Journal articles on the topic 'Is tom cruise gay'

The aim is to examine how male bodies are represented on a gay cruise website. The article focus on photographs in which such bodies appear on the official Atlantis Events website in ads for cruises organized by the company for the 2018 season. The central argument points out that the bodies are predominantly masculine and athletic and reproduce aesthetic patterns connected to strength and healthy physical condition, moving away from disparaging stigmas associated with gays and their negative connection to the female condition. The clothes and accessories used by these men and the portrayed situations and places point to a pattern of consumption allowed only to middle and upper class individuals, which ends up marginalizing, in the company’s communication, other members of the LGBT population who do not fit into such aesthetic and financial standards.

Based on sampling over the period 1976-1993 in the southeast Brazilian Bight, the distribution of spawning of the Brazilian sardine (Sardinella brasi/iensis) is described in relation to environmental conditions. The area of intense spawning occurs in the southern part of the bight where coastal upwelling was less /Tequent. Spawning intensity showed high interannllal variation and the egg abundance in the survey area ranged /Tom 99 billion eggs in the January 1988 cruise to 4669 billion eggs in the January 1981 cruise. Peak spawning takes place one hour after midnight and eggs hatch . out within 19 hours with a water temperature of 24 °e.

This study is an analysis of illocutionary speech acts performed in Tom Cruise's interview in promoting his movie. This study aims to describe the types as well as the functions of illocutionary speech acts performed by both the interviewer and the interviewee. Moreover, this study also describes the most and the least used illocutionary speech acts performed in the interview. This study uses qualitative method employing descriptive analysis design. The data source of this study is collected by downloading the video of the interview from YouTube. The data are observed and transcribed into written form. Furthermore, the data are categorized into some types of illocutionary speech acts. The result showed that there are four kinds of illocutionary speech acts which are performed in Tom Cruise's interview which are representative, commissive, directive, and expressive. Here, the representative speech acts was categorized as the most performed speech in that interview. The result of the present study showed that Tom Cruise tended to convey his utterance to give statements of fact or to describe things that he believed to be true. Meanwhile, the percentage of the most performed or the most used speech acts to the least one in Tom Cruise's interview is: representative (48.7%), expressive (38.5%), commissive (7.7%), directive (5.1%), and declarative (0%).

This article historically contextualises the origins of a transnational gay male aesthetic many now think of as homonormative. While typically understood as a depoliticisation that ‘recodes freedom and liberation in terms of privacy, domesticity, and consumption’ (Manalansan, 2005: 142), homonormativity also has an associated look defined by a set of slick surface appearances relating both to the body and design. Recognisable in various locations across the globe and in multiple settings including cruise ships, resorts, and gyms, this aesthetic is, above all, associated with gaybourhoods and gay villages. Using Soho’s gay village in London as a case-study of the emergence of this generic style in the 1990s, its branded emphasis on ‘affluence’, minimalist interior design and idealised gym bodies is contextualised with references to yuppification and AIDS. Constituting a ‘clean break’ with earlier forms of urban gay culture now stigmatised as ‘dirty’ and ‘unhealthy’, the homonormative aesthetic can be viewed as an example of ‘de-generational unremembering’ following the first traumatic phase of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s (Castiglia C and Reed C (2011) If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past. Minneapolis, MN, and London: University of Minnesota Press, p. 9). By placing AIDS at the centre of a discussion of homonormativity, some of the assumptions about its privilege can be queried while at the same time maintaining a critique of how class-specific ‘aspirational’ imagery was deployed to detract from the stigma of the health crisis.

Cue: Lalo Schifrin's “Theme from Mission: Impossible.” If the return of Tom Cruise, explosions, and fast-paced chases to the screen this summer is any indication, Americans (and the global audience for Hollywood action film) love an impossible mission. Certainly, U.S. music scholars do. Reading the eight reviews of the second edition of The Grove Dictionary of American Music (hereafter, AmeriGrove II), edited by Charles Garrett (with a large and distinguished editorial team and nearly fifteen hundred contributors), as well as dipping frequently into its entries, we were deeply impressed both by the quality and ambition of the eight-volume, 5.4 million-word encyclopedia and by the “gargantuan” task (as Leta Miller puts it) with which the reviewers had been charged.

