Journal articles on the topic 'Monstrous reproduction'

This article considers the figure of the monster and monstrosity as a phenomenon as an entangled effect of kinship and reproduction, and thus as conveying specific understandings of gender, sexuality and race. While non-heterosexual reproduction and family-making has long been viewed as monstrous, increasing LGBTQ rights and recognition has instead insisted on its normality. Engaging with feminist and queer monster theory, and building on ethnographic research in Stockholm, Sweden, this article considers the monstrous remains within contemporary queer kinship. In particular, it proposes that when choice and intent rather than biological ‘facts’ constitute the foundation of (queer) family, sexual and racial difference does not cease to exist, but rather, re-emerges as monstrous attachments and embodiments. To sketch a larger argument about the potential limits of ideas about social construction, the article hones in on two examples. First, it shows that gestation and childbirth, as monstrous embodiments, can pose problems for families that insist on parental equality through the perceived sameness of shared intent. Secondly it proposes that in the context of Sweden, reproduction through donor-insemination is built on a cultural idea of white sperm as both neutral and desirable. These examples, the article suggest, point to some remaining irreconcilable dimensions embedded in the fantasy of queer kinship that, like monsters, haunt its queer normative forms. In closing, it argues for a reconsideration of hopeful monstrosities by considering both queer reproduction and the sexual and racial differences with which it inevitably engages can instead be understood as somatechnical, as kinship technologies that are inevitably entangled in the biopolitics of (queer) nation-making and its natrualised whiteness.

The thirty years between the 1972 publication of Rosario Ferré’s short story “La muñeca menor” and Pedro Cabiya’s 2003 novella “Relato del piloto que dijo adiós con la mano” span the cultural, political, and economic “shift” from a “regulatory state” to a neoliberal global order that, per Rebekah Sheldon’s analysis, has articulated and contextualized similar contrasting takes on biological and material reproduction. Focusing on their transformed imaginary of “monstrous” reproduction, I explore in this paper how the texts’ Gothic and SF modalizations refract local conditions as well as critical elements of that shift, full of increasingly urgent and extreme consequences in Puerto Rico, and even farther afield.

Abstract The revival of the Frankenstein origin myth has left science fiction’s relationship to colonialism undertheorized. More recent creative interventions have, however, challenged the genre’s colonialist legacy: two works that achieve this are Larissa Lai’s novel Salt Fish Girl (2002) and Hiromi Goto’s short story “Hopeful Monsters” (2004). Using different forms of unruly reproduction—strange births, recurring histories, and eclectic intertextuality—these texts unravel the tangled histories of science fiction and colonialism. Using tropes of repetition and mutation, Lai and Goto trace not a myth of origins but the texture of interwoven histories of gendered and racialized oppression. Monstrous patchworks of texts, these works interrogate the boundaries between science fiction, myth, folklore, and fantasy, showing these generic distinctions to have been buttressed by colonialist discourses.

AbstractReproduction is one of the most persistently generative themes in the history of science and cinema. Cabbage fairies, clones and monstrous creations have fascinated filmmakers and audiences for more than a century. Today we have grown accustomed not only to the once controversial portrayals of sperm, eggs and embryos in biology and medicine, but also to the artificial wombs and dystopian futures of science fiction and fantasy. Yet, while scholars have examined key films and genres, especially in response to the recent cycle of Hollywood ‘mom coms’, the analytic potential of reproduction on film as a larger theme remains largely untapped. This introduction to a special issue aims to consolidate a disparate literature by exploring diverse strands of film studies that are rarely considered in the same frame. It traces the contours of a little-studied history, pauses to consider in greater detail a few particularly instructive examples, and underscores some promising lines of inquiry. Along the way, it introduces the six original articles that constituteReproduction on Film.

Purpose – The pupose of this paper is twofold. First, to consider the cultural reception of recent developments in genetic technology and human reproduction, particularly in relation to the prospect of human cloning and the advent of the “designer human”; and second, to explore the ways in which public discussion of these developments presuppose and recast issues of diversity, difference and (in)equality. Design/methodology/approach – The research draws upon UK print media sources (broadsheet and tabloid newspapers) over the past two decades to examine the ways in which cultural expectations concerning developments in reproductive technology are commonly expressed. It does not aim at a quantitative examination of the content of what was said; rather it seeks to explore how it was said and thus the discursive resources that were employed in doing so. Findings – The paper suggests that images of “technology” function simultaneously as “mirrors of society”, providing a means for articulating and rhetorically rehearsing the various philosophical antinomies and moral conflicts that characterize social organization. Originality/value – The paper adopts a novel approach to the question of diversity, difference and (in)equality by considering the “monsters” discursively associated with recent developments in genetic and reproductive technology as well as the “monstrous” forms of social organization that they foreshadow.

Promises are an example of what linguist JL Austin described as performative acts, in that their very utterance allows the act of promising to take place. Austin formed his theory of performative speech acts as a way in which to make fully predictable the effects of certain speech acts, promises amongst them. Using Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, this article demonstrates the impossibility of predicting the effects of promises, explaining that Austin and Frankenstein both lack a consideration of the bearing different bodies have on the effects of promises. Taking a feminist deconstructive approach, this article examines the technics of speech and the gaze, the accumulation of knowledge, the status and reproductive abilities of women, and how these relate to monsters and monstrosity in both the novel and Austin's seminal work, How to Do Things With Words.

Abstract Allochronic isolation can be a strong mechanism for reproductive isolation and speciation. However, imperfect allochrony and the expression of phenological plasticity can erode temporal barriers to gene flow and result in hybridization between divergent lineages. Here, we combine behavioural ecology and genomics to investigate this scenario in two closely related species of grigs in the genus Cyphoderris. These species exhibit a unique mating system whereby females feed on the fleshy hind wings of the male during copulation, and copulation with conspecific males is more likely in food-restricted females than in well-fed females. In western Canada, Cyphoderris buckelli and Cyphoderris monstrosa are sympatric but largely allochronically separated, with C. buckelli breeding earlier. However, their breeding seasons can overlap, leading to potential for older C. buckelli females to mate with young C. monstrosa males to obtain resources via sexual cannibalism. We used behavioural assays to test whether female feeding status affects the propensity for interspecific mating between C. buckelli females and C. monstrosa males. We then tested for hybridization and gene exchange in wild populations of both species, using morphology, mitochondrial DNA and genome-wide nuclear markers. We found that interspecific courtship and mating can occur, but the relationship between food restriction and increased propensity for hybridization was not significant. Although we observed intraspecific population genetic structure in both species, we found no signatures of hybridization in the morphological or genetic datasets, which suggests that postmating reproductive barriers might be preventing successful hybridization in the wild.

En este artículo se revisan la delimitación y la representación de la región patagónica argentina en diversos mapas. Dicho espacio se incorporó tardíamente al país sudamericano y se caracterizó como frontera en discursos que mezclan la línea y el territorio. Este proceso de apropiación está representado gráficamente en los mapas, lo cual permite evidenciar cómo las fronteras estatales y las de organización interna de Estado se superponen. Así, el mapa se erige en constructor, reproductor y naturalizador de discursos.

Data on age and reproduction of the rabbitfish at the Portuguese continental slope are presented. Ages were estimated based on transverse sections of the dorsal spine. Differences in growth patterns were detected between sexes—males grow slower and are smaller than females. The results from histological analysis of different development stages of testes indicated that the macroscopic scale used is well adapted to rabbitfish sampled in Portuguese waters. In females and excluding macroscopic Stage 4, which according to the adopted scale corresponds to an active phase, all the remaining stages were identified in the samples. Ovarian fecundity was estimated as 6·46±2·32 oocytes (females range: 45·0 to 70·0 cm pre-supra caudal fin length [PSCFL]). Length of first maturity in males (40·7 cm PSCFL) is lower than in females (45·9 cm PSCFL).

Oviducal glands (OGs) are distinct expanded regions of the anterior portion of the oviduct, commonly found in chondrichthyans, which play a key role in the production of the egg in-vestments and in the female sperm storage (FSS). The FSS phenomenon has implications for understanding the reproductive ecology and management of exploited populations, but little information is available on its taxonomic extent. For the first time, mature OGs from three lecithotrophic oviparous and four yolk-sac viviparous species, all considered at risk from the fishing impacts in the central western Mediterranean Sea, were examined using light microscopy. The OG microanatomy, whose morphology is generally conserved in all species, shows differences within the two reproductive modalities. Oviparous species show a more developed baffle zone in respect to viviparous ones because of the production of different egg envelopes produced. Among oviparous species, Raja polystigma and Chimaera monstrosa show presence of sperm, but not sperm storage as observed, instead, in Galeus melastomus and in all the viviparous sharks, which preserve sperm inside of specialized structures in the terminal zone.

<p>Este artículo aborda cuestiones como la violencia sexual, la heteronormalización obligatoria y la denuncia la cosificación heterosexual y reproductiva de las mujeres a través de los mitos de la Vagina Dentata. Planteamos una reflexión histórica, literaria, artística y con perspectiva de género de estos mitos universales donde es misión del héroe heteronormalizar a la monstrua arrancándole los dientes para convertir esos órganos genitales en un constructo social heteronormativo usable y disfrutable por el varón. Establecemos la actualidad de este tema y vindicamos desde la investigación y la creación artística con perspectiva de género a las mujeres como personas y no como órganos reproductores o lúdicos al servicio del heteropatriarcado pasado, presente y futuro.<strong></strong></p>

In his discussion of the “big, ambitious novel,” James Wood dismisses both male and female authors but singles out Zadie Smith's White Teeth for most of his critique of what he terms “hysterical realism.” For Wood, recent long novels display too much imagination but not enough substance and depth of character; the new novel has become “a picture of life.” With its deliberate foregrounding of inhumanness and spectacularity, Emil Ferris's My Favorite Thing Is Monsters commits many of Wood's list of transgressions against the traditional novel. This article examines how Ferris's book is unaffected by negative reactions to this transgressiveness, championing transgression and ignored voices as the mode of expression best suited to the big, ambitious novel of our times. The book's heroine and purported author of the book touches readers and moves them through the monstrous form she imagines for herself. Her reproductions of comics covers and art works negotiate diverse visual vocabularies and their resulting aesthetic and historical scope. In filtering its story through a young protagonist who is marginalized on all counts (age, class, race, sex, sexual orientation), Ferris's “big, ambitious (graphic) novel” is also a layered response against the criticisms of childishness levied against comics. Transgression in My Favorite Thing Is Monsters becomes a way of rethinking tradition—of comics, of novels, and of graphic novels—in the broader terms of cultural history.

At an exhibition in 1992 at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., “Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration,” one room among the four devoted to Ming China was called “Lamaist Art.” In the coffee-table book produced for the exhibition, with reproductions and descriptions of over 1,100 of the works displayed, however, not one painting, sculpture, or artifact was described as being of Tibetan origin. In commenting upon one of the Ming paintings, the well-known Asian art historian, Sherman E. Lee, wrote, “The individual [Tang and Song] motifs, however, were woven into a thicket of obsessive design produced for a non-Chinese audience. Here the aesthetic wealth of China was placed at the service of the complicated theology of Tibet.” This complicated theology is named by Lee with the term “Lamaism,” an abstract noun that does not occur in the Tibetan language but which has a long history in the West, a history inextricable from the ideology of exploration and discovery that the National Gallery cautiously sought to celebrate. Lee echoes the nineteenth-century portrayal of Lamaism as something monstrous, a composite of unnatural lineage, devoid of the spirit of original Buddhism (as constructed by European Orientialists). Lamaism was a deformity unique to Tibet, its parentage denied by India (in the voice of British Indologists) and by China (in the voice of the Qing empire), an aberration so unique in fact that it would eventually float free from its Tibetan abode, an abode that would vanish.

Cartilaginous fish are commonly recognized as key species in marine ecosystems for their fundamental ecological role as top predators. Nevertheless, effective management plans for cartilaginous fish are still missing, due to the lack of knowledge on their abundance, distribution or even life-history. In this regard, this paper aims at providing new information on the life-history traits, such as age, maturity, reproductive period, in addition to diet characteristics of eleven rare cartilaginous fish inhabiting the Central-Western Mediterranean Sea belonging to the orders Chimaeriformes (Chimaera monstrosa), Hexanchiformes (Heptranchias perlo and Hexanchus griseus), Myliobatiformes (Aetomylaeus bovinus and Myliobatis aquila), Rajiformes (Dipturus nidarosiensis and Leucoraja circularis), Squaliformes (Centrophorus uyato, Dalatias licha and Oxynotus centrina) and Torpediniformes (Tetronarce nobiliana), useful for their assessment and for future management actions. Particularly, the present paper provides for the first time the age estimation of D. nidarosienis and L. circularis which were both found capable of becoming older than ten years. In addition, the present study updates the sizes of first maturity of C. uyato and D. licha, which appeared to be capable of reproducing earlier than what was previously hypothesized, representing very valuable information for a better understanding of these rare species populations status and, eventually, their conservation. On the basis of the stomach content analysis, it was possible to identify five different predator groups.

Involuntary childlessness is a well-known phenomenon, and in Denmark, every twelfth child is born through the use of assisted reproduction. Denmark is currently positioned as one of the key global actors both as far as the use of in-vitro ­fertilization (IVF) is concerned as well as within the global ­market in sperm and reproductive technologies. In this article, the authors develop a feminist legal rhetorical framework to discuss how the Danish law and ethical guidelines on adoption and assisted reproduction rhetorically produce different master plots on “natural,” “artificial,” and “monstrous” forms of kinship. The authors conclude with a discussion of the potential that a feminist legal rhetorical framework holds, including its ability to analyze how rhetorical figures and metaphors legitimize certain types of kinship as well as the ability to raise new and provo­cative questions related to gender equality within the law

Patricia Piccinini’s work has been described as disquieting, compelling and grotesque. Other adjectives often used include disturbing, visceral, monstrous, chimerical but also cute and beautiful. The reason for the encounter of such descriptions which are typically found in separate realms is precisely that Piccinini seeks to fracture unitarian conceptualisations of humanness as she strives to materially debate issues of posthuman ethics. Her concerns relate to issues of breeding, mutation, biotechnology, motherhood/childhood, eco-philosophy and speciesism. In this paper, I will set off from the works of Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti to discuss Piccinini’s posthuman aesthetics and ethics. I propose to investigate the affirmative posthuman predicament which she has creatively designed for the art gallery space, reflecting the technocultural fabrications of our natureculture continuum. I will focus my attention on three posthuman propositions as they relate to the discourses of motherhood and reproduction: the cyborgian realities of the human and the animal; the organism and the machine; as well as the human, the animal and the vegetable. Piccinini’s reconfigurations are created into a world of tenderness and imbued with an ethics of care as she, unlike Victor Frankenstein, aims to love her creatures.

