Journal articles on the topic 'Extra-marital affairs'

Extra-marital affairs are common in theusand frequently result in difficulties for individuals, families, and society. The psychological literature, however, does not provide adequate client-centered treatment directions for those who have affairs and seek psychotherapy for this issue.In an attempt to begin to address this gap in the literature, a descriptive phenomenological psychological study, a method that has the goal of articulating the general structure of an experience, in a pretheoretical manner, was undertaken. Results suggest areas of further inquiry and may imply directions for psychotherapeutic praxis with those who have had affairs.

Seeking out extra-pair paternity (EPP) is a viable reproductive strategy for females in many pair-bonded species. Across human societies, women commonly engage in extra-marital affairs, suggesting this strategy may also be an important part of women's reproductive decision-making. Here, I show that among the Himba 17 per cent of all recorded marital births are attributed by women to EPP, and EPP is associated with significant increases in women's reproductive success. In contrast, there are no cases of EPP among children born into ‘love match’ marriages. This rate of EPP is higher than has been recorded in any other small-scale society. These results illustrate the importance of seeking EPP as a mechanism of female choice in humans, while simultaneously showing it to be highly variable and context-dependent.

In many human societies, high male social status associates with higher fertility, but the means by which status increases lifetime fitness have not been systematically investigated. We analyse the pathways by which male status begets reproductive success in a small-scale, Amerindian society. Men who are more likely to win a dyadic physical confrontation, i.e. dominant men, have higher intra-marital fertility for their age, and men with more community-wide influence, i.e. prestigious men, exhibit both higher intra-marital fertility and lower offspring mortality. Both forms of status elicit support from allies and deference from competitors, but high status men are not provisioned more than their peers. Prestigious but not dominant men marry wives who first give birth at earlier ages, which multivariate analysis suggests is the strongest pathway between status and fitness in this population. Furthermore, men are motivated to pursue status because of fitness gains both within and outside of marital unions: dominant and prestigious men have more in-pair surviving offspring as well as more extra-marital affairs.

In a programmatic article, published nearly twenty years ago, Peter Laslett characterized historians who try to write social history from literature as people who look at the world through the wrong end of a telescope. His particular examples of their inverted gaze were not always well chosen: warfare in Homer, the young age at betrothal of Shakespeare's Juliet, the extra-marital affairs in Restoration Comedy. The main point, however, still challenges ancient historians. ‘The great defect of the evidence’, as A. H. M. Jones forewarned readers of his social history, ‘is the total absence of statistics’: at best, we have isolated numbers which do not survive in significant sequences. Yet since 1951, ancient historians have continued to look down their telescopes and find social history in a widening range of texts. In the past decade, Roman historians have re-read prose fictions for this purpose, while on the Greek side, more recent attention has gone to poetry, especially tragedy and Homeric epic.

Just like ideas of ‘equivalence’, the concept of ‘sameness’ in translation is not a neutral, univocal one: its interpretation can shift both diachronically and synchronically, with a variety of factors, be they individual or collective, influencing the outcome. This paper intends to investigate a specific example from one author’s work in translation with a view to highlighting the role played by social norms and ideological beliefs in the production and reception of translated texts. Rosamond Lehmann (1901–1990) was an English writer, close to the Bloomsbury Set and author of several popular, critically acclaimed novels. However, her ‘scandalous’ narratives – including extra-marital affairs, gay and lesbian characters and abortion – perhaps rather predictably, provoked some strong reactions in Britain. Although all her books were translated with great success in France, it is perhaps surprising that four of her novels were published in Italy during the years of the Fascist regime. This paper outlines the French and Italian versions of The Weather in the Streets, published in 1936 and 1938 respectively, within their historical context.

Background: The co-existence genital ulcers either in the recipient or donor could potentially increase the risk of transmission of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Hence the meticulous clinical and serologic evaluation of females presenting with genital ulceration is important to curb the future spread of HIV.Methods: A total 80 female patients within the age group 15-45 years presenting with genital ulceration were enrolled in the study done at tertiary care centre in Amritsar for a period of one year. Various investigations such as Tzanck smear, VDRL, gram staining, genital mucosal biopsy, HSV serology and HIV testing - ELISA and Tri dot were done on study participants.Results: Out of 80 females, 8 patients with genital ulceration tested positive for HIV. Most common cause of genital ulceration in HIV positive female patients was herpes progenitalis (50%). Only 25% of HIV seropositive females were married rest were widowed or unmarried. History of condom use was absent in 62.5% of HIV positive females.Conclusions: Pre-existing genital ulcers due to sexually transmitted diseases (STD) or due to non-STDs, inconsistent condom use, urbanization and pre/extra marital affairs are risk factors for the acquisition of HIV.

The patriarchal, virilocal, patrilineal structure of the family in India not only exploits class upper-caste/middle-class women’s claims to equality within marriage but also renders their sexuality as particularly tied to the reproductive project of heterosexuality. Moreover, the institutionalization of marriage produces asymmetrical gendered relations to an extent that women are reduced to being men’s property and possession, rigidly placed under their sexual ownership. This is mirrored and upheld by the institutional structures of the nation, especially the legislative and adjudicatory framework and how it approaches marriage, incidents of extra-marital affairs, divorce, legitimate progeny, and varied property laws. The latest example of this is the Government Ordinance rejecting the recommendations by the Justice J. S. Verma Committee to criminalize marital rape. Thus, the patriarchal biases inherent in the structures of the nation-state are not willing to reconsider marriage and women’s negotiation of their sexuality out of the hegemonic framework that naturalizes consent. Through a reading of Mridula Garg’s Chittacobra, this article focuses on the discourses around sexuality and intimacy within and outside the institution of marriage, highlighting how the gendered biases endorsed by the family–community–nation continuum negate other modes of identifying relationships and concerns of sexuality that may rest on mediation of lived experience and individual subjectivities. Although first published in 1979, the concerns raised by Garg in Chittacobra significantly illustrate how patriarchal institutions like marriage, even as late as the contemporary context, operate with categories like good and bad women, constantly rendering them fluid and temporal, offering an insight into and interrogating the concomitant structures of the violence inherent in this intimacy.

Abstract The aim of the study was to examine the perceptions of young married women on meanings and motivations of partner opposition to their contraceptive use. Qualitative data was collected from focus group discussions and individual in-depth interviews with young married women and key informant interviews with health workers and traditional leaders in the districts of Ntcheu, Mangochi and Zomba in Malawi. Thematic data analysis was done using ATLAS ti software version 7. The results show that partners’ opposition to young married women’s use of contraceptives was perceived to be principally motivated by their husbands’ quest to control the sexual and reproductive lives of their spouses. Related to this aspect are the fears and misconceptions that use of modern contraceptives would relieve young married women of the fear of engaging in extra marital affairs as they would no longer be afraid of being discovered through pregnancy. Hence, the opposition was perceived to safeguard their marriages from instability and dissolution. The paper asserts that there should be a shift in the family planning programme delivery in the country aimed at reducing or eliminating partner opposition to young married women’s contraceptive use through involvement and inclusion of partners in the designing and implementation of contraceptive information and service provision interventions.

Decision scientists have revealed and described, through empirical study, the ways in which we tend to make decisions, and in particular, the ways we make decisions under conditions of uncertainty and that involve risk. The findings from these studies demonstrate the heuristics we use in making judgments and ways in which we process information compared with subject matter experts and logical and statistical principles. These findings have been applied to public policy issues and environmental safety, among other areas of social and political import, but have largely not been applied to our understanding of important personal decisions that are also made under uncertainty and risk and which have important personal and sometimes social consequences. This article aims to consider extra-marital affairs as an example of a personal decision that is made under uncertainty and with risk, and to apply decision science models to the decision-making that occurs in these cases. The hope is that decision scientists, psychologists, and clinicians who treat instances of infidelity, as well as the public, can benefit from what is known about how these decisions are made, which so often lead to regret. Theoretical implications for other personal decisions made under uncertainty with risk will be discussed.

Bangladesh is a Muslim-majority society with more than 163 million people. Most Bangladeshis hold the ideals of Islamic norms and values which is manifest in all sorts of socio-cultural behaviour. In reference to such values, the tradition of legitimizing child marriage in Bangladesh is the issue that needs to be addressed in a holistic yet rigorous approach. Currently Bangladesh ranks 4th in the world and 1st in Asia in terms of child marriage. Recently the Child Marriage Restraint Act 1929 has been abolished and it has been replaced by the Act of 2017 preserving article 2 of the previous statute, the legal age for marriage for a boy 21 and for a girl 18. This Act adds article 19 which legalizes minors (below 18 years of age) to be married off with the consent of the parents/guardians at the presence of a magistrate under “special circumstances” deemed with securing the best interest for them. The law artfully coincides with the Muslim Marriage Law which allows participants of 15 years and above to get legally married and as such contradicts the international law and the Act of 2017 itself. In the West intimate relationships including extra-marital cohabitation before reaching 18 years of age are culturally accepted. In contrast, such extra-marital and intimate relationships are strictly prohibited in Muslim-majority societies, which are dearly adhered in Bangladeshi Muslim culture. This study examines how the religious cultural and socio-economic realities influence child marriage practice in Bangladesh. Along with secondary documents, we interviewed 22 individuals including the Deputy Commissioner, the District Women and Children Affairs Officer, elected Union Parishad Chairman and Members, Social Workers, married couples and their parents/guardians at Manikganj district. In addition, we also conducted a mass survey with 62 randomly selected participants, and a voluntary online survey where the opinion of another 53 young students were collected to find broad opinion. We also collected stories of how marriages take place at the rural, urban and sub-urban areas in Bangladesh. The study has revealed that Bangladeshis does not support marriage at early ages but socio-economic reality often pushes poor into getting their children married at early ages. Many view that the special provision may encourage child marriage in the country. This study suggests that the government of Bangladesh should redefine public policy in regard to finding a middle ground between Islamic ethics and international values by exploring isomorphic mimicry and other socio-culturally accepted measures with a view to abolishing child marriage successfully.

Introduction: The burden of HSV-2 infection, the cause of most cases of genital herpes in Nigeria, varies from region to region; and so are the associated factors. This infection is known to be responsible for several negative pregnancy outcomes. There is currently no documented data on sexual behavioral factors associated with the occurrence of HSV-2 infection or seroprevalence among pregnant women in Nigeria. This study aimed at identifying the sexual behavioral correlates of HSV-2 seroprevalence among pregnant women in Benin City, Nigeria. Methodology: The cross-sectional study design was adopted and the study took place between November 2011 and June 2012. Four hundred and ten consenting ante-natal clinic patients in two major tertiary hospitals in Benin City were consecutively and prospectively included. Data sources were represented by questionnaires, the patient’s case records and laboratory investigations. Each patient’s serum was analyzed for HSV-2 antibody detection. Data analysis was performed using SPSS version 16. Results: Four hundred and ten patients were enrolled with average age 30.6 years. Seroprevalence of HSV-2 antibody was 47.3%. Sexual behavioral factors that were significantly associated with HSV-2 seroprevalence included early exposure to sexual intercourse, number of sex partners, involvement in polygamous marriages, involvement of husband in extra-marital affairs and hormonal contraceptive use. Conclusion: The prevalence of HSV-2 among pregnant women in Benin City is high. Public health campaigns aimed at: delaying onset of sexual activity; encouraging monogamous relationships; and emphasizing that hormonal contraceptives do not protect from STI’s, are recommended.

