Journal articles on the topic 'Sabin (Firm)'

Mushrooms containing psilocybin have been used in Indigenous healing ceremonies in Mesoamerica since at least the sixteenth century. However, the sacramental use of mushrooms was only discovered by Westerners in the early to mid-twentieth century. Most notably, the meeting between amateur mycologist Robert Gordon Wasson and Mazatec curandera María Sabina in 1955 resulted in the widespread popularization of ingesting “magic mushrooms” in the West. To Sabina and the Mazatec people, psilocybin mushrooms were sacred and only to be used for healing. However, Western “hippies” viewed mushrooms as psychedelic drugs which they consumed with little regard for cultural sensitivities, rendering the mushrooms desacralized. This article argues that the desacralization of psilocybin mushrooms constitutes a form of spiritual abuse that has had far-reaching and long-lasting consequences at individual, local and global levels. Further, acknowledging and understanding the desacralization of psilocybin mushrooms as spiritual abuse has important implications for restorative justice and the understanding of psilocybin as a sacred medicine.

I welcome you with most significant pleasure and honour to the Volume 1 Issue 4 of Indian-Pacific Journal of Accounting and Finance. In this Issue 4, the emphasis is placed on accounting, taxation, business administration, corporate governance and risk management, accounting regulation and financial reporting, and accounting. In the first paper entitled “Board Characteristics, Corporate Performance and CEO Turnover Decisions: An empirical study of listed Non-financial Companies”, Mr Yahya Uthman Abdullahi (Tunku Puteri Intan Safinaz School of Accountancy, Universiti Utara Malaysia), Dr. Rokiah Ishak (Tunku Puteri Intan Safinaz School of Accountancy, Universiti Utara Malaysia) and Dr. Norfaiezah Sawandi (Tunku Puteri Intan Safinaz School of Accountancy, Universiti Utara Malaysia) examine the influence of board characteristics and corporate performance on CEO turnover decisions using a sample of 144 firms from non-financial companies listed on the Nigerian Stock exchange between the periods of 2011 to 2015. The study adopts agency and resource dependency theories to support its objectives and applies a logistic regression statistical technique to analyse the results. The results show that board nominating committee has a significant positive relationship with CEO turnover and board gender diversity has a negative influence on CEO turnover. Also, the study also finds that poor corporate performance leads to CEO turnover. In concurring with the findings, the study suggests to the government to enact legislation on gender quota for more women appointment on the board of the corporation to better the performance of the firm, and as well to enhance the monitoring role of the board. In the second paper with the caption “Factors affecting the productivity of IRBM Field Tax Auditor: A Case Study in Malaysia”, Mr Sabin Samitah (Tunku Puteri Intan Safinaz School of Accountancy, Universiti Utara Malaysia), Prof Dr Kamil Md Idris (Tunku Puteri Intan Safinaz School of Accountancy, Universiti Utara Malaysia) and Dr Saliza Abdul Aziz (Tunku Puteri Intan Safinaz School of Accountancy, Universiti Utara Malaysia) explore the idea of factors affecting the productivity of field tax auditors in the Inland Revenue Board of Malaysia (IRBM). This study is significant because IRBM has not yet implemented a systematic method of deploying officers to the field tax audit unit throughout Malaysia. The factors identified could be used as a reference in designing future human development programme in IRBM with particular emphasis on field tax auditors. Several variables have been defined, which broadly classified into individual characteristics and external factors. Data for the analysis are sourced from IRBM’s internal database, unpublished records and direct questionnaire of all respondents engaged in the field audit in Klang Valley. The proposed idea would analyse the relationship between auditors’ productivity and various variables based on the initial assumption that all variables are influencing the productivity through direct impact. This is, however, merely an initial expectation and subject to further data analysis once the data collection is implemented and completed. In the third paper with the title “Knowledge sharing and barriers in Organisations: A conceptual paper on Knowledge-Management Strategy”, Mr Saravanan Nadason (School of Business Management, Universiti Utara Malaysia), Associate Prof Dr Ram Al-Jaffri Saad (Tunku Puteri Intan Safinaz School of Accountancy, Universiti Utara Malaysia) and Dr Aidi Ahmi (Tunku Puteri Intan Safinaz School of Accountancy, Universiti Utara Malaysia) investigates the barriers that give impact towards the knowledge sharing among individuals in organisations. Knowledge sharing becomes the significant part of many organisations’ knowledge-management strategy. Even though the knowledge sharing is signifying practice for organisations’ competitiveness directly and market performance indirectly, several barriers make it difficult for knowledge management to achieve the goals and deliver a positive return on investment (ROI). The barriers were identified through literature reviews. The findings of previous studies revealed that several factors affect the knowledge sharing in organisations. This paper provides the analysis of significant factors that influence knowledge sharing in organisations, which comprise the individuals, culture, technology and organisation. In the fourth paper entitled “Ownership Structure and Earnings Management of listed Conglomerates in Nigeria”, Dr Musa Adeiza Farouk (Department of Accounting, Ahmadu Bello University) and Dr Nafiu Muhammad Bashir (Department of Business Administration, Ahmadu Bello University) examine the effect of ownership structure on earnings management of listed conglomerates in Nigeria. Ownership structure is represented with managerial ownership, institutional ownership, block ownership and foreign ownership, while earnings management is measured using modified Jones model by Dechow, Sloan and Sweeney (1995). Data were obtained from the six listed conglomerates on the Nigerian Stock Exchange covering the period 2008-2014 through their annual reports and accounts. The findings show that managerial ownership and ownership concentration have a significant and adverse effect on earnings management of listed conglomerates in Nigeria, while foreign ownership recorded positive and significant impact on earnings management of firms, institutional ownership was however reported to have an insignificant but negative influence on earnings management. The study, therefore, recommends that management should be encouraged to have more interest through shares in the organisation as it enables them to have more sense of belonging, which in turn will help mitigate their opportunistic tendencies. Also, the institutional ownership should be improved upon through allotment of more shares as these categories of investors are well informed and could be more vigilant over their stake in the organisation thereby performing monitoring role to mitigate earnings management. In the fifth paper with the title “Corporate Governance Structure and Firm Performance: A Case Study of Malaysian University Holdings Companies”, Prof Dr Wan Nordin Wan Hussina (Othman Yeop Abdullah Graduate, College of Business, Universiti Utara Malaysia), Dr. Norfaiezah Sawandi (Tunku Puteri Intan Safinaz School of Accountancy, College of Business, Universiti Utara Malaysia), and Dr Hasnah Shaari (Tunku Puteri Intan Safinaz School of Accountancy, College of Business, Universiti Utara Malaysia) analyse the corporate governance structure and performance of Malaysian public university holding companies from 2010 to 2014. The sample comprises eight public university holding companies. Data were obtained by using three methods, namely: survey, semi-structured interview, and documentation review. The board structure and board sub-committees practices of these case organisations were evaluated against the best practice recommendation of (i) the Malaysian Code on Corporate Governance (MCCG) 2012, (ii) the Green Book 2006, and (iii) other relevant acts. The firm performance is measured using four indicators which are sales, profit before tax, net profit margin and return on equity. Overall, their study finds that the practice and structure of corporate governance of the holding companies are excellent. However, their study reveals non-compliance by companies about certain aspects of the recommendations of Malaysian Code on Corporate Governance 2012 (MCCG) and the Green Book. The study also observed that the practice of governance between the university companies is not uniform. The findings provide an insight into the competence of the ministry of higher education as the shareholder to improve the monitoring of the public university holding companies. As you read through this Vol. 1 Issue 4 of IPJAF, I would like to reiterate that the success of the journal depends on your active participation and those of your colleagues and friends through submission of high-quality articles within the journal scope for review and publication. I acknowledge your support as we endeavour to make IPJAF the most authoritative journal on accounting and finance for the community of academic, professional, industry, society and government.

Todo género cinematográfico y literario posee una serie de elementos que le distinguen y le caracterizan, por lo que se puede decir que buscan generar un efecto determinado en el lector y/o espectador. En el caso del género de Terror, en donde el resultado global que se desea es causar horror, miedo, ansiedad, repulsión, asco, etc., no solo podemos esperar esto, quienes se han adentrado en el sinnúmero de producciones realizadas desde los inicios del cine y la literatura (producciones que son por mucho más antiguas al surgimiento del cine), saben que este género permite la expresión de propuestas subversivas y de contracultura que van desde miradas muy subjetivas y propias de un individuo determinado como la inmortalidad, la locura, el vacío existencial o la descomposición física y mental, hasta la crítica de la sociedad a través de distintas épocas, reprochando por ejemplo, los excesos del capitalismo, las desventajas de la tecnología, el consumismo, el aislamiento y la desigualdad social, la desconfianza y la paranoia, la lucha por los derechos civiles, etc.

Visual and cultural criminology are integrated with documentary filmmaking to develop a theoretically grounded, practice-based approach called ‘documentary criminology’. The first section establishes the need for documentary filmmaking in criminology and outlines methodological opportunities. The second section examines theoretically the aesthetics and substance of documentary criminology. The third section takes the film Girl Model (Redmon and Sabin, 2011) as a case study to demonstrate how documentary criminology embedded in lived experience (in this case, the experience of scouts that recruit young Russian girls, purportedly for the modelling industry) can depict sensuous immediacy. The final section contrasts the aesthetic and ethical consequences of documentary criminology within Carrabine’s (2012, 2014) concept of ‘just’ images to a documentary filmmaking approach that remains interpretively open-ended. Readers can access Girl Model at https://vimeo.com/29694894 with the password industry.

AbstractThis paper begins with a stark contrast. Whereas the Athenians took great pride in claiming autochthony, a bloodline unsullied by admixture with barbarians or even other Hellenes, Rome's legendary genealogy unhesitatingly encompassed a host of divergent blends and multiple minglings. Greek forbears from Arcadia, Trojan immigrants who merged with Latins, Sabine and Etruscan kings, the fabled intermarriage of Romans and Sabine women – all indicate a firm belief in ethnic mixture at the origins of the nation. This article asks a pointed question: if Romans were perfectly comfortable with multiple identities in their own makeup, how does one account for the numerous slurs, smears and nasty comments addressed by Roman writers against other races and peoples? It examines a variety of such calumnies and stereotypes and argues that they do not fall into the category of ethnic prejudice. Many of the more (ostensibly) hostile remarks have been taken out of context, misunderstood, more humorous than malicious, and outweighed by a host of admiring comments. The collection of quips, jibes and clichés does not amount to ethnic bigotry. Indeed ethnicity, in terms of genetic characteristics that render non-Romans inferior to Romans, plays little or no role in these assessments. A far better indicator of the Roman outlook is the remarkable practice of extending citizenship to manumitted slaves — almost all of whom (or their ancestors) came from abroad. The Romans’ sense of themselves did not require the establishment of ethnic superiority.

Savannah grazing lawns are a key food resource for large herbivores such as blue wildebeest (Connochaetes taurinus), hippopotamus (Hippopotamus amphibius) and white rhino (Ceratotherium simum), and impact herbivore densities, movement and recruitment rates. They also exert a strong influence on fire behaviour including frequency, intensity and spread. Thus, variation in grazing lawn cover can have a profound impact on broader savannah ecosystem dynamics. However, knowledge of their present cover and distribution is limited. Importantly, we lack a robust, broad-scale approach for detecting and monitoring grazing lawns, which is critical to enhancing understanding of the ecology of these vital grassland systems. We selected two sites in the Lower Sabie and Satara regions of Kruger National Park, South Africa with mesic and semiarid conditions, respectively. Using spectral and texture features derived from WorldView-3 imagery, we (i) parameterised and assessed the quality of Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Machines (SVM), Classification and Regression Trees (CART) and Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) models for general discrimination of plant functional types (PFTs) within a sub-area of the Lower Sabie landscape, and (ii) compared model performance for probabilistic mapping of grazing lawns in the broader Lower Sabie and Satara landscapes. Further, we used spatial metrics to analyse spatial patterns in grazing lawn distribution in both landscapes along a gradient of distance from waterbodies. All machine learning models achieved high F-scores (F1) and overall accuracy (OA) scores in general savannah PFTs classification, with RF (F1 = 95.73±0.004%, OA = 94.16±0.004%), SVM (F1 = 95.64±0.002%, OA = 94.02±0.002%) and MLP (F1 = 95.71±0.003%, OA = 94.27±0.003%) forming a cluster of the better performing models and marginally outperforming CART (F1 = 92.74±0.006%, OA = 90.93±0.003%). Grazing lawn detection accuracy followed a similar trend within the Lower Sabie landscape, with RF, SVM, MLP and CART achieving F-scores of 0.89, 0.93, 0.94 and 0.81, respectively. Transferring models to the Satara landscape however resulted in relatively lower but high grazing lawn detection accuracies across models (RF = 0.87, SVM = 0.88, MLP = 0.85 and CART = 0.75). Results from spatial pattern analysis revealed a relatively higher proportion of grazing lawn cover under semiarid savannah conditions (Satara) compared to the mesic savannah landscape (Lower Sabie). Additionally, the results show strong negative correlation between grazing lawn spatial structure (fractional cover, patch size and connectivity) and distance from waterbodies, with larger and contiguous grazing lawn patches occurring in close proximity to waterbodies in both landscapes. The proposed machine learning approach provides a novel and robust workflow for accurate and consistent landscape-scale monitoring of grazing lawns, while our findings and research outputs provide timely information critical for understanding habitat heterogeneity in southern African savannahs.

<p>De tots els contes de Perrault –ja ho predeien els exemples anteriors– La Caputxeta vermella és el més popular. En el cas de molts pares novells, és quasi el primer conte que poden explicar sense perdre’s, i a la majoria de nois i noies, tot i que el recorden bé, els és difícil saber qui, quan i com els el van explicar per primer vegada: tenen la sensació que el saben de sempre. I és que per a moltes persones els records de la narració oral d’aquest conte queden emmarcats amb la visió de les imatges d’un llibre o d’un film de dibuixos animats.</p>

Bu araştırmada Millî Eğitim Bakanlığı’nın (MEB) Eylül 2018 dönemi mesleki çalışma programı kapsamında öğretmenlerin izlemesi için önerdiği filmlerin sınıf yönetiminin boyutları açısından incelenmesi amaçlanmıştır. Bu amaç doğrultusunda MEB tarafından önerilen 50 film arasından sınıf içi uygulamaların en yoğun sahnelendiği dört film ölçüt örnekleme tekniği ile seçilmiştir. Nitel olarak tasarlanan bu araştırmada verilerin elde edilmesinde doküman incelemesi; çözümünde betimsel analiz tekniğinden yararlanılmıştır. Araştırma sonucunda, filmlerde sınıf yönetimi açısından öğrencilerin tek kişilik sıralarda oturması, öğretmenlerin derse hazırlıklı ve öğrenciden önce gelmesi, öğrencilere ismi ile hitap etmesi ve sakin, samimi, nezaket kurallarına dikkat eden bir yapıda olmaları gibi olumlu özelliklerin ön plana çıktığı belirlenmiştir. Diğer yandan öğretmen tarafından sınıfın seviyesine uygun olmayan bir metnin okutulması, dersin plansız bir şekilde işlenmesi ve tepkisel sınıf yönetimi modelinin benimsenerek ceza yöntemine başvurulması ise sınıf yönetimini olumsuz etkileyen davranışlar olarak tespit edilmiştir. Filmlerde sınıf yönetimi açısından ortaya çıkan olumlu ve olumsuz davranışlar, öğretmenlik grubu lisans öğrencilerine “Sınıf Yönetimi” derslerinde uygulamalı örnekler olarak sunulabilir.

Abstract Sabine T. Kriebel’s Revolutionary Beauty is the most thorough study to date of the Communist photomontage artist John Heartfield’s work for the Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (aiz) in the late 1920s and 1930s. Kriebel analyses Heartfield’s production through the frame of ‘suture’, a concept she derives from film theory. She argues that Heartfield’s work at once stimulated collective solidarity at the same time as it cultivated habits of visual suspicion and active political thinking in ways that may not have always coincided with official Communist aesthetic doctrine. Although Kriebel’s approach yields many valuable insights, there is nonetheless a danger that her theory of subject-formation may preclude a more critical understanding of representative politics as a form of mediation.