Classic gaze theory that was underlined by Laura Mulvey in 1975 which claims the male gaze objectifies woman and turns the woman into a sex object, is lack in the explaining gaze from man to man. In Tom Ford’s A Single Man the gaze is used from man to man different from man to woman and it is not perceived as something negative. By providing a queer gaze analysis, this article will show how homosexual people live their intimate feelings by gaze and how gay gaze can be different from the classic gaze in a way that it does not reduces the other one in an interior position.

If you had typed genre into amazon.com's search engine on a certain day in March 2007, you would have come up with an initial ten listings that included two gay men's magazines (Genre and Instinct Magazine), one introductory theoretical text (my own Genre), a compact disc by a group called D-Genre, a composition textbook (Tom Romano's Blending Genre, Altering Style: Writing Multigenre Papers), three resource kits for children (Carson-Dellosa's Literary Genres, Susan Ludwig's Twenty-Four Ready-to-Go Genre Book Reports: Engaging Activities with Reproducibles, Rubrics, and Everything You Need to Help Students Get the Most Out of Their Independent Reading, and a bulletin-board set entitled BB Set Genres of Lit), and, finally, two school textbooks (Tara McCarthy's Teaching Genre (Grades 4–8) and Heather Lattimer's Thinking through Genre: Units of Study in Reading and Writing Workshops 4–12).

Many movies include a scene or two containing mathematics content to achieve various effects, such as to show the importance of education, to emphasize a point the filmmaker wants to clarify, and to add humor. many of us have been dazzled by the complexity of mathematics in A Beautiful Mind and Good Will Hunting. I know the level of mathematics is beyond the middle school years, but the passion for the subject matter might inspire some students. In Rain Man, Dustin hoffman plays the autistic brother of Tom cruise and proves that he can calculate square roots and do complex decimal computations in his head. These scenes hint at the importance of mental-math skills, a concept that we need to emphasize in the middle grades. It also shows that calculations can be done accurately and rapidly, even when the person doing the calculation has no understanding of what the numbers mean. middle school students are used to a world of television and video games and learn a lot from these visual aids. So why not use films to help us teach concepts or make students smile about mathematics?

An account of cultural policy-making in Queensland since the election of the Goss Labor government in 1989 requires revisiting the rise and fall of what Stevenson (2000) has called the ‘cultural policy moment’ in Australia.This period, from the early 1990s to the early 2000s, was characterised by political and scholarly interest in the civic and symbolic utility of culture, and in the outcomes achieved through its management. The cultural policy moment was produced simultaneously within government, the cultural sector and the academy. Within government, it was characterised by a new and highly visible interest in managing culture and (through it) the citizenry (O'Regan 2002). Within the academy, the cultural policy project was raised by Tim Rowse in Arguing the Arts (1985) and developed by the Institute for Cultural Policy Studies at Griffith University through the work of Ian Hunter, Tony Bennett, Toby Miller, Colin Mercer, Jenny Craik, Tom O'Regan and Gay Hawkins in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Stuart Cunningham's Framing Culture (1992) focused existing debate within Australian cultural studies over the place of policy-based approaches within the discipline.

Abstract Celebrated as 'China's Tom of Finland', Xiyadie is probably one of the best-known queer artists living in China today. His identity as a gay man from rural China and his method of using the Chinese folk art of papercutting for queer artistic expression make him a unique figure in contemporary Chinese art. As the first academic article on the artist and his works, this article examines Xiyadie's transformation of identity in life and his representation of queer experiences through the art of papercutting. Using a critical biographical approach, in tandem with an analysis of his representative artworks, I examine the transformation of Xiyadie's identity from a folk artist to a queer artist. In doing so, I delineate the transformation and reification of human subjectivity and creativity under transnational capitalism. Meanwhile, I also seek possible means of desubjectivation and human agency under neo-liberal capitalism by considering the role of art in this picture. This article situates Xiyadie's life and artworks in a postsocialist context where class politics gave way to identity politics in cultural production. It calls for a reinvigoration of Marxist and socialist perspectives for a nuanced critical understanding of contemporary art production and social identities.

