Journal articles on the topic 'Latino threat narrative'

AbstractThis study investigates the figuration of “Spanish” as a sociocultural discourse within the context of a middle school in North Carolina, where immigration from Latin America is new, yet quickly accelerating. The school-based discourse is analyzed in terms of everyday ways of talking among students, as well as institutional ideologies and practices, which mediate national discourses about US Latinos and reinforce tropes circulated by students. Everyday ways of talking among non-Latino students suggest that Latinos—both immigrants and US born—are Spanish monolinguals who “choose” to be segregated from the English speakers. The use of Spanish by Latinos is constructed by non-Latinos as secretive and dangerous, linking local tropes about Spanish to national discourses. Consistent informal pressure against Spanish at school links to broader pressures against Spanish in the community and beyond. The discourse problematizes Latino identity formations and limits the types of identities available to Latino students. (Discursive production, Spanish, US Latinos, Latino threat narrative)*

Ideologies that support racial domination and White supremacy remain foundational in U.S. society, even as the nation becomes increasingly diverse and progressively focused on quantitative measurement. This study explores how a prominent mainstream news outlet represents the growth of the nation’s second largest population, Latinos, within this changing demographic and numeric environment. Drawing from two frameworks, the Latino Threat Narrative and Color-Blind Racism, quantitative and qualitative analyses are conducted with 174 Los Angeles Times ( LAT) articles about 2000 and 2010 census results. Reporters for the LAT, located in the single most important U.S. location for Latinos, frame Latinos and their population dynamics in line with the overtly racist narrative of Latino threat and the covertly racist ideology of color-blind racism. Moreover, the analyses reveal that quantitative logics circulating in the present evaluative climate further the view that Latinos pose cultural-demographic threats to the nation. Quantification also enhances color-blind frames and rhetorical strategies justifying present-day racial stratification and the subordinate locations of non-White groups. This suggests how White supremacy retains its power as the populations and metrics of evaluation change. Finally, given recent research linking demographic trends and media representations with attitudes, policy positions, and political partisanship, these representations have implications for the well-being of Latinos, other populations, and the nation.

Opposition to immigrant inclusion is often grounded in a “Latino threat” narrative that portrays Latino immigrants and their descendants as incapable of assimilation and “undeserving” of the benefits of citizenship. Are nativist reactions to this narrative strongest where immigrants are lagging behind in cultural assimilation, or where they are actually making the greatest gains? Two competing logics of status threat are tested through an analysis of county-level voting returns on California’s Proposition 227. Status politics theories predict higher antibilingual support where immigrants are failing to learn English. In contrast, the status devaluation argument leads to the counterintuitive prediction that support should be highest where language assimilation rates are high. Although we might expect that the claims of the Latino threat narrative would be least appealing where objective circumstances refute them, findings suggest that the resonance of such claims can be amplified in settings where they are furthest from the truth. The theoretical argument advanced helps explain why nativist policies continue to generate broad appeal at a time when immigrants are rapidly assimilating.

Today’s college student is endowed with enormous pressure to succeed; to graduate within four years, to work part-time, to be involved in extracurricular activities, curate friendships, pursue internships, and maintain a competitive grade point average. These pressures can wreak havoc on the physical, mental, psychological, and emotional well-being of students. Eurocentric and patriarchal ideals shape American values and standards exacerbate the social pressures faced by minoritized groups who are already distanced from the status quo. The university campus is no exception to this exacerbation. College and university campuses can be viewed as microcosms of society; which means the same types of social discrimination, racial privileges, and racial oppression observable in the greater society are also observable on a university campus and influence peer-to-peer interactions, student self-perception, students’ relationship with professors, and ability to succeed. College and university campuses that are comprised of a predominately White student body, with students of color comprising a smaller group, are often referred to as Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs). While some PWIs strive to create a diverse and inclusive campus culture, many university campuses are deemed as unresponsive to the needs to racial minorities (Gomer & White). Unresponsive colleges and universities exhibit the effects of institutional racism: equating success with cultural conformity through campus culture, maintaining a racially homogenous faculty, and exclusionary practices which lead minorities to feel excluded, inferior, or forced to assimilate. In these environments, minorities are pressured to meet societal standards, assimilate and defy stereotypes which decreases their mental bandwidth and limits their capacity to learn and succeed on a university campus (Verschelden, 2017). Institutional racism, which reduces the cognitive bandwidth of Black and Latino students, can be noted as a contributing factor to the discrepancies in retention and graduation rates of Blacks and Latino students compared to White students. Bandwidth can be reclaimed by decentering Whiteness and empowering marginalized students to define their own identities, name their own challenges, validate their own experiences, find community, and develop strategies to dismantle oppression through rejecting assimilation, cultural expectations, and master-narratives (Verschelden, 2017). These efforts of resisting the assimilation and marginalization are collectively referred to as counter-narrative storytelling, a form of self-actualization which validates the identities, experiences, and capabilities of traditionally oppressed groups. Counter-narrative storytelling has historically been used to uplift and encourage minoritized groups through validating their identities, dismantling stereotypes and stereotype threat and by providing community by creating space for sharing commonalities between individual experiences. Counter-narrative storytelling can help empower marginalized individuals to set and achieve the goals they set for themselves personally, professionally, academically or otherwise. Counter-narrative storytelling is grounded in Critical Race Theory (CRT). CRT provides a critical means of evaluating the relationships between the success of Black and Latino/a students and their ability to construct a counter-narratives and achieve collegiate success. CRT is referenced in the included research as it. CRT will also provide a framework for evaluating what university practices are most effective in promoting the success of Black and Latino students. This paper will examine the influence of counter-narrative storytelling on the success collegiate success Black and Latino students at PWIs. The phrase “success” shall be operationalized to mean college retention, feeling included and supported within the university, and graduation from college. The referenced articles examine the experiences of Blacks and Latino/a students enrolled in colleges and universities across the United States and the influence counter-narrative storytelling had on their experience.

In this article we explore the policy and legal build-up that led to the 2017 Executive Orders targeting Latino/a immigrant families and communities. We provide a historical backdrop for the merging of criminal and immigration laws that has contributed to the criminalization of the behaviors, bodies, and communities of Latino/a immigrants. We then look at the media narratives that burry immigrants’ complex identities and reproduce daily the demonization of Latino/as as criminals. Together, these factors contribute to socially construct a “Brown Threat” which reproduces anxieties and fears about crime, terror, and threats to the nation, affecting the everyday lives of immigrants and non-immigrants alike, though in different ways. Based on an 18-month ethnography in a small Kansas town carried out before and after the signing of Executive Orders in 2017, we examine the spill-over effects of this environment on Guatemalan immigrant families as well as on non-immigrant Anglo-white residents in a rural community.

Objectives: We examine how news media portrays the causes of mass shootings for shooters of different races. Specifically, we explore whether White men are disproportionately framed as mentally ill, and what narratives media tend to invoke when covering mass shootings through the lens of mental illness as opposed to other explanatory frames. Methods: The study examines a unique data set of 433 news documents covering 219 mass shootings between January 1, 2013, and December 31, 2015. It analyzes the data using a mixed methods approach, combining logistic regression with content analysis. Results: Quantitative findings show that Whites and Latinos are more likely to have their crime attributed to mental illness than Blacks. Qualitative findings show that rhetoric within these discussions frame White men as sympathetic characters, while Black and Latino men are treated as perpetually violent threats to the public. Conclusions: Results suggest that there is racial variability in how the media assign blame to mass shooters. While Black men and Latinos are cast as violently inclined, White men are treated as victims or sympathetic characters. Results also indicate that there are noteworthy differences in how blame is assigned to Black men and Latinos.

With the digital network environments, the possibilities for interaction and participation have expanded significantly, inaugurating a significant and decentralized shift in the production and publication of narratives. The promise of horizontalization reveals the opening of communication channels pari passu to the idealization of a narrative counterpoint in the face of the centralization of traditional media, that is, a harbinger of the promotion of the human right to communication. However, the internet, which is born under the proposal of open architecture, is soon overtaken by business conglomerates. By appropriating digital networks, the proprietary capitalist policy complexifies the scenario, posing us with a question: would we be losing the possibilities of democratizing communication in digital spaces? Therefore, this work problematizes the (im) possibilities of promoting the right to communication on digital platforms. The theoretical discussion revisits the MacBride Report, prepared 40 years ago by UNESCO, which proposes the reduction of commercial influences in the organization of communications, defends national communication policies and ratifies communication as a human right, pointing out its prognoses about the impacts of technology and its setbacks in countries considered underdeveloped, demarcating congruences with theories of communication developed by leading Latin American authors in the debate on the human right to communication: Bordenave (1989), Freire (2005), Peruzzo (2005) and Marques de Melo ( 2008) and theorists of digital sociology, among them, Lupton (2015), Selwyn (2019), Morozov (2018) and Silveira (2019).

Abstract Territorial displacements, stolen lands, repression, targeted assassinations, and forced disappearances among rural communities in Mexico and Colombia are constant threats that generate complex and urgent questions on the fragile conditions in which the residents of these communities live their day-to-day lives. In this article, I examine recent graphic novels that take an ethical stand to discuss local events in their connections to drug-trafficking, para-State, and other contemporary forms of violence. While there are divergent reasons, conditions and challenges for the creation, distribution, and reception of these graphic novels in such contexts, their authors use similar semiotic and literary mechanisms to imagine and represent these types of violence, and aim to include voices usually omitted, and/or displaced in the narration of these conflicts. I argue that it is precisely due to these inclusions that the role of these works in the politics of narrative and memory of armed conflicts in these Latin American countries is essential for the recognition of new human geographies and cartographies generated by the forced disappearance and uprooting of these communities using violence.

We sought to identify the key dynamics in the relationship between social media and violence by identifying new mechanisms that elucidate how Internet banging becomes offline violence through the perceptions of the Black and Latino boys and men. We conducted 33 interviews with Black and Latino boys and men aged 14–24 who live in Chicago, have experience with gang violence, and are social media users. In our investigation of the use of social media by boys and young men to navigate neighborhood violence, we uncovered a recurring narrative about gender relationships in violence. Male participants often attributed escalations of violence to girls and young women, beginning with online communications that migrated to face-to-face meetings. They described girls and young women as the precipitators of violence through “set-up” meetings that began under the guise of romance, dating, and courtship. This study provides an in-depth examination of how males perceive girls and young women as unique threats to their personal safety, a narrative we must engage with in order to further current violence prevention efforts. Future research is needed to examine the lived experiences of young women, their experience with and exposure to social media-related gang violence, and their view of social media behaviors of men that may lead to violence.

As any etymologist knows, the word ‘text’ is derived from the past participle of the Latin verb texere, to weave. Text is therefore something that is ‘woven’. It’s a persuasive metaphor, to imagine writing in terms of the warp and weft of ideas and words, of narrative threads woven together to become a piece of fabric. The idea of history as fabric brings together a whole different set of tropes, not just of weaving, but of the very materiality of fabric. Does the fabric have a nap, or a pattern? Is it cut with the grain, or on the bias? What of its folds, its seams? All these qualities of fabric have application in the interpretation of history, and some of these images are already familiar in historical discourse.

Based on the analysis of President Donald J. Trump’s social media, along with excerpts from his speeches and press releases, this study sheds light on the framing of white supremacy during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Our findings reveal that the triad of divide, divert, and conquer was crucial to Trump’s communications strategy. We argue that racist nativism—or racialized national threats to American security—is key to comprehending the external divisiveness in this strategy. When Trump bitterly cast China as the cause of America’s pandemic fallout and Mexico as the source of other key American problems (i.e., crime and low-paid jobs for U.S.-born Americans), he sowed clear racialized divisions between the United States (U.S.). and these two nations. We further argue that nativist racism—or the framing of descendants from those nations as incapable of ever being American—is key to comprehending the internal divisiveness in the former President’s pandemic rhetoric. Trump’s framing of China and Mexico as enemies of America further found its culprits in Asian and Latino Americans who were portrayed as COVID-19 carriers. Trump’s narrative was ultimately geared to diverting attention from his administration’s mishandling of COVID-19, the dismal structural conditions faced by detained and undocumented Latinos, and the anti-Asian bias faced by some of his Asian American constituents. In the conclusions, this article makes a call for countering white supremacy by developing comparative approaches that pay more attention to how different racisms play out for different groups.

Caravaggio's seminal ambitious program in the Contarelli Chapel (San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome) representing the Calling and the Martyrdom of St. Matthew (1599-1600) invoked the threat of iconoclasm as it imagined the martyr's body as a violated relic. Counter-Reformation images and hagiographies, such as the engravings in Richard Verstegan's Thééââtre des cruautéés des hééréétiques nostre temps, traduit du latin en franççois (Anvers, 1588) and Giovanni Battista Cavalieri's Ecclesiae Anglicanae Trophaea (Rome, 1584), after paintings by Pomarancio, depicted disintegrated sacred bodies subject both to iconoclastic violence and to confusion with polluted bodies. This conflation of social categories in Caravaggio's paintings led his biographers to blame him for the endemic replacement of classical antiquity by persons off the street. The retrospective account by classical theorists displaced an earlier archaeological project that took the ruined saint's body as its artifact: the scientific archaeology of the Christian relic in the Roman catacombs in Antonio Bosio's Roma Soutteranea (Rome, Latin edition, 1634; Italian edition, 1650). The threat of the disintegration of the composition in Caravaggio's paintings thematized the paradox of the incorruptible yet violated flesh of the martyr.The painting, like the relic, recapitulated the biographical narrative of martyrdom. It also proposed patterns of reception based on contemporary rhetorical models: the descriptive enumeration of Christian humanist ekphrasis based on Prudentius's fourth century Crowns of Martyrdom and articulated in Gregory Martin's late-sixteenthcentury guide to Sacred Rome.

Purpose The official history of an organization is usually found on the organization’s website and in brochures. The purpose of this paper is to explore the narrative of an institution’s official history, the autobiography, as compared to the biography constructed by researchers. Design/methodology/approach A case study was conducted on the Organization of Latin American Immigrants in Israel (OLEI), covering the entire history of the organization. Based on a longitudinal, holistic and qualitative perspective, the research methodology combines data collected from interviews, archival and digital sources. The access to these data enables researchers to explore some of the reasons and circumstance behind the construction of the official history. Findings The analysis of the data revealed a significant gap between the autobiography and the biography in four episodes. The common thread running through them was the creation of a narrative that reinforces and emphasizes the growth and stability of the organization, through the use of strategies such as forgetting, erasing and remythologizing. This narrative was found to have been re-constructed following a period of instability. Originality/value The originality of this study relies on the use of the terminology of autobiography and biography for the exploration of the official history of an organization. The innovative research methodology applied in this paper, which compares an organization’s biography with its autobiography, enables the exploration of different dimensions and dynamics, emphasizing the value of understanding autobiography by constructing a biography.

This qualitative case study offers a window into one classroom in which one Latinx English language arts teacher and her newcomer high school students tapped into community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) as they engaged in literacy practices to resist oppression, denounce discrimination, and strive for social justice. We draw upon Yosso’s (2005) framework of community cultural wealth (CCW) to understand how teachers can encourage resistance among historically marginalized students within the current racist and xenophobic political climate; and we examine how students respond to the teacher’s invitation to engage and develop their resistant capital through their writing. Data analyzed for this study include student letters, teacher interviews, and fieldnotes from one lesson, which was situated in a year-long ethnographic study. We found that the teacher cultivated resistant capital by tapping into students’ lived experiences to scrutinize oppressive rhetoric and persist in the face of adversity. Students seized the opportunity to resist the dominant anti-immigrant narrative by leveraging their resistant capital through counter-stories, assertions of experiential knowledge, and appeals to a moral imperative. Our study contributes to scholarship on CCW by exploring how CCW is utilized in a previously under-examined context and has implications for educators by offering examples of classroom practices that cultivate CCW and transform deficit discourses that threaten to impede academic success, especially among Latinx students.

Background As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to affect life in the United States, the important role of nonpharmaceutical preventive behaviors (such as wearing a face mask) in reducing the risk of infection has become clear. During the pandemic, researchers have observed the rapid proliferation of misinformed or inconsistent narratives about COVID-19. There is growing evidence that such misinformed narratives are associated with various forms of undesirable behavior (eg, burning down cell towers). Furthermore, individuals’ adherence to recommended COVID-19 preventive guidelines has been inconsistent, and such mandates have engendered opposition and controversy. Recent research suggests the possibility that trust in science and scientists may be an important thread to weave throughout these seemingly disparate components of the modern public health landscape. Thus, this paper describes the protocol for a randomized trial of a brief, digital intervention designed to increase trust in science. Objective The objective of this study is to examine whether exposure to a curated infographic can increase trust in science, reduce the believability of misinformed narratives, and increase the likelihood to engage in preventive behaviors. Methods This is a randomized, placebo-controlled, superiority trial comprising 2 parallel groups. A sample of 1000 adults aged ≥18 years who are representative of the population of the United States by gender, race and ethnicity, and age will be randomly assigned (via a 1:1 allocation) to an intervention or a placebo-control arm. The intervention will be a digital infographic with content based on principles of trust in science, developed by a health communications expert. The intervention will then be both pretested and pilot-tested to determine its viability. Study outcomes will include trust in science, a COVID-19 narrative belief latent profile membership, and the likelihood to engage in preventive behaviors, which will be controlled by 8 theoretically selected covariates. Results This study was funded in August 2020, approved by the Indiana University Institutional Review Board on September 15, 2020, and prospectively registered with ClinicalTrials.gov. Conclusions COVID-19 misinformation prophylaxis is crucial. This proposed experiment investigates the impact of a brief yet actionable intervention that can be easily disseminated to increase individuals’ trust in science, with the intention of affecting misinformation believability and, consequently, preventive behavioral intentions. Trial Registration ClinicalTrials.gov NCT04557241; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04557241 International Registered Report Identifier (IRRID) PRR1-10.2196/24383

AbstractInterviews are designed to gather propositional information communicated through reference and predication. Some lament the fact that interviews always include interactional positioning that presupposes and sometimes creates social identities and power relationships. Interactional aspects of interview events threaten to corrupt the propositional information communicated, and it appears that these aspects need to be controlled. Interviews do often yield useful propositional information, and interviewers must guard against the sometimes-corrupting influence of interactional factors. But we argue that the interactional aspects of interview events can also be valuable data. Interview subjects sometimes position themselves in ways that reveal something about the habitual positioning that characterizes individuals or groups. We illustrate the potential value of this interactional information by describing “payday mugging” stories told by interviewees in one New Latino Diaspora town. (Interview data, narrating events, transference)

This paper is focused on the critical enterprise involved in the translation of Black female authorship from Afro-Caribbean and Latin American contexts into the English language. More specifically, it looks at the circumstances of the translation of the fictional narratives Célanire cou-coupé (2000) by the Guadeloupian Maryse Condé and As mulheres de Tijucopapo (1982) by the Brazilian Marilene Felinto, as well as the publications of the versions in English: Who slashed Celanire’s Throat? (2004) and The Wo­men of Tijucopapo (1994), respectively. We take on a cultural perspective within the field of translation studies and it may be inserted within the theoretical and descriptive branch, being product-process oriented. From general cultural social theories, we draw on the works of Black female intellectuals, Lélia Gonzalez, Patricia Hill-Collins, Denise Carrascosa, and many others, in dialogue with the perspectives of cultural theorists from translation studies, André Lefevere, Lawrence Venuti, and others. Based on the models of descriptive analysis within this field by Gideon Toury and others, we propose a description of the translation (process and product) of Condé’s and Felinto’s novels.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to introduce prolonged therapeutic community action research and compare research on new social movements in both Latin America and throughout the Australasia Southeast Asia Oceania Region where the later region’s new social movements emerged in large part from Therapeutic Community Outreach. Design/methodology/approach The qualitative method used combined prolonged depth interviews, action research, gathering warm data (N Bateson) and archival research and triangulated the findings. In writing this paper, a connoisseur derived narrative method is used consistent the socio-cultural contexts involved. Findings The characteristics and significant implications and values of these new social movements are outlined. These new social movements are not taking familiar forms with political power as an identifier – rather, a core feature is their transformatory potential in re-forming socio-cultural and socio-psychic patterns of everyday social relating penetrating the micro-structures of society. New forms of social movement are lively in unexpected public places within everyday socio-cultural life. Research limitations/implications The research implications extend to providing processes used in pioneering TCs in Australia in the 1960s. Practical implications Co-action outlined may be a resource for therapeutic communities under threat in parts of the world. Social implications The transformatory potential within new social movements is not political, but socio-cultural and any focus on power relations would miss this shift. Originality/value The action research overviewed in this paper is perhaps a unique example of prolonged engagement in integrated action research on TC processes over more than 60 years.

After many years of clinical practice, research and the teaching of projective tests, Shentoub and her colleagues (Debray, Brelet, Chabert & al.) put forward an original and rigorous method of analysis and interpretation of the TAT protocols in terms of psychoanalysis and clinical psychopathology. They developed the TAT process theory in order to understand how the subject builds a narrative. Our article will emphasize the source of the analytical approach developed by V. Shentoub in the 1950s to current research; the necessity of marking the boundary between the manifest and latent content in the cards; the procedure for analyzing the narrative, supported by an analysis sheet for understanding the stories' structure and identifying the defense mechanisms; and how developing hypotheses about how the mental functions are organized, as well as their potential psychopathological characteristics; and the formulation of a diagnosis in psychodynamic terms. In conjunction with the analysis and interpretation of the Rorschach test, this approach allows us to develop an overview of the subject's mental functioning, taking into account both the psychopathological elements that may threaten the subject and the potential for a therapeutic process. We will illustrate this by comparing neurotic, borderline, and psychotic personalities.

SARS-CoV-2 belongs to the family of coronaviruses and is an infectious disease that threatens public health worldwide. The definitive diagnosis of the new coronavirus is made by molecular tests used in breathing tests, such as, for example, or rubbing the throat. However, most of the time, infectious diseases are diagnosed employing symptoms, laboratory, and image exams, like x-ray, computed tomography, and nuclear magnetic resonance imaging. The present study aimed to analyze the main imaging tests found in the respiratory syndrome caused by the new coronavirus. This research deals with a narrative review of the literature published so far, having a descriptive and qualitative nature. A search took place in the databases of virtual health libraries. It was refined by Latin American and Caribbean Literature in Health Sciences (LILACS), Electronic Scientific Library (SCIELO), BIREME (Regional Library of Medicine), and MEDLINE. Among the authors published, the occurrence of ground-glass opacities, isolation, or multifocal, consolidations such as cardiomegaly, decreased air space, aerobocograms, and pleural effusion were observed. Also, some findings had atypical characteristics. We conclude that in several formed patterns found to characterize a lung disease, with main optional bilateral, peripheral, and essential features, with rounded morphologies, presence of lymph node enlargement, pleural effusion, excavation, and nodules in the most severe cases. In this way, it is suggested that the imaging exams be complementary to the laboratory diagnosis.

Immigration has been historically and contemporarily racialized in the United States. Although each immigrant group has unique histories, current patterns, and specific experiences, racialized immigrant groups such as Latino, Asian, and Arab immigrants all experience health inequities that are not solely due to nativity or years of residence but also influenced by conditional citizenship and subjective sense of belonging or othering. Critical race theory and intersectionality provide a critical lens to consider how structural racism might uniquely impact the health of racialized immigrants, and to understand and intervene on the interlocking systems that shape these shared experiences and health consequences. We build on and synthesize the work of prior scholars to advance how society codifies structural disadvantages for racialized immigrants into governmental and institutional policies and how that affects health via three key pathways that emerged from our review of the literature: (1) formal racialization via immigration policy and citizenship status that curtails access to material and health resources and political and civic participation; (2) informal racialization via disproportionate immigration enforcement and criminalization including ongoing threats of detention and deportation; and (3) intersections with economic exploitation and disinvestment such as labor exploitation and neighborhood disinvestment. We hope this serves as a call to action to change the dominant narratives around immigrant health, provides conceptual and methodological recommendations to advance research, and illuminates the essential role of the public health sector to advocate for changes in other sectors including immigration policy, political rights, law enforcement, labor protections, and neighborhood investment, among others.

This article uses the title of the famous book Arabian Nights which in Spanish (Las mil y una noches) has a time connotation, similar to "for ever and a day" in English. In Spanish, "thousand" is a way to mean "infinite"; if you add one to infinite then you have numberless nights. The article departs from a hypothetical question an academic asks him/herself in his way to the educational institution where he-she works: What is my university? What makes me change from enthusiasm to deception, from pain to happiness? The answers give place to a personal dialogue, which brings the awareness that education overflows from the windows and doors of the classroom, to reach those distant places that Juvenal defined as "ultra Auroram et Gangem" (beyond the rising sun and the Ganges), and that Latin Americans could translate to "beyond the Trópico and the Amazonas." In short, to reach the consciousness that our educational work comprehends a larger territory than the one constrained to the limited geography of a site or an institution. In this broad realm, there are diverse attributes we have to create or recreate: hope, opportunity, imagination, and therefore be able to exercise our capacity to relate, to refer, to reflect. In doing so, we organize, devise, transfer, building our narrative, our capability to plot in each journey a new plan. Every plan is a necessary new story, as those of Sherezade, needed to keep acting day by day, using the word as the only thread that gives meaning to our condition as educators, to our academic being.

IntroductionAt the 72nd World Health Assembly of May 2019, WHO member states prioritised a global action plan to promote migrant and refugee health. Five months earlier, WHO had declared vaccine hesitancy—the reluctance to vaccinate despite the availability of vaccination services—as one of the top 10 threats to global health. Although vaccination is often a requirement for immigration, repeated outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases within certain immigrant communities in some host nations suggest that vaccine hesitancy could be a factor in their susceptibility to vaccine-preventable diseases. Studies of the prevalence and determinants of vaccine hesitancy among migrants globally seem to be lacking. This scoping review will (1) identify articles on vaccine hesitancy among migrants; (2) examine the extent and nature of the extant evidence; and (3) determine the value of undertaking a full systematic review.Methods and analysisThe framework for the scoping review proposed by the Joanna Briggs Institute will be used. The reporting will follow the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews checklist. Studies published in English or French between January 1999 and December 2019 will be drawn from most or all of the following multidisciplinary databases: Africa-Wide Information, Allied and Complementary Medicine, Cochrane Library, Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature, Embase, Index Medicus for the Eastern Mediterranean Region, International Bibliography of Social Sciences, Literature in the Health Sciences in Latin America and the Caribbean, Medline, Proquest Theses/Dissertations, PsycInfo and Web of Science. The search will include an extensive list of keywords to capture multiple dimensions of confidence and hesitancy vis-à-vis vaccines among migrants. Findings will be reported through summary narratives, tables, flowcharts and evidence maps.Ethics and disseminationThis review is exempted from ethical approval and will be published in a peer-reviewed open-access journal to ensure wide dissemination.

The contemporary fictional films Nosilatiaj. La belleza [Beauty] (dir. Daniela Seggiaro, 2012) and Los decentes [A Decent Woman] (dir. Lukas Valenta Rinner, 2016) explore the complex intra-action between the human and the non-human worlds, in this case the animal world and the natural landscape, in the context of environmental crisis. In both movies, images of natural landscapes are accompanied by depictions of class inequalities and the environmental crisis. As fiction, the films present an environmental perspective through a symbolic framing of nature. This highlights the marginal place assigned to the non-human world by progress and development. In Beauty, nature is threatened by deforestation of the dry forest landscape called the Bush or the Gran Chaco. Throughout the film, the landscape is always present in the background, either fragmented or just suggested in the memories and subjectivity of the protagonist, Yolanda, a girl of the Wichí people. A Decent Woman adopts the trope of idyllic nature through a nudist community set in a natural jungle-like area adjacent to a gated community for wealthy residents. Belén, the protagonist, a maid working in the gated area, begins participating in the nudists’ rituals. Employing posthuman and new materialist theories, the article analyzes scenes from both movies that foreground the interactions between the human and the more-than-human world in the light of the threats to the natural ecosystem. We discuss the framing of the environmental crisis through the intervention of animals and the animalization of characters, which exemplify the haunting presence of a receding but resistant nature. While nature vanishes from the screen—it is either cut out for agriculture or for ornamental parks in private neighborhoods—the viewers are placed in an active position that prompts ethical thinking concerning the environment. Resumen Las películas de ficción contemporáneas Nosilatiaj. La belleza [Beauty] (2012) de Daniela Seggiaro y Los decentes [A Decent Woman] (2016) de Lukas Valenta Rinner exploran las complejas intra-acciones entre el mundo humano y el mundo más que humano, en este caso el mundo animal y el paisaje natural, en el contexto de la crisis ambiental. Como películas de ficción, la perspectiva ambiental se presenta a través de tomas fílmicas donde la naturaleza adquiere significados simbólicos, destacando así el lugar marginal asignado al mundo no-humano por el progreso y el desarrollo. En Nosilatiaj. La belleza la naturaleza está amenazada por la deforestación y es evocada en la narrativa por el paisaje del Monte chaqueño argentino. A lo largo de la película, el paisaje siempre está latente, enrevesado con los recuerdos y la subjetividad de la protagonista, Yolanda, una niña del pueblo Wichí. Los decentes adopta el tropo de la naturaleza idílica a través de la presencia de una comunidad nudista en un área verde similar a la jungla adyacente a una comunidad cerrada para residentes de clase alta. Belén, la protagonista, una empleada doméstica que trabaja en el barrio cerrado, comienza a participar en los rituales de la comunidad nudista en ese entorno natural. Empleando teorías sobre el materialismo posthumano y el neomaterialismo, el objetivo de este artículo es analizar escenas en ambas películas que ponen de relieve las interacciones entre las formas de vida humana y más que humana, explorando cómo este tema se retrata a la luz de la amenaza a respectivos ecosistemas. Discutimos los encuadres de la crisis ambiental a través de la intervención de animales y de la animalización de los personajes en las películas, que prefigura la inquietante presencia de una naturaleza que retrocede, pero resiste. Al desvanecerse la naturaleza de la pantalla‒es podada para la agricultura o para parques ornamentales en barrios privados‒analizamos cómo el espectador va ganando una posición más activa que exige un gesto ético hacia la crisis medioambiental.

In December 2018, then congresswoman-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made headlines for a brief speech she was invited to give at a Hanukkah-lighting event sponsored by Jews for Racial and Economic Justice in Queens, New York. Some people found Ocasio-Cortez’s statements problematic. In partial and prompt response, she further clarified her perspective in a Twitter thread that amply demonstrated some of the tensions that arise in the study of Latinx/a/o religious pluralism. This article examines how Latinx/a/o stories can complicate dominant definitions of religion in part because of the memory of colonialism that frames religion as a category in Latina/o/x contexts. However, Latinx/o/a contexts themselves have been overly dominated by romanticized narratives of mixture that present their own challenges, particularly when encoded with a linear, straight temporality focused on both origins and destinations. Nevertheless, drawing on the work of Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez (2020) and her use of apocalypso, I turn to understandings of hybridity that could disrupt a neat, linear temporality.