Scene V.viii of Terence's Phormio (894–989) brings to a climax the confrontation between the trickster Phormio and the two old men Demipho and Chremes. Phormio, exploiting his knowledge of Chremes' extra-marital affair in Lemnos, persuades Chremes to surrender any claim to thirty minae, extracted by false pretences, which have in fact been used to purchase a girl for Chremes' son Phaedria. Demipho urges resistance to this blackmail, suggesting that they have more chance of placating Chremes' wife Nausistrata if they themselves tell her about the Lemnian affair. Phormio reacts by moving towards Chremes' house and calling out Nausistrata by name. The old men try in vain to restrain him.

The phenomenon of workplace romance is an integral part of organizational dynamics. Workplace romance might result in both positive and negative effect. The negative side of workplace romance bears the phenomenon of workplace affair, in which workers engage in extra-marital relations with each other. This research aims to test whether past behaviour, conscientiousness personality, which a part of big five model personality traits and attitude have an impact on the likelihood of employee’s engagement in the workplace affair. As many as 250 workers in Greater Jakarta participated in the survey with minimum tenure six months as criteria of sampling. The analysis of data is performed using structural equation modelling (SEM) process. The result indicates that workers who have workplace romance engagement in their past behaviour would affect the attitude of perceiving workplace romance. The attitude itself plays as a mediator between past behaviour and the engagement of workplace affair. At the same time, personality determinant does not give any significant effect on attitude and engagement in workplace affair. To mitigate the issue of workplace affair, the organization needs to perform background checking prior accepting the employees since the past behaviour of engagement in workplace romance is the reliable indicator of future likelihood in workplace affair engagement. While the previous research studies about the effect of workplace romance, this study emphasize deeper into the findings from the workplace affair perspectives, which is the negative effect of workplace romance.

August Wilson’s Fences is perhaps the most controversial in his ten-play chronicle of the African American experience in the 20th century. The play’s conflict centres on Troy’s alleged highhandedness against his son and his extra-marital affair. The morality behind these issues has been the subject of debate since the play debuted in 1987, and the protagonist is generally believed to be a villain. This paper challenges this negative perspective, which is largely based on Western socio-cultural paradigms and logic, and provides an alternative reading of the play by reasserting the influence of the Black Aesthetic on Wilson, and by linking it to a specific African pre-text: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Keywords: August Wilson’s Fences; African world view; Black Aesthetic; Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart; intertextuality

The novel, ‘A Grain of Sand’ (Chokher Bali,1903), is about the social problems of early marriages, widowhood, and extra-marital affair of a married man with a young widow. In this novel, Rabindranath Tagore has portrayed the problems of women in Indian society like widow-remarriage, child-marriage, dowry and illicit extra-marital relationship along with the predicaments of widows in Bengal at the end of the nineteenth century. The difficulties and complications of human relationships and the significance of love in the human relationships are portrayed in this novel. He has encouraged the need of female education and the abolition of social evils like child-marriage, dowry, widowhood and illiteracy of women, domestic hostility and submissiveness of women are presented in his wonderful novels and stories. In the centre of these social obstacles, female education is revealed as a greater need in the Tagore’s novels. He has portrayed the solitude, sufferings, disappointments and unfulfilled suppressed desires of sexuality of a Bengali widow Binodini in this novel ‘A Grain of Sand’. Rabindranath Tagore had seen social realities from a psychological point of view and performed the role of a social reformer or a moralist. He has presented the problems of women by examining what is happening in the society. In this novel Tagore has shown an amazing notice of the predicaments of women of the Hindu society. In this study an investigation has been made to show how Rabindranath Tagore has depicted the theme of love and suffering of women in this novel ‘A Grain of Sand’.

Manju Kapur exposes the disparity and how modernity plays a major role in our society and also the hollowness modern life through her novel Custody. The present paper deals with the key aspects of custody, like extra marital affair, exploration of children and the law system of India. Manju Kapur has published five novels and all her novels dealt with postmodern era, which became sensational in the literary world. She talks about the life of people in Metropolitan cities and how it changes the attitude of theirs and makes them to be victims of modernity through her novel Custody. She manages to disclose the atmosphere which revolves around the family and how it destroys their peace. Here the author portrays how her female protagonist goes to an extent to fulfill her need even breaking her marital relationship with her husband and lack of concern with her children. She portrays the unimaginable incident of broken marriage and illustrates how it causes their children to yearning for their custody from their parents. The children are mentally affected because of the conflict between their egoistic parents to take back their custody only to win the battle not having the real concern over the future of their children. The author manages to create an excellent atmosphere that reveals the various disasters roaming around the family. The future of the children is also hazard. This novel proves that Manju Kapur is a great curator of the modern Indian family.

Abstract Background Intimate partner violence (IPV) against women is a global human rights violation and a public health problem. The phenomenon is linked to adverse health effects for women and children. Mothers of young children in Malawi can be particularly at risk because of gender-based power imbalances. The objectives of this study were to examine the prevalence and the risk factors of IPV against mothers of children under-five years of age in rural Malawi. Methods A multistage, cross-sectional study design was used. A sample of 538 mothers of young children was randomly selected from postnatal clinics in Dowa district. The WHO’s Violence against women screening instrument was used to collect data. Logistic regressions were used to determine risk factors that were associated with IPV against mothers. Results Overall prevalence of all four forms of IPV against mothers of under-five children was 60.2%. The prevalence of IPV controlling behavior, psychological, physical, and sexual violence were 74.7, 49.4, 43.7 and 73.2% respectively. In multivariate analyses, mothers whose partners had extra marital affairs were more likely to experience controlling behavior (AOR: 4.97, 95% CI: 2.59–8.55, P = 0.001), psychological (AOR: 2.14, 95% CI: 1.486–3.472, P = 0.001) and physical (AOR: 2.29, 95% CI: 1.48–3.94, P = 0.001) violence than mothers whose partners did not have extra marital affairs. Mothers whose partners consume alcohol were more likely to experience sexual violence (AOR: 2.00, 95% CI: 1.17–3.41, P = 0.001) than mothers whose partners did not drink. Finally, mothers who spent more than 30 min drawing water were at greater risk of experiencing IPV than mothers who spent less than 30 min. Conclusion This study found a significantly higher prevalence of IPV against mothers of under-five children in rural Malawi compared to women in the general population. Micro and macro-level programs aimed at mitigating the partners’ potential risk behaviors identified in this study are suggested. Public health programs that support increased household access to safe water are also recommended to help undermine IPV against mothers.

Aim: The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of self regulation-attachment couple therapy on improving marital commitment and sexual function in women with extra-marital affair. Methods: Semi-experimental research method with pre/post-test and control group including follow-up was used. The statistical population included women with extramarital affair referred to the counseling center for women in the city of Sanandaj, Iran. Using available sampling method, 30 subjects were selected and randomly assigned to experimental and control groups (15 participants each). Marital Commitment Questionnaire (Adams, Jones, 1997) and Women's Sexual Function Questionnaire (Rosen, Grandon, Myers, Hutty, 2004) were used. The intervention group received self regulation-attachment couple therapy through 8 ninety-minute sessions on a weekly basis. Data was analyzed using mixed analysis of variance. Findings: Results showed that self regulation-attachment couple therapy programs significantly improved the marital commitment and sexual function. Follow-up analyses showed that these results remained stable after three months (P<0/001). Conclusion: self regulation-attachment couple therapy approach by helping women achieve greater adjustment in relationship, dialogue and negotiation, increasing the ability to interact and improve the marital commitment and sexual function in women with extramarital affair. Discussions: The findings of the present study show that studying counseling and internship in this field has influenced students’ views of marriage and marital relationships in various ways.

South African society consists of people who value honour, respect and dignity. One of the most worrying factors in our democratic country is the escalation of sex-related violations like rape, sexual harassment and sexual abuse. According to media reports, the rape and abuse of women are daily occurrences. Statistics also suggest that most marriages will at some point need to resolve the emotional trauma resulting from an extra-marital affair. It is imperative that whilst the police are trying to get the culprits into custody, we as a society should help to find out what has gone so wrong that the beautiful gift of a sexual relationship is being abused and degraded by the people. This delicate issue may be an indication of the influence of patriarchal systems in some African cultures. Rape statistics reveal that most of the perpetrators are well-known members of a community. There are many possible reasons why our society is facing this challenge; however, this study will explore the view that women are considered as sexual objects and how this perspective reveals itself as the cause of sexual offences.

