Journal articles on the topic 'Glamour photography'

How have gender and racial norms conveyed by illustrated magazines—whose circulation exploded in Africa in the 1960s—affected photographers’ local practices? And how, in turn, have they themselves generated this gendered visual order? This article aims to shed light on this two-fold question by proposing a diachronic analysis of the influence of models of femininity transmitted by the illustrated press on the visual imagination of a Ghanaian photographer—as seen in his photographs taken between the 1950s and the 1980s. It explores the links between the publications of the pan-African magazine Drum (the most widely circulated magazine in English-speaking Africa at the time) and its translation into the art of portraiture as practiced by James Barnor (1929-), a photographer with a transnational career, between Ghana and England. Because his professional and personal career path tracked the evolution of these gendered norms, James Barnor became both the repository and the instigator of an idealized vision of “the” African woman.By means of an intersectional focus, the issues of gender norms and of racial biases are examined in parallel to better understand how the photographer appropriated throughout his career the shifting codes of a “female glamour” reinvented for Africa during the post-independence period. While numerous studies have examined the modalities of this codification, in the present paper they are addressed through an in-depth exploration of the photographer's archives, now held in Paris, and combined with an analysis of early issues of Drum. The aim is to juxtapose images intended for publication, i.e. public, with private images in order to consider how the standards of fashion photography infused Barnor’s practices which lie at the crossroad of different social worlds. The corpus composed of portraits of young women is also informed by numerous interviews with the photographer and some of his models, which provide behind-the-scenes insights relative to the published images by exploring their political and social contexts.We first look at Drum’s editorial strategy from its launch in South Africa to its expansion throughout West Africa. While the magazine initially borrowed from white Western references such as Life, it gradually became, to some extent, a showcase for black pride on the continent and in the global diaspora. Then, we study Barnor’s early studio practice as already acutely aware of the codes of femininity enacted by the magazine: this is shown through his “recycling” of the poses and the composition of the images. During the ten years he spent in England, from 1959 to 1969, his collaboration with Drum gave rise to a gallery of portraits of anonymous young women, who became ordinary icons for an ideal African femininity in the context of the diaspora. Finally, in the 1970s, Barnor’s return to Ghana saw the reuse of these codes inherited from the globalized fashion industry combined with the emerging iconography produced by African-American models as a means to create social documentary. In this way, he contributed to an aesthetic of blackness that was constructed within a transnational framework.

Beyond the glamour of Cairo history lies a different side of the city that unravels the unique beauty of urban decay. Al-Hattaba, a UNESCO heritage area, is caught in between these narrations of beauty and decay; the beautiful home whose inhabitants want to keep and grow, and the formally enlisted dangerous informal space subject to eviction and demolition. Al-Hattaba embraces the beauty of its rich and diverse history, growing through time. It beholds moments of prosperity, failure, change, beauty, and loss. Urban decay photography is used to interpret al-Hattaba’s controversy and explore the bonds between time and memory. We take the reader through a visual journey in al-Hattaba. It constitutes a photo-sequence that considers al-Hattaba in reflection of its background context, the Citadel of Saladin; historic and residential buildings, some abandoned and attempts of local renovation. This urban setting reflects a rich visual diversity that witnessed its changes through time. We argue that the essence of al-Hattaba’s beauty is in its urban decay. It is a space that will never fail to amaze its visitors with its hidden beauty.

Fotografi fashion adalah subgenre dari fotografi komersial yang fokus untuk mengambil foto pakaian dan item fashion lainnya. Mayoritas hasil foto digunakan untuk tujuan komersial atau periklanan seperti untuk ditempatkan di billboard atau di majalah. Fashion fotografi merupakan sebuah karya seni yang dibantu oleh cahaya lensa kamera yang dikhususkan untuk memotret model dengan dibantu pencahayaan yang glamour, selain difokuskan pada model, fashion photography juga memotret sebuah item fashion seperti baju, tas, sepatu,dan aksesoris. Fashion sendiri merupakan suatu ekspresi manusia dalam berbusana atau berpakaian, dan tentunya kini sudah mempengaruhi sebuah gaya hidup seseorang. Fashion bukan hanya tentang pakaian dan aksesoris tetapi merupakan sebuah seni dan memerlukan taste yang baik dari penggunanya. Street fashion merupakan gaya berpakaian yang digunakan dalam kegiatan sehari – hari dengan wujudnya yang lebih casual. Seiring perkembangan jaman, fashion menjadi identik dengan kehidupan sehari – hari masyarakat terutama anak muda. Dengan adanya fotografi fashion, fotografer mampu mengeluarkan gagasan baru dengan penggunaan berbagai macam lensa dalam memvisualkan street fashion. Streetwear merupakan tren fashion yang sangat besar dan digemari generasi muda, khususnya di perkotaan. lahir dari sebuah fenomena budaya yang turun serta mempengaruhi gaya hidup anak muda, yaitu street culture. Street culture sendiri dapat diartikan sebagai budaya yang bergerak pada arus bawah yang identik dengan jalanan dan anak punk. Lensa fish eye merupakan lensa wide angle (sudut lebar) berbentuk cembung yang bisa menangkap gambar dengan sudut 180 derajat.

Comment les normes de genre et de race véhiculées par les magazines illustrés, dont la circulation explose en Afrique au détour des années 1960, se répercutent-elles dans les pratiques localisées de photographes du continent qui, à leur tour, se font prescripteurs d’un ordre visuel genré ? Le présent article éclaire cette double question, en proposant une analyse diachronique de l’influence des modèles de féminité transmis par la presse sur l’imaginaire visuel d’un photographe ghanéen, des années 1950 à 1980. Il articule les publications du titre panafricain Drum (magazine le plus distribué en Afrique anglophone à cette époque) et ses traductions dans l’art du portrait tel que pratiqué par James Barnor (1929-), photographe au parcours transcontinental, entre le Ghana et l’Angleterre. Parce sa trajectoire professionnelle et personnelle épouse les évolutions de ces normes, James Barnor devient ainsi à la fois le réceptacle et l’instigateur d’une vision idéale de « la » femme africaine.Dans une approche intersectionnelle, on croise la question des normes de genre et celle des biais raciaux, pour tenter de comprendre comment le photographe s’est approprié tout au long de sa carrière les codes mouvants d’un glamour féminin réinventé pour l’Afrique durant la période des postindépendances. Si de nombreuses études se sont interrogées sur les modalités de cette codification, elles sont ici abordées à travers l’exploration en profondeur des archives du photographe, aujourd’hui conservées à Paris, croisée à l’analyse sérielle des numéros de Drum. Le parti-pris est de mêler images destinées à la publication et images à caractère privé pour analyser comment les canons de la photographie de mode infusent les pratiques de ce producteur d’images à la croisée de différents mondes sociaux. Le corpus composé de portraits de jeunes femmes est également éclairé par de nombreux entretiens avec le photographe et certaines de ses modèles, qui nous informent sur les coulisses des images publiées en explorant leurs contextes politiques et sociaux.On se penche d’abord sur la stratégie éditoriale de Drum depuis son lancement en Afrique du Sud, et à mesure de son déploiement vers l’Afrique de l’Ouest. Si le magazine emprunte dans un premier temps aux références du monde blanc occidental comme Life, il devient progressivement, et dans une certaine mesure, une vitrine pour les fiertés noires sur le continent et dans la diaspora. Dans sa pratique de studio des années 1950, Barnor montre déjà une attention aiguë aux codes de la féminité édictés par le magazine, par la reprise de poses et de façons de composer l’image. Durant les dix années qu’il passe ensuite en Angleterre, de 1959 à 1969, sa collaboration avec Drum alimente une galerie de portraits de jeunes femmes anonymes, qui deviennent les icônes ordinaires de cette féminité africaine idéale en contexte diasporique. Enfin, dans les années 1970, le retour de Barnor au Ghana témoigne du réemploi de ces codes hérités de la photographie de mode mais aussi de l’influence nouvelle des modèles africains-américains pour produire du documentaire social. Par ce biais, il contribue à une esthétique de la blackness qui se construit dans un cadre transnational.

Abstract In the art of three San Francisco drag queen painters we find their highly personal responses to HIV/AIDS and their own mortality. Doris Fish's commitment to glamour wouldn't allow the disease to intrude on her paintings, though she was able to write about her illness's progress in her weekly newspaper column. Jerome Caja made art from the disease's horror by incorporating the ashes of deceased artist Charles Sexton, who died of AIDS, into her works, her way of mastering the carnage. Miss Kitty confronted the disease in an even more personal way, creating art from her own illness by incorporating her prescription for Prozac into one painting and using her emaciated, AIDS-ravaged body as the subject of a photographic portrait by Daniel Nicoletta in which her physical body fades, white on white, into an angel with wings.

The aim of the research was to analyze the media visibility of transgenders. The study was conducted via a multi-modal analysis of photographs of trans-genders published in two leading dailies of Pakistan. The analysis was conducted on two levels according to the meta-functions of the visual design as proposed by Kress & van Leeuwen (1996), which are ideational and interpersonal. On the ideational level, five themes emerged which were categorized as images showing confidence, glamour, deprivation, protest, and harassment. The number of images with the themes of confidence and glamour was significantly more in number in comparison to the themes of deprivation, harassment, and protests which were significantly fewer in number although they bear the closest affinity to the everyday lives of the subjects. On the interpersonal level, it is interesting that most of the photographs maintained direct eye contact between the subject and the viewer and thus create an interpersonal bond. A major anomaly that was observed referred to the absolute exclusion of female to male transgenders or trans-males, which is another case of symbolic annihilation.

"What Happened Around the Camera" takes as its starting point the images collected in The Misfits: Story of aShoot (Phaidon, 2000). Coming at a crucial time in the history of new Hollywood, these images are an important record of changes in the popular depiction of stardom. In the photographs, the glamour and ease once associated with playing to the camera have been transformed into something more tentative and uncertain. What weighs down the actors is not just the harshness of the location, but also time. It is this consciousness of time and the way it engages with the complex forms of belief and disbelief circulating between actor, image, and spectator that make these images vital to considerations of cinematic performance.

This essay analyzes the testimonial occasion organized by Lady Gregory, Yeats, and Pound to honor the poet and anti-imperialist Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (1840–1922). On 18 January 1914, Blunt welcomed six younger poets to his house in Sussex, where they dined on a peacock culled from his flock. At the ritual center of the meal was the presentation to Blunt of a marble box containing his guests’ poems; on the top of the box, designed by Gaudier-Brzeska, was a reclining nude woman. The dinner had a double purpose: to construct a poetic genealogy that would give meaning to a distinctly masculine literary tradition and to make that genealogy visible. Accounts of the event were planted in four journals, and the famous photograph, with the tall, impressively bearded Blunt surrounded by his scions, appears in all the poets’ biographies. With its potent combination of homosocial intimacy and artistic glamour, the “peacock dinner” claimed an important place in its participants’ memories and resonated in their writing for many years.

In January 1977, Potassa de Lafayette visited Andy Warhol’s studio wearing a black velvet and taffeta evening gown. The Dominican model sat for sketches by visiting artist Jamie Wyeth and photographs taken by Warhol that together reveal the sequence in which Potassa raised her skirt and lowered her stockings to expose her penis. This contribution explores Potassa’s strategies of self-presentation amid the politics at play in the studio that day. The author reads Potassa as a self-possessed figure fully in control of her image because hers is an identity not predicated on a gendered or sexed body, but on a visual sensibility – as one who ‘loves beautiful things’. As an aesthete and as one of the first openly transgender models of color, Potassa, the author argues, negotiated difference through beauty and glamor in Warhol’s studio and across New York’s high art and fashion scenes.

This paper explores how Bucharest’s cinema-going public perceived the Nazi influence on Hollywood in the 1930s. The aim is to identify how Nazi propaganda was disseminated and consumed in interwar Bucharest and its similarities to the idea of glamour, relevant both to fashion and cinema. Considering the links between Goebbels’ propaganda machine and certain entities or individuals in Hollywood, US cinematography becomes a more complex medium of dissemination beyond a mere promoter of modernity’s technological and consumerist ideas. Romania’s situation in the 1930s, especially the increasing leaning towards the extreme right then inform movie star image, particularly through a gendered lens, as perfect tools for propagandists. The interwar cinema-centered Romanian discourse involves a triple filtration, through Hollywood, Berlin, and Bucharest, as a complex depiction of the Romanian public’s ideals and views. To illustrate these points, I will analyze relevant written and visual texts from the interwar era, including fiction, memoirs, essays, nationally and locally spread cinema-centered and general periodicals, postcards, or photographs. The interdisciplinary research will include cultural studies (fashion, media, cinema, gender), history, and discourse analysis. This innovative perspective on fashion and cinema in an interwar Romanian context adds to the existing knowledge by opening new research topics and subjects in the fields of fashion studies and Romanian studies.

Lorelei Lee, the “professional lady” who narrates her own adventures in the 1925 international bestseller Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, is not a likely alter ego for an aspiring writer. Indifferent to most books and unlikely to indulge in introspection, Lorelei makes writing far less a priority than managing social invitations and sexual conquests. Accordingly, Anita Loos, the author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, went to considerable lengths to distance herself from her blonde-bombshell narrator. As if to acknowledge and enforce such distance, Loos has Lorelei remark offhandedly in the opening pages of the book, “It would be strange if I turn out to be an authoress.” The novel's first edition highlights the incongruity of Lorelei's status as author, illustrating this remark with a drawing of a wide-eyed young woman clutching a pen and bending over a ruffle-skirted vanity table. She is dressed for writing in a pair of highheeled slippers, a sheer, rose-trimmed negligee, and a frilly bed cap tied under her chin. Years later, a publicity still for the musical version of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes continued to emphasize the distinction by juxtaposing a seated, conservatively clad Loos with the standing figure of Carol Channing as Lorelei Lee, elaborately gowned and dripping with diamonds. As the photograph suggests, Loos carefully positioned herself in opposition to the glamour girl whose appearance has since been labeled “the most significant event in the evolution of the dumb blonde” (Everett, 254).

<div><p><em>The article describes the main media visualization tools and describes typical gender images that are portrayed in the media. The influence of media on the creation, change and dissemination of stereotypes is outlined. The process and consequences of the transformation of gender roles, depending on the socio-historical context and the features of their contemporary identification in the magazine media for men, are examined. Monitoring of periodicals illustrated, on the one hand, the existing system of imagery (illustrations, dies, lines, footnotes, cuts, color, free space, various decorative elements) and components of illumination of a certain media image – on the other. Emphasis is placed on the ratio of visual and textual content in this plane.</em></p></div><p><em>It has been found that in the counters of modern men’s magazines there is a considerable number of photographs depicting women, mostly thought leaders in their fields. As a rule, in most of the photos the woman is shown in a certain role: «Barbie-woman», «Cinderella», «glamor maiden», «bitch-woman», «superwoman», «cosmo-woman», «feminist», «caregiver», «a militaristic woman»</em><em>.</em><em> </em><em>Among the most common female media images portrayed in the mass media GQ, Esquire and Men’s Health is named «cosmo-woman», «glamor maiden» and «Cinderella», which allowed to state: modern magazines for the general public, in particular for men, aimed at depicting women in the popular nowadays.</em></p><p><em>As a result of a practical study of magazines, stereotypes that are no longer indicative of the current information world have been identified, as well as factors that influence the emergence or, on the contrary, the disappearance of gender roles in the media environment.</em></p><p><strong><em>Key words:</em></strong><em> visualization, gender, image, media, stereotype, mass culture.</em></p>

The article is devoted to the analysis of the cover design of a glossy magazine. It examines the important role of the mass media in the process of forming the views of modern society, which, thanks to the design and spread of certain models of life, has huge impact on the points of view of its audience. This is also inherent in glossy magazines. The peculiarity of the communicative component of the design of this type of publications is analyzed. It is determined that its content covers different layers of human society as a translator of ideas, trends, mass culture phenomena and current events. These tasks are solved not only due to illustrative materials accompanied by meaningful texts, but also by the choice of those persons whose photos designers and editors place on the covers of publications. Actors, writers, artists, politicians, famous fashion designers, etc often become their "heroes". The results of the study indicate that interesting exceptions from this list can be observed recently. For example, the cover of the glossy magazine "Vogue Scandinavia" for August 2021 featured a photo illustration of the eco-leader Greta Thunberg as a symbol of the fight against environmental pollution as a result of human activities. The choice for analysis of this magazine has been made due to the fact that it is in demand on the market of periodicals today, is very popular with readers and has an impact on its audience segment, building stereotypes of its behavior. The article proves that the desire to raise such an important issue as an environmental problem draws our attention to a new trend of glossy magazines. That is, a departure from the former, narrowly specific issues – beauty, fashion, glamour, news from the lives of movie stars and show business stars, sophisticated lifestyle and a turn to those aspects of life without which all this cannot be realized, in particular, to the problems of nature conservation. It has been investigated that the photographic subject of the cover refers to the archetype "girl with a unicorn" known from paintings of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, which is a symbol of purity and virtue, the fragility of harmony with nature. This parallel is read by the reader as a certain cultural code with a warning about the importance of maintaining this natural balance.

This article explores the intertextual relationship between women’s glossy fashion magazines and Instagram. As the boundaries between the two formats are becoming increasingly porous – with visual conventions and discourses flowing bi-directionally between women’s magazines and Instagram – this article questions how they mutually reshape each other and the representations of femininities they carry. It explores the tensions emerging from these media’s distinctive ethos of gendered representation, and it questions how the politics of gender representation can be negotiated through aesthetic practices. This research empirically grounds these discussions in a multi-sited qualitative textual analysis, comprised of both a sample of 18 issues of three glossy women’s magazines’ titles (Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Vogue) and a sample of 77 randomly selected female ‘ordinary’ Instagram users (i.e. not celebrities or Insta-famous users), aged 18–35. Both Instagram and women’s magazines link gendered beauty to aesthetic values and the ability to look good in photographs, thus incentivising the pursuit of Instagrammable aesthetics. However, both formats can also highlight the everyday political potential of aestheticised representations. Relying on user-generated representations, Instagram has the potential to showcase a wider diversity of femininities, which can help to broaden the scope of who can be deemed photographable – an idea echoed by women’s magazines’ adoption of a popular feminist tone. These celebrations of diversity, reminiscent of strategies of visibility politics, and politicised discourses become materialised through aesthetic practices both within Instagram and women’s magazines. Yet, despite the emphasis on a social media-inspired feminist and political tone, political engagements on these media can also become enmeshed with postfeminist sensibilities, thus conflating fashion, beauty, and empowerment. This article explores how the on-going changes in these multi-layered and intertextual representational practices echo broader cultural and political transformations in contemporary visual cultures.