Romeo i Julia z Saskiej Kępy (‘Romeo and Juliet from Saska Kępa’) is a Polish film from 1988, which showcases the idea(l) of true love in late-communist Warsaw. He (Leopold) is an alcohol-wasted, promising painter, she (Sabina) comes to Warsaw from the country and finds employment as a domestic help. They find their love space in a boiler-room in a ruined tenement house in the prestigious and elitist district of Saska Kępa in Warsaw. The film is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s play of sorts; although there are references to Shakespeare’s tragedy and parallels are more or less detectable, the film rather addresses the status of the play in the Polish culture of the late 1980s, in the context of the drab reality of Poland just before the transition in 1989 (not that it anticipates it). Thus, it can be possibly classified as what Sanders (2006) views as appropriation. Our aim is to explore the functioning and role of the Romeo and Juliet myth in the (popular) culture of decadent communist Poland and its treatment in Skórzewski’s film: how certain motifs from the play, especially those associated with the myth of ideal love, were developed in a modernized version of Shakespeare’s tragedy, thus reflecting certain topical problems, which the director addresses appropriating this myth. Rather than showing love between the two figures impossible due to the rivalry between two families/opposing groups, Skórzewski finds obstacles for such love in the drab reality of the late 1980s and social differences between the two lovers. The director makes them mature people, neither are they stunningly beautiful, nor living a comfortable life.

La conservación del patrimonio es posible cuando sus actores trabajan en conjunto y en diálogo permanente; no se puede hablar de patrimonio si sus principales actores no saben reconocer el valor patrimonial del objeto. Por eso, fomentar la educación patrimonial en la población resulta clave para identificar las potencialidades de su conservación. Bajo un enfoque social, la investigación tiene como objetivo ubicar los valores patrimoniales, sobre la base de la clasificación de la Dra. Cristina Nieto Pérez (Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, España), en la Unidad Vecinal Santa Marina del Callao desde las opiniones y percepciones de sus actores directos: los residentes del lugar, los estudiantes, especialistas y expertos, e instituciones municipales. Mediante instrumentos como el uso de encuestas, entrevistas, sesiones en grupos de enfoque, y fichas de análisis se identificaron los valores patrimoniales, cuyos resultados revelaron diferencias en su reconocimiento según el contexto social pero una valoración más firme en una dimensión común.

The main objective of this research was to determine the propagation potential of Juniperus scopulorum `Wichita Blue' through grafted cuttings while using Juniperus chinensis `Hetzii' and Juniperus Sabina `Blue Danube' as a rootstock. The experiment took place in a glass greenhouse, the propagation material was either placed under a polyethylene film or intermittent mist. In each of these growth conditions the graft union was either wax coated or buried in a humid substrate. Grafting method was a side veneer graft. Each treatment was repeated three times and the experimental unit was made up of ten specimens. Best results were obtained from the experimental trial covering the period of february to may (12 weeks). During this trial period we observed a similar rate of successful graft union whether grafted cuttings or conventional graft was used with J. S. `Blue Danube', while grafted cuttings was more successful with J. c. 'Hetzii'. Grafted cutting obtained the best results with J. S. `Blue Danube' when graft union was buried in perlite and placed under an intermittent mist. Rooting quality of rootstock cuttings was slightly inferieur to conventional cuttings for J. S. `Blue Danube' this difference was more prononced in the case of J. c. `Hetzii'

ABSTRACT Four in situ burning sites that varied widely in the physical setting, oil type, timing of the burn, and post-burn treatment were assessed 0.5–1.5 years post-burn: two condensate spills in intertidal marshes at Mosquito Bay, LA in April 2001 and near Sabine Lake, LA in February 2000; crude oil spill in a ponded wetland in Minnesota in July 2000; and a spill of diesel in a salt flat/wetland north of Great Salt Lake, UT in January 2000. When used quickly after a release, burning is most effective at reducing damage to vegetation and the areal extent of impact. Where crude oil was burned within hours after the release at the Minnesota site, the impact area was restricted to 3 acres. In contrast, the diesel in the Utah spill spread over 38 acres within 3 days. The window of opportunity for in situ burning to be an effective means of oil removal can be days to months, depending on the spill conditions. The condensate spill at Mosquito Bay site was effectively burned 6–7 days after the release was reported. For spills with snow and ice cover, burning may still be effective months later. In fact, it may be necessary to consider additional burns during thaw periods and during the final thaw. Burning will not reduce the toxic effects of the oil that occurred prior to the burn. It can, however, be very effective at reducing the extent and degree of impacts by quickly removing the remaining oil. In three of the four case studies, the area burned was significantly larger than the oiled area (up to 10 x). Healthy, green, unoiled vegetation is not always an effective fire break, particularly downwind; fires can quickly jump the kinds of fire breaks placed during spill emergencies in wetlands (e.g., vegetation laid down by the passage of airboats).

<p>O presente artigo busca ressaltar a importância da utilização de filmes cinematográficos como elementos facilitadores da Aprendizagem Significativa. Nesta perspectiva, foi realizada uma análise do filme ‘Os Delírios de Consumo de Becky Bloom’ (2009)<strong>, </strong>para ser apresentado como organizador prévio para a introdução dos Números Inteiros. O filme ora mencionado reporta a situação embaraçosa vivida por uma jovem que não sabia administrar suas finanças e por isso acumula muitas dívidas. Nesse contexto, os débitos foram equiparados a números negativos e os créditos equiparados a números positivos possibilitando também a abordagem do algoritmo da adição desse tipo de número. Os resultados apontam para a importância da utilização de filmes como organizadores prévios para a contextualização de conteúdos matemáticos, visto que estes, fazem parte do cotidiano dos alunos, além de tornar as aulas de Matemática mais coloridas e interessantes aos olhos desses aprendizes.</p><p align="center"><strong><em>Cinema and education: The use of the film 'The Consumer Delusions of Becky Bloom' to introduce the contents of whole numbers</em></strong></p><p><strong>Abstract</strong>: This article aims to highlight the importance of the use of cinematographic films as facilitators of Significant Learning. In this perspective, an analysis was made of the film 'The Consumer Delusions of Becky Bloom' (2009), to be presented as a previous organizer for the introduction of the Whole Numbers. The film mentioned above reports the embarrassing situation experienced by a young woman who did not know how to manage her finances and therefore accumulates many debts. In this context, the debts were equated to negative numbers and the credits equated to positive numbers, making it possible to approach the algorithm of adding this type of number. The results point to the importance of the use of films as previous organizers for the contextualization of mathematical contents, since these are part of the students' daily life, besides making Mathematics classes more colorful and interesting in the eyes of these apprentices.</p>

Kajian ini bertujuan untuk menganalisis perubahan yang terjadi pada masyarakat Samin Bojonegoro dengan menggunakan teori Pembagian Kerja dan Solidaritas Sosial Emile Durkheim. Yaitu perubahan sosial dari masyarakat tradisional menuju masyarakat modern. Menurut Emile Durkheim, peningkatan sistem pembagian kerja pada masyarakat berimplikasi pada perubahan tipe solidaritas sosialnya, yaitu pada masyarakat dengan sistem pembagian kerja yang sangat sedikit akan menghasilkan tipe soli-daritas mekanik, sedangkan pada masyarakat dengan pembagian kerja yang kompleks akan menghasilkan tipe solidaritas organik. Dimulai dengan mendeskripsikan kehidupan masyarakat Samin dari asal usul, ajaran yang diikuti dan perubahan sosial yang terjadi pada mereka. Bentuk kajian ini adalah penelitian kualitatif. Data dalam kajian ini digunakan untuk memahami dan menafsirkan makna peristiwa serta pola tingkah laku masyarakat Samin Bojonegoro. Adapun data yang diperoleh berasal dari dokumen sejarah Samin dan bahan kepustakaan berupa buku, video film maupun jurnal ilmiah. Berdasarkan hasil penelitian dapat diketahui bahwa kondisi masyarakat Samin Bojonegoro telah mengalami transformasi dari tradisional menuju masyarakat modern. Meskipun telah mengalami perubahan dan modernisasi di segala bidang, masyarakat Samin masih identik dengan masyarakat mekanik dalam hal solidaritas. Hal tersebut dikarenakan masyarakat Samin masih menjunjung tinggi ajaran Saminisme dan mengamalkannya sampai sekarang yang berimplikasi pada kesadaran kolektif yang tinggi., meskipun mengalami berbagai transformasi, masyarakat Samin masih memegang teguh ajaran leluhurnya, yaitu Saminisme.Kata Kunci: Transformasi Sosial; Suku Samin; Pembagian Kerja Emile Durkheim; Solidaritas Organik; Solidaritas MekanikThis study aims to analyze the changes that occur in the Samin Bojonegoro community by using Emile Durkheim’s Division of Work and Social Solidarity. Namely the social change from traditional society to modern society. According to Durkheim, an increase in the system of division of labor in society has implications for changes in the type of social solidarity, that is, in societies with very little division of labor will produce a type of mechanical solidarity, whereas in societies with complex division of labor will produce types of organic solidarity. It starts by describing the lives of the Samin people from their origins, the teachings that are followed and the social changes that occur in them. The form of this study is qualitative research. The data in this study are used to understand and interpret the meaning of events and the behavior patterns of the Samin Bojonegoro community. The data obtained comes from historical documents Samin and literature materials in the form of books, video films and scientific journals. Based on the results of the study it can be seen that the condition of the Samin Bojonegoro community has undergone a transformation from traditional to modern society. Although it has undergone changes and modernization in all fields, the Samin community is still synonymous with a mechanical society in terms of solidarity. That is because the Samin community still upholds the teachings of Saminism and practices it until now which has implications for high collective consciousness., Despite undergoing various transformations, the Samin community still upholds the teachings of its ancestors, namely Saminism.Keywords: Social Transformation; Samin Tribe; Emile Durkheim Division of Work, Organic Solidarity; Mechanical Solidarity

Amaç: Bu makalenin amacı, diş gelişimini değerlendirerek diş yaşı hesaplamakta kullanılan Demirjian metodunun güvenilirliğini, kullanılabilirliğini farklı ülke verilerinden yararlanarak tartışmaktır.Gereç ve Yöntem: Farklı ülkelerde veya aynı ülkenin farklı bölgelerinde 7-11 yaş aralığında, Demirjian metoduyla diş yaşı tayini yapılmış 22 çalışmanın verileri irdelendi. Çalışmalarda içerilme ölçütü; sağlıklı çocuklar üzerinde yapılmış olması, panoramik film kullanılması, sol alt mandibuler yedi dişin incelenmiş olması olarak belirlendi. 7-11 yaş arasındaki kız ve erkek çocuklara ait veriler, kronolojik yaş ile Demirjian metoduyla belirlenen diş yaşlarına ilişkin veriler tablo halinde düzenlenerek diş yaşı ile kronolojik yaş arasındaki farklılıklar değerlendirildi. Veri analizinde faktöriyel düzende varyans analizi ardından çoklu karşılaştırmalar için Bonferroni testi kullanıldı. Birinci tip hata 0,05’te sabit tutuldu (α=0,05).Bulgular: Değerlendirmeler sonucunda, Demirjian metoduyla belirlenen diş yaşı ile kronolojik yaş açısından hem toplumdan topluma hem de aynı toplumum farklı bölgelerinde yaşayan çocuklar arasında fark olduğu belirlendi. Hollanda, Türkiye, Sudan, Çin, Sırbistan, İtalya, Pakistan, Yeni Zelanda, Bosna Hersek, Malezya ve Hindistan’dan alınan örneklerde Demirjian yönteminin kullanılabilirliği açısından negatif veya pozitif farklar tespit edildi. Romanya, İran, Hindistan’da yaşayan Belçikalı çocuklar ile incelenen diğer toplumlara ait sonuçlar arasındaki farkın ise anlamlı olmadığı saptandı.Sonuç: Çocuklarda büyüme ve gelişim; kalıtım, cinsiyet, hormonlar, beslenme, sosyo–kültürel ve çevresel etmenler, geçirilen hastalıklar gibi nedenlerle bireyden bireye ve toplumdan topluma farklılıklar gösterir. Dişlerin gelişimi de benzer faktörlerin etkisi altındadır ve bu nedenle Demirjian tarafından Fransız asıllı Kanadalı (French-Canadian) çocukların diş yaşını belirlemek amacıyla geliştirilen skorlama sistemi farklı toplumlara uygulandığında kronolojik yaş ile diş yaşı arasında önemli farklılıklar görülebilmektedir. Bu farklılığın giderilmesi için metodun, toplumsal özelliklere göre modifiye edilerek kullanılması gerekmektedir.

Dedicamos este número especial a la memoria del gran forjador de la NRFH. La revista fue como su casa, el lugar desde donde se vinculó con el conocimiento de la lengua y la literatura hispánicas, y también donde dialogó con los expertos sobre estos temas. Su entrega a la revista es un claro ejemplo de la pasión y la voluntad de saber. Alatorre inició sus colaboraciones en 1947, con la traducción, que apareció sin su firma, de un artículo de Vittorio Bertoldi, “La Iberia en el sustrato étnico-lingüístico del Mediterráneo occidental”. Sabemos que Amado Alonso y Alfonso Reyes encargaron a Raimundo Lida la elaboración de la NRFH en su nueva etapa, en su camino hispanoamericano. Después, Antonio Alatorre recibió la encomienda de las manos de Lida e hizo la revista solo, según confiesa, desde 1953 hasta 1972. Estuvo siempre presente en sus páginas. Con el objeto de rendir un homenaje a Alatorre desde la NRFH, convocamos a aquellos eminentes hispanistas que fueron sus amigos y que lo admiraron, a aquéllos con los que compartió el asombro por los temas clave de nuestra literatura. Yliana Rodríguez González y Alejandro Rivas Velázquez cuidaron con esmero la edición; este último elaboró la bibliografía de Alatorre para invitar a las nuevas generaciones a adentrarse en la obra del hispanista. Agradecemos a todos los colegas que colaboraron en este homenaje, porque en sus voces podemos descubrirlas huellas que Alatorre imprimió en nuestro imaginario. Escribo todo esto a fin de erigir, en las páginas de la NRFH, un monumento para el sabio de Autlán tras su partida; para él, que no ansiaba monumentos.

The African hygropetric beetle genus Coelometopon Janssens is revised, and Oomtelecopon new genus is described, based on the study of 1,884 specimens. The genus Coelometopon is redescribed, and redescriptions are provided for C. cavifrons Janssens, C. leleupi Janssens, C. madidum Janssens, and C. mussardi Janssens. Eighteen new species of Coelometopon and two new species of Oomtelecopon are described. The two genera are placed in the Coelometoponini, new tribe, of the subfamily Prosthetopinae. A key to the two genera and 24 known species is given. High resolution digital images of all holotypes are presented (online version in color), the male genitalia are illustrated, and geographic distributions are mapped. Structural details of a representative species, C. granulatum, are illustrated with scanning electron micrographs. Members of Coelometopon are restricted to hygropetric microhabitats, being found on vertical or near vertical rock surfaces which have a thin film of flowing water, such as rock seeps and splash zones of waterfalls and cascades. Members of Oomtelecopon have been collected from algae in seeps, from wet cliff faces, and by sifting marsh shore litter. New species of Coelometopon are: C. angulatum (Lesotho: Mamathes, 5 mi. E. Tayateyaneng), C. balfourbrownei (South Africa: Cape Prov., George District, near George), C. blinkwater (South Africa: Cape Prov., Table Mountain, Blinkwater ravine), C. brincki (Lesotho: Mamathes, 5 mi. E. Tayateyaneng), C. clandestinum (South Africa: Natal Prov., Olivershoek Pass), C. coronatum (Lesotho: Mamathes, 5 mi. E. Tayateyaneng), C. costatum (South Africa: Transvaal Prov., Zoutpansberg, 6 mi. NNE Louis Trichardt), C. drakensbergense (South Africa: Natal Prov., Drakensburg, Cathedral Peak, Mikes Pass), C. emarginatum (South Africa: Transvaal Prov., Nelshoogte, Knuckles rocks forest), C. endroedyi (South Africa: Natal Prov., Drakensburg, Loteni Reserve), C. fimbriatum (South Africa: Cape Prov., Swellendam District, Langeberge Mountains, Tradouw Pass), C. granulatum (South Africa: Natal Prov., Mpumalanga, 13 km E Sabie), C. kilimanjaro (Tanzania: Kilimanjaro, Marangu), C. langebergense (South Africa: Cape Prov., Swellendam District, Langeberge Mountains, Tradouw Pass), C. minipunctum (South Africa: Natal Prov., Drakensberg, Cathedral Peak, Rainbow G.), C. natalensis (South Africa: Natal Prov., Mpumalanga, 28 km N Graskop), C. punctipennis (South Africa: Cape Prov., Xalanga District, Cala Pass), and C. zulu (South Africa: Natal Prov., Zulu Drakensberg, 7 km N Nogome Forest Reserve). New species of Oomtelecopon are: O. sebastiani (South Africa: Cape Prov., Cape-Cederberg), and O. setosum (type species) (South Africa: Cape Prov., Table Mountain, Blinkwater Ravine).

