Academic literature on the topic 'Guilt (Adat law)'

AbstractThere is no doubt that, in terms of criminal policy, we have been living in an era of pre-crime for quite some time now. Whether we like it or not, times have changed and so has the general position on concepts of (criminal) guilt, dangerousness and liability. Whereas once there was a broad consensus that penal repression, at least in principle, should be executed in a strictly postcrime fashion, nowadays the same consensus has been reached on trading freedom (from penal repression) for (promised) security, long before an »actual crime« might even be committed. In this regard, the criminalisation of endangerment and risks only nomotechnically solves the issue of »actual« vs. »potential« crimes – in essence it merely creates a normative fiction of pre-crime crimes, whereas in reality actual crimes do not exist at all. The starting point of criminalisation has clearly shifted away from the guilt of having committed a crime, to the mere dangerousness of potentially committing a crime, which potential as such is purely hypothetical and beyond the grasp of empirical proof. Such shift raises fundamental criminological and sociological questions, just as it highlights our obligation to process and shape this shift. The change of paradigm from post- to pre-crime also makes one wonder about the current and future role of criminology. It makes one wonder about criminology’s capacity to adapt and its willingness to take on a transdisciplinary lead role in scientising or even criminologising the precrime era. In the end it also makes one wonder whether such an engagement would be scientifically justified.

The purpose of this research is 1) To know the Judges considerations in determining Notary Torts in South Jakarta District Court, 2) To determine the Decision Execution Judge Effects of Torts committed Notary in South Jakarta District Court.The method in this research is descriptive. This type of research is normative. The method used is qualitative analysis, namely data obtained through fieldwork and research literature then arranged systematically, and then analyzed qualitatively to achieve clarity issues to be discussed. The data is then analyzed using a theoretical and interpretive positive law which has been poured and then deductively conclude to address existing problems.Based on the results of research that the judge in analyzing the case with No. 124/PDT.G/2017/PN.Jkt.Sel seen from the evidence presented as witnesses, documentary evidence, conjecture, confession or oath that is revealed in the trial are: Defendant 1 and Defendant V and co-Defendant 1 and Defendant II helped found guilty of Torts; Plaintiff is the legal owner of the disputed land Right No. 3747/Pondok Pinang, covering an area of 310 M.2, Pictures situation 24-0201994 date No. 1242/1994; Sale and Purchase Deed before a Notary Noor Kholid Adam, SH., MH between Andrei Widjaya with Ir. Sugandi, canceled Based on Law; Mortgage Ranked First No. 5204/2016 based APHT PPAT Noor Kholis Adam, SH., MH, registered in the name of Standard Chartered Bank with registered office in Branch Jakarta dated August 29, 2016 is the Disability Law, Illegal, not have binding legal force; As a result of the implementation of decisions of law in case No. 124 / PDT.G / 2017 / PN.Jak.Sel relating to tort which did by Notary is null and void, with all the legal consequences of Notary Deed and the Co-Defendants, namely: Sale and Purchase Deed No. 202/2016 dated May 23, 2016, made before PPAT Noor Kholis Adam, SH., MH; Property Ownership Deed of Credit Agreement (KPP) No. 872 / MRG / V / 16 dated May 23, 2016; Property Title Deed of Credit Agreement (KPP) No. 873 / MRG / V / 16 dated May 23, 2016; Power of Attorney Imposing Mortgage No. 203/2016 dated May 23, 2016 of Notary PPAT Noor Kholis Adam, SH., MH .; Power of Attorney to charge Encumbrance No. 256/2016 dated June 22, 2016, made before PPAT Noor Kholis Adam, SH., MH. Granting Mortgage Deed No. 301/2016 dated July 21, 2016, made before PPAT Noor Kholis Adam, SH., MH .; Owned right certificate No. 3747/Pondok Pinang Size 310 M.2, Pictures Situation No. 1242/1994 dated February 24, 1994 on behalf of Andrie Widjaya burdened security rights to Standard Chartered Bank.Keywords: Judge's Decision; Torts; Notary.

Following the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, there has been an unforeseen pressure and stress to the already burdened health-care systems. This necessitated an urgent need to reallocate the health-care resources and prompted immediate suspension and postponement of non-emergent health-care services including infertility treatments. This pandemic brought additional stress to the couples seeking infertility treatment and resulted in an indefinite time lag to their treatment thereby adding to the psychological distress among this vulnerable population. The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has also predisposed them to various psychiatric disorders by affecting their mental, reproductive, and relationship status. These included emotional disorders ranging from frustration, depression, anxiety, hopelessness, and guilt, feelings of worthlessness in life to psychiatric disorders such as generalized anxiety disorder, major depressive disorder, and dysthymic disorder. The social isolation imposed grave psychological consequences and lead to an unpredicted change in attitudes and beliefs of such infertile couples. The implication of the loss of employment has further dwelled on their financial constraints and made this population even more labile. Thus, the current time has brought forth some unique and unexpected challenges and emotional turmoil that needs due recognition and prompt professional support. Furthermore, it is high time to review our health-care policies and hence restart infertility services striking a balance between the safety of both patient and health-care professionals amidst this pandemic while helping these unfortunate couples achieve parenthood. The resumption of infertility services post-COVID-19 has challenges of its own. The clinician and the paramedical staff had to undergo specific training to adapt to the new norms of workplace while minimizing in person interactions and exposure risk.

The radical political violence outgoing from extremist communities became the most dangerous trend in the modern criminal dynamics. The victims of crimes committed by suicide terrorists are not only those who are subject to political and ideological violence, but also absolutely random people outside the field of politics. The actual perpetrators of mass homicide, including the most brutal acts of terrorism, are extremists with homicide-suicidal syndrome, interested in the society’s attention to them, convinced, in an irrational way, that absolutely all people are guilty of their problems. The fate of extremists and victims of their radical violence is not always directly determined by the level of unemployment or organized relations between the rule of law state and other social management institutions. These well-known criminological determinants affect the form of extremist actions and crimes, they may lower the level of extremist aggression, but do not change the motives of criminals. The higher the quality of life in the country, the less frequently mass homicide will happen, but it is likely to use high tech. Limiting the use of firearms by extremists, we are confronted with their attempts to adapt vehicles for deadly purposes. The actions of extremists do not reflect any real political struggle for freedom and independence, for religious values, for social justice; in practice, there is irrational extremism — a new socio-political phenomenon of active criminal protest against the very idea of huma­nism. Violent extremism emerges against the background of a certain social situation: 1) low efficiency of social policy; 2) isolation of an individual from civil society institutions and state structures; 3) desperate human desire for self-realization that is set against universal indifference to the problems of an individual. Under the influence of criminogenic factors, an extremist’s personality may become the object of manipulation by terrorist groups and other criminal communities.

The authors examine the specific features of the digital environment to analyze contemporary approaches to the system of instruments of studying illegal actions in cyberspace. They state that law enforcement bodies should adapt key characteristics of the digital environment to the accomplishment of investigation tasks. The authors analyze the possibilities offered by digital profiling and modeling of the digital profile (portrait) of an unidentified criminal through mathematical methods of modeling and prediction in investigating and solving serial crimes, including cybercrimes. An extensive review of Russian and foreign publications is used to study the evolution of scientific ideas regarding the profiling method, which is the basis for the digital profiling of the behavioral model of an unidentified criminal in the digital environment. It is stated that none of the branches of criminal law, including criminology and criminalistics, could alone solve the interdisciplinary problem of the investigation and detection of crimes in the digital environment. The authors prove that it is necessary to integrate the knowledge of these branches and to conduct interdisciplinary research involving experts, i.e. to duly streamline the organization of those activities that together make up the investigation and detection of crimes. Based on the content of the concept «modus operandi», which lies at the heart of building an abstract model of criminal behavior, they conclude that it could be used to investigate and solve crimes in the digital environment and determine the specific features of the content of its structural elements. The comparative analysis of the contents of the key stages of profiling is used to prove the expediency of employing the whole range of logical and mathematical methods of analysis to process and analyze criminological information, which leads to the necessity of both critically reviewing them and finding ways to go beyond the traditional approaches. The authors describe the essence of the mathematical extrapolation method, which is most commonly used in criminology for the quantitative analysis of knowledge regarding objects, phenomena, processes, as well as the possibility of using it in digital profiling. As a result of this research based on the systemic approach, the authors state the objective character of links between the traditional and the digital profiling, point out the existing links and regularities, which allow them to reduce the essence of the examined phenomena to building a model through the recreation, in the process of investigation, of the mental trace pattern and then using it to find the guilty person.