Winter, W. Christopher, Tom Gampper, Spencer B. Gay, and Paul M. Suratt. Lateral pharyngeal fat pad pressure during breathing in anesthetized pigs. J. Appl. Physiol. 83(3): 688–694, 1997.—It has been hypothesized that the pressure in tissues surrounding the upper airway is one of the determinants of the size and shape of the upper airway. To our knowledge, this pressure has not been measured. The purpose of this study was to test whether the pressure in a tissue lateral to the upper airway, the lateral pharyngeal fat pad pressure (Pfp), differs from atmospheric and pharyngeal pressures and whether it changes with breathing. We studied six male lightly sedated pigs by inserting a transducer tipped catheter into their fat pad space by using computerized tomographic scan guidance. We measured airflow with a pneumotachograph attached to a face mask and pharyngeal pressure with a balloon catheter. Pfp differed from atmospheric pressure, generally exceeding it, and from pharyngeal pressure. Pfp correlated positively with airflow and with pharyngeal pressure, decreasing during inspiration and increasing during expiration. Changes in Pfp with ventilation were eliminated by oropharyngeal intubation. We conclude that Pfp differs from atmospheric and pharyngeal pressures and that it changes with breathing.

The idea of national identity as threatened by foreign invasions has been at the centre of many popular Science Fiction (SF) films in the United States of America. In alien invasion films, aggressive colonisers stand for collective anxieties and can be read “as metaphors for a range of perceived threats to humanity, or particular groups, ranging from 1950s communism to the AIDS virus and contemporary ‘illegal aliens’ of human origin” (King and Krzywinska, 2000: 31-2). Such films can effectively tell historical and cultural specificities, including gender concerns. In them, the characters’ sense of belonging to a nation is destabilised in a number of ways, resulting in identity crisis in most cases. A fervent need to defend the nation from the malevolent strangers is combined with an alienation of the self in the search of individual salvation or survival.The present analysis will attempt to illustrate how threats to configurations of power are employed in a contemporary alien invasion film: The War of the Worlds (Steven Spielberg, 2005). Specifically, the film takes the narrative of destruction to suggest the destabilisation of US national power within the context of post September 11, together with a subtle disruption of the gender and sexual status quo. Indeed, new ways of understanding masculinity and fatherhood assault both the public and the private spaces of its white male heterosexual protagonist, Ray, performed by popular actor Tom Cruise. Ambiguous patriotism, identity crises and selfishness are at the core of this contemporary version of H.G. Wells’s landmark novel.

This article examines a cross-section of viral Deepfake videos that utilise the recognisable physiognomies of Hollywood film stars to exhibit the representative possibilities of Deepfakes as a sophisticated technology of illusion. Created by a number of online video artists, these convincing ‘mash-ups’ playfully rewrite film history by retrofitting canonical cinema with new star performers, from Jim Carrey in The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) to Tom Cruise in American Psycho (Mary Harron, 2000). The particular remixing of stardom in these videos can – as this article contends – be situated within the technological imaginary of ‘take two’ cinephilia, and the ‘technological performativity of digitally remastered sounds and images’ in an era of ‘the download, the file swap, [and] the sampling’ (Elsaesser 2005: 36–40). However, these ‘take two’ Deepfake cyberstars further aestheticize an entertaining surface tension between coherency and discontinuity, and in their modularity function as ‘puzzling’ cryptograms written increasingly in digital code. Fully representing the star-as-rhetorical digital asset, Deepfakes therefore make strange contemporary Hollywood’s many digitally mediated performances, while the reskinning of (cisgender white male) stars sharpens the ontology of gender as it is understood through discourses of performativity (Butler 1990; 2004). By identifying Deepfakes as a ‘take two’ undoing, this article frames their implications for the cultural politics of identity; Hollywood discourses of hegemonic masculinity; overlaps with non-normative subjectivities, ‘body narratives’ and ‘second skins’ (Prosser 1998); and how star-centred Deepfakes engage gender itself as a socio-techno phenomenon of fakery that is produced – and reproduced – over time.

