptations (1995/1998), as examples of texts exploring the notion of the good witch – the representational stereotype of witches as wicked and malevolent creatures has held centrally true. A witch’s activities are generally focussed on controlling and bringing misfortune upon others, in favour of their own gain (Moro). As Schimmelpfennig puts it, the recurrent image of the witch is that of someone who is “envious” of others: “nobody loves, likes, or pities her. She seems to have brought disaster upon herself and lives on the margins of society, [often] visualised by her residence in the woods” (31). The common perception, as cemented in fictional contexts, has been that witches have nefarious and villainous intents, and their magical actions (especially) are perpetually motivated by this. Although she was initially alienated by both her magical and non-magical communities, Yennefer’s character development does not adhere exactly to the broadly established characterisation of witches. Admittedly, she does act in morally ambiguous ways. For example, in the episode “Bottled Appetites”, her desire to have children leads her to attempt to control a jinn regardless of the dangerous costs to herself and others. And yet, in the following episode, "Rare Species", Yennefer changes her mind about trying to slay a dragon whose magical properties could help her, and instead works with Geralt to defend the Dragon and its family from Reavers. She also confronts injustices by helping to defend the territory of Sodden Hill which is threatened by Nilfgaardian forces ("Much More"). Rather than being purely evil, as witches have long been considered to be, Yennefer offers a more nuanced and relatable depiction, as both a witch and, arguably, a woman character. The moral complexity of Yennefer as a magical figure, then, not only makes for compelling viewing – with such magical characters often being an expected presence in mainstream programming (Greene) – but her continued growth, and the attention given to her identity development by showrunners, challenge gender stereotypes. On screen, female characters have often been treated as auxiliaries to their male counterparts (Taber et al.); they have fulfilled roles as mother, lover, or damsel in distress, reducing any potential for growth (Nairn). The Witcher Season One gives Yennefer her own arc and, in doing so, becomes a series that elevates the status of women rather than treating them as, to borrow Simone de Bauvoir’s famous words, ‘the second sex’. Power & Empowerment Differentiating Yennefer from the stereotypes of female characters, and witches/sorceresses more specifically within the broader popular media and culture landscape, is her obvious agency within The Witcher series. Gammage et al. argue that agency can be understood as “the capacity for purposive action, the ability to make decisions and pursue goals free from violence, retribution, and fear, but it also includes a cognitive dimension” (6). Throughout The Witcher, Yennefer does not act subserviently and will even oppose the will of those around her. For example, in the episode “Before the Fall”, she gives advice to young girls training to be mages to ignore the instructions of their tutors and "to think for themselves" (26:19-26:20). She follows up by later telling the young mages about how Aretuza takes away their opportunity to bear children, to ensure the mages stay loyal to the cause. As she puts it: "Even if you do everything right, follow their rules, that's still no guarantee you will get what you want" (29:42-29:51). This exposes her character as not tied to traditional patriarchal notions of subservience. And while personal motivations may laterally aid the conception of witches as egotistical, her actions still stand out as being propelled by individual agency. Female characters on screen have often been portrayed as submissive and passive, and this includes iconic on-screen witches from Samantha in Bewitched to the titular character in Sabrina the Teenage Witch. It is not uncommon to see good witches in popular media and culture, in particular, as still defined by male relationships in terms of cultural and social value (for instance, Sally Owens in Practical Magic, and Wanda Maximoff in the Marvel Cinematic Universe). As Godwin puts it, these characters embody the expected gender roles of a patriarchal society, with storylines, for example, that favour love potions or keeping house. As far as The Witcher is concerned, being submissive and passive is often in direct contrast with Yennefer’s preferences. For example, in “Betrayer Moon”, she intentionally ignores the decision of the Brotherhood to act as the mage in Nilfgaard by intentionally catching the eye of the King of Aedirn: the King then asks for Yennefer to be his mage. Fringilla (Mimi Ndiweni), who was supposed to be the mage in Aedirn, is forced to go to Nilfgaard instead. Yennefer's behaviour not only defies The Brotherhood in favour of her own interests but also demonstrates her unwillingness to conform to the expectations placed on her. Such depictions of Yennefer acting with agency make her, arguably, relatable to audiences. Female characters and witches such as Yennefer become emblematic of independent, competent women who use magic to take control of their own destiny (Burger and Mix) and can be praised for opposing “oppressive societal norms” and instead advocating for “independent thought” (Godwin 92). It is possible to argue here that what drives Yennefer appears to be her sense of Otherness, as an intrinsic difference that is central to her being, both physically and emotionally. Although initially her othered nature is seemingly the product of her deformities and ethnic background (with elves being socially, culturally, and politically ostracised on the Continent), she openly admits to feeling othered throughout the series, even after her physical disfigurement is cured by magic. Her individualised agency makes her inevitably stand out and becomes a marker of difference. This representation is not dissimilar to the feelings expressed by women across First, Second, and Third-wave Feminism (Butler; Connell). Indeed, Worrow observes that “The Witcher encodes female characters with power as ‘other’, enhancing this otherness through magical abilities” (61). It would seem that, in essence, the show surreptitiously gives voice to the plight of minority groups through the hard work, dedication, and determination of Yennefer as an Othered character, as she struggles and defies expectations in pursuit of her goal of becoming a powerful sorceress. Her independence and agency tell a story of empowerment because, like other fictional witches of the last decade in the twenty-first century, Yennefer “refuses to pretend to be someone or something they are not, eschewing the lie to instead embody the truth of themselves, their identity's, and their unapologetic strength” (Burger and Mix 14). This