ABSTRACTObjective: to evaluate the level of awareness of women enrolled in the Family Health Unit of the municipality of Vitória de Santo Antão - PE, about the Pap smear. Method: cross-sectional study in women aged 15 to 49 years enrolled in USF. The sample consisted of 249 women who were sexually active, spontaneous participation and signature of the TCLE. Data collection occurred from March to May 2010 using a questionnaire during home visits. The analysis was performed using Epi-Info (3.5.1). The proposed study was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Health Sciences Center / UFPE, CAAE No. 0079.0.172.000-10 Results: the concentrated age between 30 to 39 years, with a good level of education, income less than two minimum wages, and early onset of sexual activity and reproduction. The level of knowledge about the Pap smear was considered optimal for a little over half (54.8%) and the motivation to take the exam. 51,8% of the women studied, unaware of the purpose of the examination, but 54% know the requirements to be able to its realization. Conclusion: women often perform the screening test and have knowledge level characterized as great for the motivation and requirements to achieve it, however, are necessary to provide educational autonomy and critical consciousness since most women were not its purpose. Descriptors: women's health; cytology; primary health care; health education.RESUMOObjetivo: avaliar o nível de informação de mulheres cadastradas em Unidade de Saúde da Família (USF) do município da Vitória de Santo Antão – PE, acerca do exame Papanicolau. Método: estudo transversal realizado em mulheres entre 15 a 49 anos, cadastradas na USF. A amostra foi composta de 249 mulheres, que tinham vida sexual ativa, participação espontânea e assinatura do Termo de Compromisso Livre Esclarecido - TCLE. A coleta dos dados ocorreu de março a maio de 2010, através de preenchimento de questionário durante visita domiciliar. A análise foi realizada no software Epi-Info (3.5.1). A realização do estudo foi aprovada pelo Comitê de Ética do Centro de Ciências da Saúde/UFPE, CAAE Nº 0079.0.172.000-10. Resultados: a idade concentrou-se entre 30 a 39 anos, com bom nível de escolaridade, renda menor que dois salários mínimos e início precoce de atividade sexual e reprodutiva. O nível de conhecimento sobre o Papanicolau foi considerado ótimo para pouco mais da metade (54,8%). Quanto à motivação das mulheres estudadas para realizar o exame, 51,8% desconhece a sua finalidade, entretanto 54% sabe os requisitos necessários para sua realização. Conclusão: as mulheres realizam com frequência o exame preventivo e têm o nível de conhecimento caracterizado como ótimo para a motivação e os requisitos para realizá-lo, porém são necessárias ações educativas que proporcionem autonomia e consciência crítica, visto que a maior parte das mulheres desconhecia sua finalidade. Descritores: saúde da mulher; citologia; atenção primária à saúde; educação em saúde.RESUMENObjetivo: evaluar el nível de conciencia de las mujeres incluidas en la Unidad de Salud Familiar (USF) en el município de Vitória de Santo Antão – PE, sobre la prueba de Papanicolaou. Método: estudio transversal en mujeres de 15 a 49 años, registradas en la USF. La muestra consistió en 249 mujeres que eran sexualmente activas, la participación espontânea y la Firma de los Términos del Tratado de libre Informado – (TTLI). La recolección de datos ocurrió entre marzo y mayo de 2010, a través de un cuestionário durantes las visitas domiciliarias. El análisis se realizó com software Epi-Info (3.5.1). El estúdio propuesto fue aprobado por el Comité de Ética del Centro de Ciencias de la Salud / UFPE, CAAE N° 0079.0.172.000-10. Resultados: la edad se concentra entre los 30 y los 39 años.con un buen nivel de educación, ingresos menores a dos salários mínimos y el inicio de la actividad sexual y la reproducción. El nivel de conocimiento sobre la prueba de Papanicolaou se considera óptimo para un poco más de media (54,8%). En cuanto a la motivación de las mujeres estudiadas para el examen, el 51,8% desconoce su propio, aunque el 54% conoce los requisitos necesarios para su realización. Conclusión: las mujeres a menudo realizan la prueba de Papanocolaou y tienen el nível de conocimiento caracterizado como ideal para la motivación y los requisitos para lograrlo, pero las acciones educativas son necesarias para proporcionar y consciência critica, así que la mayoría de las mujeres no saben su proposito. Descriptores: salud de la mujer; la citología; la atención primaria de la salud; educación en salud.

WuXi PharmaTech receives honorable mention at 2014 ISPE Facility of the Year Awards. UCLA launches joint venture with Chinese firm to open sophisticated lab in Shanghai. Mucosis enters strategic partnership with Changchun BCHT Biotechnology of China. Catalent enters biosimilar development collaboration with Zhejiang Hisun Pharma. Bio-Techne acquires Shanghai PrimeGene Bio-Tech. Sinovac receives notification of China government grant for EV71 vaccine project. Sinovac enters technology transfer agreement with intravacc to develop and commercialize Sabin Inactivated Polio Vaccine (sIPV). WuXi PharmaTech breaks ground on new cell therapy manufacturing facility. China study to see how Pacific current affects climate. ResearchDx receives Strategic Partner Award from WuXi AppTec. iBio receives patent allowance in China for fusion protein compositions and technology.

The need to conduct research on the impact of elephant on the environment prompted the construction of exclosures along two of the most important rivers in the Kruger National Park. Scientific research on these exclosures along the Sabie and Letaba rivers addresses how patterns of spatial and temporal heterogeneity of the riparian zone are affected by fire, flood and herbivory. To further assist this research programme, a vegetation survey was conducted at the Nkhuhlu exclosure site along the Sabie River to classify and map the vegetation of the area. This will provide baseline data to assess future changes in vegetation and floristic patterns due to small-scale environmental factors created by the presence/absence of herbivory and fire. Phytosociological data were analysed to identify plant communities and subsequent mapping units. Five plant communities, ten sub-communities and four variants were recognised and described in relation to prevailing soil forms. Differences in species richness, diversity and community structure of the plant communities are clearly articulated.

The Grace Creek #1 site (41GG33, GC–1) was situated on a natural alluvial rise on the east side of Grace Creek, about 0.4 km north of its confluence with the Sabine River. On the north side of the site was an abandoned Sabine River lake bed, while to the south was an old channel, as well as a channel lake (Muddy Lake), of the Sabine River. Jones divided the site into three areas (A, B, and C); a midden deposit was apparently located in Area B on the central part of the rise. Buddy Calvin Jones identified and worked at the Grace Creek #1 site between 1954 and 1956, while the site was being destroyed for the construction of an earthen dike along Grace Creek and the Sabine River. In addition to the extensive surface collection of projectile points, lithic tools, and ceramic sherds he found there, in areas A–C, Jones also conducted limited excavations in areas where apparently organically–stained soil and possible feature stains were noted on the scraped surface of the site. In these excavations, he documented midden deposits, a flexed burial in the midden deposits in Area B, two pit features in this area, and several small (ca. 10 cm in diameter) post holes in Area C. Jones' map of the site did not indicate the location of the excavations in Area C, but Jones suggested that aboriginal houses were likely present here. The ceramic artifacts discussed in this article are from a fire pit in Area B that was excavated by Buddy Jones in October 1956. There are also a number of arrow points in the collections from the site, as well as a large ceramic elbow pipe. These materials are in the collections of the Gregg County Historical Museum in Longview, Texas.

Herbivory and fire could be regarded as important drivers for perennial plant diversity, since their absence causes an increase in plant biomass, which was proven to suppress individual numbers of perennial species.

In response to David Cronenberg's film, A Dangerous Method, this paper elucidates the erotic transference that was enacted in the analytic relationship between Carl Jung and Sabina Spielrein. Given that psychoanalysis was in its infancy, the blurring of boundaries in the analytic relationship at this time was common. What we would now consider boundary violations also led to a deeper understanding of transference and counter-transference dynamics and provided vital lessons for future training. The erotic transference between Jung and Spielrein manifested the mutual idolisation that both had experienced at the hands of their mothers and the sadomasochistic attachment that had evolved from their early relationships. There is no evidence that Spielrein's powerful erotic transference was ever worked through. Despite this, and amidst other struggles in her life, Spielrein made significant contributions to both Jung and Freud's thinking and was one of the first pioneers of child analysis.

<p class="XIEPEF-TextoNormal">A Educação das Relações de Gênero é também a Educação que está inserida na defesa e manutenção dos Direitos Humanos, sendo, desse modo, uma das guardiãs da democracia. Nosso referencial metodológico foi a pesquisa qualitativa de cunho participante, apoiada na técnica de Grupo Focal com mulheres que participam dos projetos educativos do Centro de Desenvolvimento Agroecológico Sabiá. As relações opressoras entre masculino/feminino afetam nossa sociedade de uma forma estrutural. A Formação de Professores não deve ficar de fora dessa discussão, considerando que a escola é uma das instituições sociais que devem contribuir para a construção de uma sociedade mais justa e solidária. Consideramos ser essencial para a Formação do Professor de Química o estudo do tema das Relações de Gênero. Apenas a busca firme por uma educação em consonância com a defesa dos Direitos Humanos pode, de fato, colaborar para a construção de uma sociedade mais justa e solidária.</p>

V prvem delu prispevka primerjam različne teoretske poglede na funkcije obraza v filmskem velikem planu. Balázs meni, da spričo povečave prikazanega obraza, ki vzbuja občutek intenzivne bližine, nastane premik v naraciji iz dogajalnega gibanja v mikrogibanje. Deleuze izpostavi veliki plan kot entiteto (ločeno od prostorsko-časovnih koordinat, iz katerih izhaja), kjer obrazni izraz postane nosilec afekta, obenem pa obraz izgubi funkcije individualizacije, socializacije in komunikacije, ki so ga predhodno opredeljevale. Barthes piše o obrazu filmske zvezde v vlogi maske, Greco pa o vplivu pogleda, ki ga maska iz ekrana usmerja v gledalca. Plantinga analizira vlogo obraza v »prizorih empatije«. V drugem delu članka analiziram film Roka Bička Razredni sovražnik (2013). Netransparentnost obraza se izraža najočitneje pri reprezentaciji lika Sabine, ki sošolce pretrese s samomorom. Nedostopnost Sabinine subjektivnosti predstavljajo bližnji prikazi njenega obraza v kontekstu spominskih predstav njene prijateljice in maske, ustvarjene po fotografiji Sabininega obraza, ki si jih nadenejo njeni sošolci. Sabinin obraz je slepa pega filmske pripovedi; čeprav se pred nami razkriva scela, je njegov pomen odprt, nedoumljiv. Eden od učinkov takega prikaza je zavrnitev obraza kot »znakovnega instrumenta« (Eleftheriotis) oziroma kot transparentne površine, hkrati pa tudi zavrnitev prisvajanja oziroma redukcije skrivnostne drugosti obrazov bližnjih na berljive emocije oziroma afekte.

При помощи сравнительно-исторического анализа автор исследует азербайджанские мультипликационные фильмы, экранизирующие произведения как отечественной, так и зарубежной литературы. В процессе создания каждого рисованного мультфильма советской эпохи принимали участие профессиональные режиссеры, сценаристы, художники-постановщики, снимавшие анимационные фильмы по произведениям азербайджанских писателей-классиков, среди которых – Низами Гянджеви, Мухаммед Физули, Сеид Азим Ширвани, Мирза Алекпер Сабир, Джалил Мамедкулизаде, Абдулла Шаиг, Сулейман Сами Ахундов, Али Керим, Расул Рза. К числу азербайджанских мультфильмов, снятых по произведениям зарубежной литературы, относится экранизация «Звездных дневников Ийона Тихого» и анимационный фильм по мотивам японских хайку. Азербайджанские мультфильмы по мотивам литературных произведений, вошедшие в золотой фонд киноискусства Азербайджана, отличаются специфическим творческим методом. Using a comparative historical analysis, the author explores Azerbaijani cartoon films that screen works of both domestic and foreign literature. In the process of creating each Soviet-era drawn cartoon, professional directors, screenwriters, and production designers took part in making animated films based on the works of Azerbaijani classic writers, such as Nizami Ganjavi, Mohammad Fuzuli, Seyid Azim Shirvani, Mirza Alakbar Sabir, Jalil Mammadguluzadeh, Abdulla Shaig, Suleyman Sani Akhundov, Ali Kerim, Rasul Rza. Azerbaijani cartoons based on works of foreign literature include the adaptation of «Ijon Tichy’s Star Diaries» and an animated film based on Japanese haiku. Azerbaijani cartoons based on literary works included in the Golden Fund of cinema art of Azerbaijan are distinguished by a specific creative method.

Pierce, Tamora. Mastiff: Beka Cooper Book 3. New York: Random House, 2011. Print. The final book in the Beka Cooper trilogy begins three years after the close of the previous book, Bloodhound, at the funeral of Beka’s fiancé. Instead of grief, Beka is relieved to be free of this unhappy relationship; enthusiastically, she begins a new hunt for the King’s abducted son, along with her supernatural cat, Pounce; her scenthound, Achoo; and her partner, Tunstall. Soon joined by the deceptively capable mage, Farmer, and the lady knight, Sabine, the group follows the heir’s trail through noble houses, discovering corruption in all levels of the government. Pierce is known for her strong female protagonists, and Beka is no different. Fiercely loyal and honest, Beka is an upstanding member of the Tortall police force who believes in protecting the poor. When she discovers that the prince is being held by slave traders, she becomes even more determined to rescue him. Her relationships with her friends are tested by a shocking betrayal that causes innocents to die. The story is fast-paced and includes a growing relationship between Beka and Farmer that provides a satisfying conclusion to the trilogy. Although it could be read as a standalone novel, some elements of the narrative are explained in the previous books. Recommended: 3 out of 4 starsReviewer: Kristine MoruziKristine Moruzi is a Grant Notley Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, where she is examining representations of girlhood in Canadian children's literature between 1840 and 1940.

The construction of exclosures along two of the most important rivers in the Kruger National Park was done to investigate how patterns of spatial and temporal heterogeneity of the riparian zone is affected by fire, flood and herbivory. To assist this research programme, vegetation surveys were conducted within exclosures along the Letaba River to classify and map the vegetation of the area. The history and experimental design of the Letaba exclosures are similar to that of the Nkhuhlu exclosures along the Sabie River, which is directly related to questions surrounding elephant management. The main difference between the Nkhuhlu and Letaba exclosures is local heterogeneity, since the latter lies within the Mopaneveld, which is floristically and physiognomically much more homogenous than the vegetation of the southern Kruger National Park. Nevertheless, four plant communities, eight sub-communities and six variants were recognised and mapped for the Letaba exclosures. The vegetation description was done in relation to prevailing soil forms, differences in species richness, diversity and community structure, and therefore should serve as a basis for further detailed and broad-based botanical studies. Vegetation mapping was done to sub-community level and, where possible, to variant level. As expected in Mopaneveld vegetation, the plant communities could broadly be related to soil types, although smaller-scale variations correspond to soil moisture availability because the Mopaneveld is considered ‘event-driven’, especially in the herbaceous layer.Conservation implications: Floristic surveying and vegetation mapping of a long-term monitoring site, such as the Letaba exclosures, is seen as a baseline inventory to assist natural resource management. Linking mapping units to biodiversity strengthens the understanding needed to maintain biodiversity in all its natural facets and fluxes.

