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Journal articles on the topic 'Separate spheres ideology'

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1

Oksun Kang. "British Women’s Subordination and The Ideology of “Separate Spheres” in the 19th Century." Studies in English Language & Literature 38, no. 3 (August 2012): 145–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.21559/aellk.2012.38.3.008.

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Ledezma, Ana María. "‘Mijita Rica’: The female body as a subject in the public space." Multidisciplinary Journal of Gender Studies 6, no. 2 (June 25, 2017): 1290. http://dx.doi.org/10.17583/generos.2017.2042.

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The politeness system is one of the most subtle and everyday forms of gender violence.Harassment in public is a socially accepted practice in Chile, where the ideological background crosses the various social spheres and remains rooted in the national and Latin American ethos.This article questions its bases, revealing the symbolic violence, gender hierarchization, and the reproduction of the ideology of separate spheres infused in street "flattery".
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August, Andrew. "How Separate a Sphere? Poor Women and Paid Work in Late-Victorian London." Journal of Family History 19, no. 3 (September 1994): 285–309. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/036319909401900305.

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The essay traces patterns of poor women's employment in late-nineteenth-century London. It shows that employment was common among single, married and widowed women, except among mothers of young children. Unpaid domestic work and paid employment dovetailed into a constant burden of work facing poor women. This challenges the prevalent argument that married women earned wages only at moments of severe crisis in the household economy. It reveals a culture of women's work among the poor that contrasts sharply with the ideology of separate spheres that excluded middle-class women from employment.
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Wilson, Linda. "‘She succeeds with cloudless brow …’ How Active was the Spirituality of Nonconformist Women in the Home during the Period 1825–75?" Studies in Church History 34 (1998): 347–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0424208400013747.

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He role and place of women in the nineteenth century has been the subject of much recent debate. In their influential book, Family Fortunes, Davidoff and Hall traced the development of separate spheres, which, they argued, was linked to the process of industrialization and the emergence of the middle class during the period 1780–1850. They emphasised that both nonconformists and evangelical Anglicans had played a determining role in this development. Amanda Vickery, amongst others, has questioned this thesis. She believes that the premises are flawed, and that early modern studies have shown that neither industrialization, nor the development of separate spheres, can be located at the end of the eighteenth century. Additionally, Helsinger and others have pointed out that there was a contemporary debate over the issue of women, with several varieties of ideology under discussion. Whilst these criticisms of Davidoff and Hall need to be recognized, nevertheless, as Helsinger acknowledges, the ideal of the passive, home-based woman was a major influence in mid-nineteenth-century society.
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Khan, Muhammad Moiz, and Erum Ali Warduk. "THE MYTH OF ALLAHABAD." Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities 56, no. 1 (June 30, 2017): 41–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.46568/jssh.v56i1.58.

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Since the creation of Pakistan the foundation of the Idea of Pakistan has been a matter of academic and political debate. There is a difference between the two spheres. The academic debate allows a room to discuss popular and unpopular ideas and respect the contrary views. The ideology of Pakistan, political system of Pakistan and the constitution of Pakistan have always been discussed and debated amongst scholars. The purpose of this research is to explore the famous presidential address of Allama Iqbal at the annual session of Muslim League in 1930. There are many perceptions about the address delivered by Iqbal, such as he demanded a separate homeland for Muslims of India or not. This research will explore the facts of Iqbal’s speech of Allahabad and will attempt to do justice to his words which have been misinterpreted by some spheres.
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Rubio-Marín, Ruth. "Women and participatory constitutionalism." International Journal of Constitutional Law 18, no. 1 (January 2020): 233–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/icon/moaa005.

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Abstract This article underscores the foundational exclusion of women from constitution-making as an expression of the ideology of separate and gendered spheres dominant at the birth of written constitutionalism. It traces the incorporation of women into constitution-making within a broader gender equality participatory turn taking place, since the late 1980s and especially 1990s, coinciding in time with the rise of popular constitutionalism more broadly speaking. By looking at a variety of examples drawn from multiple jurisdictions across the world, it explores the forms of participation of women in constitution-making both through their gradual (though yet insufficient) incorporation into official constitution-making bodies and institutions and, more importantly, through civil society mobilization. It claims that without taking into account the structural dimension of women’s traditional exclusion from the public sphere and constitution-making it is not possible to have an adequate comprehension of the strategies, challenges, meaning, and impact of women joining constitution-making, all of which I briefly describe.
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Kulagina-Stadnichenko, Hanna. "Sources of religious syncretism of Christianity." Ukrainian Religious Studies, no. 20 (October 30, 2001): 41–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.32420/2001.20.1180.

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Christianity - a phenomenon historically and territorially limited. This is an ideology inherent in a certain time and a separate territory. At the same time, for its time and territory, it became the norm and sign system: any thought was translated into the images of the Christian myth, in the traditional phraseology of the Holy Scripture and the works of the Fathers of the Church. Like other religions, Christianity tended to shift the terrestrial problems to unearthly spheres, but its specificity does not manifest itself in what it did, but in how it did it. In other words, it is not enough to say that Christianity is a religion with all the peculiarities of thinking, it is important to find out what exactly Christianity is distinguished among other religions. To clarify this we will proceed from the ratio of Christianity with the main ideological movements of late antiquity, the era of formation of the basic principles of Christian doctrine.
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Masud, Muhammad Khalid. "Religion and State Are Twin Brothers: Classical Muslim Political Theory." ICR Journal 9, no. 1 (September 22, 2020): 9–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.52282/icr.v9i1.135.

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The current reluctance for democratic transition in Muslim societies is mostly attributed to Islamic political theories that do not allow a separation between religion and politics. Extremist views often reject democracy because it is perceived to be anti-religion. This paper examines the thread of classical Islamic political theory that considers religion and state to be inseparable twin brothers. Exploring the origins of this thread in Sassanid and tenth century Islamic thought, analysis of the doctrine reveals that Muslim political thought more generally has traditionally been more pragmatic on political issues (siyasah), with Muslim jurists continuously marking boundaries between religion and culture in their fatawa, particularly concerning bid’ah (innovation) and tashabbuh bi’l kuffar (imitation of the infidels). Indeed, all definitions of religion that make it inseparable from the state are seen to be a modern phenomenon, in which religion is defined in terms of the ideology of political power, with secularism perceived as its rival. Analysing diverse interpretations of the doctrine from the Abbasid period to the twenty-first century, the paper finds that, like twin brothers, religion and politics are separate in Islam albeit united in their origin. This perspective becomes more meaningful in modern times if we recognise the role of social consensus (ijma’), besides the political and the religious spheres.
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Siber, Mouloud. "Ellen M. Rogers as a Feminist and Orientalist Travel Writer: A Study of her A Winter in Algeria: 1863-4 (1865)." Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, no. 29 (November 15, 2016): 213. http://dx.doi.org/10.14198/raei.2016.29.12.

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This article studies the Orientalist and Feminist discourses that underlay Ellen M. Rogers’s A Winter in Algeria: 1863-4 (1865). Her conception of Algeria reproduces the Victorian imperialist attitude toward the Algerian as inferior to the European in order to celebrate British imperial power. Underneath this colonial discourse, the writer proclaims her feminist point of view about empire and juxtaposes feminist attitudes in Victorian Britain with the degraded condition of the Oriental woman. To contribute to Victorian feminist struggle for gender equality, she identifies with the suffering of Muslim Algerian women under male domination and compares their confinement to the harem and their veiling to Victorian “separate spheres” ideology. From this perspective, Rogers presents the profiles of the Orientalist as defined by Edward Said (1978) and the feminist as defined by Antoinette Burton (1994). Said limits his discussion of Orientalism to male writers and travelers who construct imperialist views about the colonial world and its people. However, Burton argues that many Victorian travel writers were women who not only circulated Orientalist ideas but also constructed a feminist discourse. Women writers found in the colonial world ways to cross the boundaries of gender and power in order to criticize male writers who insisted on women’s inferior status. In sum, the major claim made in this article is that Ellen M. Rogers projects a feminist-Orientalist view in her travel account about French Algeria.
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Parkhomenko, Nataliia, and Tetiana Podorozhna. "Legal reform as an instrument of constitutionalization of the legal order." Law Review of Kyiv University of Law, no. 2 (August 10, 2020): 26–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.36695/2219-5521.2.2020.03.

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The article examines the problems of constitutionalization of the legal order in the light of legal reform. It is noted that the currentsituation in the legal sphere (in the state of constitutionalization of law) is characterized by the following negative features: the lack ofrational legal policy and of systematic decisions of public authorities; the lack of optimal economic and political conditions for the developmentof the legal system as a whole and its individual elements; the low level of legal awareness of subjects of law and the high levelof legal nihilism; conservatism and inertness of individual subjects of the legal system. All these circumstances are a serious obstacle tothe legal order. Reforming is closely related to the change of power, political system, state policy, ideology, political course. In such situations,there is a need for systematic improvement of existing legislation. And it is necessary to make amendments not to separate laws,but to the whole legal field which needs systematic updating. It is emphasized that legal reform should be divided into three main areas:constitutional, legislative and judicial. These are, first of all, the reform of public administration, administrative and territorial reform,judicial and legal reform, the reform of criminal justice, and the reform of local self-government in Ukraine. All these areas are interconnected.At the same time, taking into account the fundamental importance of constitutional law (in relation to other branches of law),there is a need to substantiate the possibility of implementing constitutional principles into the fields of current legislation in order to furtherconstitutionalize the legal order. In view of this, an important step for the legal enforcement of reforms is the constitutional reform,the implementation of which is part of the problem of the development of statehood, improving the legal system of Ukraine.It is concluded that in the implementation of legal reform it is important to strictly adhere to the principles of the rule of law, oflegal certainty, and of proportionality, with the latter formed in the legal positions of the European Court of Human Rights. These legalmechanisms will contribute to more effective constitutional development of Ukraine, improvement and harmonization of all spheres ofpublic life, including legal one, renewal, constructive mechanism for protection of human and civil rights and freedoms, which is themain goal of constitutionalization of the legal order.
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Craig, Béatrice. "Petites Bourgeoises and Penny Capitalists: Women in Retail in the Lille Area during the Nineteenth Century." Enterprise & Society 2, no. 2 (June 2001): 198–224. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/es/2.2.198.

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With few exceptions, historians have argued that in the nineteenth century women were excluded from most retail activities. In Europe women became increasingly concentrated in small-scale, undercapitalized, and short-lived stores. The “separate sphere” ideology in its different guises underlay this evolution. In North America, on the other hand, women capitalized on this ideology to carve a niche for themselves in trade and retailing. Women were not marginalized or segregated everywhere in Europe, however. In northern France the expansion of retail trade and overall improvements in standards of living provided women, especially married ones, with opportunities they were not reluctant to grasp. Though the activities of married women remained subordinated to the needs of their families, female retailers were neither particularly impoverished nor segregated in sectors deemed appropriate for persons of their sex.
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Najamudin, Najamudin. "The consequences of increasing assertiveness of trans-national religious communities for international relations." Indonesian Journal of Islam and Muslim Societies 2, no. 2 (December 1, 2012): 165. http://dx.doi.org/10.18326/ijims.v2i2.165-190.

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The transnational communities, or in other terms, the migrant communities whowent to the US and the UK, or to any other European states had strong belief intheir religion in which they might not be contaminated by the secular ideology inthe Western countries. In this respect, the phenomenology of religion in internationalrelations is a relatively new and surprising. Accordingly, this paper aims atinvestigating the implications of the emergence of trans-national religious groupsfor international relations. The paper will argue that the rise of trans-nationalreligious groups has produced a profound impact on international relations. Thefactors that influenced this transformation in international relations is the contemporaryprocesses of globalization which scholars argue, are pivotal to bringingreligion to the centre stage of international relations. In order to deepen theunderstanding of this process, two case scenarios will be analyzed, namely, theSikh Diasporas and the imagined Islamic community, the umma. In this paper, ithas been argued that the rise of trans-national religious actors may affect statesovereignty in one way or another. Under secular ideology, the role of religion ismarginalized from the public sphere, in particular, the domain of politics and religion is being obviously separated. This separation, according to both groups,is problematic. It is therefore, the emergence of Islamic and Sikh communities isconsidered by some liberal democratic countries like India as a peril to its statesovereignty. In Islamic doctrines, the Muslims hold a principle in din wa dawla,the unity of state and religion, while in Sikhism, the Sikhs have to trust miri andpiri, the unification of religious and political institution.Masyarakat transnasional atau dalam terma lain disebut juga sebagai masyarakatmigran yang menetap di Amerika dan Inggris, atau ke negara-negara Eropalainnya memiliki keyakinan yang kuat terhadap agama mereka dan tidakterkontaminasi oleh ideologi sekuler Barat. Pada konteks ini, fenomenologi agamadalam perspektif hubungan internasional merupakan kajian baru dan menarikuntuk dibahas. Berdasarkan hal tersebut, makalah ini bertujuan untuk menyelidikiimplikasi dari munculnya kelompok trans-nasional tersebut terhadap kajianhubungan internasional. Makalah ini berasumsi bahwa munculnya kelompok sosialkeagamaan yang bersifat trans-nasional berdampak besar terhadap hubunganinternasional. Faktor-faktor yang mempengaruhi perubahan ini adalah prosesglobalisasi yang menarik agama ke dalam pola hubungan internasional. Untuklebih jelasnya, dua skenario kasus akan dianalisis, yaitu Diaspora Sikh dan konsepsi‘keummatan’ dalam Islam. Dalam pembahasan makalah ini, didapati bahwamunculnya kelompok masyarakat trans-nasional dapat mengancam kedaulatansuatu negara dalam berbagai bentuknya. Dalam ideologi sekuler, peran agamatermarjinalkan dari ruang publik, khususnya ranah politik. Pemisahan ini, menurutkedua kelompok tersebut, memiliki sejumlah permasalahan. Oleh karena itu,munculnya masyarakat transnasional Islam dan Sikh dianggap oleh beberapanegara demokrasi liberal seperti India sebagai ancaman bagi kedaulatan negara.Dalam perspektif Islam, prinsip din wa dawlah merupakan konsepsi kesatuannegara dan agama, sementara dalam ajaran Sikhisme, doktrin miri piri, merupakankonsepsi penyatuan lembaga keagamaan dan politik.
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Zdioruk, Serhiy. "Etno-confessional features of Ukraines integration into the united Europe." Religious Freedom, no. 20 (March 7, 2017): 107–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.32420/rs.2017.20.873.

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In all societies, at least prior to the Enlightenment, religion served as a basis for formation of ideology determining the existence of culture. All important areas of society and its institutions were determined by the religious legitimacy this way or the other. Today they are separated from the order of life and culture specified for the society as a whole by the religion and have the status of independent subsystems. However, in fact, religion has become one of the spheres of social life. Now it coexists with the art, philosophy, science, politics, economics and so on. According to the differentiation and specialization of society the individual acquires the status of free and autonomous entity: he is not required to submit to the power of the religious tradition. He is free to use the opportunities to choose any branch of knowledge opening prospects for his capacities. Man has the right to profess any religion or profess none being limited to purely secular activities.
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Madhavan, Anugraha, and Sharmila Narayana. "Violation of Land as Violation of Feminine Space: An Ecofeminist Reading of Mother Forest and Mayilamma." Tattva Journal of Philosophy 12, no. 2 (January 27, 2021): 13–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.12726/tjp.24.2.

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Agarwal, B. (1992). The gender and environment debate: Lessons from India. Feminist Studies, 18(1), 119-158. https:// doi.org/ 10.2307/ 3178217. Althuser, L. (1971). Ideology and ideological state apparatuses (Notes toward an investigation). Lenin and philosophy, and other essays (B.Brewster, Trans.). Monthly Review Press, 1971. Basha, C. (2017). Tribal land alienation: A sociological analysis. International Journal of Advanced Educational Research, 2(3), 78–81. http:// www.educationjournal.org/archives/2017/vol2/issue3. Berman, T. (1993). Towards an integrative ecofeminist praxis. Canadian Women Studies, 13(3), 15–17. cws.journals.yorku.ca/ index.php/ cws/ article/ viewFile/10402/949. Béteille, A. (1986). The concept of tribe with special reference to India. European Journal of Sociology, 27(2), 296–318. https:// doi.org/ 10.1017/S000397560000463X Bhaskaran. (2004). Mother forest: The unfinished story of C K Janu (N Ravi Shankar, Trans). Kali for Women. Bijoy, C R. (2001). The Adivasis of India – A history of discrimination, conflict and resistance. Indigenous Affairs, Jan, 54-61. https:// www.researchgate.net/publication/295315229. Bose, N. K. (1971). Tribal life in India. National Book Trust. Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory, and antiracist politics. Feminist Legal Theory, 1, 139–167. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429500480-5. Crenshaw, K. (2017). Kimberlé Crenshaw on intersectionality, More than two decades later. Columbia Law School. www.law.columbia.edu/pt-br/news/2017/06/kimberle-crenshaw-intersectionality. Das, V. (2011). Orissa: Mining bauxite, maiming people. Economic & Political Weekly, 38(28). https://www.epw.in/journal/2001/28/commentary/orissa-mining-bauxite-maiming-people.html. Devika, J. (2010). Caregiver vs. citizen? Reflections on ecofeminism from Kerala state, India. Man in India, 89(4), 751–769. http:// www.academia.edu/ Habermas, J. (1974). The public sphere: An encyclopedia article (1964). New German Critique, 3, 49–55. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367809195-3. Lewis, D. R. (1995). Native Americans and the environment: A survey of twentieth-century issues. American Indian Quarterly, 19(3), 423-450. https://doi.org/10.2307/1185599. Limpangog, C P. (2016) Matrix of domination. The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies, 1–3. https:// doi.org/10.2307/3178217. Mahtab, M. (2018) When the Santhals rebelled. The Daily Star. Retrieved November 25, 2019, from https://www.thedailystar.net/in-focus/when-the-santhals-rebelled-1245196. Merchant, C. (1999). Ecofeminism and feminist theory. Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, 100-105. Sierra Club Books. Merchant, C. (2014). Earthcare: Women and the environment. Routledge. Oberhauser, A. M., Fluri, J. L., Whitson, R. & Mollet, S. (2018). Feminist spaces: Gender and geography in a global context. Routledge. Ortner, S. (1974). Is female to male as nature is to culture? Woman, Culture, and Society (Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, Eds). Stanford University Press. Oskarsson, P. (2018). Adivasi land rights and dispossession. Landlock: Paralysing Dispute over Minerals on Adivasi Land in India, 14, 29–50. www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv75d8rq.8. Pariyadath, J. (2018). Mayilamma: The life of a tribal eco-warrior. (Swarnalatha Rangarajan and Sreejith Varma, Trans). Orient BlackSwan. Pedersen, K. (1998). Environmentalism in interreligious perspective. Explorations in global ethics. (Sumner Twiss and Bruce Grelle, Eds.). Westview Press. Pulido, L. (1996). Environmentalism and economic justice: Two Chicano struggles in the Southwest. University of Arizona Press. Rangarajan, S, and Varma, S R. (2018). Introduction. Mayilamma: The life of a tribal eco-warrior (pp. xxi-xxxix). Orient BlackSwan. Ranjan, R. (2018). Birsa Munda and his struggle in colonial India. Talking Humanities. Retrieved on November 26, 2019, from https://talkinghumanities.blogs.sas.ac.uk/2018/02/13/birsa-munda-and-his-struggle-in-colonial-india/. Shankar, R. (2004). Translator’s note. Mother Forest: The unfinished story of C K Janu (pp. ix-xii). Kali for Women. Showalter, E. (1981). Feminist criticism in the wilderness. Critical Inquiry, 8(2), 179-205. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343159. Varma, S. R., & Rangarajan, S. (2018). The politics of land, water and toxins: Reading the life-narratives of three women oikos-carers from Kerala. In D. A. Vakoch & S. Mickey (Eds.) Women and nature?: Beyond dualism in gender, body, and environment (pp. 167–184). Routledge. Vickery, A. (1993). Golden age to separate spheres? A review of the categories and chronology of English women’s history. The Historical Journal, 36(2), 383–414. www.jstor.org/stable/2639654. Warren, K. J. (2000). Ecofeminist philosophy. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Williams, R. (1983). Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society. Oxford University Press. Xaxa, V. (1999). Transformation of tribes in India: Terms of discourse. Economic and Political Weekly, 34(24), 1519–1524. https:// www.jstor.org/stable/4408077.
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Berman, Anna A. "The Family Novel (and Its Curious Disappearance)." Comparative Literature 72, no. 1 (March 1, 2020): 1–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00104124-7909939.

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Abstract What is a family novel? Russian literary scholars—who use the term frequently—claim that it is originally an English genre, yet in English scholarship the term has virtually disappeared. This article recovers the lost history of the family novel, tracing two separate strands: usage of the term and form/content of the novels. The genre began in England with Richardsonian domestic fiction and spread to Russia, where it evolved along different lines, shaped by the different social and political context. In England, the fate of the term turns out to be tied up with the fate of women writers in the nineteenth century, and then with the rise of feminist studies in the late twentieth that, in validating the importance of the domestic sphere, caused family novel to be superseded by domestic fiction. In Russia, by contrast, the great family novels of the nineteenth century were not associated with women or the domestic sphere, nor—as it turns out—were they considered to be family novels at the time they were written. Only in twentieth-century scholarship, as the original meaning of the term was lost, did they become family novels. In recovering the lost history of the term, this article illustrates the way later ideology and theoretical emphases that shape the language of scholarship ultimately reshape our understanding of the past.
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Petrov, Artur. "Dynamics of information entropy of road safety provision systems in Siberian regions." E3S Web of Conferences 135 (2019): 02027. http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/e3sconf/201913502027.

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This article considers the issues of dynamics of road safety provision systems in three multiscaled systems (Russia, Siberian Federal Okrug or SFO and separate regions of SFO). The indicator of relative information entropy Hn of road safety provision process was taken as the characteristic of system orderliness. The ideology, methodic and results of quantitative assessment of road safety provision systems information entropy H were considered. Time series of modification of relative information entropy Hn of road safety provision systems in 2004.. .2018 in Russia, Siberian Federal Okrug and individual subjects of SFD were presented. Special attention was paid to consideration of the re-searched process in the Republic of Tuva. This region is characterized by nonstandard, different from general trend dynamics of information entropy H of road safety provision system. The general conclusion of the article is that during last 15 years information entropy of road safety provision systems significantly decreased, i.e. orderliness of formation process of road traffic participants safety greatly increased. However, results achieved in this sphere by Siberian regions are still far from best world results.
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CLARKE, DAVID. "Elvis and Darmstadt, or: Twentieth-Century Music and the Politics of Cultural Pluralism." twentieth-century music 4, no. 01 (March 2007): 3–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1478572207000515.

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Abstract[PART 1] Contemporary musical production and consumption have become increasingly pluralist, seemingly bearing out postmodernist accounts of the eroding distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures. Accordingly, accounts of twentieth-century music ought to be able to narrate these different musical spheres – emblematized by the phenomena of Elvis and Darmstadt – together. While such gestures are not altogether absent from some recent histories of twentieth-century music, the results suggest that a more developed theorization of cultural pluralism is needed, one that also has a political dimension. Liberalism is one polity that espouses cultural pluralism and value pluralism, ideas that are not entirely separable from postmodernist relativism. Both epistemes are limited, however, by a disinclination towards dialectical thought and by the absence of ideology critique. [PART 2] Theoretical concepts from Slavoj Žižek (influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Laclau and Mouffe’s ideas of radical democracy) hold the potential for a post-Marxian model of ideology critique that might galvanize approaches to musical pluralism. Such an application could be relevant to various kinds of music, without giving a priori preference to one musical style over another – as was the case with Adorno. That said, these ideas have significant resonances with Adorno’s negative dialectics, and are valuable in developing a form ofstrong relativismthat could dialecticize a dialogical approach to musical pluralism. This suggests the possilbity of construing pluralism not as the achievement of stasis (or ‘the end of history’), but as a means of effecting social and historical movement beyond the present cultural paradigm.
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Krylova, I. I. "Water supply and wastewater sector as state regulation object." Public administration aspects 6, no. 9 (October 17, 2018): 5–15. http://dx.doi.org/10.15421/151849.

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The sphere of water supply and sewage is directly related to a human and society life including a certain creation of life conditions with satisfaction of the immediate needs of a person, and so on. Despite the time, era, change of historical conditions, ideology and culture, the need for water and services is associated with its constant. Just the state policy, goals and tasks of public authorities aimed at regulation of this sphere are changing. The state regulation in any sphere of economic relations is the influence of the state through the normative legal acts adoption, regulations and compliance control including the control by the subjects of the legislation sphere, and application of coercive measures in case of violation of these requirements. In this article, the author considers the water supply and drainage sphere as an object of state regulation, and analyzes the definition of the concept in this field, which is disclosed in various sources, as well as its components and characteristics, and methods of state regulation of the sphere. Formation and development of the water supply and water discharge sector of Ukraine took place as an integral part of housing and communal services. And only since 2002 the sphere of water supply and sewage became regulated by the separate Law of Ukraine «On Potable Water and Drinking Water Supply», which has defined the main concepts, subjects and objects of this phere, and the principles of state policy. While exploring the conditions of state regulated market economy transition, the principles of housing and communal services reform, the author analyzes the scope of water supply and drainage as a market for water supply and sewage services, and reveals its characteristic features. It is very important to identify the specific features inherent in the services of water supply and discharge – the demand inelasticity; dependence of the services supply on the availability of networks; availability of technological and infrastructure constraints in providing services; lack of any alternative to drinking water and water supply and sewage services; water supply and drainage are technologically separate processes carried out using various engineering systems. Paying no attention to the privileged position of natural monopoly entities providing centralized water supply and sewage services, the availability of production facilities, material and financial resources, a guaranteed market for sales of services and the lack of competition, the sphere of water supply and drainage (as well as the sphere of housing and communal services), unlike other branches of natural monopolies, is unprofitable. The statistical data in the field testify that today housing and communal services are the most technically backward sector of the economy with many accumulated problems. Reforms conducted at the state level do not provide the expected result. Until now, at the state level, there are no clearly formulated mechanisms for creating conditions, which would balance the interests of market participants, and protect the interests of consumers in providing them with good quality public services at reasonable prices, and create conditions for the effective functioning of natural monopoly entities, while attracting investments to the development of housing and communal services. And the fact that the water supply and sanitation sector is one of the most attractive in terms of reliability and investment return in the world practice, confirms the correctness of the chosen research direction.
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Obushnyi, Mykola. "IDEOLOGY AS A FACTOR OF CONSOLIDATION OF UKRAINIANS IN THE POST-COLONIAL ERA." Almanac of Ukrainian Studies, no. 23 (2018): 60–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.17721/2520-2626/2018.23.10.

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The article is devoted to the disclosure of the place and role of ideology as a factor in the consolidation of Ukrainians in the post-colonial era. It is proved that in the Ukrainian state-building process the problem of consolidation of Ukrainians is relevant and complex, and still remains one of the most important. As Ukrainian progress, which opens up new opportunities for the socio-economic, political and spiritual development of Ukrainian society, depends on its solution. It is emphasized that effective work of subjects of consolidation of Ukrainians depends on a complex of socio-economic, political and spiritual factors. One of the determining factors in the spiritual sphere is ideology, which should be national in its essence, since it is intended to unite all representatives of ethnic and national minorities of Ukrainian society, based on the ideas of spirituality, social justice and national patriotism, taking into account historical traditions and existing realities of the modern world. Exactly this kind of unifying ideology should determine the main direction of the Ukrainian policy of the unity of society, the system of its ideals and values. Therefore, the search for such an ideology is an important factor in the consolidation of Ukrainians, especially in today post-colonial era. World experience clearly shows that those societies that have an ideological consolidation core, which is understandable and supported by every citizen, are developing more dynamically. According to its status, this consolidation core is one of the ideological foundations of state ideology, the discussion on its development is still ongoing. Its acuteness intensifies the existing confrontation of the various, though not formed party ideologies, which somehow still claim to state status, trying to revise the legislative norm, according to which the most important carrier of state ideology is the Constitution. And other bearers of state ideology have the right, within their powers and ideological directions, to use the fundamental principles of state ideology, such as: to defend state independence and sovereignty, democratic social order, civil society, human rights, etc., but they shoyd not revise these fundamental basics of statehood. A special protection needs a consolidation aspect of state ideology, since it is a kind of manifestation of civic education and the core of person politicization. In each state, ideology is called differently - Americanism, Russianism, Polonism, Zionism, and so on. In Ukraine, due to the kind of scientific ostracism that appeared (and quite well-grounded) after the proclamation of independence in connection with the contemporary ideology and mono-ideology that was in the Soviet Union, it is difficult to name the ideology. Nowadays, a number of scholars and party ideologists are inclined to think that the term "solidarism", based on the ideas of the consolidation of the ideology of Ukrainians, could be used, based on the ideas that only solidarity of just cooperation and mutual assistance of all members of society is the basis of social, economic and political progress. It is noteworthy that some Ukrainian political parties in their updated (after the Revolution of Dignity) programs use the term "solidarism" to consolidate Ukrainians. In particular, the political party, the People's Front, defines its programmatic task to restore the territorial integrity of Ukraine, liberate it from terrorists, foreign troops, mercenaries, and to conduct reforms. The PF ideologists associate these tasks with the consolidation of Ukrainians. Ideologists of the Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform (UDAR) political party proceed from the assumption that only a consolidated country can be effective and competitive in the world. "We must realize, - stated in the UDAR program, that the goals that unite us are more important than the historical myths and ideologies that can separate us." A lot of attention is paid to the problem of consolidation of Ukrainians through the disclosure of the idea of solidarity in the program of the political party "Petro Poroshenko Bloc Solidarity "(new edition). In this program it is declared for the first time that the party puts the idea of solidarity at the basis of its ideology. The idea of solidarity in the «Batkivshchyna» Party, whose program was adopted in 1999, has its own story, but as long as this solidarity spirit is officially not reflected as an ideology in its program. The article contains a recommendation for Ukrainian political forces to study more thoroughly the ideological grounds of solidarity ideas with a view to their possible use in their political and ideological activities.
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Sarsenov, Karin. "The Literature Curriculum in Russia: Cultural Nationalism vs. The Cultural Turn." Culture Unbound 2, no. 4 (November 4, 2010): 495–513. http://dx.doi.org/10.3384/cu.2000.1525.10229495.

