Journal articles on the topic 'The Education For All Handicapped Children Act of 1975'

Inclusion, the philosophy of placing all children with disabilities in regular education settings, is easily the most discussed and controversial education reform issue since the 1975 passage of PL 94-142, Education of Handicapped Children Act (EHA). However, inclusion is never mentioned in the original EHA or the updated PL 101-476, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) (e.g., Sherrill, 1994; Stein, 1994). What is discussed in IDEA as well as Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 is the “continuum of least restrictive environments” (LRE). The purpose of this paper is to (a) review United States federal laws regarding inclusion and LRE, most notably IDEA and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973; (b) review recent U.S. court cases regarding inclusion and LRE including three landmark cases: Roncker v. Walter (Ohio) (1983), Daniel R.R. v. State Board of Education (Texas) (1989), and Sacramento Unified School District, Board of Education v. Rachel H. (California) (1994); and (c) apply these federal laws and court decisions to physical education placement.

The relevance of the research problem tackling the inclusive education evolution in the United States is explained by the fact that it the USA has been a leader in developing a rights-based model of inclusive education. The research is conditioned by the current stage of national education that undergoes modernization, the steady course of Ukraine to create an inclusive school, and government’s request to implement its initiatives. The purpose of this article is to present a reconsidered historical analysis of the inclusive education in the USA that represents an expansion of earlier research conducted by the author. Methods applied include historical and comparative research. The author’s periodization that describes the phases in the inclusive education development in the USA is presented. This is based on the chronologically arranged U.S. federal legislation related to ensuring equal rights and opportunities. It is stated that some court decisions and federal legislation that incorporated court decisions clearly marked the phases in inclusive education development. These legislative milestones beginning each phase include the U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (1975), the Education of the Handicapped Students Act Amendments (1986), No Child Left Behind Act (2001), and Every Student Succeeds Act (2015). Consequently, there are five phases in the inclusive education development and each phase reflects the general trend in the U.S. inclusive education. The initial phase is referred to as the active social movement for the right to education (1954–1974). In the second phase, children with disabilities were integrated into regular schools through mainstreaming (1975–1985). Then comes the so-called Regular Education Initiative phase or full inclusion (1986–2000), followed by the accountable inclusive education phase (2001–2014). Finally, the phase of the high-quality inclusive education started in 2015 and continues today.

Since the passage of the 1975 Education for All Handicapped Children Act and the 1986 PL99–457 amendment, many children aged birth to 3 years with special health care needs are enrolled in early intervention programs. Educators working in early intervention services often need to respond to and manage seizure activity and medical emergencies for special needs children. To do so, they need to have knowledge and confidence in their ability to intervene effectively. This intervention study was designed to address the knowledge and self-efficacy of 28 special needs educators on seizure management. The intervention resulted in increased knowledge, skills, and self-efficacy related to seizure management and their ability to interact supportively with families.

Teachers face numerous challenges. Pressure exists to meet Common Core Standards and increase state test scores while operating on shoestring budgets. In addition, public schools have seen an increase in students with disabilities—individuals with unique academic and social needs. Due to the Education for all Handicapped Children Act of 1975, inclusion in general education classrooms is the right of children with disabilities. Disability advocates applaud this act for ensuring equality for all. Yet, equality is not akin to equity. In classrooms where teachers lack proper training, children with special needs may not experience equity, ultimately weakening the intent of inclusive practices. The current study stems from a commissioned needs assessment that explored how teachers at two elementary schools in Northeast Ohio define inclusion, current training related to students with disabilities, and teacher recommendations for training/resources to teach students with special needs effectively. The article ends with policy and future research recommendations.

Special education, a discipline that aims to provide specialized instruction to meet the unique needs of each child with a disability, has turned 40 years old in the United States. Ever since the passage of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (P.L. 94-142) in 1975, every state has been directed to provide a free and appropriate education for all students with disabilities (Gallagher, 2000; Rothstein, 1995). The focus of this paper is to revisit the foundations of the special education movement in the United States to show how special education has progressed since 1975. The current Race to the Top movement impacts school districts across the nation, creating great concern about what this means for students with disabilities and how it affects their struggle to succeed within the public school domain. In fact, after 40 years, (P.L. 94-142) known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, IDEA, is the current high stakes standards and assessment climate taking the “special” out of special education?

Since the passage of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act in 1975 many legal precedents have been established that serve to define the parameters of programs for students. These parameters, as well as emerging and as yet unresolved issues as they relate to students with severe handicaps, are discussed. The authors focus their discussions around an example of a student with severe handicaps and present the effects of the precedents on this child's free appropriate public education, including extended school year, related services, appropriate curriculum, and appropriate placement.

In 1975, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in 1990) established the essential obligation of special education law, which is to develop a student’s individualized special education program that enables them to receive a free appropriate public education (FAPE). FAPE was defined in the federal law as special education and related services that: (a) are provided at public expense, (b) meet the standards of the state education agency, (c) include preschool, elementary, or secondary education, and (d) are provided in conformity with a student’s individualized education program (IEP). Thus, the IEP is the blueprint of an individual student’s FAPE. The importance of FAPE has been shown in the number of disputes that have arisen over the issue. In fact 85% to 90% of all special education litigation involves disagreements over the FAPE that students receive. FAPE issues boil down to the process and content of a student’s IEP. In this article, we differentiate procedural (process) and substantive (content) violations and provide specific guidance on how to avoid both process and content errors when drafting and implementing students’ IEPs.

Since the passage of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act in 1975, problems remain regarding appropriate placement of children into least restrictive learning environments in physical education. Many educational placements are ineffective for reasons that have little relationship to the children's abilities, and this has resulted in an ongoing need to seek alternative methods of assessing children for appropriate class placements. Parents have always been involved in this decision-making process. As advocacy and training programs have increased their effectiveness as resource personnel, parents' roles in the education process have broadened. Because of parents' enhanced capabilities as support personnel, and the crucial roles they play in their children's educational programs, this study investigated parents' perspectives regarding the factors essential for placement of children with disabilities into integrated physical education programs. Seventy-five parents completed a 21-item survey to determine factors essential for integrated physical education programs. Results suggested that class size, program support, physical and communicative skills, health status, and motivation were prerequisites of an effectively integrated program.

Editor’s Note Since the landmark enactment of Education of the Handicapped Act in 1975, special education supports and services have been provided to children with disabilities. Although costly, the intentionality of these specialized services has been to advance the educational and societal opportunities of children with disabilities as they progress to adulthood. For our republished article in this issue of JSE’s 50th anniversary volume, we have selected an article by Paul Morgan, Michelle Frisco, George Farkas, and Jacob Hibel. In this research, Morgan and his colleagues quantified the effectiveness of special education services on children’s learning and behavioral outcomes using large-scale longitudinal data. Their results challenge all education professionals to explore ways to increase the effectiveness of special education and to document research efforts that provide clear evidence that the services and supports provided to individuals with disabilities are improving the extent to which they fully experience the benefits of education and participate fully in society.

Since the conception of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act in 1975, there has been substantial progress regarding the education of learners with disabilities. Nevertheless, significant challenges remain for addressing the diverse needs of these learners and improving in- and out-of-school outcomes. This special topic focuses on an approach that holds promise for the delivery of interventions that are aligned to learners’ social, emotional, behavioral, and learning needs—multitiered systems of support (MTSS). The four articles that comprise the special topic highlight the need for actionable information for schools implementing MTSS, early intervention for children with or at risk for disabilities, and an enhanced focus on intensive interventions. This introduction to the special topic provides information on the meeting that motivated the special topic, a summary of each of the four articles, and paths forward for early and sustained intervention for learners with or at risk for disabilities.

The article deals with studying of social transformations in 1975-1989 and new democratic traditions caused with the US legislation on education of individuals with disabilities.The role of the period for the current special education system creation in the United States is highlighted. US federal legislation in 1975–1989 introduced the legal basis of the special education system, which finally determined the vector of its development and caused a revolution in the whole education system. Active civil movement for equal rights enabled the adoption of The Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, known after the renewal as The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 1990. The main innovations of the adopted law in the field of US special education were ensuring free access to appropriate public education for American children with disabilities aged 3 to 21, a right to be served in the least restrictive environment, at public expense, and under public supervision; introduction of individualized educational programs, launching early intervention programs for children at risk, funding of additional educational services for students with special educational needs, etc. The law adoption guaranteed millions of students who were raised in residential institutions or did not receive appropriate educational services in regular schools a possibility to study for free in accordance with state standards with their peers.According to the amendments to this law in 1983 and 1986, the leading principle of special education has been the partnership of parents or caregivers and professionals. To intensify active parental interaction, the law provided their mandatory participation in each stage of individualized educational programs for their children, the opportunity to discuss the conditions of the child’s education and the right to sue the school in case of a controversial educational decision.Key words: history of US special education, legal regulation of US special education, periods of US special education legislation, special education in the USA, periods of special education legislation. Ухвалені Конгресом США у 1975–1989 рр. законодавчі акти запровадили правові основи системи спеціальної освіти, які остаточно визначили вектор її розвитку та спричинили революцію в системі освіти країни загалом. Зауважено роль активного руху за рівні права для всіх громадян країни в ухваленні Закону «Про освіту для всіх дітей з інвалідністю» після оновлення у 1990 р. відомого під назвою «Освіта осіб з особливими освітніми потребами». Досліджено, що головними нововведеннями галузі спеціальної освіти у США після ухвалення зазначеного закону стали забезпечення доступу американський дітей з обмеженнями життєдіяльності віком від 3 до 21 року до безкоштовної освіти належної якості у державних закладах освіти і під контролем громадськості, запровадження індивідуальних навчальних планів, програм раннього втручання для дітей групи ризику, фінансування додаткових освітніх послуг для учнів з особливими освітніми потребами тощо. Підкреслено, що після ухвалення зазначеного закону мільйони учнів, які раніше зростали в закритих спеціалізованих установах або не отримували належних освітніх послуг у загальних школах, отримали можливість безкоштовно навчатися відповідно державних стандартів разом зі своїми однолітками.Указано, що відповідно до поправок до вказаного закону 1983 та 1986 рр. провідним принципом спеціальної освіти стала партнерська взаємодія батьків або опікунів та фахівців. Наголошено, що для активізації цієї взаємодії законом передбачено обов’язкову участь членів сім’ї на кожному етапі укладання індивідуальних навчальних програм для своїх дітей, можливість обговорювати умови навчання дитини та право подавати позов на школу в разі ухвалення суперечливого рішення.Ключові слова: спеціальна освіта у США, правове врегулювання спеціальної освіти, періодизація розвитку правового забезпечення спеціальної освіти, періодизація становлення правового забезпечення спеціальної освіти США.

In this article, Thomas M. Skrtic analyzes and critiques the special education system in the United States, focusing on its policies, practices, and grounding assumptions. He provides an expansive and in-depth literature review, applying a form of criticism he calls "immanent critique" to three areas: 1) special education as a professional practice, 2) special education as an institutional practice, and 3) public education as a social practice of society. In critiquing these areas, he compares the debate over the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975 with the current debate over the Regular Education Initiative and reflects on the positions of the leading scholars who advocate reform within special and regular education. After deconstructing the discourses in these areas, Skrtic argues that the current bureaucratic school organizational structure and specialized professional culture are inappropriate forms to fulfill our social goals of educational excellence and equity. In their place, Skrtic proposes an alternative school organizational structure and professional culture,which he terms "adhocracy." He argues that this form, which stresses collaboration and active problem solving, would provide all students with schooling that is both excellent and equitable, and thus prepare today's youth for the challenges and requirements of the post-industrial era of the coming twenty-first century.

Background: In 1975, Congress passed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (Public Law 94-142), and it has been revised and modified several times. At the time of this writing, this law was most recently amended by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (Pub. L. No. 108-446, 118 Stat. 2647, December 3, 2004), which took effect on July 1, 2005. Colloquially the law is still referred to as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Children with hearing loss or auditory processing disorder (APD) may qualify for services under IDEA. However, a review of the literature found no review of case law for such children. Purpose: This article provides a comprehensive review of case law involving the IDEA and children with hearing loss or APD from the U.S. Supreme Court and U.S. courts of appeals. Research Design: We conducted a systematic review of case law. A LexisNexis search for cases involving IDEA and children with hearing loss or APDs was conducted. For the purpose of the present case review, all appellate decisions (cases accepted by the U.S. courts of appeals or the U.S. Supreme Court) were included if they found that the child had hearing loss or APD, regardless of the reason for the appeal under IDEA. In the instance of multiple cases that involved the same two parties, these cases are summarized together to provide the legal context. Brief explanations of IDEA and the federal judicial process as it pertains to IDEA disputes are presented. Following these explanations, a chronological review of IDEA appellate cases concerning students with hearing loss or APD is provided. Results: The IDEA cases reviewed focus on three main issues: placement of the child, methodology of teaching, and the provision of services. Conclusions: This case law review provides a helpful summary of higher court cases for educational audiologists and parents of children with hearing loss or APDs, as well as educators, individualized education program team members, school administrators, and legal representatives involved in IDEA cases.

In the past 20 years, there have been significant changes in educational services for students with hearing impairments in the public schools. These changes include the enactment of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, the provision of related services by speech-language pathologists and the transition from primarily oral instructional philosophies and practices to those of total communication. Policies and procedures for delivering instruction in oral communication to students with hearing impairments have accompanied these changes. This article presents the results of a survey completed by speech-language pathologists and teachers of hearing-impaired students to identify parameters of instruction for developing oral communication in hearing impaired students. Specifically examined were aspects of professional preparation, roles, and responsibilities of speech-language pathologists and teachers, and parameters of direct instruction. Based on the findings of this survey and knowledge regarding how students learn oral communication, recommendations for the implementation of collaboration and consultation models by speech-language pathologists, teachers, and audiologists are proposed.

In the 10 years since the enactment of the Education of the Handicapped Act (EHA) (1975), special education has grown substantially. Physical education, although cited within the definition of special education, has not grown to the same degree relative to number of teachers trained and children served. Financial assistance from the federal government helped develop adapted physical education programs but it has not been adequate to meet the needs. Several areas of concern are identified and recommendations are made for possible implementation of the physical education mandate of the EHA.

The Education for All Handicapped Children Act is an unusual piece of legislation in that it has continued to enjoy bipartisan support in an era of shrinking federal investment in such programs. Judith Singer and John Butler report the findings of a study on the Act's implementation in five diverse school districts across the country, conducted during the fifth through the eighth years of the Act's existence. The process of equilibration between federal demands and the local capacity to respond provides a central focus for the authors as they ask how, and how well, the schools have functioned as agents of social reform. While they find that both significant transformation of attitude and social reform have occurred, they also point to inequities whose roots in the social fabric make them difficult for the schools alone to overcome.

This article reviews the Tenth Annual Report to Congress on the Implementation of The Education of the Handicapped Act (EHA), covering the 1986–1987 school year. In addition to reporting the current status of services (i.e., numbers of students served, their placement, resources allocated and needed for their support), the report also discusses and cites data pertinent to (a) transition from secondary education: (b) state and federal efforts anticipating full implementation of preschool special education services under Public Law 99–457; and (c) the classification of students with learning disabilities. Some directions for research on special education at a national level are suggested.

Court decisions interpreting the effect of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act on traditional forms of public school discipline have raised many questions. This article reviews these decisions and confirms that most forms of minor disciplinary remedies remain available to educators so long as they are also used with nonhandicapped students. However, many legal problems arise with expulsion and long-term, or indefinite, suspensions of handicapped students, especially in light of the recent Supreme Court ruling regarding the expulsion of handicapped students.

The Education of the Handicapped Act requires state and local educational agencies to provide a free, appropriate public education to all children with disabilities. The meaning of “appropriate” was left quite open-ended by Congress, which predicated “appropriateness” on compliance with state standards and a child's IEP. The Supreme Court's first special education case, Board v. Rowley (1982), clarified the meaning of “appropriate”—as did the Court's later decision, Irving I.S.D. v. Tatro (1984)—but raised questions about just how far the EHA requires schools to go in educating a child. This article analyzes Rowley's meaning for “appropriate” education and justifies the rightness of that decision in terms of its impact on the education of the child and the integration of children who have disabilities with children who do not.

Abstract The passage of the Higher Education Opportunity Act in 2008 extended the expectation of previous legislation (the Education for All Handicapped Children Act and Individuals With Disabilities Education Act) regarding general education academic access for students with intellectual disability, from elementary to secondary and now through to postsecondary education. In light of this extension of academic access, the authors conducted a systematic research review of the studies that explored access to and progress in college academics for students with intellectual disability (ID) enrolled in inclusive postsecondary education (PSE) programs. Of the 43 studies that met criteria, between 1987 and 2017, less than half provided sufficient contextual information to confirm academically inclusive course attendance or participation. Findings and implications, regarding the lack of research exploring access to and progress in academically inclusive college course content for students with ID are discussed. Authors also discuss the need for consensus on academic expectations of students with ID enrolled in college courses and the timely use of compensatory technologies and strategies.