While several Dickens characters fit binary stereotypes of the disabled (pitiful/helpless; monstrous/villainous), Jenny Wren, the dolls’ dressmaker in Our Mutual Friend,(1864-5),creates a unique and constructive life overcoming her infirmities. This essay considers her successful adaptation and argues that in several respects she reverses and challenges the limits ordinarily imposed on disabled women in Victorian fiction. Jenny Wren anticipates today’s view that the disabled and the able-bodied can work together in interdependent relationships, subverting the expectation that the disabled are inevitably dependent. While typically the disabled woman in the Victorian novel is denied a reproductive future, Jenny is an exception. Dickens was ahead of his time in providing a suitor for Jenny, and envisioning that a disabled woman can be beautiful.

This paper considers whether the twenty-first-century resurgence of H. P. Lovecraft and weird fiction can be read as a conceptual parallel to the Anthropocene epoch, taking Carl H. Sederholm and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock’s The Age of Lovecraft as a starting-point. The assumption is that the two ‘ages’ are historically and thematically linked through the ‘monsters’ that inhabit them; monsters that include—but are not limited to—extensions, reproductions, and evolutions of Lovecraft’s writings. Preoccupied with environmental issues such as global climate change, the twenty-first-century imaginary has conjured monsters that appear to have much in common with early twentieth-century cosmic horror stories. Considering the renewed interest in Lovecraft and the weird, such developments raise the question: What can (weird) monsters tell us about the Anthropocene moment? This paper maps the ‘monstrous’ in the discourses emerging from the Anthropocene epoch and ‘The Age of Lovecraft’ by considering (new) weird narratives from contemporary literature, graphic novels, film, TV, and video games. Mindful of on-going discussions within ecocriticism, philosophy, and critical theory, the paper discusses a handful of unconventional texts to investigate the potential of the weird for expressing Anthropocene anxieties and for approaching nonhuman realities from new angles.

Images of anal flesh have been flashed on Australian television in the popular animated American 'kidult' cartoon series, Ren and Stimpy (1991-95) and South Park (1997-). Ren and Stimpy relates the tales of two male human-voiced animals: Ren, a skinny hyperactive chihuahua, and Stimpy, his stupid fat cat friend. The "Son of Stimpy" and "Blazing Entrails" episodes of the series contain landmark references to the anus which have informed the broader range of representations of the orifice in the South Park series. South Park explores the lives of four pre-pubescent Colorado schoolboys -- Stan, Kyle, Cartman and Kenny. Commentary about the excessive depictions of violence and viscera in these masculinist comedy cartoons has avoided analysis of their representations of anal flesh. How have ani been represented in these popular cultural productions? "Son Of Stimpy" pioneered with a narrative of male anal birth. At Christmas, Stimpy passes his first fart. His bare buttocks gurgle and a fart cloud rises and disappears. Stimpy's anus is not visually (re)presented. His attempts to produce another fart fail. Stimpy and "Stinky" search desperately for each other. Stinky, the personified fart, resembles a wrinkled hybrid of Casper The Friendly Ghost and Tweety Bird. Appearing outside the closed window of Ren and Stimpy's bedroom, Stinky ogles the sleeping Stimpy's unreachable buttocks. "Oh why did I leave home? I'll never find a home as warm and snuggly as the one I left", he reflects on Stimpy's anus. Father and son eventually meet, the adult Stinky marries a rotting dead codfish, and the newly-weds then live in Ren's nostrils. As probably the most conspicuously homoerotic televised cartoon, "Son of Stimpy" also shows Ren flirtatiously snuggling up to Stimpy under some mistletoe, the pair sharing a bed, and reminiscences about their nuptials. Thus, the unavoidable thrust of this play is that Stinky-the-fart (the son) was farted (born) through the anus of Stimpy (the male mother) after sodomitical penetration by Ren (Stinky's father). Moreover, Stimpy's search for his fart-child and Ren's relishing of Stinky's smell provide a clear metaphor for Ren and Stimpy's continuing desire for more fun, fart-producing, "gay", an(im)al sex. Although Stimpy's anus and Ren's penis are not depicted, the fleshy intercourse between them (that produced the cherished Stinky) can hardly be ignored in the imagination of the viewer. "Blazing Entrails" includes a groundbreaking image of inner male anal flesh. The title refers to Blazing Saddles with its famous comedy scene involving bean-eating, farting cowboys. The plot loosely reworks that of Fantastic Voyage, with Ren taking a crazed Stimpy to see a scientist who inflates him into a giant. Ren then travels through Stimpy's (unseen) anal sphincter (in a significant departure from the plot of Voyage). Ren is shown reading The Bowel Daily News on a speeding subway train that travels along the giant Stimpy's rectum. After this close-up depiction of Ren's (total body) penetration of Stimpy's anal canal, Ren travels via various vital organs to Stimpy's brain, which he shatters. Stimpy soon recovers. The fundamental thrust is that Ren 'fucks Stimpy brainless' through his anus for another mutually happy ending. The South Park series (Parker and Stone) also contains spectacular depictions of anal birth, a personified anal product, and anal sex between male animals. However, none lead to consensual homoerotic ecstasy. In "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe", which spoofs Communion, Cartman is raped in his sleep by male space aliens who penetrate his anus with a probe. Thus 'impregnated', he experiences immense pain (and ridicule), until his blazing anus delivers an enormous satellite dish. Instead of Stinky-the-fart, South Park features the more 'fleshy' Mr Hankey, a non-denominational talking Christmas turd that resembles Mr Potato Head. "Big Gay Al's Gay Boat Ride" contains the only reference to 'gay' male sex in the series. Sparky, a stray "gay homosexual" dog mounts another male canine before anally raping yet another. The anus is not depicted in these scenes. Anything but eroticised, the unexposed human male anus is valorised in South Park as an arsenal of multiple farts which are either deployed as weapons against male enemies, or shared between male friends as penultimate acts of affection and sacrifice. In "Not without My Anus", Terrance and Phillip organise a stadium full of Canadians to don gasmasks and fart on cue, thus generating an enormous cloud of gas that kills Saddam Hussein. In "Chicken Pox", Phillip worries that he "won't be able to fart anymore", due to his anal cancer. After he and Terrance appear in surgery with their buttocks and heads (but not ani) exposed, the two men literally 'bond' through an (unseen) "anal transplant". Terrance donates half his anus to Phillip, who happily farts again after the successful operation. The "Cow Days" episode of South Park includes close-up images depicting the outside and inside of an anus. The Chamber of Farts sideshow ride first appears from the outside as a giant pair of pink body-less buttocks, decorated with a vampire bat, spider and cobwebs. After buying tickets, the schoolboys take the traincar ride into the Chamber through the front door -- a giant asterisk which designates the anal sphincter. Inside, the boys pass clothed male dummies (one with a bare front bottom) and a farting black oval anus. They exit through a back door between the spread legs of a farting clothed female dummy. This arrangement codes the anal chamber as female (or feminised), with the rear door configured as a 'pussy-farting' vagina, or (to borrow a gay term for the male anus), as 'backpussy'. Therein, the confusing boys-in-the-train-in-the-haunted-Chamber-of-Farts scenario seemingly expresses heterosexual male anxieties about engaging in (paid group) penetration of a female anus, because the act too readily evokes visions of the beastly queer male things gay men and Sparky do with (their or other) male ani. Eve Sedgwick has stressed that "there has been no important and sustained [modern] Western discourse in which women's anal eroticism means anything" (129). In the form of the Chamber of Farts, the eroticised female anus has been conflated by hysterical heterosexual males to mean something horrific. There are few other farting females in these cartoons. In the "Powdered Toast Man with Vitamin 'F'" segment of Ren and Stimpy, a girl and boy fart after eating Powdered Toast. An empowering image of an exploding atomic bomb is superimposed only over the fart-inflated pants of the girl. In South Park's "Not Without My Anus", Terrance's baby daughter farts once, but only to establish her resemblance to her father. Women contribute only in long shot to the fart cloud that kills Saddam Hussein. While the female anus is demeaned in South Park, other female flesh is overwhelmingly cast as terrifying. Barbara Creed has demonstrated that classic horror films feature seven female archetypes (archaic mother, monstrous womb, vampire, witch, possessed body, monstrous mother and castrator) that express male fears of the mythical vagina dentata. Versions of these 'monstrous-feminine' figures in South Park include the Conjoined Fetus Lady; Frieda (the herpes-spreading prostitute); Cartman's highly-sexed hermaphrodite-born mother; Aunt Flo (the red-haired "monthly visitor" who personifies menstruation and gives away a serial killer fish), Barbra Streisand's "spooky" face; Wendy and Ms Crabtree (with their gnashing teeth); and Stan's mother with her herpes-infected genitalia. While male genitals are celebrated in South Park, the anus is configured as the most grotesque zone of male flesh, sometimes through misogynist references. The penis and "chocolate salty balls" of the black man, Chef, are praised through descriptive (heterosexual) innuendo. One father's insult to another, "I wasn't born with a silver enema up my ass", exploits the experiences of birthing women who have received enemas. In Ren and Stimpy, on the other hand, horrific (hairy, muscled, excretive, male) flesh belongs to hyper-masculine bodies, and sex organs other than male genitalia are celebrated. The joyous anal birth of Stinky mimics, yet edifies, non-vaginal birth. Stinky-the-fart and his female codfish wife celebrate the joining of the odours of anal and vaginal flesh, which they respectively incarnate. Key episodes of Ren and Stimpy provided the seminal subversive representations of ani in the history of televised animated cartoons. In "Son of Stimpy" and "Blazing Entrails", the meta(eu)phoric valorisation of the creativity of gay anal eroticism, orgasmic farting, and gay fatherhood (through metadiegetic narratives of inter-male conception and anal birth) challenges the dominant homophobic culture which demonises the (anal) sexuality of gay men and denies them access to reproductive technologies and families. Ren and Stimpy also pioneered with a skit celebrating the farting power of the female anus. In South Park, these subversive themes have been twisted into misogynist and homophobic contexts. Perhaps the anal transplant innovatively satirises the seriousness of rectal (bowel, colon, and prostate) cancers. However, this scenario is overshadowed by the show's gynophobic grotesquerie of female flesh, exemplified by the disturbing graphic imag(in)ing of the sexualised farting female anus as a chamber of horrors. The representation of collective killer ani and inter-male (human and animal) anal rape as comedy, is also disturbing. There are no references to fleshy practices -- such as anal masturbation, pleasurable inter-male or inter-female human anal eroticism, or female penetrations of male ani -- which could upset the hetero-masculinist homosocial phallologocentric order. How sad. References Blazing Entrails." Dir. Bob Camp. Ren and Stimpy 4.43 (1994).Nickelodeon. The Ren and Stimpy Prime Time Show. TVQ10, Brisbane. 9 April 1995. Blazing Saddles. Dir. Mel Brooks. Warner Bros., 1974. Communion. Dir. Philippe Mora. Allied Vision, 1989. Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous~Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, 1993. Fantastic Voyage. Dir. Richard Fleischer. 20th Century Fox, 1966. "Powdered Toast man with Vitamin 'F'." Dir. John Kricfalusi. Ren and Stimpy 3.27 (1993). Nickelodeon. Big Breakfast. TVQ10, Brisbane. 14 May 1994. "Son of Stimpy." Dir. John Kricfalusi. Ren and Stimpy 2.19 (1992). Nickelodeon. The Ren and Stimpy Prime Time Show. TVQ10, Brisbane. 1995. Parker, Trey, and Matt Stone, dirs. "Big Gay Al's Big Gay Boat Ride." South Park 1.4 (1997). Comedy Partners/Celluloid Studios, U.S.A. SBS, Brisbane. 19 Oct. 1998. ---, dirs. "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe." South Park 1.1 (1997). SBS, Brisbane. 28 Sept. 1998. ---, dirs. "Chicken Pox." South Park 2.10 (1998). SBS, Brisbane. 12 Oct. 1998. ---, dirs. "Cowdays." South Park 2.13 (1998). SBS, Brisbane. 23 Nov. 1998. ---, dirs. "Mr Hankey." South Park 1.10 (1997). SBS, Brisbane. 5 Oct. 1998. ---, dirs. "Not Without My Anus." South Park 2.01 (1998). SBS, Brisbane. 31 Aug. 1998. Sedgwick, Eve K. "A Poem Is Being Written." Representations 17 (1987): 110-143. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Simon-Astley Scholfield. "How Funny?: Spectacular Ani in Animated Television Cartoons." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.3 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/funny.php>. Chicago style: Simon-Astley Scholfield, "How Funny?: Spectacular Ani in Animated Television Cartoons," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 3 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/funny.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Simon-Astley Scholfield. (1999) How funny?: spectacular ani in animated television cartoons. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(3). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/funny.php> ([your date of access]).

