Journal articles on the topic 'Use case silhouette'

Recent years have seen a rise in the use of various machine learning techniques in computer vision, particularly in posing feature-based human action recognition which includes convolutional neural networks (CNN) and recurrent neural network (RNN). CNN-based methods are useful in recognizing human actions for combined motions (i.e., standing up, hand shaking, walking). However, in case of uncertainty of camera motion, occlusion, and multiple people, CNN suppresses important feature information and is not efficient enough to recognize variations for human action. Besides, RNN with long short-term memory (LSTM) requires more computational power to retain memories to classify human actions. This research proposes an extended framework based on capsule network using silhouette pose features to recognize human actions. Proposed extended framework achieved high accuracy of 95.64% which is higher than previous research methodology. Extensive experimental validation of the proposed extended framework reveals efficiency which is expected to contribute significantly in action recognition research.

The National Medium Term Development Plan 2020-2024 states that one of the visions of national development is to accelerate the distribution of welfare and justice. Cluster analysis is analysis that grouping of objects into several smaller groups where the objects in one group have similar characteristics. This study was conducted to find the best clustering method and to classify cities based on the level of welfare in Java. In this study, the cluster analysis that used was hard clustering such as K-Means, K-Medoids (PAM and CLARA), and Hierarchical Agglomerative as well as soft clustering such as Fuzzy C Means. This study use elbow method, silhouette method, and gap statistics to determine the optimal number of clusters. From the evaluation results of the silhouette coefficient, dunn index, connectivity coefficient, and Sw/Sb ratio, it was found that the best cluster analysis was Agglomerative Ward Linkage which produced three clusters. The first cluster consists of 27 cities with moderate welfare, the second cluster consists of 16 cities with high welfare, the third cluster consists of 76 cities with low welfare. With the best clustering results, the government of cities in Java shall be able to make a better policies of welfare based on the dominant indicators found in each cluster.

Mr. DB was a 95 year old man who presented to the emergency department with dyspnea progressing over the last 3 months. Chest x-ray demonstrated an enlarged cardiac silhouette.
 He had a past medical history significant for coronary artery disease, hypertension and a lobectomy due to tuberculosis.
 A point of care cardiac ultrasound was conducted by an internal medicine resident as part of his physical examination in the emergency department. A large pericardial effusion was found. There were no clinical signs of tamponade.
 Video 1 (online supplement; Figure 1) demonstrates a parasternal long axis view with the pericardial effusion noted to be posterior to the left ventricle in this view. Video 2 (online supplement; Figure 2) is a short axis view of the heart which is showing that the effusion is surrounding the heart. Video 3 and 4 (online supplements; Figures 3 & 4) demonstrates that the pericardial effusion is present significantly surrounding the apex as well. An echocardiogram confirmed the POCUS findings and cardiology was consulted to conduct a pericardiocentesis, following which the patient’s symptoms resolved. The effusion was thought to be chronic and transudative. In this case, the use of POCUS at the bedside allowed for rapid detection of a large pericardial effusion and subsequent treatment.

Abstract The present paper focuses on the analysis of the possibilities of using integral transforms for measuring and evaluating the differences of compared images (car silhouettes) with the purpose of a correct car body categorization. Approaches such as the light intensities frequency change, the application of discrete integral transforms without the use of further supplementary information enabling automated data processing using the Fourier-Mellin transforms are used within this work. The calculation of the several metrics was verified through different combinations that implied using and not using the Hamming window and a low-pass filter. The paper introduced a method for measuring and evaluating the differences in the compared images (car silhouettes). The proposed method relies on the fact that the integral transforms have their own transformants in the case of translation, scaling and rotation, in the frequency area. Besides, the Fourier-Mellin transform was to offer image transformation that is resistant to the translation, rotation and scale.

For many years now in Poland there has been a large number of road accidents at pedestrian crossings during night periods [5, 11]. One of the technical solutions that can improve this condition is the use of proper lighting for pedestrian crossings. The designated pedestrian crossing should be visible in different weather conditions and at different times of the day. In case of night vision restrictions use artificial lighting of pedestrian crossings. At the same time, lighting of pedestrian crossings should ensure: proper conditions for the driver to recognise the traffic situation and observe the pedestrian's silhouette, and for the pedestrian to observe the surroundings, pedestrian crossings and upcoming vehicles. The article gives an opinion on the proposal of lighting requirements for dedicated luminaires, realizing positive luminance contrast, used in the area of pedestrian crossings together with the proposed measurement grids. Quantitative requirements have been formulated taking into account the gradation of lighting classes resulting from the current lighting standard.

Clustering is one of technique in data mining which has purpose to group data into a cluster. At the end, a cluster will have different data compared with others. This paper discussed about the implementation of clustering technique in determining UKT (Uang Kuliah Tinggal) / Tuition Fee in Indonesia. UKT is a tuition fee where its amount is determined by considering students purchasing power. Most of University in Indonesia often use manual technique in order to classify UKT’s group for each student. Using web-based application, this paper proposed a new approach to automatise UKT’s grouping which leads to give an reasonable recommendation in determining the UKT’s group. Pillar K-Means algorithm had been implemented to conduct data clustering. This algorithm used pillar algorithm to initiate centroid value in K-means algorithm. By deploying students data at Institut Teknologi Sumatera Lampung as case study, the result illustrated that Pillar K-Means and silhouette coefficient value might be adopted in determining UKT’s group

Introduction. Pericardial effusion in the setting of hyperthyroidism is rare. We present a patient with Graves’ disease who developed a sanguineous pericardial effusion and cardiac tamponade.Case Description. A 76-year-old man presenting with fatigue was diagnosed with Graves’ disease and treated with methimazole. Two months later, he was hospitalized for uncontrolled atrial fibrillation. Electrocardiography showed diffuse low voltage and atrial fibrillation with rapid ventricular rate. Chest radiograph revealed an enlarged cardiac silhouette and left-sided pleural effusion. Thyroid stimulating hormone was undetectable, and free thyroxine was elevated. Diltiazem and heparin were started, and methimazole was increased. Transthoracic echocardiography revealed a large pericardial effusion with cardiac tamponade physiology. Pericardiocentesis obtained 1,050 mL of sanguineous fluid. The patient progressed to thyroid storm, treated with propylthiouracil, potassium iodine, hydrocortisone, and cholestyramine. Cultures and cytology of the pericardial fluid were negative. Thyroid hormone markers progressively normalized, and he improved clinically and was discharged.Discussion. We found 10 previously reported cases of pericardial effusions in the setting of hyperthyroidism. Heparin use may have contributed to the sanguineous nature of our patient’s pericardial effusion, but other reported cases occurred without anticoagulation. Sanguineous and nonsanguineous pericardial effusions and cardiac tamponade may be due to hyperthyroidism.

The rejection on ratification of the revision of Indonesian Code Law or known as RKUHP and Corruption Law raises several opinions from various perspectives in social media. Twitter as one of many platforms affected, has more than 19.5 million users in Indonesia. Twitter is one of many social media in Indonesia where people can share their views, arguments, information, and opinions from all points of view. Since Twitter has a great diversity of users, it needs a system which is designed to determine the opinion tendency towards the problems or objects. The purpose of this study is to analyze the sentiment of Twitter users' tweets to reject the revision of the Law whether they have positive or negative sentiments using the Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering method. The data that being used in this study were obtained from the results of crawling tweets based on hashtag (#) (#ReformasiDikorupsi). The next stage is pre-processing which consists of case folding, tokenizing, cleansing, sanitizing, and stemming. The extraction features Opinion words and Term Frequency (TF) which performs the process automatically. In the clustering stage, two clusters use three approaches; single linkage, complete linkage and average linkage. In the accuracy calculation phase, the writer uses the error ratio, confusion matrix, and silhouette coefficient. Therefore, the results are quite good. From 2408 tweets, the highest accuracy results are 61.6%.

There is increasing awareness of environmental issues in Australia (Victorian Government 1986, 1987). However, public participation in many such issues is typically limited to comment and submission on government policy, management plans and a range of other environmental statements. It is rare for the public to be involved in the scientific research upon which many environmental policies are based.Recent surveys for the rare and endangered Leadbeater's Possum, Gymnobelideus leadbeateri have been an exception to this trend (Lindenmayer et al. 1990a, 1990b, 1990c). These studies have used a new wildlife survey technique termed stagwatching (Lindenmayer, 1989; Lindenmayer & Press, 1989) involves observing and counting animals emerging from nest and den sites in very large living or dead trees with hollows (“stags”) at, or close to, dusk. Animals are observed and recognised in silhouette. Because many Australian animals regularly move between nest sites, stagwatching is dependent on simultaneously watching all stags in a known area (= 3 ha in this study) (Smith et al. 1989). This makes stagwatching extremely labour intensive and its success is dependent on substantial participation by the public. Our experience of this public support suggests that stagwatching has considerable value for use in public and environmental education to increase the awareness of methods of study and understanding of forest biology and conservation. The values of stagwatching in environmental education are identified in this paper, and a case study of the use of stagwatching in surveys for Leadbeater's Possum is also presented. The methods used to organise the stagwatching program are documented so they may be adopted and modified for teaching a range of topics about Australian forests.

This investigation presents results for the clustering of wind resource data based on statistical Weibull characteristics. The clustering of a chosen geographical area is based on the Weibull and mean wind speed characteristics for each geospatial point for the high energy demand period. The geographically clustered area is chosen from one of the renewable energy development zones, which were identified by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research. The renewable energy dataset used throughout this study represents the eight renewable energy zones through a meso-scale wind and solar dataset, which spans a 5-year period, at a 15-min temporal resolution. The clustering exercise is aimed at the identification of various geographical areas which best represent a specific independent power producers energy site expectations, while balancing factors such as grid stability and economic and environmental considerations. The study looks into various clustering factors, namely the demand seasons and the energy time of use periods, which correlate to energy production demands for the South African region. The clustering algorithms compared within this study include k-means clustering, the Clustering LARge Applications algorithm, the hierarchical agglomerative algorithm and a model-based clustering algorithm. The initial comparison study yielded the k-means algorithm as the best performing algorithm based on the following internal validation metrics: the Silhouette index, Dunn index and the Calinski-Harabasz index. This clustering method is then subsequently performed on various topical case studies.

Deep learning-based feature extraction methods and transfer learning have become common approaches in the field of pattern recognition. Deep convolutional neural networks trained using tripled-based loss functions allow for the generation of face embeddings, which can be directly applied to face verification and clustering. Knowledge about the ground truth of face identities might improve the effectiveness of the final classification algorithm; however, it is also possible to use ground truth clusters previously discovered using an unsupervised approach. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the potential improvement of classification results of state-of-the-art supervised classification methods trained with and without ground truth knowledge. In this study, we use two sufficiently large data sets containing more than 200,000 “taken in the wild” images, each with various resolutions, visual quality, and face poses which, in our opinion, guarantee the statistical significance of the results. We examine several clustering and supervised pattern recognition algorithms and find that knowledge about the ground truth has a very small influence on the Fowlkes–Mallows score (FMS) of the classification algorithm. In the case of the classification algorithm that obtained the highest accuracy in our experiment, the FMS improved by only 5.3% (from 0.749 to 0.791) in the first data set and by 6.6% (from 0.652 to 0.718) in the second data set. Our results show that, beside highly secure systems in which face verification is a key component, face identities discovered by unsupervised approaches can be safely used for training supervised classifiers. We also found that the Silhouette Coefficient (SC) of unsupervised clustering is positively correlated with the Adjusted Rand Index, V-measure score, and Fowlkes–Mallows score and, so, we can use the SC as an indicator of clustering performance when the ground truth of face identities is not known. All of these conclusions are important findings for large-scale face verification problems. The reason for this is the fact that skipping the verification of people’s identities before supervised training saves a lot of time and resources.

ABSTRACT Globular clusters (GCs) have historically been subdivided in either two (disc/halo) or three (disc/inner-halo/outer-halo) groups based on their orbital, chemical, and internal physical properties. The qualitative nature of this subdivision makes it impossible to determine whether the natural number of groups is actually two, three, or more. In this paper we use cluster analysis on the (log M, log σ0, log Re, [Fe/H], log |Z|) space to show that the intrinsic number of GC groups is actually either k = 2 or k = 3, with the latter being favoured albeit non-significantly. In the k = 2 case, the Partitioning Around Medoids (PAM) clustering algorithm recovers a metal-poor halo GC group and a metal-rich disc GC group. With k = 3 the three groups can be interpreted as disc/inner-halo/outer-halo families. For each group we obtain a medoid, i.e. a representative element (NGC 6352, NGC 5986, and NGC 5466 for the disc, inner halo, and outer halo, respectively), and a measure of how strongly each GC is associated with its group, the so-called silhouette width. Using the latter, we find a correlation with age for both disc and outer halo GCs where the stronger the association of a GC with the disc (outer halo) group, the younger (older) it is. Our findings are aligned with previous work based on very different approaches, such as cladistic analysis, suggesting that the grouping we obtain is quite robust and represents some genuine underlying physical subdivision of GCs. We provide a catalogue where we list the assigned group for each GC.

In this article I analyse Swedish scenographer Knut Ström’s costume and set design sketches, made in Germany in 1915‐18, for his production of August Strindberg’s A Dream Play. I focus on the costume sketches for the main character, Indra’s daughter, and discuss how the act of costuming is more than just dressing up a body onstage; it also produces the body and makes it meaningful in relation to the scenographic whole. The modernist female body could, among other aspects, be understood as a body with agency, a clothed body in motion where clothing, staging and patterns of movement all helped create a new, slim silhouette. This view of the female fashioned body, I argue, leaves an imprint on Knut Ström’s visual thinking in the sketch material where Indra’s Daughter emerges in corsetless, straight dresses. Ström’s staging of Indra’s daughter as a modernist woman not only anchors her in the process of social change; it also underlines the ‘othering’ qualities of costume and serves to distinguish her as an outsider in the play. As pointed out by Barbieri, costume can communicate with the spectators both metaphorically and viscerally. In the case of Indra’s Daughter, Ström could be said to use the modernist costuming of Indra’s Daughter metaphorically to set her apart from the other actors in more traditional costumes, and physically, with colours and shapes of her costumes that visibly stand out from the scenographic landscape. Ström’s creative work with the sketches for A Dream Play shows how he understood the power of the costumed body as a vital part of the scenographic whole.

The use of multibeam echosounder systems (MBES) for detailed seafloor mapping is increasing at a fast pace. Due to their design, enabling continuous high-density measurements and the coregistration of seafloor’s depth and reflectivity, MBES has become a fundamental instrument in the advancing field of acoustic seafloor classification (ASC). With these data becoming available, recent seafloor mapping research focuses on the interpretation of the hydroacoustic data and automated predictive modeling of seafloor composition. While a methodological consensus on which seafloor sediment classification algorithm and routine does not exist in the scientific community, it is expected that progress will occur through the refinement of each stage of the ASC pipeline: ranging from the data acquisition to the modeling phase. This research focuses on the stage of the feature extraction; the stage wherein the spatial variables used for the classification are, in this case, derived from the MBES backscatter data. This contribution explored the sediment classification potential of a textural feature based on the recently introduced Weyl transform of 300 kHz MBES backscatter imagery acquired over a nearshore study site in Belgian Waters. The goodness of the Weyl transform textural feature for seafloor sediment classification was assessed in terms of cluster separation of Folk’s sedimentological categories (4-class scheme). Class separation potential was quantified at multiple spatial scales by cluster silhouette coefficients. Weyl features derived from MBES backscatter data were found to exhibit superior thematic class separation compared to other well-established textural features, namely: (1) First-order Statistics, (2) Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrices (GLCM), (3) Wavelet Transform and (4) Local Binary Pattern (LBP). Finally, by employing a Random Forest (RF) categorical classifier, the value of the proposed textural feature for seafloor sediment mapping was confirmed in terms of global and by-class classification accuracies, highest for models based on the backscatter Weyl features. Further tests on different backscatter datasets and sediment classification schemes are required to further elucidate the use of the Weyl transform of MBES backscatter imagery in the context of seafloor mapping.

Context. NGC 3311 is the central galaxy of the Hydra I galaxy cluster. It has a hot interstellar medium and hosts a central dust lane with emission lines. These dust lanes are frequent in elliptical galaxies, but the case of NGC 3311 might be particularly interesting for problems of dust lifetime and the role of cool gas in the central parts. Aims. We aim to use archival HST images and MUSE data to investigate the central dust structure of NGC 3311. Methods. We used the tool PyParadise to model the stellar population and extract the emission lines. Results. The HST/ACS colour map reveals the known dust structures, but also blue spots, which are places of strong line emission. A dusty “mini-jet” emanates from the centre. The distribution of the emission line gas matches the dust silhouette almost exactly. Close to the brightest Hα emission, the ratio [NII]/Hα resembles that of HII-regions; in the outer parts, [NII] gets stronger and is similar to LINERLow-ionization nuclear emission-line region -like spectra. The gas kinematics is consistent with that of a rotating disc. The Doppler shifts of the strongest line emissions, which indicate the areas of highest star formation activity, smoothly fit into the disc symmetry. The metallicity is supersolar. The presence of neutral gas is indicated by the fit residuals of the stellar NaI D absorption line, which we interpret as interstellar absorption. We estimate the mass of the neutral gas to be of the order of the X-ray mass. The dynamical mass infers a stellar population of intermediate age, whose globular clusters have already been identified. Conclusions. Our findings can be harmonised in a scenario in which the star formation is triggered by the accretion of cold gas onto a pre-existing gas/dust disc or ring. Newly produced dust then contributes to the longevity of the dust.

Background and Aim. The purpose of the study was to evaluate the relationship between COPD severity and the diaphragmatic function measured by point-of-care US in patients with stable COPD. Method. A total of 61 patients with COPD and 40 healthy subjects who had been admitted to Ufuk University Hospital between December 2018 and May 2019 were enrolled. Point-of-care US was performed, and lung silhouette and anterior, right, and left hemidiaphragm method in M-mode were used to evaluate the diaphragm. Results. The point-of-care US measurements, lung silhouette method right (Lung Sil R), lung silhouette method left (Lung Sil L), right hemidiaphragm US method in B-mode (Ant B-Mode R), and right hemidiaphragm US method in M-mode (Ant M-Mode R), were significantly different among groups (P<0.001 for each). FEV1 was strongly correlated with Lung Sil R, Lung Sil L, Ant B-Mode R, and Ant M-Mode R (r = 0.963, P<0.001; r = 0.956, P<0.001; r = 0.953, P<0.001; and r = 0.917, and P<0.001, respectively). Negative correlations were detected between the number of exacerbations per year and Lung Sil R and the number of exacerbations per year and Ant M-Mode R (r = −0.599, P<0.001 and r = −0.587, and P<0.001, respectively). Conclusion. In this study, FEV1 and annual number of exacerbations turned out to be strongly correlated US findings. The use of US in COPD patients could help to support clinical decision, but further clinical studies are necessary to confirm those findings.

Background The World Health Organization’s International Classification of Functioning Disability and Health (ICF) conceptualizes disability not solely as a problem that resides in the individual, but as a health experience that occurs in a context. Word embeddings build on the idea that words that occur in similar contexts tend to have similar meanings. In spite of both sharing “context” as a key component, word embeddings have been scarcely applied in disability. In this work, we propose social media (particularly, Reddit) to link them. Objective The objective of our study is to train a model for generating word associations using a small dataset (a subreddit on disability) able to retrieve meaningful content. This content will be formally validated and applied to the discovery of related terms in the corpus of the disability subreddit that represent the physical, social, and attitudinal environment (as defined by a formal framework like the ICF) of people with disabilities. Methods Reddit data were collected from pushshift.io with the pushshiftr R package as a wrapper. A word2vec model was trained with the wordVectors R package using the disability subreddit comments, and a preliminary validation was performed using a subset of Mikolov analogies. We used Van Overschelde’s updated and expanded version of the Battig and Montague norms to perform a semantic categories test. Silhouette coefficients were calculated using cosine distance from the wordVectors R package. For each of the 5 ICF environmental factors (EF), we selected representative subcategories addressing different aspects of daily living (ADLs); then, for each subcategory, we identified specific terms extracted from their formal ICF definition and ran the word2vec model to generate their nearest semantic terms, validating the obtained nearest semantic terms using public evidence. Finally, we applied the model to a specific subcategory of an EF involved in a relevant use case in the field of rehabilitation. Results We analyzed 96,314 comments posted between February 2009 and December 2019, by 10,411 Redditors. We trained word2vec and identified more than 30 analogies (eg, breakfast – 8 am + 8 pm = dinner). The semantic categorization test showed promising results over 60 categories; for example, s(A relative)=0.562, s(A sport)=0.475 provided remarkable explanations for low s values. We mapped the representative subcategories of all EF chapters and obtained the closest terms for each, which we confirmed with publications. This allowed immediate access (≤ 2 seconds) to the terms related to ADLs, ranging from apps “to know accessibility before you go” to adapted sports (boccia). For example, for the support and relationships EF subcategory, the closest term discovered by our model was “resilience,” recently regarded as a key feature of rehabilitation, not yet having one unified definition. Our model discovered 10 closest terms, which we validated with publications, contributing to the “resilience” definition. Conclusions This study opens up interesting opportunities for the exploration and discovery of the use of a word2vec model that has been trained with a small disability dataset, leading to immediate, accurate, and often unknown (for authors, in many cases) terms related to ADLs within the ICF framework.

The authors formulate the body pose estimation as a multi-dimensional nonlinear optimization problem, suitable to be approximately solved by a meta-heuristic, specifically, the particle swarm optimization (PSO). Starting from multi-view video sequences acquired in a studio environment, a full skeletal configuration of the human body is retrieved. They use a generic subdivision-surface body model in 3-D to generate solutions for the optimization problem. PSO then looks for the best match between the silhouettes generated by the projection of the model in a candidate pose and the silhouettes extracted from the original video sequence. The optimization method, in this case PSO, is run in parallel on the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) and is implemented in Cuda-C™ on the nVidia CUDA™ architecture. The authors compare the results obtained by different configurations of the camera setup, fitness function, and PSO neighborhood topologies.

Molecular diagnostics offers quick access to information but fails to operate at a speed required for clinical decision-making. Our novel methodology, droplet-on-thermocouple silhouette real-time polymerase chain reaction (DOTS qPCR), uses interfacial effects for droplet actuation, inhibition relief, and amplification sensing. DOTS qPCR has sample-to-answer times as short as 3 min 30 s. In infective endocarditis diagnosis, DOTS qPCR demonstrates reproducibility, differentiation of antibiotic susceptibility, subpicogram limit of detection, and thermocycling speeds of up to 28 s/cycle in the presence of tissue contaminants. Langmuir and Gibbs adsorption isotherms are used to describe the decreasing interfacial tension upon amplification. Moreover, a log-linear relationship with low threshold cycles is presented for real-time quantification by imaging the droplet-on-thermocouple silhouette with a smartphone. DOTS qPCR resolves several limitations of commercially available real-time PCR systems, which rely on fluorescence detection, have substantially higher threshold cycles, and require expensive optical components and extensive sample preparation. Due to the advantages of low threshold cycle detection, we anticipate extending this technology to biological research applications such as single cell, single nucleus, and single DNA molecule analyses. Our work is the first demonstrated use of interfacial effects for sensing reaction progress, and it will enable point-of-care molecular diagnosis of infections.

Background:Several cohort and case-control studies have suggested that overweight or obesity is associated with the risk of Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA). Associations were based on Body Mass Index (BMI), although this measurement does not reflect the fat distribution [1].Objectives:To study the relationships between anthropometric measurements and the risk of RA in women involved in the E3N cohort.Methods:E3N is an ongoing French prospective cohort that enrolled 98,995 women aged 40-65 years in 1990. Women completed mailed questionnaires every 2-3 years on lifestyle and health-related information. A total of 698 incident RA cases have been validated among 78,452 women [2]. Available anthropometric measurements include birth height and weight, height and weight (collected at baseline and regularly updated during follow-up), and age-related body shapes (BS). Women had to identify the silhouette among 8 BS that best described their BS at 8 years, puberty, 20-25 years, 30-35 years, and study baseline. BS trajectories (from 8 to 30-35 years) were constructed using Nagin’s approach to group-based trajectory modeling that identifies 6 different trajectories [3]. Hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for the risk of incident RA were estimated using Cox proportional hazards regression models with age as the time scale. Models were first adjusted for known risk factors of RA (model 1), and then multi-adjusted (model 2).Results:Taking lean BS as reference, medium BS at puberty was associated with an increased risk of RA [HR=1.23 (95% CI 1.0-1.5)], in the fully adjusted model (table 1), as was large BS at baseline [HR =1.32 (95% CI 1.1-1.6)] (in model 1). Obesity (BMI>30 kg/m2) was marginally associated with RA in model 1 [HR=1.30 (95% CI 1.0-1.7)], but the association was no longer statistically significant in the multi-adjusted model, taking normal BMI [18-25 kg/m2[as the reference.Birth weight and height, BS (at 8, 20-25 and 30-35 years), and BS trajectories were not significantly associated with RA in any model.Conclusion:In E3N cohort, medium body shape at puberty was associated with an increased risk of RA independently of the BMI and smoking exposure.Table 1.Cox proportional-hazards analysis of anthropometric factors associated with RARANon-casesMODEL 1MODEL 2HRs (95%CI)ptrendHRs (95%CI)ptrendBaseline Body mass index (kg/m2)<18101,7970.75 (0.4-1.4)0.05320.85 (0.4-1.6)0.6165 [18-25[46250,330RefRef [25-30]17119,7161.10 (0.9-1.3)1.00 (0.8-1.2)> 30555,9111.30 (1.0-1.7)1.13 (0.8-1.6)Body shape at pubertyLean33240,485Ref0.0937Ref0.1490Medium17917,9031.24 (1.0-1.5)1.23 (1.0-1.5)Large14715,9841.14 (0.9-1.4)1.12 (0.9-1.4)Body shape at baselineLean35944,718Ref0.0055Ref0.1743Medium20020,0411.20 (1.0-1.4)1.16 (0.9-1.4)Large1109,8381.32 (1.1-1.6)1.20 (0.9-1.6)ptrend: p for trend. Ref: reference.Model 1 adjusted for age, smoking (past/current/never), passive smoking during childhood and/or adulthood (ever/never), educational level (<high–school, up to 2 years of university, ≥ 3 years of university).Multi-adjusted model 2 included model 1 + body mass index (<18, 18–25, 25–30, >30 kg/m2), body shape at puberty, body shape at baseline adjusted for age, baseline physical activity (in quartiles), age at menarche (<13, 13–15, ≥15 years), age at menopause (≤45, 45–53, ≥53 years), age at the first pregnancy (<22, 22–27, ≥27 years), number of full-term pregnancies (≤1, 2, ≥3), and duration of premenopausal use of progestogen (0, 0–24, >24 months).References:[1]Crowson CS, Matteson EL, Davis JM 3rd, Gabriel SE. Contribution of obesity to the rise in incidence of rheumatoid arthritis. Arthritis Care Res (Hoboken). 2013;65:71-7.[2]Nguyen Y, Salliot C, Gusto G, et al. Improving accuracy of self-reported diagnoses of rheumatoid arthritis in the French prospective E3N-EPIC cohort: a validation study. BMJ Open. 2019;9:e033536.[3]Nagin D. Analyzing developmental trajectories: a semiparametric, group based approach. Psychol Methods 1999;4:139e57.Disclosure of Interests:None declared

Objective: to investigate the meanings of adolescents about pregnancy. Method: qualitative study of ethnographic aspect, performed with eight pregnant teenagers. The data collection technique was the narrative interview, which was subjected to thematic analysis, and drawing as a complementary technique. The study was initiated after approval by the Ethics Committee with CAAE number 00554512.0.0000.5346. Results: the use of the drawing produced meanings of the bodily changes, which were of reflection about their silhouette, timidity in representing themselves in a drawing and satisfaction with the corporal alterations caused by the pregnancy. In the representations, they were alone, only one included the partner. Conclusion: the drawing allows a more communicative and participatory position during the interviews. Thereby, it recognizes the relevance of using this technique in data collection work with anthropological approach.