The doppelgänger (literally ‘double-goer’) of 18th and 19th century European literature and lore is a sinister likeness that dogs and shadows a protagonist heralding their death or descent into madness – a ‘spectral presentiment of disaster’ (Schwartz 84). Recently the term ‘digital doppelgänger’ has been adopted by the English-speaking entertainment and technology press to refer to a digital image of an actor or performer; whether that image is a computer-generated wire-frame model, an amalgamation of old film footage and artistry, or a three dimensional laser scan of the face and body’s topography. (Magid, Chimielewski) This paper examines some of the implications of this term and its linkage to a set of anxieties about the relationship between the self and its image. According to Friedrich Kittler, media of recording and storing bodily data are central to how many of us imagine identity today. Technologies such as photography and film ushered in a ‘technological rechristening of the soul’ (149). Kittler contends that these image technologies have had an impact on identity by creating ‘mechanised likenesses [that] roam the databanks that store bodies’ (96). In this context the use of the term ‘digital doppelgänger’ suggests some kind of perceived disruption to the way identity and image, or original and copy, relate. For example, a short article in Variety, ‘Garner finds viewing her digital doppelgänger surreal’, promotes the release of the videogame version of the television show Alias. But instead of the usual emphasis on the entertainment value of the game and its potential to extend the pleasures of the televisual text, this blurb focuses on the uncanniness of an encounter between the show’s lead, Jennifer Garner, and the digitally animated game character modelled from her features (Fritz 2003). An actor’s digital likeness can be made to perform actions that are beyond the will or physicality of the actor themselves. Such images have a variety of uses. In action cinema the digital likeness often replaces the actor’s stunt double, removing much of the risk previously borne by the human body in filming explosions, car chases and acrobatic leaps. Through its multiplication or manipulation the digital doppelgänger can expand the performative limits of the actor’s body and face. These figures also have an important role in video game versions of popular action or science fiction films such as the Wachowski brothers’ Matrix trilogy. The digital doppelgänger therefore extends the capabilities of the human performer’s image, bestowing ‘superhuman’ qualities and granting it entry to interactive media forms. The most serendipitous use of these images, however, is in the completion of films where an actor has died in mid-production, as when, for instance, Oliver Reed famously passed on during the filming of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator. In such cases the image literally substitutes for the once-living; its digitally animated gestures and expressions filling in for an inanimate body that can express and gesture no longer and never will again. The history of doppelgängers and doubles, you see, is intimately bound up with human mortality and the origins of image making. According to Otto Rank, the earliest connotations of the double in Indo-European lore were benign, entailing the immortality of the self. This incarnation stems from animistic beliefs in the manifestation of the soul in shadows, reflections and images (49-77) and is intimately connected to the magical origins of figurative representation. Andre Bazin argues that the most enduring form of image magic has been that concerned with rendering the subject immortal. In his essay ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, he emphasises that the basic psychological impulse beneath the origins of the plastic arts was a desire to snatch mortal things from the indifferent flow of time – to cheat death through the creation of a substitute, a double, for the living body (9). However, by the post-Enlightenment era, Western belief in the preservative powers of the double had eroded, and subsequently, the meaning of this figure in folktales and literature came to be inverted. The double or doppelgänger became a spectral projection of the self, an ‘uncanny harbinger of death’ (Freud 324-5). Meanwhile, even as the haunted image persists as a motif in short stories, novels and film, rationally: No one believes any longer in the ontological identity of model and image, but all are agreed that the image helps us to remember the subject and to preserve him from a second spiritual death (Bazin 9). Photographic and filmic images have aided Western cultures in keeping the dead in view, saving them from being totally forgotten. These images are filled in or animated by the subjective memory of the viewer. The digital likeness, however, is birthed in a computer and made to gesture in the performer’s stead, promising not just a ‘technological rechristening of the soul’, but the possibility of future career resurrection. Ron Magid reports: Cyberware president David Addleman is hopeful that all stars will eventually stockpile their data, like the suspended bodies in Coma, just waiting for the day when technology will resurrect them for as yet undreamed-of projects. (Magid) This reference to the 1970s horror film, Coma, with its connotations of lifeless bodies and sinister scientific procedures, brings to mind unconscious forms, zombies awaiting resurrection, an actor’s image as puppet, a mindless figure forced to gesture at the control of another. These are fears of decorporealised detachment from one’s own likeness. It is a fear of the image being in exile from its referent, being endowed with the semblance of life though digital processes. In this fear we can hear the echoes of earlier anxieties about the double. But these fears also revisit earlier responses to the cinematic recording of the human image, ones that now may seem quaint to us in a culture where people fantasise of becoming media celebrities and indeed queue in their thousands for the chance. To put this into some historical perspective, it is worth noting how the figure of the double played a part in some responses to then new cinema technologies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Yuri Tsivian writes of the unease expressed in the early 1900s by Russian performers when encountering their own moving image on screen. For some the root of their discomfort was a belief that encountering their projected moving image would play havoc with their own internal self-image. For others, their unease was compounded by non-standardised projection speeds. Until the mid to late 1910s both camera and projector were cranked by hand. It was common for a projectionist to lend some haste to the action on the screen in order to finish work at the auditorium early. Early Russian writers on film were well aware of the projectionist’s role in transforming ‘calm fluent gesture’ into a ‘jerky convulsive twitch’, and making the ‘actors gesture like puppets’ (cited in Tsivian 53-54). Luigi Pirandello’s novel Shoot! from 1916 dealt with a cinema actress traumatised by the sight of her own ‘altered and disordered’ screen image (59-60). A playwright, Pirandello condemned the new media as reducing the craft of the living, breathing stage-actor to an insubstantial flickering phantom, a ‘dumb image’ subtracted from a moment of live action before the camera (105-6). Walter Benjamin refers to Pirandello’s novel in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, recognising it as one of the first discourses on the relationship between the actor and their screen image. For Benjamin the screen actor is in exile from their image. He or she sends out his or her shadow to face the public and this decorporealised shadow heralds a diminishment of presence and aura for the audience (222). Benjamin suggests that in compensation for this diminishment of presence, the film industry ‘responds to the shrivelling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the “personality” outside the studio’ (224). The development of star-image discourse and celebrity works to collapse the split between person and decorporealised shadow, enveloping the two in the electrified glow of interconnected texts such as roles, studio publicity, glamour photography, interviews, and gossip. Star personality, celebrity scandal and gossip discourse have smoothed over this early unease, as have (importantly) the sheer ubiquity and democracy of mediated self-images. The mundane culture of home video has banished this sense of dark magic at work from the appearance of our own faces on screens. In the context of these arguments it remains to be seen what impact the ‘digital doppelgänger’ will have on notions of public identity and stardom, concepts of cinematic performance and media immortality. Further research is also required in order to uncover the implications of the digital double for the image cultures of indigenous peoples or for cinema industries such as Bollywood. As for the term ‘digital doppelgänger’ itself, perhaps with ubiquity and overuse, its older and more sinister connotations will be gradually papered over and forgotten. The term ‘doppelgänger’ suggests a copy that threatens its original with usurpation, but it may be that the digital doppelgänger functions in a not dissimilar way to the waxwork models at Madame Tussauds – as a confirmation of a celebrity’s place in the media galaxy, wholly reliant on the original star for its meaning and very existence. References Bazin, A. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” What is Cinema? Ed./Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley & London: U of California P, 1967. 9-16. Benjamin, W. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Fonatan, 1992. 211-44. Chimielewski, D. “Meet Sunny’s Digital Doppelganger.” The Age (5 January 2005). http://www.theage.com.au/news/Film/Meet-Sunnys-digital-doppelganger/2005/01/04/1104601340883.html>. Freud, S. “The ‘Uncanny.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. Ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud et al. Vol. xvii (1917-19). London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1955. 219-52. Fritz, B. “Garner Finds Viewing Her Digital Doppelganger Surreal.” Variety (27 August 2003). http://www.variety.com/index.asp?layout=upsell_article&articleID=VR1117891622&cs=1>. Kittler, F. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Trans. and intro. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford, California: Stanford UP, 1999. Magid, R. “New Media: Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” Wired News (March 1998). http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,10645,00.html>. Parisi, P. “Silicon Stars: The New Hollywood.” Wired (December 1995): 144-5, 202-10. http:www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,10645,00.html>. Pirandello, L. Shoot! (Si Gira) The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematographer Operator. Trans. C.F. Scott Moncrieff. New York: E.P. Dutton and Co.,1926. Rank, O. The Double: A Psychoanalytical Study. Trans./ed. Harry Tucker, Jr. North Carolina: U of North Carolina P, 1971. Schwartz, H. The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles. New York: Zone, 1996. Tsivian, Y. Early Russian Cinema and Its Cultural Reception. Trans. A. Bodger. Ed. R. Taylor. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1998. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Bode, Lisa. "Digital Doppelgängers." M/C Journal 8.3 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0507/07-bode.php>. APA Style Bode, L. (Jul. 2005) "Digital Doppelgängers," M/C Journal, 8(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0507/07-bode.php>.

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.

Halfway through the 2006 memoir comic Fun Home, the reader encounters a photograph that the book’s author, Alison Bechdel, found in a box of family snapshots shortly after her father’s death. The picture—“literally the core of the book, the centrefold” (Bechdel qtd. in Chute “Interview” 1006)—of Alison’s teenaged babysitter, Roy, erotically reclining on a bed in only his underwear, is the most tangible and direct evidence of her father’s sexual affairs with teenage boys, more confronting than his own earlier confession. Through this image, and a rich archive of familial texts, Bechdel chronicles her father’s thwarted desires and ambitions, probable suicide, and her own sexual and artistic coming of age.Bruce Bechdel, a married school teacher and part-time funeral director, was also an avid amateur historical restorer and connoisseur of modernist literature. Shortly after Alison came out to her parents at nineteen, Bruce was hit by a truck in what his daughter believes was an act of suicide. In Fun Home, Bechdel reads her family history suspiciously, plumbing family snapshots, letters, and favoured novels, interpreting against the grain, to trace her queer genealogy. Ultimately, she inverts this suspicious and interrogative reading, using the evidence she has gathered in order to read her father’s sexuality positively and embrace her queer and artistic inheritance from him. In The New York Times Magazine, in 2004, Charles McGrath made the suggestion that comics were “the new literary form” (24). Although comics have not yet reached widespread mainstream acceptance as a medium of merit, the burgeoning field of comics scholarship over the last fifteen years, the 2007 adaptation of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis into a feature film, and the addition of comics to the Best American series all testify to the widening popularity and status of the form. Memoir comics have established themselves, as Hillary Chute notes, as “the dominant mode of contemporary work” (Graphic 17). Many of these autobiographical works, including Fun Home, recount traumatic histories, employing the medium’s unique capacity to evoke the fractured and repetitive experience of the traumatised through panel structure and use of images. Comics articulate “what wasn’t permitted to be said or imagined, defying the ordinary processes of thought” (Said qtd. in Whitlock 967). The hand-drawn nature of comics emphasises the subjectivity of perception and memory, making it a particularly powerful medium for personal histories. The clear mediation of a history by the artist’s hand complicates truth claims. Comics open up avenues for both suspicious and restorative readings because their form suggests that history is always constructed and therefore not able to be confirmed as “ultimately truthful,” but also that there is no ultimate truth to be unveiled. No narrative is unmediated; a timeline is not more “pure” than a fleshed out narrative text. All narratives exclude information in order to craft a comprehensible series of events. Bechdel’s role as a suspicious reader of her father and of her own history resonates through her role as a historian and her interrogation of the ethical concerns of referential writing.Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity critiques the hermeneutics of suspicion from a queer theory perspective, instead advocating reparative reading as a critical strategy. The hermeneutics of suspicion describes “the well-oiled machine of ideology critique” that has become the primary mode of critical reading over the last thirty or so years, suspiciously interpreting texts to uncover their hidden ideological biases (Felski, Uses 1). Reparative reading, on the other hand, moves away from this paranoid mode, instead valuing pleasure and “positive affects like joy and excitement” (Vincent). Sedgwick does not wholly reject suspicious reading, suggesting that it “represent[s] a way, among other ways, of seeking, finding, and organizing knowledge. Paranoia knows some things well and others poorly” (Touching 129). Felski, paraphrasing Ricoeur, notes that the hermeneutics of suspicion “adopts an adversarial sensibility to probe for concealed, repressed, or disavowed meanings” (“Suspicious” 216). In this fashion, Bechdel employs suspicious strategies to reveal her father’s hidden desires and transgressions that were obscured in the standard version of her family narrative, but ultimately moves away from such techniques to joyfully embrace her inheritance from him. Sedgwick notes that paranoid readings may only reveal that which is already known:While there is plenty of hidden violence that requires exposure there is also, and increasingly, an ethos where forms of violence that are hypervisible from the start may be offered as an exemplary spectacle rather than remain to be unveiled as a scandalous secret. (Touching 139)This is contrary to suspicious reading’s assumption that violence is culturally shunned, hidden, and in need of “unveiling” in contemporary Western culture. It would be too obvious for Bechdel to condemn her father: gay men have been unfairly misrepresented in the American popular imagination for decades, if not longer. Through her reparative reading of him, she rejects this single-minded reduction of people to one negative type. She accepts both her father’s weaknesses and her debts to him. A reading which only sought to publicise Bruce’s homosexual affairs would lack the great depth that Bechdel finds in the slippage between her father’s identity and her own.Bechdel’s embrace of Bruce’s failings as a father, a husband, and an artist, her revisioning of his death as a positive, creative act full of agency, and her characterisation of him as a supportive forerunner, “there to catch [Alison] as [she] leapt,” (Bechdel 232) moves his story away from archetypal narratives of homosexual tragedy. Bechdel’s memoir ends with (and enacts through its virtuoso execution) her own success, and the support of those who came before her. This move mirrors Joseph Litvak’s suggestion that “the importance of ‘mistakes’ in queer reading and writing […] has a lot to do with loosening the traumatic, inevitable-seeming connection between mistakes and humiliation […] Doesn’t reading queer mean learning, among other things, that mistakes can be good rather than bad surprises?” (Sedgwick Touching 146–7).Fun Home is saturated with intertextual references and archival materials that attempt to piece together the memoir’s fractured and hidden histories. The construction of this personal history works by including familial and historical records to register the trauma of the Bechdels’ personal tragedy. The archival texts are meticulously hand-drawn, their time-worn and ragged physicality maintained to emphasise the referentiality of these documents. Bechdel’s use of realistically drawn family photographs, complete with photo corners, suggests a family photograph album, although rather than establishing a censored and idealistic narrative, as most family albums do, the photographs are read and reproduced for their suppressed and destabilising content. Bechdel describes them as “particularly mythic” (Chute “Interview” 1009), and she plunders this symbolic richness to rewrite her family history. The archival documents function as primary texts, which stand in opposition to the deadly secrecy of her childhood home: they are concrete and evidentiary. Bechdel reads her father’s letters and photographs (and their gothic revival house) for sexual and artistic evidence, “read[ing] the text against the grain in order to draw out what it refuses to own up to” (Felski “Suspicious” 23). She interprets his letters’ baroque lyrical flourishes as indications both of his semi-repressed homosexuality and of the artistic sensibility that she would inherit and refine.Suspicion of the entire historical project marks the memoir. Philippe Lejeune describes the “Autobiographical Pact” as “a contract of identity that is sealed by the proper name” of the author (19). Bechdel does not challenge this pact fundamentally—the authoritative narrative voice of her book structures it to be read as historically truthful—but she does challenge and complicate the apparent simplicity of this referential model. Bechdel’s discussion of the referential failings of her childhood diary making—“the troubled gap between word and meaning”—casts a suspicious eye over the rest of the memoir’s historical project (Bechdel 143). She asks how language can adequately articulate experience or refer to the external world in an environment defined by secrets and silence. At the time of her childhood, it cannot—the claim to full disclosure that the memoir ultimately makes is predicated on distance and time. Bechdel simultaneously makes a claim for the historical veracity of her narrative and destabilises our assumptions around the idea of factual and retrospective truth:When I was ten, I was obsessed with making sure my diary entries bore no false witness. But as I aged, hard facts gave way to vagaries of emotion and opinion. False humility, overwrought penmanship, and self-disgust began to cloud my testimony […] until […] the truth is barely perceptible behind a hedge of qualifiers, encryption, and stray punctuation. (Bechdel 169)That which is “unrepresentable” is simultaneously represented and denied. The comics medium itself, with its simultaneous graphic and textual representation, suggests the unreliability of any one means of representation. Of Bechdel’s diaries, Jared Gardner notes, “what develops over the course of her diary […] is an increasing sense that text and image are each alone inadequate to the task, and that some merger of the two is required to tell the story of the truth, and the truth of the story” (“Archives” 3).As the boyishly dressed Alison urges her father, applying scare-quoted “bronzer,” to hurry up, Bechdel narrates, “my father began to seem morally suspect to me long before I knew that he actually had a dark secret” (16). Alison is presented as her father’s binary opposite, “butch to his nelly. Utilitarian to his aesthete,” (15) and, as a teenager, frames his love of art and extravagance as debauched. This clear distinction soon becomes blurred, as Alison and Bruce’s similarities begin to overwhelm their differences. The huge drawn hand shown holding the photograph of Roy, in the memoir’s “centrefold,” more than twice life-size, reproduces the reader’s hand holding the book. We are placed in Bechdel’s, and by extension her father’s, role, as the illicit and transgressive voyeurs of the erotic spectacle of Roy’s body, and as the possessors and consumers of hidden, troubling texts. At this point, Bechdel begins to take her queer reading of this family archive and use it to establish a strong connection between her initially unsympathetic father and herself. Despite his neglect of his children, and his self-involvement, Bechdel claims him as her spiritual and creative father, as well as her biological one. This reparative embrace moves Bruce from the role of criticised outsider in Alison’s world to one of queer predecessor. Bechdel figures herself and her father as doubled aesthetic and erotic observers and appreciators. Ann Cvetkovich suggests that “mimicking her father as witness to the image, Alison is brought closer to him only at the risk of replicating his illicit sexual desires” (118). For Alison, consuming her father’s texts connects her with him in a positive yet troubling way: “My father’s end was my beginning. Or more precisely, […] the end of his lie coincided with the beginning of my truth” (Bechdel 116–17). The final panel of the same chapter depicts Alison’s hands holding drawn photos of herself at twenty-one and Bruce at twenty-two. The snapshots overlap, and Bechdel lists the similarities between the photographs, concluding, “it’s about as close as a translation can get” (120). Through the “vast network of transversals” (102) that is their life together, Alison and Bruce are, paradoxically, twinned “inversions of one another” (98). Sedgwick suggests that “inversion models […] locate gay people—whether biologically or culturally—at the threshold between genders” (Epistemology 88). Bechdel’s focus on Proust’s “antiquated clinical term” both neatly fits her thematic expression of Alison and Bruce’s relationship as doubles (“Not only were we inverts. We were inversions of one another”) and situates them in a space of possibility and liminality (97-98).Bechdel rejects a wholly suspicious approach by maintaining and embracing the aporia in her and her father’s story, an essential element of memory. According to Chute, Fun Home shows “that the form of comics crucially retains the insolvable gaps of family history” (Graphic 175). Rejecting suspicion involves embracing ambiguity and unresolvability. It concedes that there is no one authentic truth to be neatly revealed and resolved. Fun Home’s “spatial and semantic gaps […] express a critical unknowability or undecidability” (Chute Graphic 182). Bechdel allows the gaps in her narrative to remain, refusing to “pretend to know” Bruce’s “erotic truth” (230), an act to which suspicious reading is diametrically opposed. Suspicious reading wishes to close all gaps, to articulate silences and literalise mysteries, and Bechdel’s narrative progressively moves away from this mode. The medium of comics uses words and images together, simultaneously separate and united. Similarly, Alison and Bruce are presented as opposites: butch/sissy, artist/dilettante. Yet the memoir’s conclusion presents Alison and Bruce in a loving, reciprocal relationship. The final page of the book has two frames: one of Bruce’s perspective in the moment before his death, and one showing him contentedly playing with a young Alison in a swimming pool—death contrasted with life. The gaps in the narrative are not closed but embraced. Bechdel’s “tricky reverse narration” (232) suggests a complex mode of reading that allows both Bechdel and the reader to perceive Bruce as a positive forebear. Comics as a medium pay particular visual attention to absence and silence. The gutter, the space between panels, functions in a way that is not quite paralleled by silence in speech and music, and spaces and line breaks in text—after all, there are still blank spaces between words and elements of the image within the comics panel. The gutter is the space where closure occurs, allowing readers to infer causality and often the passing of time (McCloud 5). The gutters in this book echo the many gaps in knowledge and presence that mark the narrative. Fun Home is impelled by absence on a practical level: the absence of the dead parent, the absence of a past that was unspoken of and yet informed every element of Alison’s childhood.Bechdel’s hyper-literate narration steers the reader through the memoir and acknowledges its own aporia. Fun Home “does not seek to preserve the past as it was, as its archival obsession might suggest, but rather to circulate ideas about the past with gaps fully intact” (Chute Graphic 180). Bechdel, while making her own interpretation of her father’s death clear, does not insist on her reading. While Bruce attempted to restore his home into a perfect, hermetically sealed simulacrum of nineteenth-century domestic glamour, Bechdel creates a postmodern text that slips easily between a multiplicity of time periods, opening up the absences, failures, and humiliations of her story. Chute argues:Bruce Bechdel wants the past to be whole; Alison Bechdel makes it free-floating […] She animates the past in a book that is […] a counterarchitecture to the stifling, shame-filled house in which she grew up: she animates and releases its histories, circulating them and giving them life even when they devolve on death. (Graphic 216)Bechdel employs a literary process of detection in the revelation of both of their sexualities. Her archive is constructed like an evidence file; through layered tableaux of letters, novels and photographs, we see how Bruce’s obsessive love of avant-garde literature functions as an emblem of his hidden desire; Alison discovers her sexuality through the memoirs of Colette and the seminal gay pride manifestos of the late 1970s. Watson suggests that the “panels, gutters, and page, as bounded and delimited visual space, allow texturing of the two-dimensional image through collage, counterpoint, the superimposition of multiple media, and self-referential gestures […] Bechdel's rich exploitation of visual possibilities places Fun Home at an autobiographical interface where disparate modes of self-inscription intersect and comment upon one another” (32).Alison’s role as a literary and literal detective of concealed sexualities and of texts is particularly evident in the scene when she realises that she is gay. Wearing a plaid trench coat with the collar turned up like a private eye, she stands in the campus bookshop reading a copy of Word is Out, with a shadowy figure in the background (one whose silhouette resembles her father’s teenaged lover, Roy), and a speech bubble with a single exclamation mark articulating her realisation. While “the classic detective novel […] depends on […] a double plot, telling the story of a crime via the story of its investigation” (Felski “Suspicious” 225), Fun Home tells the story of Alison’s coming out and genesis as an artist through the story of her father’s brief life and thwarted desires. On the memoir’s final page, revisioning the artifactual photograph that begins her final chapter, Bechdel reclaims her father from what a cool reading of the historical record (adultery with adolescents, verbally abusive, emotionally distant) might encourage readers to superficially assume. Cvetkovich articulates the way Fun Home uses:Ordinary experience as an opening onto revisionist histories that avoid the emotional simplifications that can sometimes accompany representations of even the most unassimilable historical traumas […] Bechdel refuses easy distinctions between heroes and perpetrators, but doing so via a figure who represents a highly stigmatised sexuality is a bold move. (125)Rejecting paranoid strategies, Bechdel is less interested in classification and condemnation of her father than she is in her own tangled relation to him. She adopts a reparative strategy by focusing on the strands of joy and identification in her history with her father, rather than simply making a paranoid attack on his character.She occludes the negative possibilities and connotations of her father’s story to end on a largely positive note: “But in the tricky reverse narration that impels our entwined stories, he was there to catch me when I leapt” (232). In the final moment of her text Bechdel moves away from the memoir’s earlier destabilising actions, which forced the reader to regard Bruce with suspicion, as the keeper of destructive secrets and as a menacing presence in the Bechdels’ family life. The final image is of complete trust and support. His death is rendered not as chaotic and violent as it historically was, but calm, controlled, beneficent. Bechdel has commented, “I think it’s part of my father’s brilliance, the fact that his death was so ambiguous […] The idea that he could pull that off. That it was his last great wheeze. I want to believe that he went out triumphantly” (qtd. in Burkeman). The revisioning of Bruce’s death as a suicide and the reverse narration which establishes the accomplished artist and writer Bechdel’s creative and literary debt to him function as a redemption.Bechdel queers her suspicious reading of her family history in order to reparatively reclaim her father’s historical and personal connection with herself. The narrative testifies to Bruce’s failings as a father and husband, and confesses to Alison’s own complicity in her father’s transgressive desires and artistic interest, and to her inability to represent the past authoritatively and with complete accuracy. Bechdel both engages in and ultimately rejects a suspicious interpretation of her family and personal history. As Gardner notes, “only by allowing the past to bleed into history, fact to bleed into fiction, image into text, might we begin to allow our own pain to bleed into the other, and more urgently, the pain of the other to bleed into ourselves” (“Autobiography’s” 23). Suspicion itself is queered in the reparative revisioning of Bruce’s life and death, and in the “tricky reverse narration” (232) of the künstlerroman’s joyful conclusion.ReferencesBechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. New York: Mariner Books, 2007. Burkeman, Oliver. “A life stripped bare.” The Guardian 16 Oct. 2006: G2 16.Cvetkovich, Ann. “Drawing the Archive in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 36.1/2 (2008): 111–29. Chute, Hillary L. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia UP, 2010. ---. “Interview with Alison Bechdel.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (2006): 1004–13. Felski, Rita. Uses of Literature. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2008.---. “Suspicious Minds.” Poetics Today 32:3 (2011): 215–34. Gardner, Jared. “Archives, Collectors, and the New Media Work of Comics.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (2006): 787–806. ---. “Autobiography’s Biography 1972-2007.” Biography 31.1 (2008): 1–26. Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: HarperPerennial, 1994. McGrath, Charles. “Not Funnies.” New York Times Magazine 11 Jul. 2004: 24–56. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. ---. Touching Feeling. Durham : Duke University Press, 2003. Vincent, J. Keith. “Affect and Reparative Reading.” Honoring Eve. Ed. J. Keith Vincent. Affect and Reparative Reading. Boston University College of Arts and Sciences. October 31 2009. 25 May 2011. ‹http://www.bu.edu/honoringeve/panels/affect-and-reparative-reading/?›.Watson, Julia. “Autographic disclosures and genealogies of desire in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” Biography 31.1 (2008): 27–59. Whitlock, Gillian. “Autographics: The Seeing “I” of the Comics.” Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (2006): 965–79.