A new device, sure to inspire technological bedazzlement, has been installed in Hong Kong shopping malls. Called simply The Love Machine, it functions like a photo booth, dispensing on-the-spot portraits1. But rather than one subject, it requires a couple, in fact the couple, in order to do its work of digital reproduction. For the output of this imaging machine is none other than a picture of the combined features of the two sitters, 'morphed' together by computer software to produce a technological child. Its Japanese manufacturers, while obviously cashing in on the novelty value, nevertheless list the advantage it allows for future matrimonial selection based around the production of a suitable aesthetic. Needless to say, the good citizens of Hong Kong have not allowed any rigid criteria for genetic engineering to get in the way of the progeny such a machine allows, creating such monstrous couplings as the baby 'cat-human', achieved by a sitter coupling with their pet. Rather than being the object of love here, technology acts as the conduit of emotion, or stronger still, it is the love relation itself, bringing the two together as one. What I want to touch upon is the sense in which a desire for oneness inhabits our relations to and through the technological. There is already an abundance of literature around the erotics of cyberspace, documenting and detailing encounters of virtual sex fantasies and romance. As well, there are more theoretical attempts to come to terms with what Michael Heim describes as the "erotic ontology of cyberspace" (59). Heim depicts these encounters not as a ravaging desire gone wild, sprouting up in odd places or producing monstrous offspring, but in homely and familial terms. Finally with the computer as incarnation of the machine, our love for technology can cease its restless and previously unfulfilled wanderings and find a comfortable place. What is worth pausing over here is the sense in which the sexual is subjugated to a conjugal and familial metaphor, at the same time as desire is modelled according to a metaphysics of fullness and lack. I would argue that in advancing this kind of love relation with the computer and the digital, the possibility of a relation is actually short-circuited. For a relation assumes the existence of at least two terms, and in these representations, technology does not figure as a second term. It is either marked as the other, where desire finds a soul mate to fill its lack. Or the technological becomes invisible, subsumed in a spiritual instrumentalism that sees it merely forging the union of cybernetic souls. I would suggest that an erotic relation with the technological is occluded in most accounts of the sexual in cyberspace and in many engagements with digital technologies. Instead we are left with a non-relational meeting of the same with itself. We might describe the dominant utilisation of the technological as onanistic. Relations of difference could be a productive effect of the technological, but are instead culturally caught up within an operational logic which sees the relational erotic possibilities of the machinic eliminated as sameness touches itself. I want to point towards some different models for theorising technology by briefly drawing upon the texts of Félix Guattari and Avital Ronell. These may lead to the production of a desiring relation with technology by coupling the machine with alterity. One of several climatic scenes from the 'virtual sex' movie Strange Days, directed by Katherine Bigelow, graphically illustrates the onanistic encounter. Set on the eve of the new millennium, the temporality of the film sets up a feeling of dis-ease: it is both futuristic and yet only too close. The narrative centres on the blackmarket in ultimate VR: purchasing software which allows the user, donning special headgear, to re-experience recorded memories in other peoples' lives. An evil abuser of this technology, known until the end of the film as an anonymous male junkie, is addicted to increasingly frequent hits of another's apperception. In his quest to score above his tolerance level, the cyber-junkie rapes a prostitute, but instead of wearing the headgear used to record his own perception of the rape, he forces the woman to put it on making her annex her subjectivity to his experience of desire. He records her reaction to becoming an appendage to him. The effect of watching this scene is deeply unsettling: the camera-work sets up a point-of-view shot from the position of the male subject but plays it to the audience as one might see through a video view-finder, thus sedimenting an assumed cultural association between masculinity and the male gaze. What we see is the violence produced by the annihilation of another's desire; what we hear is the soundtrack of the woman mimicking the male's enjoyment of his own desire. Put simply, what we watch is a feedback loop of a particular formation of technological desire, one in which the desire of or for the other is audio-visually impeded. Ultimately the experience can be stored and replayed as a porn movie solely for future masturbation. The scene in Strange Days quite adequately summarises the obstructed and obstructive desire to go no further than masturbation caught in the defiles of feedback. Feedback is also the term used in both video and sound production when a recording device is aimed at or switched onto a device playing back the same recording. The result, in the case of video, is to create an infinite abyss of the same image playing back into itself on the monitor; in the case of sound a high-pitched signal is created which impedes further transmission. By naming the desire to fuse with the technological a feedback loop, I am suggesting that manifestations of this desire are neither productive nor connective, in that any relation to exterior or heterogeneous elements are shut out. They stamp out the flow of other desires and replay the same looping desire based around notions of fullness and lack, completion and incompletion, and of course masculinity and femininity. Mark Dery makes this association between the desire for the technological, the elision of matter and phallic modes of masculinity: This, to the masculinist technophile, is the weirdly alchemical end point of cyberculture: the distillation of pure mind from base matter. Sex, in such a context, would be purged of feminine contact -- removed, in fact, from all notions of physicality -- and reduced to mental masturbation. (121) Dery's point is a corollary to mine; in discarding the need for an embodied sexual experience, the literature and representations of cyberspace, both theoretical and fictional, endorse only a touching of the sublimated self, no other bodies or even the bodily is brought into contact. There is no shortage of evidence for the disregard embodiment holds among the doyens of cyber-architecture. Hans Moravec and Marvin Minsky, writing about Artificial Intelligence, promote a future in which pure consciousness, freed from its entanglement with the flesh, merges with the machine (Mind Children; The Society of Mind). Here the reverence shown towards digital technology enters the sublime point of a coalition where the mind is supported by some sophisticated hardware, ultimately capable of adapting and reproducing itself. There are now enough feminist critics of this kind of cyberspeak to have noticed in this fantasy of machinic fusion a replay of the old Cartesian mind/body dualism. My point, however, is that this desire is not simply put in place by a failure to rethink the body in the realm of the digital. It is augmented by the fact that this disregard for theorising an embodied experience feeds into an inability to encounter any other within the realm of the technological. We should note that this is perpetuated not just by those seeking future solace in the digital, but also by its most ardent cultural critics. Baudrillard, as one who seemingly fits this latter category, eager to disperse the notion that writers such as Moravec and Minsky propound regarding AI, is driven to making rather overarching ontological remarks about machines in general. In attempting to forestall the notion that the machine could ever become the complement to the human, Baudrillard cancels the relation of the machine to desire by cutting off its ability to produce anything in excess of itself. The machine, on his account, can be reduced to the production of itself alone; there is nothing supplementary, exterior to or differential in the machinic circuit (53). For Baudrillard, the pleasures of the interface do not even extend to the solitary vice of masturbation. Celibate machines are paralleled by celibate digital subjects each alone with themselves, forming a non-relational system. While Baudrillard offers a fair account of the solitary lack of relation produced in and by digital technologies, he nevertheless participates in reinforcing the transformation of what he calls "the process of relating into a process of communication between One and the Same" (58). He catches himself within the circulation of the very desire he finds problematic. But whether onanistic or celibate, the erotics of our present or possible relations to technology do not become any more enticing in many actual engagements with emerging technologies. Popular modes of interfacing our desires with the digital favor a particular assemblage of body and machine where a kind of furtive one-handed masturbation may be the only option left to us. I will call this the operational assemblage, borrowing from Baudrillard and his description of Virtual Man, operating and communicating across computer cables and networks while being simultaneously immobilised in front of the glare of the computer screen. An operational assemblage, whilst being efficacious, inhibits movement and ties the body to the machine. Far from the body being discarded by information technologies, the operational assemblage sees certain parts of the body privileged and territorialised. The most obvious instance of this is VR, which, in its most technologically advanced state, still only selects the eyes and the hand as its points of bodily interface. In so-called fully immersive VR experience, it is the hand, wearing a data glove, which propels the subject into movement in the virtual world, but it is a hand propelled by the subject's field of vision, computer monitors mounted in the enveloping headset. Thus the hand operates by being subjected to the gaze2. In VR, then, the real body is not somehow left behind as the subject enters a new state of electronic consciousness; rather there is a re-organisation and reterritorialisation of the hand under the operative guidance of the eye and scopic desire. This is attested to by the experience one has of the postural body schema during immersion in VR. The 'non-operational' body remaining in physical space often feels awkward and clumsy as if it is too large or cumbersome to drag around and interact in the virtual world, as if it were made virtually non-functional. The operational assemblage of a distanced eye territorialising the hand to create a loop of identity through the machine produces a desiring body which is blocked in its relational capacities. It can only touch itself as self; it cannot find itself an other or as other. Rather than encouraging the hand to break connections with the circuit of the gaze, to develop speeds, capabilities and potentials of its own, these encounters are perpetually returned to the screen and the domain of the eye. They feed back into a loop where relations to other desires, other kinds of bodies, other machines are circumvented. Looping back and returning to the aesthetic reduction performed by the Love Machine, a more lo-tech version of the two technologically contracted to one might point to the possibility of alterity that current digital machines seem keen to circumvent. At San Fransisco's Exploratorium museum one of the public points of interface with the Human Genome Project can be found3. The Exploratorium has a display set up which introduces the public to the bioinformation technology involved as well as soliciting responses to bio-ethical issues surrounding the question of genetic engineering. In the midst of this display a simple piece of glass hangs as a divider between two sides of a table. By sitting on one side of the table with a light shining from behind, one could see both a self-reflection and through the glass to whomever was sitting on the other side. The text accompanying the display encourages couples to occupy either side of the glass. What is produced for the sitter on the light side is a combination of their own reflection 'mapped' onto the features of the sitter on the other side. The text for the display encourages a judgement of the probable aesthetic outcome of combining one's genes with those of the other. I tested this display with my partner, crossing both sides of the mirror/glass. Our reactions were similar; a sensation approaching horror arose as we each faced our distorted, mirrored features as possible future progeny, a sensation akin to encountering the uncanny4. While suggesting the familiar, it also indicates what is concealed, becoming a thing not known and thus terrifying. For what was decidedly spooky in viewing a morphing of my image onto that of the other's, in the context of the surrounding bioinformatic technologies, was the sense in which a familiarity with the homely features of the self was dislocated by a haunting, marking the claim of a double utterly different. Recalling the assertion made by Heim that in the computer we find an intellectual and emotional resting point, we could question whether the familiarity of a resting place provides a satisfactory erotic encounter with the technological. We could ask whether the dream of the homely, of finding in the computer a kinship which sanctions the love machine relation, operates at the expense of dispelling that other, unfamiliar double through a controlling device which adjusts differences until they reach a point of homeostasis. What of a reading of the technological which might instaurate rather than diffuse the question of the unfamiliar double? I will gesture towards both Guattari's text Chaosmosis and Ronell's The Telephone Book, for the importance both give to the double in producing a different relation with the technological. For Guattari, the machine's ghost is exorcised by the predominant view that sees particular machines, such as the computer, as a subset of technology, a view given credence at the level of hype in the marketing of AI, virtual reality and so forth as part of the great technological future. It also gains credibility theoretically through the Heideggerian perspective. Instead Guattari insists that technology is dependent upon the machinic (33). The machinic is prior to and a condition of any actual technology, it is a movement rather than a ground; the movement through which heterogeneous elements such as bodies, sciences, information come to form the interrelated yet specific fields of a particular assemblage we might term technological. It is also the movement through which these components retain their singularity. Borrowing from modern biology, Guattari labels this movement "autopoietic" (39). Rather than the cybernetic model which sees the outside integrated into the structure of the machinic by an adjustment towards homogeneity cutting off flow, Guattari underlines a continual machinic movement towards the outside, towards alterity, which transforms the interrelations of the technological ensemble. The machinic is doubled not by the reproduction of itself, but by the possibility of its own replacement, its own annihilation and transformation into something different: Its emergence is doubled with breakdown, catastrophe -- the menace of death. It possesses a supplement: a dimension of alterity which it develops in different forms. (37) Here, we can adjoin Guattari with Ronell's historical reading of the metaphorics of the telephone in attempts to think through technology. Always shadowed by the possibility Heidegger wishes to stake out for a beyond to or an overcoming of the technological, Ronell is both critical of the technologising of desire in the cybernetic loop and insistent upon the difference produced by technology's doubling desire. Using the telephone as a synecdoche for technology -- and this strategy is itself ambiguous: does the telephone represent part of the technological or is it a more comprehensive summary of a less comprehensive system? -- Ronell argues that it can only be thought of as irreducibly two, a pair (5). This differentiates itself from the couple which notoriously contracts into one. She argues that the two are not reducible to each other, that sender and receiver do not always connect, are not reducible to equal end points in the flow of information. For Ronell, what we find when we are not at home, on unfamiliar ground, is -- the machine. The telephone in fact maintains its relation to the machinic and to the doubling this implies, via the uncanny in Ronell's text. It relates to a not-being-at-home for the self, precisely when it becomes machine -- the answering machine. The answering machine disconnects the speaker from the listener and inserts itself not as controlling device in the loop, but as delay, the deferral of union. Loosely soldering this with Guattari's notion that the machine introduces a "dimension of alterity", Ronell reads the technological via the telephone line as that relation to the outside, to the machinic difference that makes the self always unfamiliar (84). I would suggest then that pursuing a love relation with technology or through the technological leads us to deploy an entire metaphorics of the familial, where the self is ultimately home alone and only has itself to play with. In this metaphorics, technology as double and technology's doubling desire become a conduit that returns only to itself through the circuitous mechanism of the feedback loop. Rather than opening onto heterogeneous relations to bodies or allowing bodies to develop different relational capacities, the body here is immobilised by an operational and scopic territorialisation. To be excited by an encounter with the technological something unfamiliar is preferable, some sense of an alternating current in the midst of all this homeliness, an external perturbation rubbing up against the tired hand of a short-circuiting onanism. Footnotes 1. The Love Machine is also the title of a digital still image and sound installation commenting upon the Hong Kong booth produced by myself and Michele Barker and last exhibited at the Viruses and Mutations exhibition for the Melbourne Festival, The Aikenhead Conference Centre, St. Vincent's Hospital, October, 1998. 2. For an articulation of the way in which this maps onto perspectival vision, see Simon Penny, "Virtual Reality as the Completion of the Enlightenment Project." Culture on the Brink. Eds. G. Bender and T. Druckery. Seattle: Bay Press, 1994. 3. Funded by the US Government, the project's goal is to develop maps for the 23 paired human chromosomes and to unravel the sequence of bases that make up the DNA of these chromosomes. 4. This is what Freud described in his paper "The Uncanny". Tracing the etymology of the German word for the uncanny, unheimlich, which in English translates literally as 'unhomely', Freud notes that heimlich, or 'homely', in fact contains the ambiguity of its opposite, in one instance. References Baudrillard, Jean. "Xerox and Infinity." The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena. Trans J. Benedict. London: Verso, 1993. 51-9. Dery, Mark. Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century. New York: Grove Press, 1996. Freud, Sigmund. "The Uncanny." Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 17. Trans. and ed. J. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1955. Guattari, Félix. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Sydney: Power Publications, 1995. Heim, Michael. "The Erotic Ontology of Cyberspace." Cyberspace: First Steps. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1994.59-80. Minsky, Marvin. The Society of Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985. Moravec, Hans. Mind Children. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1988. Ronell, Avital. The Telephone Book. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Anna Munster. "Love Machines." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.6 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/love.php>. Chicago style: Anna Munster, "Love Machines," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 6 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/love.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Anna Munster. (1999) Love machines. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(6). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/love.php> ([your date of access]).