Introduction Lillian Ng was born in Singapore and lived in Hong Kong and the United Kingdom before migrating to Australia with her daughter and Ah Mah Yin Jie (“Ah Mahs are a special group of people who took a vow to remain unmarried … [so they] could stick together as a group and make a living together” (Yu 118)). Ng studied classical Chinese at home, then went to an English school and later on studied Medicine. Her first book, Silver Sister (1994), was short-listed for the inaugural Angus & Robertson/Bookworld Prize in 1993 and won the Human Rights Award in 1995. Ng defines herself as a “Chinese living in Australia” (Yu 115). Food, flesh and meat are recurrent topics in Lillian Ng´s second novel Swallowing Clouds, published in 1997. These topics are related to desire and can be used as a synecdoche (a metaphor that describes part/whole relations) of the human body: food is needed to survive and pleasure can be obtained from other people´s bodies. This paper focuses on one type of meat and animal, pork and the pig, and on the relation between the two main characters, Syn and Zhu Zhiyee. Syn, the main character in the novel, is a Shanghainese student studying English in Sydney who becomes stranded after the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 1989. As she stops receiving money from her mother and fears repression if she goes back to China, she begins to work in a Chinese butcher shop, owned by Zhu Zhiyee, which brings her English lessons to a standstill. Syn and Zhu Zhiyee soon begin a two-year love affair, despite the fact that Zhu Zhiyee is married to KarLeng and has three daughters. The novel is structured as a prologue and four days, each of which has a different setting and temporal location. The prologue introduces the story of an adulterous woman who was punished to be drowned in a pig´s basket in the HuanPu River in the summer of 1918. As learnt later on, Syn is the reincarnation of this woman, whose purpose in life is to take revenge on men by taking their money. The four days, from the 4th to the 7th of June 1994, mark the duration of a trip to Beijing and Shanghai that Syn takes as member of an Australian expedition in order to visit her mother with the security of an Australian passport. During these four days, the reader learns about different Chinese landmarks, such as the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, the Ming Tomb and the Summer Palace, as well as some cultural events, such as a Chinese opera and eating typical foods like Peking duck. However, the bulk of the plot of the book deals with the sexual relationship, erotic games and fantasies of Syn and Zhu Zhiyee in the period between 1989 and 1992, as well as Syn´s final revenge in January 1993. Pigs The fact that Zhu Zhiyee is a butcher allows Lillian Ng to include references to pigs and pork throughout the novel. Some of them refer to the everyday work of a butcher shop, as the following examples illustrate: “Come in and help me with the carcass,” he [Zhu Zhiyee] pointed to a small suckling pig hung on a peg. Syn hesitated, not knowing how to handle the situation. “Take the whole pig with the peg,” he commanded (11).Under dazzling fluorescent tubes and bright spotlights, trays of red meat, pork chops and lamb cutlets sparkled like jewels … The trays edged with red cellophane frills and green underlay breathed vitality and colour into the slabs of pork ribs and fillets (15).Buckets of pig´s blood with a skim of froth took their place on the floor; gelled ones, like sliced cubes of large agate, sat in tin trays labelled in Chinese. More discreetly hidden were the gonads and penises of goats, bulls and pigs. (16)These examples are representative of Syn and Zhu Zhiyee´s relationship. The first quotation deals with their interaction: most of the time Zhu Zhiyee orders Syn how to act, either in the shop or in bed. The second extract describes the meat’s “vitality” and this is the quality of Syn's skin that mesmerised Zhu when he met her: “he was excited, electrified by the sight of her unblemished, translucent skin, unlined, smooth as silk. The glow of the warmth of human skin” (13). Moreover, the lights seem to completely illuminate the pieces of meat and this is the way Zhu Zhiyee leers at Syn´s body, as it can be read in the following extract: “he turned again to fix his gaze on Syn, which pierced and penetrated her head, her brain, eyes, permeated her whole body, seeped into her secret places and crevices” (14). The third excerpt introduces the sexual organs of some of the animals, which are sold to some customers for a high price. Meat is also sexualised by Zhu Zhiyee´s actions, such as his pinching the bottoms of chickens and comparing them with “sacrificial virgins”: “chickens, shamelessly stripped and trussed, hung by their necks, naked in their pimply white skin, seemed like sacrificial virgins. Syn often caught Zhu pinching their fleshy bottoms, while wrapping and serving them to the housewives” (15-16). Zhu also makes comments relating food with sex while he is having lunch next to Syn, which could be considered sexual harassment. All these extracts exemplify the relationship between Syn and Zhu Zhiyee: the orders, the looks and the implicit sexuality in the quotidian activities in the butcher´s shop. There are also a range of other expressions that include similes with the word `pig´ in Ng´s novel. One of the most recurrent is comparing the left arm and hand of Zhu Zhiyee´s mother with a “pig´s trotter”. Zhu Zhiyee´s mother is known as ZhuMa and Syn is very fond of her, as ZhuMa accepts her and likes her more than her own daughter-in-law. The comparison of ZhuMa´s arm and hand with a trotter may be explained by the fact that ZhuMa´s arm is swollen but also by the loving representation of pigs in Chinese culture. As Seung-Og Kim explains in his article “Burials, Pigs, and Political Prestige in Neolithic China”: In both Melanesia and Asia, pigs are viewed as a symbolic representation of human beings (Allen 1976: 42; Healey 1985; Rappaport 1967: 58; Roscoe 1989: 223-26). Piglets are treated as pets and receive a great deal of loving attention, and they in turn express affection for their human “parents.” They also share some physiological features with human beings, being omnivorous and highly reproductive (though humans do not usually have multiple litters) and similar internal anatomy (Roscoe 1989: 225). In short, pigs not only have a symbiotic relationship with humans biologically but also are of great importance symbolically (121). Consequently, pigs are held in high esteem, taken care of and loved. Therefore, comparing a part of a human´s body, such as an arm or a hand, for example, to a part of a pig´s body such as a pig´s trotter is not negative, but has positive connotations. Some descriptions of ZhuMa´s arm and hand can be read in the following excerpts: “As ZhuMa handed her the plate of cookies Syn saw her left arm, swollen like a pig´s trotter” (97); “Syn was horrified, and yet somewhat intrigued by this woman without a breast, with a pig´s trotter arm and a tummy like a chessboard” (99), “mimicking the act of writing with her pig-trotter hand” (99), and ZhuMa was praising the excellence of the opera, the singing, acting, the costumes, and the elaborate props, waving excitedly with her pig trotter arm and pointing with her stubby fingers while she talked. (170) Moreover, the expression “pig´s trotters” is also used as an example of the erotic fetishism with bound feet, as it can be seen in the following passage, which will be discussed below: I [Zhu Zhiyee] adore feet which are slender… they seem so soft, like pig´s trotters, so cute and loving, they play tricks on your mind. Imagine feeling them in bed under your blankets—soft cottonwool lumps, plump and cuddly, makes you want to stroke them like your lover´s hands … this was how the bound feet appealed to men, the erotic sensation when balanced on shoulders, clutched in palms, strung to the seat of a garden swing … no matter how ugly a woman is, her tiny elegant feet would win her many admirers (224).Besides writing about pigs and pork as part of the daily work of the butcher shop and using the expression “pig´s trotter”, “pig” is also linked to money in two sentences in the book. On the one hand, it is used to calculate a price and draw attention to the large amount it represents: “The blouse was very expensive—three hundred dollars, the total takings from selling a pig. Two pigs if he purchased two blouses” (197). On the other, it works as an adjective in the expression “piggy-bank”, the money box in the form of a pig, an animal that represents abundance and happiness in the Chinese culture: “She borrowed money from her neighbours, who emptied pieces of silver from their piggy-banks, their life savings”(54). Finally, the most frequent porcine expression in Ng´s Swallowing Clouds makes reference to being drowned in a pig´s basket, which represents 19 of the 33 references to pigs or pork that appear in the novel. The first three references appear in the prologue (ix, x, xii), where the reader learns the story of the last woman who was killed by drowning in a pig´s basket as a punishment for her adultery. After this, two references recount a soothsayer´s explanation to Syn about her nightmares and the fact that she is the reincarnation of that lady (67, 155); three references are made by Syn when she explains this story to Zhu Zhiyee and to her companion on the trip to Beijing and Shanghai (28, 154, 248); one refers to a feeling Syn has during sexual intercourse with Zhu Zhiyee (94); and one when the pig basket is compared to a cricket box, a wicker or wooden box used to carry or keep crickets in a house and listen to them singing (73). Furthermore, Syn reflects on the fact of drowning (65, 114, 115, 171, 172, 173, 197, 296) and compares her previous death with that of Concubine Pearl, the favourite of Emperor Guanxu, who was killed by order of his aunt, the Empress Dowager Cixi (76-77). The punishment of drowning in a pig´s basket can thus be understood as retribution for a transgression: a woman having an extra-marital relationship, going against the establishment and the boundaries of the authorised. Both the woman who is drowned in a pig´s basket in 1918 and Syn have extra-marital affairs and break society’s rules. However, the consequences are different: the concubine dies and Syn, her reincarnation, takes revenge. Desire, Transgression and Eroticism Xavier Pons writes about desire, repression, freedom and transgression in his book Messengers of Eros: Representations of Sex in Australian Writing (2009). In this text, he explains that desire can be understood as a positive or as a negative feeling. On the one hand, by experiencing desire, a person feels alive and has joy de vivre, and if that person is desired in return, then, the feelings of being accepted and happiness are also involved (13). On the other hand, desire is often repressed, as it may be considered evil, anarchic, an enemy of reason and an alienation from consciousness (14). According to Pons: Sometimes repression, in the form of censorship, comes from the outside—from society at large, or from particular social groups—because of desire´s subversive nature, because it is a force which, given a free rein, would threaten the higher purpose which a given society assigns to other (and usually ideological) forces … Repression may also come from the inside, via the internalization of censorship … desire is sometimes feared by the individual as a force alien to his/her true self which would leave him/her vulnerable to rejection or domination, and would result in loss of freedom (14).Consequently, when talking about sexual desire, the two main concepts to be dealt with are freedom and transgression. As Pons makes clear, “the desiring subject can be taken advantage of, manipulated like a puppet [as h]is or her freedom is in this sense limited by the experience of desire” (15). While some practices may be considered abusive, such as bondage or sado-masochism, they may be deliberately and freely chosen by the partners involved. In this case, these practices represent “an encounter between equals: dominance is no more than make-believe, and a certain