IntroductionThis article is about the transformation of coffee, from having no place in the everyday lives of the people of Bangladesh, to a new position as a harbinger of liberal values and Western culture. The context is a group of Australian photojournalism students who embarked on a month-long residency in Bangladesh; the content is a Nescafé advertisement encouraging the young, middle-class Bangladesh audience to consume coffee, in a marketing campaign that promotes “my first cup.” For the Australian students, the marketing positioning of this advertising campaign transformed instant coffee into a strange and unfamiliar commodity. At the same time, the historic association between Bangladesh and tea prompted one of the photographers to undertake her own journey to explore the hidden side of that other Western staple. This paper explores the tradition of tea culture in Bangladesh and the marketing campaign for instant coffee within this culture, combining the authors’ experiences and perspectives. The outline of the Photomedia unit in the Bachelor of Creative Industries degree that the students were working towards at Edith Cowan University (ECU) in Australia states that:students will engage with practices, issues and practicalities of working as a photojournalist in an international, cross cultural context. Students will work in collaboration with students of Pathshala: South Asian Institute of Photography, Dhaka Bangladesh in the research, production and presentation of stories related to Bangladeshi society and culture for distribution to international audiences (ECU). The sixteen students from Perth, living and working in Bangladesh between 5 January and 7 February 2012, exhibited a diverse range of cultures, contexts, and motivations. Young Australians, along with a number of ECU’s international students, including some from Norway, China and Sweden, were required to learn first-hand about life in Bangladesh, one of the world’s poorest and most densely populated countries. Danielle Fusco and ECU lecturer Duncan Barnes collaborated with staff and students of Pathshala, South Asian Media Institute (Pathshala). Their recollections and observations on tea production and the location are central to this article but it is the questions asked by the group about the marketing of instant coffee into this culture that provides its tensions. Fusco completed a week-long induction and then travelled in Bangladesh for a fortnight to research and photograph individual stories on rural and urban life. Barnes here sets the scene for the project, describing the expectations and what actually happened: When we travel to countries that are vastly different to our own it is often to seek out that difference; to go in search of the romanticised ideals that have been portrayed as paradise in films, books and photographs. “The West” has long been fascinated with “The East” (Said) and for the past half century, since the hippie treks to Marrakesh and Afghanistan, people have journeyed overland to the Indian sub-continent, both from Europe and from Australia, yearning for a cultural experience they cannot find at home. Living in Perth, Western Australia, sometimes called the most isolated capital city in the world, that pull to something “different” is like a magnet. Upon arrival in Dhaka, you find yourself deliciously overwhelmed by the heavy traffic, the crowded markets, the spicy foods and the milky lassie drinks. It only takes a few stomach upsets to make your Western appetite start kicking in and you begin craving things you have at home but that are hard to find in Bangladesh. Take coffee for example. I recently completed a month-long visit to Bangladesh, which, like India, is a nation of tea drinkers. Getting any kind of good coffee requires that you be in what expatriates call “the Golden Triangle” of Dhaka city—within the area contained by Gulshan-Banani-Baridhara. Here you find the embassies and a sizeable expatriate community that constitutes a Western bubble unrepresentative of Bangladesh beyond these districts. Coffee World is an example of a Western-style café chain that, as the name suggests, serves coffee beverages. It has trouble making a quality flat white. The baristas are poorly trained, the service is painfully slow, yet the prices are comparable to those in the West. Even with these disadvantages, it is frequented by Westerners who also make use of the free WiFi. In contrast, tea is available at every road junction for around 5 cents Australian. It’s ready in seconds: the kettle is always hot due to a constant turnover of local customers. It was the history of tea growing in Bangladesh, and a desire to know more about a commodity that people in the West take for granted, that most attracted Fusco’s interest. She chose to focus on Bangladesh’s oldest commercial tea garden (plantation) Sylhet, which has been in production since 1857 (Tea Board). As is the case with many tea farms in the Indian sub-continent, the workers at Sylhet are part of Bangladesh’s Hindu minority. Fusco left Dhaka and travelled into the rural areas to investigate tea production: Venturing into these estates from the city is like entering an entirely different world. They are isolated places, and although they are close in distance, they are completely separate from the main city. Spending time in the Khadim tea estate amongst the plantations and the workers’ compounds made me very aware of the strong relationship that exists between them. The Hindu teaching of Samsara refers to the continuous cycle of repeated birth, life, death and rebirth [Hinduism], which became a metaphor for me, for this relationship I was experiencing. It is clear that neither farm [where the tea is grown] nor village [which houses the people] could live without each other. The success and maintenance of the tea farm relies on the workers just as much as the workers rely on the tea gardens for their livelihood and sustenance. Their life cycles are intertwined and in synch. There are many problems in the compounds. The people are extremely poor. Their education opportunities are limited, and they work incredibly hard for very little money for their entire lives. They are bound to stay and work here and as those generations before them, were born, worked and died here, living their whole lives in the community of the tea farm. By documenting the lives of the people, I realised I was documenting the process of the lives of the tea trees at the same time. This is how I met Lolita.Figure 1. Bangladeshi tea worker, Lolita, stands in a small section of the Khadim tea plantation in the early morning. Sylhet, Bangladesh (Danielle Fusco, Jan. 2012). This woman emulated everything I was seeing and feeling about the village and the garden. She spoke about the reliance on the trees, especially because of the money and, therefore, the food, they provide for her and her husband. I became aware of the injustice of this system because the workers are paid so little while this industry is booming. It was obvious that life here is far from perfect, but as Lolita explains, they make do. She has worked on the tea estate for decades. As her husband is no longer working, she is the primary income earner. They are able, however, to live in relative comfort now their children have all married and left and it is just the two of them. Lolita describes that money lies within these trees. Money for her means that she can eat that day. Money for the managers means industrial success. Either way, whether it is in the eyes of the individual or the industry, tea always comes down to Taka [the currency of Bangladesh]. Marketing Coffee in a Culture of Tea and Betel Nut With such a strong culture of tea production and consumption and a coffee culture just existing on the fringe, a campaign by Nescafé to encourage Bangladeshi consumers to have “my first cup” of Nescafé instant coffee at the time of this study captured the imagination of the students. How effective can the marketing of Nescafé instant coffee be in a society that is historically a producer and consumer of tea, and which also still embraces the generations-old use of the betel nut as an everyday stimulant? Although it only employs some 150,000 (Islam et al.) in a nation of 150 million people, tea makes an important contribution to the Bangladesh economy. Shortly after the 1971 civil war, in which East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) became independent from West Pakistan (now Pakistan), the then-Chairman of the Bangladesh Tea Board, writing in World Development, commented:In the highly competitive marketing environment of today it is extremely necessary for the tea industry of Bangladesh to increase production by raising the per acre yield, improve quality by adoption of finer plucking standards and modernization of factories and reduce per unit cost of production so as to be able to sell more of our teas to foreign markets and thereby earn higher amounts of much needed foreign exchange for the country as well as generate additional resources within the industry for ploughing back for further development (Ali 55). In Bangladesh, tea is a cash crop that, even in the 1970s following vicious conflicts, is more than capable of meeting local demand and producing an export dividend. Coffee is imported commodity that, historically, has had little place in Bangladeshi life or culture. However important tea is, it is not the traditional Bangladesh stimulant. Instead, over the years, when people in the West would have had a cup of tea or coffee and/or a cigarette, most Bangladeshis have turned to the betel nut. A 2005 study of 100 citizens from Araihazar, Bangladesh, conducted by researchers from Columbia University, found that coffee consumption is “very low in this population” (Hafeman et al. 567). The purpose of the study was to assess the impact of betel quids (the wad of masticated nut) and the chewing of betel nuts, upon tremor. For this reason, it was important to record the consumption of stimulants in the 98 participants who progressed to the next stage of the study and took a freehand spiral-drawing test. While “26 (27%) participants had chewed betel quids, 23 (23%) had smoked one or more cigarettes, [and] 14 (14%) drank tea; on that day, only 1 (1%) drank caffeinated soda, and none (0%) drank coffee” (Hafeman et al. 568). Given its addictive and carcinogenic properties (Sharma), the people who chewed betel quids were more likely to exhibit tremor in their spiral drawings than the people who did not. As this (albeit small) study suggests, the preferred Bangladeshi stimulant is more likely to be betel or tobacco rather than a beverage. Insofar as hot drinks are consumed, Bangladesh citizens drink tea. This poses a significant challenge for multinational advertisers who seek to promote the consumption of instant coffee as a means of growing the global market for Nescafé. Marketing Nescafé to Bangladesh In Dhaka, in January 2012, the television campaign slogan for Nescafé is “My first cup”, with the tagline, “Time you started.” This Nescafé television commercial (NTC) impressed itself upon the Australian visitors, both in terms of its frequency of broadcast and in its referencing of Western culture and values. (The advertisement can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2E8mFX43oAM). The NTC’s three stars, Vir Das, Purab Kohli, and leading Bollywood actress Deepika Padukone, are highly-recognisable to young Bangladeshi audiences and the storyline is part of a developing series of advertisements which together form a mini-soap opera, like that used so successfully to advertise the Nescafé Gold Blend brand of instant coffee in the West in the 1980s to 1990s (O’Donohoe 242; Beale). The action takes place in Kohli’s affluent, Western-style apartment. The drama starts with Das challenging Kohli regarding whether he has successfully developed a relationship with his attractive neighbour, Padukone. Using a combination of local language with English words and sub-titles, the first sequence is captioned: “Any progress with Deepika, or are you still mixing coffee?” Suggesting incredulity, and that he could do better, Das asks Kohli, according to the next subtitle, “What are you doing dude?” The use of the word “dude” clearly refers to American youth culture, familiar in such movies as Dude, where’s my car? This is underlined by the immediate transition to the English words of “bikes … biceps … chest … explosion.” Of these four words only “chest” is pronounced in the local tongue, although all four words are included as captions in English. Kohli appears less and less impressed as Das becomes increasingly insistent, with Das going on to express frustration with Kohli through the exclamation “u don’t even have a plan.” The use of the text-speak English “u” here can be constructed as another way of persuading young Bangladeshi viewers that this advertisement is directed at them: the “u” in place of “you” is likely to annoy their English-speaking elders. Das continues speaking in his mother tongue, with the subtitle “Deepika padukone [sic] is your neighbour and you are only drinking coffee,” with the subsequent subtitle emphasising: “Deepika and only coffee.” At this point, Padukone enters the apartment through the open door without knocking and confidently says “Hi.” Kohli explains the situation by responding (in English, and subtitled) “my school friend, Das”. Padukone, in turn, responds in a friendly way to both men (in English, and subtitled) “You guys want to have coffee?” Instead of responding directly to this invitation, Das models to Kohli what it is to take the initiative in this situation: what it is to have a plan. “Hello” (he says, in English and subtitled) “I don’t have coffee but I have a plan. You and me, my bike, right now, hit the town, party!” Kohli looks down at the floor, embarrassed, while Padukone looks quizzically at him over Das’s shoulder. Kohli smiles, and points to himself and Padukone, clearly excluding Das: “I will have coffee” (in English, and subtitle). “Better plan”, exclaims Padukone, “You and me, my place, right now, coffee.” She looks challengingly at Das: “Right?,” a statement rather than a request, and exits, with Kohli following and Das left behind in the apartment. Cue voice-over (not a subtitle, but in-screen speech bubble) “[It’s] time you started” (spoken) “the new Nescafé” (shot change) “My first cup” (with an in-screen price promotion). This commercial associates coffee drinking with Western values of social and personal autonomy. For young women in the traditional Muslim culture of Bangladesh, it suggests a world in which they are at liberty to spend time with the suitors they choose, ignoring those whom they find pushy or inappropriate, and free to invite a man back to “my place, right now” for coffee. The scene setting in this advertisement and the use of English in both the spoken and written text suggests its target is the educated middle class, and indicates that sophisticated, affluent, trend-setters drink coffee as a part of getting to know their neighbours. In line with this, the still which ends the commercial promotes the Facebook page “Know your neighbours.” The flirtatious nature of the actors in the advertisement, the emphasis on each of the male characters spending time alone with the female character, and the female character having both power and choice in this situation is likely to be highly unacceptable to traditional Bangladeshi parental values and, therefore, proportionately more exciting to the target audience. The underlying suggestion of “my first cup” and “time you started” is that the social consumption of that first cup of coffee is the “first step” to becoming more Western. The statement also has overtones of sexual initiation. The advertisement aligns itself with the world portrayed in the Western media consumed in Bangladesh, and the implication is that—even if Western liberal values are not currently a possible choice for all—it is at least feasible to start on the journey towards these values through drinking that first cup of coffee. Unbeknownst to the Bangladesh audience, this Nescafé marketing strategy echoes, in almost all material particulars, the same approach that was so successful in persuading Australians to embrace instant coffee. Khamis, in her essay on Australia and the convenience of instant coffee, argues that, while in 1928 Australia had the highest per capita consumption of tea in the world, this had begun to change by the 1950s. The transformation in the market positioning of coffee was partly achieved through an association between tea and old-fashioned ‘Britishness’ and coffee and the United States: this discovery [of coffee] spoke to changes in Australia’s lifestyle options: the tea habit was tied to Australia’s development as a far-flung colonial outpost, a daily reminder that many still looked to London as the nation’s cultural capital: the growing appeal of instant coffee reflected a widening and more nuanced cultural palate. This was not just ‘another’ example of the United States postwar juggernaut; it marks the transitional phase in Australia’s history, as its cultural identity was informed less by the staid conservativism of Britain than the heady flux of New World glamour (219). Coffee was associated with the USA not simply through advertising but also through cultural exposure. By 1943, notes Khamis, there were 120,000 American service personnel stationed in Australia and she quotes Symons (168) as saying that “when an American got on a friendly footing with an Australian family he was usually found in the kitchen, teaching the Mrs how to make coffee, or washing the dishes” (168, cited in Khamis 220). The chances were that “the Mrs”—the Australian housewife—felt she needed the tuition: an Australian survey conducted by Gallup in March 1950 indicated that 55 per cent of respondents at that time had never tried coffee, while a further 24 per cent said they “seldom” consumed it (Walker and Roberts 133, cited in Khamis 222). In a newspaper article titled, “Overpaid, Oversexed and Over Here”, Munro describes the impact of exposure to the first American troops based in Australia during this time, with a then seven year old recalling: “They were foreign, quite a different culture from us. They spoke more loudly than us. They had strange accents, cute expressions, they were really very exotic.” The American troops caused consternation for Australian fathers and boyfriends. Dulcie Wood was 18 when she was dating an American serviceman: They had more money to spend (than Australian troops). They seemed to have plenty of supplies, they were always bringing you presents—stockings and cartons of cigarettes […] Their uniforms were better. They took you to more places. They were quite good dancers, some of them. They always brought you flowers. They were more polite to women. They charmed the mums because they were very polite. Some dads were a bit more sceptical of them. They weren’t sure if all that charm was genuine (quoted in Munro). Darian-Smith argues that, at that time, Australian understanding of Americans was based on Hollywood films, which led to an impression of American technological superiority and cultural sophistication (215-16, 232). “Against the American-style combination of smart advertising, consumerism, self-expression and popular democracy, the British class system and its buttoned-up royals appeared dull and dour” writes Khamis (226, citing Grant 15)—almost as dull and dour as 1950s tea compared with the postwar sophistication of Nescafé instant coffee. Conclusion The approach Nestlé is using in Bangladesh to market instant coffee is tried and tested: coffee is associated with the new, radical cultural influence while tea and other traditional stimulants are relegated to the choice of an older, more staid generation. Younger consumers are targeted with a romantic story about the love of coffee, reflected in a mini-soap opera about two people becoming a couple over a cup of Nescafé. Hopefully, the Pathshala-Edith Cowan University collaboration is at least as strong. Some of the overseas visitors return to Bangladesh on a regular basis—the student presentations in 2012 were, for instance, attended by two visiting graduates from the 2008 program who were working in Bangladesh. For the Australian participants, the association with Pathshala, South Asian Media Institute, and Drik Photo Agency brings recognition, credibility and opportunity. It also offers a totally new perspective on what to order in the coffee queue once they are home again in Australia. Postscript The final week of the residency in Bangladesh was taken up with presentations and a public exhibition of the students’ work at Drik Picture Agency, Dhaka, 3–7 February 2012. Danielle Fusco’s photographs can be accessed at: http://public-files.apps.ecu.edu.au/SCA_Marketing/coffee/coffee.html References Ali, M. “Commodity Round-up: Problems and Prospects of Bangladesh Tea”, World Development 1.1–2 (1973): 55. Beale, Claire. “Should the Gold Blend Couple Get Back Together?” The Independent 29 Apr 2010. 8 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/advertising/should-the-gold-blend-couple-get-back-together-1957196.html›. Darian-Smith, Kate. On the Home Front: Melbourne in Wartime 1939-1945. 2nd ed. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2009. Dude, Where’s My Car? Dir. Danny Leiner. Twentieth Century Fox, 2000. Edith Cowan University (ECU). “Photomedia Summer School Bangladesh 2012.” 1 May 2012 .Grant, Bruce. The Australian Dilemma: A New Kind of Western Society. Sydney: Macdonald Futura, 1983. Hafeman, D., H. Ashan, T. Islam, and E. Louis. “Betel-quid: Its Tremor-producing Effects in Residents of Araihazar, Bangladesh.” Movement Disorders 21.4 (2006): 567-71. Hinduism. “Reincarnation and Samsara.” Heart of Hinduism. 8 Apr. 2012 ‹http://hinduism.iskcon.org/concepts/102.htm›. Islam, G., M. Iqbal, K. Quddus, and M. Ali. “Present Status and Future Needs of Tea Industry in Bangladesh (Review).” Proceedings of the Pakistan Academy of Science. 42.4 (2005): 305-14. 8 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.paspk.org/downloads/proc42-4/42-4-p305-314.pdf›. Khamis, Susie. “It Only Takes a Jiffy to Make: Nestlé, Australia and the Convenience of Instant Coffee.” Food, Culture & Society 12.2 (2009): 217-33. Munro, Ian. “Overpaid, Oversexed and Over Here.” The Age 27 Feb. 2002. 8 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/02/26/1014704950716.html›. O’Donohoe, Stephanie. “Raiding the Postmodern Pantry: Advertising Intertextuality and the Young Adult Audience.” European Journal of Marketing 31.3/4 (1997): 234-53 Pathshala. Pathshala, South Asian Media Academy. 8 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.pathshala.net/controller.php›. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. Sharma, Dinesh. “Betel Quid and Areca Nut are Carcinogenic without Tobacco.” The Lancet Oncology 4.10 (2003): 587. 8 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.lancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2045(03)01229-4/fulltext›. Symons, Michael. One Continuous Picnic: A History of Eating in Australia. Ringwood, Vic: Penguin, 1984. Tea Board. “History of Bangladesh Tea Industry.” Bangladesh Tea Board. 8 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.teaboard.gov.bd/index.php?option=HistoryTeaIndustry›. Walker, Robin and Dave Roberts. From Scarcity to Surfeit: A History of Food and Nutrition in New South Wales. Sydney: NSW UP, 1988.