Benedict Anderson; Under three flags; Anarchism and the anticolonial imagination (Greg Bankoff) Leakthina Chau-Pech Ollier, Tim Winter (eds); Expressions of Cambodia; The politics of tradition, identity and change (David Chandler) Ying Shing Anthony Chung; A descriptive grammar of Merei (Vanuatu) (Alexandre François) Yasuyuki Matsumoto; Financial fragility and instability in Indonesia (David C. Cole) Mason C. Hoadley; Public administration; Indonesian norms versus Western forms (Jan Kees van Donge) Samuel S. Dhoraisingam; Peranakan Indians of Singapore and Melaka (Joseph M. Fernando) Vatthana Pholsena; Post-war Laos; The politics of culture, history and identity (Volker Grabowksy) Gert Oostindie; De parels en de kroon; Het koningshuis en de koloniën (Hans Hägerdal) Jean-Luc Maurer; Les Javanais du Caillou; Des affres de l’exil aux aléas de l’intégration; Sociologie historique de la communauté indonésienne de Nouvelle-Calédonie (Menno Hecker) Richard Stubbs; Rethinking Asia’s economic miracle; The political economy of war, prosperity and crisis (David Henley) Herman Th. Verstappen; Zwerftocht door een wereld in beweging (Sjoerd R. Jaarsma) Klokke, A.H. (ed. and transl.); Fishing, hunting and headhunting in the former culture of the Ngaju Dayak in Central Kalimantan; Notes from the manuscripts of the Ngaju Dayak authors Numan Kunum and Ison Birim; from the Legacy of Dr. H. Schaerer; With a recent additional chapter on hunting by Katuah Mia (Monica Janowski) Ian Proudfoot; Old Muslim calendars of Southeast Asia (Nico J.G. Kaptein) Garry Rodan; Transparency and authoritarian rule in Southeast Asia (Soe Tjen Marching) Greg Fealy, Virginia Hooker (eds); Voices of Islam in Southeast Asia; A contemporary sourcebook (Dick van der Meij) Eko Endarmoko; Tesaurus Bahasa Indonesia (Don van Minde) Charles J.-H. Macdonald; Uncultural behavior; An anthropological investigation of suicide in the southern Philippines (Raul Pertierra) Odd Arne Westad, Sophie Quinn-Judge (eds); The Third Indochina War; Conflict between China, Vietnam and Cambodia, 1972-79 (Vatthana Pholsena) B. Bouman; Ieder voor zich en de Republiek voor ons allen; De logistiek achter de Indonesische Revolutie 1945-1950 (Harry A. Poeze) Michel Gilquin; The Muslims of Thailand (Nathan Porath) Tom Boellstorff; The gay archipelago; Sexuality and nation in Indonesia (Raquel Reyes) Kathleen M. Adams; Art as politics; Re-crafting identities, tourism, and power in Tana Toraja, Indonesia (Dik Roth) Aris Ananta, Evi Nurvidya Arifin, Leo Suryadinata; Emerging democracy in Indonesia (Henk Schulte Nordholt) Casper Schuring; Abdulgani; 70 jaar nationalist van het eerste uur (Nico G. Schulte Nordholt) Geoff Wade (ed. and transl.); Southeast Asia in the Ming Shi-lu; An open access resource (Heather Sutherland) Alexander Horstmann, Reed L. Wadley (eds); Centering the margin; Agency and narrative in Southeast Asian Borderlands (Nicholas Tapp) Marieke Brand, Henk Schulte Nordholt, Fridus Steijlen (eds); Indië verteld; Herinneringen, 1930-1950 (Jean Gelman Taylor) Tin Maung Maung Than; State dominance in Myanmar; The political economy of industrialization (Sean Turnell) Henk Schulte Nordholt, Ireen Hoogenboom (eds); Indonesian transitions (Robert Wessing) In: Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde no. 163 (20075), no: 4, Leiden

