Journal articles on the topic 'McCain family'

Jenis karya sastra cerita detektif bukan hal baru dalam kesusastraan Australia. Salah satu penulis cerita detektif, Gabrielle Lord, menampilkan masalah yang tidak pernah diangkat oleh penulis lainnya, yaitu masalah hubungan keluarga. Novel yang akan dikaji dalam tulisan ini adalah Lethal Factor. Dalam karya ini masalah keluarga dan penyalahgunaan anak dibahas dan dilibatkan dalam kasus kriminal yang terjadi dalam kehidupan penyidik forensic, Jack McCain. Kasus kriminal terjadi dalam beberapa kasus yang menggunakan senjata tajam yang menimpa seorang biarawati dan senjata racun kimia yang menimpa teman McCain. Persoalan menjadi menarik dan penting ketika McCain juga harus menyelesaikan kasusnya dengan istri dan terancamnya jiwa anaknya.

This article critically examines the mandates of the McCain Tobacco Bill and the Master Settlement Agreement toward addressing the youth smoking crisis in the United States. An overview of teenage smoking trends is presented, followed by the legislative history of the McCain Tobacco Bill and the Master Settlement Agreement. Reactions to this legislation are discussed, as well as predicted consequences. A review of the literature on youth smoking prevention, rooted in risk taking and social control theory, is presented. Empirical and theoretical support is provided for suggesting alternative solutions. The need for a comprehensive, coordinated approach involving law enforcement, the media, the family, and the educational system is described.

Lygodium japonicum (Thunb.) Swartz (Family, Schizaeaceae) is naturally distributed from Asia to Australia and has naturalized in the United States from Texas to the Carolinas and Florida (4). Recently, it has been declared a Category I weed (the most invasive group) by the Florida Exotic Pest Plant Council. A foliar rust fungus was observed on a population of L. japonicum growing under the canopy of a pine/hardwood forest in Gainesville, FL. The lower surfaces of almost all the pinnules (foliage) were covered with cinnamon-brown eruptive pustules. Necrotic areas developed around mature, erupted, and coalesced pustules. Severely infected foliage were wilted and dried. Microscopic observations of the pustules and spore morphology revealed these eruptive structures to be uredinia. The dimensions (24.6 [+ 2.2] × 29.7 [+ 3.5] μm) and morphology (ellipsoid or obovoid, pale cinnamon-brown, and echinulate with indistinct pores) of urediniospore were similar to those reported for Puccinia lygodii (Har.) Arth. (Uredinales) (1). Therefore, the rust was identified as P. lygodii and confirmed by J. Hennen. P. lygodii is native to South America, where it has been recorded from L. volubile and L. venustum (2). This rust was previously identified as Milesia and Uredinopsis spp. on L. japonicum from Louisiana and Florida, respectively (3). Herein, we report the performance of Koch's postulates for P. lygodii on L. japonicum. Excised foliage bearing uredinia from plants collected near Gainesville were placed in a flask, flooded with deionized distilled water, shaken vigorously for a few minutes, and the suspension strained through four layers of cheesecloth. Urediniospores suspended in the filtrate were concentrated to 1.0 × 106 spores/ml, using sedimentation technique, and then misted onto 3-week-old foliage of fully expanded fronds of four juvenile L. japonicum plants grown in pots, until the foliage were completely wet. The plants were then covered with a plastic bag and placed in dappled shade. After 3 days, the bags were removed and the water-filled containers were placed around L. japonicum plants to maintain high ambient humidity. During the remaining 4-week experimental period, the temperature and relative humidity under the shaded areas ranged from 23 to 38°C and 38 to 93%, respectively. The plants were monitored daily for development of symptoms characteristics of P. lygodii. Minute cinnamon-brown flecks appeared on the foliage 20 days after inoculation. Within 3 to 5 days, these flecked areas expanded, erupted, and formed uredinia on the lower surface of the symptomatic foliage. The morphology and size range of the uredinia and urediniospores were the same as those of the P. lygodii applied in this test. This is the first report confirming pathogenicity of P. lygodii on L. japonicum. P. lygodii may be a potential biological control agent of L. japonicum in the Southeast United States. References: (1) J. C. Arthur. Bull. Torrey Club 51:55, 1924. (2) J. F. Hennen and J. W. McCain. Mycologia 85:970–986, 1993. (3) J. W. McCain, J. F. Hennen, and Y. Ono. Mycotaxon 39:281–300, 1990. (4) R. W. Pemberton and A. P. Ferriter. Am. Fern J. 88:165–175, 1998.

A class of groups that is closed with respect to subnormal subgroups and normal products is called a Fitting class. Given a finite soluble group G, one may ask for the Fitting class (G) generated by G, that is the intersection of all Fitting classes containing G. For simple or nilpotent groups G it is easy to compute (G), but in other cases the determination of (G) seems to be surprisingly difficult, and there is no general method of solving this problem. In recent years there has been a lot of work in this area, see for instance Bryce and Cossey[l], [2], Hawkes[6] (or [5], IX. 9. Var. II), Heineken[7] and McCann[10].

A new genus and species, Phalloleucon abyssalis, of the cumacean family Leuconidae from the Peru Basin is introduced. The new genus is characterised in having penial lobes and one pair of pleopods in males. It is suggested that the species Eudorella redacticruris Watling and McCann, 1997 is transfered into a new leuconid genus: Pseudeudorella.

Lygodium microphyllum (Cav.) R.Br. (Old World climbing fern), in the family Schizaeaceae, is one of the most invasive (Category I in Florida) weeds in Florida. It has invaded more than 50,000 ha of wetlands and moist habitats in southern Florida and is rapidly spreading in new areas of the Everglades (3). The search and evaluation of biocontrol agents for this fern is currently in progress. Puccinia lygodii (Har.) Arth. (Uredinales) (1), previously recorded on L. volubile Sw. and L. venustum Sw. in South America (2), attacks foliage and severely damages L. japonicum Thunb. (Japanese climbing fern) vines in northern and central Florida (4). We hypothesized that since L. japonicum occurred mainly in northern and central Florida, P. lygodii did not have opportunity to interact with L. microphyllum, which primarily occurs in southern Florida. Therefore, we used two inoculation methods to test the possible pathogenicity of P. lygodii on the new host, L. microphyllum. Method-I was designed to imitate a seminatural inoculation technique in which three containerized (0.45-L capacity) L. microphyllum test plants (15- to 30-cm-high sporelings) were intermixed among a group of containerized (5.0-L capacity) P. lygodii-infected L. japonicum plants (source of inoculum) in a glasshouse. In Method-II, uredospores obtained from pustules on diseased L. japonicum foliage were adjusted to 1 × 106 uredospores/ml and then misted on three L. microphyllum sporelings (same size as in Method-I) until foliage was completely wet. The plants were then covered individually with a plastic bag for 3 days to facilitate spore germination and infection. In both methods, three L. japonicum sporelings of similar size as L. microphyllum were intermixed among diseased L. japonicum plants as a positive control. All test and infected plants were placed on 6-cm-high trays filled two-thirds with water and exposed to diffused daylight and a temperature range of 20 to 35°C in a glasshouse. These plants were monitored for the development of rust symptoms (halos and rust pustules) development for 8 weeks. Minute cinnamon flakes that developed into eruptive pustules were seen on the lower surface of the pinnules approximately 42 and 28 days after treatment initiation (in both methods) for L. microphyllum and L. japonicum (positive control), respectively. Each method was repeated twice. Dimensions (29.7 [±3.7] × 23.5 [±2.6] μm) and morphology of urediniospores from pustules on inoculated L. microphyllum were similar to those reported for P. lygodii on other host systems (1,2,4). To our knowledge, this is the first report demonstrating the infection of P. lygodii on L. microphyllum. The potential use of P. lygodii as a classical bio-control agent of L. microphyllum in southern Florida will be further investigated. References: (1) J. C. Arthur. Bull. Torrey Bot. Club 51:55, 1924. (2) J. W. McCain et al. Mycotaxon 39:281, 1990. (3) R. W. Pemberton. SIDA 20:1759, 2003. (4) M. B. Rayachhetry et al. Plant Dis. 85:232, 2000.

In pre-transitional societies, contraceptive practice is usually low or absent and prolonged breast-feeding has been identified as the major factor in keeping marital fertility levels below the biological maximum (Bongaarts, 1978), so that the length of birth intervals is the strongest determinant of completed family size.In transitional societies there is accumulating evidence that, with increasing modernization, the percentage of women who initiate breast-feeding and the duration of breast-feeding are declining (Jelliffe & Jelliffe, 1972; McCann et al., 1981; Rosa, 1976). Shorter durations of breast-feeding are observed for women who are more educated, belong to the upper socioeconomic class and live in urban areas (Jain & Sun, 1972; Lesthaeghe & Page, 1980).

ABSTRACTIn past research, the form of Japanese children's personal narratives was found to be distinctly different from that of English-speaking children. Despite follow-up questions that encouraged them to talk about one personal narrative at length, Japanese children spoke succinctly about collections of experiences rather than elaborating on any one experience in particular (Minami & McCabe, 1991). Conversations between mothers and children in the two cultures were examined in order partly to account for the way in which cultural narrative style is transmitted to children. Comparison of mothers from the two cultures yielded the following salient contrasts: (1) In comparison to the North American mothers, the Japanese mothers requested proportionately less description from their children. (2) Both in terms of frequency and proportion, the Japanese mothers gave less evaluation and showed more verbal attention to children than did North American mothers. (3) Japanese mothers pay verbal attention more frequently to boys than to girls. In addition, at five years, Japanese children produce 1·22 utterances per turn on average, while North American children produce 2·00 utterances per turn, a significant difference. Thus, by frequently showing verbal attention to their children's narrative contributions, Japanese mothers not only support their children's talk about the past but also make sure that it begins to take the shape of narration valued in their culture. The production of short narratives in Japan is understood and valued differently from such production in North America.

Abstract The daily lives of family caregivers of persons with dementia (PwD) often require that they manage multiple competing demands in a context of unpredictability. Memory and behavior changes associated with dementia can cause PwD to act in random and irrational ways that create stress and influence all aspects of caregivers’ everyday life. Supportive others, including informal helpers and formal service professionals, should provide relief to primary caregivers; however, help may not alleviate caregiver stress and can sometimes compound the burden of care. This symposium draws on daily diary surveys and face-to-face interviews to focus on four aspects of managing everyday care of PwD among family caregivers in rural areas. Brandy Renee McCann explores how caregivers’ vigilance on behalf of PwD care quality interacts with service use. Karen Roberto examines the ways in which caregivers manage PwD resistance to help, including their use of forceful care strategies. Rosemary Blieszner focuses on competing caregiver roles and demands that may contribute to or alleviate caregiver stress. Tina Savla addresses the unexpected, and often hidden, challenges involved in using formal services. Collectively, the four presentations provide in-depth insight into the complicated daily lives of families coping with dementia and the ways in which they meet the demands of full-time caregiving under often difficult and challenging circumstances. Discussant Steve Zarit considers the efficacy of these management strategies for various aspects of everyday care and offers suggestions for future research and person-centered programs and interventions to reduce health disparities among caregivers in rural areas.

One of the most vulnerable spheres of life of any individual is his / her private and family life. Therefore, this issue could not slip the attention of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of 1950 (hereinafter - the Convention) (Council of Europe, 1950). In fact, there have always been some prejudices within this issue, as it is not a secret that accusations of violating an individual’s right to privacy often provoke discussion in the public sphere. For example, when the UK Special Forces eliminated three terrorists (who were no longer resisting) on the territory of Gibraltar (Case of McCann and Others v. the United Kingdom, 1995), the media did not particularly intend to protect the right to life of these criminals. On the other hand, quite a few liberal media sources have resonantly responded to the interference with private life, when a group of stockbrokers and bankers were prosecuted for sadomasochism in a private residence. A similar behavior of the press was observed when discussing the mandatory use of seat belts. However, when considering the issues related to the violation of Article 8 of the Convention (Council of Europe, 1950), it is important to find answers to a few rather essential questions: Has there been an interference with private life under Article 8 § 1 of the Convention (Council of Europe, 1950)? If so, then – Is this interference sufficiently justified in the light of Article 8 § 2 of the Convention (Council of Europe, 1950), namely: Was the interference lawful? If yes, then – Did the interference have a lawful purpose? If yes, then – Was the interference necessary for a democratic society (can it be regarded as an adequate response to socially urgent necessity)? In case there arises a question concerning state’s positive obligations, it will no longer belong to the jurisdiction of paragraph 2, but will touch upon the analysis of the issue whether state’s positive obligation exists at all.

ABSTRACT Evidence suggests that the Pseudomonas aeruginosa PAO1 gnyRDBHAL cluster, which is involved in acyclic isoprenoid degradation (A. L. Díaz-Pérez, N. A. Zavala-Hernández, C. Cervantes, and J. Campos-García, Appl. Environ. Microbiol. 70:5102-5110, 2004), corresponds to the liuRABCDE cluster (B. Hoschle, V. Gnau, and D. Jendrossek, Microbiology 151:3649-3656, 2005). A liu (leucine and isovalerate utilization) homolog cluster was found in the PAO1 genome and is related to the catabolism of acyclic monoterpenes of the citronellol family (AMTC); it was named the atu cluster (acyclic terpene utilization), consisting of the atuCDEF genes and lacking the hydroxymethyl-glutaryl-coenzyme A (CoA) lyase (HMG-CoA lyase) homolog. Mutagenesis of the atu and liu clusters showed that both are involved in AMTC and leucine catabolism by encoding the enzymes related to the geranyl-CoA and the 3-methylcrotonyl-CoA pathways, respectively. Intermediary metabolites of the acyclic monoterpene pathway, citronellic and geranic acids, were accumulated, and leucine degradation rates were affected in both atuF and liuD mutants. The alpha subunit of geranyl-CoA carboxylase and the alpha subunit of 3-methylcrotonyl-CoA carboxylase (α-MCCase), encoded by the atuF and liuD genes, respectively, were both induced by citronellol, whereas only the α-MCCase subunit was induced by leucine. Both citronellol and leucine also induced a LacZ transcriptional fusion at the liuB gene. The liuE gene encodes a probable hydroxy-acyl-CoA lyase (probably HMG-CoA lyase), an enzyme with bifunctional activity that is essential for both AMTC and leucine degradation. P. aeruginosa PAO1 products encoded by the liuABCD cluster showed a higher sequence similarity (77.2 to 79.5%) with the probable products of liu clusters from several Pseudomonas species than with the atuCDEF cluster from PAO1 (41.5%). Phylogenetic studies suggest that the atu cluster from P. aeruginosa could be the result of horizontal transfer from Alphaproteobacteria. Our results suggest that the atu and liu clusters are bifunctional operons involved in both the AMTC and leucine catabolic pathways.

The presence of women candidates in both major parties’ presidential primaries, including a likely woman Democratic nominee, has increased the attention paid to gender dynamics in the 2016 US presidential election. However, the presumption that previous presidential elections—without female prominent contenders—were gender neutral is false: gender dynamics have been at play in all US presidential elections to date. The nation’s top executive office is arguably the most masculine in American politics. Duerst-Lahti (1997) describes the presidency as a gendered space in which masculine norms and images are reified as the ideal, adding, “the masculinist assumption-made-normal is strong and is made even stronger when it goes unnoticed for its gendered aspects” (22). Presidents and presidential contenders, whether male or female, are expected to meet the masculine expectations of the office through words and actions, and those around them—family, spouses, and advisors—often play a role in shaping the degree to which they are successful. In navigating American politics, candidates also face gendered treatment by opponents, voters, and media, reminding us that presidential politics is far from gender neutral. These gender dynamics have been detailed by scholars, particularly in analyses of the presidential candidacies of women (Beail and Longworth 2013; Carlin and Winfrey 2009; Carroll and Dittmar 2009; Dittmar and Carroll 2013; Duerst-Lahti 2013; Falk 2010; Han and Heldman 2007; Heldman, Carroll, and Olson 2005; Lawrence and Rose 2009; McClain, Carter, and Brady 2005). However, the depth and nuance in scholarly analyses are rarely evident in popular dialogue about the ways in which gender shapes presidential elections.

There are two families of group classes that are of particular interest for clearing up the structure of finite soluble groups: Saturated formations and Fitting classes. In both cases there is a unique conjugacy class of subgroups which are maximal as members of the respective class combined with the property of being suitably mapped by homomorphisms (in the case of saturated formations) or intersecting suitably with normal subgroups (when considering Fitting classes). While it does not seem too difficult, however, to determine the smallest saturated formation containing a given group, the same problem regarding Fitting classes does not seem answered for the dihedral group of order 6. The object of this paper is to determine the smallest Fitting class containing one of the groups described explicitly later on; all of them are qp-groups with cyclic commutator quotient group and only one minimal normal subgroup which in addition coincides with the centre. Unlike the results of McCann [7], which give a determination “up to metanilpotent groups”, the description is complete in this case. Another family of Fitting classes generated by a metanilpotent group was considered and described completely by Hawkes (see [5, Theorem 5.5 p. 476]); it was shown later by Brison [1, Proposition 8.7, Corollary 8.8], that these classes are in fact generated by one finite group. The Fitting classes considered here are not contained in the Fitting class of all nilpotent groups but every proper Fitting subclass is. They have the following additional properties: all minimal normal subgroups are contained in the centre (this follows in fact from Gaschiitz [4, Theorem 10, p. 64]) and the nilpotent residual is nilpotent of class two (answering the open question on p. 482 of Hawkes [5]), while the quotient group modulo the Fitting subgroup may be nilpotent of any class. In particular no one of these classes consists of supersoluble groups only.

El Centro de Estudios Demográficos, Urbanos y Ambientales de El Colegio de México realizó un reconocimiento a la trayectoria de la profesora investigadora Julieta Quilodrán por su destacada labor en la docencia e investigación demográficas durante más de cuatro décadas. Durante el homenaje se hizo un recuento de su sobresaliente desempeño como profesora investigadora en análisis demográfico; se enfatizó que Julieta Quilodrán es pionera en la investigación sobre familia y nupcialidad, que ha dedicado cuarenta años a investigar las transformaciones del matrimonio, la familia y la fecundidad en México y América Latina, y que es una referencia en la investigación en la demografía mundial. Además ha formado a un gran número de generaciones de demógrafos, a quienes ha inculcado el rigor en el uso de todas las metodologías del análisis demográfico. También se presentó el libro Parejas conyugales en transformación –del cual Julieta Quilodrán es compiladora–, en el que se documenta desde el punto de vista demográfico los cambios ocurridos en el ámbito de la vida conyugal y familiar a partir de varios enfoques metodológicos cuantitativos, cualitativos y jurídicos. El reconocimiento y la presentación del libro se llevaron a cabo el 23 de abril en El Colegio de México. En la ceremonia participaron Teresa Castro, Robert McCaa, Beatriz Figueroa, Viridiana Sosa, Manuel Ordorica y Silvia Giorguli. Por último, Julieta Quilodrán emitió un breve mensaje de agradecimiento. A continuación presentamos las palabras de quienes intervinieron en el acto, en el orden de su presentación. AbstractThe Center for Demographic, Urban and Environmental Studies of El Colegio de México paid tribute to Julieta Quilodrán for her outstanding work in teaching and research in the field of demography for over four decades. Speakers at the tribute emphasized her outstanding performance as a professor and researcher in demographic analysis. Mention was also made of the fact that Julieta Quilodrán is a pioneer in research on family and marriage. She has spent forty years researching the transformations in marriage, families and fertility in Mexico and Latin America and is a worldwide reference in demography. She has also trained several generations of demographers, in whom she has instilled the value of the rigorous use of all the methodologies in demographic analysis. Parejas conyugales en transformación –which Julieta Quilodrán compiled–, was also presented. This book documents the changes that have occurred from a demographic point of view in the sphere of marital and family life using various quantitative, qualitative and legal methodological approaches. The tribute and the book presentation were held on April 23 at El Colegio de México. Teresa Castro, Robert McCaa, Beatriz Figueroa, Viridiana Sosa, Manuel Ordorica and Silvia Giorguli participated in the ceremony. Lastly, Julieta Quilodrán gave a brief message of thanks. The speeches of those who participated in the event, preceded by an introduction by Silvia Giorguli, director of the Center for Demographic, Urban and Environmental Studies of El Colegio de México are given below.

Abstract Autoimmune lymphoproliferative syndrome (ALPS) is a rare disorder of the immune system due to defective Fas-mediated apoptosis which usually presents in childhood with lymphadenopathy, hypersplenism, hypergammaglobulinemia and multilineage cytopenias. Heterozygous germline mutations in FAS (TNFRSF6) gene commonly cause what is known as ALPS-FAS. Patients with genetic defect in Caspase 10 are classified as ALPS-CASP10. We have identified 16 individuals from 11 families with caspase 10 mutations. However six individuals were noted to have recognized caspase 10 polymorphisms. Here we are describing the clinical spectrum of a cohort of 10 patients from 8 families seen in our institution during the last 20 years with features suggestive of ALPS due to Caspase 10 mutations. There were 5 males and 5 females. Their median age at presentation was 7 years (Range 1-32yrs). Lymphadenopathy (n=8) was noted in most and splenomegaly in 5/10. The immunophenotypic signature of ALPS, "double negative" TCR-__+ T lymphocytes (DNTs) that lack both CD4 and CD8 markers were expanded in 6/8 patients. One patient (#132.1) had significant autoimmune kidney disease (glomerulonephritis) in addition to AIHA and ITP requiring renal transplantation. Patient #11.1 had acquired factor VIII inhibitor, hematuria, joint effusions and needed long term immunosuppression including weekly methotrexate. She is currently off all immunosuppressive medications and without any clinically significant autoimmune problems. More details of the clinical spectrum seen in this cohort of patients are presented in Table 1. During follow up we noted significant hypogammaglobulinemia requiring IVIG associated with infiltrative lung lesions and arthropathies in two siblings from family #171. Their unique evolving clinical phenotype led to diagnosis of a second genetic defect (STAT3 gain of function defect: 2141C>T; p.P714L) in them. The Caspase 10 mutation seen in this family(pI406L) was also noted following EXOME sequencing in another child with congenital neurological findings and her healthy parent as well as healthy sibling. Hence we are attributing the more recent clinical findings of hypogammaglobulinemia, diffuse lymphocytic lung disease and pulmonary fibrosis in patients 171.1.and 171.4 to the recently described STAT3 GOF mutation (Reference). Lesson learnt from this one family we wish to share is that if evolving clinical phenotype in a patient does not fit the working diagnosis of a known monogenic disorder, it is worthwhile to expand the search for other coexisting genetic defects using extended genetic testing methods currently in vogue. Reference: Milner JD, Vogel TP, Forbes L, Ma CA, Stray-Pedersen A, Niemela JE, Lyons JJ, Engelhardt KR, Zhang Y, Topcagic N, Roberson ED, Matthews H, Verbsky JW, Dasu T, Vargas-Hernandez A, Varghese N, McClain KL, Karam LB, Nahmod K, Makedonas G, Mace EM, Sorte HS, Perminow G, Rao VK, O'Connell MP, Price S, Su HC, Butrick M, McElwee J, Hughes J, Willet J, Swan D, Xu Y, Santibanez-Koref M, Slowik V, Dinwiddie DL, Ciaccio CE, Saunders CJ, Septer S, Kingsmore SF, White AJ, Cant AJ, Hambleton S, Cooper MA. Early-onset lymphoproliferation and autoimmunity caused by germline STAT3 gain-of-function mutations. Blood. 2014 Oct 30.PMID: 25359994. Disclosures No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.

This essay begins with an account of the circumstances which led to my parents owning a Colin and Anne McCahon children’s painting. Then it expands upon certain biographical questions raised (or not raised) in my 2011 book Dark Night: Walking with McCahon. I describe the work I did in 2018 with Finn McCahon-Jones, Colin’s grandson, on the Visitor Narrative for the McCahon House Trust; and conclude with some thoughts upon the limitations of biography as a genre. Implicit in the discussion is a comparison, hopefully unforced, between my own family and that of the McCahons.

