Journal articles on the topic 'Western Highlands Association for the Disabled'

Abstract The association between convection and African easterly wave (AEW) activity over tropical Africa and the tropical Atlantic during the boreal summer is examined using satellite brightness temperature (TB) and ECMWF reanalysis datasets. Spectral analysis using 18 yr of TB data shows significant variance in the 2–6-day range across most of the region. Within the regions of deep convection, this time scale accounts for about 25%–35% of the total variance. The 2–6-day convective variance has similar amplitudes over western and eastern Africa, while dynamic measures of AEW activity show stronger amplitudes in the west. This study suggests that weak AEW activity in the east is consistent with initial wave development there and indicates that convection triggered on the western side of the mountains over central and eastern Africa, near Darfur (western Sudan) and Ethiopia, has a role in initiating AEWs westward. The subsequent development and growth of AEWs in West Africa is associated with stronger coherence with convection there. Results show large year-to-year variability in convection at the 2–6-day time scale, which tends to vary consistently with the mean convection and dynamical measures of AEW activity over West Africa and the Atlantic, but not over central and eastern Africa. The Darfur region is particularly important for providing convective precursors that propagate westward and trigger AEWs downstream. During wet years, convection over eastern Africa (western Ethiopian highlands) can be a significant source of AEW initiation. In addition to being important for precursors of AEWs, the Darfur region is also a source of convection that propagates eastward toward Ethiopia.

The hitherto unknown larva of Apatania theischingerorum Malicky 1981 is described, based on the association with adult females using sequence data from the mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase region. Genetic data confirmed the distinct status of this taxon within the parthenogenetic Apatania muliebris complex (Schmid 1954). We provide information on the morphology of the larva and figure the most important diagnostic features. Apatania theischingerorum is morphologically close to A. fimbriata (Pictet 1834). In the context of the Apataniidae key of Waringer et al. (2015), the species pair can be separated by pleural setation patterns on abdominal segment I and by their distribution ranges in Europe: A. fimbriata is known from the Alps, the western and central highlands, the western plains, the Hungarian lowlands and the Carpathians, whereas A. theischingerorum has been recorded exclusively on the Iberian peninsula.