The Montana Office of Public Instruction, Special Education Division, initiated its state Comprehensive System of Personnel Development (CSPD) Council 15 years ago in compliance with Public Law 94–142, The Education of All Handicapped Children Act. The state council has remained active and has become stronger from its beginning to the present time. Because of the large geography of the state and diversity of needs across the state, however, the state council was somewhat limited and fragmented in meeting personnel development needs. Consequently, the state council implemented a CSPD regionalization concept based on the five existing Developmental Disabilities Planning and Advisory Council (DDPAC) and Montana Council of Administrators of Special Education (MCASE) regions. The purpose of this article is to report on strategies and activities of regional CSPD actions in Montana. The regional model holds promise for replication as a framework of personnel development in other large rural states. This information is represented within the context of the recently enacted amendments to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act through the provisions of Public Law 105–17.

The author presents a critical examination of the U.S. Department of Education's Tenth Annual Report to Congress on the Implementation of Public Law 94–142: The Education of All Handicapped Children Act. It appears that the overall results of the report contribute significantly to painting an accurate picture about efforts made to provide adequate instructional environments for school-aged children, who exhibit learning disabilities. The most telling conclusion, however, is that ethnic minority children generally, and Black economically disadvantaged children in particular, are not reaping comparable instructional benefits from these special programs, as are their white counterparts. As a matter of fact, the data reveal a striking parallel between Black students who drop out of “special programs” and those who are disadvantaged by their socio-economic backgrounds, and who tend to drop out of “regular education.” In light of these curious trends, the author proposes that a comprehensive follow-up study be conducted. The purpose of this investigation is to determine the extent to which interactive factors are contributing to the dropout problem, as evidenced by Black students with learning disabilities.

Students with special educational needs have largely been marginalised from regular schools. As the 1900s drew to a close, the Education of All Handicapped Children Act put an end to child segregation from regular schools as an attempt to prevailing equity amongst students and promoting individual differences. Accordingly, disabled students started studying alongside their same-age peers in regular schools. This step requires from teachers to renew their teaching methods and differentiate instruction to meet all students’ needs. Inclusive Education is a teaching approach which considers students’ diverse needs and works on meeting those needs through differentiating instruction. This study aims to explore teachers’ readiness to differentiate instruction to embrace students’ needs and bypass problems associated with disabled students. Methodologically, a qualitative study was carried out principally focusing on a survey and focus group. A sample of 74 in-service middle school teachers of English was chosen as an attempt to provide a more comprehensive picture of their readiness and attitude towards the integration of inclusive education in English courses at middle schools. Ultimately, the analysis of the findings indicated that middle school teachers are ready to integrate inclusive education in their classes as a useful input to meet students’ diverse needs.

This study addresses the issue of state variability in the placement of students with disabilities in integrated or segregated (students with disabilities only) settings. The study examines actual placement patterns of students with severe disabilities (“severely handicapped”) in a small sample of states in order to more closely identify and analyze factors that might influence national monitoring and reporting of LRE issues. Three states representing different geographical areas and including rural, suburban, and urban population bases participated in a direct survey. The survey asked respondents to identify the number of students with severe disabilities (as defined by the U.S. Department of Education) in the state and the educational placement of these students. A survey validity check was also carried out on a sample of 139 students across the three states. Students were observed and rated using a scale that reports degree of disability (moderate to profound) across nine characteristics; in addition, the placement of these students was recorded. The results of the study suggest that the means by which states collect child count data to report to the federal government under Section 618 of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act are inadequate to meet present informational needs. The collection of data by disability category, for example, rather than by estimates of the extent of disability, may make it difficult to evaluate the effects of present educational reform efforts.

Analyses of special education services for students with Emotional and Behavioral Disorders (EBD) conducted prior to and after the passage of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (Public Law 94-142) pointed to significant short comings in service provision such as high rates of segregated placement and poorly prepared personnel. In 1991, a group of leading scholars in the field (the Peacock Hill Working Group) published a set of recommendations to improve practices for students with EBD and summarized what at the time were current research-based strategies. Unfortunately, the field has failed to consistently adopt recommended practices and the in-school and postsecondary outcomes among students with EBD continue to show minimal improvements. Recently, a group of researchers, teacher trainers, and policy makers convened to discuss past and present work in the field and proposed a set of guiding principles and recommendations building on past seminal work. This article provides a context and overview of the group’s work and brief summaries of the five articles that make up this special issue.

The need of speech and language pathology (SLP) as a specialized field in Pakistan emerged with the education of deaf. Development in education of deaf began in Pakistan by Mr. Siddique Akbar Makhdum in 1949. Later in 1951 College for the Teachers of the Deaf in Lahore was established with the collaboration of USAID and faculty from US to teach speech-language pathology. The basic courses introduced were speech, language and audiology. In the tenure of 6th president of Pakistan General Zia-ul-Haq, many organizations were formed to serve special needs children. In his time special education centers were developed in Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi. One of its kind was Speech and Hearing Centre, Karachi, which was established in 1983 and aimed to advocate Auditory Verbal Therapy (AVT).1 In 1991, Post graduate diploma in speech-language therapy (PGD-SLT) was launched with collaboration of NIRM (formerly called National Institute of Handicapped NIHd), UNDP and National Institute of Psychology (NIP), Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad. Ministry of Women Development, Social Welfare and Special education took this initiative. Diane Schaffer from USA and Linda from England were two expert speech therapists who came to Pakistan to teach and train PGD-SLT students in NIRM. Speech and Hearing Association of Pakistan (SHAP) was formed in January 2000.2 On 13th June 2002 SHAP got registered under Sindh Government with registrar of societies Act 21 of 1860. Currently Ms. Amina Siddiqui is President and Dr. Nadeem Mukhtar is Vice President of SHAP. In 2006-2007 Special Education Department of Karachi University launched masters in speech Therapy program. In 2007 Zia-u-Din Hospital started clinical services and collaborated with SHAP to develop the College of Speech Language & Hearing Sciences (CSLHS) where nation’s first 4-year Bachelor’s program in Speech Language Therapy was launched in 2007.2 In 2010 Riphah University Islamabad started MS program in speech-language pathology under supervision of Dr. Ayesha Kamal Butt. In 2013 Isra University Islamabad campus started M.Phil SLP degree program and PhD in Rehabilitation Sciences which opened way to doctoral degree for SLPs as well. In 2019 Riphah International University also launched PhD in Rehabilitation Sciences program. King Edward Medical University also launched BS program in 2008. Currently there are 16 institutes offering BS, 5 institutes offering MS/MPhil and 6 institutes offering diploma in SLP. On 9th October 2019 Pakistan Speech and language pathologist association (PSLPA) was formed by pioneers of field in Pakistan. It is federally registered under the society’s registration act 21 of 1860. Launch day of PSLPA i.e. 9th October was also declared as National Speech Pathology Day. President and Vice President of PSLPA are Dr. Nazia Mumtaz and Ms. Saima Tariq respectively. Although the field of speech-language pathology in Pakistan headed up in 1990 but research in the field began with the commencement of degree programs. The lag between practice and research resulted in the lack of culturally appropriate standardized practices which has yet not been eradicated fully. Despite efforts of existing associations to eliminate malpractice and quackery from the field, it is still going on a huge scale. In fact many practicing SLPs are yet not registered with any association because on legal grounds there is not yet any such compulsion for them on national level. In many states, like other medical professions, it is mandatory for SLPs to be licensed through a state authority in order to practice their speciality.3 The licensing process includes such steps that helps to maintain and establish stringent standards for licensure candidacy and practice. In Pakistan there is a dire need of state’s recognized licensing system that could assure provision of genuine SLPs to public through a standardized vetting process that internationally involves qualifying degree education, supervised clinical experience and examination. Graduate programs are producing culturally consistent researches, even though application of these researches is slow and rare to an extent that out dated traditional practices still dominates. Consequently patients and their families suffer with no or slow pace of progress. There are also centers where patients treated by SLP students are not supervised and guided by senior therapists hence their trial and error learning only benefits them in making stronger clinical record books but at the cost of patient’s wastage of time and student’s malpractice. One reason behind lack of desired clinical supervision is recruitment of less number of SLP clinical supervisors in teaching hospitals as compared to number of students and case load. In many institutes SLP departments are provided with too low budget to equip their clinics with latest assessment and treatment tools due to which students could not get know how of latest practices happening in the field at international level. A huge proportion of clients that take speech therapy sessions are children and adolescents. Regarding pediatric speech therapy, many families raise issues that they are not allowed to observe or stay in sessions. Furthermore, non-provision of appropriate parent training which is contrary to roles and responsibilities of SLPs,4 is also a critical issue that puts parents or guardians in psychological stress when they try to work with their affected family member. Like other countries, in Pakistan the solution of all aforesaid problems can only be found with integration of evidence based practices (EBP). Only with evidence based practices Pakistani SLPs can make informed, evidence based decisions in their practices along with provision of high quality services reflecting the needs, choices, interests and values of target population.

Until 1975, American public schools educated one out of every five children with disabilities between the ages of three and twenty-one. That means that, during this period, public school districts around the nation turned away two million disabled students from their classrooms. Of those lucky handicapped students who were admitted, it is estimated that 2.5 million received ineffective education. Prompted by these findings and in response to two highly publicized federal judicial opinions, Congress statutorily decreed the right of disabled children to receive a free appropriate public education. The 1975 Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EHA) funded state education programs that adhered to this new right and opened their school doors to handicapped children. In 1990, the Act morphed into the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), recognizing more types of disabilities as “handicaps” and strengthening the protections for the discriminated group.

Students with learning disabilities are one of the fastest growing student population attending colleges and universities. Students with learning disabilities in the pre-kindergarten through twelfth grade (PK-12) educational system are protected by the Education of All Handicapped Children Act of 1975 and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEIA) of 1990/Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEIA) of 2004. Conversely, when students with learning disabilities transition to higher education they are no longer covered by these legislations. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 prohibit colleges and universities from discriminating against students with disabilities and mandate that accommodations be provided. The types and levels of accommodations and services offered in higher education, however, are not as extensive as those required to be provided in the PK-12 system. This article comes from a four-year study of the same group of 10 first-year students with dyslexia and/or reading problems. It chronicles their adjustments to the academic expectations of the college environment as they transitioned from high school to college. Chichering (1969; Chickering & Reisser, 1993) provies the theoretical framework for the study. The study begins durign the students' first year of college and concludes four years later when the students are seniors preparing to graduate. Questions in the study were asked of the students over a four-year period.

Inclusion has been a prominent topic in music education since the passage of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1974 (now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act or IDEA 2004). In 2000, music educators at the Housewright Symposium presented a list of goals for music education for the year 2020 in a document called Vision 2020, and one of those goals stated that barriers would be removed for the inclusion of all students. The purpose of this literature review was to examine the past 20 years of music education research (1999–2019) to determine how well the inclusion goal of Vision 2020 has been met. Four themes emerged: Perceptions in Schools, Practices in Schools, University Coursework, and Unique Topics. A concluding section summarizes findings and presents implications for meeting the Vision 2020 inclusion goal as it pertains to students with disabilities.