The article presents the preliminary results of the interdisciplinary research (geological and geospatial studies, archaeological excavations, salt production experiments, and ethnographic survey) carried out during 2016-2019, in the site and hybrid saltscape of Băile Figa, well known for its remarkable environmental, ancient and current salt exploitation evidence. Besides, the article aims to evaluate the contribution of the recent research to a better understanding of the environmental context of the site and ancient salt production technology in the Inner Carpathian region. Also, it focuses on the hybrid character of the site and its potential to the transdisciplinary and holistic study. Environmental context. The site is rich in environmental, archaeological and ethnographic evidence. It is positioned in the salt-rich area of the Someșul Mare Basin at the northern edge of the Transylvanian Plain (Fig. 1/2; 2/1). The site is part of the landscape that was and is strongly affected by the dynamics of a salt diapir (Fig. 2/2) and deposits of salt mud, brine and halo-biotic factors, as well as by the intense human activity. Excavation. The excavation was carried out in Trench S.XV (16 m x 14 m), located in the central-southern sector of the site. The trench cut through the stream-bed and steep and high banks of the salt stream that crosses the site from south to north (Fig. 4; 5, 10). Its profile sections show four major stratigraphic units: a blackish topsoil, yellow clay mixed with gravel, salty mud, and the rock salt massif. The excavation was conducted in the mud layer, in the central sector of the trench, and in the clay-and-gravel layer found in its lateral sectors. In the area of ca. 60 square meters of the central sector, the excavation has reached the rock salt massif (Fig. 7-11). The excavation in the trench has uncovered rich evidence for Late Bronze Age salt production: seven interconnected features and around one hundred artifacts. The vast majority of the finds have been uncovered in the mud layer. The uncovered features included five timber structures surviving in the salt mud layer, as well as a ditch and a pit dug in the rock salt massif. Feature 1-XV-2013 (Fig. 12; 14/1) is a structure that includes a cone-shaped wattle-lined pit surrounded by a roundish wattle-made fence. The pit cuts through the mud up to the rock salt massif. Its rock salt bottom was sectioned by a ditch, 0.4-0.5 m wide and over 0.9 m deep. It seems that first, by rather extensive digging, the soil and mud were removed down to the salt massif. Then, a ditch, about 5 m long, 0.4 m wide and over 0.9 m deep (see below), was dug in the rock, from east to west. After that, a cone-shaped outer framework made of wattle (D maximal: 1.2 m, D minimal: 0.4 m, H: 1.8 m) was placed over the ditch, narrow end down. After that, the empty space around the framework was filled with mud. Then the pit was surrounded by a roundish wattle fence. A 1.6 m long massive rope made of three twisted threads (Clematis vitalba) has been found in the ditch (Fig. 41). Four samples taken from the wattle framework have produced five dates which fall between 2821±24 and 2778±26 BP. Feature 2-XV-2013 (Fig. 13) was uncovered in the northern part of the trench, on the right side of the stream, between feature 1-XV-2013 (see above) and the north edge of the trench. It was a rectilinear fence, 3.6 m long, built of vertical planks, split troughs, and channelled pieces, pushed into the mud down to the rock salt massif. Three fragments of the troughs from the fence were dendrochronologically dated to the period between 996 and 980 BC. Feature 1-XV-2015 (Fig. 14) was uncovered in the central-southern part of the trench. It was a corridor, 2.5 m long and 1 m wide, oriented E – W, made of two parallel rectilinear alignments of massive upright poles driven into the mud. One of its poles was at the same time part of the fence of the Feature 1-XV-2013. The corridor, on the base of three samples, has been radiocarbon-dated between 2870±32 and 2718±30 BP. Feature 1-XV-2018 (Fig. 15-17) was partially uncovered in the north-west part of the trench, about 3.5 m west of the stream. It is a 5 m long fence, oriented S – N, made of vertical planks, stakes (Fig. 17/2), and a split trough (Fig. 17/1), stuck into the mud, and four horizontal planks linking them to each other (Fig.17/2). Not dated. Feature 2-XV-2018 (Fig. 18; 19/1) was partially uncovered in the western part of the trench, in the rock salt massif. It is a roundish pit (over 2.5 x 1.8 m) with irregular edges, ca. 1.7 m deep below the salt massif surface. Not dated. Feature 3-XV-2018 (Fig. 19; 20) was uncovered in the central part of the trench. It was a ditch dug in the salt massif, 0.4 to 0.8 m wide, over 0.9 m deep, and about 4 m long. It cuts through the bottom of feature 1-XV-2013 (Fig. 12/2) and links it to the feature 2-XV-2018. Not dated. Feature 4-XV-2018 (Fig. 19/1; 20-22) was uncovered in the south-east corner of the trench, covering about 4 x 4 m, and consisted of a cluster of parallel beams laying on the salt massif, and a few vertical poles. The feature continues eastwards and southwards beyond the sides of the trench. On the base of three samples, it was radiocarbon-dated between 2856±31 and 2817±30 BP. Artifacts. We found some 100 artifacts in Trench S.XV during the excavation seasons, between 2016 and 2019. Most of them were made of wood, 1 of hemp (?), and 3 of stone (basalt). The wooden artifacts include 31 component pieces and fragments of trough bodies (Fig. 24-27), 17 channelled pieces (Fig. 28-30), 2 shovels (Fig. 33), 12 paddles (Fig. 31; 32), 4 mallets (Fig. 34/2,3), an L-shaped haft for a socketedaxe (Fig. 34/1), 2 pans (Fig. 35), a bowl (Fig. 36), fragments of 2 ladders (Fig. 37), 3 knife-shaped tools (Fig. 38/2,3), 11 rods with pointed end (Fig. 38/4), 4 loops made of twisted twigs (Fig. 40), a massive rope made of three twisted threads (Clematis vitalba) (Fig. 41), and 5 wedges. One of the artifacts found was made of plant material, possibly hemp: a small twisted cord (it may come from a peg inserted in the trough hole). Stone (basalt) artifacts include 2 mining hammers (mining tools) with engraved grooves aimed to fix the bindings (Fig. 44/1,3), an ovoid-shaped object with many percussion marks at its thicker end (Fig. 44/2). The chronology of the finds. In 2018 4 samples (wattle) from the Feature 1-XV-2013 were dated at Oxford University Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art / Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit. In 2019 some of the timber features (1-XV-2015 and 4-XV-2018) and wooden artifacts (the ladder, the troughs nos. 4 and 5 and some others) were radiocarbon dated by “Horia Hulubei” National Institute for Research and Development in Physics and Nuclear Engineering. Most of the dates fall between 1000 – 900 cal BC. Just one date (a wooden bowl) falls between ca. 1419-1262 cal BC (Tabels 1, 2, 3). The structures and most of the artifacts uncovered in S.XV date to ca. XI-IX centuries cal BC and seem to have been part of a complex production system aimed at brine and rock salt processing. Differential distribution of finds across the site. The research has revealed differential distribution of finds across the site. Thus, the evidence dating to ca. 2300 – 2000 cal BC (a pit dug in the rock massif and pottery), 1600 – 1400 cal BC (a wattle-built structure and wooden troughs), and 400 – 180 cal BC (timber-lined shaft, a wooden ladder and pottery) is mainly concentrated in the southern sector of the site. In exchange, the finds dating to ca. 1400 – 1100 cal BC have mainly been uncovered in the south-central part of the site (timber structures) and northern part of the site (pottery). The evidence dating to about 1050 – 850 cal BC covers two distinct areas: the south-central and northern sectors of the site. While about thirty fragmented troughs have been found in the south-central sector, no one object of this kind has been found in the northern sector. There are also differences concerning the timber structures between these sectors of the site. These strongly suggest that in XI – IX centuries cal BC, at least two different and complementary production areas were active in the site. Salt production experiments. The experiments on salt production, using faithful replicas of Late Bronze Age artifacts uncovered in trenches S.I and S.XV – troughs, channelled pieces, mallets, wedges, stone mining hammers, etc. – aimed to obtain from the different source material – rock salt massif, brine, and mud – various forms of salt: lumps of rock salt, fine salt, and highly concentrated and pure brine. The experiments showed the technical validity of several techniques. The most effective were as follows: 1. Detaching lumps of rock salt from the massif. By means of jets of fresh water directed with the troughs (along the twisted cords fitted in the perforations of the sticks that went through the pegs which were fixed in the holes at the base of the trough) depressions were simultaneously created in the rock salt at ten to twenty spots, 10 to 15 cm apart and 7 to 12 cm deep. This process took few hours (Fig. 45/1). It was noticed that each hole generated one to three cracks in the salt massif, around 1 m long and 5 to 10 cm deep. The holes and cracks allowed the insertion of wooden wedges. By hitting them with heavy wooden mallets, the wedges were pushed down to ca. 20 cm deep. Finally, using hooked sticks, many blocks of rock salt could be detached from the massif. The larger blocks were easily broken by stone hammers (mining tools). 2. Producing small pieces of salt and fine salt from the rock salt massif. The first stages of the process were identical to the previously described. After the holes and cracks were created, the rock salt mass was beaten with stone hammers (mining tools) along the cracks and holes, so that small pieces of salt, as well as wet and soft fine salt, were easily separated from the mass. Thus, about 50 kilograms of fine salt were collected in 30 minutes during the experiment (Fig. 45/2). 3. Boiling brine in the troughs with hot stones and drawing off the brine. Stones heated as much as possible in a fire were immersed in the brine with which the trough was filled, thus bringing it to the boil (Fig. 46). The boiling continued until the salt begun to crystallize. After that, the trough, full of highly concentrated brine, was left motionless for several hours. The insoluble impurities of the brine sedimented according to their specific weight: the lightest of them floated to the top, while the heaviest (metals and minerals) settled on the bottom. Above the sediment lying on the bottom of the trough and under that at the top remained a rather thick layer of fairly clean brine. During the experiments, the lower sediment has never reached 3 cm in thickness. The wider tops of the plugs that were inserted into the holes found at the bottom of the trough, were at least 3 cm high. Because of this, the upper edges of the plugs remained above the sediment on the bottom of the trough. We then slightly raised the long sticks that were tightly inserted into the axial holes of the plugs, which in turn tightly closed the holes in the trough’s bottom. The sticks were fixed and maintained in a slightly raised position by a kind of pliers – half split twigs – set transversely over the trough opening. In this way, the brine was allowed to drain easily into channelled pieces set under the trough. The brine then flowed through the channelled pieces to the next trough(s). The process could be repeated in the next trough(s) until the salt makers would get a fairly clean and highly concentrated brine. Ethnographic survey. Băile Figa and its surroundings are places where the evidence for ethnographic research, of what is commonly called ‘the traditional salt civilization’, can still be found. In every ancient salt production archaeological site known in Romania, without any exception, the current folk salt exploitation is still in progress. The latter offers to these sites a valuable research potential, almost unique in Europe, for the ethnoarchaeological research. The ethnographic survey has attested a number of aspects of the present-day folk ways of exploiting brine, rock salt, salt mud, and halophytic vegetation, as well as other traditional practices and customs related to these resources. Brine folk exploitation. The most exploited saline occurrence at Băile Figa is currently brine. Brine is taken directly from the numerous springs filling the central salty stream valley (Fig. 48/1). Then, it is loaded into plastic drums of 50 to 200 litres and transported by carts to the neighbouring villages (Fig. 48/2). The locals told us that, in the past, the brine was transported in large, cone-shaped barrels, called “bote mari”, of 60 litres, made of softwood boards connected to each other with circles of hazel twigs (Fig. 49/5), in smaller containers, of approx. 20 litres, called “barbânțe” (Fig. 49/3), as well as in smaller containers hollowed out of tree trunks and called “bote” (Fig. 49/2). The most remote localities, to which the brine from Băile Figa is transported, are situated at a distance of 11 km. But most people that currently get brine from Băile Figa live within a maximum perimeter of 6 km. Brine is mainly used for preserving meat, bacon (especially around the winter holidays), and vegetables. Sometimes the brine is used for health care purposes, mainly against colds, rheumatic pains, skin diseases or circulatory deficiencies, either on the spot or at home. In the 1960s and 1970s, the locals built two brine ponds and used them for health cure baths. Rock salt folk exploitation. According to some elderly locals, until 1989, the rock salt was periodically extracted at Băile Figa, by manual or mechanized digging of vertical pits. It was mainly used to supplement the feed of domestic animals in the individual households, sheepfolds (Fig. 50) and collective farms or state agricultural enterprises. Sometimes, the locals crushed and grinded salt lumps. In some households in the village of Figa, we have identified and documented some primitive millstones used in salt grinding (Fig. 49/1). Ground salt is added to animal feed and very rarely in human food, people being sure that this kind of salt can harm their health. Sapropelic mud folk exploitation. The ethnographic surveys have documented the traditional exploitation of sapropelic mud at Băile Figa. It is found only in some limited spots of the salt stream valley. The spots with small deposits of sapropelic mud are known only by “connoisseurs” who, among the clues, are guided by a specific smell. The sapropelic mud is used for health care purposes, especially for the treatment of rheumatic diseases. The mud is applied, either on most of the body or only on the parts affected by pain. Sometimes, the mud is applied to animal wounds, for disinfection and drying. Mud-based treatments are done both on-site and at home. Shepherding. Until the building, during 2007 – 2011, of the leisure resort, Băile Figa was the favourite place for grazing for the local domestic animals (sheep, cows, buffaloes, and horses). The animals, according to the information delivered by the shepherds, loved salt grass and brine (Fig. 49/2). Shepherds tried to prevent the animals from drinking brine from the springs because their fondness of the salty taste made them to drink it in unhealthy quantities, so that they could “swell” and die. Beekeeping. In the northern sector of the salt stream valley, at the surface of the soil, in the summer of 2018, a primitive beehive made of a hollowed-out oak trunk was discovered (Fig. 48/4). So far, as we can know, it is a unique find of this sort in a saline context.