Introduction Presidents “define who Americans are—often by declaring who they aren’t”, and “by their very utterances […] have shaped our sense of who we are as Americans” (Stuckey, front cover). This advocacy of some groups and policies to the exclusion of others has been facilitated in the United States’ political culture by the country music industry. Indeed, President Richard Nixon said of country music that it “radiates a love of this nation—a patriotism,” adding that it “makes America a better country” (Bufwack and Oermann 328). Country music’s ardent support of American military conflict, including Vietnam, has led to its long-term support of Republican candidates. There has been a general lack of scholarly interest, however, in how country music has promoted Republican definitions of what it means to be an American. Accordingly, we have two primary objectives. First, we will demonstrate that Republicans, aided by country music, have used the theme of defence of “country,” especially post-9/11, to attempt to intimidate detractors. Secondly, Republicans have questioned the love of “country,” or “patriotism,” of their electoral opponents just as country musicians have attempted to silence their own critics. This research is timely in that little has been done to merge Presidential advocacy and country music; furthermore, with the election of a new President mere days away, it is important to highlight the tendencies toward intolerance that both conservatism and country music have historically shared. Defence of ‘Country’ After the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush addressed the nation before a Joint Session of Congress on 20 September 2001. During this speech, the president threatened the international community and raised the spectre of fear in Americans both while drawing distinctions between the United States and its enemies. This message was reflected and reinforced by several patriotic anthems composed by country artists, thus enhancing its effect. In his remarks before Congress, Bush challenged the international community: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists;” thus “advocating some groups to the exclusion of others” on the international stage (20 September 2001). With these words, the President expanded the definition of the United States’ enemies to include not only those responsible for the 9/11 attacks, but also anyone who refused to support him. Republican Senator John McCain’s hawkishness regarding the attacks mirrored the President’s. “There is a system out there or network, and that network is going to have to be attacked,” McCain said the next morning on ABC (American Broadcasting Company) News. Within a month he made clear his priority: “Very obviously Iraq is the first country,” he declared on CNN. Later he yelled to a crowd of sailors and airmen: “Next up, Baghdad!” (http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/17/america/mccain.php). Bush’s address also encouraged Americans at home to “be calm and resolute, even in the face of a continuing threat” (20 September 2001). The subtle “us vs. them” tension here is between citizens and those who would threaten them. Bush added that “freedom and fear” had always “been at war” and “God is not neutral between them” (20 September 2001) suggesting a dualism between God and Satan with God clearly supporting the cause of the United States. Craig Allen Smith’s research refers to this as Bush’s “angel/devil jeremiad.” The President’s emphasis on fear, specifically the fear that the American way of life was being assailed, translated into public policy including the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the Patriot Act. This strategic nomenclature strengthened the power of the federal government and has been used by Republicans to suggest that if a candidate or citizen is not a terrorist then what does he/she have to fear from the government? The impact of Bush’s rhetoric of fear has of late been evaluated by scholars who have termed it “melodrama” in international affairs (Anker; Sampert and Treiberg). To disseminate his message for Americans to support his defence of “country,” Bush needed look no further than country music. David Firestein, a State Department diplomat and published authority on country music, asserted that the Bush team “recognised the power of country music as a political communication device” (86). The administration’s appeal to country music is linked to what Firestein called the “honky-tonk gap” which delineates red states and blue states. In an analysis of census data, Radio-Locator’s comprehensive listing by state of country music radio stations, and the official 2004 election results, he concluded that If you were to overlay a map of the current country music fan base onto the iconic red-and-blue map of the United States, you would find that its contours coincide virtually identically with those of the red state region. (84) And country musicians were indeed powerful in communicating the Republican message after 9/11. Several country musicians tapped into Bush’s defence of country rhetoric with a spate of songs including Alan Jackson’s Where Were You? (When the World Stopped Turning), Toby Keith’s Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (the Angry American), and Darryl Worley’s Have You Forgotten? to name a few. Note how well the music parallels Bush’s attempt to define Americans. For instance, one of the lines from Keith’s Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (the Angry American) speaks of those who have given their lives so that other Americans may rest peacefully. This sentiment is reiterated by the theme of Worley’s Have You Forgotten? in which he talks of spending time with soldiers who have no doubts about why they are at war. Both songs implicitly indict the listener for betraying United States soldiers if his/her support for the Iraqi war wanes or, put in Bush terms, the listener would become a supporter of “terrorism.” Country music’s appeal to middle-America’s red state conservatism has made the genre a natural vehicle for supporting the defence of country. Indeed, country songs have been written about every war in United States history; most expressing support for the conflict and the troops as opposed to protesting the United States’ action: “Since the Civil War and Reconstruction, ‘Dixie’ has always been the bellwether of patriotic fervour in time of war and even as the situation in Vietnam reached its lowest point and support for the war began to fade, the South and its distinctive music remained solidly supportive” (Andresen 105). Historically, country music has a long tradition of attempting to “define who Americans were by defining who they weren’t” (Stuckey). As Bufwack and Oermann note within country music “images of a reactionary South were not hard to find.” They add “Dixie fertilized ‘three r’s’ – the right, racism, and religion” (328). Country musicians supported the United States’ failed intervention in Vietnam with such songs as It’s for God and Country and You Mom (That’s Why I’m Fighting In Vietnam), and even justified the American massacre of noncombatants at My Lai in the Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley (328). Thus, a right-wing response to the current military involvement in Iraq was not unexpected from the industry and the honky-tonk state listeners. During the current election, Republican presidential nominee McCain has also received a boost from the country music genre as John Rich, of Big and Rich, wrote Raising McCain, a musical tribute to McCain’s military service used as his campaign theme song. The song, debuted at a campaign rally on 1 August 2008, in Florida, mentions McCain’s ‘Prisoner of War’ status to keep the focus on the war and challenge those who would question it. Scholars have researched the demographics of the country music listener as they have evaluated the massification theory: the notion that the availability of a widespread media culture would break down social and cultural barriers and result in a “homogenised” society as opposed to the results of government-controlled media in non-democratic countries (Peterson and DiMaggio). They have determined that the massification theory has only been partially demonstrated in that regional and class barriers have eroded to some extent but country music listeners are still predominately white and older (Peterson and DiMaggio 504). These individuals do tend to be more conservative within the United States’ political culture, and militarism has a long history within both country music and conservatism. If the bad news of the massification theory is that a mass media market may not perpetuate a homogenous society, there is good news. The more onerous fears that the government will work in tandem with the media to control the people in a democracy seem not to have been borne out over time. Although President Bush’s fear tactics were met with obsequious silence initially, resistance to the unquestioning support of the war has steadily grown. In 2003, a worldwide rally opposed the invasion of Iraq because it was a sovereign state and because the Bush doctrine lacked United Nations’ support. Further opposition in the United States included rallies and concerts as well as the powerful display in major cities across the nation of pairs of combat boots representing fallen soldiers (Olson). Bush’s popularity has dropped precipitously, with his disapproval ratings higher than any President in history at 71% (Steinhauser). While the current economic woes have certainly been a factor, the campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain can also be viewed as a referendum on the Bush war. The American resistance to the Bush rhetoric and the Iraq war is all the more significant in light of research indicating that citizens incorrectly believe that the opposition to the Vietnam War was typified by protests against the troops rather than the war itself (Beamish). This false notion has empowered the Republicans and country musicians to challenge the patriotism of anyone who would subsequently oppose the military involvement of the United States, and it is to this topic of patriotism that we now turn. Patriotism Patriotism can be an effective way for presidential candidates to connect with voters (Sullivan et al). It has been a particularly salient issue since the 9/11 attacks and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ironically, George W. Bush, a man whose limited military service had been the subject of debate in 2000, was able to employ the persistent patriotic themes of country music to his electoral advantage. In fact, Firestein argued that country music radio had a greater effect on the 2004 election than any ads run by issue groups because it “inculcated and reinforced conservative values in the red state electorate, helped frame the issues of the day on terms favourable to the conservative position on those issues, and primed red state voters to respond positively to President Bush’s basic campaign message of family, country, and God” (Firestein 83). Bush even employed Only in America, a patriotic anthem performed by Brooks and Dunn, as a campaign theme song, because the war and patriotism played such a prominent role in the election. That the Bush re-election campaign successfully cast doubt on the patriotism of three-time Purple Heart winner, Democratic Senator John Kerry, during the campaign is evidence of Firestein’s assertion. The criticism was based on a book: Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry (O’Neill and Corsi). The book was followed by advertisements funded by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth which included unsubstantiated claims that Kerry lied or exaggerated his combat role in Vietnam in order to obtain two of his Purple Hearts and his Bronze Star; the testimony of Kerry’s crewmen and Navy records notwithstanding, these ads were effective in smearing Kerry’s service record and providing the President with an electoral advantage. As far as country music was concerned, the 2004 election played out against the backdrop of the battle between the patriotic Toby Keith and the anti-American Dixie Chicks. The Dixie Chicks were berated after lead singer Natalie Maines’s anti-Bush comments during a concert in London. The trio’s song about an American soldier killed in action, Travelin’ Soldier, quickly fell from the top spot of the country music charts. Moreover, while male singers such as Keith, Darryl Worley, and Alan Jackson received accolades for their post 9/11 artistic efforts, the Dixie Chicks endured a vitriolic reaction from country music fans as their CDs were burned, country radio refused to play their music, their names were added to an internet list of traitors, their concerts were protested by Bush supporters, and their lives were even threatened (http://www.poppolitics.com/archives/2003/04/Bandwagon). Speaking from experience at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, Kerry addressed the issue of patriotism stating: This election is a chance for America to tell the merchants of fear and division: you don’t decide who loves this country; you don’t decide who is a patriot; you don’t decide whose service counts and whose doesn’t. […] After all, patriotism is not love of power or some cheap trick to win votes; patriotism is love of country. (http://www.clipsandcomment.com/2008/08/27/full-text-john-kerry-speech-democratic-national-convention/) Kerry broached the issue because of the constant attacks on the patriotism of Democratic nominee, Senator Barack Obama. At the most basic level, many of the attacks questioned whether Obama was even an American. Internet rumours persisted that Obama was a Muslim who was not even an American citizen. The attacks intensified when the Obamas’ pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, came under fire for comments made during a sermon in which he stated “God damn America.” As a result, Obama was forced to distance himself from his pastor and his church. Obama was also criticised for not wearing a United States flag lapel pin. When Michelle Obama stated for the “first time [she was] proud of her country” for its willingness to embrace change in February of 2008, Cindy McCain responded that she “had always been proud of her country” with the implication being, of course, a lack of patriotism on the part of Michelle Obama. Even the 13 July 2008 cover of the liberal New Yorker portrayed the couple as flag-burning Muslim terrorists. During the 2008 election campaign, McCain has attempted to appeal to patriotism in a number of ways. First, McCain’s POW experience in Vietnam has been front and centre as he touts his experience in foreign policy. Second, the slogan of the campaign is “Country First” implying that the Obama campaign does not put the United States first. Third, McCain’s running mate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, insisted in a speech on 4 October 2008, that Barack Obama has been “palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.” Her reference was to Obama’s acquaintance, Bill Ayers, who was involved in a series of Vietnam era bombings; the implication, however, was that Obama has terrorist ties and is unpatriotic. Palin stood behind her comments even though several major news organisations had concluded that the relationship was not significant as Ayers’ terrorist activities occurred when Obama was eight-years-old. This recent example is illustrative of Republican attempts to question the patriotism of Democrats for their electoral advantage. Country music has again sided with the Republicans particularly with Raising McCain. However, the Democrats may have realised the potential of the genre as Obama chose Only in America as the song played after his acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention. He has also attempted to reach rural voters by starting his post-convention campaign in Bristol, Virginia, a small, conservative town. Conclusion Thus, in the wake of 9/11, Republicans seized the opportunity to control the culture through fear and patriotic fervour. They were facilitated in this endeavor by the country music industry with songs that that would questions the motives, defence of “country,” and patriotism, of anyone who would question the Bush administration. This alliance between country music and the right is an historically strong one, and we recommend more research on this vital topic. While this election may indeed be a referendum on the war, it has been influenced by an economic downturn as well. Ultimately, Democrats will have to convince rural voters that they share their values; they don’t have the same edge as Republicans without the reliance of country music. However, the dynamic of country music has changed to somewhat reflect the war fatigue since the 2004 campaign. The Angry American, Toby Keith, has admitted that he is actually a Democrat, and country music listeners have grown tired of the “barrage of pro-troop sentiment,” especially since the summer of 2005 (Willman 115). As Joe Galante, the chief of the RCA family of labels in Nashville, stated, “It’s the relatability. Kerry never really spent time listening to some of those people” (Willman 201). Bill Clinton, a Southern governor, certainly had relatability, carrying the normally red states and overcoming the honky-tonk gap, and Obama has seen the benefit of country music by playing it as the grand finale of the Democratic Convention. Nevertheless, we recommend more research on the “melodrama” theory of the Presidency as the dynamics of the relationship between the Presidency and the country music genre are currently evolving. References Andreson, Lee. Battle Notes: Music of the Vietnam War. 2nd ed. Superior, WI: Savage Press, 2003. Anker, Elisabeth. “Villains, Victims and Heroes: Melodrama, Media and September 11th.” Journal of Communication. 55.1 (2005): 22-37. Baker, Peter and David Brown. “Bush Tries to Tone Down High-Pitched Debate on Iraq.” Monday, 21November 2005, Page A04. washingtonpost.com Beamish, Thomas D., Harvey Molotch, and Richard Flacks. “Who Supports the Troops? Vietnam, the Gulf War, and the Making of Collective Memory.” Social Problems. 42.3 (1995): 344-60. Brooks and Dunn. Only in America. Arista Records, 2003. Bufwack, Mary A. and Robert K. Oermann. Finding Her Voice The Saga of Women in Country Music. New York: Crown Publishers, 1993. Dixie Chicks. “Travelin Soldier.” Home. Columbia. 27 August 2002. Firestein, David J. “The Honky-Tonk Gap.” Vital Speeches of the Day. 72.3 (2006): 83-88. Jackson, Alan. Where Were You? (When the World Stopped Turning) Very Best of Alan Jackson. Nashville: Arista, 2004. Keith, Toby. Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American). Nashville: Dreamworks. November 9, 2004. Olson, Scott. “Chicago remembers war dead with 500 pairs of empty boots.” 22 January 2004. http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2004-01-22-chicago-boots_x.htm O’Neill, John E. and Jerome L. Corsi. “Unfit for Command Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry.” Washington D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2004. Peterson, Richard A. and Peter Di Maggio. “From Region to Class, the Changing Locus of Country Music. A Test of the Massification Hypothesis.” Social Forces. 53.3 (1975): 497-506. Rich, John. Raising McCain. Production information unavailable. Sampert, Shannon, and Natasja Treiberg. “The Reification of the ?American Soldier?: Popular Culture, American Foreign Policy, and Country Music.” Paper presented at the International Studies Association 48th Annual Convention, Chicago, Illinois, United States, 28 February 2007. Smith, Craig Allen. “President Bush’s Enthymeme of Evil: The Amalgamation of 9/11, Iraq, and Moral Values.” American Behavioral Scientist. 49 (2005): 32-47. Steinhauser, Paul. “Poll: More disapprove of Bush that any other president.” Politics Cnn.politics.com. 1 May 2008. Stuckey, Mary E. Defining Americans: The Presidency and National Identity. Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 2004. Sullivan, John L., Amy Fried, Mary G. Dietz. 1992. “Patriotism, Politics, and the Presidential Election of 1988.” American Journal of Political Science. 36.1 (1992): 200-234. Willman, Chris. Rednecks and Bluenecks: The Politics of Country Music. New York: The New Press, 2005. Worley, Darryl. Have You Forgotten? Nashville: Dreamworks, 2003.

The bicontraction of a vertex $v$ of degree two in a graph, with precisely two neighbours $v_1$ and $v_2$, consists of shrinking the set $\{v_1,v,v_2\}$ to a single vertex. The retract of a matching covered graph $G$, denoted by $\widehat{G}$, is the graph obtained from $G$ by repeatedly bicontracting vertices of degree two. Up to isomorphism, the retract of a matching covered graph $G$ is unique. If $G$ is a brace on six or more vertices, an edge $e$ of $G$ is thin if $\widehat{G-e}$ is a brace. A thin edge $e$ in a simple brace $G$ is strictly thin if $\widehat{G-e}$ is a simple brace. Theorems concerning the existence of strictly thin edges have been used (implicitly by McCuaig (Pólya's Permanent Problem, Electron. J. of Combin., 11, 2004) and explicitly by the authors (On the Number of Perfect Matchings in a Bipartite Graph, SIAM J. Discrete Math., 27, 940-958, 2013)) as inductive tools for establishing properties of braces.Let $G$ and $J$ be two distinct braces, where $G$ is of order six or more and $J$ is a simple matching minor of $G$. It follows from a theorem of McCuaig (Brace Generation, J. Graph Theory, 38, 124-169, 2001) that $G$ has a thin edge $e$ such that $J$ is a matching minor of $G-e$. In Section 2, we give an alternative, and simpler proof, of this assertion. Our method of proof lends itself to proving stronger results concerning thin edges.Let ${\cal G}^+$ denote the family of braces consisting of all prisms, all Möbius ladders, all biwheels, and all extended biwheels. Strengthening another result of McCuaig on brace generation, we show that every simple brace of order six or more which is not a member of ${\cal G}^+$ has at least two strictly thin edges. We also give examples to show that this result is best possible.

In conditions of a sharp reduction in the stocks of traditional fuels, it is important to find new efficient and renewable carbon-neutral energy sources. One of the most promising sources of renewable energy is the biomass of woody plants, in particular the family Willow (Salicaceae Mirb.). Traditionally, Salicaceae plants are propagated by generative and vegetative methods. Microclonal propagation, in contrast to traditional methods of reproduction, allows to obtain genetically homogeneous healthy planting material throughout the year. A significant number of biotechnological publications focus on the development of the optimal protocol for the reproduction of plants of the family Salicaceae, the study of the morphogenetic potential of tissues and optimizing their growth. However, the authors note the individually determined regenerative ability of plant material in vitro, which depends on a number of factors. The purpose of the study is to analyze the results of biotechnological research on the effectiveness (possibility) of obtaining high-quality planting material of plants of the family Salicaceae by tissue in vitro. For this purpose, we used the results of biotechnological studies of plant tissues of the family Salicaceae in vitro by foreign and domestic authors published in professional journals during 2010−2020. Research methods − analysis, comparison, synthesis, generalization. The analysis revealed that the sterilization regime of Salicaceae plant material depends on the type of explant, phenological phase and age of the donor plant. Step-by-step sterilization using mercury chloride, sodium hypochlorite and silver nitrate effectively neutralizes the exogenous biota of woody explants. The stage of active vegetation is the optimal period of isolation of explants. To obtain virus-free regenerating plants, it is advisable to use apical meristems, callus tissue − leaf blades, active regeneration − microshoots. Stable regeneration system, its type, multiplication factor of Salicaceae plants are genetically determined. For the introduction of plants in vitro, active proliferation, rooting, microclonal propagation, it is advisable to use nutrient media according to WPM (McCown & Lloyd, 1981) and MS (Murashige & Skoog, 1962). For regeneration of plants by direct morphogenesis and activation of growth of existing meristems of an explant to apply the environment with cytokinins (BAP (6-benzylaminopurine), kinetin or 2-isopentenyladenine (2-ip), for rooting − with auxins NAA (α-naphthylacetic), IBA (3-indolylbutyric acid) and IAA (β-indolyl-3-acetic acid). Further research is aimed at optimizing the propagation protocols of Salicaceae plants in vitro.

This article makes a case for the everyday while on tour and argues that the ability to continue with everyday routines and social relationships, while at the same time moving through and staying in liminal or atypical zones of tourist locales, is a key part of some kinds of tourist experience. Based on ethnographic field research with grey nomads (retirees who take extended tours of Australia in caravans and motorhomes) everyday life while on tour is examined, specifically the overlap and intersection between the out-of-the-ordinary “tourist zone” and the ordinariness of the “everyday zone.” The “everyday zone” and “tourist zone” can be readily differentiated by their obvious geospatial boundaries (being at home or being away on holiday). More specifically, the “everyday zone” refers to the routines of quotidian life, or the mundane practices which make up our daily, at-home lives. These practices are closely connected with the domestic realm and include consumption practices (clothing, cooking, mass media) and everyday social interactions. The “tourist zone” is similarly concerned with consumption. In this zone, however, tourists are seen to consume places; the culture, landscape, and peoples of exotic or out-of-the-ordinary tourist locales. Needless to say this consumption of place also includes the consumption of services and objects available in the tourist destinations (Urry, “The Consuming of Place” 220). The notion of tourists being away from home has often been contrasted with constructions of home—with the dull routines of everyday life—by social scientists and tourist marketers alike in an effort to illuminate the difference between being “away” and being at “home.” Scott McCabe and Elizabeth Stokoe suggest that peoples’ notion of “home” takes into account the meaning of being away (602). That is to say that when people are away from home, as tourists for example, they often compare and contrast this with the fundamental aspects of living at home. Others, however, argue that with the widespread use of mobile communication technologies, the distinction between the notion of being at “home” and being “away” becomes less clear (White and White 91). In this sense, the notion of home or the everyday is viewed with an eye towards social relationships, rather than any specific geographical location (Jamal and Hill 77–107; Massey 59–69; Urry, “The Tourist Gaze” 2–14; White and White 88–104). It can be argued, therefore, that tourism entails a fusion of the routines and relationships associated with the everyday, as well as the liminal or atypical world of difference. This article is based on semi-structured interviews with 40 grey nomads, as well as four months of ethnographic fieldwork carried out in rural and remote Australia—in Western Australia, the Northern Territory, and South Australia. Grey nomads have been part of Australian senior culture for at least four decades. They are a relatively heterogeneous group of tourists encompassing a range of socio-economic backgrounds, preferred activities, health status, and favoured destinations (Davies et al. 40–1; Economic Development Committee 4; Holloway 117–47), as well age cohorts—including the frugal generation (1910–1932), the silent generation (1931–1946), and the baby boomer generation (1946–65). Grey nomads usually tour as spousal couples (Tourism Research Australia 26; Onyx and Leonard 387). Some of these couples live solely on government pensions while others are obviously well-resourced—touring in luxury motorhomes costing well over half a million dollars. Some prefer to bush camp in national parks and other isolated locations, and some choose to stay long term in caravan parks socialising with other grey nomads and the local community. All grey nomads, nonetheless, maintain a particularly close link with the everyday while touring. Mobile communication technologies anchor grey nomads (and other tourists) to the everyday—allowing for ready contact with existing family and friends while on tour. Grey nomads’ mobile dwellings, their caravans and motorhomes, integrate familiar domestic spaces with a touring life. The interior and exterior spaces of these mobile dwellings allow for easy enactment of everyday, domestic routines and the privatised world of adult spousal relationships. This peripatetic form of dwelling, where the dwelling itself accommodates both travel and an everyday domestic life further blurs the distinctions between the “everyday zone” and the “tourist zone”. In this sense grey nomads carry out a lifestyle that is both anchored and mobile; anchored in the everyday domestic life while at the same time being nomadic or geographically unstable. This blurring of the boundaries between the “everyday zone” and “tourist zone” is attractive to senior tourists, offering them a relatively safe and comfortable incursion into tourist locales, where established routines and patterns of everyday life can be maintained. Other homes-away-from-homes such as serviced apartments, holiday homes and house swaps also offer greater connection to the everyday, but are geographically anchored to specific tourism spaces. The caravan or motorhome allows this at-home connection for the peripatetic tourist offsets the relative rigours of outback touring in remote and rural Australia. Everyday Social Relationships in the “Tourist Zone” When tourists go away from home, they are usually thought of as being away from both place (home) and relationships (family and friends). Nowadays, however, being away from home does not necessarily mean being away from family and friends. This is because the ease and speed of today’s telecommunication technologies allows for instantaneous contact with family and friends back home—or the virtual co-presence of family and friends while being away on tour. In the past, those friends and relations who were geographically isolated from each other still enjoyed social contact via letters and telegrams. Such contacts, however, occurred less frequently and message delivery took time. Long distance telephone calls were also costly and therefore used sparingly. These days, telecommunication technologies such as mobile phones and the Internet, as well as the lower cost of landline phone calls, mean that everyday social contact does not need to be put on hold. Keeping in contact is now a comparatively fast, inexpensive, and effortless activity and socialising with distant friends and relatives is now a routine activity (Larsen 24). All grey nomads travel with a mobile phone device, either a digital mobile, Next G or satellite phone (Obst, Brayley and King 8). These phones are used to routinely keep in contact with family and friends, bringing with them everyday familial relationships while on tour. “We ring the girls. We’ve got two daughters. We ring them once a week, although if something happens Debbie [daughter] will ring us” (Teresa). Grey nomads also take advantage of special deals or free minutes when they scheduled weekly calls to family or friends. “I mainly [use] mobile, then I ring, because I’ve got that hour, free hour” (Helen). E-mail is also a favoured way of keeping in contact with family and friends for some grey nomads. This is because the asynchronicity of e-mail interaction is very convenient as they can choose the times when they pick up and send messages. “Oh, thank goodness for the e-mail” (Pat). Maintaining social contact with family and friends at a distance is not necessarily as straightforward as when grey nomads and other tourists are at home. According to discussants in this study and the Regional Telecommunications Independent Review Committee, mobile phone coverage within Australia is still rather patchy when outside major metropolitan areas. Consequently, the everyday task of kin keeping via the phone can be somewhat intermittent, especially for those grey nomads who spend a great deal of time outside major towns in rural and remote Australia. “You can never get much [reception] but [...] they can just ring the mobile and just leave a message and we will get that message [later]” (Rena). Similarly, using the Internet to e-mail family and friends and catch up with online banking can only be carried out when passing through larger towns. “I do it [using the Internet] like every major town we went through. I’d stop and do a set of e-mails and I used to do my banking” (Maureen). The intermittent phone coverage in remote and rural Australia was not always viewed as an inconvenience by discussants in this study. This is because continuing engagement with family and friends while on tour may leave little respite from the ongoing obligations or any difficulties associated with family and friends back home, and encroach on the leisure and relaxation associated with grey nomad touring. “I don’t want the phone to ring […] That’s one thing I can do without, the phone ringing, especially at 4:00 in the morning” (Rena). In this way, too much co-presence, in the form of mobile phone calls from family and friends, can be just as much a nuisance when away from home as when at home—and impinge on the feeling of “being away from it all.” Naomi White and Peter White also suggest that “being simultaneously home and away is not always experienced in a positive light” (98) and at times, continued contact (via the phone) with friends and family while touring is not satisfying or enjoyable because these calls reiterate the “dynamics evident in those that are [usually] geographically proximate” (100). Thus, while mobile communication technologies are convenient tools for grey nomads and other tourists which blur the boundaries between the “everyday zone” and “tourist zones” in useful and pleasurable ways, their overuse may also encroach on tourists’ away time, thus interfering with their sense of solitude and quiescence when touring in remote or rural Australia. The “Everyday Zone” of the Caravan or Motorhome Being a tourist involves “everyday practices, ordinary places and significant others, such as family members and friends, but co-residing and at-a-distance” (Larsen 26). While tourism involves some sense of liminality, in reality, it is interspersed with the actuality of the everyday routines and sociabilities enacted while touring. Tim Edensor notes that; Rather than transcending the mundane, most forms of tourism are fashioned by culturally coded escape attempts. Moreover, although suffused with notions of escape from normativity, tourists carry quotidian habits and responses with them: they are part of the baggage. (61) Grey nomads go further than this by bringing on tour with them a domestic space in which everyday routines and sociabilities are sustained. Travelling in this manner “makes possible, and probably encourages, greater continuity with everyday routine than many other kinds of holiday making” (Southerton et al. 6). To be able to sleep in your own bed with your own pillow and linen, or perhaps travel with your dogs, makes caravanning and motorhoming an attractive touring option for many people. Thus, the use of caravans or motorhomes when travelling brings with it a great deal of mobile domesticity while on tour. The caravan or motorhome is furnished with most of the essentially-domestic objects and technologies to enable grey nomads to sleep, eat, relax, and be entertained in a manner similar to that which they enjoy in the family home, albeit within smaller dimensions. Lorna: We have shower, toilet. We had microwave, stereo. We have air conditioning and heating.Eric: Yeah, reverse cycle air conditioning.Lorna: Reverse cycle. What else do we have?Eric: Hot water service. Gas or 240 volt. 12 volt converter in that, which is real good, it runs your lights, runs everything like that. You just hook it into the main power and it converts it to 12 volt. Roll out awning plus the full annex.Lorna: Full annex. What else do we have? There’s a good size stove in it. The size of caravans and motorhomes means that many domestic tasks often take less time or are simplified. Cleaning the van takes a lot less time and cooking often becomes simplified, due to lack of bench and storage space. Women in particular like this aspect of grey nomad travel. “It is great. Absolutely. You don’t have toilets to clean, you don’t have bathrooms to clean. Cooking your meals are easier because everything is all […] Yeah. It’s more casual” (Sonya). This touring lifestyle also introduces new domestic routines, such as emptying chemical toilets, filling water tanks, towing and parking the van and refilling gas tanks, for example. Nonetheless grey nomads, spend significantly less time on these domestic tasks when they are touring. In this sense, the caravan or motorhome brings with it the comforts and familiarity of home, while at the same time minimising the routine chores involved in domestic life. With the core accoutrements of everyday life available, everyday activities such as doing the dishes, watching television, preparing and eating a meal—as well as individual hobbies and pastimes—weave themselves into a daily life that is simultaneously home and away. This daily life, at home in the caravan or motorhome, brings with it possibilities of a domestic routinised lifestyle—one that provides welcome comfort and familiarity when travelling and a retreat from the demands of sightseeing. On the farm I used to make jam and cakes, so I do it again [in the caravan]. I make jam, I made marmalade a couple of weeks ago. We’d often stay home [in the caravan], I’d just clean or do a bit of painting. (Jenny) Touring in a caravan or motorhome allows for some sense of predictability: that you own and control the private spaces of your own mobile dwelling, and can readily carry out everyday domestic routines and sociabilities. “We go for a long walk. We come back and we see friends and we stop and have a coffee with them, and then you come home in the caravan at 2.30 and you can still have lunch” (Yvonne). Touring in a caravan or motorhome also frees grey nomads from dependence on prearranged tourist experiences such as organised tours or hotel meal times where much of the tourist experience can be regimented. We always went in hotels and you always had to dress up, and you had to eat before a certain time, and you had your breakfast before a certain time. And after 2.30 you can’t have lunch anymore and sometimes we have lunch at 2 o’clock. I like the caravan park [better]. (Donald) Despite the caravan or motorhome having close links with everyday life and the domestic realm, its ready mobility offers a greater sense of autonomy while touring: that you are unfettered, not bound to any specific place or timetable, and can move on at whim. Grey nomads often cross paths with other tourists dependent on guided bus tours. “They go in [to Kakadu] on a bus trip. All they do is go in on the main road, they’re in there for the day and there’re back. That’s absolutely ridiculous” (Vance). This autonomy, or freedom to structure their own tourist experiences, allows grey nomads the opportunity to travel at a leisurely pace. Even those grey nomads who travel to the same northern destination every year take their time and enjoy other tourist locations along the way. We take our time. This time, last time, we did three weeks before we got in [to] Broome. We spent a lot [of time] in Karratha but also in Geraldton. And when we came back, in Kalbarri, [we had] a week in Kalbarri. But it’s nice going up, you know. You go all through the coast, along the coast. (John) Caravan or motorhome use, therefore, provides for a routinised everyday life while at the same time allowing a level of autonomy not evident in other forms of tourism—which rely more heavily on pre-booking accommodation and transport options. These contradictory aspects of grey nomad travel, an everyday life of living in a caravan or motorhome coupled with freedom to move on in an independent manner, melds the “everyday zone” and the “tourist zone” in a manner appealing to many grey nomads. Conclusion Theories of tourism tend to pay little attention to the aspects of tourism that involve recurrent activities and an ongoing connectedness with everyday life. Tourism is often defined: by contrasting it to home geographies and everydayness: tourism is what they are not. [...] The main focus in such research is on the extraordinary, on places elsewhere. Tourism is an escape from home, a quest for more desirable and fulfilling places. (Larsen 21) Nonetheless, tourism involves everyday routines, everyday spaces and an everyday social life. Grey nomads find that mobile phones and the Internet make possible the virtual co-presence of family and friends allowing everyday relationships to continue while touring. Nonetheless, the pleasure of ongoing contact with distant family and friends while touring may at times encroach on the quietude or solitude grey nomads experienced when touring remote and rural Australia. In addition to this, grey nomads’ caravans and motorhomes are equipped with the many comforts and domestic technologies of home, making for the continuance of everyday domiciliary life while on tour, further obfuscating the boundaries between the “tourist zone” and the “everyday zone.” In this sense grey nomads lead a lifestyle that is both anchored and mobile. This anchoring involves dwelling in everyday spaces, carrying out everyday domestic and social routines, as well as maintaining contact with friends and family via mobile communication technologies. This anchoring allows for some sense of predictability: that you own and control the private spaces of your own mobile dwelling, and can readily carry out everyday domestic routines and sociabilities. Conversely, the ready mobility of the caravan or motorhome offers a sense of autonomy: that you are unfettered, not bound to any specific place and can move on at whim. This peripatetic form of dwelling, where the dwelling itself is the catalyst for both travel and an everyday domestic life, is an under researched area. Mobile dwellings such as caravans, motorhomes, and yachts, constitute dwellings that are anchored in the everyday yet unfixed to any one locale. References Davies, Amanda, Matthew Tonts, and Julie Cammell. Coastal Camping in the Rangelands: Emerging Opportunities for Natural Resource Management. Perth: Rangelands WA, 2009. 24 Sep. 2011 ‹http://www.rangelandswa.com.au/pages/178/publications›. Economic Development Committee. Inquiry into Developing Queensland’s Rural and Regional Communities through Grey Nomad Tourism. Brisbane: Queensland Parliament, 2011. 23 Sep. 2011 ‹http://www.parliament.qld.gov.au/Documents/TableOffice/TabledPapers/2011/5311T3954.pdf›. Edensor, Tim. “Performing Tourism, Staging Tourism: (Re)Producing Tourist Space and Practice.” Tourist Studies 1 (2001): 59–81. Holloway, Donell. Grey Nomads: Retirement, Leisure and Travel in the Australian Context. PhD diss. Edith Cowan University: Perth, 2010. Jamal, Tanzin, and Steve Hill. “The Home and the World: (Post) Touristic Spaces of (in) Authenticity.” The Tourist as a Metaphor of The Social World. Ed. Graham Dann. Wallingford: CAB International, 2002. 77–107. Larsen, Jonas. “De-Exoticizing Tourist Travel: Everyday Life and Sociality on the Move.” Leisure Studies 27 (2008): 21–34. Massey, Doreen. “Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place.” Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change. Eds. Jon Bird et al. London: Routeledge, 1993. 59–69. McCabe, Scott, and Elizabeth Stokoe. “Place and Identity in Tourists’ Accounts.” Annals of Tourism Research 31 (2004): 601–22. Obst, Patricia L., Nadine Brayley, and Mark J. King. “Grey Nomads: Road Safety Impacts and Risk Management.” 2008 Australasian Road Safety Research, Policing and Education Conference. Adelaide: Engineers Australia, 2008. Onyx, Jenny, and Rosemary Leonard. “The Grey Nomad Phenomenon: Changing the Script of Aging.” The International Journal of Aging and Human Development 64 (2007): 381–98. Regional Telecommunications Independent Review Committee. Regional Telecommunications Review Report: Framework for the Future. Canberra: RTIRC, 2008. Southerton, Dale, Elizabeth Shove, Alan Warde, and Rosemary Dean. “Home from Home? A Research Note on Recreational Caravanning.” Department of Sociology, Lancaster University. 1998. 10 Jan. 2009 ‹http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/sociology/papers/southerton-et-al-home-from-home.pdf›. Tourism Research Australia. Understanding the Caravan industry in WA: Grey Nomads—Fast Facts. Perth, Australia: Tourism WA (n.d.). Urry, John. “The Consuming of Place.” Discourse, Communication, and Tourism. Eds. Adam Jaworski and Annette Pritchard. Clevedon: Channel View Publications, 2005. 19–27. ———. The Tourist Gaze. London: Sage, 2002. White, Naomi, and Peter White. “Home and Away: Tourists in a Connected World.” Annals of Tourism Research 34 (2006): 88–104.