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In Western educational systems, the question “Why study literature in school?” has been raised in connection with the theoretical development often summarized as “the cultural turn.” The author strives to contribute to this discussion by examining the development of educational discourse in Russia. During the Soviet period, literature was – together with history – the subject most heavily influenced by the dogmas of Soviet state ideology. As such, literature enjoyed great prestige and was a compulsory and separate subject from the fifth to the eleventh school years. Since 1991, the educational system has undergone radical reform, but the number of hours devoted to literature has not changed significantly. This would suggest that literature still is perceived as an important means of incorporating children into the national and political community. The target of this study is to identify authorities’ specific aims in devoting so much time to literature in school, as well as to elucidate in what way literature is to achieve these aims. Russian guidelines for the development of literature curricula published in the years 1991–2010 are examined to see just how literature is legitimated as a secondary school subject. Based on this material, the author draws conclusions about the rhetorical practices and ideological development of curricular discourse, its relationship to Soviet educational thought and the extent to which the cultural turn has influenced this sphere.
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Ishida, Yoriko. "Was Ida Lewis a Womanly, or a Manly, Woman? The Ambivalence of a Woman Lighthouse Keeper’s Gender Identity Between Masculinity and Femininity." International Journal of Social Science Studies 7, no. 5 (August 13, 2019): 12. http://dx.doi.org/10.11114/ijsss.v7i5.4447.

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It is obvious that Darling could be mentioned as a most brave woman in doing the heavy labor involved in a lighthouse keeping and even saving shipwrecked people, but it is more particularly worth noting that Ida Lewis’s efforts saved the lives of at least eighteen people over a period of twenty-five years. This paper focuses on Ida Lewis, the most famous woman lighthouse keeper in the United States, and analyzes the gender identity of women lighthouse keepers. most studies that discuss women lighthouse keepers point out that, behind women’s being appointed as official lighthouse keepers in the nineteenth-century United States, the labor of lighthouse keepers could essentially share common features with the form of femininity that was emphasized in the Victorian era. However, when analyzing from the viewpoint of gender ideology, I cannot help raising questions regarding women lighthouse keepers as examples of mere femininity simply because the labor forms were analogous with household labor. When the labors of lighthouse keeping would be actually recognized as a manly role, can we make a judgement that women lighthouse keepers all endowed feminine traits even when performing the heavy tasks of lighthouse keeping? Moreover, lifesaving, being separable from lighthouse keeping, has been traditionally considered to be “masculine behavior.” The aim of this paper is to point out that “femininity” and “masculinity” have been artificially generated, and, as such, are entirely unrelated to an individual’s characteristics and abilities. In that light, to deconstruct ideologies of “femininity” and “masculinity,” I have chosen to focus on women who have committed to continuing to perform their duties by analyzing the life of Ida Lewis as the most famous woman lighthouse keeper. This has been accomplished by referring to the United States Department of the Interior National Park Service: National Register of Historic Places Inventory for 1897 and some articles about Ida Lewis from 1869 to 1911 as primary sources. Ida Lewis applies simultaneously as among those women who, under the patriarchy, should be confined to the “women’s sphere.” Furthermore, according to social gender ideology, the life of Ms. Lewis does not necessarily correspond to an individual’s abilities and character, as she was able to display the same ability as a man and perform “men’s work” in the women’s sphere.
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Киреев, Михаил, Mikhail Kireev, Зуфар Тагиров, and Zufar Tagirov. "TERRORISM AND ECONOMY." Services in Russia and abroad 10, no. 5 (August 29, 2016): 49–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.12737/21195.

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The article analyzes some aspects of the financial foundations of modern terrorism, considers sources of funding terrorist organization and movements, highlights the factors affecting the development of this phenomenon, presents the author´s view on the issue of "terrorist" finances. The authors substantiate that economic factors are the terrorism foundation, in this regard terrorist activity as an economic category is considered in two aspects: financing of separated terrorist acts and in general the terrorist ideology and practice. Some of the "traditional" options for the legalization of criminal incomes by terrorists are described. The specifics of terrorist economy as rule is that criminals for illegal activity usually get income in the form of cash. However, traditional use of cash for terrorist purposes in the current conditions takes second place and supplanted by developing non-cash financial instruments. The article distinguishes the financial and organizational factors that are favorable for terrorist activities, analyzes connection and interaction of terrorism and economic and financial spheres from the perspective of the "violent entrepreneurship" theory. Violent entrepreneurship is defined as a set of solutions and strategies, allowing to convert permanently an organized force in the cash income and other benefits that have market value. The authors offer the three-stage financial model of a terrorist attack. The first stage is advancement of political, economic and other requirements with the threat to paralyze the whole economic system of the country in case of their failure. The second stage includes demonstrational attack (or its threat) to a single economic structure and paralyzation of its actions. The third stage is repetition of requirements in a more rigid form relying on the effect of real or possible demonstration of force. In conclusion, the authors forecasts the future economic goals of global terrorism. Currently, the problem of financial and economic terrorism cannot be separated from the information, and in the future, information terrorism will focus on the global economy.
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Saifudin, Saifudin. "Memahami Hadis Ukhuwwah dalam Konteks Media Sosial (Upaya Membangun Etika Solidaritas Sosial)." Riwayah : Jurnal Studi Hadis 3, no. 1 (July 5, 2018): 53. http://dx.doi.org/10.21043/riwayah.v3i1.3464.

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<p class="06IsiAbstrak"><span lang="EN-GB">Manusia dilahirkan sebagai makhluk sosial yang bersaudara satu dengan lainnya (<em>ukhuwa</em>). Berawal dari tingkat sosial terkecil (keluarga) dan berkembang dalam lingkungan yang lebih besar- dari sosial tingkat dasar sampai dengan tingkatan pemerintah, semua berhubungan dengan letak dasar keluarga. Solidaritas sosial yang ada belum mampu menunjukkan ikatan sosial dalam bentuk ikatan ideologi, agama atau hubungan manusia dengan sesama dalam lingkup bernegara. </span></p><p class="06IsiAbstrak"><span lang="EN-GB">Dengan memahami hadis <em>ukhuwa</em>, studi ini diharapkan mampu memberikan pandangan sosial yang berhubungan dengan <em>ukhuwa </em> dalam dunia virtual, pada sosial masyarakat industri yang sangat modern yang mana arus informasi berubah sangat cepat dari berbagai penjuru dunia. <em>Ukhuwa </em>dibangun dengan tiga pilar utama, pertama, simpati, tanggung jawab moral dan solidaritas sosial. Pilar- pilar tersebut seakan sudah terlaksana dalam aspek kehidupan. Akan tetapi, pilar-pilat tersebut akan berbeda dengan kenyataan jika dalam lingkup virtual.</span></p><p class="06IsiAbstrak"><span lang="EN-GB">The birth of the brotherhood (ukhuwa) was inspired by the human existences as social human being. The human was born from the most little social institution (family) and than to be grown in the biggest environment- from the basic society level until the governmental level, all of which rest on family ties. Solidarity shown by society in a social sphere, shows that there are many social engagement that cannot be separated either in the name of ideology, religion, or a formal relationship between the members in a country.With understanding to hadith of <em>ukhuwa, </em>this study has found the sociological reality of interwoven ukhuwa in the virtual world, in an ultra modern industrial society which is changing very rapidly due to the current flood of information coming from all over the world. The ukhuwa building is supported by three important pillars, namely a sense of sympathy, moral commitment, and social solidarity. The pillars at a glance resemble to what happens in the real social world. However, the pillars are manifested in different forms in accordance with reality in virtual space.</span></p><p class="06IsiAbstrak"><span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span></p>
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Dzhafarova, O. V., and O. O. Mozhovyi. "Public and Service Activity of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine: Current Issues." Bulletin of Kharkiv National University of Internal Affairs 89, no. 2 (June 26, 2020): 143–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.32631/v.2020.2.14.

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The author has studied scientific concepts on the introduction of service-oriented activities of public administration authorities aimed at meeting the needs and interests of society through the provision of quality public services to the population, coordinated with long-term goals of society and state’s development. It has been proved that public and service activity of public administration authorities is really possible and actually feasible under the condition of creation and functioning of optimal normative, material and resource, organizational base for its guaranteeing (availability of legislative and other normative and legal documents, functioning of specialized service centers for providing administrative services with the staff of qualified civil servants and electronic databases, etc.). It has been emphasized that the content of public and service activity of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine is: a) a separate function of the service state, the content of which is to change the ideology, forms and methods in the work of law enforcement agencies; b) one of the externally-oriented functions of a specially created state institution along with such functions as regulatory, supervisory and law enforcement, c) the basis for the authorized entity to implement the tasks and functions of the state to ensure human rights and freedoms, as well as the interests of society and the state, keeping public order and security, combating crime, d) high-quality and affordable provision of administrative services to specific individuals in the form of licensing, registration and other similar actions in the law enforcement sphere.
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Kent, Susan Kingsley. "The Politics of Sexual Difference: World War I and the Demise of British Feminism." Journal of British Studies 27, no. 3 (July 1988): 232–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/385912.

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The outbreak of war in August 1914 brought to a halt the activities of both militant and constitutional suffragists in their efforts to gain votes for women. By that time, the suffrage campaign had attained the size and status of a mass movement, commanding the time, energies, and resources of thousands of men and women and riveting the attention of the British public. In early 1918, in what it defined as a gesture of recognition for women's contribution to the war effort, Parliament granted the vote to women over the age of thirty. This measure, while welcome to feminists as a symbol of the fall of the sex barrier, failed to enfranchise some five million out of eleven million adult women. When war ended, feminists continued to agitate for votes for women on the same terms as they had been granted to men, but organized feminism, despite the fact that almost half of the potential female electorate remained disenfranchised, never regained its prewar status as a mass movement. By the end of the 1920s, feminism as a distinct political and social movement no longer existed. This was due to the impact of the war on cultural perceptions of gender. Feminists' understandings of masculinity and femininity became transformed during the war and in the immediate postwar period, until they were virtually indistinguishable from those of antifeminists.As I have argued elsewhere, prewar British feminists regarded their movement as an attack on separate-sphere ideology and its constructions of masculinity and femininity.
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Rex, John. "National Identity in the Democratic Multi-Cultural State." Sociological Research Online 1, no. 2 (July 1996): 1–9. http://dx.doi.org/10.5153/sro.18.

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It has been suggested that there is a crisis of national identity in the advanced welfare states of Western Europe following post-war immigration. The aim of this paper is, first of all, to clarify the concept of national identity in its application to these states prior to this immigration, secondly to analyze the concept of ethnic identity amongst immigrant ethnic groups, and, finally, to look at the kinds of institutions which have evolved to determine the relation of immigrant groups to the established national societies of settlement. The modern nation state is often thought of as part of a modernizing project in industrial societies. In this project the nation state is not thought of as being based upon a national identity, but is seen as having more universal aims. These include a modern economy, universal and uniform education and the compromise institutions of the welfare state negotiated between different classes and status groups. In some cases, on the other hand, the nation state may be established by a dominant ethnic group with its own values and institutions. In both cases the nation state will develop its own national ideology but will be corrosive of subordinate ethnicities and ethnic identities. New immigrant ethnic minorities have their own separate sense of identity. This should not however be thought of in essentialist terms as unchanging and clearly bounded. A more complex model of ethnic mobilization under conditions of migration is suggested. The response of established societies to the presence of these minorities might take one of three forms. It may involve attempts to assimilate the minorities on equal terms as citizens; it may seek to subordinate them to a dominant ethnic group as second class citizens or denizens; or, it may recognize cultural diversity in the private communal sphere while maintaining a shared public political culture. The new national identity of the host society will depend upon the outcome of processes which follow from the adoption of these different policies.
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Ouis, Soumaya Pernilla. "Women in Islam." American Journal of Islam and Society 19, no. 4 (October 1, 2000): 104–7. http://dx.doi.org/10.35632/ajis.v19i4.1896.

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Anne Sofie Roald, a Norwegian convert to Islam and associate professor ofthe history of religion at Malmo University (Sweden), devotes her book totwo major themes: Examining what the interpretations of the Qur'an andSunnah in the Arab cultural sphere "say" on various women's issues, andhow this interpretation tends to change during the cultural encounter withthe West. The cover picture exemplifies these themes: two young happyMuslim women wearing headscarves while biking, illustrating Muslimwomen well integrated into western society but without giving up theirIslamic identity. The book is divided into two parts: theoretical and methodologicalreflections, and empirical issues.Roald's approach involves exact textual citation. Her emphasis on textis explained, as Islam is a scriptural religion, as "what can be termedIslamic is what can be linked to the text." Further, she analyses how classicaland contemporary scholars have interpreted the text, in addition to theresults of her fieldwork among Arab Sunni Muslim activists living in theWest. This methodology allows her to avoid the reification of Islam - theapprehension of Islam as separated from its social context. She chooses toemphasize the opinions of the Muslim Brotherhood (ikhwarJ) and the postikhwantrend, or an "independent Islamist trend" of Islamists who gobeyond the ikhwan's thought and who are not linked to its organization.Being an Arabic-speaking Muslim herself, Roald plays both roles of beingan "insider" and an "outsider."Her analysis builds basically on two theories: the "basket metaphor"combined with the idea of"normative fields." The "basket," defined as theset-up of traditions in a specific religion or ideology, is a metaphor thatcomes from the idea that a basket leaks from the inside and absorbs fromthe outside. In other words, concepts might leak out and new ones mightget absorbed. Further, even though all of its contents are latently present,what is needed in different times and spaces is subjected to the processes ofselection. Roald explains that Muslims might consider such a metaphorblasphemous, but the selection from ''the basket" is what actually happens.The text's function, how it is being interpreted and applied, is superior tothe text's very existence ...
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Palamar, Antonіі. "The Influence of Religion on the Political Situation in Egypt in 2011–2013: "Political Islam" and "Islamic Fundamentalism"." Grani 24, no. 1 (January 31, 2021): 58–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.15421/172106.

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The influence of religion on politics is inherent not only to the Islamic world, however, none of political theorist should ignore the role of Islam in Muslims’ public life, its impact on the policies of Muslim nations and the global geopolitical situation. Due to its historical uniqueness Modern Islam is not only a religion but also a way of life for the vast majority of Muslims and the basis of their civilizational and even national self-identification. Therefore, the role of religion in the Muslim world is different to that of countries, mostly populated by Christians, as Christianity is legally separated from the system of public administration in European countries. Islam, on the other hand, regulates not only the sociocultural sphere of society, including human relations, but also significantly affects the socio-political life of many Muslim countries, where Islamist movements have now become the major part this sphere.In Egypt, where authoritarian secular regime of Hosni Mubarak was overthrown during the revolution, Islamists took the lead in the protest movement, won the first democratic elections and used the opportunity to lead the country after nearly 60 years of underground activity. This paper examines the influence of the religious factor on the change of Egypt’s political regime in 2011-2013 by conceptualizing the terms of “political Islam” and “Islamic fundamentalism.” The author concludes that the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and its Freedom and Justice Party should not be defined as “fundamentalists” because: 1. they don’t try to return to a “righteous caliphate,” Sharia, and a literal perception of the sacred texts; 2. the Brothers could not be viewed as the most conservative force among Islamists, while Salafists are properly rightly considered to be; 3. the association is considered as a part of moderate Islamism, an ideology that does not mandate any the use of armed methods of struggle. At the same time, the author argues that owing to the fact that Egyptian “Muslim Brotherhood” adhered to moderate Islamism as an ideological party basis, it became a decisive reason that provided them a venue at the top tier of the government in 2011-2013.
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Kazakova, Marina N., and Irina G. Napalkova. "Patriotic education as a basis for strengthening Russian national civic identity: experience of the Republic of Mordovia." Finno-Ugric World 12, no. 4 (December 25, 2020): 430–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.15507/2076-2577.012.2020.04.430-446.

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Introduction. In modern Russia, patriotism is broadcast by the authorities as the only possible ideology of a democratic state, its national idea, which gives rise to many disputes and discussions within connotational boundaries: “love for the homeland lies outside states and nations – this is an initial, natural, genetic feeling” vs “the idea of sovereign patriotism can and should be the basis of the national idea of Russia”. The purpose of this publication is to consider the conceptual base and the activity of the formation of patriotic consciousness in the period 2012–2020 on the example of a separate subject of the Russian Federation – the Republic of Mordovia. Materials and Methods. The methodology was based on a retrospective analysis, an axiological paradigm, and a systematic approach. Case study was used among the applied methods. The Republic of Mordovia acted as a case, as it is a typical constituent entity of the Russian Federation related to agro-industrial regions, on the other hand as a national republic in which citizens of 119 nationalities live, while the national composition is dominated by Mordovians (Moksha, Erzya), Russians, Tatars. Results and Discussion. In the Republic of Mordovia, as well as in the Russian Federation as a whole, civic and patriotic education and the formation of patriotic consciousness of citizens is implemented through a program-targeted approach. This is expressed in a number of state programs, including “Development of Education in the Republic of Mordovia”, “Development of Culture and Tourism in Russia”, “Counteracting Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking”, “Harmonization of Interethnic and Interfaith Relations in the Republic of Mordovia”, etc., and there is a continuity in their adoption and prolongation. Effective vertical and horizontal interagency links have been created for their implementation. In recent years, individual civil society institutions, in particular, socially oriented non-profit organizations, have been actively involved in civic and patriotic education. The work also examines the activity component in the context of the analysis of individual events, graded by the authors for civic and patriotic, social and patriotic, heroic and patriotic and military and patriotic vectors. The problematic area remains the co-financing of state-funded programs in terms of the region’s obligations due to the accumulated problems in the budgetary sphere and, as a result, the highest debt burden of all the subjects of the Russian Federation. Conclusion. In nowadays Russia, the elements of civic-patriotic education are consistently implemented in the state educational, cultural, national, and youth policy. In the Republic of Mordovia, the implementation of patriotic themes is assessed as diversive and it has various formats. It is carried out according to civic and patriotic, socio-patriotic, heroic-patriotic, military-patriotic vectors.
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Zuin, Antônio Álvaro Soares, and Luiz Roberto Gomes. "A formação da subjetividade na Idade Mídia (The formation of subjectivity in the Media Age)." Revista Eletrônica de Educação 13, no. 2 (May 10, 2019): 377. http://dx.doi.org/10.14244/198271993350.

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In today’s society of the spectacle, the screens are present in all spheres of public and private spaces, in such a way that it becomes possible to characterize the current society as the Media Age. This omnipresence of screens in all social relations determines unprecedented transformations in both the objective and the subjective dimensions. It is no coincidence that it is possible to identify signs of addictive behaviour in relation to audio-visual stimuli continuously produced and consumed through electronic gadgets, with emphasis on the ubiquitous presence of mobile devices. Following this line of reasoning, it becomes increasingly common to intensify anxiety, if someone separates from their cell phone for example. Given this context, the main objective of this article is to reflect critically on the metamorphoses in the subjective dimension present in the so-called Media Age. In order to do so, we will present considerations about the transformations related to the concept of cultural industry in the era of the microelectronic revolution, as well as the analysis of the changes in subjectivity resulting from the reconfiguration of the public and private spheres in times of hegemony of digital technologies.ResumoNa atual sociedade do espetáculo, as telas estão presentes em todas as esferas dos espaços público e privado, de tal maneira que se torna possível caracterizar a sociedade hodierna como a da Idade Mídia. Esta onipresença das telas em todas as relações sociais determina transformações inéditas tanto na dimensão objetiva, quanto na subjetiva. Não por acaso, já é possível identifcar sinais de comportamento de vício em relação aos estímulos audiovisuais continuamente produzidos e consumidos por meio dos gadgets eletrônicos, com destaque para a presença ubíqua dos aparelhos celulares. Seguindo esta linha de raciocínio torna-se cada vez mais comum o recrudescimento da ansiedade, caso alguém se separe de seu celular, por exemplo. Diante de tal contexto, os autores deste artigo têm, como principal objetivo, refletir criticamente sobre as metamorfoses na dimensão subjetiva presentes na chamada Idade Mídia. Para tanto, serão apresentadas considerações sobre as transformações no conceito de indústria cultural na era da revolução microeletrônica, bem como a análise das modifcações na subjetividade decorrentes da reconfiguração das esferas pública e privada em tempos de hegemonia das tecnologias digitais.Keywords: Subjectivity, Media Age, Cultural Industry, Microelectronic Revolution.Palavras-chave: Subjetividade, Idade Mídia, Indústria Cultural, Revolução Microeletrônica.ReferencesADORNO, Theodor W. Educação e emancipação. Trad. Wolfgang Leo Maar. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1995.ADORNO, Theodor W. “A indústria cultural”. In: COHN, Gabriel (Org.), Theodor W. Adorno, coleção grandes cientistas sociais, São Paulo: editora Ática, 1994a.ADORNO, Theodor W. “Sobre música popular”. In: COHN, Gabriel (Org.), Theodor W. Adorno, coleção grandes cientistas sociais, São Paulo: editora Ática, 1994b.ADORNO, Theodor W. Minima Moralia: reflexões a partir da vida danificada. Trad. Luiz Eduardo Bicca. São Paulo: Ática, 1993.ADORNO, Theodor W.; HORKHEIMER, Max. Dialética do esclarecimento: fragmentos filosóficos. Tradução de Guido Antonio de Almeida. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar editor, 1986.ARENDT, Hannah. A condição humana. Trad. Roberto Raposo. Rio de Janeiro: Forense Universitária, 2017.CABOT, Mateu; LASTÓRIA, Luiz A. C. N.; ZUIN, Antônio, A. S. (Coords.). Tecnologia, violência, memória: diagnósticos críticos de la cultura contemporánea. Barcelona: Anthropos; México: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana - Iztapalana, 2018. 270p.DARDOT, Pierre; LAVAL, Christian. Comum: ensaio sobre a revolução no século XXI. Trad. Mariana Echalar. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2017.HABERMAS, Jürgen. Entre naturalismo y religião. Madrid: Technos, 2005.HABERMAS, Jürgen. Direito e democracia: entre facticidade e validade. Rio de Janeiro: Tempo Brasileiro, 2003. 2 v. 2003a – volume 1 e 2003b – volume 2.HABERMAS, Jürgen. Mudança estrutural da esfera pública: investigações quanto a uma categoria da sociedade burguesa. Trad. Flávio R. Kothe. Rio de Janeiro: Tempo Brasileiro, 1984.HABERMAS, Jürgen. Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns - Band 1 und 2. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1981.HABERMAS, Jürgen. Técnica e ciência como ideologia. Trad. Artur Morão. Lisboa: Edições 70, 1968.HABERMAS, Jürgen. Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Neuwied und Berlin: Hermann Luchterhand Verlag, 1962.HEW, Khe F. Students’ and teachers’ use of Facebook, Computers in Human Behaviour, 27, 662-676, 2011.HORKHEIMER, Max. Teoria tradicional e teoria crítica. Coleção os Pensadores. São Paulo: Editora Abril, 1987.HORKHEIMER, Max; ADORNO, Theodor W. Dialética do esclarecimento. Rio de Janeiro. Jorge Zahar, 1985.KANT, Immanuel. Resposta à pergunta: que é esclarecimento? In: Textos seletos. Petrópolis: Vozes, 1985.LUHMANN, Niklas. Soziale Systeme: Grundriss einer allgemeinen Theorie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994.MARTINS, Sandra Olades. A esfera pública: dos salões à rede virtual. In: BORGES, Bento Itamar; GOMES, Luiz Roberto; JESUS, Osvaldo Freitas de (Orgs.) Direito e democracia em Habermas: pressupostos e temas em debate. São Paulo: Xamã, 2010.MAZER, Joseph P.; MURPHY, Richard E.; SIMONDS, Cheri J. I will see you on “Facebook”: The effects of computer-mediated teacher self-disclosure on student motivation, affective learning, and classroom climate, Communication Education, 56 (1), 1-17, 2007.McLUHAN, Marshall. Os meios de comunicação como extensão do homem. São Paulo: Cultrix, 1969.NOBRE, Marcos. A teoria crítica. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Editor, 2004.TÜRCKE, Christoph. Erregte Gesellshaft: Philosophie der Sensation, München: C.H. Beck Verlag, 2002. TÜRCKE, Christoph. Sociedade excitada: filosofia da sensação. Tradução de Antônio Zuin, Fabio Durão, Francisco Fontanella e Mario Frungillo. Campinas: Editora da Unicamp, 2010.
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Panasiuk, Valerii. "«La Traviata» remastered. G. Verdi’s opera in the stage interpretation by V. Nemirovich-Danchenko." Aspects of Historical Musicology 21, no. 21 (March 10, 2020): 63–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.34064/khnum2-21.04.

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The historical evidence of the XX – the beginning of the ХХІ century musical theatre proves that the drastic interpretation as “a coherent artistic project” can include creating a new text for a libretto, which is aligned to fundamentally important provisions of the director’s concept. It was true for G. Verdі’s “LaTraviata” theatrical performance implemented on the stage of the State Musical Theatre named after People’s Artist of the Republic V. Nemirovich-Danchenko (1934). Due to their provocative approach and radicalism of breaking with wellestablished traditions the ideas of the stage producers (directors, a conductor, an artist and a librettist) are in tune with the guidelines of the modern interpreters of opera classic. Consequently, that far away experience becomes relevant nowadays. Considering it, one can enable solve certain problems in condition when the new ideological principles and innovative art directions are spread. There is an urgent necessity to define the principles of coping with a libretto as an integral part of a holistic director’s vision on the example of “LaTraviata” staging implemented by V. Nemirovich-Danchenko (1858–1943), who was one of the most prominent reformers of both drama and musical theatres in the XX century. So, the aim of this article is to analyze the libretto for the opera “La Traviata” by G. Verdi created by V. Inber using the research approaches of theater studies and literary theory and to define the principles of working with the verbal text as with the part of a holistic director’s conception implemented by V. Nemirovich-Danchenko. The results of the research. Taking into account the guiding directions of the Soviet ideology, the producers obviously over accentuate the social component of the conflict. As a result, “the scenic situation is exacerbated” and consequently “Violetta’s social characteristics” are adjusted; being originally a demimondaine, the main heroine turns into an opera singer, whose tragedy makes the class conflict obvious. The total redefining of the conflict, transferring the place of the action (Venice) and the time (the 1870s), and characters’ social tagging enables implementing another fundamentally important provision – an aesthetic one. The visual identity of the 1870s is strongly associated with the impressionists’ images, Venice is identified with a carnival and relevant artistic attributes (the third act of the play). Focusing on the certain “painting archetype of the epoch”, the set designer (P. Williams) created the suitably matched environment for scenic playing. The innovative approach provided by the director’s concept is implemented within the libretto text by means of updating the stage narrative itself. The author of the libretto, Vera Inber (1890–1972) does not emphasize the opera singer’s destiny, but pays attention to the main character’s relations with the bourgeois society. The latter observes the lifetime conflicts development of one of the artistic bohemia’s representatives with a great deal of interest, but without any compassion. That fact justifies using the new scene – the stage, which enables applying the principle “a theatre within a theatre” (also in the sphere of the artistic design). This approach is naturally combined with the use of the “heraldic construction” in V. Inber’s libretto. In the process of realizing the stage narrative, a separate plot situation is repeated in a small-scale version. The mindset to double and complicate the narrative is carried out in the libretto. Due to that fact, a new conflict (social in its origin and provided by the authors of the director’s vision) development is enabled. The relevant literary allusions in poetical text (although obviously shallow) are set to create a meaningful artistic prospect. In the turning points, the storylines development in V. Inber’s libretto coincides with F. М. Piave’s libretto drama collisions: happy lovers; their happiness, destroyed by Alfred’s father; having an argument and the heroine’s death. The key distinction of a new version is the refusal to use Violetta’s disease as the character’s feature and the plot component, which determines the tragic ending. That is why the fourth act becomes fundamentally different, unlike the original one. Being ignored by the bourgeois environment, Violetta secludes herself from the society and abandons her successful career. The singer informs her coactors (who appear on the stage later) about that fact in the letter. Implementing the principle “a theatre within a theatre” consistently, V. Inber treats the entire final set (especially the heroine’s death) as the last scene of the theatrical performance. Thus, the inevitability of the tragic resolution of the conflict between the artistic personality and the bourgeois society is proved. It facilitates realizing dramatically vital guidelines of a director’s general vision, which becomes determinant in the process of staging G. Verdі’s masterpiece. Conclusions. The practice of rewriting librettos in the first decades of XXI century acquires a new relevance. First, creating a new libretto resolves all the disagreements between a conception of the production team and the original verbal text nowadays. Mostly those contradictions emerge in the process of changing the locality, in which the action proceeds and the time of the plot. Secondly, one of the most burning problems of the ХХІ century musical theatre, concerning the performance language choice, is resolved. Performing an opera using the audience’s native language promotes full-fledged communication between the actors and the spectators. Thirdly, the necessity for rewriting librettos supposes involving the prominent masters of the word, especially poets. Thus the effective dialogue between different national cultures is put into practice and the active circulation of the previous centuries classic (including the opera one) in the socio-cultural sphere is insured.
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Beller, Anne-Marie. "Collapsing the Courtship Plot." Victorian Popular Fictions Journal, October 26, 2020, 28–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.46911/risv8270.