What creative techniques of resistance are available to a female filmmaker when she is the victim of a violent event and filmed at her most vulnerable? This article uses an autoethnographic lens to discuss my experience of a serious car crash my family and I were inadvertently involved in due to police negligence and a criminal act. Employing Creative Analytical Practice (CAP) ethnography, a reflexive form of research which recognises that the creative process, producer and product are “deeply intertwined” (Richardson, “Writing: A Method” 930), I investigate how the crash’s violent affects crippled my agency, manifested in my creative praxis and catalysed my identification of latent forms of institutionalised violence in film culture, its discourse and pedagogy that also contributed to my inertia. The article maps my process of writing a feature length screenplay during the aftermath of the crash as I set out to articulate my story of survival and resistance. Using this narrative inquiry, in which we can “investigate how we construct the world, ourselves, and others, and how standard objectifying practices...unnecessarily limit us” (Richardson, “Writing: A Method” 924), I outline how I attempted to disrupt the entrenched power structures that exist in dominant narratives of violence in film and challenge my subjugated positioning as a woman within this canon. I describe my engagement with the deconstructionist practices of writing the body and militant feminist cinema, which suggest subversive opportunities for women’s self-determination by encouraging us to embrace our exiled positioning in dominant discourse through creative experimentation, and identify some of the possibilities and limitations of this for female agency. Drawing on CAP ethnography, existentialism, film feminism, and narrative reframing, I assert that these reconstructive practices are more effective for the creative enfranchisement of women by not relegating us to the periphery of social systems and cultural forms. Instead, they enable us to speak back to violent structures in a language that has greater social access, context and impact.My strong desire to tell screen stories lies in my belief that storytelling is a crucial evolutionary mechanism of resilience. Narratives do not simply represent the social world but also have the ability to change it by enabling us to “try to figure out how to live our lives meaningfully” (Ellis 760). This conviction has been directly influenced by my personal story of trauma and survival when myself, my siblings, and our respective life partners became involved in a major car crash. Two police officers attending to a drunken brawl in an inner city park had, in their haste, left the keys in the ignition of their vehicle. We were travelling across a major intersection when the police car, which had subsequently been stolen by a man involved in the brawl – a man who was wanted on parole, had a blood alcohol level three times over the legal limit, and was driving at speeds exceeding 110kms per hour - ran a red light and crossed our path, causing us to crash into his vehicle. From the impact, the small four-wheel drive we were travelling in was catapulted metres into the air, rolling numerous times before smashing head on into oncoming traffic. My heavily pregnant sister was driving our vehicle.The incident attracted national media attention and our story became a sensationalist spectacle. Each news station reported erroneous and conflicting information, one stating that my sister had lost her unborn daughter, another even going so far as to claim my sister had died in the crash. This tabloidised, ‘if it bleeds, it leads’, culture of journalism, along with new digital technologies, encourages and facilitates the normalisation of violent acts, often inflicted on women. Moreover, in their pursuit of high-rating stories, news bodies motivate dehumanising acts of citizen journalism that see witnesses often inspired to film, rather than assist, victims involved in a violent event. Through a connection with someone working for a major news station, we discovered that leading news broadcasters had bought a tape shot by a group of men who call themselves the ‘Paparazzi of Perth’. These men were some of the first on the scene and began filming us from only a few metres away while we were still trapped upside down and unconscious in our vehicle. In the recording, the men are heard laughing and celebrating our tragedy as they realise the lucrative possibilities of the shocking imagery they are capturing as witnesses pull us out of the back of the car, and my pregnant sister incredibly frees herself from the wreckage by kicking out the window.As a female filmmaker, I saw the bitter irony of this event as the camera was now turned on me and my loved ones at our most vulnerable. In her discussion of the male gaze, a culturally sanctioned form of narrational violence against women that is ubiquitous in most mainstream media, Mulvey proposes that women are generally the passive image, trapped by the physical limits of the frame in a permanent state of powerlessness as our identity is reduced to her “to-be-looked-at-ness” (40). For a long period of time, the experience of performing the role of this commodified woman of a weaponised male gaze, along with the threat of annihilation associated with our near-death experience, immobilised my spirit. I felt I belonged “more to the dead than to the living” (Herman 34). When I eventually returned to my creative praxis, I decided to use scriptwriting as both my “mode of reasoning and a mode of representation” (Richardson, Writing Strategies 21), test whether I could work through my feelings of alienation and violation and reclaim my agency. This was a complex and harrowing task because my memories “lack[ed] verbal narrative and context” (Herman 38) and were deeply rooted in my body. Cixous confirms that for women, “writing and voice...are woven together” and “spring from the deepest layers of her psyche” (Moi 112). For many months, I struggled to write. I attempted to block out this violent ordeal and censor my self. I soon learnt, however, that my body could not be silenced and was slow to forget. As I tried to write around this experience, the trauma worked itself deeper inside of me, and my physical symptoms worsened, as did the quality of my writing.In the early version of the screenplay I found myself writing a female-centred film about violence, identity and death, using the fictional narrative to express the numbness I experienced. I wrote the female protagonist with detachment as though she were an object devoid of agency. Sartre claims that we make objects of others and of ourselves in an attempt to control the uncertainty of life and the ever-changing nature of humanity (242). Making something into an object is to deprive it of life (and death); it is our attempt to keep ourselves ‘safe’. While I recognise that the car crash’s reminder of my mortality was no doubt part of the reason why I rendered myself, and the script’s female protagonist, lifeless as agentic beings, I sensed that there were subtler operations of power and control behind my self-objectification and self-censorship, which deeply concerned me. What had influenced this dea(r)th of female agency in my creative imaginings? Why did I write my female character with such a red pen? Why did I seem so compelled to ‘kill’ her? I wanted to investigate my gender construction, the complex relationship between my scriptwriting praxis, and the context within which it is produced to discover whether I could write a different future for myself, and my female characters. Kiesinger supports “contextualizing our stories within the framework of a larger picture” (108), so as to remain open to the possibility that there might not be anything ‘wrong’ with us, per se, “but rather something very wrong with the dynamics that dominate the communicative system” (109) within which we operate: in the case of my creative praxis, the oppressive structures present in the culture of film and its pedagogy.Pulling FocusWomen are supposed to be the view and when the view talks back, it is uncomfortable.— Jane Campion (Filming Desire)It is a terrible thing to see that no one has ever taught us how to develop our vision as women neither in the history of arts nor in film schools.— Marie Mandy (Filming Desire)The democratisation of today’s media landscape through new technologies, the recent rise in female-run production companies (Zemler) in Hollywood, along with the ground-breaking #MeToo and Time’s Up movements has elevated the global consciousness of gender-based violence, and has seen the screen industry seek to redress its history of gender imbalance. While it is too early to assess the impact these developments may have on women’s standing in film, today the ‘celluloid ceiling’ still operates on multiple levels of indoctrination and control through a systemic pattern of exclusion for women that upholds the “nearly seamless dialogue among men in cinema” (Lauzen, Thumbs Down 2). Female filmmakers occupy a tenuous position of influence in the mainstream industry and things are not any better on the other side of the camera (Lauzen, The Celluloid Ceiling). For the most part, Hollywood’s male gaze and penchant for sexualising and (physically or figuratively) killing female characters, which normalises violence against women and is “almost inversely proportional to the liberation of women in society” (Mandy), continues to limit women to performing as the image rather than the agent on screen.Film funding bodies and censorship boards, mostly comprised of men, remain exceptionally averse to independent female filmmakers who go against the odds to tell their stories, which often violate taboos about femininity and radically redefine female agency through the construction of the female gaze: a narrational technique of resistance that enables reel woman to govern the point of view, imagery and action of the film (Smelik 51-52). This generally sees their films unjustly ghettoised through incongruent classification or censorship, and forced into independent or underground distribution (Sexton-Finck 165-182). Not only does censorship propose the idea that female agency is abject and dangerous and needs to be restrained, it prevents access to this important cinema by women that aims to counter the male gaze and “shield us from this type of violence” (Gillain 210). This form of ideological and institutional gatekeeping is not only enforced in the film industry, it is also insidiously (re)constituted in the epistemological construction of film discourse and pedagogy, which in their design, are still largely intrinsically gendered institutions, encoded with phallocentric signification that rejects a woman’s specificity and approach to knowledge. Drawing on my mutually informative roles as a former film student and experienced screen educator, I assert that most screen curricula in Australia still uphold entrenched androcentric norms that assume the male gaze and advocate popular cinema’s didactic three-act structure, which conditions our value systems to favour masculinity and men’s worldview. This restorative storytelling approach is argued to be fatally limiting to reel women (Smith 136; Dancyger and Rush 25) as it propagates the Enlightenment notion of a universal subjectivity, based on free will and reason, which neutralises the power structures of society (and film) and repudiates the influence of social positioning on our opportunity for agency. Moreover, through its omniscient consciousness, which seeks to efface the presence of a specific narrator, the three-act method disavows this policing of female agency and absolves any specific individual of responsibility for its structural violence (Dyer 98).By pulling focus on some of these problematic mechanisms in the hostile climate of the film industry and its spaces of learning for women, I became acutely aware of the more latent forms of violence that had conditioned my scriptwriting praxis, the ambivalence I felt towards my female identity, and my consequent gagging of the female character in the screenplay.Changing Lenses How do the specific circumstances in which we write affect what we write? How does what we write affect who we become?— Laurel Richardson (Fields of Play 1)In the beginning, there is an end. Don’t be afraid: it’s your death that is dying. Then: all the beginnings.— Helene Cixous (Cixous and Jensen 41)The discoveries I made during my process of CAP ethnography saw a strong feeling of dissidence arrive inside me. I vehemently wanted to write my way out of my subjugated state and release some of the anguish that my traumatised body was carrying around. I was drawn to militant feminist cinema and the French poststructuralist approach of ‘writing the body’ (l’ecriture feminine) given these deconstructive practices “create images and ideas that have the power to inspire to revolt against oppression and exploitation” (Moi 120). Feminist cinema’s visual treatise of writing the body through its departure from androcentric codes - its unformulaic approach to structure, plot, character and narration (De Lauretis 106) - revealed to me ways in which I could use the scriptwriting process to validate my debilitating experience of physical and psychic violence, decensor my self and move towards rejoining the living. Cixous affirms that, “by writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into…the ailing or dead figure” (Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa 880). It became clear to me that the persistent themes of death that manifested in the first draft of the script were not, as I first suspected, me ‘rehearsing to die’, or wanting to kill off the woman inside me. I was in fact “not driven towards death but by death” (Homer 89), the close proximity to my mortality, acting as a limit, was calling for a strengthening of my life force, a rebirth of my agency (Bettelheim 36). Mansfield acknowledges that death “offers us a freedom outside of the repression and logic that dominate our daily practices of keeping ourselves in order, within the lines” (87).I challenged myself to write the uncomfortable, the unfamiliar, the unexplored and to allow myself to go to places in me that I had never before let speak by investigating my agency from a much more layered and critical perspective. This was both incredibly terrifying and liberating and enabled me to discard the agentic ‘corset’ I had previously worn in my creative praxis. Dancyger and Rush confirm that “one of the things that happens when we break out of the restorative three-act form is that the effaced narrator becomes increasingly visible and overt” (38). I experienced an invigorating feeling of empowerment through my appropriation of the female gaze in the screenplay which initially appeased some of the post-crash turmoil and general sense of injustice I was experiencing. However, I soon, found something toxic rising inside of me. Like the acrimonious feminist cinema I was immersed in – Raw (Ducournau), A Girl Walks Home at Night (Amirpour), Romance (Breillat), Trouble Every Day (Denis), Baise-Moi (Despentes and Thi), In My Skin (Van), Anatomy of Hell (Breillat) – the screenplay I had produced involved a female character turning the tables on men and using acts of revenge to satisfy her needs. Not only was I creating a highly dystopian world filled with explicit themes of suffering in the screenplay, I too existed in a displaced state of rage and ‘psychic nausea’ in my daily life (Baldick and Sartre). I became haunted by vivid flashbacks of the car crash as abject images, sounds and sensations played over and over in my mind and body like a horror movie on loop. I struggled to find the necessary clarity and counterbalance of stability required to successfully handle this type of experimentation.I do not wish to undermine the creative potential of deconstructive practices, such as writing the body and militant cinema, for female filmmakers. However, I believe my post-trauma sensitivity to visceral entrapment and spiritual violence magnifies some of the psychological and physiological risks involved. Deconstructive experimentation “happens much more easily in the realm of “texts” than in the world of human interaction” (hooks 22) and presents agentic limitations for women since it offers a “utopian vision of female creativity” (Moi 119) that is “devoid of reality...except in a poetic sense” (Moi 122). In jettisoning the restorative qualities of narrative film, new boundaries for women are inadvertently created through restricting us to “intellectual pleasure but rarely emotional pleasure” (Citron 51). Moreover, by reducing women’s agency to retaliation we are denied the opportunity for catharsis and transformation; something I desperately longed to experience in my injured state. Kaplan acknowledges this problem, arguing that female filmmakers need to move theoretically beyond deconstruction to reconstruction, “to manipulate the recognized, dominating discourses so as to begin to free ourselves through rather than beyond them (for what is there ‘beyond’?)” (Women and Film 141).A potent desire to regain a sense of connectedness and control pushed itself out from deep inside me. I yearned for a tonic to move myself and my female character to an active position, rather than a reactive one that merely repeats the victimising dynamic of mainstream film by appropriating a reversed (female) gaze and now makes women the violent victors (Kaplan, Feminism and Film 130). We have arrived at a point where we must destabilise the dominance-submission structure and “think about ways of transcending a polarity that has only brought us all pain” (Kaplan, Feminism and Film 135). I became determined to write a screen narrative that, while dealing with some of the harsh realities of humanity I had become exposed to, involved an existentialist movement towards catharsis and activity.ReframingWhen our stories break down or no longer serve us well, it is imperative that we examine the quality of the stories we are telling and actively reinvent our accounts in ways that permit us to live more fulfilling lives.— Christine Kiesinger (107)I’m frightened by life’s randomness, so I want to deal with it, make some sense of it by telling a film story. But it’s not without hope. I don’t believe in telling stories without some hope.— Susanne Bier (Thomas)Narrative reframing is underlined by the existentialist belief that our spiritual freedom is an artistic process of self-creation, dependent on our free will to organise the elements of our lives, many determined out of our control, into the subjective frame that is to be our experience of our selves and the world around us (107). As a filmmaker, I recognise the power of selective editing and composition. Narrative reframing’s demand for a rational assessment of “the degree to which we live our stories versus the degree to which our stories live us” (Kiesinger 109), helped me to understand how I could use these filmmaking skills to take a step back from my trauma so as to look at it objectively “as a text for study” (Ellis 108) and to exercise power over the creative-destructive forces it, and the deconstructive writing methods I had employed, produced. Richardson confirms the benefits of this practice, since narrative “is the universal way in which humans accommodate to finitude” (Writing Strategies 65).In the script’s development, I found my resilience lay in my capacity to imagine more positive alternatives for female agency. I focussed on writing a narrative that did not avoid life’s hardships and injustices, or require them to be “attenuated, veiled, sweetened, blunted, and falsified” (Nietzsche and Hollingdale 68), yet still involved a life-affirming sentiment. With this in mind, I reintroduced the three-act structure in the revised script as its affectivity and therapeutic denouement enabled me to experience a sense of agentic catharsis that turned “nauseous thoughts into imaginations with which it is possible to live” (Nietzsche 52). Nevertheless, I remained vigilant not to lapse into didacticism; to allow my female character to be free to transgress social conventions surrounding women’s agency. Indebted to Kaplan’s writing on the cinematic gaze, I chose to take up what she identifies as a ‘mutual gaze’; an ethical framework that enabled me to privilege the female character’s perspective and autonomy with a neutral subject-subject gaze rather than the “subject-object kind that reduces one of the parties to the place of submission” (Feminism and Film 135). I incorporated the filmic technique of the point of view (POV) shot for key narrative moments as it allows an audience to literally view the world through a character’s eyes, as well as direct address, which involves the character looking back down the lens at the viewer (us); establishing the highest level of identification between the spectator and the subject on screen.The most pertinent illustration of these significant scriptwriting changes through my engagement with narrative reframing and feminist film theory, is in the reworking of my family’s car crash which became a pivotal turning point in the final draft. In the scene, I use POV and direct address to turn the weaponised gaze back around onto the ‘paparazzi’ who are filming the spectacle. When the central (pregnant) character frees herself from the wreckage, she notices these men filming her and we see the moment from her point of view as she looks at these men laughing and revelling in the commercial potential of their mediatised act. Switching between POV and direct address, the men soon notice they have been exposed as the woman looks back down the lens at them (us) with disbelief, reproaching them (us) for daring to film her in this traumatic moment. She holds her determined gaze while they glance awkwardly back at her, until their laughter dissipates, they stop recording and appear to recognise the culpability of their actions. With these techniques of mutual gazing, I set out to humanise and empower the female victim and neutralise the power dynamic: the woman is now also a viewing agent, and the men equally perform the role of the viewed. In this creative reframing, I hope to provide an antidote to filmic violence against and/or by women as this female character reclaims her (my) experience of survival without adhering to the culture of female passivity or ressentiment.This article has examined how a serious car crash, being filmed against my will in its aftermath and the attendant damages that prevailed from this experience, catalysed a critical change of direction in my scriptwriting. The victimising event helped me recognise the manifest and latent forms of violence against women that are normalised through everyday ideological and institutional systems in film and prevent us from performing as active agents in our creative praxis. There is a critical need for more inclusive modes of practice – across the film industry, discourse and pedagogy – that are cognisant and respectful of women’s specificity and our difference to the androcentric landscape of mainstream film. We need to continue to exert pressure on changing violent mechanisms that marginalise us and ghettoise our stories. As this article has demonstrated, working outside dominant forms can enable important emancipatory opportunities for women, however, this type or deconstruction also presents risks that generally leave us powerless in everyday spaces. While I advocate that female filmmakers should look to techniques of feminist cinema for an alternative lens, we must also work within popular film to critique and subvert it, and not deny women the pleasures and political advantages of its restorative structure. By enabling female filmmakers to (re)humanise woman though encouraging empathy and compassion, this affective storytelling form has the potential to counter violence against women and mobilise female agency. Equally, CAP ethnography and narrative reframing are critical discourses for the retrieval and actualisation of female filmmakers’ agency as they allow us to contextualise our stories of resistance and survival within the framework of a larger picture of violence to gain perspective on our subjective experiences and render them as significant, informative and useful to the lives of others. This enables us to move from the isolated margins of subcultural film and discourse to reclaim our stories at the centre.ReferencesA Girl Walks Home at Night. Dir. Ana Lily Amirpour. Say Ahh Productions, 2014.Anatomy of Hell. Dir. Catherine Breillat. Tartan Films, 2004. Baise-Moi. Dirs. Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi. FilmFixx, 2000.Baldick, Robert, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Nausea. 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For seven months in 1999/2000, six-year old Cuban Elián González was embroiled in a family feud plotted along rival national and ideological lines, and relayed televisually as soap opera across the planet. In Miami, apparitions of the Virgin Mary were reported after Elián’s arrival; adherents of Afro-Cuban santería similarly regarded Elián as divinely touched. In Cuba, Elián’s “kidnapping” briefly reinvigorated a torpid revolutionary project. He was hailed by Fidel Castro as the symbolic descendant of José Martí and Che Guevara, and of the patriotic rigour they embodied. Cubans massed to demand his return. In the U.S.A., Elián’s case was arbitrated at every level of the juridical system. The “Save Elián” campaign generated widespread debate about godless versus godly family values, the contours of the American Dream, and consumerist excess. By the end of 2000 Elián had generated the second largest volume of TV news coverage to that date in U.S. history, surpassed only by the O. J. Simpson case (Fasulo). After Fidel Castro, and perhaps the geriatric music ensemble manufactured by Ry Cooder, the Buena Vista Social Club, Elián became the most famous Cuban of our era. Elián also emerged as the unlikeliest of popular-cultural icons, the focus and subject of cyber-sites, books, films, talk-back radio programs, art exhibits, murals, statues, documentaries, a South Park episode, poetry, songs, t-shirts, posters, newspaper editorials in dozens of languages, demonstrations, speeches, political cartoons, letters, legal writs, U.S. Congress records, opinion polls, prayers, and, on both sides of the Florida Strait, museums consecrated in his memory. Confronted by Elián’s extraordinary renown and historical impact, John Carlos Rowe suggests that the Elián story confirms the need for a post-national and transdisciplinary American Studies, one whose practitioners “will have to be attentive to the strange intersections of politics, law, mass media, popular folklore, literary rhetoric, history, and economics that allow such events to be understood.” (204). I share Rowe’s reading of Elián’s story and the clear challenges it presents to analysis of “America,” to which I would add “Cuba” as well. But Elián’s story is also significant for the ways it challenges critical understandings of fame and its construction. No longer, to paraphrase Leo Braudy (566), definable as an accidental hostage of the mass-mediated eye, Elián’s fame has no certain relation to the child at its discursive centre. Elián’s story is not about an individuated, conscious, performing, desiring, and ambivalently rewarded ego. Elián was never what P. David Marshall calls “part of the public sphere, essentially an actor or, … a player” in it (19). The living/breathing Elián is absent from what I call the virtualizing drives that famously reproduced him. As a result of this virtualization, while one Elián now attends school in Cuba, many other Eliáns continue to populate myriad popular-cultural texts and to proliferate away from the states that tried to contain him. According to Jerry Everard, “States are above all cultural artefacts” that emerge, virtually, “as information produced by and through practices of signification,” as bits, bites, networks, and flows (7). All of us, he claims, reside in “virtual states,” in “legal fictions” based on the elusive and contested capacity to generate national identities in an imaginary bounded space (152). Cuba, the origin of Elián, is a virtual case in point. To augment Nicole Stenger’s definition of cyberspace, Cuba, like “Cyberspace, is like Oz — it is, we get there, but it has no location” (53). As a no-place, Cuba emerges in signifying terms as an illusion with the potential to produce and host Cubanness, as well as rival ideals of nation that can be accessed intact, at will, and ready for ideological deployment. Crude dichotomies of antagonism — Cuba/U.S.A., home/exile, democracy/communism, freedom/tyranny, North/South, godlessness/blessedness, consumption/want — characterize the hegemonic struggle over the Cuban nowhere. Split and splintered, hypersensitive and labyrinthine, guarded and hysterical, and always active elsewhere, the Cuban cultural artefact — an “atmospheric depression in history” (Stenger 56) — very much conforms to the logics that guide the appeal, and danger, of cyberspace. Cuba occupies an inexhaustible “ontological time … that can be reintegrated at any time” (Stenger 55), but it is always haunted by the prospect of ontological stalling and proliferation. The cyber-like struggle over reintegration, of course, evokes the Elián González affair, which began on 25 November 1999, when five-year old Elián set foot on U.S. soil, and ended on 28 June 2000, when Elián, age six, returned to Cuba with his father. Elián left one Cuba and found himself in another Cuba, in the U.S.A., each national claimant asserting virtuously that its other was a no-place and therefore illegitimate. For many exiles, Elián’s arrival in Miami confirmed that Castro’s Cuba is on the point of collapse and hence on the virtual verge of reintegration into the democratic fold as determined by the true upholders of the nation, the exile community. It was also argued that Elián’s biological father could never be the boy’s true father because he was a mere emasculated puppet of Castro himself. The Cuban state, then, had forfeited its claims to generate and host Cubanness. Succoured by this logic, the “Save Elián” campaign began, with organizations like the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) bankrolling protests, leaflet and poster production, and official “Elián” websites, providing financial assistance to and arranging employment for some of Elián’s Miami relatives, lobbying the U.S. Congress and the Florida legislature, and contributing funds to the legal challenges on behalf of Elián at state and federal levels. (Founded in 1981, the CANF is the largest and most powerful Cuban exile organization, and one that regards itself as the virtual government-in-waiting. CANF emerged with the backing of the Reagan administration and the C.I.A. as a “private sector initiative” to support U.S. efforts against its long-time ideological adversary across the Florida Strait [Arboleya 224-5].) While the “Save Elián” campaign failed, the result of a Cuban American misreading of public opinion and overestimation of the community’s lobbying power with the Clinton administration, the struggle continues in cyberspace. CANF.net.org registers its central role in this intense period with silence; but many of the “Save Elián” websites constructed after November 1999 continue to function as sad memento moris of Elián’s shipwreck in U.S. virtual space. (The CANF website does provide links to articles and opinion pieces about Elián from the U.S. media, but its own editorializing on the Elián affair has disappeared. Two keys to this silence were the election of George W. Bush, and the events of 11 Sep. 2001, which have enabled a revision of the Elián saga as a mere temporary setback on the Cuban-exile historical horizon. Indeed, since 9/11, the CANF website has altered the terms of its campaign against Castro, posting photos of Castro with Arab leaders and implicating him in a world-wide web of terrorism. Elián’s return to Cuba may thus be viewed retrospectively as an act that galvanized Cuban-exile support for the Republican Party and their disdain for the Democratic rival, and this support became pivotal in the Republican electoral victory in Florida and in the U.S.A. as a whole.) For many months after Elián’s return to Cuba, the official Liberty for Elián site, established in April 2000, was urging visitors to make a donation, volunteer for the Save Elián taskforce, send email petitions, and “invite a friend to help Elián.” (Since I last accessed “Liberty for Elián” in March 2004 it has become a gambling site.) Another site, Elian’s Home Page, still implores visitors to pray for Elián. Some of the links no longer function, and imperatives to “Click here” lead to that dead zone called “URL not found on this server.” A similar stalling of the exile aspirations invested in Elián is evident on most remaining Elián websites, official and unofficial, the latter including The Sad Saga of Elian Gonzalez, which exhorts “Cuban Exiles! Now You Can Save Elián!” In these sites, a U.S. resident Elián lives on as an archival curiosity, a sign of pathos, and a reminder of what was, for a time, a Cuban-exile PR disaster. If such cybersites confirm the shipwrecked coordinates of Elián’s fame, the “Save Elián” campaign also provided a focus for unrestrained criticism of the Cuban exile community’s imbrication in U.S. foreign policy initiatives and its embrace of American Dream logics. Within weeks of Elián’s arrival in Florida, cyberspace was hosting myriad Eliáns on sites unbeholden to Cuban-U.S. antagonisms, thus consolidating Elián’s function as a disputed icon of virtualized celebrity and focus for parody. A sense of this carnivalesque proliferation can be gained from the many doctored versions of the now iconic photograph of Elián’s seizure by the INS. Still posted, the jpegs and flashes — Elián and Michael Jackson, Elián and Homer Simpson, Elián and Darth Vader, among others (these and other doctored versions are archived on Hypercenter.com) — confirm the extraordinary domestication of Elián in local pop-cultural terms that also resonate as parodies of U.S. consumerist and voyeuristic excess. Indeed, the parodic responses to Elián’s fame set the virtual tone in cyberspace where ostensibly serious sites can themselves be approached as send ups. One example is Lois Rodden’s Astrodatabank, which, since early 2000, has asked visitors to assist in interpreting Elián’s astrological chart in order to confirm whether or not he will remain in the U.S.A. To this end the site provides Elián’s astro-biography and birth chart — a Sagittarius with a Virgo moon, Elián’s planetary alignments form a bucket — and conveys such information as “To the people of Little Havana [Miami], Elian has achieved mystical status as a ‘miracle child.’” (An aside: Elián and I share the same birthday.) Elián’s virtual reputation for divinely sanctioned “blessedness” within a Cuban exile-meets-American Dream typology provided Tom Tomorrow with the target in his 31 January 2000, cartoon, This Modern World, on Salon.com. Here, six-year old Arkansas resident Allen Consalis loses his mother on the New York subway. His relatives decide to take care of him since “New York has much more to offer him than Arkansas! I mean get real!” A custody battle ensues in which Allan’s heavily Arkansas-accented father requires translation, and the case inspires heated debate: “can we really condemn him to a life in Arkansas?” The cartoon ends with the relatives tempting Allan with the delights offered by the Disney Store, a sign of Elián’s contested insertion into an American Dreamscape that not only promises an endless supply of consumer goods but provides a purportedly safe venue for the alternative Cuban nation. The illusory virtuality of that nation also animates a futuristic scenario, written in Spanish by Camilo Hernández, and circulated via email in May 2000. In this text, Elián sparks a corporate battle between Firestone and Goodyear to claim credit for his inner-tubed survival. Cuban Americans regard Elián as the Messiah come to lead them to the promised land. His ability to walk on water is scientifically tested: he sinks and has to be rescued again. In the ensuing custody battle, Cuban state-run demonstrations allow mothers of lesbians and of children who fail maths to have their say on Elián. Andrew Lloyd Weber wins awards for “Elián the Musical,” and for the film version, Madonna plays the role of the dolphin that saved Elián. Laws are enacted to punish people who mispronounce “Elián” but these do not help Elián’s family. All legal avenues exhausted, the entire exile community moves to Canada, and then to North Dakota where a full-scale replica of Cuba has been built. Visa problems spark another migration; the exiles are welcomed by Israel, thus inspiring a new Intifada that impels their return to the U.S.A. Things settle down by 2014, when Elián, his wife and daughter celebrate his 21st birthday as guests of the Kennedys. The text ends in 2062, when the great-great-grandson of Ry Cooder encounters an elderly Elián in Wyoming, thus providing Elián with his second fifteen minutes of fame. Hernández’s text confirms the impatience with which the Cuban-exile community was regarded by other U.S. Latino sectors, and exemplifies the loss of control over Elián experienced by both sides in the righteous Cuban “moral crusade” to save or repatriate Elián (Fernández xv). (Many Chicanos, for example, were angered at Cuban-exile arguments that Elián should remain in the U.S.A. when, in 1999 alone, 8,000 Mexican children were repatriated to Mexico (Ramos 126), statistical confirmation of the favored status that Cubans enjoy, and Mexicans do not, vis-à-vis U.S. immigration policy. Tom Tomorrow’s cartoon and Camilo Hernández’s email text are part of what I call the “What-if?” sub-genre of Elián representations. Another example is “If Elián Gonzalez was Jewish,” archived on Lori’s Mishmash Humor page, in which Eliat Ginsburg is rescued after floating on a giant matzoh in the Florida Strait, and his Florida relatives fight to prevent his return to Israel, where “he had no freedom, no rights, no tennis lessons”.) Nonetheless, that “moral crusade” has continued in the Cuban state. During the custody battle, Elián was virtualized into a hero of national sovereignty, an embodied fix for a revolutionary project in strain due to the U.S. embargo, the collapse of Soviet socialism, and the symbolic threat posed by the virtual Cuban nation-in-waiting in Florida. Indeed, for the Castro regime, the exile wing of the national family is virtual precisely because it conveniently overlooks two facts: the continued survival of the Cuban state itself; and the exile community’s forty-plus-year slide into permanent U.S. residency as one migrant sector among many. Such rhetoric has not faded since Elián’s return. On December 5, 2003, Castro visited Cárdenas for Elián’s tenth birthday celebration and a quick tour of the Museo a la batalla de ideas (Museum for the Battle of Ideas), the museum dedicated to Elián’s “victory” over U.S. imperialism and opened by Castro on July 14, 2001. At Elián’s school Castro gave a speech in which he recalled the struggle to save “that little boy, whose absence caused everyone, and the whole people of Cuba, so much sorrow and such determination to struggle.” The conflation of Cuban state rhetoric and an Elián mnemonic in Cárdenas is repeated in Havana’s “Plaza de Elián,” or more formally Tribuna Anti-imperialista José Martí, where a statue of José Martí, the nineteenth-century Cuban nationalist, holds Elián in his arms while pointing to Florida. Meanwhile, in Little Havana, Miami, a sun-faded set of photographs and hand-painted signs, which insist God will save Elián yet, hang along the front fence of the house — now also a museum and site of pilgrimage — where Elián once lived in a state of siege. While Elián’s centrality in a struggle between virtuality and virtue continues on both sides of the Florida Strait, the Cuban nowhere could not contain Elián. During his U.S. sojourn many commentators noted that his travails were relayed in serial fashion to an international audience that also claimed intimate knowledge of the boy. Coming after the O.J. Simpson saga and the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, the Elián story confirmed journalist Rick Kushman’s identification of a ceaseless, restless U.S. media attention shift from one story to the next, generating an “übercoverage” that engulfs the country “in mini-hysteria” (Calvert 107). But In Elián’s case, the voyeuristic media-machine attained unprecedented intensity because it met and worked with the virtualities of the Cuban nowhere, part of it in the U.S.A. Thus, a transnational surfeit of Elián-narrative options was guaranteed for participants, audiences and commentators alike, wherever they resided. In Cuba, Elián was hailed as the child-hero of the Revolution. In Miami he was a savior sent by God, the proof supplied by the dolphins that saved him from sharks, and the Virgins who appeared in Little Havana after his arrival (De La Torre 3-5). Along the U.S.A.-Mexico border in 2000, Elián’s name was given to hundreds of Mexican babies whose parents thought the gesture would guarantee their sons a U.S. future. Day by day, Elián’s story was propelled across the globe by melodramatic plot devices familiar to viewers of soap opera: doubtful paternities; familial crimes; identity secrets and their revelation; conflicts of good over evil; the reuniting of long-lost relatives; and the operations of chance and its attendant “hand of Destiny, arcane and vaguely supernatural, transcending probability of doubt” (Welsh 22). Those devices were also favored by the amateur author, whose narratives confirm that the delirious parameters of cyberspace are easily matched in the worldly text. In Michael John’s self-published “history,” Betrayal of Elian Gonzalez, Elián is cast as the victim of a conspiracy traceable back to the hydra-headed monster of Castro-Clinton and the world media: “Elian’s case was MANIPULATED to achieve THEIR OVER-ALL AGENDA. Only time will bear that out” (143). His book is now out of print, and the last time I looked (August 2004) one copy was being offered on Amazon.com for US$186.30 (original price, $9.95). Guyana-born, Canadian-resident Frank Senauth’s eccentric novel, A Cry for Help: The Fantastic Adventures of Elian Gonzalez, joins his other ventures into vanity publishing: To Save the Titanic from Disaster I and II; To Save Flight 608 From Disaster; A Wish to Die – A Will to Live; A Time to Live, A Time to Die; and A Day of Terror: The Sagas of 11th September, 2001. In A Cry for Help, Rachel, a white witch and student of writing, travels back in time in order to save Elián’s mother and her fellow travelers from drowning in the Florida Strait. As Senauth says, “I was only able to write this dramatic story because of my gift for seeing things as they really are and sharing my mystic imagination with you the public” (25). As such texts confirm, Elián González is an aberrant addition to the traditional U.S.-sponsored celebrity roll-call. He had no ontological capacity to take advantage of, intervene in, comment on, or be known outside, the parallel narrative universe into which he was cast and remade. He was cast adrift as a mere proper name that impelled numerous authors to supply the boy with the biography he purportedly lacked. Resident of an “atmospheric depression in history” (Stenger 56), Elián was battled over by virtualized national rivals, mass-mediated, and laid bare for endless signification. Even before his return to Cuba, one commentator noted that Elián had been consumed, denied corporeality, and condemned to “live out his life in hyper-space” (Buzachero). That space includes the infamous episode of South Park from May 2000, in which Kenny, simulating Elián, is killed off as per the show’s episodic protocols. Symptomatic of Elián’s narrative dispersal, the Kenny-Elián simulation keeps on living and dying whenever the episode is re-broadcast on TV sets across the world. Appropriated and relocated to strange and estranging narrative terrain, one Elián now lives out his multiple existences in the Cuban-U.S. “atmosphere in history,” and the Elián icon continues to proliferate virtually anywhere. References Arboleya, Jesús. The Cuban Counter-Revolution. Trans. Rafael Betancourt. Research in International Studies, Latin America Series no. 33. Athens, OH: Ohio Center for International Studies, 2000. Braudy, Leo. The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986. Buzachero, Chris. “Elian Gonzalez in Hyper-Space.” Ctheory.net 24 May 2000. 19 Aug. 2004: http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=222>. Calvert, Clay. Voyeur Nation: Media, Privacy, and Peering in Modern Culture. Boulder: Westview, 2000. Castro, Fidel. “Speech Given by Fidel Castro, at the Ceremony Marking the Birthday of Elian Gonzalez and the Fourth Anniversary of the Battle of Ideas, Held at ‘Marcello Salado’ Primary School in Cardenas, Matanzas on December 5, 2003.” 15 Aug. 2004 http://www.revolutionarycommunist.org.uk/fidel_castro3.htm>. Cuban American National Foundation. Official Website. 2004. 20 Aug. 2004 http://www.canf.org/2004/principal-ingles.htm>. De La Torre, Miguel A. La Lucha For Cuba: Religion and Politics on the Streets of Miami. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003. “Elian Jokes.” Hypercenter.com 2000. 19 Aug. 2004 http://www.hypercenter.com/jokes/elian/index.shtml>. “Elian’s Home Page.” 2000. 19 Aug. 2004 http://elian.8k.com>. Everard, Jerry. Virtual States: The Internet and the Boundaries of the Nation-State. London and New York, Routledge, 2000. Fernández, Damián J. Cuba and the Politics of Passion. Austin: U of Texas P, 2000. Hernández, Camilo. “Cronología de Elián.” E-mail. 2000. Received 6 May 2000. “If Elian Gonzalez Was Jewish.” Lori’s Mishmash Humor Page. 2000. 10 Aug. 2004 http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/6174/jokes/if-elian-was-jewish.htm>. John, Michael. Betrayal of Elian Gonzalez. MaxGo, 2000. “Liberty for Elián.” Official Save Elián Website 2000. June 2003 http://www.libertyforelian.org>. Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1997. Ramos, Jorge. La otra cara de América: Historias de los inmigrantes latinoamericanos que están cambiando a Estados Unidos. México, DF: Grijalbo, 2000. Rodden, Lois. “Elian Gonzalez.” Astrodatabank 2000. 20 Aug. 2004 http://www.astrodatabank.com/NM/GonzalezElian.htm>. Rowe, John Carlos. 2002. The New American Studies. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 2002. “The Sad Saga of Elian Gonzalez.” July 2004. 19 Aug. 2004 http://www.revlu.com/Elian.html>. Senauth, Frank. A Cry for Help: The Fantastic Adventures of Elian Gonzalez. Victoria, Canada: Trafford, 2000. Stenger, Nicole. “Mind Is a Leaking Rainbow.” Cyberspace: First Steps. Ed. Michael Benedikt. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1991. 49-58. Welsh, Alexander. George Eliot and Blackmail. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1985. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Allatson, Paul. "The Virtualization of Elián González." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/16-allatson.php>. APA Style Allatson, P. (Nov. 2004) "The Virtualization of Elián González," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/16-allatson.php>.