The L Word: Generation Q is the reboot of The L Word, a long running series about a group of lesbians and bisexuals in Los Angeles in the early 2000s. Both programmes are unique in their positioning of lesbian characters and have been well received by audiences and critics alike. These programmes present a range of characters and narratives, previously excluded from mainstream film and television, bringing a refreshing change from the destructive images typically presented before. We argue that the reboot Generation Q now offers more meaningful representation of the broader lesbian and transgender communities, and discuss its relevance in the changing portrayals of gay representation. Gay visibility has never really been an issue in the movies. Gays have always been visible. It is how they have been visible that has remained offensive for almost a century. (Russo 66) In 2004 The L Word broke new ground as the very first television series written and directed by predominantly queer women. This set it apart from previous representations of lesbians by Hollywood because it portrayed a community rather than an isolated or lone lesbian character, that was extraneous to a cast of heterosexuals (Moore and Schilt). The series brought change, and where Hollywood was more often “reluctant to openly and non-stereotypically engage with gay subjects and gay characters” (Baker 41), the L Word offered an alternative to the norm in media representation. “The L Word’s significance lies in its very existence” according to Chambers (83), and this article serves to consider this significance in conjunction with its 2019 reboot, the L Word: Generation Q, to ascertain if the enhanced visibility and gay representation influences the system of representation that has predominantly been excluding and misrepresentative of gay life. The exclusion of authentic representation of lesbians and gays in Hollywood film is not new. Over time, however, there has been an increased representation of gay characters in film and television. However, beneath the positive veneer remains a morally disapproving undertone (Yang), where lesbians and gays are displayed as the showpiece of the abnormal (Gross, "Out of the Mainstream"). Gross ("Out of the Mainstream") suggests that through the ‘othering’ of lesbians and gays within media, a means of maintaining the moral order is achieved, and where being ‘straight’ results in a happy ending. Lesbians and gays in film thus achieve what Gerbner referred to as symbolic annihilation, purposefully created in a bid to maintain the social inequity. This form of exclusion often saw controversial gay representation, with a history of portraying these characters in a false, excluding, and pejorative way (Russo; Gross, "What Is Wrong"; Hart). The history of gay representation in media had at times been monstrous, playing out the themes of gay sexuality as threatening to heterosexual persons and communities (Juárez). Gay people were incorrectly stereotyped, and gay lives were seen through the slimmest of windows. Walters (15) argued that it was “too often” that film and television images would narrowly portray gays “as either desexualized or over sexualized”, framing their sexuality as the sole identity of the character. She also contested that gay characters were “shown as nonthreatening and campy 'others' or equally comforting and familiar boys (and they are usually boys, not girls) next door” (Walters 15). In Russo’s seminal text, The Celluloid Closet, he demonstrated that gay characters were largely excluded from genuine and thoughtful presentation in film, while the only option given to them was how they died. Gay activists and film makers in the 1980s and beyond built on the momentum of AIDS activism (Streitmatter) to bring films that dealt with gay subject matter more fairly than before, with examples like The Birdcage, Philadelphia, To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, and In and Out. Walters argues that while “mainstream films like Brokeback Mountain and The Kids are Alright entertain moviegoers with their forthright gay themes and scenes” (12), often the roles have been more of tokenisation, representing the “surprisingly gay characters in a tedious romcom, the coyly queer older man in a star-studded indie hit, the incidentally gay sister of the lead in a serious drama” (Walters 12). This ambivalence towards the gay role model in the media has had real world effects on those who identify themselves as lesbian or gay, creating feelings of self-hatred or of being ‘unacceptable’ citizens of society (Gamson), as media content “is an active component in the cultural process of shaping LGBT identities” (Sarkissian 147). The stigmatisation of gays was further identified by the respondents to a study on media and gay identity, where “the prevailing sentiment in these discussions was a sense of being excluded from traditional society” (Gomillion and Guiliano 343). Exclusion promotes segregation and isolation, and since television media are ever-present via conventional and web-based platforms, their messages are increasingly visible and powerful. The improved portrayal of gay characters was not just confined to the area of film and television however, and many publications produced major stories on bi-sexual chic, lesbian chic, the rise of gay political power and gay families. This process of greater inclusion, however, has not been linear, and in 2013 the media advocacy group known as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance against Defamation (GLAAD) mapped the quantity, quality, and diversity of LGBT people depicted in films, finding that there was still much work to be done to fairly include gay characters (GLAAD Studio Responsibility Index). In another report made in 2019, which examined cable and streaming media, GLAAD found that of the 879 regular characters expected to appear on broadcast scripted primetime programming, 10.2% were identified as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and or queer (GLAAD Where Are We on TV). This was the highest number of queer characters recorded since the start of their reporting. In January 2004, Showtime launched The L Word, the first scripted cable television to focus chiefly on lesbians. Over the course of six seasons it explored the deep bonds that linked the members of an evolving lesbian friendship circle. The central themes of the programme were the love and friendship between the women, and it was a television programme structured by its own values and ideologies. The series offered a moral argument against the widespread sexism and anti-gay prejudice that was evident in media. The cast, however, were conventionally beautiful, gender normative, and expensively attired, leading to fears that the programme would appeal more to straight men, and that the sex in the programme would be exploitative and pornographic. The result, however, was that women’s sex and connection were foregrounded, and appeared as a central theme of the drama. This was, however, ground-breaking television. The showrunner of the original L Word, Ilene Chaiken, was aware of the often-damning account of lesbians in Hollywood, and the programme managed to convey an indictment of Hollywood (Mcfadden). The L Word increased lesbian visibility on television and was revolutionary in countering some of the exclusionary and damaging representation that had taken place before. It portrayed variations of lesbians, showing new positive representations in the form of power lesbians, sports lesbians, singles, and couples. Broadly speaking, gay visibility and representation can be marked and measured by levels of their exclusion and inclusion. Sedgwick said that the L Word was particularly important as it created a “lesbian ecology—a visible world in which lesbians exist, go on existing, exist in forms beyond the solitary and the couple, sustain and develop relations among themselves of difference and commonality” (xix). However, as much as this programme challenged the previous representations it also enacted a “Faustian bargain because television is a genre which ultimately caters to the desires and expectations of mainstream audiences” (Wolfe and Roripaugh 76). The producers knew it was difficult to change the problematic and biased representation of queer women within the structures of commercial media and understood the history of queer representation and its effects. Therefore, they had to navigate between the legitimate desire to represent lesbians as well as being able to attract a large enough mainstream audience to keep the show commercially viable. The L Word: Generation Q is the reboot of the popular series, and includes some of the old cast, who have also become the executive producers. These characters include Bette Porter, who in 2019 is running for the office of the Mayor of Los Angeles. Shane McCutchen returns as the fast-talking womanising hairdresser, and Alice Pieszecki in this iteration is a talk show host. When interviewed, Jennifer Beals (executive producer and Bette Porter actor) said that the programme is important, because there have been no new lesbian dramas to follow after the 2004 series ended (Beals, You Tube). Furthermore, the returning cast members believe the reboot is important because of the increased attacks that queer people have been experiencing since the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Between the two productions there have been changes in the film and television landscape, with additional queer programmes such as Pose, Orange Is the New Black, Euphoria, RuPaul’s Drag Race, and Are You the One, for example. The new L Word, therefore, needed to project a new and modern voice that would reflect contemporary lesbian life. There was also a strong desire to rectify criticism of the former show, by presenting an increased variation of characters in the 2019 series. Ironically, while the L Word had purposefully aimed to remove the negativity of exclusion through the portrayal of a group of lesbians in a more true-to-life account, the limited character tropes inadvertently marginalised other areas of lesbian and queer representation. These excluded characters were for example fully representative trans characters. The 2000s television industry had seemingly returned to a period of little interest in women’s stories generally, and though queer stories seeped into popular culture, there was no dedicated drama with a significant focus on lesbian story lines (Vanity Fair). The first iteration of The L Word was aimed at satisfying lesbian audiences as well as creating mainstream television success. It was not a tacky or pornographic television series playing to male voyeuristic ideals, although some critics believed that it included female-to-female sex scenes to draw in an additional male viewership (Anderson-Minshall; Graham). There was also a great emphasis on processing the concept of being queer. However, in the reboot Generation Q, the decision was made by the showrunner Marja-Lewis Ryan that the series would not be about any forms of ‘coming out stories’, and the characters were simply going about their lives as opposed to the burdensome tropes of transitioning or coming out. This is a significant change from many of the gay storylines in the 1990s that were seemingly all focussed on these themes. The new programme features a wider demographic, too, with younger characters who are comfortable with who they are. Essentially, the importance of the 2019 series is to portray healthy, varied representations of lesbian life, and to encourage accurate inclusion into film and television without the skewed or distorted earlier narratives. The L Word and L Word: Generation Q then carried the additional burden of countering criticisms The L Word received. Roseneil explains that creating both normalcy and belonging for lesbians and gays brings “cultural value and normativity” (218) and removes the psychosocial barriers that cause alienation or segregation. This “accept us” agenda appears through both popular culture and “in the broader national discourse on rights and belongings” (Walters 11), and is thus important because “representations of happy, healthy, well integrated lesbian and gay characters in film or television would create the impression that, in a social, economic, and legal sense, all is well for lesbians and gay men” (Schacter 729). Essentially, these programmes shouldered the burden of representation for the lesbian community, which was a heavy expectation. Critiques of the original L Word focussed on how the original cast looked as if they had all walked out of a high-end salon, for example, but in L Word: Generation Q this has been altered to have a much more DIY look. One of the younger cast members, Finlay, looks like someone cut her hair in the kitchen while others have styles that resemble YouTube tutorials and queer internet celebrities (Vanity Fair). The recognisable stereotypes that were both including and excluding have also altered the representation of the trans characters. Bette Porter’s campaign manager, for example, determines his style through his transition story, unlike Max, the prominent trans character from the first series. The trans characters of 2019 are comfortable in their own skins and supported by the community around them. Another important distinction between the representation of the old and new cast is around their material wealth. The returning cast members have comfortable lives and demonstrate affluence while the younger cast are less comfortable, expressing far more financial anxiety. This may indeed make a storyline that is closer to heterosexual communities. The L Word demonstrated a sophisticated awareness of feminist debates about the visual representation of women and made those debates a critical theme of the programme, and these themes have been expanded further in The L Word: Generation Q. One of the crucial areas that the programme/s have improved upon is to denaturalise the hegemonic straight gaze, drawing attention to the ways, conventions and techniques of reproduction that create sexist, heterosexist, and homophobic ideologies (McFadden). This was achieved through a predominantly female, lesbian cast that dealt with stories amongst their own friend group and relationships, serving to upend the audience position, and encouraging an alternative gaze, a gaze that could be occupied by anyone watching, but positioned the audience as lesbian. In concluding, The L Word in its original iteration set out to create something unique in its representation of lesbians. However, in its mission to create something new, it was also seen as problematic in its representation and in some ways excluding of certain gay and lesbian people. The L Word: Generation Q has therefore focussed on more diversity within a minority group, bringing normality and a sense of ‘realness’ to the previously skewed narratives seen in the media. In so doing, “perhaps these images will induce or confirm” to audiences that “lesbians and gay men are already ‘equal’—accepted, integrated, part of the mainstream” (Schacter 729). 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Showtime Networks, 2019–. To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar. Dir. Beeban Kidron. Film. Universal Pictures, 1995. Walters, Suzanna Danuta. The Tolerance Trap: How God, Genes and Good Intentions Are Sabotaging Gay Equality. New York: New York UP, 2014. Yang, Alan. "From Wrongs to Rights: Public Opinion on Gay and Lesbian Americans Moves towards Equality." New York: The Policy Institute of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, 1999.