Taishū engeki—Entertainment for the Masses? What do a highway robber, a samurai, and a geisha have in common? They are all played by the same actor, often at the same time, in an incredible flurry of costume change, in a contemporary form of Japanese theatre called taishū engeki. Taishū engeki, translated as vaudeville, literally, “theatre for the masses”, would be better described as a parallel world of fantasy, glitter, and manga-esque beautiful men wearing elaborate wigs and even more elaborate kimonos, who dance and gracefully sway their hips to portray women, and simultaneously do their best to seduce the overwhelmingly female audience. Taishū engeki represents an escape into a world of romances enacted through dance, of tragic love stories that somehow end well when the main character reappears in the second act as a brilliant dragon-slaying god, and of literal dances with dragons. One performance by dance troupe Gekidan Kokoro included onna-gata buyō (traditional Japanese dance performed by a man playing the part of a woman), a play about brotherly love and devotion where the glamorous actor from the first part was a not too bright young boy (depicted with snot running down his nose), more crossdressing and dancing, a few shamisen songs, a totally unexpected breakdancing piece, and a collaboration with Iwami Kagura—a famous group from Shimane who performs sacred dances in association with various Shinto rituals. Despite being able to combine theatrical skills with dance and acrobatic feats, taishū engeki is seen as a minor theatrical genre, often included in the category of folk arts (Kurata 42), or “low art” intended merely for fun and entertainment” (Endo 151). Although the name would indicate that is addresses a wider audience (which may have been the case decades ago, when cheap entertainment was not so readily available as it is today), taishū engeki caters to a specific category of people. The performers are organised in small itinerant troupes who spend about one month in a specific location, putting on two shows daily—one starting at noon, and one in the evening. In most cases, the show has two parts: one is a play, followed by a free program of dancing, acrobatic features, and even playing instruments such as drums or shamisen. The audience itself consists of two categories: the local people, living in the vicinity of the small theatres where performances are held, and who might attend each new show two or three times, and the fans, who follow their favourite actor from place to place to the limit of their time and financial resources. When it comes to performing arts, Japan’s most famous form of theatre is definitely kabuki: a performative genre highly appreciated by the Japanese and whose extravagant costumes and make-up, as well as exaggerated gestures eliminate some of the language barriers and make it (at least to a certain degree) comprehensible to non-Japanese speakers. Besides kabuki, noh (a highly ritualised form of theatre characterised by its use of masks) and bunraku (puppet theatre) are most often mentioned together, popular both within and outside the borders of Japan as entertainment and objects of scholarly research. As a scholar of Japanese studies, I had learned about these three categories in my first year as an undergraduate student, but it took me over ten years in Japan to discover taishū engeki, something that Robert Schneider and Nathan Schneider (256) ironically call “a weed in Japan’s exquisite garden of classical theatre and a living fossil in the detritus of Asian modernity”. Is taishū engeki really a fossil or a weed accidentally left on the stage of classical theatre? Its faithful fans would beg to differ, and so would the accomplishments of some troupes, who are entirely self-sufficient, renting the venues where they perform and travelling with their own light and sound systems, as well as hundreds of exquisite costumes and wigs. To give just an example, Aotsuki Shinya, the leader of Gekidan Kokoro, told me that he possesses more than two hundred wigs, and mid-September this year will attempt to perform 120 different dances, with different costumes, during the three days that will celebrate his birthday. In contrast with noh or kabuki, where each gesture is highly stylised and must be performed in a pre-defined order, in a set context, taishū engeki is flexible: plays are based on known stories, but the plot is overly simplified, so that the audience can focus on the main characters and the way they perform more than on the storyline, and the second act is actually the main attraction of the show, when the actors can showcase their special skills to the delight of the audience. Kabuki developed in the seventeenth century, and it was aimed at the “common people”, while “the true professionals, the performers of the [noh] and the kyōgen [comedy], began to retreat behind the curtain of refinement” (Tsubaki 4). In the twenty-first century, noh has become more of a mixture of performance and ritual, appreciated by a small number of specialists, and often staged to accompany religious manifestations. Kabuki, on the other hand, has taken its place as the most valued theatrical art, with fans and aficionados vying for the best seats (whose prices can go up to 30,000 Japanese yen, and yet are hard to procure), but taishū engeki shows no signs that it might ever reach that level of popularity. In 1995 Marilyn Ivy saw it as a “discourse of the vanishing”, an art that might disappear as, while “it appears to carry on an unarguably Japanese knowledge” (239), it has failed to create a “boom” or a vast audience. While novelty is part of the performance, it seems to somehow be not new enough, not entrancing enough. The actors are talented, creative, and versatile, but they do not attain the fame level of their kabuki counterparts. Despite all these, as an anthropologist, I could not help but wonder why taishū engeki has not attracted more scholarly interest. The studies on this topic, both in Japanese and English, are far less numerous than those on butoh, for example, “a post-modern dance genre” which has been the focus of both practical and theoretical interest on the part of Japanese studies specialists. To give just an example, in his book on Japanese theatre, Benito Ortolani has a subchapter on butoh, but does not even mention taishū engeki. Prince(ss) Charming My first encounters with taishū engeki were due to a class project—I had started teaching a class on theatre as ritual performance, and wanted my students to have a first-hand experience. The project was a success: students who had shown no enthusiasm at all when reading the syllabus were mesmerised once the performance had begun, to the level that they had attended shows by themselves, and even started following the actors on various social networks. Taishū engeki surpasses all expectations of a first-time viewer. It follows a canon, just like kabuki, but that canon is audience-oriented, so without having ever been part of that audience, it is difficult to imagine what will happen on stage. As mentioned above, each performance has two parts: the first one is a play, whose content changes during the one-month performance, usually based on historical events familiar to the audience, but not restricted to that, an intermission during which the leader of the troupe greets the audience, talks about the schedule for the remainder of the month, and promotes the merchandise available for sale (T-shirts, fans, boxes of sweets), followed by a free-style show where the performers are free to display their best skills. Photography is not allowed during the first part—and this may be due to the fact that most troupe leaders create their own plays using the vast available materials, and are reluctant to share that with other troupes—but is encouraged during the second part. Video taking is forbidden at all times. Crossdressing is a significant part of the performance, with men playing the part of women who are attractive to other women, and women playing the part of men who also attract women. The actresses, however, never become the star of the troupe. Just like in the case of Takarazuka Theatre, where the otoko yaku (women playing the male roles) receive significantly more appreciation than the female counterparts, the heavily made-up male actors of taishū engeki represent the dreamy ideal of their dedicated fans. Each performing group is centered around one male actor who is representative of the troupe—usually the leader or the leader’s son, and who gathers a dedicated fan base composed of women (most of whom are middle-aged or older). These women try to attend as many shows as they can, literally showering their favourite actor with money. The few available studies on taishū engeki tended to focus on two major aspects: crossdressing (mostly of the onnagata—men playing women—type) and on the money the actors receive while on stage. Fig. 1: An actor on the Gofukuza Stage (Osaka) displaying money gifts, 13 June 2018. Schneider and Schneider, for example, looked into how gender is performed, and what rules are applied when performing gender. Their conclusion? There are no clear rules, as “taishū engeki plays with gender, but it also quite simply plays gender” (262). My own interest was not in the actual gender performed, but in the most pervasive and permanent element of all taishū engeki performances: seduction. Those who go to see these shows may do so for mere amusement—and their expectations are never disappointed, as the costumes are complex and flamboyant, and the performers are skilled dancers, but those who go faithfully do so due to their admiration for a certain actor. The first act (the historical play) is a convention where the star appears slightly more human—less make-up, sometimes performing the role of a man—always strong and masculine, which is quite an artistic feat seeing that even in the role of a man, the actors will wear specific make-up and false eyelashes. The Takarazuka Revue, an all-female group founded in 1914, has a large and consistent fan base made-up almost entirely of women who fall in love with the actress playing the main male roles—a phenomenon explained by the desire to temporarily live in a fantasy world. The difference between the Takarazuka actresses and the taishū engeki actors is that the former do not aim to seduce, but to invite the audience into a dream world, while the latter’s goal is to fully entrance. Regardless of the gender they play, the taishū engeki stars create erotic characters, just like their kabuki precursors, where, as Samuel L. Leiter (212) puts it, “eros remained primary”. Dressed in kimonos of intricate patterns that go far outside the lines of tradition, and are representative of the creative spirit of the performer, using make-up which completely transforms their physiognomies through the heavy use of eyeliner, glitter, false eyelashes, and wearing exquisite wigs, the actors invite the audience into a dream world where the Fairy Godmother gave the best dress to the prince, not the princess. For hundreds if not thousands of years, the folktales focussed around the image of a beautiful prince, the kalos kagathos hero (beautiful and virtuous, the ancient Greek ideal) who takes the maiden from distress and into a happily ever after. Taishū engeki heroes switch perspectives: it is not Prince Charming, but Princess Charming, an utterly beautiful creature who enchants the female audience by being the impossible. Princess Charming represents an embodiment of the best possible features—beauty, glamour, grace, sex appeal, elegance—and none of the negative ones—lack of manners, roughness, insensitivity. Moreover, Princess Charming is accessible. For a mere 2,000 yen, anybody can spend three hours in her company, and shaking her hand starts at a similarly low price—2,000 or 3,000 yen for a trinket bought during the intermission, to hand over as a gift during the performance. Fig. 2: Aotsuki Shinya as a romantic lady in a flowing kimono, Gofukuza, 9 July 2022. Dressed as females, the actors move their bodies with the grace of a geisha, bat their eyelashes, smile coquettishly, and even wink at the audience. As males, they are either abandoned lovers who drown their sorrows in drink, or fierce warriors dancing with masks and swords. In all circumstances, they present exaggerated feminine or masculine ideals, with the difference that femininity is emphasised through the overuse of garments and accessories, while masculinity will almost always involve a certain degree of nakedness: chest, arms, legs. The reasons are both practical (showing various naked body parts would destroy the dreamy feminine beauty wrapped up in layers of cloth and glitter), and symbolic: femininity is mysterious and fragile, and thus cannot easily be revealed, while masculinity must re-assert its strength and vitality. The body presented on stage is more of an artistic act than the performance itself, because it is there that most of the actor’s talent is poured. Creating a persona means borrowing from the “traditional” Japanese culture which includes geisha, courtesans, heavy wigs, and heavily embroidered kimonos, as well as the contemporary manga and cosplay culture. With exaggerated eyes and hairstyles as the central features of the head, the characters moving in front of the audience seem to have directly descended from (or drawn the viewers into, “Take On Me” style) the pages of a fantasy manga. An interview with Aotsuki Shinya (stage name), leader and star of the Kokoro (“Heart”) troupe conducted on 15 June 2022, did not offer any insightful glimpses into the metamorphosis process. While acknowledging that he cannot present his true self on stage, thus using make-up to become Aotsuki Shinya, the actor did not admit to any conscious attempt of becoming attractive. In his own words, all their efforts are for the benefit of the audience, directed towards helping them have fun. “Tanoshii”, “fun” seemed to be a key concept when staging a new performance, and the reasoning behind that is easy to follow. Unlike the more elevated kabuki, a taishū engeki theatre is a small cosy place where the audience can interact quite freely with the performers, who do not shy away from showing momentarily glimpses of the face behind the mask: forgetting a line and admitting to it, laughing at a joke said by another actor, kneeling prettily to receive gifts from their fans. Rather than gender fluid, the bodies in taishū engeki are genderless because they are not, nor do they claim to be, real. An actor on the traditional stage is a photography, or, if the setting includes fantastic elements, a painting of an imaginable universe. An actor on the taishū engeki stage turns their body into a manga drawing: something that does not exist in real life, but it is highly desirable. Kabuki actors staged eroticism by impersonating women; taishū engeki actors play with desire becoming in turns both Cinderella and the Prince. Figs. 3 & 4: Aotsuki Shinya as a fantastic character (fig. 3) and as the god Susano-wo slaying the dragon (fig. 4). “Fantasy, Sweet Fantasy” Analysing the loyalty that Takarazuka actresses inspire into their fans, Makiko Yamanashi interprets it as something that goes beyond (dreams of) physical love or mere escapism, and sees it as the desire to belong to an ideal community of women—friends, sisters, mothers. While not wrong, this approach seems to gloss over the real erotic feelings and the longing for something not of this world which are most definitely present among performative arts (be they kabuki, revue, vaudeville, butoh, modern theatre) aficionados. The men performed by the Takarazuka actresses do not exist in real life, and just as in the case of taishū engeki actors, make-up plays a crucial role. Lorie Brau even mentions an incident where an American director hired to stage a production of “West Side Story” required the actresses playing male roles to give up their false eyelashes—a change that did not last after the director left (86). The taishū engeki actors are warriors who bring back to life the god Izanagi, the creator of Japan, who fought an army of underworld monsters, while wearing eyeliner, eyelashes, and sparkling make-up. They are completely unrecognisable without make-up, and yet changing their appearance takes approximately ten minutes, much less than it would take a drag queen to turn from ordinary man into glamorous woman (at least forty minutes). I am not mentioning here the drag queens by chance—the two types of performances are similar enough that they lead to collaborations. On 10 June 2022, the troupe Kokoro performed at the Gofukuza Theatre in Umeda in the company of five drag queens well known on the Osaka stage: Feminina, Rulu Daisy, Madame Cocco, Ozu, and Il Rosa. One characteristic of drag performances is that they are actor-centred: they are not about the storyline, but about the performer’s creation—“channeling your inner femininity, fusing it with the male, and creating something otherworldly” (Hastings). The noticeable difference between drag and taishū engeki is that drag is actor-oriented, while taishū engeki is audience-oriented. Drag queens interact with the audiences and entertain, but the focus is internal, towards freeing something that had been developing within. Taishū engeki actors do choose their characters, of course, and have individual preferences, but this is secondary to their goal of captivating the audiences. Both categories of performers learn to re-invent their bodies, to re-create them on stage; however, in one case we witness an individual metamorphosis from real life to theatrical persona, and in the other we have one individual who can shapeshift into whatever character might work better magic on the people in front of him. Drag is about freedom while taishū engeki is about seduction. Fig. 5: Il Rosa and two actors of the Shin troupe, Gofukuza, 10 June 2022 Taishū engeki may not be kabuki: it is not celebrated by the media or the researchers, and many people in contemporary Japanese society see it as an inferior form of entertainment. Considering the low price of the tickets and the fact that shows are seldom sold out, one might worry about its future. Nevertheless, a visit to the backstage of Gofukuza during the month when Shin was performing revealed a large room full of costumes, and another one full of wig boxes—more than two hundred, according to Aotsuki Shinya. The Shin troupe was founded five years ago, so everything was still new and shiny—a sign that the genre will not disappear any time in the near future. The same visit, when I could interact with the actors in their day-to-day attires, using their regular voices, and standing near the costumes and wigs like exhibits in a museum, made one more thing acutely clear: the fact that their performances are a fantasy world. More of a fantasy world than a kabuki performance (to remain consistent with the comparison), where the setting is clearly a setting, separate from the audience. The blurred lines between stage and audience, between performance and flirting of the taishū engeki create a tangible fantasy, where one can not only fall in love with the Prince(ss) Charming, but maybe even take them to a ball. References Brau, Lorie. “The Women’s Theater of Takarazuka”. TDR 34.4 (Winter 1990): 79-95. Endo, Yukihide. “Reconsidering the Traveling Theater of Today’s Japan: An Interdisciplinary Approach to a Stigmatized Form of Japanese Theater.” Athens Journal of Humanities and Arts 2.3. Hastings, Magnus. Why Drag? Hong Kong: Chronicle Books, 2016. Ivy, Marilyn. Discourses of the Vanishing. Modernity Phantasm Japan. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. Kurata, Ryosuke. “Taishū Engeki as a Show Business: Exploring the Segmentation of Customers.” Mathesis Universalis 17.2. Leiter, Samuel L. “From Gay to Gei: The Onnagata and the Creation of Kabuki’s Female Characters.” In A Kabuki Reader: History and Performance, ed. Samuel L. Leitner. New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2002. 211-229. Ortolani, Benito. The Japanese Theatre. From Shamanistic Ritual to Contemporary Pluralism. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1995. Schneider, Robert, and Nathan Schneider. “A Dive and a Dance with Kabuki Vaudeville: Taishū Engeki Comes Back!” New Theater Quarterly 36.3 (2020). 29 July 2020 <https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/new-theatre-quarterly/article/abs/dive-and-a-dance-with-kabuki-vaudeville-taishu-engeki-comes-back/BB72486E86C79B70730B6F2DB5EC0FF8>. Yamanashi, Makiko. A History of the Takarazuka Revue Since 1914: Modernity, Girls’ Culture, Japan Pop. Leiden: Global Oriental, 2012.