In The Practice of Everyday Life, Walking in the City, Michel de Certeau celebrates the glorious sublimity of an Icarian moment as his gaze from the 110th floor of the World Trade Centre soars over Manhattan. Having taken such a voluptuous pleasure (92) in the view myself, and watched the twin towers collapse into rubble on my television screen last September, as I re-visit the aerial site through de Certeau, his words resonate strongly with the oneiric force of memory, myth and the wonder of urban possibility. For while theorising, does de Certeau not write his own story of the city as dream, as imaginative longing, consuming and producing an urban 'text' (93) as he reads from on high? Participating in the logic of one of the city's opportunities, a tourist attraction, his analytic practice is a creative expression of his own subjective experience. Theoretically, the story begins in the labyrinth of the cityscape, where the urban text is humanised by its mobile, unpredictable practitioners whose everyday operations style, invent and generate ways of being and becoming. What de Certeau offers us is something quite beautiful and noble, almost consolatory, in the idea of an artful, other spatiality that slips, undetected, into the banal routine of daily existence. To explore how lived space (96) is authorised by its heroic practitioners, made other, as it is inscribed into and outside the historic, social and economic realities or strategies of the urban environment, I resort to fiction, where the certain strangeness (93) of the everyday surfaces to be read. Colum McCann's novel, This Side of Brightness, takes us down below de Certeau's down below to the subterranean spaces of the New York City subway tunnels where the central character, Treefrog, estranged from his family, makes his home: his dark nest, high in the tunnel (McCann 2). Treefrog's escape into this murky, cavernous netherworld is a disappearing act for this is where no ordinary practitioners of the city live 'down below,' [down] below the thresholds at which [an everyday] visibility begins. (de Certeau 93) Seeking refuge, this is where the city's resident asylum seekers migrate, claiming exile as a right. To be outcast is an autonomous and pragmatic spatial tactic, a self-imposed, self-composed state of being as other. Here, survival is a process of resistance, an illegal occupation. Errant and devious, the lifestyle choice these urban consumers make violates the civil ordinances of the city. Venturing topside, Treefrog repels, offends and embarrasses the ordinary practitioners of the city travelling on the subway (96, 240) and in the reading room at the public library (93). The disgust and fear aroused by his stench and squalid appearance make no allowance for pity or pride. In these aboveground collective social spaces his unhygienic, undomesticated presence is not proper; it signals defiance in its fetid, imposing refusal to be controlled or to disappear. Treefrog is an anonymous manifestation of the cityscape. Disguised by long hair, a beard, ragged clothes, filth and dirt (242), his real identity is undetectable: Clarence Nathan Walker is invisible. Seemingly primitive, this sight is decidedly modern in its ubiquitous depiction of the contemporary urban indigent. A place of wounded spirits, Treefrog's 'mole' neighbourhood confesses the shame of an overwhelming suffering born of the streets. Papa Love's grief is monumentalised in the surreal gargantuan murals and portraits of the dead he paints on the walls of the tunnel. Crack addicts, Angela and Elijah, get high, wasted, underground. A symbolic toilet seat hangs wreath-like on Faraday's front door; as a doorbell (128). Dean, the Trash Man, collects the discarded remains of an urban consumer society and installs them in his 'front yard' as an assemblage of ready-made materials and found objects. Textually, his 'work' orchestrates a cacophony of human ruin and putrescence: the mounds of human faeces and the torn magazines and the empty containers and the hypodermic needles with blobs of blood at their tips like poppies erupting in a field...the broken bottles and rat droppings and a baby carriage and smashed TV and squashed cans and discarded cardboard boxes and shattered jars and orange peels and crack vials and a single teddy bear with both its eyes missing, its belly nibbled into by rats. (56) In this community, housing isolates, shelters and incarcerates, each inhabitant has their own cubicle, concrete bunker, solitary cell (56). In contrast to this depressed existential vista, before his incarnation as Treefrog, Clarence Nathan knows the sublime erotic charge of towering over New York City, expressed by de Certeau. Working construction on the city's skyscrapers, he seeks ascension, going, willfully, higher than any walking man in Manhattan....Beneath him, Manhattan becomes a blur of moving yellow taxis and dark silhouettes. There is something in this rising akin to desire, the gentle rock from side to side, the cooling breeze, the knowledge that he is the one who will pierce the virginity of space where the steel hits the sky....The elevator clangs and stops. Clarence Nathan finishes his coffee, tosses the paper cup and walks across the metal decking towards two ladders which jut up in the air. For a joke the men call this area the POST: The Place of Shrivelled Testicles. No ordinary man will go further. The nimblest Clarence Nathan and Cricket...climb three ladders to the very top of the building, where columns of steel reach up into the air. (195-6) Unaffected by vertigo and impervious to the danger, there is a seeming nonchalance, a banality, to Clarence Nathan's activity as he finishes his coffee, tosses the paper cup and gets to work; this is a practice of everyday life for him. And yet this productive activity, governed by city council planning and approval, contains a liberatory ruse, an 'anthropological,' poetic and mythic experience of space, (93) as proposed by de Certeau. High above, he performs a transcendent manoeuvre, a magic trick, creating and constructing space out of thin air, nothing. Icarian, Clarence Nathan's desire seems not for scopic pleasure but for the pure visceral elation of being unrestrained, unprotected, autonomous, above and beyond the rest of the world. At such a height Clarence Nathan does not speculate or even think he forgets where he is, that his 'body even exists.' (177) Surpassing rational comprehension and linguistic expression, his elevation articulates an unadulterated liberation, an erotics of feeling and an ecstasy of being: [s]ometimes, for a joke, Clarence Nathan takes out his harmonica at the top of the column and blows into it using just one hand. The wind carries most of the tune away, but occasionally the notes filter down to the ironworkers below. The notes sound billowy and strained, and for this the men sometimes call him Treefrog, a name he doesn't much care for. (198) From this pivotal point, high on the extreme vertical axis of the cityscape, Clarence Nathan has much further to fall when he loses his balance mentally, descending into an abyss of human despair. Being down is not deep enough. Going underground, Clarence Nathan reclaims this haunted, burrowed space of the city as a legacy bequeathed to him by his grandfather, one of the sandhogs who dug the tunnels of the New York subway, and reinvents himself as Treefrog. An appropriate moniker for this uncivilised, otherworldly realm, [a]ll darkness and dampness and danger, (7) sometimes it is the only name he can remember (29). Foregrounding memory and myth, McCann's fable weaves the creation story of a family through the interstices of a city's legends and official history, allowing us to read the appropriation, the othering, of the city's spaces by its inhabitants in the practice of their lives as ephemeral markings of artistic activity. Through the incantation of spatial and narrative trajectories, as de Certeau suggests, [a] migrational, or metaphorical, city thus slips into the clear text of the planned and readable city (93). Writing himself into these catacombs, literally, Treefrog embraces his interment, his burial rights, as a return to his primordial home: In his notebook Treefrog writes: Back down under the earth, where you belong. Back down under the earth where you belong....He could make a map of those words, beginning at the B and ending at the g where all beginning begins and ends and they would make the strangest of upground and belowground topographies. (139) So as not to forget the strange topographies of existence, Treefrog inscribes them on the surface of his skin: [h]is chest is scrimshawed with stabwounds and burns and scars. So many mutilations of his body. Hot paper clips, blunt scissors, pliers, cigarettes, matches, blades they have all left their marks. (30) Mapping an abstract expression, intimately, these are the warrior scars of the initiate. Belowground, Clarence Nathan eludes the clinical strategies of his obsessive-compulsive post-traumatic stress disorder; he avoids the nuthouse (228). Here, in retreat, as Treefrog, he is free to create, dream and imagine, unrestrained and unexamined; it is an elegant self-prescribed remedy. For Clarence Nathan, the tunnels are therapeutic and restorative. Ultimately, they enable him to be resurrected back into the light, upground, leaving Treefrog, like a discarded doppelgänger, to the shadows of the tunnels (242-3). An ironic compensation for his mental instability, Clarence Nathan's gift of perfect physical balance, his inheritance, (170) determines his survival underground. Safe and secure with his cave positioned high in the tunnel wall, Treefrog's daily movements are dependent upon the demonstration of an agile bodily grace, a mobility that defies gravity in its series of acrobatic swings and precarious tight-rope walking. Enhancing the danger and difficulty of his daring by performing blindfolded, Treefrog negotiates space intuitively: he walks onto the catwalk with his eyelids shut. The narrow beam requires supreme balance below him is a twenty foot drop to the tunnel. He swings his way down to the second beam ten feet below, crouches, then leaps and drops soundlessly to the gravel, knees bent, heart thumping. He opens his eyes to the darkness. (25) Mimetically Treefrog appropriates this eternal nocturnal realm and makes it his own, a part of himself, he feels the darkness, smells it, belongs to it. (23) As from his subterranean perch Treefrog fills the emptiness with the eerie, improvised strains of his harmonica, the stale, dank, tired air of the tunnels, is filtered through the human body, and used to make something strangely ethereal, beautiful, fresh and new: in the miasmic dark, Treefrog played, transforming the air, giving back to the tunnels their original music (2). Treefrog accepts this other spatiality, carved into and out of the urban environment, as a gift, and his performance reciprocates a generosity that signals hope and healing; '[t]he world, he knows, can still spring its small and wondrous surprises (53). McCann presents the tunnels of New York City as an urban wilderness, a lawless frontier. And yes, Treefrog's community is comprised of "demonic subterraneans madmen, perverts, addicts, criminals, murderers," but challenging Blanche Gelfant's account of the lower states, this reverse spatial direction does not necessarily signify a metaphorical mobilisation of values downward into the unexplored depths of moral disorder (417). Rather, in This Side of Brightness, moral disorder is a condition of ordinary, everyday existence aboveground, where violence, chaos, vulnerability, persecution, terror, inequality, kindness, disregard, compassion, indifference, awe, tragedy, compose, socially, [a] landscape of loving and hating. A palpable viciousness in the air. And yet a tenderness too. Something about this part of the world being so alive that its own heart could burst from the accumulated grief. As if it all might suddenly fulminate under the gravity of living. (185) Figured imaginatively through Treefrog the tunnels become an enchanted otherworldly space, '[a] heaven of hell,' (70) in which darkness, solitude and anonymity have the miraculous power to strengthen and absolve. Amidst the waste and detritus a beauty is brutally, painfully laid bare. For Treefrog, for Clarence Nathan, the tunnels are an emotional and psychological sanctuary and their appropriation is a courageous life-affirming act: it is only underground that...men become men, integrated, whole (37). References de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. Gelfant, Blanche. Residence Underground: Recent Fictions of the Subterranean City. The Sewanee Review. 83 (1975): 406-38. McCann, Colum. This Side of Brightness. London: Phoenix House, 1998. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Williams, Marisa. "Going Underground" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.2 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/underground.php>. Chicago Style Williams, Marisa, "Going Underground" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 2 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/underground.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Williams, Marisa. (2002) Going Underground. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(2). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/underground.php> ([your date of access]).

Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto (2005) reconceives transience and domesticity together. This queer Irish road film collapses opposition between mobility and home by uncoupling them from heteronormative structures of gender, desire, and space—male/female, public/private. The film’s protagonist, Patrick “Kitten” Braden (Cillian Murphy), wanders in search of a loved one without whom she does not feel at home. Along the way, the film exposes and exploits the doubleness of both “mobility” and “home” in the traditional road narrative, queering the conventions of the road film to convey the desire and possibilities for an alternative domesticity. In its rerouting of the traditional road plot, Breakfast on Pluto does not follow a hero escaping the obligations of home and family to find autonomy on the road. Instead, the film charts Kitten’s quest to realise a sense of home through trans-domesticity—that is, to find shelter in non-heteronormative, mutual care while in both transient and public spaces.I affix “trans-” to “domesticity” to signal both the queerness and mobility that transform understandings of domestic spaces and practices in Breakfast on Pluto. To clarify, trans-domesticity is not queer assimilation to heteronormative domesticity, nor is it a relegation of queer culture to privatised and demobilised spaces. Rather, trans-domesticity challenges the assumption that all forms of domesticity are inherently normalising and demobilising. In other words, trans-domesticity uncovers tensions and violence swept under the rugs of hegemonic domesticity. Moreover, this alternative domesticity moves between and beyond the terms of gender and spatial oppositions that delimit the normative home.Specifically, “trans-domesticity” names non-normative homemaking practices that arise out of the “desire to feel at home”, a desire that Anne-Marie Fortier identifies in queer diasporic narratives (1890-90). Accordingly, “trans-domesticity” also registers the affective processes that foster the connectedness and belonging of “home” away from private domestic spaces and places of origin, a “rethinking of the concept of home”, which Ed Madden traces in lesbian and gay migrant narratives (175-77). Building on the assumption of queer diaspora theorists “that not only can one be at home in movement, but that movement can be one’s very own home” (Rapport and Dawson 27), trans-domesticity focuses critical attention on the everyday practices and emotional labour that create a home in transience.As Breakfast on Pluto tracks its transgender protagonist’s movement between a small Irish border town, Northern Ireland, and London, the film invokes both a specifically Irish migration and the broader queer diaspora of which it is a part. While trans-domesticity is a recurring theme across a wide range of queer diasporic narratives, in Breakfast on Pluto it also simultaneously drives the plot and functions as a narrative frame. The film begins and ends with Kitten telling her story as she wanders through the streets of Soho and cares for a member of her made family, her friend Charlie’s baby.Although I am concerned with the film adaptation, Patrick McCabe’s “Prelude” to his novel, Breakfast on Pluto (1998), offers a useful point of departure: Patrick “Pussy” Braden’s dream, “as he negotiates the minefields of this world”, is “ending, once and for all, this ugly state of perpetual limbo” and “finding a map which might lead to that place called home” (McCabe x). In such a place, McCabe’s hero might lay “his head beneath a flower-bordered print that bears the words at last ‘You’re home’”(McCabe xi). By contrast, the film posits that “home” is never a “place” apart from “the minefields of this world”, and that while being in transit and in limbo might be a perpetual state, it is not necessarily an ugly one.Jordan’s film thus addresses the same questions as does Susan Fraiman in her book Extreme Domesticity: “But what about those for whom dislocation is not back story but main event? Those who, having pulled themselves apart, realize no timely arrival at a place of their own, so that being not-unpacked is an ongoing condition?” (155). Through her trans-domestic shelter-making and caregiving practices, Kitten enacts “home” in motion and in public spaces, and thereby realises the elision in the flower-bordered print in McCabe’s “Prelude” (xi), which does not assure “You are at home” but, rather, “You are home”.From Housed to Trans-Domestic SubjectivitySelf and home are equated in the dominant cultural narratives of Western modernity, but “home” in such formulations is assumed to be a self-owned, self-contained space. Psychoanalytic theorist Carl Jung describes this Ur-house as “a concretization of the individuation process, […] a symbol of psychic wholeness” (225). Philosopher Gaston Bachelard sees in the home “the topography of our intimate being”, a structure that “concentrates being within limits that protect” (xxxii). However, as historian Carolyn Steedman suggests, the mythic house that has become “the stuff of our ‘cultural psychology,’ the system of everyday metaphors by which we see ourselves”, is far from universal; rather, it reflects “the topography of the houses” of those who stand “in a central relationship to the dominant culture” (75, 17).For others, the lack of such housing correlates with political marginalisation, as the house functions as both a metaphor and material marker for culturally-recognised selfhood. As cultural geographer John Agnew argues, in capitalist societies the self-owned home is both a sign of autonomous individuality and a prerequisite for full political subjectivity (60). Philosopher Rosi Braidotti asserts that this figuration of subjectivity in “the phallo-Eurocentric master code” treats as “disposable” the “bodies of women, youth, and others who are racialised or marked off by age, gender, sexuality, and income” (6). These bodies are “reduced to marginality” and subsequently “experience dispossession of their embodied and embedded selves, in a political economy of repeated and structurally enforced eviction” (Braidotti 6).To shift the meaning of “home” and the intimately-linked “self” from a privately-owned, autonomous structure to trans-domesticity, to an ethos of care enacted even, and especially in, transient and public spaces, is not to romanticise homelessness or to deny the urgent necessity of material shelter. Breakfast on Pluto certainly does not allow viewers to do either. Rather, the figure of a trans-domestic self, like Braidotti’s “nomadic subject”, has the potential to challenge and transform the terms of power relations. Those now on the margins might then be seen as equally-embodied selves and full political subjects with the right to shelter and care.Such a political project also entails recognising and revaluing—without appropriating and demobilising—existing trans-domesticity. As Fraiman argues, “domesticity” must be “map[ped] from the margins” in order to include the homemaking practices of gender rebels and the precariously housed, of castaways and outcasts (4-5). This alternative map would allow “outsiders to normative domesticity” to “claim domesticity while wrenching it away from such things as compulsory heterosexuality […] and the illusion of a safely barricaded life” (Fraiman 4-5). Breakfast on Pluto shares in this re-mapping work by exposing the violence embedded in heteronormative domestic structures, and by charting the radical political potential of trans-domesticity.Unsettling HousesIn the traditional road narrative, “home” tends to be a static, confining structure from which the protagonist escapes, a space that then functions as “a structuring absence” on the road (Robertson 271). Bachelard describes this normative structure as a “dream house” that constitutes “a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability” (17); the house functions, Henri Lefebvre argues, as “the epitome of immobility” (92). Whether the dream is to escape and/or to return, “to write of houses”, as Adam Hanna asserts, “is to raise ideas of shelters that are fixed and secure” (113).Breakfast on Pluto quickly gives lie to those expectations. Kitten is adopted by Ma Braden (Ruth McCabe), a single woman who raises Kitten and her adopted sister in domestic space that is connected to, and part of, a public house. That spatial contiguity undermines any illusion of privacy and security, as is evident in the scene in which a school-aged Kitten, who thought herself safely home alone and thus able to dress in her mother’s and sister’s clothes, is discovered in the act by her mother and sister from the pub’s street entrance. Further, the film lays bare the built-in mechanisms of surveillance and violence that reinforce heteronormative, patriarchal structures. After discovering Kitten in women’s clothes, Ma Braden violently scrubs her clean and whacks her with a brush until Kitten says, “I’m a boy, not a girl”. The public/house space facilitates Ma Braden’s close monitoring of Kitten thereafter.As a young writer in secondary school, Kitten satirises the violence within the hegemonic home by narrating the story of the rape of her biological mother, Eily Bergin (Eva Birthistle), by Kitten’s father, Father Liam (Liam Neeson) in a scene of hyper-domesticity set in the rectory kitchen. As Patrick Mullen notes, “the rendition of the event follows the bubble-gum logic and tone of 1950s Hollywood culture” (130). The relationship between the ideal domesticity thereby invoked and the rape then depicted exposes the sexual violence for what it is: not an external violation of the double sanctity of church and home space, but rather an internal and even intrinsic violence that reinforces and is shielded by the power structures from which normative domesticity is never separate.The only sense of home that seems to bind Kitten to her place of origin is based in her affective bonds to friends Charlie (Ruth Negga) and Lawrence (Seamus Reilly). When Lawrence is killed by a bomb, Kitten is no longer at home, and she leaves town to search for the “phantom” mother she never knew. The impetus for Kitten’s wandering, then, is connection rather than autonomy, and neither the home she leaves, nor the sense of home she seeks, are fixed structures.Mobile Homes and Queering of the Western RoadBreakfast on Pluto tracks how the oppositions that seem to structure traditional road films—such as that between home and mobility, and between domestic and open spaces—continually collapse. The film invokes the “cowboy and Indian” mythology from which the Western road narrative descends (Boyle 19), but to different ends: to capture a desire for non-heteronormative affective bonds rather than “lone ranger” autonomy, and to convey a longing for domesticity on the trail, for a home that is both mobile and open. Across the past century of Irish fiction and film, “cowboy and Indian” mythology has often intersected with queer wandering, from James Joyce’s Dubliners story “An Encounter” (1914) to Lenny Abrahamson’s film Adam & Paul (2004). In this tradition, Breakfast on Pluto queers “cowboy and Indian” iconography to convey an alternative conception of domesticity and home. The prevailing ethos in the film’s queered Western scenes is of trans-domesticity—of inclusion and care during transience and in open spaces. After bar bouncers exclude Kitten and friends because of her transgenderism and Lawrence’s Down syndrome, “The Border Knights” (hippie-bikers-cum-cowboys) ride to their rescue and bring them to their temporary home under the stars. Once settled around the campfire, the first biker shares his philosophy with a cuddled-up Kitten: “When I’m riding my hog, you think I’m riding the road? No way, man. I’m travelling from the past into the future with a druid at my back”. “Druid man or woman?” Kitten asks. “That doesn’t matter”, the biker clarifies, “What matters is the journey”. What matters is not place as fixed destination or gender as static difference, but rather the practice of travelling with open relationships to space, to time, and to others. The bikers welcome all to their fire and include both Kitten and Lawrence in their sharing of jokes and joints. The only exclusion is of reference to political violence, which Charlie’s boyfriend, Irwin (Laurence Kinlan), tries to bring into the conversation.Further, Kitten uses domesticity to try to establish a place for herself while on the road with “Billy Hatchett and The Mohawks”, the touring band that picks her up when she leaves Ma Braden’s. As Mullen notes, “Kitten literally works herself into the band by hand sewing a ‘squaw’ outfit to complement the group’s glam-rock Native American image” (Mullen 141). The duet that Kitten performs with Billy (Gavin Friday), a song about a woman inviting “a wandering man” to share the temporary shelter of her campfire, invokes trans-domesticity. But the film intercuts their performance with scenes of violent border-policing: first, by British soldiers at a checkpoint who threaten the group and boast about the “13 less to deal with” in Derry, and then by members of the Republican Prisoners Welfare Association, who throw cans at the group and yell them off stage. A number of critics have noted the postcolonial implications of Breakfast on Pluto’s use of Native American iconography, which in these intercut scenes clearly raises the national stakes of constructions of domestic belonging (see, for instance, Winston 153-71). In complementary ways, the film queers “cowboy and Indian” mythology to reimagine “mobility” and “home” together.After Kitten is forced out by the rest of the band, Billy sets her up in a caravan, a mobile home left to him by his mother. Though Billy “wouldn’t exactly call it a house”, Kitten sees in it her first chance at a Bachelardian “dream house”: she calls it a “house of dreams and longing” and cries, “Oh, to have a little house, to own the hearth, stool, and all”. Kitten ecstatically begins to tidy the place, performing what Fraiman terms a “hyper-investment in homemaking” that functions “as compensation for domestic deprivation” (20).Aisling Cormack suggests that Kitten’s hyper-investment in homemaking signals the film’s “radical disengagement with politics” to a “femininity that is inherently apolitical” (169-70). But that reading holds only if viewers assume a gendered, spatial divide between public and private, and between the political and the domestic. As Fraiman asserts, “the political meaning of fixating on domestic arrangements is more complex […] For the poor or transgendered person, the placeless immigrant or the woman on her own, aspiring to a safe, affirming home doesn’t reinforce hierarchical social relations but is pitched, precisely, against them” (20).Trans-Domesticity as Political ActEven as Kitten invokes the idea of a Bachelardian dream house, she performs a trans-domesticity that exposes the falseness of the gendered, spatial oppositions assumed to structure the normative home. Her domesticity is not an apolitical retreat; rather, it is pitched, precisely, against the violence that public/private and political/domestic oppositions enable within the house, as well as beyond it. As she cleans, Kitten discovers that violence is literally embedded in her caravan home when she finds a cache of Irish Republican Army (IRA) guns under the floor. After a bomb kills Lawrence, Kitten throws the guns into a reservoir, a defiant act that she describes to the IRA paramilitaries who come looking for the guns as “spring cleaning”. Cormack asserts that Kitten “describing her perilous destruction of the guns in terms of domestic labor” strips it “of all political significance” (179). I argue instead that it demonstrates the radical potential of trans-domesticity, of an ethos of care-taking and shelter-making asserted in public and political spaces. Kitten’s act is not apolitical, though it is decidedly anti-violence.From the beginning of Breakfast on Pluto, Kitten’s trans-domesticity exposes the violence structurally embedded in heteronormative domestic ideology. Additionally, the film’s regular juxtaposition of scenes of Kitten’s homemaking practices with scenes of political violence demonstrates that no form of domesticity functions as a private, apolitical retreat from “the minefields of this world” (McCabe x). This latter counterpoint throws into relief the political significance of Kitten’s trans-domesticity. Her domestic practices are her means of resisting and transforming the structural violence that poses an existential threat to marginalised and dispossessed people.After Kitten is accused of being responsible for an IRA bombing in London, the ruthless, violent interrogation of Kitten by British police officers begins to break down her sense of self. Throughout this brutal scene, Kitten compulsively straightens the chairs and tidies the room, and she responds to her interrogators with kindness and even affection. Fraiman’s theorisation of “extreme domesticity” helps to articulate how Kitten’s homemaking in carceral space—she calls it “My Sweet Little Cell”—is an “urgent” act that, “in the wake of dislocation”, can mean “safety, sanity, and self-expression; survival in the most basic sense” (25). Cormack reads Kitten’s reactions in this scene as “masochistic” and the male police officers’ nurturing response as of a piece with the film’s “more-feminine-than-feminine disengagement from political realities” (185-89). However, I disagree: Kitten’s trans-domesticity is a political act that both sustains her within structures that would erase her and converts officers of the state to an ethos of care and shelter. Inspector Routledge, for example, gently carries Kitten back to her cell, and after her release, PC Wallis ensures that she is safely (if not privately) housed with a cooperatively-run peep show, the address at which an atoning Father Liam locates her in London.After Kitten and a pregnant Charlie are burned out of the refuge that they temporarily find with Father Liam, Kitten and Charlie return to London, where Charlie’s baby is born soon after into the trans-domesticity that opens the film. Rejoining the story’s frame, Breakfast on Pluto ends close to where it begins: Kitten and the baby meet Charlie outside a London hospital, where Kitten sees Eily Bergin with her new son, Patrick. Instead of meeting where their paths intersect, the two families pass each other and turn in opposite directions. Kitten now knows that hers is both a different road and a different kind of home. “Home”, then, is not a place gained once and for all. Rather, home is a perpetual practice that does not separate one from the world, but can create the shelter of mutual care as one wanders through it.The Radical Potential and Structural Limits of Trans-DomesticityBreakfast on Pluto demonstrates the agency that trans-domesticity can afford in the lives of marginalised and dispossessed individuals, as well as the power of the structures that militate against its broader realisation. The radical political potential of trans-domesticity manifests in the transformation in the two police officers’ relational practices. Kitten’s trans-domesticity also inspires a reformation in Father Liam, the film’s representative of the Catholic Church and a man whose relationship to others transmutes from sexual violence and repressive secrecy to mutual nurturance and inclusive love. Although these individual conversions do not signify changes in structures of power, they do allow viewers to imagine the possibility of a state and a church that cherish, shelter, and care for all people equally. The film’s ending conveys this sense of fairy-tale-like possibility through its Disney-esque chattering birds and the bubble-gum pop song, “Sugar Baby Love”.In the end, the sense of hopefulness that closes Breakfast on Pluto coexists with the reality that dominant power structures will not recognise Kitten’s trans-domestic subjectivity and family, and that those structures will work to contain any perceived threat, just as the Catholic Church banishes the converted Father Liam to Kilburn Parish. That Kitten and Charlie nevertheless realise a clear contentment in themselves and in their made family demonstrates the vital importance of trans-domesticity and other forms of “extreme domesticity” in the lives of those who wander.ReferencesAgnew, John. “Home Ownership and Identity in Capitalist Societies.” Housing and Identity: Cross Cultural Perspectives. Ed. James S. Duncan. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982. 60–97.Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. 1957. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.Boyle, Kevin Jon, ed. Rear View Mirror: Automobile Images and American Identities. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. 2nd ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.Breakfast on Pluto. Dir. Neil Jordan. Pathé Pictures International, 2005.Cormack, Aisling B. “Toward a ‘Post-Troubles’ Cinema? The Troubled Intersection of Political Violence and Gender in Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game and Breakfast on Pluto.” Éire-Ireland 49.1–2 (2014): 164–92.Fortier, Anne-Marie. “Queer Diaspora.” Handbook of Lesbian and Gay Studies. Eds. Diane Richardson and Steven Seidman. London: Sage Publishing, 2002. 183–97.Fraiman, Susan. Extreme Domesticity: A View from the Margins. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.Hanna, Adam. Northern Irish Poetry and Domestic Space. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Jung, Carl. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. 1957. Ed. Aniela Jaffe. Trans. Clara Winston and Richard Winston. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Social Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.Madden, Ed. “Queering the Irish Diaspora: David Rees and Padraig Rooney.” Éire-Ireland 47.1–2 (2012): 172–200.McCabe, Patrick. Breakfast on Pluto. London: Picador, 1998.Mullen, Patrick R. The Poor Bugger’s Tool: Irish Modernism, Queer Labor, and Postcolonial History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.Rapport, Nigel, and Andrew Dawson. Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of ‘Home’ in a World of Movement. Oxford: Berg, 1998.Robertson, Pamela. “Home and Away: Friends of Dorothy on the Road in Oz.” The Road Movie Book. Eds. Steven Cohen and Ina Rae Hark. London: Routledge, 1997. 271–306.Steedman, Carolyn. Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987.Winston, Greg. “‘Reluctant Indians’: Irish Identity and Racial Masquerade.” Irish Modernism and the Global Primitive. Eds. Maria McGarrity and Claire A. Culleton. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 153–71.

Australian suburbia, historically and culturally, has been viewed as a feminised domain, associated with the domestic and family, routine and order. Where “the city is coded as a masculine and disorderly space… suburbia, as a realm of domesticity and the family, is coded as a feminine and disciplinary space” (Wilson 46). This article argues how the treatment of suburbia in fiction as “feminine” has impacted not only on the representation and development of the character of the “suburban female”, but also on the shape and form of her narrative journeys. Suburbia’s subordination as domestic and everyday, a restrictive realm of housework and child rearing, refers to the anti-suburban critique and establishes the dichotomy of suburbia/feminine/domesticity in contrast to bush or city/masculine/freedom as first observed by Marilyn Lake in her analysis of 1890s Australia. Despite the fact that suburbia necessarily contains the “masculine” as well as the “feminine”, the “feminine” dominates to such an extent that positive masculine traits are threatened there. In social commentary and also literature, the former is viewed negatively as a state from which to escape. As Tim Rowse suggests, “women, domesticity = spiritual starvation. (Men, wide open spaces, achievement = heroism of the Australian spirit)” (208). In twentieth-century Australian fiction, this is especially the case for male characters, the preservation of whose masculinity often depends on a flight from the suburbs to elsewhere—the bush, the city, or overseas. In Patrick White’s The Tree Of Man (1955), for example, During identifies the recurrent male character of the “tear-away” who “flee(s) domesticity and family life” (96). Novelist George Johnston also establishes a satirical depiction of suburbia as both suffocatingly feminine and as a place to escape at any cost. For example, in My Brother Jack (1964), David Meredith “craves escape from the ‘shabby suburban squalor’ into which he was born” (Gerster 566). Suburbia functions as a departure point for the male protagonist who must discard any remnants of femininity, imposed on him by his suburban childhood, before embarking upon narratives of adventure and maturation as far away from the suburbs as possible. Thus, flight becomes essential to the development of male protagonist and proliferates as a narrative trajectory in Australian fiction. Andrew McCann suggests that its prevalence establishes a fictional “struggle with and escape from the suburb as a condition of something like a fully developed personality” (Decomposing 56-57). In this case, any literary attempt to transform the “suburban female”, a character inscribed by her gender and her locale, without recourse to flight appears futile. However, McCann’s assertion rests on a literary tradition of male flight from suburbia, not female. A narrative of female flight is a relatively recent phenomenon, influenced by the second wave feminism of the 1970s and 1980s. For most of the twentieth century, the suburban female typically remained in suburbia, a figure of neglect, satire, and exploitation. A reading of twentieth-century Australian fiction until the 1970s implies that flight from suburbia was not a plausible option for the average “suburban female”. Rather, it is the exceptional heroine, such as Teresa in Christina Stead’s For Love Alone (1945), who is brave, ambitious, or foolish enough to leave, and when she does there were often negative consequences. For most however, suburbia was a setting where she belonged despite its negative attributes. These attributes of conformity and boredom, repetition, and philistinism, as presented by proponents of anti-suburbanism, are mainly depicted as problematic to male characters, not female. Excluded from narratives of flight, for most of the twentieth-century the suburban female typically remained in suburbia, a figure of neglect, satire, and even exploitation, her stories mostly untold. The character of the suburban female emerges out of the suburban/feminine/domestic dichotomy as a recurrent, albeit negative, character in Australian fiction. As Rowse states, the negative image of suburbia is transferred to an equally negative image of women (208). At best, the suburban female is a figure of mild satire; at worst, a menacing threat to masculine values. Male writers George Johnston, Patrick White and, later, David Ireland, portrayed the suburban female as a negative figure, or at least an object of satire, in the life of a male protagonist attempting to escape suburbia and all it stood for. In his satirical novels and plays, for example, Patrick White makes “the unspoken assumption… that suburbia is an essentially female domain” (Gerster 567), exemplifying narrow female stereotypes who “are dumb and age badly, ending up in mindless, usually dissatisfied, maternity and domesticity” (During 95). Feminist Anne Summers condemns White for his portrayal of women which she interprets as a “means of evading having to cope with women as unique and diverse individuals, reducing them instead to a sexist conglomerate”, and for his use of women to “represent suburban stultification” (88). Typically “wife” or “mother”, the suburban female is often used as a convenient device of oppositional resistance to a male lead, while being denied her own voice or story. In Johnston’s My Brother Jack (1964), for example, protagonist David Meredith contrasts “the subdued vigour of fulfillment tempered by a powerful and deeply-lodged serenity” (215) of motherhood displayed by Jack’s wife Shelia with the “smart and mannish” (213) Helen, but nothing deeper is revealed about the inner lives of these female characters. Feminist scholars identify a failure to depict the suburban female as more than a useful stereotype, partially attributing the cause of this failure to a surfeit of patriarchal stories featuring adventuresome male heroes and set in the outback or on foreign battlefields. Summers states how “more written words have been devoted to creating, and then analysing and extolling… [the] Australian male than to any other single facet of Australian life” (82-83). Where she is more active, the suburban female is a malignant force, threatening to undermine masculine goals of self-realisation or achievement, or at her worst, to wholly emasculate the male protagonist such that he is incapable of escape. Even here the motivations behind her actions are not revealed and she appears two-dimensional, viewed only in relation to her destructive effect on the weakened male protagonist. In her criticism of David Ireland’s The Glass Canoe (1976), Joan Kirkby observes how “the suburbs are populated with real women who are represented in the text as angry mothers and wives or simply as the embodiment of voraciously feral sexuality” (5). In those few instances where the suburban female features as more than an accessory to the male narrative, she lacks the courage and inner strength to embark upon her own journey out of suburbia. Instead, she is depicted as a victim, misunderstood and miserable, entrapped by the suburban milieu to which she is meant to belong but, for some unexplored reason, does not. The inference is that this particular suburban female is atypical, potentially flawed in her inability to find contentment within a region strongly designated her own. The unhappy suburban female is therefore tragic, or at least pitiable, languishing in a suburban environment that she loathes, often satirised for her futile resistance to the status quo. Rarely is she permitted the masculine recourse of flight. In those exceptional instances where she does leave, however, she is unlikely to find what she is looking for. A subsequent return to the place of childhood, most often situated in suburbia, is a recurrent narrative in many stories of Australian female protagonist, but less so the male protagonist. Although this mistreatment of the suburban female is most prevalent in fiction by male writers, female writers were also criticised for failing to give a true and authentic voice to her character, regardless of the broader question of whether writers should be truthful in their characterisations. For example, Summers criticises Henry Handel Richardson as “responsible for, if not creating, then at least providing a powerful reinforcement to the idea that women as wives are impediments to male self-realisation” with characters who “reappear, with the monotonous regularity of the weekly wash, as stereotyped and passive suburban housewives” (87-88). All this changed, however, with the arrival of second wave feminism leading to a proliferation of stories of female exodus from the suburbs. A considered portrait of the life of the suburban female in suburbia was neglected in favour of a narrative journey; a trend attributable in part to a feminist polemic that granted her freedom, adventure, and a story so long as she did not dare choose to stay. During the second wave feminism of the 1970s and 1980s, women were urged by leading figures such as Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer to abandon ascribed roles of housewife and mother, led typically in the suburbs, in pursuit of new freedoms and adventures. As Lesley Johnson and Justine Lloyd note, “in exhorting women to ‘leave home’ and find their fulfillment in the world of work, early second wave feminists provided a life story through which women could understand themselves as modern individuals” (154) and it is this “life story” which recurs in women’s fiction of the time. Women writers, many of whom identified as feminist, mirrored these trajectories of flight from suburbia in their novels, transplanting the suburban female from her suburban setting to embark upon “new” narratives of self-discovery. The impact of second wave feminism upon the literary output of Australian women writers during the 1970s and 1980s has been firmly established by feminist scholars Johnson, Lloyd, Lake, and Susan Sheridan, who were also active participants in the movement. Sheridan argues that there has been a strong “relationship of women’s cultural production to feminist ideas and politics” (Faultlines xi) and Johnson identifies a “history of feminism as an awakening” at the heart of these “life stories” (11). Citing Mary Morris, feminist Janet Woolf remarks flight as a means by which a feminine history of stagnation is remedied: “from Penelope to the present, women have waited… If we grow weary of waiting, we can go on a journey” (xxii). The appeal of these narratives may lie in attempts by their female protagonists to find new ways of being outside the traditional limits of a domestic, commonly suburban, existence. Flight, or movement, features as a recurrent narrative mode by which these alternative realities are configured, either by mimicking or subverting traditional narrative forms. Indeed, selection of the appropriate narrative form for these emancipatory journeys differed between writers and became the subject of vigorous, feminist and literary debate. For some feminists, the linear narrative was the only true path to freedom for the female protagonist. Following the work of Carolyn G. Heilbrun and Elaine Showalter, Joy Hooton observes how some feminist critics privileged “the integrated ego and the linear destiny, regarding women’s difference in self-realization as a failure or deprivation” (90). Women writers such as Barbara Hanrahan adopted the traditional linear trajectory, previously reserved for the male protagonist as bushman or soldier, explorer or drifter, to liberate the “suburban female”. These stories feature the female protagonist trading a stultifying life in the suburbs for the city, overseas or, less typically, the outback. During these geographical journeys, she is transformed from her narrow suburban self to a more actualised, worldly self in the mode of a traditional, linear Bildungsroman. For example, Hanrahan’s semi-autobiographical debut The Scent of Eucalyptus (1973) is a story of escape from oppressive suburbia, “concentrating on that favourite Australian theme, the voyage overseas” (Gelder and Salzman, Diversity 63). Similarly, Sea-green (1974) features a “rejection of domestic drabness in favour of experience in London” (Goodwin 252) and Kewpie Doll (1984) is another narrative of flight from the suburbs, this time via pursuit of “an artistic life” (253). In these and other novels, the act of relocation to a specific destination is necessary to transformation, with the inference that the protagonist could not have become what she is at the end of the story without first leaving the suburbs. However, use of this linear narrative, which is also coincidentally anti-suburban, was criticised by Summers (86) for being “masculinist”. To be truly free, she argued, the female protagonist needed to forge her own unique paths to liberation, rather than relying on established masculine lines. Evidence of a “new” non-linear narrative in novels by women writers was interpreted by feminist and literary scholars Gillian Whitlock, Margaret Henderson, Ann Oakley, Sheridan, Johnson, and Summers, as an attempt to capture the female experience more convincingly than the linear form that had been used to recount stories of the journeying male as far back as Homer. Typifying the link between the second wave feminism and fiction, Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip features Nora’s nomadic, non-linear “flights” back and forth across Melbourne’s inner suburbs. Nora’s promiscuity belies her addiction to romantic love that compromises her, even as she struggles to become independent and free. In this way, Nora’s quest for freedom­—fragmented, cyclical, repetitive, impeded by men— mirrors Garner’s “attempt to capture certain areas of female experience” (Gelder and Salzman, Diversity 55), not accessible via a linear narrative. Later, in Honour and Other People’s Children (1980) and The Children’s Bach (1984), the protagonists’ struggles to achieve self-actualisation within a more domesticated, family setting perhaps cast doubt on the efficacy of the feminist call to abandon family, motherhood, and all things domestic in preference for the masculinist tradition of emancipatory flight. Pam Gilbert, for instance, reads The Children’s Bach as “an extremely perceptive analysis of a woman caught within spheres of domesticity, nurturing, loneliness, and sexuality” (18) via the character of “protected suburban mum, Athena” (19). The complexity of this characterisation of a suburban female belies the anti-suburban critique by not resorting to satire or stereotype, but by engaging deeply with a woman’s life inside suburbia. It also allows that flight from suburbia is not always possible, or even desired. Also seeming to contradict the plausibility of linear flight, Jessica Anderson’s Tirra Lirra by the River (1978), features (another) Nora returning to her childhood Brisbane after a lifetime of flight; first from her suburban upbringing and then from a repressive marriage to the relative freedoms of London. The poignancy of the novel, set towards the end of the protagonist’s life, rests in Nora’s inability to find a true sense of belonging, despite her migrations. She “has spent most of her life waiting, confined to houses or places that restrict her, places she feels she does not belong to, including her family home, the city of Brisbane, her husband’s house, Australia itself” (Gleeson-White 184). Thus, although Nora’s life can be read as “the story of a very slow emergence from a doomed attempt to lead a conventional, married life… into an independent existence in London” (Gelder and Salzman, Diversity 65), the novel suggests that the search for belonging—at least for Australian women—is problematic. Moreover, any narrative of female escape from suburbia is potentially problematic due to the gendering of suburban experience as feminine. The suburban female who leaves suburbia necessarily rejects not only her “natural” place of belonging, but domesticity as a way of being and, to some extent, even her sex. In her work on memoir, Hooton identifies a stark difference between the shape of female and male biography to argue that women’s experience of life is innately non-linear. However, the use of non-linear narrative by feminist fiction writers of the second wave was arguably more conscious, even political in seeking a new, untainted form through which to explore the female condition. It was a powerful notion, arguably contributing to a golden age of women’s writing by novelists Helen Garner, Barbara Hanrahan, Jessica Anderson, and others. It also exerted a marked effect on fiction by Kate Grenville, Amanda Lohrey, and Janette Turner Hospital, as well as grunge novelists, well into the 1990s. By contrast, other canonical, albeit older, women writers of the time, Thea Astley and Elizabeth Jolley, neither of whom identified as feminist (Fringe 341; Neuter 196), do not seek to “rescue” the suburban female from her milieu. Like Patrick White, Astley seems, at least superficially, to perpetuate narrow stereotypes of the suburban female as “mindless consumers of fashion” and/or “signifiers of sexual disorder” (Sheridan, Satirist 262). Although flight is permitted those female characters who “need to ‘vanish’ if they are to find some alternative to narrow-mindedness and social oppression” (Gelder and Salzman, Celebration 186), it has little to do with feminism. As Brian Matthews attests of Astley’s work, “nothing could be further from the world-view of the second wave feminist writers of the 1980s” (76) and indeed her female characters are generally less sympathetic than those inhabiting novels by the “feminist” writers. Jolley also leaves the female protagonist to fend for herself, with a more optimistic, forceful vision of “female characters who, in their sheer eccentricity, shed any social expectations” to inhabit “a realm empowered by the imagination” (Gelder and Salzman, Celebration 194). If Jolley’s suburban females desire escape then they must earn it, not by direct or shifting relocations, but via other, more extreme and often creative, modes of transformation. These two writers however, were exceptional in their resistance to the influence of second wave feminism. Thus, three narrative categories emerge in which the suburban female may be transformed: linear flight from suburbia, non-linear flight from suburbia, or non-flight whereby the protagonist remains inside suburbia throughout the entire novel. Evidence of a rejection of the flight narrative by contemporary Australian women writers may signal a re-examination of the suburban female within, not outside, her suburban setting. It may also reveal a weakening of the influence of both second wave feminism and anti-suburban critiques on this much maligned character of Australian fiction, and on suburbia as a fictional setting. References Anderson, Jessica. Tirra Lirra by the River. Melbourne: Macmillan, 1978. Astley, Thea. “Writing as a Neuter: Extracts from Interview by Candida Baker.” Eight Voices of the Eighties: Stories, Journalism and Criticism by Australian Women Writers. Ed. Gillian Whitlock. St Lucia, Qld: U of Queensland P, 1989. 195-6. Durez, Jean. “Laminex Dreams: Women, Suburban Comfort and the Negation of Meanings.” Meanjin 53.1 (1994): 99-110. During, Simon. Patrick White. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1996. Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1965. Garner, Helen. Honour and Other People’s Children. Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin, 1982. ———. The Children’s Bach. Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1984. ———. Monkey Grip. Camberwell, Vic.: Penguin, 2009. Gelder, Ken, and Paul Salzman. The New Diversity. Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1989. ———. After the Celebration. Melbourne: UP, 2009. Gerster, Robin. “Gerrymander: The Place of Suburbia in Australian Fiction.” Meanjin 49.3 (1990): 565-75. Gilbert, Pam. Coming Out from Under: Contemporary Australian Women Writers. London: Pandora Press, 1988. Gleeson-White, Jane. Australian Classics: 50 Great Writers and Their Celebrated Works. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2007. Goodwin, Ken. A History of Australian Literature. Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1986. Greer, Germain. The Female Eunuch. London: Granada, 1970. Hanrahan, Barbara. The Scent of Eucalyptus. St Lucia, Qld: U of Queensland P, 1973. ———. Sea-Green. London: Chatto & Windus, 1974. ———. Kewpie Doll. London: Hogarth Press, 1989. Hooton, Joy. Stories of Herself When Young: Autobiographies of Childhood by Australian Women Writers. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1990. Ireland, David. The Glass Canoe. Melbourne: Macmillan, 1976. Johnson, Lesley. The Modern Girl: Girlhood and Growing Up. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1993. ———, and Justine Lloyd. Sentenced to Everyday Life: Feminism and the Housewife. New York: Berg, 2004. Johnston, George. My Brother Jack. London: Collins/Fontana, 1967. Jolley, Elizabeth. “Fringe Dwellers: Extracts from Interview by Jennifer Ellison.” Eight Voices of the Eighties: Stories, Journalism and Criticism by Australian Women Writers. Ed. Gillian Whitlock. St Lucia, Qld: U of Queensland P, 1989. 334-44. Kirkby, Joan. “The Pursuit of Oblivion: In Flight from Suburbia.” Australian Literary Studies 18.4 (1998): 1-19. Lake, Marilyn. Getting Equal: The History of Australian Feminism. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1999. McCann, Andrew. “Decomposing Suburbia: Patrick White’s Perversity.” Australian Literary Studies 18.4 (1998): 56-71. Matthews, Brian. “Before Feminism… After Feminism.” Thea Astley’s Fictional Worlds. Eds. Susan Sheridan and Paul Genoni. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006. 72-6. Rowse, Tim. Australian Liberalism and National Character. Melbourne: Kibble Books, 1978. Saegert, Susan. “Masculine Cities and Feminine Suburbs: Polarized Ideas, Contradictory Realities.” Signs 5.3 (1990): 96-111. Sheridan, Susan. Along the Faultlines: Sex, Race and Nation in Australian Women’s Writing 1880s–1930s. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1995. ———. “Reading the Women’s Weekly: Feminism, Femininity and Popular Culture.” Transitions: New Australian Feminisms. Eds. Barbara Caine and Rosemary Pringle. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1995. ———. "Thea Astley: A Woman among the Satirists of Post-War Modernity." Australian Feminist Studies 18.42 (2003): 261-71. Sowden, Tim. “Streets of Discontent: Artists and Suburbia in the 1950s.” Beasts of Suburbia: Reinterpreting Cultures in Australian Suburbs. Eds. Sarah Ferber, Chris Healy, and Chris McAuliffe. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1994. 76-93. Stead, Christina. For Love Alone. Sydney: Collins/Angus and Robertson, 1990. Summers, Anne. Damned Whores and God’s Police. Melbourne: Penguin, 2002. White, Patrick. The Tree of Man. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1956. ———. A Fringe of Leaves. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977. Wolff, Janet. Resident Alien: Feminist Cultural Criticism. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995.