From elephants to ABBA fans, silicon to hormone, the following discussion uses a new research method to look at printed text, motion pictures and a teenage rebel icon. If by ‘print’ we mean a mechanically reproduced impression of a cultural symbol in a medium, then printing has been with us since before microdot security prints were painted onto cars, before voice prints, laser prints, network servers, record pressings, motion picture prints, photo prints, colour woodblock prints, before books, textile prints, and footprints. If we accept that higher mammals such as elephants have a learnt culture, then it is possible to extend a definition of printing beyond Homo sapiens. Poole reports that elephants mechanically trumpet reproductions of human car horns into the air surrounding their society. If nothing else, this cross-species, cross-cultural reproduction, this ‘ability to mimic’ is ‘another sign of their intelligence’. Observation of child development suggests that the first significant meaningful ‘impression’ made on the human mind is that of the face of the child’s nurturer – usually its mother. The baby’s mind forms an ‘impression’, a mental print, a reproducible memory data set, of the nurturer’s face, voice, smell, touch, etc. That face is itself a cultural construct: hair style, makeup, piercings, tattoos, ornaments, nutrition-influenced skin and smell, perfume, temperature and voice. A mentally reproducible pattern of a unique face is formed in the mind, and we use that pattern to distinguish ‘familiar and strange’ in our expanding social orbit. The social relations of patterned memory – of imprinting – determine the extent to which we explore our world (armed with research aids such as text print) or whether we turn to violence or self-harm (Bretherton). While our cultural artifacts (such as vellum maps or networked voice message servers) bravely extend our significant patterns into the social world and the traversed environment, it is useful to remember that such artifacts, including print, are themselves understood by our original pattern-reproduction and impression system – the human mind, developed in childhood. The ‘print’ is brought to mind differently in different discourses. For a reader, a ‘print’ is a book, a memo or a broadsheet, whether it is the Indian Buddhist Sanskrit texts ordered to be printed in 593 AD by the Chinese emperor Sui Wen-ti (Silk Road) or the US Defense Department memo authorizing lower ranks to torture the prisoners taken by the Bush administration (Sanchez, cited in ABC). Other fields see prints differently. For a musician, a ‘print’ may be the sheet music which spread classical and popular music around the world; it may be a ‘record’ (as in a ‘recording’ session), where sound is impressed to wax, vinyl, charged silicon particles, or the alloys (Smith, “Elpida”) of an mp3 file. For the fine artist, a ‘print’ may be any mechanically reproduced two-dimensional (or embossed) impression of a significant image in media from paper to metal, textile to ceramics. ‘Print’ embraces the Japanese Ukiyo-e colour prints of Utamaro, the company logos that wink from credit card holographs, the early photographs of Talbot, and the textured patterns printed into neolithic ceramics. Computer hardware engineers print computational circuits. Homicide detectives investigate both sweaty finger prints and the repeated, mechanical gaits of suspects, which are imprinted into the earthy medium of a crime scene. For film makers, the ‘print’ may refer to a photochemical polyester reproduction of a motion picture artifact (the reel of ‘celluloid’), or a DVD laser disc impression of the same film. Textualist discourse has borrowed the word ‘print’ to mean ‘text’, so ‘print’ may also refer to the text elements within the vision track of a motion picture: the film’s opening titles, or texts photographed inside the motion picture story such as the sword-cut ‘Z’ in Zorro (Niblo). Before the invention of writing, the main mechanically reproduced impression of a cultural symbol in a medium was the humble footprint in the sand. The footprints of tribes – and neighbouring animals – cut tracks in the vegetation and the soil. Printed tracks led towards food, water, shelter, enemies and friends. Having learnt to pattern certain faces into their mental world, children grew older and were educated in the footprints of family and clan, enemies and food. The continuous impression of significant foot traffic in the medium of the earth produced the lines between significant nodes of prewriting and pre-wheeled cultures. These tracks were married to audio tracks, such as the song lines of the Australian Aborigines, or the ballads of tramping culture everywhere. A typical tramping song has the line, ‘There’s a track winding back to an old-fashion shack along the road to Gundagai,’ (O’Hagan), although this colonial-style song was actually written for radio and became an international hit on the airwaves, rather than the tramping trails. The printed tracks impressed by these cultural flows are highly contested and diverse, and their foot prints are woven into our very language. The names for printed tracks have entered our shared memory from the intersection of many cultures: ‘Track’ is a Germanic word entering English usage comparatively late (1470) and now used mainly in audio visual cultural reproduction, as in ‘soundtrack’. ‘Trek’ is a Dutch word for ‘track’ now used mainly by ecotourists and science fiction fans. ‘Learn’ is a Proto-Indo-European word: the verb ‘learn’ originally meant ‘to find a track’ back in the days when ‘learn’ had a noun form which meant ‘the sole of the foot’. ‘Tract’ and ‘trace’ are Latin words entering English print usage before 1374 and now used mainly in religious, and electronic surveillance, cultural reproduction. ‘Trench’ in 1386 was a French path cut through a forest. ‘Sagacity’ in English print in 1548 was originally the ability to track or hunt, in Proto-Indo-European cultures. ‘Career’ (in English before 1534) was the print made by chariots in ancient Rome. ‘Sleuth’ (1200) was a Norse noun for a track. ‘Investigation’ (1436) was Latin for studying a footprint (Harper). The arrival of symbolic writing scratched on caves, hearth stones, and trees (the original meaning of ‘book’ is tree), brought extremely limited text education close to home. Then, with baked clay tablets, incised boards, slate, bamboo, tortoise shell, cast metal, bark cloth, textiles, vellum, and – later – paper, a portability came to text that allowed any culture to venture away from known ‘foot’ paths with a reduction in the risk of becoming lost and perishing. So began the world of maps, memos, bills of sale, philosophic treatises and epic mythologies. Some of this was printed, such as the mechanical reproduction of coins, but the fine handwriting required of long, extended, portable texts could not be printed until the invention of paper in China about 2000 years ago. Compared to lithic architecture and genes, portable text is a fragile medium, and little survives from the millennia of its innovators. The printing of large non-text designs onto bark-paper and textiles began in neolithic times, but Sui Wen-ti’s imperial memo of 593 AD gives us the earliest written date for printed books, although we can assume they had been published for many years previously. The printed book was a combination of Indian philosophic thought, wood carving, ink chemistry and Chinese paper. The earliest surviving fragment of paper-print technology is ‘Mantras of the Dharani Sutra’, a Buddhist scripture written in the Sanskrit language of the Indian subcontinent, unearthed at an early Tang Dynasty site in Xian, China – making the fragment a veteran piece of printing, in the sense that Sanskrit books had been in print for at least a century by the early Tang Dynasty (Chinese Graphic Arts Net). At first, paper books were printed with page-size carved wooden boards. Five hundred years later, Pi Sheng (c.1041) baked individual reusable ceramic characters in a fire and invented the durable moveable type of modern printing (Silk Road 2000). Abandoning carved wooden tablets, the ‘digitizing’ of Chinese moveable type sped up the production of printed texts. In turn, Pi Sheng’s flexible, rapid, sustainable printing process expanded the political-cultural impact of the literati in Asian society. Digitized block text on paper produced a bureaucratic, literate elite so powerful in Asia that Louis XVI of France copied China’s print-based Confucian system of political authority for his own empire, and so began the rise of the examined public university systems, and the civil service systems, of most European states (Watson, Visions). By reason of its durability, its rapid mechanical reproduction, its culturally agreed signs, literate readership, revered authorship, shared ideology, and distributed portability, a ‘print’ can be a powerful cultural network which builds and expands empires. But print also attacks and destroys empires. A case in point is the Spanish conquest of Aztec America: The Aztecs had immense libraries of American literature on bark-cloth scrolls, a technology which predated paper. These libraries were wiped out by the invading Spanish, who carried a different book before them (Ewins). In the industrial age, the printing press and the gun were seen as the weapons of rebellions everywhere. In 1776, American rebels staffed their ‘Homeland Security’ units with paper makers, knowing that defeating the English would be based on printed and written documents (Hahn). Mao Zedong was a book librarian; Mao said political power came out of the barrel of a gun, but Mao himself came out of a library. With the spread of wireless networked servers, political ferment comes out of the barrel of the cell phone and the internet chat room these days. Witness the cell phone displays of a plane hitting a tower that appear immediately after 9/11 in the Middle East, or witness the show trials of a few US and UK lower ranks who published prints of their torturing activities onto the internet: only lower ranks who published prints were arrested or tried. The control of secure servers and satellites is the new press. These days, we live in a global library of burning books – ‘burning’ in the sense that ‘print’ is now a charged silicon medium (Smith, “Intel”) which is usually made readable by connecting the chip to nuclear reactors and petrochemically-fired power stations. World resources burn as we read our screens. Men, women, children burn too, as we watch our infotainment news in comfort while ‘their’ flickering dead faces are printed in our broadcast hearths. The print we watch is not the living; it is the voodoo of the living in the blackout behind the camera, engaging the blood sacrifice of the tormented and the unfortunate. Internet texts are also ‘on fire’ in the third sense of their fragility and instability as a medium: data bases regularly ‘print’ fail-safe copies in an attempt to postpone the inevitable mechanical, chemical and electrical failure that awaits all electronic media in time. Print defines a moral position for everyone. In reporting conflict, in deciding to go to press or censor, any ‘print’ cannot avoid an ethical context, starting with the fact that there is a difference in power between print maker, armed perpetrators, the weak, the peaceful, the publisher, and the viewer. So many human factors attend a text, video or voice ‘print’: its very existence as an aesthetic object, even before publication and reception, speaks of unbalanced, and therefore dynamic, power relationships. For example, Graham Greene departed unscathed from all the highly dangerous battlefields he entered as a novelist: Riot-torn Germany, London Blitz, Belgian Congo, Voodoo Haiti, Vietnam, Panama, Reagan’s Washington, and mafia Europe. His texts are peopled with the injustices of the less fortunate of the twentieth century, while he himself was a member of the fortunate (if not happy) elite, as is anyone today who has the luxury of time to read Greene’s works for pleasure. Ethically a member of London and Paris’ colonizers, Greene’s best writing still electrifies, perhaps partly because he was in the same line of fire as the victims he shared bread with. In fact, Greene hoped daily that he would escape from the dreadful conflicts he fictionalized via a body bag or an urn of ashes (see Sherry). In reading an author’s biography we have one window on the ethical dimensions of authority and print. If a print’s aesthetics are sometimes enduring, its ethical relationships are always mutable. Take the stylized logo of a running athlete: four limbs bent in a rotation of action. This dynamic icon has symbolized ‘good health’ in Hindu and Buddhist culture, from Madras to Tokyo, for thousands of years. The cross of bent limbs was borrowed for the militarized health programs of 1930s Germany, and, because of what was only a brief, recent, isolated yet monstrously horrific segment of its history in print, the bent-limbed swastika is now a vilified symbol in the West. The sign remains ‘impressed’ differently on traditional Eastern culture, and without the taint of Nazism. Dramatic prints are emotionally charged because, in depicting Homo sapiens in danger, or passionately in love, they elicit a hormonal reaction from the reader, the viewer, or the audience. The type of emotions triggered by a print vary across the whole gamut of human chemistry. A recent study of three genres of motion picture prints shows a marked differences in the hormonal responses of men compared to women when viewing a romance, an actioner, and a documentary (see Schultheiss, Wirth, and Stanton). Society is biochemically diverse in its engagement with printed culture, which raises questions about equality in the arts. Motion picture prints probably comprise around one third of internet traffic, in the form of stolen digitized movie files pirated across the globe via peer-to-peer file transfer networks (p2p), and burnt as DVD laser prints (BBC). There is also a US 40 billion dollar per annum legitimate commerce in DVD laser pressings (Grassl), which would suggest an US 80 billion per annum world total in legitimate laser disc print culture. The actively screen literate, or the ‘sliterati’ as I prefer to call them, research this world of motion picture prints via their peers, their internet information channels, their television programming, and their web forums. Most of this activity occurs outside the ambit of universities and schools. One large site of sliterate (screen literate) practice outside most schooling and official research is the net of online forums at imdb.com (International Movie Data Base). Imdb.com ‘prints’ about 25,000,000 top pages per month to client browsers. Hundreds of sliterati forums are located at imdb, including a forum for the Australian movie, Muriel’s Wedding (Hogan). Ten years after the release of Muriel’s Wedding, young people who are concerned with victimization and bullying still log on to http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0110598/board/> and put their thoughts into print: I still feel so bad for Muriel in the beginning of the movie, when the girls ‘dump’ her, and how much the poor girl cried and cried! Those girls were such biartches…I love how they got their comeuppance! bunniesormaybemidgets’s comment is typical of the current discussion. Muriel’s Wedding was a very popular film in its first cinema edition in Australia and elsewhere. About 30% of the entire over-14 Australian population went to see this photochemical polyester print in the cinemas on its first release. A decade on, the distributors printed a DVD laser disc edition. The story concerns Muriel (played by Toni Collette), the unemployed daughter of a corrupt, ‘police state’ politician. Muriel is bullied by her peers and she withdraws into a fantasy world, deluding herself that a white wedding will rescue her from the torments of her blighted life. Through theft and deceit (the modus operandi of her father) Muriel escapes to the entertainment industry and finds a ‘wicked’ girlfriend mentor. From a rebellious position of stubborn independence, Muriel plays out her fantasy. She gets her white wedding, before seeing both her father and her new married life as hollow shams which have goaded her abandoned mother to suicide. Redefining her life as a ‘game’ and assuming responsibility for her independence, Muriel turns her back on the mainstream, image-conscious, female gang of her oppressed youth. Muriel leaves the story, having rekindled her friendship with her rebel mentor. My methodological approach to viewing the laser disc print was to first make a more accessible, coded record of the entire movie. I was able to code and record the print in real time, using a new metalanguage (Watson, “Eyes”). The advantage of Coding is that ‘thinks’ the same way as film making, it does not sidetrack the analyst into prose. The Code splits the movie print into Vision Action [vision graphic elements, including text] (sound) The Coding splits the vision track into normal action and graphic elements, such as text, so this Coding is an ideal method for extracting all the text elements of a film in real time. After playing the film once, I had four and a half tightly packed pages of the coded story, including all its text elements in square brackets. Being a unique, indexed hard copy, the Coded copy allowed me immediate access to any point of the Muriel’s Wedding saga without having to search the DVD laser print. How are ‘print’ elements used in Muriel’s Wedding? Firstly, a rose-coloured monoprint of Muriel Heslop’s smiling face stares enigmatically from the plastic surface of the DVD picture disc. The print is a still photo captured from her smile as she walked down the aisle of her white wedding. In this print, Toni Collette is the Mona Lisa of Australian culture, except that fans of Muriel’s Wedding know the meaning of that smile is a magical combination of the actor’s art: the smile is both the flush of dreams come true and the frightening self deception that will kill her mother. Inserting and playing the disc, the text-dominant menu appears, and the film commences with the text-dominant opening titles. Text and titles confer a legitimacy on a work, whether it is a trade mark of the laser print owners, or the household names of stars. Text titles confer status relationships on both the presenters of the cultural artifact and the viewer who has entered into a legal license agreement with the owners of the movie. A title makes us comfortable, because the mind always seeks to name the unfamiliar, and a set of text titles does that job for us so that we can navigate the ‘tracks’ and settle into our engagement with the unfamiliar. The apparent ‘truth’ and ‘stability’ of printed text calms our fears and beguiles our uncertainties. Muriel attends the white wedding of a school bully bride, wearing a leopard print dress she has stolen. Muriel’s spotted wild animal print contrasts with the pure white handmade dress of the bride. In Muriel’s leopard textile print, we have the wild, rebellious, impoverished, inappropriate intrusion into the social ritual and fantasy of her high-status tormentor. An off-duty store detective recognizes the printed dress and calls the police. The police are themselves distinguished by their blue-and-white checked prints and other mechanically reproduced impressions of cultural symbols: in steel, brass, embroidery, leather and plastics. Muriel is driven in the police car past the stenciled town sign (‘Welcome To Porpoise Spit’ heads a paragraph of small print). She is delivered to her father, a politician who presides over the policing of his town. In a state where the judiciary, police and executive are hijacked by the same tyrant, Muriel’s father, Bill, pays off the police constables with a carton of legal drugs (beer) and Muriel must face her father’s wrath, which he proceeds to transfer to his detested wife. Like his daughter, the father also wears a spotted brown print costume, but his is a batik print from neighbouring Indonesia (incidentally, in a nation that takes the political status of its batik prints very seriously). Bill demands that Muriel find the receipt for the leopard print dress she claims she has purchased. The legitimate ownership of the object is enmeshed with a printed receipt, the printed evidence of trade. The law (and the paramilitary power behind the law) are legitimized, or contested, by the presence or absence of printed text. Muriel hides in her bedroom, surround by poster prints of the pop group ABBA. Torn-out prints of other people’s weddings adorn her mirror. Her face is embossed with the clown-like primary colours of the marionette as she lifts a bouquet to her chin and stares into the real time ‘print’ of her mirror image. Bill takes the opportunity of a business meeting with Japanese investors to feed his entire family at ‘Charlie Chan’’s restaurant. Muriel’s middle sister sloppily wears her father’s state election tee shirt, printed with the text: ‘Vote 1, Bill Heslop. You can’t stop progress.’ The text sets up two ironic gags that are paid off on the dialogue track: “He lost,’ we are told. ‘Progress’ turns out to be funding the concreting of a beach. Bill berates his daughter Muriel: she has no chance of becoming a printer’s apprentice and she has failed a typing course. Her dysfunction in printed text has been covered up by Bill: he has bribed the typing teacher to issue a printed diploma to his daughter. In the gambling saloon of the club, under the arrays of mechanically repeated cultural symbols lit above the poker machines (‘A’ for ace, ‘Q’ for queen, etc.), Bill’s secret girlfriend Diedre risks giving Muriel a cosmetics job. Another text icon in lights announces the surf nightclub ‘Breakers’. Tania, the newly married queen bitch who has made Muriel’s teenage years a living hell, breaks up with her husband, deciding to cash in his negotiable text documents – his Bali honeymoon tickets – and go on an island holiday with her girlfriends instead. Text documents are the enduring site of agreements between people and also the site of mutations to those agreements. Tania dumps Muriel, who sobs and sobs. Sobs are a mechanical, percussive reproduction impressed on the sound track. Returning home, we discover that Muriel’s older brother has failed a printed test and been rejected for police recruitment. There is a high incidence of print illiteracy in the Heslop family. Mrs Heslop (Jeannie Drynan), for instance, regularly has trouble at the post office. Muriel sees a chance to escape the oppression of her family by tricking her mother into giving her a blank cheque. Here is the confluence of the legitimacy of a bank’s printed negotiable document with the risk and freedom of a blank space for rebel Muriel’s handwriting. Unable to type, her handwriting has the power to steal every cent of her father’s savings. She leaves home and spends the family’s savings at an island resort. On the island, the text print-challenged Muriel dances to a recording (sound print) of ABBA, her hand gestures emphasizing her bewigged face, which is made up in an impression of her pop idol. Her imitation of her goddesses – the ABBA women, her only hope in a real world of people who hate or avoid her – is accompanied by her goddesses’ voices singing: ‘the mystery book on the shelf is always repeating itself.’ Before jpeg and gif image downloads, we had postcard prints and snail mail. Muriel sends a postcard to her family, lying about her ‘success’ in the cosmetics business. The printed missal is clutched by her father Bill (Bill Hunter), who proclaims about his daughter, ‘you can’t type but you really impress me’. Meanwhile, on Hibiscus Island, Muriel lies under a moonlit palm tree with her newly found mentor, ‘bad girl’ Ronda (Rachel Griffiths). In this critical scene, where foolish Muriel opens her heart’s yearnings to a confidante she can finally trust, the director and DP have chosen to shoot a flat, high contrast blue filtered image. The visual result is very much like the semiabstract Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints by Utamaro. This Japanese printing style informed the rise of European modern painting (Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, etc., were all important collectors and students of Ukiyo-e prints). The above print and text elements in Muriel’s Wedding take us 27 minutes into her story, as recorded on a single page of real-time handwritten Coding. Although not discussed here, the Coding recorded the complete film – a total of 106 minutes of text elements and main graphic elements – as four pages of Code. Referring to this Coding some weeks after it was made, I looked up the final code on page four: taxi [food of the sea] bq. Translation: a shop sign whizzes past in the film’s background, as Muriel and Ronda leave Porpoise Spit in a taxi. Over their heads the text ‘Food Of The Sea’ flashes. We are reminded that Muriel and Ronda are mermaids, fantastic creatures sprung from the brow of author PJ Hogan, and illuminated even today in the pantheon of women’s coming-of-age art works. That the movie is relevant ten years on is evidenced by the current usage of the Muriel’s Wedding online forum, an intersection of wider discussions by sliterate women on imdb.com who, like Muriel, are observers (and in some cases victims) of horrific pressure from ambitious female gangs and bullies. Text is always a minor element in a motion picture (unless it is a subtitled foreign film) and text usually whizzes by subliminally while viewing a film. By Coding the work for [text], all the text nuances made by the film makers come to light. While I have viewed Muriel’s Wedding on many occasions, it has only been in Coding it specifically for text that I have noticed that Muriel is a representative of that vast class of talented youth who are discriminated against by print (as in text) educators who cannot offer her a life-affirming identity in the English classroom. Severely depressed at school, and failing to type or get a printer’s apprenticeship, Muriel finds paid work (and hence, freedom, life, identity, independence) working in her audio visual printed medium of choice: a video store in a new city. Muriel found a sliterate admirer at the video store but she later dumped him for her fantasy man, before leaving him too. One of the points of conjecture on the imdb Muriel’s Wedding site is, did Muriel (in the unwritten future) get back together with admirer Brice Nobes? That we will never know. While a print forms a track that tells us where culture has been, a print cannot be the future, a print is never animate reality. At the end of any trail of prints, one must lift one’s head from the last impression, and negotiate satisfaction in the happening world. References Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “Memo Shows US General Approved Interrogations.” 30 Mar. 2005 http://www.abc.net.au>. British Broadcasting Commission. “Films ‘Fuel Online File-Sharing’.’’ 22 Feb. 2005 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3890527.stm>. Bretherton, I. “The Origins of Attachment Theory: John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth.” 1994. 23 Jan. 2005 http://www.psy.med.br/livros/autores/bowlby/bowlby.pdf>. Bunniesormaybemidgets. Chat Room Comment. “What Did Those Girls Do to Rhonda?” 28 Mar. 2005 http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0110598/board/>. Chinese Graphic Arts Net. Mantras of the Dharani Sutra. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.cgan.com/english/english/cpg/engcp10.htm>. Ewins, R. Barkcloth and the Origins of Paper. 1991. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.justpacific.com/pacific/papers/barkcloth~paper.html>. Grassl K.R. The DVD Statistical Report. 14 Mar. 2005 http://www.corbell.com>. Hahn, C. M. The Topic Is Paper. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.nystamp.org/Topic_is_paper.html>. Harper, D. Online Etymology Dictionary. 14 Mar. 2005 http://www.etymonline.com/>. Mask of Zorro, The. Screenplay by J McCulley. UA, 1920. Muriel’s Wedding. Dir. PJ Hogan. Perf. Toni Collette, Rachel Griffiths, Bill Hunter, and Jeannie Drynan. Village Roadshow, 1994. O’Hagan, Jack. On The Road to Gundagai. 1922. 2 Apr. 2005 http://ingeb.org/songs/roadtogu.html>. Poole, J.H., P.L. Tyack, A.S. Stoeger-Horwath, and S. Watwood. “Animal Behaviour: Elephants Are Capable of Vocal Learning.” Nature 24 Mar. 2005. Sanchez, R. “Interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policy.” 14 Sept. 2003. 30 Mar. 2005 http://www.abc.net.au>. Schultheiss, O.C., M.M. Wirth, and S.J. Stanton. “Effects of Affiliation and Power Motivation Arousal on Salivary Progesterone and Testosterone.” Hormones and Behavior 46 (2005). Sherry, N. The Life of Graham Greene. 3 vols. London: Jonathan Cape 2004, 1994, 1989. Silk Road. Printing. 2000. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.silk-road.com/artl/printing.shtml>. Smith, T. “Elpida Licenses ‘DVD on a Chip’ Memory Tech.” The Register 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02>. —. “Intel Boffins Build First Continuous Beam Silicon Laser.” The Register 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02>. Watson, R. S. “Eyes And Ears: Dramatic Memory Slicing and Salable Media Content.” Innovation and Speculation, ed. Brad Haseman. Brisbane: QUT. [in press] Watson, R. S. Visions. Melbourne: Curriculum Corporation, 1994. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Watson, Robert. "E-Press and Oppress: Audio Visual Print Drama, Identity, Text and Motion Picture Rebellion." M/C Journal 8.2 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/08-watson.php>. APA Style Watson, R. (Jun. 2005) "E-Press and Oppress: Audio Visual Print Drama, Identity, Text and Motion Picture Rebellion," M/C Journal, 8(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/08-watson.php>.