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The New Woman writing of the 1890s grappled with the legacy of mid-nineteenth century constructions of romance and gender ideology. In their bid to promote a new vision of heterosexual relations between the sexes, New Woman writers often explicitly engaged with earlier ideals of Separate Spheres and the “Angel in the House.” The short story provided an ideal form for exploring these issues, freeing writers from the generic conventions of the traditional three-volume novel. This article examines the ways in which three women writers of the 1890s attempted to rewrite the script of mid-Victorian courtship through the short story genre. In different, but related ways, Mona Caird’s “The Yellow Drawing Room,” Ella D’Arcy’s “The Pleasure Pilgrim” and Ella Hepworth Dixon’s “One Doubtful Hour” all offer a challenge to the doctrine of separate spheres. Yet, while each of these texts critique what they present as outmoded views of woman’s sphere and nature, they also articulate the difficulties experienced by both genders in imagining an evolved and improved model of sexual relations. These short stories represent the collapse in New Woman fiction of the traditional “courtship plot” through a failure to re-imagine and re-map the mid-Victorian gender ideology they seek to dismantle.
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Ekasanti, Nabilla Rahmadhiya, and Mala Hernawati. "Representation of Gender Stereotyping in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women: Endorsement of Traditional Gender Roles." Lexicon 6, no. 2 (October 1, 2019). http://dx.doi.org/10.22146/lexicon.v6i2.54682.

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This research discusses how the characters in the novel Little Women written by Louisa May Alcott eventually submit themselves to the stereotypical role of women in the late 19th century when in reality American women were protesting the ideology of ‘separate spheres’ in accordance to the traditional gender stereotype that they faced. The research applies the sociological approach to uncover the connection between the literary work and the social condition of the era and to find out how the gender roles affect the characters of the March girls, supported by the theory of children literature. The primary data used in this research are the excerpts taken from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and some supporting data are taken from academic journals. The research focuses on the characters of the March Girls’ actions and dialogues that show submissive behavior, in contrast to the efforts and movement of the women during that era who were protesting the ideology of ‘separate spheres’ that resulted in inequality. The result of the research concludes that Little Women seems to be written only as a reproduction of traditional gender values, this matter contradicts with what the American women in the late 19th century struggled for.
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Burke, Sara. "Women of Newfangle: Co-Education, Racial Discourse and Women’s Rights in Victorian Ontario." Historical Studies in Education / Revue d'histoire de l'éducation, August 5, 2007, 111–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.32316/hse/rhe.v19i1.275.

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This article argues that during the 1870s, members of the Anglo-Canadian women’s movement targeted university co-education in their first radical assault on separate spheres ideology, deliberately exploiting the discourses of both individual and racial progress to openly contest established definitions of middle-class womanliness. Rather than accept the evolutionist theory that white women’s contribution to the race was solely reproductive – that they were passive recipients of the benefits of male progress – reformers in Ontario argued that Anglo-Saxon women had an active, vital role to play in the ongoing work of racial advancement. Reformers linked the right of middleclass women to higher education to the much larger issue of the continued progress of the Anglo- Saxon race. By championing co-education, members of the women’s movement were promoting a blueprint for social change in which the daughters as well as the sons of the new Dominion would assume their responsibility to regenerate Anglo-Saxon civilization.
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"HUMAN RIGHTS IN MODERN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS: EVOLUTION OF DEVELOPMENT, PROBLEMS AND PROSPECTS." Journal of V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, Series "Law", no. 30 (2020). http://dx.doi.org/10.26565/2075-1834-2020-30-20.

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Introduction. At the present stage of development of the world political process, one of the main problems has been to ensure the effective operation of human rights protection mechanisms, both at the national and international levels. The main vocation of legal science in this area is to provide expert assessments of problematic issues and scientifically developed recommendations for improving the mechanisms of human rights protection in modern international relations and especially in crisis situations that have become almost permanent in the life of the world community. The purpose of this publication was to implement a retrospective analysis of the evolution of the development of legal consolidation of human rights at the international level and the thorny problems in this area. Summary of the main research results. Thus, this publication considers the main stages of human rights, highlights the main problems of development, outlines the place of human rights in modern international relations and presents the main characteristics of the challenges facing states in the implementation of cooperation in the field of human rights. Finding the specifics of human rights and identifying mechanisms for their formation is a separate problem for jurists. The legal aspect of enshrining human rights in international legal instruments is important in the context of modern reality. It is through the disclosure of this issue that it is possible to identify the main stages of the evolution of the consolidation of human rights in international law. Conclusions. The development of international legal consolidation of human rights has significantly influenced the evolution of international law as a whole. Under the influence of these processes, national sovereignty, as a basic principle of international law, began to take on new forms, and the individual acquired many features of international legal personality. Thanks to non-state rule-making, the sphere of consolidation and protection of human rights tends to self-development and constant adaptation to the changing needs of society in the social and moral spheres. Human rights are a cultural phenomenon that reflects the system of value orientations of a person rooted in a particular historical epoch and depends on the ideology of the world legal community. The problem of human rights, their protection from external and internal threats requires an immediate solution, making it a priority to consider legal issues among a wide range of global problems of mankind. At the same time, it must be emphasized that the democratic development of modern society and human rights are inextricably linked. This connection also implies that human rights must be recognized as legitimate as a result of democratic procedures, but outside the national legal systems there is a moral justification necessary to convince the subjects of international law that everyone, even outside the national legal system must enjoy all guaranteed rights and freedoms.
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Gallagher, Mary, and Blake Miller. "Who Not What: The Logic of China's Information Control Strategy." China Quarterly, June 1, 2021, 1–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0305741021000345.

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Abstract In this paper, we examine how the Chinese state controls social media. While social media companies are responsible for censoring their platforms, they also selectively report certain users to the government. This article focuses on understanding the logic behind media platforms’ decisions to report users or content to the government. We find that content is less relevant than commonly thought. Information control efforts often focus on who is posting rather than on what they are posting. The state permits open discussion and debate on social media while controlling and managing influential social forces that may challenge the party-state's hegemonic position. We build on Schurmann's “ideology and organization,” emphasizing the Party's goals of embedding itself in all social structures and limiting the ability of non-Party individuals, networks or groups to carve out a separate space for leadership and social status. In the virtual public sphere, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) continues to apply these principles to co-opt, repress and limit the reach of influential non-Party “thought leaders.” We find evidence to support this logic through qualitative and quantitative analysis of leaked censorship documents from a social media company and government documents on information control.
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Tiffee, Sean. "The Rhetorical Alternative in Neurocinematics." M/C Journal 20, no. 1 (March 15, 2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1201.

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IntroductionIn 2008, researchers at New York University’s Computational Neuroimaging Laboratory challenged our contemporary understanding of audience with an alternative approach to engaging some of the most essential questions regarding film consumption. The study itself used a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner during the “free viewing of films” allowing researchers the opportunity to see which sections of the brain are activated during certain parts of the viewing (Hasson et al. 2). In an effort to overcome limitations of fMRI imaging, the researchers further utilized an inter-subjective correlation (ISC) technique to validate their findings. Simply put, ISC looks at the similar effects in neuroimaging across a range of viewers for the same rhetorical artifact; the higher the similarity, the more confident the researchers are that the impact of the film is the same for most or all viewers. This impact is said to “control” the viewers mental and emotional state in that they can be a reliable way to predict a viewer’s “emotions, thoughts, [and] attitudes” (Hasson et al. 2). The researchers termed their work “neurocinematics” and concluded that this new approach could “contribute to the cognitive movement in film theory, analogous to contributions that neuroscience has made to cognitive and social psychology.” (Hasson et al. 21).Since the publication of this research, there have been over a dozen academic essays published, including additional work in the hard sciences, and contributions from psychology and literary and film studies (see Cohen, Shavalian and Rube; Loschky et al.; Erincin; Kauttonen, Hlushchuk and Tikka; Christoforou et al.). Many seem to be responding to the original authors’ calls for neurocinematics to be “a new interdisciplinary field” between “cognitive neuroscience and film studies” that is “part of a larger endeavor that looks for connections between neuroscience and art” (Hasson et al. 1, 21). Noticeably missing from their call for an inter-disciplinary approach, however, is one that includes rhetorical studies. In fact, to date, there has only been a single publication referring to neurocinematics in communication studies – an essay that was not specific to film nor audience, and that limited its discussion to the effectiveness of fMRI imaging (see Weber, Mangus and Huskey). It is the argument of this essay that rhetorical studies should be included in neurocinematics for two reasons: first, rhetorical studies can provide an alternative theoretical understanding of narrative that should prove to be enlightening for this emerging field; and second, rhetorical studies can provide the necessary ethical positioning for this emerging field.The Rhetorical Studies AlternativeThe first justification for the inclusion of rhetorical studies in neurocinematics is the alternative theoretical approach to narrative that rhetoricians can provide. The original neurocinematics research found that structured stories provided a much higher degree of ISC than open-ended, unstructured “real life” depictions. The researchers showed 10 minutes of Sergio Leone’s film, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly and a 10-minute stable shot of a Saturday afternoon in Washington Square Park that represented an unstructured, real-life event. The researchers concluded that, “a mere mechanical reproduction of reality, with no directorial intention or intervention, is not sufficient by itself for controlling viewer’s brain activity” (Hasson et al. 8). That the “slice of real life” didn’t have the same predictive functions as the “intentional construction of the film’s sequence through aesthetic means” has important implications for rhetorical studies (Hasson et al. 9). It’s not cinematic imagery alone that corresponds to brain activations, but the construction of story and the aesthetic elements of narrative presentations (that is to say, the creation of rhetoric) that has predictive functions. In A Grammar of Motives, Kenneth Burke notes that dramatism “invites one to consider the matter of motives in a perspective that, being developed from the analysis of drama, treats language and thought primarily as modes of action” (xxii). For Burke, all of our stories are the product of thought, whether it be conscious or unconscious, and this thought belies how we view the world of symbols in which we live. Michael Overington contends that dramatismaddresses the empirical questions of how persons explain their actions to themselves and others, what the cultural and social structural influences on these interpretations might be, and what effect connotational links among the explanatory (motivational) terms might have on these explanations and hence, on action itself. (133)Language is the vehicle for human behaviour and represents how we describe the world to ourselves and to others so that “a rhetor’s language can be used to discover motive” (Foss, Foss and Trapp 200). Film is nothing short of a dramatistic explanation that allows us the opportunity to dissect it with more detail to determine the worldview not only of the auteur, but of the spectator as well. Although film studies has its own theories on story and structure, a “systematic application” of Burke’s dramatism “enables an observer to reconstruct various perspectives of ‘reality’” (Stewart, Smith, and Denton 168). When compared to film studies, as an academic discipline, rhetorical studies offers an alternative understanding of narrative. Film studies asks us to apply a structural model to a narrative, while rhetorical studies asks us to apply a systems model that unmasks a narrative. As an example, film studies might examine a film’s structure, looking at the rising action of subplot B as it corresponds in the third reel to the declining action of the subplot A before denouement. As an alternative example, rhetorical studies could offer a dramatistic reading to examine the motivations of scenic ratios between the two subplots as it defines cinematic reality for the audience. Although neurocinematics may help predict the affective impact of the subplots for an audience, it is currently rooted in a structural assumption of audience and narrative, which fails to provide a full account of the spectator’s experience as it relates to the filmmaker’s rhetorical motivation. The addition of rhetorical studies to the conversation can provide an alternative approach and give an additional richness to our understandings of audience.While film studies may engage the ideological function of films, rhetorical studies amplifies their findings. In “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin writes,the storytelling that thrives for a long time in the milieu of work … is itself an artisanal form of communication, as it were. It does not aim to convey the pure ‘in itself’ or gist of a thing, like information or a report. It submerges the thing into the life of the story-teller, in order to bring it out of him again. (149)For Benjamin, the storyteller is an artisan that exists external to the rhetorical artifact itself, which, of course, means that the structural focus of film studies falls inevitably short. Further, Benjamin argues that there is an ideological component to both narrative and its medium. He writes, “Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception. The way in which human perception is organized – the medium in which it occurs – is conditioned not only by nature but by history” (Benjamin "Reproducibility" 255, emphasis in original). The oral tradition of storytelling is different, as is the storytelling of the novel, film, and so on. Indeed, it is the goal of neurocinematics to illustrate how the rhetoric of film is distinct from other forms of narrative discourse, which necessarily demands an inter-disciplinary focus that allows for an interrogation of the ideological functions that exist both within and without the text, which is what Burke’s dramatism provides.Further, Walter Fisher’s work with narrative extends the role of rhetorical theory into what should be discussed in neurocinematics. Fisher contends that the narrative form is something that is unique to humans, but something that all humans engage in; for him, “stories are fundamental to communication because they provide structure for our experience as humans and because they influence people to live in communities that share common explanations and understandings” (Burgchardt 239). As noted earlier, neurocinematics argues that there is a coherence in cinematic narratives that don’t exist in “slice of life” filmic images. Similarly, Walter Fisher contends that this “coherence” is inborn in the narrative being (his homo narran) “their inherent awareness of narrative probability, what constitutes a coherent story, and their constant habit of testing narrative fidelity, whether the stories they experience ring true with the stories they know to be true in their lives” (8). The neurocinematics researchers conclude that, “the ISC analysis of brain activity can also serve as a measurement of systematic differences in how various groups of individuals … respond to the same film” (Hasson et al. 20). Fisher notes that the philosophical foundation of the rational world paradigm (which he sets opposite his narrative paradigm) “is epistemology. Its linguistic materials are self-evident propositions, demonstrations, and proofs, the verbal expressions of certain and probably knowing” (4). The danger with neurocinematics rooted in pure rationality is that it co-opts the narrative function, makes the spectator as agent and film as object separate from one another (when ISC begs that they interact), and brackets off questions such as ethics. Fisher concludes, “With knowledge of agents, we can hope to find that which is reliable or trustworthy; with knowledge of objects, we can hope to discover that which has the quality of veracity. The world requires both kinds of knowledge” (18). Of course, this question demands a discussion of ethics, which the current approach to neurocinematics explicitly denies as a subject of inquiry. The authors write, different filmmakers differ in the level of control they choose to impose on viewers, and out methods are not designed to judge this, but rather to measure the effect of a given film on different target groups. Thus the critical evaluation of each film is outside the domain of this research. (Hasson et al. 21-2)This is the danger Fisher warns of. The assumption that neurocinematics can be a purely descriptive project is not only unfeasible, but also unconscionable. Unlike researchers who deny the place of ideology and ethics, “rhetorical critics, of course, have long recognized the centrality of ideology to persuasive discourse” (Burgchardt 451). To illustrate why this is a vital issue for neurocinematics, let’s take its existing descriptive project to its logical conclusion. Theoretically, researchers could reach a point where there was a 100% ISC, meaning that there existed a cinematic formula that would impact every audience member the same way and would “control” their emotional and mental states – for neurocinematics this would constitute the “perfect” film. This “perfect” film, however, wouldn’t exist in a research vacuum, but in a morass of culture, politics, and ideology. Cultural critic Slavoj Žižek notes the impact that Nine-Eleven had on film:the ultimate twist in this link between Hollywood and the ‘war on terrorism’ occurred when the Pentagon decided to solicit the help of Hollywood: … at the beginning of November 2001, there was a series of meetings between White House advisors and senior Hollywood executives with the aim of co-ordinating the war effort and establishing how Hollywood could help in the war effort and establishing how Hollywood could help in the ‘war against terrorism’ by getting the right ideological meaning across not only to Americans, but to the Hollywood public around the globe – the ultimate empirical proof that Hollywood does in fact function as an ‘ideological state apparatus’. (16)The ethical implications are overwhelming: propaganda films are nothing new, but neurocinematics has the potential to usher in a whole new type of propaganda cinema, under the guise of entertainment, that is 100% effective. The original neurocinematic research argued that “the ISC measurement should probably not be used to evaluate the aesthetic, artistic, social, or political value of movies” (Hasson et al. 21). Conversely, rhetorical studies demands that criticism and scholarship not only comment on texts, but ethical considerations “will not be averted either by ignoring it or placing it beyond our provence” (Wander 18).Further, the very goal of neurocinematics demands the critical reaction that current rhetorical theory is prepared to provide. The stated end-game for neurocinematics is to determine how films discursively interact with a viewer’s mental state and, therefore, their affective response to an aesthetic experience. Raymie McKerrow notes that critical rhetorical theory must examine “the manner in which discourse insinuates itself in the fabric of social power, and thereby ‘effects’ the status of knowledge among the members of the social group” (92). Michael Calvin McGee argues, “We do not ‘observe’ objects and human actions … we construct these phenomena through rational acts of ‘selecting,’ ‘coordinating,’ ‘interpreting,’ and ‘applying’ sensory data” (48). There is no potential for a non-normative descriptive project inside of these parameters; there is no neutral observation by the spectator, the filmic experience is one that is constructed internally. Neurocinematics notes that there are interactions between brain spheres (e.g. neocortex and the amygdala) that create an intersubjective experience (which is quantitatively described with the ISC), but to explain, even descriptively, what is occurring in these viewers requires determining what the audience “knows” and how the discursive impact of the film effects them neurologically. The field of neurocinematics is not morally neutral, though it insists on presenting itself that way. At its most basic level, the researchers are not separate from the ethical and ideological functions of their studies: they make normative claims about which films are “worthy” of study, they manufacture inter-subjective reality with their critical reactions to the artifacts, and their communicative reporting in the essay itself provides agency to the film while simultaneously denying agency to the viewers. Further, when neurocinematics is taken to its logical conclusion (the ability to manufacture the descriptively “perfect” film – one with a 100% ISC), the ethical concerns are overwhelming. With Hollywood films operating more and more as a part of the ideological state apparatus, the potential for highly effective propaganda films becomes more and more real, and more and more frightening. If the conclusions by these researchers is true, that these films “control” our mental states, then the power of such propaganda films could be devastating.ConclusionThis essay has argued that rhetorical scholars have not only a unique opportunity, but an ethical obligation, to insert ourselves into one of the most innovative inter-disciplinary fields to emerge in recent history. Neurocinematics has the potential to transform cognitive neuroscience and film studies both and it is imperative that rhetoricians insert themselves into this dialogue. First, the work that rhetorical studies has done on storytelling, narrative, and dramatism provides unique perspectives that have been overlooked by the structural models of film studies. Further, the scientists driving neurocinematics forward deny the need for political and value claims to be assessed to their work. Rhetorical studies has the opportunity to challenge these illusions of neutrality and help neuroscientists to understand that their work is, indeed, ideological, and that the dangers of ideology manifest themselves when these perspectives are pushed to the side under the guise of neutrality. ReferencesBenjamin, Walter. "The Storyteller." Trans. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland, and others. Selected Writings Volume 3, 1935-1938. Eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. ———. "Work of Art in the Age of Reproducibility." Trans. Edmund Jephcott and others. Selected Writings Volume 4, 1938-1940. Eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. Burgchardt, Carl, ed. Readings in Rhetorical Criticism. Third ed. State College: Strata Publishing, 2005. Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1945. Christoforou, Christoforos, Spyros Christou-Champi, Fofi Constantinidou, and Maria Theodorou. "From the Eyes and the Heart: A Novel Eye-Gaze Metric That Predicts Video Preferences of a Large Audience." Frontiers in Psychology 6 (2015): 1-11. Cohen, Anna-Lisa, Elliot Shavalian, and Moshe Rube. "The Power of the Picture: How Narrative Film Captures Attention and Disrupts Goal Pursuit." PLoS ONE 10.12 (2015): 1-8. Erincin, Serap. "Dance in Translation: Subjectivity, Failed Spectatorship and Tolerance." Word & Text: A Journal of Literary Studies & Linguistics 2.2 (2012): 156-70. Fisher, Walter. "Narration as a Human Communication Paradigm: The Case of Public Moral Argument." Communication Monographs 51.1 (1984): 1-22. Foss, Sonja K., Karen A. Foss, and Robert Trapp. Contemporary Perspectives on Rhetoric. Third ed. Prospect Heights: Waveland Press, 2002. Hasson, Uri, Ohad Landesman, Barbara Knappmeyer, Ignacio Vallines, Nava Rubin, and David J. Heeger. "Neurocinematics: The Neuroscience of Film." Projections 2.1 (2008): 1-26. Kauttonen, Janne, Yevhen Hlushchuk, and Pia Tikka. "Optimizing Methods for Linking Cinematic Features to fMRI Data." NeuroImage 110 (2015): 136-48. Loschky, Lester C., Adam M. Larson, Joseph P. Magliano, and Tim J. Smith. "What Would Jaws Do? The Tyranny of Film and the Relationship between Gaze and Higher-Level Narrative Film Comprehension." PLoS ONE 10.11 (2015): 1-23. McKerrow, Raymie E. "Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis." Communication Monographs 56.2 (1989): 91. Overington, Michael A. "Kenneth Burke and the Method of Dramatism." Theory & Society 4.1 (1977): 131. Stewart, Charles J., Craig Allen Smith, and Robert E. Denton Jr. Persuasion and Social Movements. Prospect Heights: Waveland Press, 1994. Wander, Philip C. "The Ideological Turn in Modern Criticism." Central States Speech Journal 34 (1983): 1-18. Weber, René, J. Michael Mangus, and Richard Huskey. "Brain Imaging in Communication Research: A Practical Guide to Understanding and Evaluating fMRI Studies." Communication Methods & Measures 9.1/2 (2015): 5-29. Žižek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates. New York: Verso, 2002.
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McRae, Leanne. "Rollins, Representation and Reality." M/C Journal 4, no. 4 (August 1, 2001). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1925.