AbstractA century ago the Rijksprentenkabinet in Amsterdam acquired a 19th-century album containing 56 rapid sketches in black chalk after 17th-century, mostly Dutch paintings (Note 1). The sketches, which are numberd, have the names of the painters wrillen on them in the artist's own hand. They were first published in 1895 (Note 2) by E. W. Moes, who concluded that they were by a Delft artist, and C. Hofstede de Groot, who convincingly attributed them to Leonaert Bramer (1596-1674) and identified two of the paintings in question. Since then various other paintings have been identified (Notes 5, 7, 8, 11 and 12), notably by A. Blankert, who has made his findings available for the present publication, and other drawings belonging to the series have been found, Frits Lugt leading the way here (Notes 9 and 10). The present study, the first to be undertaken in depth since 1895, has brought to light three more sketches after paintings by Bramer himself (cat. nos.9-11) and one probably after Wouwerman (cat. no.65), while seven more paintings have been identified and one of the sketches without a name has proved to be after a painting by Antonio Maria Viani. Two lists of the sketches so far found are given here: that of State I reproduces the original order, that of State II gives the artists in alphabetical order as they appear in the catalogue published here. These sketches are of exceptional documentary value, since they have not only given us the names of some previously unknown painters, such as M. de Berch, J. Garbaal, P. Monincx and A. Pick, but they have also revealed unexpected aspects of some well-known ones, e.g. a still life by P. van Groenewegen, a Dutch landscape by J.B. Weenix and a genre piece of a very Utrecht character by L. de Jongh. Moreover, the sketches afford a fine glimpse of collecting in Holland in the 17th century, a subject otherwise known uirtually only from non-visual documents. On the back of one of the drawings (cat. no.6) appears a list of the owners of the pictures sketched (Fig. I), possibly written by Bramer himself. This is reproduced here in an amplified version of Moes' transcription, with one completely new name yielded by the present study. The styles given in the list suggest that the men concerned appear in it in order of their social standing. The first, Simon Graswinckel (c.1611-71), was a member of a wealthy Delft family of brewers and regents. He owned a great deal of property in and around Delft, but is reported by his brothers-in-law to have spent his time in gaming-houses and taverns (Note 30). His will of 1663 is known, but no paintings are mentioned in it. The second man on the list was probably a Van Beresteijn, another family from the wealthy upper echelons of Delft society. His precise identity came to light in a roundabout way via the inventory of 28 February 1652 of Adriaen van Vredenburg, in which are listed a number of paintings that were very probably sketched by Bramer (Note 32), notably one of Jezebel, this mention and Bramer's sketch being virtually unique indications of this subject in Dutch 17th-century painting. Vredenburg does not appear in the list of owners of the paintings, but on his death his property went to his stepdaughter, whose guardian he had been and who married Theodorus van Beresteijn in November 1652. Antonie van Bronchorst is known only from the commission he gave Bramer in 1653 to painl frescoes in his house (Note 34), while Capitein van der Bon..., Nicolaas van der Werch and Johan Persijn have not yet been traced in the Delft archives. Willem de Langue (1599-1666), on the other hand, was a lawyer and a connoisseur of paintings unparalleled in Delft in the mid 17th century (Note 36). He himself made the inventories of the paintings in important estates and he numbered many artists among his clientele (Note 37). Portraits of him and his wife by Van Vliet are known (Note 38), while he also appears as an officer in a militia piece of 1648 by Jacob Willemsz Delff (Fig. 2). Abraham de Cooge (before 1600-after 1680) was the most versatile person in the list, being an engraver, painter, dealer in tulip bulbs, organs and paintings and pottery manufacturer (Note 39). He was registered in the Guild of St. Luke in Delft in 1632 and two paintings by him are known (Note 40). In 1646 Leonaerl Bramer made illustrations to the picaresque novel Lazarilo de Tormes for him (Note 17). In the 1650's De Cooge was increasingly involved in art-dealing and that on no small scale. He also had representatives in Antwerp, so was probably among the biggest art-dealers in the Northern Netherlands. Adam Pick (c. 1622-before 1666) enrolled in the Guild of St. Luke in Delft in 1642 (Note 43) and was active in the town up to the early 1650's as a painter of landscapes, genre pieces and still lifes (Fig.3) and also as the keeper of the Toelast ( Wine Cask) inn. He probably moved to Leiden, where he is mentioned in 1654 as a vintner, in 1653, perhaps as a consequence of the death of his first wife in 1652, f or he certainly sold the inn that year. The inventory of their joint property drawn up in 1653 includes a list of paintings, which tally with nos.8(?) -98 in the State I list. Only one painting by Pick is known (Fig.3), plus the sketch by Bramer after another (cat. no.44). Reinier Jansz Vermeer (1591-1652, Note 46), the father of Johannes, started out as a silk weaver, but appears in 1629 as an innkeeper and in 1631 was registered in the Guild of St. Luke in Delft as an art-dealer. From then on he came into frequent contact with local painters, Bramer included, but his dealing was probably only a sideline of his innkeeping. He died in October 1652. The last owner on the list is Bramer himself, who returned to Delft in 1628 after a lengthy period in France and Italy (1614-27, Note 49). He played a leading part in the Guild of St. Luke and was among the most successful painters in Delft around the middle of the 17th century. Later in life, however, he was often in financial difficulties (Note 50). He was one of the very few Dutch fresco painters (Note 51), as well as a painter of history and genre pieces and a prolific draughtsman and illustrator (Note 52), while just one document provides evidence of his dealing in paintirtgs (Note 54). The presence of works by Bramer himself among the sketches seems to rule out the theory that he made them as an aide mémoire for his own use (Note 15), while their very rapid character makes it unlikely that they were produced for one of the owners as an art-object. It also seems highly improbable that the collectors/owners would have wanted their collections of paintings sketched together in one book. The most acceptable suggestion appears to be that they were made in connection with a forthcoming sale of pictures, particularly as three of the owners listed were involved in art-dealing, while in the cases of Vermeer, Pick and Van Beresteijn there was every reason for paintings from their collections being sold around the end of 1652 or beginning of 1653: Vermeer's death left his family in dire financial straits, Pick will probably have sold his pictures (as he did his inn) before moving to Leiden and Van Beresteijn will probably have wanted to realize some money on his wife's inheritance. Thus the dates of Vermeer's burial in October 1652 and Pick's inventory of March 1653 would seem to provide crucial clues to the dating of the sketches, which were probably made in rapid succession, to judge from the unity of style, despite the great diversity of the models, and the straightforward consecutive numbering. Presumably the intention was to bring these pictures from Delft collections together for a sale (Note 18) and Bramer was commissioned to make sketches in advance (or even to make a certain selection, Note 19) possibly to give an idea of what was on offer to collectors or dealers elsewhere (which might explain the 'inking in' of the painters' names originally written in chalk on five of the drawings, cat. nos. 17, 35, 36, 47 and 64). Bramer made such chalk inscriptions on ten of the drawings (Note 20), probably while sketching them. Afterwards he inscribed and numbered all of them in ink (Note 5). Notes in another 17th-century hand appear on cat. nos.22 and 24. The sheets may all have been of the same size originally, but have since been cut down, often wholly or partly along the framing lines around the sketch. This may well have been done by Bramer himsef or the dealer he made them for. Just over half of them remained together and were stuck into the present album in the 19th century. There are no portraits among the sketches and only two stll lifes and two marine paintings, but eleven Italianate landscapes and 22 history paintings. Thus the subjects differ somewhat from the categories arrived at by Montiasfor mid 17th-century Delft from his study of inventories (Note 56). The preference for history pieces is probably to be explained by the high social standing of the owners. The majority of the pictures were very modern for that time and of the 41 artists, 28 were still alive in 1652-3 and eight of them were only 35 or younger. Bramer's material contradicts Montlas' conclusion that Delft collectors showed a preference for local painters (Note 58), whose work amounted to 40-50% of that listed in the inventories. Of Bramer's 41 painters, only thirteen were from Delft (Note 59) and only five are found in Montias' list of the most common painters in Delft inventories. Thus the pictures sketched by Bramer fall outside the 'normal Delft pattern' and evince a less provincial taste. However, the collectors were still not among the leading figures of their day in this field by comparison with, for example, Boudewijn de Man of Delft (Note 62), whose collection included works by Goltzius, Bloemaert, Rubens, Rembrandt and Ter Brugghen in 1644. The pictures sketched by Bramer were presumably to be brought together for public auction and the sketches may very probably have been made with an eye to the sale catalogue. While sale catalogues are known in the second half of the 17th century, they only relate to very important collections, which makes these sketches very unusual as a documentation of a sale of pictures from average well-to-do collectors and dealers. The collection of sketches as such certainly has no parallel at this period (Note 64).