Susanne Bier and David Farr’s 2016 television adaptation of John le Carré’s novel The Night Manager (“Manager”) indexes the resilience of traditional Christian misogyny in contemporary British-American media. In the first episode of the series, Sophie (Aure Atika)’s partner Freddie Hamid (David Avery) brutally beats her. In the subsequent scene, despite her scars, Sophie has a sex scene with the eponymous night manager Pine (Tom Hiddlestone). Sophie’s eye socket and the left side of her face bear fresh bruises and wounds throughout the sex scene. And in the sixth and final episode, Pine and Jed (Elizabeth Debicki) have sex after she has been tortured at length by her partner Roper’s (Hugh Laurie) henchman, at Roper’s request. Jed’s neck, face, and arms bear bruises from the torture.These sex scenes function as a space of revelation. I interpret the women’s wounds and injuries alongside a feminist-critical tradition of reading noir on screen. Inaugurated by Ann Kaplan’s 1978 Women in Film Noir, many feminist commentators have since made the claim that women in noir achieve a peculiar significance, and their key scenes a subversive meaning; “in excess of” their punitive treatment within the narrative (Kaplan 5; Harvey 31; Tasker Working Girls 117). My reading emphasizes a tension between Manager’s patriarchal narrative framing and these two sex scenes that I argue disrupt and subvert the former.That Sophie and Jed are brutalised by their partners does not tell us much: it is a routine expectation in British-American film and television that “bad guys” are tough on “their” chicks. It is only after these violent encounters with their partners, when the women share “romantic” moments with Pine, that the text’s patriarchal entitlement is laid bare (“revelation” stems from Late Latin revelare to “lay bare”). Forgetting about their cuts, injuries and bruises, they desire Pine, remove their clothes, and are stimulated, stimulating, pleasuring, and pleasured. Director Bier and writer Farr assume that a 2016 British and American audience will (i) find these encounters between Sophie and Pine, and Pine and Jed, to be romantic and tender; and also (ii) find Pine’s behavior consistent with that of a “savior”. These expectations regarding audience complicity are truly revelatory.Sophie and Jed’s wounds constitute a space of revelation: the wounds are in excess of, and spill over, the patriarchal narrative framing. Their wounds indicate that the narrative has approached a moment of excessive patriarchal entitlement—emphasising extreme power imbalances between Pine and the women—and break through the narrative framing and encourage feminist enquiry. I use feminist legal theorist Catharine MacKinnon’s theory of consent to argue that, given this blatant power inequity, it could be interpreted the characters have different perspectives of the sexual act and it is questionable whether the women are in fact consenting (182).Critical ReceptionAcademic engagement with John le Carré’s well-respected espionage novels continues to emerge, including the books of Myron Aronoff, Tony Barley, Matthew Bruccoli and Judith Baughman, John Cobbs, David Monaghan, Peter Lewis and Peter Wolfe. There are a small number of academic commentaries exploring the screen adaptations of his novels, including Eric Morgan’s “Whores and Angels” and Geraint D’Arcy’s “Essentially, Another Man’s Woman”. Unfortunately, there are almost no academic commentaries on Manager, with the exception of Gunhild Agger’s “Geopolitical Location and Plot in The Night Manager”, and none that focus on the handling of gender themes within it.However, there are abundant mainstream media articles and reviews of Manager. I randomly selected seven of these articles and reviews in order to gauge the response to these sex scenes within a 2016 British-American media community. I looked at articles and reviews by Hal Boedeker, Caitlin Flynn, Tim Goodman, Jeff Jensen, Tom Lamont, Jasper Rees, and Claire Webb. None of the articles mention the theme of “gender” or note the gendered violence in the series. The reviews are complicit with the patriarchal narrative framing, and introduce Sophie and Jed in terms of their physical appearances and in their relation to principal male characters. “Beautiful and pale” Jed is “girlfriend of Bogeyman arms dealer” (Jensen), and is also referred to as “Roper’s long-legged trophy girlfriend” (Rees). Sophie, in a “sultry brunette corner” is a “tempting, tragic damsel-in-distress” (Rees) and “arouses Pine” (Jensen). However, reviewers describe the character Burr (who is male in the novel but played by Olivia Colman in the series) with greater dignity and detail. Introducing the character Sophie (Aure Atika), reviewer Tom Goodman does not refer to her by character or actress name despite the fact he introduces male characters by both. Instead, Sophie is a “beautiful connected woman” and is subsequently referred to as “the woman” (Goodman). This anonymity of Sophie as character, and Atika as actor, indexes the Christian misogyny in operation here: in Genesis, Adam only names Eve after the fall of man (New International Version, Gen. 3:20). Goodman’s textual erasure supports Sophie’s vulnerability and expendability within the narrative logic. Indeed, the reviews recapitulate stock noir themes, suggesting that the women are seductively manipulative: Goodman implies that both Bier and Debicki both deploy beauty so as to distract or beguile (Goodman), and Jensen notes that the women are “sultry with danger” (Jensen).Commentators and reviewers have likened Manager, with good reason, to screen adaptations of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. This is a useful comparison for the purposes of clarifying my own analytical approach. Lisa Funnell and Klaus Dodds’s Geographies, Genders and Geopolitics of James Bond, endorse a feminist geopolitical sensibility that audits which bodies are vulnerable, and which are disposable (14). Bond, like Manager’s Pine, is fundamentally privileged and invulnerable (14). Their account of Bond also describes Pine: “white, cis-gender, middle-class, heterosexual, able-bodied… British, attended Cambridge… he can move, act, and perform; gain access to places, spaces and resources” (1). Sophie’s vulnerability counterpoints Pine’s privilege. Against Pine’s athletic form and blond features stands the “foreign” Sophie, iterated through an emphasis on her dark features, silk dresses (that reference kaftans), and accented language (she delivers English language lines with a strong accent and discloses to Pine that she has tried to “Anglicise” her identity and has changed name). Sophie’s social and financial precarity seems behind her decision to become the mistress of violent gangster Freddie Hamid (in “Episode One” Sophie explains that Hamid “owns her”). By the end of this episode Hamid has violently beaten her then later murdered her. And even though the character Jed is white and American, it is implied that financial necessity is behind her choice of Richard Roper as partner. Jed is violently tortured and beaten in “Episode Six”.Funnell and Dodds also note Bond’s capacity to sexually satisfy women as a key dimension of his hegemonic masculinity (1). In Manager, the spectator is presumed complicit with the narrative framing and is expected to uncritically accept Pine’s extreme desirability to women. The assumption of Pine’s sexiness and sexual competency together constitute his entitlement, made clear in sex scenes between him and Sophie, and him and Jed. These sex scenes follow events of gendered violence and I raise the possibility that they also constitute instances of gendered violence.Noir Feminine ArchetypesReviewers have pointed out that Manager engages with the noir tradition (Jensen). Sophie and Jed are both “fallen” women, reflecting the Christian heritage of the noir tradition, though incarnate different noir archetypes (Allen 6). Mysterious and seductive Sophie emerges as a femme fatale in the first episode: the dark and seductive girlfriend of gangster Freddie Hamid, Sophie entrusts Pine with delicate and dangerous information, leading him into a dark world. In Milton’s Paradise Lost, the snake convinces Eve that the fruit does not bring death but instead knowledge. Eve wishes to share this knowledge with her partner “but keep the odds of knowledge in my power / without co-partner?” ultimately precipitating the fall of Adam and mankind (Milton 818). Sophie shares information regarding Hamid and Roper’s illegal arms deal with Pine. There are two transgressions on her part: she shares her partner’s confidential information with Pine and then has an affair with him. Hamid murders Sophie for the betrayals. However, Sophie’s murder does not erase her narrative significance: the event motivates protagonist Pine in his chief quest to ‘bring Roper down’, and as Boedeker concurs, the narrative’s action is “driven by this event”. Indeed, Yvonne Tasker notes the dual function of the femme fatale: she is both “an archetype which suggests an equation between female sexuality, death and danger” and also “functions as the vibrant centre of the narrative” (Tasker 117).Pine’s later love interest Jed is an example of the more complicated “good-bad girl” noir type, as Andrew Spicer has usefully coined it (92). The “good-bad girl” occupies a morally ambiguous space between the (dangerously sexy) femme fatale and (fundamentally decent) “girl-next-door” (Spicer 92). Both “good” and “bad”, Jed is unmarried but living with villain Roper, whom she has presumably selected out of economic necessity; she is a mother, but this does not bestow her with maternal legitimacy as she keeps her son a secret and is physically remote from him. Jed finds “real love” with Pine and betrays Roper in assisting Pine’s espionage plot. Roper’s henchman punishes Jed for the betrayal (in the torture scene Roper laments “I saw how you looked at him last night”; “Episode 6”).Despite the routine sexism and punitive thrust of the noir narrative, the women’s “romantic” sex scenes with Pine are laden with subversive significance. In her analysis of women in noir, Sylvia Harvey argues:Despite the ritual punishment of acts of transgression, the vitality with which these acts are endowed produces an excess of meaning which cannot finally be contained. Narrative resolutions cannot recuperate their subversive significance. (31)The visibility of Sophie and Jed’s wounds throughout their respective sex scenes with Pine signals an excessive patriarchal entitlement that disrupts the narrative logic and invites us to question the women’s perspectives. My analysis of the scenes is informed by feminist legal theorist Catharine MacKinnon’s argument that under unequal power relations consent is fraught, if not impossible (180). MacKinnon argues that women’s beliefs and reactions are shaped by power inequality, including the threat of male violence, economic dependence, and need (175).Analysis of Sophie and Pine’s InteractionsI first analyse Sophie’s dialogue because I seek to demonstrate that there is a communication breakdown in play: Sophie is asking Pine for help and safety while Pine thinks she is seducing him. Sophie’s verbal exchanges with Pine can be read in two different ways: (i) according to the patriarchal narrative framing (the spectator is positioned alongside Pine, seeing Sophie as scopophilic object); or (ii) from a feminist perspective that takes Sophie’s situation and perspective into account (Mulvey 835-36). Sophie’s language is legible as flirtation. If we are uncritically complicit with the narrative framing, Sophie is usually trying to arrange time alone with Pine because she desires him. However, if we emphasise Sophie’s perspective, she is asking for privacy, discretion, and help to stay alive (and to save the lives of others too, given that she is foiling an arms deal). Catharine MacKinnon’s observation that “men are systematically conditioned not even to notice what women want” plays out elegantly in the scenes between Pine and Sophie (181). Pine manages to discern that Sophie needs some sort of help, but shows no regard for her perspective or the significant power inequality between the two of them. From their earliest interaction in “Episode One” Sophie addresses Pine in a flirtatious way. In an audacious request, although it is ‘below’ his duties as manager she insists he make her a coffee and cheekily demands he sit with her while she drinks it. Their interaction is a standard flirtatious tête-à-tête, entailing the playful query “what do you [Pine] know of me?” Sophie begs Pine to copy some documents for her in his office even though he points out that his colleague performs such duties. Sophie suggestively demands “I would prefer to use your office”. It seems that by insisting on time alone with him, Sophie’s goal is that Pine does the task, rather than the task be done per se. However, it promptly transpires that Sophie sought a private location in order to share classified information with him, having noted at an earlier date Pine’s friendship with a British diplomat. She asks him to “hold onto” the documents “in case something happens to her”.Pine nonetheless passes on these classified documents to this contact.Sophie and Pine’s next interaction follows a similar pattern: she rings him from her hotel room and asks him to bring her a scotch. He suggests alternative ways she can procure a drink, yet she confirms the real object of her desire (“I want you”). Pine smirks as he approaches her room. Sophie’s declaration appears as (i) a desirous statement and invitation to come to her room for sex but it is in fact (ii) a demand that Pine (specifically) comes to her room, because she wants to know with whom he shared the documents and to reveal to him the injuries she received as a punishment for his leak.After realising the danger he has put her in, Pine takes her to a remote house to secure her safety. Once inside, she implores “why do you sit so far away?” which sounds like a request for closeness, perhaps even that he touch her. Yet the extent of her desired proximity, and the nature of the touch she requests, can be interpreted in (at least) two ways. Certainly, Pine believes that she desires sexual intercourse with him. The spectator is meant to interpret this request along those lines by virtue of Atika’s seductive delivery. Pine explains that he sits with distance “out of respect” and Sophie teases “is that why you came all the way here, to respect me?” This remark reveals Sophie’s assumption that Pine’s assistance has been transactional (help in exchange for sex) and the content indicates the kind of sex she assumes he expects (“disrespectful” sex, or at least sex that playfully skirts the boundaries of respect). In a declaration that stands up as a positive affirmation of consent under British and American law, Sophie announces: “I want one of your many selves to sleep with me tonight.”From a freshly bruised eye socket, Sophie lovingly stares at Pine. Extra-diegetic strings instruct us that the moment is romantic. Pine strokes the (unbruised side) side of her face. Could her question “why do you sit so far away?” have been a request that he sit near her, place an arm around her shoulder, hold her hand, stroke her forehead, perhaps even tend to her wounds? Might the request that he “sleep with [her] tonight” have been a request that he sleep in the cottage, albeit on the floor?Sophie and Pine are subsequently displayed naked, limbs entangled. A new shot, a close-up of the right side of her face, displays a scab atop her eyebrow, a deeply bruised eye socket, further bruises down her cheeks, and a split lip. The muscular, broad Pine is atop Sophie and thrusting; Sophie’s split lip smiles in ecstasy and gratitude. A post-coital shot follows: she stares lovingly down at him with her facial injuries on full display, her dark eyes stare into his lucid green. Pine asks Sophie’s “real name”. Samira recounts that she changed her name to Sophie in order to “be more Western”. The power inequality is manifest on gendered, cultural, social, and physical lines: in order to advance her social position, Samira has sought to Anglicise herself and partnered with a violent (though influential) criminal (who has recently brutalised her). Her life is in danger, she is (depicted as) dark and foreign and ostensibly has no social or support network (is isolated enough to appeal to a hotel manager for help). Meanwhile, Pine is Western university-educated, a spectacle of white male athletic privilege, and has elite connections with British intelligence.Catharine MacKinnnon argues that consent is only a meaningful option if the parties are equally powerful (174). Sophie’s extreme vulnerability renders their situations patently unequal. As MacKinnon argues “when perspective is bound up with situation, and [that] situation is unequal, whether or not a contested interaction is authoritatively considered rape comes down to whose meaning wins” (182). I do not argue that Pine rapes Sophie per se. However, the revealing of Sophie’s injuries efficiently articulates the power inequality in their situations and thus problematises a straightforward assumption of her consent. MacKinnon’s argues that rape occurs “somewhere between” the following three factors (182). First, “what the woman actually wanted” (Sophie wanted to save the lives of others (by foiling an arms deal) and not die for the breach). Second, “what she was able to express about what she wanted” (class/gender/race power dynamics may have frustrated Sophie’s ability to articulate her needs and might have motivated her sexually suggestive tenor). Third, “what the man comprehended she wanted” (Pine assumes that Sophie, like all women, sexually desire him).Analysis of Jed and Pine’s InteractionsThe injustice of Pine and Sophie’s sexual encounter finds its counterpart in Pine’s sexual encounter with Jed in the final episode of the series (“Episode Six”). Roper discovers that Jed has given a third party (Pine and his colleagues) access to his private (incriminating) files. Roper instructs his henchman to torture Jed until she identifies this third party. The henchman holds Jed by the back of her neck and dunks her head repeatedly into bathwater. The camera reveals deep bruises on her arms. Jed refuses to identify her beloved (Pine) as the ‘rat’, yet the astute Roper nevertheless surmises “you must care deeply about the person you are protecting”.Alas, the dominant narrative must go on: Roper and Pine attend to an arms deal; the deal fails because Pine has set Roper up to appear as though he has robbed the buyers (and so on). Burr and Pine’s mission to “bring down” Roper has been completed. I keep wondering what Roper’s henchman has been doing to Jed during this “men’s business”. Alas, after Pine has completed the job, we encounter Jed again. She is in bed, her limbs entangled with Pine’s. The camera positioning and shot sequencing are almost identical to the sex scene between Pine and Sophie in “Episode One”. A medium close-up from the left reveals Pine thrusting atop Jed. Through pale moonlight the viewer discerns injures on Jed’s face and chin.The morning after this (brief) sex scene, Pine and Jed discuss her imminent departure (“home” to New York, to be reunited with her son). Debicki’s performance is tremendously tender: her lip trembles, her voice shakes as she swallows tears. Jed is sad because she is bidding Pine farewell, and, as she verbalises to Pine, she is nervous about whether her son will “recognise her”. Does Jed’s torture also give her grounds to weep and tremble? Ever a gentleman, Pine clasps her hand, and while marching her to her taxi, we see more bruises atop her left arm.I am also not arguing that Pine raped Jed. Yet given what Jed had endured earlier that day – torture by drowning, as commissioned and witnessed by her own partner – was sexual intercourse what she desired or needed? The visibility of Jed’s injuries throughout the sex scene marks an apotheosis of patriarchal entitlement. Might a fraternal or (even remedial) touch have been Pine’s first priority? Does Jed need a hug? Does she need ice? Had Pine been educated or socialised in a different tradition, one remotely attuned to what anyone might need after a disastrously traumatic and violent event, he might not have found penetrative sex an appropriate remedy. Pine’s absolute security in his own sexual desirability meant that he found the activity suitable, yet her injuries break my blind faith in his sexiness. I wish to raise the possibility that intercourse after this event might have compounded the violent events Jed endured that day. Contrary to the narrative’s implication, penetrative intercourse (even with Tom Hiddleston) might not heal Sophie or Jed’s wounds.ConclusionI am not a humourless feminist immune to the entertaining (and often entertainingly preposterous) dimensions of the spy and action genre. In fact, I enthusiastically await subsequent screen adaptations of le Carré’s work and the next Bond instalment. This is not a call to “cancel” a genre, text, director or writer. Biblically, a “revelation” has always instructed humans on how to live in this life. These sex scenes do not merely lay bare extreme patriarchal entitlement but might instruct directors and writers working within the genre to keep wounds, and wounded women, out of their sex scenes. I think that is a modest request. ReferencesAgger, Gunhild. “Geopolitical Location and Plot in The Night Manager.” Journal of Scandinavian Cinema 7 (2017): 27-42.Allen, Virginia. The Femme Fatale: Erotic Icon. Troy, New York: The Whitston Publishing Company, 1983.Aronoff, Myron. The Spy Novels of John le Carré: Balancing Ethics and Politics. New York: St. Martin’s, 1999.Barley, Tony. Taking Sides: The Fiction of John le Carré. Philadelphia: Open U, 1986.Boedeker, Hal. “‘Night Manager’: Check in for Tom Hiddleston.” Orlando Sentinel, 16 Apr. 2016. 7 June 2020 <https://www.orlandosentinel.com/entertainment/tv-guy/os-night-manager-check-in-for-tom-hiddleston-20160416-story.html>.Bruccoli, Matthew, and Judith Baughman. Conversations with John le Carré. Oxford: U of Mississippi P, 2004.Cobbs, John. Understanding John le Carré. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1998.D’arcy, Geraint. “‘Essentially, Another Man’s Woman’: Information and Gender in the Novel and Adaptations of John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.” Adaptation 7.3 (2014): 275-90.Funnell, Lisa, and Klaus Dodds. Geographies, Genders and Geopolitics of James Bond. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.Flynn, Caitlin. “Who Is Sophie on ‘The Night Manager’? Aure Atika’s Character Will Drive the Thriller.” Bustle, 20 Apr. 2016. 7 June 2020 <https://www.bustle.com/articles/155498-who-is-sophie-on-the-night-manager-aure-atikas-character-will-drive-the-thriller>. Goodman, Tim. “Critic's Notebook: 'The Night Manager' Glosses over Its Flaws with Beauty and Talent.” Hollywood Reporter, 28 Apr. 2016. 7 June 2020 <https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/bastard-machine/critics-notebook-night-manager-glosses-888648>.Harvey, Sylvia. “Woman’s Place: The Absent Family of Film Noir.” Women in Film Noir. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. London: British Film Institute, 1980. 30-38.Jackson, Emily. “Catharine MacKinnon and Feminist Jurisprudence: A Critical Appraisal.” Journal of Law and Society 19.2 (1992): 195-213.Jensen, Jeff. “‘The Night Manager’: EW Review.” Entertainment Weekly, 14 Apr. 2016. 7 June 2020 <https://ew.com/article/2016/04/14/the-night-manager-review/>. Kaplan, E. Ann. “Introduction.” Women in Film Noir. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. London: British Film Institute, 1980. 1-5.Lamont, Tom. “Elizabeth Debicki: ‘We Fought about How Sexy I Should Be’.” The Guardian, 8 Oct. 2016. 7 June 2020 <https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/oct/08/elizabeth-debicki-fought-a-lot-how-sexy-should-be-the-night-manager>. Lewis, Peter. John le Carré. New York: Ungar, 1985.MacKinnon, Catharine. Towards a Feminist Theory of the State. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989.Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Eds. Mary Waldrep and Susan Rattiner. United States: Dover Publications, 2005.Monaghan, David. The Novels of John le Carré: The Art of Survival. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985.———. Smiley’s Circus: A Guide to the Secret World of John le Carré. New York: St. Martin’s, 1986.Morgan, Eric. “Whores and Angels of Our Striving Selves: The Cold War Films of John le Carré, Then and Now.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 36.1 (2016): 88-103.Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema.” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. 833-44.The Night Manager. Dir. S. Bier. Screenplay D. Farr. UK/USA: BBC and AMC, 2016.Rees, Jasper. “The Night Manager, Episode 1: Brilliant Event Drama.” The Telegraph, 20 Apr. 2016. 2 June 2020 <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/2016/02/19/the-night-manager-episode-1-event-drama-of-the-highest-calibre/>.Scheppele, Kim. “The Reasonable Woman.” The Responsive Community, Rights and Responsibilities 1.4 (1991): 36–47.Tasker, Yvonne. Working Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Popular Cinema. London: Routledge, 1998.———. “Women in Film Noir.” A Companion to Film Noir. Eds. Andrew Spicer and Helen Hanson. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. 353-68.Sauerberg, Lars Ole. Secret Agents in Fiction. London: Macmillan, 1984.Webb, Claire. “Where to Find the Plush Hotels and Lush Locations in The Night Manager”. Radio Times, 21 Feb. 2016. 2 June 2020 <http://www.radiotimes.com/ news/2016-02-21/where-to-find-the-plush-hotels-and-lush-locations-inthe-night-manager>.Wolfe, Peter. Corridors of Deceit: The World of John le Carré. Madison, WI: Popular P, 1987.

The labyrinth is probably the most universal trope of complexity. Deriving from pre-Greek labyrinthos, a word denoting “maze, large building with intricate underground passages”, and possibly related to Lydian labrys, which signifies “double-edged axe,” symbol of royal power, the notion of the labyrinth primarily evokes the Minoan Palace in Crete and the myth of the Minotaur. According to this myth, the Minotaur, a monster with the body of a man and the head of a bull, was born to Pesiphae, king Minos’s wife, who mated with a bull when the king of Crete was besieging Athens. Upon his return, Minos commanded the artist Daedalus to construct a monumental building of inter-connected rooms and passages, at the center of which the King sought to imprison the monstrous sign of his disgrace. The Minotaur required human sacrifice every couple of years, until it was defeated by the Athenian prince Theuseus, who managed to extricate himself from the maze by means of a clue of thread, given to him by Minos’s enamored daughter, Ariadne (Parandowski 238-43). If the Cretan myth establishes the labyrinth as a trope of complexity, this very complexity associates labyrinthine design not only with disorientation but also with superb artistry. As pointed out by Penelope Reed Doob, the labyrinth is an inherently ambiguous construct (39-63). It presumes a double perspective: those imprisoned inside, whose vision ahead and behind is severely constricted, are disoriented and terrified; whereas those who view it from outside or from above – as a diagram – admire its structural sophistication. Labyrinths thus simultaneously embody order and chaos, clarity and confusion, unity (a single structure) and multiplicity (many paths). Whereas the modern, reductive view equates the maze with confusion and disorientation, the labyrinth is actually a signifier with two contradictory signifieds. Not only are all labyrinths intrinsically double, they also fall into two distinct, though related, types. The paradigm represented by the Cretan maze is mainly derived from literature and myth. It is a multicursal model, consisting of a series of forking paths, each bifurcation requiring new choice. The second type is the unicursal maze. Found mainly in the visual arts, such as rock carvings or coin ornamentation, its structural basis is a single path, twisting and turning, but entailing no bifurcations. Although not equally bewildering, both paradigms are equally threatening: in the multicursal construct the maze-walker may be entrapped in a repetitious pattern of wrong choices, whereas in the unicursal model the traveler may die of exhaustion before reaching the desired end, the heart of the labyrinth. In spite of their differences, the basic similarities between the two paradigms may explain why they were both included in the same linguistic category. The labyrinth represents a road-model, and as such it is essentially teleological. Most labyrinths of antiquity and of the Middle Ages were designed with the thought of reaching the center. But the fact that each labyrinth has a center does not necessarily mean that the maze-walker is aware of its existence. Moreover, reaching the center is not always to be desired (in case it conceals a lurking Minotaur), and once the center is reached, the maze-walker may never find the way back. Besides signifying complexity and ambiguity, labyrinths thus also symbolically evoke the danger of eternal imprisonment, of inextricability. This sinister aspect is intensified by the recursive aspect of labyrinthine design, by the mirroring effect of the paths. In reflecting on the etymology of the word ‘maze’ (rather than the Greek/Latin labyrinthos/labyrinthus), Irwin observes that it derives from the Swedish masa, signifying “to dream, to muse,” and suggests that the inherent recursion of labyrinthine design offers an apt metaphor for the uniquely human faculty of self-reflexitivity, of thought turning upon itself (95). Because of its intriguing aspect and wealth of potential implications, the labyrinth has become a category that is not only formal, but also conceptual and symbolic. The ambiguity of the maze, its conflation of overt complexity with underlying order and simplicity, was explored in ideological systems rooted in a dualistic world-view. In the early Christian era, the labyrinth was traditionally presented as a metaphor for the universe: divine creation based on a perfect design, perceived as chaotic due to the shortcomings of human comprehension. In the Middle-Ages, the labyrinthine attributes of imprisonment and limited perception were reflected in the view of life as a journey inside a moral maze, in which man’s vision was constricted because of his fallen nature (Cazenave 348-350). The maze was equally conceptualized in dynamic terms and used as a metaphor for mental processes. More specifically, the labyrinth has come to signify intellectual confusion, and has therefore become most pertinent in literary contexts that valorize rational thought. And the rationalistic genre par excellence is detective fiction. The labyrinth may serve as an apt metaphor for the world of detective fiction because it accurately conveys the tacit assumptions of the genre – the belief in the existence of order, causality and reason underneath the chaos of perceived phenomena. Such optimistic belief is ardently espoused by the putative detective in Paul Auster’s metafictional novella City of Glass: He had always imagined that the key to good detective work was a close observation of details. The more accurate the scrutiny, the more successful the results. The implication was that human behavior could be understood, that beneath the infinite façade of gestures, tics and silences there was finally a coherence, an order, a source of motivation. (67) In this brief but eloquent passage Auster conveys, through the mind of his sleuth, the central tenets of classical detective fiction. These tenets are both ontological and epistemological. The ontological aspect is subsumed in man’s hopeful reliance on “a coherence, an order, a source of motivation” underlying the messiness and blood of the violent deed. The epistemological aspect is aptly formulated by Michael Holquist, who argues that the fictional world of detective stories is rooted in the Scholastic principle of adequatio rei et intellectus, the adequation of mind to things (157). And if both human reality and phenomenal reality are governed by reason, the mind, given enough time, can understand everything. The mind’s representative is the detective. He is the embodiment of inquisitive intellect, and his superior powers of observation and deduction transform an apparent mystery into an incontestable solution. The detective sifts through the evidence, assesses the relevance of data and the reliability of witnesses. But, first of foremost, he follows clues – and the clue, the most salient element of the detective story, links the genre with the myth of the Cretan labyrinth. For in its now obsolete spelling, the word ‘clew’ denotes a ball of thread, and thus foregrounds the similarity between the mental process of unraveling a crime mystery and the traveler’s progress inside the maze (Irwin 179). The chief attributes of the maze – circuitousness, enclosure, and inextricability – associate it with another convention of detective fiction, the trope of the locked room. This convention, introduced in Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” a text traditionally regarded as the first analytic detective story, establishes the locked room as the ultimate affront to reason: a hermetically sealed space which no one could have penetrated or exited and in which a brutal crime has nevertheless been committed. But the affront to reason is only apparent. In Poe’s ur-text of the genre, the violent deed is committed by an orangutan, a brutal and abused beast that enters and escapes from the seemingly locked room through a half-closed window. As accurately observed by Holquist, in the world of detective fiction “there are no mysteries, there is only incorrect reasoning” (157). And the correct reasoning, dubbed by Poe “ratiocination”, is the process of logical deduction. Deduction is an enchainment of syllogisms, in which a conclusion inevitably follows from two valid premises; as Dupin elegantly puts it, “the deductions are the sole proper ones and … the suspicion arises inevitably from them as a single result” (Poe 89). Applying this rigorous mental process, the detective re-arranges the pieces of the puzzle into a coherent and meaningful sequence of events. In other words – he creates a narrative. This brings us back to Irwin’s observation about the recursive aspect of the maze. Like the labyrinth, detective fiction is self-reflexive. It is a narrative form which foregrounds narrativity, for the construction of a meaningful narrative is the protagonist’s and the reader’s principal task. Logical deduction, the main activity of the fictional sleuth, does not allow for ambiguity. In classical detective fiction, the labyrinth is associated with the messiness and violence of crime and contrasted with the clarity of the solution (the inverse is true of postmodernist detective mysteries). The heart of the labyrinth is the solution, the vision of truth. This is perhaps the most important aspect of the detective genre: the premise that truth exists and that it can be known. In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the initially insoluble puzzle is eventually transformed into a coherent narrative, in which a frantic orangutan runs into the street escaping the abuse of its master, climbs a rod and seeks refuge in a room inhabited by two women, brutally slashes them in confusion, and then flees the room in the same way he penetrated it. The sequence of events reconstructed by Dupin is linear, unequivocal, and logically satisfying. This is not the case with the ‘hard boiled’, American variant of the detective genre, which influenced the inception of film noir. Although the novels of Hammett, Chandler or Cain are structured around crime mysteries, these works problematize most of the tacit premises of analytic detective fiction and re-define its narrative form. For one, ‘hard boiled’ fiction obliterates the dualism between overt chaos and underlying order, between the perceived messiness of crime and its underlying logic. Chaos becomes all-encompassing, engulfing the sleuth as well as the reader. No longer the epitome of a superior, detached intellect, the detective becomes implicated in the mystery he investigates, enmeshed in a labyrinthine sequence of events whose unraveling does not necessarily produce meaning. As accurately observed by Telotte, “whether [the] characters are trying to manipulate others, or simply hoping to figure out how their plans went wrong, they invariably find that things do not make sense” (7). Both ‘hard-boiled’ fiction and its cinematic progeny implicitly portray the dissolution of social order. In film noir, this thematic pursuit finds a formal equivalent in the disruption of traditional narrative paradigm. As noted by Bordwell and Telotte, among others, the paradigm underpinning classical Hollywood cinema in the years 1917-1960 is characterized by a seemingly objective point of view, adherence to cause-effect logic, use of goal-oriented characters and a progression toward narrative closure (Bordwell 157, Telotte 3). In noir films, on the other hand, the devices of flashback and voice-over implicitly challenge conventionally linear narratives, while the use of the subjective camera shatters the illusion of objective truth (Telotte 3, 20). To revert to the central concern of the present paper, in noir cinema the form coincides with the content. The fictional worlds projected by the ‘hard boiled’ genre and its noir cinematic descendent offer no hidden realm of meaning underneath the chaos of perceived phenomena, and the trope of the labyrinth is stripped of its transcendental, comforting dimension. The labyrinth is the controlling visual metaphor of the Coen Brothers’ neo-noir film The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001). The film’s title refers to its main protagonist: a poker-faced, taciturn barber, by the name of Ed Crane. The entire film is narrated by Ed, incarcerated in a prison cell. He is writing his life story, at the commission of a men’s magazine whose editor wants to probe the feelings of a convict facing death. Ed says he is not unhappy to die. Exonerated of a crime he committed and convicted of a crime he did not, Ed feels his life is a labyrinth. He does not understand it, but he hopes that death will provide the answer. Ed’s final vision of life as a bewildering maze, and his hope of seeing the master-plan after death, ostensibly refer to the inherent dualism of the labyrinth, the notion of underlying order manifest through overt chaos. They offer the flicker of an optimistic closure, which subscribes to the traditional Christian view of the universe as a perfect design, perceived as chaos due to the shortcomings of human comprehension. But this interpretation is belied by the film’s final scene. Shot in blindingly white light, suggesting the protagonist’s revelation, the screen is perfectly empty, except for the electric chair in the center. And when Ed slowly walks towards the site of his execution, he has a sudden fantasy of the overhead lights as the round saucers of UFOs. The film’s visual metaphors ironically subvert Ed’s metaphysical optimism. They cast a view of human life as a maze of emptiness, to borrow the title of one of Borges’s best-known stories. The only center of this maze is death, the electric chair; the only transcendence, faith in God and in after life, makes as much sense as the belief in flying saucers. The Coen Brothers thus simultaneously construct and deconstruct the traditional symbolism of the labyrinth, evoking (through Ed’s innocent hope) its promise of underlying order, and subverting this promise through the images that dominate the screen. The transcendental dimension of the trope of the labyrinth, its promise of a hidden realm of meaning and value, is consistently subverted throughout the film. On the level of plot, the film presents a crisscrossed pattern of misguided intentions and tragi-comic misinterpretations. The film’s protagonist, Ed Crane, is estranged from his own life; neither content nor unhappy, he is passive, taking things as they come. Thus he condones Doris’s, his wife’s, affair with her employer, Big Dave, reacting only when he perceives an opportunity to profit from their liason. This opportunity presents itself in the form of Creighton Tolliver, a garrulous client, who shares with Ed his fail-proof scheme of making big money from the new invention of dry cleaning. All he needs to carry out his plan, confesses Creighton, is an investment of ten thousand dollars. The barber decides to take advantage of this accidental encounter in order to change his life. He writes an anonymous extortion letter to Big Dave, threatening to expose his romance with Doris and wreck his marriage and his financial position (Dave’s wife, a rich heiress, owns the store that Dave runs). Dave confides in Ed about the letter; he suspects the blackmailer is a con man that tried to engage him in a dry-cleaning scheme. Although reluctant to part with the money, which he has been saving to open a new store to be managed by Doris, Big Dave eventually gives in. Obviously, although unbeknownst to Big Dave, it is Ed who collects the money and passes it to Creighton, so as to become a silent partner in the dry cleaning enterprise. But things do not work out as planned. Big Dave, who believes Creighton to be his blackmailer, follows him to his apartment in an effort to retrieve the ten thousand dollars. A fight ensues, in which Creighton gets killed, not before revealing to Dave Ed’s implication in his dry-cleaning scheme. Furious, Dave summons Ed, confronts him with Creighton’s story and physically attacks him. Ed grabs a knife that is lying about and accidentally kills Big Dave. The following day, two policemen arrive at the barbershop. Ed is certain they came to arrest him, but they have come to arrest Doris. The police have discovered that she has been embezzling from Dave’s store (Doris is an accountant), and they suspect her of Dave’s murder. Ed hires Freddy Riedenschneider, the best and most expensive criminal attorney, to defend his wife. The attorney is not interested in truth; he is looking for a version that will introduce a reasonable doubt in the minds of the jury. At some point, Ed confesses that it is he who killed Dave, but Riedenschneider dismisses his confession as an inadequate attempt to save Doris’s neck. He concocts a version of his own, but does not get the chance to win the trial; the case is dismissed, as Doris is found hanged in her cell. After his wife’s death, Ed gets lonely. He takes interest in Birdy, the young daughter of the town lawyer (whom he initially approached for Doris’s defense). Birdy plays the piano; Ed believes she is a prodigy, and wants to become her agent. He takes her for an audition to a French master pianist, who decides that the girl is nothing special. Disenchanted, they drive back home. Birdy tells Ed, not for the first time, that she doesn’t really want to be a pianist. She hasn’t been thinking of a career; if at all, she would like to be a vet. But she is very grateful. As a token of her gratitude, she tries to perform oral sex on Ed. The car veers; they have an accident. When he comes to, Ed faces two policemen, who tell him he is arrested for the murder of Creighton Tolliver. The philosophical purport of the labyrinth metaphor is suggested in a scene preceding Doris’s trial, in which her cocky attorney justifies his defense strategy. To support his argument, he has recourse to the theory of some German scientist, called either Fritz or Werner, who claimed that truth changes with the eye of the beholder. Science has determined that there is no objective truth, says Riedenschneider; consequently, the question of what really happened is irrelevant. All a good attorney can do, he concludes, is present a plausible narrative to the jury. Freddy Riedenschneider’s seemingly nonchalant exposition is a tongue-in-cheek reference to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Succinctly put, the principle postulates that the more precisely the position of a subatomic particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa. What follows is that concepts such as orbits of electrons do not exist in nature unless and until we measure them; or, in Heisenberg’s words, “the ‘path’ comes into existence only when we observe it” (qtd. in Cassidy). Heisenberg’s discovery had momentous scientific and philosophical implications. For one, it challenged the notion of causality in nature. The law of causality assumes that if we know the present exactly, we can calculate the future; in this formulation, suggests Heisenberg, “it is not the conclusion that is wrong, but the premises” (qtd. in Cassidy). In other words, we can never know the present exactly, and on the basis of this exact knowledge, predict the future. More importantly, the uncertainty principle seems to collapse the distinction between subjective and objective reality, between consciousness and the world of phenomena, suggesting that the act of perception changes the reality perceived (Hofstadter 239). In spite of its light tone, the attorney’s confused allusion to quantum theory conveys the film’s central theme: the precarious nature of truth. In terms of plot, this theme is suggested by the characters’ constant misinterpretation: Big Dave believes he is blackmailed by Creighton Tolliver; Ed thinks Birdy is a genius, Birdy thinks that Ed expects sex from her, and Ann, Dave’s wife, puts her faith in UFOs. When the characters do not misjudge their reality, they lie about it: Big Dave bluffs about his war exploits, Doris cheats on Ed and Big Dave cheats on his wife and embezzles from her. And when the characters are honest and tell the truth, they are neither believed nor rewarded: Ed confesses his crime, but his confession is impatiently dismissed, Doris keeps her accounts straight but is framed for fraud and murder; Ed’s brother in law and partner loyally supports him, and as a result, goes bankrupt. If truth cannot be known, or does not exist, neither does justice. Throughout the film, the wires of innocence and guilt are constantly crossed; the innocent are punished (Doris, Creighton Tolliver), the guilty are exonerated of crimes they committed (Ed of killing Dave) and convicted of crimes they did not (Ed of killing Tolliver). In this world devoid of a metaphysical dimension, the mindless processes of nature constitute the only reality. They are represented by the incessant, pointless growth of hair. Ed is a barber; he deals with hair and is fascinated by hair. He wonders how hair is a part of us and we throw it to dust; he is amazed by the fact that hair continues to grow even after death. At the beginning of the film we see him docilely shave his wife’s legs. In a mirroring scene towards the end, the camera zooms in on Ed’s own legs, shaved before his electrocution. The leitmotif of hair, the image of the electric chair, the recurring motif of UFOs – all these metaphoric elements convey the Coen Brothers’ view of the human condition and build up to Ed’s final vision of life as a labyrinth. Life is a labyrinth because there is no necessary connection between cause and effect; because crime is dissociated from accountability and punishment; because what happened can never be ascertained and human knowledge consists only of a maze of conflicting, or overlapping, versions. The center of the existential labyrinth is death, and the exit, the belief in an after-life, is no more real than the belief in aliens. The labyrinth is an inherently ambiguous construct. Its structural attributes of doubling, recursion and inextricability yield a wealth of ontological and epistemological implications. Traditionally used as an emblem of overt complexity concealing underlying order and symmetry, the maze may aptly illustrate the tacit premises of the analytic detective genre. But this purport of the maze symbolism is ironically inverted in noir and neo-noir films. As suggested by its title, the Coen Brothers’ movie is marked by absence, and the absence of the man who wasn’t there evokes a more disturbing void. That void is the center of the existential labyrinth. References Auster, Paul. City of Glass. The New York Trilogy. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1990. 1-132. Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: Wisconsin UP, 1985. Cassidy, David. “Quantum Mechanics, 1925-1927.” Werner Heisenberg (1901-1978). American Institute of Physics, 1998. 5 June 2007 http://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg/p08c.htm>. Cazenave, Michel, ed. Encyclopédie des Symboles. Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1996. Coen, Joel, and Ethan Coen, dirs. The Man Who Wasn’t There. 2001. Doob, Penelope Reed. The Idea of the Labyrinth. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992. Hofstadter, Douglas. I Am a Strange Loop. New York: Basic Books, 2007. Holquist, Michael. “Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in Post-War Fiction.” The Poetics of Murder. Eds. Glenn W. Most and William W. Stowe. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. 149-174. Irwin, John T. The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges and the Analytic Detective Story. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. Parandowski, Jan. Mitologia. Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1960. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Edgar Allan Poe: The Complete Illustrated Stories and Poems. London: Chancellor Press, 1994. 103-114. Telotte, J.P. Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir. Urbana: Illinois UP, 1989. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Shiloh, Ilana. "A Vision of Complex Symmetry: The Labyrinth in The Man Who Wasn’t There." M/C Journal 10.3 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/09-shiloh.php>. APA Style Shiloh, I. (Jun. 2007) "A Vision of Complex Symmetry: The Labyrinth in The Man Who Wasn’t There," M/C Journal, 10(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/09-shiloh.php>.