In my article, "A New Sound; a New Sensation: A Cultural and Literary Reconsideration of the Motorcar in Modernity" (Ryder), I propose that "a range of semiotic engines" may be mobilised "to argue that, in the first quarter of the twentieth century, the motorcar is received as relatum profundis of freedom". In that 2019 article I further argue that, as Roland Barthes has indirectly proposed, the automobile fits into a "highway code" and into a broader "car system" in which its attributes—including its architectural details—are received as signs of liberation (Barthes Elements, 10, 29). While extending that argument, with near exclusive focus on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) and with special reference to the hero’s Rolls Royce, I argue here that the automobile is offered as a sign of both conquest and destruction; as both dream machine and vehicle of nightmare. This is not to suggest that the motorcar was, prior to 1925, seen in absolutely idealistic terms. Nor is it to suggest that by the end of the first quarter of the twentieth century the automobile had been unequivocally condemned. As observed in my 2019 article for the Southern Semiotic Review, while The Wind in the Willows (1908) is the first novel written in English to deal with the deleterious effects of the motorcar, "it is [nonetheless] impossible to find a literary text from the early part of the twentieth century that flatly condemns the machine". So, from Gatsby’s emblematic "circus wagon" to narrator Nick Carraway’s equally symbolic "Dodge", I argue that the motorcar is represented by Fitzgerald as an emblem of both dreams and wreckage.The first motorcar noted in The Great Gatsby is the "old Dodge" belonging to Nick Carraway—the novel’s narrator and greatest dodger (Fitzgerald Great Gatsby, 17). Dreaming of success, and having declared himself restless, Nick claims to have come East to try his luck in the bond business (16). But, reflecting a propensity to dishonesty, the unreliable narrator (Abrams, 168) eventually reveals that at least one of the reasons for his migration East is to escape his emotional responsibilities to a girl "out West" (Fitzgerald Great Gatsby, 30); a girl to whom he continues to write letters signed "Love, Nick" (61). While these notions of being dodgy and dodging—and their connection to Carraway’s car—seem to have escaped the attention of commentators, several have nonetheless observed that the make suits its owner for another reason: a work-a-day mass-produced machine, the vehicle is surely a sign of the narrator’s conservatism. Tad Burness, for instance, notes that in the early twentieth century the Dodge was a make that particularly appealed to conservative and careful drivers (91). Certainly, the Dodge brothers’ advertising of the nineteen-twenties, which steadfastly emphasised staunchness and stability, reinforces this conclusion. The make, therefore, is entirely appropriate to Nick: a man who evades the vicissitudes of romance; who shuns excitement, who aligns himself with mainstream Midwestern values, who identifies more with the mechanical than with the human, and who, until the very end, fails to commit to the extraordinary. Apropos, in reviewing the manuscript of Gatsby, Keath Fraser records an exchange between Jordan Baker and Nick Carraway that was finally, and perhaps unfortunately, excised: "You appeal to me,” she said suddenly as we strolled away.“You’re sort of slow and steady ... you’ve got everything adjusted just right.” (Qtd. in Bloom, 67)To have been included at the end of the third chapter, Jordan’s assessment of Nick suggests that the narrator has over-tuned the cognitive machinery necessary to navigation through a social milieu to which he does not belong. While Fitzgerald may have felt this to be too blunt a narrative tool, the ‘slow and steady’ approach to life attributed to Nick in the finished novel clearly suggests that the narrator lives life by the manual.It may be argued, then, that while ostensibly facilitating a new start and an associated desire for upward social mobility, Nick’s old Dodge symbolises a perfunctory approach to the business of living, a shabby escape from a "tangle back home", and an escape from self (Fitzgerald Great Gatsby, 61). Certainly, it represents no "on the road" conquest. Indeed, Nick’s clinical and mechanical approach to life comes close to ruining him. Short of his identification with Gatsby at the end—and the subsequent telling of a tragic tale—Nick is an archetypal loser. While claiming to identify with the "racy, adventurous" feel of New York (59), his instinct is to fall back on "interior rules that act as brakes on [his] desires" (61). He therefore fails to connect with Jordan Baker—his racy and attractive would-be lover, herself named after the Jordan Playboy automobile: the "first car to be marketed on emotional appeal alone" (Heimann and Patton, 14). So, it turns out that Nick is one of life’s "rotten drivers" (Fitzgerald Great Gatsby, 60)—an accusation he ironically levels at Jordan Baker who eventually tackles him on this point:"You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn’t I? I mean it was careless of me to make such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person." (154)As Fraser has pointed out, the mechanical and shifty Nick is far from honest (Bloom, 68). Rather than achieving any sort of emotional consummation, his already muted desires idle, misfire, or stall. Declaring himself to be "one of the few honest people that [he has] ever known" (Fitzgerald Great Gatsby, 154), Nick’s self-deception is, from the outset, complete. Left without the stimulus of the hero, one wonders if perhaps Nick might become a George B. Wilson.Despite his dream of pecuniary success (something shared with Nick Carraway), garage proprietor George B. Wilson is impoverished by the automobile. A dissolute dealer in second-hand machines, this once-handsome but "spiritless man" (Fitzgerald Great Gatsby, 33) has worked for years on scant margins. James Flink notes that dealers in used automobiles had a particularly hard time in the mid to late 1920s when profits on sales were very slight (144). The fact that Wilson is a second-hand car dealer also reinforces that everything else in his life is second-hand: built on the enterprise of others, his dream is second hand; his premises are second-hand; even his wife is second-hand. And, of course, he himself is used. Fitzgerald, then, is at pains to highlight the cultural meaning of the common or inferior car. Indeed, in the dark recesses of Wilson’s garage—which itself rests precariously on the edge of a wasteland under the faded and failed eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg—sits a "dust-covered wreck of a Ford" (Fitzgerald Great Gatsby, 33). Emblematic of the garage proprietor’s broken dreams, Wilson’s psychic paralysis is variously foregrounded—principally by the broken car. Here we have nothing less than Heidegger’s das Gestell: the mechanised consciousness as discussed in his essay "The Question Concerning Technology" (in Krell, 227). Significantly, only automobiles elicit a spark of interest from Wilson—but the irony, as suggested above, is that these are signs of the technical spirit to which he has so utterly acquiesced.It is often, if not always, the case in Gatsby that automobiles signpost derailed agency and, therefore, broken dreams. After all, Gatsby’s own death and funeral are foreshadowed through the automobile. In the first chapter, for example, Nick tells his cousin Daisy that "all the cars in Chicago have the left rear wheel painted black as a mourning wreath" for her (Fitzgerald Great Gatsby, 22). More portentously, during Nick and Gatsby’s drive to Astoria, "a dead man" passes the hero’s Rolls-Royce "in a hearse heaped with blooms" (68). While Myrtle’s death and Gatsby’s murder are contemporaneously suggested, in this emblematic tableau Gatsby’s Rolls-Royce is also overtaken by a limousine—and so the final chapter’s depressing "procession of three cars" is subtly anticipated (153). A "horribly black and wet" motor hearse bears Gatsby’s corpse to the cemetery while the narrator arrives with Gatsby’s father and the minister in a limousine. Then come the servants and the postman in Gatsby’s yellow station wagon. That the yellow and black cars are so incongruously and so tragically juxtaposed is a structurally and semantically significant feature of the text. The yellow car that once bore cheerful guests to Gatsby’s parties now follows the black hearse—the novel’s ultimate and, arguably, most awful death car. Thus, Fitzgerald presents us with one last reminder that, corrupted by our materialistic drives, our dreams wither and die; that there is, in the end, no magic.As Robert Long points out, however, the manuscript of Gatsby confirms that Fitzgerald had originally intended such foreshadowing to be much more obvious. For instance, in the manuscript, when Gatsby drives Nick to New York he declares his car to be "the handsomest in New York" and that he "wouldn’t want to ride around in a big hearse like some of those fellas do" (Long, 193). Further confirmation of Fitzgerald’s determination to mute the novel’s funereal symbolism is provided in chapter two when, along with the word "sepulchrally", the phrase "reeks of death" is crossed out (Long, 194). As published, then, the automobile travels much more subtly in The Great Gatsby. While a ghostly machine turns up to the hero’s house shortly after the funeral, the end of the road for Nick is suggested when he sells his plain old Dodge to a plain old grocer (Fitzgerald Great Gatsby, 157-158).The counterpoint to Nick’s old Dodge is, of course, Gatsby’s magnificent Rolls Royce: literature’s ultimate dream car. C.S. Rolls knew very well that his automobile was the new haute couture of the privileged. In his famous article on motorcars in the 1911 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, he declares the upmarket machine to be "the private carriage of the wealthier classes to be used on all occasions" (223). To set it apart from competitors, the Rolls Royce not only offered an extraordinarily robust and responsive chassis, but boasted bodywork hand-crafted by a range of highly skilled artisans. W.A. Robotham writes that "one of the more fascinating aspects of Rolls-Royce car production in the twenties was the manufacture of the body at the many coachbuilding establishments that existed in London, the provinces, and Paris" (14). Once an order for a chassis was placed, an appointed carrossier would prescribe and detail coachwork and agonise over every internal appointment. With its "interior of glittering plate glass and rich morocco", the unnamed machine that so hopelessly besots the Toad in the third chapter of The Wind in the Willows is undoubtedly the result of such a special order—and seems likely to have goaded Fitzgerald into a fit of imitation (Grahame, 30). Apposite to a novel that contrasts dream and reality and pertinent to the near nonchalant agency of its wraithlike, almost ethereal, hero, Gatsby’s car is a cream-yellow Rolls Royce: a Silver Ghost. When C.S. Rolls conceived the model, he wrote: "the motion of the car must be absolutely silent. The car must be free from the objectionable rattling and buzzing and inconvenience of chains. ... The engine must be smokeless and odourless" (Robson, 27). Reflecting its whisper-quiet locomotion and its extensive use of silver, nickel, and aluminium plating, Rolls’s partner Claude Johnson gave the model its perfect name. Manufactured between 1906 and 1925, the Silver Ghost was the automobile of choice for F. Scott Fitzgerald himself. In 1922, the year in which Gatsby is set, Scott and his wife Zelda owned a second-hand Silver Ghost which they drove, with much joy, between Great Neck and New York. Here, then, lies one of those rare and fortuitous connections between one’s personal drives and one’s work; really, the hero of Fitzgerald’s third novel could have no other motorcar.Like the machine he drives, and in keeping with Roland Barthes’ idea that automobiles are somehow "magical" (Mythologies, 88), Gatsby would appear to have arrived from the heavens. Ghost-like, he glides in and out of the narrative and is, moreover, ineluctably associated with silver. He has pursued silver for much of his life and is, on numerous occasions, specifically identified with this powerful symbol of privilege and betrayal. While Nick finds him "regarding the silver pepper of the stars" (Fitzgerald Great Gatsby, 31), later the "pale", wraithlike hero wears a "silver shirt" (80). So much the object of Gatsby’s yearnings, along with Jordan Baker, Daisy Buchanan is likened to a "silver idol" (105), has a "voice full of money", and wears a hat of "metallic cloth" (109). A trophy held in hopeless memory, Daisy may be said to be one of an extensive collection of enchanted objects beheld and worshipped by an all-too-flawed hero—but while Fitzgerald’s numerous references to silver undoubtedly highlight a double-edged significance, it is nonetheless suggestions of glamour that first strike us. Early in the novel, then, aside from the portentous foreshadowing of disasters to come, Gatsby’s car emerges as a powerful archetype: an image coupled with enormous emotive significance (Jung, 87); a sign of uncompromised and near-miraculous opulence. Terraced with windshields and sporting a green leather interior, his magnificent cream-yellow Rolls Royce is "bright with nickel" (a very expensive plating used for Rolls Royce radiators) and is "swollen here and there in its monstrous length with triumphant hat-boxes and supper boxes and tool boxes" (Fitzgerald Great Gatsby, 64). Fitzgerald’s parataxis here seems to encourage breathless awe at the near obscene luxury of the vehicle, yet the depiction is historically accurate.In an Autocar article of 1921 there appears a closely-annotated plan of a two-seater Rolls Royce. Numerous fittings are noted: food lockers, tool cupboards, hot-and-cold water-locker, wash-basin compartment, spares cupboard, kodak photography compartment, cooking utensil compartment, suit and dressing cases, spare accumulator compartment, and recess for spare petroleum tins (Garnier and Allport, 50). Like Toad’s, Gatsby’s chimerical car is undoubtedly the creation of a carrossier. Its standard of appointment, moreover, suggests royal status. Since the Rolls-Royce is an English car, its presence in America, where it was manufactured under licence for a time, also points to a desire to recapture something left behind. This, as all readers of Fitzgerald will know, is a major thematic thread in Gatsby. To be explored in a forthcoming article, the relationship between this theme of "backing up" (that is, recapturing the past) and representations of the motorcar in the novel is profound, but for the moment I focus on the Silver Ghost as a sign of Gatsby’s outrageous aristocratic pretensions. Perhaps an expression of Fitzgerald’s own fantasy that he wasn’t the son of his parents at all, but the child of a world-ruling king, Gatsby claims to have lived "like a young rajah in all the capitals of Europe" (Fitzgerald Great Gatsby, 65). If not actually a Rolls-Royce-loving rajah, Gatsby certainly lives like a king and even signs himself "in a majestic hand" (47). Indeed, in these senses and more, the hero is "circus master" and performer par excellence.As a letter from Fitzgerald to Maxwell Perkins tells us, Petronius’s Satyrica furnished one of several alternative titles for Gatsby (Fitzgerald Letters, 169). Pointing to a delight in comedic hedonism, "Trimalchio in West Egg" was one of several titular options entertained by Fitzgerald (Gatsby is actually referred to as Trimalchio at the start of the novel’s seventh chapter) and so it is fitting that Brian Way declares Gatsby’s Rolls Royce to be "not so much a means of transport as a theatrical gesture"—one commensurate with the hero’s "non-stop theatrical performance" (Way in Bloom, 102). Similarly, in their 2019 article "Comfortably Cocooned: Onboard Media and Sydney’s Ongoing Gridlock", Richardson and Ryder argue that the automobile is far greater than the sum of its collective parts. In a similar vein, Leo Marx writes that Gatsby has about him a "gratifying sense of a dream about to be consummated" and argues that the hero’s dream car is one of many objects in the novel that speak to Gatsby’s attempt to locate, in the real world, the stuff of unutterable visions (Marx, 77). As "circus wagon" (Fitzgerald Great Gatsby, 109), the machine also makes a substantial contribution to Fitzgerald’s comedy of the excess: cars driven by clowns at circuses stereotypically seem to operate according to a set of physical laws distinct from those governing the real world. However, with its "fenders spread like wings" (67), the hero’s car seems destined to fly. But, like Daisy’s white roadster, a machine that ironically bespeaks innocence and purity while sitting portentously "under … dripping bare lilac-trees" (81), Gatsby’s machine—one of the most heavenly automobiles in literature—is also literature’s most famous death car. While, in the end, the make of the killing machine is not spelled out for us, we may nonetheless be sure that it is Gatsby’s ever-so-aptly owned Silver Ghost. After the dreadful accident in the seventh chapter, the fender of the hero’s carefully hidden open car is in need of repair. That the death car is an open one is highlighted for us before the accident, when Gatsby feels the pleated leather seats of the machine that will mow Myrtle down. The point is reinforced in chapter eight, after the accident, when Gatsby orders that his open car not be taken out. Moreover, while automobile upholstery specification varied in the nineteen-twenties, open cars generally had pleated leather seat cushions while mohair or broadcloth featured in closed tourers. This, too, narrows down the options confronting readers. Finally, the focus on the Rolls Royce’s great fenders (these are referred to at least three times before Myrtle is killed) also establishes a clear connection between the calamity and Gatsby’s "winged" Rolls. And, finally, there is the crucial matter of the ambiguous paintwork.Nick tells us that Gatsby’s Rolls-Royce is a "rich cream colour" (64) while Mavro Michaelis claims that the death car is "light green" (123). Another witness to the accident claims that the vehicle involved is "a yellow car"; "a big yellow car" (125). In fact, they are all right. Like Gatsby himself, his motorcar suggests one thing at one time and another at another. From about the mid-nineteen-tens, Rolls-Royce painted a good many Silver Ghosts a rather uncertain cream-yellow and, in fading light, the lacquer betrays a greenish hue. We remember that the party drives "towards death through the cooling twilight" (122); that Myrtle runs out "into the dusk"; and that the death car comes "out of gathering darkness" (123). While an earlier 1914 model, there is an excellent example of this ambiguous colour used on a Silver Ghost in Turin’s Museo dell’automobile. Finally, of course, the many references to ‘ghosts’ and to ‘silver’ connected with both the hero and Daisy Buchanan cannot be considered accidental. In one of modern literature’s greatest novels, then, behind the dream of the automobile falls the depressingly foul dust of betrayal and death.ReferencesAbrams, Meyer H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957/1993.Barthes, Roland. Elements of Semiology. Trans. A. Lavers. NY: Hill and Wang, 1964/1977.———. Mythologies. Trans. A. Lavers. NY: Hill & Wang, 1957/1974.Bloom, Harold, ed. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: Modern Critical Interpretations. NY: Chelsea House, 1986.Burness, Tad. Cars of the Early Twenties. NY: Galahad, 1968.Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. London: The Folio Society, 1926/1968.———. The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ed. A. Turnbull. London: The Bodley Head, 1964.Flink, James. The Car Culture. Mass.: MIT Press, 1975.Garnier, Peter, and Warren Allport. Rolls Royce: From the Archives of Autocar. London: Hamlyn, 1978.Grahame, Kenneth. The Wind in the Willows. NY: Methuen, 1908/1980.Heimann, Jim, and Phil Patton. 20th Century Classic Cars. Köln: Taschen, 2009/2015.Jung, Carl G. Man and His Symbols. NY: Dell, 1964/1984.Krell, David, ed. Heidegger: Basic Writings. London: Routledge, 2011.Long, Robert E. The Achieving of The Great Gatsby. London: Bucknell UP., 1979.Marx, Leo. "The Puzzle of Anti-Urbanism in Classic American Literature." Literature & Urban Experience: Essays on the City and Literature. Eds. M.C. Jaye and A.C. Watts. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1981.Richardson, Nicholas, and Paul Ryder. "Comfortably Cocooned: Onboard Media and Sydney’s Ongoing Gridlock." Global Media Journal (Australian Edition) 13.1 (2019). 1 Mar. 2020 <https://www.hca.westernsydney.edu.au/gmjau/?p=3302>.Robotham, W. Arthur. Silver Ghosts & Silver Dawn. London: Constable & Co., 1970.Robson, Graham. Man and the Automobile. Maidenhead: McGraw Hill, 1979.Rolls, Charles S. In Encyclopaedia Britannica. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1911.Ryder, Paul. "A New Sound; A New Sensation: A Cultural and Literary Reconsideration of the Motorcar in Modernity." Southern Semiotic Review 11 (2019). 1 Mar. 2020 <http://www.southernsemioticreview.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Ryder_Issue-11_1_-2019-SSR.pdf>.

He is, surely, the only heterosexual male in the country who could get away with being photographed half-naked and smothered in baby oil for GQ and still come over as an icon of masculinity. (GQ October 2002. Article on Beckham as GQ’s Sportsman of the Year, 264) Indeed. Let us tear our thoughts away from the image of David basted in oil and consider the extract as one of innumerable examples of the media fascination with Beckham. Given his penetration in Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa, we can take as self-evident that Beckham is a quantifiably significant figure in contemporary global popular culture. By any measure of celebrity and any taxonomy of fame (Turner 15-23), Beckham qualifies as a striking example. He has inevitably appeared in a number of recent academic publications as an exemplar of celebrity and sports culture (Whannel, Turner, Cashmore and Parker) and, more notably in Cashmore’s book, as the focus of a social biography (Beckham). In his book Understanding Celebrity, Turner provides a comprehensive overview of the vast literature which has developed on issues of celebrity and fame, painting a broad picture of concerns divided between the significance of the apparent explosion in celebrity ‘culture’ and the focus on celebrities themselves. Within the literature on the social significance of celebrity culture, we can discern two key themes. First, celebrity culture is a manifestation of globalised commodity consumerism in advanced capitalism and second, its social function as a system of meanings and values which is supplanting traditional resources for self and social identities in late modern culture, including structures such as class, gender/sexuality, ethnicity and nationality. Whilst the authors mentioned above both draw on and contribute to these arguments, their focus remains broad, citing Beckham as a key manifestation of the complex interdependence between globalised sports and media industries, and transformations in gender and consumption. For example, although Cashmore’s book is solidly researched on the impact of media finance on football and has a sound argument on the significance of consumerism, he is prone to generalisations about the transformations in masculinity and celebrity culture which he suggests are central to understanding Beckham’s significance. Turner suggests that there needs to be more focused empirical work on the specific construction of celebrity since ‘modern celebrity…is a product of media representation: understanding it demands close attention to the representational repertoires and patterns employed in this discursive regime’ (8). This is how this short piece offers a contribution to the literature – drawing on a qualitative analysis of articles on Beckham, my discussion focuses on the meanings of Beckham’s celebrity and whether they can tell us something about the way the culture of fame operates. I have drawn selectively from my data, but a fuller discussion of both the data and grounded theory methodology can be found in a previous article (Rahman). Out of the six categories of meaning established through the grounded theory procedures used in the study, my contention is that masculinity is a core nexus in ‘cultural circuitry’ (Hall) – making the stories relevant, understandable, and often controversial. Moreover, the accompanying photo spreads often create a tension with the text, emphasising dissonant/controversial images which testifies to a dynamic of respect/ridicule in the representations. To be more precise, there is a construction of deference to Beckham’s professional status and to the Beckham family as the premier celebrity unit in the UK. Deference to and respect for their status is evident not only in those magazines which have paid for the privilege of access, but also the more gossip orientated celebrity weeklies such as Heat (18-24 May: 6-8): ‘those lucky enough to be asked to join David and Victoria enjoyed one the most extravagant soirees in recent memory. The sheer scale of the £350000 shindig was stunning, even by the standards of Celebville’s most extravagant couple’. Coupled with this respect is a sense of ridicule, often in discrete publications, but also within the same magazine and even sometimes the same article. Ridicule undercuts the celebrity credentials of extravagance and glamour with an implication of tackiness and vulgarity, and this gentle undercurrent becomes stronger when linked to Beckham’s fashion icon status: We’ve supported David through the highlights and lowlights of his various haircuts: the streaked curtains, the skinhead and his travis bickle style mohican. But this latest look is a ‘do too far’ – more village idiot than international style icon… (Heat 13-19 April: 24-5) This dynamic of respect/ridicule relies heavily on another dynamic; that of queer/normative invocation and recuperation. It is not only his fashion icon status being ridiculed here but also his status as a heterosexual masculine icon: People say you’re vain. Do you think so? You can see why people might think you’re a bit of a big girl’s blouse, because you have manicures, sunbeds and bleach your hair. You’re also one of the few footballers to become a gay icon. (Marie Claire June 2002: cover of Beckham, and 69-76) His gender/sexuality is anchored in hetero-family/masculine status but is somewhat dissonant in terms of vanity/grooming and gay icon status. ‘Queerying’ Beckham is not just a technique of ridicule (how very old fashioned that would be!) but also a deliberate destabilisation of ontological anchors which induces a sense of dissonance: An example from Heat (20-26 July 2002) has the cover byline ‘Phwoar! Another new look for Becks’ with a trail for a story on pages 18-20 which has a photograph of Beckham with his nail varnish highlighted and the text: David sported a new blonde barnet and a fitted black suit, and despite the controversy caused by his pink nail varnish he still managed to look macho and absolutely beautiful. This demonstrates some feminisation of Beckham but is counterbalanced by the very masculine anchor of ‘macho’. There is a recognition that the highlighted ambiguity in gender coding is potentially disruptive or controversial and hence it is recuperated – ‘he still managed to look macho’. GQ from June 2002 repeats the play on gender and sexuality, with a cover photo of Beckham lying down, bare torso but in a suit and hat, with one hand showing a ring and nail varnish, and the other in the waistband of his trousers. Inside, on pages 142-55, there follow seven full pages of photos and an interview conducted by David Furnish, a family friend of the Beckhams but also Elton John’s partner and so one of the most visible gay men in celebrity culture. However, rather than any danger of queering by association, the presence of Furnish seems only to enhance the mega-celebrity and hetero status, since he is careful to sound all the right notes of family, football and fatherhood in his questions in the text. Rather, it is the photospread which induces the queerness in this example, with four of Beckham’s naked torso in baby oil, of which one is him in unbuttoned cut-off denim shorts on a weights bench – very retro 1970s gay. In his history of male sports celebrities, Whannel suggests that Beckham is an exceptional figure, both because he is one of the few footballers in the UK to achieve full celebrity status, but also because he transgresses the discipline and work ethic associated with sporting bodies, indulging himself through conspicuous and narcissistic consumption (212). Whannel notes Beckham’s emergence during the development of a men’s style press in the UK, documented thoroughly in Nixon’s study of men’s magazines, which provides an account of the historical moment from 1984-1990 which saw the emergence of ‘new man’ imagery. Drawing on Mort’s contention that this is the first period which showed men being sexualised – a representational strategy previously applied only to women – Nixon concurs with Mort that this moment marks the beginning of men being addressed as a specific gender. However, these images of Beckham push at the boundaries of ‘new man’ constructions and ‘respectable’ images of sporting bodies, suggesting that the deliberate, indelicate and delicious sexualisation of Beckham’s body derives its power from the ‘danger’ this presents to sporting masculinity as well as simply heterosexual masculinity. Thus we need ‘family, fatherhood’ and ‘football’ to anchor the ‘queer’ Beckham. Given these and more recent images (Vanity Fair cover in July 2004, for example), we might be tempted to agree with Cashmore and Parker and Whannel that Beckham is indeed a ‘postmodern’ or ‘hybrid’ celebrity, appearing singularly able to float free of context and to signify many different meanings to many different groups. But the brief examples of the queer/normative dynamic presented here suggest that this is too glib an answer, precisely because there seems to be an explicit recognition of this dynamic: the editor of GQ says of Beckham that ‘he is in touch with his feminine side, but he is so obviously heterosexual that he can afford to be’ (Hot Stars 2-8 Nov. 2002: 36-9). The deliberate induction of dissonance suggests a reflexivity about the constructedness of these representations; a knowing indication that queerying Beckham’s masculinity is not the reality of Beckham, but rather that the queerying is perhaps a hyper reality as Baudrillard might have it. Beckham does not float ‘free’: dialectical signs are precisely mapped onto him. Dyer argues that film stars could be read as signs for specific versions of individuality, but crucially, that these signs reflect the dominant ideological constructions of class, ethnicity and gender/sexuality. In one example, he demonstrates how the sexually transgressive and potentially lesbian elements of Jane Fonda’s star persona are recuperated through the emphasis on her nationality and ethnicity, her ‘all-Americanness’ (81). Similarly, Beckham’s queerness is deliberately deployed as a sign, to be neutralised by heterosexual signs, thus recuperating the ideological dominance of a heteronormative culture. Beckham’s masculinity can be read as a ‘sign’, divorced from traditional referents and re-marked into a queer sign, specifically to promote consumption through the heady mix of respected status and apparently exciting transgression as a key aspect of this status. But this is a simulation, not indicating any ‘real’ queering of either the subject, or indeed of the assumed audience who have to make sense of the sign. Rather, the potential to remark Beckham as ‘queer’ seems to indicate that whilst heterosexual masculinity can be a sign, so perhaps too does queer itself become a sign, similarly divorced from its traditional referents. The ‘reality’ is thus simulated through pre-determined codes of representation, and one such code seems to be that gender transgression is culturally significant. Dialectical signs are mapped onto a reality/hyper reality dynamic, with queerness presented knowingly as the hyper real – after all, the reality is that Beckham is ‘so obviously heterosexual…’ It is possible to argue that the dynamics at work in making these representations effective can be understood as dialectical since there are opposing momentums at work in the construction of celebrity and fame. The respect/ridicule dynamic demonstrates that constructions of celebrity cannot be uncritically deferential. The gentle and knowing ridicule is a collusion between the media(tors) and the audience: an indication that this relationship is the true romance of celebrity culture rather than that between fans and icons. And why should this be so? Precisely because the media needs to continue to feed the desires of the audience but there is no guarantee that the desire will continue when an icon’s star wanes – unless of course, watching the decline is as much part of the romance as building the respect. Marshall argues that celebrity legitimises the individuality central to the lock between consumer capitalism and liberal democracy and the respect/ridicule dynamic exemplifies this function. The necessary continuation of consumption produces a dialectical dynamic, wherein both respect and ridicule exist to permit easy shifts in emphasis whilst maintaining the attention on the celebrity, which promotes continued consumption. Beckham’s own demonisation and rehabilitation in the wake of France 98 testifies convincingly to the necessity for continuity of producing items for consumption, no matter what the spin. Furthermore, the recent scandals over alleged infidelities has generated a production spike in the amount of images and words produced, whilst this time, not directly attacking Beckham. The queer constructions of Beckham amplify respect/ridicule along a specific dimension, supplying a dialectic of its own. The modes of meaning surrounding Beckham do indicate a shift in the possible effective constructions of masculinity, with the incorporation of a feminised interest in fashion (hairstyles, nail varnish, presentation in general) and the affirmation of gay icon/object of desire. It is in these constructions of dissonance that the de-essentialising of masculinity occurs, which may be the productive moment of disruption for those receiving the images and texts, and incorporating them into their own meaning systems around Beckham, footballers, masculinities, heteronormativity. The fact that these queer moments are possible may be testament enough to Beckham’s social significance; he is in the right place at the right time (with the right body and profession) to be our cultural lightning conductor for contemporary anxieties around gender/sexuality. However, the dialectic of queering Beckham has a synthesis which suggests that the route into queerness is not as important as the route out. These are only fleeting materialisations of the queer David Beckham – flashes of fleshy dissonance glimpsed briefly before the recuperation into the heterosexual subject, coded by footie, family and fatherhood. The newer dissonant properties of masculinity are literally contextualised within ideological codes of heterosexuality. The evident theatricalisation and appropriation may appear to signal a productive route into queerness – from heterosexual to queer (the pink nail varnish, the oiled fashion shoots, the gay gym denim cut offs shot), but what if it is actually working in reverse? What if the cultural effectivity is achieved by appropriating and theatricalising from gay/transgender to heterosexual? – de-essentialising ‘queer’ for productive dissonance and amusement, but safe in the knowledge that there is a secure and policed route out of ‘queerness’ – the encoded red carpet of heterosexual masculinity. The possibilities of a queer visibility are thus denied through the recuperative effects of the dialectics at work. The ridiculing of his gender transgressions may be necessarily gentle, in order to walk the tightrope of respect/ridicule, but they nonetheless assume that transgressions are problematic. Furthermore, the reality/hyper reality dynamic deploys queer as a ‘sign’ precisely in order to effect a recuperation of a normative version of ‘reality’. It seems that the weight of a predominantly heteronormative culture reinforces the dialectics in celebrity culture, making the unproblematic visibility of queer subjects improbable. After all, in these examples – focused one on the world’s premier celebrities – ‘queer’ itself is not actually cool – it seems that only the simulation of queer is cool. Within contemporary fame, perhaps straight is really the new queer? References Cashmore, E. Beckham. 2nd ed. Oxford: Polity Press, 2004. Cashmore, E., and A. Parker. “One David Beckham? Celebrity, Masculinity and the Soccerati.” Sociology of Sport Journal 20.3 (2003): 214-31. Dyer, R. Stars. 2nd ed. London: BFI, 1998. Hall, S. “Encoding/Decoding.” Reprinted from original 1977 publication at Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Culture, Media, Language. Ed. S. Hall. London: Unwin Hyman, 1990. Marshall, P.D. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. London: U of Minneapolis P, 1997. Mort, F. “Boy’s Own? Masculinity, Style and Popular Culture.” Male Order. Unwrapping Masculinity. Eds. J. Chapman and J. Rutherford. London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1998. 193-224. Nixon, S. Hard Looks: Masculinities, Spectatorship and Contemporary Consumption. London: UCL Press, 1996. Rahman, M. “David Beckham as a Historical Moment in the Representation of Masculinity.” Labour History Review 69.2 (Aug. 2004): 219-34. Turner, G. Understanding Celebrity. London: Sage, 2004. Whannel, G. Media Sport Stars: Masculinities and Moralities. London: Routledge, 2002. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Rahman, Mohmin. "Is Straight the New Queer?: David Beckham and the Dialectics of Celebrity." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/15-rahman.php>. APA Style Rahman, M. (Nov. 2004) "Is Straight the New Queer?: David Beckham and the Dialectics of Celebrity," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/15-rahman.php>.