Introduction Crime fiction is one of the world’s most popular genres. Indeed, it has been estimated that as many as one in every three new novels, published in English, is classified within the crime fiction category (Knight xi). These new entrants to the market are forced to jostle for space on bookstore and library shelves with reprints of classic crime novels; such works placed in, often fierce, competition against their contemporaries as well as many of their predecessors. Raymond Chandler, in his well-known essay The Simple Art of Murder, noted Ernest Hemingway’s observation that “the good writer competes only with the dead. The good detective story writer […] competes not only with all the unburied dead but with all the hosts of the living as well” (3). In fact, there are so many examples of crime fiction works that, as early as the 1920s, one of the original ‘Queens of Crime’, Dorothy L. Sayers, complained: It is impossible to keep track of all the detective-stories produced to-day [sic]. Book upon book, magazine upon magazine pour out from the Press, crammed with murders, thefts, arsons, frauds, conspiracies, problems, puzzles, mysteries, thrills, maniacs, crooks, poisoners, forgers, garrotters, police, spies, secret-service men, detectives, until it seems that half the world must be engaged in setting riddles for the other half to solve (95). Twenty years after Sayers wrote on the matter of the vast quantities of crime fiction available, W.H. Auden wrote one of the more famous essays on the genre: The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict. Auden is, perhaps, better known as a poet but his connection to the crime fiction genre is undisputed. As well as his poetic works that reference crime fiction and commentaries on crime fiction, one of Auden’s fellow poets, Cecil Day-Lewis, wrote a series of crime fiction novels under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake: the central protagonist of these novels, Nigel Strangeways, was modelled upon Auden (Scaggs 27). Interestingly, some writers whose names are now synonymous with the genre, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Raymond Chandler, established the link between poetry and crime fiction many years before the publication of The Guilty Vicarage. Edmund Wilson suggested that “reading detective stories is simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between crossword puzzles and smoking” (395). In the first line of The Guilty Vicarage, Auden supports Wilson’s claim and confesses that: “For me, as for many others, the reading of detective stories is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol” (406). This indicates that the genre is at best a trivial pursuit, at worst a pursuit that is bad for your health and is, increasingly, socially unacceptable, while Auden’s ideas around taste—high and low—are made clear when he declares that “detective stories have nothing to do with works of art” (406). The debates that surround genre and taste are many and varied. The mid-1920s was a point in time which had witnessed crime fiction writers produce some of the finest examples of fiction to ever be published and when readers and publishers were watching, with anticipation, as a new generation of crime fiction writers were readying themselves to enter what would become known as the genre’s Golden Age. At this time, R. Austin Freeman wrote that: By the critic and the professedly literary person the detective story is apt to be dismissed contemptuously as outside the pale of literature, to be conceived of as a type of work produced by half-educated and wholly incompetent writers for consumption by office boys, factory girls, and other persons devoid of culture and literary taste (7). This article responds to Auden’s essay and explores how crime fiction appeals to many different tastes: tastes that are acquired, change over time, are embraced, or kept as guilty secrets. In addition, this article will challenge Auden’s very narrow definition of crime fiction and suggest how Auden’s religious imagery, deployed to explain why many people choose to read crime fiction, can be incorporated into a broader popular discourse on punishment. This latter argument demonstrates that a taste for crime fiction and a taste for justice are inextricably intertwined. Crime Fiction: A Type For Every Taste Cathy Cole has observed that “crime novels are housed in their own section in many bookshops, separated from literary novels much as you’d keep a child with measles away from the rest of the class” (116). Times have changed. So too, have our tastes. Crime fiction, once sequestered in corners, now demands vast tracts of prime real estate in bookstores allowing readers to “make their way to the appropriate shelves, and begin to browse […] sorting through a wide variety of very different types of novels” (Malmgren 115). This is a result of the sheer size of the genre, noted above, as well as the genre’s expanding scope. Indeed, those who worked to re-invent crime fiction in the 1800s could not have envisaged the “taxonomic exuberance” (Derrida 206) of the writers who have defined crime fiction sub-genres, as well as how readers would respond by not only wanting to read crime fiction but also wanting to read many different types of crime fiction tailored to their particular tastes. To understand the demand for this diversity, it is important to reflect upon some of the appeal factors of crime fiction for readers. Many rules have been promulgated for the writers of crime fiction to follow. Ronald Knox produced a set of 10 rules in 1928. These included Rule 3 “Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable”, and Rule 10 “Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them” (194–6). In the same year, S.S. Van Dine produced another list of 20 rules, which included Rule 3 “There must be no love interest: The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar”, and Rule 7 “There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better” (189–93). Some of these directives have been deliberately ignored or have become out-of-date over time while others continue to be followed in contemporary crime writing practice. In sharp contrast, there are no rules for reading this genre. Individuals are, generally, free to choose what, where, when, why, and how they read crime fiction. There are, however, different appeal factors for readers. The most common of these appeal factors, often described as doorways, are story, setting, character, and language. As the following passage explains: The story doorway beckons those who enjoy reading to find out what happens next. The setting doorway opens widest for readers who enjoy being immersed in an evocation of place or time. The doorway of character is for readers who enjoy looking at the world through others’ eyes. Readers who most appreciate skilful writing enter through the doorway of language (Wyatt online). These doorways draw readers to the crime fiction genre. There are stories that allow us to easily predict what will come next or make us hold our breath until the very last page, the books that we will cheerfully lend to a family member or a friend and those that we keep close to hand to re-read again and again. There are settings as diverse as country manors, exotic locations, and familiar city streets, places we have been and others that we might want to explore. There are characters such as the accidental sleuth, the hardboiled detective, and the refined police officer, amongst many others, the men and women—complete with idiosyncrasies and flaws—who we have grown to admire and trust. There is also the language that all writers, regardless of genre, depend upon to tell their tales. In crime fiction, even the most basic task of describing where the murder victim was found can range from words that convey the genteel—“The room of the tragedy” (Christie 62)—to the absurd: “There it was, jammed between a pallet load of best export boneless beef and half a tonne of spring lamb” (Maloney 1). These appeal factors indicate why readers might choose crime fiction over another genre, or choose one type of crime fiction over another. Yet such factors fail to explain what crime fiction is or adequately answer why the genre is devoured in such vast quantities. Firstly, crime fiction stories are those in which there is the committing of a crime, or at least the suspicion of a crime (Cole), and the story that unfolds revolves around the efforts of an amateur or professional detective to solve that crime (Scaggs). Secondly, crime fiction offers the reassurance of resolution, a guarantee that from “previous experience and from certain cultural conventions associated with this genre that ultimately the mystery will be fully explained” (Zunshine 122). For Auden, the definition of the crime novel was quite specific, and he argued that referring to the genre by “the vulgar definition, ‘a Whodunit’ is correct” (407). Auden went on to offer a basic formula stating that: “a murder occurs; many are suspected; all but one suspect, who is the murderer, are eliminated; the murderer is arrested or dies” (407). The idea of a formula is certainly a useful one, particularly when production demands—in terms of both quality and quantity—are so high, because the formula facilitates creators in the “rapid and efficient production of new works” (Cawelti 9). For contemporary crime fiction readers, the doorways to reading, discussed briefly above, have been cast wide open. Stories relying upon the basic crime fiction formula as a foundation can be gothic tales, clue puzzles, forensic procedurals, spy thrillers, hardboiled narratives, or violent crime narratives, amongst many others. The settings can be quiet villages or busy metropolises, landscapes that readers actually inhabit or that provide a form of affordable tourism. These stories can be set in the past, the here and now, or the future. Characters can range from Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin to Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, from Agatha Christie’s Miss Jane Marple to Kerry Greenwood’s Honourable Phryne Fisher. Similarly, language can come in numerous styles from the direct (even rough) words of Carter Brown to the literary prose of Peter Temple. Anything is possible, meaning everything is available to readers. For Auden—although he required a crime to be committed and expected that crime to be resolved—these doorways were only slightly ajar. For him, the story had to be a Whodunit; the setting had to be rural England, though a college setting was also considered suitable; the characters had to be “eccentric (aesthetically interesting individuals) and good (instinctively ethical)” and there needed to be a “completely satisfactory detective” (Sherlock Holmes, Inspector French, and Father Brown were identified as “satisfactory”); and the language descriptive and detailed (406, 409, 408). To illustrate this point, Auden’s concept of crime fiction has been plotted on a taxonomy, below, that traces the genre’s main developments over a period of three centuries. As can be seen, much of what is, today, taken for granted as being classified as crime fiction is completely excluded from Auden’s ideal. Figure 1: Taxonomy of Crime Fiction (Adapted from Franks, Murder 136) Crime Fiction: A Personal Journey I discovered crime fiction the summer before I started high school when I saw the film version of The Big Sleep starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. A few days after I had seen the film I started reading the Raymond Chandler novel of the same title, featuring his famous detective Philip Marlowe, and was transfixed by the second paragraph: The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armour rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the visor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn’t seem to be really trying (9). John Scaggs has written that this passage indicates Marlowe is an idealised figure, a knight of romance rewritten onto the mean streets of mid-20th century Los Angeles (62); a relocation Susan Roland calls a “secular form of the divinely sanctioned knight errant on a quest for metaphysical justice” (139): my kind of guy. Like many young people I looked for adventure and escape in books, a search that was realised with Raymond Chandler and his contemporaries. On the escapism scale, these men with their stories of tough-talking detectives taking on murderers and other criminals, law enforcement officers, and the occasional femme fatale, were certainly a sharp upgrade from C.S. Lewis and the Chronicles of Narnia. After reading the works written by the pioneers of the hardboiled and roman noir traditions, I looked to other American authors such as Edgar Allan Poe who, in the mid-1800s, became the father of the modern detective story, and Thorne Smith who, in the 1920s and 1930s, produced magical realist tales with characters who often chose to dabble on the wrong side of the law. This led me to the works of British crime writers including Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy L. Sayers. My personal library then became dominated by Australian writers of crime fiction, from the stories of bushrangers and convicts of the Colonial era to contemporary tales of police and private investigators. There have been various attempts to “improve” or “refine” my tastes: to convince me that serious literature is real reading and frivolous fiction is merely a distraction. Certainly, the reading of those novels, often described as classics, provide perfect combinations of beauty and brilliance. Their narratives, however, do not often result in satisfactory endings. This routinely frustrates me because, while I understand the philosophical frameworks that many writers operate within, I believe the characters of such works are too often treated unfairly in the final pages. For example, at the end of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Frederick Henry “left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain” after his son is stillborn and “Mrs Henry” becomes “very ill” and dies (292–93). Another example can be found on the last page of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four when Winston Smith “gazed up at the enormous face” and he realised that he “loved Big Brother” (311). Endings such as these provide a space for reflection about the world around us but rarely spark an immediate response of how great that world is to live in (Franks Motive). The subject matter of crime fiction does not easily facilitate fairy-tale finishes, yet, people continue to read the genre because, generally, the concluding chapter will show that justice, of some form, will be done. Punishment will be meted out to the ‘bad characters’ that have broken society’s moral or legal laws; the ‘good characters’ may experience hardships and may suffer but they will, generally, prevail. Crime