The Papua New Guinea (PNG) species of the water beetle genus Hydraena Kugelann, 1794, are revised, based on the study of 7,411 databased specimens. The two previously named species are redescribed, and 130 new species are described. The species are placed in 32 species groups. High resolution digital images of all primary types are presented (online version in color), scanning electron micrographs of representative species are given, and geographic distributions are mapped. Male genitalia, representative female terminal abdominal segments and representative spermathecae are illustrated. Papua New Guinea Hydraena species are typically found in sandy/gravelly stream margins, often in association with streamside litter; some species are primarily pond or swamp dwelling, and a few species are usually found in the hygropetric splash zone on stream boulders or on rocks at the margins of waterfalls. The geographic distributions of PNG Hydraena are compared with the Areas of Freshwater Endemism recently proposed by Polhemus and Allen (2007), and found to substantially support those areas. Only one species, H. impercepta Zwick, 1977 is known to be found in both Australia and Papua New Guinea. The probable Australian origins of the PNG hydraenid genera Gymnochthebius and Limnebius are discussed. The origins of just a few species of PNG Hydraena appear to clearly be Australia, and of comparatively recent origin, whereas the origins of the remainder remain problematic because of lack of knowledge of the Hydraena fauna in Papua Province, Indonesia, and islands large and small to the west of New Guinea. No endemic genera of Hydraenidae are currently known for New Guinea, whereas 98% of the known species are endemic. New species of Hydraena are: H. acumena (Eastern Highlands Province: Koma River, tributary of Fio River), H. adelbertensis (Madang Province: Adelbert Mts., below Keki), H. akameku (Madang Province: Akameku–Brahmin, Bismarck Range), H. altapapua (Southern Highlands Province: Sopulkul, 30–35 km NE Mendi), H. ambra (Eastern Highlands Province: Wanitabi Valley, nr. Okapa), H. ambripes (Madang Province: Finisterre Mts., Naho River Valley, Budemu), H. ambroides (Eastern Highlands Province: Wanitabi Valley, nr. Okapa), H. apertista (Madang Province: Finisterre Mts., Lower Naho Valley, Hinggia), H. apexa (Eastern Highlands Province: Okapa), H. aquila (Madang Province: Simbai area), H. aulaarta (Western Highlands Province: Kundum), H. austrobesa (Central Province: nr. Port Moresby, Sogeri Plateau, Musgrave River), H. bacchusi (Eastern Highlands Province: Wanitabi Valley, nr. Okapa), H. balkei (Eastern Highlands Province: Akameku–Brahmin, Bismarck Range), H. bicarinova (Eastern Highlands Province: Wanitabi Valley, nr. Okapa), H. bifunda (Morobe Province: c. 7 mi. Lae–Bulolo road), H. biundulata (Morobe Province: Lae–Bulolo road), H. brahman (Madang Province: Ramu Valley, 4.5 km N Brahman), H. bubulla (Madang Province: Akameku–Brahmin, Bismarck Range), H. buloba (Morobe Province: Herzog Mts., Wagau), H. buquintana (Western Highlands Province: Mt. Hagen town area), H. carinocisiva (Eastern Highlands Province: Aiyura), H. carmellita (Morobe Province: Herzog Mts., Wagau), H. cavifrons (Madang Province: Ramu Valley, 4.5 km N Brahman), H. cheesmanae (Central Province: Kokoda), H. clarinis (Madang Province: Sepik Ramu Basin, Kojé Creek), H. colorata (Morobe Province: 5 miles W of Lae, Buins Creek), H. confluenta (Eastern Highlands Province: Umg. [=environs of] Kainantu, Onerunka), H. copulata (Gulf Province: Marawaka, Mala), H. cunicula (Madang Province: Akameku–Brahmin, Bismarck Range), H. decepta (Eastern Highlands Province: Okapa), H. diadema (Eastern Highlands Province: Purosa Valley, nr. Okapa), H. dudgeoni (Madang Province: Sepik Ramu Basin, Kojé Creek), H. einsteini (Central Province: Port Moresby–Brown River road), H. essentia (Eastern Highlands Province: Sepik River Basin, stream beside milestone labelled G-99), H. exhalista (Gulf Province: Marawaka, Mala), H. fasciata (Morobe Province: Herzog Mts., Wagau), H. fascinata (Madang Province: Finisterre Mts., Naho River Valley, nr. Moro), H. fasciolata (Madang Province: Madang, Ohu Village), H. fasciopaca (Madang Province: Keki, Adelbert Mts.), H. fenestella (Morobe Province: Lae-Bulolo road), H. foliobba (Morobe Province: Herzog Mts., Wagau), H. formosopala (East Sepik Province: Prince Alexander Mts., Wewak), H. funda (Central Province: Moitaka, 7 miles N of Port Moresby), H. fundacta (Madang Province: Adelbert Mts., Sewan–Keki), H. fundapta (Central Province: Port Moresby–Brown River road), H. fundarca (Eastern Highlands Province: Okapa), H. fundextra (Morobe Province: Markham Valley, Gusap), H. galea (Eastern Highlands Province: Akameku–Brahmin, Bismarck Range, 700 m), H. herzogestella (Morobe Province: Herzog Mts., Bundun), H. hornabrooki (East Sepik Province: Sepik, main river), H. huonica (Madang Province: Kewensa, Finisterre Range, Yupna, Huon Peninsula), H. ibalimi (Sandaun Province: Mianmin), H. idema (Eastern Highlands Province: Umg. [=environs of] Onerunka, Ramu River), H. impala (Central Province: nr. Port Moresby, Sogeri Plateau, Musgrave River), H. incisiva (Morobe Province: Herzog Mts., Wagau), H. incista (Western Highlands Province: Simbai, Kairong River), H. infoveola (Gulf Province: Marawaka, Mala), H. inhalista (Madang Province: Finisterre Mts., Naho River Valley, Damanti), H. inplacopaca (Eastern Highlands Province: Waisa, nr. Okapa), H. insandalia (Eastern Highlands Province: Headwaters of Fio River, 0.5 km downstream of river crossing on Herowana/Oke Lookout path, ca. 4.5 km N of Herowana airstrip), H. intensa (Morobe Province: Lae–Bulolo road), H. johncoltranei (National Capital District, Varirata NP), H. jubilata (Madang Province: Finisterre Mts., Naho River Valley, Budemu), H. koje (Madang Province: Sepik Ramu Basin, Kojé Creek), H. koma (Eastern Highlands Province: Koma River, tributary of Fio River, 100 m downstream of rattan bridge crossing, ca. 3.8 km S by E of Herowana airstrip), H. labropaca (Central Province: nr. Port Moresby, Sogeri Plateau, Musgrave River), H. lassulipes (Morobe Province: Herzog Mts., Wagau), H. limbobesa (Gulf Province: Marawaka, near Ande), H. maculopala (Madang Province: Madang, Ohu Village), H. manulea (Morobe Province: Lae, Buins Creek), H. manuloides (Central Province: Port Moresby–Brown River road), H. marawaka (Gulf Province: Marawaka, Mala), H. mercuriala (Sandaun Province: May River), H. mianminica (Sandaun Province:May River), H. nanocolorata (Madang Province: Sepik Ramu Basin, Kojé Creek), H. nanopala (Madang Province: Sepik Ramu Basin, Kojé Creek), H. nitidimenta (Eastern Highlands Province: Koma River, tributary of Fio River, at rattan bridge crossing, ca. 2.6 km N by W of Herowana airstrip), H. okapa (Eastern Highlands Province: Wanitabi Valley, nr. Okapa), H. ollopa (Western Highlands Province: Kundum), H. otiarca (Morobe Province: Herzog Mts., Wagau, Snake River), H. owenobesa (Morobe Province: ca. 10 km S Garaina Saureri), H. pacificica (Morobe Province: Huon Pen., Kwapsanek), H. pala (Morobe Province: Lae–Bulolo road, Gurakor Creek), H. palamita (Central Province: nr. Port Moresby, Sogeri Plateau, Musgrave River), H. paxillipes (Morobe Province: Lae–Bulolo road, Patep Creek), H. pectenata (Madang Province: Finisterre Mts., Naho River Valley, Damanti), H. pegopyga (Madang Province: Ramu Valley, 3 km N Brahman), H. penultimata (Sandaun Province: May River), H. perpunctata (Madang Province: Sepik Ramu Basin, Kojé Creek), H. pertransversa (Eastern Highlands Province: Clear stream, summit of Kassem Pass at forest level), H. phainops (Morobe Province: Lae–Bulolo road, Patep Creek), H. photogenica (Eastern Highlands Province: Goroka, Mt. Gahavisuka), H. picula (Eastern Highlands Province: Goroka, Daulo Pass), H. pilulambra (Eastern Highlands Province: Clear stream, summit of Kassem Pass at forest level), H. pluralticola (Morobe Province: c. 7 miles Lae–Bulolo road), H. processa (Morobe Province: Herzog Mts., Wagau), H. quadriplumipes (Madang Province: Aiome area), H. quintana (Morobe Province: Markham Valley, Lae–Kainantu road, Erap R), H. ramuensis (Madang Province: Ramu Valley, 6 km N Brahman), H. ramuquintana (Madang Province: Ramu Valley, 6 km N Brahman), H. receptiva (Morobe Province: Lae–Bulolo road), H. remulipes (Morobe Province: Herzog Mts., Wagau), H. reticulobesa (Madang Province: Finisterre Mts., Naho River Valley, Moro), H. sagatai (Sandaun Province: Abau River), H. saluta (Madang Province: Finisterre Mts., Naho River Valley, Damanti), H. sepikramuensis (Madang Province: Ramu Valley, Sare River, 4 km N Brahman), H. sexarcuata (Eastern Highlands Province: Akameku–Brahmin, Bismarck Range), H. sexsuprema (Madang Province: Finisterre Mts., Naho River Valley, Damanti), H. spinobesa (Madang Province: Finisterre Mts., Naho River Valley, Budemu), H. striolata (Oro Province: Northern District, Tanbugal Afore village), H. supersexa (Eastern Highlands Province: Okapa), H. supina (Eastern Highlands Province: Wanitabi Valley, nr. Okapa), H. tarsotricha (Morobe Province: Herzog Mts., Wagau, Snake River), H. tetana (Eastern Highlands Province: Okapa), H. thola (Central Province: Port Moresby– Brown River road), H. tholasoris (Morobe Province: Markham Valley, Gusap, c. 90 miles NW of Lae), H. thumbelina (Madang Province: Finisterre Mts., Naho River Valley, Damanti), H. thumbelipes (Sandaun Province: Mianmin), H. tibiopaca (Morobe Province: ridge between Aseki–Menyamya), H. torosopala (Madang Province: Keki, Adelbert Mts.), H. torricellica (Morobe Province: Torricelli Mts., village below Sibilanga Stn.), H. transvallis (Madang Province: Finisterre Mts., Naho River Valley, Damanti), H. trichotarsa (Morobe Province: Lae–Bulolo road), H. tricosipes (Morobe Province: Herzog Mts., Wagau), H. tritropis (Madang Province: Sepik Ramu Basin, Kojé Creek), H. tritutela (Morobe Province: ca. 10 km S Garaina Saureri), H. ulna (Morobe Province: Herzog Mts., Wagau), H. variopaca (Eastern Highlands Province: Wanitabi Valley, nr. Okapa), H. velvetina (Eastern Highlands Province: Purosa Valley, nr. Okapa).