Through Andy Warhol, much important thinking about the meanings of celebrity for a capitalist, schizoid world takes place — by Andy, by his significant others (Pat Hackett, Bob Colacello, Brigid Berlin), and by the consumers and contemplators of his works. Both a source of his own observations and a screen on which philosophies are projected, Warhol presents an unparalleled critique of celebrity. Other horizontalities, such as Madonna’s, do not generate half the heat as Warhol’s own tendril-like intrusion into so many aspects of the media machine (music, publishing, modeling, painting, film-making, writing). Exchanging competence for breadth, Warhol follows Michel de Certeau’s critique of Freud in Heterologies: Discourse on the Other perfectly: he, too, makes a “conquista” of disciplines and practices outside his sphere of competence. Warhol’s comments with respect to actress Janet Gaynor’s paintings after her May 1976 opening at Manhattan’s Wally Findlay Gallery refer both to Gaynor and himself: “‘The paintings are so bad…but I bet they go up. Look how big she signs her name. It’s like buying an autograph and then you get the flowers thrown in, right?’” (Colacello 289). Comprehending the power of branding, Warhol grants autograph primacy over “autographed.” Factoring the art market into his aesthetics, Warhol founds his definition about what counts as art upon what counts as economics. Through him, business art truly comes into its own. Contemplating art suddenly means comprehending art’s social and financial contexts as well — as when, for example, Warhol ponders the absence of a black audience for his work: “Some blacks recognized me a few times this weekend, and I’m trying to figure out what they recognize so I can somehow sell it to them, whatever it is” (Diaries, Sunday 3 July 1977). Setting his own life up as a philosophical object, Warhol exemplifies astrophysics’ great question of how nothing can produce something. Fashion philosophe himself, he also answers fellow thinker Quentin Crisp’s important question about how “zero” becomes “one.” For both Warhol and Crisp, celebrity is founded upon the algebraic exchange of a positive quantity (fame) for a placeholding nonquantity (nonentity). In How to Have a Life-Style, Crisp traces his interest in the proliferative zero to the educative childhood lunchtime acquisition which first taught him the importance of spontaneous generation: One day, when I was lying as naked as the Greater London Council would allow on a few planks in the “life” room of Walthamstowe College of Art, a student came and sat beside me. It did not befit my station in life to begin a conversation with her. My supposition was that she wished less to be with me than in front of the only electric heater in the place. I was amazed when she asked me if I would like some of the chocolate that formed the “afters” of her instant lunch. I sat up at once. My limbs were galvanized, as though insulin had been pumped into my muscles, by the thought of getting something for nothing. The girl broke her slab of chocolate in two and handed me half. (3) For Crisp, the production of celebrity from nonentity echoes other unbalanced nonexchanges; concerned with similar economic aberrances, Warhol takes a related pleasure in the freak appearance of fame. Like Crisp, he also finds himself “galvanized” by the prospect of converting the null set into the productive series. Setting himself up as a “stargazer” (Stephen Koch’s epithet), Warhol makes it his project to reflect the fame of others, while using those reflections to garner fame for himself. Becoming a surface, Warhol makes fame a question of optics. Throughout the Diaries, we witness Warhol’s constant attention to his own appearance: “Got my live-in contacts but I can’t read or draw in them. Do they have bifocals you can wear with contacts? It’s so scary to wake up in the middle of the night and be able to see” (Tuesday 11 Aug. 1981). Normality is consistently painted in the fauve colors of the bizarre — in this quote, vision becomes a source of disorientation. Sight and unsight cross wires. Rather than facilitate the production of his art, ocular prostheses impede it — implying that he is a better artist when blind or half-sighted. Even odder is the fact that Warhol’s new contacts boost his performance as a model. That someone with so “off” an appearance should ever qualify as model material seems almost like a cruel insider joke (as in John Waters’ 1972 film Female Trouble, the repulsive is given new life as the gorgeous). Warhol had always been interested in modeling, though, as a 1968 photo shoot, “The Status Shirt Put On,” demonstrates. The caption reads: “Andy Warhol, right, garnishes velvet pants ($40, from Stone the Crows) with chains, belts and a lace-trimmed dinner shirt from Turnbull & Asser ($40, Bonwit Teller).” Situated at the confluence of status, fashion and chicanery, Warhol as putter-on emerges from his chrysalis as a model — someone meant to be looked at and emulated, a body meant to be run through the media machine and copied. As the Diaries draw to a close, Warhol’s modeling career provides him with his final cultural act: “In the morning I was preparing myself for my appearance in the fashion show Benjamin coordinated at the Tunnel. They’d sent the clothes over and I look like Liberace in them. Should I just go all the way and be the new Liberace? Snakeskin and rabbit fur. Julian Schnabel (laughs) would be so impressed he would start wearing them” (Tuesday 17 Feb. 1987). Bob Colacello is less than kind in his analysis of Warhol as model: Zoli did get him a couple of runway jobs and Daniela Morela put him in a L’Uomo Vogue spread jumping up and down with some other cute guys, but it was obvious that he was being used for his joke value. That October, Halston asked him to model in a Martha Graham charity fashion show as Bloomingdale’s. He didn’t appear until the end of the show, accompanied by Victor Hugo. His face was caked with makeup and he wore a voluminous royal blue taffeta smock with a big red bow around his neck. He looked like a cross between a clown and a Christmas present. Victor wore the same outfit in emerald green. As Andy minced down the runway, I could hear the ladies around me buzz. The words they used were weirdo, creep, and sissy. (442-3) Bursting Warhol’s balloon, and probably paying him back for countless episodes of personal humiliation, Colacello points out the strangeness of Warhol’s new career choice. Like so many other classes of people (old bags, debs), models pique Andy’s curiosity by virtue of their ontological freshness. In his Diaries, Warhol expresses a keen interest in model anthropology: how this new breed of human beings and these new workers comport themselves commands attention. Their language bemuses him: “Jerry Hall came by with a Halston model named Carol, and models just all talk that baby talk, the girls and the boys — you always know you’re talking to a model” (Wednesday 8 July 1981). Like all other industry-bound jargons, model talk emerges from a concrete set of practices and concerns. All creatures from the modeling industry seem to partake of its linguistic possibilities: “Went into the kitchen for coffee in the main house. Pat Cleveland was reading her Latin books and her mind-control books…She was after Jon, showing him how to walk like you have a dime up your ass and they did that well. She talks model talk. And she plays the flute. And she does yoga. All those things” (Saturday 11 July 1981). Generically distinct from other public creatures, models have their own enunciative staples and rules for structuring an utterance. Like Martians, they have their own unique mode of communicating. Ever interested in specificity, Warhol cannot help but be intrigued by the novelty of their speech; in its simplicity and in its constant juvenilization, their language mirrors his own. Saturated with Hollywoodisms, like “up-there” or “the kids,” Warhol’s vocabulary and syntax point to the existence of other linguistic subsystems and idioms. What matters most is the existence of what de Certeau refers to as a “way of operating,” a mode of getting around. Warhol’s fascination with celebrity species informs his own attention to his development over time. Reflecting important fashion debates of the decades he inhabits, Warhol makes his body a living record of all that transpires around it. As in Richard Avedon’s famous photograph of Warhol’s torso (Andy Warhol, Artist, New York City, 8/20/69), his body tells a story — in this instance, about Valerie Solanas’ rage and its traces. Warhol gets to know Warhol, recording his own oscillations in image: “Everyone tells me they like my hair this new way. I cut it every day. It’s almost a crewcut. Fred said I dress like the kids I hang around with now, he likes it. I guess the preppie look really is big because of the Preppie Handbook. I’m wearing all of Jed’s leftover clothes, the ones he left behind. I’m so skinny they fit me now” (Wednesday 8 July 1981). Warhol monitors his appearance with precision, never failing to provide his readers with the details of his transformation from one type to another. With almost an evolutionary sensibility, Warhol traces the development of new styles while also showing the effect they have on his own aesthetic of dressing. Inextricably immersed in time, Warhol gives in to its flows, which wash over him, carrying his body along with their currents. Similarly, he keeps meticulous track of styles of locomotion, as when, after a Twyla Tharp show, he comments: “The dancing, it’s a funny new kind of dancing, falling and tripping, and it looks like disco dancing. It looks like if you had a creative person on the disco floor, that they would do this (intermission drinks $10)” (Thursday, February 15, 1979). Using his early films, like Vinyl, to document dance styles, such as the frug, Warhol records different ways of posturing. He also documents the emergence of new social diseases: “The Donahue Show was on the flasher problem. This is a big important new problem, right? Men who flash. A wife and her husband who flashed were on, they were in the dark, and businessmen and lawyers who flashed” (Monday 28 July 1980). Within the hypermediated universe of capitalism, everything has its fifteen moments of fame, including problems. Ever the voyeur, Warhol makes note of new trends in exhibitionism, well aware that the job of the talk show is to fabricate and disseminate new fears (What do I do if my neighbor flashes me?, etc.). Fears, too, are commodities, as discussed by Barry Glossner in his The Culture of Fear. Alongside locomotionary styles and fashion creature Feynmann sums, anxieties wax and wane in popularity, produced, dissolved and eventually recycled by the media as products-of-the-week. Recognizing the new status of the media in everyday life, Warhol dedicates himself to recording its fluctuations for the purposes of fashion documentary, biography and contemplation. Positing glamour as a breakdown in the fashion system, Warhol offers a worldview in which the faux pas, the leftover and the mismatched forge an aesthetics of desperation. Warhol is the vehicle for fame. Through him, this abstract entity comes to know itself as such, realizing its possibilities through sensual and material objectification. References Books Colacello, Bob. Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up. New York: Cooper Square Press, 1990. Crisp, Quentin. How to Have a Life-Style. Los Angeles: Alyson Books, 1998. De Certeau, Michel. Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Glossner, Barry. The Culture of Fear. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Warhol, Andy. The Warhol Diaries. New York: Warner Books, 1989. ——— and Hackett, Pat. POPism: The Warhol Sixties. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980. Articles “The Status Shirt Put On.” Look. 12 Nov. 1968. Time Capsule –12. Films Warhol, Andy. Vinyl, 1965. Waters, John. Female Trouble. New Line Cinema, 1972. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Tata, Michael Angelo. "Beyond the Stars: Warholian Meta-Celebrity." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/11-tata.php>. APA Style Tata, M. (Nov. 2004) "Beyond the Stars: Warholian Meta-Celebrity," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/11-tata.php>.

Who would have thought so much activity and noise over stillness? According to the contributors of this issue of M/C Journal 'still' as phenomenon, state, pause, symbolic field or geopolitical struggle fizzes, vibrates and resonates. It hums; it makes one vulnerable; it draws one into the world differently and it accesses new agencies and movement. Or not. Such is the complexity of the topologies/ecologies and economies (in every sense of the word) of still. For us and our contributors, still is an intriguing theoretical figure that media-mobility-cultural studies and indeed, the world should attend to more closely, more slowly. Now is the time for what Andrew Murphie has called, "the revenge of the still". This collection is positioned within a world that has increasingly come to be understood through the theoretical and conceptual lens of animation. There are multiple overlapping antecedents to this, criss-crossing the humanities and social sciences. Metaphors of movement, from Manuel Castells’ space of flows to Zygmunt Bauman’s liquid modernity underpin much work within the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ (Sheller and Urry) that is interested in understanding the world through relations of movement and flux. Moving away from a sedentary metaphysics of being-in-the-world, burgeoning mobilities research illustrates a commitment to exploring the differentiated dynamics of a world increasingly characterised by networks of corporeal, virtual and imaginative mobilities. In a different but related vein, the ‘affective turn’ (Clough and Halley) has generated new ways of attending to the relations between bodies, technology and matter, through a renewed ontological focus on the pre-individual bodily forces that constitute life. Attending to the excessiveness of affect, matter is increasingly apprehended as processual, turbulent and fluid. Indeed it is through a sense of liveliness and energy within which worldly dwelling is increasingly conceptualised. Against this buzz of mobility and animation, a topology of stillness haunts the space of flows. Indeed mobility scholars have increasingly recognised the importance of considering the relational dialectic of mobilities and immobilities; or 'mobilities and moorings' to use John Urry's phrase; understanding how these relations are central, not only to the functioning of mobility systems, but how they have the capacity to generate the systematic inequalities that are such a significant (and indeed integral) part of such systems. Yet we want to suggest that to focus on such a dialectic of stasis and movement neglects other registers and modalities which still inhabits, where still emerges through other configurations of matter which are not necessarily reducible to the dialectic of mobility and immobility. What happens if we think stillness not only as rhythm, but also as technic or trope? As attunement or perception? As such, each paper in this collection attends to still through a range of different grammars and vocabularies; illuminating the multiplicity of ontological and epistemological registers through which still moves.For some in this collection, still emerges as a site of political and ethical potential. For Emma Cocker, the significance of collective acts of still have the capacity to augment the affectual capacity of the body. Here, experimental practices of still in the city constitute events of resistance that disrupt habitual modalities of inhabiting the city, producing fissures within which new lines of flight can emerge. Such deliberative attunement through collective practices of still produces an affirmative model of subjectivity; a challenge to the choking assemblages of governance that stratify bodies. Similarly, for Natalia Radwyl, the body’s affective intensities are enhanced and augmented through still. Still here works as a reflexive figure, serving to focus attention on how we are conditioned and desensitised by habitual rhythms of the everyday. In a rather different context, Sebastian Abrahamsson’s discussion of the still of Gunther van Hagen's plastinates also highlights how still enacts a mode of resistance, in this instance to the temporal organisational logics of modernity. Such an affirmative vitalism works to emphasise the presencing tendencies of still; how still enables bodies to become aware of the otherwise imperceptible rhythms, materialities and intensities that are more often than not subsumed beneath the hallucinatory effects of the dizzying flux of contemporary flows. We might consider this still as attunement where still provides the necessary conditions under which productive, focused activity can emerge. Greg Noble and Megan Watkins emphasise how such attunement in educational settings might be achieved through a particular set of corporeal postures characterised by still. Still here generates a more receptive body, enhancing a disposition towards learning. In a radically different context, Peter Adey describes how still functioned to prime the body in a variety of different ways during the air raids of World War II. Here the development of anticipatory structures of feeling through still formed part of a strategy of affectual management where achieving still was a means of survival. Others in this collection illustrate the problematics of aligning still with such affirmative presencing; the calling into being of a body. Paul Harrison considers the nature of agency and determination through an exploration of gestures of ‘suspension’, ‘decline’ and ‘remaining aside’. In the absence of wilful or effective action, where resolution is suspended, we are forced to rethink the morality of action and the persistent ‘telos of the political’ that is often assumed to inhabit action. For Harrison, far from constituting resignation or failure, this suspension of meaning and value in ‘remaining still’ exists as a condition of political possibility.Debbie Lisle too points to the radical incommensurability of still, where meaning stutters and fails. Her discussion of the still of photographic images thus problematises the assumption of the role of media to generate and transmit meaning. In a similar non-relational vein, J.-D. Dewsbury also problematises the assumption of a reflexive, intentional body, arguing that still invites us to consider the ‘neutral presence of life itself’. This is not the surrender to still that emerges through Radywyl’s discussion, rather it is the still point which brings bodies into being, and provides the conditions through which it is possible to comprehend as a body. This still not only promises a sensitivity to the susceptibility and vulnerability of corporeal being in the world, but also radically decentres the body from analysis; demonstrating an appreciation for an expanded repertoire of materialities. Shades of the post-human are evident in Ross Harley’s paper which considers the dynamic geometries brought about by a range of non-human materialities in the airport. Here it is only a spectre of the human that haunts these images which are instead inhabited by a world of hums, transparencies, lightwaves, luminosities and glows. Reworking the oft-invoked dualistic relation between the attentive body and inattentive spatiality, these ‘techno-veins and tendrils’ reach out and press into a body tending towards still. Indeed the stubborn obduracy of matter is also underlined by Nour Dados in her discussion on the endurance of the archive. Contrary to a corporeal emphasis, Adey also points to how still might be better apprehended as a sensibility distributed through ‘bodies, feelings, materials and atmospheres’. And yet this collection also warns us that we need to be attentive to the shadows of still; where still is seized upon and engineered by other forces - particularly through channels of authoritarian capitalism to great material and symbolic effect. Whilst still often denotes as a threat to neoliberal capitalism, for Sarah Sharma, even under conditions of capitalism disintegration, the inexorable power of capitalism is revealed through its wily recalibrations. The constraints placed on mobility during periods of capital restructuring open up new avenues of exploitation, which, when folded through sentimental, insular nationalist discourses culminates in an intoxicating profusion of moral responsibility to be still and an obedience to capitalism that only exacerbates socio-economic inequalities. Whilst remaining still is presented as a necessary consolation of the broken promises of capitalism, it also serves to illustrate the tensions that simmer between the impression of an agentive, autonomous individual taking charge of their situation, and the parallel still of the credulous ‘passenger’, swindled yet again by the overbearing affective and discursive power of capitalism. This echoes Cocker’s assertion of the power of capitalism to generate ‘sad affects’. Such a sinister manipulation of still also emerges through regimes of governmentality. For Andrew Murphie, still has always been and remains a powerful ‘technic of modernity’, which has the capacity to coerce, organise and stratify bodies in harmful ways that reduce their potential for action. In contrast to vitalist-inspired literature that explores how corporeal limits can be transcended affectually and materially through various configurations of practical activity, coerced still can push bodies to limits in ways that diminish their potentials. Here, still can inflict wounds, tear and break down the body, reducing its capacity to act. In a similar vein, for Nicholas Gill, still emerges as a crucial tool of political strategy to organise and arrange asylum seekers’ bodies.But in attending to still, are we merely just reversing the glamour of animation? World-weary with the dizzying effect that chasing movement induces, have we become self-effacing post-humanists, taking respite by languishing in the resignation and reprive that tending to still might offer? Does still offer an escapist fantasy from the hell of constant commodified and complicit motion, as Cocker asks? Or in tending to still are we just acknowledging the failure and fallout, not only of systems and networks, but also of representational, symbolic and discursive systems? There are certainly many suggestions that we need to slow down. Indeed many writers have draw attention to the epistemic problematic associated with the impulse to relentlessly move conceptual understandings beyond; a drive that is often characteristic of academic practice. An unremitting desire to put things in the 'post-'. The implication here is that speed, and the resulting displacement, as a particular characteristic of engagement does not provide the space for a sustained involvement within - or sufficient reflection through - worldly phenomena. Decisions and interventions made too hastily, where the unabating power of affect curtails apparently sensible, reflective dispositions, are often condemned for being overly reactive, partisan or thoughtless. Here, still is related to tropes of mindfulness, contemplation and responsibility where an enhanced, attuned ethical sensibility is forged out of a suspension of judgement. Still might enable composure and provide the conditions through which a responsibility towards depth and detail can emerge.Whilst there certainly might be inflections of each of these suggestions, this collection does not proffer a critique of hyper-mobility.Indeed reflection on recent catastrophic events illuminates how the ‘still’ aligned with inaction is often taken to be ethically scandalous, not to mention politically disastrous. No writer in this collection evidences an urge to simply escape, transcend or withdraw from the liveliness of being-in-the-world. Still is not a state or place of escape. It is not introspective or purposefully deferential. Still here is resolutely not about the wilful invitation of an 'agency to come' in the words of Harrison. Whilst each of these papers works to undo the pejorative associations with indolence and laziness that so often accretes around paranoiac renderings of still, equally they do not advocate that still should be put to work to generate productive, purposive activity.Yes, still can be optimised, engineered, governed. But is is the radical aporia that still presents which gives it its significance to our thinking. Taken together, what this collection demonstrates is a sensitivity to still as a relation-to-the-world that moves beyond the dualisms of mobility and immobility; activity and inactivity without transcending them. The promise of still is a particular mode of engagement with a world that rearranges intensities, folds through the vital and the vulnerable, providing a new set of political and ethical concerns.Is there a still that is still? Is still to cultural studies what God might be to the process philosophy of Alfred Whitehead. If as Paul Harrison suggests still can be thought of as a theoretical figure without value - a condition of political possibility in all forms, then there is much value in this lack of value as it produces a still that is neither immanent nor transcendent but which provides a new mode of 'coherence' through which we might explore the flux of the world.AcknowledgementsWe would like to take this opportunity to thank each of the contributors for making this issue sparkle. We would like to extent our debt of gratitude to the referees for providing such thoughtful, detailed and helpful commentaries on each of the papers. We would also like to thank Elly Clarke, our cover artist, for providing such a pertinent image to front our collection.ReferencesBauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity P, 2000.Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996Clough, Patricia, and Jean Halley. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham: Duke U P, 2007.Sheller, Mimi, and John Urry. "The New Mobilities Paradigm." Environment and Planning A 38.2 (2006): 207-226.Urry, John. Global Complexity. Cambridge: Polity P, 2003.