Objective: to investigate the meanings of adolescents about pregnancy. Method: qualitative study of ethnographic aspect, performed with eight pregnant teenagers. The data collection technique was the narrative interview, which was subjected to thematic analysis, and drawing as a complementary technique. The study was initiated after approval by the Ethics Committee with CAAE number 00554512.0.0000.5346. Results: the use of the drawing produced meanings of the bodily changes, which were of reflection about their silhouette, timidity in representing themselves in a drawing and satisfaction with the corporal alterations caused by the pregnancy. In the representations, they were alone, only one included the partner. Conclusion: the drawing allows a more communicative and participatory position during the interviews. Thereby, it recognizes the relevance of using this technique in data collection work with anthropological approach.

Abstract Abstract 4298 A 69 year old woman with a history of well controlled hypertension and a single episode of viral pericarditis initially presented to her physician with persistent leukocytosis and anemia. Bone marrow biopsy and aspiration revealed acute monocytic leukemia (FAB M5b) with normal cytogenetics. Induction chemotherapy was given with idarubicin 12 mg/m2 for 3 days and continous infusion cytarabine 200 mg/m2 for 7 days. Repeat bone marrow biopsy and aspiration on day 14 showed complete remission. Consolidation chemotherapy was administered with idarubicin 12 mg/m2 for 2 days and continuous infusion cytarabine 100 mg/m2 for 5 days. Prior to discharge from the hospital, she developed sudden onset of substernal chest pain associated with tachycardia and shortness of breath. Physical exam did not reveal jugular-venous distension; however, a slight friction rub was auscultated. Development of a pericardial effusion was suspected. Chest roenterogram demonstrated a mildly enlarged cardiac silhouette with a small left pleural effusion. Serum troponin-I and beta natriutretic peptide levels were within normal limits. Transthoracic echocardiogram was performed immediately which showed a moderate pericardial effusion with right ventricular collapse consistent with pericardial tamponade. A pericardial drain was placed which drained 900 cc of serous fluid. Laboratory studies on the fluid showed WBC of 6,500, LDH 1069, glucose 93, RBC 150, total protein of 4.1, albumin of 2.1 and pH of 7.0. Cultures did not yield bacterial or viral growth. Cytological analysis did not reveal evidence of leukemia. Based on these findings, a diagnosis of cytarabine induced pericardial effusion was strongly suspected. The patient improved rapidly and within 24 hours, pericardial drain was removed and a repeat TTE showed complete resolution of the pericardial effusion. Repeat bone marrow biopsy and aspiration after consolidation chemotherapy continued to show complete remission. Given that her effusion was likely cytarabine induced, the decision to discontinue further consolidation chemotherapy with cytarabine was made. Instead, maintenance therapy with azacytidine at 50 mg/m2 intravenously daily for 5 days to be repeated every four to six weeks was initiated. After five cycles, surveillance bone marrow biopsy and aspiration has continued to show complete remission. Of the known cardiac toxicities associated with chemotherapy drugs, pericarditis and pericardial effusion are uncommon. They have been reported in association with high dose cyclophosphamide, bleomycin, cytarabine, busulphan, imatinib and all trans retinoic acid. Specifically, capillary leak syndrome, non cardiogenic pulmonary edema and pericardial effusion have been reported with high dose cytarabine. This is the first case of a concurrent pericardial effusion with tamponade with cytarabine evolving so rapidly. The pathophysiology regarding the development of pericardial effusion in this setting is unknown. It has been speculated that direct cellular damage occurs leading to a cascade of events developing eventually into an effusion as well as an immune mediated delayed hypersensitivity. Elevated levels of tumor necrosis factor and platelet activating factor in two patients who developed a capillary leak syndrome after high dose cytarabine therapy have been reported. The strongest theory of a delayed immune mediated mechanism is most accepted given the development of pericardial effusions have been documented after multiple doses of chemotherapy. Clinicians should maintain a high level of suspicion for this complication as it has a rapid onset and potentially lethal complications. A literature search yielded four cases of acute pericardial effusions in which the only commonality was the use of cytarabine. In regards to our patient, a baseline nuclear heart scan was normal. To note, she did have a previous episode of suspected viral pericarditis without effusion, two months prior to her diagnosis of AML, which may have some role in the subsequent development of a pericardial effusion. It is reported that 10–30% of patients with acute pericarditis have recurrent disease that is often associated with an effusion. It may be postulated that perhaps those patients predisposed to recurrent pericarditis are sensitized to develop this complication upon the treatment with cytarabine or other chemotherapeutic agents. Disclosures: No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.

Abstract. It was probably more valuable to use user-generated data from location services than ever before during the COVID-19 pandemic. The newly emerged situation caused by the disease’s rapid spread found most of the European countries not ready in many aspects. From the geospatial point of view, it was a tremendous lack of open-data about people’s behaviour. Many public and private services were closed as a preventive measure to slow down COVID-19 spread, which caused an unprecedented change in citizens’ mobility and overall behaviour. It is not possible to acquire such information using traditional ways of data collection (e.g. surveys and questionnaires), or it would be extremely expensive and time-consuming. In order to obtain information about people’s change in behaviour, location-based data from mobile phone users could be used. Although individual user-generated data are highly sensitive, they could be aggregated (e.g. for higher administrative units) and thus anonymised; while still possessing valuable insight into the behaviour change. This contribution deals with COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports dataset released in early April 2020 by Google (available at https://www.google.com/covid19/mobility), which offers unique information about a change of human activities due to the pandemic. This data is in principle very similar to data from mobile operators; however, more accurate, because the location of the device is determined also by connection to Wi-Fi networks and especially via GPS – besides nearby BTS stations. Information carried by the data gives the average decline in population activity in spatial resolution, either only for the entire country or for the country and its main regions. The data is constantly being updated, but Google provides no information on the date of future dissemination of data. Behavioural changes as such are monitored in six categories according to the location of the activity, which was determined by Google as useful for maintaining social distancing or from the point of view of the availability of basic services. The categories are as follows – a) residential, b) transit stations, c) retail and recreation, d) grocery and pharmacy, e) parks, and f) workplaces. Key information is the percentage decrease or increase in the number of individuals present compared to the usual state of affairs (baseline – 3 January to 6 February 2020) in these six fundamental localities. We analysed and visualized data during the peak of the pandemic (from 5 March to 11 April 2020) by processing the average value from that period. In total, 567 European regions with six pieces of information on activity in the above categories was analyzed and visualized. First, we displayed average values in given categories in separate maps, which allowed us to understand a spatial pattern of data. This procedure is relatively common step in the data visual analytics process. We present resulting maps in the contribution of the conference.From the analytical part, we applied a cluster analysis, which served as the processing input for the cartographical synthesis. Methodologically, we created a typology based on the results of cluster analysis as multiple variables can be analyzed simultaneously to provide groups of types of regions with common properties. The k-medoid method was chosen for processing data on human activity type due to its lower sensitivity to outliers. By calculating auxiliary numerical statistics (Pseudo F-index, gap statistics, silhouette method) and after expert assessment, we chose to analyse and display results into five categories (Figure 1), although the optimum number of clusters was originally determined to be two, which was cartographically senseless. This also gives readers a finer breakdown of European regions, which more appropriately shows the diversity/similarity of individual types of regions; especially in the case of areas adjacent to the countries most severely afflicted by COVID-19 - for example Portugal, southern Austria, Slovenia, and others.Besides analytical processing of data (e.g. geovisual and cluster analysis), we also explored a more advance cartographic approach. Cartographic synthesis methods allow the visualization of various types of data with qualitative and quantitative resolution. Therefore, the synthetic processing of the above-mentioned data has been implemented. During the pandemic, a lot of maps were created that are cartographically incorrect, as well as a lot of maps that are cartographically correct. In most cases, however, it was only a simple visualization of the amount of positive-tested people or any other dealing issues in the form of analytical maps. Thus, synthetic maps can provide a new perspective on the issue and can be useful in unconventionally providing information about Covid-19 pandemic. We show how this dataset can be utilised in terms of cartographic synthesis in form of a regional typology in order to reveal the spatial pattern of such change in citizens‘ behaviour.The resulting typology categorizes the relevant administrative units into five clusters (types) in the space defined by the change in behaviour. These clusters can also be named according to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on behaviour of citizens: 1) moderate – regions with a relatively small change in population activity. For this type, it must especially be emphasized that this involves a mild impact of the pandemic compared to other types and that COVID-19 and related restrictions have had a visible effect on human behaviour in these regions as well; 2) substantial (secondary activities) – regions with a generally statistically average change in population activity with a more significant change in secondary activities (Grocery and Pharmacy, Parks); 3) substantial (main activities) – regions with a generally statistically average change in population activity with a more significant change in main activities (Residential, Transit Stations, Workplaces); 4) significant – regions with a statistically significant change in behaviour (values in the fourth quartile outside the range of the box graph); 5) extreme – regions with an unprecedented change in behaviour in outliers or near their borders.Five types of regions were identified according to the impact of COVID-19 and related restrictions - from the type moderately impacted by COVID-19 (e.g. Sweden, Latvia, Hungary), to those impacted by the pandemic in a substantial (Ireland, regions of Greece, the Czech Republic, Norway, Switzerland), significant (e.g. regions of France, Belgium, Austria, Slovenia, Portugal), and extreme manner (Spain, Italy, and the Paris region). As a conclusion, The current global situation clearly shows that positional and individual data can also be useful in the case of pandemics or any other situations involving the safety and health of the population. The use of Google Location data proves to be valuable in analysis and evaluation of citizens’ behaviour during any pandemic crisis, though, in this case, aggregated into higher territorial units.

Men’s corporate Ready-to-wear clothing has always been a conventional segment of attire as far as the choice of fabrics, silhouettes, notions and functionality is concerned. But in the latest fashion eras, advances in the technologies haven’t even left this highbound clothing sector untouched. Instead of keeping warm, good looking and comfortable; people nowadays, have a much higher demand on clothing and prefer the clothes to have special properties. Textiles with advanced technology could offer extremities than the conventional textile forms that work as functional performers for the under looked Men’s clothing sector. Thus, the present paper aims at achieving the objectives of reinventing the men’s clothing wardrobe with the impressions of sustainability and style together. In this work, Men’s semi formal waist coats were conceptualized using the forgotten Jute fabrics infused with Fragrance finishes with the use of essential oils as host-guest complexes of β-cyclodextrin citrate to impart value added finish durability. It came out to be a novel approach to re-surface Jute and Men’s formal attire that can be targeted as a big boon for the M2M clothing lines.

Background, problems and innovations of the study. The modern Puppet Theater in Poland is a phenomenon that is very difficult for definition and it opposes its own identification itself. Problems here start at the stage of fundamental definitions already. In English, the case is simpler: “doll” means a doll, a toy, and “puppet” is a theatrical puppet, as well as in French functions “poupée” and “marionette” respectively. In Polish, one word serves both semantic concepts, and it is the reason that most identify the theater of puppets with theater for children, that is a big mistake. Wanting to get out of this hassle, some theaters have thrown out their puppet signage by skipping their own names. Changes in names were intended only to convey information to viewers that in these theaters do not always operate with puppets and not always for the children’s audience. In view of the use of the word “animation” in Polish, that is, “vitalization”, and also the “animator”, that is, “actor who is animating the puppet”, the term “animant” is suggested, which logically, in our opinion, is used unlike from the word “puppet”. Every subject that is animated by animator can be called an animant, starting with classical puppets (glove puppets, cane puppets, excretory puppets, silhouette puppets, tantamarees, etc.) to various plastic shapes (animals, images of fantastic creatures or unrelated to any known), any finished products (such as chairs, umbrellas, cups), as well as immaterial, which are animated in the course of action directed by the actor, either visible to viewers or hidden. In short, the animator animates the animant. If the phenomenon of vitalization does not come, that is, the act of giving “the animant” the illusion of life does not occur, then objects on the stage remain only the requisite or elements of scenography. Synopsis of the main material of the study. In the past, puppet performances, whether fair or vernacular, were seen by everyone who wanted, regardless of age. At the turn of the XIX–XX centuries, the puppet theater got divided into two separate areas – theater for adults and the one for children. After the war, the professional puppet theater for adults became a branch of the puppet theater for children. In general, little has changed so far. The only puppet theater that plays exclusively for adults is “Theater – the Impossible Union”, under the direction of Mark Khodachinsky. In the Polish puppet theater the literary model still dominates, that is, the principle of starting to work on the performance from the choice of drama. There is no such literary work, old or modern, which could not be adapted for the puppet theater. The only important thing is how and why to do it, what significance carries the use of animants, and also, whether the applying of animation does the audience mislead, as it happens when under the name of the puppet theater at the festival shows performances that have nothing in common with puppets / animations. What special the puppet theater has to offer the adult audience? The possibilities are enormous, and in the historical perspective may be many significant achievements, but this does not mean that the masterpieces are born on the stones. The daily offer of theaters varies, and in reality the puppet theaters repertoire for adults is quite modest. The metaphorical potential of puppets equally well justifies themselves, both in the classics and in modern drama. The animants perfectly show themselves in a poetry theater, fairy-tale, conventional and surrealistic. The puppet theater has an exceptional ability to embody inhuman creatures. These can be figures of deities, angels, devils, spirits, envy, death. At the puppet scenes, also animals act; come alive ordinary household items – chairs, umbrellas, fruits and vegetables, whose animation gives not only an interesting comic effect or grotesque, but also demonstrates another, more empathic view of the whole world around us. In the theater of dolls there is no limit to the imagination of creators, because literally everything can became an animant. You need only puppeteers. The puppet theater in Poland, for both children and adults, has strong organizational foundations. There are about 30 institutional theaters (city or voivodship), as well as an increasing number of “independent theaters”. The POLUNIMA, that is, the Polish branch of the UNIMA International Union of Puppets, operates. The valuable, bilingual (Polish–English) quarterly magazine “Puppet Theater” is being issued. The number of puppet festivals is increasing rapidly, and three of them are devoted to the adult puppet theater: “Puppet is also a human” in Warsaw, “Materia Prima” in Krakow, “Metamorphoses of Puppets” in Bialystok. There is no shortage of good dramas for both adults and children (thanks to the periodical “New Art for Children and Youth” published by the Center for Children’s Arts in Poznan). Conclusions. One of the main problems is the lack of vocational education in the field of the scenography of the puppet theater. The next aspect – creative and now else financial – the puppet show is more difficult, in general more expensive and more time-consuming in preparation than the performance in the drama theater. Actor-puppeteer also gets a task those three times heavier: to play live (as an actor in a drama theater), while playing a puppet and with a puppet. Consequently, the narrative of dramatic story on the stage is triple: the actor in relation to the viewer, the puppet in relation to the viewer, the actor in relation to the puppet. The director also works double – both the actor and the puppet should be led. It is necessary to observe the effect that arises from the actions of both stage partners. So the second threat seems to be absurd, but, alas, it is very real – the escape of puppeteers from puppets. The art of the puppet theater requires hard work, and by its nature, it is more chamber. This art is important for gourmets, poets, admirers of animation skills, as well as the searchers for new artistic ways in the theater, in wide understanding. Fortunately, there are some real fans of the puppet theater, and their admiration for the miracle of animation is contagious.

The integration of digital voice assistants in nursing residences is becoming increasingly important to facilitate nursing productivity with documentation. A key idea behind this system is training natural language understanding (NLU) modules that enable the machine to classify the purpose of the user utterance (intent) and extract pieces of valuable information present in the utterance (entity). One of the main obstacles when creating robust NLU is the lack of sufficient labeled data, which generally relies on human labeling. This process is cost-intensive and time-consuming, particularly in the high-level nursing care domain, which requires abstract knowledge. In this paper, we propose an automatic dialogue labeling framework of NLU tasks, specifically for nursing record systems. First, we apply data augmentation techniques to create a collection of variant sample utterances. The individual evaluation result strongly shows a stratification rate, with regard to both fluency and accuracy in utterances. We also investigate the possibility of applying deep generative models for our augmented dataset. The preliminary character-based model based on long short-term memory (LSTM) obtains an accuracy of 90% and generates various reasonable texts with BLEU scores of 0.76. Secondly, we introduce an idea for intent and entity labeling by using feature embeddings and semantic similarity-based clustering. We also empirically evaluate different embedding methods for learning good representations that are most suitable to use with our data and clustering tasks. Experimental results show that fastText embeddings produce strong performances both for intent labeling and on entity labeling, which achieves an accuracy level of 0.79 and 0.78 f1-scores and 0.67 and 0.61 silhouette scores, respectively.

ABSTRACT IMPACT: Understanding the longitudinal glucose changes following SARS-CoV-2 infection can inform point-of-care guidelines and elucidate the viral hypothesis of diabetes mellitus pathogenesis. OBJECTIVES/GOALS: Hyperglycemia has emerged as an important manifestation of SARS-CoV-2 infection in both diabetic and non-diabetic patients. Whether clinically-detectable glycemic changes persist following SARS-CoV-2 infection remain to be elucidated. This work aims to characterize temporal patterns in glucose dysregulation following SARS-CoV-2 infection. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: Electronic health records of patients with a diagnosis of COVID-19, positive laboratory test for SARS-CoV-2, and negative history of Diabetes Mellitus prior to infection were extracted from the TriNetX database. 7,502 patients with at least one blood glucose value 2 years to 2 weeks before, 2 weeks before to 2 weeks after, and 2 weeks after to 1 year after COVID-19 diagnosis were used for analysis. Temporal patterns are characterized by training state-of-the-art clustering algorithms, including fuzzy short time-series clustering, k-means for longitudinal data, and spectral clustering. Clustering performance is evaluated using internal evaluation metrics of the Silhouette coefficient, Calinski-Harabasz score, and Davies Bouldin index. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: Based on the success of prior clustering methods with random blood glucose measurements, we anticipate that the proposed time-series clustering algorithms will appropriately characterize temporal patterns of glycemic dysregulation. The best performing algorithm based on interval evaluation metrics will be selected for further analysis. Associations between blood glucose values and cluster membership will be evaluated using Kruskal-Wallis one-way ANOVA and effect size will be calculated using unbiased Cohen’s d. Clinical phenotypes for each cluster will be characterized in terms of current diagnoses, prior medication use, pertinent laboratory tests, and vital signs. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE OF FINDINGS: A clearer understanding of the longitudinal glucose changes following SARS-CoV-2 infection can elucidate clinically-detectable patterns of glycemic dysregulation, identify sub-phenotypes of patients who are more susceptive to glycemic dysregulation, and inform appropriate point-of-care guidelines.

The COVID-19 pandemic seems to be the most important phenomenon observed from March 2020 in virtually all countries of the world. The necessity to prevent the spread of COVID-19 and keep health care systems efficient resulted in the forced, drastic limitation of economic activity. Many service sectors were hit particularly hard with this but industry and agriculture were also affected. In particular, the pandemic substantially influenced financial markets and we can observe that some markets or instruments vary in stability since they have been affected in the different degree. In the paper, we present the problem of stability of stock markets during the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to the low number of works related to CEE countries during the pandemic, we analyze the Warsaw Stock Exchange, which is one of the most important markets in the CEE. Our main goal was to find how various industries represented by stock market indices have reacted to the COVID-19 shock and consequently which sectors turned out to keep stability and remained resistant to the pandemic. In our investigation, we use two clustering methods: the K-means and the Ward techniques with the criterion of maximizing the silhouette coefficient and six indicators describing stability in terms of profitability, volume, overbought/oversold conditions and volatility. The results of the research present that during the pandemic it was possible to identify 5 clusters of sector indices in the short term and 4 in the medium term. We found that the composition of the clusters is quite stable over time and that none of the obtained clusters can be univocally considered the most or the least stable taking into account all the analyzed indicators. However, we showed that the obtained clusters have different stability origins, i.e. they vary from each other in terms of the investigated indicators of stability.

The article identifies the main patterns of construction of Boyko residential buildings, which are based on an archaic three-part plan. It was found that Boyko's three-chamber dwellings existed in three variants, where the oldest type is considered to be one in which the dwelling cage is located in the middle, and the hayloft and pantry - on the sides of the dwelling. Based on measurements of existing buildings, analysis of literature and archival drawings, an ideal model of traditional three-chamber Boyko housing was created and it was substantiated that the idea of an archaic three-chamber house was based on the laws of the golden section. However, in practice, most houses had minor deviations from this rule, which were due to the different width of the ancillary premises and the violation of the proportions of the living space. The construction of traditional residential buildings of the Boyko construction school meets four basic rules: symmetry or the desire for symmetry in the construction of plans and facades with a possible asymmetrical arrangement of individual elements and parts of the house; staticity of the whole volume of the building; balance of the main elements of the house; variety in the use of details and decor. Despite the typical plans and ancient rules of the general compositional construction of houses, the masters sought uniqueness and artistic expression with the help of details. The location of the yards was influenced by the terrain and local natural conditions. It is revealed that the identity of architectural and natural forms is the main principle that makes it possible to harmoniously link static architectural forms with constantly changing natural. The predominance of the sloping lines of the silhouette of the house over the vertical lines provided an organic connection with the environment.

Colonizer and colonized, we all inhabit these death-scarred landscapes. We are here by hope, and we are here by violence.Deborah Bird Rase (1999)The bunya pine has a special meaning for Queenslanders, being endemic to the Bunya Mountains and Blackall Ranges in the South-East corner of the state, with a small stand in North Queensland. The bunya holds particular significance for local Indigenous peoples. They are bound to the tree through custodial rights and obligations and systems of traditional environmental knowledge that incorporate ‘classification …empirical observations of the local environment… [and] self-management that governs resource use’, built up through generations of interaction with the bunya forests. Indigenous groups celebrated their spiritual links to the bunya pine in large seasonal gatherings where they feasted on its edible nuts and performed ceremonies, adjudicated disputes and traded goods. The bunya's majestic height, striking unique silhouette, dark green foliage, unique botanical features and Indigenous associations held a fascination for colonial artists, natural scientists, entrepreneurs and gardeners. Over the years they assumed custodianship of the bunya pine, assimilating it into Western scientific, economic, legal, horticultural, environmental and symbolic systems, which replaced Indigenous custodial rights, obligations and knowledge. The spectacular bunya gatherings were mythologised in colonial writings as mystical, primeval ceremonies and barbaric rituals. Despite ‘fierce and actively hostile tribal resistance’ to colonisation of their lands, Indigenous groups were progressively driven out of the bunya forests. Empty landscapes left by the retreating forests – victims of timber felling and land clearing – came to symbolise the vanishing ceremonies and dwindling Aboriginal populations of South-East Queensland. While surviving Indigenous groups were swept into centralised reserves and settlements from the late nineteenth century, so too the bunya trees were cordoned off in 1908, for their own protection, in Queensland's second national park at the Bunya Mountains, where they stood ‘like the spirits of the departed original Queenslanders, mourning over the days which are forever gone’.

I draw the historical background with the question of how the city has for centuries been communicating with visual signs with its so different external sovereigns. After general remarks, I focus on the ruler’s relationship with the city during the Teutonic Knights’ era, as the example serving the Teutonic castle in Gdansk, from the beginning of its construction to the story of its demolition.
 The Teutonic castle was built, according to the message of Wigand of Marburg, during the time of Grand Master Dietrich von Altenburg around 1340. Unlike the dating, its form disappears in the darkness of history. Archaeologists have proven the existence of a castle complex consisting of the main castle and two baileys on the site of the former castle of the Pomeranian dynasty of Samborids. The convent house: a square with sides of about 53 m, had four residential wings grouped around the courtyard, three towers at the corners, and a high guard tower.
 The article then deals with the castle as a kind of a protagonist of the drama in the war for symbols, developing in four scenes. The first took place after the Battle of Grunwald in 1410, when the town paid homage to Polish King Władysław Jagiello, but in the autumn of 1410 it returned to the rule of the Teutonic Order. In the following months, the city authorities reacted negatively to the attempt of the Grand Master Henry von Plauen to raise taxes. Mayors and members of the City Council: Konrad Letzkau, Arnold Hecht, and Bartholomew (Bartholomäus) Gross, were invited to the Teutonic Knights’ Castle in spring 1411 under the pretext of negotiations, and there they were murdered in unclear circumstances. The town responded by burying both mayors, and probably Gross as well, in the ambulatory of St Mary’s Church, (possibly) in St Hedwig’s Chapel belonging to the Letzkau family. The tombstone (nowadays destructed after the fire of 1734), which preserved anti–Teutonic sentiments, became an attraction for visitors, and was excluded from the normal burial practice of St Mary’s Church in the early modern times.
 Another part of our dispute occurred in 1453, when the Gdansk delegates complained at the Reich’s conciliatory assembly in Vienna about the Gdansk Commander forbidding to continue the construction of the tower of St John’s Church. On this basis, Olaf Asendorf constructed a theory on the general prohibition of building high towers in the Teutonic state, the so-called turmverbote. However, we have no proof that such a ban existed in any form, and apart from two other messages from Elbląg and Kaliningrad, former Königsberg, we cannot trace this kind of regulation in the written sources. On the other hand, none of the towers dominating the panorama of Gdansk was built before 1457. It was only after the transition to Polish sovereignty that the construction of the towers of St John’s Church, St Catherine’s Church, St Mary’s Church, and the Town Hall tower continued. The case from 1453 fits the hypothesis of fighting with the Order with the use of the city’s symbol, but this is rather a hysterical reaction of the economically and politically weakened corporation, which tries to enforce the city’s obedience by prohibiting the further construction of the tower of St John’s Church.
 The events of the Thirteen Years’ War (1454–1466): Gdansk was to throw off the yoke of the Teutonic Knights’ power and voluntarily surrender to the power of the Polish monarchy together with the guarantee of maximum privileges, are the backdrop to the next stage of our battle with the use of symbols. Most probably in February 1454, a decision was made to demolish the fortress, which could potentially become the seat of the new ruler, thus threatening the autonomy of the city. During the negotiations between the Gdansk envoys and Casimir IV Jagiello in February and March 1454 in Cracow, the delegates secretly sent the following letter to the City Council: ‘ Those of the seats [castles of the Teutonic knights] that were demolished are to remain destroyed, but we are not [allowed] to continue the demolition of these castles without consulting or informing the Lord King and the Estates. Hence, good friends, if you have not destroyed them, we advise you in all your power that you are to dismantle them the sooner the better, before we are back home, because the Lord King is “drooling” at the thought of Gdansk’. In the original hern conynge henget de lunge sere up Danczik is an idiomatic Lower German term, literally meaning King hangs his lung [to occupy the castle], so he cares a lot about it. This is what happened. Just like in Elbląg, Toruń and Bartoszyce and partly in Królewiec, the municipal authorities thoroughly demolished the Teutonic Castle.
 As early as in 1857, August Lobegott Randt noted, without mentioning the source, that when the star vaults over the main hall of the Artus Manor were unfastened in 1478–1481, pillars from the Teutonic Castle were used; this theory was taken up by almost all later literature. A whole range of other relics in various places in Gdansk made of sandstone or granite, together with the latest finding in St Mary’s Church from 2020, are now connected with the Castle. This theory fits perfectly with the considerations of political iconography. In the Artus Court, the first monumental building completed after the Grand Permit of 1457, architectural details from the former seat of the supreme authority are placed, since it is where the elites of the new republic meet.
 Together with the demolition of the Castle, the knowledge of its silhouette was lost. Only indirectly does the image give us a fascinating iconographic message, which for me is the fourth episode of the ‘battle with the use of images’. In the painting ‘The Ship of the Church’ from the Artus Manor, destroyed in 1945: a representation of a ship armed with cannons symbolizing the community of Gdansk, in one corner rather a small depiction of a castle can be seen. It shows the main tower, the evidence of which was proven by the 2002 archaeological researches. Its unusual spire evokes obvious associations with the Flemish–Brabantine belfry towers: free–standing towers or towers inscribed in town halls or cloth halls being symbols of urban self–government. What is the function of the representation of the Teutonic castle in the painting? Who was its author and fundator? According to Adam Labuda’s interpretation, it is the pendant to the painting ‘Siege of Malbork’, lost in 1945 – of almost identical dimensions, stylistically similar – and seems to be the work of the same painter. Together with the latter, it conveys the story of the battle for the gained independence of Gdansk, a powerful and rich city, united in religion and under the sceptre of the King. It is possible that the paintings were executed in connection with the would–be visit to the city of Jan Olbracht in 1501, or another entry of Alexander I in 1504. But what remains a puzzle is the function of a Teutonic castle with a Flemish helmet in the painting. Was it only related to the possible Dutch origin of the artist, or was it a political message, wishful thinking of the founders: an allusion to Gdansk as an independent city?
 The article on its first level interprets a non–existent building which has become the protagonist, the pretext, and the background of the multi–act drama of ‘the battle with the use of images’. More generally, it states the entanglement of Gdansk art and architecture in politics as a characteristic feature of this metropolis through all epochs. Yet above all, I would like to thank Małgorzata Omilanowska, the one to whom we dedicate this volume, because without her initiative I would never have started teaching in this fascinating city and thus researching its art history.