amount of freedom (as much as is compatible with giving oneself up to one´s fantasies) is maintained throughout” (24). Consequently, the perception of freedom changes with each person and situation. What is transgressive depends on the norms in every culture and, as these evolve, so do the forms of transgression (Pons 43). Examples of transgressions can be: firstly, the separation of sex from love, adultery or female and male homosexuality, which happen with the free will of the partners; or, secondly, paedophilia, incest or bestiality, which imply abuse. Going against society’s norms involves taking risks, such as being discovered and exiled from society or feeling isolated as a result of a feeling of difference. As the norms change according to culture, time and person, an individual may transgress the rules and feel liberated, but later on do the same thing and feel alienated. As Pons declares, “transgressing the rules does not always lead to liberation or happiness—transgression can turn into a trap and turn out to be simply another kind of alienation” (46). In Swallowing Clouds, Zhu Zhiyee transgresses the social norms of his time by having an affair with Syn: firstly, because it is extra-marital, he and his wife, KarLeng, are Catholic and fidelity is one of the promises made when getting married; and, secondly, because he is Syn´s boss and his comments and ways of flirting with her could be considered sexual harassment. For two years, the affair is an escape from Zhu Zhiyee´s daily worries and stress and a liberation and fulfillment of his sexual desires. However, he introduces Syn to his mother and his sisters, who accept her and like her more than his wife. He feels trapped, though, when KarLeng guesses and threatens him with divorce. He cannot accept this as it would mean loss of face in their neighbourhood and society, and so he decides to abandon Syn. Syn´s transgression becomes a trap for her as Zhu, his mother and his sisters have become her only connection with the outside world in Australia and this alienates her from both the country she lives in and the people she knows. However, Syn´s transgression also turns into a trap for Zhu Zhiyee because she will not sign the documents to give him the house back and every month she sends proof of their affair to KarLeng in order to cause disruption in their household. This exposure could be compared with the humiliation suffered by the concubine when she was paraded in a pig´s basket before she was drowned in the HuangPu River. Furthermore, the reader does not know whether KarLeng finally divorces Zhu Zhiyee, which would be his drowning and loss of face and dishonour in front of society, but can imagine the humiliation, shame and disgrace KarLeng makes him feel every month. Pons also depicts eroticism as a form of transgression. In fact, erotic relations are a power game, and seduction can be a very effective weapon. As such, women can use seduction to obtain power and threaten the patriarchal order, which imposes on them patterns of behaviour, language and codes to follow. However, men also use seduction to get their own benefits, especially in political and social contexts. “Power has often been described as the ultimate aphrodisiac” (Pons 32) and this can be seen in many of the sexual games between Syn and Zhu Zhiyee in Swallowing Clouds, where Zhu Zhiyee is the active partner and Syn becomes little more than an object that gives pleasure. A clear reference to erotic fetishism is embedded in the above-mentioned quote on bound feet, which are compared to pig´s trotters. In fact, bound feet were so important in China in the millennia between the Song Dynasty (960-1276) and the early 20th century that “it was impossible to find a husband” (Holman) without them: “As women’s bound feet and shoes became the essence of feminine beauty, a fanatical aesthetic and sexual mystique developed around them. The bound foot was understood to be the most intimate and erotic part of the female anatomy, and wives, consorts and prostitutes were chosen solely on the size and shape of their feet” (Holman). Bound feet are associated in Ng’s novel with pig´s trotters and are described as “cute and loving … soft cottonwool lumps, plump and cuddly, [that] makes you want to stroke them like your lover´s hands” (224). This approach towards bound feet and, by extension, towards pig´s trotters, can be related to the fond feelings Melanesian and Asian cultures have towards piglets, which “are treated as pets and receive a great deal of loving attention” (Kim 121). Consequently, the bound feet can be considered a synecdoche for the fond feelings piglets inspire. Food and Sex The fact that Zhu Zhiyee is a butcher and works with different types of meat, including pork, that he chops it, sells it and gives cooking advice, is not gratuitous in the novel. He is used to being in close proximity to meat and death and seeing Syn’s pale skin through which he can trace her veins excites him. Her flesh is alive and represents, therefore, the opposite of meat. He wants to seduce her, which is human hunting, and he wants to study her, to enjoy her body, which can be compared to animals looking at their prey and deciding where to start eating from. Zhu´s desire for Syn seems destructive and dangerous. In the novel, bodies have a price: dead animals are paid for and eaten and their role is the satiation of human hunger. But humans, who are also animals, have a price as well: flesh is paid for, in the form of prostitution or being a mistress, and its aim is satiation of human sex. Generally speaking, sex in the novel is compared to food either in a direct or an indirect way, and making love is constantly compared to cooking, the preparation of food and eating (as in Pons 303). Many passages in Swallowing Clouds have cannibalistic connotations, all of these being used as metaphors for Zhu Zhiyee’s desire for Syn. As mentioned before, desire can be positive (as it makes a person feel alive) or negative (as a form of internal or social censorship). For Zhu Zhiyee, desire is positive and similar to a drug he is addicted to. For example, when Zhu and Syn make delivery rounds in an old Mazda van, he plays the recordings he made the previous night when they were having sex and tries to guess when each moan happened. Sex and Literature Pons explains that “to write about sex … is to address a host of issues—social, psychological and literary—which together pretty much define a culture” (6). Lillian Ng´s Swallowing Clouds addresses a series of issues. The first of these could be termed ‘the social’: Syn´s situation after the Tiananmen Massacre; her adulterous relationship with her boss and being treated and considered his mistress; the rapes in Inner Mongolia; different reasons for having an abortion; various forms of abuse, even by a mother of her mentally handicapped daughter; the loss of face; betrayal; and revenge. The second issue is the ‘psychological’, with the power relations and strategies used between different characters, psychological abuse, physical abuse, humiliation, and dependency. The third is the ‘literary’, as when the constant use of metaphors with Chinese cultural references becomes farcical, as Tseen Khoo notes in her article “Selling Sexotica” (2000: 164). Khoo explains that, “in the push for Swallowing Clouds to be many types of novels at once: [that is, erotica, touristic narrative and popular], it fails to be any one particularly successfully” (171). Swallowing Clouds is disturbing, full of stereotypes, and with repeated metaphors, and does not have a clear readership and, as Khoo states: “The explicit and implicit strategies behind the novel embody the enduring perceptions of what exotic, multicultural writing involves—sensationalism, voyeuristic pleasures, and a seemingly deliberate lack of rooted-ness in the Australian socioscape (172). Furthermore, Swallowing Clouds has also been defined as “oriental grunge, mostly because of the progression throughout the narrative from one gritty, exoticised sexual encounter to another” (Khoo 169-70).Other novels which have been described as “grunge” are Edward Berridge´s Lives of the Saints (1995), Justine Ettler´s The River Ophelia (1995), Linda Jaivin´s Eat Me (1995), Andrew McGahan´s Praise (1992) and 1988 (1995), Claire Mendes´ Drift Street (1995) or Christos Tsiolkas´ Loaded (1995) (Michael C). The word “grunge” has clear connotations with “dirtiness”—a further use of pig, but one that is not common in the novel. The vocabulary used during the sexual intercourse and games between Syn and Zhu Zhiyee is, however, coarse, and “the association of sex with coarseness is extremely common” (Pons 344). Pons states that “writing about sex is an attempt to overcome [the barriers of being ashamed of some human bodily functions], regarded as unnecessarily constrictive, and this is what makes it by nature transgressive, controversial” (344-45). Ng´s use of vocabulary in this novel is definitely controversial, indeed, so much so that it has been defined as banal or even farcical (Khoo 169-70).ConclusionThis paper has analysed the use of the words and expressions: “pig”, “pork” and “drowning in a pig’s basket” in Lillian Ng´s Swallowing Clouds. Moreover, the punishment of drowning in a pig’s basket has served as a means to study the topics of desire, transgression and eroticism, in relation to an analysis of the characters of Syn and Zhu Zhiyee, and their relationship. This discussion of various terminology relating to “pig” has also led to the study of the relationship between food and sex, and sex and literature, in this novel. Consequently, this paper has analysed the use of the term “pig” and has used it as a springboard for the analysis of some aspects of the novel together with different theoretical definitions and concepts. Acknowledgements A version of this paper was given at the International Congress Food for Thought, hosted by the Australian Studies Centre at the University of Barcelona in February 2010. References Allen, Bryan J. Information Flow and Innovation Diffusion in the East Sepic District, Papua New Guinea. PhD diss. Australian National University, Australia. 1976. Berridge, Edward. Lives of the Saints. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1995. C., Michael. “Toward a sound theory of Australian Grunge fiction.” [Weblog entry] Eurhythmania. 5 Mar. 2008. 4 Oct. 2010 http://eurhythmania.blogspot.com/2008/03/toward-sound-theory-of-australian.html. Ettler, Justine. The River Ophelia. Sydney: Picador, 1995. Healey, Christopher J. “Pigs, Cassowaries, and the Gift of the Flesh: A Symbolic Triad in Maring Cosmology.” Ethnology 24 (1985): 153-65. Holman, Jeanine. “Bound Feet.” Bound Feet: The History of a Curious, Erotic Custom. Ed. Joseph Rupp 2010. 11 Aug. 2010. http://www.josephrupp.com/history.html. Jaivin, Linda. Eat Me. Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company, 1995. Khoo, Tseen. “Selling Sexotica: Oriental Grunge and Suburbia in Lillian Ngs’ Swallowing Clouds.” Diaspora: Negotiating Asian-Australian. Ed. Helen Gilbert, Tseen Khoo, and Jaqueline Lo. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2000. 164-72. Khoo, Tseen; Danau Tanu, and Tien. "Re: Of pigs and porks” 5-9 Aug. 1997. Asian- Australian Discussion List Digest numbers 1447-1450. Apr. 2010 . Kim, Seung-Og. “Burials, Pigs, and Political Prestige in Neolithic China.” Current Anthopology 35.2 (Apr. 1994): 119-141. McGahan, Andrew. Praise. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992. McGahan, Andrew. 1988. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1995. Mendes, Clare. Drift Street. Pymble: HarperCollins, 1995. Ng, Lillian. Swallowing Clouds. Ringwood: Penguin Books Australia,1997. Pons, Xavier. Messengers of Eros. Representations of Sex in Australian Writing. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. Rappaport, Roy. Pigs for the Ancestors. New Have: Yale UP, 1967. Roscoe, Paul B. “The Pig and the Long Yam: The Expansion of the Sepik Cultural Complex”. Ethnology 28 (1989): 219-31. Tsiolkas, Christos. Loaded. Sydney: Vintage, 1995. Yu, Ouyang. “An Interview with Lillian Ng.” Otherland Literary Journal 7, Bastard Moon. Essays on Chinese-Australian Writing (July 2001): 111-24.