Michael Haneke’s film Caché tells the story of a bourgeois family in peril. The comfortable lives of the Laurents—husband Georges (Daniel Auteuil), wife Anne (Juliette Binoche), and teenage son Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky)—are disrupted when surveillance tapes of their home and private conversations are delivered to them anonymously. Ostensibly Caché sits in a familiar generic framework: the thriller narrative of a family under threat is reminiscent of films such as The Desperate Hours (1955), Cape Fear (1962), and Straw Dogs (1971). The weight of outside forces causes tension within the family dynamic and Georges spends much of the film playing detective (unravelling clues from the tapes and from his past). This framing draws us in; it is presumed that the mystery of the family’s harassment will finally be solved, and yet Haneke’s treatment of this material undermines viewer expectations. This paper examines the process of suspicious reading when applied to a film that encourages such a method, only to thwart the viewer’s attempts to come to a definitive meaning. I argue that Caché plays with generic expectations in order to critique the interpretive process, and consider what implications this has for suspicious readers. Caché positions us as detective. Throughout the film we follow Georges’s investigation to unravel the film’s central enigma: Who is sending the tapes? The answer to this, however, is never revealed. Instead viewers are left with more questions than answers; it seems that for every explanation there is a circumventing intricacy. This lack of narrative closure within the surface framework of a psychological thriller has proven fertile ground for critics, scholars, and home viewers alike as they painstakingly try to ascertain the elusive culprit. Character motives are scrutinised, performances are analysed, specific shots are dissected, and various theories have been canvassed. The viewer becomes ensnared in the hermeneutics of suspicion, a critical reading strategy that literary theorist Rita Felski has compared to the hard-boiled crime story, a scenario in which critic becomes detective, and text becomes criminal suspect to be “scrutinized, interrogated, and made to yield its hidden secrets” (224). Like Georges, the viewer becomes investigator, sifting through the available evidence in the vain hope that with scrupulous attention the film will surrender its mystery.Of course, Haneke is not unique in his withholding of a film’s enigma. David Lynch’s surreal neo-noir Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Drive (2001) have garnered a similar response and continue to be debated. Film scholar Mark Cousins compares Caché’s reception at Cannes to other landmark film and television examples:Where Dallas made people ask ‘who?’, Twin Peaks ‘what?’, the genre-bending films of the last decade ‘how?’ and The Crying Game was about the implications of the answer, Caché’s conversational buzz was more circular. Yes, we asked ‘who?’ Then, when it was clear this question was not answered by the film, we considered why it was not answered. (225–6)Felski’s meditation on the hermeneutics of suspicion touches on this issue, considering literary texts as preemptive of our mistrust. Extending Felski’s reasoning here as applicable to other forms of cultural expression, I would like to argue that Caché is a film that “matches and exceeds the critic’s own vigilance” for it is already involved in “subverting the self-evident, challenging the commonplace, [and] relentlessly questioning idées fixes and idées recus” (Felski 217). Caché challenges fixed and received ideas pertaining to audience expectations of the thriller film, subverting generic conventions that traditionally see the enigma resolved, the culprit apprehended, and order restored. More than simply refusing closure, Caché casts doubt on the very clues it offers up as evidence. Such a text performs “a meta-commentary on the traps of interpretation, a knowing anticipation and exposure of all possible hermeneutic blunders” (Felski 217). Throughout her essay, Felski highlights the lures and pitfalls of suspicious reading practices. Felski warns that attempts to gain mastery over texts by drawing to light purportedly obscured meanings are often as concerned with self-congratulatory demonstrations of skill in drawing hitherto unmade connections as they are with the texts themselves (230). While I do not wish to endorse suspicious reading as an unproblematic approach, the present paper considers what happens when readers encounter a text that seemingly cannot be approached in any other way. Unlike the realist literary narratives and mystery stories drawn on by Felski, Caché resists a manifest meaning in both form and content, making it nearly impossible for viewers not to search for latent meaning.So where are suspicious readers left when the texts interrogated refuse to bend to the demands placed on them? This is the question I will be examining in the remainder of this paper through the questions Caché poses and the care it takes in ensuring its enigmatic quality. I will proceed by breaking down what I believe to be the three possible avenues of response—Caché as impossible puzzle, inconclusive puzzle, or wrong puzzle—and their implications.I The Impossible Puzzle Caché opens with a static frame long take of a Parisian residential street. This could be mistaken for a still image until a pedestrian bustles past. A woman leaves her house centre frame. A cyclist turns the corner. “Well?” a male voice intones. “Nothing,” a female replies. The voices come from off-screen, and soon after the image is interrupted by fast forward lines, revealing that what we have been watching is not an image of the present moment but a video cassette of time already elapsed; the voices belong to our protagonists, Georges and Anne, commenting on its content and manipulating its playback. From the opening moments it becomes clear that we cannot be certain of what we are seeing or when we are seeing it.This presents an intriguing tension between form and content that complicates our attempts to gather evidence. Haneke pares back style in a manner reminiscent of the films of Robert Bresson or the work of the Italian neo-realists. Caché’s long takes, naturalistic lighting, and emphasis on the everyday suggest a realist aesthetic; the viewer can invest faith in these images because they ascribe to a familiar paradigm, one in which artifice is apparently minimal. This notion that a realist aesthetic equates to straightforward images is at odds, however, with both the thriller narrative (in which solutions must be concealed before they can be uncovered) and Haneke’s constant undermining of the ontology of the image; throughout the film, viewers will be disoriented by Haneke’s manipulation of time and space with unclear or retroactive distinctions between past, present, video, dream, memory, and reality.An additional contention might be the seemingly impossible placement of the hidden camera. In the same tape, Georges leaves the house and walks towards the camera, unaware of it. The shot indicates the camera must be elevated in the street, and at one point it appears that Georges is looking right at it. A later recording takes place in the apartment of Georges’s suspect, Majid. Viewers are given ample opportunity to scour the mise en scène to find what apparently is not there. Perhaps the camera is just too well hidden. But if this is not the case and we can neither locate nor conceive of the camera’s placement because it simply cannot be there, this would seem to break the rules of the game. If we are to formulate theories as to the culprit at large, what good is our evidence if it is unreliable? Viewers could stop here and conclude that a puzzle without a solution amounts to a film without a point. “Well?” Georges asks in the film’s opening. “Nothing,” Anne replies. Case closed. Short of giving up on a solution, one might conclude (as Antoine Doinel has) that those looking within the film for a perpetrator are looking in the wrong place. When the motives or opportunities of on-screen characters do not add up, perhaps it is Haneke one should turn to. Those familiar with Haneke’s earlier film Funny Games (1997) will know he is not afraid to break the tacit rules by which we suspend our disbelief if there is a point to be made. Film scholar David Sorfa concludes it is in fact the audience who send the tapes; Caché’s narrative is fuelled by the desire of viewers who want to see a film (102). Tempting though these solutions might be (Georges does not see the camera because he is a fictional character in a film unaware of its creator), as critic Roger Ebert has pointed out, such theories render both the film’s content, and any analysis of it, without purpose: It introduces a wild card. It essentially means that no analysis of the film is relevant, because nothing need make sense and no character actions need be significant. Therefore, the film would have the appearance of a whodunit but with no who and no dunnit. (“Caché: A Riddle”)The Caché as impossible puzzle avenue leaves the suspicious reader without reason to engage. If there can be no reward for our efforts, we are left without incentive. Alternately, if we conclude that Haneke is but the puppet master sadistically toying with his characters, we are left at a similar juncture; our critical enquiry has all the consequence of the trite “but it was all a dream…” scenario. “Well?” “Nothing.” I suspect there is more to Caché than that. A film so explicit in its stimulation of suspicious reading seems to merit our engagement. However, this is not to say that our attention will be satisfied with the neatly tied up solution we might expect. II The Inconclusive Puzzle When, one evening, Pierrot does not come home as expected, Georges and Anne conclude the boy has been kidnapped. They interpret their son’s absence as an escalation in the “campaign of terror” that had hitherto consisted of surveillance videos, odd phone calls, and childlike but portent drawings. With police assistance, Georges goes to confront his suspect, Majid. An Algerian boy from his childhood, now middle aged and disadvantaged because of lies Georges told as a child, Majid has already (quite convincingly) denied any knowledge of the tapes. At the door they meet Majid’s son who is equally perplexed at the accusation of kidnapping. The pair are arrested and an exhausted Georges returns home to explain the situation to his wife:Georges: So now they’re both in the cage for the night.Anne: And then?Georges: Then they’ll let them go. If there’s no proof, they have to. There’s suspicion, nothing more.The next day a sullen Pierrot returns home, having stayed the night at a friend’s without notifying his parents. His clear disdain for his mother is revealed as he rejects her affection and accuses her of having an affair. Pierrot likewise treats his father with disinterest, raising viewer suspicion that he might have a motive for tormenting his parents with the videotapes. Pierrot is just one cog in the family’s internal mechanism of suspicion, however. Whether or not Anne is actually having an affair can only be speculated; she denies it, but other scenes open the way to our suspicion. Anne is rightly suspicious of Georges’s reluctance to be open about his past as his proclivity to lie is gradually revealed. In short, Haneke deliberately layers the film with complexity and ambiguity; numerous characters could be implicated, and many questions are raised but few are answered.This suggests that suspicious readers might have recourse to Haneke as author of the text. Haneke, however, celebrates Caché’s ambiguity and his decision to leave the film open: “The truth is always hidden…that’s how it is in the real world. We never, ever know what the truth is. There are a thousand versions of the truth. It depends on your point of view” (Haneke). In interview, Haneke’s language also raises suspicion. At times he speaks knowingly (refusing to reveal important dialogue that occurs in the film’s final shot—an extreme long shot, the characters too distant to be heard), and at other times he seems as uncertain as his viewers (commenting on Anne’s denial of an affair, Haneke remarks “I believe her because she plays it very seriously. But you never know”) (Haneke).Despite this reluctance to offer explanations, Haneke’s status as an auteur with recurring concerns and an ever-developing vision prompts suspicious readers to evaluate Caché in light of his greater oeuvre. Those suspecting Pierrot of wanting to punish his parents might find their theory bolstered by Benny’s Video (1992), Haneke’s film about a teenage boy who murders a friend and then turns in his parents to the police for helping him cover it up. Furthermore, Das Weiße Band (The White Ribbon, 2009) is set in a small German village on the eve of World War One and the narrative strongly suggests the town’s children are responsible for a series of malicious crimes. Whilst malign children in Haneke’s other works cannot explain Caché’s mystery, his oeuvre provides a greater context in which to consider the film, and regenerates discussion as viewers look for patterns in the subject matter Haneke chooses to explore. Regarding Caché as an inconclusive puzzle shifts the emphasis from a neatly packaged solution to a renewable process of discovery. To suggest that there is an answer to be found in the text, a culprit who escapes apprehension but is at least present to be caught, gives suspicious readers cause to engage and re-engage. It is to assume that the film is not without a point. Close attention may reward us with meaningful nuances that colour our interpretation. Haneke’s obsessive attention to detail also seems to suggest that nothing on screen is accidental or arbitrary, that our concentration is warranted, and that active viewing is a necessity even if our expectations and desires for closure may not be granted.Caché ends without revealing its secret. Georges’s suspect Majid has committed suicide (perhaps due to the trauma dredged up by Georges’s accusations), Majid’s son has confronted Georges at his work place (“I wondered how it feels, a man’s life on your conscience?”), and Georges has refused any responsibility for his actions in the distant and recent past. Of the film’s conclusion, cinema theorist Martine Beugnet writes:In the end […] we watch him draw the curtains, take a sleeping pill and go to bed: an emphatic way of signifying the closure of an episode, the return to normality—the conclusion of the film. Yet the images ‘refuse’ to comply: behind the closing credits, the questioning gaze not only persists but affirms its capacity to reinvent itself. (230)The images Beugnet is referring to are the two final shots, which are both static long takes. The first is an extreme long shot, taken from the darkness of a barn into the bright courtyard of the family estate of Georges’s childhood. A child (Majid) is forcibly removed from the home and taken away in a car (presumably to an orphanage due to the lies told by a jealous Georges). This shot is followed by the film’s closing shot, another extreme long shot, this time of the front steps of Pierrot’s school. The frame is cluttered with children and parents, and our eyes are not directed anywhere in particular. Some viewers will notice Pierrot chatting with Majid’s son (a potentially revealing conversation that cannot be heard), others will not see the two young men hidden in the crowd. Eventually the credits roll over this image.Georges’s attempts to shut out the world seem undermined by these images, as Beugnet writes they “‘refuse’ to comply” to this notion of conclusion. Instead of bringing closure to the narrative, they raise more questions. What and when are they? One cannot be sure. The first shot may be a dream or a memory; its placement after a shot of Georges going to bed might encourage us to connect the two. The second shot at the school could be more surveillance footage, or possibly another dream. It might imply the boys have conspired together. It might imply Majid’s son is confronting Pierrot with information about his father. It could be interpreted as the end of the narrative, but it could also be the beginning. Some read it as threatening, others as hopeful. It might imply so many things. However, this “questioning gaze” that persists and reinvents itself is not just the gaze of the film. It is also the gaze of the suspicious reader. From the initial hype upon the film’s Cannes release in 2005, to the various theories circulating in online forums, to Ebert’s scrupulous re-evaluation of the film’s enigma in 2010, to the ever developing body of scholarly work on Haneke’s films, it seems Caché’s mileage for suspicious readers is still running strong, not least because “whodunit?” may be the wrong question.III The Wrong PuzzleOliver C. Speck has remarked that Caché is “Haneke’s most accessible film, but also the most densely layered,” leading the viewer “on a search for clues that always ends in frustration” (97). For Ebert, the film’s lack of resolution leaves the viewer “feeling as the characters feel, uneasy, violated, spied upon, surrounded by faceless observers” (“Caché”). Cousins likewise comments on the process Caché instigates: The film structures our experience in a generically gripping way but then the structure melts away at the moment when it should most cohere, requiring us to look back along its length (the structure’s length and the film’s) to work out where we went wrong. But we did not go wrong. We went where we were told to go, we took the hand of the narrative that, in the final stages, slipped away, leaving us without co-ordinates. (226)The "whodunit” of Caché cannot be definitively proven. Ultimately, viewers can have suspicion, nothing more. So where are we left as suspicious readers when texts such as Caché surpass our own critical vigilance? We can throw in the towel and claim that an impossible puzzle does not deserve our efforts. We can accept that the text has out-played us; it is an inconclusive but compelling puzzle that does not provide enough links in the hermeneutic chain for us to find the closure we seek. Alternately, when the answer is not forthcoming, we can hypothesise that perhaps we have been asking the wrong question; whodunit is beside the point, simply a Hitchcockian MacGuffin (the object or objective that the protagonists seek) introduced to bait us into confronting much more important questions. Perhaps instead we should be asking what Caché can tell us about colonial histories, guilt, vision, or the ontology of cinema itself.This is the avenue many scholars have taken, and the avenue Haneke (rather than his film necessarily) would have us take. The “who did what, when, why, and how” might be regarded as beside the point. In an interview with Andrew O’Hehir, Haneke is quoted:These superficial questions are the glue that holds the spectator in place, and they allow me to raise underlying questions that they have to grapple with. It’s relatively unimportant who sent the tapes, but by engaging with that the viewer must engage questions that are far less banal.Catherine Wheatley agrees, arguing Caché’s open ending renders the epistemological questions of the guilty party and their motives irrelevant, giving preference to questions raised by how this chain of events affect Georges, and by extension the viewer (163–4). By refusing to divulge its secrets, Caché both incites and critiques the interpretive process, encouraging us to take up the role of detective only to anticipate and exceed our investigative efforts. Caché’s subversion of the self-evident is as much a means to launch its thriller narrative as it is a way of calling into question our very understanding of what “self-evident” means. Where Felski describes suspicious interpretations of realist texts (those that attempt to unmask the ideologies concealed behind an illusion of transparency and totality), from its opening moments, Caché is already and constantly unmasking itself. The film’s resistance of a superficial reading seems to make suspicious interpretation inevitable. Wherever viewer suspicion is directed, however, it relies on engagement. Without reason to engage, viewers are left with an impossible puzzle where critical involvement and attention is of no consequence. “Who is sending the tapes?” may be an unimportant or unanswerable question, but it must always be a valid one. It is this query that incites and fuels the interpretive process. As there can only ever be suspicion, nothing more, perhaps it is the question rather than “the answer” that is of utmost significance.Works CitedBeugnet, Martine. “Blind Spot.” Screen 48.2 (2007): 227–31.Benny’s Video. Dir. Michael Haneke. Madman, 1992.Caché (Hidden). Dir. Michael Haneke. Sony Pictures Classics, 2005. Cape Fear. Dir. J. Lee Thompson. Universal, 1962.Cousins, Mark. “After the End: Word of Mouth and Caché.” Screen 48.2 (2007): 223–6.Desperate Hours, The. Dir. William Wyler. Paramount, 1955.Doinel, Antoine. “(Un)hidden Camera: The ‘Real’ Sender of the Tapes.” Mubi.com. Mubi. n.d. 10 Apr. 2011. ‹http://mubi.com/topics/461›. Ebert, Roger. “Caché.” Roger Ebert.com. Chicago Sun-Times. 13 Jan. 2006. 25 Feb. 2011. ‹http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060112/REVIEWS/51220007›.---. “Caché: A Riddle, Wrapped in a Mystery, Inside an Enigma [Response to Readers].” Roger Ebert’s Journal. Chicago Sun-Times. 18 Jan. 2010. 2 Apr. 2011. ‹http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/01/a_riddle_wrapped_in_a_mystery.html›.Felski, Rita. “Suspicious Minds.” Poetics Today 32.2 (2011): 215–34.Funny Games. Dir. Michael Haneke. Madman, 1997.Haneke, Michael. “Hidden: Interview with Michael Haneke by Serge Toubiana.” DVD Special Features. Hidden (Caché). Dir. Michael Haneke. Madman, 2005.Lost Highway. Dir. David Lynch. Universal, 1997.Mulholland Drive. Dir. David Lynch. Reel, 2001.O’Hehir, Andrew. “Michael Haneke’s ‘White Ribbon.’” Salon.com. Salon. 2 Jan. 2010. 2 Apr. 2011. ‹http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/andrew_ohehir/2010/01/02/haneke›.Sorfa, David. “Uneasy Domesticity in the Films of Michael Haneke.” Studies in European Cinema 3.2 (2006): 93–104.Speck, Oliver C. Funny Frames: The Filmic Concepts of Michael Haneke. New York: Continuum, 2010.Straw Dogs. Dir. Sam Peckinpah. MRA, 1971.Wheatley, Catherine. Michael Haneke’s Cinema: The Ethic of the Image. New York: Berghahn Books, 2009.White Ribbon, The (Das Weiße Band). Dir. Michael Haneke. Artificial Eye, 2009.

This paper will use the popular television character, Dexter Morgan, to interrogate the relationship between self and persona, and unsettle the distinction between the two terms. This operation will enable me to raise a series of questions about the critical vocabulary and scholarly agenda of the nascent discipline of persona studies, which, I argue, needs to develop a critical genealogy of the term “persona.” This paper makes a modest contribution to such a project by drawing attention to some key questions regarding the discourse of authenticity in persona studies. For those not familiar with the show, Dexter portrays the life of a serial killer who only kills other serial killers. This is because Dexter, under the tutelage of his deceased father, develops a code that enables him to find a “socially useful” purpose for his homicidal impulses—by exclusively targeting other killers he rationalises his own deadly acts. Dexter necessarily leads a double life, which entails performing a series of normative social roles that conceal his true identity, and the murderous activities of his “dark passenger.” This apparent split between “true” self and “false” persona says a lot about popular conceptions of the performative nature of the self in contemporary culture, and provides a useful framework for unpacking some of the aporias generated by the concept of persona.My aim in the present context is to substantiate the argument that persona studies needs to engage with the philosophical discourse of “self” and “authenticity” if it is to provide a convincing account of the status and function of persona today. The term “persona” derives from the classical Latin word for mask, and has its roots in the theatre of ancient Greece. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term thus:1. An Assumed character or role, especially one adopted by an author in his or her writing, or by a performer.2.a. as the aspect of a person’s character that is displayed to or perceived by others.b. Psychol. In Jungian psychology: the outer or assumed aspect of character; a set of attitudes adopted by an individual to fit his or her perceived social role. Contrasted with anima.For Jung the persona is “a complicated system of relations between individual consciousness and society, fittingly enough a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and, on the other, to conceal the true nature of the individual” (305). We can see that all these usages share a theatrical or actorly dimension. Persona is something we adopt, display, or assume. Further, it is an external quality, which masks, presumably, that which is not assumed or displayed—the private self. Thus, persona is predicated on an opposition between inside and outside. Moreover, it is not a value neutral concept, but one, I will argue, that connotes a sense of “inauthenticity” through suggesting a division between self and role. The “self” is a complicated word with a wide range of usages and connotations. The OED notes that when used with reference to a person the word refers to an essential entity.3. Chiefly Philos. That which in a person is really and intrinsically he (in contradistinction to what is adventitious); the ego (often identified with the soul or mind as opposed to the body); a permanent subject of successive and varying states of consciousness.Of course both terms are further complicated by the way they function within specific specialised discourses. Jung’s use of the term “persona” is part of a complex psychological theory of personality, and the term “self” appears in a multitude of forms in a plethora of scholarly disciplines. The “self” is obviously a key concept in psychology and philosophy, where it is sometimes conflated with something called the subject, or discussed with reference to questions of personal identity. Michel Foucault’s project to track “the constitution of the subject across history which has led us up to the modern concept of the self” (202) is perhaps the most complex and rich body of work with which persona studies must reckon if it is to produce a distinctive account of the relationship between persona and self. In broad terms, this paper advocates a loosely Foucauldian approach to understanding the relationship between self and persona, but defers a detailed encounter with Foucault’s work on the subject (which requires a much larger canvas).For the moment I want to focus on the status of authenticity in the self/persona relationship with specific reference to world of Dexter, which provides an accessible forum for examining a contemporary manifestation of the self/persona relationship with specific reference to the question of authenticity. Dexter conveys the division between authentic inner self and persona through the use of a first person narrative voice that provides a running commentary on the character’s thoughts, and exposes the gap between Dexter’s various social roles and his real sociopathic self. Dexter Morgan is, of course, an unreliable narrator, yet he is acutely aware of how others perceive him, and his narrative voice-over functions as a device to bind the viewer to the character’s first-person perspective. This is important because Dexter is devoid of empathy—he lacks the ability to feel genuine emotion, and conform to the social conventions that govern everyday activities, yet he is focus of audience identification. This means the voice-over must perform the work of making Dexter sympathetic.The voice-over narration in Dexter is characterised by an obsession with the presentation of self, and the disparity between self and persona. In an early episode, Dexter’s narrative voice proclaims a love of Halloween because it is “the one time of year when everyone wears a mask—not just me. People think it's fun to pretend you're a monster. Me, I spend my life pretending I'm not. Brother, friend, boyfriend—all part of my costume collection” (Dexter “Let’s Give the Boy a Hand”).Dexter develops a series of social masks and routines to disguise his “real” self. He is compelled to develop a series of elaborate ruses to appear like a regular guy—a “normal” person who needs to perform a series of social roles. He thus becomes a studious observer of everyday life, and much of the show’s appeal lies in the way he dissects the minutiae of human behavior in order to learn how be normal. Indeed, because he does not comprehend emotion he must learn how to read the external signs that convey care, love, interest, concern and so on—“I just don't understand all that emotion, which makes it tough to fake,” he declares (Dexter, “Popping Cherry”). Each social role requires a considerable degree of actorly preparation, and Dexter demonstrates what we might call, with Erving Goffman, a dramaturgical approach to everyday life (2).For example, Dexter enters into a relationship with Rita, an ostensibly naïve, doe-eyed single mother of two children and a victim of domestic violence—he chooses her because he believes that she is as damaged as he is, and unlikely to challenge him too strongly—“Rita's ex-hubby, the crack addict, repeatedly raped her, knocked her around. Ever since then she's been completely uninterested in sex. That works for me!” (Dexter “Dexter”). Rita provides the perfect cover because she facilitates Dexter’s construction of himself as a normal, heterosexual family man. However, in order to play this most paradigmatic normative role, he must learn how to play with children, and feign affection and intimacy. J. M. Tyree observes that Dexter “employs a fake-it-till-you-make-it strategy for imitating normal life” (82). Of course, he cannot maintain the role too long before Rita becomes suspicious, and aware of Dexter’s repeated lies and evasions.In short, Dexter dramatises what Goffman calls impression management—the character of Dexter Morgan must consistently “give off” signs of normativity (80). Goffman argues that we are all compelled to perform social roles in the manner of Dexter, and this perhaps accounts for why the show appealed to such a wide audience. In many ways, Dexter exposes normative behavior as an “act” that nobody can sustain no matter how hard they try. Dexter’s struggle to decode the conventions that govern everyday life make him a sympathetic character despite his obviously sociopathic tendencies. In other words we are all a little bit like Dexter insofar we must all perform social roles we may not find comfortable. Of course, the whole question of impression management in Dexter becomes even more complex if one considers Michael C. Hall’s celebrity persona and his performance as the titular character, but I do not have the space to pursue this line of inquiry in the present context.So, Dexter is a consummate actor within his “everyday” world, and neatly, perhaps too neatly, confirms Goffman’s “dramaturgical” theory of the “self.” In his essay, “Letter to a Poor Actor” David E. R. George provides a fascinating critique of Goffman from the perspective of a theatre studies scholar. George provocatively claims that Goffman was attracted to theatrical metaphors because of the “anti-theatrical prejudice” embedded within the western tradition. George cites Jonash Barish’s authoritative tome on this topic, which argues “that with infrequent exceptions, terms borrowed from the theatre—theatrical, operatic, melodramatic, stagey, etc.—tend to be hostile or belittling” (1).Barish cites instances of this prejudice from Plato through to St Augustine and beyond, and George situates Goffman within this powerful tradition. He writes,the theatrum mundi metaphor has always been a recipe for paranoia, and in this respect Goffman appears merely to be continuing a long philosophical tradition: the actor-as-paranoiac puts on the maximum number of masks to protect a threatened and fragile self against the daily threat of intimacy, disrespect, deception. (353)It is hardly surprising, then, that Dexter, a paranoid sociopath, stands as an exemplary instance of Goffman’s dramaturgical conception of the self, for Dexter is a show that consistently presents narratives about the relationship between the need to protect the “fragile” self through the construction of various personae. George also argues, with Lyman and Scott, that a “dramatistic” approach to understanding the world produces a cynical perspective because drama is predicated on the split between appearance and reality, nothing is what it appears to be, and nobody is what they appear to be (7). The actor, traditionally, has always worn a mask in some form or another. From the literal masks worn by the actors in ancient Greece to the sophisticated make-up and prosthetic devices worn by today’s thespians, actors, even when they are supposedly playing themselves, expose the gap between self and persona. Arguably, the most challenging and provocative aspect of George’s theory of the actor for persona studies lies in his thesis about how the reviled art of the theatre, which has been pilloried for so many centuries, can function as a paradigm for authenticity. He cites Artaud and Grotowski as examples of two iconic figures that view the theatre as a sacred space that facilitates ‘close encounters of the authentic kind (George 361).George attempts to rescue an authentic core identity, which he perceives to be under siege from the likes of Goffman, who proffers an “onion” model of the self. In George’s reading, Goffman produces a self without an essential, authentic core. This is hardly surprising given Goffman’s background. As an advocate of symbolic interactionism, a school of sociology that proposes that the self is produced as a result of various acts of socialisation, Goffman’s dramaturgical account of the self reinforces George Herbert Mead’s belief that “when a self does appear it always involves an experience of another; there could not be an experience of the self simply by itself” (195).Dexter not only dramatises this self/other dynamic, but also underscores the extent to which we, to use the terminology of Benita Luckmann, inhabit a series of “small life-worlds.” In other words, we lead a series of part-time lives in part-time worlds—modern life, for Luckmann writing in 1970, unfolds on multiple stages that are not necessarily connected or operate according to the same regulatory principles. She writes,The multi-world existence of modern man requires frequent ‘gear-shifting.’ As he moves from one small world into the next, he is faced with at least marginally different expectations, requiring different role performances in concert with different sets of people. (590)Dexter must negotiate a variety of different social roles, each with different requirements and demands. He must, therefore, cultivate a professional persona as a blood-splatter analyst, and perform the personal roles of brother, lover, husband, and so on. Each of these roles occurs in a different “life world” and requires a different presentation of self. Luckmann’s analysis of modern life remains compelling despite being written more than 40 years ago, and she raises one of the most crucial questions for persona studies: what “self,” if any, functions as the executive “gear-shifter?” In Dexter, the narrative voice, the voice behind the masks implies such an essential entity—the true, authentic self, which is consistent with Jung’s account of the relationship between self and persona.Despite a welter of critical theory that debunks the possibility of an essential, self-identical, authentic self (from Adorno’s anti-Heideggerean argument in The Jargon of Authenticity to various post-structuralist theories of subjectivity, especially Judith Butler’s conception of performativity) the idea of sovereign self stubbornly persists in everyday discourse. One of the tasks of persona studies must be to examine these common notions of self and authenticity. On one level, most people experience the “self” as something that refers to what we might call a singular sense of being, and speak about when the feel “most like themselves.” For some, the self emerges within the private realm, the “backstage” areas to use Goffman’s terminology (3). Others speak of feeling most like themselves in executing a social role or some kind of professional occupation. For example, take this extract from a contemporary self-growth web site:Are you feeling like you don’t know who you are anymore? Or maybe you feel like you never really knew yourself. Perhaps you’ve gone through most of your life living by other people’s agendas or ideas of who you should be, and are just now realizing that you really don’t know yourself, your dreams, or your purpose. (Ewing 2013)From the Platonic exhortation to “know thyself” through to the advice dispensed by self-help gurus, the self emerges as a persistent, if elusive, trope in scholarly and everyday discourse. Persona studies needs to reckon with the scope and breadth of the deployment of the self. Indeed it is the very ubiquity of terms like self, authenticity, and persona that require genealogical analysis in the Foucauldian sense of the term. This task entails looking for and uncovering the conditions of possibility for talking about the self across a wide range of contexts.In summary, then, I contend that persona studies needs to carefully examine the relationship between various theories of self and the discourse of authenticity, and establish the extent to which Goffman’s apparently cynical account for the self challenges the assumed authenticity of the self in the Jungian paradigm. Of course, there are many other approaches one could take to this question. For example, Sartrean existentialism problematises any simple opposition between self and persona in its insistence that the self is the product of the others’ perceptions of the subject. This position is captured in his famous maxim that “hell is other people.” This is not because other people are inherently antagonistic or hostile, but that one’s sense of self is in the hands of others. Sartre dramatises this conundrum elegantly in his 1944 play, No Exit.Sartre’s philosophy also engages with the discourse of authenticity, which it borrows from Heidegger’s Being and Time. Existentialism, in its many guises, dominated continental philosophy up until the 1960s and popularised the idea of “authenticity” as an ideal, which enables one to avoid the tyranny of the “They” and avoid the pitfalls of living in bad faith. There is a possibility that the nascent discipline of Persona Studies, as articulated by P. David Marshall and others, risks ignoring the crucial relationship between the discourse of authenticity and the presentation of self by concentrating on the “presentational self” as a set of pragmatic, tactical techniques designed to maximise the impact of impression management within a variety of social and professional contexts (Marshall “Persona”; Barbour and Marshall “Academic”). A more detailed and direct engagement with Foucault’s account of the emergence and constitution of the modern subject, as well as with theories of performativity and authenticity that challenge the arguments and verities of Goffman, and Jung, can provide a richer account of how the concept of persona operates today with reference to, say, “the networked self” (Papacharissi; Barbour and Marshall).So, I would like to conclude by returning to Dexter and the question of authenticity. Dexter can never really manage to identify his authentic self—his “gear-changing” core.It’s there always, this Dark Passenger. And when he’s driving, I feel alive, half sick with the thrill of complete wrongness [...] lately there are these moments when I feel connected to something else... someone. It’s like the mask is slipping and things... people... who never mattered before are suddenly starting to matter. (Dexter, “An Inconvenient Lie”)In this speech, he paradoxically identifies his “dark passenger” as the driver (Luckmann’s “gear-changer”) but then feels “the mask” slipping. There is something beyond what he assumed to be his dark core—the innermost aspect of being that makes executive decisions. Moreover, the status of Dexter’s “dark passenger” is unclear in this speech—is he ‘”he self” or some external agent impelling Dexter to commit murder. Either way Dexter questions the motives and authenticity of this “dark passenger” and those of us with a stake in the nascent discipline of persona studies would do well to be equally skeptical about the status of our key terms.References Adorno, Theodor. The Jargon of Authenticity. Trans. Tarnowski, Knut and Will, Fredric. London and New York: Routledge, 2009.“An Inconvenient Lie.” Dexter. Season 2, Episode 3. DVD Showtime, 2007.Barbour K and Marshall P. D. “The Academic Online: Constructing Persona through the World Wide Web.” First Monday 17.9 (2012). 16 May 2014 http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3969/3292.Barish, Jonas. The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice. University of California Press, 1981.Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. London and New York: Routledge, 1990.“Dexter.” Dexter. Season 1, Episode 1. DVD Showtime, 2006.Ewing, Catherine. ‘Do You Feel Like a Stranger to Yourself?’ 17 April 2014 ‹ http://reawakenyourdreamer.com/2013/09/feel-like-stranger/ ›.Foucault, Michel. “About the Beginnings of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth.” Political Theory (1993): 198-227.George, David E.R. “Letter to a Poor Actor.” New Theatre Quarterly 2.8 (1986): 352-362.Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday, 1959.Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarie and Edward Robinson. London: Blackwell, 2006.Jung, Carl. Collected Works 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972.“Let’s Give the Boy a Hand.” Dexter. Season 1, Episode 4. DVD Showtime, 2006.Luckmann, Benita. “The Small Life-Worlds of Modern Man.” Social Research 37.4 (1970): 580-596.Lyman, S. M., and Scott, M. B. The Drama of Social Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Presss, 1975.Marshall, P. David. “Persona Studies: Mapping the Proliferation of the Public Self.” Journalism 15 (2014): 153-170.Mead, George Herbert. Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934.Papacharissi, Zizi (ed.). A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites. London and New York: Routledge, 2011.“persona, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2014. 12 April 2014.“Popping Cherry.” Dexter. Season 1, Episode 3. DVD Showtime, 2006.Sartre, Jean-Paul. No Exit and Three Other Plays. Trans. Stuart Gilbert. New York: Vintage, 1989.“self, pron., adj., and n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2014. 13 April 2014.Tyree, J.M. “Spatter Pattern.” Film Quarterly 62.1 (2008): 82-85.