As Lewis Carroll’s Alice comes to the end of her journey through the looking glass world, she has also come to the end of her patience with its strange power games and arbitrations. At every stage of the adventure, she has encountered someone who wants to dictate rules and protocols, and a lesson on table manners from the Red Queen finally triggers rebellion. “I can’t stand this any more,” Alice cries, as she seizes the tablecloth and hurls the entire setting into chaos (279). Then, catching hold of the Red Queen, she gives her a good shaking, until the rigid contours of the imperious figure become fuzzy and soft. At this point, the hold of the dream dissolves and Alice, awakening on the other side of the mirror, realises she is shaking the kitten. Queens have long been associated with ideas of transformation. As Alice is duly advised when she first looks out across the chequered landscape of the looking glass world, the rules of chess decree that a pawn may become a queen if she makes it to the other side. The transformation of pawn to queen is in accord with the fairy tale convention of the unspoiled country girl who wins the heart of a prince and is crowned as his bride. This works in a dual register: on one level, it is a story of social elevation, from the lowest to the highest rank; on another, it is a magical transition, as some agent of fortune intervenes to alter the determinations of the social world. But fairy tales also present us with the antithesis and adversary of the fortune-blessed princess, in the figure of the tyrant queen who works magic to shape destiny to her own ends. The Queen and the mirror converge in the cultural imaginary, working transformations that disrupt the order of nature, invert socio-political hierarchies, and flout the laws of destiny. In “Snow White,” the powers of the wicked queen are mediated by the looking glass, which reflects and affirms her own image while also serving as a panopticon, keep the entire realm under surveillance, to pick up any signs of threat to her pre-eminence. All this turbulence in the order of things lets loose a chaotic phantasmagoria that is prime material for film and animation. Two major film versions of “Snow White” have been released in the past few years—Mirror Mirror (2012) and Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)—while Tim Burton’s animated 3D rendition of Alice in Wonderland was released in 2010. Alice through the Looking Glass (2016) and The Huntsman: Winter’s War, the 2016 prequel to Snow White and the Huntsman, continue the experiment with state-of-the-art-techniques in 3D animation and computer-generated imaging to push the visual boundaries of fantasy. Perhaps this escalating extravagance in the creation of fantasy worlds is another manifestation of the ancient lore and law of sorcery: that the magic of transformation always runs out of control, because it disrupts the all-encompassing design of an ordered world. This principle is expressed with poetic succinctness in Ursula Le Guin’s classic story A Wizard of Earthsea, when the Master Changer issues a warning to his most gifted student: But you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. (48)In Le Guin’s story, transformation is only dangerous if it involves material change; illusions of all kinds are ultimately harmless because they are impermanent.Illusions mediated by the mirror, however, blur the distinction Le Guin is making, for the mirror image supposedly reflects a real world. And it holds the seductive power of a projected narcissism. Seeing what we wish for is an experience that can hold us captive in a way that changes human nature, and so leads to dangerous acts with material consequences. The queen in the mirror becomes the wicked queen because she converts the world into her image, and in traditions of animation going back to Disney’s original Snow White (1937) the mirror is itself an animate being, with a spirit whose own determinations become paramount. Though there are exceptions in the annals of fairy story, powers of transformation are typically dark powers, turbulent and radically elicit. When they are mediated through the agency of the mirror, they are also the powers of narcissism and autocracy. Through a Glass DarklyIn her classic cultural history of the mirror, Sabine Melchior-Bonnet tracks a duality in the traditions of symbolism associated with it. This duality is already evident in Biblical allusions to the mirror, with references to the Bible itself as “the unstained mirror” (Proverbs 7.27) counterpointed by images of the mortal condition as one of seeing “through a glass darkly” (1 Corinthians 13.12).The first of these metaphoric conventions celebrates the crystalline purity of a reflecting surface that reveals the spiritual identity beneath the outward form of the human image. The church fathers drew on Plotinus to evoke “a whole metaphysics of light and reflection in which the visible world is the image of the invisible,” and taught that “humans become mirrors when they cleanse their souls (Melchior-Bonnet 109–10). Against such invocations of the mirror as an intermediary for the radiating presence of the divine in the mortal world, there arises an antithetical narrative, in which it is portrayed as distorting, stained, and clouded, and therefore an instrument of delusion. Narcissus becomes the prototype of the human subject led astray by the image itself, divorced from material reality. What was the mirror if not a trickster? Jean Delumeau poses this question in a preface to Melchior-Bonnet’s book (xi).Through the centuries, as Melchior-Bonnet’s study shows, these two strands are interwoven in the cultural imaginary, sometimes fused, and sometimes torn asunder. With Venetian advances in the techniques and technologies of mirror production in the late Renaissance, the mirror gained special status as a possession of pre-eminent beauty and craftsmanship, a means by which the rich and powerful could reflect back to themselves both the self-image they wanted to see, and the world in the background as a shimmering personal aura. This was an attempt to harness the numinous influence of the divinely radiant mirror in order to enhance the superiority of leading aristocrats. By the mid seventeenth century, the mirror had become an essential accessory to the royal presence. Queen Anne of Austria staged a Queen’s Ball in 1633, in a hall surrounded by mirrors and tapestries. The large, finely polished mirror panels required for this kind of display were made exclusively by craftsmen at Murano, in a process that, with its huge furnaces, its alternating phases of melting and solidifying, its mysterious applications of mercury and silver, seemed to belong to the transformational arts of alchemy. In 1664, Louis XIV began to steal unique craftsmen from Murano and bring them to France, to set up the Royal Glass and Mirror Company whose culminating achievement was the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.The looking glass world of the palace was an arena in which courtiers and visitors engaged in the high-stakes challenge of self-fashioning. Costume, attitude, and manners were the passport to advancement. To cut a figure at court was to create an identity with national and sometimes international currency. It was through the art of self-fashioning that the many princesses of Europe, and many more young women of title and hereditary distinction, competed for the very few positions as consort to the heir of a royal house. A man might be born to be king, but a woman had to become a queen.So the girl who would be queen looks in the mirror to assess her chances. If her face is her fortune, what might she be? A deep relationship with the mirror may serve to enhance her beauty and enable her to realise her wish, but like all magical agents, the mirror also betrays anyone with the hubris to believe they are in control of it. In the Grimm’s story of “Snow White,” the Queen practises the ancient art of scrying, looking into a reflective surface to conjure images of things distant in time and place. But although the mirror affords her the seer’s visionary capacity to tell what will be, it does not give her the power to control the patterns of destiny. Driven to attempt such control, she must find other magic in order to work the changes she desires, and so she experiments with spells of self-transformation. Here the doubleness of the mirror plays out across every plane of human perception: visual, ethical, metaphysical, psychological. A dynamic of inherent contradiction betrays the figure who tries to engage the mirror as a servant. Disney’s original 1937 cartoon shows the vain Queen brewing an alchemical potion that changes her into the very opposite of all she has sought to become: an ugly, ill-dressed, and impoverished old woman. This is the figure who can win and betray trust from the unspoiled princess to whom the arts of self-fashioning are unknown. In Tarsem Singh’s film Mirror Mirror, the Queen actually has two mirrors. One is a large crystal egg that reflects back a phantasmagoria of palace scenes; the other, installed in a primitive hut on an island across the lake, is a simple looking glass that shows her as she really is. Snow White and the Huntsman portrays the mirror as a golden apparition, cloaked and faceless, that materialises from within the frame to stand before her. This is not her reflection, but with every encounter, she takes on more of its dark energies, until, in another kind of reversal, she becomes its image and agent in the wider world. As Ursula Le Guin’s sage teaches the young magician, magic has its secret economies. You pay for what you get, and the changes wrought will come back at you in ways you would never have foreseen. The practice of scrying inevitably leads the would-be clairvoyant into deeper levels of obscurity, until the whole world turns against the seer in a sequence of manifestations entirely contrary to his or her framework of expectation. Ultimately, the lesson of the mirror is that living in obscurity is a defining aspect of the human condition. Jorge Luis Borges, the blind writer whose work exhibits a life-long obsession with mirrors, surveys a range of interpretations and speculations surrounding the phrase “through a glass darkly,” and quotes this statement from Leon Bloy: “There is no human being on earth capable of declaring with certitude who he is. No one knows what he has come into this world to do . . . or what his real name is, his enduring Name in the register of Light” (212).The mirror will never really tell you who you are. Indeed, its effects may be quite the contrary, as Alice discovers when, within a couple of moves on the looking glass chessboard, she finds herself entering the wood of no names. Throughout her adventures she is repeatedly interrogated about who or what she is, and can give no satisfactory answer. The looking glass has turned her into an estranged creature, as bizarre a species as any of those she encounters in its landscapes.Furies“The furies are at home in the mirror,” wrote R. S. Thomas in his poem “Reflections” (265). They are the human image gone haywire, the frightening other of what we hope to see in our reflection. As the mirror is joined by technologies of the moving image in twentieth-century evolutions of the myth, the furies have been given a new lease of life on the cinema screen. In Disney’s 1937 cartoon of Snow White, the mirror itself has the face of a fury, which emerges from a pool of blackness like a death’s head before bringing the Queen’s own face into focus. As its vision comes into conflict with hers, threatening the dissolution of the world over which she presides, the mirror’s face erupts into fire.Computer-generated imaging enables an expansive response to the challenges of visualisation associated with the original furies of classical mythology. The Erinyes are unstable forms, arising from liquid (blood) to become semi-materialised in human guise, always ready to disintegrate again. They are the original undead, hovering between mortal embodiment and cadaverous decay. Tearing across the landscape as a flock of birds, a swarm of insects, or a mass of storm clouds, they gather into themselves tremendous energies of speed and motion. The 2012 film Snow White and the Huntsman, directed by Rupert Sanders, gives us the strongest contemporary realisation of the archaic fury. Queen Ravenna, played by Charlize Theron, is a virtuoso of the macabre, costumed in a range of metallic exoskeletons and a cloak of raven’s feathers, with a raised collar that forms two great black wings either side of her head. Powers of dematerialisation and rematerialisation are central to her repertoire. She undergoes spectacular metamorphosis into a mass of shrieking birds; from the walls around her she conjures phantom soldiers that splinter into shards of black crystal when struck by enemy swords. As she dies at the foot of the steps leading up to the great golden disc of her mirror, her face rapidly takes on the great age she has disguised by vampiric practices.Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen in Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is a figure midway between Disney’s fairy tale spectre and the fully cinematic register of Theron’s Ravenna. Bonham Carter’s Queen, with her accentuated head and pantomime mask of a face, retains the boundaries of form. She also presides over a court whose visual structures express the rigidities of a tyrannical regime. Thus she is no shape-shifter, but energies of the fury are expressed in her voice, which rings out across the presence chamber of the palace and reverberates throughout the kingdom with its calls for blood. Alice through the Looking Glass, James Bobin’s 2016 sequel, puts her at the centre of a vast destructive force field. Alice passes through the mirror to encounter the Lord of Time, whose eternal rule must be broken in order to break the power of the murdering Queen; Alice then opens a door and tumbles in free-fall out into nothingness. The place where she lands is a world not of daydream but of nightmare, where everything will soon be on fire, as the two sides in the chess game advance towards each other for the last battle. This inflation of the Red Queen’s macabre aura and impact is quite contrary to what Lewis Carroll had in mind for his own sequel. In some notes about the stage adaptation of the Alice stories, he makes a painstaking distinction between the characters of the queen in his two stories.I pictured to myself the Queen of Hearts as a sort of embodiment of ungovernable passion—a blind and aimless Fury. The Red Queen I pictured as a Fury, but of another type; her passion must be cold and calm—she must be formal and strict, yet not unkindly; pedantic to the 10th degree, the concentrated essence of governesses. (86)Yet there is clearly a temptation to erase this distinction in dramatisations of Alice’s adventures. Perhaps the Red Queen as a ‘not unkindly’ governess is too restrained a persona for the psychodynamic mythos surrounding the queen in the mirror. The image itself demands more than Carroll wants to accord, and the original Tenniel illustrations give a distinctly sinister look to the stern chess queen. In their very first encounter, the Red Queen contradicts every observation Alice makes, confounds the child’s sensory orientation by inverting the rules of time and motion, and assigns her the role of pawn in the game. Kafka or Orwell would not have been at all relaxed about an authority figure who practises mind control, language management, and identity reassignment. But here Carroll offers a brilliant modernisation of the fairy story tradition. Under the governance of the autocratic queen, wonderland and the looking glass world are places in which the laws of science, logic, and language are overturned, to be replaced by the rules of the queen’s games: cards and croquet in the wonderland, and chess in the looking glass world. Alice, as a well-schooled Victorian child, knows something of these games. She has enough common sense to be aware of how the laws of gravity and time and motion are supposed to work, and if she boasts of being able to believe six impossible things before breakfast, this signifies that she has enough logic to understand the limits of possibility. She would also have been taught about species and varieties and encouraged to make her own collections of natural forms. But the anarchy of the queen’s world extends into the domain of biology: species of all kinds can talk, bodies dissolve or change size, and transmutations occur instantaneously. Thus the world-warping energies of the Erinyes are re-imagined in an absurdist’s challenge to the scientist’s universe and the logician’s mentality.Carroll’s instinct to tame the furies is in accord with the overall tone and milieu of his stories, which are works of quirky charm rather than tales of terror, but his two queens are threatening enough to enable him to build the narrative to a dramatic climax. For film-makers and animators, though, it is the queen who provides the dramatic energy and presence. There is an over-riding temptation to let loose the pandemonium of the original Erinyes, exploiting their visual terror and their classical association with metamorphosis. FashioningThere is some sociological background to the coupling of the queen and the mirror in fairy story. In reality, the mirror might assist an aspiring princess to become queen by enchanting the prince who was heir to the throne, but what was the role of the looking glass once she was crowned? Historically, the self-imaging of the queen has intense and nervous resonances, and these can be traced back to Elizabeth I, whose elaborate persona was fraught with newly interpreted symbolism. Her portraits were her mirrors, and they reflect a figure in whom the qualities of radiance associated with divinity were transferred to the human monarch. Elizabeth developed the art of dressing herself in wearable light. If she lacked for a halo, she made up for it with the extravagant radiata of her ruffs and the wreaths of pearls around her head. Pearls in mediaeval poetry carried the mystique of a luminous microcosm, but they were also mirrors in themselves, each one a miniature reflecting globe. The Ditchely portrait of 1592 shows her standing as a colossus between heaven and earth, with the changing planetary light cycle as background. This is a queen who rules the world through the mediation of her own created image. It is an inevitable step from here to a corresponding intervention in the arrangement of the world at large, which involves the armies and armadas that form the backdrop to her other great portraits. And on the home front, a regime of terror focused on regular public decapitations and other grisly executions completes the strategy to remaking the world according to her will. Renowned costume designer Eiko Ishioka created an aesthetic for Mirror Mirror that combines elements of court fashion from the Elizabethan era and the French ancien régime, with allusions to Versailles. Formality and mannerism are the keynotes for the palace scenes. Julia Roberts as the Queen wears a succession of vast dresses that are in defiance of human scale and proportion. Their width at the hem is twice her height, and 100,000 Svarovski crystals were used for their embellishment. For the masked ball scene, she makes her entry as a scarlet peacock with a high arching ruff of pure white feathers. She amuses herself by arranging her courtiers as pieces on a chess-board. So stiffly attired they can barely move more than a square at a time, and with hats surmounted by precariously balanced ships, they are a mock armada from which the Queen may sink individual vessels on a whim, by ordering a fatal move. Snow White and the Huntsman takes a very different approach to extreme fashioning. Designer Colleen Atwood suggests the shape-shifter in the Queen’s costumes, incorporating materials evoking a range of species: reptile scales, fluorescent beetle wings from Thailand, and miniature bird skulls. There is an obvious homage here to the great fashion designer Alexander McQueen, whose hallmark was a fascination with the organic costuming of creatures in feathers, fur, wool, scales, shells, and fronds. Birds were everywhere in McQueen’s work. His 2006 show Widows of Culloden featured a range of headdresses that made the models look as if they had just walked through a flock of birds in full flight. The creatures were perched on their heads with outstretched wings askance across the models’ faces, obscuring their field of vision. As avatars from the spirit realm, birds are emblems of otherness, and associated with metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls. These resonances give a potent mythological aura to Theron’s Queen of the dark arts.Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman accordingly present strikingly contrasted versions of self-fashioning. In Mirror Mirror we have an approach driven by traditions of aristocratic narcissism and courtly persona, in which form is both rigid and extreme. The Queen herself, far from being a shape-shifter, is a prisoner of the massive and rigid architecture that is her costume. Snow White and the Huntsman gives us a more profoundly magical interpretation, where form is radically unstable, infused with strange energies that may at any moment manifest themselves through violent transformation.Atwood was also costume designer for Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, where an invented framing story foregrounds the issue of fashioning as social control. Alice in this version is a young woman, being led by her mother to a garden party where a staged marriage proposal is to take place. Alice, as the social underling in the match, is simply expected to accept the honour. Instead, she escapes the scene and disappears down a rabbit hole to return to the wonderland of her childhood. In a nice comedic touch, her episodes of shrinking and growing involve an embarrassing separation from her clothes, so divesting her also of the demure image of the Victorian maiden. Atwood provides her with a range of fantasy party dresses that express the free spirit of a world that is her refuge from adult conformity.Alice gets to escape the straitjacket of social formation in Carroll’s original stories by overthrowing the queen’s game, and with it her micro-management of image and behaviour. There are other respects, though, in which Alice’s adventures are a form of social and moral fashioning. Her opening reprimand to the kitten includes some telling details about her own propensities. She once frightened a deaf old nurse by shouting suddenly in her ear, “Do let’s pretend that I’m a hungry hyaena and you’re a bone!” (147). Playing kings and queens is one of little Alice’s favourite games, and there is more than a touch of the Red Queen in the way she bosses and manages the kitten. It is easy to laud her impertinence in the face of the tyrannical characters she meets in her fantasies, but does she risk becoming just like them?As a story of moral self-fashioning, Alice through the Looking Glass cuts both ways. It is at once a critique of the Victorian social straitjacket, and a child’s fable about self-improvement. To be accorded the status of queen and with it the freedom of the board is also to be invested with responsibilities. If the human girl is the queen of species, how will she measure up? The published version of the story excludes an episode known to editors as “The Wasp in a Wig,” an encounter that takes place as Alice reaches the last ditch before the square upon which she will be crowned. She is about to jump the stream when she hears a sigh from woods behind her. Someone here is very unhappy, and she reasons with herself about whether there is any point in stopping to help. Once she has made the leap, there will be no going back, but she is reluctant to delay the move, as she is “very anxious to be a Queen” (309). The sigh comes from an aged creature in the shape of a wasp, who is sitting in the cold wind, grumbling to himself. Her kind enquiries are greeted with a succession of waspish retorts, but she persists and does not leave until she has cheered him up. The few minutes devoted “to making the poor old creature comfortable,” she tells herself, have been well spent.Read in isolation, the episode is trite and interferes with the momentum of the story. Carroll abandoned it on the advice of his illustrator John Tenniel, who wrote to say it didn’t interest him in the least (297). There is interest of another kind in Carroll’s instinct to arrest Alice’s momentum at that critical stage, with what amounts to a small morality tale, but Tenniel’s instinct was surely right. The mirror as a social object is surrounded by traditions of self-fashioning that are governed by various modes of conformity: moral, aesthetic, political. Traditions of myth and fantasy allow wider imaginative scope for the role of the mirror, and by association, for inventive speculation about human transformation in a world prone to extraordinary upheavals. ReferencesBorges, Jorge Luis. “Mirrors of Enigma.” Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. Eds. Donald A. Yates and James Irby. New York: New Directions, 2007. 209–12. Carroll, Lewis. Alice through the Looking Glass. In The Annotated Alice. Ed. Martin Gardner. London: Penguin, 2000.The King James Bible.Le Guin, Ursula. The Earthsea Quartet. London: Penguin, 2012.Melchior-Bonnet, Sabine. The Mirror: A History. Trans. Katherine H. Jewett. London: Routledge, 2014.Thomas, R.S. “Reflections.” No Truce with the Furies, Collected Later Poems 1988–2000. Hexham, Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2011.