A representação gráfica no processo de desenvolvimento de produtos assistivos é uma área pouco explorada que poderia auxiliar na visualização de aspectos conceituais tornando-os tangíveis. Isto amplia o entendimento das etapas do processo por todos os membros da equipe, formada por profissionais de diferentes áreas. Assim apresenta-se uma caracterização de símbolos gráficos usados nas representações de processos de desenvolvimento de tecnologias assistivas. Para tanto, foram selecionados, na literatura, símbolos gráficos e pictogramas utilizados na área de saúde e posteriormente propostas de design para produtos assistivos que possuíssem alguma representação gráfica do processo apresentado. Foi então proposto um modelo híbrido de caracterização das representações a partir dos modos de simbolização de representações gráficas (verbal; esquemático; e pictórico) e abordagens para o desenho de pictogramas (geons; silhuetas; e observação). Os resultados da caracterização foram discutidos de acordo com as similaridades entre eles identificadas no modelo híbrido e as lacunas encontradas. A avaliação trouxe como resultado a baixa utilização de símbolos gráficos nas representações de processo levantadas, mesmo quando os autores eram designers.AbstractGraphic representation is a little explored technique in the development of assistive products, despite being helpful in the visualization of conceptual aspects, which are then made tangible. This improves the understanding of the process phases by the whole team, which includes practitioners from different areas. Thus, the characterization of graphic symbols used in assistive technology development processes are presented. A literature review was carried out to select: graphic symbols and pictorial images used in health care area; and the design of new proposed methods for assistive products that had some graphic representantion of its processes. From this point the authors developed a preliminar hybrid characterization model based on symbolization of graphical representations (verbal, schematic, and pictorial) and approaches for pictogram design (geons, silhouettes and observation). The results of the characterization were discussed using as reference the hybrid model and the gaps. The assessment showed low use of graphic symbols for design processes representations, even when the authors were designers.

AbstractSix tapestries depict the resistance of Zeeland's Sea Beggars to the Spaniards during the Eighty Years' War. Between 1572 and 1576 the fight for freedom was waged in the Scheldt delta. In 1591 the Estates of Zeeland ordered the first tapestry, a representation of the battle of Bergen op Zoom, from Francois Spierinx, a weaver in Delft. When it arrived in 1595, the Estates decided to have a series of tapestries made for the Prinsenlogement, or royal apartments, in Middelburg Abbey. The five tapestries were woven in the De Maecht workshop in less than ten years. Four of them, representing naval engagements, were designed by Hendrick Cornelisz. Vroom: The Battle of Rammekens, The Battle of Lillo, The Battle of Zierikzee and The Battle of Den Haak. The fifth, the Arms Tapestry, was woven after a design by Carel van Mander. Lord Charles Howard of Effingham, Earl of Nottingham (1536-1624) ordered from Spierinx a series of ten tapestries depicting the English victory over the Spanish Armada. These tapestries, which had hung in the House of Lords since 1650, were destroyed in a fire at the Houses of Parliament in 1834. Vroom based his designs for the Armada tapestries on maps by Robert Adams, engraved by Augustine Ryther. Compared with the Armada series, the composition of the Zeeland tapestries is fluent and vigorous. Vroom had actually visited Zeeland and spoken with eye-witnesses such as Joos dc Moor. The silhouettes of the towns are rendered in detail. Lord Thomas Howard ordered The Last Fight of the Revenge, dated 1598, from the De Maecht workshop in Middelburg. This fairly unknown tapestry, in a private collection since 1934, was on show at the Armada exhibition in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich in 1988. It was erroneously presumed to have been woven by Spierinx in Brussels. Spierinx, however, came from Antwerp, and moved to Delft in 1591. In view of the dating and an art-historical comparison, an attribution to the Dc Maccht workshop is more likely. Hendrick Vroom designed The Revenge. It bears a marked resemblance to the Zierikzee and Den Haak tapestries in the Zeeland series; the border, too, is similar. Wool, silk, gold and silver thread were used. The latter were costly materials and rarely used in North Netherlandish tapestry production. The tapestry may have been ordered to commemorate Sir Richard Grenville's valiant action. On August 31 1591 Admiral Howard led his fleet to the Azores, off Pico island. His intention was to intercept a Spanish treasure fleet on its return voyage from the West. However, the English were taken by surprise by Armada ships. Howard ordered the retreat, but Grenville, vice-admiral and commander of the Revenge, ignored these orders. He engaged in battle with the attackers, was wounded and died on the Spanish flagship. The composition, a bird's-eye view, of the Revenge tapestry, bears a strong resemblance to the Zierikzee (1599-1603) and Den Haak (1600-1602) tapestries, both of which were woven under the supervision of Hendrick de Maecht, Jan de Maecht's successor. The borders of the tapestries woven in Middelburg echo Spierinx's Bergen op Zoom. The colours in the Bergen op Zoom tapestry are bright and soft, the figures are plastic and the surround merges harmoniously with the representation. Unfortunately this cannot be said of the Zeeland borders. Various alterations in the border of the Revenge mar the harmony and symmetry. The word 'Anno' and the year in the top corners are in the wrong order. In view of the woven rendering of the composition, the use of dark colours and the rather clumsy borders, The Last Fight of The Revenge is more likely to have come from Hendrick de Maecht's studio than from Jan de Maecht's. The latter's products are distinguished by the use of lighter colours and more accurate weaving, as is particularly evident in De Battle of Rammekens and to a lesser extent in The Battle of Lillo.

Dear Editor:
 Time has proven that endoscopy is generally a safe and effective tool in the diagnosis and treatment of various conditions. It offers superior visualization with markedly decreased morbidity and mortality. In Otolaryngology, otoendoscopy has been gaining acceptance in providing improved otoscopic visualization and video recording of the tympanic membrane. We describe a technique of myringotomy and ventilation tube insertion under endoscopic visualization using a rigid Hopkins rod scope previously described by other authors based on their accepted clinical guidelines for myringotomy. 1,2 The use of rigid endoscopes provides visualization of the entire tympanic membrane with excellent resolution, better fidelity of color with a well-angled or side-to-side vision. The procedure is generally safe, convenient and can be performed in an out-patient setting. Correspondingly, the video recordings could improve disease documentation for baseline and post-myringotomy evaluation. They can also be a tool to enable better understanding for patients.3
 
 Materials and Methods
 A total of seven (n=7) patients with symptomatic and non-resolving otitis media with effusion (OME) previously managed conservatively for 3-6 months from October 2009 to March 2010 were included in the study. The patients also had disabling otalgia with 4 of the subjects having more than 30 dB hearing loss. Subjects who had poor pain threshold, were deemed non-cooperative and those in the pediatric age group were excluded from the study. Informed consent with strict compliance to institutional ethical standards was signed by all patients. The procedures were all performed by the junior author at the E.N.T Diagnostic Unit of a private tertiary university hospital. Materials used for the procedure were the same as with conventional myringotomy (eg. aural speculum, Kley or sickle knife, Hartmann ear forceps and ventilation tube/s). The anesthetic used was an Eutectic Mixture of Local Anesthesia (EMLA®) cream 5 % (Astra-Zeneca, Sodertalje, Sweden) in a 1 cc tuberculin syringe, and 20-25% aqueous form of phenol solution. A 0 degree 4mm x 107.5mm rigid endoscope (KARL STORZ GmbH & Co. KG Mittelstr., Tuttlingen, Germany) was used. (Figure 1)
 
 First an otoendoscopy was performed and the clinical indications and risks for myringotomy were thoroughly discussed with each patient. EMLA® cream was applied to the ear canal and to the external surface of the tympanic membrane using a 1 cc tuberculin syringe. After 60 minutes, the external ear canal was cleared for complete visualization of the tympanic membrane. (Figure 2) The patient was then positioned seated on the examining chair with head tilted to the opposite side. Using a 0 degree 4mm x 107.5mm rigid endoscope, the posterior third of the external auditory canal and the tympanic membrane was visualized. The scope was held with the left hand only up to the anterior portion of the cartilaginous canal to avoid involuntary activation of the Xth cranial nerve and to allow further advancement of other instruments to the posterior canal. A shorter rigid otoendoscope (4mm x 45mm) or a smaller diameter pediatric rigid endoscope (2.7mm x 107.5mm) may be used if available. A Kley knife or myringotomy knife was dipped lightly in phenol solution and carefully advanced to the tympanic membrane for the preferred myringotomy stab incision. (Figure 3)
 Care was taken to avoid contact of the phenol and knife tip with the canal wall to avoid stimulating unnecessary movement, canal abrasion or dermal irritation from the phenol solution during the entire procedure. (Figure 3) The myringotomy incisions were made at the posterior-inferior tympanic membrane quadrant for ease of access and drainage. (Figure 4) Evacuation of middle ear fluid was performed using a 2 and 3 mm Frazer middle ear suction tip. The myringotomy incision was made large enough to admit the ventilation tube in four subjects with copious effusions. In these four, the tube was introduced and adjusted using a 1 mm x 8 cm (working length) Hartmann ear forceps. A 1.14 mm I.D. Armstrong beveled fluoroplastic grommet ventilation tube (Xomed, Jocksonville, FL) was used in 3 subjects while a Sheehy collar button tube without wire (Micromedics Inc, St. Paul, Minnesota,USA) was used in one. The choice of tube depended mainly on the authors’ preference, taking tube designs available for specific ear conditions into consideration. (Figure 4) All subjects were instructed to avoid vigorous activities for the first 48 hours post-myringotomy, with strict water precautions. Ofloxacin otic drops were then prescribed.
 
 Results
 There were a total of 7 patients, 3 males and 4 females, with age ranging from 25 to 65 years (mean=50). All of them tolerated the procedure well. Ventilation tubes were inserted in 4 subjects with copious middle ear effusions. All had minimal intra-operative (PAS 2-5) and post-operative pain (PAS 0-2). The procedures were done on an out-patient basis. Co-morbid conditions were likewise treated (Table 1). Six out of the seven subjects experienced immediate subjective relief of otalgia and hearing loss after myringotomy while one subject had persistent complaint of ear fullness. The main indication for the procedure was otitis media with effusion with significant hearing loss, otalgia and ear fullness non-responsive to 3 months conservative management. All patients had significant contributing factors for OME such as frequent infectious rhinitis or chronic persistent allergic rhinitis. Six of the 7 subjects had markedly improved hearing. Four subjects with a preoperative pure-tone evaluation of >30-40 dB hearing loss had pure-tone average improvement to 10-15 dB after subsequent hearing examinations. All subjects were evaluated post-operatively with otoendoscopy. One case was unresponsive and subsequently diagnosed with adhesive otitis media and advised to undergo myringoplasty.
 
 Discussion
 Endoscopic myringotomy under topical anesthesia is a generally safe and practical procedure. Its indications are the same with conventional myringotomy with or without ventilation tube insertion such as Otitis Media with Effusion persisting beyond 3 months with associated significant hearing loss, impending mastoiditis or intracranial complications, recurrent episodes of acute otitis media (> 3 episodes in 6 months or > 4 episodes in 12 months), chronic tympanic membrane or pars flaccida, barotrauma, autophony (hearing body sounds; eg. breathing) due to patulous or widely open eustachean tube, craniofacial anomalies predisposing to middle ear dysfunction (e.g. cleft palate), and middle ear dysfunction due to head and neck radiation and skull base surgery.4
 
 Endoscopic visualization of the tympanic membrane enables better patient understanding of their ear conditions. Such has been the basis for the procedure along with the use of 5% EMLA® to decrease the pain and discomfort of patients undergoing out-patient myringotomy procedures.5 Phenol on the other hand aids in faster creation of tympanic membrane incision and decreases post-operative bleeding through its tissue vaporizing chemical cauterization effect with negligible toxicity if given in minute amount.6 Furthermore for post-operative cases of middle ear surgeries, it can be used for surveillance and middle ear cleaning. This can improve post-operative follow-up and possibly decrease the need for second look surgery.7
 
 Generally, endoscopic myringotomy provides a complete and enhanced visualization of the tympanic membrane and some middle ear structures that only appear as silhouettes with conventional otoscopy. Rigid endoscopes may have less illumination and magnification compared to an operating microscope traditionally used in myringotomy procedures but it can provide an angled or “off line-of-site” visualization of the tympanic membrane and canal wall advantageous in trans-canal visualization of the tympanic membrane. Just like the conventional out-patient myringotomy, endoscopic myringotomy under topical anesthesia is less costly than performing the procedure under general anesthesia or through sedation requiring a more controlled clinical setting. Smaller diameter and shorter endoscopes may be more feasible for diagnostic otoendoscopy, but a rigid 4 mm endoscope is more widely available in most local clinics. The major disadvantage of this procedure is the instrumentation in very young or uncooperative patients with a narrow external auditory canal. One-handed instrumentation and lens fogging may also be encountered but can be reduced with familiarity with the procedure. 
 The indications for endoscopic myringotomy as with those for traditional myringotomy remain suggestions and do not represent the standard of care. Clinicians can modify them when medically necessary as treatment options should always be individualized to meet each patient’s need. Failure to improve hearing may suggest another middle ear condition that necessitates further evaluation. Some cases may need myringotomy tube replacement while surgery is reserved for failed tympanic membrane healing. Lastly, like any other surgical technique and instrumentation, the major key to a successful endoscopic myringotomy is still good patient selection.

Abstract Introduction Left ventricular pseudoaneurysm is a rare mechanical complication of myocardial infarction, and its incidence has decreased with the widespread use of reperfusion therapies. Pseudoaneurysm is the result of a free wall rupture contained by pericardial adherences and mural thrombi, which contain the bleeding and prevent cardiac tamponade. Clinical Presentation A 68-year-old woman who had hypertension, diabetes mellitus and chronic kidney disease (caused by diabetic nephropathy) was first admitted with acute myocardial infarction of the inferior wall. Emergent coronary angiography revealed proximal occlusion of the right coronary artery. Primary angioplasty was performed with three stents implantation. However due to transitory no reflow, verapamil, nitrate and intracoronary abciximab were administered with recovery of coronary flow. Patient remained stable, without recurrence of symptoms. Echocardiography, at discharge, showed normal biventricular function and no mechanical complications. Two months later, the patient was readmitted in the emergency room with constant chest pain, fatigue, prostration and loss of appetite beginning ten days earlier and an episode of syncope. Physical examination revealed fever, cardiac auscultation was rhythmic and without murmurs or pericardial friction rub, and pulmonary auscultation revealed crackles in inferior hemithorax. 12-lead electrocardiogram showed sinus rhythm, Q waves and negative T waves in inferior leads. Blood tests revealed leucocytosis, high sensibility troponin I was 28,8 ng/L and brain natriuretic peptide was 264,9 pg/mL. Chest-X-ray demonstrated enlargement of the cardiac silhouette and echocardiography showed moderate to large pericardial effusion with large amounts of fibrin close to right cardiac chambers and a basal inferior pseudoaneurysm with 23 mm x 24 mm; intracavitary contrast was administered without opacification of pericardial space; biventricular function remained normal. Patient was promptly admitted on Cardiac Intensive Care Unit with diagnosis of pseudoaneurysm due to myocardial infarction. Therapeutic with ticagrelor was suspended and surgical correction was proposed, after discussion in Heart Team. False aneurysm correction was performed with a bovine pericardial patch without complications, and the patient was discharged asymptomatic eight days later. Conclusion Even with lower incidence, pseudoaneurysms remains as a potential life-threatening due to its high risk of rupture. Prompt diagnosis, usually with echocardiography and surgical referral are crucial. Abstract P704 Figure. Inferior Pseudoaneurysm

Abstract CASE PRESENTATION K.C.P., a 26 y.o. female, presenting dizziness and progressive dyspnea since 9 months ago. Physical examination showed hepatomegaly at 2 centimeters below the right inferior costal border, but without edema, cardiac murmurs or other findings. Electrocardiogram showed atria overload and diffuse ventricular repolarization abnormality. Chest X-ray revealed normal sized cardiac silhouette but with signs of pericardial calcification. Transthoracic echocardiogram revealed: enlargement of both atria, no signs of myocardial left ventricular (LV) hypertrophy; dilated inferior vena cava with minimal respiratory variation; septal bounce; septal e´= 17.20 cm/s, lateral e´= 6.09 cm/s; E/e" septal ratio = 3.9; E deceleration time = 144 ms; thickening and hyper-refringence of the pericardium with calcification adjacent to the lateral and inferior walls of the LV and the free wall of the right ventricle. For evaluation of thickness and extent of pericardial involvement, computed tomography (CT) was performed, showing gross calcifications of the pericardium, mainly in basal and lower portions, without pericardial effusion. Cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging with late gadolinium enhancement revealed areas suggestive of active inflammation adjacent to the basal wall of the LV. With this evidence of active inflammatory activity, the patient was treated empirically against the etiologic agent for tuberculosis. Because of progressively severe edema and dyspnea pericardiectomy was warranted providing relief of symptoms. DISCUSSION: The echocardiogram is the initial image exam for diagnosis and monitoring of pericardial conditions. It is a widely available, low-cost method that does not use ionizing radiation and allows a complete morphological and functional evaluation of the heart. However, in up to 20% of cases, pericardial thickening may not be detectable at echocardiography. CT allows a more accurate assessment of pericardial thickening, while CMR allows detection of active inflammatory process. CONCLUSION: A typical and illustrative clinical case of constrictive pericarditis is presented, where the multimodality of cardiac imaging was decisive for the diagnostic and therapeutic delineation.

Abstract INTRODUCTION Mutations in the genes encoding transforming growth factor β receptors 1 and 2 (TGFBR1 and TGFBR2) have recently been found in association with a continuum of clinical features. Mild association – a presentation similar to that of Marfan"s syndrome. Severe association – a complex phenotype in which aortic dissection or rupture commonly occurs in childhood and at aortic diameters, that ordinarily would not be predictive of these events. Classified as the Loeys–Dietz syndrome. Is chest wall asymmetry a serious issue? A study of 71 patients with Loeys-Dietz – 9% died from aneurysm rupture or dissection with aortic diameters of less than 4.5cm and as early as 6 months of age. Genetic variants of unknown clinical significance - how should they be managed? CASE History 3-year old girl seen in general paediatric clinic with 5 months history of worsening chest wall deformity. Examination Asymmetrical pectus deformity. Spinal asymmetry and soft systolic murmur at the lower left sternal edge. INVESTIGATION Chest x-ray: Grossly enlarged and distorted cardiac/mediastinal silhouette. Echocardiogram Massive ascending aortic root dilatation (5.5cm) with significant aortic regurgitation. MRI whole body angiogram Massively dilated aortic root and ascending aorta to the proximal arch, hugely tortuous and ectatic cerebral vessels, diffuse marked dural ectasia, asymmetrical pectus deformity and a diaphragmatic morgagni hernia in the lower right hemi thorax. Genetic analysis Heterozygous missense variant of unknown clinical significance in exon 3 of TGFBR1 gene. The first heterozygous missense variant of its kind in the paediatric population for which its clinical significance remains unknown. TREATMENT As risk of dissection, a Bentall procedure was performed. Family screening - Father has a dilated proximal ascending aorta. LEARNING POINTS Chest wall deformity should prompt clinicians to expedite investigations for aortic root dilatation/aneurysm and connective tissue disorders. The continuum of clinical features of these genetic associations emphasises the importance of early recognition of the phenotype, prophylactic intervention and meticulous surveillance of the distal aorta and vascular tree for optimal management. A genetic variant of uncertain significance (VUS) should not be used in clinical decision making. Efforts to resolve the classification of the variant as pathogenic or benign should be undertaken with good working relationships with clinical geneticists. A VUS is difficult for patients and parents to understand and may also cause psychological distress. The importance of careful clinical and molecular characterisation to identify patients and families at risk cannot be overemphasised. This allows the use of a structured approach to intervention, informed counselling regarding the risk of recurrence, concerns related to pregnancy, and guidelines for clinical management. Abstract P705 Figure. Case Photography and Imaging

Abstract BACKGROUND We are reporting a case of a Hispanic female who presented with a pericardial effusion as a complication of hypothyroidism, untreated due to lack of medical care, which demonstrates health disparities in chronic diseases. CLINICAL CASE The patient is a 48 year-old Hispanic female with PMHx of hypothyroidism, non-compliant with medical therapy, who presented to the ED with fatigue and dyspnea. Despite progressively worsening symptoms for the past 4 months, she had refused to be seen by a physician because she was uninsured. Her physical exam was notable for generalized pallor and bradycardia, with otherwise normal cardiopulmonary exam. Her initial laboratory data showed hemoglobin of 5.5 g/dl. CXR demonstrated an enlarged cardiac silhouette, which on CT was found to represent a large pericardial effusion. On admission her laboratory data demonstrated low ferritin, TSH of 94 mIU/L and T4 of 1.4 mcg/dl. m. Cortisol was 9 mcg/dl at 11 am. Repeat hemoglobin post-transfusion was 9 g/dl The patient was started on IV levothyroxine and hydrocortisone. Echocardiogram showed a large posterior wall pericardial effusion without evidence of RV strain. Pericardiocentesis was attempted but was unsuccessful because of difficult access to the fluid location. She was discharged on levothyroxine 88mcg QD and recommended to follow up with endocrinology and cardiology as an outpatient. It is well known that the United States spends a disproportionate amount of money in healthcare in comparison to developing countries (1). Underinvestment in social services and high prices set by pharmaceutical companies are likely contributing factors (1). Unfortunately, the resulting outcomes do not necessarily reflect the spending. Minorities are well known to have a higher morbidity and mortality as well as to present more frequently with dramatic manifestations of chronic diseases. This can often be attributed to a lack of access to medical care and poor follow up. Our patient was diagnosed with pericardial effusion as a complication of untreated hypothyroidism, a condition that is underdiagnosed despite a high incidence (3-37%). This pericardial effusion was initially concerning due to its large volume. The fact that she was hemodynamically stable reflects its chronicity, but it could have led to a fatal complication if she continued without appropriate therapy for a longer period of time. CONCLUSION A case such as this should make us question what more we can do to improve healthcare outcomes for minorities in the USA. REFERENCES (1). Papanicolas, Irene, Liana R. Woskie, and Ashish K. Jha. “Health care spending in the United States and other high-income countries.” Jama 319.10 (2018): 1024-1039.

Abstract Background Only a small fraction of the information available is generally used in the majority of camera-based sensing approaches for vital sign monitoring. Dedicated skin pixels, for example, fall into this category while other regions are often disregarded early in the processing chain. Methods We look at a simple processing chain for imaging where a video stream is converted to several other streams to investigate whether other image regions should also be considered. These streams are generated by mapping spatio-temporal and -spectral features of video segments and, thus, compressing the information contained in several seconds of video and encoding these in a new image. Two typical scenarios are provided as examples to study the applicability of these maps: face videos in a laboratory setting and measurements of a baby in the neonatal intensive care unit. Each measurement consists of the synchronous recording of photoplethysmography imaging (PPGI) and infrared thermography (IRT). We report the results of a visual inspection of those maps, evaluate the root mean square (RMS) contrast of foreground and background regions, and use histogram intersections as a tool for similarity measurements. Results The maps allow us to distinguish visually between pulsatile foreground objects and an image background, which is found to be a noisy pattern. Distortions in the maps could be localized and the origin could be discovered. The IRT highlights subject contours for the heart frequency band, while silhouettes show strong signals in PPGI. Reflections and shadows were found to be sources of signals and distortions. We can testify advantages for the use of near-infrared light for PPGI. Furthermore, a difference in RMS contrast for pulsatile and non-pulsatile regions could be demonstrated. Histogram intersections allowed us to differentiate between the background and foreground. Conclusions We introduced new maps for the two sensing modalities and presented an overview for three different wavelength ranges. The maps can be used as a tool for visualizing aspects of the dynamic information hidden in video streams without automation. We propose focusing on an indirect method to detect pulsatile regions by using the noisy background pattern characteristic, for example, based on the histogram approach introduced.