Introduction Films with deaf characters often do not focus on the condition of deafness at all. Rather, the characters seem to satisfy a role in the story that either furthers the plot or the audience’s understanding of other hearing characters. The deaf characters can be symbolic, for example as a metaphor for isolation representative of ‘those without a voice’ in a society. The deaf characters’ misunderstanding of auditory cues can lead to comic circumstances, and their knowledge can save them in the case of perilous ones. Sign language, because of its unique linguistic properties and its lack of comprehension by hearing people, can save the day in a story line. Deaf characters are shown in different eras and in different countries, providing a fictional window into their possible experiences. Films shape and reflect cultural attitudes and can serve as a potent force in influencing the attitudes and assumptions of those members of the hearing world who have had few, if any, encounters with deaf people. This article explores categories of literary function as identified by the author, providing examples and suggestions of other films for readers to explore. Searching for Deaf Characters in Film I am a sign language interpreter. Several years ago, I started noticing how deaf characters are used in films. I made a concerted effort to find as many as I could. I referred to John Shuchman’s exhaustive book about deaf actors and subject matter, Hollywood Speaks; I scouted video rental guides (key words were ‘deaf’ or ‘disabled’); and I also plugged in the key words ‘deaf in film’ on Google’s search engine. I decided to ignore the issue of whether or not the actors were actually deaf—a political hot potato in the Deaf community which has been discussed extensively. Similarly, the linguistic or cultural accuracy of the type of sign language used or super-human lip-reading talent did not concern me. What was I looking for? I noticed that few story lines involving deaf characters provide any discussion or plot information related to that character’s deafness. I was puzzled. Why is there signing in the elevator in Jerry Maguire? Why does the guy in Grand Canyon have a deaf daughter? Why would the psychosomatic response to a trauma—as in Psych Out—be deafness rather than blindness? I concluded that not being able to hear carried some special meaning or fulfilled a particular need intrinsic to the plot of the story. I also observed that the functions of deaf characters seem to fall into several categories. Some deaf characters fit into more than one category, serving two or more symbolic purposes at the same time. By viewing and analysing the representations of deafness and deaf characters in forty-six films, I have come up with the following classifications: Deafness as a plot device Deaf characters as protagonist informants Deaf characters as a parallel to the protagonist Sign language as ‘hero’ Stories about deaf/hearing relationships A-normal-guy-or-gal-who-just-happens-to-be-deaf Deafness as a psychosomatic response to trauma Deafness as metaphor Deafness as a symbolic commentary on society Let your fingers do the ‘talking’ Deafness as Plot Device Every element of a film is a device, but when the plot hinges on one character being deaf, the story succeeds because of that particular character having that particular condition. The limitations or advantages of a deaf person functioning within the hearing world establish the tension, the comedy, or the events which create the story. In Hear No Evil (1993), Jillian learns from her hearing boyfriend which mechanical devices cause ear-splitting noises (he has insomnia and every morning she accidentally wakes him in very loud ways, eg., she burns the toast, thus setting off the smoke detector; she drops a metal spoon down the garbage disposal unit). When she is pursued by a murderer she uses a fire alarm, an alarm/sprinkler system, and a stereo turned on full blast to mask the sounds of her movements as she attempts to hide. Jillian and her boyfriend survive, she learns about sound, her boyfriend learns about deafness, and she teaches him the sign for orgasm. Life is good! The potential comic aspects of deafness may seem in this day and age to be shockingly politically incorrect. While the slapstick aspect is often innocent and means no overt harm or insult to the Deaf as a population, deafness functions as the visual banana peel over which the characters figuratively stumble in the plot. The film, See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989), pairing Gene Wilder with Richard Pryor as deaf and blind respectively, is a constant sight gag of lip-reading miscues and lack-of-sight gags. Wilder can speak, and is able to speech read almost perfectly, almost all of the time (a stereotype often perpetuated in films). It is mind-boggling to imagine the detail of the choreography required for the two actors to convince the audience of their authenticity. Other films in this category include: Suspect It’s a Wonderful Life Murder by Death Huck Finn One Flew over the Cuckoo’s NestThe Shop on Main StreetRead My Lips The Quiet Deaf Characters as Protagonist Informants Often a deaf character’s primary function to the story is to give the audience more information about, or form more of an affinity with, the hearing protagonist. The deaf character may be fascinating in his or her own right, but generally the deafness is a marginal point of interest. Audience attitudes about the hearing characters are affected because of their previous or present involvement with deaf individuals. This representation of deafness seems to provide a window into audience understanding and appreciation of the protagonist. More inferences can be made about the hearing person and provides one possible explanation for what ensues. It is a subtle, almost subliminal trick. There are several effective examples of this approach. In Gas, Food, Lodging (1992), Shade discovers that tough-guy Javier’s mother is deaf. He introduces Shade to his mother by simple signs and finger-spelling. They all proceed to visit and dance together (mom feels the vibrations on the floor). The audience is drawn to feel ‘Wow! Javier is a sensitive kid who has grown up with a beautiful, exotic, deaf mother!’ The 1977 film, Looking for Mr. Goodbar presents film-goers with Theresa, a confused young woman living a double life. By day, she is a teacher of deaf children. Her professor in the Teacher of the Deaf program even likens their vocation to ‘touching God’. But by night she cruises bars and engages in promiscuous sexual activity. The film shows how her fledgling use of signs begins to express her innermost desires, as well as her ability to communicate and reach out to her students. Other films in this category include: Miracle on 34th Street (1994 version)Nashville (1975, dir. Robert Altman)The Family StoneGrand CanyonThere Will Be Blood Deaf Characters as a Parallel to the Protagonist I Don’t Want to Talk about It (1993) from Argentina, uses a deaf character to establish an implied parallel story line to the main hearing character. Charlotte, a dwarf, is friends with Reanalde, who is deaf. The audience sees them in the first moments of the film when they are little girls together. Reanalde’s mother attempts to commiserate with Charlotte’s mother, establishing a simultaneous but unseen story line somewhere else in town over the course of the story. The setting is Argentina during the 1930s, and the viewer can assume that disability awareness is fairly minimal at the time. Without having seen Charlotte’s deaf counterpart, the audience still knows that her story has contained similar struggles for ‘normalcy’ and acceptance. Near the conclusion of the film, there is one more glimpse of Reanalde, when she catches the bridal bouquet at Charlotte’s wedding. While having been privy to Charlotte’s experiences all along, we can only conjecture as to what Reanalde’s life has been. Sign Language as ‘Hero’ The power of language, and one’s calculated use of language as a means of escape from a potentially deadly situation, is shown in The River Wild (1996). The reason that any of the hearing characters knows sign language is that Gail, the protagonist, has a deaf father. Victor appears primarily to allow the audience to see his daughter and grandson sign with him. The mother, father, and son are able to communicate surreptitiously and get themselves out of a dangerous predicament. Signing takes an iconic form when the signs BOAT, LEFT, I-LOVE-YOU are drawn on a log suspended over the river as a message to Gail so that she knows where to steer the boat, and that her husband is still alive. The unique nature of sign language saves the day– silently and subtly produced, right under the bad guys’ noses! Stories about Deaf/Hearing Relationships Because of increased awareness and acceptance of deafness, it may be tempting to assume that growing up deaf or having any kind of relationship with a deaf individual may not pose too much of a challenge. Captioning and subtitling are ubiquitous in the USA now, as is the inclusion of interpreters on stages at public events. Since the inception of USA Public Law 94-142 and section 504 in 1974, more deaf children are ‘mainstreamed’ into public schools than ever before. The Americans with Disabilities Act was passed in 1993, opening the doors in the US for more access, more job opportunities, more inclusion. These are the external manifestations of acceptance that most viewers with no personal exposure to deafness may see in the public domain. The nuts and bolts of growing up deaf, navigating through opposing philosophical theories regarding deaf education, and dealing with parents, siblings, and peers who can’t communicate, all serve to form foundational experiences which an audience rarely witnesses. Children of a Lesser God (1986), uses the character of James Leeds to provide simultaneous voiced translations of the deaf student Sarah’s comments. The audience is ushered into the world of disparate philosophies of deaf education, a controversy of which general audiences may not have been previously unaware. At the core of James and Sarah’s struggle is his inability to accept that she is complete as she is, as a signing not speaking deaf person. Whether a full reconciliation is possible remains to be seen. The esteemed teacher of the deaf must allow himself to be taught by the deaf. Other films in this category include: Johnny Belinda (1949, 1982)Mr. Holland’s OpusBeyond SilenceThe Good ShepherdCompensation A Normal Guy-or-Gal-Who-Just-Happens-to-Be-Deaf The greatest measure of equality is to be accepted on one's own merits, with no special attention to differences or deviations from whatever is deemed ‘the norm.’ In this category, the audience sees the seemingly incidental inclusion of a deaf or hearing-impaired person in the casting. A sleeper movie titled Crazy Moon (1986) is an effective example. Brooks is a shy, eccentric young hearing man who needs who needs to change his life. Vanessa is deaf and works as a clerk in a shop while takes speech lessons. She possesses a joie de vivre that Brooks admires and wishes to emulate. When comparing the way they interact with the world, it is apparent that Brooks is the one who is handicapped. Other films in this category include: Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (South Korea, 1992)Liar, LiarRequiem for a DreamKung Fu HustleBangkok DangerousThe Family StoneDeafness as a Psychosomatic Response to Trauma Literature about psychosomatic illnesses enumerates many disconcerting and disruptive physiological responses. However, rarely is there a PTSD response as profound as complete blockage of one of the five senses, ie; becoming deaf as a result of a traumatic incident. But it makes great copy, and provides a convenient explanation as to why an actor needn't learn sign language! The rock group The Who recorded Tommy in 1968, inaugurating an exciting and groundbreaking new musical genre – the rock opera. The film adaptation, directed by Ken Russell, was released in 1975. In an ironic twist for a rock extravaganza, the hero of the story is a ‘deaf, dumb, and blind kid.’ Tommy Johnson becomes deaf when he witnesses the murder of his father at the hands of his step-father and complicit mother. From that moment on, he is deaf and blind. When he grows up, he establishes a cult religion of inner vision and self-discovery. Another film in this category is Psych Out. Deafness as a Metaphor Hearing loss does not necessarily mean complete deafness and/or lack of vocalization. Yet, the general public tends to assume that there is utter silence, complete muteness, and the inability to verbalize anything at all. These assumptions provide a rich breeding ground for a deaf character to personify isolation, disenfranchisement, and/or avoidance of the harsher side of life. The deafness of a character can also serve as a hearing character’s nemesis. Mr. Holland’s Opus (1995) chronicles much of the adult life of a beleaguered man named Glenn Holland whose fondest dream is to compose a grand piece of orchestral music. To make ends meet he must teach band and orchestra to apparently disinterested and often untalented students in a public school. His golden son (named Cole, in honor of the jazz great John Coltrane) is discovered to be deaf. Glenn’s music can’t be born, and now his son is born without music. He will never be able to share his passion with his child. He learns just a little bit of sign, is dismissive of the boy’s dreams, and drifts further away from his family to settle into a puddle of bitterness, regrets, and unfulfilled desires. John Lennon’s death provides the catalyst for Cole’s confrontation with Glenn, forcing the father to understand that the gulf between them is an artificial one, perpetuated by the unwillingness to try. Any other disability could not have had the same effect in this story. Other films in this category include: Ramblin’ RoseBabelThe Heart Is a Lonely HunterA Code Unkown Deafness as a Symbolic Commentary on Society Sometimes films show deafness in a different country, during another era, and audiences receive a fictionalized representation of what life might have been like before these more enlightened times. The inability to hear and/or speak can also represent the more generalized powerlessness that a culture or a society’s disenfranchised experience. The Chinese masterpiece To Live (1994) provides historical and political reasons for Fenxi’s deafness—her father was a political prisoner whose prolonged absence brought hardship and untended illness. Later, the chaotic political situation which resulted in a lack of qualified doctors led to her death. In between these scenes the audience sees how her parents arrange a marriage with another ‘handicapped’ comrade of the town. Those citizens deemed to be crippled or outcast have different overt rights and treatment. The 1996 film Illtown presents the character of a very young teenage boy to represent the powerlessness of youth in America. David has absolutely no say in where he can live, with whom he can live, and the decisions made all around him. When he is apprehended after a stolen car chase, his frustration at his and all of his generation’s predicament in the face of a crumbling world is pounded out on the steering wheel as the police cars circle him. He is caged, and without the ability to communicate. Were he to have a voice, the overall sense of the film and his situation is that he would be misunderstood anyway. Other films in this category include: Stille Liebe (Germany)RidiculeIn the Company of Men Let Your Fingers Do the ‘Talking’ I use this heading to describe films where sign language is used by a deaf character to express something that a main hearing character can’t (or won’t) self-generate. It is a clever device which employs a silent language to create a communication symbiosis: Someone asks a hearing person who knows sign what that deaf person just said, and the hearing person must voice what he or she truly feels, and yet is unable to express voluntarily. The deaf person is capable of expressing the feeling, but must rely upon the hearing person to disseminate the message. And so, the words do emanate from the mouth of the person who means them, albeit self-consciously, unwillingly. Jerry Maguire (1996) provides a signed foreshadowing of character metamorphosis and development, which is then voiced for the hearing audience. Jerry and Dorothy have just met, resigned from their jobs in solidarity and rebellion, and then step into an elevator to begin a new phase of their lives. Their body language identifies them as separate, disconnected, and heavily emotionally fortified. An amorous deaf couple enters the elevator and Dorothy translates the deaf man’s signs as, ‘You complete me.’ The sentiment is strong and a glaring contrast to Jerry and Dorothy’s present dynamic. In the end, Jerry repeats this exact phrase to her, and means it with all his heart. We are all made aware of just how far they have traveled emotionally. They have become the couple in the elevator. Other films in this category include: Four Weddings and a FuneralKnowing Conclusion This has been a cursory glance at examining the narrative raison d’etre for the presence of a deaf character in story lines where no discussion of deafness is articulated. A film’s plot may necessitate hearing-impairment or deafness to successfully execute certain gimmickry, provide a sense of danger, or relational tension. The underlying themes and motifs may revolve around loneliness, alienation, or outwardly imposed solitude. The character may have a subconscious desire to literally shut out the world of sound. The properties of sign language itself can be exploited for subtle, undetectable conversations to assure the safety of hearing characters. Deaf people have lived during all times, in all places, and historical films can portray a slice of what their lives may have been like. I hope readers will become more aware of deaf characters on the screen, and formulate more theories as to where they fit in the literary/narrative schema. ReferencesMaltin, Leonard. Leonard Maltin’s 2009 Movie Guide. Penguin Group, 2008.Shuchman, John S. Hollywood Speaks. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Filmography Babel. Dir. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. Central Films, 2006. DVD. Bangkok Dangerous. Dir. Pang Brothers. Film Bangkok, 1999. VHS. Beyond Silence. Dir. Caroline Link. Miramax Films, 1998. DVD. Children of a Lesser God. Dir. Randa Haines. Paramount Pictures, 1985. DVD. A Code Unknown. Dir. Michael Heneke. MK2 Editions, 2000. DVD. Compensation. Dir. Zeinabu Irene Davis. Wimmin with a Mission Productions, 1999. VHS. Crazy Moon. Dir. Allan Eastman. Allegro Films, 1987. VHS. The Family Stone. Dir. Mike Bezucha. 20th Century Fox, 2005. DVD. Four Weddings and a Funeral. Dir. Mike Newell. Polygram Film Entertainment, 1994. DVD. Gas, Food, Lodging. Dir. Allison Anders. IRS Media, 1992. DVD. The Good Shepherd. Dir. Robert De Niro. Morgan Creek, TriBeCa Productions, American Zoetrope, 2006. DVD. Grand Canyon. Dir. Lawrence Kasdan, Meg Kasdan. 20th Century Fox, 1991. DVD. Hear No Evil. Dir. Robert Greenwald. 20th Century Fox, 1993. DVD. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Dir. Robert Ellis Miller. Warner Brothers, 1968. DVD. Huck Finn. Stephen Sommers. Walt Disney Pictures, 1993. VHS. I Don’t Want to Talk about It. Dir. Maria Luisa Bemberg. Mojame Productions, 1994. DVD. Knowing. Dir. Alex Proyas. Escape Artists, 2009. DVD. Illtown. Dir. Nick Gomez. 1998. VHS. In the Company of Men. Dir. Neil LaBute. Alliance Atlantis Communications,1997. DVD. It’s a Wonderful Life. Dir. Frank Capra. RKO Pictures, 1947. DVD. Jerry Maguire. Dir. Cameron Crowe. TriSTar Pictures, 1996. DVD. Johnny Belinda. Dir. Jean Nagalesco. Warner Brothers Pictures, 1948. DVD. Kung Fu Hustle. Dir. Stephen Chow. Film Production Asia, 2004. DVD. Liar, Liar. Dir. Tom Shadyac. Universal Pictures, 1997. DVD. Looking for Mr. Goodbar. Dir. Richard Brooks. Paramount Miracle on 34th Street. Dir. Les Mayfield. 20th Century Fox, 1994. DVD. Mr. Holland’s Opus. Dir. Stephen Hereck. Hollywood Pictures, 1996. DVD Murder by Death. Dir. Robert Moore. Columbia Pictures, 1976. VHS. Nashville. Dir. Robert Altman. Paramount Pictures, 1975. DVD. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Dir. Milos Forman. United Artists, 1975. DVD. The Perfect Circle. Dir. Ademir Kenovic. 1997. DVD. Psych Out. Dir. Richard Rush. American International Pictures, 1968. DVD. The Quiet. Dir. Jamie Babbit. Sony Pictures Classics, 2005. DVD. Ramblin’ Rose. Dir. Martha Coolidge. Carolco Pictures, 1991. DVD. Read My Lips. Dir. Jacques Audiard. Panthe Films, 2001. DVD. Requiem for a Dream. Dir. Darren Aronofsky. Artisan Entertainment, 2000. DVD. Ridicule. Dir. Patrice Laconte. Miramax Films, 1996. DVD. The River Wild. Dir. Curtis Hanson. Universal Pictures, 1995. DVD. See No Evil, Hear No Evil. Dir. Arthur Hiller. TriSTar Pictures,1989. DVD. The Shop on Main Street. Dir. Jan Kadar, Elmar Klos. Barrandov Film Studio, 1965. VHS. Stille Liebe. Dir. Christoph Schaub. T and C Film AG, 2001. DVD. Suspect. Dir. Peter Yates. Tri-Star Pictures, 1987. DVD. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. Dir. Park Chan-wook. CJ Entertainments, Tartan Films, 2002. DVD. There Will Be Blood. Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson. Paramount Vantage, Miramax Films, 2007. DVD. To Live. Dir. Zhang Yimou. Shanghai Film Studio and ERA International, 1994. DVD. What the Bleep Do We Know?. Dir. Willam Arntz, Betsy Chasse, Mark Vicente. Roadside Attractions, 2004. DVD.

In 1975, Congress enacted a law eventually known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which ensures that children with disabilities receive a free, appropriate, public education. Since then, scholarly and popular debates about the effectiveness of inclusive education have proliferated and typically focus on the ability or inability of students with disabilities to succeed in so-called regular classrooms. These debates reflect widespread assumptions that the regular classroom is rightly the province of nondisabled students and a neutral, value-free space that students with disabilities invade and disrupt via their very presence and their costly needs for adaptation. But as many scholars in the field of Disability Studies in Education (DSE) have argued, these discussions often fail to recognize that the space of the regular classroom, far from neutral, is constructed for a nondisabled, neurotypical, white, male, middle-class "norm" that neither reflects nor accommodates the wide range of diverse learners within it, regardless of whether these learners have been diagnosed with a disability. A DSE perspective sees the educational environment, not students with disabilities, as the "problem" and calls for a Universal Design for Learning approach to education, or the design of instructional materials and activities that allows the learning goals to be achievable by individuals with wide differences in their abilities and backgrounds. Agreeing with this DSE perspective, this article uses an autoethnographic approach to reexamine inclusive education and to consider how university classrooms, pedagogy, and curricular materials can be improved in order to accommodate all students, not just those with disabilities. Ultimately, the article argues that Universal Design for Learning has the potential to radically transform the meaning of inclusive education and the very concept of disability.

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mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-size:10.0pt; mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.0in 1.0in 1.0in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> <!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} </style> <![endif]--> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;"><em>Our commentary on Christine Sleeter’s landmark work, </em>Why Is There Learning Disabilities? A Critical Analysis of the Birth of the Field in Its Social Context<em>, is presented in four sections. Each of the first three sections addresses one of the foci of her conflict analysis—ideology, institutions, and differentiated education—by summarizing her argument with respect to that aspect of her analysis, historicizing her line of argument in Foucault's sense of recontextualization or rereading a text in terms of categories and problems unavailable to its author, and assessing the social, historical and theoretical value of her analysis in general and with respect to the categories and problems of our recontextualization.<span> </span>In the first section we draw upon democratic theory to differentiate three strains of American liberalism—market, developmental, and managerial—which we use to extend Sleeter's argument regarding the ideology behind the creation of the learning disabilities category. In the second section we use institutional theory to reread her argument regarding schools as social institutions and what they had to gain from the creation of the learning disabilities category.<span> </span>For the third aspect of her analysis, we use the institutional history of public education to trace the roots of the discursive practice of differentiated education and to characterize the system that existed in the 1950s that the </em>Brown<em> decision, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, and the Education of All Handicapped Children Act of 1975 tried to change.<span> </span>In our concluding section we bring Sleeter's analysis forward in time to consider the new push for higher standards that she speculates about at the end of her paper. What she was referring to turned out to be the start of the neoliberal standards-based reform movement, which we review and relate to Sleeter's analysis and our recontextualization, as well as to her most recent work that addresses the intersection of accountability, equity, and democracy.</em></p>