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Men in crisis Confused by society's mixed messages about what's expected of them as boys, and later as men, many feel a sadness and disconnection they cannot even name. (Pollack 1) The recent 'crisis in masculinity' has been punctuated by a plethora of material devoted to reclaiming men's 'lost' power within a society. Triggered by the recognition that their roles within our society are changing, this emerging cannon often fails to recognise men as part of a social continuum that subjectifies individuals within discursive frameworks. Rather it mourns this process as the emasculation of male identity within our culture. However, this self-help rhetoric masks a wider project of renegotiating men's power within our society. David Buchbinder for example, calls for an interrogation of "how men and various masculinities are represented" (7). As a consequence, male subjectivities are being called into question. There is now examination of the manner in which "power is differentiated so that particular styles of masculinity become ascendant…in certain situations" (Haywood and Mac an Ghaill 52). In this way, male power is being problematised on many fronts. The desire to shore-up male power in the face of various 'threats' has called for a corporeal manifestation of masculine dominance. Men's bodies have been redefined through contemporary attention to physical sculpting and molding. This reanimation of the Superman ethic of embodiment is part of the hegemonic maintenance of masculine power in our culture. At the times of the greatest threat to male competence and control within society - social, political and economic restructuring, war and recovery - the body has been at the frontier of reasserting male power. This paper traces performances of superhero masculinity across men's bodies. As central 'creators' of their world, superheroes embody a mythology in masculine identity that shapes men as social and natural determinists within a society. In attempting to replicate this role, men are subjected to a rupture in the social fabric whereby their bodies move through a series of discursive frameworks in a contradictory tapestry that activates a 'crisis' within masculine identity. This paper seeks to open the seam between masculinity and power to examine how masculine legitimacy is negotiated on embodied surfaces. This trajectory is constantly stretched to its limits where men's bodies are in a persistent state of rebuilding. Henry Rollins forms part of the frayed edges of superhero identity. Simultaneously validating and undermining this mentality, Rollins creates a nexus of contradictory ideologies. Embracing a "rock-hard male body" (Robinson 11) in a powerfully built embodied reality, and at the same time deconstructing it, Rollins takes issue with men in their mythological role as centres of social reality and their power to create and control it. Rollins forms an identity that is shaped within discursive practices rather than the director of them. In tracing this performance through the "Liar" music video that features Rollins in the Superman role, this paper demonstrates the convoluted masculinity embraced by Rollins and the movement of Superman across his body. Between superheroes, war and bodybuilding, the aim is to trace how men are positioned as unproblematic agents of power, change and creation within the embodied myths of our culture. Bodies of knowledge Men's bodies have changed. While they have been the 'normal' against which women's bodies have been defined, this sense of normality has altered (Cranny-Francis 8). Foucault has consistently demonstrated how bodies are created and inscribed through cultural processes whereby discourses determine the shape and nature of embodied realities. Even though men are often centralised in these knowledge systems, it does not mean that they are immune to their influence. Men are insistently defined through metaphors of the mind. The proper man is a controlled man. In bodybuilding this relationship is activated in the repetitive and disciplined action of tensing and relaxing muscle. Defined as, "the toning and accentuating of muscles by the repeated action of flexing and releasing…particularly through the use of weights" (Carden-Coyne n.pag), it reifies a controlled mind restraining and shaping the physical form. During the Enlightenment thrust toward scientific rationalism, Descartes positioned an uncomplicated division between the mind and the body. Men spent their time purifying their souls and using bodies "as a spiritual vessel, a Christian container of morality and purity" (Carden-Coyne n.pag). They were shells that required discipline so the mind was not led astray. The mind was the controlling agent that subdued a disobedient embodiment. The extent to which this was achieved was the measure of the legitimacy and competence of a man. The currency of this corporeal state resonates most potently today through the phallus. As an extension of the phallus, the surface of the male body is a crucial site for the demonstration of embodied control. For the phallus is not very closely related to the possession of a penis as David Buchbinder argues when he suggests, "the phallus as a symbol, however, is not to be identified with an actual penis, because no actual penis could ever really measure up to the imagined sexual potency and social or magical power of the phallus" (49). Indeed, men's penises are "flaccid most of the time" (Buchbinder 48). They are fragile and soft. They rarely meet the 'supernatural' prowess of the phallus. Phallic power is related to the capacity to occupy the space of symbolic power effectively - to be embodied in a competent masculinity. Bodybuilding demonstrates a mastery over the self that articulates this discipline. The capacity to mobilise this control is linked to wider social power in which men are supposed to be privileged agents of creation and control in the political and economic spheres of life. Henry Rollins mobilises a mythos of masculine embodied control and corporeal hardness in his embrace of Superman. He is the epitome of phallic power and Rollins uses this character as a metonym to articulate the contradictions between the ideologies circulating through culture and the reality of lived experience. While Rollins mobilises a superhero musculature, the surfacing of his self masks a vulnerable masculine subjectivity that is embedded within distinct social frameworks. He uses the ideologies surrounding superheroes to create a dialogue between the reality of everyday life and the discourses that frame those experiences. Superheroes are resourceful, disciplined and righteous. They are sites of strength, moral virtue, creation and control. They often have super-powers, super-human strength, agility or speed that enables them to exist apart from regular humans. They occupy spaces removed from everyday life. However, their separateness from these realities is contrary to real men's experiences. Like the phallus, there is a gulf between the superhero ideology that men are supposed to embody and the reality of lived experience. Nevertheless there remains a constant struggle to build and rebuild the male body to the pinnacle of (super)masculine prowess. Superman is framed within the mind/body binary quite clearly. The control he exercises over his body reifies his calm and disciplined mind. His powerful physique, "represents in vividly graphic detail the masculinity, the confidence, the power that personifies the ideal of phallic masculinity" (Brown n.pag). His control extends across his self and out into the world. Rollins embraces this control through his own self-empowering rhetoric that litters his lyrics, spoken word and concert performances. He also most clearly embodies the Superman ideology through a life-long attention to bodybuilding. Introduced to weightlifting as a teenager, Rollins incorporates the Superman ideology into his subjectivity. He has been referred to as the "tattooed, muscled Ubermensch of serious rawk" (geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Palms/4396/hrf.htm). He works his muscles to rebuild his identity after a disaffiliated, Ritalin-addicted childhood spent bouncing between divorced parents. The processes of disciplining his body and empowering the self are made clear through his relationship to his body and to the weights. Rollins believes in extending himself to his limits and beyond. Bodybuilding is the mattering map Rollins uses to construct a sense of self. He uses it to define who he is and to build his self-esteem. For example,"time away from the Iron makes my mind and body degenerate. I turn on myself and wallow in thick depression that makes me unable to function. The body shuts my mind down. The Iron is the best anti-depressant I have ever found. No better way to fight weakness than with strength. Fight degeneration with generation" (Rollins 257). In his embrace of the embodied power of Superman and the building mechanisms of weightlifting he is able to repair and regenerate his sense of self. He is able to transform himself into something new and different, thereby exercising power as an agent of change. This ethic of rebuilding hails an earlier time when control over the body needed to reestablish the coherent corporeality of damaged men within a culture. World War One redefined popular consciousness of men's bodies as the mechanisation of warfare ripped limbs from torsos and severed the relationship between a disciplined mind and the controlled body. Rebuilding battered bodies The first widespread conflict to use guns, shells and tanks produced the first evidence of neurasthenia, or shell shock (Carden-Coyne n.pag). Faith in evolution and human improvement was shaken to its core with the appearance of physically and emotionally broken masculinity. Men's bodies were dismembered and disabled - their minds were tortured. As a result Carden-Coyne argues, [t]he first world war significantly undermined confidence in the male instinct, by demonstrating that the primitive energies of the male body (virility, physical strength and aggression) were no match for modern technological warfare. A process of healing was needed to rebuild a masculinity of control and strength in these men. Faith in progress needed to be renegotiated and the damaged minds and bodies of men mended. Bodybuilding was seen as the most complete demonstration of embodied control. It required discipline and strength and so required the mind to order the body. Bodybuilding was embraced after World War One to repair the fissures in war-ravaged masculinity. It served, "to shape corporeal borders…against the sense of decay and uncertainty that permeated the 'air' of modernity" (Carden-Coyne n.pag). The strong body created a strong mind and bodybuilding in the post-war period also helped to more popularly render images of heroes. War heroes could be more easily framed in musculature. In popular culture, heroes shifted from aristocratic figures such as the Scarlet Pimpernel, to more everyday men. By 1938 the emergence of Superman comics positioned the ordinary-like man as superhero (Bridwell 6). The hard body had the capacity to make the ordinary man exceptional. Indeed, the superheroes of the twentieth century like "Tarzan, Conan, James Bond" (Connell 6) all depict a resilience and similar competence over all aspects of their lives. However as men's authority has been increasingly challenged within our society, embodied strength has increased in Superman to mirror the changes in the lives of these men. Postmodern paychecks World War Two also tore men's bodies apart. However with this war, the machine was reinscribed as saving rather than taking lives on the battlefield (Fussell 3). The development of the atomic bomb was attributed to, and celebrated as, man's ability to create and conquer anything (Easlea 90). By 1950 Superman comics depicted the man of steel withstanding a nuclear blast thereby validating the superiority and resilience of white, western masculinity and embodied hardness over the weak Others (Bridwell 10). Nevertheless World War Two chewed through men's bodies at an imperceptible rate. Despite the rhetoric of heroism and technological superiority, the reality of everyday battle was broken bodies. The ideology of the superhero served to mask the realities of this war. Despite the damage to the corporeal form, the heroic mythology of masculine identity served to reify a coherent embodiment and a clear mind. The mobilisation of this masculine myth masked the erosion of legitimate male power within culture. This resonates into the postwar period where a whole series of structural changes to the social landscape have radically redefined our social reality. The mechanisms men have used to define themselves have decayed. The rising empowerment of women, gay men and black men have problematised the centrality of white, heterosexual men in our culture (Faludi 40). They are no longer able to easily occupy a stable, silent centre in our society. As a result, there has been an attempt to reclaim the body and reclaim the competency that serves to define men as masculine. The rising interest in men's health and physical fitness on the whole, has lead to a reanimation of the superman figure. Men's bodies are getting harder and larger. Part animal, part machine Henry Rollins embraces the contradictions in heroic masculinity. He demonstrates an embodied control that is regimented through an incorporation of Nietzschean will. In this way he embodies the relationship between the superhero and contemporary masculinity. However, Rollins' Superman is not an Ubermensch (Nietzsche 230). He performs a problematic masculinity. As a result, Rollins deconstructs the masculine hierarchy by subverting, not only his own performance of masculinity, but all such performances. The "Liar" music video by The Rollins Band features Rollins in the Superman role. In this clip he interrogates different levels of truth and reality. For him, neither Clark Kent nor Superman is a valid model on which to base effective performances of masculinity. Neither of these men are heroes, rather they are simulations. The version of Superman that Rollins constructs is authoritative and totalitarian. He depicts a corrupt figure and flawed leader who is not in control and is struggling to meet the demands of his role. This performance of Superman deconstructs the myth of the male hero. For Rollins, this hero does not exist - or if he does - he is a "Liar". Henry Rollins both embodies and deconstructs the superhero identity. He forms a nexus around which contradictory ideologies in masculinity collide and are reworked into a radically subversive critique of the relationship between men and superheroes. For Rollins the superhero mentality masks the complicated ideologies men must negotiate everyday in which they are subjectified within contradictory discursive frameworks that demand multifarious performances. Rollins strips back the layers of masculine power to reveal the ways in which men are embedded within social structures that reflect and affect their reality. In this self-reflexive critique he performs Superman in playful, resistive ways. This Superman does not exist apart from everyday life, but is entrenched within its frameworks that can only produce flawed performances of a social ideal. For Rollins a superhero embodiment cannot wipe away the discourses that encircle men within our culture but is rather a reflection of the extent to which men are embedded within them. In negotiating the difficulties in masculinity, Henry Rollins deprioritises men's roles as super-human agents of control, creation and change within a society. He calls into question the validity of masculine power and reifies the contradictions in manhood. He hails an ultimately resilient and empowered dominant masculinity within a deconstructive rhetoric. He is mobilising a moment within our culture where men must redefine who they are. This redefinition must be less concerned with how men can reclaim the power they are currently mourning in the 'crisis of masculinity'. If we are to make lasting change within a Cultural Studies framework then it cannot end, but only begin, with the articulation of a diversity of voices. Deep, structural change can only be made if we examine how a powerful position is able to occupy an unproblematised node of commonsense. Men need to redefine who they are, their bodies, their minds and their performances to position a masculinity that is not separate from society, but that can exist coherently within it. References Bridwell, Nathan. "Introduction." Superman from the Thirties to the Seventies. New York: Bonanza Books, 1971. Brown, James. "Comic book masculinity and the new black superhero." African American Review. 33.1 (1999): expanded academic database [n.pag]. Accessed 9.4.2001. Buchbinder, David. Performance Anxieties. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1998. Carden-Coyne, Anna. "Classical heroism and modern life: Body building and masculinity in the early twentieth century." Journal of Australian Studies. (December 1999): expanded academic database [n.pag] Accessed 9.4.2001. Connell, Robert. "Masculinity, violence and war" in P. Patton and R. Poole (eds.), War/Masculinity. Sydney: Intervention Publications, 1985. Cranny-Francis, Ann. The Body in the Text. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1995. Descartes, Rene. Key Philosphical Writings. (Translated by E. Haldane and G. Ross) Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 1997. Easlea, Brian. Fathering the Unthinkable. London: Pluto Press, 1983. Faludi, Susan. Stiffed: The Betrayal of the Modern Man. London: Chatto and Windus, 1999. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic. London: Routledge, 1973. ---Madness and Civlisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. London: Routledge, 1965. ---The Order of Things. London: Vintage, 1972. Fussell, Paul. Wartime: Understanding of Behaviour in the Second World War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Haywood, Christina and Mac an Ghaill, Martin. "Schooling masculinities" in Martin Mac an Ghaill (ed.), Understanding Masculinities. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1996. "I Have Zero Sex Appeal." Melody Maker. (March 29 1997). geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Palms/4396/hrf/htm. Accessed July 30 2001. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche Volume 4, The Will to Power, Book One and Two. O. Levy (ed.), London: George Allen and Unwin, 1924. Pollack, William. Real Boys. Melbourne: Scribe Publications, 1999. Robinson, Doug. No Less a Man. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University, 1994. Rollins, Henry. "The Iron." The Portable Henry Rollins. London: Phoenix House, 1997.
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Subramanian, Shreerekha Pillai. "Malayalee Diaspora in the Age of Satellite Television." M/C Journal 14, no. 2 (May 1, 2011). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.351.

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This article proposes that the growing popularity of reality television in the southernmost state of India, Kerala – disseminated locally and throughout the Indian diaspora – is not the product of an innocuous nostalgia for a fast-disappearing regional identity but rather a spectacular example of an emergent ideology that displaces cultural memory, collective identity, and secular nationalism with new, globalised forms of public sentiment. Further, it is arguable that this g/local media culture also displaces hard-won secular feminist constructions of gender and the contemporary modern “Indian woman.” Shows like Idea Star Singer (hereafter ISS) (Malayalam [the language spoken in Kerala] television’s most popular reality television series), based closely on American Idol, is broadcast worldwide to dozens of nations including the US, the UK, China, Russia, Sri Lanka, and several nations in the Middle East and the discussion that follows attempts both to account for this g/local phenomenon and to problematise it. ISS concentrates on staging the diversity and talent of Malayalee youth and, in particular, their ability to sing ‘pitch-perfect’, by inviting them to perform the vast catalogue of traditional Malayalam songs. However, inasmuch as it is aimed at both a regional and diasporic audience, ISS also allows for a diversity of singing styles displayed through the inclusion of a variety of other songs: some sung in Tamil, some Hindi, and some even English. This leads us to ask a number of questions: in what ways are performers who subscribe to regional or global models of televisual style rewarded or punished? In what ways are performers who exemplify differences in terms of gender, sexuality, religion, class, or ability punished? Further, it is arguable that this show—packaged as the “must-see” spectacle for the Indian diaspora—re-imagines a traditional past and translates it (under the rubric of “reality” television) into a vulgar commodification of both “classical” and “folk” India: an India excised of radical reform, feminists, activists, and any voices of multiplicity clamouring for change. Indeed, it is my contention that, although such shows claim to promote women’s liberation by encouraging women to realise their talents and ambitions, the commodification of the “stars” as televisual celebrities points rather to an anti-feminist imperial agenda of control and domination. Normalising Art: Presenting the Juridical as Natural Following Foucault, we can, indeed, read ISS as an apparatus of “normalisation.” While ISS purports to be “about” music, celebration, and art—an encouragement of art for art’s sake—it nevertheless advocates the practice of teaching as critiqued by Foucault: “the acquisition and knowledge by the very practice of the pedagogical activity and a reciprocal, hierarchised observation” (176), so that self-surveillance is built into the process. What appears on the screen is, in effect, the presentation of a juridically governed body as natural: the capitalist production of art through intense practice, performance, and corrective measures that valorise discipline and, at the end, produce ‘good’ and ‘bad’ subjects. The Foucauldian isomorphism of punishment with obligation, exercise with repetition, and enactment of the law is magnified in the traditional practice of music, especially Carnatic, or the occasional Hindustani refrain that separates those who come out of years of training in the Gury–Shishya mode (teacher–student mode, primarily Hindu and privileged) from those who do not (Muslims, working-class, and perhaps disabled students). In the context of a reality television show sponsored by Idea Cellular Ltd (a phone company with global outposts), the systems of discipline are strictly in line with the capitalist economy. Since this show depends upon the vast back-catalogue of film songs sung by playback singers from the era of big studio film-making, it may be seen to advocate a mimetic rigidity that ossifies artistic production, rather than offering encouragement to a new generation of artists who might wish to take the songs and make them their own. ISS, indeed, compares and differentiates the participants’ talents through an “opaque” system of evaluations which the show presents as transparent, merit-based and “fair”: as Foucault observes, “the perpetual penalty that traverses all points and supervises every instant in the disciplinary institutions compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes. In short, it normalizes” (183). On ISS, this evaluation process (a panel of judges who are renowned singers and composers, along with a rotating guest star, such as an actor) may be seen as a scopophilic institution where training and knowledge are brought together, transforming “the economy of visibility into the exercise of power” (187). The contestants, largely insignificant as individuals but seen together, at times, upon the stage, dancing and singing and performing practised routines, represent a socius constituting the body politic. The judges, enthroned on prominent and lush seats above the young contestants, the studio audience and, in effect, the show’s televised transnational audience, deliver judgements that “normalise” these artists into submissive subjectivity. In fact, despite the incoherence of the average judgement, audiences are so engrossed in the narrative of “marks” (a clear vestige of the education and civilising mission of the colonial subject under British rule) that, even in the glamorous setting of vibrating music, artificial lights, and corporate capital, Indians can still be found disciplining themselves according to the values of the West. Enacting Keraleeyatham for Malayalee Diaspora Ritty Lukose’s study on youth and gender in Kerala frames identity formations under colonialism, nationalism, and capitalism as she teases out ideas of resistance and agency by addressing the complex mediations of consumption or consumptive practices. Lukose reads “consumer culture as a complex site of female participation and constraint, enjoyment and objectification” (917), and finds the young, westernised female as a particular site of consumer agency. According to this theory, the performers on ISS and the show’s MC, Renjini Haridas, embody this body politic. The young performers all dress in the garb of “authentic identity”, sporting saris, pawaadu-blouse, mundum-neertha, salwaar-kameez, lehenga-choli, skirts, pants, and so on. This sartorial diversity is deeply gendered and discursively rich; the men have one of two options: kurta-mundu or some such variation and the pant–shirt combination. The women, especially Renjini (educated at St Theresa’s College in Kochi and former winner of Ms Kerala beauty contest) evoke the MTV DJs of the mid-1990s and affect a pidgin-Malayalam spliced with English: Renjini’s cool “touching” of the contestants and airy gestures remove her from the regional masses; and yet, for Onam (festival of Kerala), she dresses in the traditional cream and gold sari; for Id (high holy day for Muslims), she dresses in some glittery salwaar-kameez with a wrap on her head; and for Christmas, she wears a long dress. This is clearly meant to show her ability to embody different socio-religious spheres simultaneously. Yet, both she and all the young female contestants speak proudly about their authentic Kerala identity. Ritty Lukose spells this out as “Keraleeyatham.” In the vein of beauty pageants, and the first-world practice of indoctrinating all bodies into one model of beauty, the youngsters engage in exuberant performances yet, once their act is over, revert back to the coy, submissive docility that is the face of the student in the traditional educational apparatus. Both left-wing feminists and BJP activists write their ballads on the surface of women’s bodies; however, in enacting the chethu or, to be more accurate, “ash-push” (colloquialism akin to “hip”) lifestyle advocated by the show (interrupted at least half a dozen times by lengthy sequences of commercials for jewellery, clothing, toilet cleaners, nutritious chocolate bars, hair oil, and home products), the participants in this show become the unwitting sites of a large number of competing ideologies. Lukose observes the remarkable development from the peasant labor-centered Kerala of the 1970s to today’s simulacrum: “Keraleeyatham.” When discussing the beauty contests staged in Kerala in the 1990s, she discovers (through analysis of the dress and Sanskrit-centred questions) that: “Miss Kerala must be a naden pennu [a girl of the native/rural land] in her dress, comportment, and knowledge. Written onto the female bodies of a proliferation of Miss Keralas, the nadu, locality itself, becomes transportable and transposable” (929). Lukose observes that these women have room to enact their passions and artistry only within the metadiegetic space of the “song and dance” spectacle; once they leave it, they return to a modest, Kerala-gendered space in which the young female performers are quiet to the point of inarticulate, stuttering silence (930). However, while Lukose’s term, Keraleeyatham, is useful as a sociological compass, I contend that it has even more complex connotations. Its ethos of “Nair-ism” (Nayar was the dominant caste identity in Kerala), which could have been a site of resistance and identity formation, instead becomes a site of nationalist, regional linguistic supremacy arising out of Hindu imaginary. Second, this ideology could not have been developed in the era of pre-globalised state-run television but now, in the wake of globalisation and satellite television, we see this spectacle of “discipline and punish” enacted on the world stage. Thus, although I do see a possibility for a more positive Keraleeyatham that is organic, inclusive, and radical, for the moment we have a hegemonic, exclusive, and hierarchical statist approach to regional identity that needs to be re-evaluated. Articulating the Authentic via the Simulacrum Welcome to the Malayalee matrix. Jean Baudrillard’s simulacrum is our entry point into visualising the code of reality television. In a state noted for its distinctly left-leaning politics and Communist Party history which underwent radical reversal in the 1990s, the political front in Kerala is still dominated by the LDF (Left Democratic Front), and resistance to the state is an institutionalised and satirised daily event, as marked by the marchers who gather and stop traffic at Palayam in the capital city daily at noon. Issues of poverty and corporate disenfranchisement plague the farming and fishing communities while people suffer transportation tragedies, failures of road development and ferry upkeep on a daily basis. Writers and activists rail against imminent aerial bombing of Maoists insurgent groups, reading in such statist violence repression of the Adivasi (indigenous) peoples scattered across many states of eastern and southern India. Alongside energy and ration supply issues, politics light up the average Keralaite, and yet the most popular “reality” television show reflects none of it. Other than paying faux multicultural tribute to all the festivals that come and go (such as Id, Diwaali, Christmas, and Kerala Piravi [Kerala Day on 1 November]), mainly through Renjini’s dress and chatter, ISS does all it can to remove itself from the turmoil of the everyday. Much in the same way that Bollywood cinema has allowed the masses to escape the oppressions of “the everyday,” reality television promises speculative pleasure produced on the backs of young performers who do not even have to be paid for their labour. Unlike Malayalam cinema’s penchant for hard-hitting politics and narratives of unaccounted for, everyday lives in neo-realist style, today’s reality television—with its excessive sound and light effects, glittering stages and bejewelled participants, repeat zooms, frontal shots, and artificial enhancements—exploits the paradox of hyper-authenticity (Rose and Wood 295). In her useful account of America’s top reality show, American Idol, Katherine Meizel investigates the fascination with the show’s winners and the losers, and the drama of an American “ideal” of diligence and ambition that is seen to be at the heart of the show. She writes, “It is about selling the Dream—regardless of whether it results in success or failure—and about the enactment of ideology that hovers at the edges of any discourse about American morality. It is the potential of great ambition, rather than of great talent, that drives these hopefuls and inspires their fans” (486). In enacting the global via the site of the local (Malayalam and Tamil songs primarily), ISS assumes the mantle of Americanism through the plain-spoken, direct commentaries of the singers who, like their US counterparts, routinely tell us how all of it has changed their lives. In other words, this retrospective meta-narrative becomes more important than the show itself. True to Baudrillard’s theory, ISS blurs the line between actual need and the “need” fabricated by the media and multinational corporations like Idea Cellular and Confident Group (which builds luxury homes, primarily for the new bourgeoisie and nostalgic “returnees” from the diaspora). The “New Kerala” is marked, for the locals, by extravagant (mostly unoccupied) constructions of photogenic homes in garish colours, located in the middle of chaos: the traditional nattumparathu (countryside) wooden homes, and traffic congestion. The homes, promised at the end of these shows, have a “value” based on the hyper-real economy of the show rather than an actual utility value. Yet those who move from the “old” world to the “new” do not always fare well. In local papers, the young artists are often criticised for their new-found haughtiness and disinclination to visit ill relatives in hospital: a veritable sin in a culture that places the nadu and kin above all narratives of progress. In other words, nothing quite adds up: the language and ideologies of the show, espoused most succinctly by its inarticulate host, is a language that obscures its distance from reality. ISS maps onto its audience the emblematic difference between “citizen” and “population”. Through the chaotic, state-sanctioned paralegal devices that allow the slum-dwellers and other property-less people to dwell in the cities, the voices of the labourers (such as the unions) have been silenced. It is a nation ever more geographically divided between the middle-classes which retreat into their gated neighbourhoods, and the shanty-town denizens who are represented by the rising class of religio-fundamentalist leaders. While the poor vote in the Hindu hegemony, the middle classes text in their votes to reality shows like ISS. Partha Chatterjee speaks of the “new segregated and exclusive spaces for the managerial and technocratic elite” (143) which is obsessed by media images, international travel, suburbanisation, and high technology. I wish to add to this list the artificially created community of ISS performers and stars; these are, indeed, the virtual and global extension of Chatterjee’s exclusive, elite communities, decrying the new bourgeois order of Indian urbanity, repackaged as Malayalee, moneyed, and Nayar. Meanwhile, the Hindu Right flexes its muscle under the show’s glittery surface: neither menacing nor fundamentalist, it is now “hip” to be Hindu. Thus while, on the surface, ISS operates according to the cliché, musicinu mathamilla (“music has no religion”), I would contend that it perpetuates a colonising space of Hindu-nationalist hegemony which standardises music appreciation, flattens music performance into an “art” developed solely to serve commercial cinema, and produces a dialectic of Keraleeyatham that erases the multiplicities of its “real.” This ideology, meanwhile, colonises from within. The public performance plays out in the private sphere where the show is consumed; at the same time, the private is inserted into the public with SMS calls that ultimately help seal the juridicality of the show and give the impression of “democracy.” Like the many networks that bring the sentiments of melody and melancholy to our dinner table, I would like to offer you this alternative account of ISS as part of a bid for a more vociferous, and critical, engagement with reality television and its modes of production. Somehow we need to find a way to savour, once again, the non-mimetic aspects of art and to salvage our darkness from the glitter of the “normalising” popular media. References Baudrillard, Jean. The Mirror of Production. Trans. Mark Poster. New York: Telos, 1975. ———. Selected Writings. Ed. Mark Poster. California: Stanford UP, 1988. Chatterjee, Partha. The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1995. Lukose, Ritty. “Consuming Globalization: Youth and Gender in Kerala, India.” Journal of Social History 38.4 (Summer 2005): 915-35. Meizel, Katherine. “Making the Dream a Reality (Show): The Celebration of Failure in American Idol.” Popular Music and Society 32.4 (Oct. 2009): 475-88. Rose, Randall L., and Stacy L. Wood. “Paradox and the Consumption of Authenticity through Reality Television.” Journal of Consumer Research 32 (Sep. 2005): 284-96.
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40

King, Ben. "Invasion." M/C Journal 2, no. 2 (March 1, 1999). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1741.

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The pop cultural moment that most typifies the social psychology of invasion for many of us is Orson Welles's 1938 coast to coast CBS radio broadcast of Invaders from Mars, a narration based on H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds. News bulletins and scene broadcasts followed Welles's introduction, featuring, in contemporary journalistic style, reports of a "meteor" landing near Princeton, N.J., which "killed" 1500 people, and the discovery that it was in fact a "metal cylinder" containing strange creatures from Mars armed with "death rays" which would reduce all the inhabitants of the earth to space dust. Welles's broadcast caused thousands to believe that Martians were wreaking widespread havoc in New York and Jersey. New York streets were filled with families rushing to open spaces protecting their faces from the "gas raids", clutching sacred possessions and each other. Lines of communication were clogged, massive traffic jams ensued, and people evacuated their homes in a state of abject terror while armouries in neighbouring districts prepared to join in the "battle". Some felt it was a very cruel prank, especially after the recent war scare in Europe that featured constant interruption of regular radio programming. Many of the thousands of questions directed at police in the hours following the broadcast reflected the concerns of the residents of London and Paris during the tense days before the Munich agreement. The media had undergone that strange metamorphosis that occurs when people depend on it for information that affects themselves directly. But it was not a prank. Three separate announcements made during the broadcast stressed its fictional nature. The introduction to the program stated "the Columbia Broadcasting System and its affiliated stations present Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air in The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells", as did the newspaper listing of the program "Today: 8:00-9:00 -- Play: H.G. Wells's 'War of the Worlds' -- WABC". Welles, rather innocently, wanted to play with the conventions of broadcasting and grant his audience a bit of legitimately unsettling, though obviously fictitious, verisimilitude. There are not too many instances in modern history where we can look objectively at such incredible reactions to media soundbytes. That evening is a prototype for the impact media culture can have on an audience whose minds are prepped for impending disaster. The interruption of scheduled radio invoked in the audience a knee-jerk response that dramatically illustrated the susceptibility of people to the discourse of invasion, as well as the depth of the relationship between the audience and media during tense times. These days, the media itself are often regarded as the invaders. The endless procession of information that grows alongside technology's ability to present it is feared as much as it is loved. In the current climate of information and technological overload, invasion has swum from the depths of our unconscious paranoia and lurks impatiently in the shallows. There is so much invasion and so much to feel invaded about: the war in Kosovo (one of over sixty being fought today) is getting worse with the benevolence and force of the UN dwindling in a cloud of bureaucracy and failed talks, Ethiopia and Eritrea are going at it again, the ideology of the Olympic Games in Sydney has gone from a positive celebration of the millennium to a revenue-generating boys club of back scratchers, Internet smut is still everywhere, and most horrifically, Baywatch came dangerously close to being shot on location on the East Coast of Australia. In this issue of M/C we take a look at literal and allegorical invasions from a variety of cleverly examined aspects of our culture. Firstly, Axel Bruns takes a look a subtle invasion that is occurring on the Web in "Invading the Ivory Tower: Hypertext and the New Dilettante Scholars". He points to the way the Internet's function as a research tool is changing the nature of academic writing due to its interactivity and potential to be manipulated in a way that conventional written material cannot. Axel investigates the web browser's ability to invade the text and the elite world of academic publishing via the format of hypertext itself rather than merely through ideas. Felicity Meakins's article Shooting Baywatch: Resisting Cultural Invasion examines media and community reactions to the threat of having the television series Baywatch shot on Australian beaches. Felicity looks at the cultural cringe that has surrounded the relationship between Australia and America over the years and is manifested by our response to American accents in the media. American cultural imperialism has come to signify a great deal in the dwindling face of Aussie institutions like mateship and egalitarianism. In a similarly driven piece called "A Decolonising Doctor? British SF Invasion Narratives", Nick Caldwell investigates some of the implications of the "Britishness" of the cult television series Doctor Who, where insularity and cultural authority are taken to extremes during the ubiquitous intergalactic invasions. Paul Mc Cormack's article "Screen II: The Invasion of the Attention Snatchers" turns from technologically superior invaders to an invasion by technology itself -- he considers how the television has irreversibly invaded our lives and claimed a dominant place in the domestic sphere. Recently, the (Internet-connected) personal computer has begun a similar invasion: what space will it eventually claim? Sandra Brunet's "Is Sustainable Tourism Really Sustainable? Protecting the Icon in the Commodity at Sites of Invasion" explores the often forgotten Kangaroo Island off the coast of South Australia. She looks at ways in which the image of the island is constructed by the government and media for eco-tourism and how faithful this representation is to the farmers, fishermen and other inhabitants of the island. Paul Starr's article "Special Effects and the Invasive Camera: Enemy of the State and The Conversation" rounds off the issue with a look at the troubled relationship between cutting-edge special effects in Hollywood action movies and the surveillance technologies that recent movies such as Enemy of the State show as tools in government conspiracies. The depiction of high-tech gadgetry as 'cool' and 'evil' at the same time, he writes, leads to a collapse of meaning. This issue of M/C succeeds in pointing out sites of invasion in unusual places, continuing the journal's tradition of perception in the face of new media culture. I hope you enjoy this second issue of the second volume: 'invasion'. Ben King 'Invasion' Issue Editor Citation reference for this article MLA style: Ben King. "Editorial: 'Invasion'." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.2 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9903/edit.php>. Chicago style: Ben King, "Editorial: 'Invasion'," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 2 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9903/edit.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Ben King. (1999) Editorial: 'invasion'. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(2). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9903/edit.php> ([your date of access]).
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41

Antonio, Amy Brooke. "Writing Women: The Virtual Cookbook and Pinterest." M/C Journal 16, no. 3 (June 23, 2013). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.644.