Abstract Study question What are the differences in the semen microbiota composition of patients with asthenozoospermia and normospermia according to cluster analysis of PCR data? Summary answer The detection rate of 4 stable semen microbiota clusters and the dominant bacteria groups varied in patients with asthenozoospermia and normospermia. What is known already Most of the research dedicated to analyzing normal and pathological semen microbiota is based on 16S rRNA gene specific Next generation sequencing (NGS). It has shown that microbiota is represented by polymicrobial communities (clusters) that consist of microorganisms from different genera and bacteria phyla. Despite it being highly informative, NGS has several weaknesses: complex sample preparation, difficult sample intake control, long analysis process, complicated results interpretation, high cost of equipment and reagents. These factors make it virtually impossible to use this approach in routine medical practice. Quantitative real-time PCR (RT-PCR) is far more suitable for this. Study design, size, duration Patients included in the study (n = 301) came to the “Garmonia” Medical Center (Yekaterinburg, Russia) either seeking preconception care or for infertility treatment. Depending on the spermiogram results, they were divided into two groups. Group 1 (n = 171) — asthenozoospermia, Group 2 (n = 130) — normospermia. Participants/materials, setting, methods Semen microbiota was analyzed using RT-PCR kit Androflor (DNA-Technology, Russia). Cluster analysis was performed for 201 samples with the total bacterial load (TBL) of at least 103 GE/ml (asthenozoospermia = 96, normospermia = 105). Cluster analysis was conducted using the k-means ++ algorithm, scikit-learn. The Silhouette index and the Davies–Bouldin index (DBI) were used to confirm the stability of clusters. Main results and the role of chance Both in the samples with normospermia and asthenozoospermia, four stable microbiota clusters were distinguished. Cluster I was characterized by the prevalence of obligate anaerobes, Lactobacillus spp. were prevalent in Cluster II, Gram-positive facultative anaerobes were prevalent in Cluster III, Enterobacteriaceae/Enterococcus spp. were prevalent in Cluster IV. Cluster I was detected the most often in both groups. However, in normospermia it was represented by various obligate anaerobes without pronounced quantitative predominance of any bacteria group. In samples with asthenozoospermia one of the bacteria groups were prevalent in Cluster I: Bacteroides spp./Porphyromonas spp./Prevotella spp., Peptostreptococcus spp./Parvimonas spp. or Eubacterium spp. In samples with asthenozoospermia Cluster II was characterized by the prevalence of Lactobacillus spp., while in samples with normospermia other bacteria groups were present along with lactobacilli, mainly obligate anaerobes. In samples with normospermia Corynebacterium spp. and Streptococcus spp., typical of normal microbiota of male UGT, were prevalent in Cluster III. In samples with asthenozoospermia Cluster III were characterized by the prevalence of Staphylococcus spp. In samples with asthenozoospermia Lactobacillus spp was present in Cluster IV along with Enterobacteriaceae/Enterococcus spp., which was not typical of the samples with normospermia. Limitations, reasons for caution Cluster analysis was not conducted for the samples with TBL lower than 103 GE/ml, since their results were incompatible with the data received for the negative control samples. Wider implications of the findings Further research could determine the detection rate of the described bacterial clusters in semen with other pathologies. Establishing the relationship between the characteristics of semen microbiota and infertility in men might allow the development of new algorithms for treating patients with reproductive disorders, depending on the composition of semen microbiota. Trial registration number not applicable

Retro fashion trends continue to be a feature of the contemporary clothing market, providing alternate configurations of womanhood from which women can fashion their identities (Hackett). This article examines the design attributes of 1950s-style clothing, that some women choose to wear over more contemporary styles. The 1950s style can be located in a distinctly hourglass design that features a small waist with distinct bust and hips. This article asks: what are the design features of this style that lead women to choose it over contemporary fashion? Taking a material culture approach, it firstly looks at the design features of the garments and the way they are marketed. Secondly, it draws upon interviews and a survey conducted with women who wear these clothes. Thirdly, it investigates the importance of this silhouette to the women who wear it, through the key concepts of body shape and size. Clothing styles of the 1950s were influenced by the work of Christian Dior, particularly his "New Look" collection of 1947. Dior’s design focus was on emphasising female curves, featuring full bust and flowing skirts cinched in with a narrow waist (Dior), creating an exaggerated hourglass shape. The look was in sharp contrast to fashion designs of the Second World War and offered a different conceptualisation of the female body, which was eagerly embraced by many women who had grown weary of rationing and scarcity. Post-1950s, fashion designers shifted their focus to a slimmer ideal, often grounded in narrow hips and a smaller bust. Yet not all women suit this template; some simply do not have the right body shape for this ideal. Additionally, the intervening years between the 1950s and now have also seen an incremental increase in body sizes so that a slender figure no longer represents many women. High-street brand designers, such as Review, Kitten D’Amour and Collectif, have recognised these issues, and in searching for an alternative conceptualisation of the female body have turned to the designs of the 1950s for their inspiration. The base design of wide skirts which emphasise the relative narrowness of the waist is arguably more suited to many women today, both in terms of fit and shape. Using a material culture approach, this article will examine these design features to uncover why women choose this style over more contemporary designs. Method This article draws upon a material culture study of 1950s-designed clothes and why some contemporary women choose to wear 1950s-style clothing as everyday dress. Material culture is “the study through artefacts of the beliefs—values, ideas, attitudes and assumptions—of a particular community or society at a given time” (Prown 1). The premise is that a detailed examination of a culture’s relationship with its objects cannot be undertaken without researching the objects themselves (Hodder 174). Thus both the object is analysed and the culture is surveyed about their relationship with the object. In this study, analysis was conducted in March and September 2019 on the 4,286 items of clothing available for sale by the 19 brands that the interview subjects wear, noting the design features that mark the style as "1950s" or "1950s-inspired". Further, a quantitative analysis of the types of clothing (e.g. dress, skirt, trousers, etc.) was undertaken to reveal where the design focus lay. A secondary analysis of the design brands was also undertaken, examining the design elements they used to market their products. In parallel, two cohorts of women who wear 1950s-style clothing were examined to ascertain the social meanings of their clothing choices. The first group comprised 28 Australian women who participated in semi-structured interviews. The second cohort responded to an international survey that was undertaken by 229 people who sew and wear historic clothing. The survey aimed to reveal the meaning of the clothes to those who wear them. Both sets of participants were found through advertising the study on Facebook in 2018. The interview subjects were selected with the requirement that they self-identified as wearing 1950s-style clothing on a daily basis. The survey examined home dressmakers who made historic-style clothing and asked them a range of questions regarding their sewing practice and the wearing of the clothes. Literature Review While subcultures have adopted historic clothing styles as part of their aesthetic (Hebdige), the more mainstream wearing of clothing from alternative eras as an everyday fashion choice has its roots in the hippy movement of the late 1960s (Cumming 109). These wearers are not attempting to “‘rebel’ against society, nor … explicitly ‘subvert’ items that are offered by mainstream culture” (Veenstra and Kuipers 362-63), rather they are choosing styles that both fit in with contemporary styles, yet are drawn from a different design ideal. Wearers of vintage clothing often feel that modern clothing is designed for an ideal body size or shape which differed markedly from their own (Smith and Blanco 360-61). The fashion industry has long been criticised for its adherence to an ultra-thin body shape and it is only in the last decade or so that small changes have begun to be made (Hackett and Rall 270-72). While plus-size models have begun to appear in advertising and on cat-walks, and fashion brands have begun to employ plus-sized fit models, the shift to inclusivity has been limited as the models persistently reflect the smaller end of the “plus” spectrum and continue to have slim, hourglass proportions (Gruys 12-13). The overwhelming amount of clothing offered for sale remains within the normative AU8-16 clothing range. This range is commonly designated “standard” with any sizes above this “plus-sized”. Yet women around the world do not fit neatly into this range and the average woman in countries such as Australia and the United States are at the upper edge of normative size ranges. In Australia, the average woman is around an AU16 (Olds) and in the US they are in the lower ranges of plus sizes (Gruys) which calls into question the validity of the term “plus-sized”. Closely related to body size, but distinctly different, is the concept of body shape. Body shape refers to the relative dimensions of the body, and within fashion, this tends to focus on the waist, hips and bust. Where clothing from the 1960s onwards has generally presented a slim silhouette, 1950s-style clothing offers an arguably different body shape. Christian Dior’s 1947 "New Look" design collection came to dominate the style of the 1950s. Grounded in oversized skirts, cinched waists, full bust, and curved lines of the mid-nineteenth century styles, Dior sought to design for “flower-like women” (Dior 24) who were small and delicate, yet had full hips and busts. While Dior’s iteration was an exaggerated shape that required substantial body structuring through undergarments, the pronounced hourglass design shape became identified with 1950s-style clothing. By the 1960s the ideal female body shape had changed dramatically, as demonstrated by the prominent model of that decade, the gamine Twiggy. For the next few decades, iterations of this hyper-thin design ideal were accelerated and fashion models in magazines consistently decreased in size (Sypeck et al.) as fashion followed trends such as "heroin chic", culminating in the "size zero" scandals that saw models' BMI and waist-to-height rations plummet to dangerously unhealthy sizes (Hackett and Rall 272-73; Rodgers et al. 287-88). The majority of the fashion industry, it appears, is not designing for the average woman. Discrimination against “fat” people leads to industry practices that actively exclude them from product offerings (Christel). This has been variously located as being entrenched anywhere from the top of the industry (Clements) to the entry level, where design students are taught their trade using size 8 models (Rutherford-Black et al.). By restricting their designs in terms of size and shape offering, clothing brands collectively restrict the ability of people whose bodies fall outside that arbitrary range to fashion their identity but are eager nonetheless to participate in fashion (Church Gibson; Peters). This resulting gap provides an opportunity for brands to differentiate their product offering with alternate designs that cater to this group. Findings 1950s-Style Clothing There are several key styles that could arguably be identified as “1950s”; however, one of the findings in this study was that the focus of the designs was on the voluptuous style of the 1950s associated with Dior’s New Look, featuring a cinched-in waist, full bust, and predominantly wide, flowing skirts. A count of the garments available for sale on the websites of these brands found that the focus is overwhelmingly on dresses (64% of the 4,286 garments on offer), with skirts and bifurcated garments being marketed in far smaller numbers, 10% (679) and 7% (467) respectively. The majority of the skirts were wide, with just a few being narrow, often in a hobble-skirt style. Both styles emphasise wide hips and narrow waists. The high number of dresses with voluminous skirts suggest that this design aesthetic is popular amongst their customers; these women are seeking designs that are based on a distinctly, if exaggerated, female form. Many of the brands surveyed have an extended size collection, outside the normative AU8-16, with one brand going as high as a UK32. Sizing standards have ceased to be universally used by clothing designers, with brands often creating their own size scales, making it difficult to make direct size comparisons between the brands (Hackett and Rall, 267). Despite this, the analysis found that many of these brands have extended their sizing ranges well into the plus-sized bracket, with one brand going up to a size 32. In most brands, the exact same designs are available throughout the sizes rather than having a separate dedicated plus-size range. Only one design brand had a dedicated separate "plus-size" range where the clothing differed from their "standard-sized" ranges. Further, many of the brands did not use terminology separating sizes into “standard” or “plus-size”. Beyond the product offering, this analysis also looked at the size of the models that design brands use to market their clothes. Four brands did not use models, displaying the clothes in isolation. Eight of the brands used a range of models of different sizes to advertise their clothes, reflecting the diversity of the product range. Seven of the brands did not, preferring to use models of smaller size, usually around a size AU8, with a couple using the occasional model who was a size AU12. Body Shape There were two ideal body shapes in the 1950s. The first was a voluptuous hourglass shape of a large bust and hips, with a small cinched-in waist. The second was more slender, as exemplified by women such as Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn, this was “a subdued and classy sensuality, often associated with the aristocrat and high fashion” (Mazur). It is the first that has come to be the silhouette most commonly associated with the decade among this cohort, and it is this conceptualisation of a curvy ideal that participants in this study referenced when discussing why they wear these clothes: I'm probably like a standard Australia at 5'10" but I am curvy. A lot of corporate clothes I don't think are really made to fit women in the way they probably could and they could probably learn a bit from looking back a bit more at the silhouettes for you know, your more, sort of average women with curves. (Danielle) The 50s styles suit my figure and I wear that style on an everyday basis. (Survey Participant #22) As these women note, this curvy ideal aligns with their own figures. There was also a sense that the styles of the 1950s were more forgiving, and thus suited a wider range of body shapes, than more contemporary styles: these are the styles of clothes I generally wear as the 50’s and 60’s styles flatter the body and are flattering to most body types. (Survey Participant #213) In contrast, some participants chose the style because it created the illusion of a body shape they did not naturally possess. For example, Emma stated: I’m very tall and I found that modern fast fashion is often quite short on me whereas if it’s either reproduction or vintage stuff it tends to suit me better in length. It gives me a bit of shape; I’m like a string bean, straight up and down. (Emma) For others it allows them to control or mask elements of their body: okay, so the 1950s clothes I find give you a really feminine shape. They always consider the fact that you have got a waist. And my waist [inaudible]. My hips I always want to hide, so those full skirts always do a good job at hiding those hips. I feel… I feel pretty in them. (Belinda) Underlying both these statements is the desire to create a feminine silhouette, which in turn increases feelings of being attractive. This reflects Christian Dior’s aim to ground his designs in femininity. This locating of the body ideal in exaggerated curves and equating it to a sense of femininity was reflected by a number of participants. The sensory appeal of 1950s designs led to one participant feeling “more feminine because of that tiny waist and heels on” (Rosy). This reflects Dior’s design aim to create highly feminine clothing styles. Another participant mused upon this in more detail: I love how pretty they make me feel. The tailoring involved to fit your individual body to enhance your figure, no matter your size, just amazes me. In by-gone eras, women dressed like women, and men like men ... not so androgynous and sloppy like today. I also like the idea of teaching the younger generation about history ... and debunking a lot of information and preconceived notions that people have. But most of all ... THE PRETTY FACTOR! (Survey Participant #130) Thus the curvy style is conceived to be distinctly feminine and thus a clear marker of the female identity of the person wearing the clothes. Body Size Participants were also negotiating the relative size of their bodies when it came to apparel choice. Body size is closely related to body shape and participants often negotiated both when choosing which style to wear. For example, Skye stated how “my bust and my waist and my hips don’t fit a standard [size]”, indicating that, for her, both issues impacted on her ability to wear contemporary clothing. Ashleigh concurred, stating: I was a size 8, but I was still a very hourglass sized 8. So modern stuff doesn’t even work with me when I’m skinnier and that shape. (Ashleigh) Body size is not just about measurements around the hips and torso, it also affects the ability to choose clothing for those at the higher and lower ends of the height spectrum. Gabrielle discussed her height, saying: so I’m really tall, got quite big hips … . So I quite like that it cinches the waist a bit, goes over the hips and hides a little bit [laughs] I don’t know … I really like that about it I guess. (Gabrielle) For Gabrielle, her height creates a further dimension for her to negotiate. In this instance, contemporary fashion is too short for her to feel comfortable wearing it. The longer skirts of 1950s style clothing provide the desired coverage of her body. The curvy contours of 1950s-designed clothing were found by some participants to be compatible with their body size, particularly for those in the large size ranges. The following statement typifies this point of view: the later styles are mostly small waist/full skirt that flatters my plus size figure. I also find them the most romantic/attractive. (Survey Participant #74) The desire to feel attractive in clothes when negotiating body size reflects the concerns participants had regarding shape. For this cohort, 1950s-style clothing presents a solution to these issues. Discussion The clothing designs of the 1950s focus on a voluptuous body shape that is in sharp contrast to the thin ideal of contemporary styles. The women in this study state that contemporary designs just do not suit their body shape, and thus they have consciously sought out a style that is designed along lines that do. The heavy reliance on skirts and dresses that cinch at the waist and flare wide over the hips suggests that the base silhouette of the 1950s designed clothing is flattering for a wide range of female shapes, both in respect to shape and size. The style is predominantly designed around flared skirts which serves to reduce the fit focus to the waist and bust, thus women do not have to negotiate hip size when purchasing or wearing clothes. By removing one to the three major fit points in clothing, the designers are able to cater to a wider range of body shapes. This is supported in the interviews with women across the spectrum of body shapes, from those who note that they can "hide their wider hips" and to those women who use the style to create an hourglass shape. The wider range of sizes available in the 1950s-inspired clothing brands suggests that the flexibility of the style also caters to a wide range of body sizes. Some of the brands also market their clothes using models with diverse body sizes. Although this is, in some cases, limited to the lower end of the “plus”-size bracket, others did include models who were at the higher end. This suggests that some of these brands recognise the market potential of this style and that their customers are welcoming of body diversity. The focus on a relatively smaller waist to hip and bust also locates the bigger body in the realm of femininity, a trait that many of the respondents felt these clothes embodied. The focus on the perceived femininity of this style, at any size, is in contrast to mainstream fashion. This suggests that contemporary fashion designers are largely continuing to insist on a thin body ideal and are therefore failing to cater for a considerable section of the market. Rather than attempting to get their bodies to fit into fashion, these women are finding alternate styles that fit their bodies. The fashion brands analysed did not create an artificial division of sizing into “standard” and “plus” categories, reinforcing the view that these brands are size-inclusive and the styles are meant for all women. This posits the question of why the fashion industry continues this downward trajectory in body size. Conclusion The design of 1950s-inspired clothing provides an alternate silhouette through which women can fashion their identity. Designers of this style are catering to an alternate concept of feminine beauty than the one provided by contemporary fashion. Analysis of the design elements reveals that the focus is on a narrow waist below a full bust, with wide flowing skirts. In addition, women in this study felt these designs catered for a wide variety of body sizes and shapes. The women interviewed and surveyed in this study feel that designers of contemporary styles do not cater for their body size and/or shape, whereas 1950s-style clothing provides a silhouette that flatters them. Further, they felt the designs achieved femininity through the accentuating of feminine curves. The dominance of the dress, a highly gendered garment, within this modern iteration of 1950s-style underscores this association with femininity. This reflects Christian Dior’s design ethos which placed emphasis on female curves. This was to become one of the dominating influences on the clothing styles of the 1950s and it still resonates today with the clothing choices of the women in this study. References Christel, Deborah A. "It's Your Fault You're Fat: Judgements of Responsibility and Social Conduct in the Fashion Industry." Clothing Cultures 1.3 (2014): 303-20. DOI: 10.1386/cc.1.3.303_1. Church Gibson, Pamela. 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"Results of a Strategic Science Study to Inform Policies Targeting Extreme Thinness Standards in the Fashion Industry." International Journal of Eating Disorders 50.3 (2017): 284-92. DOI: 10.1002/eat.22682. Rutherford-Black, Catherine, et al. "College Students' Attitudes towards Obesity: Fashion, Style and Garment Selection." Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management 4.2 (2000): 132-39. Smith, Dina, and José Blanco. "‘I Just Don't Think I Look Right in a Lot of Modern Clothes…’: Historically Inspired Dress as Leisure Dress." Annals of Leisure Research 19.3 (2016): 347-67. Sypeck, Mia Foley, et al. "No Longer Just a Pretty Face: Fashion Magazines' Depictions of Ideal Female Beauty from 1959 to 1999." International Journal of Eating Disorders 36.3 (2004): 342-47. DOI: 10.1002/eat.20039. Veenstra, Aleit, and Giselinde Kuipers. "It Is Not Old-Fashioned, It Is Vintage, Vintage Fashion and the Complexities of 21st Century Consumption Practices." Sociology Compass 7.5 (2013): 355-65. DOI: 10.1111/soc4.12033.

What we wear signals our membership within groups, be theyorganised by gender, class, ethnicity or religion. Simultaneously our clothing signifies hierarchies and power relations that sustain dominant power structures. How we dress is an expression of our identity. For Veblen, how we dress expresses wealth and social stratification. In imitating the fashion of the wealthy, claims Simmel, we seek social equality. For Barthes, clothing is embedded with systems of meaning. For Hebdige, clothing has modalities of meaning depending on the wearer, as do clothes for gender (Davis) and for the body (Entwistle). For Maynard, “dress is a significant material practice we use to signal our cultural boundaries, social separations, continuities and, for the present purposes, political dissidences” (103). Clothing has played a central role in historical and contemporary forms of political dissent. During the French Revolution dress signified political allegiance. The “mandated costumes, the gold-braided coat, white silk stockings, lace stock, plumed hat and sword of the nobility and the sober black suit and stockings” were rejected as part of the revolutionary struggle (Fairchilds 423). After the storming of the Bastille the government of Paris introduced the wearing of the tricolour cockade, a round emblem made of red, blue and white ribbons, which was a potent icon of the revolution, and a central motif in building France’s “revolutionary community”. But in the aftermath of the revolution divided loyalties sparked power struggles in the new Republic (Heuer 29). In 1793 for example anyone not wearing the cockade was arrested. Specific laws were introduced for women not wearing the cockade or for wearing it in a profane manner, resulting in six years in jail. This triggered a major struggle over women’s abilities to exercise their political rights (Heuer 31).Clothing was also central to women’s political struggles in America. In the mid-nineteenth century, women began wearing the “reform dress”—pants with shortened, lightweight skirts in place of burdensome and restrictive dresses (Mas 35). The wearing of pants, or bloomers, challenged gender norms and demonstrated women’s agency. Women’s clothes of the period were an "identity kit" (Ladd Nelson 22), which reinforced “society's distinctions between men and women by symbolizing their natures, roles, and responsibilities” (Ladd Nelson 22, Roberts 555). Men were positioned in society as “serious, active, strong and aggressive”. They wore dark clothing that “allowed movement, emphasized broad chests and shoulders and presented sharp, definite lines” (Ladd Nelson 22). Conversely, women, regarded as “frivolous, inactive, delicate and submissive, dressed in decorative, light pastel coloured clothing which inhibited movement, accentuated tiny waists and sloping shoulders and presented an indefinite silhouette” (Ladd Nelson 22, Roberts 555). Women who challenged these dress codes by wearing pants were “unnatural, and a perversion of the “true” woman” (Ladd Nelson 22). For Crane, the adoption of men’s clothing by women challenged dominant values and norms, changing how women were seen in public and how they saw themselves. The wearing of pants came to “symbolize the movement for women's rights” (Ladd Nelson 24) and as with women in France, Victorian society was forced to consider “women's rights, including their right to choose their own style of dress” (Ladd Nelson 23). As Yangzom (623) puts it, clothing allows groups to negotiate boundaries. How the “embodiment of dress itself alters political space and civic discourse is imperative to understanding how resistance is performed in creating social change” (Yangzom 623). Fig. 1: 1850s fashion bloomersIn a different turn is presented in Mahatma Gandhi’s Khadi movement. Khadi is a term used for fabrics made on a spinning wheel (or charkha) or hand-spun and handwoven, usually from cotton fibre. Khadi is considered the “fabric of Indian independence” (Jain). Gandhi recognised the potential of the fabric to a self-reliant, independent India. Gandhi made the struggle for independence synonymous with khadi. He promoted the materials “simplicity as a social equalizer and made it the nation’s fabric” (Sinha). As Jain notes, clothing and in this case fabric, is a “potent sign of resistance and change”. The material also reflects consciousness and agency. Khadi was Gandhi’s “own sartorial choices of transformation from that of an Englishman to that of one representing India” (Jain). For Jain the “key to Khadi becoming a successful tool for the freedom struggle” was that it was a “material embodiment of an ideal” that “represented freedom from colonialism on the one hand and a feeling of self-reliance and economic self-sufficiency on the other”. Fig. 2: Gandhi on charkha The reappropriating of Khadi as a fabric of political dissent echoes the wearing of blue denim by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at the 1963 National Mall Washington march where 250,000 people gather to hear Martin Luther King speak. The SNCC formed in 1960 and from then until the 1963 March on Washington they developed a “style aesthetic that celebrated the clothing of African American sharecroppers” (Ford 626). A critical aspect civil rights activism by African America women who were members of the SNCC was the “performance of respectability”. With the moral character of African American women under attack (as a way of delegitimising their political activities), the female activists “emphasized the outward display of their respectability in order to withstand attacks against their characters”. Their modest, neat “as if you were going to church” (Chappell 96) clothing choices helped them perform respectability and this “played an important performative role in the black freedom struggle” (Ford 626). By 1963 however African American female civil rights activists “abandoned their respectable clothes and processed hairstyles in order to adopt jeans, denim skirts, bib-and-brace overalls”. The adoption of bib-and-brace overalls reflected the sharecropper's blue denim overalls of America’s slave past.For Komar the blue denim overalls “dramatize[d] how little had been accomplished since Reconstruction” and the overalls were practical to fix from attack dog tears and high-pressure police hoses. The blue denim overalls, according to Komar, were also considered to be ‘Negro clothes’ purchased by “slave owners bought denim for their enslaved workers, partly because the material was sturdy, and partly because it helped contrast them against the linen suits and lace parasols of plantation families”. The clothing choice was both practical and symbolic. While the ‘sharecropper’ narrative is problematic as ‘traditional’ clothing (something not evident in the case of Ghandi’s Khandi Movement, there is an emotion associated with the clothing. As Barthes (6-7) has shown, what makes ‘traditional clothing,’ traditional is that it is part of a normative system where not only does clothing have its historical place, but it is governed by its rules and regimentation. Therefore, there is a dialectical exchange between the normative system and the act of dressing where as a link between the two, clothing becomes the conveyer of its meanings (7). Barthes calls this system, langue and the act of dressing parole (8). As Ford does, a reading of African American women wearing what she calls a “SNCC Skin” “the uniform [acts] consciously to transgress a black middle-class worldview that marginalised certain types of women and particular displays of blackness and black culture”. Hence, the SNCC women’s clothing represented an “ideological metamorphosis articulated through the embrace and projection of real and imagined southern, working-class, and African American cultures. Central to this was the wearing of the blue denim overalls. The clothing did more than protect, cover or adorn the body it was a conscious “cultural and political tool” deployed to maintain a movement and build solidarity with the aim of “inversing the hegemonic norms” via “collective representations of sartorial embodiment” (Yangzom 622).Fig. 3: Mississippi SNCC March Coordinator Joyce Ladner during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom political rally in Washington, DC, on 28 Aug. 1963Clothing in each of these historical examples performs an ideological function that can bridge, that is bring diverse members of society together for a cause, or community cohesion or clothing can act as a fence to keep identities separate (Barnard). This use of clothing is evident in two indigenous examples. For Maynard (110) the clothes worn at the 1988 Aboriginal ‘Long March of Freedom, Justice and Hope’ held in Australia signalled a “visible strength denoted by coherence in dress” (Maynard 112). Most noted was the wearing of colours – black, red and yellow, first thought to be adopted during protest marches organised by the Black Protest Committee during the 1982 Commonwealth Games in Brisbane (Watson 40). Maynard (110) describes the colour and clothing as follows:the daytime protest march was dominated by the colours of the Aboriginal people—red, yellow and black on flags, huge banners and clothing. There were logo-inscribed T-shirts, red, yellow and black hatband around black Akubra’s, as well as red headbands. Some T-shirts were yellow, with images of the Australian continent in red, others had inscriptions like 'White Australia has a Black History' and 'Our Land Our Life'. Still others were inscribed 'Mourn 88'. Participants were also in customary dress with body paint. Older Indigenous people wore head bands inscribed with the words 'Our Land', and tribal elders from the Northern Territory, in loin cloths, carried spears and clapping sticks, their bodies marked with feathers, white clay and red ochres. Without question, at this most significant event for Aboriginal peoples, their dress was a highly visible and cohesive aspect.Similar is the Tibetan Freedom Movement, a nonviolent grassroots movement in Tibet and among Tibet diaspora that emerged in 2008 to protest colonisation of Tibet. It is also known as the ‘White Wednesday Movement’. Every Wednesday, Tibetans wear traditional clothes. They pledge: “I am Tibetan, from today I will wear only Tibetan traditional dress, chuba, every Wednesday”. A chuba is a colourful warm ankle-length robe that is bound around the waist by a long sash. For the Tibetan Freedom Movement clothing “symbolically functions as a nonverbal mechanism of communication” to “materialise consciousness of the movement” and functions to shape its political aims (Yangzom 622). Yet, in both cases – Aboriginal and Tibet protests – the dress may “not speak to single cultural audience”. This is because the clothing is “decoded by those of different political persuasions, and [is] certainly further reinterpreted or reframed by the media” (Maynard 103). Nevertheless, there is “cultural work in creating a coherent narrative” (Yangzom 623). The narratives and discourse embedded in the wearing of a red, blue and white cockade, dark reform dress pants, cotton coloured Khadi fabric or blue denim overalls is likely a key feature of significant periods of political upheaval and dissent with the clothing “indispensable” even if the meaning of the clothing is “implied rather than something to be explicated” (Yangzom 623). On 21 January 2017, 250,000 women marched in Washington and more than two million protesters around the world wearing pink knitted pussy hats in response to the remarks made by President Donald Trump who bragged of grabbing women ‘by the pussy’. The knitted pink hats became the “embodiment of solidarity” (Wrenn 1). For Wrenn (2), protests such as this one in 2017 complete with “protest visuals” which build solidarity while “masking or excluding difference in the process” indicates “a tactical sophistication in the social movement space with its strategic negotiation of politics of difference. In formulating a flexible solidarity, the movement has been able to accommodate a variety of races, classes, genders, sexualities, abilities, and cultural backgrounds” (Wrenn 4). In doing so they presented a “collective bodily presence made publicly visible” to protest racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, and xenophobic white masculine power (Gokariksel & Smith 631). The 2017 Washington Pussy Hat March was more than an “embodiment tactic” it was an “image event” with its “swarms of women donning adroit posters and pink pussy hats filling the public sphere and impacting visual culture”. It both constructs social issues and forms public opinion hence it is an “argumentative practice” (Wrenn 6). Drawing on wider cultural contexts, as other acts of dissent note here do, in this protest with its social media coverage, the “master frame” of the sea of pink hats and bodies posited to audiences the enormity of the anger felt in the community over attacks on the female body – real or verbal. This reflects Goffman’s theory of framing to describe the ways in which “protestors actively seek to shape meanings such that they spark the public’s support and encourage political openings” (Wrenn 6). The hats served as “visual tropes” (Goodnow 166) to raise social consciousness and demonstrate opposition. Protest “signage” – as the pussy hats can be considered – are a visual representation and validation of shared “invisible thoughts and emotions” (Buck-Coleman 66) affirming Georg Simmel’s ideas about conflict; “it helps individuals define their differences, establish to which group(s) they belong, and determine the degrees to which groups are different from each other” (Buck-Coleman 66). The pink pussy hat helped define and determine membership and solidarity. Further embedding this was the hand-made nature of the hat. The pattern for the hat was available free online at https://www.pussyhatproject.com/knit/. The idea began as one of practicality, as it did for the reform dress movement. This is from the Pussy Hat Project website:Krista was planning to attend the Women’s March in Washington DC that January of 2017 and needed a cap to keep her head warm in the chill winter air. Jayna, due to her injury, would not be able to attend any of the marches, but wanted to find a way to have her voice heard in absentia and somehow physically “be” there. Together, a marcher and a non-marcher, they conceived the idea of creating a sea of pink hats at Women’s Marches everywhere that would make both a bold and powerful visual statement of solidarity, and also allow people who could not participate themselves – whether for medical, financial, or scheduling reasons — a visible way to demonstrate their support for women’s rights. (Pussy Hat Project)In the tradition of “craftivism” – the use of traditional handcrafts such as knitting, assisted by technology (in this case a website with the pattern and how to knit instructions), as a means of community building, skill-sharing and action directed towards “political and social causes” (Buszek & Robertson 197) –, the hand-knitted pink pussy hats avoided the need to purchase clothing to show solidarity resisting the corporatisation of protest clothing as cautioned by Naomi Klein (428). More so by wearing something that could be re-used sustained solidarity. The pink pussy hats provided a counter to the “incoherent montage of mass-produced clothing” often seen at other protests (Maynard 107). Everyday clothing however does have a place in political dissent. In late 2018, French working class and middle-class protestors donned yellow jackets to protest against the government of French President Emmanuel Macron. It began with a Facebook appeal launched by two fed-up truck drivers calling for a “national blockade” of France’s road network in protest against rising fuel prices was followed two weeks later with a post urging motorist to display their hi-vis yellow vests behind their windscreens in solidarity. Four million viewed the post (Henley). Weekly protests continued into 2019. The yellow his-vis vests are compulsorily carried in all motor cars in France. They are “cheap, readily available, easily identifiable and above all representing an obligation imposed by the state”. The yellow high-vis vest has “proved an inspired choice of symbol and has plainly played a big part in the movement’s rapid spread” (Henley). More so, the wearers of the yellow vests in France, with the movement spreading globally, are winning in “the war of cultural representation. Working-class and lower middle-class people are visible again” (Henley). Subcultural clothing has always played a role as heroic resistance (Evans), but the coloured dissent dressing associated with the red, blue and white ribboned cockades, the dark bloomers of early American feminists, the cotton coloured natural fabrics of Ghandi’s embodiment of resistance and independence, the blue denim sharecropper overalls worn by African American women in their struggles for civil rights, the black, red and orange of Aboriginal protestors in Australia and the White Wednesday performances of resistance undertaken by Tibetans against Chinese colonisation, the Washington Pink Pussy Hat marches for gender respect and equality and the donning of every yellow hi-vis vests by French protestors all posit the important role of fabric and colour in protest meaning making and solidarity building. It is in our rage we consciously wear the colours and fabrics of dissent dress. ReferencesBarnard, Malcolm. Fashion as Communication. New York: Routledge, 1996. Barthes, Roland. “History and Sociology of Clothing: Some Methodological Observations.” The Language of Fashion. Eds. Michael Carter and Alan Stafford. UK: Berg, 2006. 3-19. Buck-Coleman, Audra. “Anger, Profanity, and Hatred.” Contexts 17.1 (2018): 66-73.Buszek, Maria Elena, and Kirsty Robertson. “Introduction.” Utopian Studies 22.1 (2011): 197-202. Chappell, Marisa, Jenny Hutchinson, and Brian Ward. “‘Dress Modestly, Neatly ... As If You Were Going to Church’: Respectability, Class and Gender in the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Early Civil Rights Movement.” Gender and the Civil Rights Movement. Eds. Peter J. Ling and Sharon Monteith. New Brunswick, N.J., 2004. 69-100.Crane, Diana. Fashion and Its Social Agendas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Davis, Fred. Fashion, Culture, and Identity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.Entwistle, Joanne. The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress, and Modern Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000.Evans, Caroline. “Dreams That Only Money Can Buy ... Or the Shy Tribe in Flight from Discourse.” Fashion Theory 1.2 (1997): 169-88.Fairchilds, Cissie. “Fashion and Freedom in the French Revolution.” Continuity and Change 15.3 (2000): 419-33.Ford, Tanisha C. “SNCC Women, Denim, and the Politics of Dress.” The Journal of Southern History 79.3 (2013): 625-58.Gökarıksel, Banu, and Sara Smith. “Intersectional Feminism beyond U.S. Flag, Hijab and Pussy Hats in Trump’s America.” Gender, Place & Culture 24.5 (2017): 628-44.Goodnow, Trischa. “On Black Panthers, Blue Ribbons, & Peace Signs: The Function of Symbols in Social Campaigns.” Visual Communication Quarterly 13 (2006): 166-79.Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge, 2002. Henley, Jon. “How Hi-Vis Yellow Vest Became Symbol of Protest beyond France: From Brussels to Basra, Gilets Jaunes Have Brought Visibility to People and Their Grievances.” The Guardian 21 Dec. 2018. <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/21/how-hi-vis-yellow-vest-became-symbol-of-protest-beyond-france-gilets-jaunes>.Heuer, Jennifer. “Hats On for the Nation! Women, Servants, Soldiers and the ‘Sign of the French’.” French History 16.1 (2002): 28-52.Jain, Ektaa. “Khadi: A Cloth and Beyond.” Bombay Sarvodaya Mandal & Gandhi Research Foundation. ND. 19 Dec. 2018 <https://www.mkgandhi.org/articles/khadi-a-cloth-and-beyond.html>. Klein, Naomi. No Logo. London: Flamingo, London, 2000. Komar, Marlen. “What the Civil Rights Movement Has to Do with Denim: The History of Blue Jeans Has Been Whitewashed.” 30 Oct. 2017. 19 Dec. 2018 <https://www.racked.com/2017/10/30/16496866/denim-civil-rights-movement-blue-jeans-history>.Ladd Nelson, Jennifer. “Dress Reform and the Bloomer.” Journal of American and Comparative Cultures 23.1 (2002): 21-25.Maynard, Margaret. “Dress for Dissent: Reading the Almost Unreadable.” Journal of Australian Studies 30.89 (2006): 103-12. Pussy Hat Project. “Design Interventions for Social Change.” 20 Dec. 2018. <https://www.pussyhatproject.com/knit/>.Roberts, Helene E. “The Exquisite Slave: The Role of Clothes in the Making of the Victorian Woman.” Signs (1977): 554-69.Simmel, Georg. “Fashion.” American Journal of Sociology 62 (1957): 541–58.Sinha, Sangita. “The Story of Khadi, India's Signature Fabric.” Culture Trip 2018. 18 Jan. 2019 <https://theculturetrip.com/asia/india/articles/the-story-of-khadi-indias-fabric/>.Yangzom, Dicky. “Clothing and Social Movements: Tibet and the Politics of Dress.” Social Movement Studies 15.6 (2016): 622-33. Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. New York: Dover Thrift, 1899. Watson, Lilla. “The Commonwealth Games in Brisbane 1982: Analysis of Aboriginal Protests.” Social Alternatives 7.1 (1988): 1-19.Wrenn, Corey. “Pussy Grabs Back: Bestialized Sexual Politics and Intersectional Failure in Protest Posters for the 2017 Women’s March.” Feminist Media Studies (2018): 1-19.