Apart from its negative literary connotations, the notion of adaptation generally carries an optimistic connotation in the sense that it is most often associated with an improved outcome in the face of challenging circumstances. However, this is not an inevitable response to an adaptive imperative: there are often indicators of significant failure to adapt. In short, there is often evidence of maladaption. Examples include the spiralling rates of heart disease, obesity and adult-onset diabetes that have characterised richer western populations over the past half-century. Arguably, the West as a whole has failed to adapt to the health opportunities provided by plentiful food supplies. Instead, a growing dietary emphasis upon refined carbohydrates (including simple sugars) and animal-sourced protein (including dairy foods) is harming these populations. This paper applies the metaphors of adaptation and maladaptation to the development of a new sense of self following a diagnosis of heart disease. There is a range of evidence to suggest that newly-diagnosed heart patients resist accepting the implications of lifestyle-related heart disease. Such a lack of acceptance can impact upon short-term health, exercise and diet priorities, as well as upon long-term life expectancy. While this paper does not describe a medical, but a cultural approach to the well-adapted self as heart patient, it is also important to stress that there is a significant range of heart conditions that are not lifestyle related. Counterproductively, the links increasingly made between lifestyle choices and heart disease mean that many heart patients feel “punished” by people with healthy hearts who seem to assume that the patient is to “blame”. Nonetheless, there are few heart patients who cannot positively impact their health and recovery prospects by improving lifestyle choices. Ladwig and his research team argue that the challenge lies in getting heart patients to take their illness seriously without precipitating a traumatically negative view of the experience of illness. Such a negative view may, in itself, facilitate poor outcomes. These perspectives indicate that issues of communication and identity—that is, cultural imperatives—are important determinants of a healthy recovery. This paper records and analyses recent research relating to heart patients who are members of an online support community, HeartNET. HeartNET is an experimental Website funded by two Australian Research Council Linkage Grants (2004-10), with the National Heart Foundation (WA Division) as the industry partner. The authors/researchers speculate that engagement in the HeartNET online community enables the positive adaptation of an individual’s sense of self (rather than the fostering of a maladaptive identity, including a denial of the implications of heart disease that can lead to behaviours which promote morbidity). Early indications are that supportive online interactions can foster the development of a positive persona of a “heart patient“. At the optimistic end of the response-spectrum, a positive heart patient is a person who is keenly motivated to maximise their health and—if possible—halt or reverse (see, for example, Esselstyn) the progress of their disease. Such a response can be constituted and enhanced via supportive online interactions. Insofar as medical commentators theorise about reactions to a life-changing health diagnosis, this tends to be in terms of self-image (see, for example, Petrie et al.) and sometimes includes Kubler-Ross’s stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. The results reported here look instead at issues of adapting to a new identity as “heart patient” that potentially involves positive commitment to improved health, partly as a result of giving and receiving social support. The rationale behind this perspective is influenced by significant evidence that compliance with the therapeutic regimes recommended and prescribed by physicians is lacking. It is speculated that patients are enacting a denial of the importance of the health challenges confronting them. For example, Hugtenburg et al. found that “of 232 first-time chronic medicine prescriptions [repeats], 132 were not collected at all (46.1%) or too late (11%).” Noting that 46% of the 232 prescriptions studied were for cardiovascular drugs (353), Hugtenburg et al. conclude that “This kind of non-compliance may result in an increased health risk as well as constituting a waste of a large amount of money” (352). Clearly, more emphasis needs to be placed on communicating constructively with patients and supporting the evolution and reconstitution of an identity that includes positive constructions of self-as-heart-patient and that works to facilitate recovery. The Website that enables the HeartNET community was developed by the National Heart Foundation (WA Branch: NHFWA) and Edith Cowan University (ECU) as part of an ARC-Linkage grant, 2004-6 “Evaluating the effectiveness of online support in building community, promoting healthy behaviours and supporting philanthropy”. The first three months of the Website’s operation (when the tiny number of postings trickled away and then dried up completely) are reported in Bonniface et al. (“Affect”) and graphed below (see Figure 1). They followed on from a careful process of recruitment via databases of existing heart patients that were held by the NHFWA and supportive cardiologists. Participants were approached to gain ethical consent, and would-be Website participants were matched with people who had equivalent heart illness, but who weren’t invited to join the HeartNET community, thus acting as comparisons. Baseline data was collected to compare “before” the HeartNET intervention with the yet-to-be collected “after” data. The idea was to see if there were differences between the online and offline groups that could be attributed to Website activity. Instead, the first version of the supposed-community remained stillborn, and it wasn’t until the Website was thrown open to all comers that it began to thrive. This was a preliminary indication that an invitation to participate in a therapeutic community was not effective, by itself, in encouraging communication with people who shared important health-related experiences. While Website engagement might have fitted comparatively well into a (Kubler-Ross) Bargaining approach to heart patients’ illnesses (“I’ll help others, and they’ll help me”) the default position appeared to be non-engagement, possibly an indication of the patients having become “stuck“ in the first stage of grief, Denial. Even though the initial HeartNET participants were well established as heart patients, and had all been diagnosed some time earlier, it is possible that they preferred to ignore the implications of this for their health. Figure 1 records the patterns of postings made by the 68 people who agreed to join the HeartNET Web community and who signed and returned the ethical consent forms. Of the 68 people recruited, only 53 logged on (despite phone calls to every individual) and of the 53 who logged into the site, only 22 posted (Bonniface et al. “Affect”). The heaviest week’s traffic was 40 postings in Week 4. By Week 12, activity had ceased entirely. The decision to relaunch had been taken a fortnight earlier and the first iteration of the Website was closed down. Figure 1, reprinted from Bonniface et al (“Affect”) The relaunch of the Website made it available for anyone interested in participating, and membership and traffic both grew exponentially. Amongst other innovations were “newbie” icons (to indicate new members to be welcomed and nurtured), guest status (to “try before you buy”), and symbols to indicate whether the member was a heart patient, a family member or supporter, or an administrator. In due course a “ratings system“ was added to indicate the total number of member-postings to date, so that people could gauge an individual’s commitment and contribution to the community. People contributing up to 150 posts to discussion boards were allotted from one to five stars, while Superstar status indicated 1000-plus posts. One of the major differences between the group of heart patients invited to participate in the site’s first iteration, and the group that ultimately launched the Website as a viable and vibrant community, is that the second-stage members were generally recently diagnosed. The research team speculate that they were actively reconstituting their identities as heart patients, and they and their families consequently had many matters and issues they wanted to discuss. In effect, the people who joined the relaunched site were “learning“ to be heart patients. Weis et al., investigating a pharmaceutically-sponsored Website for MS sufferers, argued that “users are diverse” and “communication needs change over time [as the disease progresses]” (146). They found that, of the 943 users who responded to their online survey, indications were that participants used “the website the most during early stages of the disease” (135). However, one area the HeartNET research is investigating is whether a community-member whose persona includes “care and support for my Web community“ will continue to participate even after the first information-seeking phase of their illness is over. Support offered for new heart patients by cardiologists, hospital staff, other specialists and general practitioners is an important part of the enculturation of the self-as-heart-patient, but it leaves unexplored the more personal work of reconstituting the individual’s identity as a person with heart disease (or as a supporter of such a person). It also leaves unaddressed the sense of “aloneness“ that HeartNET members say they feel until they are able to talk regularly with people who understand exactly what they are going through, as a result of having already “been there“ themselves. Although health professionals, family and friends are supportive, that support is only occasionally able to cut through the isolation. Extracts from two (separate) interviews are typical of the kinds of comments made: Murphy: I mean the support from Sandra and the family was all great but—to actually talk to other people who know what you’re feeling and … Yes, nothing against family and friends but they’re [other patients are] going through the same thing, they know what you’re feeling and … you know. Margo: I found friends were pains. It was like “well, okay, but you’re better now, they fixed you.” Well I looked at her and I said, ‘“You’re never fixed, but [it’s] something you live with for the rest of your life that doesn’t go away. …’ The implication is that heart patients have a differential need to communicate with others about their experience of heart disease, and that the communicative imperative is greatest in the first stages of being a heart patient, soon after diagnosis. For the well-established patients invited to contribute to the original HeartNET Website, their status as people-with-heart-disease was no longer problematic. Consequently, they had little to say and very few incentives to revisit the adaptive processes of personal identity construction. People who are used to their status as a heart patient may be theorised as having very different information needs and behaviours compared with the newly diagnosed. There is evidence that at least some of these well established patients were prompted to engage when new patients who needed support joined the site in the second iteration. However, those who are never given the opportunity to interact and learn from others may take longer to reach a level of adaptation. Even worse, they may adopt maladaptive behaviours encompassing issues of denial or self-sabotage—such as rejecting medications or increasing behaviours which progress morbidity, such as smoking and excessive alcohol consumption. Patients’ denial of the implications of heart disease is recognised as a major medical problem. Cooper et al. (234) cite evidence from Petrie et al. that “only a third of eligible patients under 65 years old attended cardiac rehabilitation” while noting that “Ades et al. showed uptake as low as 21% in eligible patients over 62 years”. In another study of patients who did/did not adhere to their pharmacological treatment regime, Horwitz et al. found that “Compared with patients with good adherence, patients with poor adherence were twice as likely to have died within a year of follow-up.” They argue that “adherence may need to be viewed more broadly as encompassing a cluster of health-related behaviours that may influence the outcome of treatment.” The argument advanced in our paper is that such a broader view should also encompass necessary adaptation strategies which introduce positive influences to the formation of patient identity. Compliance with therapeutic and medical regimes has been linked to increased self esteem (Burkhart and Rayens), and the combination of compliance with a positive patient identity may well multiply beneficial health outcomes. Whereas currently a majority of recovering heart patients may be inferred as resisting a revised self-identity that takes their diagnosis and health challenges seriously, the HeartNET Website may offer an effective enticement to positive behavioural change. Bonniface et al. (“Shuffling buddies”) have demonstrated that engagement with HeartNET can influence attitudes to (and involvement in) exercise. The hypothesis regarding identity adaptation is that active HeartNET members, through Website engagement, consistently indicate a willingness to acknowledge their changed health status and work to develop a reconstituted identity as a person with a heart condition who is proactively maximising positive outcomes (and helping others to do so at the same time). This is particularly the case where the online engagement feeds into the offline world: where “shuffling buddies“ have developed mutually supportive walking and exercise regimes, involving social events, consistent with their commitment to health-enhancing activity. Adaptation strategies delivered online offer new ways to counter the maladaptive processes which can follow diagnosis. By using the raw materials of social support and Website engagement, patients can chart new and positive ways in which they progress from denial and bargaining to health-promoting acceptance. For those established patients, online engagement may progress the stages of grief beyond the level of acceptance to the end goal of “support” as they pass on their knowledge, empathy and understanding of illness to the newly diagnosed. References Ades, Philip, M. L. Waldman, W. J. McCann, and S. O. Weaver. “Predictors of Cardiac Rehabilitation Participation in Older Coronary Patients.” Archives of Internal Medicine 152.2 (1992): 1033-5. Bonniface, Leesa, Lelia Green, and Maurice Swanson. “Affect and an Effective Online Therapeutic Community.” M/C Journal 8.6 (2005). 22 Apr. 2007 . Bonniface, Leesa, Arshad Omari, and Maurice Swanson. “Shuffling Buddies—How an Online Community Supports Healthier Lifestyle Choices: An Early Indication of Physical Activity and Exercise Outcomes from the HeartNET Intervention.” Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Cultural Attitudes towards Technology and Communication. Eds. F Sudweeks, H Hrachovec and C Ess. Estonia, Tartu: School of Information Technology, Murdoch University, 2006. 90-101. Burkhart, Patricia, and Mary Rayens. “Self-Concept and Health Locus of Control: Factors Related to Children’s Adherence to Recommended Asthma Regimen.” Pediatric Nursing 31.5 (2005): 404-9. Campbell, Colin, and Thomas Campbell. The China Study: Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health. Dallas, TX: Benbella Books, 2004. Cooper, A., G., Lloyd, J. Weinman, and G. Jackson. “Why Patients Do Not Attend Cardiac Rehabilitation: Role of Intentions and Illness Beliefs.” Heart 82.2 (1999): 234-6. Horwitz, Ralph, Catherine Viscoli, Lisa Berkman, Robert Donaldson, Sarah Horwitz, Carolyn Murray, David Ransohoff, and Jody Sindelar. “Treatment Adherence and Risk of Death after a Myocardial Infarction.” The Lancet 336 (1990): 542-5. Hugtenburg, J. G., A. T. G. Blom, and S. U. Kisoensingh. “Initial Phase of Chronic Medication Use; Patients’ Reasons for Discontinuation.” British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology 61.3 (2005): 352-4. Kubler-Ross, Elisabeth. On Death and Dying: What the Dying Have to Teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy, and Their Own Families. New York: Macmillan, 1969. Ladwig, Karl-Heinz, Andreas Schoefinius, Gerhard Dammann, Reinhold Danner, Rolf Gurtler, and Robert Hermann. “Long-Acting Psychotraumatic Properties of a Cardiac Arrest Experience.” American Journal of Psychiatry 156.6 (1999): 912-9. Esselstyn, C.B. Jr. Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease. New York: Penguin Group, 2007. Petrie, Keith, John Weinman, Sharpe Norman, and Judith Buckley. “Role of Patients’ View of Their Illness in Predicting Return to Work and Functioning after Myocardial Infarction: Longitudinal Study.” British Medical Journal 312 (1996): 1191-4. Weis, Robert, Keith Stamm, Craig Smith, Michael Nilan, Fiona Clark, Joan Weis, and Kate Kennedy. “Communities of Care and Caring: The Case of Mswatch.Com.” Journal of Health Psychology 8.1 (2003): 135-48. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Green, Lelia, Leesa Bonniface, and Tami McMahon. "Adapting to a New Identity: Reconstituting the Self as a Heart Patient." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/13-bonnifacegreenmcmahon.php>. APA Style Green, L., L. Bonniface, and T. McMahon. (May 2007) "Adapting to a New Identity: Reconstituting the Self as a Heart Patient," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/13-bonnifacegreenmcmahon.php>.

Photograph by Gonzalo Echeverria (2010)“Beyond reasonable doubt” is the standard of proof for criminal cases in a court of law. However, what happens when doubt, reasonable or otherwise, is embedded in the media reporting of criminal cases, even before charges have been laid? This paper will analyse newspaper reports of recent rape cases involving Australian footballers, and identify narrative figures that are used to locate blame solely with the alleged victims, protecting the footballers from blame. I uncover several stock female “characters” which evoke doubt in the women’s claims: the Predatory Woman, who hunts down footballers for sex and is always sexually available to any and all footballers; the Woman Scorned, who makes a false rape complaint out of revenge; and the Gold Digger, who makes a false complaint for money. I will argue that the news media thus effectively provide footballers with a criminal defence, before the cases can even reach court. Rape and Football in Australia The issue of football and rape first came to mass public attention in February 2004, when six players from National Rugby League (NRL) team the Canterbury Bulldogs allegedly raped a woman while at a New South Wales resort. Two weeks later, two players from the St Kilda Australian Football League (AFL) team allegedly raped a woman following their pre-season cup victory. These two football codes are the nation’s most popular, with rugby league dominating the north-eastern states, with the southern, eastern and western the domain of Australian Rules. In neither case were charges laid, and although at least twenty distinct cases have been reported in the Australian media, involving more than fifty-six footballers and officials, only one–NRL star Brett Stewart–has yet been tried. Stewart was acquitted in September 2010. Former AFL footballer Andrew Lovett has also been ordered to stand trial in July 2011 for allegedly raping a woman on Christmas Eve, 2009. Nevertheless, the majority of cases never reach court. In criminal cases, the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) ultimately decides whether to pursue charges through the courts, and, as most cases will be decided by a jury drawn from the general public, the DPP must decide whether the general public would accept the prosecution’s evidence as proof of guilt “beyond reasonable doubt.” This means that if a jury retains any doubt that the accused person is guilty, as long as that doubt is reasonable, they must return a verdict of “not guilty.” Public opinion in high-profile cases is therefore extremely important. If the DPP perceives a high level of public scepticism about a particular case, this indicates that the likelihood of the general public accepting the prosecution’s evidence is low, and they will often decide not to pursue the case. My analysis will show that media reports of the cases, which were published before any decision about laying criminal charges was made, can in fact work to create doubt, taking popular, victim-blaming stories to cast doubt on the complainants’ testimonies. Thus “reasonable doubt,” or a doubt that seems reasonable to many or most readers, is created before the case can even reach court. Predatory Women, Gold Diggers and Women Scorned When debate began in 2004 and explanations were sought for the high numbers of cases, stories abounded in which women have consensual sex with footballers, and then make a false rape complaint. I identify the principal characters of these stories as the Predatory Woman, Gold Digger and Woman Scorned. These stories were particularly prevalent amongst football representatives, blog contributors and talkback radio callers. Some media commentators provided alternative explanations (Magnay, for example), and others were explicitly critical of such stories (Pinkney, Wilson, for example); however, other journalists in fact evoked these same stereotypes. All of these characters have “common currency” (Smart 39), and have been used by defence lawyers in criminal trials for centuries, which means they are likely to be believed. These commentators therefore (indirectly) portray the complainants as liars, and reinforce the pervasive victim-blaming discourses in the wider public. The Predatory Woman The Predatory Woman character can be traced back at least as far as the early nineteenth century, when so-called “fallen” women were frequently “scorned as predatory creatures who lured young men into sin” (Clark 59). In her study of newspaper articles on football and sexual assault, gender theorist Kim Toffoletti identified the “predatory female” as a recurrent figure who is used to portray footballers as victims of “deviant” female sexuality (432-3). Toffoletti argues that the assumption underlying the use of the predatory female is that “incidents of sexual assault can occur when women deviate from the ‘conventions’ of heterosexual relations that expect them to be passive and sexually available, and men to exude sexual virility” (433). However, I argue that commentators’ usage often carries this further, and rather than using the story to claim that a victim of rape “deserved” it, the Predatory Woman actually serves as a replacement for the Raped Woman, therefore implicitly claiming that the complainant was lying. The Predatory Woman is the aggressor in all sexual encounters with footballers, a “sexual predator” (McCabe 31) who is said to “target” players and “hunt in packs” (Lyon 1). In a 2004 interview, one footballer described the phenomenon as “frightening” (McCabe 31), and another in 2009 claimed that footballers are “given temptations,” and “some of them [women] are downright predators” (Cunningham 30). The hunting animal metaphor clearly represents women as sexual aggressors, virtually suggesting that they are committing violent acts–moving in on unsuspecting footballers for the “kill” (sex). Thus portraying a complainant as one who seeks out sex with footballers implies that she victimised the players. As a woman cannot be both sexual aggressor and rape victim, the character of the Predatory Woman replaces that of the Raped Woman, therefore invalidating a complainant’s testimony and creating doubt. The Woman Scorned The Woman Scorned, another popular character in footballer sexual assault narratives, has also been evoked by the defence in criminal rape trials for centuries (Sanday; Benedict 2, 39-40, 83; Larcombe 100, 104-106, 111; Lees 78). The prevalence of footballers’ beliefs in the Woman Scorned story when NRL player Simon Williams commented about the prevalence of group sex/rape incidents involving NRL players on the 2009 Four Corners “Code of Silence” episode: It’s not during the act, it’s the way you treat them after it. Most of them could have been avoided, if they [players] had put them [women] in a cab and said thanks or that sort of thing not just kicked her out and called her a dirty whatever. It’s how you treat them afterwards that can cover a lot of that stuff up. Williams’ implicit claim here is that no woman would make a rape complaint as long as footballers always “said thanks” after sex. He thus implies that “most” of the complaints have been about revenge from women who felt mistreated after consensual sex: Women Scorned. The Gold Digger The Gold Digger is also an established character in both football rape stories and criminal rape trials; Peggy Sanday identifies her in cases dating from the eighteenth century. In rape cases, the Gold Digger can be evoked when a prominent and/or wealthy man–such as a noble in the eighteenth century, or a footballer in the present context–is accused of rape, whether or not the alleged victim seeks or receives a financial settlement. Many football fans evoked the Gold Digger on Internet blog sites, even when there were no observable characteristics corresponding to the Gold Digger in any of the media narratives. One declared: “My mum said she was probably being a slut, then after they ‘did’ her, she decided 2 say summin coz she thought she could get money or summin out of it [sic]” (in Baird 41). The Gold Digger stereotype invalidates a rape complaint, as a woman who alleges rape for financial gain must be lying, and was therefore not raped. Her claims are to be doubted. Narrative Immunity From 2009 onward, although traces of these characters remained, the focus of the debate shifted, from the possibility of sexual assault to players’ alcohol intake and the prevalence of “group sex.” Nina Philadelphoff-Puren identifies implicit claims that the complainants were lying in the statements of football representatives (37, 41-43), which imply that they must be Predatory Women, Women Scorned or Gold Diggers. In order to show clearly how journalists mobilised these characters more directly to evoke doubt, I conducted a search of the “Newsbank” newspaper database, for opinion pieces that sought to explain why the allegations were made, using varying combinations of the search terms “AFL,” “NRL,” “football,” “sexual assault,” “rape,” “rugby,” “sexual violence,” “sex” and “women.” Articles were sought in broadsheet newspapers The Age (Melbourne) and The Sydney Morning Herald, and tabloids The Herald Sun (Melbourne) and Daily Telegraph (Sydney), the most widely read newspapers in the cities where the alleged incidents occurred. The time-frame selected was 27 February 2004 to 1 May 2004, which covered the period from when the Canterbury Bulldogs case was first reported, until debate died down after the announcement that no charges would be laid against St Kilda footballers Steven Milne and Leigh Montagna. Twenty articles were collected for analysis: two from the Daily Telegraph, eight from the Herald Sun, seven from the Age, and three from the Sydney Morning Herald. Of these, half (ten) overtly blamed the alleged victims, with seven of those explicitly evoking Predatory Woman, Woman Scorned and/or Gold Digger stereotypes, and one strongly implying them. Although it might be expected that tabloid newspapers would be much more likely to (re-)produce popular stereotypes than broadsheets, the same numbers were found in each type of newspaper. The “common currency” (Smart 39) these stories have means that they are more likely to be considered credible than other stories. Their use by respected media commentators–particularly broadsheet journalists, whose publications lay claim to an educated readership and more progressive attitudes–is of even greater significance. In this paper, I will analyse three broadsheet articles in detail, in order to illustrate the various strategies used to evoke the stereotyped characters for an educated readership. The articles selected are by writers from very different backgrounds–a former footballer, a feminist and a “life-skills” coach to AFL footballers–and although it might seem that they would provide markedly different perspectives on the issue, I will show that all three evoke stereotypes that cast doubt on the complainants’ claims. The Story of the “Insider” Former AFL footballer Tim Watson’s “AFL Players and the Trouble Zone” was published shortly after the allegations against the St Kilda AFL players were made public in 2004. The article features a number of Predatory Women, who make “victims” of footballers; however, while Watson does not provide direct narrative accounts of the alleged rapes, he instead recounts narratives of other interactions between footballers and women. Predatory Women therefore come to replace Raped Women as characters and invalidate the alleged victims’ claims; as Watson represents these women as the sole agents, full responsibility for these incidents is attributed to women. The bulk of Watson’s article relates two stories unconnected with any (known) sexual assault cases, about AFL teams travelling to the country for training and being harassed by women. Placing the narratives immediately after warnings about “trouble zones,” when the article is clearly responding to the sexual assault allegations, suggests that his narratives explain what “potential trouble” and “trouble zones” are. He therefore implies that his narratives illustrate what “really” happened with the St Kilda (and Canterbury) players. The only instances where players are given grammatical agency in this narrative is when they “mingled with the locals” and “left the function as a group”; all the narrative action is attributed to women. Mingling has no sexual connotation, and “the locals” is a gender neutral term, implying that the players’ only action at the function was to interact with men and women in a non-sexual way. The characters of “a couple of girls” are introduced, and according to Watson these “girls” made it clear to everyone that they were keen to attract the attention of a couple of the players. One girl was so convinced of her intentions that she sidled up to the coach to explain to him what she planned to do later in the night to one of his players. The team left the function as a group and went back to the hotel without the adoring fans. In order to portray the women more clearly as the sole sexual aggressors–Predatory Women–Watson leaves out any events where players actively participate, events which are highly likely to have occurred. For example, in Watson’s narrative there is no two-way flirtation, and the players do not seek out, encourage or even respond in any (positive) way to the female attention they receive, although anecdotal evidence suggests this is extremely unlikely to have happened (Mewett and Toffoletti 170, 172-73). The women are only grammatical agents with intentions–their agency relates to what they plan to do–however, emphasising the fact that the team left as a group suggests that it was only this defensive action which prevented the women from carrying out their intentions and instigating sexual activity. Using “sidled” rather than “went” or “approached” characterises the woman as sly and manipulative, casting her in a negative light and adding to the sense that she was solely responsible. The second story is described as “almost identical” to the first, but Watson takes even greater pains to emphasise the players’ passivity, again portraying them as victims of Predatory Women. Watson attaches only the passive voice to the players: he says that they were “woken in their hotel rooms” and “subject to determined, but unwanted, advances.” The women are entirely absent from these statements. They appear only as shadows presumed responsible for waking the players and making the unwanted advances. This erasure of the female agent only emphasises the players’ passivity in the face of female seduction and general resistance to overwhelming female sexual aggression. As in the first story, the only action attributed to a footballer is defensive: a senior player convincing the women to leave. This reinforces the idea that male footballers are the victims when it comes to casual sexual relations, and casts doubt on any claims of rape. The Story of the “Insider-Outsider” The second article, “When an Elite Footballer Has Sex with a Girl…,” is by “life skills” coach to AFL players Damien Foster, who calls himself “a classic insider-outsider” to football (SBS). As a partial outsider, Foster would therefore presumably have less vested interest in protecting footballers than Watson; however, his narrative also denies the complaints’ credibility, clearly evoking a victim-blaming character: the Woman Scorned. Foster obliquely claims that the St Kilda and Canterbury cases arose simply because women and men view sex differently and therefore “a footballer may land himself in trouble because it just doesn’t occur to him to develop tactful, diplomatic methods of saying goodbye”. He continues, “When the girl [sic] realises the total indifference with which she is being treated after intimacy, bitterness sets in and it lingers. There are many girls in Australia now in this situation.” While Foster does not directly say that the “girls” who made rape complaints against the Bulldogs and St Kilda are Women Scorned, the fact that this story is used to explain why the allegations were made says it for him. According to Foster’s logic, if footballers learnt to say “thanks, love, that was great” after sex, then no rape complaints would ever be made. A “Feminist” Story? Controversial feminist Germaine Greer would seem even more likely to avoid victim-blame than men involved with football clubs, and she does not follow Watson’s portrayal of utterly passive, squeaky-clean footballers, or Foster’s narrative of undiplomatic players. In “Ugly Sex Has Just Got a Lot Louder,” she does acknowledge that some harm may have been done; however, Greer nevertheless portrays the complainants as Predatory Women, Women Scorned and Gold Diggers. Greer elects to tell a “history” of male footballer-female interactions, establishing male athletes’ disrespect for and mistreatment of women as a given. However, she goes on to evoke the Predatory Woman, portraying her as utterly desperate and willing to go to any lengths to have contact with players. Greer laments, good family men have been known to succumb to the groupies’ onslaught, believing that as long as they don’t kiss these desperate creatures, as long as they make no move that could be interpreted as a sign of affection, they haven’t been genuinely unfaithful to their wives and sweethearts. Indeed, the more brutal the treatment of the women they have casual sex with, the less they have to reproach themselves for. Pack rape in such circumstances can come to seem guiltless, a condign punishment for being a stupid slag, even. This explanation of footballers’ behaviour contains several grammatical patterns which represent the players as passive and not responsible for anything that takes place. In the first sentence, the only things these footballers actually do are succumbing and believing, both passive verbs; the rest of the sentence is devoted to what they do not do: “as long as they don’t kiss… as long as they make no move.” Thus it would seem that the players do not actively participate in the sexual activity instigated by these women, that they simply lie back and allow the women to do as they will. That the women are labelled “desperate creatures” who launch an “onslaught” to which footballers “succumb” confirms their sexual aggression. Although the second and third sentences depict violence and rape, these actions are not directly attributed to the players. The brutal treatment of the women the players have casual sex with has no grammatical agent–“the more brutal the treatment of the women they have casual sex with”–dissociating them from the brutality and subtly implying that “someone else” is responsible for it. Similarly, “pack rape” has no agent: no player commits or is involved in it, and it appears to happen independently of them. As Susan Ehrlich demonstrates, this denial of agency is a common tactic for accused rapists to use, in order to deny that they were responsible for their actions (36-61). Thus Greer uses the same grammatical patterns which deflect blame away from footballers, even when the behaviour involved is violent rape. This continual emphasis on the players’ passivity reinforces the portrayal of the women as sexually aggressive Predatory Women. Greer also introduces the figures of the Woman Scorned and Gold Digger. She claims that the only difference between the “old days” and the present scenarios is that now women are “not embarrassed to say that they agreed to sex with one man they’d only just met, or even with two, but they hadn’t agreed to being brutalised, insulted or humiliated, and they want redress.” This paragraph appears almost directly after the one where Greer mentions pack rape and violence, and it may seem therefore that the redress these women seek is for rape. However, since Greer claims that at least some of the women who “want redress” want it because they have been “insulted or humiliated,” rather than raped, this evokes the Woman Scorned. Greer continues by introducing the Gold Digger as a further (and complementary) explanation for these insulted and humiliated women to seek “redress.” Greer writes that women now “also seem quite interested in another factor in sex with footballers – namely, indecent amounts of money.” With this statement, she implies that some women have sex with footballers just so that they can make a rape complaint afterwards and obtain a large payment. She concedes that the women who make allegations against footballers may have been “abused,” but she trivialises them by claiming that they “scream and holler,” portraying them as hysterical. She thus discredits them and casts doubt on their claims. Greer ignores the fact that only one woman has either sought or obtained a financial settlement from footballers for a case of rape, and this woman only applied for it after charges against the players responsible were dropped. Whilst this argument is clearly unfounded, the strength of the Gold Digger story, along with the Woman Scorned and Predatory Woman, is likely to give the impression that the rape complaints made against the footballers were unfounded. Conclusion: The Benefit of the Doubt The fact that a significant number of media commentators employed tactics similar to those defence lawyers use in rape trials suggests that a de facto “trial” took place; one in which stories that discredit the complainants were prominent. These stories were enough to evoke “(un)reasonable doubt” in the women’s claims, and the accused footballers were therefore “acquitted.” That doubt can be evoked so easily in such high-profile cases is particularly problematic as rape cases in general are those least likely to be believed (Jordan 64-83). Further, many victims state that the fear of disbelief is one of the most important factors in deciding not to pursue criminal charges (Warshaw 50). Even if one leaves aside the likelihood that the prevalence of doubt in the media and the “blogosphere” contributed to the DPP’s decision not to pursue charges, the media “acquittal” is likely to have two further effects: it may deter future complainants from coming forward, if they assume that their claims will similarly be doubted; and it contributes to more generalised beliefs that women habitually lie about rape, particularly those who accuse footballers. While of course any accused person must be held innocent until proven guilty, it is equally important to give an alleged victim the benefit of the doubt, and not presume that all rape complainants are liars unless proven otherwise. References “Code of Silence.” Four Corners. ABC, 11 May. 2009. Television. Baird, Julia. “All Together, Boys, for a Weekend Roast.” Sydney Morning Herald 28 February. 2004: 41. Benedict, Jeff. Athletes and Acquaintance Rape. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 1998. Clark, Anna. Women’s Silence, Men’s Violence: Sexual Assault in England 1770-1845. New York: Pandora Press, 1987. Cunningham, Ryan. “A Footballer’s Life: Confusion, Temptation and Guilt by Association.” Sydney Morning Herald 19 Jun. 2009: 30. Ehrlich, Susan. Representing Rape: Language and Sexual Consent. London: Routledge, 2001. Foster, Damien. “When an Elite Footballer Has Sex with a Girl...” Age 23 Mar. 2004: 13. “Foul Play.” Insight. SBS, 16 Apr. 2004. Television. Greer, Germaine. “Ugly Sex Has Just Got a Lot Louder.” Age 23 Mar. 2004: 1, 17. Jordan, Jan. The Word of a Woman?: Police, Rape and Belief. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Larcombe, Wendy. Compelling Engagements: Feminism, Rape Law and Romance Fiction. Sydney: Federation Press, 2005. Lees, Sue. Ruling Passions. Buckingham: Open UP, 1997. Lyon, Karen. “They Love Their Footy, But Can They Keep the Faith?” Age 20 Mar. 2004: 1. Magnay, Jacquelin. “What Dogs Do.” Sydney Morning Herald 28 Feb. 2004: 31 McCabe, Helen. “Perilous Games of Sport and Sex.” Daily Telegraph 1 May. 2004: 31. Mewett, Peter, and Kim Toffoletti. “Rogue Men and Predatory Women: Female Fans’ Perceptions of Australian Footballers’ Sexual Conduct.” International Review for the Sociology of Sport 43.2 (2008): 165-80. Pinkney, Matthew. “Don’t Make Their Excuses.” Herald Sun 22 March. 2004: 18. Philadelphoff-Puren, Nina. “Dereliction: Women, Rape and Football.” Australian Feminist Law Journal 17. (2004): 35-51. Sanday, Peggy Reeves. A Woman Scorned: Acquaintance Rape on Trial. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996. Smart, Carol. Feminism and the Power of Law. London: Routledge, 1989. Toffoletti, Kim. “How Is Gender-Based Violence Covered in the Sporting News? An Account of the Australian Football League Sex Scandal.” Women’s Studies International Forum 30 (2007): 427-38. Warshaw, Robin. I Never Called It Rape: The Ms. Report on Recognizing, Fighting, and Surviving Date and Acquaintance Rape. New York: HarperPerennial, 1994. Watson, Tim. “AFL Players and the Trouble Zone.” Age 18 Mar. 2004: 16. Wilson, Caroline. “All the Dirty Linen Must — and Will — Be Aired.” Age, 21 Mar. 2004: 4.