Audiences are a contested domain with Ang and others desperate to analyse, anatomise, understand and describe them. They are particularly important for the commercialisation of any medium since advertisers like to know what they are getting for their money and, in the famous aphorism, 'the role of the commercial media is to deliver audiences to advertisers'. Marshall's concept of 'audience-commodity' continues this intellectual interrogation of the audience and its production by individual practices of media consumption. Mass media audiences have consumed much research attention over most of the past century with major consideration being paid to the displacement of other activities arising from the consumption of newly-introduced media, effects of the media and a succession of moral panics. It has only been in recent years that 'the audience' has been researched on (essentially) its own terms -- in the branch of media and culture studies enquiry called, conveniently, 'audience studies'. Well- known Australian examples of such studies often concern children and adolescents and include: Hodge & Tripp, Noble, and Palmer (now Gillard). Audience studies assumes that audience participants are sufficiently insightful and sufficiently cognisant of their various pleasures, desires and frustrations to be able to discuss their media consumption patterns with interested researchers. The paradigm takes as read that people have reasons for their behaviours, and sets out to uncover what these are through (often) a variety of interview and observation techniques. It accords audience membership an importance in people's lives. The nature of the 'general' audience is illuminated by specific comments and examples offered during the research process by specific audience members -- analysed and interpreted by the research team. What is clear from a cursory glance at the literature is that audiences do not talk about 'broadcasting' per se, they talk about specific programs and have a tendency to compare programs with others of the same type. Audiences perceive broadcasting as divided into genred broadcasting streams. Unless asked to do so, an audience member (and I've formally interviewed over two hundred such people) is unlikely to compare Home and Away with the ABC Evening News. Comparisons between Home and Away and Neighbours are commonplace, however. What genre is the Internet? A silly question, I know -- but one that is begged by the repeated discussions of Internet culture, Internet communications and information and Internet communities as 'the Internet'. It's a long time since media studies and popular culture academics have discussed 'broadcasting' generically because concern for the specifics of genred broadcasting (both in television and radio) have rendered generalised discussion ridiculously global and oversimplified. In broadcasting we talk about television and radio as if they were (since they are) significantly different. We recognise that the production values for soap opera, drama, sport, news and current affairs and light entertainment are dissimilar. It's only silly to ask 'what genre is the Internet' because, when we think about it, the Internet is multiply genred. Audiences that consume broadcast programmes can be differentiated from each other in terms of age, gender and socioeconomic status, and in terms of viewing place, viewing style, motivation and preferred programme genres. As Morley indicates in his 1986 treatise, Family Television: Cultural Power and Domestic Leisure, the domestic context is central to the everyday consumption of TV. He argues that "the social dimensions of 'watching television' -- the social relationships within which viewing is performed as an activity -- have to be brought more directly into focus if we are properly to understand television audiences' choices of, and responses to, their viewing" (15). That focus upon social relationships as the domestic context within which television is consumed is the substance of his book. Holmes suggests that much of the appeal of the Internet is a spurious one, viz. by selling "a new kind of community to those who have been disconnected from geographical communities" (35). He claims that society has been divided into a multitude of separate domestic spheres within which television is consumed, creating an isolation which the Internet is marketed as solving. "The Internet offers to the dispossessed the ability to remove some of the walls for brief periods of time in return for a time-charged fee" (35). A key to understanding the domestic consumption of television, however, is an understanding of the specifics of genre, and the pleasures associated with the consumption of the genre. Uses to which the broadcast material is put in daily life in interpersonal settings are essentially related to the broadcast material consumed. Discussion of soaps, and of finance reporting, may both be used to develop interpersonal networks and to display current knowledge, but these discussions are likely to occur in different domestic/work contexts. Have we had enough of generalised discussion of the global Internet? Can we move onto addressing whether it is genred; and if so, in which ways? Faced with the cacophony which is the Internet today -- let alone the projected manifestation of the Internet tomorrow -- we are forced to conclude that the Internet has the potential to mimic the features of all the media and genres that have preceded it, and more. It can operate as a mass medium, as a niche medium, and as one-to-one discrete communication -- Dayan's 'particularistic' media (103-13). Within all these categories it can (or has the potential to) work in audio, visual, audiovisual, text and data. On top of this complexity, it offers a variety of degrees of interactivity from simple access to full content creation as part of the communication exchange. You thought Media Studies was big? Watch out for the disciplinary field of Internet Studies! The concept of the active audience has been a staple of audience studies theory for a generation. Here the activity recognised in the 'active' audience is one of the audience actively engaging with programme content -- resisting, reformulating and recirculating the messages and meanings on offer. This is a different level of interactivity compared with that implicit in some aspects of the Internet (online community, for example). Internet interactivity recognises that the text is produced as part of the act of consumption. Have the audience activity characteristics of online community members been sufficiently differentiated from -- say -- the activity of accessing Encyclopaedia Britannica online? Are online community members more of a 'www.participants' than an 'audience'; should we see audiences as genred too? Television audiences (as my anonymous reviewer has helpfully remarked) are typically constituted via essentialising experiences' "generally domestic/familial setting, generally in the context of other activities, generally ritualised in terms of the serialisation of these experiences etc." We know that this is the case from detailed investigations into the consumption of television. Less is known about the experience of online participation, although Wilbur discusses "the strangely solitary work that many CMC [computer-mediated communications] researchers are engaged in, sitting alone at their computers, but surrounded by a global multitude" (6). He goes on to suggest seven definitions of 'virtual community' before concluding that the "multi-bladed, critical Swiss army knives" might offer an appropriate metaphor for the many uses of the Internet. 'Participation' in this culture is similarly hard to define, and (given that it is so individual and spatially private) expressive of individual difference. "For those who doubt the possibility of online intimacy, I can only speak of ... hours sitting at my keyboard with tears streaming down my face, or convulsed with laughter" (Wilbur 18). I wait for the ethnographic research before I venture further into definitions of 'www.participants'. Online community, I would argue, is a specifically genred stream of Internet activity. Further, it is particularly interesting to audience researchers because it has no clear precursor in the audiences and readerships of the traditional mass media. Holmes (32) has usefully differentiated between 'Communities of broadcast' (using the generic term, to offer an exception to the rule!) and 'Communities of interactivity', but he does so to highlight difference -- not to argue great similarity. The community of interest brought into being by the shared consumption and social circulation of elements of broadcast programming differs from the community of interactivity made visible through online community membership -- and both differ from Anderson's notion of the imagined community. Online communities are particularly problematic for audience studies theorists because the audience is the content producer. There is no content apart from the interactions and creativity of community members, and the contributions of new/casual online participants. For sites where 'hits' are enumerated, the simple act of access is also content production, and creates value and interest for others. Clearly the research is yet to be done in these areas. If we are to theorise cogently and in depth about people's activities and production/consumption patterns on the Internet, we need to identify genres and investigate specific audience/community members. Interactions with online community members suggest that age may offer a critical nexus of audience/participant distinction (Palandri & Green). Community members of 35+ have had to deliberately choose to learn the conventions of Internet interaction. They have experienced specific motivations. In affluent societies such as ours, on the other hand, for many people under 20, the required Internet skills and competencies have been normalised as part of an everyday social repertoire, in the same way that almost all of us have learned the conventions of television viewing. An understanding of the specifics of difference, and of congruence, will make discussions of Internet audiences/participants/content providers/community members that much more useful. Such research has an added frisson. I started this article with an acknowledgement of Ang's book Desperately Seeking the Audience. The research to be undertaken in the Internet genre of online community includes the need to seek desperately for the audience; the individual audience member; and (in many cases) the individual audience member's multiple identities -- each of which offers specific and different value to the researched community member. Identity is a key issue for Internet researchers, and a signal difference between communities of broadcast and communities of interactivity. As Holmes has usefully pointed out: "broadcast facilitates mass recognition ... with little reciprocity while the Internet facilitates reciprocity with little or no recognition" (31). We need to acknowledge, recognise and explore these differences in the next generation of audience studies research. References Anderson, B. Imagined Communities. 2nd ed. London: Verso, 1991. Ang, I. Desperately Seeking the Audience. London: Routledge, 1991. Dayan, D. "Particularistic Media and Diasporic Communications." Media, Ritual and Identity. Eds T. Liebes and J. Curran. London: Routledge, 1998. 103-13. Hodge, B., and D. Tripp. Children and Television: A Semiotic Approach. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986. Holmes, D. "Virtual Identity: Communities of Broadcast, Communities of Interactivity." Virtual Politics: Identity and Community in Cyberspace. Ed. D. Holmes. London: Sage, 1997. 26-45. Morley, D. Family Television: Cultural Power and Domestic Leisure. London: Routledge, 1986. Noble, G. Children in Front of the Small Screen. London: Constable, 1975. Palandri, M., and L. Green. "Image Management in a Bondage, Discipline, Sadomasochist Subculture: A Cyber-Ethnographic Study." CyberPsychology and Behavior. USA: Mary Ann Liebert, forthcoming. <http://www.liebertpub.com/cpb/default.htm>. Palmer, P. Girls and Television. Sydney: NSW Ministry of Education, 1986. ---. The Lively Audience: A Study of Children around the TV Set. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1986. Wilbur, S.P. "An Archaeology of Cyberspaces: Virtuality, Community, Identity." Internet Culture. Ed. D. Porter. New York: Routledge, 1997. 5- 22. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Lelia Green. "Relating to Internet 'Audiences'." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.1 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/internet.php>. Chicago style: Lelia Green, "Relating to Internet 'Audiences'," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 1 (2000), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/internet.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Lelia Green. (2000) Relating to Internet 'Audiences'. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(1). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/internet.php> ([your date of access]).