Fiction: A Taste For Justice Superimposed upon Auden’s parameters around crime fiction, are his ideas of the law in the real world and how such laws are interwoven with the Christian-based system of ethics. This can be seen in Auden’s listing of three classes of crime: “(a) offenses against God and one’s neighbor or neighbors; (b) offenses against God and society; (c) offenses against God” (407). Murder, in Auden’s opinion, is a class (b) offense: for the crime fiction novel, the society reflected within the story should be one in “a state of grace, i.e., a society where there is no need of the law, no contradiction between the aesthetic individual and the ethical universal, and where murder, therefore, is the unheard-of act which precipitates a crisis” (408). Additionally, in the crime novel “as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time) are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder” (408). Thus, as Charles J. Rzepka notes, “according to W.H. Auden, the ‘classical’ English detective story typically re-enacts rites of scapegoating and expulsion that affirm the innocence of a community of good people supposedly ignorant of evil” (12). This premise—of good versus evil—supports Auden’s claim that the punishment of wrongdoers, particularly those who claim the “right to be omnipotent” and commit murder (409), should be swift and final: As to the murderer’s end, of the three alternatives—execution, suicide, and madness—the first is preferable; for if he commits suicide he refuses to repent, and if he goes mad he cannot repent, but if he does not repent society cannot forgive. Execution, on the other hand, is the act of atonement by which the murderer is forgiven by society (409). The unilateral endorsement of state-sanctioned murder is problematic, however, because—of the main justifications for punishment: retribution; deterrence; incapacitation; and rehabilitation (Carter Snead 1245)—punishment, in this context, focuses exclusively upon retribution and deterrence, incapacitation is achieved by default, but the idea of rehabilitation is completely ignored. This, in turn, ignores how the reading of crime fiction can be incorporated into a broader popular discourse on punishment and how a taste for crime fiction and a taste for justice are inextricably intertwined. One of the ways to explore the connection between crime fiction and justice is through the lens of Emile Durkheim’s thesis on the conscience collective which proposes punishment is a process allowing for the demonstration of group norms and the strengthening of moral boundaries. David Garland, in summarising this thesis, states: So although the modern state has a near monopoly of penal violence and controls the administration of penalties, a much wider population feels itself to be involved in the process of punishment, and supplies the context of social support and valorization within which state punishment takes place (32). It is claimed here that this “much wider population” connecting with the task of punishment can be taken further. Crime fiction, above all other forms of literary production, which, for those who do not directly contribute to the maintenance of their respective legal systems, facilitates a feeling of active participation in the penalising of a variety of perpetrators: from the issuing of fines to incarceration (Franks Punishment). Crime fiction readers are therefore, temporarily at least, direct contributors to a more stable society: one that is clearly based upon right and wrong and reliant upon the conscience collective to maintain and reaffirm order. In this context, the reader is no longer alone, with only their crime fiction novel for company, but has become an active member of “a moral framework which binds individuals to each other and to its conventions and institutions” (Garland 51). This allows crime fiction, once viewed as a “vice” (Wilson 395) or an “addiction” (Auden 406), to be seen as playing a crucial role in the preservation of social mores. It has been argued “only the most literal of literary minds would dispute the claim that fictional characters help shape the way we think of ourselves, and hence help us articulate more clearly what it means to be human” (Galgut 190). Crime fiction focuses on what it means to be human, and how complex humans are, because stories of murders, and the men and women who perpetrate and solve them, comment on what drives some people to take a life and others to avenge that life which is lost and, by extension, engages with a broad community of readers around ideas of justice and punishment. It is, furthermore, argued here that the idea of the story is one of the more important doorways for crime fiction and, more specifically, the conclusions that these stories, traditionally, offer. For Auden, the ending should be one of restoration of the spirit, as he suspected that “the typical reader of detective stories is, like myself, a person who suffers from a sense of sin” (411). In this way, the “phantasy, then, which the detective story addict indulges is the phantasy of being restored to the Garden of Eden, to a state of innocence, where he may know love as love and not as the law” (412), indicating that it was not necessarily an accident that “the detective story has flourished most in predominantly Protestant countries” (408). Today, modern crime fiction is a “broad church, where talented authors raise questions and cast light on a variety of societal and other issues through the prism of an exciting, page-turning story” (Sisterson). Moreover, our tastes in crime fiction have been tempered by a growing fear of real crime, particularly murder, “a crime of unique horror” (Hitchens 200). This has seen some readers develop a taste for crime fiction that is not produced within a framework of ecclesiastical faith but is rather grounded in reliance upon those who enact punishment in both the fictional and real worlds. As P.D. James has written: [N]ot by luck or divine intervention, but by human ingenuity, human intelligence and human courage. It confirms our hope that, despite some evidence to the contrary, we live in a beneficent and moral universe in which problems can be solved by rational means and peace and order restored from communal or personal disruption and chaos (174). Dorothy L. Sayers, despite her work to legitimise crime fiction, wrote that there: “certainly does seem a possibility that the detective story will some time come to an end, simply because the public will have learnt all the tricks” (108). Of course, many readers have “learnt all the tricks”, or most of them. This does not, however, detract from the genre’s overall appeal. We have not grown bored with, or become tired of, the formula that revolves around good and evil, and justice and punishment. Quite the opposite. Our knowledge of, as well as our faith in, the genre’s “tricks” gives a level of confidence to readers who are looking for endings that punish murderers and other wrongdoers, allowing for more satisfactory conclusions than the, rather depressing, ends given to Mr. Henry and Mr. Smith by Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell noted above. Conclusion For some, the popularity of crime fiction is a curious case indeed. When Penguin and Collins published the Marsh Million—100,000 copies each of 10 Ngaio Marsh titles in 1949—the author’s relief at the success of the project was palpable when she commented that “it was pleasant to find detective fiction being discussed as a tolerable form of reading by people whose opinion one valued” (172). More recently, upon the announcement that a Miles Franklin Award would be given to Peter Temple for his crime novel Truth, John Sutherland, a former chairman of the judges for one of the world’s most famous literary awards, suggested that submitting a crime novel for the Booker Prize would be: “like putting a donkey into the Grand National”. Much like art, fashion, food, and home furnishings or any one of the innumerable fields of activity and endeavour that are subject to opinion, there will always be those within the world of fiction who claim positions as arbiters of taste. Yet reading is intensely personal. I like a strong, well-plotted story, appreciate a carefully researched setting, and can admire elegant language, but if a character is too difficult to embrace—if I find I cannot make an emotional connection, if I find myself ambivalent about their fate—then a book is discarded as not being to my taste. It is also important to recognise that some tastes are transient. Crime fiction stories that are popular today could be forgotten tomorrow. Some stories appeal to such a broad range of tastes they are immediately included in the crime fiction canon. Yet others evolve over time to accommodate widespread changes in taste (an excellent example of this can be seen in the continual re-imagining of the stories of Sherlock Holmes). Personal tastes also adapt to our experiences and our surroundings. A book that someone adores in their 20s might be dismissed in their 40s. A storyline that was meaningful when read abroad may lose some of its magic when read at home. Personal events, from a change in employment to the loss of a loved one, can also impact upon what we want to read. Similarly, world events, such as economic crises and military conflicts, can also influence our reading preferences. Auden professed an almost insatiable appetite for crime fiction, describing the reading of detective stories as an addiction, and listed a very specific set of criteria to define the Whodunit. Today, such self-imposed restrictions are rare as, while there are many rules for writing crime fiction, there are no rules for reading this (or any other) genre. People are, generally, free to choose what, where, when, why, and how they read crime fiction, and to follow the deliberate or whimsical paths that their tastes may lay down for them. Crime fiction writers, past and present, offer: an incredible array of detective stories from the locked room to the clue puzzle; settings that range from the English country estate to city skyscrapers in glamorous locations around the world; numerous characters from cerebral sleuths who can solve a crime in their living room over a nice, hot cup of tea to weapon wielding heroes who track down villains on foot in darkened alleyways; and, language that ranges from the cultured conversations from the novels of the genre’s Golden Age to the hard-hitting terminology of forensic and legal procedurals. Overlaid on these appeal factors is the capacity of crime fiction to feed a taste for justice: to engage, vicariously at least, in the establishment of a more stable society. Of course, there are those who turn to the genre for a temporary distraction, an occasional guilty pleasure. There are those who stumble across the genre by accident or deliberately seek it out. There are also those, like Auden, who are addicted to crime fiction. So there are corpses for the conservative and dead bodies for the bloodthirsty. There is, indeed, a murder victim, and a murder story, to suit every reader’s taste. References Auden, W.H. “The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on The Detective Story, By an Addict.” Harper’s Magazine May (1948): 406–12. 1 Dec. 2013 ‹http://www.harpers.org/archive/1948/05/0033206›. Carter Snead, O. “Memory and Punishment.” Vanderbilt Law Review 64.4 (2011): 1195–264. Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976/1977. Chandler, Raymond. The Big Sleep. London: Penguin, 1939/1970. ––. The Simple Art of Murder. New York: Vintage Books, 1950/1988. Christie, Agatha. The Mysterious Affair at Styles. London: HarperCollins, 1920/2007. Cole, Cathy. Private Dicks and Feisty Chicks: An Interrogation of Crime Fiction. Fremantle: Curtin UP, 2004. Derrida, Jacques. “The Law of Genre.” Glyph 7 (1980): 202–32. Franks, Rachel. “May I Suggest Murder?: An Overview of Crime Fiction for Readers’ Advisory Services Staff.” Australian Library Journal 60.2 (2011): 133–43. ––. “Motive for Murder: Reading Crime Fiction.” The Australian Library and Information Association Biennial Conference. Sydney: Jul. 2012. ––. “Punishment by the Book: Delivering and Evading Punishment in Crime Fiction.” Inter-Disciplinary.Net 3rd Global Conference on Punishment. Oxford: Sep. 2013. Freeman, R.A. “The Art of the Detective Story.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1924/1947. 7–17. Galgut, E. “Poetic Faith and Prosaic Concerns: A Defense of Suspension of Disbelief.” South African Journal of Philosophy 21.3 (2002): 190–99. Garland, David. Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. London: Random House, 1929/2004. ––. in R. Chandler. The Simple Art of Murder. New York: Vintage Books, 1950/1988. Hitchens, P. A Brief History of Crime: The Decline of Order, Justice and Liberty in England. London: Atlantic Books, 2003. James, P.D. Talking About Detective Fiction. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. Knight, Stephen. Crime Fiction since 1800: Death, Detection, Diversity, 2nd ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2010. Knox, Ronald A. “Club Rules: The 10 Commandments for Detective Novelists, 1928.” Ronald Knox Society of North America. 1 Dec. 2013 ‹http://www.ronaldknoxsociety.com/detective.html›. Malmgren, C.D. “Anatomy of Murder: Mystery, Detective and Crime Fiction.” Journal of Popular Culture Spring (1997): 115–21. Maloney, Shane. The Murray Whelan Trilogy: Stiff, The Brush-Off and Nice Try. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1994/2008. Marsh, Ngaio in J. Drayton. Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime. Auckland: Harper Collins, 2008. Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Penguin Books, 1949/1989. Roland, Susan. From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction. London: Palgrave, 2001. Rzepka, Charles J. Detective Fiction. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. Sayers, Dorothy L. “The Omnibus of Crime.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1928/1947. 71–109. Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction: The New Critical Idiom. London: Routledge, 2005. Sisterson, C. “Battle for the Marsh: Awards 2013.” Black Mask: Pulps, Noir and News of Same. 1 Jan. 2014 http://www.blackmask.com/category/awards-2013/ Sutherland, John. in A. Flood. “Could Miles Franklin turn the Booker Prize to Crime?” The Guardian. 1 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jun/25/miles-franklin-booker-prize-crime›. Van Dine, S.S. “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1928/1947. 189-93. Wilson, Edmund. “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1944/1947. 390–97. Wyatt, N. “Redefining RA: A RA Big Think.” Library Journal Online. 1 Jan. 2014 ‹http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2007/07/ljarchives/lj-series-redefining-ra-an-ra-big-think›. Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2006.