“I realised some time ago that I am a showgirl. When I perform it is to show the girl, whereas some performers take the approach of caricaturing or ‘burlesquing’ the girl.” (Lola the Vamp) “Perhaps the most surprising idea of contemporary feminism is that women are female impersonators” (Tyler, 1) In recent years, femininity has been the subject of much debate in mainstream culture, as well as in feminist theory. The recent moral panic over “size zero” bodies is only the latest example of the anxieties and tensions generated by a culture in which every part of the female body is subject to endless surveillance and control. The backlash against the women’s movement of the late 20th century has seen the mainstreaming of high femininity on an unprecedented scale. The range of practices now expected of middle-class women, including cosmetic surgery, dieting, fake tanning, manicures, pedicures, and waxing (including pubic waxing) is staggering. Little wonder, then, that femininity has often been imagined as oppressive labour, as work. If women were to attempt to produce the ideal femininities promoted by women’s magazines in the UK, USA and Australia, there would be little time in the day—let alone money—for anything else. The work of femininity hence becomes the work of adapting oneself to a current set of social norms, a work of adaptation and adjustment that must remain invisible. The goal is to look natural while constantly labouring away in private to maintain the façade. Alongside this feminine ideal, a subculture has grown up that also promotes the production of an elaborately feminine identity, but in very different ways. The new burlesque is a subculture that began in club nights in London and New York, has since extended to a network of performers and fans, and has become a highly active community on the Internet as well as in offline cultural spaces. In these spaces, performers and audiences alike reproduce striptease performances, as well as vintage dress and styles. Performers draw on their own knowledge of the history of burlesque to create acts that may invoke late 19th-century vaudeville, the supper clubs of pre-war Germany, or 1950s pinups. However the audience for these performances is as likely to consist of women and gay men as the heterosexual men who comprise the traditional audience for such shows. The striptease star Dita von Teese, with her trademark jet-black hair, pale skin, red lips and tiny 16-inch corseted waist, has become the most visible symbol of the new burlesque community. However, the new burlesque “look” can be seen across a web of media sites: in film, beginning with Moulin Rouge (Baz Luhrmann, 2001), and more recently in The Notorious Bettie Paige (Mary Harron, 2005), as well as in mainstream movies like Mrs Henderson Presents (Stephen Frears, 2005); in novels (such as Louise Welsh’s The Bullet Trick); in popular music, such as the iconography of Kylie Minogue’s Showgirl tour and the stage persona of Alison Goldfrapp; and in high fashion through the work of Vivienne Westwood and Roland Mouret. Since the debut in the late 1990’s of von Teese’s most famous act, in which she dances in a giant martini glass, the new burlesque has arisen in popular culture as a counterpoint to the thin, bronzed, blonde ideal of femininity that has otherwise dominated popular culture in the West. The OED defines burlesque as “a comically exaggerated imitation, especially in a literary or dramatic work; a parody.” In this article, I want to think about the new burlesque in precisely this way: as a parody of feminine identity that, by making visible the work involved in producing feminine identity, precisely resists mainstream notions of feminine beauty. As Lola the Vamp points out in the quotation that opens this article, new burlesque is about “caricaturing or burlesquing the girl”, but also about “showing the girl”, not only in the literal sense of revealing the body at the end of the striptease performance, but in dramatising and making visible an attachment to feminine identity. For members of the new burlesque community, I want to suggest, femininity is experienced as an identity position that is lived as authentic. This makes new burlesque a potentially fruitful site in which to think through the questions of whether femininity can be adapted, and what challenges such adaptations might pose, not only for mainstream culture, but for feminist theory. As I have stated, feminist responses to mainstream femininity have emphasised that femininity is work; that is, that feminine identities do not emerge naturally from certain bodies, but rather have to be made. This is necessary in order to resist the powerful cultural discourses through which gender identities are normalised. This model sees femininity as additive, as something that is superimposed on some mystical “authentic” self which cries out to be liberated from the artificially imposed constraints of high heels, makeup and restrictive clothing. This model of femininity is summed up by Naomi Wolf’s famous statement, in The Beauty Myth, that “femininity is code for femaleness plus whatever society happens to be selling” (Wolf, 177; emphasis added). However, a potential problem with such a view of gender identity is that it tends to reproduce essentialist notions of identity. The focus on femininity as a process through which bodies are adapted to social norms suggests that there is an unmarked self that precedes adaptation. Sabina Sawhney provides a summary and critique of this position: Feminism seems to be relying on the notion that the authentic identity of woman would be revealed once the drag is removed. That is to say, when her various “clothes”—racial, ethnic, hetero/homosexual, class textured—are removed, the real, genuine woman would appear whose identity would pose no puzzles. But surely that is a dangerous assumption, for it not only prioritises certain forms of identity formation over others, but also essentialises a sexual or gendered identity as already known in advance. (5) As Sawhney suggests here, to see femininity only in terms of oppressive labour is implicitly essentialist, since it suggests the existence of a primary, authentic “femaleness”. Femininity consists of consumer “stuff” which is superimposed onto unproblematically female bodies. Sawhney is right, here, to compare femininity to drag: however, female and male femininities are read very differently in this account. Drag and cross-dressing are decried as deliberate (male) parodies of “women” (and it is interesting to note that parodies of femininity are inevitably misread as parodies of women, as though the two were the same). However, those women who engage in feminine identity practices are to be pitied, not blamed, or at least not explicitly. Femininity, the compulsion to adapt oneself to incorporate “whatever society is selling”, is articulated in terms of “social pressure”, as a miserable duty over which women have no control. As Samantha Holland argues, the danger is that women become positioned as “mindless consumers, in thrall to the power of media images” (10). Resisting the adaptations demanded by femininity thus becomes a way of resisting mindlessness, particularly through resisting excessive consumption. This anxiety about female excess is echoed in some of the press coverage of the burlesque scene. For example, an article in the British Sunday paper The Observer takes a sceptical position on some performers’ claims that their work is feminist, wondering whether the “fairy dust of irony really strips burlesque of any political dubiousness” (O’Connell, 4), while an article on a feminist Website argues that the movement “can still be interpreted as a form of exploitation of women’s bodies,” (DiNardo, 1), which rather suggests that it is the purpose of feminism to try and interpret all manifestations of femininity in this way: as if the writer is suggesting that feminism itself were a system for curbing feminine excess. This is not to deny that the new burlesque, like more mainstream forms of femininity, involves work. Indeed, a reading of online burlesque communities suggests that it is precisely the labour of femininity that is a source of pleasure. Many books and Websites associated with this movement offer lessons in stage performance; however, these real and virtual classes are not limited to those who wish to perform. In this subculture, much of the pleasure derives from a sense of community between performer and audience, a sense which derives mainly from the adaptation of a specific retro or vintage feminine identity. Miss Indigo Blue’s Academy offers courses in the more theatrical aspects of burlesque, such as stripping techniques, but also in subjects such as “makeup and wig tricks” and “walking in heels” (Miss Indigo Blue’s Academy of Burlesque). Burlesque, like cross-dressing suggests that femininity needs to be learnt: and learning femininity, in this sense, also involves unlearning whatever “one [usually restrictive] size fits all” forms of femininity are currently being sold by the fashion and beauty industries. In contrast to this normative model, the online accounts of burlesque fans and performers reveal an intense pleasure in creating and adapting new feminine identities within a subculture, through a “DIY” approach to femininity. This insistence on doing it yourself is important, since it is through the process of reclaiming vintage styles of clothing, hair and makeup that real adaptation takes place. Whereas mainstream femininity is positioned as empty consumption, and as a source of anxiety, burlesque is aligned with recycling, thrift shopping and the revival of traditional crafts such as knitting and weaving. This is most visible in magazines and Websites such as Bust magazine. This magazine, which launched in the early 1990s, was an early forerunner of the burlesque revival with its use of visual imagery taken from 1950s women’s magazines alongside pinups of the same era. The Website has been selling Bettie Page merchandise for some time alongside its popular Stitch n’ Bitch knitting books, and also hosts discussions on feminism, craft and “kitsch and make-up” (Bust). In the accounts cited above, femininity is clearly not imagined through an imperative to conform to social norms: instead, the practice of recovering and re-creating vintage looks is constructed as a pleasurable leisure activity that brings with it a sense of achievement and of engagement with a wider community. The appeal of burlesque, therefore, is not limited to a fetishistic preference for the trappings of burlesque or retro femininity: it is also defined by what it is not. Online discussions reveal a sense of dissatisfaction with more culturally visible forms of femininity promoted by celebrity culture and women’s magazines. Particular irritants include the low-maintenance look, skinniness, lip gloss, highlighted and layered hair, fake tan and, perhaps unexpectedly, jeans. These are seen as emblematic of precisely stereotypical and homogenising notions of feminine identity, as one post points out: “Dita VT particularly stands out in this day and age where it seems that the mysterious Blondifier and her evil twin, the Creosoter, get to every female celeb at some point.” (Bust Lounge, posted on Oct 17 2006, 3.32 am) Another reason for the appeal of New Burlesque is that it does not privilege slenderness: as another post says “i think i like that the women have natural bodies in some way” (Bust Lounge, posted on Oct 8 2006, 7:34 pm), and it is clear that the labour associated with this form of femininity consists of adorning the body for display in a way that opposes the dominant model of constructing “natural” beauty through invisible forms of labour. Burlesque performers might therefore be seen as feminist theorists, whose construction of a feminine image against normative forms of femininity dramatises precisely those issues of embodiment and identity that concern feminist theory. This open display and celebration of feminine identity practices, for example, makes visible Elizabeth Grosz’s argument, in Volatile Bodies, that all bodies are inscribed with culture, even when they are naked. A good example of this is the British performer Immodesty Blaize, who has been celebrated in the British press for presenting an ideal of beauty that challenges the cultural predominance of size zero bodies: a press cutting on her Website shows her appearance on the cover of the Sunday Times Style magazine for 23 April 2006, under the heading “More Is More: One Girl’s Sexy Journey as a Size 18” (Immodesty Blaize). However, this is not to suggest that her version of femininity is simply concerned with rejecting practices such as diet and exercise: alongside the press images of Immodesty in ornate stage costumes, there is also an account of the rigorous training her act involves. In other words, the practices involved in constructing this version of femininity entail bringing together accounts of multiple identity practices, often in surprising ways that resist conforming to any single ideal of femininity: while both the athletic body and the sexualised size 18 body may both be seen as sites of resistance to the culturally dominant slender body, it is unusual for one performer’s image to draw on both simultaneously as Blaize does. This dramatisation of the work involved in shaping the body can also be seen in the use of corsets by performers like von Teese, whose extremely tiny waist is a key aspect of her image. Although this may be read on one hand as a performance of conformity to feminine ideals of slimness, the public flaunting of the corset (which is after all a garment originally designed to be concealed beneath clothing) again makes visible the practices and technologies through which femininity is constructed. The DIY approach to femininity is central to the imperative to resist incorporation by mainstream culture. Dita von Teese makes this point in a press interview, in which she stresses the impossibility of working with stylists: “the one time I hired a stylist, they picked up a pair of my 1940’s shoes and said, these would look really cute with jeans. I immediately said, you’re out of here” (West, 10). With its constant dramatisation and adaptation of femininity, then, I would argue that burlesque precisely carries out the work which Grosz says is imperative for feminist theory, of problematising the notion of the body as a “blank, passive page” (156). If some feminist readings of femininity have failed to account for the multiplicity and diversity of feminine identity performances, it is perhaps surprising that this is also true of feminist research that has engaged with queer theory, especially theories of drag. As Carol-Ann Tyler notes, feminist critiques of drag performances have tended to read drag performances as a hostile parody of women themselves (60). I would argue that this view of drag as a parody of women is problematic, in that it reproduces an essentialist model in which women and femininity are one and the same. What I want to suggest is that it is possible to read drag in continuum with other performances, such as burlesque, as an often affectionate parody of femininity; one which allows female as well as male performers to think through the complex and often contradictory pleasures and anxieties that are at stake in performing feminine identities. In practice, some accounts of burlesque do see burlesque as a kind of drag performance, but they reveal that anxiety is not alleviated but heightened when the drag performer is biologically female. While drag is performed by male bodies, and hence potentially from a position of power, a female performer is held to be both complicit with patriarchal power, and herself powerless: the performance thus emanates from a doubly powerless position. Because femininity is imagined as a property of “women”, to parody femininity is to parody oneself and is hence open to being read as a performance of self-hatred. At best, the performer is herself held to occupy a position of middle class privilege, and hence to have access to what O’Connell, in the Observer article, calls “the fairy dust of irony” (4). For O’Connell however the performer uses this privilege to celebrate a normative, “politically dubious” form of femininity. In this reading, which positions itself as feminist, any potential for irony is lost, and burlesque is seen as unproblematically reproducing an oppressive model of feminine identities and roles. The Websites I have cited are aware of the potential power of burlesque as parody, but as a parody of femininity which attempts to work with the tensions inherent in feminine identity: its pleasures as well as its constraints and absurdities. Such a thinking-through of femininity is not the sole preserve of the male drag performer. Indeed, my current research on drag is engaged with the work of self-proclaimed female drag queens, also known as “bio queens” or “faux queens”: recently, Ana Matronic of the Scissor Sisters has spoken of her early experiences as a performer in a San Francisco drag show, where there is an annual faux-queen beauty pageant (Barber, 1). I would argue that there is a continuity between these performers and participants in the burlesque scene who may be conflicted about their relationship to “feminism” but are highly aware of the possibilities offered by this sense of parody, which is often articulated through an invocation of queer politics. Queer politics is often explicitly on the agenda in burlesque performance spaces; however the term “queer” is used not only to refer to performances that take place in queer spaces or for a lesbian audience, but to the more general way in which the very idea of women parodying femininity works to queer both feminist and popular notions of femininity that equate it with passivity, with false consciousness. While burlesque does celebrate extreme femininities, it does so in a highly self-aware and parodic manner which works to critique and denaturalise more normalised forms of femininity. It does so partly by engaging with a queer agenda (for example Miss Indigo’s Academy of Burlesque hosts lectures on queer politics and feminism alongside makeup classes and stripping lessons). New Burlesque stage performers use 19th- and 20th-century ideals of femininity to parody contemporary feminine ideals, and this satirical element is carried through in the audience and in the wider community. In burlesque, femininity is reclaimed as an identity precisely through aligning an excessive form of femininity with feminism and queer theory. This model of burlesque as queer parody of femininity draws out the connections as well as the discontinuities between male and female “alternative” femininities, a potentially powerful connectivity that is suggested by Judith Butler’s work and that disrupts the notion that femininity is always imposed on women through consumer culture. It is possible, then, to open up Butler’s writing on drag in order to make explicit this continuity between male and female parodies of femininity. Writing of the need to distinguish between truly subversive parody, and that which is likely to be incorporated, Butler explains: Parody by itself is not subversive, and there must be a way to understand what makes certain kinds of parodic repetitions effectively disruptive, truly troubling, and which repetitions become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony (Gender Trouble, 177). The problem with this is that femininity, as performed by biologically female subjects, is still positioned as other, as that which presents itself as natural, but is destabilised by more subversive gender performances, such as male drag, that reveal it as performative. The moment of judgment, when we as queer theorists decide which performances are truly subversive and which are not, is divisive: having drawn out the continuity between male and female performances of femininity, it reinstates the dualistic order in which women are positioned as lacking agency. If a practice is ultimately incorporated by consumer culture, this does not necessarily mean that it is not troubling or politically interesting. Such a reductive and pessimistic reading produces “the popular” as a bad object in a way that reproduces precisely the hegemonic discourse it is trying to disrupt. In this model, very few practices, including drag, could be held to be subversive at all. What is missing from Butler’s account is an awareness of the complex and multiple forms of pleasure and desire that characterise women’s attachment to feminine identities. I would argue that she opens up a potentially exhilarating possibility that has significant implications for feminist understandings of feminine identity in that it allows for an understanding of the ways in which female performers actively construct, rework and critique feminine identity, but that this possibility is closed down through the implication that only male drag performances are “truly troubling” (Gender Trouble, 177). By allowing female performers to ”parody the girl”, I am suggesting that burlesque potentially allows for an understanding in which female performances of femininity may, like drag, also be “truly troubling” (Butler, Gender Trouble, 177). Like drag, they require the audience both to reflect on the ways in which femininity is performatively constructed within the constraints of a normative, gendered culture, but also do justice to the extent to which feminine identity may be experienced as a source of pleasure. Striptease, in which feminine identity is constructed precisely through painstakingly creating a look whose layers are then stripped away in a stylised performance of feminine gesture, powerfully dramatises the historic tension between feminism and femininity. Indeed, the labour involved in burlesque performances can be adapted and adopted as feminist theoretical performances that speak back to hegemonic ideals of beauty, to feminism, and to queer theory. References Barber, Lynn. “Life’s a Drag”. The Guardian 26 Nov. 2006, 10. Bust Lounge. 8 Mar. 2007 http://www.bust.com/>. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. ———. Undoing Gender. London and New York: Routledge, 2004 DiNardo, Kelly. “Burlesque Comeback Tries to Dance with Feminism.” Women’s E-News 2004. 1 Mar. 2007 http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/2099>. Dita von Teese. 8 Mar. 2007 http://www.dita.net>. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Towards a New Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994. Holland, Samantha. Alternative Femininities. London: Berg, 2004. Immodesty Blaize. 10 Apr. 2007 http://www.immodestyblaize.com/collage2.html>. Lola the Vamp. 8 Mar. 2006 http://www.lolathevamp.net>. Miss Indigo Blue’s Academy of Burlesque. 8 Mar. 2007 http://www.academyofburlesque.com>. O’Connell, Dee. “Tassels Will Be Worn.” The Observer 28 Sep. 2003, 4. Sawhney, Sabina. “Feminism and Hybridity Round Table.” Surfaces 7 (2006): 113. Tyler, Carol Ann. Female Impersonation. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. West, Naomi. “Art of the Teese.” Daily Telegraph online edition 6 Mar. 2006: 10. 1 Mar. 2007 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fashion/main.jhtml?xml=/fashion/2006/03/06/efdita04.xml>. Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth. London: Chatto and Windus, 1990. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Ferreday, Debra. "Adapting Femininities: The New Burlesque." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/12-ferreday.php>. APA Style Ferreday, D. (May 2007) "Adapting Femininities: The New Burlesque," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/12-ferreday.php>.