The DebateQuestion 1: Various commentators have frequently invoked the importance of moderate Muslims and the role that they can play in fighting extremism in the Muslim world. But it is not clear who is a moderate Muslim. The recent cancellation of Tariq Ramadan’s visa to the United States, the raids on several American Muslim organizations, and the near marginalization of mainstream American Muslims in North America pose the following question: If moderate Muslims are critical to an American victory in the war on terror, then why does the American government frequently take steps that undermine moderate Muslims? Perhaps there is a lack of clarity about who the moderate Muslims are. In your view, who are these moderate Muslims and what are their beliefs and politics? JLE: Our human tendency is to define what is normal or moderate in terms of someone just like “us.” The American government, as well as many western and Muslim governments and experts, define moderate by searching for reflections of themselves. Thus, Irshad Manji or “secular” Muslims are singled out as self-critical moderate Muslims by such diverse commentators as Thomas Friedman or Daniel Pipes. In an America that is politicized by the “right,” the Republican and religious right, and post-9/11 by the threat of global terrorism and the association of Islam with global terrorism, defining a moderate Muslim becomes even more problematic. Look at the situations not only in this country but also in Europe, especially France. Is a moderate Muslim one who accepts integration, or must it be assimilation? Is a moderate Muslim secular, as in laic (which is really anti-religious)? Is a moderate Muslim one who accepts secularism, as in the separation of church and state, so that no religion is privileged and the rights of all (believer and nonbeliever) are protected? Is a moderate Muslim one who accepts a particular notion of gender relations, not simply the equality of women and men but a position against wearing hijab? (Of course let’s not forget that we have an analogous problem with many Muslims whose definition of being a Muslim, or of being a “good” Muslim woman, is as narrowly defined.) In today’s climate, defining who is a moderate Muslim depends on the politics or religious positions of the individuals making the judgment: Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes, Gilles Kepel, Stephen Schwartz, Pat Robertson, and Tom DeLay. The extent to which things have gotten out of hand is seen in attempts to define moderate Islam or what it means to be a good European or American Muslim. France has defined the relationship of Islam to being French, sought to influence mosques, and legislated against wearing hijab in schools. In the United States, non-Muslim individuals and organizations, as well as the government, establish or fund organizations that define or promote “moderate Islam,” Islamic pluralism, and so on, as well as monitor mainstream mosques and organizations. The influence of foreign policy plays a critical role. For some, if not many, the litmus test for a moderate Muslim is tied to foreign policy issues, for example, how critical one is of American or French policy or one’s position in regard to Palestine/Israel, Algeria, Kashmir, and Iraq. Like many Muslim regimes, many experts and ideologues, as well as publications like The Weekly Standard, National Review, The Atlantic, The New York Sun and media like Fox Television, portray all Islamists as being the same. Mainstream and extremist (they deny any distinction between the two) and indeed all Muslims who do not completely accept their notion of secularism, the absolute separation of religion and the state, are regarded as a threat. Mainstream Islamists or other Islamically oriented voices are dismissed as “wolves in sheep’s clothing.” What is important here is to emphasize that it is not simply that these individuals, as individual personalities, have influence and an impact, but that their ideas have taken on a life of their own and become part of popular culture. In a post-9/11 climate, they reinforce the worst fears of the uninformed in our populace. The term moderate is in many ways deceptive. It can be used in juxtaposition to extremist and can imply that you have to be a liberal reformer or a progressive in order to pass the moderate test, thus excluding more conservative or traditionalist positions. Moderates in Islam, as in all faiths, are the majority or mainstream in Islam. We assume this in regard to such other faiths as Judaism and Christianity. The Muslim mainstream itself represents a multitude of religious and socioeconomic positions. Minimally, moderate Muslims are those who live and work “within” societies, seek change from below, reject religious extremism, and consider violence and terrorism to be illegitimate. Often, in differing ways, they interpret and reinterpret Islam to respond more effectively to the religious, social, and political realities of their societies and to international affairs. Some seek to Islamize their societies but eschew political Islam; others do not. Politically, moderate Muslims constitute a broad spectrum that includes individuals ranging from those who wish to see more Islamically oriented states to “Muslim Democrats,” comparable to Europe’s Christian Democrats. The point here is, as in other faiths, the moderate mainstream is a very diverse and disparate group of people who can, in religious and political terms, span the spectrum from conservatives to liberal reformers. They may disagree or agree on many matters. Moderate Jews and Christians can hold positions ranging from reform to ultraorthodox and fundamentalist and, at times, can bitterly disagree on theological and social policies (e.g., gay rights, abortion, the ordination of women, American foreign and domestic policies). So can moderate Muslims.