Introduction Although our postmodern (media) society should provide room for diversity and otherness (Greer and Jewkes), some people are not integrated but rather excluded. Social exclusion can be defined as the discrepancy of the wish of being part of a society and its possibilities to be part of it and contains feelings or experiences of physically or emotionally exclusion from others (Burchardt et al.; Riva and Eck). It is not really known what or who is responsible for social exclusion (Hills et al.), but it is certain that it is not that rare phenomenon — especially in social media. Here, digital engagement characteristics (likes, follows, shares, and comments) are important to build up, renew, and strengthen different forms of relationships. But if users do not receive any feedback, the risk of feeling social excluded increases. In this context, adolescents and young adults as the primary audience are the focus of interest. They seem to be especially vulnerable when it comes to social ostracism within social media and its potential negative psychological effects (Timeo et al.). The variety of social exclusion allows multiple perspectives on the topic. Hereafter we focus on young people with cancer. This life-threatening disease can increase the risk of being excluded. Cancer as a chronic illness and its negative effects on people’s lives, such as potential death, long-term and late effects, private and social burdens (Hilgendorf et al.), show an obvious otherness compared to the healthy peer, which might push ostracism effects and social exclusion of young people within social media to a new level. We actually can see a large number of (included) young cancer patients and survivors using social media for information sharing, exchanging ideas, networking, and addressing their unmet needs of the real world (Chou et al.; Chou and Moskowitz; Ruckenstuhl et al.; Perales et al.). Especially Instagram is becoming more present in social cancer communication (Stage et al.), though it actually increasingly represents cheerful, easy-going content (Hu et al.; Waterloo et al.). Judging by the number of cancer-related hashtags, we can see more and more public cancer bloggers thematise cancer illness on Instagram. But less is known about the actual content posted by cancer bloggers on Instagram. This leads us to the question, to what extent is cancer content found and included or excluded on public Instagram profiles of German speaking cancer bloggers? And is there a difference between biography descriptions with visible cancer references and posted motifs, captions and hashtags? Chronic Illnesses, Identities, and Social Networks Chronic illnesses such as cancer not only affect the body, but also impact on the identity of those affected. It is understood as life-changing with both short-term and long-term effects on the identity-forming process and on the already developed identity (Bury; Charmaz; Leventhal et al.). With their diagnosis, adolescents and young adults face a double challenge: they have to cope with the typical developmental changes of this age group and they have to negotiate these changes against the background of a life-threatening illness (Makros and McCabe; Zebrack and Isaacso). Miller shows three levels of identity for young cancer patients (pre-cancer identity, patient identity, and post-cancer identity), which are used regularly and flexibly by those affected in their interaction with the social network in order to maintain relationships and to minimise communicative misunderstandings. Moreover, the negotiation of the self within the social network and its expectations, especially towards convalescent people, can lead to paradoxical situations and identities of young people with cancer (Jones et al.). Although therapeutic measures are completed and patients may be discharged as cured, physical, cognitive, and emotional challenges with regard to the illness (e.g. fatigue, loss of performance, difficulty concentrating) still have to be overcome. These challenges, despite recovery, cause those affected to feel they still belong to a cancer group which they have actually largely outgrown medically and therapeutically, and also continually remind them of their present difference from the healthy peer group. To minimise these differences, narratives are the means for those affected to negotiate their new illness-related identity with their network (Hyde). These processes can be digitally transformed on blogs or to age-appropriate social network sites (SNS), which enable users to record and communicate experiences and emotions in an uncomplicated, situational manner and with fewer inhibitions (Kim and Gilham). Cancer contents on SNS are called autopathography and can serve as a means of self-expression, whilst at the same time stimulating communication and networking and thus significantly influencing identity and identity development in the chronic disease process (Rettberg; Ressler et al.; Abrol et al.; Stage). The possibility of recording and archiving private moments in a digital environment through photos and texts creates a visual diary. Here, illness recordings are not just motifs, but also part of an identity process by accepting the self as being ill (Nesby and Salamonsen; Tembeck). Instagram-Exclusive Positivity Instagram is the most popular social media network amongst 14-29 year olds in Germany (Beisch et al.). It presents itself as a highly visual structured platform. Furthermore, both posts and stories are dominated by content with innocuous motifs (Hu et al.). Additionally, the visual culture on Instagram is supported by integrated image optimisations such as filters and therefore often associated with high aesthetic standards (Waterloo et al.). This encourages the exchange of idealised self-presenting and self-advertising content (Lee et al.; Lup et al.; Sheldon and Bryant). The positive tone of the shared motifs and captions can also be explained by larger, sometimes anonymous networks on Instagram. The principle of non-reciprocal following of public accounts increasingly creates weak ties, which can additionally encourage the sharing of positively connoted content due to the anonymity (Lin et al.; Waterloo et al.). The posting of negative moods or image motifs to anonymous followers does not seem to be socially standardised, due to the associated intimate thoughts and feelings (Bazarova). In addition, users are aware of the public framework in which they address intimate topics and discourses (Bazarova and Choi). Internal platform standards and technical possibilities thus create a particular posting culture: an environment that is—due to its strong visual-aesthetic structure and anonymous follower-based networks—almost exclusively positive. However, these assumptions and findings are based on a general posting culture, which is usually not focussed on niche topics like cancer. Previous studies show that SNS are used for exchange and networking, especially by young cancer patients (Chou and Moskowitz; Perales et al.). Studies from online SNS disease-related self-help groups show that weak ties in illness situations are considered beneficial when it comes to self-disclosure, seeking help, and support (Wright et al.; Love et al.; Donovan et al.). In addition, Instagram is part of the so-called “vital media” (Stage et al.), which means it is very important for young cancer patients to share cancer-related material. But despite these research findings less is known about the content shared by German-speaking bloggers who have visible cancer references in their Instagram biography. Do they include a serious, even life-threatening illness on a platform that actually stands for positivity, or do they follow the invisible platform regulations in their posted content and statements and exclude it by themselves? The specific objectives of this explorative study were (a) to obtain a descriptive analysis of the manner in which cancer bloggers post content on Instagram, and (b) to determine the extent to which most applied practices exclude the posting of certain negatively connoted motives and emotions associated with cancer. Methodology For the study, 142 German-speaking cancer bloggers (14–39 years of age) with public accounts and visible cancer references in their biography were researched on Instagram. The sample was divided into posts (7,553) and stories (4,117). The content was examined using a standardised content analysis and a code book with relevant categories (motifs, body presences, emotions, captions, emojis; ICR Cronbach’s alpha = 0.85). Measured by the value of the content posted, the story users, at 23 years of age, were comparatively much younger than the post users, at 30 years of age. The sample was predominantly female in both posts (81%) and stories (99%). The most common form of cancer was breast cancer (posts: 28%; stories: 29%), followed by brain tumors (posts: 19%; stories: 16%) and leukaemia (posts: 4%; stories: 19%). Most content was shared by people who were actively involved in treatment – 46% of posts and 54% of stories. Completed treatments were more common in posts (39%) than in stories (19%). At the time of data collection, the Instagram entries were explicitly open to the public, and no registration was required. The content, not the individual, was analysed to minimise the risk for the bloggers and to prevent them from violations of privacy and autonomy by third parties. Furthermore, the entries were assigned unidentifiable numbers to ensure that no tracing is possible (Franzke et al.). Results The sample consists of public cancer blogger accounts who document everyday experiences for their network in images and videos. The following results are shown for posts (P) and stories (S). Motifs and Bodies Looking at the evaluation of the image motifs, the selfie predominates both in posts, with 20.7 per cent, and stories, with 32.8 per cent. Other popular photo motifs are pictures of food (P: 10.2%; S: 11.0%), activities (P: 7.2%; S: 7.7%), landscapes (P: 6.3%; S: 7.1%), and of/with family and friends (P: 12.5%; S: 6.0%). Photos in medical or clinical settings are rare, with one per cent in the posts and three per cent in the stories. Looking at the bodies and faces displayed, a comparatively normal to positive image of the bloggers that were studied can be observed. Most of the people in the posts present themselves with hair (81.3%), wear make-up (53.3%) and smile at the camera (64.1%). A similar trend can also be seen in the stories. Here 63.8 per cent present themselves with hair, 62.7 per cent with make-up and 55.3 per cent with happy facial expressions. In contrast, scars (P: 1.6%; S: 4.4%) or amputations (P: 0.2%; S: 0.1%) are hardly ever shown. Thus, possible therapy-accompanying symptoms, such as alopecia, ports for chemotherapy, or amputations (e.g. mastectomy in the case of breast cancer) are rarely or hardly ever made visible by cancer bloggers. Captions, Hashtags, and Emojis Similar to the motifs, everyday themes dominate in the captions of the images, such as the description of activities (P: 23.2%; S: 18.0%), food (P: 8.2%; S: 9.3%), or beauty/fashion (P: 6.2%; S: 10.2%). However, information on the current health status of the person affected can be found under every tenth photo, both in the stories and in the posts. Hashtags are mainly found amongst the posts with 81.5 per cent. In keeping with the caption, normal themes were also chosen here, divided into the categories of activities (17.7%), beauty/fashion (7.6%), food (5.8%), and family/friends (4.8%). Illness-specific hashtags (e.g. #cancer, #survivor, or #chemo) were chosen in 15.6 per cent. In addition, the cancer bloggers in this study used emojis in 74 per cent of their posts. In the stories, however, only 28.2 per cent of the content was tagged with emojis. The most common category is smileys & people (P: 46.8%; S: 52.8%), followed by symbols (e.g. hearts, ribbons) (P: 21.1%; S: 26.5%), and animals & nature (P: 17.0%; S: 14.2%). Emotions In captions, hashtags and emojis, emotions were divided into positive (e.g. joy, fighting spirit), neutral (e.g. simple narration of the experience), and negative (e.g. fear, anger). It is noticeable that in all three categories predominantly and significantly positive or neutral words and images were used to describe emotional states or experiences. In the case of captions, 40.4 per cent of the posts and 43.9 per cent of the stories could be classified as positive. For the hashtags, the values were 18.7 per cent (P) and 43 per cent (S), and for the emojis 60 per cent (P) and 65.7 per cent (S). In contrast, there were hardly any negative moods (captions P: 5.7%, S: 5.8%; hashtags P: 4.4%, S: 0.7%; emojis P: 8.7%, S: 6.4%). Although the disease status (e.g. active in therapy or completed) had less impact on emotional messages, a significant connection with the applied thematic areas could be observed. Thus, it is apparent that medical and/or therapeutic aspects tend to be described with positive and negative words and hashtags, e.g. the current health status (χ²(3) = 795.44, p =.000, φ = 0.346) or the topics of illness/health via hashtag (χ²(3) = 797.67, p =.000, φ = 0.361). Topics such as food (χ²(3) = 20.49, p =.000, φ = 0.056) or beauty/fashion (χ²(3) = 51.52, p =.000, φ = 0.092) are recognisably more impersonal from an emotional perspective. Discussion A Digital Identity Paradox Drugs, chemotherapy, setbacks, physical impairments, or anxiety are issues that usually accompany cancer patients during treatment and also in remission. Looking at the content posted by German-speaking cancer bloggers on Instagram, illness-related images and words are comparatively rare. The bloggers show their normal, mostly cancer-free world, in which negative and illness-related content does not seem to fit. Although they clearly draw attention to their illness through their biography, this is not or only rarely addressed. Therefore, it can be stated that cancer as a topic is excluded by choice by the bloggers examined. Neither motifs, captions, nor hashtags make the illness visible. This seems paradoxical because the content and biography appear to contradict each other. And yet, the content studied only shows what Jones et al. and Miller have already described: their identity paradox, or multiple identities. The digital acceptance of one's own illness and solidarity with (anonymous) fellow sufferers is clearly given through the disclosure in the biography, but yet a normal and healthy online ego—comparable to the peer group and equal to their own illness identity—is aspired to. It seems as if those affected have to switch their identity back and forth. The awareness that they are already different in real life (in this case, ill) encourages the users examined to show a normal, age-appropriate life—at least online, which is why we speak of an identity paradox 2.0. Based on our data, the obvious otherness of being ill—and in this context the potential higher risk of digital ostracism effects (Greer and Jewkes; Timeo et al.)—can be a reason for self-exclusion of the cancer topic, in order not to be excluded by a healthy peer. The Standard Creates the Content The positive tone that can be found in almost every second post can be explained by the platform standards and practices themselves (Waterloo et al.). Thus, smiling faces in a public environment correspond more to this than sadness, anger, or despair. Although disease-related topics in captions are also provided with negatively connoted language, they do not have a determining influence on the public self-image of the blogger and their life and the illness. The strong visual culture on Instagram does not leave much scope for "other", perhaps more authentic serious content. The fact that published content has the potential to talk about cancer and to make one’s own experience with the disease transparent is proven by blogs (Kim and Gilham). Instagram does not currently seem to be particularly suitable for public profiles to make serious illness narratives about cancer. Conclusion It remains to be noted that public cancer blogs attempt to include a serious topic on Instagram. But with regard to the data, we can see a form of (maybe unconsciously) self-chosen exclusion of illness narratives. The reasons might vary. On the one hand, cancer bloggers want to belong to a healthy peer group, and expressing a visible otherness would exclude them. Therefore, they try to reduce the higher risk potential of ostracism effects. On the other hand, internal Instagram regulations and standards create an environment which can strengthen the bloggers' posting behaviours: young people, especially, post life-affirming and life-related content. This also helps them to cope with crisis situations and to avoid being dominated by a life-threatening disease. Further research on cancer on Instagram is needed to determine to what extent this is desired, and whether an awareness of this paradox exists or develops intuitively. 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IntroductionLike other forms of embodiment, pregnancy has increasingly become subject to representation and interpretation via digital technologies. Pregnancy and the unborn entity were largely private, and few people beyond the pregnant women herself had access to the foetus growing within her (Duden). Now pregnant and foetal bodies have become open to public portrayal and display (Lupton The Social Worlds of the Unborn). A plethora of online materials – websites depicting the unborn entity from the moment of conception, amateur YouTube videos of births, social media postings of ultrasounds and self-taken photos (‘selfies’) showing changes in pregnant bellies, and so on – now ensure the documentation of pregnant and unborn bodies in extensive detail, rendering them open to other people’s scrutiny. Other recent digital technologies directed at pregnancy include mobile software applications, or ‘apps’. In this article, we draw on our study involving a critical discourse analysis of a corpus of pregnancy-related apps offered in the two major app stores. In so doing, we discuss the ways in which pregnancy-related apps portray pregnant and unborn bodies. We place a particular focus on the ludification and gamification strategies employed to position pregnancy as a playful, creative and fulfilling experience that is frequently focused on consumption. As we will demonstrate, these strategies have wider implications for concepts of pregnant and foetal embodiment and subjectivity.It is important here to make a distinction between ludification and gamification. Ludification is a broader term than gamification. It is used in the academic literature on gaming (sometimes referred to as ‘ludology’) to refer to elements of games reaching into other aspects of life beyond leisure pursuits (Frissen et al. Playful Identities: The Ludification of Digital Media Cultures; Raessens). Frissen et al. (Frissen et al. "Homo Ludens 2.0: Play, Media and Identity") for example, claim that even serious pursuits such as work, politics, education and warfare have been subjected to ludification. They note that digital technologies in general tend to incorporate ludic dimensions. Gamification has been described as ‘the use of game design elements in non-game contexts’ (Deterding et al. 9). The term originated in the digital media industry to describe the incorporation of features into digital technologies that not explicitly designed as games, such as competition, badges, rewards and fun that engaged and motivated users to make them more enjoyable to use. Gamification is now often used in literatures on marketing strategies, persuasive computing or behaviour modification. It is an important element of ‘nudge’, an approach to behaviour change that involves persuasion over coercion (Jones, Pykett and Whitehead). Gamification thus differs from ludification in that the former involves applying ludic principles for reasons other than the pleasures of enjoying the game for their own sake, often to achieve objectives set by actors and agencies other than the gamer. Indeed, this is why gamification software has been described by Bogost (Bogost) as ‘exploitationware’. Analysing Pregnancy AppsMobile apps have become an important medium in contemporary digital technology use. As of May 2015, 1.5 million apps were available to download on Google Play while 1.4 million were available in the Apple App Store (Statista). Apps related to pregnancy are a popular item in app stores, frequently appearing on the Apple App Store’s list of most-downloaded apps. Google Play’s figures show that many apps directed at pregnant women have been downloaded hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of times. For example, ‘Pregnancy +’, ‘I’m Expecting - Pregnancy App’ and ‘What to Expect - Pregnancy Tracker’ have each been downloaded between one and five million times, while ‘My Pregnancy Today’ has received between five and ten million downloads. Pregnancy games for young girls are also popular. Google Play figures show that the ‘Pregnant Emergency Doctor’ game, for example, has received between one and five million downloads. Research has found that pregnant women commonly download pregnancy-related apps and find them useful sources of information and support (Hearn, Miller and Fletcher; Rodger et al.; Kraschnewski et al.; Declercq et al.; Derbyshire and Dancey; O'Higgins et al.). We conducted a comprehensive analysis of all pregnancy-related smartphone apps in the two major app stores, Apple App Store and Google Play, in late June 2015. Android and Apple’s iOS have a combined market share of 91 percent of apps installed on mobile phones (Seneviratne et al.). A search for all pregnancy-related apps offered in these stores used key terms such as pregnancy, childbirth, conception, foetus/fetus and baby. After eliminating apps listed in these searches that were clearly not human pregnancy-related, 665 apps on Google Play and 1,141 on the Apple App Store remained for inclusion in our study. (Many of these apps were shared across the stores.)We carried out a critical discourse analysis of these apps, looking closely at the app descriptions offered in the two stores. We adopted the perspective that sees apps, like any other form of media, as sociocultural artefacts that both draw on and reproduce shared norms, ideals, knowledges and beliefs (Lupton "Quantified Sex: A Critical Analysis of Sexual and Reproductive Self-Tracking Using Apps"; Millington "Smartphone Apps and the Mobile Privatization of Health and Fitness"; Lupton "Apps as Artefacts: Towards a Critical Perspective on Mobile Health and Medical Apps"). In undertaking our analysis of the app descriptions in our corpus, attention was paid to the title of each app, the textual accounts of its content and use and the images that were employed, such as the logo of the app and the screenshots that were used to illustrate its content and style. Our focus in this article is on the apps that we considered as including elements of entertainment. Pregnancy-related game apps were by far the largest category of the apps in our corpus. These included games for young girls and expectant fathers as well as apps for ultrasound manipulation, pregnancy pranks, foetal sex prediction, choosing baby names, and quizzes. Less obviously, many other apps included in our analysis offered some elements of gamification and ludification, and these were considered in our analysis. ‘Pregnant Adventures’: App Games for GirlsOne of the major genres of apps that we identified was games directed at young girls. These apps invited users to shop for clothes, dress up, give a new hair style, ‘make-over’ and otherwise beautify a pregnant woman. These activities were directed at the goal of improving the physical attractiveness and therefore (it was suggested) the confidence of the woman, who was presented as struggling with coming to terms with changes in her body during pregnancy. Other apps for this target group involved the player assuming the role of a doctor in conducting medical treatments for injured pregnant women or assisting the birth of her baby.Many of these games represented the pregnant woman visually as looking like an archetypal Barbie doll, with a wardrobe to match. One app (‘Barbara Pregnancy Shopping’) even uses the name ‘Barbara’ and the screenshots show a woman similar in appearance to the doll. Its description urges players to use the game to ‘cheer up’ an ‘unconfident’ Barbara by taking her on a ‘shopping spree’ for new, glamorous clothes ‘to make Barbara feel beautiful throughout her pregnancy’. Players may find ‘sparkly accessories’ as well for Barbara and help her find a new hairstyle so that she ‘can be her fashionable self again’ and ‘feel prepared to welcome her baby!’. Likewise, the game ‘Pregnant Mommy Makeover Spa’ involves players selecting clothes, applying beauty treatments and makeup and adding accessories to give a makeover to ‘Pregnant Princess’ Leila. The ‘Celebrity Mommy’s Newborn Baby Doctor’ game combines the drawcard of ‘celebrity’ with ‘mommy’. Players are invited to ‘join the celebrities in their pregnancy adventure!’ and ‘take care of Celebrity Mom during her pregnancy!’.An app by the same developer of ‘Barbara Pregnancy Shopping’ also offers ‘Barbara’s Caesarean Birth’. The app description claims that: ‘Of course her poor health doesn’t allow Barbara to give birth to her baby herself.’ It is up to players to ‘make everything perfect’ for Barbara’s caesarean birth. The screenshots show Barbara’s pregnant abdomen being slit open, retracted and a rosy, totally clean infant extracted from the incision, complete with blonde hair. Players then sew up the wound. A final screenshot displays an image of a smiling Barbara standing holding her sleeping, swaddled baby, with the words ‘You win’.Similar games involve princesses, mermaids, fairies and even monster and vampire pregnant women giving birth either vaginally or by caesarean. Despite their preternatural status, the monster and vampire women conform to the same aesthetic as the other pregnant women in these games: usually with long hair and pretty, made-up faces, wearing fashionable clothing even on the operating table. Their newborn infants are similarly uniform in their appearance as they emerge from the uterus. They are white-skinned, clean and cherubic (described in ‘Mommy’s Newborn Baby Princess’ as ‘the cutest baby you probably want’), a far cry from the squalling, squashed-faced infants smeared in birth fluids produced by the real birth process.In these pregnancy games for girls, the pain and intense bodily effort of birthing and the messiness produced by the blood and other body fluids inherent to the process of labour and birth are completely missing. The fact that caesarean birth is a major abdominal surgery requiring weeks of recovery is obviated in these games. Apart from the monsters and vampires, who may have green- or blue-hued skin, nearly all other pregnant women are portrayed as white-skinned, young, wearing makeup and slim, conforming to conventional stereotypical notions of female beauty. In these apps, the labouring women remain glamorous, usually smiling, calm and unsullied by the visceral nature of birth.‘Track Your Pregnancy Day by Day’: Self-Monitoring and Gamified PregnancyElements of gamification were evident in a large number of the apps in our corpus, including many apps that invite pregnant users to engage in self-tracking of their bodies and that of their foetuses. Users are asked to customise the apps to document their changing bodies and track their foetus’ development as part of reproducing the discourse of the miraculous nature of pregnancy and promoting the pleasures of self-tracking and self-transformation from pregnant woman to mother. When using the ‘Pregnancy+’ app, for example, users can choose to construct a ‘Personal Dashboard’ that includes details of their pregnancy. They can input their photograph, first name and their expected date of delivery so that that each daily update begins with ‘Hello [name of user], you are [ ] weeks and [ ] days pregnant’ with the users’ photograph attached to the message. The woman’s weight gain over time and a foetal kick counter are also included in this app. It provides various ways for users to mark the passage of time, observe the ways in which their foetuses change and move week by week and monitor changes in their bodies. According to the app description for ‘My Pregnancy Today’, using such features allows a pregnant woman to: ‘Track your pregnancy day by day.’ Other apps encourage women to track such aspects of physical activity, vitamin and fluid intake, diet, mood and symptoms. The capacity to visually document the pregnant user’s body is also a feature of several apps. The ‘Baby Bump Pregnancy’, ‘WebMD Pregnancy’, ‘I’m Expecting’,’iPregnant’ and ‘My Pregnancy Today’ apps, for example, all offer an album feature for pregnant bump photos taken by the user of herself (described as a ‘bumpie’ in the blurb for ‘My Pregnancy Today’). ‘Baby Buddy’ encourages women to create a pregnant avatar of themselves (looking glamorous, well-dressed and happy). Some apps even advise users on how they should feel. As a screenshot from ‘Pregnancy Tracker Week by Week’ claims: ‘Victoria, your baby is growing in your body. You should be the happiest woman in the world.’Just as pregnancy games for little girls portrayal pregnancy as a commodified and asetheticised experience, the apps directed at pregnant women themselves tend to shy away from discomforting fleshly realities of pregnant and birthing embodiment. Pregnancy is represented as an enjoyable and fashionable state of embodiment: albeit one that requires constant self-surveillance and vigilance.‘Hello Mommy!’: The Personalisation and Aestheticisation of the FoetusA dominant feature of pregnancy-related apps is the representation of the foetus as already a communicative person in its own right. For example, the ‘Pregnancy Tickers – Widget’ app features the image of a foetus (looking far more like an infant, with a full head of wavy hair and open eyes) holding a pencil and marking a tally on the walls of the uterus. The app is designed to provide various icons showing the progress of the user’s pregnancy each day on her mobile device. The ‘Hi Mommy’ app features a cartoon-like pink and cuddly foetus looking very baby-like addressing its mother from the womb, as in the following message that appears on the user’s smartphone: ‘Hi Mommy! When will I see you for the first time?’ Several pregnancy-tracking apps also allow women to input the name that they have chosen for their expected baby, to receive customised notifications of its progress (‘Justin is nine weeks and two days old today’).Many apps also incorporate images of foetuses that represent them as wondrous entities, adopting the visual style of 1960s foetal photography pioneer Lennart Nilsson, or what Stormer (Stormer) has referred to as ‘prenatal sublimity’. The ‘Pregnancy+’ app features such images. Users can choose to view foetal development week-by-week as a colourful computerised animation or 2D and 3D ultrasound scans that have been digitally manipulated to render them aesthetically appealing. These images replicate the softly pink, glowing portrayals of miraculous unborn life typical of Nilsson’s style.Other apps adopt a more contemporary aesthetic and allow parents to store and manipulate images of their foetal ultrasounds and then share them via social media. The ‘Pimp My Ultrasound’ app, for example, invites prospective parents to manipulate images of their foetal ultrasounds by adding in novelty features to the foetal image such as baseball caps, jewellery, credit cards and musical instruments. The ‘Hello Mom’ app creates a ‘fetal album’ of ultrasounds taken of the user’s foetus, while the ‘Ultrasound Viewer’ app lets users manipulate their 3/4 D foetal ultrasound images: ‘Have fun viewing it from every angle, rotating, panning and zooming to see your babies [sic] features and share with your family and friends via Facebook and Twitter! … Once uploaded, you can customise your scan with a background colour and skin colour of your choice’.DiscussionPregnancy, like any other form of embodiment, is performative. Pregnant women are expected to conform to norms and assumptions about their physical appearance and deportment of their bodies that expect them to remain well-groomed, fit and physically attractive without appearing overly sexual (Longhurst "(Ad)Dressing Pregnant Bodies in New Zealand: Clothing, Fashion, Subjectivities and Spatialities"; Longhurst "'Corporeographies’ of Pregnancy: ‘Bikini Babes'"; Nash; Littler). Simultaneously they must negotiate the burden of bodily management in the interests of risk regulation. They are expected to protect their vulnerable unborn from potential dangers by stringently disciplining their bodies and policing to what substances they allow entry (Lupton The Social Worlds of the Unborn; Lupton "'Precious Cargo': Risk and Reproductive Citizenship"). Pregnancy self-tracking apps enact the soft politics of algorithmic authority, encouraging people to conform to expectations of self-responsibility and self-management by devoting attention to monitoring their bodies and acting on the data that they generate (Whitson; Millington "Amusing Ourselves to Life: Fitness Consumerism and the Birth of Bio-Games"; Lupton The Quantified Self: A Sociology of Self-Tracking).Many commentators have remarked on the sexism inherent in digital games (e.g. Dickerman, Christensen and Kerl-McClain; Thornham). Very little research has been conducted specifically on the gendered nature of app games. However our analysis suggests that, at least in relation to the pregnant woman, reductionist heteronormative, cisgendered, patronising and paternalistic stereotypes abound. In the games for girls, pregnant women are ideally young, heterosexual, partnered, attractive, slim and well-groomed, before, during and after birth. In self-tracking apps, pregnant women are portrayed as ideally self-responsible, enthused about their pregnancy and foetus to the point that they are counting the days until the birth and enthusiastic about collecting and sharing details about themselves and their unborn (often via social media).Ambivalence about pregnancy, the foetus or impending motherhood, and lack of interest in monitoring the pregnancy or sharing details of it with others are not accommodated, acknowledged or expected by these apps. Acknowledgement of the possibility of pregnant women who are not overtly positive about their pregnancy or lack interest in it or who identify as transgender or lesbian or who are sole mothers is distinctly absent.Common practices we noted in apps – such as giving foetuses names before birth and representing them as verbally communicating with their mothers from inside the womb – underpin a growing intensification around the notion of the unborn entity as already an infant and social actor in its own right. These practices have significant implications for political agendas around the treatment of pregnant women in terms of their protection or otherwise of their unborn, and for debates about women’s reproductive rights and access to abortion (Lupton The Social Worlds of the Unborn; Taylor The Public Life of the Fetal Sonogram: Technology, Consumption and the Politics of Reproduction). Further, the gamification and ludification of pregnancy serve to further commodify the experience of pregnancy and childbirth, contributing to an already highly commercialised environment in which expectant parents, and particularly mothers, are invited to purchase many goods and services related to pregnancy and early parenthood (Taylor "Of Sonograms and Baby Prams: Prenatal Diagnosis, Pregnancy, and Consumption"; Kroløkke; Thomson et al.; Taylor The Public Life of the Fetal Sonogram: Technology, Consumption and the Politics of Reproduction; Thomas).In the games for girls we examined, the pregnant woman herself was a commodity, a selling point for the app. The foetus was also frequently commodified in its representation as an aestheticised entity and the employment of its image (either as an ultrasound or other visual representations) or identity to market apps such as the girls’ games, apps for manipulating ultrasound images, games for predicting the foetus’ sex and choosing its name, and prank apps using fake ultrasounds purporting to reveal a foetus inside a person’s body. As the pregnant user engages in apps, she becomes a commodity in yet another way: the generator of personal data that are marketable in themselves. In this era of the digital data knowledge economy, the personal information about people gathered from their online interactions and content creation has become highly profitable for third parties (Andrejevic; van Dijck). Given that pregnant women are usually in the market for many new goods and services, their personal data is a key target for data mining companies, who harvest it to sell to advertisers (Marwick).To conclude, our analysis suggests that gamification and ludification strategies directed at pregnancy and childbirth can serve to obfuscate the societal pressures that expect and seek to motivate pregnant women to maintain physical fitness and attractiveness, simultaneously ensuring that they protect their foetuses from all possible risks. In achieving both ends, women are encouraged to engage in intense self-monitoring and regulation of their bodies. These apps also reproduce concepts of the unborn entity as a precious and beautiful already-human. These types of portrayals have important implications for how young girls learn about pregnancy and childbirth, for pregnant women’s experiences and for concepts of foetal personhood that in turn may influence women’s reproductive rights and abortion politics.ReferencesAndrejevic, Mark. Infoglut: How Too Much Information Is Changing the Way We Think and Know. New York: Routledge, 2013. Print.Bogost, Ian. "Why Gamification Is Bullshit." The Gameful World: Approaches, Issues, Applications. Eds. Steffen Walz and Sebastian Deterding. Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2015. 65-80. Print.Declercq, E.R., et al. Listening to Mothers III: Pregnancy and Birth. New York: Childbirth Connection, 2013. Print.Derbyshire, Emma, and Darren Dancey. 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The latest reality program about weight loss makeover, Australian Channel Seven’s Bringing Sexy Back maintained the dominant frame of fat as bad, shameful and unsexy. Similar to other programs’ point of view, only slim bodies could claim to be healthy and sexy. Conversely the Fat Acceptance movement presents fat as beautiful, sexy, and healthy. But what did online audiences in 2014 think about Bringing Sexy Back? In this article online-viewer-generated comments are analysed to find out: a) whether audiences challenged and contested the dominant framing; and b) what phrases did they use to do this. The research task is a discourse analysis in which key words and phrases are highlighted and colour coded as categories and patterns begin to emerge. My intention is to represent the expressions of the participants responding to the articles and or online forums about the program. The focus is on the ‘language-in-use’ (Gee 34), in particular their gut reactions to the idea of whether only slim people can be sexy and their experience of viewing the program. Selected television websites, online television forums and blogs will be analysed. Introduction The latest makeover television program drawing on the obesity-epidemic discourse Bringing Sexy Back (BSB) promises the audience that by the end of the program participants will have bought their sexy back. Sexy in the program is equated with one’s younger and slimmer self; the program host Samantha Armytage (from Sunrise the national Australian morning show) tells viewers sexy can be reclaimed if participants (from their late 30s and up to 51 years) drop kilos, commit to a strenuous exercise regime, and re-style their wardrobe. Experts, the usual suspects, are bought in—the medical machinery, the personal trainer, the stylist, and the hairdresser etc.—to assess, admonish, advise and appraise the participants. At the final reveal the audience—made up of family, friends and the local community—show enthusiasm for the aesthetic desirability of the participants slimmer sexier body as evidenced by descriptors such as “wow”, and “oh my God” as well as an outpouring of emotion such as crying and squeals of delight. Previous researchers of fat-shaming television programs have found audience’s reactions divided: some audience members see it as motivating; others see it as humiliating; and others see it as what the contestants deserve (Holland, Blood and Thomas; Rodan, Ellis and Lebeck; Sender and Sullivan)! I want to find out if online and social media audiences of the relatively tame makeover program BSB, which features individual Australians and couples who are overweight and obese, challenge and contest the dominant framing. In my analysis of the phrases online audiences’ have used about BSB, posters mostly found the program inspiring and motivating. From this inauspicious first strike, I will push onto examine the phrases posters have used to respond to the program. The paper begins with a short background about the program. The key elements of the makeover television genre are then discussed. Following this, I provide an analysis of the program’s official BSB Facebook site, and unofficial viewer-generated sites, such as the bubhub, TVTONIGHT, MamaMia, The Hoopla and the hashtag #sexybackau on Twitter. Posters to these sites were regular, infrequent or intermittent viewers. My approach to the analysis of these online forums and social media sites is a discourse analysis that examines “language-in-use”—as well as other elements such as values, symbols, tools and thinking styles—so as to identify and track tacit knowledge—that is, meanings emerging from obesity-epidemic discourse (Gee 34, 40–41). Such a method is apt given its capacity to analyse contributors’ spontaneous statements of their feelings—in particular their gut reactions to the program and the participants. The paper ends with my findings and conclusions. Bringing Sexy Back: Background Information Screened in 2014, season one of BSB format consists of a host Samantha Armytage, fitness trainer Cameron Byrnes and stylist Jules Sebastian and her team of hairdresser, groomers etc. Undoubtedly, part of the program’s construction is to select participants who appeal to a broad range of viewers. Participants’ ages range from 21 years (Courney Gollings) to 51 years (Vicki Gollings). The individuals or couples who make up the series include: Ned (truck driver), Sam and Gary (parents of two boys), Lisa Wilson (single mother and hairdresser), Vicki and Courtney Golling (mother and daughter), Livio Caldarone (pizza/small restaurant owner), and Paula Beckton (mother of four), The first episode was aired on Australia’s Channel Seven on 12 August 2014 and the final episode on 13 January 2015. This particular series consisted of 9 episodes. In this paper I focus on the six episodes that were aired in 2014. Generally each individual episode consisted of: the intervention, presenting medical facts about participant’s weight; the helper figures setting training and diet regimes; the trials leading to transformation; and the happy ending evident in the reveal. Essentially, these segments illustrate that the program series is highly contrived and they also demonstrate the program’s method of challenging participants to lose weight. Makeover Television I now provide a further construct to assist the reader’s understanding of ‘what is going on’ in the BSB program, which fits within the genre of makeover program. As reflected in the literature, makeover television has some or all of the following ingredients: personal fitness trainer as expertstylist and grooming expertsfamily members and contestant’s reflexivity (reflect on their own behaviour)new self-celebrated photo shootscontestant winning challengessymbols, such as the dream outfit, and before and after photographstransformation before the ‘big reveal’ Moreover, makeover programs are about the ordinary person on television. According to Redden, identities on these programs are individual rather than collective in that they serve to show a type of “individuality” as if it exists irrespective of any social or cultural group (156). And what is the role of the expert? Redden points out the expert on makeover programs interprets the “life situation of the given person, who may represent a certain social category of ordinary person” (153). So while makeover programs purport to be about the ordinary person and make claims about the actuality of the ordinary person’s life (Skeggs and Wood 559; Stagi 138), they also depict a hierarchy of social categories. The participants’ class also features in makeover programs like BSB. Class is evident in that participants who are selected to be on the program are often from lower-middle class backgrounds. Most participants have non-professional occupations—truck driver (Ned), hairdresser (Lisa), pizza/small restaurant owner (Livio), body caster, a person who makes body casts (Paula). Similar to The Biggest Loser (2004–2014) on American NBC, and Australia Network Ten, the participants in BSB were also mainly from lower–middle class backgrounds (Rodan; Sender and Sullivan 575) Several researcher’s show that makeover television promises advancement for lower–middle class citizens (Fraser 188–189; Miller 589; Redden 155; Skeggs and Wood 561) based on the proposition that contestants have the power to transform themselves (Bratich 17; Ouellette and Hay 471–472; Lewis 443; Sender and Sullivan 581). Like other makeover programs BSB takes advantage of the aspirations of working and lower-middle class participants. And, not surprisingly, the desired transcendence is something most participants/viewers from lower-middle and working class backgrounds cannot strive to achieve without participating in the program (Miller 589). Transcendence in BSB comes from losing weight, and acquiring new gym equipment, gym clothing, access to a personal trainer, gym membership, holiday at a health retreat, new wardrobe, new haircut, and new gym clothes. These acts to transform oneself are often “presented” as the middle class “standard,” taste and specific ongoing “intimate practices” of the “middle class” (Skeggs and Wood 561; Redden 155). But clearly much of the sprucing up (such as a private gym at home, personal trainers) are expensive and beyond the budget of even an Australian middle-class family. Analysis Posters on the official BSB Channel Seven Facebook forum overall were the most positive about the program—they found the program motivating and inspiring. Several posters on Facebook asked how they might apply to be on the program. After the airing of the reveal, posters on all the online forums and social media analysed consistently used adjectives such as fantastic, awesome, congratulations, stunning, amazing, gorgeous, wow, incredible, look sensational, look hot, look great, champion effort, fabulous, impressive, beautiful, inspirational. Fat-Shaming In BSB fat-shaming works through the use of medical machines and imagery, which measure weight and body fat percentage (BMI) using the DXA scanner and X-ray machine. Even though many physicians object to BMI measurement, it has become an “infallible marker of dangerous risk-saturated obesity” (Morgan 205) in Health Department campaigns, insurance company policies and on makeover television. Participants’ current weight is compared to the weight of their 20 year-old self. The program also induces fat-shaming through visuals of food and drink stashes found in participant’s bedroom cupboards (Ned), remnants of take-away packaging in rubbish bins (Lisa), processed foods in pantry cupboards (Vicki and Courtney), and pizza cartons at work (Livio). Here food amounts are quantified for audiences to gasp with shock and horror reinforcing the stereotype that people are fat because they have insufficient willpower and overeat (Farrell 34), thus perpetuating the view that obese people are undisciplined, sloppy and “less likely to do productive work” (Greenberg et al.). Banners are produced of participants’ photographs in their 20s; the photographs chosen have been taken when participants were slim and looked hot at the beach or night clubbing. These banners are juxtaposed with a banner of participant’s current self—appearing overweight in unflattering short crop top and underwear. Both banners are flashed onto the screen during the program especially in the final reveal presumably as a visual measurement to shame participants for “letting themselves go”. Even though host Samantha provides reasons for participants gaining weight—such as the stress of being a single parent, having a busy life as a mother of four, work commitments etc—the visual banners powerfully signify more than the presenter’s dialogue. Katrina Dowd on Facebook suggests it is the banners that signified the truth about participants’ lifestyles when she comments: Absolutely. Amazing how people whom follow unhealthy eating patterns for years with lack of exercise get congratulated because they’ve lost weight. Should never have let yourself get to that stage. Using your children and work commitments as excuses for why you got that way is a big “fail”. Some social media participants on Twitter and online forum posters saw the participants as “Bogan” ( a white working-class person who lacks fashion sense, is uncouth unsophisticated and invokes disgust), lazy, slobs as represented in the following comments: “Bogan Hunters Makeover” (tvaddict); “STILL A FUCKING FAT BOGAN […] JUST STOP EATING” (Al_Mack); “Stop being a lazy bitch […] Seriously lazy slobs” (Dutchess of Tweet St); “learn to cook lazy cow” (Gidgit VonLaRue). Thus, for Katrina and the posters above, it is the “fat body” that is seen as the “uncivilized body” that lacks the self-control of the thin body (Richardson 80). Inspirational and Motivational I discovered that many online forum and social media participants found the program BSB inspiring and motivating. A similar finding to my study of The Biggest Loser online viewers (Rodan), as well as other researchers who interviewed audiences about The Biggest Loser (Readdy and Ebbeck). For instance, Twitter posters said the BSB inspires “everyday women” (Sharon@Shar0n) and “inspires me that I can do the same” (Sharon@KeepitRealV), “another great show #inspiring” (miss shadow). On Facebook most of the posters talked about how inspired they were by the show and or by the individual participants, for instance: Hi Lisa, I think I see a lot of me in you, I pretty much cried through the whole show. You have inspired me, much admiration for sharing your story with Australia. (Haigh) Many posters on Facebook identified with Lisa as a single mother (Jenkins) and her declaration that she was “an emotional eater” (McTavish). This may account for Lisa Wilson (5,824 likes) receiving the most likes on Facebook. There were those who identified with individual participants, such as Paula, who were attempting to lose weight. On the forum the bubhub, a forum for parents established in 2002, the administrator BH-bubhub started a thread titled “Need some motivation to shift those kilos? Our pal Paula is here to help hubbers!” Paula was the participant on BSB who lost the most weight, and was invited onto the forum to answer forum members’ questions. On this forum, disparaging, negative, demotivating comments were removed from public viewing (see caveat BH-bubhub). Overall, online forum posters on the bubhub expressed positive feelings about BSB as a weight loss program. Participants comments included “Awesome work Paula, I have no doubt you will inspire many and I look forward to hearing all your tips” (Mod-Uniquey) “and … you look fabulous” (BH-KatiesMum), “Wow, you must be so proud of yourself! That is an amazing effort and you look great” (Curby), “What an inspirational story!” (Mod-Nomsie). Facebook posters on the BSB official forum found the show motivating and evidence of others finding the same are: “I feel great after watching #sexybackau” (Freeburn), “an uplifting hour” (Hustwaite), “feeling motivated now to change a lot of things about myself” (McDonald). However, online posters rarely commented that the program inspired or motivated them to take specific actions about their own body size or lifestyle. For some, as other researchers have found about makeover programs, it is a form of televisual escapism (Holland, Blood and Thomas; Readdy and Ebbeck 585)—that is, the pleasure of watching others’ emotions in achieving their goal. For many others, identifying with the participants’ struggle, and seeing them overcome daily challenges and obstacles to losing weight, gave posters insights about themselves and how to change their own lifestyle. But maintaining weight-loss and a lifestyle that supports it—as Facebook posters frequently suggest—is very challenging for most people who are overweight. The transformations and reveals make for fairy-tale endings (the essence of makeover television), but the reality of losing weight is persistence, perseverance and hard work. Criticisms of the Program Posters on Facebook were censored more than some of the other online forums and social media. Facebook criticisms about the program BSB were dealt with swiftly by other posters—that is, posters were pressured to only express positive feelings about the program. For instance, Lynne Nicholas in response to Peter Thomson’s criticism that the program is “exploiting these people for cheap television entertainment” (Facebook, 14 August 2014) posted on Facebook: If you don’t like the show then don’t come on the page and comment. Channel 7 gives these people a chance to change their life and inspire others to do the same. (Facebook, 14 Aug. 2014) And in response to criticisms about the amount of processed food Cam discarded from participants Vicki and Courtney’s cupboard, Emily McCabe commented: If you don’t enjoy the concept of the program, feel free to change the channel and keep your negative comments to yourself. (Facebook, 2 Sep. 2014) Nevertheless, a lot of criticism appeared on the various online and social media outlets ranging from: the commercial aspects (matúš; Hales); the constant use of the word “fat” by the host (Spencer); the sponsorship and advertisements by a take-away food company (Daisy Murray; Patriot); the “irresponsible/unsafe training!” (M_Gardner; Ashton); the insufficient number of “diet tips” (Pedron-Peggs); and “sick of seeing all that food thrown away!!” (Barkla; Dunell; Robbie; Martin; Coupland). As noted above, some of the sites were censored. Criticisms of the program were only aired if the online forum and social media allowed people to vent their feelings and express their opinion. Allowing viewers to express their concerns about mainstream television programs such as BSB counters the argument made by other researchers suggesting that makeover programs do the work of audiences becoming “self-managing” and self-governing citizens (see Stagi; Ouellette and Hay 471-472; Sender and Sullivan 581; Ringrose and Walkerdine); and makeover programs perpetuate the myth that obesity is solely an individual behavioural problem (Yoo). Such critical comments (above) reveal that some viewers do question the show’s premises, and as a consequence they do not accept the dominant framing. Thus the hypothesis that all viewers of makeover programs are pliable and docile cannot be supported in my analysis. Findings and Conclusion Most BSB posters said they found the program inspiring and motivating. It seems many of the online posters identified with the participants’ struggle to lose their weight, and stay motivated to keep it off. So there was little fat-shaming from posters on Facebook and the online forums. The posters on Facebook expressed the most positive comments about the BSB program and the participants; however, the Facebook site was the official BSB social media site. It seems that many of the Facebook and online forum discussants were makeover television fans who had acquired a taste for the makeover genre – that is the transformation and the big reveal at the end, the re-styled self, the symbols as well as the tips, information and ideas about how to lose weight and change their lifestyle. Questions were often asked by posters about the participants’ eating plan, exercise regime, maintenance program etc., as well as how they (the posters) could apply to be on the show. Very few social media or online posters questioned and challenged the makeover genre, the advertising during the program, the quality and number of diet and nutrition tips, and the time as well as financial cost required to maintain the new self. References Al_Mack. “STILL A FUCKING FAT BOGAN.” 