She leant lazily across the picnic hamper and reached for my hearing aid in my open-palmed hand. I jerked away from her, batting her hand away from mine. The glare of the summer sun blinded me. I struck empty air. Her tendril-fingers seized the beige seashell curve of my hearing aid and she lifted the cargo of sound towards her eyes. She peered at the empty battery-cage before flicking it open and shut as if it was a cigarette lighter, as if she could spark hearing-life into this trick of plastic and metal that held no meaning outside of my ear. I stared at her. A band of horror tightened around my throat, strangling my shout: ‘Don’t do that!’ I clenched my fist around the new battery that I had been about to insert into my hearing aid and imagined it speeding like a bullet towards her heart. This dream arrived as I researched my anthology of memoir-style essays on deafness, The Art of Being. I had already been reflecting and writing for several years about my relationship with my deaf-self and the impact of my deafness on my life, but I remained uneasy about writing about my deaf-life. I’ve lived all my adult life entirely in the hearing world, and so recasting myself as a deaf woman with something pressing to say about deaf people’s lives felt disturbing. The urgency to tell my story and my anxiety to contest certain assumptions about deafness were real, but I was hampered by diffidence. The dream felt potent, as if my deaf-self was asserting itself, challenging my hearing persona. I was the sole deaf child in a family of five muddling along in a weatherboard war commission house at The Grange in Brisbane during the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties. My father’s resume included being in the army during World War Two, an official for the boxing events at the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games and a bookie with a gift for telling stories. My mother had spent her childhood on a cherry orchard in Young, worked as a nurse in war-time Sydney and married my father in Townsville after a whirlwind romance on Magnetic Island before setting up home in Brisbane. My older sister wore her dark hair in thick Annie-Oakley style plaits and my brother took me on a hike along the Kedron Brook one summer morning before lunchtime. My parents did not know of any deaf relatives in their families, and my sister and brother did not have any friends with deaf siblings. There was just me, the little deaf girl. Most children are curious about where they come from. Such curiosity marks their first foray into sexual development and sense of identity. I don’t remember expressing such curiosity. Instead, I was diverted by my mother’s story of her discovery that I was deaf. The way my mother tells the story, it is as if I had two births with the date of the diagnosis of my deafness marking my real arrival, over-riding the false start of my physical birth three years earlier. Once my mother realized that I was deaf, she was able to get on with it, the ‘it’ being to defy the inevitability of a constrained life for her deaf child. My mother came out swinging; by hook or by crook, her deaf daughter was going to learn to speak and to be educated and to take her place in the hearing world and to live a normal life and that was that. She found out about the Commonwealth Acoustics Laboratory (now known as Australian Hearing Services) where, after I completed a battery of auditory tests, I was fitted with a hearing aid. This was a small metal box, to be worn in a harness around my body, with a long looping plastic cord connected to a beige ear-mould. An instrument for piercing silence, it absorbed and conveyed sounds, with those sounds eventually separating themselves out into patterns of words and finally into strings of sentences. Without my hearing aid, if I am concentrating, and if the sounds are made loudly, I am aware of the sounds at the deeper end of the scale. Sometimes, it’s not so much that I can hear them; it’s more that I know that those sounds are happening. My aural memory of the deep-register sounds helps me to “hear” them, much like the recollection of any tune replays itself in your imagination. With and without my hearing aids, if I am not watching the source of those sounds – for example, if the sounds are taking place in another room or even just behind me – I am not immediately able to distinguish whether the sounds are conversational or musical or happy or angry. I can only discriminate once I’ve established the rhythm of the sounds; if the rhythm is at a tearing, jagged pace with an exaggerated rise and fall in the volume, I might reasonably assume that angry words are being had. I cannot hear high-pitched sounds at all, with and without my hearing aids: I cannot hear sibilants, the “cees” and “esses” and “zeds”. I cannot hear those sounds which bounce or puff off from your lips, such as the letters “b” and “p”; I cannot hear that sound which trampolines from the press of your tongue against the back of your front teeth, the letter “t”. With a hearing-aid I can hear and discriminate among the braying, hee-hawing, lilting, oohing and twanging sounds of the vowels ... but only if I am concentrating, and if I am watching the source of the sounds. Without my hearing aid, I might also hear sharp and sudden sounds like the clap of hands or crash of plates, depending on the volume of the noise. But I cannot hear the ring of the telephone, or the chime of the door bell, or the urgent siren of an ambulance speeding down the street. My hearing aid helps me to hear some of these sounds. I was a pupil in an oral-deaf education program for five years until the end of 1962. During those years, I was variously coaxed, dragooned and persuaded into the world of hearing. I was introduced to a world of bubbles, balloons and fingers placed on lips to learn the shape, taste and feel of sounds, their push and pull of air through tongue and lips. By these mechanics, I gained entry to the portal of spoken, rather than signed, speech. When I was eight years old, my parents moved me from the Gladstone Road School for the Deaf in Dutton Park to All Hallows, an inner-city girls’ school, for the start of Grade Three. I did not know, of course, that I was also leaving my world of deaf friends to begin a new life immersed in the hearing world. I had no way of understanding that this act of transferring me from one school to another was a profound statement of my parents’ hopes for me. They wanted me to have a life in which I would enjoy all the advantages and opportunities routinely available to hearing people. Like so many parents before them, ‘they had to find answers that might not, for all they knew, exist . . . How far would I be able to lead a ‘normal’ life? . . . How would I earn a living? You can imagine what forebodings weighed on them. They could not know that things might work out better than they feared’ (Wright, 22). Now, forty-four years later, I have been reflecting on the impact of that long-ago decision made on my behalf by my parents. They made the right decision for me. The quality of my life reflects the rightness of their decision. I have enjoyed a satisfying career in social work and public policy embedded in a life of love and friendships. This does not mean that I believe that my parents’ decision to remove me from one world to another would necessarily be the right decision for another deaf child. I am not a zealot for the cause of oralism despite its obvious benefits. I am, however, stirred by the Gemini-like duality within me, the deaf girl who is twin to the hearing persona I show to the world, to tell my story of deafness as precisely as I can. Before I can do this, I have to find that story because it is not as apparent to me as might be expected. In an early published memoir-essay about my deaf girlhood, I Hear with My Eyes (in Schulz), I wrote about my mother’s persistence in making sure that I learnt to speak rather than sign, the assumed communication strategy for most deaf people back in the 1950s. I crafted a selection of anecdotes, ranging in tone, I hoped, from sad to tender to laugh-out-loud funny. I speculated on the meaning of certain incidents in defining who I am and the successes I have enjoyed as a deaf woman in a hearing world. When I wrote this essay, I searched for what I wanted to say. I thought, by the end of it, that I’d said everything that I wanted to say. I was ready to move on, to write about other things. However, I was delayed by readers’ responses to that essay and to subsequent public speaking engagements. Some people who read my essay told me that they liked its fresh, direct approach. Others said that they were moved by it. Friends were curious and fascinated to get the inside story of my life as a deaf person as it has not been a topic of conversation or inquiry among us. They felt that they’d learnt something about what it means to be deaf. Many responses to my essay and public presentations had relief and surprise as their emotional core. Parents have cried on hearing me talk about the fullness of my life and seem to regard me as having given them permission to hope for their own deaf children. Educators have invited me to speak at parent education evenings because ‘to have an adult who has a hearing impairment and who has developed great spoken language and is able to communicate in the community at large – that would be a great encouragement and inspiration for our families’ (Email, April 2007). I became uncomfortable about these responses because I was not sure that I had been as honest or direct as I could have been. What lessons on being deaf have people absorbed by reading my essay and listening to my presentations? I did not set out to be duplicitous, but I may have embraced the writer’s aim for the neatly curved narrative arc at the cost of the flinty self-regarding eye and the uncertain conclusion. * * * Let me start again. I was born deaf at a time, in the mid 1950s, when people still spoke of the ‘deaf-mute’ or the ‘deaf and dumb.’ I belonged to a category of children who attracted the gaze of the curious, the kind, and the cruel with mixed results. We were bombarded with questions we could either not hear and so could not answer, or that made us feel we were objects for exploration. We were the patronized beneficiaries of charitable picnics organized for ‘the disadvantaged and the handicapped.’ Occasionally, we were the subject of taunts, with words such as ‘spastic’ being speared towards us as if to be called such a name was a bad thing. I glossed over this muddled social response to deafness in my published essay. I cannot claim innocence as my defence. I knew I was glossing over it but I thought this was right and proper: after all, why stir up jagged memories? Aren’t some things better left unexpressed? Besides, keep the conversation nice, I thought. The nature of readers’ responses to my essay provoked me into a deeper exploration of deafness. I was shocked by the intensity of so many parents’ grief and anxiety about their children’s deafness, and frustrated by the notion that I am an inspiration because I am deaf but oral. I wondered what this implied about my childhood deaf friends who may not speak orally as well as I do, but who nevertheless enjoy fulfilling lives. I was stunned by the admission of a mother of a five year old deaf son who, despite not being able to speak, has not been taught how to Sign. She said, ‘Now that I’ve met you, I’m not so frightened of deaf people anymore.’ My shock may strike the average hearing person as naïve, but I was unnerved that so many parents of children newly diagnosed with deafness were grasping my words with the relief of people who have long ago lost hope in the possibilities for their deaf sons and daughters. My shock is not directed at these parents but at some unnameable ‘thing out there.’ What is going on out there in the big world that, 52 years after my mother experienced her own grief, bewilderment, anxiety and quest to forge a good life for her little deaf daughter, contemporary parents are still experiencing those very same fears and asking the same questions? Why do parents still receive the news of their child’s deafness as a death sentence of sorts, the death of hope and prospects for their child, when the facts show – based on my own life experiences and observations of my deaf school friends’ lives – that far from being a death sentence, the diagnosis of deafness simply propels a child into a different life, not a lesser life? Evidently, a different sort of silence has been created over the years; not the silence of hearing loss but the silence of lost stories, invisible stories, unspoken stories. I have contributed to that silence. For as long as I can remember, and certainly for all of my adult life, I have been careful to avoid being identified as ‘a deaf person.’ Although much of my career was taken up with considering the equity dilemmas of people with a disability, I had never assumed the mantle of advocacy for deaf people or deaf rights. Some of my early silence about deaf identity politics was consistent with my desire not to shine the torch on myself in this way. I did not want to draw attention to myself by what I did not have, that is, less hearing than other people. I thought that if I lived my life as fully as possible in the hearing world and with as little fuss as possible, then my success in blending in would be eloquence enough. If I was going to attract attention, I wanted it to be on the basis of merit, on what I achieved. Others would draw the conclusions that needed to be drawn, that is, that deaf people can take their place fully in the hearing world. I also accepted that if I was to be fully ‘successful’ – and I didn’t investigate the meaning of that word for many years – in the hearing world, then I ought to isolate myself from my deaf friends and from the deaf culture. I continued to miss them, particularly one childhood friend, but I was resolute. I never seriously explored the possibility of straddling both worlds, despite the occasional invitation to do so. For example, one of my childhood deaf friends, Damien, visited me at my parents’ home once, when we were both still in our teens. He was keen for me to join him in the Deaf Theatre, but I couldn’t muster the emotional dexterity that I felt this required. Instead, I let myself to be content to hear news of my childhood deaf friends through the grape-vine. This was, inevitably, a patchy process that lent itself to caricature. Single snippets of information about this person or that person ballooned into portrait-size depictions of their lives as I sketched the remaining blanks of their history with my imagination as my only tool. My capacity to be content with my imagination faltered. * * * Despite the construction of public images of deafness around the highly visible performance of hand-signed communication, the ‘how-small-can-we-go?’ advertorials of hearing aids and the cochlear implant with its head-worn speech processor, deafness is often described as ‘the invisible disability.’ My own experience bore this out. I became increasingly self-conscious about the singularity of my particular success, moderate in the big scheme of things though that may be. I looked around me and wondered ‘Why don’t I bump into more deaf people during the course of my daily life?’ After all, I am not a recluse. I have broad interests. I have travelled a lot, and have enjoyed a policy career for some thirty years, spanning the three tiers of government and scaling the competitive ladder with a reasonable degree of nimbleness. Such a career has got me out and about quite a bit: up and down the Queensland coast and out west, down to Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Adelaide and Hobart, and to the United Kingdom. And yet, not once in those thirty years did I get to share an office or a chance meeting or a lunch break with another deaf person. The one exception took place in the United Kingdom when I attended a national conference in which the keynote speaker was the Chairman of the Audit Commission, a man whose charisma outshines his profound deafness. After my return to Australia from the United Kingdom, a newspaper article about an education centre for deaf children in a leafy suburb of Brisbane, prompted me into action. I decided to investigate what was going on in the world of education for deaf children and so, one warm morning in 2006, I found myself waiting in the foyer for the centre’s clinical director. I flicked through a bundle of brochures and newsletters. They were loaded with images of smiling children wearing cochlear implants. Their message was clear: a cochlear implant brought joy, communication and participation in all that the world has to offer. This seemed an easy miracle. I had arrived with an open mind but now found myself feeling unexpectedly tense, as if I was about to walk a high-wire without the benefit of a safety net. Not knowing the reason for my fear, I swallowed it and smiled at the director in greeting upon her arrival. She is physically a small person but her energy is large. Her passion is bracing. That morning, she was quick to assert the power of cochlear implants by simply asking me, ‘Have you ever considered having an implant?’ When I shook my head, she looked at me appraisingly, ‘I’m sure you’d benefit from it’ before ushering me into a room shining with sun-dappled colour and crowded with a mess of little boys and girls. The children were arrayed in a democracy of shorts, shirts, and sandals. Only the occasional hair-ribbon or newly pressed skirt separated this girl from that boy. Some young mothers and fathers, their faces stretched with tension, stood or sat around the room’s perimeter watching their infant children. The noise in the room was orchestral, rising and falling to a mash of shouts, cries and squeals. A table had been set with several plastic plates in which diced pieces of browning apple, orange slices and melon chunks swam in a pond of juice. Some small children clustered around it, waiting to be served. When they finished their morning fruit, they were rounded up to sit at the front of the room, before a teacher poised with finger-puppets of ducks. I tripped over a red plastic chair – its tiny size designed to accommodate an infant’s bottom and small-sausage legs – and lowered myself onto it to take in the events going on around me. The little boys and girls laughed merrily as they watched their teacher narrate the story of a mother duck and her five baby ducks. Her hands moved in a flurry of duck-billed mimicry. ‘“Quack! Quack! Quack!” said the mother duck!’ The parents trilled along in time with the teacher. As I watched the children at the education centre that sunny morning, I saw that my silence had acted as a brake of sorts. I had, for too long, buried the chance to understand better the complex lives of deaf people as we negotiate the claims and demands of the hearing world. While it is true that actions speak louder than words, the occasional spoken and written word must surely help things along a little. I also began to reflect on the apparent absence of the inter-generational transfer of wisdom and insights born of experience rather than academic studies. Why does each new generation of parents approach the diagnosis of their newborn child’s disability or deafness with such intensity of fear, helplessness and dread for their child’s fate? I am not querying the inevitability of parents experiencing disappointment and shock at receiving unexpected news. I accept that to be born deaf means to be born with less than perfect hearing. All the same, it ought not to be inevitable that parents endure sustained grief about their child’s prospects. They ought to be illuminated as quickly as possible about all that is possible for their child. In particular, they ought to be encouraged to enjoy great hopes for their child. I mused about the power of story-telling to influence attitudes. G. Thomas Couser claims that ‘life writing can play a significant role in changing public attitudes about deafness’ (221) but then proceeds to cast doubt on his own assertion by later asking, ‘to what degree and how do the extant narratives of deafness rewrite the discourse of disability? Indeed, to what degree and how do they manage to represent the experience of deafness at all?’ (225). Certainly, stories from the Deaf community do not speak for me as my life has not been shaped by the framing of deafness as a separate linguistic and cultural entity. Nor am I drawn to the militancy of identity politics that uses terms such as ‘oppression’ and ‘oppressors’ to deride the efforts of parents and educators to teach deaf children to speak (Lane; Padden and Humphries). This seems to be unhelpfully hostile and assumes that deafness is the sole arbitrating reason that deaf people struggle with understanding who they are. It is the nature of being human to struggle with who we are. Whether we are deaf, migrants, black, gay, mentally ill – or none of these things – we are all answerable to the questions: ‘who am I and what is my place in the world?’ As I cast around for stories of deafness and deaf people with which I could relate, I pondered on the relative infrequency of deaf characters in literature, and the scarcity of autobiographies by deaf writers or biographies of deaf people by either deaf or hearing people. I also wondered whether written stories of deafness, memoirs and fiction, shape public perceptions or do they simply respond to existing public perceptions of deafness? As Susan DeGaia, a deaf academic at California State University writes, ‘Analysing the way stories are told can show us a lot about who is most powerful, most heard, whose perspective matters most to society. I think if we polled deaf/Deaf people, we would find many things missing from the stories that are told about them’ (DeGaia). Fighting my diffidence in staking out my persona as a ‘deaf woman’ and mustering the ‘conviction as to the importance of what [I have] to say, [my] right to say it’ (Olsen 27), I decided to write The Art of Being Deaf, an anthology of personal essays in the manner of reflective memoirs on deafness drawing on my own life experiences and supported by additional research. This presented me with a narrative dilemma because my deafness is just one of several life-events by which I understand myself. I wanted to find fresh ways of telling stories of deaf experiences while fashioning my memoir essays to show the texture of my life in all its variousness. A.N.Wilson’s observation about the precarious insensitivity of biographical writing was my guiding pole-star: the sense of our own identity is fluid and tolerant, whereas our sense of the identity of others is always more fixed and quite often edges towards caricature. We know within ourselves that we can be twenty different persons in a single day and that the attempt to explain our personality is doomed to become a falsehood after only a few words ... . And yet ... works of literature, novels and biographies depend for their aesthetic success precisely on this insensitive ability to simplify, to describe, to draw lines around another person and say, ‘This is she’ or ‘This is he.’ I have chosen to explore my relationship with my deafness through the multiple-threads of writing several personal essays as my story-telling vehicle rather than as a single-thread autobiography. The multiple-thread approach to telling my stories also sought to avoid the pitfalls of identity narrative in which I might unwittingly set myself up as an exemplar of one sort or another, be it as a ‘successful deaf person’ or as an ‘angry militant deaf activist’ or as ‘a deaf individual in denial attempting to pass as hearing.’ But in seeking to avoid these sorts of stories, what autobiographical story am I trying to tell? Because, other than being deaf, my life is not otherwise especially unusual. It is pitted here with sadness and lifted there with joy, but it is mostly a plateau held stable by the grist of daily life. Christopher Jon Heuer recognises this dilemma when he writes, ‘neither autobiography nor biography nor fiction can survive without discord. Without it, we are left with boredom. Without it, what we have is the lack of a point, a theme and a plot’ (Heuer 196). By writing The Art of Being Deaf, I am learning more than I have to teach. In the absence of deaf friends or mentors, and in the climate of my own reluctance to discuss my concerns with hearing people who, when I do flag any anxieties about issues arising from my deafness tend to be hearty and upbeat in their responses, I have had to work things out for myself. In hindsight, I suspect that I have simply ignored most of my deafness-related difficulties, leaving the heavy lifting work to my parents, teachers, and friends – ‘for it is the non-deaf who absorb a large part of the disability’ (Wright, 5) – and just got on with things by complying with what was expected of me, usually to good practical effect but at the cost of enriching my understanding of myself and possibly at the cost of intimacy. Reading deaf fiction and memoirs during the course of this writing project is proving to be helpful for me. I enjoy the companionability of it, but not until I got over my fright at seeing so many documented versions of deaf experiences, and it was a fright. For a while there, it was like walking through the Hall of Mirrors in Luna Park. Did I really look like that? Or no, perhaps I was like that? But no, here’s another turn, another mirror, another face. Spinning, twisting, turning. It was only when I stopped searching for the right mirror, the single defining portrait, that I began to enjoy seeing my deaf-self/hearing-persona experiences reflected in, or challenged by, what I read. Other deaf writers’ recollections are stirring into fresh life my own buried memories, prompting me to re-imagine them so that I can examine my responses to those experiences more contemplatively and less reactively than I might have done originally. We can learn about the diversity of deaf experiences and the nuances of deaf identity that rise above the stock symbolic scripts by reading authentic, well-crafted stories by memoirists and novelists. Whether they are hearing or deaf writers, by providing different perspectives on deafness, they have something useful to say, demonstrate and illustrate about deafness and deaf people. I imagine the possibility of my book, The Art of Being Deaf, providing a similar mentoring role to other deaf people and families.References Couser, G. Thomas. Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disablity, and Life Writing. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. Heuer, Christopher Jon. ‘Deafness as Conflict and Conflict Component.’ Sign Language Studies 7.2 (Winter 2007): 195-199. Lane, Harlan. When the Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf. New York: Random House, 1984 Olsen, Tillie. Silences. New York: Delta/Seymour Lawrence. 1978. Padden, Carol, and Tom Humphries. Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. Schulz, J. (ed). A Revealed Life. Sydney: ABC Books and Griffith Review. 2007 Wilson, A.N. Incline Our Hearts. London: Penguin Books. 1988. Wright, David. Deafness: An Autobiography. New York: Stein and Day, 1969.