Briareos: If it's so quiet, then why do they need machines like that? I thought it was supposed to be peacetime. I'll tell you why-eighty per cent of the people here are artificial. Genetic engineering's out of control! -- Shirow, Appleseed 1.5: 37. Welcome to the 'machine' issue of M/C, appropriately mediated to you through the global network of machines sometimes known as the Internet. The question of the machine might seem a curious one for media and cultural studies scholars -- after all, commonsense tells us that whilst machines may let us practice culture or produce media, they are by definition not cultural. The cultural, the human, the social, is that which is left after all the nonhuman components have been properly contained within a 'machine'. And yet, what is a machine? When we talk of the machine in everyday discourse, it is always, explicitly or implicitly, part of a binary opposition between humans and machines, between motive biology and immobile artefacts, between active subjects and passive objects. In a similar vein the machine is always spectral, always metaphoric: it is one of the defining tropes of our industrialised civilisation. Whether it is the machinic Gehenna of H. G. Wells's or Fritz Lang's nightmares, all demonic steam engines and inhuman cogs; the shadowy, fifth column clones of Appleseed or the invasive 'Alien' that is micro-computerisation, the Human Genome project and nanotechnology, the machine is a metaphor that structures all levels of our relationships to culture. In scientific thought, at least since Newton and Descartes, the world has been composed of machines -- instruments which transmit and direct force, and which can be investigated, manipulated, invented. In humanistic thought, the machine is the other, the Frankenstein, the binary category against which the human gains its definition. It is the gleaming machine against which unruly women have been defined, the efficient machine against which uncontrollable mobs have had no recourse, the starkly military machine against which disenfranchised and colonised peoples have had no recourse but death. The machine is thus a significant cultural category, organising and policing ideological, discursive, historical, spiritual and political boundaries. In this issue of M/C, a range of authors address from different perspectives this question of the machine and its imbricated other, the human. Our feature writer, Anna Munster, in "Love Machines" critiques contemporary writing about sexuality and sexual experiences in cyberspace, commenting that "an erotic relation with the technological is occluded in most accounts of the sexual in cyberspace and in many engagements with digital technologies", arguing instead that these accounts engage in a kind of "onanistic" logic instead. She begins to address ways around this unsatisfactory arrangement by using the theories of Félix Guattari and Avital Ronell. Our second feature article is by the feminist philosopher and sociologist of technology, Zoë Sofoulis. In an article entitled "Machinic Musings with Mumford", Sofoulis returns to historian of technology Lewis Mumford for ideas about the role and purpose of machines in cultural development. She suggests that the machine's fascinating autonomy may inspire notions of the 'post-human', which can be critiqued from Mumford's humanist position as well as Latour's "non modern" stance. Taking up Mumford's point about the over-emphasis on machines in technology studies, Sofoulis argues that it is important to look at machines not just as things in themselves, but also the purposes they serve. A concern with the work of Guattari returns in Andreas Broeckmann's article "Minor Media -- Heterogenic Machines". Broeckmann reads a series of works by contemporary artists through the prism of Guattari's writings on art, media and the machine to argue that the "line of flight" of such media experimentation "is the construction of new and strong forms of subjectivity". Such artistic practices, which draw upon the networking and transformative features of digital media, Broeckmann suggests, "point us in the direction of the positive potentials of post media". 'Desire' Issue Editor Laurie Johnson takes a slightly different tack in this issue by developing a reading of classic 50s SF film Forbidden Planet in order to come to terms with deleuzoguattarian theorisations of the machine. He asks the question of Deleuze and Guattari: "how can we use a concept of machine that claims to go beyond the concept of utility (or techné, the function of technical machines)?" Johnson's article "Félix and Gilles's Tempestuous, Monstrous Machines" develops through a sophisticated cross-reading of Forbidden Planet with its source text, The Tempest, and the analysis of civilization that Deleuze and Guattari elaborate in Anti-Oedipus: "what the film demonstrates instead is that stripping a civilisation of its instrumentalities produces something other than just a return of the primitive repressed". In "From Haptic Interfaces to Man-Machine Symbiosis", Sonja Kangas provides an historicised account of the ways in which humans and machines interact with one another, which develops into a discussion of the problems of interactivity from the paradigm of game interface design. Drawing on the notions of cultural capital as developed by Pierre Bourdieu and the theorisations of the cyborg by Donna Haraway, Susan Luckman in "XX @ MM: Cyborg Subjectivity as Millennial Fashion Statement" addresses "some of the ways in which the traditional determinants of class are being redefined in light of the so-called postmodern capitalist information economy". In doing so she brings in "nerd chic", cyborgs, rave culture and I-Macs. Paul Benneworth, in his article "The Machine as Mythology -- The Case of the Joyce-Loebl Microdensitometer", takes us on an archeology of technology, examining the history and the fate of a small, pre-digital measuring device, the microdensitometer. His social history locates the device within its geographic and historical -- as well as its technological -- milieux, to demonstrate that the existence of any machine depends upon far more than merely its technical characteristics; that every machine is a social machine. If the machinic philosophy of Félix Guattari is the refrain of this issue of M/C, then Donna Haraway's cyborg metaphor is its melody. Drawing on the work of Haraway, Sophie Taysom's article "True Love Is a Trued Wheel: Technopleasure in Mountain Biking" seeks to make clear some of the ways in which mountain biking magazines have an important role in negotiating the boundaries between the "inside" and "outside" of mountain biking practices. Taysom achieves this by conducting a semiotic reading of this magazine genre, to prise open the trope of technology and see how it is reconfigured both literally and figuratively within their pages. Frances Bonner takes to task the highly gendered division in Science Fiction of "hard" and "soft" SF through an analysis of the representations of the 'technological' in Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan saga. As Bonner explains, this series is not so easily placed in either category, mixing as it does the tropes of space adventure with explorations of the ramifications of advanced reproductive technology. The engagement with the work of Guattari returns as a coda in Belinda Barnet's article "Machinic Heterogenesis and Evolution: Collected Notes on Sound, Machines and Sonicform". Hotwiring together Guattari's machinic philosophy with the work of the complexity theorists such as Stuart Kauffman and Ilya Prigogine, and using the example of the self-organising and evolving Sonicform Web site/sound system, Barnet examines the use and spread of evolutionary metaphors beyond their scientific origins. As she points out, "evolution is not just conflict, competition, selfish genes, tree diagrams, living and non-living systems. It's not just something furry, crawling things do. It's music. It's a dance. Poetic-existential. Hybrid subjectivities. And all the wor(l)ds in between". Nick Caldwell, Sean Aylward Smith -- 'Machine' Issue Editors Citation reference for this article MLA style: Nick Caldwell, Sean Aylward Smith. "Editorial: 'Machine'." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.6 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/edit.php>. Chicago style: Nick Caldwell, Sean Aylward Smith, "Editorial: 'Machine'," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 6 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/edit.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Nick Caldwell, Sean Aylward Smith. (1999) Editorial: 'machine'. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(6). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/edit.php> ([your date of access]).