Being a celebrity sure ain’t what it used to be. Or, perhaps more accurately, the process of maintaining a stable star persona isn’t what it used to be. With the rise of new media technologies—including digital photography and video production, gossip blogging, social networking sites, and streaming video—there has been a rapid proliferation of voices which serve to articulate stars’ personae. This panoply of sanctioned and unsanctioned discourses has brought the coherence and stability of the star’s image into crisis, with an evermore-heightened loop forming recursively between celebrity gossip and scandals, on the one hand, and, on the other, new media-enabled speculation and commentary about these scandals and gossip-pieces. Of course, while no subject has a single meaning, Hollywood has historically expended great energy and resources to perpetuate the myth that the star’s image is univocal. In the present moment, however, studios’s traditional methods for discursive control have faltered, such that celebrities have found it necessary to take matters into their own hands, using new media technologies, particularly Twitter, in an attempt to stabilise that most vital currency of their trade, their professional/public persona. In order to fully appreciate the significance of this new mode of publicity management, and its larger implications for contemporary subjectivity writ large, we must first come to understand the history of Hollywood’s approach to celebrity publicity and image management.A Brief History of Hollywood PublicityThe origins of this effort are nearly as old as Hollywood itself, for, as Richard DeCordova explains, the celebrity scandals of the 1920s threatened to disrupt the economic vitality of the incipient industry such that strict, centralised image control appeared as a necessary imperative to maintain a consistently reliable product. The Fatty Arbuckle murder trial was scandalous not only for its subject matter (a murder suffused with illicit and shadowy sexual innuendo) but also because the event revealed that stars, despite their mediated larger-than-life images, were not only as human as the rest of us, but that, in fact, they were capable of profoundly inhuman acts. The scandal, then, was not so much Arbuckle’s crime, but the negative pall it cast over the Hollywood mythos of glamour and grace. The studios quickly organised an industry-wide regulatory agency (the MPPDA) to counter potentially damaging rhetoric and ward off government intervention. Censorship codes and morality clauses were combined with well-funded publicity departments in an effort that successfully shifted the locus of the star’s extra-filmic discursive construction from private acts—which could betray their screen image—to information which served to extend and enhance the star’s pre-existing persona. In this way, the sanctioned celebrity knowledge sphere became co-extensive with that of commercial culture itself; the star became meaningful only by knowing how she spent her leisure time and the type of make-up she used. The star’s identity was not found via unsanctioned intrusion, but through studio-sanctioned disclosure, made available in the form of gossip columns, newsreels, and fan magazines. This period of relative stability for the star's star image was ultimately quite brief, however, as the collapse of the studio system in the late 1940s and the introduction of television brought about a radical, but gradual, reordering of the star's signifying potential. The studios no longer had the resources or incentive to tightly police star images—the classic age of stardom was over. During this period of change, an influx of alternative voices and publications filled the discursive void left by the demise of the studios’s regimented publicity efforts, with many of these new outlets reengaging older methods of intrusion to generate a regular rhythm of vendible information about the stars.The first to exploit and capitalize on star image instability was Robert Harrison, whose Confidential Magazine became the leading gossip publication of the 1950s. Unlike its fan magazine rivals, which persisted in portraying the stars as morally upright and wholesome, Confidential pledged on the cover of each issue to “tell the facts and name the names,” revealing what had been theretofore “confidential.” In essence, through intrusion, Confidential reasserted scandal as the true core of the star, simultaneously instituting incursion and surveillance as the most direct avenue to the “kernel” of the celebrity subject, obtaining stories through associations with call girls, out-of-work starlettes, and private eyes. As extra-textual discourses proliferated and fragmented, the contexts in which the public encountered the star changed as well. Theatre attendance dropped dramatically, and as the studios sold their film libraries to television, the stars, formerly available only on the big screen and in glamour shots, were now intercut with commercials, broadcast on grainy sets in the domestic space. The integrity—or at least the illusion of integrity—of the star image was forever compromised. As the parameters of renown continued to expand, film stars, formally distinguished from all other performers, migrated to television. The landscape of stardom was re-contoured into the “celebrity sphere,” a space that includes television hosts, musicians, royals, and charismatic politicians. The revamped celebrity “game” was complex, but still playabout: with a powerful agent, a talented publicist, and a check on drinking, drug use, and extra-marital affairs, a star and his or her management team could negotiate a coherent image. Confidential was gone, The National Inquirer was muzzled by libel laws, and People and E.T.—both sheltered within larger media companies—towed the publicists’s line. There were few widely circulated outlets through which unauthorised voices could gain traction. Old-School Stars and New Media Technologies: The Case of Tom CruiseYet with the relentless arrival of various news media technologies beginning in the 1980s and continuing through the present, maintaining tight celebrity image control began to require the services of a phalanx of publicists and handlers. Here, the example of Tom Cruise is instructive: for nearly twenty years, Cruise’s publicity was managed by Pat Kingsley, who exercised exacting control over the star’s image. With the help of seemingly diverse yet essentially similar starring roles, Cruise solidified his image as the cocky, charismatic boy-next-door.The unified Cruise image was made possible by shutting down competing discourses through the relentless, comprehensive efforts of his management company; Kingsley's staff fine-tuned Cruise’s acts of disclosure while simultaneously eliminating the potential for unplanned intrusions, neutralising any potential scandal at its source. Kingsley and her aides performed for Cruise all the functions of a studio publicity department from Hollywood’s Golden Age. Most importantly, Cruise was kept silent on the topic of his controversial religion, Scientology, lest it incite domestic and international backlash. In interviews and off-the-cuff soundbites, Cruise was ostensibly disclosing his true self, and that self remained the dominant reading of what, and who, Cruise “was.” Yet in 2004, Cruise fired Kingsley, replaced her with his own sister (and fellow Scientologist), who had no prior experience in public relations. In essence, he exchanged a handler who understood how to shape star disclosure for one who did not. The events that followed have been widely rehearsed: Cruise avidly pursued Katie Holmes; Cruise jumped for joy on Oprah’s couch; Cruise denounced psychology during a heated debate with Matt Lauer on The Today Show. His attempt at disclosing this new, un-publicist-mediated self became scandalous in and of itself. Cruise’s dismissal of Kingsley, his unpopular (but not necessarily unwelcome) disclosures, and his own massively unchecked ego all played crucial roles in the fall of the Cruise image. While these stumbles might have caused some minor career turmoil in the past, the hyper-echoic, spastically recombinatory logic of the technoculture brought the speed and stakes of these missteps to a new level; one of the hallmarks of the postmodern condition has been not merely an increasing textual self-reflexivity, but a qualitative new leap forward in inter-textual reflexivity, as well (Lyotard; Baudrillard). Indeed, the swift dismantling of Cruise’s long-established image is directly linked to the immediacy and speed of the Internet, digital photography, and the gossip blog, as the reflexivity of new media rendered the safe division between disclosure and intrusion untenable. His couchjumping was turned into a dance remix and circulated on YouTube; Mission Impossible 3 boycotts were organised through a number of different Web forums; gossip bloggers speculated that Cruise had impregnated Holmes using the frozen sperm of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. In the past, Cruise simply filed defamation suits against print publications that would deign to sully his image. Yet the sheer number of sites and voices reproducing this new set of rumors made such a strategy untenable. Ultimately, intrusions into Cruise’s personal life, including the leak of videos intended solely for Scientology recruitment use, had far more traction than any sanctioned Cruise soundbite. Cruise’s image emerged as a hollowed husk of its former self; the sheer amount of material circulating rendered all attempts at P.R., including a Vanity Fair cover story and “reveal” of daughter Suri, ridiculous. His image was fragmented and re-collected into an altered, almost uncanny new iteration. Following the lackluster performance of Mission Impossible 3 and public condemnation by Paramount head Sumner Redstone, Cruise seemed almost pitiable. The New Logic of Celebrity Image ManagementCruise’s travails are expressive of a deeper development which has occurred over the course of the last decade, as the massively proliferating new forms of celebrity discourse (e.g., paparazzi photos, mug shots, cell phone video have further decentered any shiny, polished version of a star. With older forms of media increasingly reorganising themselves according to the aesthetics and logic of new media forms (e.g., CNN featuring regular segments in which it focuses its network cameras upon a computer screen displaying the CNN website), we are only more prone to appreciate “low media” forms of star discourse—reports from fans on discussion boards, photos taken on cell phones—as valid components of the celebrity image. People and E.T. still attract millions, but they are rapidly ceding control of the celebrity industry to their ugly, offensive stepbrothers: TMZ, Us Weekly, and dozens of gossip blogs. Importantly, a publicist may be able to induce a blogger to cover their client, but they cannot convince him to drop a story: if TMZ doesn’t post it, then Perez Hilton certainly will. With TMZ unabashedly offering pay-outs to informants—including those in law enforcement and health care, despite recently passed legislation—a star is never safe. If he or she misbehaves, someone, professional or amateur, will provide coverage. Scandal becomes normalised, and, in so doing, can no longer really function as scandal as such; in an age of around-the-clock news cycles and celebrity-fixated journalism, the only truly scandalising event would be the complete absence of any scandalous reports. Or, as aesthetic theorist Jacques Ranciere puts it; “The complaint is then no longer that images conceal secrets which are no longer such to anyone, but, on the contrary, that they no longer hide anything” (22).These seemingly paradoxical involutions of post-modern celebrity epistemologies are at the core of the current crisis of celebrity, and, subsequently, of celebrities’s attempts to “take back their own paparazzi.” As one might expect, contemporary celebrities have attempted to counter these new logics and strategies of intrusion through a heightened commitment to disclosure, principally through the social networking capabilities of