Hidden away at the ends of streets, behind suburban parks and community assets, there remain remnants of the coastal wallum heathlands that once stretched from Caloundra to Noosa, in Queensland, Australia. From late July to September, these areas explode with colour, a springtime wonderland of white wedding bush, delicate ground orchids, the pastels and brilliance of pink boronias, purple irises, and the diverse profusion of yellow bush peas. These gifts of nature are still relatively unknown and unappreciated, with most locals, and Australians at large, having little knowledge of the remarkable nature of the wallum, the nutrient-poor sandy soil that can be almost as acidic as battery acid, but which sustains a finely tuned ecosystem that, once cleared, cannot be regrown. These heathlands and woodlands, previously commonplace beyond the beach dunes of the coastal region, are now only found in a number of national parks and reserves, and suburban remnants.Image 1: The author wildflowering and making art (Photo: Judy Barrass)I too was one of those who had no idea of the joys of the wallum and heathland wildflowers, but it was the creative works of Kathleen McArthur and Judith Wright that helped initiate my education, my own wanderings, wildflowering, and love. Learning country has been a multi-faceted experience, extended and tested as walking becomes an embodied encounter, bodies and landscapes entwined (Lund), an imaginative reimagining, creative act and source of inspiration, a form of pilgrimage (Morrison), forging an intimate relationship (Somerville).Image 2: Women wildflowering next to Rainbow Beach (Photo: Susan Davis)Wandering—the experience shares some similar characteristics to walking, but may have less of a sense of direction and destination. It may become an experience that is relational, contemplative, connected to place. Wandering may be transitory but with impact that resonates across years. Such is the case of wandering for McArthur and Wright; the experience became deeply relational but also led to a destabilisation of values, where the walking body became “entangled in monumental historical and social structures” (Heddon and Turner). They called their walking and wandering “wildflowering”. Somerville said of the term: “Wildflowering was a word they created to describe their passion for Australian wildflower and their love of the places where they found them” (Somerville 2). However, wildflowering was also very much about the experience of wandering within nature, of the “art of seeing”, of learning and communing, but also of “doing”.Image 3: Kathleen McArthur and Judith Wright “wildflowering” north of Lake Currimundi. (Photo: Alex Jelinek, courtesy Alexandra Moreno)McArthur defined and described going wildflowering as meaningdifferent things to different people. There are those who, with magnifying glass before their eyes, looking every inch the scientist, count stamens, measure hairs, pigeon-hole all the definitive features neatly in order and scoff at common names. Others bring with them an artistic inclination, noting the colours and shapes and shadows in the intimate and in the general landscape. Then there are those precious few who find poetry in a Helmut Orchid “leaning its ear to the ground”; see “the trigger-flower striking the bee”; find secrets in Sun Orchids; see Irises as “lilac butterflies” and a fox in a Yellow Doubletail…There are as many different ways to approach the “art of seeing” as there are people who think and feel and one way is as worthy as any other to make of it an enjoyably sensuous experience… (McArthur, Australian Wildflowers 52-53)Wildflowering thus extends far beyond the scientific collector and cataloguer of nature; it is about walking and wandering within nature and interacting with it; it is a richly layered experience, an “art”, “a sensuous experience”, “an artistic inclination” where perception may be framed by the poetic.Their wildflowering drove McArthur and Wright to embark on monumental struggles. They became the voice for the voiceless lifeforms within the environment—they typed letters, organised meetings, lobbied politicians, and led community groups. In fact, they often had to leave behind the environments and places that brought them joy to use the tools of culture to protest and protect—to ensure we might be able to appreciate them today. Importantly, both their creativity and the activism were fuelled by the same wellspring: walking, wandering, and wildflowering.Women Wandering and WildfloweringWhen McArthur and Wright met in the early 1950s, they shared some similarities in terms of relatively privileged social backgrounds, their year of birth (1915), and a love of nature. They both had houses named after native plants (“Calanthe” for Wright’s house at Tambourine, “Midyim” for McArthur’s house at Caloundra), and were focussed on their creative endeavours—Wright with her poetry, McArthur with her wildflower painting and writing. Wright was by then well established as a highly regarded literary figure on the Australian scene. Her book of poetry The Moving Image (1946) had been well received, and later publications further consolidated her substance and presence on the national literary landscape. McArthur had been raised as the middle daughter of a prominent Queensland family; her father was Daniel Evans, of Evans Deakin Industries, and her mother “Kit” was a daughter of one of the pastoral Durack clan. Kathleen had married and given birth to three children, but by the 1950s was exploring new futures and identities, having divorced her husband and made a home for her family at Caloundra on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. She had time and space in her life to devote to her own pursuits and some financial means provided through her inheritance to finance such endeavours.Wright and McArthur met in 1951 after McArthur sent Wright a children’s book for Judith and Jack McKinney’s daughter Meredith. The book was by McArthur’s cousins, Mary Durack (of Kings in Grass Castles fame) and Elizabeth Durack. Wright subsequently invited McArthur to visit her at Tambourine and from that visit their friendship quickly blossomed. While both women were to become known as high-profile nature lovers and conservationists, Wright acknowledges that it was McArthur who helped “train her eye” and cultivated her appreciation of the wildflowers of south-east Queensland:There are times in one’s past which remain warm and vivid, and can be taken out and looked at, so to speak, with renewed pleasure. Such, for me, were my first meetings in the early 1950s with Kathleen McArthur, and our continuing friendship. They brought me joys of discovery, new knowledge, and shared appreciation. Those “wild-flowering days” at Tamborine Mountain, Caloundra, Noosa or Lake Cootharaba, when I was able to wander with her, helped train my own eye a little to her ways of seeing and her devotion to the flowers of the coast, the mountains, and the wallum plains and swamps. (Wright quoted in McArthur, Australian Wildflowers 7)It was through this wandering and wildflowering that their friendship was forged, their knowledge of the plants and landscape grew and their passion was ignited. These acts of wandering were ones where feelings and the senses were engaged and celebrated. McArthur was to document her experiences of these environments through her wildflower paintings, cards, prints, weekly articles in the local newspapers, and books featuring Queensland and Australian Wildflowers (McArthur, Queensland Wildflowers; Living; Bush; Australian Wildflowers). Wright wrote a range of poems featuring landscapes and flora from the coastal experiences and doubtless influenced by their wildflowering experiences. These included, for example, Judith Wright’s poems “Wildflower Plain”, “Wonga Vine”, “Nameless Flower”, and “Sandy Swamp” (Collected Works).Through these acts of wildflowering, walking, and wandering, McArthur and Wright were drawn into activism and became what I call “wild/flower” women: women who cared for country, who formed a deep connection and intimate relationship with nature, with the more-than-human world; women who saw themselves not separate from nature but part of the great cycles of life, growth, death, and renewal; women whose relationship to the country, to the wildflowers and other living things was expressed through drawing, painting, poetry, stories, and performances—but that love driving them also to actions—actions to nurture and protect those wildflowers, places, and living things. This intimate relationship with nature was such that it inspired them to become “wild”, at times branded difficult, prompted to speak out, and step up to assume high profile roles on the public stage—and all because of their love of the small, humble, and often unseen.Wandering into Activism A direct link between “wildflowering” and activism can be identified in key experiences from 1953. That was the year McArthur devoted to “wildflowering”, visiting locations across the Sunshine Coast and South-East Queensland, documenting all that was flowering at different times of the year (McArthur, Living 15). She kept a monthly journal and also engaged in extensive drawing and painting. She was joined by Wright and her family for some of these trips, including one that would become a “monumental” expedition. They explored the area around Noosa and happened to climb to the top of Mt Tinbeerwah. Unlike many of the other volcanic plugs of the Sunshine Coast that would not be an easy climb for a family with young children, Tinbeerwah is a small volcanic peak, close to the road that runs between Cooroy and Tewantin, and one that is a relatively easy walk. From the car park, the trail takes you over volcanic lava flows, a pathway appearing, disappearing, winding through native grasses, modest height trees and to the edge of a dramatic cliff (one now popular with abseilers and adventurers). The final stretch brings you out above the trees to stunning 360-degree views, other volcanic peaks, a string of lakes and waterways, the patchwork greens of farmlands, distant blue oceans, and an expanse of bushland curving north for miles. Both women wrote about the experience and its subsequent significance: When Meredith was four years old, Kathleen McArthur, who was a great wildflower enthusiast and had become a good friend, invited us to join her on a wildflower expedition to the sand-plains north of Noosa. There the Noosa River spread itself out into sand-bottomed lakes between which the river meandered so slowly that everywhere the sky was serenely mirrored in it, trees hung low over it, birds haunted them.Kathleen took her little car, we took our converted van, and drove up the narrow unsealed road beyond Noosa. Once through the dunes—where the low bush-cover was white with wedding-bush and yellow with guinea-flower vines—the plains began, with many and mingled colours and scents. It was spring, and it welcomed us joyfully. (Wright, Half 279-280)McArthur also wrote about this event and its importance, as they both realised that this was territory that was worth protecting for posterity: ‘it was obvious that this was great wildflower country in addition to having a fascinating system of sand mass with related river and lakes. It would make a unique national park’ (McArthur, Living 53). After this experience, Kathleen and Judith began initial inquiries to find out about how to progress ideas for forming a national park (McArthur, Living). Brady affirms that it was Kathleen who first “broached the idea of agitating to have the area around Cooloola declared a National Park” (Brady 182), and it was Judith who then made inquiries in Brisbane on their way back to Mount Tambourine:Judith took the idea to Romeo Lahey of the National Parks Association who told her it was not threatened in any way whereas there were important areas of rainforest that were, and his association gave priority to those. If he had but known, it was threatened. The minerals sands prospectors were about to arrive, if not already in there. (McArthur, Living 53)These initial investigations were put on hold as the pair pursued their “private lives” and raised their children (McArthur, Living), but reignited throughout the 1960s. In 1962, McArthur and Wright were to become founding members of the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland (along with David Fleay and Brian Clouston), and Cooloola was to become one of one of their major campaigns (McArthur, Living 32). This came to the fore when they discovered there were multiple sand mining leases pending across the Cooloola region. It was at McArthur’s suggestion that a national postcard campaign was launched in 1969, with their organisation sending over 100,000 postcards across Australia to then be sent back to Joh Bjelke Peterson, the notoriously pro-development, conservative Queensland Premier. This is acknowledged as Australia’s first postcard campaign and was reported in national newspapers; The Australian called the Caloundra branch of WPSQ one of the “most militant cells” in Australia (25 May 1970). This was likely because of the extent of the WPSQ communications across media channels and persistence in taking on high profile critics, including the mining companies.It was to be another five years of campaigning before the national park was declared in 1975 (then named Cooloola National Park, now part of the Great Sandy). Wright was to then leave Queensland to live on a property near Braidwood (on the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales) and in a different political climate. However, McArthur stayed in Caloundra, maintaining her deep commitment to place and country, keeping on walking and wandering, painting, and writing. She campaigned to protect beach dunes, lobbied to have Pumicestone Passage added to the national heritage register (McArthur, Pumicestone), and fought to prevent the creation of canal estates on the Pumicestone passage. Following the pattern of previous campaigns, she engaged in detailed research, drawing on expertise nationally and internationally, and writing many submissions, newspaper columns, and letters.McArthur also advocated for the plants, the places, and forms of knowing that she loved, calling for “clear thinking and deep feeling” that would enable people to see, value, and care as she did, notably saying:Because our flowers have never settled into our consciousness they are not seen. People can drive through square miles of colourful, massed display of bloom and simply not see it. It is only when the mind opens that the flowers bloom. (McArthur, Bush 2)Her belief was that once you walked the country and could “see”, become familiar with, and fall in love with the wildflowers and their environment, you could not then stand by and see what you love destroyed. Her conservation activities and activism arose and was fed through her wildflowering and the deep knowledge and connections that were formed.Wildflowering and Wanderings of My OwnSo, what we can learn from McArthur and Wright, from our wild/flower women, their wanderings, and wildflowering?Over the past few years, I have walked the wallum country that they loved, recited their poetry, shared their work with others, walked with women in the present accompanied by resonances of the past. I have shared these experiences with friends, artists, and nature lovers. While wandering with one group of women one day, we discovered that a patch of wallum behind Sunshine Beach was due to be cleared for an aged care development. It is full of casuarina food trees visited by the endangered Glossy Black Cockatoos, but it is also full of old wallum banksias, a tree I have come to love, influenced in part by writing and art by McArthur, and my experiences of “wildflowering”.Banksia aemula—the wallum banksia—stands tall, often one of the tallest trees of our coastal heathlands and after which the wallum was named. A range of sources, including McArthur herself, identify the source of the tree’s name as an Aboriginal word:It is an Aboriginal word some say applied to all species of Banksia, and others say to Banksia aemula. The wallum, being up to the present practically useless for commercial purposes provides our best wildflower shows… (McArthur, Queensland Wildflowers 2)Gnarled, textured bark—soft grey and warm red browns, in parts almost fur—the flower heads, when young, feed the small birds and honeyeaters; the bees collect nectar to make honey. And the older heads—remnants on the ground left by glorious black cockatoos, whose beaks, the perfect pliers, crack pods open to recover the hidden seeds. In summer, as the new flowers burst open, every stage of the flower stem cycle is on show. The trees often stand together like familiar friends gossiping, providing shelter; they are protective, nurturing. Banksia aemula is a tree that, according to Thomas Petrie’s reminiscence of “early” Queensland, was significant to Aboriginal women, and might be “owned” by certain women:but certain men and women owned different fruit or flower-trees and shrubs. For instance, a man could own a bon-yi (Auaurcaria Bidwilli) tree, and a woman a minti (Banksia aemula)… (Petrie, Reminiscences 148)Banksia, wallum, women… the connection has existed for millennia. Women walking country, talking, observing, collecting, communing—and this tree was special to them as it has become for me. Who knows how old those trees are in that patch of forest and who may have been their custodians.Do I care about this? Yes, I do. How did I come to care? Through walking, through “wildflowering”, through stories, art, and experience. My connections have been forged by nature and culture, seeing McArthur’s art and reading Wright’s words, through walking the country with women, learning to know, and sharing a wildflowering culture. But knowing isn’t enough: wandering and wondering, has led to something more because now I care; now we must act. Along with some of the women I walked with, we have investigated council records; written to, and called, politicians and the developer; formed a Facebook group; met with various experts; and proposed alternatives. However, our efforts have not met with success as the history of the development application and approval was old and complex. Through wandering and “wildflowering”, we have had the opportunity to both lose ourselves and find ourselves, to escape, to learn, to discover. However, such acts are not necessarily aimless or lacking direction. As connections are forged, care and concern grows, and acts can shift from the humble and mundane, into the intentional and deliberate. The art of seeing and poetic perceptions may even transform into ecological action, with ramifications that can be both significant monumental. Such may be the power of “wildflowering”.ReferencesBrady, Veronica. South of My Days: A Biography of Judith Wright. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1998.Heddon, Deirdre and Cathy Turner. “Walking Women: Shifting the Tales and Scales of Mobility.” Contemporary Theatre Review 22.2 (2012): 224–236.Lund, Katrín. “Landscapes and Narratives: Compositions and the Walking Body.” Landscape Research 37.2 (2012): 225–237.McArthur, Kathleen. Queensland Wildflowers: A Selection. Brisbane: Jacaranda Press, 1959.———. The Bush in Bloom: A Wildflower Artist’s Year in Paintings and Words. Sydney: Kangaroo Press, 1982.———. Pumicestone Passage: A Living Waterway. Caloundra: Kathleen McArthur, 1978.———. Looking at Australian Wildflowers. Sydney: Kangaroo Press, 1986.———. Living on the Coast. Sydney: Kangaroo Press, 1989.Morrison, Susan Signe. “Walking as Memorial Ritual: Pilgrimage to the Past.” M/C Journal 21.4 (2018). 12 Aug. 2019 <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1437>.Petrie, Constance Campbell, and Tom Petrie. Tom Petrie’s Reminiscences of Early Queensland. 4th ed. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1992. Somerville, Margaret. Wildflowering: The Life and Places of Kathleen McArthur. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2004.Wright, Judith. Collected Poems: 1942 to 1985. Sydney: Harper Collins, 2016.———. Half a Lifetime. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1999.