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This article aims to throw new light on the representation of women who cook as necessarily perpetuating a domestic ideology in which women are confined to the home. Traditionally, cookbooks written by women have disseminated both cooking information and rules and practices for running an effective household, which have contributed to the ideologies that underpin female domestic practice. However, the evolution of social media platforms, such as Pinterest, which enable the user to actively select and visually display culinary masterpieces on a digital pinboard, have provided a forum for women’s voices and a novel means of expression that is available to the amateur cook and professional chef alike. This article will argue that the creation of a virtual cookbook, via Pinterest, is a means of empowering women, which is central to the lexicon of feminist debate. Rather than being the victims of domestic servitude, this article will argue that the women who create virtual cookbooks do so by choice, and as a means of pleasing the self, irrespective of achieving domestic or marital bliss. Cookbooks “provide a range of insights into everyday life, such as attitudes towards food, domestic economy and the roles of women” (Wessell and Wishart 1). The proliferation of the cooking industry in the form of television programs, celebrity chefs, and social media channels seemingly devoted to the display of culinary artefacts, has transformed what was once a domestic chore into a professional practice. Traditionally, cookbooks that contained information on both the preparation and cooking of food and advice on how to run an effective household were more like guidebooks for women on how to achieve domestic and marital happiness. According to Jenny Lawson, well-known and highly acclaimed cookbooks such as Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management were published as a reaction against eating-out, which was drawing men away from the home. “This aligned a cultural expectation of female domestic servitude with gaining the love and respect of a male partner” (Lawson 348) and reinforced the now familiar proverb that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. More recently, How to be a Domestic Goddess highlights the distance between feminism and cooking (Lawson). The book, according to Joanne Hollows, equates baking with a false consciousness and suggests that baking is not far removed from domestic enslavement. This conceptualisation of the-woman-in-the-kitchen is intimately bound to the views of second-wave feminists who believe that cooking is a sign of traditional femininity, which is at odds with a feminist identity (Ashley et al.). This argument situates cooking and food within debates about the sexual division of labour and positions women as providers of food for others. “Women frequently use food to offer pleasure to family members, yet have difficulty experiencing food as pleasurable themselves, particularly in a domestic context” (Hollows 184). Anne Murcott’s It’s a Pleasure to Cook for Him argues that the choice of what to cook and eat is invariably done in the service of some others. Marjorie DeVault similarly asserts that it is the relationship between cooking and caring that cements the relationship between cooking and femininity, while Charles and Kerr conclude that because women fear gaining weight, they deprive themselves of pleasure and so prepare food for others to give pleasure. Women fundamentally cook to please, and please men in particular (Charles and Kerr). For Charles and Kerr, the pleasure that women get from cooking for men is a by-product of the pleasure they receive from caring for others. The notion that women cook out of a desire to care for others is an argument left over from the patrilineal delineations outlined in Biblical texts. Western civilisation has drawn its leading metaphors and definitions of gender from the Bible, specifically the Book of Genesis. As a result of the Fall, which proceeded Adam and Eve’s sin in the Garden of Eden, the sexual division of labour emerged. Adam was instructed to work, and Eve was punished with the pain of childbearing and motherhood. Traditionalist assumptions posited that the assignment of different tasks and roles to men and women was evidence of the naturalness of their respective responsibilities. This explanation focused on women’s reproductive capacity and reiterated motherhood—central to which was an obligation to care for and nurture others—as a woman’s chief goal, which was necessary for the continued promulgation of the species (Lerner). In the nineteenth century, the credibility of this argument was questioned and a scientific explanation was used to justify patriarchy and women’s place within the home. Darwinian theories continued to define women according to their maternal role and justified their exclusion from economic and educational opportunities on the grounds that this was in the best interests of the survival of the species (Lerner). This contributed to the prevailing “cult of domesticity” that was the hallmark of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. According to this ideological position, true women were supposed to devote themselves to unpaid domestic labour and refrain from paid work. Each of these positions served to reinforce women’s responsibility within the home and, for centuries, women have participated in their own subordination by internalising the proscriptive belief that they exist solely to propagate the human race. If caring and nurturing others is the condition on which cooking is deemed to be “feminine”, then cooking to please oneself should negate the argument that cooking is a “feminine” activity. This article will suggest that the creation of virtual cookbooks on Pinterest enables women to resist societies continued attempts at defining femininity in increasingly restrictive ways. It will be argued that women who create virtual cookbooks do so by choice and as a means of pleasing the self. The representation of celebrity chef Nigella Lawson will be used to elucidate the reconceptualisation of cooking as a pleasurable activity. She is able to distinguish between leisure time and work-related culinary activity and, in so doing, she is represented as enjoying cooking in and of itself, not as a domestic responsibility. Building on this notion of cooking as pleasure, it will be argued that women who create virtual cookbooks on Pinterest do so by choice, for both personal and professional reasons, and irrespective of a desire to please others. Whilst Pinterest has raised significant debate as to whether or not it actually perpetuates gender stereotypes traditionally associated with cooking and femininity, this article will suggest that the desire to cook and a belief in equal rights for women are not mutually exclusive. For the purpose of this article, feminism and contemporary femininity are articulated around the idea of choice. Women are not choosing to create virtual cookbooks on Pinterest for the benefit of men. They are choosing to embrace this platform and are using it as a means of creative expression and an outlet of empowerment that transforms cooking from a domestic chore into an activity with public significance. This “promotes a new female relationship with food, enabling the other sides of femininity, those subversive, darker, abject possibilities to surface” (Lawson, Food Legacies 361), which ultimately grants women moments of agency and transcendence through cooking. Nigella Lawson, who cooks out of a desire for solitary pleasure, epitomises the changing nature of the cookbook throughout the last century. In Feast, she advocates the need for self-satisfaction and independence: “At its most basic, perhaps, is the quiet satisfaction of knowing one is fending for oneself, the instrument of one’s own survival” (4). According to Elisabeth Nathanson, “thinking about cooking as personally satisfying, rather than as a task associated with taking care of one’s family, denotes a new articulation of contemporary femininity” (318). For the purpose of this article then, feminism simply refers to the notion of choice and pleasing the self. Cooking is no longer an activity conducted solely by women in the privacy of their own home, for the purpose of caring for others. Female celebrity chefs, such as Nigella Lawson, draw attention to a particular ethos of pleasing the self as opposed to others. According to Jenny Lawson, Nigella Lawson renegotiates her cooking duties for her own cause (Food Legacies). She disrupts notions of female care and responsibility by “embracing self-satisfaction and indulgence” (Lawson, Disturbing 82) and, in this way, she negotiates a feminine identity that “hovers between the polarised figures of ‘the feminist’ and ‘the housewife’” (Hollows 180). According to Hollows, Nigella Lawson’s work offers an alternative way of imagining women’s relationship to food, which is based on the pleasure of cooking and eating, rather than pleasing others. The Nigella Lawson cooking philosophy posits that cooking should be pleasurable and should start from a desire to eat. Lawson is represented as aware of what she wants to eat and she does not defer to the preferences of others. She separates cooking from the notion of “cooking for”, which allows us to appreciate cooking as a pleasure in, and of, itself. It should be noted, however, that Nigella Lawson is a successful businesswoman who has made her success from her status as a woman-in-the-kitchen. Her programs are carefully constructed to show her prioritising leisure time and cooking to please the self (Lawson, Food Legacies). Although Lawson has encouraged women to cook to please, this is not the sole reason why she cooks. Her brand identity depends on her appearing as though she cooks for pleasure and yet she is undoubtedly, at least in part, driven by economic motivations. Although the cookbooks of the past have promoted a particular lifestyle for other women to emulate (Lawson, Disturbing), they nevertheless represented elements of the private sphere where women were able to wield authority and bequeath their knowledge to other women (Theophano). Throughout history, Janet Theophano notes, women have shared their prize recipes as a vehicle for making themselves visible. As early as the eighteenth century, cookbooks were a way for women to gain economic independence and authority. The formation of cookbooks provided women with an opportunity to enter the professional domain of culinary writing, which served to remove cooking from domestic life. Flora Pell’s Our Cookery Book, first published in 1916, blurred the boundary between the notion of private and public spheres. Pell advocated that a woman’s place was in the home and she upheld socially conservative gender roles and yet she was, paradoxically, a career woman who remained unmarried until she was sixty years old (Wessell and Wishart). Pell’s cookbook reinforced stereotypes of the woman-in-the-kitchen and domestic goddess, whose primary occupation in life was to please others and men in particular. The emergence of Pinterest in 2010, however, a virtual platform that enables the user to post and share images of whatever they choose, has further transformed cooking from a “chore without glamour or choice” (Wessell and Brien 87) into an optional, albeit pleasurable, form of play. This innovative platform has opened up new possibilities for users, more than 70 per cent of whom are women, to find novel means of personal expression via the creation of virtual cookbooks. Pinterest has been self-defined as a space that is perfect for recipe sharing, which is not dissimilar to the practice of compiling family recipes into a book and cutting and pasting extracts from a magazine into one’s own personal collection. Pinterest, however, enables the user to share this collection with others and transforms what has been seen as a private practice into a public activity. Pinterest has transformed the creation of a personal recipe collection from a domestic chore into a commercial venture, which is evident when scrolling through endless pins promoting catering businesses and cake-baking services. Pinterest is, potentially, a great tool for enhancing and even structuring the user’s culinary dreams. The platform has not been without its critics who are polarized, between those who believe that women who use this tool to curate digital recipe collections are in some way undoing or even killing feminism by pinning images that reinforce stereotypes of femininity, and those who believe that because women are pinning these images by choice, it defies traditional notions of femininity previously attached to cooking. The former view posits that female users of Pinterest are pinning images that are aligned with the “traditional” woman, such as cooking, do-it-yourself home-wares and crafts, rather than the “modern” woman who does not want to be seen as different from a man. Advocates of Pinterest, in contrast, argue that the platform is a natural path for reform, noting, in particular, the increased opportunity it provides women for voice and creative expression. This latter position supports the central premise of this article, which suggests that a woman can have both an interest in cooking and a belief in equal rights for women. In the words of Antonia Hayes “we have the luxury of choosing what sort of woman we want to be, including the freedom to be both a feminist and a connoisseur of cauliflower pizzas” (online). Pinterest celebrates the fact that there is no right or wrong way to be a woman. As a platform, Pinterest allows women to rewrite the meanings that have been assigned to them as passive individuals, devoid of a voice, and provides women with the opportunity for expression through the self-publication of digital cookbooks. In Amy Odell’s How Pinterest is Killing Feminism, she labels Pinterest “the Mormon housewife’s image bookmarking service of choice”, which creates a “Stepford Wife” version of identity that is hollow and uncreative. Odell argues that the user-generated content, which is made up predominantly of recipes, home décor, fitness, and fashion, is evidence that women are conditioned to “seek out the retrograde, materialistic content that women’s magazines have been hawking for decades” (online). She further asserts that, “adult women are still conditioned to think about diet and exercise and looking beautiful … so it makes sense that they’d pin these things” (online). She takes particular issue with the diet recipes on Pinterest, such as low-carbohydrate pizza crusts made with crumbed cauliflower, which she argues are indicative of women’s internalised belief that they must be thin in order to be beautiful. This is an image that she argues is synonymous with women’s magazines and Pinterest alike, which she sees as being similarly inundated with images of unrealistic body types. The difference, however, which Odell overlooks, is that the content on Pinterest does not bombard us like a magazine or billboard. The content on Pinterest is user-generated; it is uploaded by our fellow Pinterest users. Women are curating their own experience on the site. They are not victims but actors. Odell’s stance is the antithesis of a feminist argument as it makes women the victims of the media. In order to buy into her argument, you have to assume that all female Pinterest users are one dimensional and easily led, which hardly sounds like a powerful feminist position. Odell’s argument also neglects the role played by male chefs, such as Jamie Oliver, whose recipe books are attempting to curb the obesity epidemic, by focusing on quick and easy meals that are also nutritionally beneficial, hence their respective titles underlining that they are “30-minute” and “15-minute meals”. Given that the latter involves the atempted preparation of an entire meal in 15-minutes, you can rest assured that you will be eating salads that can easily be tossed together in this stringent time frame, rather than sweets and treats. That being said, no one is accusing Oliver of being a victim of the media’s unrealistic portrayal of the human body simply because he advocates the cooking of healthy recipes. This begs the question as to why women who pin healthy recipes, such as cauliflower pizza crusts, and create virtual cookbooks are necessarily victims of the unattainable body syndrome. Odell suggests that cooking and feminism are mutually exclusive and she makes the uncomfortable suggestion that by pinning diet recipes that perpetuate negative body image, and posting and disseminating pretty pictures of culinary delights, women are, as the title of her post suggests, killing feminism. Odell’s diatribe is being met with fierce opposition by Pinterest users who identify as post-feminists. Post-feminists posit that gender equality has been achieved and that women are free to choose their lifestyles in both public and private worlds (Nathanson). This article builds on the premise that pinners perform post-feminism and that women curate visual manifestations of their capacity to “have-it-all”; choice, empowerment and licensed transgression. Nathan Jurgenson, the author of “Pinterest and Feminism” argues that Pinterest is giving women what they want, which is the whole point. In the same way that Nigella Lawson cooks out of a desire for solitary pleasure, women are using Pinterest as a form of leisure time entertainment that is separate from work time. The creation of virtual cookbooks on Pinterest is a pastime that women engage in selfishly. It is an escape from their domestic responsibilities because it is something that they do for themselves and no one else. Amelia McDonnell acknowledges that she wants to spend time drooling over a recipe that she intends to make on the weekend and invites Odell to share the pork chops she made—the recipe for which she found on Pinterest and cooked for herself because she is single and happy. Her satirical response to Odell reinforces the notion of self-satisfaction and independence that accompanies cooking. Like Nigella Lawson, who promotes a fantasy of domestic pleasure on her own terms, both women renegotiate what it means to be a public woman disseminating cooking practices (Lawson, Food Legacies). Antonia Hayes rejects Odell’s premise that Pinterest is killing feminism and accuses the latter of perpetuating the sexism that continues to pervade society. Hayes acknowledges that you can have an interest in cooking and interior design, whilst simultaneously espousing beliefs in equal rights for women: “Kitchen porn and feminism aren’t mutually exclusive” (online). As a self-proclaimed feminist and Pinterest user, with an ever-expanding virtual cookbook, it is easy to resent Odell’s remark that pinning photos of cauliflower crust pizzas is setting the women’s movement back decades. As Hayes asserts “it’s just as damaging to tell women that they’re killing feminism by liking pretty pictures as it is to tell them that in order to be feminine you must dress, act, look a certain way. It’s the same constructed view albeit from a different angle” (online). Self-proclaimed feminists like Odell, who tell us that “only a certain kind of woman (the Pinterest-rejecting, domesticity hater) deserves equal rights and respect” (online), are actually perpetuating the sexism that they are trying to combat. In so doing, they pose questions about notions of agency, choice and desire, which speak to longstanding debates and dilemmas in feminist theory.Since when did it become anti-feminist to like something that is visually pleasing? I have a Pinterest account and I am a feminist. However, if recent criticism on Pinterest is to be believed, these two things are antithetical. If traditional femininity posits that women should be passive, submissive, and silent, then the very nature of Pinterest, which requires the user to actively choose, post, and share images with others, is the very antithesis of these traits. Pinterest users, who create virtual cookbooks out of a desire to please the self, irrespective of any domestic obligations, are active, dominant and communicative. Women are choosing to publish cookbooks in their leisure time, which stands in direct to contrast to the productive demands of work time. Pinterest, a platform renowned for its capacity to render even the most productive individuals into serial procrastinators and time wasters, is the epitome of a leisure time activity. Rather than cooking for their husbands and children, as is their “heaven-appointed mission,” according to Flora Pell, women are scrolling through pins, creating a virtual cookbook of the culinary delights that they will make for themselves to enjoy.ReferencesAshley, Bob, Joanne Hollows, Steve Jones, and Ben Taylor. Food and Cultural Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. Charles, Nickie, and Marrion Kerr. Women, Food and Families: Power, Status, Love, Anger. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1988. DeVault, Marjorie. Feeding the Family: The Social Organisation of Caring as Gendered Work. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1994. Hayes, Antonio. “Pinterest and the Modern Feminist.” 2012. 5 Apr. 2013 ‹http://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/life/7803000/Pinterest-and-the-modern-feminist› Hollows, Joanne. “Feeling Like a Domestic Goddess: Post-feminism and Cooking.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 6.2 (2003): 179–202. Jurgenson, Nathan. “Pinterest and Feminism.” The Society Pages. 5 Mar. 2012. 25 Mar. 2013 ‹http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2012/03/05/pinterest-and-feminism› Lawson, Jenny. “Disturbing Objects: Making, Eating and Watching Food in Popular Culture And Performance Practice.” Platform 3.2 (2008): 79–99. Lawson, Jenny. “Food Legacies: Playing the Culinary Feminine.” Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 21.3 (2011): 337–66. Lawson, Nigella. How to Be a Domestic Goddess: Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking. New York: Hyperion, 2001. Lawson, Nigella Feast: Food to Celebrate Life. London: Chatto & Windus, 2006. Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Patriarchy. London: Oxford UP, 1986. McDonnell, Amelia. “The Soapbox: Oh Please, Pinterest Isn’t ‘Killing’ Feminism.” 2 Oct. 2012. 28 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.thefrisky.com/2012-10-02/the-soapbox-oh-please-pinterest-isnt-killing-feminism› Murcott, Anne. It’s A Pleasure To Cook For Him: Food, Mealtimes and Gender In Some South Wales Households. London: Heinemann, 1983. Nathanson, Elizabeth. “As Easy As Pie: Cooking Shows, Domestic Efficiency and Postfeminist Temporality.” Television and New Media 10.4 (2009): 311–30. Odell, Amy. “How Pinterest is Killing Feminism.” 2012. 19 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.buzzfeed.com/amyodell/how-pinterest-is-killing-feminism›. Oliver, Jamie. Jamie's 30-Minute Meals. London: Michael Joseph, 2010. ---. Jamie’s 15-Minute Meals. London: Michael Joseph, 2012. Theophano, Janet. Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives Through the Cookbooks They Wrote. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Wessell, Adele, and Wishart, Alison. “Recipes for Reading Culinary Heritage: Flora Pell and Her Cookery Book.” reCollections 1.5 (2010): 1–19. Wessell, Adele, and Brien, Donna. “Australian Cookbooks For Young Readers: from Flora Pell to Junior Masterchef.” The International Journal for the Practice and Theories of Writing for Children and Children’s Literature 3.1 (2011): 76–90.
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Hill, Wes. "Revealing Revelation: Hans Haacke’s “All Connected”." M/C Journal 23, no. 4 (August 12, 2020). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1669.

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In the 1960s, especially in the West, art that was revelatory and art that was revealing operated at opposite ends of the aesthetic spectrum. On the side of the revelatory we can think of encounters synonymous with modernism, in which an expressionist painting was revelatory of the Freudian unconscious, or a Barnett Newman the revelatory intensity of the sublime. By contrast, the impulse to reveal in 1960s art was rooted in post-Duchampian practice, implicating artists as different as Lynda Benglis and Richard Hamilton, who mined the potential of an art that was without essence. If revelatory art underscored modernism’s transcendental conviction, critically revealing work tested its discursive rules and institutional conventions. Of course, nothing in history happens as neatly as this suggests, but what is clear is how polarized the language of artistic revelation was throughout the 1960s. With the international spread of minimalism, pop art, and fluxus, provisional reveals eventually dominated art-historical discourse. Aesthetic conviction, with its spiritual undertones, was haunted by its demystification. In the words of Donald Judd: “a work needs only to be interesting” (184).That art galleries could be sites of timely socio-political issues, rather than timeless intuitions undersigned by medium specificity, is one of the more familiar origin stories of postmodernism. Few artists symbolize this shift more than Hans Haacke, whose 2019 exhibition All Connected, at the New Museum, New York, examined the legacy of his outward-looking work. Born in Germany in 1936, and a New Yorker since 1965, Haacke has been linked to the term “institutional critique” since the mid 1980s, after Mel Ramsden’s coining in 1975, and the increased recognition of kindred spirits such as Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Michael Asher, Martha Rosler, Robert Smithson, Daniel Buren, and Marcel Broodthaers. These artists have featured in books and essays by the likes of Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster, and Yve-Alain Bois, but they are also known for their own contributions to art discourse, producing hybrid conceptions of the intellectual postmodern artist as historian, critic and curator.Haacke was initially fascinated by kinetic sculpture in the early 1960s, taking inspiration from op art, systems art, and machine-oriented research collectives such as Zero (Germany), Gruppo N (Italy) and GRAV (France, an acronym of Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel). Towards the end of the decade he started to produce more overtly socio-political work, creating what would become a classic piece from this period, Gallery-Goers’ Birthplace and Residence Profile, Part 1 (1969). Here, in a solo exhibition at New York’s Howard Wise Gallery, the artist invited viewers to mark their birthplaces and places of residence on a map. Questioning the statistical demography of the Gallery’s avant-garde attendees, the exhibition anticipated the meticulous sociological character of much of his practice to come, grounding New York art – the centre of the art world – in local, social, and economic fabrics.In the forward to the catalogue of All Connected, New Museum Director Lisa Philips claims that Haacke’s survey exhibition provided a chance to reflect on the artist’s prescience, especially given the flourishing of art activism over the last five or so years. Philips pressed the issue of why no other American art institution had mounted a retrospective of his work in three decades, since his previous survey, Unfinished Business, at the New Museum in 1986, at its former, and much smaller, Soho digs (8). It suggests that other institutions have deemed Haacke’s work too risky, generating too much political heat for them to handle. It’s a reputation the artist has cultivated since the Guggenheim Museum famously cancelled his 1971 exhibition after learning his intended work, Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System as of May 1, 1971 (1971) involved research into dubious New York real estate dealings. Guggenheim director Thomas Messer defended the censorship at the time, going so far as to describe it as an “alien substance that had entered the art museum organism” (Haacke, Framing 138). Exposé was this substance Messer dare not name: art that was too revealing, too journalistic, too partisan, and too politically viscid. (Three years later, Haacke got his own back with Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Board of Trustees, 1974, exposing then Guggenheim board members’ connections to the copper industry in Chile, where socialist president Salvador Allende had just been overthrown with US backing.) All Connected foregrounded these institutional reveals from time past, at a moment in 2019 when the moral accountability of the art institution was on the art world’s collective mind. The exhibition followed high-profile protests at New York’s Whitney Museum and Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the Louvre, and the British Museum. These and other arts organisations have increasingly faced pressures, fostered by social media, to end ties with unethical donors, sponsors, and board members, with activist groups protesting institutional affiliations ranging from immigration detention centre management to opioid and teargas manufacturing. An awareness of the limits of individual agency and autonomy undoubtedly defines this era, with social media platforms intensifying the encumbrances of individual, group, and organisational identities. Hans Haacke, Gallery-Goers’ Birthplace and Residence Profile, Part 1, 1969 Hans Haacke, Gallery-Goers’ Birthplace and Residence Profile, Part 2, 1969-71Unfinished BusinessUnderscoring Haacke’s activist credentials, Philips describes him as “a model of how to live ethically and empathetically in the world today”, and as a beacon of light amidst the “extreme political and economic uncertainty” of the present, Trump-presidency-calamity moment (7). This was markedly different to how Haacke’s previous New York retrospective, Unfinished Business, was received, which bore the weight of being the artist’s first museum exhibition in New York following the Guggenheim controversy. In the catalogue to Haacke’s 1986 exhibition, then New Museum director Marcia Tucker introduced his work as a challenge, cautiously claiming that he poses “trenchant questions” and that the institution accepts “the difficulties and contradictions” inherent to any museum staging of his work (6).Philips’s and Tucker’s distinct perspectives on Haacke’s practice – one as heroically ethical, the other as a sobering critical challenge – exemplify broader shifts in the perception of institutional critique (the art of the socio-political reveal) over this thirty-year period. In the words of Pamela M. Lee, between 1986 and 2019 the art world has undergone a “seismic transformation”, becoming “a sphere of influence at once more rapacious, acquisitive, and overweening but arguably more democratizing and ecumenical with respect to new audiences and artists involved” (87). Haacke’s reputation over this period has taken a similar shift, from him being a controversial opponent of art’s autonomy (an erudite postmodern conceptualist) to a figurehead for moral integrity and cohesive artistic experimentation.As Rosalyn Deutsche pointed out in the catalogue to Haacke’s 1986 exhibition, a potential trap of such a retrospective is that, through biographical positioning, Haacke might be seen as an “exemplary political artist” (210). With this, the specific political issues motivating his work would be overshadowed by the perception of the “great artist” – someone who brings single-issue politics into the narrative of postmodern art, but at the expense of the issues themselves. This is exactly what Douglas Crimp discovered in Unfinished Business. In a 1987 reflection on the show, Crimp argued that, when compared with an AIDS-themed display, Homo Video, staged at the New Museum at the same time, reviewers of Haacke’s exhibition tended to analyse his politics “within the context of the individual artist’s body of work … . Political issues became secondary to the aesthetic strategies of the producer” (34). Crimp, whose activism would be at the forefront of his career in subsequent years, was surprised at how Homo Video and Unfinished Business spawned different readings. Whereas works in the former exhibition tended to be addressed in terms of the artists personal and partisan politics, Haacke’s prompted reflection on the aesthetics-politics juxtaposition itself. For Crimp, the fact that “there was no mediation between these two shows”, spoke volumes about the divisions between political and activist art at the time.New York Times critic Michael Brenson, reiterating a comment made by Fredric Jameson in the catalogue for Unfinished Business, describes the timeless appearance of Haacke’s work in 1986, which is “surprising for an artist whose work is in some way about ideology and history” (Brenson). The implication is that the artist gives a surprisingly long aesthetic afterlife to the politically specific – to ordinarily short shelf-life issues. In this mode of critical postmodernism in which we are unable to distinguish clearly between intervening in and merely reproducing the logic of the system, Haacke is seen as an astute director of an albeit ambiguous push and pull between political specificity and aesthetic irreducibility, political externality and the internalist mode of art about art. Jameson, while granting that Haacke’s work highlights the need to reinvent the role of the “ruling class” in the complex, globalised socio-economic situation of postmodernism, claims that it does so as representative of the “new intellectual problematic” of postmodernism. Haacke, according Jameson, stages postmodernism’s “crisis of ‘mapping’” whereby capitalism’s totalizing, systemic forms are “handled” (note that he avoids “critiqued” or “challenged”) by focusing on their manifestation through particular (“micro-public”) institutional means (49, 50).We can think of the above examples as constituting the postmodern version of Haacke, who frames very specific political issues on the one hand, and the limitless incorporative power of appropriative practice on the other. To say this another way, Haacke, circa 1986, points to specific sites of power struggle at the same time as revealing their generic absorption by an art-world system grown accustomed to its “duplicate anything” parameters. For all of his political intent, the artistic realm, totalised in accordance with the postmodern image, is ultimately where many thought his gestures remained. The philosopher turned art critic Arthur Danto, in a negative review of Haacke’s exhibition, portrayed institutional critique as part of an age-old business of purifying art, maintaining that Haacke’s “crude” and “heavy-handed” practice is blind to how art institutions have always relied on some form of critique in order for them to continue being respected “brokers of spirit”. This perception – of Haacke’s “external” critiques merely serving to “internally” strengthen existing art structures – was reiterated by Leo Steinberg. Supportively misconstruing the artist in the exhibition catalogue, Steinberg writes that Haacke’s “political message, by dint of dissonance, becomes grating and shrill – but shrill within the art context. And while its political effectiveness is probably minimal, its effect on Minimal art may well be profound” (15). Hans Haacke, MOMA Poll, 1970 All ConnectedSo, what do we make of the transformed reception of Haacke’s work since the late 1980s: from a postmodern ouroboros of “politicizing aesthetics and aestheticizing politics” to a revelatory exemplar of art’s moral power? At a period in the late 1980s when the culture wars were in full swing and yet activist groups remained on the margins of what would become a “mainstream” art world, Unfinished Business was, perhaps, blindingly relevant to its times. Unusually for a retrospective, it provided little historical distance for its subject, with Haacke becoming a victim of the era’s propensity to “compartmentalize the interpretive registers of inside and outside and the terms corresponding to such spatial­izing coordinates” (Lee 83).If commentary surrounding this 2019 retrospective is anything to go by, politics no longer performs such a parasitic, oppositional or even dialectical relation to art; no longer is the political regarded as a real-world intrusion into the formal, discerning, longue-durée field of aesthetics. The fact that protests inside the museum have become more visible and vociferous in recent years testifies to this shift. For Jason Farrago, in his review of All Connected for the New York Times, “the fact that no person and no artwork stands alone, that all of us are enmeshed in systems of economic and social power, is for anyone under 40 a statement of the obvious”. For Alyssa Battistoni, in Frieze magazine, “if institutional critique is a practice, it is hard to see where it is better embodied than in organizing a union, strike or boycott”.Some responders to All Connected, such as Ben Lewis, acknowledge how difficult it is to extract a single critical or political strategy from Haacke’s body of work; however, we can say that, in general, earlier postmodern questions concerning the aestheticisation of the socio-political reveal no longer dominates the reception of his practice. Today, rather than treating art and politics are two separate but related entities, like form is to content, better ideas circulate, such as those espoused by Bruno Latour and Jacques Rancière, for whom what counts as political is not determined by a specific program, medium or forum, but by the capacity of any actor-network to disrupt and change a normative social fabric. Compare Jameson’s claim that Haacke’s corporate and museological tropes are “dead forms” – through which “no subject-position speaks, not even in protest” (38) – with Battistoni’s, who, seeing Haacke’s activism as implicit, asks the reader: “how can we take the relationship between art and politics as seriously as Haacke has insisted we must?”Crimp’s concern that Unfinished Business perpetuated an image of the artist as distant from the “political stakes” of his work did not carry through to All Connected, whose respondents were less vexed about the relation between art and politics, with many noting its timeliness. The New Museum was, ironically, undergoing its own equity crisis in the months leading up to the exhibition, with newly unionised staff fighting with the Museum over workers’ salaries and healthcare even as it organised to build a new $89-million Rem Koolhaas-designed extension. Battistoni addressed these disputes at-length, claiming the protests “crystallize perfectly the changes that have shaped the world over the half-century of Haacke’s career, and especially over the 33 years since his last New Museum exhibition”. Of note is how little attention Battistoni pays to Haacke’s artistic methods when recounting his assumed solidarity with these disputes, suggesting that works such as Creating Consent (1981), Helmosboro Country (1990), and Standortkultur (Corporate Culture) (1997) – which pivot on art’s public image versus its corporate umbilical cord – do not convey some special aesthetico-political insight into a totalizing capitalist system. Instead, “he has simply been an astute and honest observer long enough to remind us that our current state of affairs has been in formation for decades”.Hans Haacke, News, 1969/2008 Hans Haacke, Wide White Flow, 1967/2008 Showing Systems Early on in the 1960s, Haacke was influenced by the American critic, artist, and curator Jack Burnham, who in a 1968 essay, “Systems Esthetics” for Artforum, inaugurated the loose conceptualist paradigm that would become known as “systems art”. Here, against Greenbergian formalism and what he saw as the “craft fetishism” of modernism, Burnham argues that “change emanates, not from things, but from the way things are done” (30). Burnham thought that emergent contemporary artists were intuitively aware of the importance of the systems approach: the significant artist in 1968 “strives to reduce the technical and psychical distance between his artistic output and the productive means of society”, and pays particular attention to relationships between organic and non-organic systems (31).As Michael Fried observed of minimalism in his now legendary 1967 essay Art and Objecthood, this shift in sixties art – signalled by the widespread interest in the systematic – entailed a turn towards the spatial, institutional, and societal contexts of receivership. For Burnham, art is not about “material entities” that beautify or modify the environment; rather, art exists “in relations between people and between people and the components of their environment” (31). At the forefront of his mind was land art, computer art, and research-driven conceptualist practice, which, against Fried, has “no contrived confines such as the theatre proscenium or picture frame” (32). In a 1969 lecture at the Guggenheim, Burnham confessed that his research concerned not just art as a distinct entity, but aesthetics in its broadest possible sense, declaring “as far as art is concerned, I’m not particularly interested in it. I believe that aesthetics exists in revelation” (Ragain).Working under the aegis of Burnham’s systems art, Haacke was shaken by the tumultuous and televised politics of late-1960s America – a time when, according to Joan Didion, a “demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community” (41). Haacke cites Martin Luther King’s assassination as an “incident that made me understand that, in addition to what I had called physical and biological systems, there are also social systems and that art is an integral part of the universe of social systems” (Haacke, Conversation 222). Haacke created News (1969) in response to this awareness, comprising a (pre-Twitter) telex machine that endlessly spits out live news updates from wire services, piling up rolls and rolls of paper on the floor of the exhibition space over the course of its display. Echoing Burnham’s idea of the artist as a programmer whose job is to “prepare new codes and analyze data”, News nonetheless presents the museum as anything but immune from politics, and technological systems as anything but impersonal (32).This intensification of social responsibility in Haacke’s work sets him apart from other, arguably more reductive techno-scientific systems artists such as Sonia Sheridan and Les Levine. The gradual transformation of his ecological and quasi-scientific sculptural experiments from 1968 onwards could almost be seen as making a mockery of the anthropocentrism described in Fried’s 1967 critique. Here, Fried claims not only that the literalness of minimalist work amounts to an emphasis on shape and spatial presence over pictorial composition, but also, in this “theatricality of objecthood” literalness paradoxically mirrors (153). At times in Fried’s essay the minimalist art object reads as a mute form of sociality, the spatial presence filled by the conscious experience of looking – the theatrical relationship itself put on view. Fried thought that viewers of minimalism were presented with themselves in relation to the entire world as object, to which they were asked not to respond in an engaged formalist sense but (generically) to react. Pre-empting the rise of conceptual art and the sociological experiments of post-conceptualist practice, Fried, unapprovingly, argues that minimalist artists unleash an anthropomorphism that “must somehow confront the beholder” (154).Haacke, who admits he has “always been sympathetic to so-called Minimal art” (Haacke, A Conversation 26) embraced the human subject around the same time that Fried’s essay was published. While Fried would have viewed this move as further illustrating the minimalist tendency towards anthropomorphic confrontation, it would be more accurate to describe Haacke’s subsequent works as social-environmental barometers. Haacke began staging interactions which, however dry or administrative, framed the interplays of culture and nature, inside and outside, private and public spheres, expanding art’s definition by looking to the social circulation and economy that supported it.Haacke’s approach – which seems largely driven to show, to reveal – anticipates the viewer in a way that Fried would disapprove, for whom absorbed viewers, and the irreduction of gestalt to shape, are the by-products of assessments of aesthetic quality. For Donald Judd, the promotion of interest over conviction signalled scepticism about Clement Greenberg’s quality standards; it was a way of acknowledging the limitations of qualitative judgement, and, perhaps, of knowledge more generally. In this way, minimalism’s aesthetic relations are not framed so much as allowed to “go on and on” – the artists’ doubt about aesthetic value producing this ongoing temporal quality, which conviction supposedly lacks.In contrast to Unfinished Business, the placing of Haacke’s early sixties works adjacent to his later, more political works in All Connected revealed something other than the tensions between postmodern socio-political reveal and modernist-formalist revelation. The question of whether to intervene in an operating system – whether to let such a system go on and on – was raised throughout the exhibition, literally and metaphorically. To be faced with the interactions of physical, biological, and social systems (in Condensation Cube, 1963-67, and Wide White Flow, 1967/2008, but also in later works like MetroMobiltan, 1985) is to be faced with the question of change and one’s place in it. Framing systems in full swing, at their best, Haacke’s kinetic and environmental works suggest two things: 1. That the systems on display will be ongoing if their component parts aren’t altered; and 2. Any alteration will alter the system as a whole, in minor or significant ways. Applied to his practice more generally, what Haacke’s work hinges on is whether or not one perceives oneself as part of its systemic relations. To see oneself implicated is to see beyond the work’s literal forms and representations. Here, systemic imbrication equates to moral realisation: one’s capacity to alter the system as the question of what to do. Unlike the phenomenology-oriented minimalists, the viewer’s participation is not always assumed in Haacke’s work, who follows a more hermeneutic model. In fact, Haacke’s systems are often circular, highlighting participation as a conscious disruption of flow rather than an obligation that emanates from a particular work (148).This is a theatrical scenario as Fried describes it, but it is far from an abandonment of the issue of profound value. In fact, if we accept that Haacke’s work foregrounds intervention as a moral choice, it is closer to Fried’s own rallying cry for conviction in aesthetic judgement. As Rex Butler has argued, Fried’s advocacy of conviction over sceptical interest can be understood as dialectical in the Hegelian sense: conviction is the overcoming of scepticism, in a similar way that Geist, or spirit, for Hegel, is “the very split between subject and object, in which each makes the other possible” (Butler). What is advanced for Fried is the idea of “a scepticism that can be remarked only from the position of conviction and a conviction that can speak of itself only as this scepticism” (for instance, in his attempt to overcome his scepticism of literalist art on the basis of its scepticism). Strong and unequivocal feelings in Fried’s writing are informed by weak and indeterminate feeling, just as moral conviction in Haacke – the feeling that I, the viewer, should do something – emerges from an awareness that the system will continue to function fine without me. In other words, before being read as “a barometer of the changing and charged atmosphere of the public sphere” (Sutton 16), the impact of Haacke’s work depends upon an initial revelation. It is the realisation not just that one is embroiled in a series of “invisible but fundamental” relations greater than oneself, but that, in responding to seemingly sovereign social systems, the question of our involvement is a moral one, a claim for determination founded through an overcoming of the systemic (Fry 31).Haacke’s at once open and closed works suit the logic of our algorithmic age, where viewers have to shift constantly from a position of being targeted to one of finding for oneself. Peculiarly, when Haacke’s online digital polls in All Connected were hacked by activists (who randomized statistical responses in order to compel the Museum “to redress their continuing complacency in capitalism”) the culprits claimed they did it in sympathy with his work, not in spite of it: “we see our work as extending and conversing with Haacke’s, an artist and thinker who has been a source of inspiration to us both” (Hakim). This response – undermining done with veneration – is indicative of the complicated legacy of his work today. Haacke’s influence on artists such as Tania Bruguera, Sam Durant, Forensic Architecture, Laura Poitras, Carsten Höller, and Andrea Fraser has less to do with a particular political ideal than with his unique promotion of journalistic suspicion and moral revelation in forms of systems mapping. It suggests a coda be added to the sentiment of All Connected: all might not be revealed, but how we respond matters. Hans Haacke, Large Condensation Cube, 1963–67ReferencesBattistoni, Alyssa. “After a Contract Fight with Its Workers, the New Museum Opens Hans Haacke’s ‘All Connected’.” Frieze 208 (2019).Bishara, Hakim. “Hans Haacke Gets Hacked by Activists at the New Museum.” Hyperallergic 21 Jan. 2010. <https://hyperallergic.com/538413/hans-haacke-gets-hacked-by-activists-at-the-new-museum/>.Brenson, Michael. “Art: In Political Tone, Works by Hans Haacke.” New York Times 19 Dec. 1988. <https://www.nytimes.com/1986/12/19/arts/artin-political-tone-worksby-hans-haacke.html>.Buchloh, Benjamin. “Hans Haacke: Memory and Instrumental Reason.” Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry. Cambridge: MIT P, 2000.Burnham, Jack. “Systems Esthetics.” Artforum 7.1 (1968).Butler, Rex. “Art and Objecthood: Fried against Fried.” Nonsite 22 (2017). <https://nonsite.org/feature/art-and-objecthood>.Carrion-Murayari, Gary, and Massimiliano Gioni (eds.). Hans Haacke: All Connected. New York: Phaidon and New Museum, 2019.Crimp, Douglas. “Strategies of Public Address: Which Media, Which Publics?” In Hal Foster (ed.), Discussions in Contemporary Culture, no. 1. Washington: Bay P, 1987.Danto, Arthur C. “Hans Haacke and the Industry of Art.” In Gregg Horowitz and Tom Huhn (eds.), The Wake of Art: Criticism, Philosophy, and the Ends of Taste. London: Routledge, 1987/1998.Didion, Joan. The White Album. London: 4th Estate, 2019.Farago, Jason. “Hans Haacke, at the New Museum, Takes No Prisoners.” New York Times 31 Oct. 2019. <https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/31/arts/design/hans-haacke-review-new-museum.html>.Fried, Michael. “Art and Objecthood.” Artforum 5 (June 1967).Fry, Edward. “Introduction to the Work of Hans Haacke.” In Hans Haacke 1967. Cambridge: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2011.Glueck, Grace. “The Guggenheim Cancels Haacke’s Show.” New York Times 7 Apr. 1971.Gudel, Paul. “Michael Fried, Theatricality and the Threat of Skepticism.” Michael Fried and Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2018.Haacke, Hans. Hans Haacke: Framing and Being Framed: 7 Works 1970-5. Halifax: P of the Nova Scotia College of Design and New York: New York UP, 1976.———. “Hans Haacke in Conversation with Gary Carrion-Murayari and Massimiliano Gioni.” Hans Haacke: All Connected. New York: Phaidon and New Museum, 2019.Haacke, Hans, et al. “A Conversation with Hans Haacke.” October 30 (1984).Haacke, Hans, and Brian Wallis (eds.). Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, Mass: MIT P, 1986.“Haacke’s ‘All Connected.’” Frieze 25 Oct. 2019. <https://frieze.com/article/after-contract-fight-its-workers-new-museum-opens-hans-haackes-all-connected>.Judd, Donald. “Specific Objects.” Complete Writings 1959–1975. Halifax: P of the Nova Scotia College of Design and New York: New York UP, 1965/1975.Lee, Pamela M. “Unfinished ‘Unfinished Business.’” Hans Haacke: All Connected. New York: Phaidon P Limited and New Museum, 2019.Ragain, Melissa. “Jack Burnham (1931–2019).” Artforum 19 Mar. 2019. <https://www.artforum.com/passages/melissa-ragain-on-jack-burnham-78935>.Sutton, Gloria. “Hans Haacke: Works of Art, 1963–72.” Hans Haacke: All Connected. New York: Phaidon P Limited and New Museum, 2019.Tucker, Marcia. “Director’s Forward.” Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, Mass: MIT P, 1986.
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Kabir, Nahid. "Why I Call Australia ‘Home’?" M/C Journal 10, no. 4 (August 1, 2007). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2700.