The DebateQuestion 1: Various commentators have frequently invoked the importance of moderate Muslims and the role that they can play in fighting extremism in the Muslim world. But it is not clear who is a moderate Muslim. The recent cancellation of Tariq Ramadan’s visa to the United States, the raids on several American Muslim organizations, and the near marginalization of mainstream American Muslims in North America pose the following question: If moderate Muslims are critical to an American victory in the war on terror, then why does the American government frequently take steps that undermine moderate Muslims? Perhaps there is a lack of clarity about who the moderate Muslims are. In your view, who are these moderate Muslims and what are their beliefs and politics? JLE: Our human tendency is to define what is normal or moderate in terms of someone just like “us.” The American government, as well as many western and Muslim governments and experts, define moderate by searching for reflections of themselves. Thus, Irshad Manji or “secular” Muslims are singled out as self-critical moderate Muslims by such diverse commentators as Thomas Friedman or Daniel Pipes. In an America that is politicized by the “right,” the Republican and religious right, and post-9/11 by the threat of global terrorism and the association of Islam with global terrorism, defining a moderate Muslim becomes even more problematic. Look at the situations not only in this country but also in Europe, especially France. Is a moderate Muslim one who accepts integration, or must it be assimilation? Is a moderate Muslim secular, as in laic (which is really anti-religious)? Is a moderate Muslim one who accepts secularism, as in the separation of church and state, so that no religion is privileged and the rights of all (believer and nonbeliever) are protected? Is a moderate Muslim one who accepts a particular notion of gender relations, not simply the equality of women and men but a position against wearing hijab? (Of course let’s not forget that we have an analogous problem with many Muslims whose definition of being a Muslim, or of being a “good” Muslim woman, is as narrowly defined.) In today’s climate, defining who is a moderate Muslim depends on the politics or religious positions of the individuals making the judgment: Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes, Gilles Kepel, Stephen Schwartz, Pat Robertson, and Tom DeLay. The extent to which things have gotten out of hand is seen in attempts to define moderate Islam or what it means to be a good European or American Muslim. France has defined the relationship of Islam to being French, sought to influence mosques, and legislated against wearing hijab in schools. In the United States, non-Muslim individuals and organizations, as well as the government, establish or fund organizations that define or promote “moderate Islam,” Islamic pluralism, and so on, as well as monitor mainstream mosques and organizations. The influence of foreign policy plays a critical role. For some, if not many, the litmus test for a moderate Muslim is tied to foreign policy issues, for example, how critical one is of American or French policy or one’s position in regard to Palestine/Israel, Algeria, Kashmir, and Iraq. Like many Muslim regimes, many experts and ideologues, as well as publications like The Weekly Standard, National Review, The Atlantic, The New York Sun and media like Fox Television, portray all Islamists as being the same. Mainstream and extremist (they deny any distinction between the two) and indeed all Muslims who do not completely accept their notion of secularism, the absolute separation of religion and the state, are regarded as a threat. Mainstream Islamists or other Islamically oriented voices are dismissed as “wolves in sheep’s clothing.” What is important here is to emphasize that it is not simply that these individuals, as individual personalities, have influence and an impact, but that their ideas have taken on a life of their own and become part of popular culture. In a post-9/11 climate, they reinforce the worst fears of the uninformed in our populace. The term moderate is in many ways deceptive. It can be used in juxtaposition to extremist and can imply that you have to be a liberal reformer or a progressive in order to pass the moderate test, thus excluding more conservative or traditionalist positions. Moderates in Islam, as in all faiths, are the majority or mainstream in Islam. We assume this in regard to such other faiths as Judaism and Christianity. The Muslim mainstream itself represents a multitude of religious and socioeconomic positions. Minimally, moderate Muslims are those who live and work “within” societies, seek change from below, reject religious extremism, and consider violence and terrorism to be illegitimate. Often, in differing ways, they interpret and reinterpret Islam to respond more effectively to the religious, social, and political realities of their societies and to international affairs. Some seek to Islamize their societies but eschew political Islam; others do not. Politically, moderate Muslims constitute a broad spectrum that includes individuals ranging from those who wish to see more Islamically oriented states to “Muslim Democrats,” comparable to Europe’s Christian Democrats. The point here is, as in other faiths, the moderate mainstream is a very diverse and disparate group of people who can, in religious and political terms, span the spectrum from conservatives to liberal reformers. They may disagree or agree on many matters. Moderate Jews and Christians can hold positions ranging from reform to ultraorthodox and fundamentalist and, at times, can bitterly disagree on theological and social policies (e.g., gay rights, abortion, the ordination of women, American foreign and domestic policies). So can moderate Muslims.

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

Profile pictures from gay dating sites of young men posing with the stelae of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe in Berlin have been subject to an art exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York and a tribute online blog. This paper unveils the meaning of these pictures on this particular site, in an effort to understand why these men chose to portray themselves at the Holocaust Memorial in order to cruise the digital sphere of gay dating websites. In three consecutive sections, the paper asserts that, on the one hand, the conversion of the Holocaust Memorial into a cruising scenario is facilitated by a design that —putting forward autonomy and abstraction— allows and even invites its constant resignification in terms of everyday practices. And, on the other hand, it posits that the images exhibited at the Jewish Museum can be interpreted as a performative memorial which reinscribes sexuality and gender into Holocaust narratives.