1991 An afternoon in late 1991 found me on a Sydney bus reading Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (1991). A disembarking passenger paused at my side and, as I glanced up, hissed, ‘I don’t know how you can read that filth’. As she continued to make her way to the front of the vehicle, I was as stunned as if she had struck me physically. There was real vehemence in both her words and how they were delivered, and I can still see her eyes squeezing into slits as she hesitated while curling her mouth around that final angry word: ‘filth’. Now, almost fifteen years later, the memory is remarkably vivid. As the event is also still remarkable; this comment remaining the only remark ever made to me by a stranger about anything I have been reading during three decades of travelling on public transport. That inflamed commuter summed up much of the furore that greeted the publication of American Psycho. More than this, and unusually, condemnation of the work both actually preceded, and affected, its publication. Although Ellis had been paid a substantial U.S. $300,000 advance by Simon & Schuster, pre-publication stories based on circulating galley proofs were so negative—offering assessments of the book as: ‘moronic … pointless … themeless … worthless (Rosenblatt 3), ‘superficial’, ‘a tapeworm narrative’ (Sheppard 100) and ‘vile … pornography, not literature … immoral, but also artless’ (Miner 43)—that the publisher cancelled the contract (forfeiting the advance) only months before the scheduled release date. CEO of Simon & Schuster, Richard E. Snyder, explained: ‘it was an error of judgement to put our name on a book of such questionable taste’ (quoted in McDowell, “Vintage” 13). American Psycho was, instead, published by Random House/Knopf in March 1991 under its prestige paperback imprint, Vintage Contemporary (Zaller; Freccero 48) – Sonny Mehta having signed the book to Random House some two days after Simon & Schuster withdrew from its agreement with Ellis. While many commented on the fact that Ellis was paid two substantial advances, it was rarely noted that Random House was a more prestigious publisher than Simon & Schuster (Iannone 52). After its release, American Psycho was almost universally vilified and denigrated by the American critical establishment. The work was criticised on both moral and aesthetic/literary/artistic grounds; that is, in terms of both what Ellis wrote and how he wrote it. Critics found it ‘meaningless’ (Lehmann-Haupt C18), ‘abysmally written … schlock’ (Kennedy 427), ‘repulsive, a bloodbath serving no purpose save that of morbidity, titillation and sensation … pure trash, as scummy and mean as anything it depicts, a dirty book by a dirty writer’ (Yardley B1) and ‘garbage’ (Gurley Brown 21). Mark Archer found that ‘the attempt to confuse style with content is callow’ (31), while Naomi Wolf wrote that: ‘overall, reading American Psycho holds the same fascination as watching a maladjusted 11-year-old draw on his desk’ (34). John Leo’s assessment sums up the passionate intensity of those critical of the work: ‘totally hateful … violent junk … no discernible plot, no believable characterization, no sensibility at work that comes anywhere close to making art out of all the blood and torture … Ellis displays little feel for narration, words, grammar or the rhythm of language’ (23). These reviews, as those printed pre-publication, were titled in similarly unequivocal language: ‘A Revolting Development’ (Sheppard 100), ‘Marketing Cynicism and Vulgarity’ (Leo 23), ‘Designer Porn’ (Manguel 46) and ‘Essence of Trash’ (Yardley B1). Perhaps the most unambiguous in its message was Roger Rosenblatt’s ‘Snuff this Book!’ (3). Of all works published in the U.S.A. at that time, including those clearly carrying X ratings, the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) selected American Psycho for special notice, stating that the book ‘legitimizes inhuman and savage violence masquerading as sexuality’ (NOW 114). Judging the book ‘the most misogynistic communication’ the organisation had ever encountered (NOW L.A. chapter president, Tammy Bruce, quoted in Kennedy 427) and, on the grounds that ‘violence against women in any form is no longer socially acceptable’ (McDowell, “NOW” C17), NOW called for a boycott of the entire Random House catalogue for the remainder of 1991. Naomi Wolf agreed, calling the novel ‘a violation not of obscenity standards, but of women’s civil rights, insofar as it results in conditioning male sexual response to female suffering or degradation’ (34). Later, the boycott was narrowed to Knopf and Vintage titles (Love 46), but also extended to all of the many products, companies, corporations, firms and brand names that are a feature of Ellis’s novel (Kauffman, “American” 41). There were other unexpected responses such as the Walt Disney Corporation barring Ellis from the opening of Euro Disney (Tyrnauer 101), although Ellis had already been driven from public view after receiving a number of death threats and did not undertake a book tour (Kennedy 427). Despite this, the book received significant publicity courtesy of the controversy and, although several national bookstore chains and numerous booksellers around the world refused to sell the book, more than 100,000 copies were sold in the U.S.A. in the fortnight after publication (Dwyer 55). Even this success had an unprecedented effect: when American Psycho became a bestseller, The New York Times announced that it would be removing the title from its bestseller lists because of the book’s content. In the days following publication in the U.S.A., Canadian customs announced that it was considering whether to allow the local arm of Random House to, first, import American Psycho for sale in Canada and, then, publish it in Canada (Kirchhoff, “Psycho” C1). Two weeks later, when the book was passed for sale (Kirchhoff, “Customs” C1), demonstrators protested the entrance of a shipment of the book. In May, the Canadian Defence Force made headlines when it withdrew copies of the book from the library shelves of a navy base in Halifax (Canadian Press C1). Also in May 1991, the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC), the federal agency that administers the classification scheme for all films, computer games and ‘submittable’ publications (including books) that are sold, hired or exhibited in Australia, announced that it had classified American Psycho as ‘Category 1 Restricted’ (W. Fraser, “Book” 5), to be sold sealed, to only those over 18 years of age. This was the first such classification of a mainstream literary work since the rating scheme was introduced (Graham), and the first time a work of literature had been restricted for sale since Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969. The chief censor, John Dickie, said the OFLC could not justify refusing the book classification (and essentially banning the work), and while ‘as a satire on yuppies it has a lot going for it’, personally he found the book ‘distasteful’ (quoted in W. Fraser, “Sensitive” 5). Moreover, while this ‘R’ classification was, and remains, a national classification, Australian States and Territories have their own sale and distribution regulation systems. Under this regime, American Psycho remains banned from sale in Queensland, as are all other books in this classification category (Vnuk). These various reactions led to a flood of articles published in the U.S.A., Canada, Australia and the U.K., voicing passionate opinions on a range of issues including free speech and censorship, the corporate control of artistic thought and practice, and cynicism on the part of authors and their publishers about what works might attract publicity and (therefore) sell in large numbers (see, for instance, Hitchens 7; Irving 1). The relationship between violence in society and its representation in the media was a common theme, with only a few commentators (including Norman Mailer in a high profile Vanity Fair article) suggesting that, instead of inciting violence, the media largely reflected, and commented upon, societal violence. Elayne Rapping, an academic in the field of Communications, proposed that the media did actively glorify violence, but only because there was a market for such representations: ‘We, as a society love violence, thrive on violence as the very basis of our social stability, our ideological belief system … The problem, after all, is not media violence but real violence’ (36, 38). Many more commentators, however, agreed with NOW, Wolf and others and charged Ellis’s work with encouraging, and even instigating, violent acts, and especially those against women, calling American Psycho ‘a kind of advertising for violence against women’ (anthropologist Elliot Leyton quoted in Dwyer 55) and, even, a ‘how-to manual on the torture and dismemberment of women’ (Leo 23). Support for the book was difficult to find in the flood of vitriol directed against it, but a small number wrote in Ellis’s defence. Sonny Mehta, himself the target of death threats for acquiring the book for Random House, stood by this assessment, and was widely quoted in his belief that American Psycho was ‘a serious book by a serious writer’ and that Ellis was ‘remarkably talented’ (Knight-Ridder L10). Publishing director of Pan Macmillan Australia, James Fraser, defended his decision to release American Psycho on the grounds that the book told important truths about society, arguing: ‘A publisher’s office is a clearing house for ideas … the real issue for community debate [is] – to what extent does it want to hear the truth about itself, about individuals within the community and about the governments the community elects. If we care about the preservation of standards, there is none higher than this. Gore Vidal was among the very few who stated outright that he liked the book, finding it ‘really rather inspired … a wonderfully comic novel’ (quoted in Tyrnauer 73). Fay Weldon agreed, judging the book as ‘brilliant’, and focusing on the importance of Ellis’s message: ‘Bret Easton Ellis is a very good writer. He gets us to a ‘T’. And we can’t stand it. It’s our problem, not his. American Psycho is a beautifully controlled, careful, important novel that revolves around its own nasty bits’ (C1). Since 1991 As unlikely as this now seems, I first read American Psycho without any awareness of the controversy raging around its publication. I had read Ellis’s earlier works, Less than Zero (1985) and The Rules of Attraction (1987) and, with my energies fully engaged elsewhere, cannot now even remember how I acquired the book. Since that angry remark on the bus, however, I have followed American Psycho’s infamy and how it has remained in the public eye over the last decade and a half. Australian OFLC decisions can be reviewed and reversed – as when Pasolini’s final film Salo (1975), which was banned in Australia from the time of its release in 1975 until it was un-banned in 1993, was then banned again in 1998 – however, American Psycho’s initial classification has remained unchanged. In July 2006, I purchased a new paperback copy in rural New South Wales. It was shrink-wrapped in plastic and labelled: ‘R. Category One. Not available to persons under 18 years. Restricted’. While exact sales figures are difficult to ascertain, by working with U.S.A., U.K. and Australian figures, this copy was, I estimate, one of some 1.5 to 1.6 million sold since publication. In the U.S.A., backlist sales remain very strong, with some 22,000 copies sold annually (Holt and Abbott), while lifetime sales in the U.K. are just under 720,000 over five paperback editions. Sales in Australia are currently estimated by Pan MacMillan to total some 100,000, with a new printing of 5,000 copies recently ordered in Australia on the strength of the book being featured on the inaugural Australian Broadcasting Commission’s First Tuesday Book Club national television program (2006). Predictably, the controversy around the publication of American Psycho is regularly revisited by those reviewing Ellis’s subsequent works. A major article in Vanity Fair on Ellis’s next book, The Informers (1994), opened with a graphic description of the death threats Ellis received upon the publication of American Psycho (Tyrnauer 70) and then outlined the controversy in detail (70-71). Those writing about Ellis’s two most recent novels, Glamorama (1999) and Lunar Park (2005), have shared this narrative strategy, which also forms at least part of the frame of every interview article. American Psycho also, again predictably, became a major topic of discussion in relation to the contracting, making and then release of the eponymous film in 2000 as, for example, in Linda S. Kauffman’s extensive and considered review of the film, which spent the first third discussing the history of the book’s publication (“American” 41-45). Playing with this interest, Ellis continues his practice of reusing characters in subsequent works. Thus, American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, who first appeared in The Rules of Attraction as the elder brother of the main character, Sean – who, in turn, makes a brief appearance in American Psycho – also turns up in Glamorama with ‘strange stains’ on his Armani suit lapels, and again in Lunar Park. The book also continues to be regularly cited in discussions of censorship (see, for example, Dubin; Freccero) and has been included in a number of university-level courses about banned books. In these varied contexts, literary, cultural and other critics have also continued to disagree about the book’s impact upon readers, with some persisting in reading the novel as a pornographic incitement to violence. When Wade Frankum killed seven people in Sydney, many suggested a link between these murders and his consumption of X-rated videos, pornographic magazines and American Psycho (see, for example, Manne 11), although others argued against this (Wark 11). Prosecutors in the trial of Canadian murderer Paul Bernardo argued that American Psycho provided a ‘blueprint’ for Bernardo’s crimes (Canadian Press A5). Others have read Ellis’s work more positively, as for instance when Sonia Baelo Allué compares American Psycho favourably with Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs (1988) – arguing that Harris not only depicts more degrading treatment of women, but also makes Hannibal Lecter, his antihero monster, sexily attractive (7-24). Linda S. Kauffman posits that American Psycho is part of an ‘anti-aesthetic’ movement in art, whereby works that are revoltingly ugly and/or grotesque function to confront the repressed fears and desires of the audience and explore issues of identity and subjectivity (Bad Girls), while Patrick W. Shaw includes American Psycho in his work, The Modern American Novel of Violence because, in his opinion, the violence Ellis depicts is not gratuitous. Lost, however, in much of this often-impassioned debate and dialogue is the book itself – and what Ellis actually wrote. 21-years-old when Less than Zero was published, Ellis was still only 26 when American Psycho was released and his youth presented an obvious target. In 1991, Terry Teachout found ‘no moment in American Psycho where Bret Easton Ellis, who claims to be a serious artist, exhibits the workings of an adult moral imagination’ (45, 46), Brad Miner that it was ‘puerile – the very antithesis of good writing’ (43) and Carol Iannone that ‘the inclusion of the now famous offensive scenes reveals a staggering aesthetic and moral immaturity’ (54). Pagan Kennedy also ‘blamed’ the entire work on this immaturity, suggesting that instead of possessing a developed artistic sensibility, Ellis was reacting to (and, ironically, writing for the approval of) critics who had lauded the documentary realism of his violent and nihilistic teenage characters in Less than Zero, but then panned his less sensational story of campus life in The Rules of Attraction (427-428). Yet, in my opinion, there is not only a clear and coherent aesthetic vision driving Ellis’s oeuvre but, moreover, a profoundly moral imagination at work as well. This was my view upon first reading American Psycho, and part of the reason I was so shocked by that charge of filth on the bus. Once familiar with the controversy, I found this view shared by only a minority of commentators. Writing in the New Statesman & Society, Elizabeth J. Young asked: ‘Where have these people been? … Books of pornographic violence are nothing new … American Psycho outrages no contemporary taboos. Psychotic killers are everywhere’ (24). I was similarly aware that such murderers not only existed in reality, but also in many widely accessed works of literature and film – to the point where a few years later Joyce Carol Oates could suggest that the serial killer was an icon of popular culture (233). While a popular topic for writers of crime fiction and true crime narratives in both print and on film, a number of ‘serious’ literary writers – including Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Kate Millet, Margaret Atwood and Oates herself – have also written about serial killers, and even crossed over into the widely acknowledged as ‘low-brow’ true crime genre. Many of these works (both popular or more literary) are vivid and powerful and have, as American Psycho, taken a strong moral position towards their subject matter. Moreover, many books and films have far more disturbing content than American Psycho, yet have caused no such uproar (Young and Caveney 120). By now, the plot of American Psycho is well known, although the structure of the book, noted by Weldon above (C1), is rarely analysed or even commented upon. First person narrator, Patrick Bateman, a young, handsome stockbroker and stereotypical 1980s yuppie, is also a serial killer. The book is largely, and innovatively, structured around this seeming incompatibility – challenging readers’ expectations that such a depraved criminal can be a wealthy white professional – while vividly contrasting the banal, and meticulously detailed, emptiness of Bateman’s life as a New York über-consumer with the scenes where he humiliates, rapes, tortures, murders, mutilates, dismembers and cannibalises his victims. Although only comprising some 16 out of 399 pages in my Picador edition, these violent scenes are extreme and certainly make the work as a whole disgustingly confronting. But that is the entire point of Ellis’s work. Bateman’s violence is rendered so explicitly because its principal role in the novel is to be inescapably horrific. As noted by Baelo Allué, there is no shift in tone between the most banally described detail and the description of violence (17): ‘I’ve situated the body in front of the new Toshiba television set and in the VCR is an old tape and appearing on the screen is the last girl I filmed. I’m wearing a Joseph Abboud suit, a tie by Paul Stuart, shoes by J. Crew, a vest by someone Italian and I’m kneeling on the floor beside a corpse, eating the girl’s brain, gobbling it down, spreading Grey Poupon over hunks of the pink, fleshy meat’ (Ellis 328). In complete opposition to how pornography functions, Ellis leaves no room for the possible enjoyment of such a scene. Instead of revelling in the ‘spine chilling’ pleasures of classic horror narratives, there is only the real horror of imagining such an act. The effect, as Kauffman has observed is, rather than arousing, often so disgusting as to be emetic (Bad Girls 249). Ellis was surprised that his detractors did not understand that he was trying to be shocking, not offensive (Love 49), or that his overall aim was to symbolise ‘how desensitised our culture has become towards violence’ (quoted in Dwyer 55). Ellis was also understandably frustrated with readings that conflated not only the contents of the book and their meaning, but also the narrator and author: ‘The acts described in the book are truly, indisputably vile. The book itself is not. Patrick Bateman is a monster. I am not’ (quoted in Love 49). Like Fay Weldon, Norman Mailer understood that American Psycho posited ‘that the eighties were spiritually disgusting and the author’s presentation is the crystallization of such horror’ (129). Unlike Weldon, however, Mailer shied away from defending the novel by judging Ellis not accomplished enough a writer to achieve his ‘monstrous’ aims (182), failing because he did not situate Bateman within a moral universe, that is, ‘by having a murderer with enough inner life for us to comprehend him’ (182). Yet, the morality of Ellis’s project is evident. By viewing the world through the lens of a psychotic killer who, in many ways, personifies the American Dream – wealthy, powerful, intelligent, handsome, energetic and successful – and, yet, who gains no pleasure, satisfaction, coherent identity or sense of life’s meaning from his endless, selfish consumption, Ellis exposes the emptiness of both that world and that dream. As Bateman himself explains: ‘Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in. This was civilisation as I saw it, colossal and jagged’ (Ellis 375). Ellis thus situates the responsibility for Bateman’s violence not in his individual moral vacuity, but in the barren values of the society that has shaped him – a selfish society that, in Ellis’s opinion, refused to address the most important issues of the day: corporate greed, mindless consumerism, poverty, homelessness and the prevalence of violent crime. Instead of pornographic, therefore, American Psycho is a profoundly political text: Ellis was never attempting to glorify or incite violence against anyone, but rather to expose the effects of apathy to these broad social problems, including the very kinds of violence the most vocal critics feared the book would engender. Fifteen years after the publication of American Psycho, although our societies are apparently growing in overall prosperity, the gap between rich and poor also continues to grow, more are permanently homeless, violence – whether domestic, random or institutionally-sanctioned – escalates, and yet general apathy has intensified to the point where even the ‘ethics’ of torture as government policy can be posited as a subject for rational debate. The real filth of the saga of American Psycho is, thus, how Ellis’s message was wilfully ignored. While critics and public intellectuals discussed the work at length in almost every prominent publication available, few attempted to think in any depth about what Ellis actually wrote about, or to use their powerful positions to raise any serious debate about the concerns he voiced. Some recent critical reappraisals have begun to appreciate how American Psycho is an ‘ethical denunciation, where the reader cannot but face the real horror behind the serial killer phenomenon’ (Baelo Allué 8), but Ellis, I believe, goes further, exposing the truly filthy causes that underlie the existence of such seemingly ‘senseless’ murder. But, Wait, There’s More It is ironic that American Psycho has, itself, generated a mini-industry of products. A decade after publication, a Canadian team – filmmaker Mary Harron, director of I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), working with scriptwriter, Guinevere Turner, and Vancouver-based Lions Gate Entertainment – adapted the book for a major film (Johnson). Starring Christian Bale, Chloë Sevigny, Willem Dafoe and Reese Witherspoon and, with an estimated budget of U.S.$8 million, the film made U.S.$15 million at the American box office. The soundtrack was released for the film’s opening, with video and DVDs to follow and the ‘Killer Collector’s Edition’ DVD – closed-captioned, in widescreen with surround sound – released in June 2005. Amazon.com lists four movie posters (including a Japanese language version) and, most unexpected of all, a series of film tie-in action dolls. The two most popular of these, judging by E-Bay, are the ‘Cult Classics Series 1: Patrick Bateman’ figure which, attired in a smart suit, comes with essential accoutrements of walkman with headphones, briefcase, Wall Street Journal, video tape and recorder, knife, cleaver, axe, nail gun, severed hand and a display base; and the 18” tall ‘motion activated sound’ edition – a larger version of the same doll with fewer accessories, but which plays sound bites from the movie. Thanks to Stephen Harris and Suzie Gibson (UNE) for stimulating conversations about this book, Stephen Harris for information about the recent Australian reprint of American Psycho and Mark Seebeck (Pan Macmillan) for sales information. References Archer, Mark. “The Funeral Baked Meats.” The Spectator 27 April 1991: 31. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. First Tuesday Book Club. First broadcast 1 August 2006. Baelo Allué, Sonia. “The Aesthetics of Serial Killing: Working against Ethics in The Silence of the Lambs (1988) and American Psycho (1991).” Atlantis 24.2 (Dec. 2002): 7-24. Canadian Press. “Navy Yanks American Psycho.” The Globe and Mail 17 May 1991: C1. Canadian Press. “Gruesome Novel Was Bedside Reading.” Kitchener-Waterloo Record 1 Sep. 1995: A5. Dubin, Steven C. “Art’s Enemies: Censors to the Right of Me, Censors to the Left of Me.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 28.4 (Winter 1994): 44-54. Dwyer, Victor. “Literary Firestorm: Canada Customs Scrutinizes a Brutal Novel.” Maclean’s April 1991: 55. Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho. London: Macmillan-Picador, 1991. ———. Glamorama. New York: Knopf, 1999. ———. The Informers. New York: Knopf, 1994. ———. Less than Zero. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985. ———. Lunar Park. New York: Knopf, 2005. ———. The Rules of Attraction. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987. Fraser, James. :The Case for Publishing.” The Bulletin 18 June 1991. Fraser, William. “Book May Go under Wraps.” The Sydney Morning Herald 23 May 1991: 5. ———. “The Sensitive Censor and the Psycho.” The Sydney Morning Herald 24 May 1991: 5. Freccero, Carla. “Historical Violence, Censorship, and the Serial Killer: The Case of American Psycho.” Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 27.2 (Summer 1997): 44-58. Graham, I. “Australian Censorship History.” Libertus.net 9 Dec. 2001. 17 May 2006 http://libertus.net/censor/hist20on.html>. Gurley Brown, Helen. Commentary in “Editorial Judgement or Censorship?: The Case of American Psycho.” The Writer May 1991: 20-23. Harris, Thomas. The Silence of the Lambs. New York: St Martins Press, 1988. Harron, Mary (dir.). American Psycho [film]. Edward R. Pressman Film Corporation, Lions Gate Films, Muse Productions, P.P.S. Films, Quadra Entertainment, Universal Pictures, 2004. Hitchens, Christopher. “Minority Report.” The Nation 7-14 January 1991: 7. Holt, Karen, and Charlotte Abbott. “Lunar Park: The Novel.” Publishers Weekly 11 July 2005. 13 Aug. 2006 http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA624404.html? pubdate=7%2F11%2F2005&display=archive>. Iannone, Carol. “PC & the Ellis Affair.” Commentary Magazine July 1991: 52-4. Irving, John. “Pornography and the New Puritans.” The New York Times Book Review 29 March 1992: Section 7, 1. 13 Aug. 2006 http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/15/lifetimes/25665.html>. Johnson, Brian D. “Canadian Cool Meets American Psycho.” Maclean’s 10 April 2000. 13 Aug. 2006 http://www.macleans.ca/culture/films/article.jsp?content=33146>. Kauffman, Linda S. “American Psycho [film review].” Film Quarterly 54.2 (Winter 2000-2001): 41-45. ———. Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Kennedy, Pagan. “Generation Gaffe: American Psycho.” The Nation 1 April 1991: 426-8. Kirchhoff, H. J. “Customs Clears Psycho: Booksellers’ Reaction Mixed.” The Globe and Mail 26 March 1991: C1. ———. “Psycho Sits in Limbo: Publisher Awaits Customs Ruling.” The Globe and Mail 14 March 1991: C1. Knight-Ridder News Service. “Vintage Picks up Ellis’ American Psycho.” Los Angeles Daily News 17 November 1990: L10. Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. “Psycho: Wither Death without Life?” The New York Times 11 March 1991: C18. Leo, John. “Marketing Cynicism and Vulgarity.” U.S. News & World Report 3 Dec. 1990: 23. Love, Robert. “Psycho Analysis: Interview with Bret Easton Ellis.” Rolling Stone 4 April 1991: 45-46, 49-51. Mailer, Norman. “Children of the Pied Piper: Mailer on American Psycho.” Vanity Fair March 1991: 124-9, 182-3. Manguel, Alberto. “Designer Porn.” Saturday Night 106.6 (July 1991): 46-8. Manne, Robert. “Liberals Deny the Video Link.” The Australian 6 Jan. 1997: 11. McDowell, Edwin. “NOW Chapter Seeks Boycott of ‘Psycho’ Novel.” The New York Times 6 Dec. 1990: C17. ———. “Vintage Buys Violent Book Dropped by Simon & Schuster.” The New York Times 17 Nov. 1990: 13. Miner, Brad. “Random Notes.” National Review 31 Dec. 1990: 43. National Organization for Women. Library Journal 2.91 (1991): 114. Oates, Joyce Carol. “Three American Gothics.” Where I’ve Been, and Where I’m Going: Essays, Reviews and Prose. New York: Plume, 1999. 232-43. Rapping, Elayne. “The Uses of Violence.” Progressive 55 (1991): 36-8. Rosenblatt, Roger. “Snuff this Book!: Will Brett Easton Ellis Get Away with Murder?” New York Times Book Review 16 Dec. 1990: 3, 16. Roth, Philip. Portnoy’s Complaint. New York: Random House, 1969. Shaw, Patrick W. The Modern American Novel of Violence. Troy, NY: Whitson, 2000. Sheppard, R. Z. “A Revolting Development.” Time 29 Oct. 1990: 100. Teachout, Terry. “Applied Deconstruction.” National Review 24 June 1991: 45-6. Tyrnauer, Matthew. “Who’s Afraid of Bret Easton Ellis?” Vanity Fair 57.8 (Aug. 1994): 70-3, 100-1. Vnuk, Helen. “X-rated? Outdated.” The Age 21 Sep. 2003. 17 May 2006 http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/09/19/1063625202157.html>. Wark, McKenzie. “Video Link Is a Distorted View.” The Australian 8 Jan. 1997: 11. Weldon, Fay. “Now You’re Squeamish?: In a World as Sick as Ours, It’s Silly to Target American Psycho.” The Washington Post 28 April 1991: C1. Wolf, Naomi. “The Animals Speak.” New Statesman & Society 12 April 1991: 33-4. Yardley, Jonathan. “American Psycho: Essence of Trash.” The Washington Post 27 Feb. 1991: B1. Young, Elizabeth J. “Psycho Killers. Last Lines: How to Shock the English.” New Statesman & Society 5 April 1991: 24. Young, Elizabeth J., and Graham Caveney. Shopping in Space: Essays on American ‘Blank Generation’ Fiction. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1992. Zaller, Robert “American Psycho, American Censorship and the Dahmer Case.” Revue Francaise d’Etudes Americaines 16.56 (1993): 317-25. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Brien, Donna Lee. "The Real Filth in : A Critical Reassessment." M/C Journal 9.5 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/01-brien.php>. APA Style Brien, D. (Nov. 2006) "The Real Filth in American Psycho: A Critical Reassessment," M/C Journal, 9(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/01-brien.php>.