Photograph by Gonzalo Echeverria (2010)Doubt has been my closest companion for several years as I struggle to make sense of certain hidden events from within my family’s history. The actual nature of such events, although now lost to us, can nevertheless be explored through the distorting lens of memory and academic research. I base such explorations in part on my intuition and sensitivity to emotional experience, which are inevitably riddled with doubt. I write from the position of a psychoanalytic psychologist who is also a creative writer and my doubts increase further when I use the autobiographical impulse as a driving force. I am not alone with such uncertainties. Ross Gibson, an historian and filmmaker, uses his doubts to explore empty spaces in the Australian landscape. He looks to see “what’s gone missing” as he endeavours with a team of colleagues to build up some “systematic comprehension in response to fragments” (Gibson, “Places” 1). How can anyone be certain as to what has transpired with no “facts” to go on? he asks. What can we do with our doubts? To this end, Gibson has collected a series of crime scene photographs, taken in post war Sydney, and created a display – a photographic slide show with a minimalist musical score, mostly of drumming and percussion, coupled with a few tight, poetic words, in the form of haiku, splattered across the screen. The notes accompanying the photographic negatives were lost. The only details “known” include the place, the date and the image. Of some two thousand photos, Gibson selected only fifty for display, by hunch, by nuance, or by whatever it was that stirred in him when he first glimpsed them. He describes each photo as “the imprint of a scream”, a gut reaction riddled with doubt (Gibson and Richards, Wartime). In this type of research, creative imaginative flair is essential, Gibson argues. “We need to propose ‘what if’ scenarios that help us account for what has happened…so that we can better envisage what might happen. We need to apprehend the past” (Gibson, “Places” 2). To do this we need imagination, which involves “a readiness to incorporate the unknown…when one encounters evidence that’s in smithereens”, the evidence of the past that lies rooted in a seedbed of doubt (Gibson, “Places” 2). The sociologist, Avery Gordon, also argues in favour of the imaginative impulse. “Fiction is getting pretty close to sociology,” she suggests as she begins her research into the business of ghosts and haunting (Gordon 38). As we entertain our doubts we tune in with our uncertain imaginations. “The places where our discourse is unauthorised by virtue of its unruliness…take us away from abstract questions of method, from bloodless professionalised questions, toward the materiality of institutionalised storytelling, with all its uncanny repetitions” (Gordon 39). If we are to dig deeper, to understand more about the emotional truth of our “fictional” pasts we must look to “the living traces, the memories of the lost and disappeared” (Gordon ix). According to Janice Radway, Gordon seeks a new way of knowing…a knowing that is more a listening than a seeing, a practice of being attuned to the echoes and murmurs of that which has been lost but which is still present among us in the form of intimations, hints, suggestions and portents … ghostly matters … . To be haunted is to be tied to historical and social effects. (x) And to be tied to such effects is to live constantly in the shadow of doubt. A photograph of my dead baby sister haunts me still. As a child I took this photo to school one day. I had peeled it from its corners in the family album. There were two almost identical pictures, side by side. I hoped no one would notice the space left behind. “She’s dead,” I said. I held the photo out to a group of girls in the playground. My fingers had smeared the photo’s surface. The children peered at the image. They wanted to stare at the picture of a dead baby. Not one had seen a dead body before, and not one had been able to imagine the stillness, a photographic image without life, without breath that I passed around on the asphalt playground one spring morning in 1962 when I was ten years old. I have the photo still—my dead sister who bears the same name as my older sister, still living. The dead one has wispy fine black hair. In the photo there are dark shadows underneath her closed eyes. She looks to be asleep. I do not emphasise grief at the loss of my mother’s first-born daughter. My mother felt it briefly, she told me later. But things like that happened all the time during the war. Babies were born and died regularly. Now, all these years later, these same unmourned babies hover restlessly in the nurseries of generations of survivors. There is no way we can be absolute in our interpretations, Gibson argues, but in the first instance there is some basic knowledge to be generated from viewing the crime scene photographs, as in viewing my death photo (Gibson, "Address"). For example, we can reflect on the décor and how people in those days organised their spaces. We can reflect on the way people stood and walked, got on and off vehicles, as well as examine something of the lives of the investigative police, including those whose job it was to take these photographs. Gibson interviewed some of the now elderly men from the Sydney police force who had photographed the crime scenes he displays. He asked questions to deal with his doubts. He now has a very different appreciation of the life of a “copper”, he says. His detective work probing into these empty spaces, digging into his doubts, has reduced his preconceptions and prejudices (Gibson, "Address"). Preconception and prejudice cannot tolerate doubt. In order to bear witness, Gibson says we need to be speculative, to be loose, but not glib, “narrativising” but not inventive, with an eye to the real world (Gibson, "Address"). Gibson’s interest in an interpretation of life after wartime in Sydney is to gather a sense of the world that led to these pictures. His interpretations derive from his hunches, but hunches, he argues, also need to be tested for plausibility (Gibson, Address). Like Gibson, I hope that the didactic trend from the past—to shut up and listen—has been replaced by one that involves “discovery based learning”, learning that is guided by someone who knows “just a little more”, in a common sense, forensic, investigative mode (Gibson, “Address”). Doubt is central to this heuristic trend. Likewise, my doubts give me permission to explore my family’s past without the paralysis of intentionality and certainty. “What method have you adopted for your research?” Gordon asks, as she considers Luce Irigaray’s thoughts on the same question. It is “a delicate question. For isn’t it the method, the path to knowledge, that has always also led us away, led us astray, by fraud and artifice” (Gordon 38). So what is my methodology? I use storytelling meshed with theory and the autobiographical. But what do you think you’re doing? my critics ask. You call this research? I must therefore look to literary theorists on biography and autobiography for support. Nancy Miller writes about the denigration of the autobiographical, particularly in academic circles, where the tendency has been to see the genre as “self indulgent” in its apparent failure to maintain standards of objectivity, of scrutiny and theoretical distance (Miller 421). However, the autobiographical, Miller argues, rather than separating and dividing us through self-interests can “narrow the degree of separation” by operating as an aid to remembering (425). We recognise ourselves in another’s memoir, however fleetingly, and the recognition makes our “own experience feel more meaningful: not ‘merely’ personal but part of the bigger picture of cultural memory” (Miller 426). I speak with some hesitation about my family of origin yet it frames my story and hence my methodology. For many years I have had a horror of what writers and academics call “structure”. I considered myself lacking any ability to create a structure within my writing. I write intuitively. I have some idea of what I wish to explore and then I wait for ideas to enter my mind. They rise to the surface much like air bubbles from a fish. I wait till the fish joggles my bait. Often I write as I wait for a fish to bite. This writing, which is closely informed by my reading, occurs in an intuitive way, as if by instinct. I follow the associations that erupt in my mind, even as I explore another’s theory, and if it is at all possible, if I can get hold of these associations, what I, too, call hunches, then I follow them, much as Gibson and Gordon advocate. Like Gordon, I take my “distractions” seriously (Gordon, 31-60). Gordon follows ghosts. She looks for the things behind the things, the things that haunt her. I, too, look for what lies beneath, what is unconscious, unclear. This writing does not come easily and it takes many drafts before a pattern can emerge, before I, who have always imagined I could not develop a structure, begin to see one—an outline in bold where the central ideas accrue and onto which other thoughts can attach. This structure is not static. It begins with the spark of desire, the intercourse of opposing feelings, for me the desire to untangle family secrets from the past, to unpack one form, namely the history as presented within my family and then to re-assemble it through a written re-construction that attempts to make sense of the empty spaces left out of the family narrative, where no record, verbal or written, has been provided. This operates against pressure from certain members of my family to leave the family past unexplored. My methodology is subjective. Any objectivity I glean in exploring the work and theories of others comes through my own perspective. I read the works of academics in the literary field, and academics from psychoanalysis interested in infant development and personality theory. They consider these issues in different ways from the way in which I, as a psychotherapist, a doubt-filled researcher, and writer, read and experience them. To my clinician self, these ideas evolve in practice. I do not see them as mere abstractions. To me they are living ideas, they pulse and flow, and yet there are some who would seek to tie them down or throw them out. Recently I asked my mother about the photo of her dead baby, her first-born daughter who had died during the Hongerwinter (Hunger winter) of 1945 in Heilo, Holland. I was curious to know how the photo had come about. My curiosity had been flamed by Jay Ruby’s Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America, a transcript on the nature of post-mortem photography, which includes several photos of dead people. The book I found by chance in a second-hand books store. I could not leave these photographs behind. Ruby is concerned to ask questions about why we have become so afraid of death, at least in the western world, that we no longer take photographs of our loved ones after death as mementos, or if we take such photos, they are kept private, not shared with the public, for fear that the owners might be considered ghoulish (Ruby 161). I follow in Gordon’s footsteps. She describes how one day, on her way to a conference to present a paper, she had found herself distracted from her conference topic by thoughts of a woman whose image she had discovered was “missing” from a photo taken in Berlin in 1901. According to Gordon’s research, the woman, Sabina Spielrein, should have been present in this photo, but was not. Spielrein is a little known psychoanalyst, little known despite the fact that she was the first to hypothesise on the nature of the death instinct, an unconscious drive towards death and oblivion (Gordon 40). Gordon’s “search” for this missing woman overtook her initial research. My mother could not remember who took her dead baby’s photograph, but suspected it was a neighbour of her cousin in whose house she had stayed. She told me again the story she has told me many times before, and always at my instigation. When I was little I wondered that my mother could stay dry-eyed in the telling. She seemed so calm, when I had imagined that were I the mother of a dead baby I would find it hard to go on. “It is harder,” my mother said, to lose an older child. “When a child dies so young, you have fewer memories. It takes less time to get over it.” Ruby concludes that after World War Two, postmortem photographs were less likely to be kept in the family album, as they would have been in earlier times. “Those who possess death-related family pictures regard them as very private pictures to be shown only to selected people” (Ruby 161). When I look at the images in Ruby’s book, particularly those of the young, the children and babies, I am struck again at the unspoken. The idea of the dead person, seemingly alive in the photograph, propped up in a chair, on a mother’s lap, or resting on a bed, lifeless. To my contemporary sensibility it seems wrong. To look upon these dead people, their identities often unknown, and to imagine the grief for others in that loss—for grief there must have been such that the people remaining felt it necessary to preserve the memory—becomes almost unbearable. It is tempting to judge the past by present standards. In 1999, while writing her historical novel Year of Wonders, Geraldine Brooks came across a letter Henry James had written ninety eight years earlier to a young Sarah Orne Jewett who had previously sent him a manuscript of her historical novel for comment. In his letter, James condemns the notion of the historical novel as an impossibility: “the invention, the representation of the old consciousness, the soul, the sense of horizon, the vision of individuals in whose minds half the things that make ours, that make the modern world,” are all impossible, he insisted (Brooks 3). Despite Brooks’s initial disquiet at James’s words, she realised later that she had heard similar ideas uttered in different contexts before. Brooks had worked as a journalist in the Middle East and Africa: “They don’t think like us,” white Africans would say of their black neighbours, or Israelis of Arabs or upper class Palestinians about their desperately poor refugee-camp brethren … . “They don’t value life as we do. They don’t care if their kids get killed—they have so many of them”. (Brookes 3) But Brooks argues, “a woman keening for a dead child sounds exactly as raw in an earth-floored hovel as it does in a silk-carpeted drawing room” (3). Brooks is concerned to get beyond the certainties of our pre-conceived ideas: “It is human nature to put yourself in another’s shoes. The past may be another country. But the only passport required is empathy”(3). And empathy again requires the capacity to tolerate doubt. Later I asked my mother yet again about what it was like for her when her baby died, and why she had chosen to have her dead baby photographed. She did not ask for the photograph to be taken, she told me. But she was glad to have it now; otherwise nothing would remain of this baby, buried in an unfamiliar cemetery on the other side of the world. Why am I haunted by this image of my dead baby sister and how does it connect with my family’s secrets? The links are still in doubt. Gibson’s creative flair, Gordon’s ideas on ghostly matters and haunting, the things behind the things, my preoccupation with my mother’s dead baby and a sense that this sister might mean less to me did I not have the image of her photograph planted in my memory from childhood, all come together through parataxis if we can bear our doubts. Certainty is the enemy of introspection of imagination and of creativity. Yet too much doubt can paralyse. Here I write about tolerable levels of doubt tempered with an inquisitive mind that can land on hunches and an imagination that allows the researcher to follow such hunches and then seek evidence that corroborates or disproves them. As Gibson writes elsewhere, I tried to use all these scrappy details to help people think about the absences and silences between all the pinpointed examples that made up the scenarios that I presented in prose that was designed to spur rigorous speculation rather than lock down singular conclusions. (“Extractive” 2) Ours is a positive doubt, one that expects to find something, however “unexpected”, rather than a negative doubt that expects nothing. For doubt in large doses can paralyse a person into inaction. Furthermore, a balanced state of doubt fosters connectivity. As John Patrick Shanley’s character, the parish priest, Father Flynn, in the film Doubt, observes, “there are these times in our life when we feel lost. It happens and it’s a bond” (Shanley). References Brooks, Geraldine. "Timeless Tact Helps Sustain a Literary Time Traveller." New York Times, 2001. 14 Jan. 2011 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/02/arts/writers-on-writing-timeless-tact-helps-sustain-a-literary-time-traveler.html?pagewanted=3&src=pm›. Doubt. Shanley, Dir. J. P. Shanley. Miramax Films, 2008. Gibson, Ross, and Kate Richards. “Life after Wartime.” N.d. 25 Feb. 2011. ‹http://www.lifeafterwartime.com/›. Gibson, Ross. “The Art of the Real Conference.” Keynote address. U Newcastle, 2008. Gibson, Ross. “Places past Disappearance.” Transformations 13-1 (2006). 22 Feb. 2007 ‹http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_13/article_01.shtml›. ———. “Extractive Realism.” Australian Humanities Review 47 (2009). 25 Feb. 2011 ‹http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-November-2009/gibson.html›. Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 2008. Miller, Nancy K. “But Enough about Me, What Do You Think of My Memoir?” The Yale Journal of Criticism 13.2 (2000): 421-536. Ruby, Jay. Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1995.