Story spreads out through time the behaviors or bodies – the shapes – a self has been or will be, each replacing the one before. Hence a story has before and after, gain and loss. It goes somewhere…Moreover, shape or body is crucial, not incidental, to story. It carries story; it makes story visible; in a sense it is story. Shape (or visible body) is in space what story is in time. (Bynum, quoted in Garland Thomson, 113-114) Drawing on Goffman’s classic work on stigma, research documenting the existence of discrimination and bias against individuals classified as obese goes back five decades. Since Cahnman published “The Stigma of Obesity” in 1968, other researchers have well documented systematic and growing discrimination against fat people (cf. Puhl and Brownell; Puhl and Heuer; Puhl and Heuer; Fikkan and Rothblum). While weight-based stereotyping has a long history (Chang and Christakis; McPhail; Schwartz), contemporary forms of anti-fat stigma and discrimination must be understood within a social and economic context of neoliberal healthism. By neoliberal healthism (see Crawford; Crawford; Metzel and Kirkland), I refer to the set of discourses that suggest that humans are rational, self-determining actors who independently make their own best choices and are thus responsible for their life chances and health outcomes. In such a context, good health becomes associated with proper selfhood, and there are material and social consequences for those who either unwell or perceived to be unwell. While the greatest impacts of size-based discrimination are structural in nature, the interpersonal impacts are also significant. Because obesity is commonly represented (at least partially) as a matter of behavioral choices in public health, medicine, and media, to “remain fat” is to invite commentary from others that one is lacking in personal responsibility. Guthman suggests that this lack of empathy “also stems from the growing perception that obesity presents a social cost, made all the more tenable when the perception of health responsibility has been reversed from a welfare model” (1126). Because weight loss is commonly held to be a reasonable and feasible goal and yet is nearly impossible to maintain in practice (Kassierer and Angell; Mann et al.; Puhl and Heuer), fat people are “in effect, asked to do the impossible and then socially punished for failing” (Greenhalgh, 474). In this article, I explore how weight-based stigma shaped the decisions of bariatric patients to undergo weight loss surgery. In doing so, I underline the work that emotion does in circulating anti-fat stigma and in creating categories of subjects along lines of health and responsibility. As well, I highlight how fat bodies are lived and negotiated in space and place. I then explore ways in which participants take up notions of time, specifically in regard to risk, in discussing what brought them to the decision to have bariatric surgery. I conclude by arguing that it is a dynamic interaction between the material, social, emotional, discursive, and the temporal that produces not only fat embodiment, but fat subjectivity “failed”, and serves as an impetus for seeking bariatric surgery. Methods This article is based on 30 semi-structured interviews with American bariatric patients. At the time of the interview, individuals were between six months and 12 years out from surgery. After obtaining Intuitional Review Board approval, recruitment occurred through a snowball sample. All interviews were audio-taped with permission and verbatim interview transcripts were analyzed by means of a thematic analysis using Dedoose (www.dedoose.com). All names given in this article are pseudonyms. This work is part of a larger project that includes two additional interviews with bariatric surgeons as well as participant-observation research. Findings Navigating Anti-Fat Stigma In discussing what it was like to be fat, all but one of the individuals I interviewed discussed experiencing substantive size-based stigma and discrimination. Whether through overt comments, indirect remarks, dirty looks, open gawking, or being ignored and unrecognized, participants felt hurt, angry, and shamed by friends, family, coworkers, medical providers, and strangers on the street because of the size of their bodies. Several recalled being bullied and even physically assaulted by peers as children. Many described the experience of being fat or very fat as one of simultaneous hypervisibility and invisibility. One young woman, Kaia, said: “I absolutely was not treated like a person … . I was just like this object to people. Just this big, you know, thing. That’s how people treated me.” Nearly all of my participants described being told repeatedly by others, including medical professionals, that their inability to lose weight was effectively a failure of the will. They found these comments to be particularly hurtful because, in fact, they had spent years, even decades, trying to lose weight only to gain the weight back plus more. Some providers and family members seemed to take up the idea that shame could be a motivating force in weight loss. However, as research by Lewis et al.; Puhl and Huerer; and Schafer and Ferraro has demonstrated, the effect this had was the opposite of what was intended. Specifically, a number of the individuals I spoke with delayed care and avoided health-facilitating behaviors, like exercising, because of the discrimination they had experienced. Instead, they turned to health-harming practices, like crash dieting. Moreover, the internalization of shame and blame served to lower a sense of self-worth for many participants. And despite having a strong sense that something outside of personal behavior explained their escalating body weights, they deeply internalized messages about responsibility and self-control. Danielle, for instance, remarked: “Why could the one thing I want the most be so impossible for me to maintain?” It is important to highlight the work that emotion does in circulating such experiences of anti-fat stigma and discrimination. As Fraser et al have argued in their discussion on fat and emotion, the social, the emotional, and the corporeal cannot be separated. Drawing on Ahmed, they argue that strong emotions are neither interior psychological states that work between individuals nor societal states that impact individuals. Rather, emotions are constitutive of subjects and collectivities, (Ahmed; Fraser et al.). Negative emotions in particular, such as hate and fear, produce categories of people, by defining them as a common threat and, in the process, they also create categories of people who are deemed legitimate and those who are not. Thus following Fraser et al, it is possible to see that anti-fat hatred did more than just negatively impact the individuals I spoke with. Rather, it worked to produce, differentiate, and drive home categories of people along lines of health, weight, risk, responsibility, and worth. In this next section, I examine the ways in which anti-fat discrimination works at the interface of not only the discursive and the emotive, but the material as well. Big Bodies, Small Spaces When they discussed their previous lives as very fat people, all of the participants made reference to a social and built environment mismatch, or in Garland Thomson’s terms, a “misfit”. A misfit occurs “when the environment does not sustain the shape and function of the body that enters it” (594). Whereas the built environment offers a fit for the majority of bodies, Garland Thomson continues, it also creates misfits for minority forms of embodiment. While Garland Thomson’s analysis is particular to disability, I argue that it extends to fat embodiment as well. In discussing what it was like to navigate the world as fat, participants described both the physical and emotional pain entailed in living in bodies that did not fit and frequently discussed the ways in which leaving the house was always a potential, anxiety-filled problem. Whereas all of the participants I interviewed discussed such misfitting, it was notable that participants in the Greater New York City area (70% of the sample) spoke about this topic at length. Specifically, they made frequent and explicit mentions of the particular interface between their fat bodies and the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), and the tightly packed spaces of the city itself. Greater New York City area participants frequently spoke of the shame and physical discomfort in having to stand on public transportation for fear that they would be openly disparaged for “taking up too much room.” Some mentioned that transit seats were made of molded plastic, indicating by design the amount of space a body should occupy. Because they knew they would require more space than what was allotted, these participants only took seats after calculating how crowded the subway or train car was and how crowded it would likely become. Notably, the decision to not take a seat was one that was made at a cost for some of the larger individuals who experienced joint pain. Many participants stated that the densely populated nature of New York City made navigating daily life very challenging. In Talia’s words, “More people, more obstacles, less space.” Participants described always having to be on guard, looking for the next obstacle. As Candice put it: “I would walk in some place and say, ‘Will I be able to fit? Will I be able to manoeuvre around these people and not bump into them?’ I was always self-conscious.” Although participants often found creative solutions to navigating the hostile environment of both the MTA and the city at large, they also identified an increasing sense of isolation that resulted from the physical discomfort and embarrassment of not fitting in. For instance, Talia rarely joined her partner and their friends on outings to movies or the theater because the seats were too tight. Similarly, Decenia would make excuses to her husband in order to avoid social situations outside of the home: “I’d say to my husband, ‘I don’t feel well, you go.’ But you know what? It was because I was afraid not to fit, you know?” The anticipatory scrutinizing described by these participants, and the anxieties it produced, echoes Kirkland’s contention that fat individuals use the technique of ‘scanning’ in order to navigate and manage hostile social and built environments. Scanning, she states, involves both literally rapidly looking over situations and places to determine accessibility, as well as a learned assessment and observation technique that allows fat people to anticipate how they will be received in new situations and new places. For my participants, worries about not fitting were more than just internal calculation. Rather, others made all too clear that fat bodies are not welcome. Nina recalled nasty looks she received from other subway riders when she attempted to sit down. Decenia described an experience on a crowded commuter train in which the woman next to her openly expressed annoyance and disgust that their thighs were touching. Talia recalled being aggressively handed a weight loss brochure by a fellow passenger. When asked to contrast their experiences living in New York City with having travelled or lived elsewhere, participants almost universally described the New York as a more difficult place to live for fat people. However, the experiences of three of the Latinas that I interviewed troubled this narrative. Katrina felt that the harassment she received in her country of origin, the Dominican Republic, was far worse than what she now experienced in the New York Metropolitan Area. Although Decenia detailed painful experiences of anti-fat stigma in New York City, she nevertheless described her life as relatively “easy” compared to what it was like in her home country of Brazil. And Denisa contrasted her neighbourhood of East Harlem with other parts of Manhattan: “In Harlem it's different. Everybody is really fat or plump – so you feel a bit more comfortable. Not everybody, but there's a mix. Downtown – there's no mix.” Collectively, their stories serve as a reminder (see Franko et al.; Grabe and Hyde) to be suspicious of over determined accounts that “Latino culture” is (or people of colour communities in general are), more accepting of larger bodies and more resistant to weight-based stigma and discrimination. Their comments also reflect arguments made by Colls, Grosz, and Garland Thomson, who have all pointed to the contingent nature between space and bodies. Colls argue that sizing is both a material and an emotional process – what size we take ourselves to be shifts in different physical and emotional contexts. Grosz suggests that there is a “mutually constitutive relationship between bodies and cities” – one that, I would add, is raced, classed, and gendered. Garland Thomson has described the relationship between bodies and space/place as “a dynamic encounter between world and flesh.” These encounters, she states, are always contingent and situated: “When the spatial and temporal context shifts, so does the fit, and with it meanings and consequences” (592). In this sense, fat is materialized differently in different contexts and in different scales – nation, state, city, neighbourhood – and the materialization of fatness is always entangled with raced, classed, and gendered social and political-economic relations. Nevertheless, it is possible to draw some structural commonalities between divergent parts of the Greater New York City Metropolitan Area. Specifically, a dense population, cramped physical spaces, inaccessible transportation and transportation funding cuts, social norms of fast paced life, and elite, raced, classed, and gendered norms of status and beauty work to materialize fatness in such a way that a ‘misfit’ is often the result for fat people who live and/or work in this area. And importantly, misfitting, as Garland Thomson argues, has consequences: it literally “casts out” when the “shape and function of … bodies comes into conflict with the shape and stuff of the built world” (594). This casting out produces some bodies as irrelevant to social and economic life, resulting in segregation and isolation. To misfit, she argues, is to be denied full citizenship. Responsibilising the Present Garland Thomson, discussing Bynum’s statement that “shape carries story”, argues the following: “the idea that shape carries story suggests … that material bodies are not only in the spaces of the world but that they are entwined with temporality as well” (596). In this section, I discuss how participants described their decisions to get weight loss surgery by making references to the need take responsibility for health now, in the present, in order to avoid further and future morbidity and mortality. Following Adams et al., I look at how the fat body is lived in a state of constant anticipation – “thinking and living toward the future” (246). All of the participants I spoke with described long histories of weight cycling. While many managed to lose weight, none were able to maintain this weight loss in the long term – a reality consistent with the medical fact that dieting does not produce durable results (Kassirer and Angell; Mann et al.; Puhl and Heuer). They experienced this inability as not only distressing, but terrifying, as they repeatedly regained the lost weight plus more. When participants discussed their decisions to have surgery, they highlighted concerns about weight related comorbidities and mobility limitations in their explanations. Consistent then with Boero, Lopez, and Wadden et al., the participants I spoke with did not seek out surgery in hopes of finding a permanent way to become thin, but rather a permanent way to become healthy and normal. Concerns about what is considered to be normative health, more than simply concerns about what is held to be an appropriate appearance, motivated their decisions. Significantly, for these participants the decision to have bariatric surgery was based on concerns about future morbidity (and mortality) at least as much, if not more so, than on concerns about a current state of ill health and impairment. Some individuals I spoke with were unquestionably suffering from multiple chronic and even life threatening illnesses and feared they would prematurely die from these conditions. Other participants, however, made the decision to have bariatric surgery despite the fact that they had no comorbidities whatsoever. Motivating their decisions was the fear that they would eventually develop them. Importantly, medial providers explicitly and repeatedly told all of these participants that lest they take drastic and immediate action, they would die. For example: Faith’s reproductive endocrinologist said: “you’re going to have diabetes by the time you’re 30; you’re going to have a stroke by the time you’re 40. And I can only hope that you can recover enough from your stroke that you’ll be able to take care of your family.” Several female participants were warned that without losing weight, they would either never become pregnant or they would die in childbirth. By contrast, participants stated that their bariatric surgeons were the first providers they had encountered to both assert that obesity was a medical condition outside of their control and to offer them a solution. Within an atmosphere in which obesity is held to be largely or entirely the result of behavioural choices, the bariatric profession thus positions itself as unique by offering both understanding and what it claims to be a durable treatment. Importantly, it would be a mistake to conclude that some bariatric patients needed surgery while others choose it for the wrong reasons. Regardless of their states of health at the time they made the decision to have surgery, the concerns that drove these patients to seek out these procedures were experienced as very real. Whether or not these concerns would have materialized as actual health conditions is unknown. Furthermore, bariatric patients should not be seen as having been duped or suffering from ‘false consciousness.’ Rather, they operate within a particular set of social, cultural, and political-economic conditions that suggest that good citizenship requires risk avoidance and personal health management. As these individuals experienced, there are material and social consequences for ‘failing’ to obtain normative conceptualizations of health. This set of conditions helps to produce a bariatric patient population that includes both those who were contending with serious health concerns and those who feared they would develop them. All bariatric patients operate within this set of conditions (as do medical providers) and make decisions regarding health (current, future, or both) by using the resources available to them. In her work on the temporalities of dieting, Coleman argues that rather than seeing dieting as a linear and progressive event, we might think of it instead a process that brings the future into the present as potential. Adams et al suggest concerns about potential futures, particularly in regard to health, are a defining characteristic of our time. They state: “The present is governed, at almost every scale, as if the future is what matters most. Anticipatory modes enable the production of possible futures that are lived and felt as inevitable in the present, rendering hope and fear as important political vectors” (249). The ability to act in the present based on potential future risks, they argue, has become a moral imperative and a marker of proper of citizenship. Importantly, however, our work to secure the ‘best possible future’ is never fully assured, as risks are constantly changing. The future is thus always uncertain. Acting responsibly in the present therefore requires “alertness and vigilance as normative affective states” (254). Importantly, these anticipations are not diagnostic, but productive. As Adams et al state, “the future arrives already formed in the present, as if the emergency has already happened…a ‘sense’ of the simultaneous uncertainty and inevitability of the future, usually manifest in entanglements of fear and hope” (250). It is in this light, then, that we might see the decision to have bariatric surgery. For these participants, their future weight-related morbidity and mortality had already arrived in the present and thus they felt they needed to act responsibly now, by undergoing what they had been told was the only durable medical intervention for obesity. The emotions of hope, fear, anxiety and I would suggest, hatred, were key in making these decisions. Conclusion Medical, public health, and media discourses frame obesity as an epidemic that threatens to bring untold financial disaster and escalating rates of morbidity and mortality upon the nation state and the world at large. As Fraser et al argue, strong emotions (such hatred, fear, anxiety, and hope), are at the centre of these discourses; they construct, circulate, and proliferate them. Moreover, they create categories of people who are deemed legitimate and categories of others who are not. In this context, the participants I spoke with were caught between a desire to have fatness understood as a medical condition needing intervention; the anti-fat attitudes of others, including providers, which held that obesity was a failure of the will and nothing more; their own internalization of these messages of personal responsibility for proper behavioural choices, and, the biologically intractable nature of fatness wherein dieting not only fails to reduce weight in the vast majority of cases but results, in the long term, in increased weight gain (Kassirer and Angell; Mann et al.; Puhl and Heuer). Widespread anxiety and embarrassment over and fear and hatred of fatness was something that the individuals I interviewed experienced directly and which signalled to them that they were less than human. Their desire for weight loss, therefore was partially a desire to become ‘normal.’ In Butler’s term, it was the desire for a ‘liveable life. ’A liveable life, for these participants, included a desire for a seamless fit with the built environment. The individuals I spoke with were never more ashamed of their fatness than when they experienced a ‘misfit’, in Garland Thomson’s terms, between their bodies and the material world. Moreover, feelings of shame over this disjuncture worked in tandem with a deeply felt, pressing sense that something must be done in the present to secure a better health future. The belief that bariatric surgery might finally provide a durable answer to obesity served as a strong motivating factor in their decisions to undergo bariatric surgery. By taking drastic action to lose weight, participants hoped to contest stigmatizing beliefs that their fat bodies reflected pathological interiors. Moreover, they sought to demonstrate responsibility and thus secure proper subjectivities and citizenship. In this sense, concerns, anxieties, and fears about health cannot be disentangled from the experience of anti-fat stigma and discrimination. Again, anti-fat bias, for these participants, was more than discursive: it operated through the circulation of emotion and was experienced in a very material sense. The decision to have weight loss surgery can thus be seen as occurring at the interface of emotion, flesh, space, place, and time, and in ways that are fundamentally shaped by the broader social context of neoliberal healthism. AcknowledgmentI am grateful to the anonymous reviewers of this article for their helpful feedback on earlier version. References Adams, Vincanne, Michelle Murphy, and Adele E. Clarke. “Anticipation: Technoscience, Life, Affect, Temporality.” Subjectivity 28.1 (2009): 246-265. Ahmed, Sara. “Affective Economies.” Social Text 22.2 (2004): 117-139 Boero, Natalie. Killer Fat: Media, Medicine, and Morals in the American "Obesity Epidemic". New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012. Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004. Bynum, Caroline Walker. 1999. Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities. National Endowment for the Humanities. Washington, DC, 1999. Cahnman, Werner J. “The Stigma of Obesity.” The Sociological Quarterly 9.3 (1968): 283-299. Chang, Virginia W., and Nicholas A. Christakis. “Medical Modeling of Obesity: A Transition from Action to Experience in a 20th Century American Medical Textbook.” Sociology of Health & Illness 24.2 (2002): 151-177. Coleman, Rebecca. “Dieting Temporalities: Interaction, Agency and the Measure of Online Weight Watching.” Time & Society 19.2 (2010): 265-285. Colls, Rachel. “‘Looking Alright, Feeling Alright:’ Emotions, Sizing, and the Geographies of Women’s Experience of Clothing Consumption.” Social & Cultural Geography 5.4 (2004): 583-596. Crawford, Robert. “You Are Dangerous to Your Health: The Ideology and Politics of Victim Blaming.” International Journal of Health Services 7.4 (1977): 663-680. ———. “Health as a Meaningful Social Practice.: Health 10.4 (2006): 401-20. Dedoose. Computer Software. n.d. Franko, Debra L., Emilie J. Coen, James P. Roehrig, Rachel Rodgers, Amy Jenkins, Meghan E. Lovering, Stephanie Dela Cruz. “Considering J. Lo and Ugly Betty: A Qualitative Examination of Risk Factors and Prevention Targets for Body Dissatisfaction, Eating Disorders, and Obesity in Young Latina Women.” Body Image 9.3 (2012), 381-387. Fikken, Janna J., and Esther D. Rothblum. “Is Fat a Feminist Issue? Exploring the Gendered Nature of Weight Bias.” Sex Roles 66.9-10 (2012): 575-592. Fraser, Suzanne, JaneMaree Maher, and Jan Wright. “Between Bodies and Collectivities: Articulating the Action of Emotion in Obesity Epidemic Discourse.” Social Theory & Health 8.2 (2010): 192-209. Garland Thomson, Rosemarie. “Misfits: A Feminist Materialist Disability Concept.” Hypatia 26.3 (2011): 591-609. Goffman, Erving. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963. Grabe, Shelly, and Janet S. Hyde. “Ethnicity and Body Dissatisfaction among Women in the United States: A Meta-Analysis.” Psychological Bulletin 132.2 (2006): 622. Greenhalgh, Susan. “Weighty Subjects: The Biopolitics of the U.S. War on Fat.” American Ethnologist 39.3 (2012): 471-487. Grosz, Elizabeth A. “Bodies-Cities.” Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader, eds. Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick. New York: Routledge, 1999. 381-387. Guthman, Julie. “Teaching the Politics of Obesity: Insights into Neoliberal Embodiment and Contemporary Biopolitics.” Antipode 41.5 (2009): 1110-1133. Kassirer, Jerome P., and M. Marcia Angell. “Losing Weight: An Ill-Fated New Year's Resolution.” The New England Journal of Medicine 338.1 (1998): 52. Kirkland, Anna. “Think of the Hippopotamus: Rights Consciousness in the Fat Acceptance Movement.” Law & Society Review 42.2 (2008): 397-432. Lewis, Sophie, Samantha L. Thomas, R. Warwick Blood, David Castle, Jim Hyde, and Paul A. Komesaroff. “How Do Obese Individuals Perceive and Respond to the Different Types of Obesity Stigma That They Encounter in Their Daily Lives? A Qualitative Study.” Social Science & Medicine 73.9 (2011): 1349-56. López, Julia Navas. “Socio-Anthropological Analysis of Bariatric Surgery Patients: A Preliminary Study.” Social Medicine 4.4 (2009): 209-217. McPhail, Deborah. “What to Do with the ‘Tubby Hubby?: ‘Obesity,’ the Crisis of Masculinity, and the Nuclear Family in Early Cold War Canada. Antipode 41.5 (2009): 1021-1050. Mann, Traci, A. Janet Tomiyama, Erika Westling, Ann-Marie Lew, Barbara Samuels, and Jason Chatman. “Medicare’s Search for Effective Obesity Treatments.” American Psychologist 62.3 (2007): 220-233. Metzl, Jonathan. “Introduction: Why ‘Against Health?’” Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality, eds. Jonathan Metzl and Anna Kirkland. New York: NYU Press, 2010. 1-14. Puhl, Rebecca M. “Obesity Stigma: Important Considerations for Public Health.” American Journal of Public Health 100.6 (2010): 1019-1028.———, and Kelly D. Brownell. “Psychosocial Origins of Obesity Stigma: Toward Changing a Powerful and Pervasive Bias.” Obesity Reviews 4.4 (2003): 213-227. ——— and Chelsea A. Heuer. “The Stigma of Obesity: A Review and Update.” Obesity 17.5 (2009): 941-964. Schafer, Markus H., and Kenneth F. Ferraro. “The Stigma of Obesity: Does Perceived Weight Discrimination Affect Identity and Physical Health?” Social Psychology Quarterly 74.1 (2011): 76-97. Schwartz, H. Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies, and Fat. New York: Anchor Books, 1986. Wadden, Thomas A., David B. Sarwer, Anthony N. Fabricatore, LaShanda R. Jones, Rebecca Stack, and Noel Williams. “Psychosocial and Behavioral Status of Patients Undergoing Bariatric Surgery: What to Expect before and after Surgery.” The Medical Clinics of North America 91.3 (2007): 451-69. Wilson, Bianca. “Fat, the First Lady, and Fighting the Politics of Health Science.” Lecture. The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. 14 Feb. 2011.

In western cultures, neoliberalism has resulted in a shift from collective risk responsibility to individual risk responsibility; one in which individuals are expected to manage their risks for the collective good (O’Malley 61). A good citizen of the 21st century is one who accepts responsibility for their own personal health, well-being, and success. Individuals who require structural support, or refuse to (re)produce white, cis, able-bodied, and heteronormative, systems threaten the status quo and face marginalisation. Fat people, for example, are viewed as irresponsible citizens. They consume too many resources and fail to uphold the revised social contract (the moral obligation to be healthy). Furthermore, capitalism, according to Jones (32), relies on the apparatus of desire; more specifically, heterodesire. Fatness, therefore, is considered a threat to this apparatus, as it is excluded from heteronormative desire (Murray 239). Instead, fatness is positioned as a category for regulation (and legislation), that demands individuals to undertake the “uncompensated, unending work of individualist self-improvement…a condition of both the body and of labour under neoliberal capitalism” (Wykes, Queer 7). Fat bodies are monitored by their governments, their families, and their workplaces. They are regulated by friends and strangers alike; fat bodies are public property to shame and scold for the betterment of the individual. In the intersection of neoliberalism and capitalism, fatness is read “as a moral failing and as an aesthetic affront” (Murray 14). This results in hostile environments in which fat people are exposed to negative bias, hostile attitudes, and legalised discrimination (Puhl and Heuer 941). Living in such a context requires fat people to develop, maintain, and revise, identities in the shadow of internalised oppression. Many fat people, unsurprisingly, experience negative weight and/or body identities that often eclipse other identities held. And these weight identities are spoiled identities; stigmatised identities in which the bearer is held responsible for the stigma (Courtot 201; Kent 368). Goffman (42, 130) argued that individuals living with spoiled identities engaged in identity management strategies, including withdrawing (removing oneself from public interaction), passing (camouflaging the stigma), and covering (engaging in behaviours that made the stigma less offensive). More recently, scholars have argued that a fourth identity management style of coming out is available to individuals as well. Coming out has been explored in individuals with discreditable (non-visible) stigmas (Sánchez et al 17; Schrimshaw, Siegel, Downing, and Parsons, 143) and those with discredited (visible) stigmas (Howarth 444; Titschkoshy 135). Coming out as fat has been empirically explored by Saguy and Smith (53) and Pausé (Coming out, 50). Individuals in the Fatosphere, an online community of people who have come out as fat, are engaging in anti-assimilationist activism (Cooper 17-18). They queer fat embodiment, disrupting the normative obesity discourse and rejecting the demands of the neoliberal system. They are defiant resistors, performing their fatness in inappropriate ways (Wykes, Neoliberalism). They are, in short, doing fatness wrong. Consider, for example, Jenn Leyva, of The Fat and the Ivy, and her online project aimed at responding to neoliberal messages of responsibility. The project, But What about Your Health? is hosted on Tumblr, a Web 2.0 tool that allows for user created content to be blogged and reblogged. Tumblr allows for text posts, video posts, picture posts, audio posts, link posts, and quotes. According to information on But what about your health?, Leyva uses the site to respond to messages she receives that concern her health. “Every time you tell me I'm unhealthy or ask, I mean concern-troll about my health, you have to watch me eat something ‘unhealthy’”, the site informs. Some of the questions that Leyva receives include, “Have you had a stroke yet?”, “I’m not out to police your body, but how do you not feel sick after that much sugar that fast?” “…what if your doctor told you that should lose weight to have a better life quality or improve your health?”, and the old standby, “But what about your health?!” Some commenters do not ask a question, but leave a declarative statement instead (“You are so unhealthy”). In the project, Leyva shares the comments she has received, and responds by posting videos and gifs of her eating. And not just eating, but eating junk food such as donuts, hash browns, brownies, chocolate covered cinnamon rolls, and the ubiquitous McDonald’s fried apple pie. Leyva is pushing back and rejecting the discourse of the obesity epidemic. Similar to those who use the #obeselifestyle tag in Twitter and Instagram, Leyva is flaunting her irresponsible choice; doing fatness wrong by gleefully consuming foods she should deny herself. Fat people are not supposed to take pleasure in their fatness, they are supposed to feel shame. They are not allowed to embrace their size, they are to be burdened with the work of becoming less than who they are. One commenter felt that Leyva is not only performing her fatness wrong, but performing her fat activism wrong as well, this is really upsetting to me. its not about ‘fat acceptance’ this is encouragement of poor and deteriorating health conditions among people everywhere…Please dont encourage people to neglect their health, have respect for your body and nourish it with exercise and healthy clean food. The commenter is suggesting that Leyva is tarnishing the fat civil rights movement with her unapologetic performance, and setting a dangerous example for others (glorifying obesity, anyone?) Is this commenter seeking for Leyva to engage in a different identity management style? Would they take comfort if Leyva was apologetic, or consuming a salad as a gesture of penance? Maybe satisfaction would only occur if Leyva removed herself from the Internet entirely. Or perhaps this respondent is hoping that Leyva will change her performance to that of the good fatty. A good fatty is an apologetic fat person who takes “care” of themselves (read: is well groomed, fashionable, and active) and acknowledges that they could and should be pursuing lifestyle choices that are socially palatable. Stacy Bias has suggested that there are many versions of the good fatty in her comic blog, 12 Good Fatty Archetypes, including the fat unicorn (a healthy eating, daily exercising, metabolically healthy fatty), the work in progress (“the fatty in the process of becoming not-a-fatty”), and the no fault fatty (the fatty who can trace their fatness to a genetic or biological (pre)disposition, thereby shifting the blame to out of their control). Each of these performances, notes Bias, seeks to legitimise their existence with the larger fat hating culture. This is the opposite of the performance of the rad fatty, the dangerous fat person who rejects cultural expectation and stigma. In choosing to eat junk food in response to moralising questions about her health, Leyva is performing the rad fatty; she is “engaging in performative displays of behaviours that are discourages or considered stereotypical of fat people but with intention and a tone of rebellion” (Bias). Bias’ comic draws to mind Graham’s (178) work on lipoliteracy. Lipoliteracy, according to Graham, is the act in which people read fat bodies, believing the visual inspection of a fat body provides the viewer information about the individual’s lifestyle choices, health status, and moral character (Graham 179). In this comic, Bias illuminates how lipoliteracy may operate and the power structures it reinforces. It also highlights the danger the good fatty archetype(s) present to the fat civil rights movement. These acceptable versions of fatness may open the door for those who perform them, but they also ensure that the frame is not wide enough for other kinds of fatness to push through. Bitchtopia argued that in putting good fatties on a pedestal as acceptable forms of fatness, “our media is alienating the bodies who aren’t glowing white, able-bodied, smooth-skinned, and only slightly chubby”. Because the correct performance of fatness is not just about behaviours and attitudes, but also the privileges attached to race, class, and cis gender, that many recognized good fatties embody. It Gets Fatter (IGF) is a group that works to promote the issues of fat queer people of colour by unpacking body positivity and challenging the conflation between weight and health. IGF represents a community that is often ignored or overshadowed in fat activism, people of colour. The creators share, “This project was born out of the frustration and the isolation that a lot of fat, brown queer folks face in their communities, and in an attempt to find a way of feeling less alone in ours. While there is a thriving online community of white fat people, we know that there is something uniquely different about experiencing fatness as a person of colour” (It Gets Fatter). It Gets Fatter hosts a Facebook page (see above link), a Tumblr, and a series of videos on vmeo. The group also hosts events in Canada, including workshops. Information about the events are posted across the group’s social media platforms, making their work a note of difference in the Fatosphere as visible Fat Studies scholarship and activism is dominated by individuals in the United States (Cooper 328). On the IGF Tumblr, individuals who identify as fat and a person of colour are invited to make submissions; submissions may be text, video, audio, and photos. The purpose of these submissions is to provide a repository of fat positive material that highlights the experiences and lives of fat queer people of colour. Sites such as this strive to provide a community for others and allow for representations from individuals who may marginalised within the larger fat community. They note, “We will show preference to submissions from queer, trans*, disabled and poor/working class folks. If you don’t fit into one of these categories just be aware of the space you’re taking up in the movement and consider submitting something to another fat positivity thingy if it feels relevant!” In this, It Gets Fatter speaks directly to tensions within the fat civil rights movement, as white cis straight fat people often have their voices amplified at the expense of other voices within the movement. One member of IGF, Asam Ahmad, has reflected on this in a piece on Marilyn Wann’s blog, Fat!So?. Ahmad notes that the media/community organisations usually approach white fat people to speak on the issues of fat politics. He argues that in doing so, only certain kinds of fatness are presented to the larger public; only certain kinds of voices get heard. In these conversations, considerations of how fatness intersects with race, class, orientation, and ability, are rarely brought to the fore. He implores well known fat activists to ask themselves, “Is your voice really that idiosyncratic and fabulous? Or is it more likely that you are benefitting from white privilege and other structural systems of oppression?” (Ahmad). Fat Studies scholarship and activism are making many of the same mistakes as second wave feminism, as white voices and issues are presented as the voices and issues of fat people. Many scholars and activists also fail to acknowledge and authentically engage with their white privilege; their straight privilege; their cis privilege. For scholars and activists alike to continue to push back against neoliberal responsibility and capitalism’s heterodesire, a commitment must be made to do better at recognizing the value of an intersectional lens (Pausé, Intersectionality 83). And acknowledgement that responsibility for highlighting voices of fat people of colour, voices of fat working poor, voices of fat queers, does not fall to those groups alone. The power transferred through white supremacy places the largest burden on white people within Fat Studies scholarship and activism to ensure that spaces are made and held for people of colour. The power transferred through capitalism places the largest burden on middle and upper class people within Fat Studies scholarship and activism to ensure that spaces are made and held for people from working and poorer classes. And the power transferred through the academy places the largest burden on those within academia to ensure that spaces are made and held for those denied entry to the Ivory Tower. For many outside of the academy, the emergence of Web 2.0 tools have allowed for spaces to be created, maintained, and shared, that amplify voices of disparate individuals across social platforms. For fat people, the rise of the Fatosphere has ensured that oppositional fat politics may be engaged with by anyone with access to the Internet (Pausé, Express 1; Pausé, Commotion 76). And with the technological advance, the conversation around fatness is changing. It has been argued that spoiled identities, especially visible ones, present a situation where “all other narratives are impossible” (Kent 368). But fat people online have (co)constructed ways to present opposing narratives of fatness. And many are rejecting dominant discourses and appropriate ways of being, delighting in the opportunities to perform their fatness wrong. References Ahmad, Asam. “Dear White Fatties (and Other Socially Visible Fat Activists).” Fat!So? 23 Jan. 2015. Bias, Stacy. “12 Good Fatty Archetypes.” Stacy Bias 4 June 2014. Bitchtopia. “How the Inspiring Good Fatty Hurts the Body Positive Movement.” Bitchtopia 10 Mar. 2015. Cooper, Charlotte Rachel Mary. “Maybe It Should Be Called Fat American Studies?” The Fat Studies Reader, eds. Esther Rothblum and Sandra Solovay. New York: New York University Press, 2009. 327-333. Cooper, Charlotte Rachel Mary. "What’s Fat Activism?" University of Limerick Department of Sociology Working Paper Series, 2008. Courtot, Martha. “A Spoiled Identity”. Shadow on a Tightrope: Writings by Women on Fat Oppression, eds. Lisa Schoenfielder and Barb Wiser. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1983. 199-203. Dickins, Marissa. Weight-Related Stigma in Online Spaces: Challenges, Responses and Opportunities for Change. Diss. Monash University, 2013. Goffman, Erving. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963. Graham, Mark. “Chaos.” Fat: The Anthropology of an Obsession, eds. Dan Kulick and Anne Meneley. New York: Penguin, 2005. 169-184. Howarth, Caroline. “Race as Stigma: Positioning the Stigmatized as Agents, Not Objects.” Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology 16.6 (2006): 442-451. It Gets Fatter. “It Gets Fatter! Fat Queers of Color Take on Fat Phobia in Our Communities.” Black Girl Dangerous 1 Oct. 2012. Jones. Stefanie. “The Performance of Fat: The Spectre Outside the House of Desire.” Queering Fat Embodiment, eds. Cat Pausé, Jackie Wykes, and Samantha Murray. Surrey: Ashgate, 2014, 31-48. Kent, Le’a. “Fighting Abjection: Representing Fat Women.” The Body Reader: Essential Social and Cultural Readings, eds. Lisa Jean Moore and Mary Kosut. New York: New York University Press, 2010. 367-383. Murray, Samantha. "Pathologizing 'Fatness': Medical Authority and Popular Culture." Sociology of Sport Journal 25.1 (2008): 7-21. Murray, Samantha. “Locating Aesthetics: Sexing the Fat Woman.” Social Semiotics 14 (2004): 237–247. O'Malley, Pat. "Neoliberalism and Risk in Criminology." The Critical Criminology Companion (2008): 55-67. Pausé, Cat. “Express Yourself: Fat Activism in the Web 2.0 Age.” The Politics of Size: Perspectives from the Fat-Acceptance Movement, ed. Ragen Chastain. Santa Barbara: Praeger Publishing, 2014. 1-8. Pausé, Cat. “X-Static Process: Intersectionality within the Field of Fat Studies.” Fat Studies (2014): 80-85. Pausé, Cat. “Causing a Commotion: Queering Fatness in Cyberspace”. Queering Fat Embodiment, eds. Cat Pausé, Jackie Wykes, and Samantha Murray. Surrey: Ashgate, 2014, 75-88. Pausé, Cat. “Live to Tell: Coming Out as Fat.” Somatechnics 2.1 (2012): 42-56. Puhl, Rebecca M., and Chelsea A. Heuer. "The Stigma of Obesity: A Review and Update." Obesity 17.5 (2009): 941-964. Saguy, Abigail C., and Anna Ward. “Coming Out as Fat: Rethinking Stigma.” Social Psychology Quarterly 74.1 (2011): 53-75. Sánchez, Mónica, Esteban Cardemil, Sara Trillo Adams, Joanne L. Calista, Joy Connell, Alexandra DePalo, Juliana Ferreira, Diane Gould, Jeffrey S. Handler, Paula Kaminow, Tatiana Melo, Allison Parks, Eric Rice, and Ismael Rivera. “Brave New World: Mental Health Experiences of Puerto Ricans, Immigrant Latinos, and Brazilians in Massachusetts.” Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology 20.1 (2014): 16-26. Schrimshaw, Eric W., Karolynn Siegel, Martin J.Downing Jr, and Jeffrey T. Parsons. “Disclosure and Concealment of Sexual Orientation and the Mental Health of Non-Gay-Identified, Behaviourally Bisexual Men.” Journal of Consulting Clinical Psychology 81.1 (2013): 141-153. Titchkosky, Tanya. “From the Field – Coming Out Disabled: The Politics of Understanding.” Disability Studies Quarterly 21.4 (2001): 131-139. Wykes, Jackie. “Introduction: Why Queering Fat Embodiment.” Queering Fat Embodiment, eds. Cat Pausé, Jackie Wykes, and Samantha Murray. Surrey: Ashgate, 2014. 1-12. Wykes, Jackie. “Fat Bodies Politic: Neoliberalism, Biopower, and the ‘Obesity Epidemic’.” Massey University. Executive Seminar Suite, Wellington, New Zealand. 12 July 2012.