Whatever a work of art may be, the artist certainly cannot dare to be simple. (Rebecca West) Van Gogh's Sunflowers is [not] considered worthy of inclusion in a new selection of the world's finest art. The compilers of the Folio Society's lavish and expensive Book of the 100 Greatest Paintings believe that some works are so overexposed and have been reproduced so often that they can no longer be viewed with a fresh eye. The Independent, 24.8.2001. Sometimes the day just falls down on you. One day they'll measure the weight of a day. One day science will be able to measure the density of 24 hours. And then I can claim the burden of getting through a day as part of my fitness programme. She imagined filling in her exercise diary. Lifted three fallen days from shoulders. Pumped up biceps, triceps, amassed muscle gain in legs. Strengthened heart tissue. Deepened lung capacity. She shouldn't joke about it. But of course she did. Sometimes it was how she coped. She'd tried not joking, joking, paying attention, ignoring, running away from, facing head on, talking, not talking, sharing, selfishly selflessly, hopefully hopelessly, alone and in company. Of course some methods of dealing with it were more fun than others. She used to have sex a lot when she felt most depressed. What she'd liked most about the sex was the feeling of being what she called underneath, somewhere darker, more primal. Crawling around on the inside of things. That was how she eventually looked at it. As if it was a special sort of art she had created, woven through the threads of her brain cells and tendrils of her nerve endings. Sometimes profoundly scary, sometimes just a cheap thrill. Why can't you just be happy? she'd heard people ask. People who cared and those who didn't particularly. As if she had willed it upon herself and could just as easily will herself out of it. I choose. Or I do not choose, she might say. Either way it remains because I have understood it ultimately is not a matter of choice. I will be happy when happiness comes around again. Just the same as the sunshine comes out after the rain clouds disappear. It is a cycle and I am part of its nature. And I haven't yet learnt to control the weather. Of course shamans could do it. Certain sorts of yogis. Witches. Tap into energy flows and seismic quivers. Even then it was not a matter of controlling shifts in temperature but rather surrendering to it. Making them not just observers of natural phenomena. But participants. Adding their own energy to the natural energy. Bringing about change through focus and attention rather than resistance and will. It would be hard to stay that sensitive in the city. Too hard with all the relentless metal, the swabs of smoke and smog blinding the eyes, the clang and grrrs of the smashing traffic, all the urban thoughts circling your brain like gangs out for some kicks. She made herself scarce when the days fell like this one. Right on top of her like a mountain of collapsing ash. Even though the others had what always seemed a grudging respect for it. As if she limped. Or was blind in one eye. They sensed its genetic implications. And almost admired the way she wore it like a piece of dark, sombre clothing. Instead of letting it wear her. Still These dark days. These black moods. Like a monstrous pet She had to walk Endlessly through the city streets Until it had walked off Its rage. She closed her eyes. Somewhere in the distance she could faintly detect the scent of a certain sort of coffee, which she craved. She opened her eyes and headed up King St, peering into cafes as she passed, twitching her nostrils like a sniffer dog, nosing out the secret stash of illicit nectar that would, of course, be the momentary answer to all her problems. She walked past Café Bleu. Too stark, too gloomy. Past El Bache. Too fluorescent, too sugary. Straight past CITRUS. Too friendly, too trendy. Criss-crossed King St to Macro Whole Foods. Too positive, too pure. Back over the other side to the Marleborough Hotel. Oh no, too desperate before midday. Turned left, walked down past the hospital, briefly thought about their cafeteria. But no, way too hopeless and pessimistic. Back onto City Road, past the Uni. Way too cool and know it all. Across Broadway, past IKU. Same problem as Macro, and almost up to Badde Manors. Eek! Way, way too hip. She got herself back down almost to Paramatta Road and stopped. She briefly wondered whether she should go back to Essential Energies and see the Clairvoyant. But she was sick at the idea of handing over forty bucks for someone to tell her that everything, even depression, eventually had to pass. She may as well go up to a complete stranger on the street and ask them: Tell me what to do, please tell me what to do. In certain cultures she was sure this would work. Older, more spiritual ethnicities, which had long ago given up the idea that human beings could control everything that happened in life. They'd even laugh at the concept. They might say something ancient and wise and comforting. Something about death and rebirth and transformation and illness being a sign of health and everything the other way round. But here, pioneer's children, building, growing, planning, committing, grasping, holding on, they'd tell her to pull herself together and get on with it. If you'd just tell me what IT was, maybe I'd be able to get on with it. She might answer them if she was in the mood for a conversation. But of course she wasn't going to accost anyone. Not today. Not in Glebe. Not just down the road from Gleebooks. Too literary, too secure. She bought some Turkish bread from the Lebanese place next door, intending to feed the ducks in City Park, but slipped back inside Essential Energies, with the bread tucked under her arm, just to stand for a few moments near the oil burner. The scents were Orange, Marjoram and Lavender, a soothing combination, the sign said, to calm the troubled mind and open the third eye. Jesus, she thought to herself, suddenly laughing out loud, on days like this I'm lucky if I can keep one good eye open. Let alone two. Without realizing it, she'd been making a racket. Aware of the shop assistant staring disapprovingly at her, she backed out the door, chattering to herself like a madwoman, fleetingly remembering how being in a church always seemed to create the same sense of misadventure as being in a New Age Shop. Too clean, too quiet, too affluent, too aromatic. Back on Paramatta Road she felt like crying. Some days that was all she felt like doing, tears gathering inside her, not like great thunderstorms about to explode, but grey sheets of drizzle with their slow, maddening incessant drip drip drip on the brain. She remembered Emerald Green telling her that depression would be the Super Disease of the Millennium. Sometimes she wondered how she would last that long. If you chart your course through it, you'll mark the map for others, Emerald had told her. Maybe the true pioneers of tomorrow are those with the courage to go out alone into the most forbidding terrain and return intact. It sounded encouraging when Emerald said it, but it never helped when she was standing at crossroads such as these wondering which way to go. Walk down Broadway into Chinatown. Wolf down a Laksa for lunch. Burn her mouth and body back to life. Halfway down Broadway she stopped as she always did, at the Broadway Framers. They'd taken down the Whitely that had been in the window for ages, and replaced it with the usual assortment of famous and popular prints, framed unnecessarily, she'd always thought, in ostentatious gold. Matisse's Blue Nude, Picasso's Harlequin from his Rose period and Van Gogh's Sunflowers. When she was younger and more easily impressed, her post modernist friends had told her painting was dead and that figurative art was bogus. They seemed so sure of everything, she'd never been sure of anything and so she'd been almost ashamed to admit that one of her favourite pictures was Sunflowers. She'd never analyzed why she liked it. If pressed to give an intelligent answer it would have been something along the lines of the visceral textures of the flowers, still so apparently immediate even in the hundreds of flat prints that had crowded the waiting rooms of her life since she was a little girl. It would have had something to do with the extravagance with which the stems were stuffed into the case, the overloaded slightly bedraggled, lushness of nature crammed by the artist into the humble little pot on which he'd scrawled his name. It could have been the energy of the brush strokes, which seem to thrust the flowers towards you with such force, as if Vincent is saying to you personally: LOOK LOOK. Have you ever seen anything so beautiful? He was just doing his job, Painter Bob had said, the job that artists do. To make us look at things that mostly we're too distracted, too busy, too depressed to see. The stars in the sky at night. Swirling clouds. The sloping downwards of a face and all the stories which that particular angle tells. She thought of Van Gogh whenever she saw that picture. On his lonely road to pure painting, too crazy, to stubborn to do anything else. Painter Bob had said he'd been a shaman, a channel through which his subjects passed in order to be delivered onto paper so that … we, the rest of the world, us, the rest of history, decade after decade of casual and not so casual observers of art, could see, feel, absorb through the nerve endings in our eyes the essence of what is was, not just to see the sunflowers but to be the sunflowers. Yellow, she thought. And amber. Orange. Bits of gold. They've always made me feel so happy. It couldn't be that simple, she thought. To have the courage to cross the gap that separates the subject from the object. To become the thing which you see. To empathize. To inhabit. To break down the disconnection between matter. Plump, healthy flowers, slightly past their prime. Still, she thought, they'd cost a packet at the florists. She liked sunflowers. Despite their larger than life, exotic qualities they'd always seemed to her to be completely and utterly ordinary. ..in the end only someone who suffered deeply could see the radiance in such simple things Painter Bob was right. He was after all an expert in such things. Sometimes she felt as if she didn't know much about anything at all. Here she was looking at reproductions through plate glass windows, while above her the sun was almost coming out. Feeling hopeful, she put on her sunglasses. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Neil, Linda. "Sunflowers " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.2 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/sunflower.php>. Chicago Style Neil, Linda, "Sunflowers " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 2 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/sunflower.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Neil, Linda. (2002) Sunflowers . M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(2). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/sunflower.php> ([your date of access]).