Introduction In this paper, I examine the practices of representing Deaf ‘voices’’ to hearing audiences in two recent US television crime dramas. More literally I look at how American Sign Language is framed and made visible on the screen through various production decisions. Drawing examples from an episode of CSI: New York that aired in December 2006 and an episode of Law and Order: Criminal Intent that aired in April 2007, I examine how the practices of filming Deaf people and the use of American Sign Language intersect with the production of a Deaf ‘voice’ on the screen. The problem of representing a Deaf ‘voice’ on the screen is akin to the problem of representing other minority languages. Film and television producers in the United States have to make choices about whether the majority audience of English speakers will have access to the minority language or not. In the face of this dilemma media producers have taken several approaches: subtitling foreign speech, translating foreign speech through other characters, or leaving the language inaccessible except to those who use it. The additional difficulty with representing national sign languages is that both the language and the recording medium are visual. Sometimes, filmmakers make the choice of leaving some portions of the signed dialogue inaccessible to a non-signing hearing audience. On the one hand this choice could indicate a devaluing of the signed communication, as its specific content is considered irrelevant to the plot. On the other hand it could indicate that Deaf people have a right to be visible on television using their own language without accommodating hearing people. A number of choices made in the filming and editing can subtly undermine positive representations of Deaf ‘voices’ particularly to a Deaf audience. These choices often construct an image of sign languages as objectified, exoticised, disjointed, incomplete, or a code for spoken language. Simple choices such as using simultaneous speaking and signing by Deaf characters, cropping the scene, translating or not translating the dialogue have powerful implications for the ways that Deaf ‘voices’ are becoming more visible in the 21st century. Typical filming and editing conventions effectively silence the Deaf ‘voice.’ Over 20 years ago, in the comprehensive book, Hollywood Speaks: Deafness and the Film Entertainment Industry (1988), Schuchman’s complaint that the filming and editing techniques of the day often did not attend to preserving the visibility and comprehensibility of sign language eon the screen, still applies today. As editing techniques have evolved over the years, fr om reliance on wide and medium shots to frequent intercutting of close-ups, the tendency to cut sign language off the screen, and out of the comprehensible view of the audience, may have even increased. Recent Portrayals of Deaf People on Television During one television season in the United States between August 2006 and April 2007, 30 episodes of six different serial television programs portrayed signing Deaf characters. Three of these programs had on-going Deaf characters that appeared in a number of episodes throughout the season, while three other programs portrayed Deaf people in a one-off episode with a Deaf theme. Initial air date for the season Program and Season # of Episodes 1 14 Aug. 2006 Weeds, Season 2 5 2 20 Sep. 2006 Jericho, Season 1 13 3 28 Jan. 2007 The L Word, Season 4 9 Table 1. Dramas with Ongoing Deaf Characters during the 2006-2007 USA Television Season Initial air date Program, Season, Episode Episode Title 1 13 Dec. 2006 CSI: New York, Season 3, Episode 12 “Silent Night” 2 3 Apr. 2007 Law and Order: Criminal Intent, Season 6, Episode 18 "Silencer" 3 12 Apr. 2007 Scrubs, Season 6, Episode 16 “My Words of Wisdom” Table 2. One-off Episodes with Signing Deaf Characters during the 2006-2007 USA Television Seasons Ironically, although the shows with ongoing characters sometimes allow the Deafness of the character to be incidental to the character, it is only the one-off crime dramas that show Deaf people relating with one another as members of a vibrant community and culture based in sign language. Often, in the ongoing series, the characters remain isolated from the Deaf community and their interactions with other Deaf people are sparse or non-existent. For example, out of the 27 episodes with an ongoing Deaf character only two episodes of The L-Word have more than one Deaf character portrayed. In both Weeds and The L-Word the Deaf character is the love interest of one of the hearing characters, while in Jericho, the Deaf character is the sister of one of the main hearing characters. In these episodes though some of realities about Deaf people’s lives are touched on as they relate to the hearing characters, the reality of signing Deaf people’s social lives in the Deaf community is left absent and they are depicted primarily interacting with hearing people. The two episodes, from CSI: New York, and Law and Order: Criminal Intent, focus on the controversial theme of cochlear implants in the Deaf community. Though it is true that generally the signing Deaf community in the U.S.A. sees cochlear implants as a threat to their community, there is no record of this controversy ever motivating violent criminal acts or murder as portrayed in these episodes. In the episode of CSI: New York entitled “Silent Night” a conflict between a young Deaf man and Deaf woman who were formerly romantically involved is portrayed. The murdered young woman who comes from a Deaf family does not want her Deaf baby to have a cochlear implant while the killer ex-boyfriend who has a cochlear implant believes that it is the best option for his child. The woman’s Deaf parents are involved in the investigation. The episode of Law and Order: Criminal Intent, entitled “Silencer,” is also ultimately about a conflict between a Deaf man and a Deaf woman over cochlear implants. In the end, it is revealed that the Deaf woman is exploring the possibility of a cochlear implant. Her boyfriend projecting the past hurt of his hearing sister leaving him behind to go off and live her own life, doesn’t want his girlfriend to leave him once she gains more hearing. So he shoots the cochlear implant surgeon in the hand to prevent him from being able to perform the surgery. Then he accidentally kills him by crushing his voice box to prevent him from screaming. Analyzing Two Crime Dramas In both television dramas, the filmmakers use both sound and video editing techniques to mark the experiential difference between hearing and Deaf characters. In comparing the two dramas two techniques are evident : muting/distorting sounds and extreme close-ups on lips talking or hands signing. Though these techniques may heighten awareness of deaf experience to a non-signing audience they also point to a disabling stereotyping of the experience of being Deaf as lacking — framing their experience as hearing loss rather than Deaf gain (Bauman & Murray; Shakespeare 199). By objectifying sign language through extreme close ups American Sign Language is portrayed as something strange and unusual that separates Deaf signers from hearing speakers. The auditory silences can either jolt the hearing non-signer into awareness of the sensory aspect of sound that is missing or it can jolt them into awareness of the visual world that they often don’t really see. In the opening few scenes of the episodes both CSI: New York and Law and Order: Criminal Intent use sound editing alternately muting or distorting sounds as they cut between a ‘deaf’ auditory perspective and a ‘hearing’ perspective on the action as it unfolds. Even though the sound editing does play a part in the portrayal of Deaf people’s experience as lacking sound, the more important aspects of film production to attend to are the visual aspects where Deaf people are seen authentically signing in their own language. Scene Analysis Methodology In taking a closer look at a scene from each episode we can see exactly how the filming and editing techniques work to create an image of sign language. I have chosen comparable scenes where a Deaf individual is interviewed or interrogated by the police using a sign language interpreter. In each scene it can be assumed that all the communication is happening in both English and ASL through an interpreter, so at all times some signing should be occurring. In transcribing the scenes, I noted each point when the editor spliced different camera shots adjacent to each other. Because of the different visual aesthetics in each program where one relied heavily on continuous panning shots, I also noted where the camera shifted focus from one character to another marking the duration of screen time for each character. This allowed for a better comparison between the two programs. In my transcripts, I included both glosses of the ASL signs visible on the screen as well as the flow of the spoken English on the audio track. This enabled me to count how many separate shifts in character screen time segments contained signing and how much of these contained completely visible signing in medium shots. CSI:NY Witness Interview Scene In the first signing scene, Gina (played by Marlee Matlin) is brought in for an interview with Detective Taylor and a uniformed officer interpreter. The scene opens with a medium shot on Detective Taylor as he asks her, “What do you think woke you up?” The shot cuts to an extreme close up of her face and hands and pans to only the hands as she signs FOOTSTEPS. Then the scene shifts to an over the shoulder medium shot of the interpreter where we can still see her signing VIBRATIONS and it cuts to a close up of her face as she signs ALISON NOISE. Though these signs are cropped, they are still decipherable as they happen near the face. Throughout this sequence the interpreter voices “Footsteps, I felt vibrations. I thought maybe it was Alison.” Next we have a close-up on Detective Taylor’s face as he asks her why her family moved and whether she had family in the area. During his question the camera shifts to a close up reaction of Gina listening and then back to a close up on Taylor’s face, and then to a medium shot of the interpreter translating the last part of the question. Next, while Gina responds the camera quickly cuts from a medium shot to a close-up side view of the hands to a close-up bird’s eye view of the hands to a close up of Gina’s face with most of the signs outside of the frame. See the transcript below: [medium shot] NOT PLAN HAVE MORE CHILDREN,[close-up side view of hands] PREGNANT,[close-up from bird’s eye view] DECIDE RAISE ELIZABETH[close-up Gina’s face signs out of frame] SAFE While this sequence plays out the interpreter voices, “My husband and I weren’t planning on having any more children. When I got pregnant my husband and I decided to raise Elizabeth outside of the city where it’s safe.” The kind of quick cuts between close-ups, medium shots and reaction shots of other characters sets the visual aesthetic for this episode of CSI: NY. In this particular clip, the camera shifts shot angles no less than 50 times in the space of one minute and 34 seconds. Yet there are only 12 conversational turns back and forth between the two characters. This makes for a number of intercut reaction shots, interpreter shots as well as close-ups and other angles on the same character. If only counting shifts in screen time on a particular character, there are still 37 shifts in focus between different characters during the scene. Out of the 22 shots that contain some element of signing — we only see a medium shot with all of the signing