Twitter. Yet, as we will see, not only have the epistemological reorderings of postmodernist technoculture affected the logic of scandal/intrusion, but so too have they radically altered the workings of intrusion’s dialectical counterpart, disclosure.In the 1930s, when written letters were still the primary medium for intimate communication, stars would send lengthy “hand-written” letters to members of their fan club. Of course, such letters were generally not written by the stars themselves, but handwriting—and a star’s signature—signified authenticity. This ritualised process conferred an “aura” of authenticity upon the object of exchange precisely because of its static, recurring nature—exchange of fan mail was conventionally understood to be the primary medium for personal encounters with a celebrity. Within the overall political economy of the studio system, the medium of the hand-written letter functioned to unleash the productive power of authenticity, offering an illusion of communion which, in fact, served to underscore the gulf between the celebrity’s extraordinary nature and the ordinary lives of those who wrote to them. Yet the criterion and conventions through which celebrity personae were maintained were subject to change over time, as new communications technologies, new modes of Hollywood's industrial organization, and the changing realities of commercial media structures all combined to create a constantly moving ground upon which the celebrity tried to affix. The celebrity’s changing conditions are not unique to them alone; rather, they are a highly visible bellwether of changes which are more fundamentally occurring at all levels of culture and subjectivity. Indeed, more than seventy years ago, Walter Benjamin observed that when hand-made expressions of individuality were superseded by mechanical methods of production, aesthetic criteria (among other things) also underwent change, rendering notions of authenticity increasingly indeterminate.Such is the case that in today’s world, hand-written letters seem more contrived or disingenuous than Danny DeVito’s inaugural post to his Twitter account: “I just joined Twitter! I don't really get this site or how it works. My nuts are on fire.” The performative gesture in DeVito’s tweet is eminently clear, just as the semantic value is patently false: clearly DeVito understands “this site,” as he has successfully used it to extend his irreverent funny-little-man persona to the new medium. While the truth claims of his Tweet may be false, its functional purpose—both effacing and reifying the extraordinary/ordinary distinction of celebrity and maintaining DeVito’s celebrity personality as one with which people might identify—is nevertheless seemingly intact, and thus mirrors the instrumental value of celebrity disclosure as performed in older media forms. Twitter and Contemporary TechnocultureFor these reasons and more, considered within the larger context of contemporary popular culture, celebrity tweeting has been equated with the assertion of the authentic celebrity voice; celebrity tweets are regularly cited in newspaper articles and blogs as “official” statements from the celebrity him/herself. With so many mediated voices attempting to “speak” the meaning of the star, the Twitter account emerges as the privileged channel to the star him/herself. Yet the seemingly easy discursive associations of Twitter and authenticity are in fact ideological acts par excellence, as fixations on the indexical truth-value of Twitter are not merely missing the point, but actively distracting from the real issues surrounding the unsteady discursive construction of contemporary celebrity and the “celebretification” of contemporary subjectivity writ large. In other words, while it is taken as axiomatic that the “message” of celebrity Twittering is, as Henry Jenkins suggests, “Here I Am,” this outward epistemological certainty veils the deeply unstable nature of celebrity—and by extension, subjectivity itself—in our networked society.If we understand the relationship between publicity and technoculture to work as Zizek-inspired cultural theorist Jodi Dean suggests, then technologies “believe for us, accessing information even if we cannot” (40), such that technology itself is enlisted to serve the function of ideology, the process by which a culture naturalises itself and attempts to render the notion of totality coherent. For Dean, the psycho-ideological reality of contemporary culture is predicated upon the notion of an ever-elusive “secret,” which promises to reveal us all as part of a unitary public. The reality—that there is no such cohesive collective body—is obscured in the secret’s mystifying function which renders as “a contingent gap what is really the fact of the fundamental split, antagonism, and rupture of politics” (40). Under the ascendancy of the technoculture—Dean's term for the technologically mediated landscape of contemporary communicative capitalism—subjectivity becomes interpellated along an axis blind to the secret of this fundamental rupture. The two interwoven poles of this axis are not unlike structuralist film critics' dialectically intertwined accounts of the scopophilia and scopophobia of viewing relations, simply enlarged from the limited realm of the gaze to encompass the entire range of subjectivity. As such, the conspiratorial mindset is that mode of desire, of lack, which attempts to attain the “secret,” while the celebrity subject is that element of excess without which desire is unthinkable. As one might expect, the paparazzi and gossip sites’s strategies of intrusion have historically operated primarily through the conspiratorial mindset, with endless conjecture about what is “really happening” behind the scenes. Under the intrusive/conspiratorial paradigm, the authentic celebrity subject is always just out of reach—a chance sighting only serves to reinscribe the need for the next encounter where, it is believed, all will become known. Under such conditions, the conspiratorial mindset of the paparazzi is put into overdrive: because the star can never be “fully” known, there can never be enough information about a star, therefore, more information is always needed. Against this relentless intrusion, the celebrity—whose discursive stability, given the constant imperative for newness in commercial culture, is always in danger—risks a semiotic liquidation that will totally displace his celebrity status as such. Disclosure, e.g. Tweeting, emerges as a possible corrective to the endlessly associative logic of the paparazzi’s conspiratorial indset. In other words, through Twitter, the celebrity seeks to arrest meaning—fixing it in place around their own seemingly coherent narrativisation. The publicist’s new task, then, is to convincingly counter such unsanctioned, intrusive, surveillance-based discourse. Stars continue to give interviews, of course, and many regularly pose as “authors” of their own homepages and blogs. Yet as posited above, Twitter has emerged as the most salient means of generating “authentic” celebrity disclosure, simultaneously countering the efforts of the papparazzi, fan mags, and gossip blogs to complicate or rewrite the meaning of the star. The star uses the account—verified, by Twitter, as the “real” star—both as a means to disclose their true interior state of being and to counter erastz narratives circulating about them. Twitter’s appeal for both celebrities and their followers comes from the ostensible spontaneity of the tweets, as the seemingly unrehearsed quality of the communiqués lends the form an immediacy and casualness unmatched by blogs or official websites; the semantic informality typically employed in the medium obscures their larger professional significance for celebrity tweeters. While Twitter’s air of extemporary intimacy is also offered by other social networking platforms, such as MySpace or Facebook, the latter’s opportunities for public feedback (via wall-posts and the like) works counter to the tight image control offered by Twitter’s broadcast-esque model. Additionally, because of the uncertain nature of the tweet release cycle—has Ashton Kutcher sent a new tweet yet?—the voyeuristic nature of the tweet disclosure (with its real-time nature offering a level of synchronic intimacy that letters never could have matched), and the semantically displaced nature of the medium, it is a form of disclosure perfectly attuned to the conspiratorial mindset of the technoculture. As mentioned above, however, the conspiratorial mindset is an unstable subjectivity, insofar as it only exists through a constant oscillation with its twin, the celebrity subjectivity. While we can understand that, for the celebrities, Twitter functions by allowing them a mode for disclosive/celebrity subjectivisation, we have not yet seen how the celebrity itself is rendered conspiratorial through Twitter. Similarly, only the conspiratorial mode of the follower’s subjectivity has thus far been enumerated; the moment of the follower's celebrtification has so far gone unmentioned. Since we have seen that the celebrity function of Twitter is not really about discourse per se, we should instead understand that the ideological value of Twitter comes from the act of tweeting itself, of finding pleasure in being engaged in a techno-social system in which one's participation is recognised. Recognition and participation should be qualified, though, as it is not the fully active type of participation one might expect in say, the electoral politics of a representative democracy. Instead, it is a participation in a sort of epistemological viewing relations, or, as Jodi Dean describes it, “that we understand ourselves as known is what makes us think there is that there is a public that knows us” (122). The fans’ recognition by the celebrity—the way in which they understood themselves as known by the star was once the receipt of a hand-signed letter (and a latent expectation that the celebrity had read the fan’s initial letter); such an exchange conferred to the fan a momentary sense of participation in the celebrity's extraordinary aura. Under Twitter, however, such an exchange does not occur, as that feeling of one-to-one interaction is absent; simply by looking elsewhere on the screen, one can confirm that a celebrity's tweet was received by two million other individuals. The closest a fan can come to that older modality of recognition is by sending a message to the celebrity that the celebrity then “re-tweets” to his broader following. Beyond the obvious levels of technological estrangement involved in such recognition is the fact that the identity of the re-tweeted fan will not be known by the celebrity’s other two million followers. That sense of sharing in the celebrity’s extraordinary aura is altered by an awareness that the very act of recognition largely entails performing one’s relative anonymity in front of the other wholly anonymous followers. As the associative, conspiratorial mindset of the star endlessly searches for fodder through which to maintain its image, fans allow what was previously a personal moment of recognition to be transformed into a public one. That is, the conditions through which one realises one’s personal subjectivity are, in fact, themselves becoming remade according to the logic of celebrity, in which priority is given to the simple fact of visibility over that of the actual object made visible. Against such an opaque cultural transformation, the recent rise of reactionary libertarianism and anti-collectivist sentiment is hardly surprising. ReferencesBaudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 1994.Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968. Dean, Jodi. Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2003. DeCordova, Richard. Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. Jenkins, Henry. “The Message of Twitter: ‘Here It Is’ and ‘Here I Am.’” Confessions of an Aca-Fan. 23 Aug. 2009. 15 Sep. 2009 < http://henryjenkins.org/2009/08/the_message_of_twitter.html >.Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1984.Ranciere, Jacques. The Future of the Image. New York: Verso, 2007.