SummaryA simple and inexpensive method for monitoring child mortality in association with birth registration was introduced into the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Eight thousand two hundred and one newborn infants were registered in 1988, approximately 77% of all children born in that year. The risk of death by age 2 was determined from reports given by the mother on the present status of a previously born child at the time of a recent delivery or during clinic registration of the current birth. This was 91 per 1000 for the province and corresponds to a risk of death by age 1 of 77/1000 by extrapolation using standard lifetables. This method was validated by comparison with a continuing demographic surveillance system covering 30,000 people in the western part of the province. The new birth certificate has been an incentive to increase supervised delivery rates and to generate a register that can be used to increase vaccination coverage.

This article examines the role of the Western Canadian Association of the Deaf (wcad) in the establishment of the Saskatchewan School for the Deaf (ssd) from 1923–1931. Using correspondence between provincial officials, wcad figures, parents of deaf children, as well as extensive application records and contemporary deaf publications, it contributes to a growing body of historical literature that seeks to reappraise the political advocacy and agency of deaf and disabled people in Canada before the late twentieth century. This article argues that the wcad was instrumental in both forcing the government of Saskatchewan to meaningfully extend compulsory education to deaf children and youth, and in advising the governments of James Gardiner and J.T.M. Anderson on how best to establish an ssd that met many of the Association’s key cultural, linguistic, and educational demands.

The issues of population social security are also urgent in Ukraine in the 21st century. A lotof these issues still remain poorly studied. The purpose of this article is to clarify the circumstances of the social insurance system formation in the post-war policy of Soviet social security system in the western regions of Ukraine. The social security system is characterized by the formation of trade unions according to the industrial-branch principle. The main and only participants in these funds were enterprises, institutions and organizations; therefore, social and insurance assistance was provided to citizens in a centralized manner and had a strictly targeted purpose. All members of trade unions (workers and employees) were entitled to pensions and free medical care being disabled in the event of injury and other illnesses. In kolkhozes, the peasants could not claim the state aid, they should have been paid the aid from the funds of the collective farms on the decision of the general meeting. In the system of social security, public organizations were formed: disablement association (Ukoopinrada and Ukrinstrakhkasa), mutual aid funds (MAF), the Society of deaf people (UTOG) and the Society of blind people (UTOS). Social security bodies lacked funds; therefore, in general, the decrees remained declarative, since all payments were scanty, much lower than the subsistence level. Keywords: social security, trade unions, mutual aid fund, members of kolgosp, pension, disablement

The present study aims to evaluate the reality of the services provided to children with cerebral palsy from the guardians’ perspective and its relation to some relevant variables (i.e. branch of the association, educational level of the parents, monthly income, and number of years for receiving the associations’ services). The study was applied to the families of children with cerebral palsy in (10) centers of the Association of Disabled Children in Saudi Arabia. Therefore, a tool for data collection was prepared and verified for validity and reliability. It comprised (47) items distributed to (6) domains. The results showed that the arithmetic means of the domains ranged from (0.65) to (0.84). While “the performance of the administration and staff” was ranked first with an arithmetic mean of (0.84), “the supporting services” domain was ranked last with an arithmetic mean of (0.65), and the tool’s arithmetic mean was (0.71). Additionally, there are no statistically significant differences for (the academic qualification of the father, academic qualification of the mother, average monthly income, and number of years for receiving the associations’ services) variables. The study concluded that there is an urgent need to improve the services provided to children with cerebral palsy in all domains, especially in the Western Region of Saudi Arabia.

Bentong constituency has always been the Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA) electoral stronghold and under the Barisan National (BN) coalition since Malaysia's independence in 1957. However, during the 14th Malaysian general election (GE14) political tsunami, the MCA has lost this parliament seat (P89 Bentong) to the Democratic Action Party (DAP), which is under the Pakatan Harapan (PH) coalition on 9 May 2018. Besides, Bentong is the traditional constituency of the MCA leadership, such as the first Member of Parliament (MP) for Bentong (1959-1989), Tan Sri Chan Siang Sun, retired as Health Minister cum MCA Vice-President. The second MP for Bentong is Tan Sri Lim Ah Lek (1989-1999), and he retired as Human Resources Minister cum MCA Deputy President. Before GE14, Dato' Sri Liow Tiong Lai was the third MP for Bentong (1999-2018) and retired as Transport Minister cum MCA President. Bentong is a district located in western Pahang, Malaysia. In 2005, Bentong officially declared as Bentong Municipal Council. According to Department of Statistics Malaysia (DOSM, 2011), Bentong population has reached about 115,000 people with administrative covered area of 335 square miles (868 square km) including Bentong Town, Genting Highlands, Karak, Telemong, Manchis, Sungai Dua and Bukit Tinggi. While its control area covered Sungai Gapoi, Simpang Pelangai, Kampung Shafie, Jambu Rias, Janda Baik and Sungai Penjuring. Keywords: Bentong, GE14, Sinchew, Economics, Chinese

Abstract The process of tornadogenesis in complex terrain environments has received relatively little research attention to date. Here, an analysis is presented of a long-lived supercell that became tornadic over complex terrain in association with the Great Barrington, Massachusetts (GBR), F3 tornado of 29 May 1995. The GBR tornado left an almost continuous 50–1000-m-wide damage path that stretched for ∼50 km. The apparent rarity of significant tornadogenesis in rough terrain from a supercell well documented in operational Doppler radar motivated this case study. Doppler radar observations showed that the GBR supercell possessed a midlevel mesocyclone well prior to tornadogenesis and that the mesocyclone intensified as it crossed the eastern edge of New York’s Catskill Mountains and entered the Hudson Valley. Tornadogenesis occurred as the GBR mesocyclone crossed the Hudson Valley and ascended the highlands to the east. Subsequently, the mesocyclone weakened as it approached the Taconic Range in western Massachusetts before it intensified again as it moved downslope into the Housatonic Valley where it was associated with the GBR tornado. Because of a dearth of significant mesoscale surface and upper-air observations, the conclusions and inferences presented in this paper must be necessarily limited and speculative. What data were available suggested that on a day when the mesoscale environment was supportive of supercell thunderstorm development, according to conventional indicators of wind shear and atmospheric stability, topographic configurations and the associated channeling of ambient low-level flows conspired to create local orographic enhancements to tornadogenesis potential. Numerical experimentation is needed to address these inferences, speculative points, and related issues raised by the GBR case study.