space visible 4 times for approximately 2 seconds each. Even though signing is occurring during every communication via the interpreter or Gina, less than half of the shots contain signs and 18 of these are close ups from various angles. The close ups in this clip varied from close-ups on the face, which cut out part of the signs, to close ups on the hands caught in different perspectives from a front, side, top or even table top reflected upside-down view. Some of the other shots were over the back shoulder of Gina catching a rear view of the signs as the camera is aimed in a medium shot of the detective and interpreter. The overall result from a signing perspective is a disjointed jumble of signs leaving the impression of chaos and heightened emotion. In some ways this can be seen as an exoticisation of the signs making them look surreal, drawing attention to the body parts displaying the signs and objectifying them. Such objectification may seem harmless to a non-signing hearing audience or media producer as a mere materializing of the felt amazement at signed communication moving at such a pace. But if we were to propose a hypothetical parallel situation where a Korean character is speaking in her native tongue and we are shown extreme close ups and quick cuts jumping from an image of the lips moving to the tongue tapping the teeth to a side close up of the mouth to an overhead image from the top of the head – this type of portrayal would immediately be felt to be a de-humanization of Korean people and likely labeled racist. In the case of sign language, is it merely thought of as visual artistry? Law & Order: Suspect Interrogation Scene Law & Order: Criminal Intent has a different film aesthetic. The scene selected is an interview with a potential suspect in the murder of a cochlear implant surgeon. The Deaf man, Larry is an activist and playwright. He is sitting at a table with his lawyer across from the male detective, Goren, and the interpreter with the female detective, Eames, standing to the side. Unlike the CSI: NY scene there are no quick cuts between shots. Instead the camera takes longer shots panning around the table. Even when there are cuts to slightly different angles, the camera continues to pan in the same direction as the previous shot giving the illusion that almost the entire scene is one shot. In this 45-second scene, there are only five cuts to different camera angles. However, the act of panning the camera around the room even in a continuous shot serves to break up the scene further as the camera pulls focus zooming in on different characters while it pans. For the purposes of this analysis, in addition to dividing the scene at shifts in camera angles performed through editing, I also divide the scenes at shifts in camera angles focusing on different characters. As the camera moves to focus on a different interlocutor (serving the same purpose as a shift done through editing), this brings the total shifts in camera angles to ten. At several points throughout this Law & Order: CI episode, the cinematographer uses the technique of zooming into an extreme close-up on the hands and then pulling out to see the signer. But in this particular scene all of the visible signed sequences are filmed in medium shots. While this is positive because we can actually see the whole message including hand and face, the act of panning behind the backs of seated characters while Larry is signing blocks some of his message just as much as shifting the edit to a reaction shot would do. Of the ten shots, only one shot does not contain any signing: when Detective Eames reacts to Larry’s demands and incredulously says, “A Deaf cop?” While all of the other shots contain some signing, there are only two signed interchanges that are not interrupted by some sort of body block. Ironically, both of these shots are when the hearing detective is speaking. The first is the opening shot. The camera, in a wide shot on 5 characters, opens on their reflections in the mirrored window located in the interview room. As the camera pulls back into the room, it spins around and pans across Detective Eames’ face to settle on Detective Goran. While Goran begins talking the shot widens out to include the interpreter sitting next to him and catch the signed translation. Goran says, “Larry? There’s a lot of people pointing their finger at you.” With a bit of lag time the interpreter signs: A-LOT PEOPLE THINK YOU GUILTY. Overall Comparison of the Two Scenes For both scenes there were only four segments with unobstructed medium shots of signers in the act of signing. In the case of Law & Order: CI this might be considered a good showing as there were only nine segments in the entire scene and 8 contained signing. Thus potentially yielding 50% visibility of the signs during the entire stream of the conversation (however not all signs were actually fully visible). In the case of CSI: NY, with its higher ratio of segments split by different camera shots, 22 segments contained signing, yielding a ratio of 18% visibility of signs. Though this analysis is limited to only one scene for comparison it does reveal that both episodes prioritize the spoken language stream of information over the sign language stream of information. CSI: New York Law & Order: CI Time duration of the clip 1 min 34 sec 45 sec # shifts in character conversational turns 12 times 10 times # edited camera shots to different angle 50 5 #shifts in screen time of the characters (edited or panned) 37 9 Total # screen time segments with signing 22 8 # medium shot segments with signing fully visible 4 4 # segments containing close ups of signs, cropped off signs or blocked 18 4 Table 3. Count comparison between the two scenes Filmmakers come from a hearing framework of film production where language equals sound on an audio track. Within that framework sound editing is separate from video editing and can provide continuity between disjointed visual shots. But this kind of reliance on sound to provide the linguistic continuity fails when confronted with representing American Sign Language on the screen. The sound stream of translated English words may provide continuity for the hearing audience, but if left to rely on what is available in the visual modality Deaf viewers may have to rely on closed captioning to understand the dialog even when it is portrayed in their own language. Disjointed scenes showing quick cuts between different angles on a signed dialog and flashing between reacting interlocutors leaves the signing audience with a view on a silenced protagonist. Recommendations How can media producers give voice to sign language on the screen? First there needs to be an awareness and concern amongst these same media producers that there is actually value in taking the care required to make sign language visible and accessible to the signing Deaf audience and perhaps raise more awareness among the non-signing hearing audience. It may be entirely possible to maintain a similar visual aesthetic to the programs and still make sign language visible. Hearing producers could learn from Deaf cinema and the techniques being developed there by emerging Deaf film producers (Christie, Durr, and Wilkins). In both examples used above careful planning and choreography of the filming and editing of the scenes would make this possible. With the quick cutting style of frequent close up shots found in CSI: NY, it would be necessary to reduce the number of close ups or make sure they were wide enough to include enough of the signs to maintain intelligibility as with signs that are made near the face. In addition, medium shots of the interpreter or the interpreter and the hearing speaker would have to become the norm in order to make the interpreted spoken language accessible as well. Over the shoulder shots of signers are possible as well, as long as the back of the signer does not obscure understanding of the signs. In order to avoid objectification of sign language, extreme close-ups of the hands should be avoided as it de-humanizes sign languages and reduces language to animalistic hand gestures. In addition, with adopting the visual aesthetic of panning continuous shots such as those found in Law and Order: CI, care would need to be taken not to obstruct the signs while circling behind other participants. Other possibilities remain such as adapting the visual aesthetic of 24 (another United States crime drama) where multiple shots taking place simultaneously are projected onto the screen. In this manner reaction shots and full shots of the signing can both be visible simultaneously. Aside from careful choreography, as suggested in previous work by scholars of Deaf cinema, (Schuchman, Hollywood; Jane Norman qtd. in Hartzell), hearing media producers would need to rely on excellent ASL/Deaf culture informants during all stages of the production; typically, cinematographers, directors and editors likely will not know how to make sure that signs are not obscured. Simultaneous signing and talking by Deaf and hearing characters should be avoided as this method of communication only confirms in the minds of hearing signers that sign language is merely a code for spoken language and not a language in and of itself. Instead, hearing media producers can more creatively rely on interpreters in mixed settings or subtitling when conversations occur between Deaf characters. Subtitling is already a marker for foreign language and may alert non-signing hearing audiences to the fact that sign language is a full language not merely a code for English. Using these kinds of techniques as a matter of policy when filming signing Deaf people will enable the signing voice some of the visibility that the Deaf community desires. Acknowledgements This article is based on work originally presented at the conference “Deaf Studies Today!”, April 2008, at Utah Valley State University in Orem, Utah, USA. I am grateful for feedback that I received from participants at this presentation. An earlier version of this article is published as part of the conference proceedings Deaf Studies Today! Mosaic edited by Brian K. Eldredge, Flavia Fleischer, and Douglas Stringham. References Bauman, H-Dirksen, and Joseph Murray. "Reframing from Hearing Loss to Deaf Gain." Deaf Studies Digital Journal (Fall 2009). < http://dsdj.gallaudet.edu/ >. Chaiken, Ilene (writer). The L Word. Television series. Season 4. 2007. Chbosky, S., J. Schaer, and J.E. Steinbert (creators) Jericho. Television series. Season 1 & 2. 2006-2007. Christie, Karen, Patti Durr, and Dorothy M. Wilkins. “CLOSE-UP: Contemporary Deaf Filmmakers.” Deaf Studies Today 2 (2006): 91-104. Hartzell, Adam. “The Deaf Film Festival.” The Film Journal (May 2003) < http://www.thefilmjournal.com/issue5/deaf.html >. Kohan, J. (creator), M. Burley (producer). Weeds. Television series. Lawrence, B. (creator), V. Nelli Jr. (director). “My Words of Wisdom.” Scrubs. Television series episode. Season 6, Episode 16. 12 Apr. 2007. Lenkov, P. M., and S. Humphrey (writers), A.E. Zulker (story), and R. Bailey (director). “Silent Night.” CSI: New York. Television series episode. Season 3, episode 12. CBS, 13 Dec. 2006. O'Shea, M. (writer), D. White (director), M.R. Thewlis (producer). "Silencer." Law and Order Criminal Intent. Television series episode. Season 6, Episode 18. New York: Universal, 3 April 2007. Schuchman, John. S. Hollywood Speaks: Deafness and the Entertainment Industry. Urbana & Chicago, Ill.: University of Illinois Press. 1988. ———. “The Silent Film Era: Silent Films, NAD Films, and the Deaf Community's Response.” Sign Language Studies 4.3 (2004): 231-238.