1. Introduction: How the word 'chat' can be demeaning I think the editors mean the word 'chat' to be something of a tease. They remind us that to call something 'chat' might be to strip it of anything more serious or substantial it might be doing and, by extension, to weaken pretty well all talk. It joins 'mere talk', 'rhetoric', 'chatter' and of course 'gossip', with the pungent flavouring of sexism as an added extra. It seems that chat is limp, directionless, passive. Whoever gets to call something 'chat' has scored a win in a battle. Let's just stay with this image for a moment. Suppose it is a rhetorical victory. Scored for which side? In a battle against who or what? Well, for a commonsense view of the world that rates objects over practices, things over their descriptions, and facts over the discovery of facts. And that commonsense view, of course, is the high street version of tangled scholars' web of philosophies -- realism, materialism and essentialism. But breathe easy, because I'm not going to get us stuck in that web. All I want to do is point out -- as has long been pointed out before, especially by feminists taking a cool look at 'female language' - that some uses of the word 'chat' betray a very old-fashioned view of language. To call this edition of M/C 'Chat' is to examine that attitude. The editors want to rate practices over objects, descriptions over what they describe, and the act of discovery over what is discovered. Or at least, even if one doesn't all want to go that far, to redress the balance a little in each case. The attitude the editors want to correct is a rather complacent one. It takes people's exchange of talk as just that; as a means of transmitting what's in one person's head into the head of the other person, more or less. Inefficient, noisy and unreliable, but fixable by technology. This is, of course the 'conduit' metaphor so devastatingly unmasked by Reddy in 1979. But it would be good to see some actual examples of real people really using the word; all this has been rather hypothetical so far. In fact, what we shall find is a bit of a paradox. It turns out, if I can prefigure the action, that when people use the word 'chat' to decribe some stretch of talk, what they want to do (at least in the data I have) is not to sneer at it -- quite the contrary. But it is nevertheless highly rhetorical. It does a job. The speaker tends to use it to promote a description of a warm, informal and above all blameless event, just when there might be reason to believe that in fact something rather different would be more accurate. 2. How to analyse talk as consequential? Let me pause for a moment. Soon I shall be doing a quick survey of some examples of actual live usage of the word. I should say, in parenthesis, that M/C offered me the wonderful opportunity of actually having a link to an audio sample of these extracts, and had the data come from public sources (say from talk radio or a political speech) then I would have jumped at the chance. That way you would have been able yourself to catch the flavour of the talk undiluted by transcription conventions and the overwhelming blandness of print. But all the extracts I shall use in the article are from private conversations, the participants in which didn't give permission for their voices to be broadcast, so I'm afraid that opportunity must be passed up. But given I have transcripts, what now? How to think about language-in-use? Obviously, I have to put my money where my mouth is and treat them not like 'chat' in that demeaning, inconsequential caricature I mentioned at the beginning (and against which this whole issue of M/C is dedicated). What are the broad alternatives available? There are, loosely speaking, two sorts of things one could do, familiar to all students of language. A couple of images will be helpful, if a bit crude. The first is the pearl necklace. Here, the interesting things about the talk are its content (pearls or ivory pieces?) and its setting (one string? two?). Less fancifully, the interest is in asking: what words, what speakers, what occasion? You can trace that from William Labov and his street-level sociolinguistics (1972), or further back if you want to. What you get is a thorough rejection of the words + settings = chat. You discover, by empirical comparison of what words in what settings, such thorough non-'chat' states of affairs as social location, social discourses and social power. If the pearl necklace doesn't appeal -- it seems a bit static perhaps -- then how about the origami bird? In its prior life as undistinguished flat sheet of paper it fails to command much attention. It's the transformation that fascinates. You have to fold it up to produce it, and you have to fold it up in a certain way if you don't want it to produce an aeroplane or a hat or just a disaster. The interesting things, of course, are the details (which side do you fold first? where do you tuck?) and how that produces the beautiful end result. Or, less fancifully, the sequential structure of talk in interaction, how one part supports and constrains the next and how a stretch of it achieves social goals (beautiful or otherwise). Now for the rest of the paper I'm going to try a bit of origami, or rather, some origami-in-reverse. I'm going to try and get across the spirit of Conversation Analysis and, without spraying around too many technical terms (indeed, any, if I can help it) I'm going to take a stretch of talk and see how it folds and tucks together to make it what it is. Doing that will, I hope, show up things about it that might pass unnoticed otherwise). Readers whose fancy is tickled for this sort of thing might well want to have a look at the references at the end of the article to take it all further. 3. Example 1. "about two years ago I came round an':: (..) spent some time chattin' didn't we" Let's make a start with this case. Here we have an encounter between a psychologist and a person he is about to interview. The interview proper hasn't actually started yet, and we can read the lines below as the interviewer 'working up to' the start of the interview proper. Part of it is to remind MA that the psychologist had seen him before. Notice how the psychologist uses the word 'chatting' to describe that earlier encounter. In line 11, MR describes his previous encounter as involving "chattin'. Maybe it did, maybe it didn't. I know I shouldn't be calling in evidence which the reader can't get hold of, but Mark Rapley, the psychologist involved (and with whom I worked on the analysis; see Rapley and Antaki) pointed to that line and said to me that ('in fact') his previous dealings with MA, far from being 'chatting', had been a formal administration of a questionnaire, with all the paraphernalia of paper and pencil, and strict question and answer rights and obligations, all going down on the record. "Chattin'"? Calling it "chattin'" obliterates all that in favour of something altogether more homely and friendly. Look at what team of players it's sent out onto the field with: he "came round" (rather, than, say, 'paid an official visit') and "spent some time" (rather than 'completed my business'. They did it together -- hence the "didn't we?" The psychologist was "jus' (..) watchin' what was going on" -- not intervening, merely casually watching the world go by; note also the dropped g's. Now he's back to "see how you were gettin' on" (rather than 'administer a standardised assessment questionnaire'"). What an assembly. I'm trying to leave off any guess at what the interviewer's intentions or motives are -- we just can't know such things. But we can certainly have something to say about the effects his words give off. The origami structure that emerges from the folding is one of the 'chat' having been an interaction off the record, personal and friendly; all hearably at odds with the business the interviewer is officially prosecuting. 4. Example 2: "what Tim does (.) which is come and chat" Here is a very similar case, this time in a committee meeting: Again, I'll briefly gloss the scene (based on the previous talk, and visible in such terms as 'matters arising', the thanks expressed by one speaker to another, and the "we turn to" topic change in line 19/20). A committee meeting is in session, and AC is touting for new names to replace a member who is leaving. Committee membership is, by definition, something that is carefully regulated in standing orders and by convention, and is quite capable of being described in the most off-putting bureaucratic language (as it might be, say, were an errant member being disciplined for some infraction or other, and the thing became legalistic). Here it isn't. How does AC fold it up? AC in lines 1 to 9 is working up a request for other to nominate candidates to replace Tim Brown (all names are of course pseudonyms). We leave aside consideration of how he folds his talk so as to make the request as he does (rather than, say, deliver it as a petulant blast against his colleagues for not having provided him with any names so far). Our interest is in how the folds involve the description 'chat'. Like the psychologist interviewer in extract [1], AC bundles the 'chat' word into a description of the whole scene -- that the postgraduate representative will "come and chat," and that the interviewer "came round an':: (..)spent some time chattin'". To bundle up the description with the act of arrival is an elegantly efficient way of implying that this is the person's interest and motive in the interaction -- what they're there for. This way any candidate member can be reassured that the thing is much less onerous, official and formal than it would have sounded had AC used the bureaucratic description buried away in the Committee statutes. 'Chat', in this fold of the talk, works to eliminate the consequentiality and offputtingness of the event -- even though, of course, when the new member is inducted onto the Committee, he or she will be subject to all the dread rules and regulations that lurk in the other, hidden bureaucratic description. 5. Example 3: "we sat and chatted til about eleven" Here is another case, where, probably because the setting is not as institutional as in the first two, working out what 'chat' is doing will take us a bit more work. First the gloss. Gordon is on the phone to Danielle and talking about what he was doing the other night - we could dwell a little on his description of his guitar performance ('it went down really well') but we'll skip straight to where "chatted" appears. Unlike the previous two cases, it isn't bundled up with arrival at the scene ("come and chat" and "I came round an':: (..)spent some time chattin'"), but it does still get bundled with something -- sitting -- which parcels it up nicely as a combination-verb, something done while doing something else. Gordon and the others had no plans here; the food and wine had been consumed, then "we sat (0.3) an:' chatted (0.4) til: about eleven". Now what does such a description do for his then being struck by the thought that he'd go home and 'just phone her' (".hh then I thought (0.3) I'll come back (0.3) an' I'll jus' jus' phone you t'say that uh I'd like t'see you")? It's a magnificent play of accountability -- it holds off a collection of implications which might damage the tender sentiment presumably involved in wanting to tell someone you'd like to see them. Sitting and chatting is (notwithstanding the wine) not being drunk; it's with other people, so it's not sad-sack lonely rumination; still less is it insistent, stalking, recriminative or even violent obsession. Thinking of Danielle after (merely) being with others sitting and chatting till eleven disarms all of those possibilities; as the discursive psychologists have it (Edwards and Potter 1992) , this is a piece of 'stake management'. Gordon is inoculating himself against being seen to have the wrong sort of motivations. 'Chat' here is used as a part of a positive rhetorical strategy to have sentiments, but of the right sort. 6. Example 4: "I said to him, you know, come down 'n have a chat with me" One last example to see us out. This time we are in a marital counselling session, and the husband's ('Jeff') exams have been part of the topic of conversation, which I will gloss as being about the attention each partner pays to the other. 'Mary' now speaks. Once again the speaker is exploiting the pleasantly unspecific glow that 'chat' can have. Mary wanted Jeff to come down from 'upstairs' and 'have a chat' with her. Against this she puts words in his mouth: "I've gotta start my revising," and then her own commentary -- it was the same "every ni:ght, (.) for o:hh ye:ars.", regular as clockwork and at decidedly antisocial hours. She "never had anyone to ta:lk to" as a consequence. So the hearer is faced with Jeff's choice -- to come down from upstairs (remote, cold) and have a chat with Mary; or pursue his mechanical, laborious, self-centred and inconsiderate regime. There is, in her description, no contest; hence Jeff comes out looking something of a cold fish. Here is a lovely example of 'chat' once again being a good thing, loading the dice in the speaker's favour. 7. Concluding comments I started out saying that the word 'chat' was something of an insult. That certainly might apply when the word is used (or might be used, or is allegedly used) in a discussion about human action, and someone who wants to push the 'real', the 'material' and the 'consequential' might use 'chat' to dismiss an opponent who wants words to be responsible for some rather substantial things: reality, materiality and consequentiality. But there's a nice paradox. When you do take words seriously as doing things, and you look for what 'chat' does in people's actual usage, you find that it isn't an insult. Far from it. In the four cases we looked at the speaker was using 'chat' as a basically pleasant, socially positive and blameless description. Of course, they were doing so for rhetorical purposes, as words always are. But nevertheless there's a paradox there. In the abstract, nasty; in actuality, nice. The one thing that's constant is the fact that, in our analyses, both the hypothetical insulters and our actual glossers are using the word. In the mouths of both parties 'chat' is an interested description, as the discursive psychologists have it, following the tradition established by Garfinkel and, especially, Harvey Sacks (see, for example, the compendious Lectures on Conversation). It is always heard as a contrast (implicit or not) with something else, and does its work that way. Like it or not, 'chat' is no polite cipher. If you look at how it's folded and manipulated into the interaction, you see how it will smooth a potentially difficult interview, naturalise a possibly unwelcome encounter or set up a loaded distinction againt something mechanical and self-interested. All human life is here. If anyone needed persuading that 'chat' isn't chat, then the examples we've looked at here might have gone some way to doing so. References Atkinson, J. M., and J. Heritage, eds. Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Edwards, D., and J. Potter. Discursive Psychology. London: Sage, 1992. Labov, W. Language in the Inner City. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1972. Rapley, M., and C. Antaki. "A Conversation Analysis of the 'Acquiescence' of People with Learning Disabilities." Journal of Community and Applied Psychology 6 (1996): 371-91. Reddy, M. J. "The Conduit Metaphor - A Case of Frame Conflict in Our Language about Language." Metaphor and Thought. Ed. A. Ortony. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 1979. Sacks, H. Lectures on Conversation. Ed. Gail Jefferson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. Notation The notation follows that of Gail Jefferson described in Atkinson and Heritage (ix - xvi), with the following deviations: (..) and (...) are untimed pauses of about .4 and .8 of a second approximately. The author would like to thank Liz Holt and Derek Edwards for permission to use transcript extracts 3 and 4, whose details are as follows -- Extract 3: Holt: 1988 Undated: Side I: Call 4 Extract 4: DE-JF/C1/S1 @ 12 June, 1993 Citation reference for this article MLA style: Charles Antaki. "Two Rhetorical Uses of the Description 'Chat'." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.4 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/uses.php>. Chicago style: Charles Antaki, "Two Rhetorical Uses of the Description 'Chat'," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 4 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/uses.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Charles Antaki. (2000) Two rhetorical uses of the description 'chat'. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(4). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/uses.php> ([your date of access]).