Background:Several studies investigated the socio-economic impact of Sjögren’s syndrome (SS) showing an increased risk of work disability and a reduced health-related quality of life. SS is also associated with increased direct and indirect healthcare costs. There are no published data about Switzerland, a country with high resources and easy access to healthcare except dental care, which is rarely reimbursed.Objectives:To evaluate the professional and economic impact of SS in patients living in Western Switzerland.Methods:Cross-sectional survey-based study conducted in December 2020, during the pandemic. Patients suffering from SS and living in Western Switzerland (Geneva and Lausanne region) were invited by the regional association of patients with SS to complete a survey assessing the socio-economic impact of SS.Results:Among the 86 patients who were contacted, 55 (64%) completed the survey. Participants were predominantly female (95%) with a mean (SD) age of 54.2 (12.3). Mean (SD) EULAR SS Patient Reported Index (ESSPRI) was 6.5 (1.6), assessing pain, fatigue and dryness.In the working age population (under 65, n=39), 64% of the participants reported to be employed, 88% of whom working part-time. They reported to work 23.3 (10.1) hours per week (mean, SD). 60% reported SS-related work incapacity periods during the past year. 72% of participants had to reduce their working hours and 27% had to change careers due to their medical condition. 16% benefited from an adaptation of their workstation to their health status.In terms of work disability, 27% of the participants depended on disability insurance pension, of whom 38% received a full pension. 16% of the participants applied for a disability pension and were waiting for an administrative decision. A minority of participants (11%) reported to receive a minimum subsistence allowance from the local social service.Participants estimated to pay 2752 CHF (3000) per year (median, IQR) out of their own pocket (Swiss monthly median wage: 6500 CHF) for health care not covered by health insurances. 95% of the patients had to pay for dental medicine costs, at least partially. Public health insurance contributed to dental costs for 44% of the patients and private health insurance for 28% of them. 22% of the patients reported to limit dental care for financial reasons.Conclusion:Two-thirds of the patients with SS remained in active employment, but the majority of them working in part-time, with a substantial loss of income. One third of the patients are work disabled and depend on a disability pension. Dental care was not reimbursed in half of the patients by their health insurance, leading to dental care access restriction for 20% of the patients with SS. Despite a relatively high wage level in Switzerland, SS represents a substantial financial burden for most of the patients.References:[1]Mandl T, Jørgensen TS, Skougaard M, Olsson P, Kristensen LE. Work Disability in Newly Diagnosed Patients with Primary Sjögren Syndrome. J Rheumatol. 2017 Feb;44(2):209-215.[2]Meijer JM, Meiners PM, Huddleston Slater JJ, Spijkervet FK, Kallenberg CG, Vissink A, Bootsma H. Health-related quality of life, employment and disability in patients with Sjogren’s syndrome. Rheumatology. 2009 Sep;48(9):1077-82.[3]Westhoff G, Dörner T, Zink A. Fatigue and depression predict physician visits and work disability in women with primary Sjögren’s syndrome: results from a cohort study. Rheumatology. 2012 Feb;51(2):262-9.[4]Miyamoto ST, Valim V, Fisher BA. Health-related quality of life and costs in Sjögren’s syndrome. Rheumatology. 2019 Feb 15:key370. doi: 10.1093/rheumatology/key370. Epub ahead of print.Disclosure of Interests:None declared