There is an expression, in recent Marvel superhero films, of a social anxiety about genetic science that, in part, replaces the social anxieties about nuclear weapons that can be detected in the comic books on which these films are based (Rutherford). Much of the analysis of superhero comics – and the films on which they are based – has focussed its attention on the anxieties contained within them about gender, sexuality, race, politics, and the nation. Surprisingly little direct critique is applied to the most obvious point of difference within those texts, namely the acquisition, display, and use of extra-ordinary abilities. These superhero films represent some of the ways that audiences come to understand genetics. I am interested in this essay in considering how the representation of genetic mutation, as an error in a bio-chemical code, is a key narrative device. Moreover, mutation is central to the way the films explore the social exclusion of characters who acquire super-abilities. My contention is that, in these Marvel comic films, extra-ordinary ability, and the anxieties expressed about those abilities, parallels some of the social and cultural beliefs about the disabled body. The impaired body thus becomes a larger trope for any deviation from the “normal” body and gives rise to the anxieties about deviation and deviance explored in these films. Impairment and illness have historically been represented as either a blessing or a curse – the source of revelation and discovery, or the site of ignominy. As Western culture developed, the confluence of Greek and Judeo-Christian stories about original sin and inherited punishment for parental digression resulted in the entrenchment of beliefs about bent and broken bodies as the locus of moral questions (and answers) about the abilities and use of the human body (Sontag 47). I want to explore, firstly, in the film adaptations of the Marvel comics X-Men, Spiderman, Fantastic Four, and The Hulk, the representation of changes to the body as the effect of invisible bio-chemical states and processes. It has been impossible to see DNA, whether with the human eye or with technical aid; the science of genetics is largely based on inference from other observations. In these superhero films, the graphic display of DNA and genetic restructuring is strikingly large. This overemphasis suggests both that the genetic is a key narrative impetus of the films and that there is something uncertain or disturbing about genetic science. One such concern about genetic science is identifying the sources of oppression that might underlie the, at times understandable, desire to eliminate disease and congenital defect through changes to the genetic code or elimination of genetic error. As Adrienne Asch states, this urge to eliminate disease and impairment is problematic: Why should it be acceptable to avoid some characteristics and not others? How can the society make lists of acceptable and unacceptable tests and still maintain that only disabling traits, and not people who live with those traits, are to be avoided? (339) Asch’s questioning ends with the return to the moral concerns that have always circulated around the body, and in particular a body that deviates from a norm. The maxim “hate the sin, not the sinner” is replaced by “eradicate the impairment, not the impaired”: it is some kind of lack of effort or resourcefulness on the part of the impaired that is detectable in the presence of the impairment. This replacement of sin by science is yet another example of the trace of the body as the site of moral arguments. As Bryan Turner argues, categories of disease, and by association impairment, are intrinsic to the political discourse of Western societies about otherness and exclusion (Turner 216). It is not surprising then, that characters that experience physical changes caused by genetic mutation may take on for themselves the social shame that is part of the exclusion process. As genetic science has increasingly infiltrated the popular imagination and thus finds expression in cinema, so too has this concern of shame and guilt become key to the narrative tension of films that link changes in the genetic code to the acquisition of super-ability. In the X-Men franchise, the young female character Rogue (Anna Paquin), acquires the ability to absorb another’s life force (and abilities), and she seeks to have her genetic code resequenced in order to be able to touch others, and thus by implication have a “normal” life. In X2 (Bryan Singer, 2003), Rogue’s boyfriend, Iceman (Shawn Ashmore), who has been largely excluded from her touch, returns home with other mutants. After having hidden his mutant abilities from his family, he finally confesses to them the truth about himself. His shocked mother turns to him and asks: “Have you tried not being a mutant?” Whilst this moment has been read as an expression of anxiety about homosexuality (“Pop Culture: Out Is In”; Vary), it also marks a wider social concern about otherness, including disability, and its attendant social exclusion. Moreover, this moment reasserts the paradigm of effort that underlies anxieties about deviations from the norm: Iceman could have been normal if only he had tried harder, had a different girlfriend, remained at home, sought more knowledge, or had better counsel. Science, and more specifically genetic science, is suggested in many of these films as the site of bad counsel. The narratives of these superhero stories, almost without exception, begin or hinge on some kind of mistake by scientists – the escaped spider, the accident in the laboratory, the experiment that gets out of control. The classic image of the mad scientist or Doctor Frankenstein type, locked away in his laboratory is reflected in the various scenes in all these films, in which the scientists are separated from wider society. In Fantastic 4 (Tim Story, 2005), the villain, Dr Von Doom (Julian McMahon), is located at the top of a large multi-story building, as too are the heroes. Their separation from the rest of society is made even more dramatic by placing the site of their exposure to cosmic radiation, the source of the genetic mutation, in a space station that is empty of anyone else except the five main characters whose bodies will be altered. In Spiderman (Sam Raimi, 2002), the villain is a scientist whose experiments are kept secret by the military, emphasising the danger inherent in his work. The mad-scientist imagery dominates the representation of Bruce Bannor’s father in Hulk (Ang Lee, 2003), whose experiments have altered his genetic code, and that alteration in genetic structure has subsequently been passed onto his son. The Fantastic 4 storyline returns several times to the link between genetic mutation and the exposure to cosmic radiation. Indeed, it is made explicit that human existence – and by implication the human body and abilities – is predicated on this cosmic radiation as the source of transformations that formed the human genetic code. The science of early biology thus posits this cosmic radiation as the source of what is “normal,” and it is this appeal to the cosmos – derived from the Greek kosmos meaning “order” – that provides, in part, the basis on which to value the current human genetic code. This link to the cosmic is also made in the opening sequence of X-Men in which the following voice-over is heard as we see a ball of light form. This light show is both a reminder of the Big Bang (the supposed beginning of the universe which unleased vast amounts of radiation) and the intertwining of chromosomes seen inside biological nuclei: Mutation, it is the key to our evolution. It has enabled us to evolve from a single celled organism to the dominant species on the planet. This process is slow, normally taking thousands and thousands of years. But every few hundred millennia evolution leaps forward. Whilst mutation may be key to human evolution and the basis for the dramatic narratives of these superhero films, it is also the source of social anxiety. Mutation, whilst derived from the Latin for “change,” has come to take on the connotation of an error or mistake. Richard Dawkins, in his celebrated book The Selfish Gene, compares mutation to “an error corresponding to a single misprinted letter in a book” (31). The language of science is intended to be without the moral overtones that such words as “error” and “misprint” attract. Nevertheless, in the films under consideration, the negative connotations of mutation as error or mistake, are, therefore, the source of the many narrative crises as characters seek to rid themselves of their abilities. Norman Osborn (Willem Dafoe), the villain of Spiderman, is spurred on by his belief that human beings have not achieved their potential, and the implication here is that the presence of physical weakness, illness, and impairment is the supporting evidence. The desire to return the bodies of these superheroes to a “normal” state is best expressed in_ Hulk_, when Banner’s father says: “So you wanna know what’s wrong with him. So you can fix him, cure him, change him.” The link between a mistake in the genetic code and the disablement of the these characters is made explicit when Banner demands from his father an explanation for his transformation into the Hulk – the genetic change is explicitly named a deformity. These films all gesture towards the key question of just what is the normal human genetic code, particularly given the way mutation, as error, is a fundamental tenet in the formation of that code. The films’ focus on extra-ordinary ability can be taken as a sign of the extent of the anxiety about what we might consider normal. Normal is represented, in part, by the supporting characters, named and unnamed, and the narrative turns towards rehabilitating the altered bodies of the main characters. The narratives of social exclusion caused by such radical deviations from the normal human body suggest the lack of a script or language for being able to talk about deviation, except in terms of disability. In Spiderman, Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) is doubly excluded in the narrative. Beginning as a classic weedy, glasses-wearing, nerdy individual, unable to “get the girl,” he is exposed to numerous acts of humiliation at the commencement of the film. On being bitten by a genetically altered spider, he acquires its speed and agility, and in a moment of “revenge” he confronts one of his tormentors. His super-ability marks him as a social outcast; his tormentors mock him saying “You are a freak” – the emphasis in speech implying that Parker has never left a freakish mode. The film emphasises the physical transformation that occurs after Parker is bitten, by showing his emaciated (and ill) body then cutting to a graphic depiction of genes being spliced into Parker’s DNA. Finally revealing his newly formed, muscular body, the framing provides the visual cues as to the verbal alignment of these bodies – the extraordinary and the impaired bodies are both sources of social disablement. The extreme transformation that occurs to Ben Grimm (Michael Chiklis), in Fantastic 4, can be read as a disability, buying into the long history of the disabled