On the night of 31 August, 1888, Mary Ann ‘Polly’ Nichols was found murdered in Buck’s Row, her throat slashed and her body mutilated. She was followed by Annie Chapman on 8 September in the year of 29 Hanbury Street, Elizabeth Stride in Dutfield’s Yard and Catherine Eddowes in Mitre Square on 30 September, and finally Mary Jane Kelly in Miller’s Court, on 9 November. These five women, all prostitutes, were victims of an unknown assailant commonly referred to by the epithet ‘Jack the Ripper’, forming an official canon which excludes at least thirteen other cases around the same time. As the Ripper was never identified or caught, he has attained an almost supernatural status in London’s history and literature, immortalised alongside other iconic figures such as Sherlock Holmes. And his killing ground, the East End suburb of Whitechapel, has become notorious in its own right. In this article, I will discuss how Whitechapel developed as a Gothic location through the body of literature devoted to the Whitechapel murders of 1888, known as 'Ripperature'. I will begin by speaking to the turn of Gothic literature towards the idea of the city as a Gothic space, before arguing that Whitechapel's development into a Gothic location may be attributed to the threat of the Ripper and the literature which emerged during and after his crimes. As a working class slum with high rates of crime and poverty, Whitechapel already enjoyed an evil reputation in the London press. However, it was the presence of Jack that would make the suburb infamous into contemporary times. The Gothic Space of the City In the nineteenth century, there was a shift in the representation of space in Gothic literature. From the depiction of the wilderness and ancient buildings such as castles as essentially Gothic, there was a turn towards the idea of the city as a Gothic space. David Punter attributes this turn to Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The wild landscape is no longer considered as dangerous as the savage city of London, and evil no longer confined only to those of working-class status (Punter 191). However, it has been argued by Lawrence Phillips and Anne Witchard that Charles Dickens may have been the first author to present London as a Gothic city, in particular his description of Seven Dials in Bell’s Life in London, 1837, where the anxiety and unease of the narrator is associated with place (11). Furthermore, Thomas de Quincey uses Gothic imagery in his descriptions of London in his 1821 book Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, calling the city a “vast centre of mystery” (217). This was followed in 1840 with Edgar Allen Poe’s story The Man of the Crowd, in which the narrator follows a stranger through the labyrinthine streets of London, experiencing its poorest and most dangerous areas. At the end of the story, Poe calls the stranger “the type and the genius of deep crime (...) He is the man of the crowd” (n. p). This association of crowds with crime is also used by Jack London in his book The People of the Abyss, published in 1905, where the author spent time living in the slums of the East End. Even William Blake could be considered to have used Gothic imagery in his description of the city in his poem London, written in 1794. The Gothic city became a recognisable and popular trope in the fin-de-siècle, or end-of-century Gothic literature, in the last few decades of the nineteenth century. This fin-de-siècle literature reflected the anxieties inherent in increasing urbanisation, wherein individuals lose their identity through their relationship with the city. Examples of fin-de-siècle Gothic literature include The Beetle by Richard Marsh, published in 1897, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in the same year. Evil is no longer restricted to foreign countries in these stories, but infects familiar city streets with terror, in a technique that is described as ‘everyday Gothic’ (Paulden 245). The Gothic city “is constructed by man, and yet its labyrinthine alleys remain unknowable (...) evil is not externalized elsewhere, but rather literally exists within” (Woodford n.p). The London Press and Whitechapel Prior to the Ripper murders of 1888, Whitechapel had already been given an evil reputation in the London press, heavily influenced by W.T. Stead’s reports for The Pall Mall Gazette, entitled The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, in 1885. In these reports, Stead revealed how women and children were being sold into prostitution in suburbs such as Whitechapel. Stead used extensive Gothic imagery in his writing, one of the most enduring being the image of London as a labyrinth with a monstrous Minotaur at its centre, swallowing up his helpless victims. Counter-narratives about Whitechapel do exist, an example being Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, who attempted to demystify the East End by walking the streets of Whitechapel and interviewing its inhabitants in the 1860’s. Another is Arthur G. Morrison, who in 1889 dismissed the graphic descriptions of Whitechapel by other reporters as amusing to those who actually knew the area as a commercially respectable place. However, the Ripper murders in the autumn of 1888 ensured that the Gothic image of the East End would become the dominant image in journalism and literature for centuries to come. Whitechapel was a working-class slum, associated with poverty and crime, and had a large Jewish and migrant population. Indeed the claim was made that “had Whitechapel not existed, according to the rationalist, then Jack the Ripper would not have marched against civilization” (Phillips 157). Whitechapel was known as London’s “heart of darkness (…) the ultimate threat and the ultimate mystery” (Ackroyd 679). Therefore, the reporters of the London press who visited Whitechapel during and immediately following the murders understandably imbued the suburb with a Gothic atmosphere in their articles. One such newspaper article, An Autumn Evening in Whitechapel, released in November of 1888, demonstrates these characteristics in its description of Whitechapel. The anonymous reporter, writing during the Ripper murders, describes the suburb as a terrible dark ocean in which there are human monsters, where a man might get a sense of what humanity can sink to in areas of poverty. This view was shared by many, including author Margaret Harkness, whose 1889 book In Darkest London described Whitechapel as a monstrous living entity, and as a place of vice and depravity. Gothic literary tropes were also already widely used in print media to describe murders and other crimes that happened in London, such as in the sensationalist newspaper The Illustrated Police News. An example of this is an illustration published in this newspaper after the murder of Mary Kelly, showing the woman letting the Ripper into her lodgings, with the caption ‘Opening the door to admit death’. Jack is depicted as a manifestation of Death itself, with a grinning skull for a head and clutching a doctor’s bag filled with surgical instruments with which to perform his crimes (Johnston n.p.). In the magazine Punch, Jack was depicted as a phantom, the ‘Nemesis of Neglect’, representing the poverty of the East End, floating down an alleyway with his knife looking for more victims. The Ripper murders were explained by London newspapers as “the product of a diseased environment where ‘neglected human refuse’ bred crime” (Walkowitz 194). Whitechapel became a Gothic space upon which civilisation projected their inadequacies and fears, as if “it had become a microcosm of London’s own dark life” (Ackroyd 678). And in the wake of Jack the Ripper, this writing of Whitechapel as a Gothic space would only continue, with the birth of ‘Ripperature’, the body of fictional and non-fiction literature devoted to the murders. The Birth of Ripperature: The Curse upon Mitre Square and Leather Apron John Francis Brewer wrote the first known text about the Ripper murders in October of 1888, a sensational horror monograph entitled The Curse upon Mitre Square. Brewer made use of well-known Gothic tropes, such as the trans-generational curse, the inclusion of a ghost and the setting of an old church for the murder of an innocent woman. Brewer blended fact and fiction, making the Whitechapel murderer the inheritor, or even perhaps the victim of an ancient curse that hung over Mitre Square, where the second murdered prostitute, Catherine Eddowes, had been found the month before. According to Brewer, the curse originated from the murder of a woman in 1530 by her brother, a ‘mad monk’, on the steps of the high altar of the Holy Trinity Church in Aldgate. The monk, Martin, committed suicide, realising what he had done, and his ghost now appears pointing to the place where the murder occurred, promising that other killings will follow. Whitechapel is written as both a cursed and haunted Gothic space in The Curse upon Mitre Square. Brewer’s description of the area reflected the contemporary public opinion, describing the Whitechapel Road as a “portal to the filth and squalor of the East” (66). However, Mitre Square is the former location of a monastery torn down by a corrupt politician; this place, which should have been holy ground, is cursed. Mitre Square’s atmosphere ensures the continuation of violent acts in the vicinity; indeed, it seems to exude a self-aware and malevolent force that results in the death of Catherine Eddowes centuries later. This idea of Whitechapel as somehow complicit in or even directing the acts of the Ripper will later become a popular trope of Ripperature. Brewer’s work was advertised in London on posters splashed with red, a reminder of the blood spilled by the Ripper’s victims only weeks earlier. It was also widely promoted by the media and reissued in New York in 1889. It is likely that a ‘suggestion effect’ took place during the telegraph-hastened, press-driven coverage of the Jack the Ripper story, including Brewer’s monograph, spreading the image of Gothic Whitechapel as fact to the world (Dimolianis 63). Samuel E. Hudson’s account of the Ripper murders differs in style from Brewer’s because of his attempt to engage critically with issues such as the failure of the police force to find the murderer and the true identity of Jack. His book Leather Apron; or, the Horrors of Whitechapel, London, was published in December of 1888. Hudson described the five murders canonically attributed to Jack, wrote an analysis of the police investigation that followed, and speculated as to the Ripper’s motivations. Despite his intention to examine the case objectively, Hudson writes Jack as a Gothic monster, an atavistic and savage creature prowling Whitechapel to satisfy his bloodlust. Jack is associated with several Gothic tropes in Hudson’s work, and described as different types of monsters. He is called: a “fiend bearing a charmed and supernatural existence,” a “human vampire”, an “incarnate monster” and even, like Brewer, the perpetrator of “ghoulish butchery” (Hudson 40). Hudson describes Whitechapel as “the worst place in London (...) with innumerable foul and pest-ridden alleys” (9). Whitechapel becomes implicated in the Ripper murders because of its previously established reputation as a crime-ridden slum. Poverty forced women into prostitution, meaning they were often out alone late at night, and its many courts and alleyways allowed the Ripper an easy escape from his pursuers after each murder (Warwick 560). The aspect of Whitechapel that Hudson emphasises the most is its darkness; “off the boulevard, away from the streaming gas-jets (...) the knave ran but slight chance of interruption” (40). Whitechapel is a place of shadows, its darkest places negotiated only by ‘fallen women’ and their clients, and Jack himself. Hudson’s casting of Jack as a vampire makes his preference for the night, and his ability to skilfully disembowel prostitutes and disappear without a trace, intelligible to his readers as the attributes of a Gothic monster. Significantly, Hudson’s London is personified as female, the same sex as the Ripper victims, evoking a sense of passive vulnerability against the acts of the masculine and predatory Jack, Hudson writing that “it was not until four Whitechapel women had perished (...) that London awoke to the startling fact that a monster was at work upon her streets” (8). The Complicity of Gothic Whitechapel in the Ripper Murders This seeming complicity of Whitechapel as a Gothic space in the Ripper murders, which Brewer and Hudson suggest in their work, can be seen to have influenced subsequent representations of Whitechapel in Ripperature. Whitechapel is no longer simply the location in which these terrible events take place; they happen because of Whitechapel itself, the space exerting a self-conscious malevolence and kinship with Jack. Historically, the murders forced Queen Victoria to call for redevelopment in Spitalfields, the improvement of living conditions for the working class, and for a better police force to patrol the East End to prevent similar crimes (Sugden 2). The fact that Jack was never captured “seemed only to confirm the impression that the bloodshed was created by the foul streets themselves: that the East End was the true Ripper,” (Ackroyd 678) using the murderer as a way to emerge into the public consciousness. In Ripperature, this idea was further developed by the now popular image of Jack “stalking the black alleyways [in] thick swirling fog” (Jones 15). This otherworldly fog seems to imply a mystical relationship between Jack and Whitechapel, shielding him from view and disorientating his victims. Whitechapel shares the guilt of the murders as a malevolent and essentially pagan space. The notion of Whitechapel as being inscribed with paganism and magic has become an enduring and popular trope of Ripperature. It relates to an obscure theory that drawing lines between the locations of the first four Ripper murders created Satanic and profane religious symbols, suggesting that they were predetermined locations for a black magic ritual (Odell 217). This theory was expanded upon most extensively in Alan Moore’s graphic novel From Hell, published in 1999. In From Hell, Jack connects several important historical and religious sites around London by drawing a pentacle on a map of the city. He explains the murders as a reinforcement of the pentacle’s “lines of power and meaning (...) this pentacle of sun gods, obelisks and rational male fire, within unconsciousness, the moon and womanhood are chained” (Moore 4.37). London becomes a ‘textbook’, a “literature of stone, of place-names and associations,” stretching back to the Romans and their pagan gods (Moore 4.9). Buck’s Row, the real location of the murder of Mary Ann Nichols, is pagan in origin; named for the deer that were sacrificed on the goddess Diana’s altars. However, Moore’s Whitechapel is also Hell itself, the result of Jack slipping further into insanity as the murders continue. From Hell is illustrated in black and white, which emphasises the shadows and darkness of Whitechapel. The buildings are indistinct scrawls of shadow, Jack often nothing more than a silhouette, forcing the reader to occupy the same “murky moral and spiritual darkness” that the Ripper does (Ferguson 58). Artist Eddie Campbell’s use of shade and shadow in his illustrations also contribute to the image of Whitechapel-as-Hell as a subterranean place. Therefore, in tracing the representations of Whitechapel in the London press and in Ripperature from 1888 onwards, the development of Whitechapel as a Gothic location becomes clear. From the geographical setting of the Ripper murders, Whitechapel has become a Gothic space, complicit in Jack’s work if not actively inspiring the murders. Whitechapel, although known to the public before the Ripper as a crime-ridden slum, developed into a Gothic space because of the murders, and continues to be associated with the Gothic in contemporary Ripperature as an uncanny and malevolent space “which seems to compel recognition as not of this earth" (Ackroyd 581). References Anonymous. “An Autumn Evening in Whitechapel.” Littell’s Living Age, 3 Nov. 1888. Anonymous. “The Nemesis of Neglect.” Punch, or the London Charivari, 29 Sep. 1888. Ackroyd, Peter. London: The Biography. Great Britain: Vintage, 2001. Brewer, John Francis. The Curse upon Mitre Square. London: Simpkin, Marshall and Co, 1888. De Quincey, Thomas. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields, 1850. Dimolianis, Spiro. Jack the Ripper and Black Magic: Victorian Conspiracy Theories, Secret Societies and the Supernatural Mystique of the Whitechapel Murders. North Carolina: McFarland and Co, 2011. Ferguson, Christine. “Victoria-Arcana and the Misogynistic Poetics of Resistance in Iain Sinclair’s White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings and Alan Moore’s From Hell.” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 20.1-2 (2009): 58. Harkness, Mary, In Darkest London. London: Hodder and Staughton, 1889. Hudson, Samuel E. Leather Apron; or, the Horrors of Whitechapel. London, Philadelphia, 1888. Johnstone, Lisa. “Rippercussions: Public Reactions to the Ripper Murders in the Victorian Press.” Casebook 15 July 2012. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.casebook.org/dissertations/rippercussions.html›. London, Jack. The People of the Abyss. New York: Lawrence Hill, 1905. Mayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor, Volume 1. London: Griffin, Bohn and Co, 1861. Moore, Alan, Campbell, Eddie. From Hell: Being a Melodrama in Sixteen Parts. London: Knockabout Limited, 1999. Morrison, Arthur G. “Whitechapel.” The Palace Journal. 24 Apr. 1889. Odell, Robin. Ripperology: A Study of the World’s First Serial Killer and a Literary Phenomenon. Michigan: Sheridan Books, 2006. Paulden, Arthur. “Sensationalism and the City: An Explanation of the Ways in Which Locality Is Defined and Represented through Sensationalist Techniques in the Gothic Novels The Beetle and Dracula.” Innervate: Leading Undergraduate Work in English Studies 1 (2008-2009): 245. Phillips, Lawrence, and Anne Witchard. London Gothic: Place, Space and the Gothic Imagination. London: Continuum International, 2010. Poe, Edgar Allen. “The Man of the Crowd.” The Works of Edgar Allen Poe. Vol. 5. Raven ed. 15 July 2012. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2151/2151-h/2151-h.htm›. Punter, David. A New Companion to the Gothic. Sussex: Blackwell Publishing, 2012. Stead, William Thomas. “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.” The Pall Mall Gazette, 6 July 1885. Sugden, Peter. The Complete History of Jack the Ripper. London: Robinson Publishing, 2002. Walkowitz, Judith R. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London, London: Virago, 1998. Woodford, Elizabeth. “Gothic City.” 15 July 2012. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://courses.nus.edu.au/sg/ellgohbh/gothickeywords.html›.