profoundly diverges from other representations where being the ‘other’ was seen as a justification for punishment, marginalisation, or mistreatment, and amply seen across the historicised media spectrum, from Disney films to horror narratives and beyond. Nonetheless, although it appears as if Yennefer has agency and is empowered, there is the argument that she is a conduit of magic, and as such, lacks real power and influence without a capacity to control the chaos. As Godwin contends, witches are often limited in their capacity to be influential and to have true autonomy by the fact that they do not possess magic but are often seemingly controlled by it. At various times in Season One, Yennefer struggles to control the chaos magic. For example, while being beaten up, she inadvertently portals for the first time. During her magical training, she can't manage a number of magical tasks ("Four Marks"). Here, the suggestion is that she is not completely free to act as she chooses because it can produce unintentional consequences or no consequences at all; this conceptual enslavement to magic as the source of her power and individuality seemingly dilutes some of her agency. Furthermore, instances of her trying to control the chaos within the show also conform to stereotypes of women being ruled by emotions and prone to hysterical outbursts (Johnson). Aesthetics & Sexuality Stereotypically, and in keeping with fictional tropes in literature, media, and film, witches have been described as “mature” women, “with bad skin, crooked teeth, foul breath, a cackling laugh, and a big nose with a wart at the end of it” (Henderson 66). Classic examples include the witches depicted in the works of the Brothers Grimm, Disney’s instances of Madam Mim in The Sword in the Stone and the transformed Evil Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), the witches of Roald Dahl’s eponymous novel (1983), and (even more traditionally and iconically) the hags of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1623). Yet, more recently the witch aesthetic has altered significantly in the media spectrum with an increased focus on young, alluring, and enchanting women, such as Rowan Fielding in Mayfair Witches (2023 –), Sabrina Spellman of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018–2020), Freya Mikealson of The Originals (2013–2018), and of course, Yennefer in The Witcher. These examples emphasise that female magic users, much like a significant ratio of female characters in popular culture, are sexualised, with the seductive nature of the witch taking precedence and, in some cases, detracting from the character's agency as she becomes objectified for the male gaze (Mulvey). The hiring of actress Chaltora as Yennefer, although designed to challenge racialised beauty standards (Kain), does not dispel the treatment of women as sex objects as she is filmed nude during some magic rituals and in intimate scenes. Importantly, and as briefly mentioned above, when Yennefer’s back story is told, she is introduced as a young woman with physical deformities. As part of her ascension to a sorceress, she is required to undergo a physical transformation to make her beautiful, as conventional beauty and allure appear to be requirements for mages. As Worrow (66) attests, she is seen “undergoing an invasive, painful, magical metamorphosis which remakes her in the image of classical feminine beauty”. Unsurprisingly, the makeover received backlash for being ableist (Calder), but the magical change also enforced stereotypical views of women needing to be “manicured and coiffed” (Eckert, 530) to have relevancy and value. Yennefer’s beautifying procedure could also be interpreted as paralleling current cultural currents in contemporary society, where cosmetic interventions and physical transformations, often in the form of plastic surgery, are encouraged for women to be accepted. Indeed, Yennefer is shown as being much more accepted by human and mage communities alike after her transformation, as both her political and magical influence grows. In these terms, the portrayal of Yennefer maintains rather than challenges gender norms, making for a disappointing turn in the plotline of The Witcher. The decision to submit to the transformation also came at a cost to Yennefer. She was forced to forfeit her uterus and by extension her potential to become a mother. Such a storyline conforms to Creed’s long-standing perspective that “when a woman is represented as monstrous it is almost always in relation to her mothering and reproductive functions” (118). Here, even after achieving the expected beauty standards, Yennefer is still treated as abject because she can no longer “fulfil the function dictated by patriarchal and phallocentric hegemony” (Worrow 68), which further contributes to the widespread ideological perspective that women’s roles are to be nurturing and child-rearing (Bueskens). Of course, motherhood remains a contentious topic for Yennefer as, although she made the decision to forgo her uterus in pursuit of power and beauty, she later comes to regret that decision. In the episode “Rare Specifies”, Yennefer admits to Geralt that she feels loss and sadness over her inability to reproduce, which contributes to the complexity and inner turmoil of her character, while equally reinforcing the perception that women should be mothers. Her initial independence and choice are undermined by her attempts to regain her uterus and later, in Season 3, by her adopting the role of mother figure to Ciri. Conclusion In many respects, the story arc of sorceress Yennefer of Vengerberg conforms to what McRobbie describes as female individualism, and Gill considers post-feminist. That is, Yennefer has choice and agency. She makes decisions out of a sense of entitlement, and privileges her desire for power, beauty, and freedom, sometimes above all else. Much like other post-feminist icons, Yennefer is empowered and challenges gender stereotypes that charge women with being passive and submissive. Yet, despite the fact that 60% of the writing credits are held by women on The Witcher (Worrow), Yennefer’s character is still objectified. Although the male gaze might not always be privileged, there are examples where her sexuality is exploited; by being portrayed as physically attractive, desirable, and promiscuous, she still conforms to gender norms about ideal beauty standards. The sexuality of her character maintains perceptions of witches and sorceresses as seducers, and while she is not cavorting with Satan, as many witches have historically claimed to be (Stratton), her depiction maintains the adage that sex sells – at least as far as media production goes. Ultimately, the character of Yennefer in The Witcher appears to be an attempt to respond to a tacit cultural desire for strong female characters with relatable storylines, without ostracising male fans. 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