body as freak, and is reinforced by his being named “The Thing.” Socially, facial disfigurement may be regarded as one of the most isolating impairments; for example, films such as The Man without a Face (Mel Gibson, 1993) explicitly explore this theme. As the only character with a pre-existing relationship, Grimm’s social exclusion is reinforced by the rejection of his girlfriend when she sees his face. The isolation in naming Ben Grimm as “The Thing” is also expressed in the naming of Bruce Banner’s (Eric Bana) alter ego “Hulk.” They are grossly enlarged bodies that are seen as grotesque mutations of the “normal” human body – not human, but “thing-like.” The theme of social exclusion is played alongside the idea that those with extra-ordinary ability are also emblematic of the evolutionary dominance of a superior species of which science is an example of human dominance. The Human Genome Project, begun in 1990, and completed in 2003, was in many ways the culmination of a century and a half of work in biochemistry, announcing that science had now completely mapped the human genome: that is, provided the complete sequence of genes on each of the 46 chromosomes in human cells. The announcement of the completed sequencing of the human genome led to, what may be more broadly called, “genomania” in the international press (Lombardo 193). But arguably also, the continued announcements throughout the life of the Project maintained interest in, and raised significant social, legal, and ethical questions about genetics and its use and abuse. I suggest that in these superhero films, whose narratives centre on genetic mutation, that the social exclusion of the characters is based in part on fears about genetics as the source of disability. In these films deviation becomes deviance. It is not my intention to reduce the important political aims of the disability movement by equating the acquisition of super-ability and physical impairment. Rather, I suggest that in the expression of the extraordinary in terms of the genetic within the films, we can detect wider social anxieties about genetic science, particularly as the representations of that science focus the audience’s attention on mutation of the genome. An earlier film, not concerned with superheroes but with the perfectibility of the human body, might prove useful here. Gattaca (Andrew Nicol, 1997), which explores the slippery moral slope of basing the value of the human body in genetic terms (the letters of the title recall the chemicals that structure DNA, abbreviated to G, A, T, C), is a powerful tale of the social consequences of the primacy of genetic perfectibility and reflects the social and ethical issues raised by the Human Genome Project. In a coda to the film, that was not included in the theatrical release, we read: We have now evolved to the point where we can direct our own evolution. Had we acquired this knowledge sooner, the following people may never have been born. The screen then reveals a list of significant people who were either born with or acquired physical or psychological impairments: for example, Abraham Lincoln/Marfan Syndrome, Jackie Joyner-Kersee/Asthma, Emily Dickinson/Manic Depression. The audience is then given the stark reminder of the message of the film: “Of course the other birth that may never have taken place is your own.” The social order of Gattaca is based on “genoism” – discrimination based on one’s genetic profile – which forces characters to either alter or hide their genetic code in order to gain social and economic benefit. The film is an example of what the editors of the special issue of the Florida State University Law Journal on genetics and disability note: how we look at genetic conditions and their relationship to health and disability, or to notions of “normalcy” and “deviance,” is not strictly or even primarily a legal matter. Instead, the issues raised in this context involve ethical considerations and require an understanding of the social contexts in which those issues appear. (Crossley and Shepherd xi) Implicit in these commentators’ concern is the way an ideal body is assumed as the basis from which a deviation in form or ability is measured. These superhero films demonstrate that, in order to talk about super-ability as a deviation from a normal body, they rely on disability scripts as the language of deviation. Scholars in disability studies have identified a variety of ways of talking about disability. The medical model associates impairment or illness with a medical tragedy, something that must be cured. In medical terms an error is any deviation from the norm that needs to be rectified by medical intervention. By contrast, in the social constructivist model, the source of disablement is environmental, political, cultural, or economic factors. Proponents of the social model do not regard impairment as equal to inability (Karpf 80) and argue that the discourses of disability are “inevitably informed by normative beliefs about what it is proper for people’s bodies and minds to be like” (Cumberbatch and Negrine 5). Deviations from the normal body are classification errors, mistakes in social categorisation. In these films aspects of both the medical tragedy and social construction of disability can be detected. These films come at a time when disability remains a site of social and political debate. The return to these superheroes, and their experiences of exclusion, in recent films is an indicator of social anxiety about the functionality of the human body. And as the science of genetics gains increasing public representation, the idea of ability – and disability – that is, what is regarded as “proper” for bodies and minds, is increasingly related to how we regard the genetic code. As the twenty first century began, new insights into the genetic origins of disease and congenital impairments offered the possibility that the previous uncertainty about the provenance of these illnesses and impairments may be eliminated. But new uncertainties have arisen around the value of human bodies in terms of ability and function. This essay has explored the way representations of extra-ordinary ability, as a mutation of the genetic code, trace some of the experiences of disablement. A study of these superhero films suggests that the popular dissemination of genetics has not resulted in an understanding of ability and form as purely bio-chemical, but that thinking about the body as a bio-chemical code occurs within already present moral discourses of the body’s value. References Asch, Adrienne. “Disability Equality and Prenatal Testing: Contradictory or Compatible?” Florida State University Law Review 30.2 (2003): 315-42. Crossley, Mary, and Lois Shepherd. “Genes and Disability: Questions at the Crossroads.” Florida State University Law Review 30.2 (2003): xi-xxiii. Cumberbatch, Guy, and Ralph Negrine. Images of Disability on Television. London: Routledge, 1992. Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. 30th Anniversary ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Karpf, A. “Crippling Images.” Framed: Interrogating Disability in the Media. Eds. A. Pointon and C. Davies. London: British Film Institute, 1997. 79-83. Lombardo, Paul A. “Taking Eugenics Seriously: Three Generations Of ??? Are Enough.” Florida State University Law Review 30.2 (2003): 191-218. “Pop Culture: Out Is In.” Contemporary Sexuality 37.7 (2003): 9. Rutherford, Adam. “Return of the Mutants.” Nature 423.6936 (2003): 119. Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. London: Penguin, 1988. Turner, Bryan S. Regulating Bodies. London: Routledge, 1992. Vary, Adam B. “Mutant Is the New Gay.” Advocate 23 May 2006: 44-45. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Mantle, Martin. "“Have You Tried Not Being a Mutant?”: Genetic Mutation and the Acquisition of Extra-ordinary Ability." M/C Journal 10.5 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/10-mantle.php>. APA Style Mantle, M. (Oct. 2007) "“Have You Tried Not Being a Mutant?”: Genetic Mutation and the Acquisition of Extra-ordinary Ability," M/C Journal, 10(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/10-mantle.php>.

In 1947, the Parisian couturier Christian Dior launched his celebrated New Look, a collection that offered an aspirational alternative to the fabric restrictions and low consumer expectations of post-war austerity – seemingly re-routing fashionable trends in Europe and North America in the space of a season. The diarist had unwittingly become first a witness to, and then a participant in, the mysterious process of fashion change. Suffering from a version of sartorial jet-lag, she faced an oncoming tide of novelties, fresh versions of the fashion designer's diktat, while her own wardrobe remained in another, less contemporary, time zone. She knew that she must adapt or be overtaken. Though it would be difficult to re-enact this precise scenario today or in the more distant past, it does present some generic issues concerning fashion's close relationship with novelty, change, competition, guilt, and desire that will be familiar to historians of consumption in the early modern period and the contemporary. Fashion's relation to time and space has formed a fascinating context in which to consider the development of consumerism.

The stock narrative of the Industrial Revolution (ca. 1760–late 1800s) is one of moral and economic progress. Indeed, economic progress is cast as moral progress. The story tends to go something like this: inventors, economists, and statesmen in Western Europe dreamed up a new industrialized world. Fueled by the optimism and scientific know-how of the Enlightenment, a series of heroic men—James Watt, Adam Smith, William Huskisson, and so on— fought back against the stultifying effects of regulated economies, irrational laws and customs, and a traditional guild structure that quashed innovation. By the mid-nineteenth century, they had managed to implement a laissez-faire (“free”) economy that ran on new machines and was centered around modern factories and an urban working class. It was a long and difficult process, but this revolution eventually brought Europeans to a new plateau of civilization. In the end, Europeans lived in a new world based on wage labor, easy mobility, and the consumption of sparkling products. Europe had rescued itself from the pre-industrial misery that had hampered humankind since the dawn of time. Cheap and abundant fossil fuel powered the trains and other steam engines that drove humankind into this brave new future. Later, around the time that Europeans decided that colonial slavery wasn’t such a good idea, they exported this revolution to other parts of the world, so that everyone could participate in freedom and industrialized modernity. They did this, in part, by “opening up markets” in primitive agrarian societies. The net result has been increased human happiness, wealth, and productivity—the attainment of our true potential as a species! Sadly, this saccharine story still sweetens our societal self-image. Indeed, it is deeply ingrained in the collective identity of the industrialized world. The narrative has gotten more complex but remains a la base a triumphalist story.