I have only ever owned one pig. It didn’t have a name, due as it was for the table. Just pu‘aka. But I liked feeding it; nothing from the household was wasted. I planned not to become attached. We were having a feast and a pig was the one essential requirement. The piglet came to us as a small creature with a curly tail. It would not even live an adult life, as the fully-grown local pig is a fatty beast with little meat. Pigs are mostly killed when partly grown, when the meat/fat ratio is at its optimum. The pig was one of the few animals to accompany Polynesians as they made the slow journey across the islands and oceans from Asia: pigs and chickens and dogs. The DNA of island pigs reveals details about the route taken that were previously hidden (Larsen et al.). Of these three animals, pigs assumed the most ceremonial importance. In Tonga, pigs often live an exalted life. They roam freely, finding food where they can. They wallow. Wherever there is a pool of mud, often alongside a road, there is a pig wallowing. Huge beasts emerge from their pools with dark mud lining their bellies as they waddle off, teats swinging, to another pleasure. Pig snouts are extraordinarily strong; with the strength of a pig behind them, they can dig holes, uproot crops, and generally wreak havoc. How many times have I chased them from my garden, despairing at the loss of precious vegetables I could get no other way? But they must forage. They are fed scraps, and coconut for protein, but often must fend for themselves. Despite the fact that many meet an early death, their lives seem so much more interesting than those lived by the anonymous residents of intensive piggeries in Australia, my homeland. When the time came for the pig to be sacrificed to the demands of the feast, two young Tongan men did the honours. They also cooked the pig on an open fire after skewering it on a pole. Their reward was the roasted sweetmeats. The ‘umu was filled with taro and cassava, yam and sweet potato, along with lū pulu and lū ika: tinned beef and fish cooked in taro leaves and coconut cream. In the first sitting, all those of high status—church ministers, college teachers, important villagers and pālangi like me—had the first pick of the food. Students from the college and lowly locals had the second. The few young men who remained knew it was their task to finish off all of the food. They set about this activity with intense dedication, paying particular attention to the carcass of the pig. By the end of the night, what was left of our little pig was a pile of bones, the skeleton taken apart at every joint. Not a scrap of anything edible remained. In the early 1980s, I went to live on a small island in the Kingdom of Tonga, where my partner was the Principal of an agricultural college, in the main training young men for working small hereditary mixed farms. Memories of that time and a recent visit inform this reflection on the contemporary Tongan diet and problems associated with it. The role of food in a culture is never a neutral issue. Neither is body size, and Tongans have traditionally favoured the large body as an indication of status (Pollock 58). Similarly the capacity to eat has been seen as positive. Many Tongans are larger than is healthy, with 84% of men and 93% of women “considered overweight or obese” (Kirk et al. 36). The rate of diabetes, 80% of it undiagnosed, has doubled since the 1970s to 15% of the adult population (Colagiuri et al. 1378). In the Tongan diaspora there are also high rates of so-called “metabolic syndrome,” leading to this tendency to diabetes and cardiovascular disease. In Auckland, for instance, Pacific Islanders are 2.5 times more likely to suffer from this condition (Gentles et al.). Its chief cause is not, however, genetic, but comes from “differences in obesity,” leading to a much higher incidence of cardiovascular disease and diabetes (Gentles et al.). Deaths from diabetes in Tonga are common. When a minister’s wife in the neighbouring village to mine died, everyone of status on the island attended the putu. Though her gangrenous foot could have been amputated, the family decided against this, and she soon died from the complications of her diabetes. On arrival at the putu, as well as offering gifts such as mats and tapa, participants lined up to pay very personal respects to the dead woman. This took the form of a kiss on her face. I had never touched a dead person before, let alone someone who had died of gangrene, but life in another culture requires many firsts. I bent down and kissed the dry, cold face of a woman who had suffered much before dying. Young men of the family pushed sand over the grave with their own hands as the rest of us stood around, waiting for the funeral food: pigs, yes, but also sweets made from flour and refined sugar. Diet and eating practices are informed by culture, but so are understandings of illness and its management. In a study conducted in New Zealand, sharp differences were seen between the Tongan diaspora and European patients with diabetes. Tongans were more likely “to perceive their diabetes as acute and cyclical in nature, uncontrollable, and caused by factors such as God’s will, pollution in the environment, and poor medical care in the past”, and this was associated “with poorer adherence to diet and medication taking” (Barnes et al. 1). This suggests that as well as being more likely to suffer from illnesses associated with diet and body size, Tongans may also be less likely to manage them, causing these diseases to be even more debilitating. When James Cook visited the Tongan group and naively named them the Friendly Islands, he was given the customary hospitality shown to one of obviously high status. He and his officers were fed regularly by their hosts, even though this must have put enormous pressure on the local food systems, in which later supply was often guaranteed by the imposition of tapu in order to preserve crops and animals. Further pressure was added by exchanges of hogs for nails (Beaglehole). Of course, while they were feeding him royally and entertaining his crew with wrestling matches and dances, the local chiefs of Ha‘apai were arguing about exactly when they were going to kill him. If it were by night, it would be hard to take the two ships. By day, it might be too obvious. They never could agree, and so he sailed off to meet his fate elsewhere (Martin 279-80). As a visitor of status, he was regularly fed pork, unlike most of the locals. Even now, in contemporary Tonga, pigs are killed to mark a special event, and are not eaten as everyday food by most people. That is one of the few things about the Tongan diet that has not changed since the Cook visits. Pigs are usually eaten on formal feasting occasions, such as after church on the Sabbath (which is rigorously kept by law), at weddings, funerals, state occasions or church conferences. During such conferences, village congregations compete with each other to provide the most lavish spreads, with feasting occurring three times a day for a week or more. Though each pola is spread with a range of local root crops, fish and seafood, and possibly beef or even horse, the pola is not complete unless there is at least one pig on it. Pigs are not commercially farmed in Tonga, so these pigs have been hand- and self-raised in and around villages, and are in short supply after these events. And, although feasts are a visible sign of tradition, they are the exception. Tongans are not suffering from metabolic syndrome because they consume too much pork; they are suffering because in everyday life traditional foods have been supplanted by imports. While a range of traditional foods is still eaten, they are not always the first choice. Some imported foods have become delicacies. Mutton flap is a case in point. Known as sipi (sheep), it is mostly fat and bone, and even when barbequed it retains most of its fat. It is even found on outer islands without refrigeration, because it can be transported frozen and eaten when it arrives, thawed. I remember once the local shopkeeper said she had something I might like. A leg of lamb was produced from under the counter, mistakenly packed in the flap box. The cut was so unfamiliar that nobody else had much use for it. The question of why it is possible to get sipi in Tonga and very difficult to get any other kind of fresh meat other than one’s own pigs or chickens raises the question of how Tonga’s big neighbours think of Pacific islands. Such islands are the recipients of Australian and New Zealand aid; they are also the recipients of their waste. It’s not uncommon to find out of date medications, banned agricultural chemicals, and food that is really unsuitable for human consumption. Often the only fresh and affordable meat is turkey tails, chicken backs, and mutton flap. From July 2006 to July 2007, New Zealand exported $73 million worth of sheep off-cuts to the Pacific (Edwardes & Frizelle). Australia and the US account for the supply of turkey tails. Not only are these products some of the few fresh meat sources available, they are also relatively inexpensive (Rosen et al.). These foods are so detrimental to the health of locals that importing them has been banned in Fiji and independent Samoa (Edwardes & Frizelle). The big nations around the Pacific have found a market for the meat by-products their own citizens will not eat. Local food sources have also been supplanted as a result of the high value placed on other foods, like rice, flour and sugar, which from the nineteenth century became associated with “civilisation and progress” (Pollock 233). To counter this, education programs have been undertaken in Tonga and elsewhere in the Pacific in order to promote traditional local foods. These have also sought to address the impact of high food imports on the trade balance (Pollock 232). Food choices are not just determined by preference, but also by cost and availability. Similarly, the Tonga Healthy Weight Loss Program ran during the late 1990s, but it was found that a lack of “availability of healthy low-cost food was a problem” to its success (Englberger et al. 147). In a recent study of Tongan food preferences, it was found that “in general, Tongans prefer healthier traditional, indigenously produced, foods”, but that they are not always available (Evans et al. 170). In the absence of a consistent supply of local protein sources, the often inferior but available imported sources become the default ingredient. Fish in particular are in short supply. Though many Tongans can still be seen harvesting the reef for seafood at low tide, there is no extensive fishing industry capable of providing for the population at large. Intensive farming of pigs has been considered—there was a model piggery on the college where I lived, complete with facilities for methane collection—but it has not been undertaken. Given the strongly ceremonial function of the pig, it would take a large shift in thinking for it to be considered an everyday food. The first cooked pig I encountered arrived at my house in a woven coconut leaf basket, surrounded by baked taro and yam. It was a small pig, given by a family too poor to hold the feast usually provided after church when it was their turn. Instead, they gave the food portion owed directly to the preacher. There’s a faded photo of me squatting on a cracked linoleum floor, examining the contents of the basket, and wondering what on earth I’m going to do with them. I soon learnt the first lesson of island life: food must be shared. With no refrigeration, no family of strapping youths, and no plans to eat the pig myself, it had to be given away to neighbours. It was that simple. Even watermelon went off within the day. In terms of eating, that small pig would have been better kept until a later day, when it reached optimum size, but each family’s obligation came around regularly, and had to be fulfilled. Feasting, and providing for feasting, was a duty, even a fatongia mamafa: a “heavy duty” among many duties, in which the pig was an object deeply “entangled” in all social relations (Thomas). A small pig was big enough to carry the weight of such obligations, even if it could not feed a crowd. Growing numbers of tourists to Tonga, often ignored benignly by their hosts, are keen to snap photos of grazing pigs. It is unusual enough for westerners to see pigs freely wandering, but what is more striking about some pigs on Tongatapu and ‘Eua is that they venture onto the reefs and mudflats at low tide, going after the rich marine pickings, just as their human counterparts do. The silhouette of a pig in the water as the tropical sun sinks behind, caught in a digital frame, it is a striking memory of a holiday in a place that remains largely uninterested in its tourist potential. While an influx of guests is seen by development consultants as the path to the nation’s economic future, Tongans bemusedly refuse to take this possibility seriously (Menzies). Despite a negative trade balance, partly caused by the importation of foreign food, Tonga survives on a combination of subsistence farming and remittances from Tongans living overseas; the tourist potential is largely unrealised. Dirk Spennemann’s work took a strange turn when, as an archaeologist working in Tonga, it became necessary for him to investigate whether these reef-grazing pigs were disturbing midden contents on Tongatapu. In order to establish this, he collected bags of both wet and dry “pig excreta” (107). Spenemann’s methodology involved soaking the contents of these bags for 48 hours, stirring them frequently; “they dissolved, producing considerable smell” (107). Spennemann concluded that pigs do appear to have been eating fish and shellfish, along with grass and “the occasional bit of paper” (107). They also feed on “seaweed and seagrass” (108). I wonder if these food groups have any noticeable impact on the taste of their flesh? Creatures fed particular diets in order to create a certain distinct taste are part of the culinary traditions of the world. The deli around the corner from where I live sells such gourmet items as part of its lunch fare: Saltbush lamb baguettes are one of their favourites. In the Orkneys, the rare and ancient North Ronaldsay Sheep are kept from inland foraging for most of the year by a high stone fence in order to conserve the grass for lambing time. This forces them to eat seaweed on the beach, producing a distinct marine taste, one that is highly valued in certain Parisian restaurants. As an economy largely cut out of the world economic loop, Tonga is unlikely to find select menus on which its reef pigs might appear. While living on ‘Eua, I regularly took a three hour ferry trip to Tongatapu in order to buy food I could not get on my home island. One of these items was wholemeal flour, from which I baked bread in a mud oven we had built outside. Bread was available on ‘Eua, but it was white, light and transported loose in the back of truck. I chose to make my own. The ferry trip usually involved a very rough crossing, though on calmer days, roof passengers would cook sipi on the diesel chimney, added flavour guaranteed. It usually only took about thirty minutes on the way out from Nafanua Harbour before the big waves struck. I could endure them for a while, but soon the waves, combined with a heavy smell of diesel, would have me heading for the rail. On one journey, I tried to hold off seasickness by focussing on an island off shore from Tongatapu. I went onto the front deck of the ferry and faced the full blast of the wind. With waves and wind, it was difficult to stand. I diligently stared at the island, which only occasionally disappeared beneath the swell, but I soon knew that this trip would be like the others; I’d be leaning over the rail as the ocean came up to meet me, not really caring if I went over. I could not bear to share the experience, so in many ways being alone on the foredeck was ideal for me, if I had to be on the boat at all. At least I thought I was alone, but I soon heard a grunt, and looked across to see an enormous sow, trotters tied front and back, lying across the opposite side of the boat. And like me, she too was succumbing to her nausea. Despite the almost complete self-absorption seasickness brings, we looked at each other. I may have imagined an acknowledgement, but I think not. While the status of pigs in Tongan life remains important, in many respects the imposition of European institutions and the availability of imported foods have had an enormous impact on the rest of the Tongan diet, with devastating effects on the health of Tongans. Instead of the customary two slow-cooked meals, one before noon and one in the evening (Pollock 56), consisting mostly of roots crops, plantains and breadfruit, with a relish of meat or fish, most Tongans eat three meals a day in order to fit in with school and work schedules. In current Tongan life, there is no time for an ‘umu every day; instead, quick and often cheaper imported foods are consumed, though local foods can also be cooked relatively quickly. While some still start the day by grabbing a piece of left over cassava, many more would sit down to the ubiquitous Pacific breakfast food: crackers, topped with a slab of butter. Food is a neo-colonial issue. If larger nations stopped dumping unwanted and nutritionally poor food products, health outcomes might improve. Similarly, the Tongan government could tip the food choice balance by actively supporting a local and traditional food supply in order to make it as cheap and accessible as the imported foods that are doing such harm to the health of Tongans References Barnes, Lucy, Rona Moss-Morris, and Mele Kaufusi. “Illness Beliefs and Adherence in Diabetes Mellitus: A Comparison between Tongan and European Patients.” The New Zealand Medical Journal 117.1188 (2004): 1-9. Beaglehole, J.C. Ed. The Journals of Captain James Cook on his Voyages of Discovery: The Voyage of the Resolution and Discovery 1776-1780. Parts I & II. Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1967. ­­­____. Ed. The Journals of Captain James Cook on his Voyages of Discovery: The Voyage of the Resolution and Adventure 1772-1775. Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1969. Colagiuri, Stephen, Ruth Colgaiuri, Siva Na‘ati, Soana Muimuiheata, Zafirul Hussein, and Taniela Palu. “The Prevalence of Diabetes in the Kingdom of Tonga.” Diabetes Care 28.2 (2002): 1378-83. Edwardes, Brennan, and Frank Frizelle. “Globalisation and its Impact on the South Pacific.” The New Zealand Medical Journal 122.1291 (2009). 4 Aug. 2010 Englberger, L., V. Halavatau, Y. Yasuda, & R, Yamazaki. “The Tonga Healthy Weight Loss Program.” Asia Pacific Journal of Clinical Nutrition 8.2 (1999): 142-48. Gentles, Dudley, et al. “Metabolic Syndrome Prevalence in a Multicultural Population in Auckland, New Zealand.” Journal of the New Zealand Medical Association 120.1248 (2007). 4 Aug. 2010 Kirk, Sara F.L., Andrew J. Cockbain, and James Beasley. “Obesity in Tonga: A cross-sectional comparative study of perceptions of body size and beliefs about obesity in lay people and nurses.” Obesity Research & Clinical Practice 2.1 (2008): 35-41. Larsen, Gregor, et al. “Phylogeny and Ancient DNA of Sus Provides New Insights into Neolithic Expansion in Island Southeast Asia and Oceania.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 104.12 (2007): 4834-39. Martin, John. Tonga Islands: William Mariner’s Account, 1817. Neiafu, Tonga: Vava‘u, 1981. Menzies, Isa. “Cultural Tourism and International Development in Tonga: Notes from the Field”. Unpublished paper. Oceanic Passages Conference. Hobart, June 2010. Pollock, Nancy J. These Roots Remain: Food Habits in Islands of the Central and Eastern Pacific since Western Contact. Honolulu: Institute for Polynesian Studies, 1992. Rosen, Rochelle K., Judith DePue, and Stephen T. McGarvey. “Overweight and Diabetes in American Samoa: The Cultural Translation of Research into Health Care Practice.” Medicine and Health/ Rhode Island 91.12 (2008): 372-78. Spennemann, Dirk H.R. “On the Diet of Pigs Foraging on the Mud Flats of Tongatapu: An Investigation in Taphonomy.” Archaeology in New Zealand 37.2 (1994): 104-10. Thomas, Nicholas. Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Objects and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1991.

This is a retracted article, whose corrected version, bearing the same title, is avalaible under the DOI: https://doi.org/10.11649/slh.2417. The correction was introduced at the request of the Author.A Triumphant Gate of the Polish Narrative: The Symbolic Reconstruction of the Bridge over Chłodna Street in Warsaw vis-à-vis the Crisis of the Dominant Polish Holocaust NarrativeThe article is a study of the symbolic topography of Warsaw’s Chłodna Street. In 1940–1942 Chłodna Street was an “Aryan” border strip, dividing the Small and Large Ghettos. For the past quarter of century, the symbolic landmark dominating within this space have been the subsequent commemorations of the Ghetto’s wooden footbridge that existed here between January and August 1942. These commemorative artefacts evolved from a counter-commemoration (1996), through a commemoration with the use of painting (2007) and photography (2008), to a symbolic reconstruction of the bridge (2011). The analysis of this dynamics, from representation of an object to its materialization, is complemented by a reconstruction of the patterns and stakes of narratives that make up the subsequent layers of the Chłodna Street narrative palimpsest. An important context of the analysis, apart from the history of the site, is the fact that today, the means of control over the space of the former Ghetto are in exclusive possession of the non-Jewish majority.A breaking point in the commemoration process was Roman Polański’s film The Pianist (2002). The bridge over Chłodna was reconstructed “one to one” – in Warsaw but outside the space of the former Warsaw Ghetto. The film was shot in the midst of a nationwide debate taking place in Poland over Jan Tomasz Gross’s book Neighbors (2000). The debate concerned the Poles’ participation in the Holocaust and the socio-cultural determinants of their attitudes and behaviors. Within the Polish dominant culture, the narrative shock was so immense that a return to the old Polish tale of heroism and martyrdom seemed impossible. Meanwhile the mainstream journalistic discourse cast Gross and Polański on the two sides of a narrative opposition. The former supposedly represented subjectivism and rash generalizations, while the latter was supposed to embody objectivism and fair judgment. The silhouette of the bridge over Chłodna Street merged at that point with a counterfactual vision of the Polish context of the Holocaust. The international success of The Pianist (Palme d’Or and Oscar) sealed the evolution of the bridge as a figure: from an abject to an object of desire, a tourist attraction, and an export. (A separate issue, also tackled in the article, is how the story told in the film relates to the story of Władysław Szpilman, mediated originally by Szpilman’s ghostwriter Jerzy Walfdorff and then by the scriptwriters, Ronald Harwood and Roman Polański. In both cases the most serious discrepancies concern depictions of the Poles’ attitudes toward the Jews during, but also before, the Holocaust).The success of the film was the determining factor in a decision made to invest public funds in another, and thus far last, commemoration of the bridge over Chłodna: its symbolic reconstruction in situ. What was reconstructed was not so much the bridge as it was in 1942 but the bridge from the film, and with it – the film’s idealized portrayal of the Polish context of the Holocaust. The figure of the bridge suggests tight isolation of Jews and Poles – an isolation instituted by the Germans. By so doing, it feeds into the image of Poles as helpless bystanders (onlookers/gawkers, at times even witnesses) in the face of the Holocaust. The figure of the Polish bystander/witness to the Holocaust, in its turn, is a key figure of Polish innocence. In addition, the symbolic reconstruction of the bridge draws the attention of the users of this space away from another site on Chłodna Street, where Jews and Poles came in direct contact throughout the entire existence of the Warsaw Ghetto. By obscuring the factual state of affairs uncovered as a result of the Jedwabne debate, the symbolic reconstruction of the bridge over Chłodna Street functions as a discourse-reproducing machine of sorts, allowing the dominant majority to „indulge in retrospective hallucination.”The article uncovers the workings of a roly-poly narrative mechanism that renders impossible any successful reassessment and rejection of the Polish dominant culture and prevents common knowledge about facts from bearing in any way on the collective consciousness. To jest wycofany artykuł, którego poprawiona wersja o tym samym tytule jest dostępna pod następującym numerem DOI: https://doi.org/10.11649/slh.2417. Korekty artykułu dokonano na prośbę Autorki. Brama triumfalna polskiej opowieści. Symboliczna rekonstrukcja mostu nad Chłodną wobec kryzysu dominującej polskiej narracji o ZagładzieTekst zawiera studium topografii symbolicznej ulicy Chłodnej w Warszawie. W latach 1940–1942 Chłodna była „aryjskim” pasem granicznym dzielącym małe i duże getto. Dominantę symboliczną w analizowanej przestrzeni stanowią dzisiaj upamiętnienia gettowego drewnianego mostu dla pieszych, który istniał w tym miejscu od stycznia do sierpnia 1942 roku. Owe komemoracyjne artefakty ewoluowały od przeciwupamiętnienia (1996), przez upamiętnienia wykorzystujące malarstwo (2007) i fotografię (2008), do symbolicznej rekonstrukcji mostu nad Chłodną (2011). Analizie dynamiki wiodącej od reprezentacji przedmiotu ku jego materializacji towarzyszy rekonstrukcja wzorów i stawek narracji składających się na kolejne warstwy narracyjnego palimpsestu. Prócz historii miejsca istotnym kontekstem analizy jest fakt, że środki kontroli przestrzeni dawnego getta stanowią dzisiaj wyłączną własność nieżydowskiej większości.Przełomem w procesie komemoracji był film Romana Polańskiego Pianista (2002). Wówczas to most nad Chłodną został zrekonstruowany w skali 1:1 – w Warszawie, lecz poza obszarem dawnego getta. Zdjęcia do filmu miały miejsce w trakcie ogólnokrajowej debaty o książce Jana Tomasza Grossa Sąsiedzi (2000). Debata dotyczyła współudziału Polaków w Zagładzie oraz społeczno-kulturowych uwarunkowań ich postaw i zachowań. Dla polskiej kultury dominującej był to wstrząs narracyjny tak potężny, że zdawał się wykluczać powrót do dawnej polskiej opowieści heroiczno-martyrologicznej. Tymczasem dyskurs prasowy głównego nurtu ustawił Grossa i Polańskiego w narracyjnej opozycji. O ile pierwszy miał reprezentować subiektywizm i pochopne uogólnienia, o tyle drugi miał wnosić obiektywizm i sprawiedliwy osąd. Sylwetka mostu nad Chłodną zespoliła się wówczas z kontrfaktyczną wizją polskiego kontekstu Zagłady. Międzynarodowa kariera Pianisty (Złota Palma i Oscar) przypieczętowała ewolucję figury mostu: od abiektu do obiektu pożądania, atrakcji turystycznej i towaru eksportowego. (Osobno rozważaną kwestią jest relacja filmowej opowieści do opowieści Władysława Szpilmana już wyjściowo spisanej przez ghostwritera Jerzego Waldorffa, dodatkowo zaś zapośredniczonej przez scenarzystów Ronalda Harwooda i Romana Polańskiego. W obu wypadkach najpoważniejsze rozbieżności dotyczą obrazu stosunku Polaków do Żydów w okresie Zagłady, a także przed Zagładą).Sukces Pianisty przesądził o inwestycji funduszy publicznych w kolejne i ostatnie upamiętnienie mostu nad Chłodną: rekonstrukcję symboliczną in situ. Przedmiotem rekonstrukcji stał się nie tyle most z 1942 roku, ile most filmowy, a wraz z nim wyidealizowany filmowy wizerunek polskiego kontekstu Zagłady. Figura mostu sugeruje szczelną izolację Żydów i Polaków – przez Niemców. Podsyca tym samym wyobrażenie o Polakach jako bezsilnych świadkach Zagłady (bystander/onlooker w porywach do witness). Figura polskiego świadka Zagłady natomiast jest kluczową figurą polskiej niewinności. Dodatkowo symboliczna rekonstrukcja mostu odwraca uwagę użytkowników przestrzeni od miejsca zlokalizowanego przy tej samej ulicy, w którym Polacy i Żydzi mieli styczność bezpośrednią przez cały okres istnienia getta warszawskiego. Zasłaniając stan faktyczny odsłonięty w wyniku debaty jedwabieńskiej, symboliczna rekonstrukcja mostu nad Chłodną stanowi rodzaj maszyny do reprodukcji dyskursu, który zapewnia większości dominującej „rozkosz retrospektywnych halucynacji”.Tekst przynosi rozpoznanie narracyjnego mechanizmu typu wańka-wstańka, który sprawia, że rewizja polskiej kultury dominującej nie dochodzi do skutku, a powszechna wiedza o rzeczywistości nie znajduje odzwierciedlenia w świadomości zbiorowej.

This is the corrected version of the retracted article under the same title, which was published with the following DOI: https://doi.org/10.11649/slh.1517A Triumphant Gate of the Polish Narrative: The Symbolic Reconstruction of the Bridge over Chłodna Street in Warsaw vis-à-vis the Crisis of the Dominant Polish Holocaust NarrativeThe article is a study of the symbolic topography of Warsaw’s Chłodna Street. In 1940–1942, Chłodna Street was an “Aryan” border strip, dividing the small and large ghettos. For the past quarter-century, the symbolic dominance of this space has been made manifest by the subsequent commemorations of the ghetto’s wooden footbridge that existed here between January and August 1942. These commemorative artefacts evolved from a counter commemoration (1996), into a commemoration through the use of painting (2007) and photography (2008), into a symbolic reconstruction of the bridge (2011). The analysis of this dynamic, from representation of an object to its materialization, is complemented by a reconstruction of the patterns and stakes of narratives that make up the subsequent layers of the Chłodna Street narrative palimpsest. An important context for the analysis, apart from the history of the site, is the fact that today, the means of control over the space of the former ghetto are in the exclusive possession of the non-Jewish majority.A turning point in the commemoration process was Roman Polański’s film The Pianist (2002). The bridge over Chłodna was reconstructed “one to one” – in Warsaw but outside the space of the former Warsaw ghetto. The film was shot in the midst of a nationwide debate taking place in Poland about Jan Tomasz Gross’ book Neighbors (2000). The debate concerned the Poles’ participation in the Holocaust and the socio-cultural determinants of their attitudes and behavior. Within Polish dominant culture, the narrative shock was so immense that a return to the old Polish tale of heroism and martyrdom seemed impossible. Meanwhile, the mainstream journalistic discourse cast Gross and Polański on two sides of a narrative opposition. The former supposedly represented subjectivism and rash generalizations, while the latter was supposed to embody objectivism and fair judgment. The silhouette of the bridge over Chłodna Street merged at that point with a counterfactual vision of the Polish context of the Holocaust. The international success of The Pianist (Palme d’Or and Oscar) sealed the evolution of the bridge as a figure: from an abject to an object of desire, a tourist attraction, and an export commodity. (A separate issue, also addressed in the article, is how the events depicted in the film relate to the story of Władysław Szpilman, mediated originally by Szpilman’s ghostwriter Jerzy Waldorff and then by the scriptwriters, Ronald Harwood and Roman Polański. In both cases, the most serious discrepancies concern depictions of the Poles’ attitudes toward the Jews during, but also before, the Holocaust).The success of the film was the determining factor in a decision made to invest public funds in another, and up to now the last, commemoration of the bridge over Chłodna: its symbolic reconstruction in situ. What was reconstructed was not so much the bridge as it was in 1942 but the bridge as depicted in the film, and with it the film’s idealized portrayal of the Polish context of the Holocaust. The figure of the bridge suggests tight isolation of Jews and Poles – an isolation instituted by the Germans. By so doing, it feeds into the image of Poles as helpless bystanders (onlookers/gawkers, at times even witnesses) in the face of the Holocaust. The figure of the Polish bystander/witness to the Holocaust is in turn a key figure of Polish innocence. In addition, the symbolic reconstruction of the bridge draws the attention of the users of this space away from another site on Chłodna Street, where Jews and Poles came into direct contact with each other throughout the entire existence of the Warsaw ghetto. In obscuring the factual state of affairs uncovered as a result of the Jedwabne debate, the symbolic reconstruction of the bridge over Chłodna Street functions as a discourse-reproducing machine of sorts, alowing the dominant majority to “indulge inretrospective hallucination” (Baudrillard).The article uncovers the workings of a roly-poly narrative mechanism that renders impossible any successful reassessment and rejection of the Polish dominant culture and prevents common knowledge about facts from bearing in any way on the collective consciousness. To jest poprawiona wersja wycofanego artykułu o tym samym tytule, który był opublikowany pod następującym numerem DOI: https://doi.org/10.11649/slh.1517Brama triumfalna polskiej opowieści. Symboliczna rekonstrukcja mostu nad Chłodną wobec kryzysu dominującej polskiej narracji o ZagładzieTekst zawiera studium topografii symbolicznej ulicy Chłodnej w Warszawie. W latach 1940–1942 Chłodna była „aryjskim” pasem granicznym dzielącym małe i duże getto. Dominantę symboliczną w analizowanej przestrzeni stanowią dzisiaj upamiętnienia gettowego drewnianego mostu dla pieszych, który istniał w tym miejscu od stycznia do sierpnia 1942 roku. Owe komemoracyjne artefakty ewoluowały od przeciwupamiętnienia (1996), przez upamiętnienia wykorzystujące malarstwo (2007) i fotografię (2008), do symbolicznej rekonstrukcji mostu nad Chłodną (2011). Analizie dynamiki wiodącej od reprezentacji przedmiotu ku jego materializacji towarzyszy rekonstrukcja wzorów i stawek narracji składających się na kolejne warstwy narracyjnego palimpsestu. Prócz historii miejsca istotnym kontekstem analizy jest fakt, że środki kontroli przestrzeni dawnego getta stanowią dzisiaj wyłączną własność nieżydowskiej większości.Przełomem w procesie komemoracji był film Romana Polańskiego Pianista (2002). Wówczas to most nad Chłodną został zrekonstruowany w skali 1:1 – w Warszawie, lecz poza obszarem dawnego getta. Zdjęcia do filmu miały miejsce w trakcie ogólnokrajowej debaty o książce Jana Tomasza Grossa Sąsiedzi (2000). Debata dotyczyła współudziału Polaków w Zagładzie oraz społeczno-kulturowych uwarunkowań ich postaw i zachowań. Dla polskiej kultury dominującej był to wstrząs narracyjny tak potężny, że zdawał się wykluczać powrót do dawnej polskiej opowieści heroiczno-martyrologicznej. Tymczasem dyskurs prasowy głównego nurtu ustawił Grossa i Polańskiego w narracyjnej opozycji. O ile pierwszy miał reprezentować subiektywizm i pochopne uogólnienia, o tyle drugi miał wnosić obiektywizm i sprawiedliwy osąd. Sylwetka mostu nad Chłodną zespoliła się wówczas z kontrfaktyczną wizją polskiego kontekstu Zagłady. Międzynarodowa kariera Pianisty (Złota Palma i Oscar) przypieczętowała ewolucję figury mostu: od abiektu do obiektu pożądania, atrakcji turystycznej i towaru eksportowego. (Osobno rozważaną kwestią jest relacja filmowej opowieści do opowieści Władysława Szpilmana już wyjściowo spisanej przez ghostwritera Jerzego Waldorffa, dodatkowo zaś zapośredniczonej przez scenarzystów Ronalda Harwooda i Romana Polańskiego. W obu wypadkach najpoważniejsze rozbieżności dotyczą obrazu stosunku Polaków do Żydów w okresie Zagłady, a także przed Zagładą).Sukces Pianisty przesądził o inwestycji funduszy publicznych w kolejne i ostatnie upamiętnienie mostu nad Chłodną: rekonstrukcję symboliczną in situ. Przedmiotem rekonstrukcji stał się nie tyle most z 1942 roku, ile most filmowy, a wraz z nim wyidealizowany filmowy wizerunek polskiego kontekstu Zagłady. Figura mostu sugeruje szczelną izolację Żydów i Polaków – przez Niemców. Podsyca tym samym wyobrażenie o Polakach jako bezsilnych świadkach Zagłady (bystander/onlooker w porywach do witness). Figura polskiego świadka Zagłady natomiast jest kluczową figurą polskiej niewinności. Dodatkowo symboliczna rekonstrukcja mostu odwraca uwagę użytkowników przestrzeni od miejsca zlokalizowanego przy tej samej ulicy, w którym Polacy i Żydzi mieli styczność bezpośrednią przez cały okres istnienia getta warszawskiego. Zasłaniając stan faktyczny odsłonięty w wyniku debaty jedwabieńskiej, symboliczna rekonstrukcja mostu nad Chłodną stanowi rodzaj maszyny do reprodukcji dyskursu, który zapewnia większości dominującej „rozkosz retrospektywnych halucynacji”.Tekst przynosi rozpoznanie narracyjnego mechanizmu typu wańka-wstańka, który sprawia, że rewizja polskiej kultury dominującej nie dochodzi do skutku, a powszechna wiedza o rzeczywistości nie znajduje odzwierciedlenia w świadomości zbiorowej.