There are three stages in internet dating: first, the emailing back and forth; second, the phone conversation; and third, the meeting for 'coffee'. But before we discuss the three stages, here are some hints about the preliminary work you have to do. At the outset, you have to trawl through the thousands of people who have placed their profiles on the site. This is aided by limiting your search to a certain age spread, and your city or region. Then you can narrow it down further by checking educational background, whether they have kids, whether they write in New Age jargon, etc You have to try to assess, from their self-descriptions, which ones are likely to be compatible. You also scrutinise their photos, of course, as they will yours — but don't trust these images entirely — more on that later. Self-description. Almost without exception, women and men who describe their main interests as 'romantic walks on the beach and candle-lit dinners' have no real interests and as much personality as a lettuce. Those who say what matters to them is "good food and wine with a classy guy/lady" have a personality, but it's a repugnant one. Here is a useful binary opposition that could provide a useful key to gauging compatibility: people vary in terms of their degree of interiority and exteriority. People with interiority have the ability to think a little abstractly, can discuss emotions, probably read books as well as watch films. They analyse life rather than just describing it. People mainly given to exteriority find their pleasure in doing things — like boating or nightclubs or golf. They see themselves in the world in a different way. Of course, we are all a mixture of the two — and perhaps the best bet is someone who isn't at one extreme end of the spectrum or the other. Useful tip 1. The 'spiritual woman': for reasons unclear, and despite the fact that Australia is one of the most pagan nations on Earth, a disproportionate number of women, rather than men, claim to be religious. Perhaps because in general, women are still more inclined to interiority than men. But most religious women don't expect a partner to be. Instead, the people to be very careful about are the New Agers — they are a large and growing sub-group and apparently spend much of their time devouring books on spirituality, personal growth and self-love. If you have any sort of intellect, or are just a middling humanist who occasionally ponders "Is this all there is? " these people will drive you nuts with their vague platitudes about knowing their inner child. On the other hand, if they seem terrific in all other respects, you can probably gain their respect by saying in a reflective manner, "Is this all there is?" If you can arrange to be gazing at the star-stained night sky while saying this, all the better. This may seem calculating, but we are all putting on a performance when courting. A lot of single people have self-esteem and loneliness issues, and a personal God, the universe, and astrology make them feel less lonely. Useful tip 2: say that although you don't subscribe to mainstream religion, you feel close to some kind of spirituality when gardening — and add how you love to plant herbs. Some okay herbs to mention are: Rosemary, Thyme, Sage. Chuck a couple of these weed-like green things in your garden just in case. Useful tip 3: no matter what else you do, at all costs avoid anyone who smacks of fundamentalism. This cohort takes the Bible literally, think dinosaurs roamed the planet only a few years before Shakespeare, want gay people to admit they are an abomination - and above all, fundos cannot be reasoned with — not in your lifetime. They are deeply insecure and frightened people — which is sad, so be sympathetic to their plight - but don't get drawn into the vortex. Besides, talking about the approach of Armageddon every date gets a bit tedious. Education: It is usually best to pick someone who has an approximately similar level of education to yourself. Having a tertiary education often gives a person a different way of seeing themselves, and of perceiving others. On the other hand, it is possible to do a five year degree in a narrow professional area and know nothing at all useful about human beings and how they operate. (Ref: engineers, dentists, gynaecologists). There are high school graduates who are better-read and more intelligent than most products of a university. So it is up to the individual case. It is a plus to be interested in your partner's work, but not essential. It can be a minus to be in the same field. Ask yourself this: if you were living with this person and you asked them at night how their day had been, would the answer send you to sleep in less than a minute? A lovely man or woman who is an accountant will likely wax lyrical about having just discovered a $245 error in a billing data base. Their face will be flushed with pride. Can your respond appropriately? How often? Or the love of your life may work in an oncology ward, and regale you with the daily triumph of removing sputum from the chests of the moribund. Are you strong enough for that? And worst of all, you may go out with a writer or poet, who regularly drones on about how their rival always gets friendly reviews from his/her newspaper mates, even though they write books full of derivative, precious crap. Sense of humour (SOH): Most men and women will claim in their profile to have a sense of humour — to love to laugh — and, surprisingly often, to have a 'wicked sense of humour'. This is a difficult personal quality to get a bearing on. You may yourself be the kind of person who tricks themselves into thinking their date has a great sense of humour simply because they laughed at your jokes. That is not having a SOH. Having a SOH is possessing the ability to make others laugh — it is active as well as passive. Do they make you laugh? Are their emails touched with wit and whimsy — or just shades of cute? Is one of their close friends, the one who actually possesses a SOH, helping write their emails? It has been known to happen. You will gain a better sense of the SOH situation during the phone call, and definitely during the coffee. Interests: Most internet websites give people the chance to describe themselves by jotting down their favourite music, books, movies, sport. Often this is pretty much all you will know about what interests them, and it is an imperfect instrument. Many internet dating women say they like all music except heavy metal. Why there is this pervasive, gut-wrenching female fear of the E, A and B chords played loudly is a mystery. Anyway, some of those bands even throw in a G or C#m. But who cares. If you are a bloke, hide your Acca Dacca CDs and buy some world music CDs. New Agers of either sex will have collections full of warbling pan pipes, waterfalls and bird calls. If they are a great person in other respects, then you'll just have to get used to the flock of magpies and whip birds in the dining or bedroom. Photographs: Now, the photo on the profile is only a vague guide. It is useful for confirming the person belongs to homo sapiens, but not a lot else. Some people get a professional pic taken, but most include happy snaps, and that is a blow struck for candidness. The more the photo looks like a "glamour" shot, the softer the focus, the less reliable it is. You can get some idea of whether someone is attractive, handsome, cute or weird from the photo. But — and this is really important — they will always look different in the flesh. They will have grown a beard, cut or streaked their hair, and you will for the first time notice they have a nose the size of the AMP building. Fortunately for men, though women are not oblivious to the looks factor, they tend to be more tolerant and less shallow about it. There is a recent trend for women and men with children to put he most attractive and least manic one in the profile photo with them. This signifies: a) love me, love my kid, because I'm proud of James/Jessica/Jade; b) family values; c) at least my kid only has one head. Stage One. The first stage is in some ways the most enjoyable. It is low risk, low stress, you have the pleasurable experience of a comfortable adventure. There is anticipation, getting to know someone, being complimented on your fascinating emails and witty humour (if it's going well), and all the while wearing an old t-shirt and dirty, checked shorts or fluffy slippers. There is the extreme luxury of re-inventing yourself, of telling your favourite story (your own life-story) again and again to a new audience, the little joys of self-disclosures, the discoveries of like-interests, the occasion when they add at the bottom of their letter "looking forward to hearing from you soon". The writing stage is where you try to establish whether you have intellectual, emotional and cultural compatibility — and whether the person is sincere and relatively well-balanced (I stress 'relatively' — no one is perfect). The discovery process is one of exchanging increasingly personal information — work history, enthusiasms and dislikes, family background. She will want to know whether you are 'over' your last girlfriend/partner/wife. Not surprisingly. A lot of internet men are still bitter about their ex — either that, or they rave on about the saintliness of their ex. If encouraged, women will also tell you about the bastard who refused to pay maintenance. There are clearly a lot of those bastards out there. Both of these practices are unwise on the first coffee if you don't want to scare your potential partner off. In reality, you probably are still seething with hurt and injustice as a result of your last dumping, and maybe even the one before that. You may lie in bed at night thinking nostalgically of your ex's face — but this is a dark secret which you must never reveal. People will ask you to be open, but they don't want that open. Involve your friends: without exception, your close friends will enjoy being part of the process when you are deciding which men or women to contact on the internet. You first make a long short list by browsing through the hundreds of profiles. Print off those profiles, then get your friends to sort through them with you. If you have experience in being on selection panels for jobs, this will help. It is a quite complex matter of weighing up a whole range of variables. For example, candidate A will be gorgeous and sexy, have compatible interests, bearable taste in music, be the right age, but have two small children and live on the other side of town. Candidate B will be less attractive, but still look pretty good, have no children, and a very interesting job. Candidate C will be attractive, have two teenage children with whom he/she shares custody, a worthy but dull job, but seems to have an especially self-aware and witty personality. It's tough work rating these profiles, and the best you can do is whittle them down to a top three, and write to all of them. In the emailing stage, you will get more data to either enhance or diminish their desirability. And remember, no one is perfect: if you find someone with a beautiful brain and body who loves Celine Dion — just put up with it. As Buddhists point out, suffering cannot be avoided if you are to live a full life. But let your friends help you with that selection process — they will remind you of important issues that somehow escape your attention; such as: you really don't like other people's children in reality, just in theory. The last time you went out with someone who was newly broken up or divorced he/she hadn't got over his/her girlfriend/husband. Anyone who describes themselves as a 'passionate playmate' is probably unbalanced and tries to find male/female acceptance through over-sexualising or infantalising themselves. It means nothing that someone describes their children as "beautiful" — all mothers/fathers think that, even of the most ghastly, moronic offspring. You really don't like nightclubs any more and you are an awkward dancer. The last time you fell in love with, and tried to rescue, someone with serious emotional 'issues', it led to unimaginable misery, and you swore in future to leave such rescues to the professionals. And so on. Listen to your friends — they know you. And your bad choices impinge on their lives too. Writing is a powerful means of constructing a 'self' to project to others. There is a Thomas Hardy story about a young man who meets a beautiful girl at a fair — but he must return to London. They agree to write to each other. Only the beautiful girl is illiterate, so she asks her employer, an older woman, to ghost-write her love letters to the young man, and the employer kindly agrees. The young man falls in love with the soul and mind of the sensitive and intelligent writer of the letters and assumes the beautiful young girl has authored them. The employer also falls in love with him through his letters. Only on the day he marries the girl does he discover that he has married the wrong woman. This tale tells us about the richness of the written word, but it omits an important point — you can be intrigued and drawn to someone through his or her e-mails, but find on meeting him or her that there is no chemistry at all. Works Cited This creative non-fiction article was based on primary research. The largest Australian internet dating service is RSVP (www.rsvp.com.au). I mainly used that for my research and ensuing coffees/participant observation. There are other sites I checked out, including: www.datenet.com.au www.AussieMatchMaker.com.au www.findsomeone.com.au www.VitalPartners.com.au www.personals.yahoo.com.au There are also internet dating site guides such as: www.shoptheweb.com.au/dating.shtml www.theinternetdatingguide.com www.moonlitwalks.com www.singlesites.com/Australian_Dating.htm Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Neilsen, Philip. "An extract from 'The Internet of Love'" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.6 (2002). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/internet.php>. APA Style Neilsen, P., (2002, Nov 20). An extract from "The Internet of Love". M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 5,(6). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/internet.html

IntroductionThis article suggests extensions to the place of ‘national collections’ of Australia’s migration histories, and considers the role of regional libraries and museums in collecting, preserving, and making accessible the history of migration. The article describes a recent collaboration between the Bonegilla Migrant Experience site, the Albury LibraryMuseum and the regionally-based Charles Sturt University (CSU) to develop a virtual, three-dimensional tour of Bonegilla, a former migrant arrival centre. Through this, the role of regional collections as keeping places of migration memories and narratives outside of those institutions charged with preserving the nation’s memory is highlighted and explored.What Makes a Nation’s Memory?In 2018 the Australian Research Council (ARC) awarded a Linkage grant to a collaboration between two universities (RMIT and Deakin), and the National Library of Australia, State Library of South Australia, State Library of Victoria, and State Library of New South Wales titled “Representing Multicultural Australia in National and State Libraries” (LP170100222). This Linkage project aimed to “develop a new methodology for evaluating multicultural collections, and new policies and strategies to develop and provide access to these collections” (RMIT Centre for Urban Research).One planned output of the Linkage project was a conference, to be held in early 2019, titled “Collecting for a Society’s Memory: National and State Libraries in Culturally Diverse Societies.” The conference call for papers suggested themes that included an interrogation of the relationship between libraries and ‘the collecting sector’, but with a focus still on National and State Libraries (Boyd). As an aside, the correlation between libraries and memories seemed slightly incongruous here, as archives and museums in particular would also be key in this collecting (and preserving) society’s memory, and also the libraries that exist outside of the national and state capitals.It felt like the project and conference had a definite ‘national’ focus, with the ‘regional’ mentioned only briefly in a suggested theme.At the same time that I was reading this call for papers and about the Linkage, I was part of a CSU Learning and Teaching project to develop online learning materials for students in our Teacher Education programs (history in particular) based around the Bonegilla Migrant Arrival Centre in Wodonga, Victoria. This project uses three-dimensional film technology to bring students to the Centre site, where they can take an interactive, curriculum-based tour of the site. Alongside the interactive online tour, a series of curricula were developed to work with the Australian History Curriculum. I wondered why community-led collections like these in the regions fall to the side in discussions of a ‘national’ (aka institutional) memory, or as part of a representation of a multicultural Australia, such as in this Linkage.Before I start exploring this question I want to acknowledge the limitations of the ARC Linkage framework in terms of the project mentioned above, and that the work that is being done in the “Representing Multicultural Australia in National and State Libraries” project is of value to professional practice and community; in this article I am using the juxtaposition of the two projects as an impetus to interrogate the role of regional collaboration, and to argue for a notion of national memory as a regional collecting concern.Bonegilla: A Contested SiteFrom 1947 through to 1971 over 300,000 migrants to Australia passed through the Bonegilla Migrant Reception and Training Centre (“Bonegilla”) at a defining time in Australia’s immigration history, as post-World War II migration policies encompassed non-English speaking Europeans displaced by the war (Pennay "Remembering Bonegilla" 43). Bonegilla itself is a small settlement near the Hume Dam, 10 km from the New South Wales town of Albury and the Victorian town of Wodonga. Bonegilla was a former Army Camp repurposed to meet the settlement agendas of multiple Australian governments.New migrants spent weeks and months at Bonegilla, learning English, and securing work. The site was the largest (covering 130 hectares of land) and longest-lasting reception centre in post-war Australia, and has been confirmed bureaucratically as nationally significant, having been added to the National Heritage Register in 2007 (see Pennay “Remembering Bonegilla” for an in-depth discussion of this listing process). Bonegilla has played a part in defining and redefining Australia’s migrant and multicultural history through the years, with Bruce Pennay suggesting thatperhaps Bonegilla has warranted national notice as part of an officially initiated endeavour to develop a more inclusive narrative of nation, for the National Heritage List was almost contemporaneously expanded to include Myall Creek. Perhaps it is exemplary in raising questions about the roles of the nation and the community in reception and training that morph into modern day equivalents. (“Memories and Representations” 46)Given its national significance, both formally and colloquially, Bonegilla has provided rich material for critical thinking around, for example, Australian multicultural identity, migration commemorations and the construction of cultural memory. Alexandra Dellios argues that Bonegilla and its role in Australia’s memory is a contested site, and thatdespite criticisms from historians such as Persian and Ashton regarding Bonegilla’s adherence to a revisionist narrative of multicultural progress, visitor book comments, as well as exchanges and performances at reunions and festivals, demonstrate that visitors take what they will from available frameworks, and fill in the ‘gaps’ according to their own collective memories, needs and expectations. (1075)This recognition of Bonegilla as a significant, albeit “heritage noir” (Pennay, “Memories and Representations” 48), agent of Australia’s heritage and memory makes it a productive site to investigate the question of regional collections and collaborations in constructing a national memory.Recordkeeping: By Government and CommunityThe past decade has seen a growth in the prominence of community archives as places of memory for communities (for example Flinn; Flinn, Stevens, and Shepherd; Zavala et al.). This prominence has come through the recognition of community archives as both valid sites of study as well as repositories of memory. In turn, this body of knowledge has offered new ways to think about collection practices outside of the mainstream, where “communities can make collective decisions about what is of enduring value to them, shape collective memory of their own pasts, and control the means through which stories about their past are constructed” (Caswell, Cifor, and Ramirez 58). Jimmy Zavala, and colleagues, argue that these collections “challenge hierarchical structures of governance found in mainstream archival institutions” (212), and offer different perspectives to those kept on the official record. By recognising both the official record and the collections developed and developing outside of official repositories, there are opportunities to deepen understandings and interpretations of historical moments in time.There are at least three possible formal keeping places of memories for those who passed through, worked at, or lived alongside Bonegilla: the National Archives of Australia, the Albury LibraryMuseum in Albury, New South Wales, and the Bonegilla Migrant Experience site itself outside of Wodonga. There will of course be records in other national, state, local, and community repositories, along with newspaper articles, people’s homes, and oral lore that contribute to the narrative of Bonegilla memories, but the focus for this article are these three key sites as the main sources of primary source material about the Bonegilla experience.Official administrative and organisational records of activity during Bonegilla’s reception period are held at the National Archives of Australia in the national capital, Canberra; these records contribute to the memory of Bonegilla from a nation-state perspective, building an administrative record of the Centre’s history and of a significant period of migration in Australia’s past. Of note, Bonegilla was the only migrant centre that created its own records on site, and these records form part of the series known as NAA: A2567, NAA A2571 1949–56 and A2572 1957–71 (Hutchison 70). Records of local staff employed at the site will also be included in these administrative files. Very few of these records are publicly accessible online, although work is underway to provide enhanced online and analogue access to the popular arrival cards (NAA A2571 1949-56 and A2572 1957–71) onsite at Bonegilla (Pennay, personal communication) as they are in high demand by visitors to the site, who are often looking for traces of themselves or their families in the official record. The National Archives site Destination Australia is an example of an attempt by the holder of these administrative records to collect personal stories of this period in Australia’s history through an online photograph gallery and story register, but by 2019 less than 150 stories have been published to the site, which was launched in 2014 (National Archives of Australia).This national collection is complemented and enhanced by the Bonegilla Migration Collection at the Albury LibraryMuseum in southern New South Wales, which holds non-government records and memories of life at Bonegilla. This collection “contains over 20 sustained interviews; 357 personal history database entries; over 500 short memory pieces and 700 photographs” (Pennay “Memories and Representations” 45). It is a ‘live’ collection, growing through contributions to the Bonegilla Personal History Register by the migrants and others who experienced the Centre, and through an ongoing relationship with the current Bonegilla Migrant Experience site to act as a collection home for their materials.Alongside the collection in the LibraryMuseum, there is the collection of infrastructure at the Bonegilla Migrant Experience (BME) site itself. These buildings and other assets, and indeed the absence of buildings, plus the interpretative material developed by BME staff, give further depth and meaning to the lived experience of post-war migration to Australia. Whilst both of these collections are housed and managed by local government agencies, I suggest in this article that these collections can still be considered community archives, given the regional setting of the collections, and the community created records included in the collections.The choice to locate Bonegilla in a fairly isolated regional setting was a strategy of the governments of the time (Persian), and in turn has had an impact on how the site is accessed; by who, and how often (see Dellios for a discussion of the visitor numbers over the history of the Bonegilla Migrant Experience over its time as a commemorative and tourist site). The closest cities to Bonegilla, Albury and Wodonga, sit on the border of New South Wales and Victoria, separated by the Murray River and located 300 km from Melbourne and 550 km from Sydney. The ‘twin towns’ work collaboratively on many civic activities, and are an example of a 1970s-era regional development project that in the twenty-first century is still growing, despite the regional setting (Stein 345).This regional setting justifies a consideration of virtual, and online access to what some argue is a site of national memory loaded with place-based connections, with Jayne Persian arguing that “the most successful forays into commemoration of Bonegilla appear to be website-based and institution-led” (81). This sentiment is reflected in the motivation to create further online access points to Bonegilla, such as the one discussed in this article.Enhancing Teaching, Learning, and Public Access to CollectionsIn 2018 these concepts of significant heritage sites, community archives, national records, and an understanding of migration history came together in a regionally-based Teaching and Learning project funded through a CSU internal grant scheme. The scheme, designed to support scholarship and enhance learning and teaching at CSU, funded a small pilot project to pilot a virtual visit to a real-life destination: the Bonegilla Migrant Experience site. The project was designed to provide key teaching and learning material for students in CSU Education courses, and those training to teach history in particular, but also enhance virtual access to the site for the wider public.The project was developed as a partnership between CSU, Albury LibraryMuseum, and Bonegilla Migrant Experience, and formalised through a Memorandum of Understanding with shared intellectual property. The virtual visit includes a three-dimensional walkthrough created using Matterport software, intuitive navigation of the walkthrough, and four embedded videos linked with online investigation guides. The site is intended to help online visitors ‘do history’ by locating and evaluating sources related to a heritage site with many layers and voices, and whose narrative and history is contested and told through many lenses (Grover and Pennay).As you walk through the virtual site, you get a sense of the size and scope of the Migrant Arrival Centre. The current Bonegilla Migrant Experience site sits at Block 19, one of 24 blocks that formed part of the Centre in its peak time. The guiding path takes you through the Reception area and then to the ‘Beginning Place’, a purpose built interpretative structure that “introduces why people came to Australia searching for a new beginning” (Bonegilla site guide). Moving through, you pass markers on the walls and other surfaces that link through to further interpretative materials and investigation guides. These guides are designed to introduce K-10 students and their teachers to practices such as exploring online archives and thematic inquiry learning aligned to the Australian History Curriculum. Each guide is accompanied by teacher support material and further classroom activities.The guides prompt and guide visitors through an investigation of online archives, and other repositories, including sourcing files held by the National Archives of Australia, searching for newspaper accounts of controversial events through the National Library of Australia’s digital repository Trove, and access to personal testimonies of migrants and refugees through the Albury LibraryMuseum Bonegilla Migration Collection. Whilst designed to support teachers and students engaging with the Australian History Curriculum, these resources are available to the public. They provide visitors to the virtual site an opportunity to develop their own critical digital literacy skills and further their understanding of the official records along with the community created records such as those held by the Albury LibraryMuseum.The project partnership developed from existing relationships between cultural heritage professionals in the Albury Wodonga region along with new relationships developed for technology support from local companies. The project also reinforced the role of CSU, with its regional footprint, in being able to connect and activate regionally-based projects for community benefit along with teaching and learning outcomes.Regional CollaborationsLiz Bishoff argues for a “collaboration imperative” when it comes to the galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM) sector’s efficacy, and it is the collaborative nature of this project that I draw on in this article. Previous work has also suggested models of convergence, where multiple institutions in the GLAM sector become a single institution (Warren and Matthews 3). In fact the Albury LibraryMuseum is an example of this model. These converged models have been critiqued from resourcing, professionalisation and economic perspectives (see for example Jones; Hider et al.; Wellington), but in some cases for local government agencies especially, they are an effective way of delivering services to communities (Warren and Matthews 9). In the case of this virtual tour, the collaboration between local government and university agencies was temporal for the length of the project, where the pooling of skills, resources, and networks has enabled the development of the resource.In this project, the regional setting has allowed and taken advantage of an intimacy that I argue may not have been possible in a metropolitan or urban setting. The social intimacies of regional town living mean that jobs are often ‘for a long time (if not for life)’, lives intersect in more than a professional context, and that because there are few pathways or options for alternative work opportunities in the GLAM professions, there is a vested interest in progress and success in project-based work. The relationships that underpinned the Bonegilla virtual tour project reflect many of these social intimacies, which included former students, former colleagues, and family relationships.The project has modelled future strategies for collaboration, including open discussions about intellectual property created, the auspicing of financial arrangements and the shared professional skills and knowledge. There has been a significant enhancement of collaborative partnerships between stakeholders, along with further development of professional and personal networks.National Memories: Regional ConcernsThe focus of this article has been on records created about a significant period in Australia’s migration history, and the meaning that these records hold based on who created them, where they are held, and how they are accessed and interpreted. Using the case study of the development of a virtual tour of a significant site—Bonegilla—I have highlighted the value of regional, non-national collections in providing access to and understanding of national memories, and the importance of collaborative practice to working with these collections. These collections sit physically in the regional communities of Albury and Wodonga, along with at the National Archives of Australia in Canberra, where they are cared for by professional staff across the GLAM sector and accessed both physically and virtually by students, researchers, and those whose lives intersected with Bonegilla.From this, I argue that by understanding national and institutional recordkeeping spaces such as the National Archives of Australia as just one example of a place of ‘national memory’, we can make space for regional and community-based repositories as important and valuable sources of records about the lived experience of migration. Extending this further, I suggest a recognition of the role of the regional setting in enabling strong collaborations to make these records visible and accessible.Further research in this area could include exploring the possibility of giving meaning to the place of record creation, especially community records, and oral histories, and how collaborations are enabling this. In contrast to this question, I also suggest an exploration of the role of the Commonwealth staff who created the records during the period of Bonegilla’s existence, and their social and cultural history, to give more meaning and context to the setting of the currently held records.ReferencesBishoff, Liz. “The Collaboration Imperative.” Library Journal 129.1 (2004): 34–35.Boyd, Jodie. “Call for Papers: Collecting for a Society’s Memory: National and State Libraries in Culturally Diverse Societies.” 2018. 1 Apr. 2019 <https://networks.h-net.org/node/73374/announcements/2079324/collecting-society%E2%80%99s-memory-national-and-state-libraries>.Caswell, Michelle, Marika Cifor, and Mario H. Ramirez. “‘To Suddenly Discover Yourself Existing': Uncovering the Impact of Community Archives.” The American Archivist 79.1 (2016): 56–81.Dellios, Alexandra. “Marginal or Mainstream? Migrant Centres as Grassroots and Official Heritage.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 21.10 (2015): 1068–83.Flinn, Andrew. “Community Histories, Community Archives: Some Opportunities and Challenges.” Journal of the Society of Archivists 28.2 (2007): 151–76.Flinn, Andrew, Mary Stevens, and Elizabeth Shepherd. “Whose Memories, Whose Archives? Independent Community Archives, Autonomy and the Mainstream.” Archival Science 9.1–2 (2009): 71.Grover, Paul, and Bruce Pennay. “Learning & Teaching Grant Progress Report.” Albury Wodonga: Charles Sturt U, 2019.Hider, Philip, Mary Anne Kennan, Mary Carroll, and Jessie Lymn. “Exploring Potential Barriers to Lam Synergies in the Academy: Institutional Locations and Publishing Outlets.” The Expanding LIS Education Universe (2018): 104.Hutchison, Mary. “Accommodating Strangers: Commonwealth Government Records of Bonegilla and Other Migrant Accommodation Centres.” Public History Review 11 (2004): 63–79.Jones, Michael. “Innovation Study: Challenges and Opportunities for Australia’s Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums.” Archives & Manuscripts 43.2 (2015): 149–51.National Archives of Australia. “Snakes in the Laundry... and Other Horrors”. Canberra, 29 May 2014. <http://www.naa.gov.au/about-us/media/media-releases/2014/25.aspx>.Pennay, Bruce. “‘But No One Can Say He Was Hungry’: Memories and Representations of Bonegilla Reception and Training Centre.” History Australia 9.1 (2012): 43–63.———. “Remembering Bonegilla: The Construction of a Public Memory Place at Block 19.” Public History Review 16 (2009): 43–63.Persian, Jayne. “Bonegilla: A Failed Narrative.” History Australia 9.1 (2012): 64–83.RMIT Centre for Urban Research. “Representing Multicultural Australia in National and State Libraries”. 2018. 11 Feb. 2019 <http://cur.org.au/project/representing-multicultural-australia-national-state-libraries/>.Stein, Clara. “The Growth and Development of Albury-Wodonga 1972–2006: United and Divided.” Macquarie U, 2012.Warren, Emily, and Graham Matthews. “Public Libraries, Museums and Physical Convergence: Context, Issues, Opportunities: A Literature Review Part 1.” Journal of Librarianship and Information Science (2018): 1–14.Wellington, Shannon. “Building Glamour: Converging Practice between Gallery, Library, Archive and Museum Entities in New Zealand Memory Institutions.” Wellington: Victoria U, 2013.Zavala, Jimmy, Alda Allina Migoni, Michelle Caswell, Noah Geraci, and Marika Cifor. “‘A Process Where We’re All at the Table’: Community Archives Challenging Dominant Modes of Archival Practice.” Archives and Manuscripts 45.3 (2017): 202–15.