I was born illegitimate. Born on an existential precipice. My unwed mother was 36 years old when she relinquished me. I was the fourth baby she was required to give away. After I emerged blood stained and blue tinged – abject, liminal – not only did the nurses refuse me my mother’s touch, I also lost the sound of her voice. Her smell. Her heart beat. Her taste. Her gaze. The silence was multi-sensory. When they told her I was dead, I also lost, within her memory and imagination, my life. I was adopted soon after but not told for over four decades. It was too shameful for even me to know. Imprinted at birth with a psychological ‘death’, I fell, as a Late Discovery Adoptee (LDA), into a socio-cultural and psychological abyss, frozen at birth at the bottom of a parturitive void from where, invisible within family, society, and self I was unable to form an undamaged sense of being.Throughout the 20th century (and for centuries before) this kind of ‘social abortion’ was the dominant script. An adoptee was regarded as a bastard, born of sin, the mother blamed, the father exonerated, and silence demanded (Lynch 28-74). My adoptive mother also sinned. She was infertile. But, in taking me on, she assumed the role of a womb worthy woman, good wife, and, in her case, reluctant mother (she secretly didn’t want children and was privately overwhelmed by the task). In this way, my mother, my adoptive mother, and myself are all the daughters of bereavement, all of us sacrificed on the altar of prejudice and fear that infertility, sex outside of marriage, and illegitimacy were unspeakable crimes for which a price must be paid and against which redemptive protection must be arranged. If, as Thomas Keneally (5) writes, “original sin is the mother fluid of history” then perhaps all three of us all lie in its abject waters. Grotevant, Dunbar, Kohler and Lash Esau (379) point out that adoption was used to ‘shield’ children from their illegitimacy, women from their ‘sexual indiscretions’, and adoptive parents from their infertility in the belief that “severing ties with birth family members would promote attachment between adopted children and parents”. For the adoptee in the closed record system, the socio/political/economic vortex that orchestrated their illegitimacy is born out of a deeply, self incriminating primal fear that reaches right back into the recesses of survival – the act of procreation is infested with easily transgressed life and death taboos within the ‘troop’ that require silence and the burial of many bodies (see Amanda Gardiner’s “Sex, Death and Desperation: Infanticide, Neonaticide, and Concealment of Birth in Colonial Western Australia” for a palpable, moving, and comprehensive exposition on the links between 'illegitimacy', the unmarried mother and child murder). As Nancy Verrier (24) states in Coming Home to Self, “what has to be understood is that separation trauma is an insidious experience, because, as a society, we fail to see this experience as a trauma”. Indeed, relinquishment/adoption for the baby and subsequent adult can be acutely and chronically painful. While I was never told the truth of my origins, of course, my body knew. It had been there. Sentient, aware, sane, sensually, organically articulate, it messaged me (and anyone who may have been interested) over the decades via the language of trauma, its lexicon and grammar cellular, hormonal, muscular (Howard & Crandall, 1-17; Pert, 72), the truth of my birth, of who I was an “unthought known” (Bollas 4). I have lived out my secret fatality in a miasmic nebula of what I know now to be the sequelae of adoption psychopathology: nausea, physical and psychological pain, agoraphobia, panic attacks, shame, internalised anger, depression, self-harm, genetic bewilderment, and generalised anxiety (Brodzinsky 25-47; Brodzinsky, Smith, & Brodzinsky 74; Kenny, Higgins, Soloff, & Sweid xiv; Levy-Shiff 97-98; Lifton 210-212; Verrier The Primal Wound 42-44; Wierzbicki 447-451) – including an all pervading sense of unreality experienced as dissociation (the experience of depersonalisation – where the self feels unreal – and derealisation – where the world feels unreal), disembodiment, and existential elision – all characteristics of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). In these ways, my body intervened, acted out, groaned in answer to the social overlay, and from beyond “the dermal veil” tried to procure access, as Vicky Kirby (77) writes, to “the body’s opaque ocean depths” through its illnesses, its eloquent, and incessantly aching and silent verbosities deepened and made impossibly fraught because I was not told. The aim of this paper is to discuss one aspect of how my body tried to channel the trauma of my secret fatality and liminality: my pre-disclosure art work (the cellular memory of my trauma also expressed itself, pre-disclosure, through my writings – poetry, journal entries – and also through post-coital glossolalia, all discussed at length in my Honours research “Womb Tongues” and my Doctoral Dissertation “The Womb Artist – A Novel: Translating Pre-verbal Late Discovery Adoption Trauma into Narrative”). From the age of thirty onwards I spent twelve years in therapy where the cause of my childhood and adult psychopathology remained a mystery. During this time, my embodied grief and memories found their way into my art work, a series of 5’ x 3’ acrylic paintings, some of which I offer now for discussion (figures 1-4). These paintings map and express what my body knew but could not verbalise (without language to express my grief, my body found other ways to vent). They are symptom and sign of my pre-verbal adoption trauma, evidence that my body ‘knew’ and laboured ceaselessly and silently to find creative ways to express the incarcerated trauma. Post disclosure, I have used my paintings as artefacts to inform, underpin, and nourish the writing of a collection of poetry “Womb Tongues” and a literary novel/memoir “The Womb Artist” (TWA) in an ongoing autoethnographical, performative, and critical inquiry. My practice-led research as a now conscious and creative witness, fashions the recontextualisation of my ‘self’ into my ‘self’ and society, this time with cognisant and reparative knowledge and facilitates the translation of my body’s psychopathology and memory (explicit and implicit) into a healing testimony that explores the traumatised body as text and politicizes the issues surrounding LDAs (Riley 205). If I use these paintings as a memoirist, I use them second hand, after the fact, after they have served their initial purpose, as the tangible art works of a baby buried beneath a culture’s prejudice, shame, and judgement and the personal cries from the illegitimate body/self. I use them now to explore and explain my subclinical and subterranean life as a LDA.My pre-disclosure paintings (Figures 1-4) – filled with vaginal, fetal, uterine, and umbilical references – provide some kind of ‘evidence’ that my body knew what had happened to me as if, with the tenacity of a poltergeist, my ‘spectral self’ found ways to communicate. Not simply clues, but the body’s translation of the intra-psychic landscape, a pictorial and artistic séance into the world, as if my amygdala – as quasar and signal, homing device and history lesson (a measure, container, and memoir) – knew how to paint a snap shot or an x-ray of the psyche, of my cellular marrow memories (a term formulated from fellow LDA Sandy McCutcheon’s (76) memoir, The Magician’s Son when he says, “What I really wanted was the history of my marrow”). If, as Salveet Talwar suggests, “trauma is processed from the body up”, then for the LDA pre-discovery, non-verbal somatic signage is one’s ‘mother tongue’(25). Talwar writes, “non-verbal expressive therapies such as art, dance, music, poetry and drama all activate the sub-cortical regions of the brain and access pre-verbal memories” (26). In these paintings, eerily divinatory and pointed traumatic, memories are made visible and access, as Gussie Klorer (213) explains in regard to brain function and art therapy, the limbic (emotional) system and the prefrontal cortex in sensorimotor integration. In this way, as Marie Angel and Anna Gibbs (168) suggest, “the visual image may serve as a kind of transitional mode in thought”. Ruth Skilbeck in her paper First Things: Reflections on Single-lens Reflex Digital Photography with a Wide-angled Lens, also discusses (with reference to her photographic record and artistic expression of her mother’s death) what she calls the “dark matter” – what has been overlooked, “left out”, and/or is inexplicable (55) – and the idea of art work as the “transitional object” as “a means that some artists use, conceptually and yet also viscerally, in response to the extreme ‘separation anxiety’ of losing a loved one, to the void of the Unknown” (57). In my case, non-disclosure prevented my literacy and the evolution of the image into language, prevented me from fully understanding the coded messages left for me in my art work. However, each of my paintings is now, with the benefit of full disclosure, a powerful, penetrating, and comprehensible intra and extra sensory cry from the body in kinaesthetic translation (Lusebrink, 125; Klorer, 217). In Figure 1, ‘Embrace’, the reference to the umbilical is palpable, described in my novel “The Womb Artist” (184) this way; “two ropes tightly entwine as one, like a dark and dirty umbilical cord snaking its way across a nether world of smudged umbers”. There is an ‘abject’ void surrounding it. The cord sapped of its colour, its blood, nutrients – the baby starved of oxygen, breath; the LDA starved of words and conscious understanding. It has two parts entwined that may be seen in many ways (without wanting to reduce these to static binaries): mother/baby; conscious/unconscious; first person/third person; child/adult; semiotic/symbolic – numerous dualities could be spun from this embrace – but in terms of my novel and of the adoptive experience, it reeks of need, life and death, a text choking on the poetic while at the same time nourished by it; a text made ‘available’ to the reader while at the same narrowing, limiting, and obscuring the indefinable nature of pre-verbal trauma. Figure 1. Embrace. 1993. Acrylic on canvas.The painting ‘Womb Tongues’ (Figure 2) is perhaps the last (and, obviously, lasting) memory of the infinite inchoate universe within the womb, the umbilical this time wrapped around in a phallic/clitorial embrace as the baby-self emerges into the constrictions of a Foucauldian world, where the adoptive script smothers the ‘body’ encased beneath the ‘coils’ of Judeo-Christian prejudice and centuries old taboo. In this way, the reassigned adoptee is an acute example of power (authority) controlling and defining the self and what knowledge of the self may be allowed. The baby in this painting is now a suffocated clitoris, a bound subject, a phallic representation, a gagged ‘tongue’ in the shape of the personally absent (but socially imposing) omni-present and punitive patriarchy. Figure 2. Womb Tongues. 1997. Acrylic on canvas.‘Germination’ (Figure 3) depicts an umbilical again, but this time as emerging from a seething underworld and is present in TWA (174) this way, “a colony of night crawlers that writhe and slither on the canvas, moving as one, dozens of them as thin as a finger, as long as a dream”. The rhizomic nature of this painting (and Figure 4), becomes a heaving horde of psychosomatic and psychopathological influences and experiences, a multitude of closely packed, intense, and dendridic compulsions and symptoms, a mass of interconnected (and by nature of the silence and lie) subterranean knowledges that force the germination of a ‘ghost baby/child/adult’ indicated by the pale and ashen seedling that emerges above ground. The umbilical is ghosted, pale and devoid of life. It is in the air now, reaching up, as if in germination to a psychological photosynthesis. There is the knot and swarm within the unconscious; something has, in true alien fashion, been incubated and is now emerging. In some ways, these paintings are hardly cryptic.Figure 3. Germination.1993. Acrylic on canvas.In Figure 4 ‘The Birthing Tree’, the overt symbolism reaches ‘clairvoyant status’. This could be read as the family ‘tree’ with its four faces screaming out of the ‘branches’. Do these represent the four babies relinquished by our mother (the larger of these ‘beings’ as myself, giving birth to the illegitimate, silenced, and abject self)? Are we all depicted in anguish and as wraithlike, grotesquely simplified into pure affect? This illegitimate self is painted as gestating a ‘blue’ baby, near full-term in a meld of tree and ‘self’, a blue umbilical cord, again, devoid of blood, ghosted, lifeless and yet still living, once again suffocated by the representation of the umbilical in the ‘bowels’ of the self, the abject part of the body, where refuse is stored and eliminated: The duodenum of the damned. The Devil may be seen as Christopher Bollas’s “shadow of the object”, or the Jungian archetypal shadow, not simply a Judeo-Christian fear-based spectre and curmudgeon, but a site of unprocessed and, therefore, feared psychological material, material that must be brought to consciousness and integrated. Perhaps the Devil also is the antithesis to ‘God’ as mother. The hell of ‘not mother’, no mother, not the right mother, the reluctant adoptive mother – the Devil as icon for the rich underbelly of the psyche and apophatic to the adopted/artificial/socially scripted self.Figure 4. The Birthing Tree. 1995. Acrylic on canvas.These paintings ache with the trauma of my relinquishment and LDA experience. They ache with my body’s truth, where the cellular and psychological, flesh and blood and feeling, leak from my wounds in unspeakable confluence (the two genital lips as the site of relinquishment, my speaking lips that have been sealed through non-disclosure and shame, the psychological trauma as Verrier’s ‘primal wound’) just as I leaked from my mother (and society) at birth, as blood and muck, and ooze and pus and death (Grosz 195) only to be quickly and silently mopped up and cleansed through adoption and life-long secrecy. Where I, as translator, fluent in both silence and signs, disclose the baby’s trauma, asking for legitimacy. My experience as a LDA sets up an interesting experiment, one that allows an examination of the pre-verbal/pre-disclosure body as a fleshed and breathing Rosetta Stone, as an interface between the language of the body and of the verbalised, painted, and written text. As a constructed body, written upon and invented legally, socially, and psychologically, I am, in Hélène Cixous’s (“To Live the Orange” 83) words, “un-forgetting”, “un-silencing” and “unearthing” my ‘self’ – I am re-writing, re-inventing and, under public scrutiny, legitimising my ‘self’. I am a site of inquiry, discovery, extrapolation, and becoming (Metta 492; Poulus 475) and, as Grosz (vii) suggests, a body with “all the explanatory power” of the mind. I am, as I embroider myself and my LDA experience into literary and critical texts, authoring myself into existence, referencing with particular relevance Peter Carnochan’s (361) suggestion that “analysis...acts as midwife to the birth of being”. I am, as I swim forever amorphous, invisible, and unspoken in my mother’s womb, fashioning a shore, landscaping my mind against the constant wet, my chronic liminality (Rambo 629) providing social landfall for other LDAs and silenced minorities. As Catherine Lynch (3) writes regarding LDAs, “Through the creation of text and theory I can formulate an intimate space for a family of adoptive subjects I might never know via our participation in a new discourse in Australian academia.” I participate through my creative, self-reflexive, process fuelled (Durey 22), practice-led enquiry. I use the intimacy (and also universality and multiplicity) and illegitimacy of my body as an alterative text, as a site of academic and creative augmentation in the understanding of LDA issues. The relinquished and silenced baby and LDA adult needs a voice, a ‘body’, and a ‘tender’ place in the consciousness of society, as Helen Riley (“Confronting the Conspiracy of Silence” 11) suggests, “voice, validation, and vindication”. Judith Herman (3) argues that, “Survivors challenge us to reconnect fragments, to reconstruct history, to make meaning of their present symptoms in the light of past events”. I seek to use the example of my experience – as Judith Durey (31) suggests, in “support of evocative, creative modes of representation as valid forms of research in their own right” – to unfurl the whole, to give impetus and precedence for other researchers into adoption and advocate for future babies who may be bought, sold, arranged, and/or created by various means. The recent controversy over Gammy, the baby boy born with Down Syndrome in Thailand, highlights the urgent and moral need for legislation with regard to surrogacy (see Kajsa Ekis Ekman’s Being and Being Bought: Prostitution, Surrogacy and the Split Self for a comprehensive examination of surrogacy issues). Indeed, Catherine Lynch in her paper Doubting Adoption Legislation links the experiences of LDAs and the children of born of surrogacy, most effectively arguing that, “if the fate that closed record adoptees suffered was a misplaced solution to the question of what to do with children already conceived how can you justify the deliberate conception of a child with the intention even before its creation of cruelly removing that child from their mother?” (6). Cixous (xxii) confesses, “All I want is to illustrate, depict fragments, events of human life and death...each unique and yet at the same time exchangeable. Not the law, the exception”. I, too, am a fragment, an illustration (a painting), and, as every individual always is – paradoxically – a communal and, therefore, deeply recognisable and generally applicable minority and exception. In my illegitimacy, I am some kind of evidence. Evidence of cellular memory. Evidence of embodiment. Evidence that silenced illegitimacies will manifest in symptom and non-verbal narratives, that they will ooze out and await translation, verification, and witness. This paper is offered with reverence and with feminist intention, as a revenant mouthpiece for other LDAs, babies born of surrogacy, and donor assisted offspring (and, indeed, any) who are marginalised, silenced, and obscured. It is also intended to promote discussion in the psychological and psychoanalytic fields and, as Helen Riley (202-207) advocates regarding late discovery offspring, more research within the social sciences and the bio-medical field that may encourage legislators to better understand what the ‘best interests of the child’ are in terms of late discovery of origins and the complexity of adoption/conception practices available today. As I write now (and always) the umbilical from my paintings curve and writhe across my soul, twist and morph into the swollen and throbbing organ of tongues, my throat aching to utter, my hands ready to craft latent affect into language in translation of, and in obedience to, my body’s knowledges. It is the art of mute witness that reverses genesis, that keeps the umbilical fat and supple and full of blood, and allows my conscious conception and creation. Indeed, in the intersection of my theoretical, creative, psychological, and somatic praxis, the heat (read hot and messy, insightful and insistent signage) of my body’s knowledges perhaps intensifies – with a ripe bouquet – the inevitably ongoing odour/aroma of the reproductive world. ReferencesAngel, Maria, and Anna Gibbs. “On Moving and Being Moved: The Corporeality of Writing in Literary Fiction and New Media Art.” Literature and Sensation, eds. Anthony Uhlmann, Helen Groth, Paul Sheehan, and Stephan McLaren. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009: 162-172. Bollas, Christopher. The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known. New York: Columbia UP, 1987. Brodzinsky, David. “Adjustment to Adoption: A Psychosocial Perspective.” Clinical Psychology Review 7 (1987): 25-47. doi: 10.1016/0272-7358(87)90003-1.Brodzinsky, David, Daniel Smith, and Anne Brodzinsky. Children’s Adjustment to Adoption: Developmental and Clinical Issues. California: Sage Publications, 1998.Carnochan, Peter. “Containers without Lids”. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 16.3 (2006): 341-362.Cixous, Hélène. “To Live the Orange”. The Hélène Cixous Reader: With a Preface by Hélène Cixous and Foreword by Jacques Derrida, ed. Susan Sellers. Oxford, UK: Routledge, 1979/1994. 81-92. ---. “Preface.” The Hélène Cixous Reader: With a Preface by Hélène Cixous and Foreword by Jacques Derrida, ed. Susan Sellers. Oxford, UK: Routledge, 1994. xv-xxii.Coull, Kim. “Womb Tongues: A Collection of Poetry.” Honours Thesis. Perth, WA: Edith Cowan University, 2007. ---. “The Womb Artist – A Novel: Translating Late Discovery Adoptee Pre-Verbal Trauma into Narrative”. Dissertation. Perth, WA: Edith Cowan University, 2014. Durey, Judith. Translating Hiraeth, Performing Adoption: Art as Mediation and Form of Cultural Production. Dissertation. Perth, WA: Murdoch University, 2010. 22 Sep. 2011 .Ekis Ekman, Kajsa. 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Past Adoption Experiences: National Research Study on the Service Response to Past Adoption Practices. Research Report 21. Australian Institute of Family Studies, 2012.Kirby, Vicky. Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal. New York and London: Routledge, 1997. Klorer, P. Gussie. “Expressive Therapy with Severely Maltreated Children: Neuroscience Contributions.” Journal of the American Art Therapy Association 22.4 (2005): 213-220. doi:10.1080/07421656.2005.10129523.Levy-Shiff, Rachel. “Psychological Adjustment of Adoptees in Adulthood: Family Environment and Adoption-Related Correlates. 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Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2013: 486-509.Pert, Candace. Molecules of Emotion: The Science behind Mind-body Medicine. New York: Touchstone, 2007. Rambo, Carol. “Twitch: A Performance of Chronic Liminality.” Handbook of Autoethnography, eds. Stacy Holman Jones, Tony Adams, and Carolyn Ellis. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2013: 627-638.Riley, Helen J. Identity and Genetic Origins: An Ethical Exploration of the Late Discovery of Adoptive and Donor-insemination Offspring Status. Dissertation. Brisbane: Queensland University of Technology, 2012.---. “Confronting the Conspiracy of Silence and Denial of Difference for Late Discovery Persons and Donor Conceived People.” Australian Journal of Adoption 7.2 (2013): 1-13.Skilbeck, Ruth. “First Things: Reflection on Single-Lens Reflex Digital Photography with a Wide-Angle Lens.” International Journal of the Image 3 (2013): 55-66. Talwar, Savneet. “Accessing Traumatic Memory through Art Making: An Art Therapy Trauma Protocol (ATTP)." 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If you cannot understand my argument, and declare “It’s Greek to me,” you are quoting Shakespeare.Bernard LevinPsoriatic arthritis, in its acute or “generalised” stage, is unbearably painful. Exacerbating the crippling of the joints, the entire surface of the skin is covered with lesions only moderately salved by anti-inflammatory ointment, the application of which is as painful as the ailment it seeks to relieve: NURSE MILLS: I’ll be as gentle as I can.Marlow’s face again fills the screen, intense concentration, comical strain, and a whispered urgency in the voice over—MARLOW: (Voice over) Think of something boring—For Christ’s sake think of something very very boring—Speech a speech by Ted Heath a sentence long sentence from Bernard Levin a quiz by Christopher Booker a—oh think think—! Really boring! A Welsh male-voice choir—Everything in Punch—Oh! Oh! — (Potter 17-18)Marlow’s collation of boring things as a frantic liturgy is an attempt to distract himself from a tumescence that is both unwanted and out of place. Although bed-ridden and in constant pain, he is still sensitive to erogenous stimulation, even when it is incidental. The act of recollection, of garnering lists of things that bore him, distracts him from his immediate situation as he struggles with the mental anguish of the prospect of a humiliating orgasm. Literary lists do many things. They provide richness of detail, assemble and corroborate the materiality of the world of which they are a part and provide insight into the psyche and motivation of the collator. The sheer desperation of Dennis Potter’s Marlow attests to the arbitrariness of the list, the simple requirement that discrete and unrelated items can be assembled in linear order, without any obligation for topical concatenation. In its interrogative form, the list can serve a more urgent and distressing purpose than distraction:GOLDBERG: What do you use for pyjamas?STANLEY: Nothing.GOLDBERG: You verminate the sheet of your birth.MCCANN: What about the Albigensenist heresy?GOLDBERG: Who watered the wicket in Melbourne?MCCANN: What about the blessed Oliver Plunkett?(Pinter 51)The interrogative non sequitur is an established feature of the art of intimidation. It is designed to exert maximum stress in the subject through the use of obscure asides and the endowing of trivial detail with profundity. Harold Pinter’s use of it in The Birthday Party reveals how central it was to his “theatre of menace.” The other tactic, which also draws on the logic of the inventory to be both sequential and discontinuous, is to break the subject’s will through a machine-like barrage of rhetorical questions that leave no time for answers.Pinter learned from Samuel Beckett the pitiless, unforgiving logic of trivial detail pushed to extremes. Think of Molloy’s dilemma of the sucking stones. In order for all sixteen stones that he carries with him to be sucked at least once to assuage his hunger, a reliable system has to be hit upon:Taking a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, and putting it in my mouth, I replaced it in the right pocket of my greatcoat by a stone from the right pocket of my trousers, which I replaced with a stone from the left pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my greatcoat, which I replaced with the stone that was in my mouth, as soon as I had finished sucking it. Thus there were still four stones in each of my four pockets, but not quite the same stones. And when the desire to suck took hold of me again, I drew again on the right pocket of my greatcoat, certain of not taking the same stone as the last time. And while I sucked it I rearranged the other stones in the way I have just described. And so on. (Beckett, Molloy 69)And so on for six pages. Exhaustive permutation within a finite lexical set is common in Beckett. In the novel Watt the eponymous central character is charged with serving his unseen master’s dinner as well as tidying up afterwards. A simple and bucolic enough task it would seem. But Beckett’s characters are not satisfied with conjecture, the simple assumption that someone must be responsible for Mr. Knott’s dining arrangements. Like Molloy’s solution to the sucking stone problem, all possible scenarios must be considered to explain the conundrum of how and why Watt never saw Knott at mealtime. Twelve possibilities are offered, among them that1. Mr. Knott was responsible for the arrangement, and knew that he was responsible for the arrangement, and knew that such an arrangement existed, and was content.2. Mr. Knott was not responsible for the arrangement, but knew who was responsible for the arrangement, and knew that such an arrangement existed, and was content.(Beckett, Watt 86)This stringent adherence to detail, absurd and exasperating as it is, is the work of fiction, the persistence of a viable, believable thing called Watt who exists as long as his thought is made manifest on a page. All writers face this pernicious prospect of having to confront and satisfy “fiction’s gargantuan appetite for fact, for detail, for documentation” (Kenner 70). A writer’s writer (Philip Marlow) Dennis Potter’s singing detective struggles with the acute consciousness that words eventually will fail him. His struggle to overcome verbal entropy is a spectre that haunts the entire literary imagination, for when the words stop the world stops.Beckett made this struggle the very stuff of his work, declaring famously that all he wanted to do as a writer was to leave “a stain upon the silence” (quoted in Bair 681). His characters deteriorate from recognisable people (Hamm in Endgame, Winnie in Happy Days) to mere ciphers of speech acts (the bodiless head Listener in That Time, Mouth in Not I). During this process they provide us with the vocabulary of entropy, a horror most eloquently expressed at the end of The Unnamable: I can’t go on, you must go on, I’ll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on. (Beckett, Molloy 418)The importance Beckett accorded to pauses in his writing, from breaks in dialogue to punctuation, stresses the pacing of utterance that is in sync with the rhythm of human breath. This is acutely underlined in Jack MacGowran’s extraordinary gramophone recording of the above passage from The Unnamable. There is exhaustion in his voice, but it is inflected by an urgent push for the next words to forestall the last gasp. And what might appear to be parsimony is in fact the very commerce of writing itself. It is an economy of necessity, when any words will suffice to sustain presence in the face of imminent silence.Hugh Kenner has written eloquently on the relationship between writing and entropy, drawing on field and number theory to demonstrate how the business of fiction is forever in the process of generating variation within a finite set. The “stoic comedian,” as he figures the writer facing the blank page, self-consciously practices their art in the full cognisance that they select “elements from a closed set, and then (arrange) them inside a closed field” (Kenner 94). The nouveau roman (a genre conceived and practiced in Beckett’s lean shadow) is remembered in literary history as a rather austere, po-faced formalism that foregrounded things at the expense of human psychology or social interaction. But it is emblematic of Kenner’s portrait of stoicism as an attitude to writing that confronts the nature of fiction itself, on its own terms, as a practice “which is endlessly arranging things” (13):The bulge of the bank also begins to take effect starting from the fifth row: this row, as a matter of fact, also possesses only twenty-one trees, whereas it should have twenty-two for a true trapezoid and twenty-three for a rectangle (uneven row). (Robbe-Grillet 21)As a matter of fact. The nouveau roman made a fine if myopic art of isolating detail for detail’s sake. However, it shares with both Beckett’s minimalism and Joyce’s maximalism the obligation of fiction to fill its world with stuff (“maximalism” is a term coined by Michel Delville and Andrew Norris in relation to the musical scores of Frank Zappa that opposes the minimalism of John Cage’s work). Kenner asks, in The Stoic Comedians, where do the “thousands on thousands of things come from, that clutter Ulysses?” His answer is simple, from “a convention” and this prosaic response takes us to the heart of the matter with respect to the impact on writing of Isaac Newton’s unforgiving Second Law of Thermodynamics. In the law’s strictest physical sense of the dissipation of heat, of the loss of energy within any closed system that moves, the stipulation of the Second Law predicts that words will, of necessity, stop in any form governed by convention (be it of horror, comedy, tragedy, the Bildungsroman, etc.). Building upon and at the same time refining the early work on motion and mass theorised by Aristotle, Kepler, and Galileo, inter alia, Newton refined both the laws and language of classical mechanics. It was from Wiener’s literary reading of Newton that Kenner segued from the loss of energy within any closed system (entropy) to the running silent out of words within fiction.In the wake of Norbert Wiener’s cybernetic turn in thinking in the 1940s, which was highly influenced by Newton’s Second Law, fiction would never again be considered in the same way (metafiction was a term coined in part to recognise this shift; the nouveau roman another). Far from delivering a reassured and reassuring present-ness, an integrated and ongoing cosmos, fiction is an isometric exercise in the struggle against entropy, of a world in imminent danger of running out of energy, of not-being:“His hand took his hat from the peg over his initialled heavy overcoat…” Four nouns, and the book’s world is heavier by four things. One, the hat, “Plasto’s high grade,” will remain in play to the end. The hand we shall continue to take for granted: it is Bloom’s; it goes with his body, which we are not to stop imagining. The peg and the overcoat will fade. “On the doorstep he felt in his hip pocket for the latchkey. Not there. In the trousers I left off.” Four more things. (Kenner 87)This passage from The Stoic Comedians is a tour de force of the conjuror’s art, slowing down the subliminal process of the illusion for us to see the fragility of fiction’s precarious grip on the verge of silence, heroically “filling four hundred empty pages with combinations of twenty-six different letters” (xiii). Kenner situates Joyce in a comic tradition, preceded by Gustave Flaubert and followed by Beckett, of exhaustive fictive possibility. The stoic, he tells us, “is one who considers, with neither panic nor indifference, that the field of possibilities available to him is large perhaps, or small perhaps, but closed” (he is prompt in reminding us that among novelists, gamblers and ethical theorists, the stoic is also a proponent of the Second Law of Thermodynamics) (xiii). If Joyce is the comedian of the inventory, then it is Flaubert, comedian of the Enlightenment, who is his immediate ancestor. Bouvard and Pécuchet (1881) is an unfinished novel written in the shadow of the Encyclopaedia, an apparatus of the literate mind that sought complete knowledge. But like the Encyclopaedia particularly and the Enlightenment more generally, it is fragmentation that determines its approach to and categorisation of detail as information about the world. Bouvard and Pécuchet ends, appropriately, in a frayed list of details, pronouncements and ephemera.In the face of an unassailable impasse, all that is left Flaubert is the list. For more than thirty years he constructed the Dictionary of Received Ideas in the shadow of the truncated Bouvard and Pécuchet. And in doing so he created for the nineteenth century mind “a handbook for novelists” (Kenner 19), a breakdown of all we know “into little pieces so arranged that they can be found one at a time” (3): ACADEMY, FRENCH: Run it down but try to belong to it if you can.GREEK: Whatever one cannot understand is Greek.KORAN: Book about Mohammed, which is all about women.MACHIAVELLIAN: Word only to be spoken with a shudder.PHILOSOPHY: Always snigger at it.WAGNER: Snigger when you hear his name and joke about the music of the future. (Flaubert, Dictionary 293-330)This is a sample of the exhaustion that issues from the tireless pursuit of categorisation, classification, and the mania for ordered information. The Dictionary manifests the Enlightenment’s insatiable hunger for received ideas, an unwieldy background noise of popular opinion, general knowledge, expertise, and hearsay. In both Bouvard and Pécuchet and the Dictionary, exhaustion was the foundation of a comic art as it was for both Joyce and Beckett after him, for the simple reason that it includes everything and neglects nothing. It is comedy born of overwhelming competence, a sublime impertinence, though not of manners or social etiquette, but rather, with a nod to Oscar Wilde, the impertinence of being definitive (a droll epithet that, not surprisingly, was the title of Kenner’s 1982 Times Literary Supplement review of Richard Ellmann’s revised and augmented biography of Joyce).The inventory, then, is the underlining physio-semiotics of fictional mechanics, an elegiac resistance to the thread of fiction fraying into nothingness. The motif of thermodynamics is no mere literary conceit here. Consider the opening sentence in Borges:Of the many problems which exercised the reckless discernment of Lönnrot, none was so strange—so rigorously strange, shall we say—as the periodic series of bloody events which culminated at the villa of Triste-le-Roy, amid the ceaseless aroma of the eucalypti. (Borges 76)The subordinate clause, as a means of adjectival and adverbial augmentation, implies a potentially infinite sentence through the sheer force of grammatical convention, a machine-like resistance to running out of puff:Under the notable influence of Chesterton (contriver and embellisher of elegant mysteries) and the palace counsellor Leibniz (inventor of the pre-established harmony), in my idle afternoons I have imagined this story plot which I shall perhaps write someday and which already justifies me somehow. (72)In “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” a single adjective charmed with emphasis will do to imply an unseen network:The visible work left by this novelist is easily and briefly enumerated. (Borges 36)The annotation of this network is the inexorable issue of the inflection: “I have said that Menard’s work can be easily enumerated. Having examined with care his personal files, I find that they contain the following items.” (37) This is a sample selection from nineteen entries:a) A Symbolist sonnet which appeared twice (with variants) in the review La conque (issues of March and October 1899).o) A transposition into alexandrines of Paul Valéry’s Le cimitière marin (N.R.F., January 1928).p) An invective against Paul Valéry, in the Papers for the Suppression of Reality of Jacques Reboul. (37-38)Lists, when we encounter them in Jorge Luis Borges, are always contextual, supplying necessary detail to expand upon character and situation. And they are always intertextual, anchoring this specific fictional world to others (imaginary, real, fabulatory or yet to come). The collation and annotation of the literary works of an imagined author (Pierre Menard) of an invented author (Edmond Teste) of an actual author (Paul Valéry) creates a recursive, yet generative, feedback loop of reference and literary progeny. As long as one of these authors continues to write, or write of the work of at least one of the others, a persistent fictional present tense is ensured.Consider Hillel Schwartz’s use of the list in his Making Noise (2011). It not only lists what can and is inevitably heard, in this instance the European 1700s, but what it, or local aural colour, is heard over:Earthy: criers of artichokes, asparagus, baskets, beans, beer, bells, biscuits, brooms, buttermilk, candles, six-pence-a-pound fair cherries, chickens, clothesline, cockles, combs, coal, crabs, cucumbers, death lists, door mats, eels, fresh eggs, firewood, flowers, garlic, hake, herring, ink, ivy, jokebooks, lace, lanterns, lemons, lettuce, mackeral, matches […]. (Schwartz 143)The extended list and the catalogue, when encountered as formalist set pieces in fiction or, as in Schwartz’s case, non-fiction, are the expansive equivalent of le mot juste, the self-conscious, painstaking selection of the right word, the specific detail. Of Ulysses, Kenner observes that it was perfectly natural that it “should have attracted the attention of a group of scholars who wanted practice in compiling a word-index to some extensive piece of prose (Miles Hanley, Word Index to Ulysses, 1937). More than any other work of fiction, it suggests by its texture, often by the very look of its pages, that it has been painstakingly assembled out of single words…” (31-32). In a book already crammed with detail, with persistent reference to itself, to other texts, other media, such formalist set pieces as the following from the oneiric “Circe” episode self-consciously perform for our scrutiny fiction’s insatiable hunger for more words, for invention, the Latin root of which also gives us the word inventory:The van of the procession appears headed by John Howard Parnell, city marshal, in a chessboard tabard, the Athlone Poursuivant and Ulster King of Arms. They are followed by the Right Honourable Joseph Hutchinson, lord mayor Dublin, the lord mayor of Cork, their worships the mayors of Limerick, Galway, Sligo and Waterford, twentyeight Irish representative peers, sirdars, grandees and maharajahs bearing the cloth of estate, the Dublin Metropolitan Fire Brigade, the chapter of the saints of finance in their plutocratic order of precedence, the bishop of Down and Connor, His Eminence Michael cardinal Logue archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland, His Grace, the most reverend Dr William Alexander, archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland, the chief rabbi, the Presbyterian moderator, the heads of the Baptist, Anabaptist, Methodist and Moravian chapels and the honorary secretary of the society of friends. (Joyce, Ulysses 602-604)Such examples demonstrate how Joycean inventories break from narrative as architectonic, stand-alone assemblages of information. They are Rabelaisian irruptions, like Philip Marlow’s lesions, that erupt in swollen bas-relief. The exaggerated, at times hysterical, quality of such lists, perform the hallucinatory work of displacement and condensation (the Homeric parallel here is the transformation of Odysseus’s men into swine by the witch Circe). Freudian, not to mention Stindberg-ian dream-work brings together and juxtaposes images and details that only make sense as non-sense (realistic but not real), such as the extraordinary explosive gathering of civic, commercial, political, chivalric representatives of Dublin in this foreshortened excerpt of Bloom’s regal campaign for his “new Bloomusalem” (606).The text’s formidable echolalia, whereby motifs recur and recapitulate into leitmotifs, ensures that the act of reading Ulysses is always cross-referential, suggesting the persistence of a conjured world that is always already still coming into being through reading. And it is of course this forestalling of Newton’s Second Law that Joyce brazenly conducts, in both the textual and physical sense, in Finnegans Wake. The Wake is an impossible book in that it infinitely sustains the circulation of words within a closed system, creating a weird feedback loop of cyclical return. It is a text that can run indefinitely through the force of its own momentum without coming to a conclusion. In a text in which the author’s alter ego is described in terms of the technology of inscription (Shem the Penman) and his craft as being a “punsil shapner,” (Joyce, Finnegans 98) Norbert Wiener’s descriptive example of feedback as the forestalling of entropy in the conscious act of picking up a pencil is apt: One we have determined this, our motion proceeds in such a way that we may say roughly that the amount by which the pencil is not yet picked up is decreased at each stage. (Wiener 7) The Wake overcomes the book’s, and indeed writing’s, struggle with entropy through the constant return of energy into its closed system as a cycle of endless return. Its generative algorithm can be represented thus: “… a long the riverrun …” (628-3). The Wake’s sense of unending confounds and contradicts, in advance, Frank Kermode’s averring to Newton’s Second Law in his insistence that the progression of all narrative fiction is defined in terms of the “sense of an ending,” the expectation of a conclusion, whereby the termination of words makes “possible a satisfying consonance with the origins and with the middle” (Kermode 17). It is the realisation of the novel imagined by Silas Flannery, the fictitious author in Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller, an incipit that “maintains for its whole duration the potentiality of the beginning” (Calvino 140). Finnegans Wake is unique in terms of the history of the novel (if that is indeed what it is) in that it is never read, but (as Joseph Frank observed of Joyce generally) “can only be re-read” (Frank 19). With Wiener’s allegory of feedback no doubt in mind, Jacques Derrida’s cybernetic account of the act of reading Joyce comes, like a form of echolalia, on the heels of Calvino’s incipit, his perpetual sustaining of the beginning: you stay on the edge of reading Joyce—for me this has been going on for twenty-five or thirty years—and the endless plunge throws you back onto the river-bank, on the brink of another possible immersion, ad infinitum … In any case, I have the feeling that I haven’t yet begun to read Joyce, and this “not having begun to read” is sometimes the most singular and active relationship I have with his work. (Derrida 148) Derrida wonders if this process of ongoing immersion in the text is typical of all works of literature and not just the Wake. The question is rhetorical and resonates into silence. And it is silence, ultimately, that hovers as a mute herald of the end when words will simply run out.Post(script)It is in the nature of all writing that it is read in the absence of its author. Perhaps the most typical form of writing, then, is the suicide note. In an extraordinary essay, “Goodbye, Cruel Words,” Mark Dery wonders why it has been “so neglected as a literary genre” and promptly sets about reviewing its decisive characteristics. Curiously, the list features amongst its many forms: I’m done with lifeI’m no goodI’m dead. (Dery 262)And references to lists of types of suicide notes are among Dery’s own notes to the essay. With its implicit generic capacity to intransitively add more detail, the list becomes in the light of the terminal letter a condition of writing itself. The irony of this is not lost on Dery as he ponders the impotent stoicism of the scribbler setting about the mordant task of writing for the last time. Writing at the last gasp, as Dery portrays it, is a form of dogged, radical will. But his concluding remarks are reflective of his melancholy attitude to this most desperate act of writing at degree zero: “The awful truth (unthinkable to a writer) is that eloquent suicide notes are rarer than rare because suicide is the moment when language fails—fails to hoist us out of the pit, fails even to express the unbearable weight” (264) of someone on the precipice of the very last word they will ever think, let alone write. Ihab Hassan (1967) and George Steiner (1967), it would seem, were latecomers as proselytisers of the language of silence. But there is a queer, uncanny optimism at work at the terminal moment of writing when, contra Dery, words prevail on the verge of “endless, silent night.” (264) Perhaps when Newton’s Second Law no longer has carriage over mortal life, words take on a weird half-life of their own. Writing, after Socrates, does indeed circulate indiscriminately among its readers. There is a dark irony associated with last words. When life ceases, words continue to have the final say as long as they are read, and in so doing they sustain an unlikely, and in their own way, stoical sense of unending.ReferencesBair, Deirdre. Samuel Beckett: A Biography. London: Jonathan Cape, 1978.Beckett, Samuel. Molloy Malone Dies. The Unnamable. London: John Calder, 1973.---. Watt. London: John Calder, 1976.Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths. Selected Stories & Other Writings. Ed. Donald A. Yates & James E. Irby. New York: New Directions, 1964.Calvino, Italo. If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller. Trans. William Weaver, London: Picador, 1981.Delville, Michael, and Andrew Norris. “Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Secret History of Maximalism.” Ed. Louis Armand. Contemporary Poetics: Redefining the Boundaries of Contemporary Poetics, in Theory & Practice, for the Twenty-First Century. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2007. 126-49.Derrida, Jacques. “Two Words for Joyce.” Post-Structuralist Joyce. Essays from the French. Ed. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. 145-59.Dery, Mark. I Must Not think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012.Frank, Joseph, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature.” Sewanee Review, 53, 1945: 221-40, 433-56, 643-53.Flaubert, Gustave. Bouvard and Pécuchet. Trans. A. J. KrailSheimer. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.Flaubert, Gustave. Dictionary of Received Ideas. Trans. A. J. KrailSheimer. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.Hassan, Ihab. The Literature of Silence: Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett. New York: Knopf, 1967.Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. London: Faber and Faber, 1975.---. Ulysses. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992.Kenner, Hugh. The Stoic Comedians. Berkeley: U of California P, 1974.Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Narrative Fiction. New York: Oxford U P, 1966.‪Levin, Bernard. Enthusiasms. London: Jonathan Cape, 1983.MacGowran, Jack. MacGowran Speaking Beckett. Claddagh Records, 1966.Pinter, Harold. The Birthday Party. London: Methuen, 1968.Potter, Dennis. The Singing Detective. London, Faber and Faber, 1987.Robbe-Grillet, Alain. Jealousy. Trans. Richard Howard. London: John Calder, 1965.Schwartz, Hillel. Making Noise. From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond. New York: Zone Books, 2011.Steiner, George. Language and Silence: New York: Atheneum, 1967.Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics, Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965.