Prometheus, chained to a rock, having his liver pecked out by a great bird only for the organ to grow back again each night so that the torture may be repeated afresh the next day must be the quintessential image of masculinity in crisis. This paper will consider Promethean myth and the issues it raises regarding 'creation' including: the role of creator, the relationship between creator and created, the usurping of maternal (creative) power by patriarchy and, not least, the offering of an experimental model in which masculine identity can be recreated. I argue that Promethean myth raises significant issues relating to anxieties associated with notions of masculinity and gender, which are subsequently transposed in Shelley's modernist recasting of the myth, Frankenstein. I then consider 'Promethean' science fiction film, as an area particularly concerned with re-creation, in terms of construction of the self, gender and masculinity. Prometheus & Creation Prometheus (whose name means 'forethought') was able to foresee the future and is credited with creating man from mud/clay. As Man was inferior to other creations and unprotected, Prometheus allowed Man to walk upright [1] like the Gods. He also stole from them the gift of fire, to give to Man, and tricked the Gods into allowing Man to keep the best parts of sacrifices (giving the Gods offal, bones and fat). Thus Prometheus is regarded as the father and creator of Mankind, and as Man's benefactor and protector; whose love of Man (or love of trickery and his own cleverness) leads him to deceive the Gods. Prometheus's brother, Epimetheus (whose name means 'afterthought'), was commissioned to make all the other creations and Prometheus was to overlook his work when it was done. Due to Epimetheus's short-sightedness there were no gifts left (such as fur etc.) to bestow upon Man – the nobler animal which Prometheus was entrusted to make. Prometheus, a Titan, and illegitimate son of Iapetus and the water nymph Clymene (Kirkpatrick, 1991), helped fight against the Titans the side of Zeus, helping Zeus seize the throne. More than simple indication of a rebellious spirit, his illegitimate status (albeit as opposed to an incestuous one – Iapetus was married to his sister Themis) raises the important issues of both legitimacy and filial loyalty, so recurrent within accounts of creation (of man, and human artifice). Some hold that Prometheus is punished for his deceptions i.e. over fire and the sacrifices, thus he is punished as much for his brother's failings as much as for his own ingenuity and initiative. Others maintain he is punished for refusing to tell Zeus which of Zeus's sons would overthrow him, protecting Zeus' half mortal son and his mortal mother. Zeus's father and grandfather suffered castration and usurpment at the hands of their offspring – for both Zeus and Prometheus (pro)creation is perilous. Prometheus's punishment here is for withholding a secret which accords power. In possessing knowledge (power) which could have secured his release, Prometheus is often viewed as emblematic of endurance, suffering and resistance and parental martyrdom. Prometheus, as mentioned previously, was chained to a rock where a great bird came and tore at his liver [2], the liver growing back overnight for the torture to be repeated afresh the following day. Heracles, a half mortal son of Zeus, slays the bird and frees Prometheus, thus Man repays his debt by liberation of his benefactor, or, in other accounts, he is required to take Prometheus's place, and thus liberating his creator and resulting in his own enslavement. Both versions clearly show the strength of bond between Prometheus and his creation but the latter account goes further in suggesting that Man and Maker are interchangeable. Also linked to Promethean myth is the creation of the first woman, Pandora. Constructed (by Jupiter at Zeus's command) on one hand as Man's punishment for Prometheus's tricks, and on the other as a gift to Man from the Gods. Her opening of 'the box', either releasing all mans ills, plagues and woes, or letting all benevolent gifts but hope escape, is seen as disastrous from either perspective. However what is emphasised is that the creation of Woman is secondary to the creation of Man. Therefore Prometheus is not the creator of humankind but of mankind. The issue of gender is an important aspect of Promethean narrative, which I discuss in the next section. Gender Issues Promethean myths raise a number of pertinent issues relating to gender and sexuality. Firstly they suggest that both Man and Woman are constructed [3], and that they are constructed as distinct entities, regarding Woman as inferior to Man. Secondly creative power is posited firmly with the masculine (by virtue of the male sex of both Prometheus and Jupiter), negating maternal and asserting patriarchal power. Thirdly Nature, which is associated with the feminine, is surpassed in that whilst Man is made from the earth (mud/clay) it is Prometheus who creates him (Mother Earth providing only the most basic raw materials for production); and Nature is overcome as Man is made independent of climate through the gift of fire. Tensions arise in that Prometheus's fate is also linked to childbirth in so far as that which is internal is painfully rendered external (strongly raising connotations of the abject – which threatens identity boundaries). The intense connection between creation and childbirth indicates that the appropriation of power is of a power resting not with the gods, but with women. The ability to see the future is seen as both frightening and reassuring. Aeschylus uses this to explain Prometheus's tolerance of his fate: he knew he had to endure pain but he knew he would be released, and thus was resigned to his suffering. As the bearer of the bleeding wound Prometheus is feminised, his punishment represents a rite of passage through which he may earn the status 'Father of Man' and reassert and define his masculine identity, hence a masochistic desire to suffer is also suggested. Confrontations with the abject, the threat posed to identity, and Lacanian notions of desire in relation to the other, are subjects which problematise the myth's assertion of masculine power. I will now consider how the Promethean myth is recast in terms of modernity in the story of Frankenstein and the issues regarding male power this raises. Frankenstein - A Modern Prometheus Consistent with the Enlightenment spirit of renewal and reconstruction, the novel Frankenstein emerges in 1818, re-casting Promethean myth in terms of science, and placing the scientist (i.e. man) as creator. Frankenstein in both warning against assuming the power of God and placing man as creator, simultaneously expresses the hopes and fears of the transition from theocratic belief to rationality. One of the strategies Frankenstein gives us through its narrative use of science and technology is a social critique and interrogation of scientific discourse made explicit through its alignment with gender discourse. In appropriating reproductive power without women, it enacts an appropriation of maternity by patriarchy. In aligning the use of this power by patriarchy with the power of the gods, it attempts to deify and justify use of this power whilst rendering women powerless and indeed superfluous. Yet as it offers the patriarchal constructs of science and technology as devoid of social responsibility, resulting in monstrous productions, it also facilitates a critique of patriarchy (Cranny Francis, 1990, p220). The creature, often called 'Frankenstein' rather than 'Frankenstein's monster', is not the only 'abomination to God'. Victor Frankenstein is portrayed as a 'spoilt brat of a child', whose overindulgence results in his fantasy of omnipotent power over life itself, and leads to neglect of, and lack of care towards, his creation. Indeed he may be regarded as the true 'monster' of the piece, as he is all too clearly lacking Prometheus's vision and pastoral care [4]. "Neither evil nor inhuman, [the creature] comes to seem little more than morally uninformed, poorly 'put together' by a human creator who has ill served both his creation and his fellow humans." (Telotte, 1995, p. 76). However, the model of the natural – and naturally free – man emerges in the novel from an implied pattern of subjection which demonstrates that the power the man-made constructs of science and technology give us come at great cost: "[Power] is only made possible by what [Mary Shelley] saw as a pointedly modern devaluation of the self: by affirming that the human is, at base, just a put together thing, with no transcendent origin or purpose and bound to a half vital existence at best by material conditions of its begetting."(ibid.) Frankenstein's power expressed through his overcoming of Nature, harnessing of technology and desire to subject the human body to his will, exhibits the modern world's mastery over the self. However it also requires the devaluation of self so that the body is regarded as subject, thus leading to our own subjection. For Telotte (1995, p37), one reflection of our Promethean heritage is that as everything comes to seem machine-like and constructed, the human too finally emerges as a kind of marvellous fiction, or perhaps just another empty invention. Access to full creative potential permits entry "into a true 'no man's land'…. a wonderland...where any wonder we might conceive, or any wondrous way we might conceive of the self, might be fashioned". Certainly the modernist recasting of Promethean myth embodies that train of thought which is most consciously aiming to discover the nature of man through (re)creating him. It offers patriarchal power as a power over the self (independent of the gods); a critique of the father; and the fantasy of (re)construction of the self at the cost of deconstruction of the body which, finally, leads to the subjection of the self. The Promethean model, I maintain, serves to illuminate and further our understanding of the endurance, popularity and allure of fantasies of creation, which can be so readily found in cinematic history, and especially within the science fiction genre. This genre stands out as a medium both well suited to, and enamoured with, Promethean reworkings [5]. As religion (of which Greek mythology is a part) and science both attempt to explain the world and make it knowable they offer the reassurance, satisfaction and the illusion of security and control, whilst tantalising with notions of possible futures. Promethean science fiction film realises the visual nature of these possible futures providing us, in its future visions, with glimpses of alternative ways of seeing and being. Promethean Science Fiction Film Science fiction, can be seen as a 'body genre' delineated not by excess of sex, blood or emotion but by excess of control over the body as index of identity (Cook, 1999, p.193). Science fiction films can be seen to fall broadly into three categories: space flight, alien invaders and futuristic societies (Hayward, 1996, p.305). Within these, Telotte argues (Replications, 1995), most important are the images of "human artifice", which form a metaphor for our own human selves, and have come to dominate the contemporary science fiction film (1995, p11). The science fiction film contains a structural tension that constantly rephrases central issues about the self and constructedness. Paradoxically whilst the science fiction genre profits from visions of a technological future it also displays technophobia – the promises of these fictions represent dangerous illusions with radical and subversive potential, suggesting that nature and the self may be 'reconstructable' rather than stable and unchanging. Whilst some films return us safely to a comforting stable humanity, others embrace and affirm the subversive possibilities advocating an evolution or rebirth of the human. Regardless of their conservative (The Iron Giant, 1999, Planet of the Apes, 1968) or subversive tendencies (Metropolis 1926, Blade Runner 1982, Terminator 1984), they offer the opportunity to explore "a space of desire" (Telotte, p. 153, 1990) a place where the self can experience a kind of otherness and possibilities exceed the experience of our normal being (The Stepford Wives 1974, The Fly 1986, Gattaca 1997 [6]). What I would argue is central to the definition of a Promethean sub-genre of science fiction is the conscious depiction and understanding of the (hu)man subject or artifice as technological or scientific construction rather than natural. Often, as in Promethean myth, there is a mirroring between creator and creation, constructor and constructed, which serves to bind them despite their differences, and may often override them. Power in this genre is revealed as masculine power over the feminine, namely reproductive power; as such tensions in male identity arise and may be interrogated. Promethean (film) texts have at their centre issues of what it is to be human, and within this, what it is to be a man. There is a focus on hegemonic masculinity within these texts, which serves as a measure of masculinity. Furthermore these texts are most emphatically concerned with the construction of masculinity and with masculine power. The notion of creation raises questions of paternity, motherhood, parenting, and identification with the father, although the ways in which these issues are portrayed or explored may be quite diverse. As a creation of man, rather than of 'woman', the subjects created are almost invariably 'other' to their creators, whilst often embodying the fantasies, desires and repressed fears of their makers. That otherness and difference form central organising principles in these texts is undisputable, however there also can be seen to exist a bond between creator and created which is worthy of exploration, as the progeny of man retains a close likeness (though not always physically) to its maker [7]. Particularly in the Promethean strand of science fiction film we encounter the abject, posing a threat to fragile identity constructions (recalling the plight of Prometheus on his rock and his feminised position). I also maintained that 'lack' formed part of the Promethean heritage. Not only are the desires of the creators often lacking in Promethean care and vision, but their creations are revealed as in some way lacking, falling short of their creator's desire and indeed their own [8]. From the very beginnings of film we see the desire to realise (see) Promethean power accorded to man and to behold his creations. The mad scientists of film such as Frankenstein (1910), Homunculus (1916), Alraune (1918), Orlacs Hande (1925) and Metropolis (1926) and Frankenstein (1931) all point to the body as source of subjection and resistance. Whilst metal robots may be made servile, "the flesh by its very nature always rebels" (Telotte, 1995, p. 77). Thus whilst they form a metaphor for the way the modern self is subjugated, they also suggest resistance to that subjugation, pointing to "a tension between body and mind, humanity and its scientific attainments, the self and a cultural subjection" (ibid.). The films of the 1980's and 90's, such as Blade Runner (1982), Robocop (1987) Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1994), point towards "the human not as ever more artificial but the artificial as ever more human" (Telotte, 1995, p.22). However, these cyborg bodies are also gendered bodies providing metaphors for the contemporary anxieties about 'masculinities'. Just as the tale of Prometheus is problematic in that there exist many variations of the myth [9], with varying accounts capable of producing a range of readings, concepts of 'masculinity' are neither stable nor uniform, and are subject to recasting and reconstruction. Likewise in Promethean science fiction film masculine identities are multiple, fragmented and dynamic. These films do not simply recreate masculinities in the sense that they mirror extant anxieties but recreate in the sense that they 'play' with these anxieties, possibilities of otherness and permeate boundaries. We may see this 'play' as liberating, in that it offers possible ways of being and understanding difference, or conservative, reinstating hegemonic masculinity by asserting old hierarchies. As versions of the myth are reconstructed what new types of creator/creature will emerge? What will they say about our understanding and experiences of "masculinities"? What new possibilities and identities may we envision? Perhaps the most significant aspect of our Promethean heritage is that, as Prometheus is chained to his rock and tortured, through the perpetual regeneration of his liver, almost as if to counterweight or ballast the image of masculinity in crisis, comes the 'reassuring' notion that whatever the strains cracks or injuries the patriarchal image endures: 'we can rebuild him' [10]. We not only can but will, for in doing so we are also reconstructing ourselves. Footnote According to Bulfinch (web) he gave him an upright stature so he could look to the Heavens and gaze on the stars. Linking to Science Fiction narratives of space exploration etc. (Encyclopedia Mythica – [web]) -The liver was once regarded as the primary organ of our being (the heart being our contemporary equivalent) where passions and pain and were felt. Both physically constructed and sociologically, with woman as inferior lesser being and implying gender determinism. This is further articulated to effect in the James Whale film (Frankenstein, 1931), where 'Henry' Frankenstein's creation is regarded as his 'first born' and notions of lineage predominate, ultimately implying he will now pursue more natural methods of (pro)creation. Frankenstein is seen by some as the first cyborg novel in its linking of technology and creation and also often cited as the first science fiction film (although there were others). For example in Andrew Niccol's Gattaca (1997), the creation of man occurs through conscious construction of the self, acknowledging that we are all constructed and acknowledging that masculinity must be reconstructed if it is to be validated. Patriarchy has worked to mythologise our relationship to (mother) nature, so that the human becomes distinct from the manufactured. What is perhaps the most vital aspect of the character Vincent in Gattaca is his acknowledgement that the body must be altered, restructured, reshaped and defined in order to pass from insignificance to significance in terms of hegemonic masculine identity. It is therefore through a reappraisal of the external that the internal gains validity. See Foucault on resemblance and similitude (in The Gendered Cyborg, 2000). See Scott Bukatman on Blade Runner in Kuhn, 1990. The tale of Prometheus had long existed in oral traditions and folklore before Hesiod wrote of it in Theogeny and Works and Days, and Aeschylus, elaborated on Hesiod, when he wrote Prometheus Bound (460B.C). Catchphrase used in the 1970's popular TV series The Six Million Dollar Man in relation to Steve Austin the 'bionic' character of the title. References Bernink, M. & Cook, P. (eds.) The Cinema Book (2nd edition). London: British Film Institute Publishing, 1999. Clute, J. Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopaedia. London: Dorling Kindersley, 1995. Cohan, S. & Hark, I.R. (eds.) Screening the Male. London: Routledge, 1993. Hall, S., Held, D. & McLennan, G. (eds.) Modernity and its Futures. Cambridge and Oxford: Polity Press in association with The Open University, 1993. Jancovich, M. Rational Fears: American horror in the 1950's. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996. Jeffords, S. Can Masculinity be Terminated? In Cohan, S. & Hark, I.R. (eds.) Screening the Male. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Kirkup, G., Janes, L., Woodward, K. & Hovenden, F. (eds.) The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader. London: Routledge, 2000. Kuhn, A. (ed.) Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema. London and New York: Verso, 1990. Sobchack, V. Screening Space. New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press 1999. Telotte, J.P. A Distant Technology: Science Fiction Film and the Machine Age, Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 2000. Telotte, J.P. Replications. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995 Bulfinch's Mythology, The Age of Fable – Chapter 2: Prometheus and Pandora: (accessed 21st March 2000) http://www.bulfinch.org/fables/bull2.html Bulfinch's Mythology: (accessed March 21st 2000) http://www.bulfinch.org.html Encyclopaedia Mythica: Greek Mythology: (accessed June 15th 2000) http://oingo.com/topic/20/20246.html Encyclopaedia Mythica: Articles (accessed 15th June 2000) http://www.pantheon.org/mythica/articles.html