  Bovine tuberculosis (TB) is an important neglected zoonosis in Cameroon, where many communities depend on their livestock for livelihood and the incidence of human TB and TB-HIV/AIDS co-infection are high and increasing annually. The aim of this study was to estimate the prevalence of bovine TB in cattle in the highlands of Cameroon. The magnitude and trend of detecting TB lesions in slaughtered cattle (1994 to 2010) and tuberculin skin tests (TST) in 2853 cattle (84 herds) of 39 livestock rearing communities were analysed. Of 129 165 slaughtered cattle inspected, 599 (0.46%; 95% CI: 0.43%–0.50%) showed suspected TB lesions among a total of 983 (0.76%; 95% CI: 0.71%–0.81%) identified pathologies. The monthly TB detection rates ranged from 0.30% (95% CI: 0.20%–0.40%) to 0.81% (95% CI: 0.64%–0.98%) and annual rates from 0.04% (95% CI: 0%–0.11%) to 1.46% (95% CI: 1.22%–1.69%). The rates were not affected (P < 0.05) by season and fluctuating peaks were also recorded. The comparative TST revealed that bovine TB was widely distributed in live cattle (4.67%; 95% CI: 3.89%–5.44%) and was higher (χ² = 17.50, P ≤ 0.001) in the Western highlands than Adamawa plateaux. Comparative TST bovine TB reactors were higher (P < 0.05) in cattle managed in semi-intensive and beef production systems compared to the others. Animals in small herds showed higher (χ² = 4.283, P = 0.038) rates than those in large herds. Bovine TB prevalence in exotic/upgraded cattle was comparable to that of the Red Bororo zebu but higher than the rates in Guadali (χ² = 4.971, P = 0.026) and White Fulani (χ² = 5.6, P = 0.018) zebus. Among the indigenous zebus, the rate was higher in Red Bororo than the Guadali (χ² = 6.244, P = 0.012) and White Fulani (χ² = 6.568, P = 0.010). Sex did not influence (χ² = 0.410, P = 0.522) bovine TB prevalence in this study but diagnosis of the disease was higher (χ² = 5.787; P = 0.016) among adult/older cattle than in younger animals. Further analysis of the TST responses revealed that atypical mycobacterial infections was widespread and 6.83% of tested animals showed positive reactions at both bovine and avian tuberculin injection sites and a strong association (χ² = 2.512; P = 0.113) between skin responses to both tuberculins. The study confirms that bovine TB is prevalent in live cattle and meat production abattoirs in Cameroon and we recommend strict a interpretation of TST results for maximum diagnosis of the disease in the local environment. A need for comprehensive investigation of the molecular epidemiology, zoonotic risks and the public health importance of bovine TB in Cameroon cannot be overemphasised.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between perceived organizational support (POS), organizational commitment and job satisfaction among special education teachers in Pakistan. The data were collected from 85 special education teachers from different special education centers in Punjab, Pakistan. POS was measured using a survey of POS developed by Eisenberger et al. (1986). Affective continuance and normative commitment are measured by affective continuance and normative commitment scales developed by Meyer and Allen’s (1984) and Allen and Meyer (1990), respectively. Results of the current study show that POS and job satisfaction are positively correlated with affective and normative commitment. POS and job satisfaction are not associated with continuance organizational commitment. This suggests that a teacher’s commitment can be improved by increasing organizational support, underprivileged working environment and job satisfaction. Limitations and implication of the study are discussed. Design/methodology/approach In the current study, cross-sectional research design and non-probability purposive sampling technique were used. A sample of 85 special education teachers was collected from different special education institutes of Punjab and federal, Pakistan. Inclusion criteria were teacher with specialization in all disabilities (mentally challenged, deaf, blind, physical handicapped and slow learners), informed consent and age range 20‒55 years, at least 6-month teaching experience in special education. Exclusion criteria were teaching experience less than 6 months and age less than 20 or more than 55 years. The demographic characteristics of teachers are presented in Table II. Findings Findings of the present study suggest a positive association between POS, affective commitment, normative commitment and job satisfaction, whereas there is no association between POS and continuance commitment as well as between job satisfaction and continuance commitment among special education teachers in Pakistan. Organization should consider the exclusive support of the special education teachers. Research limitations/implications The current study also has some limitation. The sample size is very small. In the current study, data are collected from 85 special education teachers from federal and few cities of Punjab, Pakistan. Hence, data are not true representative. Data for current study are collected through self-reported scales and only collected from academic staff. Practical implications In the current study, special education teachers have identified factors that promote organizational support, commitment and job satisfaction, such as reasonable workloads, sound working environment, unbiased and fair working conditions, and administrative support. It has been found that decreased level of POS, commitment and job satisfaction damage the organization, special educators and special students. Therefore, special education department should develop and implement policies that strengthen these dimensions. A broad recommendation can be made on the basis of these findings: affective and normative commitment increases when individuals have satisfying experience with organization. Thus, this may be improved by providing special educators with the opportunity to work in a better work environment, with proper work load, as it would increase emotional and normative attachment of the individuals with their institutes. The current study would be helpful for policy makers in the field of education and administration in order to work on these dimensions to increase the teacher’s job satisfaction and organizational commitment. It would also create awareness among the general public about the potential problems of special education teachers in Pakistan affecting the quality of life of children with special needs. Results suggest that by providing organizational support, appropriate work load and unbiased attitude, a teacher’s commitment can be improved. Social implications The current research helps academics and administration to improve social functioning of special education teachers by improving their job satisfaction and organizational support. Originality/value The prevalence rate of children with disabilities is increasing rapidly in Pakistan. Since stigma is associated with individuals with disabilities, parents hide disabilities of their children so that other relatives may not face any problems, such as being doubted of carrying defective genes. Families have to cope with financial crises due to lack of institutional support, extra expense to deal with disabled person and loss of work. In such circumstances, special education institutions are only hopes for such people to assist them in dealing with their disabled children. However, the strength of teachers in these institutions is not enough to fulfill needs of such children. A number of researches have examined the role of organizational support, job satisfaction and organizational commitment of teachers in western countries (Makanjee et al., 2006; Alijanpou et al., 2013; Batool and Ullah, 2013). However, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, no study has yet investigated this serious issue in Pakistan. This study provides valuable information on organizational support, commitment and job satisfaction among special educators, and recommendation on how organizational commitment can be improved.

Due to the vertical zonality of the studied area, its environment varied greatly over a relatively short distance within the same time span. It is possible to distinguish the following different types of environment: (1) Alluvial floodplains around larger water flows. I assume in the Last Glacial there was continuous coniferous forest, with occasional sporadic occurrences of thermophilous deciduous trees in favourable locations mainly in south Moravia. (2) Lower foothills up to about 300 m a.s.l. along the floodplains, probably the most widespread type of environment in the studied area. Open grasslands with isolated trees and shrubs were predominant. (3) At the higher altitudes of the hills (ca. 300-500 m a.s.l.) there was only steppe. (4) The highest parts of highlands and the mountains (500-1,400 m a.s.l.). During the cold and dry events these areas were mostly without grassy vegetation. The boundaries of the above mentioned environments fluctuated throughout the whole of the Last Glacial. A series of new investigations of Last Glacial Moravian sites took place over the recent decades. The result was a relatively large amount of fossil vertebrate findings, from karst areas (caves), and from open air sites. All findings were assigned to precisely defined layers which were in most cases radiometrically and/or archaeologically dated. It allowed association of the fauna communities with stratigraphical events and therefore produced a clearer picture of changes during the entire Last Glacial. The study showed that the species structure of the communities was not stable during the Last Glacial. The changes did not exhibit gradual linear development. The time span of the individual communities varied greatly. In two cases a total species change occurred very rapidly. In other cases the changes occurred over a longer period of time and may have involved penetration of new species into existing communities to a significant extent. The changes of communities associated with single stratigraphical events were palaeoecologically evaluated. In comparison with changes in the environment, I can conclude that both changes occurred simultaneously. I am therefore convinced that the primary impulse for community change was induced by environmental change. The Eemian communities of regions east of Germany differ from coeval communities of Western and the west part of Central Europe. This difference was driven by variation in precipitation, a more humid climate in the West and continental climate in the East. We have therefore two different Eemian provinces in Central Europe, the more humid west (oceanic weather) and the drier east (continental weather). The first half of the Last Glacial, about 40 ka from its beginning, had a wide range of climatic oscillations of different intensity. In layers of Moravian localities with interglacial species, the numbers of finds are always limited (small number). They were previously assigned to the Eemian. The earlier stratigraphic scale of the Late Pleistocene corresponded with this view. According to recent opinion, however, the rare finds of interglacial species in these localities are not from the Eemian interglacial, but from the first interstadials of the Last Glacial. Larger temperature oscillations occurred only in the second half of the Last Glacial and the most significant cooling was at the very end of this time. In the first occurrence of the typical Holocene assemblage in the Moravian Karst there are still some species which are typical for the Last Glacial (reindeer and lemmings). Lemmings died out first, but reindeer survived up to the Neolithic age. This area had, and still has today, differing environments within a relatively short distance caused by vertical zonation. There was a significantly colder climate in the deep and relatively narrow valleys. The upper part of the insolation slopes was mainly covered with grass and the average annual temperature there was much higher than in the valleys. This was reflected of course in the fauna. The in-migration of animals was not only via a meridional route. Migration was not only caused by oscillation of the average temperature or rainfall, but also by the need to find the best conditions for living. Seasonal migration was caused mainly by annual changes in the energy value of the food plants.