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Introduction I am a transmigrant who has moved back and forth between the West and the Rest. I was born and raised in a Muslim family in a predominantly Muslim country, Bangladesh, but I spent several years of my childhood in Pakistan. After my marriage, I lived in the United States for a year and a half, the Middle East for 5 years, Australia for three years, back to the Middle East for another 5 years, then, finally, in Australia for the last 12 years. I speak Bengali (my mother tongue), Urdu (which I learnt in Pakistan), a bit of Arabic (learnt in the Middle East); but English has always been my medium of instruction. So where is home? Is it my place of origin, the Muslim umma, or my land of settlement? Or is it my ‘root’ or my ‘route’ (Blunt and Dowling)? Blunt and Dowling (199) observe that the lives of transmigrants are often interpreted in terms of their ‘roots’ and ‘routes’, which are two frameworks for thinking about home, homeland and diaspora. Whereas ‘roots’ might imply an original homeland from which people have scattered, and to which they might seek to return, ‘routes’ focuses on mobile, multiple and transcultural geographies of home. However, both ‘roots’ and ‘routes’ are attached to emotion and identity, and both invoke a sense of place, belonging or alienation that is intrinsically tied to a sense of self (Blunt and Dowling 196-219). In this paper, I equate home with my root (place of birth) and route (transnational homing) within the context of the ‘diaspora and belonging’. First I define the diaspora and possible criteria of belonging. Next I describe my transnational homing within the framework of diaspora and belonging. Finally, I consider how Australia can be a ‘home’ for me and other Muslim Australians. The Diaspora and Belonging Blunt and Dowling (199) define diaspora as “scattering of people over space and transnational connections between people and the places”. Cohen emphasised the ethno-cultural aspects of the diaspora setting; that is, how migrants identify and position themselves in other nations in terms of their (different) ethnic and cultural orientation. Hall argues that the diasporic subjects form a cultural identity through transformation and difference. Speaking of the Hindu diaspora in the UK and Caribbean, Vertovec (21-23) contends that the migrants’ contact with their original ‘home’ or diaspora depends on four factors: migration processes and factors of settlement, cultural composition, structural and political power, and community development. With regard to the first factor, migration processes and factors of settlement, Vertovec explains that if the migrants are political or economic refugees, or on a temporary visa, they are likely to live in a ‘myth of return’. In the cultural composition context, Vertovec argues that religion, language, region of origin, caste, and degree of cultural homogenisation are factors in which migrants are bound to their homeland. Concerning the social structure and political power issue, Vertovec suggests that the extent and nature of racial and ethnic pluralism or social stigma, class composition, degree of institutionalised racism, involvement in party politics (or active citizenship) determine migrants’ connection to their new or old home. Finally, community development, including membership in organisations (political, union, religious, cultural, leisure), leadership qualities, and ethnic convergence or conflict (trends towards intra-communal or inter-ethnic/inter-religious co-operation) would also affect the migrants’ sense of belonging. Using these scholarly ideas as triggers, I will examine my home and belonging over the last few decades. My Home In an initial stage of my transmigrant history, my home was my root (place of birth, Dhaka, Bangladesh). Subsequently, my routes (settlement in different countries) reshaped my homes. In all respects, the ethno-cultural factors have played a big part in my definition of ‘home’. But on some occasions my ethnic identification has been overridden by my religious identification and vice versa. By ethnic identity, I mean my language (mother tongue) and my connection to my people (Bangladeshi). By my religious identity, I mean my Muslim religion, and my spiritual connection to the umma, a Muslim nation transcending all boundaries. Umma refers to the Muslim identity and unity within a larger Muslim group across national boundaries. The only thing the members of the umma have in common is their Islamic belief (Spencer and Wollman 169-170). In my childhood my father, a banker, was relocated to Karachi, Pakistan (then West Pakistan). Although I lived in Pakistan for much of my childhood, I have never considered it to be my home, even though it is predominantly a Muslim country. In this case, my home was my root (Bangladesh) where my grandparents and extended family lived. Every year I used to visit my grandparents who resided in a small town in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan). Thus my connection with my home was sustained through my extended family, ethnic traditions, language (Bengali/Bangla), and the occasional visits to the landscape of Bangladesh. Smith (9-11) notes that people build their connection or identity to their homeland through their historic land, common historical memories, myths, symbols and traditions. Though Pakistan and Bangladesh had common histories, their traditions of language, dress and ethnic culture were very different. For example, the celebration of the Bengali New Year (Pohela Baishakh), folk dance, folk music and folk tales, drama, poetry, lyrics of poets Rabindranath Tagore (Rabindra Sangeet) and Nazrul Islam (Nazrul Geeti) are distinct in the cultural heritage of Bangladesh. Special musical instruments such as the banshi (a bamboo flute), dhol (drums), ektara (a single-stringed instrument) and dotara (a four-stringed instrument) are unique to Bangladeshi culture. The Bangladeshi cuisine (rice and freshwater fish) is also different from Pakistan where people mainly eat flat round bread (roti) and meat (gosh). However, my bonding factor to Bangladesh was my relatives, particularly my grandparents as they made me feel one of ‘us’. Their affection for me was irreplaceable. The train journey from Dhaka (capital city) to their town, Noakhali, was captivating. The hustle and bustle at the train station and the lush green paddy fields along the train journey reminded me that this was my ‘home’. Though I spoke the official language (Urdu) in Pakistan and had a few Pakistani friends in Karachi, they could never replace my feelings for my friends, extended relatives and cousins who lived in Bangladesh. I could not relate to the landscape or dry weather of Pakistan. More importantly, some Pakistani women (our neighbours) were critical of my mother’s traditional dress (saree), and described it as revealing because it showed a bit of her back. They took pride in their traditional dress (shalwar, kameez, dopatta), which they considered to be more covered and ‘Islamic’. So, because of our traditional dress (saree) and perhaps other differences, we were regarded as the ‘Other’. In 1970 my father was relocated back to Dhaka, Bangladesh, and I was glad to go home. It should be noted that both Pakistan and Bangladesh were separated from India in 1947 – first as one nation; then, in 1971, Bangladesh became independent from Pakistan. The conflict between Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) and Pakistan (then West Pakistan) originated for economic and political reasons. At this time I was a high school student and witnessed acts of genocide committed by the Pakistani regime against the Bangladeshis (March-December 1971). My memories of these acts are vivid and still very painful. After my marriage, I moved from Bangladesh to the United States. In this instance, my new route (Austin, Texas, USA), as it happened, did not become my home. Here the ethno-cultural and Islamic cultural factors took precedence. I spoke the English language, made some American friends, and studied history at the University of Texas. I appreciated the warm friendship extended to me in the US, but experienced a degree of culture shock. I did not appreciate the pub life, alcohol consumption, and what I perceived to be the lack of family bonds (children moving out at the age of 18, families only meeting occasionally on birthdays and Christmas). Furthermore, I could not relate to de facto relationships and acceptance of sex before marriage. However, to me ‘home’ meant a family orientation and living in close contact with family. Besides the cultural divide, my husband and I were living in the US on student visas and, as Vertovec (21-23) noted, temporary visa status can deter people from their sense of belonging to the host country. In retrospect I can see that we lived in the ‘myth of return’. However, our next move for a better life was not to our root (Bangladesh), but another route to the Muslim world of Dhahran in Saudi Arabia. My husband moved to Dhahran not because it was a Muslim world but because it gave him better economic opportunities. However, I thought this new destination would become my home – the home that was coined by Anderson as the imagined nation, or my Muslim umma. Anderson argues that the imagined communities are “to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined” (6; Wood 61). Hall (122) asserts: identity is actually formed through unconscious processes over time, rather than being innate in consciousness at birth. There is always something ‘imaginary’ or fantasized about its unity. It always remains incomplete, is always ‘in process’, always ‘being formed’. As discussed above, when I had returned home to Bangladesh from Pakistan – both Muslim countries – my primary connection to my home country was my ethnic identity, language and traditions. My ethnic identity overshadowed the religious identity. But when I moved to Saudi Arabia, where my ethnic identity differed from that of the mainstream Arabs and Bedouin/nomadic Arabs, my connection to this new land was through my Islamic cultural and religious identity. Admittedly, this connection to the umma was more psychological than physical, but I was now in close proximity to Mecca, and to my home of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Mecca is an important city in Saudi Arabia for Muslims because it is the holy city of Islam, the home to the Ka’aba (the religious centre of Islam), and the birthplace of Prophet Muhammad [Peace Be Upon Him]. It is also the destination of the Hajj, one of the five pillars of Islamic faith. Therefore, Mecca is home to significant events in Islamic history, as well as being an important present day centre for the Islamic faith. We lived in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia for 5 years. Though it was a 2.5 hours flight away, I treasured Mecca’s proximity and regarded Dhahran as my second and spiritual home. Saudi Arabia had a restricted lifestyle for women, but I liked it because it was a Muslim country that gave me the opportunity to perform umrah Hajj (pilgrimage). However, Saudi Arabia did not allow citizenship to expatriates. Saudi Arabia’s government was keen to protect the status quo and did not want to compromise its cultural values or standard of living by allowing foreigners to become a permanent part of society. In exceptional circumstances only, the King granted citizenship to a foreigner for outstanding service to the state over a number of years. Children of foreigners born in Saudi Arabia did not have rights of local citizenship; they automatically assumed the nationality of their parents. If it was available, Saudi citizenship would assure expatriates a secure and permanent living in Saudi Arabia; as it was, there was a fear among the non-Saudis that they would have to leave the country once their job contract expired. Under the circumstances, though my spiritual connection to Mecca was strong, my husband was convinced that Saudi Arabia did not provide any job security. So, in 1987 when Australia offered migration to highly skilled people, my husband decided to migrate to Australia for a better and more secure economic life. I agreed to his decision, but quite reluctantly because we were again moving to a non-Muslim part of the world, which would be culturally different and far away from my original homeland (Bangladesh). In Australia, we lived first in Brisbane, then Adelaide, and after three years we took our Australian citizenship. At that stage I loved the Barossa Valley and Victor Harbour in South Australia, and the Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast in Queensland, but did not feel at home in Australia. We bought a house in Adelaide and I was a full time home-maker but was always apprehensive that my children (two boys) would lose their culture in this non-Muslim world. In 1990 we once again moved back to the Muslim world, this time to Muscat, Sultanate of Oman. My connection to this route was again spiritual. I valued the fact that we would live in a Muslim country and our children would be brought up in a Muslim environment. But my husband’s move was purely financial as he got a lucrative job offer in Muscat. We had another son in Oman. We enjoyed the luxurious lifestyle provided by my husband’s workplace and the service provided by the housemaid. I loved the beaches and freedom to drive my car, and I appreciated the friendly Omani people. I also enjoyed our frequent trips (4 hours flight) to my root, Dhaka, Bangladesh. So our children were raised within our ethnic and Islamic culture, remained close to my root (family in Dhaka), though they attended a British school in Muscat. But by the time I started considering Oman to be my second home, we had to leave once again for a place that could provide us with a more secure future. Oman was like Saudi Arabia; it employed expatriates only on a contract basis, and did not give them citizenship (not even fellow Muslims). So after 5 years it was time to move back to Australia. It was with great reluctance that I moved with my husband to Brisbane in 1995 because once again we were to face a different cultural context. As mentioned earlier, we lived in Brisbane in the late 1980s; I liked the weather, the landscape, but did not consider it home for cultural reasons. Our boys started attending expensive private schools and we bought a house in a prestigious Western suburb in Brisbane. Soon after arriving I started my tertiary education at the University of Queensland, and finished an MA in Historical Studies in Indian History in 1998. Still Australia was not my home. I kept thinking that we would return to my previous routes or the ‘imagined’ homeland somewhere in the Middle East, in close proximity to my root (Bangladesh), where we could remain economically secure in a Muslim country. But gradually I began to feel that Australia was becoming my ‘home’. I had gradually become involved in professional and community activities (with university colleagues, the Bangladeshi community and Muslim women’s organisations), and in retrospect I could see that this was an early stage of my ‘self-actualisation’ (Maslow). Through my involvement with diverse people, I felt emotionally connected with the concerns, hopes and dreams of my Muslim-Australian friends. Subsequently, I also felt connected with my mainstream Australian friends whose emotions and fears (9/11 incident, Bali bombing and 7/7 tragedy) were similar to mine. In late 1998 I started my PhD studies on the immigration history of Australia, with a particular focus on the historical settlement of Muslims in Australia. This entailed retrieving archival files and interviewing people, mostly Muslims and some mainstream Australians, and enquiring into relevant migration issues. I also became more active in community issues, and was not constrained by my circumstances. By circumstances, I mean that even though I belonged to a patriarchally structured Muslim family, where my husband was the main breadwinner, main decision-maker, my independence and research activities (entailing frequent interstate trips for data collection, and public speaking) were not frowned upon or forbidden (Khan 14-15); fortunately, my husband appreciated my passion for research and gave me his trust and support. This, along with the Muslim community’s support (interviews), and the wider community’s recognition (for example, the publication of my letters in Australian newspapers, interviews on radio and television) enabled me to develop my self-esteem and built up my bicultural identity as a Muslim in a predominantly Christian country and as a Bangladeshi-Australian. In 2005, for the sake of a better job opportunity, my husband moved to the UK, but this time I asserted that I would not move again. I felt that here in Australia (now in Perth) I had a job, an identity and a home. This time my husband was able to secure a good job back in Australia and was only away for a year. I no longer dream of finding a home in the Middle East. Through my bicultural identity here in Australia I feel connected to the wider community and to the Muslim umma. However, my attachment to the umma has become ambivalent. I feel proud of my Australian-Muslim identity but I am concerned about the jihadi ideology of militant Muslims. By jihadi ideology, I mean the extremist ideology of the al-Qaeda terrorist group (Farrar 2007). The Muslim umma now incorporates both moderate and radical Muslims. The radical Muslims (though only a tiny minority of 1.4 billion Muslims worldwide) pose a threat to their moderate counterparts as well as to non-Muslims. In the UK, some second- and third-generation Muslims identify themselves with the umma rather than their parents’ homelands or their country of birth (Husain). It should not be a matter of concern if these young Muslims adopt a ‘pure’ Muslim identity, providing at the same time they are loyal to their country of residence. But when they resort to terrorism with their ‘pure’ Muslim identity (e.g., the 7/7 London bombers) they defame my religion Islam, and undermine my spiritual connection to the umma. As a 1st generation immigrant, the defining criteria of my ‘homeliness’ in Australia are my ethno-cultural and religious identity (which includes my family), my active citizenship, and my community development/contribution through my research work – all of which allow me a sense of efficacy in my life. My ethnic and religious identities generally co-exist equally, but when I see some Muslims kill my fellow Australians (such as the Bali bombings in 2002 and 2005) my Australian identity takes precedence. I feel for the victims and condemn the perpetrators. On the other hand, when I see politics play a role over the human rights issues (e.g., the Tampa incident), my religious identity begs me to comment on it (see Kabir, Muslims in Australia 295-305). Problematising ‘Home’ for Muslim Australians In the European context, Grillo (863) and Werbner (904), and in the Australian context, Kabir (Muslims in Australia) and Poynting and Mason, have identified the diversity within Islam (national, ethnic, religious etc). Werbner (904) notes that in spite of the “wishful talk of the emergence of a ‘British Islam’, even today there are Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Arab mosques, as well as Turkish and Shia’a mosques”; thus British Muslims retain their separate identities. Similarly, in Australia, the existence of separate mosques for the Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Arab and Shia’a peoples indicates that Australian Muslims have also kept their ethnic identities discrete (Saeed 64-77). However, in times of crisis, such as the Salman Rushdie affair in 1989, and the 1990-1991 Gulf crises, both British and Australian Muslims were quick to unite and express their Islamic identity by way of resistance (Kabir, Muslims in Australia 160-162; Poynting and Mason 68-70). In both British and Australian contexts, I argue that a peaceful rally or resistance is indicative of active citizenship of Muslims as it reveals their sense of belonging (also Werbner 905). So when a transmigrant Muslim wants to make a peaceful demonstration, the Western world should be encouraged, not threatened – as long as the transmigrant’s allegiances lie also with the host country. In the European context, Grillo (868) writes: when I asked Mehmet if he was planning to stay in Germany he answered without hesitation: ‘Yes, of course’. And then, after a little break, he added ‘as long as we can live here as Muslims’. In this context, I support Mehmet’s desire to live as a Muslim in a non-Muslim world as long as this is peaceful. Paradoxically, living a Muslim life through ijtihad can be either socially progressive or destructive. The Canadian Muslim feminist Irshad Manji relies on ijtihad, but so does Osama bin Laden! Manji emphasises that ijtihad can be, on the one hand, the adaptation of Islam using independent reasoning, hybridity and the contesting of ‘traditional’ family values (c.f. Doogue and Kirkwood 275-276, 314); and, on the other, ijtihad can take the form of conservative, patriarchal and militant Islamic values. The al-Qaeda terrorist Osama bin Laden espouses the jihadi ideology of Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), an Egyptian who early in his career might have been described as a Muslim modernist who believed that Islam and Western secular ideals could be reconciled. But he discarded that idea after going to the US in 1948-50; there he was treated as ‘different’ and that treatment turned him against the West. He came back to Egypt and embraced a much more rigid and militaristic form of Islam (Esposito 136). Other scholars, such as Cesari, have identified a third orientation – a ‘secularised Islam’, which stresses general beliefs in the values of Islam and an Islamic identity, without too much concern for practices. Grillo (871) observed Islam in the West emphasised diversity. He stressed that, “some [Muslims were] more quietest, some more secular, some more clamorous, some more negotiatory”, while some were exclusively characterised by Islamic identity, such as wearing the burqa (elaborate veils), hijabs (headscarves), beards by men and total abstinence from drinking alcohol. So Mehmet, cited above, could be living a Muslim life within the spectrum of these possibilities, ranging from an integrating mode to a strict, militant Muslim manner. In the UK context, Zubaida (96) contends that marginalised, culturally-impoverished youth are the people for whom radical, militant Islamism may have an appeal, though it must be noted that the 7/7 bombers belonged to affluent families (O’Sullivan 14; Husain). In Australia, Muslim Australians are facing three challenges. First, the Muslim unemployment rate: it was three times higher than the national total in 1996 and 2001 (Kabir, Muslims in Australia 266-278; Kabir, “What Does It Mean” 63). Second, some spiritual leaders have used extreme rhetoric to appeal to marginalised youth; in January 2007, the Australian-born imam of Lebanese background, Sheikh Feiz Mohammad, was alleged to have employed a DVD format to urge children to kill the enemies of Islam and to have praised martyrs with a violent interpretation of jihad (Chulov 2). Third, the proposed citizenship test has the potential to make new migrants’ – particularly Muslims’ – settlement in Australia stressful (Kabir, “What Does It Mean” 62-79); in May 2007, fuelled by perceptions that some migrants – especially Muslims – were not integrating quickly enough, the Howard government introduced a citizenship test bill that proposes to test applicants on their English language skills and knowledge of Australian history and ‘values’. I contend that being able to demonstrate knowledge of history and having English language skills is no guarantee that a migrant will be a good citizen. Through my transmigrant history, I have learnt that developing a bond with a new place takes time, acceptance and a gradual change of identity, which are less likely to happen when facing assimilationist constraints. I spoke English and studied history in the United States, but I did not consider it my home. I did not speak the Arabic language, and did not study Middle Eastern history while I was in the Middle East, but I felt connected to it for cultural and religious reasons. Through my knowledge of history and English language proficiency I did not make Australia my home when I first migrated to Australia. Australia became my home when I started interacting with other Australians, which was made possible by having the time at my disposal and by fortunate circumstances, which included a fairly high level of efficacy and affluence. If I had been rejected because of my lack of knowledge of ‘Australian values’, or had encountered discrimination in the job market, I would have been much less willing to embrace my host country and call it home. I believe a stringent citizenship test is more likely to alienate would-be citizens than to induce their adoption of values and loyalty to their new home. Conclusion Blunt (5) observes that current studies of home often investigate mobile geographies of dwelling and how it shapes one’s identity and belonging. Such geographies of home negotiate from the domestic to the global context, thus mobilising the home beyond a fixed, bounded and confining location. Similarly, in this paper I have discussed how my mobile geography, from the domestic (root) to global (route), has shaped my identity. Though I received a degree of culture shock in the United States, loved the Middle East, and was at first quite resistant to the idea of making Australia my second home, the confidence I acquired in residing in these ‘several homes’ were cumulative and eventually enabled me to regard Australia as my ‘home’. I loved the Middle East, but I did not pursue an active involvement with the Arab community because I was a busy mother. Also I lacked the communication skill (fluency in Arabic) with the local residents who lived outside the expatriates’ campus. I am no longer a cultural freak. I am no longer the same Bangladeshi woman who saw her ethnic and Islamic culture as superior to all other cultures. I have learnt to appreciate Australian values, such as tolerance, ‘a fair go’ and multiculturalism (see Kabir, “What Does It Mean” 62-79). My bicultural identity is my strength. With my ethnic and religious identity, I can relate to the concerns of the Muslim community and other Australian ethnic and religious minorities. And with my Australian identity I have developed ‘a voice’ to pursue active citizenship. Thus my biculturalism has enabled me to retain and merge my former home with my present and permanent home of Australia. References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London, New York: Verso, 1983. Australian Bureau of Statistics: Census of Housing and Population, 1996 and 2001. Blunt, Alison. Domicile and Diaspora: Anglo-Indian Women and the Spatial Politics of Home. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. Home. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Cesari, Jocelyne. “Muslim Minorities in Europe: The Silent Revolution.” In John L. Esposito and Burgat, eds., Modernising Islam: Religion in the Public Sphere in Europe and the Middle East. London: Hurst, 2003. 251-269. Chulov, Martin. “Treatment Has Sheik Wary of Returning Home.” Weekend Australian 6-7 Jan. 2007: 2. Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. Seattle: University of Washington, 1997. Doogue, Geraldine, and Peter Kirkwood. Tomorrow’s Islam: Uniting Old-Age Beliefs and a Modern World. Sydney: ABC Books, 2005. Esposito, John. The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? 3rd ed. New York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Farrar, Max. “When the Bombs Go Off: Rethinking and Managing Diversity Strategies in Leeds, UK.” International Journal of Diversity in Organisations, Communities and Nations 6.5 (2007): 63-68. Grillo, Ralph. “Islam and Transnationalism.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 30.5 (Sep. 2004): 861-878. Hall, Stuart. Polity Reader in Cultural Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994. Huntington, Samuel, P. The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of World Order. London: Touchstone, 1998. Husain, Ed. The Islamist: Why I Joined Radical Islam in Britain, What I Saw inside and Why I Left. London: Penguin, 2007. Kabir, Nahid. Muslims in Australia: Immigration, Race Relations and Cultural History. London: Kegan Paul, 2005. ———. “What Does It Mean to Be Un-Australian: Views of Australian Muslim Students in 2006.” People and Place 15.1 (2007): 62-79. Khan, Shahnaz. Aversion and Desire: Negotiating Muslim Female Identity in the Diaspora. Toronto: Women’s Press, 2002. Manji, Irshad. The Trouble with Islam Today. Canada:Vintage, 2005. Maslow, Abraham. Motivation and Personality. New York: Harper, 1954. O’Sullivan, J. “The Real British Disease.” Quadrant (Jan.-Feb. 2006): 14-20. Poynting, Scott, and Victoria Mason. “The Resistible Rise of Islamophobia: Anti-Muslim Racism in the UK and Australia before 11 September 2001.” Journal of Sociology 43.1 (2007): 61-86. Saeed, Abdallah. Islam in Australia. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2003. Smith, Anthony D. National Identity. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991. Spencer, Philip, and Howard Wollman. Nationalism: A Critical Introduction. London: Sage, 2002. Vertovec, Stevens. The Hindu Diaspora: Comparative Patterns. London: Routledge. 2000. Werbner, Pnina, “Theorising Complex Diasporas: Purity and Hybridity in the South Asian Public Sphere in Britain.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 30.5 (2004): 895-911. Wood, Dennis. “The Diaspora, Community and the Vagrant Space.” In Cynthia Vanden Driesen and Ralph Crane, eds., Diaspora: The Australasian Experience. New Delhi: Prestige, 2005. 59-64. Zubaida, Sami. “Islam in Europe: Unity or Diversity.” Critical Quarterly 45.1-2 (2003): 88-98. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Kabir, Nahid. "Why I Call Australia ‘Home’?: A Transmigrant’s Perspective." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/15-kabir.php>. APA Style Kabir, N. (Aug. 2007) "Why I Call Australia ‘Home’?: A Transmigrant’s Perspective," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/15-kabir.php>.
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44