IntroductionThe 2009 American film Trash Humpers, directed by Harmony Korine, was released at a time when the hipster had become a ubiquitous concept, entering into the common vernacular of numerous cultures throughout the world, and gaining significant press, social media and academic attention (see Žižek; Arsel and Thompson; Greif et al.; Stahl; Ouellette; Reeve; Schiermer; Maly and Varis). Trash Humpers emerged soon after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis triggered Occupy movements in numerous cities, aided by social media platforms, reported on by blogs such as Gawker, and stylized by multi-national youth-subculture brands such as Vice, American Apparel, Urban Outfitters and a plethora of localised variants.Korine’s film, which is made to resemble found VHS footage of old-aged vandals, epitomises the ironic, retro stylizations and “counterculture-meets-kitsch” aesthetics so familiar to hipster culture. As a creative stereotype from 1940s and ‘50s jazz and beatnik subcultures, the hipster re-emerged in the twenty-first century as a negative embodiment of alternative culture in the age of the Internet. As well as plumbing the recent past for things not yet incorporated into contemporary marketing mechanisms, the hipster also signifies the blurring of irony and authenticity. Such “outsiderness as insiderness” postures can be regarded as a continuation of the marginality-from-the-centre logic of cool capitalism that emerged after World War Two. Particularly between 2007 and 2015, the post-postmodern concept of the hipster was a resonant cultural trope in Western and non-Western cultures alike, coinciding with the normalisation of the new digital terrain and the establishment of mobile social media as an integral aspect of many people’s daily lives. While Korine’s 79-minute feature could be thought of as following in the schlocky footsteps of the likes of Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects (2006), it is decidedly more arthouse, and more attuned to the influence of contemporary alternative media brands and independent film history alike – as if the love child of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963) and Vice Video, the latter having been labelled as “devil-may-care hipsterism” (Carr). Upon release, Trash Humpers was described by Gene McHugh as “a mildly hip take on Jackass”; by Mike D’Angelo as “an empty hipster pose”; and by Aaron Hillis as either “the work of an insincere hipster or an eccentric provocateur”. Lacking any semblance of a conventional plot, Trash Humpers essentially revolves around four elderly-looking protagonists – three men and a woman – who document themselves with a low-quality video camera as they go about behaving badly in the suburbs of Nashville, Tennessee, where Korine still lives. They cackle eerily to themselves as they try to stave off boredom, masturbating frantically on rubbish bins, defecating and drinking alcohol in public, fellating foliage, smashing televisions, playing ten-pin bowling, lighting firecrackers and telling gay “hate” jokes to camera with no punchlines. In one purposefully undramatic scene half-way through the film, the humpers are shown in the aftermath of an attack on a man wearing a French maid’s outfit; he lies dead in a pool of blood on their kitchen floor with a hammer at his feet. The humpers are consummate “bad” performers in every sense of the term, and they are joined by a range of other, apparently lower-class, misfits with whom they stage tap dance routines and repetitively sing nursery-rhyme-styled raps such as: “make it, make it, don’t break it; make it, make it, don’t fake it; make it, make it, don’t take it”, which acts as a surrogate theme song for the film. Korine sometimes depicts his main characters on crutches or in a wheelchair, and a baby doll is never too far away from the action, as a silent and Surrealist witness to their weird, sinister and sometimes very funny exploits. The film cuts from scene to scene as if edited on a video recorder, utilising in-house VHS titling sequences, audio glitches and video static to create the sense that one is engaging voyeuristically with a found video document rather than a scripted movie. Mainstream AlternativesAs a viewer of Trash Humpers, one has to try hard to suspend disbelief if one is to see the humpers as genuine geriatric peeping Toms rather than as hipsters in old-man masks trying to be rebellious. However, as Korine’s earlier films such as Gummo (1997) attest, he clearly delights in blurring the line between failure and transcendence, or, in this case, between pretentious art-school bravado and authentic redneck ennui. As noted in a review by Jeannette Catsoulis, writing for the New York Times: “Much of this is just so much juvenile posturing, but every so often the screen freezes into something approximating beauty: a blurry, spaced-out, yellow-green landscape, as alien as an ancient photograph”. Korine has made a career out of generating this wavering uncertainty in his work, polarising audiences with a mix of critical, cinema-verité styles and cynical exploitations. His work has consistently revelled in ethical ambiguities, creating environments where teenagers take Ritalin for kicks, kill cats, wage war with their families and engage in acts of sexual deviancy – all of which are depicted with a photographer’s eye for the uncanny.The elusive and contradictory aspects of Korine’s work – at once ugly and beautiful, abstract and commercial, pessimistic and nostalgic – are evident not just in films such as Gummo, Julien Donkey Boy (1999) and Mister Lonely (2007) but also in his screenplay for Kids (1995), his performance-like appearances on The Tonight Show with David Letterman (1993-2015) and in publications such as A Crackup at the Race Riots (1998) and Pass the Bitch Chicken (2001). As well as these outputs, Korine is also a painter who is represented by Gagosian Gallery – one of the world’s leading art galleries – and he has directed numerous music videos, documentaries and commercials throughout his career. More than just update of the traditional figure of the auteur, Korine, instead, resembles a contemporary media artist whose avant-garde and grotesque treatments of Americana permeate almost everything he does. Korine wrote the screenplay for Kids when he was just 19, and subsequently built his reputation on the paradoxical mainstreaming of alternative culture in the 1990s. This is exemplified by the establishment of music and film genres such “alternative” and “independent”; the popularity of the slacker ethos attributed to Generation X; the increased visibility of alternative press zines; the birth of grunge in fashion and music; and the coining of “cool hunting” – a bottom-up market research phenomenon that aimed to discover new trends in urban subcultures for the purpose of mass marketing. Key to “alternative culture”, and its related categories such as “indie” and “arthouse”, is the idea of evoking artistic authenticity while covertly maintaining a parasitic relationship with the mainstream. As Holly Kruse notes in her account of the indie music scenes of the 1990s, which gained tremendous popularity in the wake of grunge bands such as Nirvana: without dominant, mainstream musics against which to react, independent music cannot be independent. Its existence depends upon dominant music structures and practices against which to define itself. Indie music has therefore been continually engaged in an economic and ideological struggle in which its ‘outsider’ status is re-examined, re-defined, and re-articulated to sets of musical practices. (Kruse 149)Alternative culture follows a similar, highly contentious, logic, appearing as a nebulous, authentic and artistic “other” whose exponents risk being entirely defined by the mainstream markets they profess to oppose. Kids was directed by the artist cum indie-director Larry Clark, who discovered Korine riding his skateboard with a group of friends in New York’s Washington Square in the early 1990s, before commissioning him to write a script. The then subcultural community of skating – which gained prominence in the 1990s amidst the increased visibility of “alternative sports” – provides an important backdrop to the film, which documents a group of disaffected New York teenagers at a time of the Aids crisis in America. Korine has been active in promoting the DIY ethos, creativity and anti-authoritarian branding of skate culture since this time – an industry that, in its attempts to maintain a non-mainstream profile while also being highly branded, has become emblematic of the category of “alternative culture”. Korine has undertaken commercial projects with an array skate-wear brands, but he is particularly associated with Supreme, a so-called “guerrilla fashion” label originating in 1994 that credits Clark and other 1990s indie darlings, and Korine cohorts, Chloë Sevigny and Terry Richardson, as former models and collaborators (Williams). The company is well known for its designer skateboard decks, its collaborations with prominent contemporary visual artists, its hip-hop branding and “inscrutable” web videos. It is also well known for its limited runs of new clothing lines, which help to stoke demand through one-offs – blending street-wear accessibility with the restricted-market and anti-authoritarian sensibility of avant-garde art.Of course, “alternative culture” poses a notorious conundrum for analysis, involving highly subjective demarcations of “mainstream” from “subversive” culture, not to mention “genuine subversion” from mere “corporate alternatives”. As Pierre Bourdieu has argued, the roots of alternative culture lie in the Western tradition of the avant-garde and the “aesthetic gaze” that developed in the nineteenth century (Field 36). In analysing the modernist notion of advanced cultural practice – where art is presented as an alternative to bourgeois academic taste and to the common realm of cultural commodities – Bourdieu proposed a distinction between two types of “fields”, or logics of cultural production. Alternative culture follows what Bourdieu called “the field of restricted production”, which adheres to “art for art’s sake” ideals, where audiences are targeted as if like-minded peers (Field 50). In contrast, the “field of large-scale production” reflects the commercial imperatives of mainstream culture, in which goods are produced for the general public at large. The latter field of large-scale production tends to service pre-established markets, operating in response to public demand. Furthermore, whereas success in the field of restricted production is often indirect, and latent – involving artists who create niche markets without making any concessions to those markets – success in the field of large-scale production is typically more immediate and quantifiable (Field 39). Here we can see that central to the branding of “alternative culture” is the perceived refusal to conform to popular taste and the logic of capitalism more generally is. As Supreme founder James Jebbia stated about his brand in a rare interview: “The less known the better” (Williams). On this, Bourdieu states that, in the field of restricted production, the fundamental principles of all ordinary economies are inversed to create a “loser wins” scenario (Field 39). Profit and cultural esteem become detrimental attributes in this context, potentially tainting the integrity and marginalisation on which alternative products depend. As one ironic hipster t-shirt puts it: “Nothing is any good if other people like it” (Diesel Sweeties).Trash HipstersIn abandoning linear narrative for rough assemblages of vignettes – or “moments” – recorded with an unsteady handheld camera, Trash Humpers positions itself in ironic opposition to mainstream filmmaking, refusing the narrative arcs and unwritten rules of Hollywood film, save for its opening and closing credits. Given Korine’s much publicized appreciation of cinema pioneers, we can understand Trash Humpers as paying homage to independent and DIY film history, including Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, William Eggleston’s Stranded in Canton (1973), Andy Warhol’s and Paul Morrissey’s Lonesome Cowboys (1967) and Trash (1970), and John Waters’s Pink Flamingos (1972), all of which jubilantly embraced the “bad” aesthetic of home movies. Posed as fantasized substitutions for mainstream movie-making, such works were also underwritten by the legitimacy of camp as a form of counter-culture critique, blurring parody and documentary to give voice to an array of non-mainstream and counter-cultural identities. The employment of camp in postmodern culture became known not merely as an aesthetic subversion of cultural mores but also as “a gesture of self-legitimation” (Derrida 290), its “failed seriousness” regarded as a critical response to the specific historical problem of being a “culturally over-saturated” subject (Sontag 288).The significant difference between Korine’s film and those of his 1970s-era forbears is precisely the attention he pays to the formal aspects of his medium, revelling in analogue editing glitches to the point of fetishism, in some cases lasting as long as the scenes themselves. Consciously working out-of-step with the media of his day, Trash Humpers in imbued with nostalgia from its very beginning. Whereas Smith, Eggleston, Warhol, Morrissey and Waters blurred fantasy and documentary in ways that raised the social and political identities of their subjects, Korine seems much more interested in “trash” as an aesthetic trope. In following this interest, he rightfully pays homage to the tropes of queer cinema, however, he conveniently leaves behind their underlying commentaries about (hetero-) normative culture. A sequence where the trash humpers visit a whorehouse and amuse themselves by smoking cigars and slapping the ample bottoms of prostitutes in G-strings confirms the heterosexual tenor of the film, which is reiterated throughout by numerous deadpan gay jokes and slurs.Trash Humpers can be understood precisely in terms of Korine’s desire to maintain the aesthetic imperatives of alternative culture, where formal experimentation and the subverting of mainstream genres can provide a certain amount of freedom from explicated meaning, and, in particular, from socio-political commentary. Bourdieu rightly points out how the pleasures of the aesthetic gaze often manifest themselves curiously as form of “deferred pleasure” (353) or “pleasure without enjoyment” (495), which corresponds to Immanuel Kant’s notion of the disinterested nature of aesthetic judgement. Aesthetic dispositions posed in the negative – as in the avant-garde artists who mined primitive and ugly cultural stereotypes – typically use as reference points “facile” or “vulgar” (393) working-class tropes that refer negatively to sensuous pleasure as their major criterion of judgment. For Bourdieu, the pleasures provided by the aesthetic gaze in such instances are not sensual pleasures so much as the pleasures of social distinction – signifying the author’s distance from taste as a form of gratification. Here, it is easy to see how the orgiastic central characters in Trash Humpers might be employed by Korine for a similar end-result. As noted by Jeremiah Kipp in a review of the film: “You don't ‘like’ a movie like Trash Humpers, but I’m very happy such films exist”. Propelled by aesthetic, rather than by social, questions of value, those that “get” the obscure works of alternative culture have a tendency to legitimize them on the basis of the high-degree of formal analysis skills they require. For Bourdieu, this obscures the fact that one’s aesthetic “‘eye’ is a product of history reproduced by education” – a privileged mode of looking, estranged from those unfamiliar with the internal logic of decoding presupposed by the very notion of “aesthetic enjoyment” (2).The rhetorical priority of alternative culture is, in Bourdieu’s terms, the “autonomous” perfection of the form rather than the “heteronomous” attempt to monopolise on it (Field 40). However, such distinctions are, in actuality, more nuanced than Bourdieu sometimes assumed. This is especially true in the context of global digital culture, which makes explicit how the same cultural signs can have vastly different meanings and motivations across different social contexts. This has arguably resulted in the destabilisation of prescriptive analyses of cultural taste, and has contributed to recent “post-critical” advances, in which academics such as Bruno Latour and Rita Felski advocate for cultural analyses and practices that promote relationality and attachment rather than suspicious (critical) dispositions towards marginal and popular subjects alike. Latour’s call for a move away from the “sledge hammer” of critique applies as much to cultural practice as it does to written analysis. Rather than maintaining hierarchical oppositions between authentic versus inauthentic taste, Latour understands culture – and the material world more generally – as having agency alongside, and with, that of the social world.Hipsters with No AlternativeIf, as Karl Spracklen suggests, alternativism is thought of “as a political project of resistance to capitalism, with communicative oppositionality as its defining feature” (254), it is clear that there has been a progressive waning in relevance of the category of “alternative culture” in the age of the Internet, which coincides with the triumph of so-called “neoliberal individualism” (258). To this end, Korine has lost some of his artistic credibility over the course of the 2000s. If viewed negatively, icons of 1990s alternative culture such as Korine can be seen as merely exploiting Dada-like techniques of mimetic exacerbation and symbolic détournement for the purpose of alternative, “arty” branding rather than pertaining to a counter-hegemonic cultural movement (Foster 31). It is within this context of heightened scepticism surrounding alternative culture that the hipster stereotype emerged in cultures throughout the world, as if a contested symbol of the aesthetic gaze in an era of neoliberal identity politics. Whatever the psychological motivations underpinning one’s use of the term, to call someone a hipster is typically to point out that their distinctive alternative or “arty” status appears overstated; their creative decisions considered as if a type of bathos. For detractors of alternative cultural producers such as Korine, he is trying too hard to be different, using the stylised codes of “alternative” to conceal what is essentially his cultural and political immaturity. The hipster – who is rarely ever self-identified – re-emerged in the 2000s to operate as a scapegoat for inauthentic markers of alternative culture, associated with men and women who appear to embrace Realpolitik, sincerity and authentic expressions of identity while remaining tethered to irony, autonomous aesthetics and self-design. Perhaps the real irony of the hipster is the pervasiveness of irony in contemporary culture. R. J Magill Jnr. has argued that “a certain cultural bitterness legitimated through trenchant disbelief” (xi) has come to define the dominant mode of political engagement in many societies since the early 2000s, in response to mass digital information, twenty-four-hour news cycles, and the climate of suspicion produced by information about terrorism threats. He analyses the prominence of political irony in American TV shows including The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Simpsons, South Park, The Chappelle Show and The Colbert Report but he also notes its pervasiveness as a twenty-first-century worldview – a distancing that “paradoxically and secretly preserves the ideals of sincerity, honesty and authenticity by momentarily belying its own appearance” (x). Crucially, then, the utterance “hipster” has come to signify instances when irony and aesthetic distance are perceived to have been taken too far, generating the most disdain from those for whom irony, aesthetic discernment and cultural connoisseurship still provide much-needed moments of disconnection from capitalist cultures drowning in commercial hyperbole and grave news hype. Korine himself has acknowledged that Spring Breakers (2013) – his follow-up feature film to Trash Humpers – was created in response to the notion that “alternative culture”, once a legitimate challenge to mainstream taste, had lost its oppositional power with the decentralization of digital culture. He states that he made Spring Breakers at a moment “when there’s no such thing as high or low, it’s all been exploded. There is no underground or above-ground, there’s nothing that’s alternative. We’re at a point of post-everything, so it’s all about finding the spirit inside, and the logic, and making your own connections” (Hawker). In this context, we can understand Trash Humpers as the last of the Korine films to be branded with the authenticity of alternative culture. In Spring Breakers Korine moved from the gritty low-fi sensibility of his previous films and adopted a more digital, light-filled and pastel-coloured palette. Focussing more conventionally on plot than ever before, Spring Breakers follows four college girls who hold up a restaurant in order to fund their spring break vacation. Critic Michael Chaiken noted that the film marks a shift in Korine’s career, from the alternative stylings of the pre-Internet generation to “the cultural heirs [of] the doomed protagonists of Kids: nineties babies, who grew up with the Internet, whose sensibilities have been shaped by the sweeping technological changes that have taken place in the interval between the Clinton and Obama eras” (33).By the end of the 2000s, an entire generation came of age having not experienced a time when the obscure films, music or art of the past took more effort to track down. Having been a key participant in the branding of alternative culture, Korine is in a good position to recall a different, pre-YouTube time – when cultural discernment was still caught up in the authenticity of artistic identity, and when one’s cultural tastes could still operate with a certain amount of freedom from sociological scrutiny. Such ideas seem a long way away from today’s cultural environments, which have been shaped not only by digital media’s promotion of cultural interconnection and mass information, but also by social media’s emphasis on mobilization and ethical awareness. ConclusionI should reiterate here that is not Korine’s lack of seriousness, or irony, alone that marks Trash Humpers as a response to the scepticism surrounding alternative culture symbolised by the figure of the hipster. It is, rather, that Korine’s mock-documentary about juvenile geriatrics works too hard to obscure its implicit social commentary, appearing driven to condemn contemporary capitalism’s exploitations of youthfulness only to divert such “uncool” critical commentaries through unsubtle formal distractions, visual poetics and “bad boy” avant-garde signifiers of authenticity. Before being bludgeoned to death, the unnamed man in the French maid’s outfit recites a poem on a bridge amidst a barrage of fire crackers let off by a nearby humper in a wheelchair. Although easily overlooked, it could, in fact, be a pivotal scene in the film. Spoken with mock high-art pretentions, the final lines of the poem are: So what? Why, I ask, why? Why castigate these creatures whose angelic features are bumping and grinding on trash? Are they not spawned by our greed? Are they not our true seed? Are they not what we’ve bought for our cash? We’ve created this lot, of the ooze and the rot, deliberately and unabashed. Whose orgiastic elation and one mission in creation is to savagely fornicate TRASH!Here, the character’s warning of capitalist overabundance is drowned out by the (aesthetic) shocks of the fire crackers, just as the stereotypical hipster’s ethical ideals are drowned out by their aesthetic excess. The scene also functions as a metaphor for the humpers themselves, whose elderly masks – embodiments of nostalgia – temporarily suspend their real socio-political identities for the sake of role-play. It is in this sense that Trash Humpers is too enamoured with its own artifices – including its anonymous “boys club” mentality – to suggest anything other than the aesthetic distance that has come to mark the failings of the “alternative culture” category. In such instances, alternative taste appears as a rhetorical posture, with Korine asking us to gawk knowingly at the hedonistic and destructive pleasures pursued by the humpers while factoring in, and accepting, our likely disapproval.ReferencesArsel, Zeynep, and Craig J. Thompson. “Demythologizing Consumption Practices: How Consumers Protect Their Field-Dependent Identity Investments from Devaluing Marketplace Myths.” Journal of Consumer Research 37.5 (2011): 791-806.Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984.Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production Essays on Art and Literature. Edited by Randal Johnson. London: Polity Press, 1993.Carr, David. “Its Edge Intact, Vice Is Chasing Hard News.” New York Times 24 Aug. 2014. 12 Nov. 2016 <https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/25/business/media/its-edge-intact-vice-is-chasing-hard-news-.html>.Catsoulis, Jeannette. “Geriatric Delinquents, Rampaging through Suburbia.” New York Times 6 May 2010. 1` Nov. 2016 <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/movies/07trash.html>.Chaiken, Michael. “The Dream Life.” Film Comment (Mar./Apr. 2013): 30-33.D’Angelo, Mike. “Trash Humpers.” Not Coming 18 Sep. 2009. 12 Nov. 2016 <http://www.notcoming.com/reviews/trashhumpers>.Derrida, Jacques. Positions. London: Athlone, 1981.Diesel Sweeties. 1 Nov. 2016 <https://store.dieselsweeties.com/products/nothing-is-any-good-if-other-people-like-it-shirt>.Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.Greif, Mark. What Was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation. New York: n+1 Foundation, 2010.Hawker, Philippa. “Telling Tales Out of School.” Sydney Morning Herald 4 May 2013. 12 Nov. 2016 <http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/telling-tales-out-of-school-20130503-2ixc3.html>.Hillis, Aaron. “Harmony Korine on Trash Humpers.” IFC 6 May 2009. 12 Nov. 2016 <http://www.ifc.com/2010/05/harmony-korine-2>.Jay Magill Jr., R. Chic Ironic Bitterness. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007.Kipp, Jeremiah. “Clean Off the Dirt, Scrape Off the Blood: An Interview with Trash Humpers Director Harmony Korine.” Slant Magazine 18 Mar. 2011. 1 Nov. 2016 <http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/article/clean-off-the-dirt-scrape-off-the-blood-an-interview-with-trash-humpers-director-harmony-korine>.Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (2004): 225-248.Maly, Ico, and Varis, Piia. “The 21st-Century Hipster: On Micro-Populations in Times of Superdiversity.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 19.6 (2016): 637–653.McHugh, Gene. “Monday May 10th 2010.” Post Internet. New York: Lulu Press, 2010.Ouellette, Marc. “‘I Know It When I See It’: Style, Simulation and the ‘Short-Circuit Sign’.” Semiotic Review 3 (2013): 1–15.Reeve, Michael. “The Hipster as the Postmodern Dandy: Towards an Extensive Study.” 2013. 12 Nov. 2016. <http://www.academia.edu/3589528/The_hipster_as_the_postmodern_dandy_towards_an_extensive_study>.Schiermer, Bjørn. “Late-Modern Hipsters: New Tendencies in Popular Culture.” Acta Sociologica 57.2 (2014): 167–181.Sontag, Susan. “Notes on Camp.” Against Interpretation. New York: Octagon, 1964/1982. 275-92. Stahl, Geoff. “Mile-End Hipsters and the Unmasking of Montreal’s Proletaroid Intelligentsia; Or How a Bohemia Becomes BOHO.” Adam Art Gallery, Apr. 2010. 12 May 2015 <http://www.adamartgallery.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/adamartgallery_vuwsalecture_geoffstahl.pdf>.Williams, Alex. “Guerrilla Fashion: The Story of Supreme.” New York Times 21 Nov. 2012. 1 Nov. 2016 <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/22/fashion/guerrilla-fashion-the-story-of-supreme.html>.Žižek, Slavoj. “L’Etat d’Hipster.” Rhinocerotique. Trans. Henry Brulard. Sep. 2009. 3-10.