Account is given of the distribution and habitats of the three Lymnaea species currently on recordin the National Freshwater Snail Collection (NFSC) of South Africa. A total number of 616, 353and 202 loci (1/16th square degrees) was respectively recorded for Lymnaea natalensis, L. columellaand L. truncatula. The number of loci in which the collection sites of each species was located, wasdistributed in intervals of mean annual air temperature and rainfall, as well as intervals of meanaltitude. A temperature index was calculated for all mollusc species in the database and the resultsused to rank them in order of their association with low to high climatic temperatures. Chi-squareand effect size values were calculated to determine the significance in differences between frequencies of occurrence of each species in, on, or at the different options for each of the variables investigated and also to determine the significance of the differences between the three species. None of the three Lymnaea species were well represented in the arid regions of the Northern ,Western and Eastern Cape Province, and only L. truncatula was reported from Lesotho. Lymnaeanatalensis is the most widespread of the three species, while the distribution of L. truncatula displaysa sporadic and limited pattern. The alien invader species L. columella was first reported from SouthAfrica in the early 1940’s but was so successful in its invasion of water-bodies in South Africa thatit is currently considered the third most widespread freshwater snail in the country. Lymnaea truncatula was the only one of the three species not recovered from all 14 water-body types represented in the database. The largest number of samples of L. truncatula by far, was yielded by marshes while the largest number of samples of the other two species was collected in rivers, streams and dams. The highest percentage occurrence of all three species was in habitats in which the water conditions were described as permanent, standing, fresh and clear. Although the highest percentage of samples of all three species was reported from loci that fell within the interval ranging from 16-20°C, a significant number of samples of L. truncatula came from loci falling with in the 11-15°C interval. In view of the fact that Lymnaea species are well known as intermediate hosts for liver fluke in South Africa and elsewhere in the world, the widespread occurrence of these snails could have considerable health and economic consequences. Lymnaea natalenis is the most important and probably the only intermediate host of Fasciola gigantica, the most common liver fluke in Africa but F. gigantica has been reliably reported only from Lesotho where its traditional intermediate host, L. truncatula is widespread. However, the epidemiology of fasciolosis in South Africa has been complicated by the invasion of many water-bodies by L. columella because this species has proved to be a successful host for F. hepatica where it had been introduced elsewhere in the world. To our knowledge its role in South Africa in this respect has not yet been evaluated. Due to the fact that no statistics are available in print, the results of positive serological tests on cattle herds all over South Africa were used to compile a map depicting the possible occurrence of Fasciola species in livestock in this country. Although human infections with Fasciola in Africa was considered as very rare in 1975 the situation has changed. It is considered an underrated and underreported disease in humans in Ethiopia and in Egypt an increase in cases of fasciolosis and prevalence’s as high as 12.8% in humans have also recently been reported. To our knowledge the only cases of human fasciolosis reported in literature for South Africa were from northern KwaZulu-Natal where F. hepatica infections were found in 22 out of 7 569 school children examined in 1981. Efforts to obtain recent statisticson human infections from various persons and authorities were totally unsuccessful. In view of statistics available for elsewhere in the world, it would be unwise to assume that no problems exist in this regard in South Africa. The number of people suffering from fasciolosis was already estimated at 2.4 million in 61 countries in 1995 and another 180 million at risk of becoming infected, with the highest prevalence’s reported from Bolivia, China, Ecuador, Egypt, France, Iran, Peru and Portugal. The results of recent serological assays for the detection of fasciolosis in cattle herds in selected areas in South Africa indicated positive cases from localities that closely correspond to the geographical distribution of the three Lymnaea species in this country. According to reports in the literature, the high prevalence of fasciolosis in livestock in the highlands of Ethiopia couldhave serious health implications for people in the area because they have to use the same water resources. In many rural areas in South Africa local populations also have no other options than to share natural water resources with their livestock. In most instances these water bodies harbour at least one of the Lymnaea species which can maintain the life cycle of fasciola. Under such conditions residents could daily be exposed to the risk of becoming infected. It is a matter of concern that epidemiological research with regard to human fasciolosis is such aneglected subject in South Africa. In our opinion epidemiological surveys should be conducted to determine the prevalence of human fasciolosis in specific areas which could be selected on the basis of using the geographical distribution of the three Linnaean species as guidelines. Efforts should also be made to conduct surveys to update the geographical distribution of the snail intermediate hosts and awareness programmes should be launched in rural areas at risk.