Introduction In the wake of the disaster of World War I, the Surrealists formulated a hostile critique of the novel that identified its limitations in expressing the depth of the mind's faculties and the fragmentation of the psyche after catastrophic events. From this position of crisis, the Surrealists undertook a series of experimental innovations in form, structure, and style in an attempt to renew the genre. This article examines how the praxis of shock is deployed in a number of Surrealist city novels as a conduit for revolt against a society that grew increasingly mechanised in the climate of post-war regeneration. It seeks to counter the contemporary view that Surrealist city dérives (drifts) represent an intriguing yet ultimately benign method of urban research. By reconsidering its origins in response to a world catastrophe, this article emphasises the Surrealist novel’s binding of the affective properties of shock to the dream-awakening dialectic at the heart of the political position of Surrealism. The Surrealist City Novel Today it has almost become a truism to assert that there is a causal link between the catastrophic devastation wrought by the events of the two World Wars and the ideology of rupture that characterised the iconoclasms of the Modernist avant-gardes. Yet, as we progress into the twenty-first century, it is timely to recognise that new generations are rediscovering canonical and peripheral texts of this era and refracting them through a prism of contemporary preoccupations. In many ways, the revisions of today’s encounters with that past era suggest we have travelled some distance from the rawness of such catastrophic events. One post-war body of work recently subjected to view via an unexpected route is the remarkable array of Surrealist city novels set in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, representing a spectrum of experimental texts by such authors as André Breton, Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos, Philippe Soupault, and Michel Leiris. Over the past decade, these works have become recuperated in the Anglophone context as exemplary instances of ludic engagement with the city. This is due in large part to the growing surge of interest in psychogeography, an urban research method concerned with the influence that geographical environments exert over the emotions and behaviours of individuals, and a concern for tracing the literary genealogies of walking and writing in broad sweeping encyclopaedic histories and guidebook style accounts (for prominent examples see Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust and Merlin Coverley’s Psychogeography). Yet as Surrealist novels continue to garner renewed interest for their erotic intrigue, their strolling encounters with the unconscious or hidden facets of the city, and as precursors to the apparently more radical practice of Situationist psychogeography, this article suggests that something vital is missing. By neglecting the revolutionary significance that the Surrealists placed upon the street and its inextricable connection to the shock of the marvellous, I suggest that we have arrived at a point of diminished appreciation of the praxis of the dream-awakening dialectic at the heart of Surrealist politics. With the movement firmly lodged in the popular imagination as concerned merely with the art of play and surprise, the Surrealists’ sensorial conception of the city as embedded within a much larger critique of the creators of “a sterile and dead world” (Rasmussen 372) is lost. This calls into question to what extent we can now relate to the urgency with which avant-gardes like the Surrealists responded to the disaster of war in their call for “the revolution of the subject, a revolution that destroyed identity and released the fantastic” (372). At the same time, a re-evaluation of the Surrealist city novel as a significant precursor to the psychogeograhical dérive (drift) can prove instructive in locating the potential of walking, in order to function as a form of praxis (defined here as lived practice in opposition to theory) that goes beyond its more benign construction as the “gentle art” of getting lost. The Great Shock To return to the origins of Surrealism is to illuminate the radical intentions of the movement. The enormous shock that followed the Great War represented, according to Roger Shattuck, “a profound organic reaction that convulsed the entire system with vomiting, manic attacks, and semi-collapse” (9). David Gascoyne considers 1919, the inaugural year of Surrealist activity, as “a year of liquidation, the end of everything but also of paroxysmic death-birth, incubating seeds of renewal” (17). It was at this time that André Breton and his collaborator Philippe Soupault came together at the Hôtel des Grands Hommes in Paris to conduct their early experimental research. As the authors took poetic license with the psychoanalytical method of automatic writing, their desire to unsettle the latent content of the unconscious as it manifests in the spontaneous outpourings of dream-like recollections resulted in the first collection of Surrealist texts, The Magnetic Fields (1920). As Breton recalls: Completely occupied as I still was with Freud at that time, and familiar with his methods of examination which I had had some slight occasion to use on some patients during the war, I resolved to obtain from myself what we were trying to obtain from them, namely, a monologue spoken as rapidly as possible without any intervention on the part of critical faculties, a monologue consequently unencumbered by the slightest inhibition and which was, as closely as possible, akin to spoken thought. (Breton, Manifesto 22–23) Despite their debts to psychoanalytical methods, the Surrealists sought radically different ends from therapeutic goals in their application. Rather than using analysis to mitigate the pathologies of the psyche, Breton argued that such methods should instead be employed to liberate consciousness in ways that released the individual from “the reign of logic” (Breton, Manifesto 11) and the alienating forces of a mechanised society. In the same manifesto, Breton links his critique to a denunciation of the novel, principally the realist novel which dominated the literary landscape of the nineteenth-century, for its limitations in conveying the power of the imagination and the depths of the mind’s faculties. Despite these protestations, the Surrealists were unable to completely jettison the novel and instead launched a series of innovations in form, structure, and style in an attempt to renew the genre. As J.H. Matthews suggests, “Being then, as all creative surrealism must be, the expression of a mood of experimentation, the Surrealist novel probes not only the potentialities of feeling and imagination, but also those of novelistic form” (Matthews 6). When Nadja appeared in 1928, Breton was not the first Surrealist to publish a novel. However, this work remains the most well-known example of its type in the Anglophone context. Largely drawn from the author’s autobiographical experiences, it recounts the narrator’s (André’s) obsessive infatuation with a mysterious, impoverished and unstable young woman who goes by the name of Nadja. The pair’s haunted and uncanny romance unfolds during their undirected walks, or dérives, through the streets of Paris, the city acting as an affective register of their encounters. The “intellectual seduction” comes to an abrupt halt (Breton, Nadja 108), however, when Nadja does in fact go truly mad, disappearing from the narrator’s life when she is committed to an asylum. André makes no effort to seek her out and after launching into a diatribe vehemently attacking the institutions that administer psychiatric treatment, nonchalantly resumes the usual concerns of his everyday life. At a formal level, Breton’s unconventional prose indeed stirs many minor shocks and tremors in the reader. The insertion of temporally off-kilter photographs and surreal drawings are intended to supersede naturalistic description. However, their effect is to create a form of “negative indexicality” (Masschelein) that subtly undermines the truth claims of the novel. Random coincidences charged through with the attractive force of desire determine the plot while the compressed dream-like narrative strives to recount only those facts of “violently fortuitous character” (Breton, Nadja 19). Strikingly candid revelations perpetually catch the reader off guard. But it is in the novel’s treatment of the city, most specifically, in which we can recognise the evolution of Surrealism’s initial concern for the radically subversive and liberatory potential of the dream into a form of praxis that binds the shock of the marvellous to the historical materialism of Marx and Engels. This praxis unfolds in the novel on a number of levels. By placing its events firmly at the level of the street, Breton privileges the anti-heroic realm of everyday life over the socially hierarchical domain of the bourgeois domestic interior favoured in realist literature. More significantly, the sites of the city encountered in the novel act as repositories of collective memory with the power to rupture the present. As Margaret Cohen comprehensively demonstrates in her impressive study Profane Illumination, the great majority of sites that the narrator traverses in Nadja reveal connections in previous centuries to instances of bohemian activity, violent insurrection or revolutionary events. The enigmatic statue of Étienne Dolet, for example, to which André is inexplicably drawn on his city walks and which produces a sensation of “unbearable discomfort” (25), commemorates a sixteenth-century scholar and writer of love poetry condemned as a heretic and burned at the Place Maubert for his non-conformist attitudes. When Nadja is suddenly gripped by hallucinations and imagines herself among the entourage of Marie-Antoinette, “multiple ghosts of revolutionary violence descend on the Place Dauphine from all sides” (Cohen 101). Similarly, a critique of capitalism emerges in the traversal of those marginal and derelict zones of the city, such as the Saint-Ouen flea market, which become revelatory of the historical cycles of decay and ruination that modernity seeks to repress through its faith in progress. It was this poetic intuition of the machinations of historical materialism, in particular, that captured the attention of Walter Benjamin in his 1929 “Surrealism” essay, in which he says of Breton that: He can boast an extraordinary discovery: he was the first to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the “outmoded”—in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them. The relation of these things to revolution—no one can have a more exact concept of it than these authors. (210) In the same passage, Benjamin makes passing reference to the Passage de l’Opéra, the nineteenth-century Parisian arcade threatened with demolition and eulogised by Louis Aragon in his Surrealist anti-novel Paris Peasant (published in 1926, two years earlier than Nadja). Loosely structured around a series of walks, Aragon’s book subverts the popular guidebook literature of the period by inventorying the arcade’s quotidian attractions in highly lyrical and imagistic prose. As in Nadja, a concern for the “outmoded” underpins the praxis which informs the politics of the novel although here it functions somewhat differently. As transitional zones on the cusp of redevelopment, the disappearing arcades attract Aragon for their liminal status, becoming malleable dreamscapes where an ontological instability renders them ripe for eruptions of the marvellous. Such sites emerge as “secret repositories of several modern myths,” and “the true sanctuaries of a cult of the ephemeral”. (Aragon 14) City as Dreamscape Contemporary literature increasingly reads Paris Peasant through the lens of psychogeography, and not unproblematically. In his brief guide to psychogeography, British writer Merlin Coverley stresses Aragon’s apparent documentary or ethnographical intentions in describing the arcades. He suggests that the author “rails against the destruction of the city” (75), positing the novel as “a handbook for today’s breed of psychogeographer” (76). The nuances of Aragon’s dream-awakening dialectic, however, are too easily effaced in such an assessment which overlooks the novel’s vertiginous and hyperbolic prose as it consistently approaches an unreality in its ambivalent treatment of the arcades. What is arguably more significant than any documentary concern is Aragon’s commitment to the broader Surrealist quest to transform reality by undermining binary oppositions between waking life and the realm of dreams. As Hal Foster’s reading of the arcades in Surrealism insists: This gaze is not melancholic; the surrealists do not cling obsessively to the relics of the nineteenth-century. Rather it uncovers them for the purposes of resistance through re-enchantment. If we can grasp this dialectic of ruination, recovery, and resistance, we will grasp the intimated ambition of the surrealist practice of history. (166) Unlike Aragon, Breton defended the political position of Surrealism throughout the ebbs and flows of the movement. This notion of “resistance through re-enchantment” retained its significance for Breton as he clung to the radical importance of dreams and the imagination, creative autonomy, and individual freedom over blind obedience to revolutionary parties. Aragon’s allegiance to communism led him to surrender the poetic intoxications of Surrealist prose in favour of the more sombre and austere tone of social realism. By contrast, other early Surrealists like Philippe Soupault contributed novels which deployed the praxis of shock in a less explicitly dialectical fashion. Soupault’s Last Nights of Paris (1928), in particular, responds to the influence of the war in producing a crisis of identity among a generation of young men, a crisis projected or transferred onto the city streets in ways that are revelatory of the author’s attunement to how “places and environment have a profound influence on memory and imagination” (Soupault 91). All the early Surrealists served in the war in varying capacities. In Soupault’s case, the writer “was called up in 1916, used as a guinea pig for a new typhoid vaccine, and spent the rest of the war in and out of hospital. His close friend and cousin, René Deschamps, was killed in action” (Read 22). Memories of the disaster of war assume a submerged presence in Soupault’s novel, buried deep in the psyche of the narrator. Typically, it is the places and sites of the city that act as revenants, stimulating disturbing memories to drift back to the surface which then suffuse the narrator in an atmosphere of melancholy. During the novel’s numerous dérives, the narrator’s detective-like pursuit of his elusive love-object, the young streetwalker Georgette, the tracking of her near-mute artist brother Octave, and the following of the ringleader of a criminal gang, all appear as instances of compensation. Each chase invokes a desire to recover a more significant earlier loss that persistently eludes the narrator. When Soupault’s narrator shadows Octave on a walk that ventures into the city’s industrial zone, recollections of the disaster of war gradually impinge upon his aleatory perambulations. His description evokes two men moving through the trenches together: The least noise was a catastrophe, the least breath a great terror. We walked in the eternal mud. Step by step we sank into the thickness of night, lost as if forever. I turned around several times to look at the way we had come but night alone was behind us. (80) In an article published in 2012, Catherine Howell identifies Last Nights of Paris as “a lyric celebration of the city as spectacle” (67). At times, the narrator indeed surrenders himself to the ocular pleasures of modernity. Observing the Eiffel Tower, he finds delight in “indefinitely varying her silhouette as if I were examining her through a kaleidoscope” (Soupault 30). Yet it is important to stress the role that shock plays in fissuring this veneer of spectacle, especially those evocations of the city that reveal an unnerving desensitisation to the more violent manifestations of the metropolis. Reading a newspaper, the narrator remarks that “the discovery of bags full of limbs, carefully sawed and chopped up” (23) signifies little more than “a commonplace crime” (22). Passing the banks of the Seine provokes “recollection of an evening I had spent lying on the parapet of the Pont Marie watching several lifesavers trying in vain to recover the body of an unfortunate suicide” (10). In his sensitivity to the unassimilable nature of trauma, Soupault intuits a phenomenon which literary trauma theory argues profoundly limits the text’s claim to representation, knowledge, and an autonomous subject. In this sense, Soupault appears less committed than Breton to the idea that the after-effects of shock might be consciously distilled into a form of praxis. Yet this prolongation of an unintegrated trauma still posits shock as a powerful vehicle to critique a society attempting to heal its wounds without addressing their underlying causes. This is typical of Surrealism’s efforts to “dramatize the physical and psychological trauma of a war that everyone wanted to forget so that it would not be swept away too quickly” (Lyford 4). Woman and Radical Madness In her 2007 study, Surrealist Masculinities, Amy Lyford focuses upon the regeneration and nation building project that characterised post-war France and argues that Surrealist tactics sought to dismantle an official discourse that promoted ideals of “robust manhood and female maternity” (4). Viewed against this backdrop, the trope of madness in Surrealism is central to the movement’s disruptive strategies. In Last Nights of Paris, a lingering madness simmers beneath the surface of the text like an undertow, while in other Surrealist texts the lauding of madness, specifically female hysteria, is much more explicit. Indeed, the objectification of the madwoman in Surrealism is among the most problematic aspects of its praxis of shock and one that raises questions over to what extent, if at all, Surrealism and feminism can be reconciled, leading some critics to define the movement as inherently misogynistic. While certainly not unfounded, this critique fails to answer why a broad spectrum of women artists have been drawn to the movement. By contrast, a growing body of work nuances the complexities of the “blinds spots” (Lusty 2) in Surrealism’s relationship with women. Contemporary studies like Natalya Lusty’s Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis and Katharine Conley’s earlier Automatic Woman both afford greater credit to Surrealism’s female practitioners in redefining their subject position in ways that trouble and unsettle the conventional understanding of women’s role in the movement. The creative and self-reflexive manipulation of madness, for example, proved pivotal to the achievements of Surrealist women. In her short autobiographical novella, Down Below (1944), Leonora Carrington recounts the disturbing true experience of her voyage into madness sparked by the internment of her partner and muse, fellow Surrealist Max Ernst, in a concentration camp in 1940. Committed to a sanatorium in Santander, Spain, Carrington was treated with the seizure inducing drug Cardiazol. Her text presents a startling case study of therapeutic maltreatment that is consistent with Bretonian Surrealism’s critique of the use of psycho-medical methods for the purposes of regulating and disciplining the individual. As well as vividly recalling her intense and frightening hallucinations, Down Below details the author’s descent into a highly paranoid state which, somewhat perversely, heightens her sense of agency and control over her environment. Unable to discern boundaries between her internal reality and that of the external world, Carrington develops a delusional and inflated sense of her ability to influence the city of Madrid: In the political confusion and the torrid heat, I convinced myself that Madrid was the world’s stomach and that I had been chosen for the task of restoring that digestive organ to health […] I believed that I was capable of bearing that dreadful weight and of drawing from it a solution for the world. The dysentery I suffered from later was nothing but the illness of Madrid taking shape in my intestinal tract. (12–13) In this way, Carrington’s extraordinarily visceral memoir embodies what can be described as the Surrealist woman’s “double allegiance” (Suleiman 5) to the praxis of shock. On the one hand, Down Below subversively harnesses the affective qualities of madness in order to manifest textual disturbances and to convey the author’s fierce rebellion against societal constraints. At the same time, the work reveals a more complex and often painful representational struggle inherent in occupying the position of both the subject experiencing madness and the narrator objectively recalling its events, displaying a tension not present in the work of the male Surrealists. The memoir concludes on an ambivalent note as Carrington describes finally becoming “disoccultized” of her madness, awakening to “the mystery with which I was surrounded and which they all seemed to take pleasure in deepening around me” (53). Notwithstanding its ambivalence, Down Below typifies the political and historical dimensions of Surrealism’s struggle against internal and external limits. Yet as early as 1966, Surrealist scholar J.H. Matthews was already cautioning against reaching that point where the term Surrealist “loses any meaning and becomes, as it is for too many, synonymous with ‘strange,’ ‘weird,’ or even ‘fanciful’” (5–6). To re-evaluate the praxis of shock in the Surrealist novel, then, is to seek to reinstate Surrealism as a movement that cannot be reduced to vague adjectives or to mere aesthetic principles. It is to view it as an active force passionately engaged with the pressing social, cultural, and political problems of its time. While the frequent nods to Surrealist methods in contemporary literary genealogies and creative urban research practices such as psychogeography are a testament to its continued allure, the growing failure to read Surrealism as political is one of the more contradictory symptoms of the expanding temporal distance from the catastrophic events from which the movement emerged. As it becomes increasingly common to draw links between disaster, creativity, and renewal, the shifting sands of the reception of Surrealism are a reminder of the need to resist domesticating movements born from such circumstances in ways that blunt their critical faculties and dull the awakening power of their praxis of shock. To do otherwise is to be left with little more than cheap thrills. References Aragon, Louis. Paris Peasant (1926). Trans. Simon Watson Taylor. Boston: Exact Change, 1994. Benjamin, Walter. “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia” (1929). Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Walter Benjamin Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part I, 1927–1930. Eds. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap P, 2005. Breton, André. “Manifesto of Surrealism” (1924). Manifestoes of Surrealism. Trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 1990. ———. Nadja (1928). Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Grove P, 1960. Breton, André, and Philippe Soupault. The Magnetic Fields (1920). Trans. David Gascoyne. London: Atlas P, 1985. Carrington, Leonora. Down Below (1944). Chicago: Black Swan P, 1983. Cohen, Margaret. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1993. Conley, Katharine. Automatic Woman: The Representation of Woman in Surrealism. Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 1996. Coverley, Merlin. Psychogeography. Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2010. Foster, Hal. Compulsive Beauty. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1993. Gascoyne, David. “Introduction.” The Magnetic Fields (1920) by André Breton and Philippe Soupault. Trans. David Gascoyne. London: Atlas P, 1985. Howell, Catherine. “City of Night: Parisian Explorations.” Public: Civic Spectacle 45 (2012): 64–77. Lusty, Natalya. Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. Lyford, Amy. Surrealist Masculinities: Gender Anxiety and the Aesthetics of Post-World War I Reconstruction in France. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2007. Masschelein, Anneleen. “Hand in Glove: Negative Indexicality in André Breton’s Nadja and W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.” Searching for Sebald: Photography after W.G. Sebald. Ed. Lise Patt. Los Angeles, CA: ICI P, 2007. 360–87. Matthews, J.H. Surrealism and the Novel. Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 1996. Rasmussen, Mikkel Bolt. “The Situationist International, Surrealism and the Difficult Fusion of Art and Politics.” Oxford Art Journal 27.3 (2004): 365–87. Read, Peter. “Poets out of Uniform.” Book Review. The Times Literary Supplement. 15 Mar. 2002: 22. Shattuck, Roger. “Love and Laughter: Surrealism Reappraised.” The History of Surrealism. Ed. Maurice Nadeau. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Penguin Books, 1978. 11–34. Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. London: Verso, 2002. Soupault, Philippe. Last Nights of Paris (1928). Trans. William Carlos Williams. Boston: Exact Change, 1992. Suleiman, Susan Robin. “Surrealist Black Humour: Masculine/Feminine.” Papers of Surrealism 1 (2003): 1–11. 20 Feb. 2013 ‹http://www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/papersofsurrealism/journal1›.