Hartman, Yvonne, and Sandy Darab. "The Power of the Wave: Activism Rainbow Region-Style." M/C Journal 17, no. 6 (September 18, 2014). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.865.

Full text
Abstract:
Introduction The counterculture that arose during the 1960s and 1970s left lasting social and political reverberations in developed nations. This was a time of increasing affluence and liberalisation which opened up remarkable political opportunities for social change. Within this context, an array of new social movements were a vital ingredient of the ferment that saw existing norms challenged and the establishment of new rights for many oppressed groups. An expanding arena of concerns included the environmental damage caused by 200 years of industrial capitalism. This article examines one aspect of a current environment movement in Australia, the anti-Coal Seam Gas (CSG) movement, and the part played by participants. In particular, the focus is upon one action that emerged during the recent Bentley Blockade, which was a regional mobilisation against proposed unconventional gas mining (UGM) near Lismore, NSW. Over the course of the blockade, the conventional ritual of waving at passers-by was transformed into a mechanism for garnering broad community support. Arguably, this was a crucial factor in the eventual outcome. In this case, we contend that the wave, rather than a countercultural artefact being appropriated by the mainstream, represents an everyday behaviour that builds social solidarity, which is subverted to become an effective part of the repertoire of the movement. At a more general level, this article examines how counterculture and mainstream interact via the subversion of “ordinary” citizens and the role of certain cultural understandings for that purpose. We will begin by examining the nature of the counterculture and its relationship to social movements before discussing the character of the anti-CSG movement in general and the Bentley Blockade in particular, using the personal experience of one of the writers. We will then be able to explore our thesis in detail and make some concluding remarks. The Counterculture and Social Movements In this article, we follow Cox’s understanding of the counterculture as a kind of meta-movement within which specific social movements are situated. For Cox (105), the counterculture that flourished during the 1960s and 1970s was an overarching movement in which existing social relations—in particular the family—were rejected by a younger generation, who succeeded in effectively fusing previously separate political and cultural spheres of dissent into one. Cox (103-04) points out that the precondition for such a phenomenon is “free space”—conditions under which counter-hegemonic activity can occur—for example, being liberated from the constraints of working to subsist, something which the unprecedented prosperity of the post WWII years allowed. Hence, in the 1960s and 1970s, as the counterculture emerged, a wave of activism arose in the western world which later came to be referred to as new social movements. These included the civil rights movement, women’s liberation, pacifism and the anti-nuclear and environment movements. The new movements rejected established power and organisational structures and tended, some scholars argued, to cross class lines, basing their claims on non-material issues. Della Porta and Diani claim this wave of movements is characterised by: a critical ideology in relation to modernism and progress; decentralized and participatory organizational structures; defense of interpersonal solidarity against the great bureaucracies; and the reclamation of autonomous spaces, rather than material advantages. (9) This depiction clearly announces the countercultural nature of the new social movements. As Carter (91) avers, these movements attempted to bypass the state and instead mobilise civil society, employing a range of innovative tactics and strategies—the repertoire of action—which may involve breaking laws. It should be noted that over time, some of these movements did shift towards accommodation of existing power structures and became more reformist in nature, to the point of forming political parties in the case of the Greens. However, inasmuch as the counterculture represented a merging of distinctively non-mainstream ways of life with the practice of actively challenging social arrangements at a political level (Cox 18–19; Grossberg 15–18;), the tactic of mobilising civil society to join social movements demonstrates in fact a reverse direction: large numbers of people are transfigured in radical ways by their involvement in social movements. One important principle underlying much of the repertoire of action of these new movements was non-violence. Again, this signals countercultural norms of the period. As Sharp (583–86) wrote at the time, non-violence is crucial in that it denies the aggressor their rationale for violent repression. This principle is founded on the liberal notion, whose legacy goes back to Locke, that the legitimacy of the government rests upon the consent of the governed—that is, the people can withdraw their consent (Locke in Ball & Dagger 92). Ghandi also relied upon this idea when formulating his non-violent approach to conflict, satyagraha (Sharp 83–84). Thus an idea that upholds the modern state is adopted by the counterculture in order to undermine it (the state), again demonstrating an instance of counterflow from the mainstream. Non-violence does not mean non-resistance. In fact, it usually involves non-compliance with a government or other authority and when practised in large numbers, can be very effective, as Ghandi and those in the civil rights movement showed. The result will be either that the government enters into negotiation with the protestors, or they can engage in violence to suppress them, which generally alienates the wider population, leading to a loss of support (Finley & Soifer 104–105). Tarrow (88) makes the important point that the less threatening an action, the harder it is to repress. As a result, democratic states have generally modified their response towards the “strategic weapon of nonviolent protest and even moved towards accommodation and recognition of this tactic as legitimate” (Tarrow 172). Nevertheless, the potential for state violence remains, and the freedom to protest is proscribed by various laws. One of the key figures to emerge from the new social movements that formed an integral part of the counterculture was Bill Moyer, who, in conjunction with colleagues produced a seminal text for theorising and organising social movements (Moyer et al.). Many contemporary social movements have been significantly influenced by Moyer’s Movement Action Plan (MAP), which describes not only key theoretical concepts but is also a practical guide to movement building and achieving aims. Moyer’s model was utilised in training the Northern Rivers community in the anti-CSG movement in conjunction with the non-violent direct action (NVDA) model developed by the North-East Forest Alliance (NEFA) that resisted logging in the forests of north-eastern NSW during the late 1980s and 1990s (Ricketts 138–40). Indeed, the Northern Rivers region of NSW—dubbed the Rainbow Region—is celebrated, as a “‘meeting place’ of countercultures and for the articulation of social and environmental ideals that challenge mainstream practice” (Ward and van Vuuren 63). As Bible (6–7) outlines, the Northern Rivers’ place in countercultural history is cemented by the holding of the Aquarius Festival in Nimbin in 1973 and the consequent decision of many attendees to stay on and settle in the region. They formed new kinds of communities based on an alternative ethics that eschewed a consumerist, individualist agenda in favour of modes of existence that emphasised living in harmony with the environment. The Terania Creek campaign of the late 1970s made the region famous for its environmental activism, when the new settlers resisted the logging of Nightcap National Park using nonviolent methods (Bible 5). It was also instrumental in developing an array of ingenious actions that were used in subsequent campaigns such as the Franklin Dam blockade in Tasmania in the early 1980s (Kelly 116). Indeed, many of these earlier activists were key figures in the anti-CSG movement that has developed in the Rainbow Region over the last few years. The Anti-CSG Movement Despite opposition to other forms of UGM, such as tight sands and shale oil extraction techniques, the term anti-CSG is used here, as it still seems to attract wide recognition. Unconventional gas extraction usually involves a process called fracking, which is the injection at high pressure of water, sand and a number of highly toxic chemicals underground to release the gas that is trapped in rock formations. Among the risks attributed to fracking are contamination of aquifers, air pollution from fugitive emissions and exposure to radioactive particles with resultant threats to human and animal health, as well as an increased risk of earthquakes (Ellsworth; Hand 13; Sovacool 254–260). Additionally, the vast amount of water that is extracted in the fracking process is saline and may contain residues of the fracking chemicals, heavy metals and radioactive matter. This produced water must either be stored or treated (Howarth 273–73; Sovacool 255). Further, there is potential for accidents and incidents and there are many reports—particularly in the United States where the practice is well established—of adverse events such as compressors exploding, leaks and spills, and water from taps catching fire (Sovacool 255–257). Despite an abundance of anecdotal evidence, until recently authorities and academics believed there was not enough “rigorous evidence” to make a definitive judgment of harm to animal and human health as a result of fracking (Mitka 2135). For example, in Australia, the Queensland Government was unable to find a clear link between fracking and health complaints in the Tara gasfield (Thompson 56), even though it is known that there are fugitive emissions from these gasfields (Tait et al. 3099-103). It is within this context that grassroots opposition to UGM began in Australia. The largest and most sustained challenge has come from the Northern Rivers of New South Wales, where a company called Metgasco has been attempting to engage in UGM for a number of years. Stiff community opposition has developed over this time, with activists training, co-ordinating and organising using the principles of Moyer’s MAP and NEFA’s NVDA. Numerous community and affinity groups opposing UGM sprang up including the Lock the Gate Alliance (LTG), a grassroots organisation opposing coal and gas mining, which formed in 2010 (Lock the Gate Alliance online). The movement put up sustained resistance to Metgasco’s attempts to establish wells at Glenugie, near Grafton and Doubtful Creek, near Kyogle in 2012 and 2013, despite the use of a substantial police presence at both locations. In the event, neither site was used for production despite exploratory wells being sunk (ABC News; Dobney). Metgasco announced it would be withdrawing its operations following new Federal and State government regulations at the time of the Doubtful Creek blockade. However it returned to the fray with a formal announcement in February 2014 (Metgasco), that it would drill at Bentley, 12 kilometres west of Lismore. It was widely believed this would occur with a view to production on an industrial scale should initial exploration prove fruitful. The Bentley Blockade It was known well before the formal announcement that Metgasco planned to drill at Bentley and community actions such as flash mobs, media releases and planning meetings were part of the build-up to direct action at the site. One of the authors of this article was actively involved in the movement and participated in a variety of these actions. By the end of January 2014 it was decided to hold an ongoing vigil at the site, which was still entirely undeveloped. Participants, including one author, volunteered for four-hour shifts which began at 5 a.m. each day and before long, were lasting into the night. The purpose of a vigil is to bear witness, maintain a presence and express a point of view. It thus accords well with the principle of non-violence. Eventually the site mushroomed into a tent village with three gates being blockaded. The main gate, Gate A, sprouted a variety of poles, tripods and other installations together with colourful tents and shelters, peopled by protesters on a 24-hour basis. The vigils persisted on all three gates for the duration of the blockade. As the number of blockaders swelled, popular support grew, lending weight to the notion that countercultural ideas and practices were spreading throughout the community. In response, Metgasco called on the State Government to provide police to coincide with the arrival of equipment. It was rumoured that 200 police would be drafted to defend the site in late April. When alerts were sent out to the community warning of imminent police action, an estimated crowd of 2000 people attended in the early hours of the morning and the police called off their operation (Feliu). As the weeks wore on, training was stepped up, attendees were educated in non-violent resistance and protestors willing to act as police liaison persons were placed on a rotating roster. In May, the State Government was preparing to send up to 800 police and the Riot Squad to break the blockade (NSW Hansard in Buckingham). Local farmers (now a part of the movement) and activist leaders had gone to Sydney in an effort to find a political solution in order to avoid what threatened to be a clash that would involve police violence. A confluence of events, such as: the sudden resignation of the Premier; revelations via the Independent Commission against Corruption about nefarious dealings and undue influence of the coal industry upon the government; a radio interview with locals by a popular broadcaster in Sydney; and the reputed hesitation of the police themselves in engaging with a group of possibly 7,000 to 10,000 protestors, resulted in the Office for Coal Seam Gas suspending Metgasco’s drilling licence on 15 May (NSW Department of Resources & Energy). The grounds were that the company had not adequately fulfilled its obligations to consult with the community. At the date of writing, the suspension still holds. The Wave The repertoire of contention at the Bentley Blockade was expansive, comprising most of the standard actions and strategies developed in earlier environmental struggles. These included direct blocking tactics in addition to the use of more carnivalesque actions like music and theatre, as well as the use of various media to reach a broader public. Non-violence was at the core of all actions, but we would tentatively suggest that Bentley may have provided a novel addition to the repertoire, stemming originally from the vigil, which brought the first protestors to the site. At the beginning of the vigil, which was initially held near the entrance to the proposed drilling site atop a cutting, occupants of passing vehicles below would demonstrate their support by sounding their horns and/or waving to the vigil-keepers, who at first were few in number. There was a precedent for this behaviour in the campaign leading up to the blockade. Activist groups such as the Knitting Nannas against Gas had encouraged vehicles to show support by sounding their horns. So when the motorists tooted spontaneously at Bentley, we waved back. Occupants of other vehicles would show disapproval by means of rude gestures and/or yelling and we would wave to them as well. After some weeks, as a presence began to be established at the site, it became routine for vigil keepers to smile and wave at all passing vehicles. This often elicited a positive response. After the first mass call-out discussed above, a number of us migrated to another gate, where numbers were much sparser and there was a perceived need for a greater presence. At this point, the participating writer had begun to act as a police liaison person, but the practice of waving routinely was continued. Those protecting this gate usually included protestors ready to block access, the police liaison person, a legal observer, vigil-keepers and a passing parade of visitors. Because this location was directly on the road, it was possible to see the drivers of vehicles and make eye contact more easily. Certain vehicles became familiar, passing at regular times, on the way to work or school, for example. As time passed, most of those protecting the gate also joined the waving ritual to the point where it became like a game to try to prise a signal of acknowledgement from the passing motorists, or even to win over a disapprover. Police vehicles, some of which passed at set intervals, were included in this game. Mostly they waved cheerfully. There were some we never managed to win over, but waving and making direct eye contact with regular motorists over time created a sense of community and an acknowledgement of the work we were doing, as they increasingly responded in kind. Motorists could hardly feel threatened when they encountered smiling, waving protestors. By including the disapprovers, we acted inclusively and our determined good humour seemed to de-escalate demonstrated hostility. Locals who did not want drilling to go ahead but who were nevertheless unwilling to join a direct action were thus able to participate in the resistance in a way that may have felt safe for them. Some of them even stopped and visited the site, voicing their support. Standing on the side of the road and waving to passers-by may seem peripheral to the “real” action, even trivial. But we would argue it is a valuable adjunct to a blockade (which is situated near a road) when one of the strategies of the overall campaign is to win popular backing. Hence waving, whilst not a completely new part of the repertoire, constitutes what Tilly (41–45) would call innovation at the margins, something he asserts is necessary to maintain the effectiveness and vitality of contentious action. In this case, it is arguable that the sheer size of community support probably helped to concentrate the minds of the state government politicians in Sydney, particularly as they contemplated initiating a massive, taxpayer-funded police action against the people for the benefit of a commercial operation. Waving is a symbolic gesture indicating acknowledgement and goodwill. It fits well within a repertoire based on the principle of non-violence. Moreover, it is a conventional social norm and everyday behaviour that is so innocuous that it is difficult to see how it could be suppressed by police or other authorities. Therein lies its subversiveness. For in communicating our common humanity in a spirit of friendliness, we drew attention to the fact that we were without rancour and tacitly invited others to join us and to explore our concerns. In this way, the counterculture drew upon a mainstream custom to develop and extend upon a new form of dissent. This constitutes a reversal of the more usual phenomenon of countercultural artefacts—such as “hippie clothing”—being appropriated or co-opted by the prevailing culture (see Reading). But it also fits with the more general phenomenon that we have argued was occurring; that of enticing ordinary residents into joining together in countercultural activity, via the pathway of a social movement. Conclusion The anti-CSG movement in the Northern Rivers was developed and organised by countercultural participants of previous contentious challenges. It was highly effective in building popular support whilst at the same time forging a loose coalition of various activist groups. We have surveyed one practice—the wave—that evolved out of mainstream culture over the course of the Bentley Blockade and suggested it may come to be seen as part of the repertoire of actions that can be beneficially employed under suitable conditions. Waving to passers-by invites them to become part of the movement in a non-threatening and inclusive way. It thus envelops supporters and non-supporters alike, and its very innocuousness makes it difficult to suppress. We have argued that this instance can be referenced to a similar reverse movement at a broader level—that of co-opting liberal notions and involving the general populace in new practices and activities that undermine the status quo. The ability of the counterculture in general and environment movements in particular to innovate in the quest to challenge and change what it perceives as damaging or unethical practices demonstrates its ingenuity and spirit. This movement is testament to its dynamic nature. References ABC News. Metgasco Has No CSG Extraction Plans for Glenugie. 2013. 30 July 2014 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-01-22/metgasco-says-no-csg-extraction-planned-for-glenugie/4477652›. Bible, Vanessa. 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Dobney, Chris. “Drill Rig Heads to Doubtful Creek.” Echo Netdaily Feb. 2013. 30 July 2014 ‹http://www.echo.net.au/2013/02/drill-rig-heads-to-doubtful-creek/›. Ellsworth, William. “Injection-Induced Earthquakes”. Science 341.6142 (2013). DOI: 10.1126/science.1225942. 10 July 2014 ‹http://www.sciencemag.org.ezproxy.scu.edu.au/content/341/6142/1225942.full?sid=b4679ca5-0992-4ad3-aa3e-1ac6356f10da›. Feliu, Luis. “Battle for Bentley: 2,000 Protectors on Site.” Echo Netdaily Mar. 2013. 4 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.echo.net.au/2014/03/battle-bentley-2000-protectors-site/›. Finley, Mary Lou, and Steven Soifer. “Social Movement Theories and Map.” Doing Democracy: The MAP Model for Organizing Social Movements. Eds. Bill Moyer, Johann McAllister, Mary Lou Finley, and Steven Soifer. Gabriola Island, Canada: New Society Publishers, 2001. Grossberg, Lawrence. “Some Preliminary Conjunctural Thoughts on Countercultures”. Journal of Gender and Power 1.1 (2014). 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Sovacool, Benjamin K. “Cornucopia or Curse? Reviewing the Costs and Benefits of Shale Gas Hydraulic Fracturing (Fracking).” Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews (2014): 249–64. Tait, Douglas, Isaac Santos, Damien Maher, Tyler Cyronak, and Rachael Davis. “Enrichment of Radon and Carbon Dioxide in the Open Atmosphere of an Australian Coal Seam Gas Field.” Environmental Science & Technology 47 (2013): 3099–3104. Tarrow, Sidney. Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics. 3rd ed. New York: Cambridge UP, 2011. Thompson, Chuck. “The Fracking Feud.” Medicus 53.8 (2013): 56–57. Tilly, Charles. Regimes and Repertoires. Chicago: UCP, 2006. Ward, Susan, and Kitty van Vuuren. “Belonging to the Rainbow Region: Place, Local Media, and the Construction of Civil and Moral Identities Strategic to Climate Change Adaptability.” Environmental Communication 7.1 (2013): 63–79.
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King, Emerald L., and Denise N. Rall. "Re-imagining the Empire of Japan through Japanese Schoolboy Uniforms." M/C Journal 18, no. 6 (March 7, 2016). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1041.