In a media saturated world, doodles have recently received the kind of attention usually reserved for coverage of racy extra marital affairs, corrupt governance, and product malfunction. Former British Prime Minister Blair’s private doodling at a World Economic Forum meeting in 2005 raised suspicions that he, according to one keen graphologist, struggled “to maintain control in a confusing world," which infers he was attempting to cohere a scattershot, fragmentary series of events (Spiegel). However, placid-faced Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, who sat nearby, actually scrawled the doodles. In this case, perhaps the scrawls mimicked the ambience in the room: Gates might have been ‘tuning’–registering the ‘white noise’ of the participants, letting his unconscious dictate doodles as a way to cope with the dissonance trekking in with the officialspeak. The doodles may have documented and registered the space between words, acting like deposits from his gestalt.Sometimes the most intriguing doodles co-exist with printed texts. This includes common vernacular graffiti that lines public and private books and magazines. Such graffiti exposes tensions in the role of readers as well as horror vacui: a fear of unused, empty space. Yet, school children fingering fresh pages and stiff book spines for the first few times often consider their book pages as sanctioned, discreet, and inviolable. The book is an object of financial and cultural investment, or imbued both with mystique and ideologies. Yet, in the e-book era, the old-fashioned, physical page is a relic of sorts, a holdover from coarse papyrus culled from wetland sage, linking us to the First Dynasty in Egypt. Some might consider the page as a vessel for typography, a mere framing device for text. The margins may reflect a perimeter of nothingness, an invisible borderland that doodles render visible by inhabiting them. Perhaps the margins are a bare landscape, like unmarred flat sand in a black and white panchromatic photo with unique tonal signature and distinct grain. Perhaps the margins are a mute locality, a space where words have evaporated, or a yet-to-be-explored environment, or an ambient field. Then comes the doodle, an icon of vernacular art.As a modern folklorist, I have studied and explored vernacular art at length, especially forms that may challenge and fissure aesthetic, cultural, and social mores, even within my own field. For instance, I contend that Grandma Prisbrey’s “Bottle Village,” featuring millions of artfully arranged pencils, bottles, and dolls culled from dumps in Southern California, is a syncretic culturescape with underlying feminist symbolism, not merely the product of trauma and hoarding (Ensminger). Recently, I flew to Oregon to deliver a paper on Mexican-American gravesite traditions. In a quest for increased multicultural tolerance, I argued that inexpensive dimestore objects left on Catholic immigrant graves do not represent a messy landscape of trinkets but unique spiritual environments with links to customs 3,000 years old. For me, doodles represent a variation on graffiti-style art with cultural antecedents stretching back throughout history, ranging from ancient scrawls on Greek ruins to contemporary park benches (with chiseled names, dates, and symbols), public bathroom latrinalia, and spray can aerosol art, including ‘bombing’ and ‘tagging’ hailed as “Spectacular Vernaculars” by Russell Potter (1995). Noted folklorist Alan Dundes mused on the meaning of latrinalia in Here I Sit – A Study of American Latrinalia (1966), which has inspired pop culture books and web pages for the preservation and discussion of such art (see for instance, www.itsallinthehead.com/gallery1.html). Older texts such as Classic American Graffiti by Allen Walker Read (1935), originally intended for “students of linguistics, folk-lore, abnormal psychology,” reveal the field’s longstanding interest in marginal, crude, and profane graffiti.Yet, to my knowledge, a monograph on doodles has yet to be published by a folklorist, perhaps because the art form is reconsidered too idiosyncratic, too private, the difference between jots and doodles too blurry for a taxonomy and not the domain of identifiable folk groups. In addition, the doodles in texts often remain hidden until single readers encounter them. No broad public interaction is likely, unless a library text circulates freely, which may not occur after doodles are discovered. In essence, the books become tainted, infected goods. Whereas latrinalia speaks openly and irreverently, doodles feature a different scale and audience.Doodles in texts may represent a kind of speaking from the ‘margin’s margins,’ revealing the reader-cum-writer’s idiosyncratic, self-meaningful, and stylised hieroglyphics from the ambient margins of one’s consciousness set forth in the ambient margins of the page. The original page itself is an ambient territory that allows the meaning of the text to take effect. When those liminal spaces (both between and betwixt, in which the rules of page format, design, style, and typography are abandoned) are altered by the presence of doodles, the formerly blank, surplus, and soft spaces of the page offer messages coterminous with the text, often allowing readers to speak, however haphazardly and unconsciously, with and against the triggering text. The bleached whiteness can become a crowded milieu in the hands of a reader re-scripting the ambient territory. If the book is borrowed, then the margins are also an intimate negotiation with shared or public space. The cryptic residue of the doodler now resides, waiting, for the city of eyes.Throughout history, both admired artists and Presidents regularly doodled. Famed Italian Renaissance painter Filippo Lippi avoided strenuous studying by doodling in his books (Van Cleave 44). Both sides of the American political spectrum have produced plentiful inky depictions as well: roughshod Democratic President Johnson drew flags and pagodas; former Hollywood fantasy fulfiller turned politician Republican President Reagan’s specialty was western themes, recalling tropes both from his actor period and his duration acting as President; meanwhile, former law student turned current President, Barack Obama, has sketched members of Congress and the Senate for charity auctions. These doodles are rich fodder for both psychologists and cross-discipline analysts that propose theories regarding the automatic writing and self-styled miniature pictures of civic leaders. Doodles allow graphologists to navigate and determine the internal, cognitive fabric of the maker. To critics, they exist as mere trifles and offer nothing more than an iota of insight; doodles are not uncanny offerings from the recesses of memory, like bite-sized Rorschach tests, but simply sloppy scrawls of the bored.Ambient music theory may shed some light. Timothy Morton argues that Brian Eno designed to make music that evoked “space whose quality had become minimally significant” and “deconstruct the opposition … between figure and ground.” In fact, doodles may yield the same attributes as well. After a doodle is inserted into texts, the typography loses its primacy. There is a merging of the horizons. The text of the author can conflate with the text of the reader in an uneasy dance of meaning: the page becomes an interface revealing a landscape of signs and symbols with multiple intelligences–one manufactured and condoned, the other vernacular and unsanctioned. A fixed end or beginning between the two no longer exists. The ambient space allows potential energies to hover at the edge, ready to illustrate a tension zone and occupy the page. The blank spaces keep inviting responses. An emergent discourse is always in waiting, always threatening to overspill the text’s intended meaning. In fact, the doodles may carry more weight than the intended text: the hierarchy between authorship and readership may topple.Resistant reading may take shape during these bouts. The doodle is an invasion and signals the geography of disruption, even when innocuous. It is a leveling tool. As doodlers place it alongside official discourse, they move away from positions of passivity, being mere consumers, and claim their own autonomy and agency. The space becomes co-determinant as boundaries are blurred. The destiny of the original text’s meaning is deferred. The habitus of the reader becomes embodied in the scrawl, and the next reader must negotiate and navigate the cultural capital of this new author. As such, the doodle constitutes an alternative authority and economy of meaning within the text.Recent studies indicate doodling, often regarded as behavior that announces a person’s boredom and withdrawal, is actually a very special tool to prevent memory loss. Jackie Andrade, an expert from the School of Psychology at the University of Plymouth, maintains that doodling actually “offsets the effects of selective memory blockade,” which yields a surprising result (quoted in “Doodling Gets”). Doodlers exhibit 29% more memory recall than those who passively listen, frozen in an unequal bond with the speaker/lecturer. Students that doodle actually retain more information and are likely more productive due to their active listening. They adeptly absorb information while students who stare patiently or daydream falter.Furthermore, in a 2006 paper, Andrew Kear argues that “doodling is a way in which students, consciously or not, stake a claim of personal agency and challenge some the values inherent in the education system” (2). As a teacher concerned with the engagement of students, he asked for three classes to submit their doodles. Letting them submit any two-dimensional graphic or text made during a class (even if made from body fluid), he soon discovered examples of “acts of resistance” in “student-initiated effort[s] to carve out a sense of place within the educational institution” (6). Not simply an ennui-prone teenager or a proto-surrealist trying to render some automatic writing from the fringes of cognition, a student doodling may represent contested space both in terms of the page itself and the ambience of the environment. The doodle indicates tension, and according to Kear, reflects students reclaiming “their own self-recognized voice” (6).In a widely referenced 1966 article (known as the “doodle” article) intended to describe the paragraph organisational styles of different cultures, Robert Kaplan used five doodles to investigate a writer’s thought patterns, which are rooted in cultural values. Now considered rather problematic by some critics after being adopted by educators for teacher-training materials, Kaplan’s doodles-as-models suggest, “English speakers develop their ideas in a linear, hierarchal fashion and ‘Orientals’ in a non-liner, spiral fashion…” (Severino 45). In turn, when used as pedagogical tools, these graphics, intentionally or not, may lead an “ethnocentric, assimilationist stance” (45). In this case, doodles likely shape the discourse of English as Second Language instruction. Doodles also represent a unique kind of “finger trace,” not unlike prints from the tips of a person’s fingers and snowflakes. Such symbol systems might be used for “a means of lightweight authentication,” according to Christopher Varenhorst of MIT (1). Doodles, he posits, can be used as “passdoodles"–a means by which a program can “quickly identify users.” They are singular expressions that are quirky and hard to duplicate; thus, doodles could serve as substitute methods of verifying people who desire devices that can safeguard their privacy without users having to rely on an ever-increasing number of passwords. Doodles may represent one such key. For many years, psychologists and psychiatrists have used doodles as therapeutic tools in their treatment of children that have endured hardship, ailments, and assault. They may indicate conditions, explain various symptoms and pathologies, and reveal patterns that otherwise may go unnoticed. For instance, doodles may “reflect a specific physical illness and point to family stress, accidents, difficult sibling relationships, and trauma” (Lowe 307). Lowe reports that children who create a doodle featuring their own caricature on the far side of the page, distant from an image of parent figures on the same page, may be experiencing detachment, while the portrayal of a father figure with “jagged teeth” may indicate a menace. What may be difficult to investigate in a doctor’s office conversation or clinical overview may, in fact, be gleaned from “the evaluation of a child’s spontaneous doodle” (307). So, if children are suffering physically or psychologically and unable to express themselves in a fully conscious and articulate way, doodles may reveal their “self-concept” and how they feel about their bodies; therefore, such creative and descriptive inroads are important diagnostic tools (307). Austrian born researcher Erich Guttman and his cohort Walter MacLay both pioneered art therapy in England during the mid-twentieth century. They posited doodles might offer some insight into the condition of schizophrenics. Guttman was intrigued by both the paintings associated with the Surrealist movement and the pioneering, much-debated work of Sigmund Freud too. Although Guttman mostly studied professionally trained artists who suffered from delusions and other conditions, he also collected a variety of art from patients, including those undergoing mescaline therapy, which alters a person’s consciousness. In a stroke of luck, they were able to convince a newspaper editor at the Evening Standard to provide them over 9,000 doodles that were provided by readers for a contest, each coded with the person’s name, age, and occupation. This invaluable data let the academicians compare the work of those hospitalised with the larger population. Their results, released in 1938, contain several key declarations and remain significant contributions to the field. Subsequently, Francis Reitman recounted them in his own book Psychotic Art: Doodles “release the censor of the conscious mind,” allowing a person to “relax, which to creative people was indispensable to production.”No appropriate descriptive terminology could be agreed upon.“Doodles are not communications,” for the meaning is only apparent when analysed individually.Doodles are “self-meaningful.” (37) Doodles, the authors also established, could be divided into this taxonomy: “stereotypy, ornamental details, movements, figures, faces and animals” or those “depicting scenes, medley, and mixtures” (37). The authors also noted that practitioners from the Jungian school of psychology often used “spontaneously produced drawings” that were quite “doodle-like in nature” in their own discussions (37). As a modern folklorist, I venture that doodles offer rich potential for our discipline as well. At this stage, I am offering a series of dictums, especially in regards to doodles that are commonly found adjacent to text in books and magazines, notebooks and journals, that may be expanded upon and investigated further. Doodles allow the reader to repopulate the text with ideogram-like expressions that are highly personalised, even inscrutable, like ambient sounds.Doodles re-purpose the text. The text no longer is unidirectional. The text becomes a point of convergence between writer and reader. The doodling allows for such a conversation, bilateral flow, or “talking back” to the text.Doodles reveal a secret language–informal codes that hearken back to the “lively, spontaneous, and charged with feeling” works of child art or naïve art that Victor Sanua discusses as being replaced in a child’s later years by art that is “stilted, formal, and conforming” (62).Doodling animates blank margins, the dead space of the text adjacent to the script, making such places ripe for spontaneous, fertile, and exploratory markings.Doodling reveals a democratic, participatory ethos. No text is too sacred, no narrative too inviolable. Anything can be reworked by the intimate graffiti of the reader. The authority of the book is not fixed; readers negotiate and form a second intelligence imprinted over the top of the original text, blurring modes of power.Doodles reveal liminal moments. Since the reader in unmonitored, he or she can express thoughts that may be considered marginal or taboo by the next reader. The original subject of the book itself does not restrict the reader. Thus, within the margins of the page, a brief suspension of boundaries and borders, authority and power, occurs. The reader hides in anonymity, free to reroute the meaning of the book. Doodling may convey a reader’s infantalism. Every book can become a picture book. This art can be the route returning a reader to the ambience of childhood.Doodling may constitute Illuminated/Painted Texts in reverse, commemorating the significance of the object in hitherto unexpected forms and revealing the reader’s codex. William Blake adorned his own poems by illuminating the skin/page that held his living verse; common readers may do so too, in naïve, nomadic, and primitive forms. Doodling demarcates tension zones, yielding social-historical insights into eras while offering psychological glimpses and displaying aesthetic values of readers-cum-writers.Doodling reveals margins as inter-zones, replete with psychogeography. While the typography is sanctioned, legitimate, normalised, and official discourse (“chartered” and “manacled,” to hijack lines from William Blake), the margins are a vernacular depository, a terminus, allowing readers a sense of agency and autonomy. The doodled page becomes a visible reminder and signifier: all pages are potentially “contested” spaces. Whereas graffiti often allows a writer to hide anonymously in the light in a city besieged by multiple conflicting texts, doodles allow a reader-cum-writer’s imprint to live in the cocoon of a formerly fossilised text, waiting for the light. Upon being opened, the book, now a chimera, truly breathes. Further exploration and analysis should likely consider several issues. What truly constitutes and shapes the role of agent and reader? Is the reader an agent all the time, or only when offering resistant readings through doodles? How is a doodler’s agency mediated by the author or the format of texts in forms that I have to map? Lastly, if, as I have argued, the ambient space allows potential energies to hover at the edge, ready to illustrate a tension zone and occupy the page, what occurs in the age of digital or e-books? Will these platforms signal an age of acquiescence to manufactured products or signal era of vernacular responses, somehow hitched to html code and PDF file infiltration? Will bytes totally replace type soon in the future, shaping unforeseen actions by doodlers? Attached Figures Figure One presents the intimate graffiti of my grandfather, found in the 1907 edition of his McGuffey’s Eclectic Spelling Book. The depiction is simple, even crude, revealing a figure found on the adjacent page to Lesson 248, “Of Characters Used in Punctuation,” which lists the perfunctory functions of commas, semicolons, periods, and so forth. This doodle may offset the routine, rote, and rather humdrum memorisation of such grammatical tools. The smiling figure may embody and signify joy on an otherwise machine-made bare page, a space where my grandfather illustrated his desires (to lighten a mood, to ease dissatisfaction?). Historians Joe Austin and Michael Willard examine how youth have been historically left without legitimate spaces in which to live out their autonomy outside of adult surveillance. For instance, graffiti often found on walls and trains may reflect a sad reality: young people are pushed to appropriate “nomadic, temporary, abandoned, illegal, or otherwise unwatched spaces within the landscape” (14). Indeed, book graffiti, like the graffiti found on surfaces throughout cities, may offer youth a sense of appropriation, authorship, agency, and autonomy: they take the page of the book, commit their writing or illustration to the page, discover some freedom, and feel temporarily independent even while they are young and disempowered. Figure Two depicts the doodles of experimental filmmaker Jim Fetterley (Animal Charm productions) during his tenure as a student at the Art Institute of Chicago in the early 1990s. His two doodles flank the text of “Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath, regarded by most readers as an autobiographical poem that addresses her own suicide attempts. The story of Lazarus is grounded in the Biblical story of John Lazarus of Bethany, who was resurrected from the dead. The poem also alludes to the Holocaust (“Nazi Lampshades”), the folklore surrounding cats (“And like the cat I have nine times to die”), and impending omens of death (“eye pits “ … “sour breath”). The lower doodle seems to signify a motorised tank-like machine, replete with a furnace or engine compartment on top that bellows smoke. Such ominous images, saturated with potential cartoon-like violence, may link to the World War II references in the poem. Meanwhile, the upper doodle seems to be curiously insect-like, and Fetterley’s name can be found within the illustration, just like Plath’s poem is self-reflexive and addresses her own plight. Most viewers might find the image a bit more lighthearted than the poem, a caricature of something biomorphic and surreal, but not very lethal. Again, perhaps this is a counter-message to the weight of the poem, a way to balance the mood and tone, or it may well represent the larval-like apparition that haunts the very thoughts of Plath in the poem: the impending disease of her mind, as understood by the wary reader. References Austin, Joe, and Michael Willard. “Introduction: Angels of History, Demons of Culture.” Eds. 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