The brand began, quite literally, as a method for ranchers to identify their cattle. By burning a distinct symbol into the hide of a baby calf, the owner could insure that if it one day wandered off his property or was stolen by a competitor, he’d be able to point to that logo and claim the animal as his rightful property. When the manufacturers of products adopted the brand as a way of guaranteeing the quality of their goods, its function remained pretty much the same. Buying a package of oats with the Quaker label meant the customer could trace back these otherwise generic oats to their source. If there was a problem, he knew where he could turn. More important, if the oats were of satisfactory or superior quality, he knew where he could get them again. Trademarking a brand meant that no one else could call his oats Quaker. Advertising in this innocent age simply meant publicizing the existence of one’s brand. The sole objective was to increase consumers awareness of the product or company that made it. Those who even thought to employ specialists for the exclusive purpose of writing ad copy hired newspaper reporters and travelling salesmen, who knew how to explain the attributes of an item in words that people tended to remember. It wasn’t until 1922 that a preacher and travelling “medicine show” salesman-turned-copywriter named Claude Hopkins decided that advertising should be systematized into a science. His short but groundbreaking book Scientific Advertising proposed that the advertisement is merely a printed extension of the salesman¹s pitch and should follow the same rules. Hopkins believed in using hard descriptions over hype, and text over image: “The more you tell, the more you sell” and “White space is wasted space” were his mantras. Hopkins believed that any illustrations used in an ad should be directly relevant to the product itself, not just a loose or emotional association. He insisted on avoiding “frivolity” at all costs, arguing that “no one ever bought from a clown.” Although some images did appear in advertisements and on packaging as early as the 1800s - the Quaker Oats man showed up in 1877 - these weren¹t consciously crafted to induce psychological states in customers. They were meant just to help people remember one brand over another. How better to recall the brand Quaker than to see a picture of one? It wasn’t until the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, as Americans turned toward movies and television and away from newspapers and radio, that advertisers’ focus shifted away from describing their brands and to creating images for them. During these decades, Midwestern adman Leo Burnett concocted what is often called the Chicago school of advertising, in which lovable characters are used to represent products. Green Giant, which was originally just the Minnesota Valley Canning Company’s code name for an experimental pea, became the Jolly Green Giant in young Burnett’s world of animated characters. He understood that the figure would make a perfect and enticing brand image for an otherwise boring product and could also serve as a mnemonic device for consumers. As he watched his character grow in popularity, Burnett discovered that the mythical figure of a green giant had resonance in many different cultures around the world. It became a kind of archetype and managed to penetrate the psyche in more ways than one. Burnett was responsible for dozens of character-based brand images, including Tony the Tiger, Charlie the Tuna, Morris the Cat, and the Marlboro Man. In each case, the character creates a sense of drama, which engages the audience in the pitch. This was Burnett’s great insight. He still wanted to sell a product based on its attributes, but he knew he had to draw in his audience using characters. Brand images were also based on places, like Hidden Valley Ranch salad dressing, or on recognizable situations, such as the significant childhood memories labelled “Kodak moments” or a mother nurturing her son on a cold day, a defining image for Campbell’s soup. In all these cases, however, the moment, location, or character went only so far as to draw the audience into the ad, after which they would be subjected to a standard pitch: ‘Soup is good food’, or ‘Sorry, Charlie, only the best tuna get to be Starkist’. Burnett saw himself as a homespun Midwesterner who was contributing to American folklore while speaking in the plain language of the people. He took pride in the fact that his ads used words like “ain’t”; not because they had some calculated psychological effect on the audience, but because they communicated in a natural, plainspoken style. As these methods found their way to Madison Avenue and came to be practiced much more self-consciously, Burnett¹s love for American values and his focus on brand attributes were left behind. Branding became much more ethereal and image-based, and ads only occasionally nodded to a product’s attributes. In the 1960s, advertising gurus like David Ogilvy came up with rules about television advertising that would have made Claude Hopkins shudder. “Food in motion” dictated that food should always be shot by a moving camera. “Open with fire” meant that ads should start in a very exciting and captivating way. Ogilvy told his creatives to use supers - text superimposed on the screen to emphasize important phrases and taglines. All these techniques were devised to promote brand image, not the product. Ogilvy didn’t believe consumers could distinguish between products were it not for their images. In Ogilvy on Advertising, he explains that most people cannot tell the difference between their own “favourite” whiskey and the closest two competitors’: ‘Have they tried all three and compared the taste? Don¹t make me laugh. The reality is that these three brands have different images which appeal to different kinds of people. It isn¹t the whiskey they choose, it’s the image. The brand image is ninety percent of what the distiller has to sell.’ (Ogilvy, 1993). Thus, we learned to “trust our car to the man who wears the star” not because Texaco had better gasoline than Shell, but because the company’s advertisers had created a better brand image. While Burnett and his disciples were building brand myths, another school of advertisers was busy learning about its audience. Back in the 1920s, Raymond Rubicam, who eventually founded the agency Young and Rubicam, thought it might be interesting to hire a pollster named Dr. Gallup from Northwestern University to see what could be gleaned about consumers from a little market research. The advertising industry’s version of cultural anthropology, or demographics, was born. Like the public-relations experts who study their target populations in order to manipulate them later, marketers began conducting polls, market surveys, and focus groups on the segments of the population they hoped to influence. And to draw clear, clean lines between demographic groups, researchers must almost always base distinctions on four factors: race, age, sex, and wages. Demographic research is reductionist by design. I once consulted to an FM radio station whose station manager wanted to know, “Who is our listener?” Asking such a question reduces an entire listenership down to one fictional person. It’s possible that no single individual will ever match the “customer profile” meant to apply to all customers, which is why so much targeted marketing often borders on classist, racist, and sexist pandering. Billboards for most menthol cigarettes, for example, picture African-Americans because, according to demographic research, black people prefer them to regular cigarettes. Microsoft chose Rolling Stones songs to launch Windows 95, a product targeted at wealthy baby boomers. “The Women’s Global Challenge” was an advertising-industry-created Olympics for women, with no purpose other than to market to active females. By the 1970s, the two strands of advertising theory - demographic research and brand image - were combined to develop campaigns that work on both levels. To this day, we know to associate Volvos with safety, Dr. Pepper with individuality, and Harley-Davidson with American heritage. Each of these brand images is crafted to appeal to the target consumer’s underlying psychological needs: Volvo ads are aimed at upper-middle-class white parents who fear for their children’s health and security, Dr. Pepper is directed to young nonconformists, and the Harley-Davidson image supports its riders’ self-perception as renegades. Today’s modern (or perhaps postmodern) brands don’t invent a corporate image on their own; they appropriate one from the media itself, such as MetLife did with Snoopy, Butterfinger did with Bart Simpson, or Kmart did by hiring Penny Marshall and Rosie O’Donnell. These mascots were selected because their perceived characteristics match the values of their target consumers - not the products themselves. In the language of today’s marketers, brand images do not reflect on products but on advertisers’ perceptions of their audiences’ psychology. This focus on audience composition and values has become the standard operating procedure in all of broadcasting. When Fox TV executives learned that their animated series “King of the Hill”, about a Texan propane distributor, was not faring well with certain demographics, for example, they took a targeted approach to their character’s rehabilitation. The Brandweek piece on Fox’s ethnic campaign uncomfortably dances around the issue. Hank Hill is the proverbial everyman, and Fox wants viewers to get comfortable with him; especially viewers in New York, where “King of the Hill”’s homespun humor hasn’t quite caught on with the young urbanites. So far this season, the show has pulled in a 10.1 rating/15 share in households nationally, while garnering a 7.9 rating/12 share in New York (Brandweek, 1997) As far as Fox was concerned, while regular people could identify with the network’s new “everyman” character, New Yorkers weren’t buying his middle-American patter. The television show’s ratings proved what TV executives had known all along: that New York City’s Jewish demographic doesn’t see itself as part of the rest of America. Fox’s strategy for “humanizing” the character to those irascible urbanites was to target the group’s ethnographic self-image. Fox put ads for the show on the panels of sidewalk coffee wagons throughout Manhattan, with the tagline “Have a bagel with Hank”. In an appeal to the target market’s well-developed (and well-researched) cynicism, Hank himself is shown saying, “May I suggest you have that with a schmear”. The disarmingly ethnic humor here is meant to underscore the absurdity of a Texas propane salesman using a Jewish insider’s word like “schmear.” In another Upper West Side billboard, Hank’s son appeals to the passing traffic: “Hey yo! Somebody toss me up a knish!” As far as the New York demographic is concerned, these jokes transform the characters from potentially threatening Southern rednecks into loveable hicks bending over backward to appeal to Jewish sensibilities, and doing so with a comic and, most important, nonthreatening inadequacy. Today, the most intensely targeted demographic is the baby - the future consumer. Before an average American child is twenty months old, he can recognize the McDonald’s logo and many other branded icons. Nearly everything a toddler encounters - from Band-Aids to underpants - features the trademarked characters of Disney or other marketing empires. Although this target market may not be in a position to exercise its preferences for many years, it pays for marketers to imprint their brands early. General Motors bought a two-page ad in Sports Illustrated for Kids for its Chevy Venture minivan. Their brand manager rationalized that the eight-to-fourteen-year-old demographic consists of “back-seat consumers” (Leonhardt, 1997). The real intention of target marketing to children and babies, however, goes deeper. The fresh neurons of young brains are valuable mental real estate to admen. By seeding their products and images early, the marketers can do more than just develop brand recognition; they can literally cultivate a demographic’s sensibilities as they are formed. A nine-year-old child who can recognize the Budweiser frogs and recite their slogan (Bud-weis-er) is more likely to start drinking beer than one who can remember only Tony the Tiger yelling, “They¹re great!” (Currently, more children recognize the frogs than Tony.) This indicates a long-term coercive strategy. The abstraction of brand images from the products they represent, combined with an increasing assault on our demographically targeted psychological profiles, led to some justifiable consumer paranoia by the 1970s. Advertising was working on us in ways we couldn’t fully understand, and people began to look for an explanation. In 1973, Wilson Bryan Key, a communications researcher, wrote the first of four books about “subliminal advertising,” in which he accused advertisers of hiding sexual imagery in ice cubes, and psychoactive words like “sex” onto the airbrushed surfaces of fashion photographs. Having worked on many advertising campaigns from start to finish, in close proximity to everyone from copywriters and art directors to printers, I can comfortably put to rest any rumours that major advertising agencies are engaging in subliminal campaigns. How do images that could be interpreted as “sexual” show up in ice cubes or elbows? The final photographs chosen for ads are selected by committee out of hundreds that are actually shot. After hours or days of consideration, the group eventually feels drawn to one or two photos out of the batch. Not surprising, these photos tend to have more evocative compositions and details, but no penises, breasts, or skulls are ever superimposed onto the images. In fact, the man who claims to have developed subliminal persuasion, James Vicary, admitted to Advertising Age in 1984 that he had fabricated his evidence that the technique worked in order to drum up business for his failing research company. But this confession has not assuaged Key and others who relentlessly, perhaps obsessively, continue to pursue those they feel are planting secret visual messages in advertisements. To be fair to Key, advertisers have left themselves open to suspicion by relegating their work to the abstract world of the image and then targeting consumer psychology so deliberately. According to research by the Roper Organization in 1992, fifty-seven percent of American consumers still believe that subliminal advertising is practiced on a regular basis, and only one in twelve think it “almost never” happens. To protect themselves from the techniques they believe are being used against them, the advertising audience has adopted a stance of cynical suspicion. To combat our increasing awareness and suspicion of demographic targeting, marketers have developed a more camouflaged form of categorization based on psychological profiles instead of race and age. Jim Schroer, the executive director of new marketing strategy at Ford explains his abandonment of broad-demographic targeting: ‘It’s smarter to think about emotions and attitudes, which all go under the term: psychographics - those things that can transcend demographic groups.’ (Schroer, 1997) Instead, he now appeals to what he calls “consumers’ images of themselves.” Unlike broad demographics, the psychographic is developed using more narrowly structured qualitative-analysis techniques, like focus groups, in-depth interviews, and even home surveillance. Marketing analysts observe the behaviors of volunteer subjects, ask questions, and try to draw causal links between feelings, self-image, and purchases. A company called Strategic Directions Group provides just such analysis of the human psyche. In their study of the car-buying habits of the forty-plus baby boomers and their elders, they sought to define the main psychological predilections that human beings in this age group have regarding car purchases. Although they began with a demographic subset of the overall population, their analysis led them to segment the group into psychographic types. For example, members of one psychographic segment, called the ³Reliables,² think of driving as a way to get from point A to point B. The “Everyday People” campaign for Toyota is aimed at this group and features people depending on their reliable and efficient little Toyotas. A convertible Saab, on the other hand, appeals to the ³Stylish Fun² category, who like trendy and fun-to-drive imports. One of the company’s commercials shows a woman at a boring party fantasizing herself into an oil painting, where she drives along the canvas in a sporty yellow Saab. Psychographic targeting is more effective than demographic targeting because it reaches for an individual customer more directly - like a fly fisherman who sets bait and jiggles his rod in a prescribed pattern for a particular kind of fish. It’s as if a marketing campaign has singled you out and recognizes your core values and aspirations, without having lumped you into a racial or economic stereotype. It amounts to a game of cat-and-mouse between advertisers and their target psychographic groups. The more effort we expend to escape categorization, the more ruthlessly the marketers pursue us. In some cases, in fact, our psychographic profiles are based more on the extent to which we try to avoid marketers than on our fundamental goals or values. The so-called “Generation X” adopted the anti-chic aesthetic of thrift-store grunge in an effort to find a style that could not be so easily identified and exploited. Grunge was so self-consciously lowbrow and nonaspirational that it seemed, at first, impervious to the hype and glamour normally applied swiftly to any emerging trend. But sure enough, grunge anthems found their way onto the soundtracks of television commercials, and Dodge Neons were hawked by kids in flannel shirts saying “Whatever.” The members of Generation X are putting up a good fight. Having already developed an awareness of how marketers attempt to target their hearts and wallets, they use their insight into programming to resist these attacks. Unlike the adult marketers pursuing them, young people have grown up immersed in the language of advertising and public relations. They speak it like natives. As a result, they are more than aware when a commercial or billboard is targeting them. In conscious defiance of demographic-based pandering, they adopt a stance of self-protective irony‹distancing themselves from the emotional ploys of the advertisers. Lorraine Ketch, the director of planning in charge of Levi¹s trendy Silvertab line, explained, “This audience hates marketing that’s in your face. It eyeballs it a mile away, chews it up and spits it out” (On Advertising, 1998). Chiat/Day, one of the world’s best-known and experimental advertising agencies, found the answer to the crisis was simply to break up the Gen-X demographic into separate “tribes” or subdemographics - and include subtle visual references to each one of them in the ads they produce for the brand. According to Levi’s director of consumer marketing, the campaign meant to communicate, “We really understand them, but we are not trying too hard” (On Advertising, 1998). Probably unintentionally, Ms. Ketch has revealed the new, even more highly abstract plane on which advertising is now being communicated. Instead of creating and marketing a brand image, advertisers are creating marketing campaigns about the advertising itself. Silvertab’s target market is supposed to feel good about being understood, but even better about understanding the way they are being marketed to. The “drama” invented by Leo Burnett and refined by David Ogilvy and others has become a play within a play. The scene itself has shifted. The dramatic action no longer occurs between the audience and the product, the brand, or the brand image, but between the audience and the brand marketers. As audiences gain even more control over the media in which these interactive stories unfold, advertising evolves ever closer to a theatre of the absurd. excerpted from Coercion: Why We Listen to What "They" Say)? Works Cited Ogilvy, David. Ogilvy on Advertising. New York: Vintage, 1983. Brandweek Staff, "Number Crunching, Hollywood Style," Brandweek. October 6, 1997. Leonhardt, David, and Kathleen Kerwin, "Hey Kid, Buy This!" Business Week. June 30, 1997 Schroer, Jim. Quoted in "Why We Kick Tires," by Carol Morgan and Doron Levy. Brandweek. Sept 29, 1997. "On Advertising," The New York Times. August 14, 1998 Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Rushkoff, Douglas. "Coercion " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/06-coercion.php>. APA Style Rushkoff, D. (2003, Jun 19). Coercion . M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/06-coercion.php>