26 Aug. 2014, no time. Tweet. Al_Mack. “JUST STOP EATING.” 26 Aug. 2014, no time. Tweet. Ashton, Susan. “Bringing Sexy Back.” 13 Jan. 2015, 17:56. Facebook comment. Barkla, Michelle. “Bringing Sexy Back.” 9 Sep. 2014, 18:39. Facebook comment. BH-bubhub Administrator. “Need Some Motivation to Shift Those Kilos? Our Pal Paula Is Here to Help Hubbers!” The Bubhub 3 March 2015. 15:27. BH-KatiesMum. “Need Some Motivation to Shift Those Kilos? Our Pal Paula Is Here to Help Hubbers!” The Bubhub 3 Mar. 2015 19:26. Bratich, Jack Z. “Programming Reality: Control Societies, New Subjects and the Powers of Transformation.” Ed. Dana Heller. Makeover Television: Realities Remodelled. London: I.B. Tauris, 2007. 6-22. Coupland, Allison. “Bringing Sexy Back.” 2 Sep. 2014, 17:55. Facebook comment. Curby. “Need Some Motivation to Shift Those Kilos? Our Pal Paula Is Here to Help Hubbers!” The Bubhub 3 Mar. 2015, 19.30. Dowd, Katrina. “Bringing Sexy Back.” 19 Aug. 2014, 21:07. Facebook comment. Dunell, Meredith. “Bringing Sexy Back.” 9 Sep. 2014, 17:54pm. Facebook comment. Dutchess of Tweet St (Appy_Dayz). “Seriously lazy slobs feeling sorry for themselves on #SexyBackAu are just bloody annoying.” 19 Aug. 2014, no time. Tweet. Farrell, Amy E. Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2011. Fraser, Kathryn. “‘Now I Am Ready to Tell How Bodies Are Changed into Different Bodies…’ Ovid, The Metamorphoses.” Ed. Dana Heller. Makeover Television: Realities Remodelled. London: I.B. Tauris, 2007. 177-92. Freeburn, Tim (TimBurna). “I feel great after watching #sexybackau I would’ve felt better if I didn’t eat all that Lindt chocolate while watching it though.” 19 Aug. 2014, no time. Tweet. Gee, James Paul. An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge, 2010. Gidgit VonLaRue. “You want to eat crap nightly fine, it’s your body – but not fair to your poor kid. Learn to cook lazy cow.” 19 Aug. 2014, no time. Tweet. Greenberg, B., M. Eastin, L. Hofschire, K. Lachlan, and K.D. Brownell. “Portrayals of Overweight and Obese Individuals on Commercial Television.” American Journal of Public Health 93.8 (2003): 1324–48. Haigh, Renee J. “Bringing Sexy Back.” 26 Aug. 2014, 18:47. Facebook comment. Hales, Wendy. “Bringing Sexy Back.” 26 Aug. 2014, 18:38. Facebook comment. Holland, Kate, R., Warwick Blood, and Samantha Thomas. “Viewing The Biggest Loser: Modes of Reception and Reflexivity among Obese People.” Social Semiotics 25.1 (2015): 16-32. Hustwaite, Megan. “What an uplifting hour @BSBon7 is! @sam_armytage shines and @julessebastian is a talent #sexybackau.” 19 Aug. 2014, no time. Tweet. Jenkins, Yohti. “Bringing Sexy Back.” 26 Aug. 2014, 18:45. Facebook comment. Lewis, Tanya. “Introduction: Revealing the Makeover Show.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 22.4 (2008): 441-46. M_Gardner (MSGardner_1). “This show has just trumped biggestloser for irresponsible/unsafe training! Do not try at home people #SexyBackAu.” 12 Aug. 2014, no time. Tweet. Martin, Tania. “Bringing Sexy Back.” 2 Sep. 2014, 18:41. Facebook comment. matúš (MattLXS). “Sales are going to increase now for the fit bit flex thanks to #sexybackau sorry jaw bone up.” 19 Aug. 2014, no time. Tweet. McCabe, Emily. “Bringing Sexy Back.” 2 Sep. 2014, 21:01. Facebook comment. McDonald, Christine (Clubby_R8). “Watching #sexyback I’m really feeling motivated now to change a lot of things about myself. Although the smoking thing is a tough call.” 26 Aug. 2014, no time. Tweet. McTavish, Karen. “Bringing Sexy Back.” 26 Aug. 2014, 18:51. Facebook comment. Miller, Toby. “Afterword: The New World Makeover.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 22.4 (2008): 585-90. miss shadow (Miss_Shadow). “another great show #inspiring.” 26 Aug. 2014, no time. Tweet. Mod-Nomsie. “Need Some Motivation to Shift Those Kilos? Our Pal Paula Is Here to Help Hubbers!” The Bubhub 4 Mar. 2015. 11:47. Mod-Uniquey. “Need Some Motivation to Shift Those Kilos? Our Pal Paula Is Here to Help Hubbers!” The Bubhub 3 Mar. 2015, 17:46. Morgan, Kathryn Pauly. “Foucault, Ugly Ducklings, and Technoswans: Analyzing Fat Hatred, Weight-Loss Surgery, and Compulsory Biomedicalized Aesthetics in America.” Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 4.1 (2011): 188-220. Murray, Daisy. “Bringing Sexy Back.” 2 Sep. 2014, 18:27. Facebook comment. Nicholas, Lynne. “Bringing Sexy Back.” 14 Aug. 2014, 20:08. Facebook comment. Ouellette, Laurie, and James Hay. “Makeover Television, Governmentality and the Good Citizen.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 22.4 (2008): 471-84. Patriot (THEbitchiestgay). “Why is a weight loss show sponsored by a chicken company? Chicken is fattening.” 12 Aug. 2014, no time. Tweet. Pedron-Peggs, Peta. “Bringing Sexy Back.” 16 Sep. 2014, 17:38. Facebook comment. Readdy, Tucker, and Vicki Ebbeck. “Weighing In on NBC’s The Biggest Loser: Governmentality and Self-Concept on the Scale.” Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport 83.4 (2012): 579-86. Redden, Guy. “Makeover Morality and Consumer Culture.” Ed Dana Heller. Makeover Television: Realities Remodelled. London: I.B. Tauris, 2007. 150-64. Richardson, Niall. Transgressive Bodies: Representations in Film and Popular Culture. Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2010. Ringrose, Jessica, and Valerie Walkerdine. “The TV Make-Over as Site of Neo-Liberal Reinvention toward Bourgeois Femininity.” Feminist Media Studies 8.3 (2008): 227-46. Robbie, Tina. “Bringing Sexy Back.” 5 Sep. 2014, 16:46. Facebook comment. Rodan, Debbie. “Technologies of the Self: Remaking the Obese ‘Self’ in The Biggest Loser: Couples (Australia).” Proceedings of the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association on Media Democracy and Change Conference. Ed. K. McCallum. Canberra, 2010. Rodan, Debbie, Katie Ellis, and Pia Lebeck. Disability, Obesity and Ageing: Popular Media Identifications. London: Ashgate, 2014. Sender, Katherine, and Margaret Sullivan. “Epidemics of Will, Failures of Self Esteem: Responding to Fat Bodies in The Biggest Loser and What Not to Wear.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 22.4 (2008): 573-84. Sharon (Shar0n). “Watched #SexyBackAu for the first time tonight; a top show to motivate and inspire everyday women to be healthier and set achievable goals.” 26 Aug. 2014, no time. Tweet. Sharon (KeepitRealV). “#SexyBackAu watching another single mum challenge herself and change her life really inspires me that I can do the same!” 26 Aug. 2014, no time. Tweet. Skeggs, Beverley, and Helen Wood. “The Labour of Transformation and Circuits of Value ‘around’ Reality Television.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 22.4 (2008): 559-72. Spencer, Amby. “Bringing Sexy Back.” 17 Aug. 2014, 13:55. Facebook comment. Stagi, Luisa. “Lifestyle Television and Diet: Body Care as a Duty.” Italian Journal of Sociology of Education 6.3 (2014): 130-52. Thomson, Peter. “Bringing Sexy Back.” 14 Aug. 2014, 20:03. Facebook comment. Tvaddict. “Bringing Sexy Back.” TV Tonight 13 Aug. 2014, 18:17. Yoo, Jina. “No Clear Winner: Effects of The Biggest Loser on Stigmatization of Obese Persons. 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Consumer or home use (previously ‘amateur’) moving image formats are distinguished from professional (still known as ‘professional’) ones by relative affordability, ubiquity and simplicity of use. Since Pathé Frères released its Pathé Baby camera, projector and 9.5mm film gauge in 1922, a distinct line of viewing and making equipment has been successfully marketed at nonprofessional use, especially in the home. ‘Amateur film’ is a simple term for a complex, variegated and longstanding set of activities. Conceptually it is bounded only by the negative definition of nonprofessional (usually intended as sub-professional), and the positive definition of being for the love of the activity and motivated by personal passion alone. This defines a field broad enough that two major historians of US amateur film, Patricia R. Zimmermann and Alan D. Kattelle, write about different subjects. Zimmermann focuses chiefly on domestic use and ‘how-to’ literature, while Kattelle unearths the collective practices and institutional structure of the Amateur Ciné Clubs and the Amateur Ciné League (Zimmerman, Reel Families, Professional; Kattelle, Home Movies, Amateur Ciné). Marion Norris Gleason, a test subject in Eastman Kodak’s development of 16mm and advocate of amateur film, defined it as having three parts, the home movie, “the photoplay produced by organised groups”, and the experimental film (Swanson 132). This view was current at least until the 1960s, when domestic documentation, Amateur Ciné clubs and experimental filmmakers shared the same film gauges and space in the same amateur film magazines, but paths have diverged somewhat since then. Domestic documentation remains committed to the moving image technology du jour, the Amateur Ciné movement is much reduced, and experimental film has developed a separate identity, its own institutional structure, and won some legitimacy in the art world. The trajectory of Super 8, a late-coming gauge to amateur film, has been defined precisely by this disintegration. Obsolescence was manufactured far more slowly during the long reign of amateur film gauges, allowing 9.5mm (1922-66), 16mm (1923-), 8mm (1932-), and Super 8 (1965-) to engage in protracted format wars significantly longer than the life spans of their analogue and digital video successors. The range of options available to nonprofessional makers – the quality but relative expense of 16mm, the near 16mm frame size of 9.5mm, the superior stability of 8mm compared to 9.5mm and Super 8, the size of Super 8’s picture relative to 8mm’s – are not surprising in the context of general competition for a diverse popular market on the usual basis of price, quality, and novelty. However, since analogue video’s ascent the amateur film gauges have all comprehensibly lost the battle for the home use market. This was by far the largest section of amateur film and the manufacturers’ overt target segment, so the amateur film gauges’ contemporary survival and significance is as something else. Though all the gauges from 8mm to 16mm remain available today to the curious and enthusiastic, Super 8’s afterlife is distinguished by the peculiar combination of having been a tremendously popular substandard to the substandard (ie, to 16mm, the standardised film gauge directly below 35mm in both price and quality), and now being prized for its technological excellence. When the large scale consumption that had supported Super 8’s manufacture dropped away, it revealed the set of much smaller, apparently non-transferable uses that would determine whether and as what Super 8 survived. Consequently, though Super 8 has been superseded many times over as a home movie format, it is not obsolete today as an art medium, a professional format used in the commercial industry, or as an alternative to digital video and 16mm for low budget independent production. In other words, everything it was never intended to be. I lately witnessed an occasion of the kind of high-fetishism for film-versus-video and analogue-versus-digital that the experimental moving image world is justifiably famed for. Discussion around the screening of Peter Tscherkassky’s films at the Xperimenta ‘09 festival raised the specifics and availability of the technology he relies on, both because of the peculiarity of his production method – found-footage collaging onto black and white 35mm stock via handheld light pen – and the issue of projection. Has digital technology supplied an alternative workflow? Would 35mm stock to work on (and prints to pillage) continue to be available? Is the availability of 35mm projectors in major venues holding up? Although this insider view of 35mm’s waning market share was more a performance of technological cultural politics than an analysis of it, it raised a series of issues central to any such analysis. Each film format is a gestalt item, consisting of four parts (that an individual might own): film stock, camera, projector and editor. Along with the availability of processing services, these items comprise a gauge’s viability (not withstanding the existence of camera-less and unedited workflows, and numerous folk developing methods). All these are needed to conjure the geist of the machine at full strength. More importantly, the discussion highlights what happens when such a technology collides with idiosyncratic and unintended use, which happens only because it is manufactured on a much wider scale than eccentric use alone can support. Although nostalgia often plays a role in the advocacy of obsolete technology, its role here should be carefully qualified and not overstated. If it plays a role in the three main economies that support contemporary Super 8, it need not be the same role. Further, even though it is now chiefly the same specialist shops and technicians that supply and service 9.5mm, 8mm, Super 8, and 16mm, they are not sold on the same scale nor to the same purpose. There has been no reported Renaissances of 9.5mm or 8mm, though, as long term home movie formats, they must loom large in the memories of many, and their particular look evokes pastness as surely as any two-colour process. There are some specifics to the trajectory of Super 8 as a non-amateur format that cannot simply be subsumed to general nostalgia or dead technology fetishism. Super 8 as an Art Medium Super 8 has a longer history as an art medium than as a pro-tool or low budget substandard. One key aspect in the invention and supply of amateur film was that it not be an adequate substitute for the professional technology used to populate the media sphere proper. Thus the price of access to motion picture making through amateur gauges has been a marginalisation of the outcome for format reasons alone (Zimmermann, Professional 24; Reekie 110) Eastman Kodak established their 16mm as the acceptable substandard for many non-theatrical uses of film in the 1920s, Pathé’s earlier 28mm having already had some success in this area (Mebold and Tepperman 137, 148-9). But 16mm was still relatively expensive for the home market, and when Kiyooka Eiichi filmed his drive across the US in 1927, his 16mm camera alone cost more than his car (Ruoff 240, 243). Against this, 9.5mm, 8mm and eventually Super 8 were the increasingly affordable substandards to the substandard, marginalised twice over in the commercial world, but far more popular in the consumer market. The 1960s underground film, and the modern artists’ film that was partly recuperated from it, was overwhelmingly based on 16mm, as the collections of its chief distributors, the New York Film-Makers’ Co-op, Canyon Cinema and the Lux clearly show. In the context of experimental film’s longstanding commitment to 16mm, an artist filmmaker’s choice to work with Super 8 had important resonances. Experimental work on 8mm and Super 8 is not hard to come by, even from the 1960s, but consider the cultural stakes of Jonas Mekas’s description of 8mm films as “beautiful folk art, like song and lyric poetry, that was created by the people” (Mekas 83). The evocation of ‘folk art’ signals a yawning gap between 8mm, whose richness has been produced collectively by a large and anonymous group, and the work produced by individual artists such as those (like Mekas himself) who founded the New American Cinema Group. The resonance for artists of the 1960s and 1970s who worked with 8mm and Super 8 was from their status as the premier vulgar film gauge, compounding-through-repetition their choice to work with film at all. By the time Super 8 was declared ‘dead’ in 1980, numerous works by canonical artists had been made in the format (Stan Brakhage, Derek Jarman, Carolee Schneemann, Anthony McCall), and various practices had evolved around the specific possibilities of this emulsion and that camera. The camcorder not only displaced Super 8 as the simplest to use, most ubiquitous and cheapest moving image format, at the same time it changed the hierarchy of moving image formats because Super 8 was now incontestably better than something. Further, beyond the ubiquity, simplicity and size, camcorder video and Super 8 film had little in common. Camcorder replay took advantage of the ubiquity of television, but to this day video projection remains a relatively expensive business and for some time after 1980 the projectors were rare and of undistinguished quality. Until the more recent emergence of large format television (also relatively expensive), projection was necessary to screen to anything beyond very small audience. So, considering the gestalt aspect of these technologies and their functions, camcorders could replace Super 8 only for the capture of home movies and small-scale domestic replay. Super 8 maintained its position as the cheapest way into filmmaking for at least 20 years after its ‘death’, but lost its position as the premier ‘folk’ moving image format. It remained a key format for experimental film through the 1990s, but with constant competition from evolving analogue and digital video, and improved and more affordable video projection, its market share diminished. Kodak has continued to assert the viability of its film stocks and gauges, but across 2005-06 it deleted its Kodachrome Super 8, 16mm and slide range (Kodak, Kodachrome). This became a newsworthy Super 8 story (see Morgan; NYT; Hodgkinson; Radio 4) because Super 8 was the first deletion announced, this was very close to 8 May 2005, which was Global Super 8 Day, Kodachrome 40 (K40) was Super 8’s most famous and still used stock, and because 2005 was Super 8’s 40th birthday. Kodachome was then the most long-lived colour process still available, but there were only two labs left in the world which could supply processing- Kodak’s Lausanne Kodachrome lab in Switzerland, using the authentic company method, and Dwayne’s Photo in the US, using a tolerable but substandard process (Hodgkinson). Kodak launched a replacement stock simultaneously, and indeed the variety of Super 8 stocks is increasing year to year, partly because of new Kodak releases and partly because other companies split Kodak’s 16mm and 35mm stock for use as Super 8 (Allen; Muldowney; Pro8mm; Dager). Nonetheless, the cancelling of K40 convulsed the artists’ film community, and a spirited defence of its unique and excellent properties was lead by artist and activist Pip Chodorov. Chodorov met with a Kodak executive at the Cannes Film Festival, appealed to the French Government and started an online petition. His campaign circular read: EXPLAIN THE ADVANTAGES OF K40We have to show why we care specifically about Kodachrome and why Ektachrome is not a replacement. Kodachrome […] whose fine grain and warm colors […] are often used as a benchmark of quality for other stocks. The unique qualities of the Kodachrome image should be pointed out, and especially the differences between Kodachrome and Ektachrome […]. What great films were shot in Kodachrome, and why? […] What are the advantages to the K-14 process and the Lausanne laboratory? Is K40 a more stable stock, is it more preservable, do the colors fade resistant? Point out differences in the sensitometry curves, the grain structure... There was a rash of protest screenings, including a special all-day programme at Le Festival des Cinemas Différents de Paris, about which Raphaël Bassan wrote This initiative was justified, Kodak having announced in 2005 that it was going to stop the manufacturing of the ultra-sensitive film Kodachrome 40, which allowed such recognized artists as Gérard Courant, Joseph Morder, Stéphane Marti and a whole new generation of filmmakers to express themselves through this supple and inexpensive format with such a particular texture. (Bassan) The distance Super 8 has travelled culturally since analogue video can be seen in the distance between these statements of excellence and the attributes of Super 8 and 8mm that appealed to earlier artists: The great thing about Super 8 is that you can switch is onto automatic and get beyond all those technicalities” (Jarman)An 8mm camera is the ballpoint of the visual world. Soon […] people will use camera-pens as casually as they jot memos today […] and the narrow gauge can make finished works of art. (Durgnat 30) Far from the traits that defined it as an amateur gauge, Super 8 is now lionised in terms more resembling a chemistry historian’s eulogy to the pigments used in Dark Ages illuminated manuscripts. From bic to laspis lazuli. Indie and Pro Super 8 Historian of the US amateur film Patricia R. Zimmermann has charted the long collision between small gauge film, domesticity and the various ‘how-to’ publications designed to bridge the gap. In this she pays particular attention to the ‘how-to’ publications’ drive to assert the commercial feature film as the only model worthy of emulation (Professional 267; Reel xii). This drive continues today in numerous magazines and books addressing the consumer and pro-sumer levels. Alan D. Kattelle has charted a different history of the US amateur film, concentrating on the cine clubs and their national organisation, the Amateur Cine League (ACL), competitive events and distribution, a somewhat less domestic part of the movement which aimed less at family documentation more toward ‘photo-plays’, travelogues and instructionals. Just as interested in achieving professional results with amateur means, the ACL encouraged excellence and some of their filmmakers received commissions to make more widely seen films (Kattelle, Amateur 242). The ACL’s Ten Best competition still exists as The American International Film and Video Festival (Kattelle, Amateur 242), but its remit has changed from being “a showcase for amateur films” to being open “to all non-commercial films regardless of the status of the film makers” (AMPS). This points to both the relative marginalisation of the mid-century notion of the amateur, and that successful professionals and others working in the penumbra of independent production surrounding the industry proper are now important contributors to the festival. Both these groups are the economically important contemporary users of Super 8, but they use it in different ways. Low budget productions use it as cheap alternative to larger gauges or HD digital video and a better capture format than dv, while professional productions use it as a lo-fi format precisely for its degradation and archaic home movie look (Allen; Polisin). Pro8mm is a key innovator, service provider and advocate of Super 8 as an industry standard tool, and is an important and long serving agent in what should be seen as the normalisation of Super 8 – a process of redressing its pariah status as a cheap substandard to the substandard, while progressively erasing the special qualities of Super 8 that underlay this. The company started as Super8 Sound, innovating a sync-sound system in 1971, prior to the release of Kodak’s magnetic stripe sound Super 8 in 1973. Kodak’s Super 8 sound film was discontinued in 1997, and in 2005 Pro8mm produced the Max8 format by altering camera front ends to shoot onto the unused stripe space, producing a better quality image for widescreen. In between they started cutting professional 35mm stocks for Super 8 cameras and are currently investing in ever more high-quality HD film scanners (Allen; Pro8mm). Simultaneous to this, Kodak has brought out a series of stocks for Super 8, and more have been cut down for Super 8 by third parties, that offer a wider range of light responses or ever finer grain structure, thus progressively removing the limitations and visible artefacts associated with the format (Allen; Muldowney; Perkins; Kodak, Motion). These films stocks are designed to be captured to digital video as a normal part of their processing, and then entered into the contemporary digital work flow, leaving little or no indication of the their origins on a format designed to be the 1960s equivalent of the Box Brownie. However, while Super 8 has been used by financially robust companies to produce full-length programmes, its role at the top end of production is more usually as home movie footage and/or to evoke pastness. When service provider and advocate OnSuper8 interviewed professional cinematographer James Chressanthis, he asserted that “if there is a problem with Super 8 it is that it can look too good!” and spent much of the interview explaining how a particular combination of stocks, low shutter speeds and digital conversion could reproduce the traditional degraded look and avoid “looking like a completely transparent professional medium” (Perkins). In his history of the British amateur movement, Duncan Reekie deals with this distinction between the professional and amateur moving image, defining the professional as having a drive towards clarity [that] eventually produced [what] we could term ‘hyper-lucidity’, a form of cinematography which idealises the perception of the human eye: deep focus, increased colour saturation, digital effects and so on. (108) Against this the amateur as distinguished by a visible cinematic surface, where the screen image does not seem natural or fluent but is composed of photographic grain which in 8mm appears to vibrate and weave. Since the amateur often worked with only one reversal print the final film would also often become scratched and dirty. (108-9) As Super 8’s function has moved away from the home movie, so its look has adjusted to the new role. Kodak’s replacement for K40 was finer grained (Kodak, Kodak), designed for a life as good to high quality digital video rather than a film strip, and so for video replay rather than a small gauge projector. In the economy that supports Super 8’s survival, its cameras and film stock have become part of a different gestalt. Continued use is still justified by appeals to geist, but the geist of film in a general and abstract way, not specific to Super 8 and more closely resembling the industry-centric view of film propounded by decades of ‘how-to’ guides. Activity that originally supported Super 8 continues, and currently has embraced the ubiquitous and extremely substandard cameras embedded in mobile phones and still cameras for home movies and social documentation. As Super 8 has moved to a new cultural position it has shed its most recognisable trait, the visible surface of grain and scratches, and it is that which has become obsolete, discontinued and the focus of nostalgia, along with the sound of a film projector (which you can get to go with films transferred to dvd). So it will be left to artist filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky, talking in 1995 about what Super 8 was to him in the 1980s, to evoke what there is to miss about Super 8 today. Unlike any other format, Super-8 was a microscope, making visible the inner life of images by entering beneath the skin of reality. […] Most remarkable of all was the grain. While 'resolution' is the technical term for the sharpness of a film image, Super-8 was really never too concerned with this. Here, quite a different kind of resolution could be witnessed: the crystal-clear and bright light of a Xenon-projection gave us shapes dissolving into the grain; amorphous bodies and forms surreptitiously transformed into new shapes and disappeared again into a sea of colour. Super-8 was the pointillism, impressionism and the abstract expressionism of cinematography. (Howath) Bibliography Allen, Tom. “‘Making It’ in Super 8.” MovieMaker Magazine 8 Feb. 1994. 1 May 2009 ‹http://www.moviemaker.com/directing/article/making_it_in_super_8_3044/›. AMPS. “About the American Motion Picture Society.” American Motion Picture Society site. 2009. 25 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.ampsvideo.com›. 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