Study of petrological and geochemical characteristics of mantle peridotite xenoliths in Pliocene alkaline basalt in Nghia Dan (West Nghe An) was carried out. Rock-forming clinopyroxenes, the major trace element containers, were separated from the xenoliths to analyze for major, trace element and Sr-Nd isotopic compositions. The data were interpreted for source geochemical characteristics and geodynamic processes of the lithospheric mantle beneath the region. The peridotite xenoliths being mostly spinel-lherzolites in composition, are residual entities having been produced following partial melting events of ultramafic rocks in the asthenosphere. They are depleted in trace element abundance and Sr-Nd isotopic composition. Some are even more depleted as compared to mid-ocean ridge mantle xenoliths. Modelled calculation based on trace element abundances and their corresponding solid/liquid distribution coefficients showed that the Nghia Dan mantle xenoliths may be produced of melting degrees from 8 to 12%. Applying various methods for two-pyroxene temperature- pressure estimates, the Nghia Dan mantle xenoliths show ranges of crystallization temperature and pressure, respectively, of 1010-1044°C and 13-14.2 kbar, roughly about 43km. A geotherm constructed for the mantle xenoliths showed a higher geothermal gradient as compared to that of in the western Highlands (Vietnam) and a conductive model, implying a thermal perturbation under the region. The calculated Sm-Nd model ages for the clinopyroxenes yielded 127 and 122 Ma. 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The 46th NERA Congress was held on March 8th to 10th 2018 at the University of Oslo. NERA is the Nordic Educational Research Association that brings together researchers in the field of educational sciences in the Nordic countries. An essential part of the association and of the congress are NERA’s 24 networks that are organised around different subject areas in educational sciences like early childhood research, youth research etc.. There is a network also for social pedagogy. Its aim is to develop and strengthen the cooperation between researchers and professional groups, engaged or interested in the field of social pedagogy, in the Nordic countries and even wider in Northern Europe like in Poland and Germany. It is currently coordinated by six researchers from five different countries: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Poland and Sweden. The theme for NERA2018 congress was Educational Research: Boundaries, Breaches and Bridges. The Social pedagogy network had organized altogether four sessions during the congress dealing with topical issues in the field of social pedagogical research. These sessions included two roundtable discussions, the first one dealing with sensitive research and the second one on social pedagogy at schools. In addition to the roundtables there was one symposium considering research in the area of asylum seekers and refugees, and one session was for traditional paper presentations. The countries that were represented in network sessions were Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Finland, and Poland. The sessions awakened animated conversations between participants. One common topic of the discussed issues related to the role and transformation of social pedagogy in changing societies. The sessions of the social pedagogy network were opened up by the roundtable discussion on sensitive research. The leading question for the short presentations of the roundtable participants was: how to research in cooperation with extremely vulnerable people. We heard two interesting presentations by Irena Dychawy Rosner from Malmö University and by Aneta Ostaszewska from the University of Warsaw that giuded us to a discussion about how to support the participation in social pedagogical research of e.g. women working in prostitution so that not just their anonymity and well-being during the research process are secured but also their autonomy and agency could be supported. The research examples shown in the presentations were so fascinating that the discussion around them filled up all the time of the roundtable although we had planned to have four presentations instead of two but there had been two cancellations. The second session following the roundtable was a traditional paper presentation session. Even this session had one last minute cancellation – we assumed it was because of the flue season – so we had two presentations by Jan Arvid Haugan from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and Vilborg Jóhannsdóttir from the University of Iceland. Jan Arvid’s presentation was on ’Coping strategies and resilience in upper secondary school’. He shared with us some social pedagogically interesting findings about the background factors behind school drop-out. He himself told us that he was not familiar with the social pedagogical discussion but he had thought that his research findings could be of use in our field when we are trying to find out ways how to support the integration of young people. And he certainly had right. Vilborg’s presentation on the other hand was very interesting for another reason: it was about Icelandic social pedagogy, which differs quite a lot from the understandings of social pedagogy in other Nordic countries. In Iceland, the social pedagogical practice concerns almost only work with people with disabilities. The professional education, role and perspectives of social pedagogy have developed in line with the paradigm change rooted in the CRPD (Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities), which has replaced the medical understanding of disability by the social relational understanding of disability. For example in Finland, the social pedagogical discussion and practice have focused very little on people with disabilities. The second roundtable was on social pedagogy at schools. There were four short presentations leading to a common discussion about the role that social pedagogy and social pedagogues have and could have at schools in different Nordic countries. Vilborg Jóhannsdóttir shared us more thoughts on social pedagogy in Iceland concentrating now on the work that the social pedagogues are doing in inclusive schools. Their role seems to be very essential in supporting the education of disabled children and young people in ’normal’ schools but it is at the same time quite controversal. Amela Pacuka from the Oslo Metropolitan University asked us in her presentation: What social pedagogy is for? She had a very critical perspective towards social pedagogy as it is practiced in Norway at schools: trying to find a balance between measurement, quality assurance, testing and relations work. Margareta Fehland and Mikael Boregren from Malmö University presented a project that they have been working on developing a new way of listening to kids in school. Their presentation roused a lively discussion about empathy and about the possiblity to teach empathy in social pedagogical studies. Interestingy, discussion about empathy and about teaching empathy has just recently awaken in the Finnish social pedagogical discussion. Eija Raatikainen, Leigh Anne Rauhala and Seija Mäenpää from Metropolia University of Applied Sciences have published an article about professional empathy called ’Qualified Empathy: A key element for an empowerment professional’ in the Finnish journal of social pedagogy. It is available online in English (Raatikainen, Rauhala, Mäenpää 2017). The last peresentation in the roundtable was about social pedagogical thinking at schools in Finland, presented by Elina Nivala from the University of Eastern Finland. It described social pedagogy as an approach rather than a profession meaning that different professionals at school can have a social pedagogical orientation in their work: A teacher, a special education teacher, a school social worker and even a school nurse can have a social pedagogical mindset in their work e.g. when building pedagogical relations and working holistically with the pupils, supporting their participation and finding ways to strengthen the school community and well-being of everybody at schools. All of them can be considered social pedagogues at schools if they want to develop their work based on social pedagogical thinking. The last session organised by the Social pedagogy network was the symposium called ’How to research in the area of asylum seekers and refugees’. It included originally six presentations: two from Finland and four from Denmark but two of those from Denmark were cancelled. The two presentations from Finland were ’Acts of citizenship in reception centre’ by Päivikki Rapo, and ’Life on hold? – A research project on agency and belonging of asylum seekers’ by Elina Nivala, both of them from the University of Eastern Finland. The Danish presentations were ’How do asylum-seekers experience a sense of meaningfulness in their everyday life in asylum-centres’ Anna Ørnemose, Lene Løkkegård and Lis Leleur, and ’Creating a sense of meaning in connection to school attendance of unaccompanied asylum seeking children’ by Nadia Klarsgaard & Kasper Drevsholt, all of them from the University College of Northern Denmark (UCN). The symposium had a wonderful opportunity to provide an arena for comparative discussion about social pedagogigal asylum research, which is a relatively new field in both countries. Discussions were animated but there could have been more time for comparative perspectives. This shows the need for more research and discussions on this field between different countries. One of the discussed topics concerned asylum seeker women and their possibilities to participation. According to observations of Danish researchers in an asylum center in Denmark, asylum seeker women were denied to get their own spaces. This was argumented with ideas of gender equality in Danish society. In Finland, the challenges on physical spaces of reception centres have also been discussed. Rapo (2018) made an ethnographic research in a Finnish reception centre for her master's thesis. In the observed reception centre, women's fragile position was understood and it was taken into account but even then some restrictions of spaces were noticed only later. It will be interesting to follow how practicies related to gender will transform in reception centres, as questions concerning gender, religion, culture and participation in Western societies are challenging. It is obvious that knowledge on participation and agency of asylum seeker and refugee women is much needed, and social pedagogical research could provide valuable perspectives and tools to produce it. All in all, the presentations and discussions during the sessions showed us very clearly that there is a lot of interesting research and work done in the field of social pedagogy in the Nordic countries. They also illustrated explicitly that the traditions in social pedagogical discussion and practice do differ quite a lot between different Nordic countries. Due to this, there should be more discussion about how social pedagogical practicies have developed historically in different societies and how they are defined theoretically. It is important to discuss critically how social pedagogical work is in practice but it would be of utmost importance to discuss as well how the practices are understood and represented in theory: what is it that makes something social pedagogical, how can it be conceptualised and what makes it different from other fields of practice. And the same goes to research: are there some elements that make research social pedagogical. We hope that the next NERA congress in Uppsala, Sweden on March 6th to 8th will provide an as lively arena for discussions than the previous one did and even more opportunities for critical reflection and shared moments of new understanding. We welcome all new researchers interested in social pedagogy to join us there.