As the use of social networks becomes increasingly commonplace, scholars have observed that associated requirements arise relating to how one’s digital self is practised, worked on, and disseminated (Cover; Miller; Papacharissi). Since the earliest forms of online interaction, scholars have tracked the importance of the question of “realness” in identity and social groupings (Burkhalter; Donath; O’Brien). More recently, as people become more connected, connect-able and subject to peer (as well as corporate and government surveillance) (van Zoonen), digital media cultures have increasingly demanded the performance of authenticity as part of the work of belonging online (Banet-Weiser; Keller). Drawing on Banet-Weiser’s and Keller’s work in particular, “authenticity” is defined here as the quality of being considered consistently “true to oneself” in a way which is socially legitimated. I suggest, online, that this demand for authenticity is manifested through two poles of authenticity: authentic individuality and authentic belonging. In this paper, I discuss the interplay between authentic individuality and authentic belonging in (postfeminist) digital cultures, by using the case study of a set of meme blogs narrating youthful femininity on blogging social network Tumblr. This meme set, based on Tumblr blog “WhatShouldWeCallMe” (WSWCM), sets out a self-representative affective account of quotidian feminine experiences. In a set of six blogs of this meme set, including the “founder”, I consider the production of authenticities where the simultaneous importance of connection and imitative differentiation is foregrounded, tracking the way authenticity is practised in the founder and follower meme blogs. I contend that the WSWCM founder claims authentic individuality, producing itself through claims to originality, and pre-existing “best girlfriendship”. I then suggest that the follower meme blogs foreground authentic digital belonging, by exhibiting certain affective cultural literacies that demonstrate insider status in this intimate digital feminine public (Berlant). I surmise these strategies are used to manage the demands of tension between proving one’s true and individual self and the need to be recognised as belonging through commonality. The Authentic Self Brand and the Authentic Insider I suggest that one expression of authentic individuality can be found in the increasingly prevalent practice of self-branding in digital cultures on social network sites (Banet-Weiser). In what Banet-Weiser calls “the authentic self-brand”, one sets up a simultaneous relationship to oneself, and a relationship between oneself and one’s audience. This double relationship is one of “innovation, production, and consumption [of the self], charged with ideally producing a unique, ‘authentic’ self” (73) for others. The self-social relationship offered by the authentic self-brand dovetails with what scholars identify as a postfeminist media landscape in the West (Gill; McRobbie; Negra). Postfeminist narratives promote highly commercial paradigms of self-surveillance, self-regulation and self-improvement, particularly for young women (Gill, McRobbie), whereby one’s body, social practices and relationships are evaluated as part of the marketability of one’s self-brand (Banet-Weiser, Winch). In this marketised recasting of social relationships, one must treat oneself as a product to be invested in, and remain vigilantly aware of how one is perceived by an audience of potential “buyers”. Notably, postfeminism relies on the idea of a deep, inhering individuality to justify the injunction to marketise oneself (Gill). Following this logic, gendered practices which may improve one’s feminine “self-brand” such as attention to beauty practices and body shape, must be cast as for “oneself” and part of one’s “true desires”. This occurs in a landscape where it is widely presumed that feminism has done its work, and women are now “free” to perform femininity however they wish (Gill). In postfeminist digital cultures, proving one’s acts are done for one’s true self, not for others becomes crucial in demonstrating one’s feminine authenticity (Dobson, Individuality; Performative), even as one is aware of the social value of one’s profile or digital brand (Banet-Weiser, Ringrose and Barajas). Drawing on this body of work, I suggest that authentic individuality, performed through imperviousness to social influence, is the way in which these contradictions of the postfeminist self-brand are justified. At the same time, digital cultures can also be argued to offer “remix” spaces (Lessig) where the borrowing, imitation and adaptation of existing cultural artefacts demonstrates personally felt connections to wider social meanings. One common manifestation of this is the Internet “meme”, a unit of culture which relies on imitative adaptation and differentiation in its circulation (Shifman), which I discuss further in this article. Shifman illustrates the meme as a mode of interpretive connection with the example of YouTube meme “Leave Britney Alone”, which began with the founder meme video by actor Chris Crocker making an emotional plea that society leave singer Britney Spears in peace. Memes signal dominant social understandings of the original cultural unit: Shifman notes that with the “Leave Britney Alone” meme, the follower memes tended to mock Crocker’s perceived effeminacy, sexuality and excessiveness in their re-enactments of Crocker’s founder video. Authenticity in these forms of digital production might be argued to signify more about desires for legitimate or authentic belonging within digital publics as insiders, rather than proving a fundamental individuality. WhatShouldWeCallMe and Tumblr Remix Culture Tumblr is a relatively under-researched but rapidly growing blogging social network, documented at the end of 2014 as the social platform with the most growth in user numbers (Lunden). Tumblr is known as a promising hub of burgeoning visual youth cultures (Third and Hart), possibly due to its norms of anonymity and significant pop culture content of posts. Images are a dominant form of communication on the site, and most content on Tumblr is public. Notably, 70% of Tumblr traffic occurs internally through the repurposing and reblogging of posts in the “dashboard” area (the equivalent being the “newsfeed’ for Facebook), rather than from external sources (Walker). Tumblr users are able to follow each other, and like and reblog each other’s posts. However, direct comments on posts are not an available feature, unlike most “first wave” (Miller and Fink) blogging sites; if a user wishes to comment on a post, they can only do so when reblogging the post, which is then featured on their own blog. According to Tumblr founder David Karp, this feature discourages overly negative comments and flame wars because “if you’re going to be a jerk, you’re looking like a jerk in your own space” (Walker). These structures set up Tumblr as an ideal site for the production of memes as part of its remix culture, whilst still adhering to certain connective features of other social networks. To provide some context, the founder WSWCM blog boasted 50,000 new Tumblr followers in the month following its creation in 2012, with independent traffic reports logging the number of page views as one to two million per day (Casserly). Each post on the founder WSWCM is on average liked and reblogged by hundreds of other Tumblr users, but its significance, which I consider here, lies in the way that it has been taken up in a prolific variety of follower meme blogs. Interestingly, unlike “Leave Britney Alone”, the form of imitative differentiation here is keyed at speaking at a more self-representative level, rather than making a comment on or satirising the founder, suggesting a level of personal connection. Like “Leave Britney Alone”, the WSWCM meme set can be understood as a founder-based meme (Shifman), with one originating, successful meme text which then inspires many follower memes, which are usually less successful. The follower memes I consider here adapt the GIF-reaction format which is used to narrate everyday experiences of youthful femininity. Blog posts are produced by matching a GIF image to situations such as “when my boyfriend forgets to DVR the Voice” or “when I hear my frenemy got dumped by her boyfriend”. GIFs are moving photo files excerpting about three seconds of movement from popular culture ranging from film, television and YouTube videos. It must be stressed that the term “follower” does not necessarily connote a lack of originality. The imitation of the follower blogs is strategic: a deliberate, slight differentiation, which operates to set them apart, but still locates them within a youthful feminine public. The emergence of the WSWCM follower blogs is a dynamic one which, I suggest, has catalysed the founder to intensify its claims to legitimacy through authentic originality even as its funny and creative followers throw its uniqueness into question. The Founder Meme Blog: Best Friendship as Authenticity Practice One key way that the WSWCM founder makes claims to authenticity is through a “best girlfriendship”, which is also explicitly articulated as the driving force for the maintenance of the blog, rather than Tumblr followers or outside audiences. Whilst ads are hosted on the founder blog, it is explained that these are almost ancillary—“to pay the bills” of purchasing material to create the GIFs, pay for the site design, web-hosting fees, and other costs. The almost romantic figure of the female “best friend” features significantly, fitting with Winch’s claim that the female best friend becomes a new “soul mate”, beyond one’s (heterosexual) partner in postfeminist girlfriend culture. In this way, we see how certain social relationships become recognisable as authentic. The founder bloggers state in their FAQs: We are two best friends who met in college and now live on opposite coasts (of the United States). We used to send each other funny .gifs as a way of staying in touch, and decided to start a tumblr that both of us could check during the day. We thought we were just posting inside jokes, but are thrilled that other people find them as funny as we do. We never really intended for anyone else to see it. Whilst now, with potentially hundreds of thousands of followers, it is difficult to maintain that the blog is maintained solely as a means of keeping in contact, this long distance girlfriendship can be drawn on to establish the authenticity and social capital for the blog. The best friend is a productive space through which one can express one’s true, individual desires, free of others’ wishes and outside constraints. Many moments expressed in the original blog centre on (very funny) moments that are only shared with the best friend where one can really be “oneself”, such as “when my best friend and I stay in” (for a night in), or “when my best friend and I are DGAF in public” (“don’t give a fuck”). In the blog, the very exclusivity of the female best friend compared to other ambivalent relations with “other girls” and “guys”, can also be understood as a mechanism for carving out a space of feminine individuality. I suggest that this best girlfriendship should be understood as a permutation of the authentic self-brand, practised to achieve a form of authentic individuality. In Winch’s conception, postfeminist girlfriendship is about strategy rather than solidarity; girlfriendship becomes an “investment in the individual” as it is “essential in enabling feminine normativity” (2). This may be reflected in the way best friendship is mobilised as a brand for WSWCM. At its inception, WSWCM only used the “Minimalist” theme for its layout, a free theme offered by Tumblr, which is still visible in the formats of some of the meme blogs. Fig. 1A: “Screenshot of Minimalist Theme in follower blog.” Twodumbgirls.tumblr.com, 16 Feb. 2015.Fig. 1B: “Screenshot of Minimalist Theme in follower blog.” Whatshouldwecollegeme.tumblr.com, 16 Feb. 2015. However, in early 2014 the bloggers changed to a different header to distinguish their site. I suggest this can be understood as a response to establish originality and authenticity through a best friendship brand, in opposition to the other meme blogs, which had also adopted the founder theme. The WSWCM header features cartoonish depictions of the two bloggers, one in New York with the silhouette of skyscrapers behind her, and one on a beach with an open laptop, the blog visible on her screen. Fig. 2: “WhatShouldWeCallMe Header.” Whatshouldwecallme.tumblr.com, 17 Feb. 2015. This header clearly alludes to the fact that the bloggers are separated, in different places, but links them by depicting them as virtually identical. Somewhat similar to “Bratz” dolls, they are both represented with oversized heads, tiny bodies, long hair, and large eyes, with the only differences being that one is blonde with pale skin and blue eyes, the other brunette with tanned skin and green eyes. I suggest that what is striking about this cartoonish image is the way it fits into a commercial genre of representation of “girlfriends”. Further, whilst girlfriends are often positioned as differing, their differences are often positioned as complementary, to strengthen a united co-brand (Winch). The differences here are noticeably nominal, skin-deep—the slight variation in hair, eye and skin colour hint at “‘tantalising differences within a normative paradigm” (Winch 46). I am not suggesting here that the best friendship of the bloggers is artificial or purely commercial, but rather, that this production of digital best friendship coincides with strategies to achieve authentic individuality recognisable in postfeminist digital cultures. The best friend is thus crucial to the performance of authenticity in the original blog. It is important to note, however, that these practices exceed postfeminist self-branding in certain ways. Given that WSWCM has indeed inspired follower memes keyed in a self-representative register, this suggests possibilities of broader connection and a sense of intimacy through recognisability of shared femininity. From one form of insider practice—the WSWCM best girlfriendship—to another, other Tumblr bloggers through follower meme texts have also signalled their insider status, as young women able to narrate forms of feminine experience held out as representative and legitimate. The Follower Meme Blogs: Connective Differentiation In contrast to the founder’s production of authenticity through claims to originality, and through a relationship, which is held out as distinct from the desires to gain Internet followers, authenticity is practised differently in the follower memes. Authentic individuality is decentred; rather, the follower blogs appear to foreground the importance of authentic belonging. This becomes clear in the followers’ imitation of the founder in their positioning as similar, but slightly different. For example, in the blog WhatShouldBetchesCallMe, the blogging subject still narrates quotidian feminine trials and tribulations, but is much more knowingly confident and sassy; in WhatShouldWeCollegeMe, the blog focuses more on the experience of being at university than the founder meme. Shifman foregrounds the process of repackaging and imitation in the adaptation of memes; I suggest that what also must be considered in this meme set is connective differentiation, which repositions this repackaging as simultaneously a form of distancing and connection. Here, the connective differentiation of the follower blogs is a way of citing one’s knowledge and understanding of youthful feminine experience. By creating a self-representative, knowingly derivative but different follower blog in this meme set, this subsequent variation demonstrates one’s legitimate belonging in the feminine public sphere of WSWCM readership. I suggest Berlant’s conceptualisation of intimate publics is useful here in explaining how slight variations on an original theme play out in a culture in which authenticity is held up as essential. Berlant argues that women’s culture in the West, centrally shaped by relations to commodities, creates expectations of both normativity and commonality whereby the market claims to offer texts and objects which are true to women’s “particular core interests and desires” (5). This provides a “generic-but-unique” femininity (6) through which women can expect to be recognisable in this public. Arguably, what the memes opt into—through being recognised as derivative—is a form of recognition in an intimate feminine public. Thus, the follower memes adhere to these rules of recognisability in order to be seen. Recognition as belonging in this intimate public through social knowledge becomes more useful for the follower memes, which cannot rely on the status of originality of the founder meme. What this practice of discerning, connective differentiation may signal is a configuration of authenticity which manages the tension in demands of digital culture— signalling one’s individuality yet demonstrating one’s social embeddedness. As O’Brien (1998) notes in relation to early online social interaction, if one wants to be recognised and recognisable, one must draw on established social, cultural codes. Notably, many of the situations which are put forward in blog posts of the follower memes are not necessarily easily distinguishable in genre or content from the blog posts of the founder memes. Though the founder meme text places particular emphasis on best friendship, other forms of youthful, feminine (middle class) experience are recycled and re-adapted for circulation. Many of the situations which are put forward in the meme set, while creatively assembled, are ultimately generic so that they can be circulated on Tumblr to connect with others. Consequently, posts abound about social rituals of excessive drinking, struggling through university, and inadequacies in flirting technique. However, I note that these generic posts are still specific at the same time, requiring a highly discerning ability to capture and narrativise affective moments from diverse, miscellaneous pop culture material. The well-chosen GIF articulating one’s despondency as a single girl demonstrates a level of cultural and affective awareness of the semiotic intelligibility of the GIF, and the recognisable trials and tribulations of youthful feminine experience. Fig. 3: “When I’m depressed and have too much to drink.” 2ndhand-embarrassment.tumblr.com, 11 Feb. 2015. Thus, showing one’s specific knowledge of shared experience demonstrates an affective authenticity of connection and belonging. This authenticity works to prove one’s digital authority to micro-broadcast one’s life in a youthful feminine public, through showing one’s knowledge of the recognisable pitfalls, idiosyncrasies and experiences of being a young woman. I emphasise that it is this situated knowingness that comes through in the meme set in general, particularly in the follower memes. Given the generic nature of the content of posts across the meme set, the importance of “true” emotion is decentred—rather, what is vital is knowing which affective situations have the capacity to connect and be recognisable. Whilst the revelation of inner emotional truths have otherwise been considered key in the practice of authenticity in celebrity culture (Biressi and Nunn; Hesmondalgh and Baker), I propose that in the context in which this meme set is situated, this is not necessarily the most useful form of social currency. In these remix digital cultures, I suggest the interpretive premise of the digital audience is not that these products of remix literally speak to one’s experiences. Rather, remix cultures provide a means of demonstrating insider knowledge, which connects other insiders—a form of authentic belonging. Conclusion This paper has traced differing practices of feminine authenticity visible in the intersection of social network and remix cultures on Tumblr by examining the WSWCM meme set. I have suggested that the founder meme employs particular strategies of maintaining authentic individuality, such as resorting to the performance of an exclusive, “original” best girlfriendship brand. In contrast, the follower memes perform cultural and affective knowingness of youthful femininity, to assert their digital insider status—and right to belong. This meme set presents some productive questions through which to think through authenticity in digital cultures. Could striving for authentic belonging constitute one strategy of responding to a media-saturated culture, where authentic individuality is constantly elevated yet (perhaps) harder to achieve? These blogs demonstrate how the significance and practice of authenticity transforms in managing different configurations of social desires to belong, or be recognised as individual and original in (postfeminist) digital cultures. References Banet-Weiser, Sarah. Authentic TM. New York, NY: New York UP, 2012. Beer, David, and Roger Burrows. “Popular Culture, Digital Archives and the New Social Life of Data.” Theory, Culture & Society 30.4 (2013): 47–71. Berlant, Lauren Gail. The Female Complaint. Durham: Duke UP, 2008. Burkhalter, Byron. "Reading Race Online: Discovering Racial Identity in Usenet Discussions." Communities in Cyberspace. Eds. Marc A. Smith and Peter Kollock. London: Routledge, 1999. 59–74. 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Ubiquitous in airports, border checkpoints, and other securitised spaces throughout the world, full-body imaging scanners claim to read bodies in order to identify if they pose security threats. Millimetre-wave body imaging machines—the most common type of body scanner—display to the operating security agent a screen with a generic body outline. If an anomaly is found or if an individual does not align with the machine’s understanding of an “average” body, a small box is highlighted and placed around the “problem” area, prompting further inspection in the form of pat-downs or questioning. In this complex security regime governed by such biometric, body-based technologies, it could be argued that nonalignment with bodily normativity as well as an attendant failure to reveal oneself—to become “transparent” (Hall 295)—marks a body as dangerous. As these algorithmic technologies become more pervasive, so too does the imperative to critically examine their purported neutrality and operative logic of revelation and readability.Biometric technologies are marketed as excavators of truth, with their optic potency claiming to demask masquerading bodies. Failure and bias are, however, an inescapable aspect of such technologies that work with narrow parameters of human morphology. Indeed, surveillance technologies have been taken to task for their inherent racial and gender biases (Browne; Pugliese). Facial recognition has, for example, been critiqued for its inability to read darker skin tones (Buolamwini and Gebru), while body scanners have been shown to target transgender bodies (Keyes; Magnet and Rodgers; Quinan). Critical security studies scholar Shoshana Magnet argues that error is endemic to the technological functioning of biometrics, particularly since they operate according to the faulty notion that bodies are “stable” and unchanging repositories of information that can be reified into code (Magnet 2).Although body scanners are presented as being able to reliably expose concealed weapons, they are riddled with incompetencies that misidentify and over-select certain demographics as suspect. Full-body scanners have, for example, caused considerable difficulties for transgender travellers, breast cancer patients, and people who use prosthetics, such as artificial limbs, colonoscopy bags, binders, or prosthetic genitalia (Clarkson; Quinan; Spalding). While it is not in the scope of this article to detail the workings of body imaging technologies and their inconsistencies, a growing body of scholarship has substantiated the claim that these machines unfairly impact those identifying as transgender and non-binary (see, e.g., Beauchamp; Currah and Mulqueen; Magnet and Rogers; Sjoberg). Moreover, they are constructed according to a logic of binary gender: before each person enters the scanner, transportation security officers must make a quick assessment of their gender/sex by pressing either a blue (corresponding to “male”) or pink (corresponding to “female”) button. In this sense, biometric, computerised security systems control and monitor the boundaries between male and female.The ability to “reveal” oneself is henceforth predicated on having a body free of “abnormalities” and fitting neatly into one of the two sex categorisations that the machine demands. Transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals, particularly those who do not have a binary gender presentation or whose presentation does not correspond to the sex marker in their documentation, also face difficulties if the machine flags anomalies (Quinan and Bresser). Drawing on a Foucauldian analysis of power as productive, Toby Beauchamp similarly illustrates how surveillance technologies not only identify but also create and reshape the figure of the dangerous subject in relation to normative configurations of gender, race, and able-bodiedness. By mobilizing narratives of concealment and disguise, heightened security measures frame gender nonconformity as dangerous (Beauchamp, Going Stealth). Although national and supranational authorities market biometric scanning technologies as scientifically neutral and exact methods of identification and verification and as an infallible solution to security risks, such tools of surveillance are clearly shaped by preconceptions and prejudgements about race, gender, and bodily normativity. Not only are they encoded with “prototypical whiteness” (Browne) but they are also built on “grossly stereotypical” configurations of gender (Clarkson).Amongst this increasingly securitised landscape, creative forms of artistic resistance can offer up a means of subverting discriminatory policing and surveillance practices by posing alternate visualisations that reveal and challenge their supposed objectivity. In his 2018 audio-video artwork installation entitled SANCTUM, UK-based American artist Zach Blas delves into how biometric technologies, like those described above, both reveal and (re)shape ontology by utilising the affectual resonance of sexual submission. Evoking the contradictory notions of oppression and pleasure, Blas describes SANCTUM as “a mystical environment that perverts sex dungeons with the apparatuses and procedures of airport body scans, biometric analysis, and predictive policing” (see full description at https://zachblas.info/works/sanctum/).Depicting generic mannequins that stand in for the digitalised rendering of the human forms that pass through body scanners, the installation transports the scanners out of the airport and into a queer environment that collapses sex, security, and weaponry; an environment that is “at once a prison-house of algorithmic capture, a sex dungeon with no genitals, a weapons factory, and a temple to security.” This artistic reframing gestures towards full-body scanning technology’s germination in the military, prisons, and other disciplinary systems, highlighting how its development and use has originated from punitive—rather than protective—contexts.In what follows, we adopt a methodological approach that applies visual analysis and close reading to scrutinise a selection of scenes from SANCTUM that underscore the sadomasochistic power inherent in surveillance technologies. Analysing visual and aural elements of the artistic intervention allows us to complicate the relationship between transparency and recognition and to problematise the dynamic of mandatory complicity and revelation that body scanners warrant. In contrast to a discourse of visibility that characterises algorithmically driven surveillance technology, Blas suggests opacity as a resistance strategy to biometrics' standardisation of identity. Taking an approach informed by critical security studies and queer theory, we also argue that SANCTUM highlights the violence inherent to the practice of reducing the body to a flat, inert surface that purports to align with some sort of “core” identity, a notion that contradicts feminist and queer approaches to identity and corporeality as fluid and changing. In close reading this artistic installation alongside emerging scholarship on the discriminatory effects of biometric technology, this article aims to highlight the potential of art to queer the supposed objectivity and neutrality of biometric surveillance and to critically challenge normative logics of revelation and readability.Corporeal Fetishism and Body HorrorThroughout both his artistic practice and scholarly work, Blas has been critical of the above narrative of biometrics as objective extractors of information. Rather than looking to dominant forms of representation as a means for recognition and social change, Blas’s work asks that we strive for creative techniques that precisely queer biometric and legal systems in order to make oneself unaccounted for. For him, “transparency, visibility, and representation to the state should be used tactically, they are never the end goal for a transformative politics but are, ultimately, a trap” (Blas and Gaboury 158). While we would simultaneously argue that invisibility is itself a privilege that is unevenly distributed, his creative work attempts to refuse a politics of visibility and to embrace an “informatic opacity” that is attuned to differences in bodies and identities (Blas).In particular, Blas’s artistic interventions titled Facial Weaponization Suite (2011-14) and Face Cages (2013-16) protest against biometric recognition and the inequalities that these technologies propagate by making masks and wearable metal objects that cannot be detected as human faces. This artistic-activist project contests biometric facial recognition and their attendant inequalities by, as detailed on the artist’s website,making ‘collective masks’ in workshops that are modelled from the aggregated facial data of participants, resulting in amorphous masks that cannot be detected as human faces by biometric facial recognition technologies. The masks are used for public interventions and performances.One mask explores blackness and the racist implications that undergird biometric technologies’ inability to detect dark skin. Meanwhile another mask, which he calls the “Fag Face Mask”, points to the heteronormative underpinnings of facial recognition. Created from the aggregated facial data of queer men, this amorphous pink mask implicitly references—and contests—scientific studies that have attempted to link the identification of sexual orientation through rapid facial recognition techniques.Building on this body of creative work that has advocated for opacity as a tool of social and political transformation, SANCTUM resists the revelatory impulses of biometric technology by turning to the use and abuse of full-body imaging. The installation opens with a shot of a large, dark industrial space. At the far end of a red, spotlighted corridor, a black mask flickers on a screen. A shimmering, oscillating sound reverberates—the opening bars of a techno track—that breaks down in rhythm while the mask evaporates into a cloud of smoke. The camera swivels, and a white figure—the generic mannequin of the body scanner screen—is pummelled by invisible forces as if in a wind tunnel. These ghostly silhouettes appear and reappear in different positions, with some being whipped and others stretched and penetrated by a steel anal hook. Rather than conjuring a traditional horror trope of the body’s terrifying, bloody interior, SANCTUM evokes a new kind of feared and fetishized trope that is endemic to the current era of surveillance capitalism: the abstracted body, standardised and datafied, created through the supposedly objective and efficient gaze of AI-driven machinery.Resting on the floor in front of the ominous animated mask are neon fragments arranged in an occultist formation—hands or half a face. By breaking the body down into component parts— “from retina to fingerprints”—biometric technologies “purport to make individual bodies endlessly replicable, segmentable and transmissible in the transnational spaces of global capital” (Magnet 8). The notion that bodies can be seamlessly turned into blueprints extracted from biological and cultural contexts has been described by Donna Haraway as “corporeal fetishism” (Haraway, Modest). In the context of SANCTUM, Blas illustrates the dangers of mistaking a model for a “concrete entity” (Haraway, “Situated” 147). Indeed, the digital cartography of the generic mannequin becomes no longer a mode of representation but instead a technoscientific truth.Several scenes in SANCTUM also illustrate a process whereby substances are extracted from the mannequins and used as tools to enact violence. In one such instance, a silver webbing is generated over a kneeling figure. Upon closer inspection, this geometric structure, which is reminiscent of Blas’s earlier Face Cages project, is a replication of the triangulated patterns produced by facial recognition software in its mapping of distance between eyes, nose, and mouth. In the next scene, this “map” breaks apart into singular shapes that float and transform into a metallic whip, before eventually reconstituting themselves as a penetrative douche hose that causes the mannequin to spasm and vomit a pixelated liquid. Its secretions levitate and become the webbing, and then the sequence begins anew.In another scene, a mannequin is held upside-down and force-fed a bubbling liquid that is being pumped through tubes from its arms, legs, and stomach. These depictions visualise Magnet’s argument that biometric renderings of bodies are understood not to be “tropic” or “historically specific” but are instead presented as “plumbing individual depths in order to extract core identity” (5). In this sense, this visual representation calls to mind biometrics’ reification of body and identity, obfuscating what Haraway would describe as the “situatedness of knowledge”. Blas’s work, however, forces a critique of these very systems, as the materials extracted from the bodies of the mannequins in SANCTUM allude to how biometric cartographies drawn from travellers are utilised to justify detainment. These security technologies employ what Magnet has referred to as “surveillant scopophilia,” that is, new ways and forms of looking at the human body “disassembled into component parts while simultaneously working to assuage individual anxieties about safety and security through the promise of surveillance” (17). The transparent body—the body that can submit and reveal itself—is ironically represented by the distinctly genderless translucent mannequins. Although the generic mannequins are seemingly blank slates, the installation simultaneously forces a conversation about the ways in which biometrics draw upon and perpetuate assumptions about gender, race, and sexuality.Biometric SubjugationOn her 2016 critically acclaimed album HOPELESSNESS, openly transgender singer, composer, and visual artist Anohni performs a deviant subjectivity that highlights the above dynamics that mark the contemporary surveillance discourse. To an imagined “daddy” technocrat, she sings:Watch me… I know you love me'Cause you're always watching me'Case I'm involved in evil'Case I'm involved in terrorism'Case I'm involved in child molestersEvoking a queer sexual frisson, Anohni describes how, as a trans woman, she is hyper-visible to state institutions. She narrates a voyeuristic relation where trans bodies are policed as threats to public safety rather than protected from systemic discrimination. Through the seemingly benevolent “daddy” character and the play on ‘cause (i.e., because) and ‘case (i.e., in case), she highlights how gender-nonconforming individuals are predictively surveilled and assumed to already be guilty. Reflecting on daddy-boy sexual paradigms, Jack Halberstam reads the “sideways” relations of queer practices as an enactment of “rupture as substitution” to create a new project that “holds on to vestiges of the old but distorts” (226). Upending power and control, queer art has the capacity to both reveal and undermine hegemonic structures while simultaneously allowing for the distortion of the old to create something new.Employing the sublimatory relations of bondage, discipline, sadism, and masochism (BDSM), Blas’s queer installation similarly creates a sideways representation that re-orientates the logic of the biometric scanners, thereby unveiling the always already sexualised relations of scrutiny and interrogation as well as the submissive complicity they demand. Replacing the airport environment with a dark and foreboding mise-en-scène allows Blas to focus on capture rather than mobility, highlighting the ways in which border checkpoints (including those instantiated by the airport) encourage free travel for some while foreclosing movement for others. Building on Sara Ahmed’s “phenomenology of being stopped”, Magnet considers what happens when we turn our gaze to those “who fail to pass the checkpoint” (107). In SANCTUM, the same actions are played out again and again on spectral beings who are trapped in various states: they shudder in cages, are chained to the floor, or are projected against the parameters of mounted screens. One ghostly figure, for instance, lies pinned down by metallic grappling hooks, arms raised above the head in a recognisable stance of surrender, conjuring up the now-familiar image of a traveller standing in the cylindrical scanner machine, waiting to be screened. In portraying this extended moment of immobility, Blas lays bare the deep contradictions in the rhetoric of “freedom of movement” that underlies such spaces.On a global level, media reporting, scientific studies, and policy documents proclaim that biometrics are essential to ensuring personal safety and national security. Within the public imagination, these technologies become seductive because of their marked ability to identify terrorist attackers—to reveal threatening bodies—thereby appealing to the anxious citizen’s fear of the disguised suicide bomber. Yet for marginalised identities prefigured as criminal or deceptive—including transgender and black and brown bodies—the inability to perform such acts of revelation via submission to screening can result in humiliation and further discrimination, public shaming, and even tortuous inquiry – acts that are played out in SANCTUM.Masked GenitalsFeminist surveillance studies scholar Rachel Hall has referred to the impetus for revelation in the post-9/11 era as a desire for a universal “aesthetics of transparency” in which the world and the body is turned inside-out so that there are no longer “secrets or interiors … in which terrorists or terrorist threats might find refuge” (127). Hall takes up the case study of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (infamously known as “the Underwear Bomber”) who attempted to detonate plastic explosives hidden in his underwear while onboard a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on 25 December 2009. Hall argues that this event signified a coalescence of fears surrounding bodies of colour, genitalia, and terrorism. News reports following the incident stated that Abdulmutallab tucked his penis to make room for the explosive, thereby “queer[ing] the aspiring terrorist by indirectly referencing his willingness … to make room for a substitute phallus” (Hall 289). Overtly manifested in the Underwear Bomber incident is also a desire to voyeuristically expose a hidden, threatening interiority, which is inherently implicated with anxieties surrounding gender deviance. Beauchamp elaborates on how gender deviance and transgression have coalesced with terrorism, which was exemplified in the wake of the 9/11 attacks when the United States Department of Homeland Security issued a memo that male terrorists “may dress as females in order to discourage scrutiny” (“Artful” 359). Although this advisory did not explicitly reference transgender populations, it linked “deviant” gender presentation—to which we could also add Abdulmutallab’s tucking of his penis—with threats to national security (Beauchamp, Going Stealth). This also calls to mind a broader discussion of the ways in which genitalia feature in the screening process. Prior to the introduction of millimetre-wave body scanning technology, the most common form of scanner used was the backscatter imaging machine, which displayed “naked” body images of each passenger to the security agent. Due to privacy concerns, these machines were replaced by the scanners currently in place which use a generic outline of a passenger (exemplified in SANCTUM) to detect possible threats.It is here worth returning to Blas’s installation, as it also implicitly critiques the security protocols that attempt to reveal genitalia as both threatening and as evidence of an inner truth about a body. At one moment in the installation a bayonet-like object pierces the blank crotch of the mannequin, shattering it into holographic fragments. The apparent genderlessness of the mannequins is contrasted with these graphic sexual acts. The penetrating metallic instrument that breaks into the loin of the mannequin, combined with the camera shot that slowly zooms in on this action, draws attention to a surveillant fascination with genitalia and revelation. As Nicholas L. Clarkson documents in his analysis of airport security protocols governing prostheses, including limbs and packies (silicone penis prostheses), genitals are a central component of the screening process. While it is stipulated that physical searches should not require travellers to remove items of clothing, such as underwear, or to expose their genitals to staff for inspection, prosthetics are routinely screened and examined. This practice can create tensions for trans or disabled passengers with prosthetics in so-called “sensitive” areas, particularly as guidelines for security measures are often implemented by airport staff who are not properly trained in transgender-sensitive protocols.ConclusionAccording to media technologies scholar Jeremy Packer, “rather than being treated as one to be protected from an exterior force and one’s self, the citizen is now treated as an always potential threat, a becoming bomb” (382). Although this technological policing impacts all who are subjected to security regimes (which is to say, everyone), this amalgamation of body and bomb has exacerbated the ways in which bodies socially coded as threatening or deceptive are targeted by security and surveillance regimes. Nonetheless, others have argued that the use of invasive forms of surveillance can be justified by the state as an exchange: that citizens should willingly give up their right to privacy in exchange for safety (Monahan 1). Rather than subscribing to this paradigm, Blas’ SANCTUM critiques the violence of mandatory complicity in this “trade-off” narrative. Because their operationalisation rests on normative notions of embodiment that are governed by preconceptions around gender, race, sexuality and ability, surveillance systems demand that bodies become transparent. This disproportionally affects those whose bodies do not match norms, with trans and queer bodies often becoming unreadable (Kafer and Grinberg). The shadowy realm of SANCTUM illustrates this tension between biometric revelation and resistance, but also suggests that opacity may be a tool of transformation in the face of such discriminatory violations that are built into surveillance.ReferencesAhmed, Sara. “A Phenomenology of Whiteness.” Feminist Theory 8.2 (2007): 149–68.Beauchamp, Toby. “Artful Concealment and Strategic Visibility: Transgender Bodies and U.S. State Surveillance after 9/11.” Surveillance & Society 6.4 (2009): 356–66.———. Going Stealth: Transgender Politics and U.S. Surveillance Practices. 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