When characters in the Fox Television sitcom The Mindy Project call Mindy Lahiri fat, Mindy sees it as a case of misidentification. She reminds the character that she is a “petite Asian woman,” that she has large, beautiful breasts, that she has nothing in common with fat people, and the terms “chubbster” and “BBW – Big Beautiful Woman” are offensive and do not apply to her. Mindy spends some of each episode on her love for food and more food, and her hatred of fitness regimes, while repeatedly falling for meticulously fit men. She dates, has a string of failed relationships, adventurous sexual techniques, a Bridget Jones-scale search for perfect love, and yet admits to shame in showing her naked body to lovers. Her contradictory feelings about food and body image mirror our own confusions, and reveal the fear and fascination we feel for fat in our fat-obsessed culture. I argue that by creating herself as sexy, successful, popular, sporadically confident and insecure, Mindy works against stigmas that attach both to big women – women who are considered big in comparison to the societal size-zero ideal – and women who have historically been seen as belonging to “primitive” or colonized cultures, and therefore she disrupts the conflation of thinness to civilization. In this article, I look at the performance of fat and ethnic identity on American television, and examine the bodily mechanisms through which Mindy disrupts these. I argue that Mindy uses issues of fat and body image to disrupt stereotypical iterations of race. In the first part of the paper, I look at the construction of South Asian femininity in American pop culture, to set up the discussion of fat, gender and race as interrelated performative categories. Race, Gender, Performativity As Judith Butler says of gender, “performativity must be understood not as a singular or deliberate ‘act,’ but, rather as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names” (Bodies, 2). Bodies produce and perform their gender through repeating and imitating norms of clothing, body movement, choices in gesture, action, mannerism, as well as gender roles. They do so in such a way that the discourses and histories that are embedded in them start to seem natural; they are seen to be the truth, instead of as actions that have a history. These choices do not just reflect or reveal gender, but rather produce and create it. Nadine Ehlers takes performativity into the realm of race. Ehlers says that “racial performativity always works within and through the modalities of gender and sexuality, and vice versa, and these categories are constituted through one another” (65). In this sense, neither race nor gender are produced or iterated without also producing their interrelationship. They are in fact produced through this interrelationship. So, for example, when studying the performativity of black bodies, you would need to specify whether you are looking at black femininity or masculinity. And on the other hand, when studying gender, it is important to specify gender where? And when? You couldn’t simply pry open the link between race and gender and expect to successfully theorize either on its own. Mindy’s performance of femininity, including her questions about body image and weight, her attractive though odd clothing choices, her search for love, these are all bound to her iteration of race. She often explains her body through defining herself as Asian. Yet, I suggest in a seeming contradiction that her othering of herself as a big woman (relative to normative body size for women in American film and television) who breaks chairs when she sits on them and is insecure about her body, keeps the audience from othering her because of race. Her weight, clumsiness, failures in love, her heartbreaks all make her a “normal” woman. They make her easy to identify with. They suggest that she is just a woman, an American woman, instead of othering her as a South Asian woman, or a woman from a “primitive”, colonized or minority culture.Being South Asian on American Television Mindy Lahiri (played by writer, producer and actor Mindy Kaling) is a successful American obstetrician/gynaecologist, who works in a successful practice in New York. She breaks stereotypes of South Asian women that are repeated in American television and film. Opposite to the stereotype of the traditional, dutiful South Asian who agrees to an arranged marriage, and has little to say for him or herself beyond academic achievement that is generally seen in American and British media, Mindy sleeps with as many men as she can possibly fit into a calendar year, is funny, self-deprecating, and has little interest in religion, tradition or family, and is obsessed with popular culture. The stereotypical characteristics of South Asians in the popular British media, listed by Anne Ciecko (69), include passive, law-abiding, following traditional gender roles and traditions, living in the “pathologized” Asian family, struggling to find self-definitions that incorporate their placement as both belonging to and separate from British culture. Similarly, South Asian actors on American television often play vaguely-comic doctors and lawyers, seemingly with no personal life or sexual desire. They are simply South Asians, with no further defining personality traits or quirks. It is as if being South Asian overrides any other character trait. They are rarely in lead roles, and Mindy is certainly the first South Asian-American woman to have her own sitcom, in which she plays the lead. What do South Asians on American television look and sound like? In her study on performativity of race and gender, Ehlers looks at various constructions of black femininity, and suggests that black femininity is often constructed in the media in terms of promiscuity and aggression (83), and, I would add, the image of the mama with the big heart and even bigger bosom. Contrary to black femininity, South Asian femininity in American media is often repressed, serious, concerned with work and achievement or alternatively with menial roles, with little in terms of a personal or sexual life. As Shilpa S. Dave says in her book on South Asians in American television, most South Asians that appear in American television are shown as immigrants with accents (8). That is what makes them recognizably different and other, more so even than any visual identification. It is much more common to see immigrants of Chinese or Korean descent in American television as people with American accents, as people who are not first generation immigrants. South Asians, on the other hand, almost always have South Asian accents. There are exceptions to this rule, however, the exceptions are othered and/or made more mainstream using various mechanisms. Neela in ER (played by Parminder Nagra) and Cece in New Girl (played by Hannah Simone) are examples of this. In both instances the characters are part of either an ensemble cast, or in a supporting role. Neela is a step removed from American and South Asian femininity, in that she is British, with a British accent – she is othered, but this othering makes her more mainstream than the marking that takes place with a South Asian accent. The British accent and a tragic marriage, I would say, allow her to have a personal and sexual life, beyond work. Cece goes through an arranged marriage scenario, full with saris and a South Asian wedding that is the more recognized and acceptable narrative for South Asian women in American media. The characters are made more acceptable and recognizable through these mechanisms. Bhoomi K. Thakore, in an article on the representation of South Asians in American television, briefly explains that after the 1965 Immigration and Nationality act, highly-educated South Asians could immigrate to the United States, either to get further education, or as highly skilled workers (149) – a phenomenon often called “brain-drain.” In addition, says Thakore, family members of these educated South Asians immigrated to the States as well, and these were people that were less educated and worked often in convenience stores and motels. Thakore suggests that immigrants to the United States experience a segmented assimilation, meaning that not all immigrants (first and second generation) will assimilate to the same extent or in the same way. I would say from my own experience that the degree to which immigrants can assimilate into American society often depends on not only financial prospects or education, but also attractiveness, skin tone, accent, English-speaking ability, interests and knowledge of American popular culture, interest in an American way of life and American social customs, and so on. Until recently, I would say that South Asian characters in American television shows have tended to represent either first-generation immigrants with South Asian accents and an inability or lack of desire to assimilate fully into American society, or second-generation immigrants whose personal and sexual lives are never part of the narrative. Examples of the former include South Asians who play nameless doctors and cops in American television. Kal Penn’s character Lawrence Kutner in the television series House is an example of the latter. Kutner, one of the doctors on Dr. House’s team, did not have a South Asian accent. However, he also had no personal narrative. All doctors on House came with their relationship troubles and baggage, their emotional turmoil, their sexual and romantic ups and downs – all but Kutner, whose suicide in the show (when he left it to join the Obama administration) is framed around the question – do we ever really know the people we see every day? Yet, we do know the other doctors on House. But we never know anything about Kutner’s private life. His character is all about academic knowledge and career achievement. This is the stereotype of the South Asian character in American television. Yet, Mindy, with her American accent, sees herself as American, doesn’t obsess about race or skin colour, and has no signs of a poor-me narrative in the way she presents herself. She does not seem to have any diasporic longings or group belongings. Mindy doesn’t ignore race on the show. In fact, she deploys it strategically. She describes herself as Asian on more than one occasion, often to explain her size, her breasts and femininity, and in one episode she goes to a party because she expects to see black sportsmen there, and she explains, “It’s a scientific fact that black men love South Asian girls.” Her production of her femininity is inextricably bound up with race. However, Mindy avoids marking herself as a racial minority by making her quest for love and her confusions about body image something all women can identify with. But she goes further in that she does not place herself in a diaspora community, she does not speak in a South Asian accent, she doesn’t hide her personal life or the contours of her body, and she doesn’t harp on parents who want her to get married. By not using the usual stereotypes of South Asians and Asians on American television, while at the same time acknowledging race, I suggest that she makes herself a citizen of the alleged “melting pot” as the melting pot should be, a hybrid space for hybrid identities. Mindy constructs herself as an American woman, and suggests that being a racial minority is simply part of the experience of being American. I am not suggesting that this reflects the reality of experience for many women in the USA who belong to ethnic minorities. I am suggesting that Mindy is creating a possible or potential reality, in which neither size nor being a racial minority are causes for shame. In a scene in the second season, a police officer chastises Mindy for prescribing birth control to his young daughter. He charges out of her office, and she follows him in to the street. She is wearing a version of her usual gear – a check-pinafore, belted over a printed shirt – her shoulders curved forward, arms folded, in the characteristic posture of the big-breasted, curvy woman. She screams at the officer for his outdated views on birth-control. He questions if she even has kids, suggesting that she knows nothing about raising them. She says, “How dare you? Do I look like a woman who’s had kids? I have the hips of an eleven-year-old boy.” She then informs him that she wolfed down a steak sandwich at lunch, has misgivings about the outfit she is wearing, and says that she is not a sex-crazed lunatic. He charges her for public female hysteria. She screams after him as he drives off, “Everyone see this!” She holds up the citation. “It’s for walking, while being a person of colour.” She manages in the space of a two-minute clip to deploy race, size and femininity, without shame or apology, and with humour. It is interesting to note that, contrary to her persona on the show, in interviews in the media, Kaling suggests that she is not that concerned with the question of weight. She says that though she would like to lose fifteen pounds, she is not hung up on this quest. On the other hand, she suggests that she considers herself a role model for minority women. In fact, in real life she makes the question of race as something more important to her than weight – which is opposite to the way she treats the two issues in her television show. I suggest that in real life, Kaling projects herself as a feminist, as someone not so concerned about size and weight, an intelligent woman who is concerned about race. On the show, however, she plays an everywoman, for whom weight is a much bigger deal than race. Neither persona is necessarily real or assumed – rather, they both reveal the complexities by which race, gender and body size constitute each other, and become cruxes for identification and misidentification. Is It Civilized to Be Fat? When Mindy and her colleague Danny Castellano get together in the second season of the show, you find yourself wondering how on earth they are going to sustain this sitcom, without an on-again/off-again romance, or one that takes about five years to start. When Danny does not want to go public with the relationship, Mindy asks him if he is ashamed of her. Imagine one of the Friends or Sex in the City women asking this question to see just how astonishing it is for a successful, attractive woman to ask a man if he is ashamed to be seen with her. She doesn’t say is it because of my weight, yet the question hangs in the air. When Danny does break up with her, again Mindy feels all the self-disgust of a woman rejected for no clear reason. As Amy Erdman Farrell suggests in her book on fat in American culture and television, fat people are not expected to find love or success. They are expected to be self-deprecating. They are supposed to expect rejection and failure. She says that not only do fat people bear a physical but also a character stigma, in that not only are they considered visually unappealing, but this comes with the idea that they have uncontrolled desires and urges (7-10). Kaling suggests through her cleverly-woven writing that it is because of her body image that Mindy feels self-loathing when Danny breaks up with her. She manages again to make her character an everywoman. Not a fat South Asian woman, but simply an American woman who feels all the shame that seems to go with weight and body image in American culture. However, this assumed connection of fat with immorality and laziness goes a step further. Farrell goes on to say that fat denigration and ethnic discrimination are linked, that popularity and the right to belong and be a citizen are based both on body size and ethnicity. Says Farrell, “our culture assigns many meanings to fatness beyond the actual physical trait – that a person is gluttonous, or filling a deeply disturbed psychological need, or is irresponsible and unable to control primitive urges” (6) – psychological traits that have historically been used to describe people in colonized cultures. Farrell provides an intriguing analysis of Oprah Winfrey and her public ups and downs with weight. She suggests that Winfrey’s public obsession with her own weight, and her struggles with it, are an attempt to be an “everywoman”, to be someone all and not only black women can identify with. Says Farrell, “in order to deracinate herself, to prove that ‘anyone’ can make it, Winfrey must lose weight. Otherwise, the weight of all that fat will always, de facto, mark her as a ‘black woman’, with all the accompanying connotations of inferior, primitive, bodily and out of control” (126). She goes on to say that, “Since the end of the 19th century, fatness has … served as a potent signifier of the line between the primitive and the civilized, feminine and masculine, ethnicity and whiteness, poverty and wealth, homosexuality and heterosexuality, past and future” (126). This suggests that Winfrey’s public confrontations with the question of weight help the women in the audience identify with her as a woman, rather than as a black woman. In a volume on fat studies, Farrell explains that health professionals have further demarcated lines between “civilization and primitive cultures, whiteness and blackness, sexual restraint and sexual promiscuity, beauty and ugliness, progress and the past” (260). She suggests that fat is not just part of discourses on health and beauty, but also intelligence, enterprise, work ethics, as well as race, ethnicity, sexuality and class. These connections are of course repeated in media representations, across media genres and platforms. In women’s magazines, an imperative towards weightloss comes hand-in-hand with the search for love, a woman’s ability to satisfy a man’s as well as her own desires, and with success in glamorous jobs. Sitcom couples on American television often feature men who are ineffectual but funny slobs, married to determined, fit women who are mainly homemakers, and in fact, responsible for the proper functioning of the family, and consequentially, society. In general, bigger women in American and British media are on a quest both for love and weight loss, and the implication is that deep-seated insecurities are connected to both weight gain, as well as failures in love, and that only a resolution of these insecurities will lead to weight loss, which will further lead to success in love. Films such as My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Bridget Jones’s Diary are examples of this prevailing narrative. Thakore investigates the changing image of South Asians on American television, suggesting that South Asians are represented more and more frequently, and in increasingly more central roles. However, Thakore suggests that, “all women of colour deal with hegemonic skin tone ideologies in their racial/ethnic communities, with lighter skin tone and Caucasian facial features considered more appealing and attractive … . As media producers favour casting women who are attractive, so too do the same media producers favour casting women of colour who are attractive in terms of their proximity to White physical characteristics” (153). Similarly, Lee and Vaught suggest that in American popular culture, “both White women and women of colour are represented as reflecting a White ideal or aesthetic. These women conform to a body ideal that reflects White middle class ideals: exceedingly thin, long, flowing hair, and voluptuous” (458). She goes on to say that Asian American women would need to take on a White middle class standing and a simultaneous White notion of the exotic in order to assimilate. For Mindy, then, fat allows her to be an everywoman, but also allows her to adopt her own otherness as a South Asian, and make it her own. This trend shows some signs of changing, however, and I expect that women like Lena Dunham in the HBO comedy Girls and Mindy Kaling are leading the march towards productions of diverse femininities that are at the same time iterated as attractive and desirable. On The Hollywood Reporter, when asked about the more ludicrous questions or comments she faces on social media, Kaling puts on a male voice and says, “You’re ugly and fat, it’s so refreshing to watch!” and “We’re used to skinny people, and you’re so ugly, we love it!” On David Letterman, she mentions having dark skin, and says that lazy beach holidays don’t work for her because she doesn’t understand the trend for tanning, and she can’t really relax. Mindy’s confusions about her weight and body image make her a woman for everyone – not just for South Asian women. Whereas Kaling’s concern over the question of race – and her relative lack of concern over weight – make her a feminist, a professional writer, a woman with a conscience. These personas interweave. They question both normative performances of gender and race, and question the historical conflation of size and minority identity with shame and immorality. Butler suggests that gender is “the repeated stylisation of the body” (Gender, 33). She argues that gender roles can be challenged through a “subversive reiteration” of gender (Gender, 32). In this way, women like Dunham and Kaling, through their deployment of diverse female bodies and femininities, can disrupt the normative iteration of gender and race. Their production of femininity in bodies that are attractive (just not normatively so) has more than just an impact on how we look at fat. They bring to us women that are flawed, assertive, insecure, confident, contradictory, talented, creative, that make difficult choices in love and work, and that don’t make an obsession with weight or even race their markers of self worth.References Bridget Jones’s Diary. Dir. Sharon Maguire. Miramax and Universal Pictures, 2001. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. London: Routledge, 1990. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. London: Routledge, 1993. Ciecko, Anne. “Representing the Spaces of Diaspora in Contemporary British Films by Women Directors.” Cinema Journal 38.3 (Spring 1999): 67-90. Dave, Shilpa S. Indian Accents: Brown Voice and Racial Performance in American Television. U of Illinois, 2013. Ehlers, Nadine. Racial Imperatives: Discipline, Performativity, and Struggles against Subjection. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. ER. Warner Bros. Television. NBC, 1994-2009. Farrell, Amy. “‘The White Man’s Burden’”: Female Sexuality, Tourist Postcards, and the Place of the Fat Woman in Early 20th-Century U.S. Culture.” In Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay (eds.), The Fat Studies Reader. New York: New York University Press, 2009. Farrell, Amy Erdman. Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2011. Friends. Warner Bros. Television. NBC, 1994-2004. Girls. HBO Entertainment and Apatow Productions. HBO, 2012-present. House. Universal Television. Fox, 2004-2012. Lee, Stacey J., and Sabina Vaught. “‘You Can Never Be Too Rich or Too Thin’: Popular and Consumer Culture and the Americanization of Asian American Girls and Young Women.” The Journal of Negro Education 72.4 (2003): 457-466. My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Dir. Joel Zwick. Playtone, 2002. New Girl. 20th Century Fox. Fox, 2011-present. Nicholson, Rebecca. “Mindy Kaling: ‘I Wasn’t Considered Attractive or Funny Enough to Play Myself.’” The Observer 1 June 2014. ‹http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/jun/01/mindy-kaling-project›. Sex in the City. Warner Bros. Television and HBO Original Programming. HBO, 1998-2004. Strauss, Elissa. “Why Mindy Kaling – Not Lena Dunham – Is the Body Positive Icon of the Moment.” The Week 22 April 2014. ‹http://theweek.com/article/index/260126/why-mindy-kaling-mdash-not-lena-dunham-mdash-is-the-body-positive-icon-of-the-moment›. Thakore, Bhoomi K. “Must-See TV: South Asian Characterizations in American Popular Media.” Sociology Compass 8.2 (2014): 149-156. The Mindy Project. Universal Television, 3 Arts Entertainment, Kaling International. Fox, 2012-present. Ugly Betty. ABC Studios. ABC, 2006-2010. YouTube. “Mindy Kaling on David Letterman.” 29 April 2013. 21 Oct. 2014 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8K1ye2gnJw›. YouTube. “Mindy on Being Called Fat and Ugly on Social Media.” The Hollywood Reporter 14 June 2014. 21 Oct. 2014 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ockt-BeMOWk›. YouTube. “Chris Messina: ‘I Think Mindy Kaling’s Beautiful.’” HuffPost Live 24 April 2014. 21 Oct. 2014 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HtCjGNERKQ›.