As the ball dropped on 1999, is it any wonder that No Doubt played, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” by R.E.M. live on MTV? Any discussion of the Nineties—and its pinnacle moment, Y2K—requires a discussion of both the cover and the glitch, two performative and technological enactments that fomented the collapse between author-reader and user-machine that has, twenty years later, become normalised in today’s Post Internet culture. By staging failure and inviting the audience to participate, the glitch and the cover call into question the original and the origin story. This breakdown of normative borders has prompted the convergence of previously demarcated media, genres, and cultures, a constellation from which to recognise a stochastic hybrid form. The Cover as a Revelation of Collaborative MurmurBefore Sean Parker collaborated with Shawn Fanning to launch Napster on 1 June 1999, networked file distribution existed as cumbersome text-based programs like Internet Relay Chat and Usenet, servers which resembled bulletin boards comprising multiple categories of digitally ripped files. Napster’s simple interface, its advanced search filters, and its focus on music and audio files fostered a peer-to-peer network that became the fastest growing website in history, registering 80 million users in less than two years.In harnessing the transgressive power of the Internet to force a new mode of content sharing, Napster forced traditional providers to rethink what constitutes “content” at a moment which prefigures our current phenomena of “produsage” (Bruns) and the vast popularity of user-generated content. At stake is not just the democratisation of art but troubling the very idea of intellectual property, which is to say, the very concept of ownership.Long before the Internet was re-routed from military servers and then mainstreamed, Michel Foucault understood the efficacy of anonymous interactions on the level of literature, imagining a culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an author. But what he was asking in 1969 is something we can better answer today, because it seems less germane to call into question the need for an author in a culture in which everyone is writing, producing, and reproducing text, and more effective to think about re-evaluating the notion of a single author, or what it means to write by yourself. One would have to testify to the particular medium we have at our disposal, the Internet’s ultimate permissibility, its provocations for collaboration and co-creation. One would have to surrender the idea that authors own anything besides our will to keep producing, and our desire for change; and to modulate means to resist without negating, to alter without omitting, to enable something new to come forward; the unfolding of the text into the anonymity of a murmur.We should remind ourselves that “to author” all the way down to its Latin roots signifies advising, witnessing, and transferring. We should be reminded that to author something means to forget the act of saying “I,” to forget it or to make it recede in the background in service of the other or others, on behalf of a community. The de-centralisation of Web development and programming initiated by Napster inform a poetics of relation, an always-open structure in which, as Édouard Glissant said, “the creator of a text is effaced, or rather, is done away with, to be revealed in the texture of his creation” (25). When a solid melts, it reveals something always underneath, something at the bottom, something inside—something new and something that was always already there. A cover, too, is both a revival and a reworking, an update and an interpretation, a retrospective tribute and a re-version that looks toward the future. In performing the new, the original as singular is called into question, replaced by an increasingly fetishised copy made up of and made by multiples.Authorial Effacement and the Exigency of the ErrorY2K, otherwise known as the Millennium Bug, was a coding problem, an abbreviation made to save memory space which would disrupt computers during the transition from 1999 to 2000, when it was feared that the new year would become literally unrecognisable. After an estimated $300 billion in upgraded hardware and software was spent to make computers Y2K-compliant, something more extraordinary than global network collapse occurred as midnight struck: nothing.But what if the machine admits the possibility of accident? Implicit in the admission of any accident is the disclosure of a new condition—something to be heard, to happen, from the Greek ad-cadere, which means to fall. In this drop into non-repetition, the glitch actualises an idea about authorship that necessitates multi-user collaboration; the curtain falls only to reveal the hidden face of technology, which becomes, ultimately, instructions for its re-programming. And even as it deviates, the new form is liable to become mainstreamed into a new fashion. “Glitch’s inherently critical moment(um)” (Menkman 8) indicates this potential for technological self-insurgence, while suggesting the broader cultural collapse of generic markers and hierarchies, and its ensuing flow into authorial fluidity.This feeling of shock, this move “towards the ruins of destructed meaning” (Menkman 29) inherent in any encounter with the glitch, forecasted not the immediate horror of Y2K, but the delayed disasters of 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, Indian Ocean tsunami, Sichuan Province earthquake, global financial crisis, and two international wars that would all follow within the next nine years. If, as Menkman asserts, the glitch, in representing a loss of self-control “captures the machine revealing itself” (30), what also surfaces is the tipping point that edges us toward a new becoming—not only the inevitability of surrender between machine and user, but their reversibility. Just as crowds stood, transfixed before midnight of the new millennium in anticipation of the error, or its exigency, it’s always the glitch I wait for; it’s always the glitch I aim to re-create, as if on command. The accidental revelation, or the machine breaking through to show us its insides. Like the P2P network that Napster introduced to culture, every glitch produces feedback, a category of noise (Shannon) influencing the machine’s future behaviour whereby potential users might return the transmission.Re-Orienting the Bizarre in Fantasy and FictionIt is in the fantasy of dreams, and their residual leakage into everyday life, evidenced so often in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, where we can locate a similar authorial agency. The cult Nineties psycho-noir, and its discontinuous return twenty-six years later, provoke us into reconsidering the science of sleep as the art of fiction, assembling an alternative, interactive discourse from found material.The turning in and turning into in dreams is often described as an encounter with the “bizarre,” a word which indicates our lack of understanding about the peculiar processes that normally happen inside our heads. Dreams are inherently and primarily bizarre, Allan J. Hobson argues, because during REM sleep, our noradrenergic and serotonergic systems do not modulate the activated brain, as they do in waking. “The cerebral cortex and hippocampus cannot function in their usual oriented and linear logical way,” Hobson writes, “but instead create odd and remote associations” (71). But is it, in fact, that our dreams are “bizarre” or is it that the model itself is faulty—a precept premised on the normative, its dependency upon generalisation and reducibility—what is bizarre if not the ordinary modulations that occur in everyday life?Recall Foucault’s interest not in what a dream means but what a dream does. How it rematerialises in the waking world and its basis in and effect on imagination. Recall recollection itself, or Erin J. Wamsley’s “Dreaming and Offline Memory Consolidation.” “A ‘function’ for dreaming,” Wamsley writes, “hinges on the difficult question of whether conscious experience in general serves any function” (433). And to think about the dream as a specific mode of experience related to a specific theory of knowledge is to think about a specific form of revelation. It is this revelation, this becoming or coming-to-be, that makes the connection to crowd-sourced content production explicit—dreams serve as an audition or dress rehearsal in which new learning experiences with others are incorporated into the unconscious so that they might be used for production in the waking world. Bert O. States elaborates, linking the function of the dream with the function of the fiction writer “who makes models of the world that carry the imprint and structure of our various concerns. And it does this by using real people, or ‘scraps’ of other people, as the instruments of hypothetical facts” (28). Four out of ten characters in a dream are strangers, according to Calvin Hall, who is himself a stranger, someone I’ve never met in waking life or in a dream. But now that I’ve read him, now that I’ve written him into this work, he seems closer to me. Twin Peak’s serial lesson for viewers is this—even the people who seem strangers to us can interact with and intervene in our processes of production.These are the moments that a beginning takes place. And even if nothing directly follows, this transfer constitutes the hypothesised moment of production, an always-already perhaps, the what-if stimulus of charged possibility; the soil plot, or plot line, for freedom. Twin Peaks is a town in which the bizarre penetrates the everyday so often that eventually, the bizarre is no longer bizarre, but just another encounter with the ordinary. Dream sequences are common, but even more common—and more significant—are the moments in which what might otherwise be a dream vision ruptures into real life; these moments propel the narrative.Exhibit A: A man who hasn’t gone outside in a while begins to crumble, falling to the earth when forced to chase after a young girl, who’s just stolen the secret journal of another young girl, which he, in turn, had stolen.B: A horse appears in the middle of the living room after a routine vacuum cleaning and a subtle barely-there transition, a fade-out into a fade-in, what people call a dissolve. No one notices, or thinks to point out its presence. Or maybe they’re distracted. Or maybe they’ve already forgotten. Dissolve.(I keep hitting “Save As.” As if renaming something can also transform it.)C: All the guests at the Great Northern Hotel begin to dance the tango on cue—a musical, without any music.D: After an accident, a middle-aged woman with an eye patch—she was wearing the eye patch before the accident—believes she’s seventeen again. She enrolls in Twin Peaks High School and joins the cheerleading team.E: A woman pretending to be a Japanese businessman ambles into the town bar to meet her estranged husband, who fails to recognise his cross-dressing, race-swapping wife.F: A girl with blond hair is murdered, only to come back as another girl, with the same face and a different name. And brown hair. They’re cousins.G: After taking over her dead best friend’s Meals on Wheels route, Donna Hayward walks in to meet a boy wearing a tuxedo, sitting on the couch with his fingers clasped: a magician-in-training. “Sometimes things can happen just like this,” he says with a snap while the camera cuts to his grandmother, bed-ridden, and the appearance of a plate of creamed corn that vanishes as soon as she announces its name.H: A woman named Margaret talks to and through a log. The log, cradled in her arms wherever she goes, becomes a key witness.I: After a seven-minute diegetic dream sequence, which includes a one-armed man, a dwarf, a waltz, a dead girl, a dialogue played backward, and a significantly aged representation of the dreamer, Agent Cooper wakes up and drastically shifts his investigation of a mysterious small-town murder. The dream gives him agency; it turns him from a detective staring at a dead-end to one with a map of clues. The next day, it makes him a storyteller; all the others, sitting tableside in the middle of the woods become a captive audience. They become readers. They read into his dream to create their own scenarios. Exhibit I. The cycle of imagination spins on.Images re-direct and obfuscate meaning, a process of over-determination which Foucault says results in “a multiplication of meanings which override and contradict each other” (DAE 34). In the absence of image, the process of imagination prevails. In the absence of story, real drama in our conscious life, we form complex narratives in our sleep—our imaginative unconscious. Sometimes they leak out, become stories in our waking life, if we think to compose them.“A bargain has been struck,” says Harold, an under-5 bit player, later, in an episode called “Laura’s Secret Diary.” So that she might have the chance to read Laura Palmer’s diary, Donna Hayward agrees to talk about her own life, giving Harold the opportunity to write it down in his notebook: his “living novel” the new chapter which reads, after uncapping his pen and smiling, “Donna Hayward.”He flips to the front page and sets a book weight to keep the page in place. He looks over at Donna sheepishly. “Begin.”Donna begins talking about where she was born, the particulars of her father—the lone town doctor—before she interrupts the script and asks her interviewer about his origin story. Not used to people asking him the questions, Harold’s mouth drops and he stops writing. He puts his free hand to his chest and clears his throat. (The ambient, wind-chime soundtrack intensifies.) “I grew up in Boston,” he finally volunteers. “Well, actually, I grew up in books.”He turns his head from Donna to the notebook, writing feverishly, as if he’s begun to write his own responses as the camera cuts back to his subject, Donna, crossing her legs with both hands cupped at her exposed knee, leaning in to tell him: “There’s things you can’t get in books.”“There’s things you can’t get anywhere,” he returns, pen still in his hand. “When we dream, they can be found in other people.”What is a call to composition if not a call for a response? It is always the audience which makes a work of art, re-framed in our own image, the same way we re-orient ourselves in a dream to negotiate its “inconsistencies.” Bizarreness is merely a consequence of linguistic limitations, the overwhelming sensory dream experience which can only be re-framed via a visual representation. And so the relationship between the experience of reading and dreaming is made explicit when we consider the associations internalised in the reader/audience when ingesting a passage of words on a page or on the stage, objects that become mental images and concept pictures, a lens of perception that we may liken to another art form: the film, with its jump-cuts and dissolves, so much like the defamiliarising and dislocating experience of dreaming, especially for the dreamer who wakes. What else to do in that moment but write about it?Evidence of the bizarre in dreams is only the evidence of the capacity of our human consciousness at work in the unconscious; the moment in which imagination and memory come together to create another reality, a spectrum of reality that doesn’t posit a binary between waking and sleeping, a spectrum of reality that revels in the moments where the two coalesce, merge, cross-pollinate—and what action glides forward in its wake? Sustained un-hesitation and the wish to stay inside one’s self. To be conscious of the world outside the dream means the end of one. To see one’s face in the act of dreaming would require the same act of obliteration. Recognition of the other, and of the self, prevents the process from being fulfilled. Creative production and dreaming, like voyeurism, depend on this same lack of recognition, or the recognition of yourself as other. What else is a dream if not a moment of becoming, of substituting or sublimating yourself for someone else?We are asked to relate a recent dream or we volunteer an account, to a friend or lover. We use the word “seem” in nearly every description, when we add it up or how we fail to. Everything seems to be a certain way. It’s not a place but a feeling. James, another character on Twin Peaks, says the same thing, after someone asks him, “Where do you want to go?” but before he hops on his motorcycle and rides off into the unknowable future outside the frame. Everything seems like something else, based on our own associations, our own knowledge of people and things. Offline memory consolidation. Seeming and semblance. An uncertainty of appearing—both happening and seeing. How we mediate—and re-materialise—the dream through text is our attempt to re-capture imagination, to leave off the image and better become it. If, as Foucault says, the dream is always a dream of death, its purpose is a call to creation.Outside of dreams, something bizarre occurs. We call it novelty or news. We might even bestow it with fame. A man gets on the wrong plane and ends up halfway across the world. A movie is made into the moment of his misfortune. Years later, in real life and in movie time, an Iranian refugee can’t even get on the plane; he is turned away by UK immigration officials at Charles de Gaulle, so he spends the next sixteen years living in the airport lounge; when he departs in real life, the movie (The Terminal, 2004) arrives in theaters. Did it take sixteen years to film the terminal exile? How bizarre, how bizarre. OMC’s eponymous refrain of the 1996 one-hit wonder, which is another way of saying, an anomaly.When all things are counted and countable in today’s algorithmic-rich culture, deviance becomes less of a statistical glitch and more of a testament to human peculiarity; the repressed idiosyncrasies of man before machine but especially the fallible tendencies of mankind within machines—the non-repetition of chance that the Nineties emblematised in the form of its final act. The point is to imagine what comes next; to remember waiting together for the end of the world. There is no need to even open your eyes to see it. It is just a feeling. ReferencesBruns, Axel. “Towards Produsage: Futures for User-Led Content Production.” Cultural Attitudes towards Technology and Communication 2006: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference, eds. Fay Sudweeks, Herbert Hrachovec, and Charles Ess. 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IntroductionAccording to Friedrich Nietzsche, the death of Man follows the death of God. Man as a concept must be overcome. Yet Nietzsche extends humanism’s jargon of creativity that privileges Man over animal. To truly overcome the notion of Man, one must undercome Man, in other words go below Man. Once undercome, creativity devolves into a type of building and unbuilding, affording art the ability to conceive of the subject emptied of divine creation. This article will examine how Man is unbuilt in three works by three different artists: Francis Bacon’s “Study of a Baboon” (1953), Jan Švankmajer’s Darkness, Light, Darkness (1989), and Patricia Piccinini’s “The Young Family” (2002). All three artists evoke the animalistic in their depiction of what could be called the sub-subject, a diminished agent. Unbuilding the subject becomes the basis for building the sub-subject in these depictions of the human remainder. Man, from this vantage, will be examined as a cultural construct. Man largely means human, yet the Renaissance concept favoured a certain type of powerful male. Instead of rescuing Man, Bacon, Švankmajer and Piccinini, present the remnants of the human amidst the animal rather than the human subject detached from the animal. Such works challenge humanism, expressed in Giorgio Vasari’s analysis of art and creativity as indicative of Man’s closeness to the divine, which in a strange way, is extended in Nietzsche’s writings. These artists dismantle and build a subhuman form of subjectivity and thereby provide a challenge to traditional conceptions of creativity that historically favour Man as the creator beneath only God Himself. In the course of this article, I explore the violence of Bacon’s painted devolution, the deflationary animation of Švankmajer and Piccinini’s subhuman tenderness. I do not argue that we must abandon humanism altogether as there are a multiplicity of humanisms, or attempt to invalidate all the various posthumanisms, transhumanisms and antihumanisms. Rather, I attempt to show that Nietzsche’s posthumanism is a suprahumanism and that one possible way to frame the death of Man is through undercoming Man. Art, held in high esteem by Renaissance humanism, becomes a vehicle to imagine and engage with subhuman subjectivity.What Is Humanism? Humanism has numerous connotations from designating atheism to celebrating culture to privileging humans above other animals. The type of humanism I am interested in is not secular humanism, but rather humanism that celebrates and conceptualises Man’s place in the universe and does so through accentuating his (and I mean his given humanism’s often sexist, masculinist history) creativity and intellectual power. This celebration of creativity depends in part on a type of religious view, where Man is at the centre of God’s design. Such a view holds that Man’s power to shape nature’s materials resembles God. This type of humanism remains today but usually in a more humbled form, enfeebled by the scientific realisations that characterised the Enlightenment, namely the realisation that Man was not the centre of God’s universe. The Enlightenment is sometimes characterised as the birth of modern humanism, where the human subject undergoes estrangement from his surroundings through the conceptualisation of the subject–object division, and gains control over nature. A common narrative is that the subject’s autonomy and power came to extend to art itself, which in turn, became valued as possessing its own aesthetic legitimacy and yet also becoming an alienated commodity. Yet Cary Wolfe, in What Is Posthumanism?, echoes Michel Foucault’s claim that the Enlightenment could be viewed in tension to humanism (“Introduction” n.p.). Indeed, the Enlightenment’s creation of modern science would come to seriously challenge any view of humanity’s privileged status in this world. In contrast, Renaissance humanism conceived of Man as the centrepiece of God’s design and gifted with artistic creation and the ability to uncover truth. Renaissance HumanismRenaissance humanism is encapsulated by Vasari’s preface to The Lives of the Artists. In his preface, Vasari contends that God was the first artist, being both a painter and sculptor: God on High, having created the great body of the world and having decorated the heavens with its brightest lights, descended with His intellect further down into the clarity of the atmosphere and the solidity of the earth, and, shaping man, discovered in the pleasing invention of things the first form of sculpture and painting. (3)Interestingly, God discovers creation, which is a type of decoration, where the skies are decorated with bright lights—the stars. Giving colour, light and shade to the world and heavens, qualifies God as a painter. The human body, according to Vasari, is sculpted by God, which in turn inspires artists to depict the human form. Art and design—God’s design—is thereby ‘at the origin of all things’ and not merely painting and sculpture, though the reality we know is still the product of God’s painting and sculpture. According to Vasari, God privileges Man not for his intellect per se, but by bestowing him with the ability of creation and design. Indeed, creativity and design are for Vasari a part of all intellectual discovery. Intellect is the mode of discovering design, which for Vasari, is also creation. Vasari claims “that divine light infused in us by a special act of grace which has not only made us superior to other animals but even similar, if it is permitted to say so, to God Himself” (4). God is more than just a maker, he is a creator with an aesthetic sense. All intellectual human endeavours, claims Vasari, are aesthetic and creative, in their comprehension of God’s design of the world. Vasari’s emphasis on design became outmoded as Renaissance humanism was challenged by the Enlightenment’s interest in humans and other animals as machines. However, evolution challenges even some mechanistic understandings of the human subject, which sometimes presupposed that the human-machine had a maker, as with William Paley’s watchmaker theory. As Richard Dawkins put it in The Blind Watchmaker, nature “has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If [evolution] can be said to play the role of the watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker” (“Chapter One: Explaining the Very Improbable” n.p.). No longer was God’s universe designed for Man’s comprehension and appreciation, foretelling humanity’s own potential extinction.Man and God’s DeathThe idea that humanity was created by blind processes raises the question of what sort of depiction of the human subject is possible after the death of God and the Enlightenment’s tendency toward disenchantment? An art and self-understanding founded on atheism would be in sharp distinction to Vasari’s characterisation of the nature as an artwork coloured by the divine painter and sculptor in the heavens. Man’s creativity and design are, for the Renaissance humanist, part of discovery, the embodied realisations and iterations of the Platonic realm of divine forms. But such designs, wondrous for Vasari, can be viewed as shadows without origin in a post-God world. In Vasari, Platonism is still present where the artist’s creation becomes a way of discerning the origin of all forms, God himself. Yet, without divine origin, these forms are no longer discoveries and the possibility emerges that they are not even creations, emptied of the divine meaning that gave Man’s creative and scientific work value. Nietzsche understood that the loss of God called for the revaluation of all values. This is why Nietzsche claims that God’s death signifies the death of Man. For Nietzsche, the last Man was such an iteration, a shadow of what man had been (Thus Spoke Zarathustra 9-10). The Post-Man, the Übermensch, is one who extends the human power of creation and evaluation. In Vasari, Man is a model created by God. Nietzsche extends this logic: Man is his own creation as is God Man’s model. Man is capable of self-construction and overcoming without the hindrance of the divine. This freedom unlocked by auto-creation renders Man capable of making himself God. As such, art remains a source of sacred power for Nietzsche since it is a process of creative evaluation. The sacred is affirmed against secular profanity. For Nietzsche, God must be envisaged as Dionysus, a God that Nietzsche claims takes on a human form in Greek festivals dedicated to creation and fecundity. Mankind, in order to continue to have value after God’s death, “must become gods”, must take the place of God (The Gay Science 120). Nietzsche, All-Too HumanistNietzsche begins a project of rethinking Man as a category. Yet there is much in common with Renaissance humanism generated by Nietzsche’s Dionysian belief in a merger between God and Man. Man is overcome by a stronger and more creative figure, that of the Übermensch. By comparing Nietzsche with Vasari we can understand just how humanist Nietzsche remained. Indeed, Nietzsche fervently admired the Renaissance as a rebirth of paganism. Such an assessment of the rebirth of pagan art and values can almost be found in Vasari himself. Vasari claimed that pagan art, far from being blasphemous, brought Man closer to the divine in a tribute to the creativity of God. Vasari’s criticism of Christianity is careful but present. Indeed, Vasari—in a way that anticipates Nietzsche’s view that secular sacrilege was merely an extension of Christian sacrilege—attacks Christian iconoclasm, noting that barbarians and Christians worked together to destroy sacred forms of art: not only did [early Christianity] ruin or cast to the ground all the marvellous statues, sculptures, paintings, mosaics, and ornaments of the false pagan gods, but it also did away with the memorials and testimonials to an infinite number of illustrious people, in whose honour statues and other memorials had been constructed in public places by the genius of antiquity. (5) In this respect, Vasari embodies the values Nietzsche so praised in the Italian Renaissance. Vasari emphasises the artistic creations that enshrine distinctions of value and social hierarchy. While Vasari continues Platonic notions that ideals exist before human creation, he nevertheless holds human creation as a realisation and embodiment of the ideal, which is not dissimilar to Nietzsche’s notion of divine embodiment. For Nietzsche and Vasari, Man is exulted when he can rise, like a god, above other men. Another possibility would be to lower Man to just another animal. One way to envision such a lowering would be to subvert the mode by which Man is deemed God-like. Art that engages with the death of Man helps conceptualise subhumanism and the way that the subject ceases to be raised above the animal. What follows are studies of artworks that unbuild the subject. Francis Bacon’s “Study of a Baboon”Francis Bacon’s work challenges the human subject by depicting nonhuman subjects, where the flesh is torn open and Man’s animal flesh is exposed. Sometimes Bacon does not merely disfigure the human form but violently abandons it to focus on animals that reveal animal qualities latent in the subject. Bacon’s “Study of a Baboon”, expresses a sense of human devolution: Man devolved to monkey. In the work, we see a baboon within an enclosure, sitting above a tree that simultaneously resembles a gothic shadow, a cross, and even a smear. The dark, cross-like tree may suggest the conquering of God by a baboon, a type of monkey, recalling the old slander of Darwin’s theory, namely that Darwinism entailed that humanity descended from monkeys (which Darwin’s theory does not claim). But far from victorious, the monkey is in a state of suffering. While the baboon is not crucified on or by the tree, suffering pervades the frame. Its head resembles some sort of skull. The body is faintly painted in a melancholy blue with smudges of purple and is translucent and ghostly—at once a lump of matter and a spectral absence. We do not see the baboon through the cage. Instead we see through the baboon at the cage. Indeed, its very physiology involves the encountering of trauma as the head of the baboon does not simply connect to the body but stabs through the body as a sharp bone, perhaps opaquely evoking the violence of evolution. Similarly, the baboon’s tail seems to stab through the tree. Its eye is an enlarged void and a pupil is indicated by a bluish white triangle splitting through the void. The tree has something of the menacing and looming quality of a shadow and there is a sense of wilderness confronted by death and entrapment, evoked through the background. The yellowy ground is suggestive of dead grass. While potentially gesturing to the psychical confusion and intensity of Vincent Van Gogh or Edvard Munch, the yellowed grass more likely evokes the empty, barren and hostile planes of the desert and contrasts with the darkened colours. The baboon sitting on the cross/tree may seem to have reached some sort of pinnacle but such a status is mocked by the tree that manages to continue outside the fence: the branches nightmarishly protrude through the fence to conquer the frame, which in turn furthers the sense of inescapable entrapment and threat. The baboon is thereby precluded from reaching a higher point on the tree, unable to climb the branches, and underscores the baboon’s confines. The painting is labelled a study, which may suggest it is unfinished. However, Bacon’s completed works preserve an unfinished quality. This unfinished quality conveys a sense in which Man and evolution are unfinished and that being finished in the sense of being completed is no longer possible. The idea that there can finished work of art, a work of art that preserves an eternal meaning, has been repeatedly subject to serious doubt, including by artists themselves. Indeed, Bacon’s work erases the potential for perfection and completion, and breaks down, through devolution, what has been achieved by Man and the forces that shaped him. The subject is lowered from that of human to that of a baboon and is therefore, by Vasari’s Renaissance reasoning, not a subject at all. Bacon’s sketch and study exist to evoke a sense of incompletion, involving pain without resolution. The animal state of pain is therefore married with existential entrapment and isolation as art ceases to express the Platonic ideal and aims to show the truth of the shadow—namely that humanity is without a God, a God that previously shed light on humanity’s condition and anchored the human subject. If there is a trace or echo of human nobility left, such a trace functions through the wild and violent quality of animal indignation. A scream of painful indignity is the last act approaching (or descending from) any dignity that is afforded. Jan Švankmajer’s Darkness, Light, DarknessAn even more extreme case of the subject no longer being the subject, of being broken and muted—so much so that animal protest is annulled—can be witnessed in Jan Švankmajer’s animated short Darkness, Light, Darkness. In the animation, green clay hands mould and form a human body in order to be part of it. But when complete, the human body is trapped, grotesquely out of proportion with its environment. The film begins in a darkened house. There is a knocking of the door, and then the first green hand opens the door and turns on the light. The hand falls to the floor, blindly making its way to another door on the opposite side of the house. The hand opens the door only for eyeballs to roll out. The eyes look around. The hand pushes its clay fingers against the eyeballs, and the eyeballs become attached to the fingers. Suddenly with sight, the hand is able to lift itself up. The hand discovers that another hand is knocking at the door. The first hand helps the second hand, and then goes to the window where a pair of ears are stuck together flapping like a moth. The hands work together and break the ears apart. The first hand, the one with eyes, attaches the ears to the second hand. Then a head with a snout, but missing eyes and ears, enters through the door. The hands pull the snout until it becomes a nose, suppressing and remoulding the animal until it becomes human. As with Bacon, the violence of evolution, of auto-construction is conveyed indirectly: in Bacon’s case, through painted devolution and, in the case of the claymation, through a violent construction based on mutilation and smashing body parts together.Although I have described only three minutes of the seven-minute film, it already presents an image of human construction devoid of art or divine design. Man, or rather the hands, become the blind watchman of evolution. The hands work contingently, with what they are provided. They shape themselves based on need. The body, after all, exists as parts, and the human body is made up of other life forms, both sustaining and being sustained by them. The hands work together, and sacrifice sight and hearing for the head. They tear off the ears and remove the eyes and give them to the head. Transcendence is exchanged for subsistence. The absurdity of this contingency becomes most apparent when the hands attempt to merge with the head, to be the head’s feet. Then the feet actually arrive and are attached to the head’s neck. The human subject in such a state is thereby deformed and incomplete. It is a frightened form, cowering when it hears banging at the door. It turns out that the banging is being produced by an angry erect penis pounding at the door. However, even this symbol of masculine potency is subdued, rendered harmless by the hands that splash a bucket of cold water on it. The introduction of the penis signifies the masculinist notions implicit in the term Man, but we only ever see the penis when it is flaccid. The human subject is able to be concluded when clay pours from both doors and the window. The hands sculpt the clay and make the body, which, when complete is oversized and barely fits within the house. The male subject is then trapped, cramped in a foetal position. With its head against the ceiling next to the light, breathing heavily, all it can do is turn out the light. The head opens its mouth either in horror or a state of exertion and gasps. The eyes bulge before one of the body’s hands turns switch, perhaps suggesting terror before death or simply the effort involved in turning off the light. Once completed and built, the human subject remains in the dark. Despite the evident quirky, playful humour, Švankmajer’s film reflects an exhaustion with art itself. Human life becomes clay comically finding its own form. For Vasari, the ideal of the human form is realised first by God and then by Man through marble; for Švankmajer it is green clay. He demotes man back to the substance for a God to mould but, as there is no God to breathe life into it and give form, there is just the body to imperfectly mould itself. The film challenges both Vasari’s humanism and the suprahumanism of Nietzschean spectacle. Instead of the self-generating power and radical interdependence and agency of Übermensch, Švankmajer’s sub-subject is Man undercome—man beneath as opposed to over man, man mocked by its ambition, and with no space to stand high. Švankmajer thereby realises the anti-Nietzschean potential inherent within cinema’s anti-spectacular nature. Antonin Artaud, who extends the aesthetics advanced by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, contrasts the theatre’s sense of animal life with cinema. Artaud observes that movies “murder us with second-hand reproductions […] filtered through machines” (84). Thus, films murder creative and animal power as film flattens life to a dead realm of reproduction. Continuing Jacques Derrida’s hauntological framing of the screen, the animation theorist Alan Cholodenko has argued that the screen implies death. Motion is dead and replaced by illusion, a recording relayed back to us. What renders cinema haunting also renders it hauntological. For Cholodenko, cinema’s animation challenges ontology and metaphysics by eschewing stable ontologies through a process that entails both presence and absence. As Cholodenko points out, all film is a type of animation and reanimation, of making images move that are not in fact moving. Thus, one can argue that the animated-animation (such as Švankmajer’s claymation) becomes a refinement of death, a Frankesteinian reanimation of dead material. Indeed, Darkness, Light, Darkness accentuates the presence of death with the green clay almost resembling putrefaction. The fingerprints on the clay accentuate a lack of life, for the autonomous and dead matter that constructs and shapes a dead body from seemingly severed body parts. Even the title of the film, Darkness, Light, Darkness reflects an experience of cinema as deflation rather than joyous spectacle. One goes to a darkened space, watches light flicker on a screen and then the light goes out again. The cartoonish motions of the hands and body parts in the film look only half alive and therefore seem half-dead. Made in the decaying Communist state of Czechoslovakia, Švankmajer’s film aptly acknowledges the deflation of cinema, reflecting that illumination—the light of God, is put out, or more specifically, switched off. With the light of God switched off, creation becomes construction and construction becomes reconstruction, filtered through cinema’s machine processes as framed through Cholodenko. Still, Švankmajer’s animation is not unsympathetic to the plight of the hands. We do see the body parts work together. When a vulgar, meaty, non-claymation tongue comes out through the door, it goes straight to the other door to let the teeth in. The teeth and tongue are aided by the hands to complete the face. Indeed, what they produce is a human being, which has some sense of coherence and success—a success enmeshed with failure and entrapment. Piccinini’s “The Young Family”Patricia Piccinini’s sculptural works offer a more tender approach to the subject, especially when her works focus on the nonhuman animal with human characteristics. Piccinini is interested in the combinations of the animal and the machine, so her ideas can be seen almost as transhuman, where the human is extended beyond humanism. Her work is based on connection and connectedness, but does not emphasise the humanist values of innovation and self-creation often inherent to transhumanism. Indeed, the emphasis on connection is distinct from the entrapment of Bacon’s baboon and Švankmajer’s clay human, which half lament freedom’s negation.The way that Piccinini preserves aspects of humanism within a framework of subhumanism is evident in her work “The Young Family”. The hypperrealistic sculpture depicts a humanoid pig form, flopped, presumably exhausted, as piglet-babies suckle on her nipples. The work was inspired by a scientific proposal for pigs to be genetically modified to provide organs for humans (“Educational Resource” 5). Such a transhuman setting frames a subhuman aesthetic. Care is taken to render the scene with sentiment but without a sense of the ideal, without perfection. One baby-piglet tenderly grasps its foot with both hands and stares with love at its mother. We see two piglets enthusiastically sucking their mother’s teat, while a third baby/piglet’s bottom is visible, indicating that there is a third piglet scrambling for milk. The mother gazes at us, with her naked mammalian body visible. We see her wrinkles and veins. There is some fur on her head and some hair on her eyebrows humanising her. Indeed, her eyes are distinctly human and convey affection. Affection seems to be a motif that carries through to the materials (carefully crafted by Piccinini’s studio). The affection displayed in the artwork is trans-special, emphasising that human tenderness is in fact mammalian tenderness. Such tenderness conflates the human, the nonhuman animal and the material out of which the humanoid creature and its young are constructed. The sub-agency brings together the young and the old by displaying the closeness of the family. Something of this sub-subjectivity is theorised in Malcolm Bull’s Anti-Nietzsche, where he contrasts Nietzsche’s idea of the Übermensch with the idea of the subhuman. Bull writes that subhumanism involves giving up on “becoming more than a man and think[ing] only of becoming something less” (n.p.; Chapter 2, sec. “The Subhuman”). Piccinini depicts vulnerability and tenderness with life forms that are properly speaking subhuman, and reject the displays of strength of Nietzsche’s suprahumanism or Vasari’s emphasis on art commemorating great men. But Piccinini’s subhumanism preserves enough humanism to understand art’s ability to encourage an ethics of nurturing. In this respect, her works offer an alternative to Bull’s subhumanism that aims, so Bull argues, to devalue art altogether. Instead, Piccinini affirms imagination, but through its ability to conjure new ways to perceive animal affection. The sub-subject thereby functions to reveal states of emotion common to mammals (including humans) and other animals. ConclusionThese three artists therefore convey distinct, if related and intersecting, ways of visualising the sub-subject: Bacon through animal suffering, Švankmajer through adaptation that ultimately leads to the agent’s entrapment, and Piccinini who, instead of marrying anti-humanism with the subhumanism (the procedure of Švankmajer, and Bacon), integrates aspects of transhumanism and Renaissance humanism into her subhuman vision. As such, these works present a realisation of how we might think of the going under of the human subject after Darwin, Nietzsche and the deaths of God, Man and the diminishment of creativity. Such works remain not only antithetical to Vasari’s humanism but also to Nietzsche’s suprahumanism. These artists use art’s power to humble—not through overpowering awe but through the visible breakdown of the human agent, speaking for and to the sub-subject. Such art, by unbuilding and dismantling the subject, draws on prehuman trajectories of evolution, and in the case of Piccinini, transhuman trajectories. Art ceases to be about the grandiose evocations of power. Rather, more modestly, these works build a connection between the human with other mammals. Acknowledgements I wish to acknowledge Daniel Canaris for his valuable insights into Christianity and the Italian Renaissance, Alan Cholodenko for providing copies of his works that were central to my interpretation of Švankmajer, and Rachel Franks and Simon Dwyer for their invaluable assistance and finding very helpful reviewers. References Artaud, Antonin. The Theatre and Its Double. New York: Grove P, 1958.Art Gallery of South Australia. “Educational Resource Patricia Piccinini.” Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia. 11 Dec. 2016 <https://www.artgallery.sa.gov.au/agsa/home/Learning/docs/Online_Resources/Piccinini_online_resource.pdf>.Bacon, Francis. “Head I.” 1948. Oil on Canvas. 100.3 x 74.9cm. ———. “Study of a Baboon.” 1953. Oil on Canvas. 198.3 x 137.3cm. Bull, Malcolm. Anti-Nietzsche. New York: Verso, 2011. Cholodenko, Alan. “First Principles of Animation.” Animating Film Theory. Ed. Karen Beckman. Duke UP, 2014. 98-110.———. “The Crypt, the Haunted House, of Cinema.” Cultural Studies Review 10.2 (2004): 99-113. Darkness, Light, Darkness. Jan Švankmajer, 1990. 35mm. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. ———. The Gay Science. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. ———. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006.Piccinini, Patricia. “The Young Family.” 2002. Silicone, Polyurethane, Leather, Plywood, Human Hair, 80 x 150 x 110cm. Vasari, Giorgio. The Lives of Artists. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.Wolfe, Cary. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010.