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Abstract:
Introduction“From every kind of man obedience I expect; I’m the Emperor of Japan.” (“Miyasama,” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s musical The Mikado, 1885)This commentary is facilitated by—surprisingly resilient—oriental stereotypes of an imagined Japan (think of Oscar Wilde’s assertion, in 1889, that Japan was a European invention). During the Victorian era, in Britain, there was a craze for all things oriental, particularly ceramics and “there was a craze for all things Japanese and no middle class drawing room was without its Japanese fan or teapot.“ (V&A Victorian). These pastoral depictions of the ‘oriental life’ included the figures of men and women in oriental garb, with fans, stilt shoes, kimono-like robes, and appropriate headdresses, engaging in garden-based activities, especially tea ceremony variations (Landow). In fact, tea itself, and the idea of a ceremony of serving it, had taken up a central role, even an obsession in middle- and upper-class Victorian life. Similarly, landscapes with wild seas, rugged rocks and stunted pines, wizened monks, pagodas and temples, and particular fauna and flora (cranes and other birds flying through clouds of peonies, cherry blossoms and chrysanthemums) were very popular motifs (see Martin and Koda). Rather than authenticity, these designs heightened the Western-based romantic stereotypes associated with a stylised form of Japanese life, conducted sedately under rule of the Japanese Imperial Court. In reality, prior to the Meiji period (1868–1912), the Emperor was largely removed from everyday concerns, residing as an isolated, holy figure in Kyoto, the traditional capital of Japan. Japan was instead ruled from Edo (modern day Tokyo) led by the Shogun and his generals, according to a strict Confucian influenced code (see Keene). In Japan, as elsewhere, the presence of feudal-style governance includes policies that determine much of everyday life, including restrictions on clothing (Rall 169). The Samurai code was no different, and included a series of protocols that restricted rank, movement, behaviour, and clothing. As Vincent has noted in the case of the ‘lace tax’ in Great Britain, these restrictions were designed to punish those who seek to penetrate the upper classes through their costume (28-30). In Japan, pre-Meiji sumptuary laws, for example, restricted the use of gold, and prohibited the use of a certain shade of red by merchant classes (V&A Kimono).Therefore, in the governance of pre-globalised societies, the importance of clothing and textile is evident; as Jones and Stallybrass comment: We need to understand the antimatedness of clothes, their ability to “pick up” subjects, to mould and shape them both physically and socially—to constitute subjects through their power as material memories […] Clothing is a worn world: a world of social relations put upon the wearer’s body. (2-3, emphasis added)The significant re-imagining of Japanese cultural and national identities are explored here through the cataclysmic impact of Western ideologies on Japanese cultural traditions. There are many ways to examine how indigenous cultures respond to European, British, or American (hereafter Western) influences, particularly in times of conflict (Wilk). Western ideology arrived in Japan after a long period of isolation (during which time Japan’s only contact was with Dutch traders) through the threat of military hostility and war. It is after this outside threat was realised that Japan’s adoption of military and industrial practices begins. The re-imagining of their national identity took many forms, and the inclusion of a Western-style military costuming as a schoolboy uniform became a highly visible indicator of Japan’s mission to protect its sovereign integrity. A brief history of Japan’s rise from a collection of isolated feudal states to a unified military power, in not only the Asian Pacific region but globally, demonstrates the speed at which they adopted the Western mode of warfare. Gunboats on Japan’s ShorelinesJapan was forcefully opened to the West in the 1850s by America under threat of First Name Perry’s ‘gunboat diplomacy’ (Hillsborough 7-8). Following this, Japan underwent a rapid period of modernisation, and an upsurge in nationalism and military expansion that was driven by a desire to catch up to the European powers present in the Pacific. Noted by Ian Ferguson in Civilization: The West and the Rest, Unsure, the Japanese decided […] to copy everything […] Japanese institutions were refashioned on Western models. The army drilled like Germans; the navy sailed like Britons. An American-style system of state elementary and middle schools was also introduced. (221, emphasis added)This was nothing short of a wide-scale reorganisation of Japan’s entire social structure and governance. Under the Emperor Meiji, who wrested power from the Shogunate and reclaimed it for the Imperial head, Japan steamed into an industrial revolution, achieving in a matter of years what had taken Europe over a century.Japan quickly became a major player-elect on the world stage. However, as an island nation, Japan lacked the essentials of both coal and iron with which to fashion not only industrial machinery but also military equipment, the machinery of war. In 1875 Japan forced Korea to open itself to foreign (read: Japanese) trade. In the same treaty, Korea was recognised as a sovereign nation, separate from Qing China (Tucker 1461). The necessity for raw materials then led to the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95), a conflict between Japan and China that marked the emergence of Japan as a major world power. The Korean Peninsula had long been China’s most important client state, but its strategic location adjacent to the Japanese archipelago, and its natural resources of coal and iron, attracted Japan’s interest. Later, the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05), allowed a victorious Japan to force Russia to abandon its expansionist policy in the Far East, becoming the first Asian power in modern times to defeat a European power. The Russo-Japanese War developed out of the rivalry between Russia and Japan for dominance in Korea and Manchuria, again in the struggle for natural resources (Tucker 1534-46).Japan’s victories, together with the county’s drive for resources, meant that Japan could now determine its role within the Asia-Pacific sphere of influence. As Japan’s military, and their adoption of Westernised combat, proved effective in maintaining national integrity, other social institutions also looked to the West (Ferguson 221). In an ironic twist—while Victorian and Continental fashion was busy adopting the exotic, oriental look (Martin and Koda)—the kimono, along with other essentials of Japanese fashions, were rapidly altered (both literally and figuratively) to suit new, warlike ideology. It should be noted that kimono literally means ‘things that you wear’ and which, prior to exposure to Western fashions, signified all worn clothing (Dalby 65-119). “Wearing Things” in Westernised JapanAs Japan modernised during the late 1800s the kimono was positioned as symbolising barbaric, pre-modern, ‘oriental’ Japan. Indeed, on 17 January 1887 the Meiji Empress issued a memorandum on the subject of women’s clothing in Japan: “She [the Empress] believed that western clothes were in fact closer to the dress of women in ancient Japan than the kimonos currently worn and urged that they be adopted as the standard clothes of the reign” (Keene 404). The resemblance between Western skirts and blouses and the simple skirt and separate top that had been worn in ancient times by a people descended from the sun goddess, Amaterasu wo mikami, was used to give authority and cultural authenticity to Japan’s modernisation projects. The Imperial Court, with its newly ennobled European style aristocrats, exchanged kimono silks for Victorian finery, and samurai armour for military pomp and splendour (Figure 1).Figure 1: The Meiji Emperor, Empress and Crown Prince resplendent in European fashions on an outing to Asukayama Park. Illustration: Toyohara Chikanobu, circa 1890.It is argued here that the function of a uniform is to prepare the body for service. Maids and butlers, nurses and courtesans, doctors, policemen, and soldiers are all distinguished by their garb. Prudence Black states: “as a technology, uniforms shape and code the body so they become a unit that belongs to a collective whole” (93). The requirement to discipline bodies through clothing, particularly through uniforms, is well documented (see Craik, Peoples, and Foucault). The need to distinguish enemies from allies on the battlefield requires adherence to a set of defined protocols, as referenced in military fashion compendiums (see Molloy). While the postcolonial adoption of Western-based clothing reflects a new form of subservience (Rall, Kuechler and Miller), in Japan, the indigenous garments were clearly designed in the interests of ideological allegiance. To understand the Japanese sartorial traditions, the kimono itself must be read as providing a strong disciplinary element. The traditional garment is designed to represent an upright and unbending column—where two meters of under bindings are used to discipline the body into shape are then topped with a further four meters of a stiffened silk obi wrapped around the waist and lower chest. To dress formally in such a garment requires helpers (see Dalby). The kimono both constructs and confines the women who wear it, and presses them into their roles as dutiful, upper-class daughters (see Craik). From the 1890s through to the 1930s, when Japan again enters a period of militarism, the myth of the kimono again changes as it is integrated into the build-up towards World War II.Decades later, when Japan re-established itself as a global economic power in the 1970s and 1980s, the kimono was re-authenticated as Japan’s ‘traditional’ garment. This time it was not the myth of a people descended from solar deities that was on display, but that of samurai strength and propriety for men, alongside an exaggerated femininity for women, invoking a powerful vision of Japanese sartorial tradition. This reworking of the kimono was only possible as the garment was already contained within the framework of Confucian family duty. However, in the lead up to World War II, Japanese military advancement demanded of its people soldiers that could win European-style wars. The quickest solution was to copy the military acumen and strategies of global warfare, and the costumes of the soldiery and seamen of Europe, including Great Britain (Ferguson). It was also acknowledged that soldiers were ‘made not born’ so the Japanese educational system was re-vamped to emulate those of its military rivals (McVeigh). It was in the uptake of schoolboy uniforms that this re-imagining of Japanese imperial strength took place.The Japanese Schoolboy UniformCentral to their rapid modernisation, Japan adopted a constitutional system of education that borrowed from American and French models (Tipton 68-69). The government viewed education as a “primary means of developing a sense of nation,” and at its core, was the imperial authorities’ obsession with defining “Japan and Japaneseness” (Tipton 68-69). Numerous reforms eventually saw, after an abolition of fees, nearly 100% attendance by both boys and girls, despite a lingering mind-set that educating women was “a waste of time” (Tipton 68-69). A boys’ uniform based on the French and Prussian military uniforms of the 1860s and 1870s respectively (Kinsella 217), was adopted in 1879 (McVeigh 47). This jacket, initially with Prussian cape and cap, consists of a square body, standing mandarin style collar and a buttoned front. It was through these education reforms, as visually symbolised by the adoption of military style school uniforms, that citizen making, education, and military training became interrelated aspects of Meiji modernisation (Kinsella 217). Known as the gakuran (gaku: to study; ran: meaning both orchid, and a pun on Horanda, meaning Holland, the only Western country with trading relations in pre-Meiji Japan), these jackets were a symbol of education, indicating European knowledge, power and influence and came to reflect all things European in Meiji Japan. By adopting these jackets two objectives were realised:through the magical power of imitation, Japan would, by adopting the clothing of the West, naturally rise in military power; and boys were uniformed to become not only educated as quasi-Europeans, but as fighting soldiers and sons (suns) of the nation.The gakuran jacket was first popularised by state-run schools, however, in the century and a half that the garment has been in use it has come to symbolise young Japanese masculinity as showcased in campus films, anime, manga, computer games, and as fashion is the preeminent garment for boybands and Japanese hipsters.While the gakuran is central to the rise of global militarism in Japan (McVeigh 51-53), the jacket would go on to form the basis of the Sun Yat Sen and Mao Suits as symbols of revolutionary China (see McVeigh). Supposedly, Sun Yat Sen saw the schoolboy jacket in Japan as a utilitarian garment and adopted it with a turn down collar (Cumming et al.). For Sun Yat Sen, the gakuran was the perfect mix of civilian (school boy) and military (the garment’s Prussian heritage) allowing him to walk a middle path between the demands of both. Furthermore, the garment allowed Sun to navigate between Western style suits and old-fashioned Qing dynasty styles (Gerth 116); one was associated with the imperialism of the National Products Movement, while the other represented the corruption of the old dynasty. In this way, the gakuran was further politicised from a national (Japanese) symbol to a global one. While military uniforms have always been political garments, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, as the world was rocked by revolutions and war, civilian clothing also became a means of expressing political ideals (McVeigh 48-49). Note that Mahatma Ghandi’s clothing choices also evolved from wholly Western styles to traditional and emphasised domestic products (Gerth 116).Mao adopted this style circa 1927, further defining the style when he came to power by adding elements from the trousers, tunics, and black cotton shoes worn by peasants. The suit was further codified during the 1960s, reaching its height in the Cultural Revolution. While the gakuran has always been a scholarly black (see Figure 2), subtle differences in the colour palette differentiated the Chinese population—peasants and workers donned indigo blue Mao jackets, while the People’s Liberation Army Soldiers donned khaki green. This limited colour scheme somewhat paradoxically ensured that subtle hierarchical differences were maintained even whilst advocating egalitarian ideals (Davis 522). Both the Sun Yat Sen suit and the Mao jacket represented the rejection of bourgeois (Western) norms that objectified the female form in favour of a uniform society. Neo-Maoism and Mao fever of the early 1990s saw the Mao suit emerge again as a desirable piece of iconic/ironic youth fashion. Figure 2: An example of Gakuran uniform next to the girl’s equivalent on display at Ichikawa Gakuen School (Japan). Photo: Emerald King, 2015.There is a clear and vital link between the influence of the Prussian style Japanese schoolboy uniform on the later creation of the Mao jacket—that of the uniform as an integral piece of worn propaganda (Atkins).For Japan, the rapid deployment of new military and industrial technologies, as well as a sartorial need to present her leaders as modern (read: Western) demanded the adoption of European-style uniforms. The Imperial family had always been removed from Samurai battlefields, so the adoption of Western military costume allowed Japan’s rulers to present a uniform face to other global powers. When Japan found itself in conflict in the Asia Pacific Region, without an organised military, the first requirement was to completely reorganise their system of warfare from a feudal base and to train up national servicemen. Within an American-style compulsory education system, the European-based curriculum included training in mathematics, engineering and military history, as young Britons had for generations begun their education in Greek and Latin, with the study of Ancient Greek and Roman wars (Bantock). It is only in the classroom that ideological change on a mass scale can take place (Reference Please), a lesson not missed by later leaders such as Mao Zedong.ConclusionIn the 1880s, the Japanese leaders established their position in global politics by adopting clothing and practices from the West (Europeans, Britons, and Americans) in order to quickly re-shape their country’s educational system and military establishment. The prevailing military costume from foreign cultures not only disciplined their adopted European bodies, they enforced a new regime through dress (Rall 157-174). For boys, the gakuran symbolised the unity of education and militarism as central to Japanese masculinity. Wearing a uniform, as many authors suggest, furthers compliance (Craik, Nagasawa Kaiser and Hutton, and McVeigh). As conscription became a part of Japanese reality in World War II, the schoolboys just swapped their military-inspired school uniforms for genuine military garments.Re-imagining a Japanese schoolboy uniform from a European military costume might suit ideological purposes (Atkins), but there is more. The gakuran, as a uniform based on a close, but not fitted jacket, was the product of a process of advanced industrialisation in the garment-making industry also taking place in the 1800s:Between 1810 and 1830, technical calibrations invented by tailors working at the very highest level of the craft [in Britain] eventually made it possible for hundreds of suits to be cut up and made in advance [...] and the ready-to-wear idea was put into practice for men’s clothes […] originally for uniforms for the War of 1812. (Hollander 31) In this way, industrialisation became a means to mass production, which furthered militarisation, “the uniform is thus the clothing of the modern disciplinary society” (Black 102). There is a perfect resonance between Japan’s appetite for a modern military and their rise to an industrialised society, and their conquests in Asia Pacific supplied the necessary material resources that made such a rapid deployment possible. The Japanese schoolboy uniform was an integral part of the process of both industrialisation and militarisation, which instilled in the wearer a social role required by modern Japanese society in its rise for global power. Garments are never just clothing, but offer a “world of social relations put upon the wearer’s body” (Jones and Stallybrass 3-4).Today, both the Japanese kimono and the Japanese schoolboy uniform continue to interact with, and interrogate, global fashions as contemporary designers continue to call on the tropes of ‘military chic’ (Tonchi) and Japanese-inspired clothing (Kawamura). References Atkins, Jaqueline. Wearing Propaganda: Textiles on the Home Front in Japan, Britain, and the United States. Princeton: Yale UP, 2005.Bantock, Geoffrey Herman. Culture, Industrialisation and Education. London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1968.Black, Prudence. “The Discipline of Appearance: Military Style and Australian Flight Hostess Uniforms 1930–1964.” Fashion & War in Popular Culture. Ed. Denise N. Rall. Bristol: Intellect/U Chicago P, 2014. 91-106.Craik, Jenifer. Uniforms Exposed: From Conformity to Transgression. Oxford: Berg, 2005.Cumming, Valerie, Cecil Williet Cunnington, and Phillis Emily Cunnington. “Mao Style.” The Dictionary of Fashion History. Eds. Valerie Cumming, Cecil Williet Cunnington, and Phillis Emily Cunnington. Oxford: Berg, 2010.Dalby, Liza, ed. Kimono: Fashioning Culture. London: Vintage, 2001.Davis, Edward L., ed. Encyclopaedia of Contemporary Chinese Culture. London: Routledge, 2005.Dees, Jan. Taisho Kimono: Speaking of Past and Present. Milan: Skira, 2009.Ferguson, N. Civilization: The West and the Rest. London: Penguin, 2011.Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin, 1997. Gerth, Karl. China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation, Cambridge: East Asian Harvard Monograph 224, 2003.Gilbert, W.S., and Arthur Sullivan. The Mikado or, The Town of Titipu. 1885. 16 Nov. 2015 ‹http://math.boisestate.edu/gas/mikado/mk_lib.pdf›. Hillsborough, Romulus. Samurai Revolution: The Dawn of Modern Japan Seen through the Eyes of the Shogun's Last Samurai. Vermont: Tuttle, 2014.Jones, Anne R., and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.Keene, Donald. Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852-1912. New York: Columbia UP, 2002.King, Emerald L. “Schoolboys and Kimono Ladies.” Presentation to the Un-Thinking Asian Migrations Conference, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, 24-26 Aug. 2014. Kinsella, Sharon. “What’s Behind the Fetishism of Japanese School Uniforms?” Fashion Theory 6.2 (2002): 215-37. Kuechler, Susanne, and Daniel Miller, eds. Clothing as Material Culture. Oxford: Berg, 2005.Landow, George P. “Liberty and the Evolution of the Liberty Style.” 22 Aug. 2010. ‹http://www.victorianweb.org/art/design/liberty/lstyle.html›.Martin, Richard, and Harold Koda. Orientalism: Vision of the East in Western Dress. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994.McVeigh, Brian J. Wearing Ideology: State, Schooling, and Self-Presentation in Japan. Oxford: Berg, 2000.Molloy, John. Military Fashion: A Comparative History of the Uniforms of the Great Armies from the 17th Century to the First World War. New York: Putnam, 1972.Peoples, Sharon. “Embodying the Military: Uniforms.” Critical Studies in Men’s Fashion 1.1 (2014): 7-21.Rall, Denise N. “Costume & Conquest: A Proximity Framework for Post-War Impacts on Clothing and Textile Art.” Fashion & War in Popular Culture, ed. Denise N. Rall. Bristol: Intellect/U Chicago P, 2014. 157-74. Tipton, Elise K. Modern Japan: A Social and Political History. 3rd ed. London: Routledge, 2016.Tucker, Spencer C., ed. A Global Chronology of Conflict: From the Ancient World to the Modern Middle East. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2013.V&A Kimono. Victoria and Albert Museum. “A History of the Kimono.” 2004. 2 Oct. 2015 ‹http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/h/a-history-of-the-kimono/›.V&A Victorian. Victoria and Albert Museum. “The Victorian Vision of China and Japan.” 10 Nov. 2015 ‹http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/t/the-victorian-vision-of-china-and-japan/›.Vincent, Susan J. The Anatomy of Fashion: Dressing the Body from the Renaissance to Today. Berg: Oxford, 2009.Wilde, Oscar. “The Decay of Lying.” 1889. In Intentions New York: Berentano’s 1905. 16 Nov. 2015 ‹http://virgil.org/dswo/courses/novel/wilde-lying.pdf›. Wilk, Richard. “Consumer Goods as a Dialogue about Development.” Cultural History 7 (1990) 79-100.
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46

Jeziński, Marek, and Łukasz Wojtkowski. "To Grunge or Not to Grunge on the Periphery? The Polish Grunge Scene of the 1990s and the Assimilation of Cultural Patterns." M/C Journal 21, no. 5 (December 6, 2018). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1479.

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Abstract:
Introduction – Polish GrungeThe main objective of this article is to examine the grunge scene of the 1990s in Poland in the context of acculturation and assimilation processes. Polish grunge was, on the one hand, the expression of trends that were observable in music industry since the late 1980s. On the other hand, it was symptomatic of a rapid systemic transformation. Youth culture was open for the diffusion of cultural patterns and was ready to adopt certain patterns from the West.Thus, we suggest that the local grunge scene was completely modelled on the American one: the flow of cultural practices and subcultural fashion were the manifestations of the assimilation processes in Poland, observable not only in art (i.e. rock music), but also in the domains of politics and economy, as well as in the broader social sphere. We explore how young people were ready to adopt only the surface level of the phenomenon as they were familiar with it through the media coverage it received. Young people in Poland circa the early ‘90s primarily wanted to gain access to an imaginary Western lifestyle rather than learn about real living conditions in capitalist societies, and they could do this through their involvement in grunge culture.Grunge as a Cultural PhenomenonGrunge as a popular music trend arose in the USA during the late 1980s and early 1990s, in the work of bands such as Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains. Grunge was initially opposed to consumerism and capitalist values. Nevertheless, A&R scouts recognised the commercial potential of this music: for example, Nirvana’s Nevermind was released by Geffen Company, and Pearl Jam’s Ten by Epic. As Grzegorz Brzozowicz and Filip Łobodziński put it (313),the success of Nirvana was a post-mort triumph of punk rock and, more importantly, it indicated the potential of alternative music, which suddenly stepped outside an aesthetic ghetto and became a hot stuff. This influence was also visible as regards fashion and customs – Dr. Martens’ shoes, flannel shirts, frayed jeans, and wool caps became an outfit common for the young (…). Grunge influenced visual art, film and photography.In Poland, grunge as a subculture and sub-genre of rock music emerged in the early 1990s following the international commercial success of bands such as those listed above, and it entailed the assimilation of the Western cultural patterns. Although assimilation processes were typical primarily for youth culture, they were observed in the wider context of the changes and adaptations that Polish system underwent after the fall of the centrally planned economy and subjugation to the communist party power after the Yalta agreements (1945-1989/1990).In this context, the concept Centre/Periphery (Gopinathan, Saravanan and Altbach; Hannerz; Langholm; Pisciotta) appears as the field for the dissemination of popular culture. Popular culture is a battlefield for creating and negotiating the meanings that are inherent within cultural practices (Barker). Cultural practices play a double role in the dissemination of ideas or objects. Firstly, they come as a result of adaptation in a defined culture, and secondly, they make new cultural patterns stabile, visible, and easy to practice by people as flexible patterns of behaviour. This point is clearly visible in the context of the East European states that underwent rapid acculturation processes in which new patterns of economic and social solutions were established in centre-planned economies: the tensions of the “old” and the “new” patterns dominating in the political and social systems of those countries (e.g. Poland, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, etc.) were visible and affected societies to a considerable degree (Pisciotta). Thus, the practices generated in cultural Centres tend to disseminate easily and to “conquer” other cultural systems, especially in the Periphery.In the case of popular culture, the flow of influences usually takes a one-dimensional form and is disseminated from the Centre to the Periphery. As Marek Jeziński (162-163) argues, both Centre and Periphery are functional systems. These systems have generated their own mythology, which separates one from another. However, as in the case of mythological systems in general, Centre and Periphery tales overlap frequently, and there are evidence that the bands that originated in the Periphery were assimilated by the Centre. For example, Nirvana and Pearl Jam were both successful in market terms and both built their own status based on the Peripheral components that were skilfully overtaken by the Centre narrative. While the Peripheral narratives are concentrated mainly on the undermining of the definition of situation and present dysfunctional character towards cultural system as such, the Centre narratives aim to maintain the definition of situation supporting mainstream values and their prevailing position in a system (Jeziński 164). Grunge is the epitome of such an implementation of cultural patterns. That is, grunge started as a fringe peripheral cultural phenomenon. The major records companies, however, recognised its potential and provided the space in the music market to support the new bands. Most of the groups in the US started as independent local acts related to independent record companies that built their status.In relation to the assimilation of grunge culture in Poland, we can distinguish two key phenomena. The first is concerned with the adaptation of general subcultural components, e.g. fashion and group identification. Here, the acculturation processes run as a primary form of mimicry, as the Polish grunge scene adopted elements typical of the grunge subculture, such as oversize sweaters, flannel shirts, Dr. Martens shoes or Converse trainers, long hair, and beanies. A newly formed subculture was different from the others popular in the 1990s. For example, punk and metal subcultures implied strong group identity, style homogeneity, rigid group limitations, and firm membership rules. Conversely, it seems that the grunge subculture was based more on a level of liquid and fragmented patchwork identity than on very inflexible group values and internal ideology or political attitudes (cf. Muggleton). Such patchwork identity formation was a result of a rapid clash between the adaptation of grunge cultural patterns from the West and the Polish economic transformation of the early 1990s.Poland underwent rapid changes that were also visible in the politics, culture and social domain, joining liberal democracies and liberal free market economies of the West. These changes resulted from a transformation of the system as a whole: from a central planned system to decentralisation of the power at both local and state levels (Sarnecki). Equally important were the changes in the political culture of Poles and their value system: they accepted the democratic changes but simultaneously, the mentality of Poles remained traditionalist (which is visible in surveys— the most important values for them were “family” and “work”), and their attitude towards the processes of cultural and institutional changes was impermanent (Garlicki; Jasińska-Kania).During the transformation, the changes were visible in the everyday lives of Polish citizens: examples include the shortages in the market that were evident after the socialist regime ended, and the easy availability of Western clothes such as jeans, shirts, denim jackets in ordinary stores. Consequently, the economic rates in the 1990s were higher in comparison to the previous decade (Bałtowski and Miszewski). Those changes resulted in a phase shift in the modernisation process, where patterns of economic and cultural development and were faster than the enculturation and socialisation processes.On the one hand, the free market allowed for almost unlimited commodification with unprecedented access to goods and services. On the other hand, the low cultural capital and economic possibilities of the citizens evolved rapidly. The communist-shaped social division fell apart, and the new class designations based of consumption/commodification patterns were established (Jeziński; Wojtkowski). Those factors resulted in high cross-generational mobility, lower entrance barriers, and higher openness indicators (cf. Polska klasa średnia; O ruchliwości społecznej w polsce).Hence, in cultural conditions based on capitalist consumption practices, the grunge subculture evolved with a commodified sense of style rather than with a firm identity. Yet, in the case of grunge style, relatively high costs of subculture commodities (e.g. Dr. Martens shoes, Converse trainers, or band t-shirts) led to DIY practices such as buying cheaper no-name shoes, and sewing badges with the names of bands and albums on jackets or backpacks.The second phenomenon encompasses the adaptation of music patterns. The Polish grunge scene was not as diversified in terms of genre variations as its US counterpart. In the beginning, the Polish grunge scene was more distressed geographically, with no specific Centre-Periphery relations. However, one of the most important bands, Hey, was established in the Northwest. When one looks at Polish grunge evolution as a ‘clash’ of American genre and the specific character of a time and place where Polish bands were recording, she or he will notice multiple similarities with the US scene.Firstly, we could name two approaches to grunge music among Polish performers: ‘intellectual’ and ‘rebel’. The ‘intellectual’ approach encompasses the group Hey. This band was established in Szczecin (the Northwest Poland), but after the success of their first album – Fire (1993), they moved to Warsaw. Hey released 11 studio records, but only the first three could be classified as “grunge” (cf. Sankowski). On the level of musical references, Fire sounds like a mixture of early Pearl Jam combined with Alice in Chains. With English lyrics and song topics that were typical for grunge— e.g., The Choice (“You’ve got a gun/You can use it now”)—similarities with Pearl Jam, in particular, are striking. The band evolved, and on their second album, Ho! (1994), Hey mixed equally Polish and English lyrics with the dynamic and specific Seattle sound (cf. Prato). Hey’s most distinctive feature comparing with other Polish grunge bands is its highly developed melodic approach to music and the poetic, sensual style of its lyrics. The third record, ? (1995), closes the band’s early stage. The next album, Karma (1997), opens the period when the amalgamation of electronics, hard rock and grunge dominated Hey’s music, with the album [sic!] (2001) representing the turning point in the group’s music style. The band suspended their work in 2017 and will probably never reunite.Over time, Hey gained one of the most dedicated audiences in Polish rock music. The music industry and critics have acknowledged Hey as one of the best Polish groups in the post-communist period. Hey has received the most nominations in the history of Fryderyki, the key Polish music awards. The group and Nosowska have won twenty-three times in multiple categories. As the longest-operating grunge-origin band in the country, Hey could be considered as a most important trend setting and scene-forming group.The more “rebellious” approach to grunge encompasses bands such as Illusion (1992-1999, 2014-present) and Houk. The former was based on the grunge and hardcore mixture of influences from Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, and Rage Against the Machine (especially in terms of rap-oriented lyrics). With the preservation of certain consistency, the band named first three albums: Illusion (1993), Illusion II (1994), and Illusion III (1995). Illusion marks the band’s aggressive style and lyrics simplicity but the studio production flattens the whole and gives an impression of a post-punk DIY venture rather than a coherent composition. The second record, however, is entirely conceptualised and thought out in terms of music and lyrics. Sharp riffs, hard rock tuning of instruments and aggressive lyrics that were focused on Polish life gave the album a needed consistency. The band’s third record is the most varied stylistically and politically engaged in their history. The harder-edged tunes from previous releases are accompanied by more psychedelic compositions (Wrona) that recall Alice in Chains’ slow songs and Layne Staley’s voice.Houk’s music similarly to other Polish grunge bands was the amalgamation of various genres and their style evolved in time. Initially, the band was regarded as an example of alternative rock music. The first album Soul Ammunition (1992) was named by music monthly Tylko Rock as a debut of the year (polskirock.art.pl). The combination of grunge, hardcore, hard rock, reggae and socio-politically engaged lyrics helped the group to establish a strong fan base. The band’s unique style was recognised internationally and Houk supported New Model Army and Bad Brains during the performances in the mid-1990’s (polskirock.art.pl). The band’s second studio release Generation X (1995) was recorded prior the multiple membership reorganizations that finally ended the grunge-orientation period of Houk’s history. One of the songs, Sleep, was dedicated to Kurt Cobain and reflected Nirvana’s approach to songwriting, which can be heard in songs such as “Lithium” (1991). Such a commemoration of Cobain’s figure is characteristic of Polish grunge culture’s establishment of strong ties with the American equivalent. Here and in many similar cases, Cobain serves not only as a grunge hero (or even a martyr) but also as a commodified pop culture figure (cf. Strong). Concerning both spheres - that is, the adaptation of grunge subculture and a development of the music scene -Polish grunge follows a different pattern to the US genre. Grunge was introduced to Poland after it was popularised and commodified by the major labels and media industry in the USA, so the adopted version was the mainstream one rather than the underground movement. Hence, the simplistic dichotomy between “underground” and “mainstream” culture does not function in terms of the Polish grunge culture, and probably is misstated even when it comes to the American phenomenon. Grunge could be perceived in Poland as both the first and the last “true” subcultural trend. At the same time, though, it was an affirmation not of ‘the rebel’ and ‘the underground’ but of capitalism and the cultural values of the West. Indeed, the Polish grunge culture couldn’t be fully aware of what grunge was warning us against while Polish society faced the rapid market and cultural transformation that allowed for its opening to Western trends.Conclusion – Is Grunge Really Dead?Although the popularity of grunge phenomenon in Poland was relatively short, the most important groups of this sub-genre - Illusion, Hey, Ahimsa, Houk, and Kr’shna Brothers - widely contributed to the emergence of the new wave of fashion for rock and hard-rock music in Poland in the mid-1990s. The most successful group of the era, Hey epitomises the transformation of grunge in Poland. Starting as a typical grunge band (modelled heavily on the US groups), they underwent a serious transition, substantially changing their music into more mainstream-oriented rock (that is, as music that was considered acceptable by rock music and AOR-focused radio stations). At the same time, grunge as a rock sub-genre underwent the contrary changes: it broke into the mainstream relatively quickly in the first half of the 1990s, establishing new rock stars of the scene (Illusion, Houk, Ahimsa, Hey), but in the late 1990s it went back to being a rock niche again. It seems that today grunge serves as a point of reference (in fact, it was an important period of rock history) for the new bands that intentionally use this sub-genre as a form of commodified, media-friendly nostalgia.ReferencesBałtowski, Maciej, Miszewski, Maciej. Transformacja gospodarcza w Polsce. Warszawa: PWN, 2006.Biografia Houk. 25 Nov. 2018 <https://www.polskirock.art.pl/houk,z346,biografia.html>.Brzozowicz, Grzegorz, and Filip Łobodziński. Sto płyt, które wstrząsnęły światem: Kronika czasów popkultury. Warszawa: Iskry, 2000.Domański, Henryk. Polska klasa średnia. Wrocław: FNP i W. Wrocławskie, 2002.Domański, Henryk. O ruchliwości społecznej w Polsce. Warszawa: IFiS PAN, 2004.Garlicki, Jan. “Tradycje i dynamika kultury politycznej społeczeństwa polskiego.” Dylematy polskiej transformacji. Ed. Jan Błuszkowski. Warszawa: DW Elipsa, 2007. 155-174.Gopinathan, Saravanan, and Philip G. Altbach. “Rethinking Centre–Periphery.” Asia Pacific Journal of Education 25.2 (2005): 117-123.Hannerz, Ulf. “Culture between Center and Periphery: Toward a Macroanthropology.” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 54.3-4 (1989): 200-216.Houk. Soul Ammunition. 23 Nov. 2018 <https://www.polskirock.art.pl/soul-ammunition,houk,3051,plyta.html>.Jasińska-Kania, Aleksandra. “Dynamika zmian wartości Polaków na tle europejskim: EVS 1990-1999-2008.” Polska po 20 latach wolności. Eds. Marta Bucholc, Sławomir Mandes, Tadeusz Szawiel and Joanna Wawrzyniak. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2011. 225-239.Jeziński, Marek. Mitologie muzyki popularnej. Toruń: WN Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, 2014.Jeziński, Marek, and Łukasz Wojtkowski. “Nostalgia Commodified: Towards the Marketization of the Post-Communist Past through the New Media.” Medien und Zeit 4 (2016): 96–104.Langholm, Sivert. “On the Concepts of Center and Periphery.” Journal of Peace Research 8.3-4 (1971): 273-278.Muggleton, David. Inside Subculture. The Postmodern Meaning of Style. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.Pisciotta, Barbara. “The Center-Periphery Cleavage Revisited: East and Central Europe from Postcommunism to Euroscepticism.” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 22.2 (2016): 193-219.Sankowski, Robert. “Hey, czyli któtka historia polskiego popu.” Wyborcza.pl, 3 Nov. 2012. 1 Aug. 2018 <http://wyborcza.pl/1,75410,12788097,Hey__czyli_krotka_historia_polskiego_popu.html>. Sarnecki, Paweł. “Od kumulacji do podziału władzy.” Transformacja ustrojowa w Polsce 1989-2009. Eds. Maria Kruk and Jan Wawrzyniak. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Scholar, 2011. 37-58.Strong, Catherine. Grunge and the Memory. London: Routledge, 2016.
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