Since the first days of the World Wide Web, artists like myself have been exploring the new possibilities of network interactivity. Some good tools and languages have been developed and made available free for the public to use. This has empowered individuals to participate in the media in ways that are quite remarkable. Nonetheless, the future of independent media is clouded by legal, regulatory, and organisational challenges that need to be addressed. It is not clear to what extent independent content producers will be able to build upon the successes of the 90s – it is yet to be seen whether their efforts will be largely nullified by the anticyclones of a hostile media market. Not so long ago, American news magazines were covering the Browser War. Several real wars later, the terms of surrender are becoming clearer. Now both of the major Internet browsers are owned by huge media corporations, and most of the states (and Reagan-appointed judges) that were demanding the break-up of Microsoft have given up. A curious about-face occurred in U.S. Justice Department policy when John Ashcroft decided to drop the federal case. Maybe Microsoft's value as a partner in covert activity appealed to Ashcroft more than free competition. Regardless, Microsoft is now turning its wrath on new competitors, people who are doing something very, very bad: sharing the products of their own labour. This practice of sharing source code and building free software infrastructure is epitomised by the continuing development of Linux. Everything in the Linux kernel is free, publicly accessible information. As a rule, the people building this "open source" operating system software believe that maintaining transparency is important. But U.S. courts are not doing much to help. In a case brought by the Motion Picture Association of America against Eric Corley, a federal district court blocked the distribution of source code that enables these systems to play DVDs. In addition to censoring Corley's journal, the court ruled that any programmer who writes a program that plays a DVD must comply with a host of license restrictions. In short, an established and popular media format (the DVD) cannot be used under open source operating systems without sacrificing the principle that software source code should remain in the public domain. Should the contents of operating systems be tightly guarded secrets, or subject to public review? If there are capable programmers willing to create good, free operating systems, should the law stand in their way? The question concerning what type of software infrastructure will dominate personal computers in the future is being answered as much by disappointing legal decisions as it is by consumer choice. Rather than ensuring the necessary conditions for innovation and cooperation, the courts permit a monopoly to continue. Rather than endorsing transparency, secrecy prevails. Rather than aiming to preserve a balance between the commercial economy and the gift-economy, sharing is being undermined by the law. Part of the mystery of the Internet for a lot of newcomers must be that it seems to disprove the old adage that you can't get something for nothing. Free games, free music, free pornography, free art. Media corporations are doing their best to change this situation. The FBI and trade groups have blitzed the American news media with alarmist reports about how children don't understand that sharing digital information is a crime. Teacher Gail Chmura, the star of one such media campaign, says of her students, "It's always been interesting that they don't see a connection between the two. They just don't get it" (Hopper). Perhaps the confusion arises because the kids do understand that digital duplication lets two people have the same thing. Theft is at best a metaphor for the copying of data, because the original is not stolen in the same sense as a material object. In the effort to liken all copying to theft, legal provisions for the fair use of intellectual property are neglected. Teachers could just as easily emphasise the importance of sharing and the development of an electronic commons that is free for all to use. The values advanced by the trade groups are not beyond question and are not historical constants. According to Donald Krueckeberg, Rutgers University Professor of Urban Planning, native Americans tied the concept of property not to ownership but to use. "One used it, one moved on, and use was shared with others" (qtd. in Batt). Perhaps it is necessary for individuals to have dominion over some private data. But who owns the land, wind, sun, and sky of the Internet – the infrastructure? Given that publicly-funded research and free software have been as important to the development of the Internet as have business and commercial software, it is not surprising that some ambiguity remains about the property status of the dataverse. For many the Internet is as much a medium for expression and the interplay of languages as it is a framework for monetary transaction. In the case involving DVD software mentioned previously, there emerged a grass-roots campaign in opposition to censorship. Dozens of philosophical programmers and computer scientists asserted the expressive and linguistic bases of software by creating variations on the algorithm needed to play DVDs. The forbidden lines of symbols were printed on T-shirts, translated into different computer languages, translated into legal rhetoric, and even embedded into DNA and pictures of MPAA president Jack Valenti (see e.g. Touretzky). These efforts were inspired by a shared conviction that important liberties were at stake. Supporting the MPAA's position would do more than protect movies from piracy. The use of the algorithm was not clearly linked to an intent to pirate movies. Many felt that outlawing the DVD algorithm, which had been experimentally developed by a Norwegian teenager, represented a suppression of gumption and ingenuity. The court's decision rejected established principles of fair use, denied the established legality of reverse engineering software to achieve compatibility, and asserted that journalists and scientists had no right to publish a bit of code if it might be misused. In a similar case in April 2000, a U.S. court of appeals found that First Amendment protections did apply to software (Junger). Noting that source code has both an expressive feature and a functional feature, this court held that First Amendment protection is not reserved only for purely expressive communication. Yet in the DVD case, the court opposed this view and enforced the inflexible demands of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Notwithstanding Ted Nelson's characterisation of computers as literary machines, the decision meant that the linguistic and expressive aspects of software would be subordinated to other concerns. A simple series of symbols were thereby cast under a veil of legal secrecy. Although they were easy to discover, and capable of being committed to memory or translated to other languages, fair use and other intuitive freedoms were deemed expendable. These sorts of legal obstacles are serious challenges to the continued viability of free software like Linux. The central value proposition of Linux-based operating systems – free, open source code – is threatening to commercial competitors. Some corporations are intent on stifling further development of free alternatives. Patents offer another vulnerability. The writing of free software has become a minefield of potential patent lawsuits. Corporations have repeatedly chosen to pursue patent litigation years after the alleged infringements have been incorporated into widely used free software. For example, although it was designed to avoid patent problems by an array of international experts, the image file format known as JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) has recently been dogged by patent infringement charges. Despite good intentions, low-budget initiatives and ad hoc organisations are ill equipped to fight profiteering patent lawsuits. One wonders whether software innovation is directed more by lawyers or computer scientists. The present copyright and patent regimes may serve the needs of the larger corporations, but it is doubtful that they are the best means of fostering software innovation and quality. Orwell wrote in his Homage to Catalonia, There was a new rule that censored portions of the newspaper must not be left blank but filled up with other matter; as a result it was often impossible to tell when something had been cut out. The development of the Internet has a similar character: new diversions spring up to replace what might have been so that the lost potential is hardly felt. The process of retrofitting Internet software to suit ideological and commercial agendas is already well underway. For example, Microsoft has announced recently that it will discontinue support for the Java language in 2004. The problem with Java, from Microsoft's perspective, is that it provides portable programming tools that work under all operating systems, not just Windows. With Java, programmers can develop software for the large number of Windows users, while simultaneously offering software to users of other operating systems. Java is an important piece of the software infrastructure for Internet content developers. Yet, in the interest of coercing people to use only their operating systems, Microsoft is willing to undermine thousands of existing Java-language projects. Their marketing hype calls this progress. The software industry relies on sales to survive, so if it means laying waste to good products and millions of hours of work in order to sell something new, well, that's business. The consequent infrastructure instability keeps software developers, and other creative people, on a treadmill. From Progressive Load by Andy Deck, artcontext.org/progload As an Internet content producer, one does not appeal directly to the hearts and minds of the public; one appeals through the medium of software and hardware. Since most people are understandably reluctant to modify the software running on their computers, the software installed initially is a critical determinant of what is possible. Unconventional, independent, and artistic uses of the Internet are diminished when the media infrastructure is effectively established by decree. Unaccountable corporate control over infrastructure software tilts the playing field against smaller content producers who have neither the advance warning of industrial machinations, nor the employees and resources necessary to keep up with a regime of strategic, cyclical obsolescence. It seems that independent content producers must conform to the distribution technologies and content formats favoured by the entertainment and marketing sectors, or else resign themselves to occupying the margins of media activity. It is no secret that highly diversified media corporations can leverage their assets to favour their own media offerings and confound their competitors. Yet when media giants AOL and Time-Warner announced their plans to merge in 2000, the claim of CEOs Steve Case and Gerald Levin that the merged companies would "operate in the public interest" was hardly challenged by American journalists. Time-Warner has since fought to end all ownership limits in the cable industry; and Case, who formerly championed third-party access to cable broadband markets, changed his tune abruptly after the merger. Now that Case has been ousted, it is unclear whether he still favours oligopoly. According to Levin, global media will be and is fast becoming the predominant business of the 21st century ... more important than government. It's more important than educational institutions and non-profits. We're going to need to have these corporations redefined as instruments of public service, and that may be a more efficient way to deal with society's problems than bureaucratic governments. Corporate dominance is going to be forced anyhow because when you have a system that is instantly available everywhere in the world immediately, then the old-fashioned regulatory system has to give way (Levin). It doesn't require a lot of insight to understand that this "redefinition," this slight of hand, does not protect the public from abuses of power: the dissolution of the "old-fashioned regulatory system" does not serve the public interest. From Lexicon by Andy Deck, artcontext.org/lexicon) As an artist who has adopted telecommunications networks and software as his medium, it disappoints me that a mercenary vision of electronic media's future seems to be the prevailing blueprint. The giantism of media corporations, and the ongoing deregulation of media consolidation (Ahrens), underscore the critical need for independent media sources. If it were just a matter of which cola to drink, it would not be of much concern, but media corporations control content. In this hyper-mediated age, content – whether produced by artists or journalists – crucially affects what people think about and how they understand the world. Content is not impervious to the software, protocols, and chicanery that surround its delivery. It is about time that people interested in independent voices stop believing that laissez faire capitalism is building a better media infrastructure. The German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger reminds us that the media tyrannies that affect us are social products. The media industry relies on thousands of people to make the compromises necessary to maintain its course. The rapid development of the mind industry, its rise to a key position in modern society, has profoundly changed the role of the intellectual. He finds himself confronted with new threats and new opportunities. Whether he knows it or not, whether he likes it or not, he has become the accomplice of a huge industrial complex which depends for its survival on him, as he depends on it for his own. He must try, at any cost, to use it for his own purposes, which are incompatible with the purposes of the mind machine. What it upholds he must subvert. He may play it crooked or straight, he may win or lose the game; but he would do well to remember that there is more at stake than his own fortune (Enzensberger 18). Some cultural leaders have recognised the important role that free software already plays in the infrastructure of the Internet. Among intellectuals there is undoubtedly a genuine concern about the emerging contours of corporate, global media. But more effective solidarity is needed. Interest in open source has tended to remain superficial, leading to trendy, cosmetic, and symbolic uses of terms like "open source" rather than to a deeper commitment to an open, public information infrastructure. Too much attention is focussed on what's "cool" and not enough on the road ahead. Various media specialists – designers, programmers, artists, and technical directors – make important decisions that affect the continuing development of electronic media. Many developers have failed to recognise (or care) that their decisions regarding media formats can have long reaching consequences. Web sites that use media formats which are unworkable for open source operating systems should be actively discouraged. Comparable technologies are usually available to solve compatibility problems. Going with the market flow is not really giving people what they want: it often opposes the work of thousands of activists who are trying to develop open source alternatives (see e.g. Greene). Average Internet users can contribute to a more innovative, free, open, and independent media – and being conscientious is not always difficult or unpleasant. One project worthy of support is the Internet browser Mozilla. Currently, many content developers create their Websites so that they will look good only in Microsoft's Internet Explorer. While somewhat understandable given the market dominance of Internet Explorer, this disregard for interoperability undercuts attempts to popularise standards-compliant alternatives. Mozilla, written by a loose-knit group of activists and programmers (some of whom are paid by AOL/Time-Warner), can be used as an alternative to Microsoft's browser. If more people use Mozilla, it will be harder for content providers to ignore the way their Web pages appear in standards-compliant browsers. The Mozilla browser, which is an open source initiative, can be downloaded from http://www.mozilla.org/. While there are many people working to create real and lasting alternatives to the monopolistic and technocratic dynamics that are emerging, it takes a great deal of cooperation to resist the media titans, the FCC, and the courts. Oddly enough, corporate interests sometimes overlap with those of the public. Some industrial players, such as IBM, now support open source software. For them it is mostly a business decision. Frustrated by the coercive control of Microsoft, they support efforts to develop another operating system platform. For others, including this writer, the open source movement is interesting for the potential it holds to foster a more heterogeneous and less authoritarian communications infrastructure. Many people can find common cause in this resistance to globalised uniformity and consolidated media ownership. The biggest challenge may be to get people to believe that their choices really matter, that by endorsing certain products and operating systems and not others, they can actually make a difference. But it's unlikely that this idea will flourish if artists and intellectuals don't view their own actions as consequential. There is a troubling tendency for people to see themselves as powerless in the face of the market. This paralysing habit of mind must be abandoned before the media will be free. Works Cited Ahrens, Frank. "Policy Watch." Washington Post (23 June 2002): H03. 30 March 2003 <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A27015-2002Jun22?la... ...nguage=printer>. Batt, William. "How Our Towns Got That Way." 7 Oct. 1996. 31 March 2003 <http://www.esb.utexas.edu/drnrm/WhatIs/LandValue.htm>. Chester, Jeff. "Gerald Levin's Negative Legacy." Alternet.org 6 Dec. 2001. 5 March 2003 <http://www.democraticmedia.org/resources/editorials/levin.php>. Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. "The Industrialisation of the Mind." Raids and Reconstructions. London: Pluto Press, 1975. 18. Greene, Thomas C. "MS to Eradicate GPL, Hence Linux." 25 June 2002. 5 March 2003 <http://www.theregus.com/content/4/25378.php>. Hopper, D. Ian. "FBI Pushes for Cyber Ethics Education." Associated Press 10 Oct. 2000. 29 March 2003 <http://www.billingsgazette.com/computing/20001010_cethics.php>. Junger v. Daley. U.S. Court of Appeals for 6th Circuit. 00a0117p.06. 2000. 31 March 2003 <http://pacer.ca6.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/getopn.pl?OPINION=00a0... ...117p.06>. Levin, Gerald. "Millennium 2000 Special." CNN 2 Jan. 2000. Touretzky, D. S. "Gallery of CSS Descramblers." 2000. 29 March 2003 <http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery>. Links http://artcontext.org/lexicon/ http://artcontext.org/progload http://pacer.ca6.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/getopn.pl?OPINION=00a0117p.06 http://www.billingsgazette.com/computing/20001010_cethics.html http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery http://www.democraticmedia.org/resources/editorials/levin.html http://www.esb.utexas.edu/drnrm/WhatIs/LandValue.htm http://www.mozilla.org/ http://www.theregus.com/content/4/25378.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A27015-2002Jun22?language=printer Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Deck, Andy. "Treadmill Culture " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/04-treadmillculture.php>. APA Style Deck, A. (2003, Apr 23). Treadmill Culture . M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/04-treadmillculture.php>