Introduction: Physical disability, especially in childhood and adolescence can cause major psychological problems such as depression and anxiety. Burden of landmine in western border cities of Iran caused many disabled survivors through the years after Iran-Iraq war. Aims: To investigate the potential association of disability of activities of daily living and symptoms of depression and anxiety in adolescents’ affected of post war landmine in Iran. Methods: This study employed two questionnaires for 35 adolescents’ survivors of mine explosions; the prevalence of anxiety and depressive symptoms was examined using the Hopkins Symptom Checklist-25 (HSCL-25) and the ability to perform activities of daily living (ADL) was measured by the Barthel index questionnaire. In addition, the association between anxiety and depression with demographic characteristics and activities of daily living was estimated. Results: Maximum independency was in activities of feeding, bowels, bathing and grooming while highest dependency was in activities of mobility, stairs and dressing. All of the cases have shown depression and the prevalence of anxiety was 31 (88.6%). An analysis of the data reveals significant association between activities of daily living included dressing, feeding, grooming and bathing with depression and anxiety (p<0.05). Although eye injured cases had the most complete independency (50%) in ADL but a significant direct relation was observed between eye impairment and depression (p=0.050). Conclusion: Overall, the study suggested that adolescents with physical disability due to landmine explosion may be suffering from depression and anxiety.

This paper aims to identify the archaeological and historical sites, the geographical distribution, and the spatial relations between them and other geographical phenomena in Al-Baha, which provides us with a comprehensive view of the current status of these archaeological and historical sites and developing awareness of its importance as tourist sites. To achieve the research goals, to achieve research objectives, the spatial analysis approach in the GIS environment was used to measure spatial geographical phenomena in the study area through its statistical and spatial analysis tools. The cartographic presentation and mapping method was adopted using the GIS software 10.6. The study concluded that the number of archaeological and historical sites in Al-Baha has reached about 129 sites distributed among 7 governorates. Its relative distribution was very different between the western and eastern parts of the region (about 97 archaeological and historical sites in east and 32 archaeological and historical sites west, with 75% of sites in the east and 25% of sites in the west) in close association with topography, water resources, mineral resources and historic trade routes. The distribution of archaeological and historical sites in the area of Al-Baha was a close distribution in its entirety (Neighborhood Index=0.63) due to the limitation and small areas of plains that are suitable for settlement and the proliferation of the steep highlands and vast desert over the area of Al-Baha. The density of archaeological and historical sites was high in the eastern part and fell in the western part of the study area. The study recommended the importance of using GIS applications to study the spatial distribution of archaeological and historical sites and the spatial relations between them and the various natural and human phenomena in the study area. Using the spatial analysis output to prepare archaeological atlas containing maps, illustrations and photographs of the archaeological and historical sites in the region for the purpose of exploiting and commercializing these potential resources. Also, encouraging studies and research that contribute to highlighting the importance of archaeological and historical sites and encouraging exploiting them in several special fields, including tourism.

The past two decades have seen the publication of at least half a dozen books that consider the part that fairs, circuses, sideshows and freakshows play in the continuing cultural labour to define, categorise and control the human body, including Robert Bogdan’s Freakshow, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s Extraordinary Bodies, and her edited collection Freakery, and Rachel Adams’s Sideshow USA. These writers cast the freakshow as a theatre of culture, worthy of critical attention precisely because of the ways in which it has provided a popular forum for staging, solidifying and transforming ideas about the body and bodily difference, and because of its prominence in the project of modernity (Garland-Thomson “From Wonder to Error” 2-13). They point to the theatrical mechanisms by which the freakshow maps cultural anxieties about corporeal difference across ‘suitable’ bodies. For, as Bogdan (3) says, being a freak is far more than a fact of biology. The freak personae that populate the Western cultural imaginary—the fat lady, the bearded lady, the hermaphrodite and the geek—can only be produced by a performative isolation, manipulation and exaggeration of the peculiar characteristics of particular human bodies. These peculiarities have to be made explicit, in Rebecca Schneider’s (1) terms; the horror-inducing tropes of the savage, the bestial and the monstrous have to be cast across supposedly suitable and compliant flesh. The scopic mechanisms of the freakshow as a theatre, as a cabinet of corporeal curiosities in which spectators are excited, amazed and edified by the spectacle of the extraordinary body, thus support the specific forms of seeing and looking by which freak bodies are produced. It would, however, be a mistake to suggest that the titillating threat of this face-to-face encounter with the Levinasian other fully destabilises the space between signifier and signified, between the specific body and the symbolic framework in which it sits. In a somewhat paradoxical cultural manoeuvre, the ableist, sexist and racist symbolic frameworks of the freakshow unfold according to what Deleuze and Guattari (178) would call a logic of sameness. The roles, relationships and representational mechanisms of the freakshow—including the ‘talkers’ that frame the spectator’s engagement with the extraordinary body of the freak—in fact function to delineate “degrees of deviance” (178) or difference from an illusory bodily norm. So configured, the monstrous corporeality of the freak is also monstrously familiar, and is made more so by the freak spectacle’s frequent emphasis on the ways in which non-normative bodies accommodate basic functions such as grooming and eating. In such incarnations, the scenography and iconography of the freakshow in fact draws spectators into performative (mis)recognitions that manage the difference of other bodies by positioning them along a continuum that confirms the stability of the symbolic order, and the centrality of the able, white, male self in this symbolic order. Singular, specific, extraordinary bodies are subject to what might, in a Levinasian paradigm, be called the violence of categorisation and comprehension (“Is Ontology Fundamental?” 9). The circumstances of the encounter reduce the radical, unreadable difference of the other, transporting them “into the horizon of knowledge” (“Transcendence and Height” 12), and transforming them into something that serves the dominant cultural logic. In this sense, Petra Kuppers suggests, “the psychic effects of the freak spectacle have destabilizing effects, assaulting the boundaries of firm knowledge about self, but only to strengthen them again in cathartic effect” (45). By casting traits they abhor across the freak body (Garland-Thomson Extraordinary Bodies 55-56), spectators become complicit in this abhorrence; comforted, cajoled and strangely pleasured by a sense of distance from what they desire not to be. The subversive potential of the prodigious body evaporates (Garland-Thomson “From Wonder to Error” 3; Extraordinary Bodies 78). An evaporation more fully effected, writers on the freakshow explain, as the discursive construct of the freak was drawn into the sphere of medical spectacle in the late nineteenth century. As the symbolic framework for understanding disabled bodies ‘advances’ from the freak, the monster and the mutant to the medical specimen (Garland-Thomson “From Wonder to Error” 13; Extraordinary Bodies 70, 78-80; Synder and Mitchell 370-373; Stephens 492), the cultural trajectory away from extraordinary bodies with the capacity to expand the classes and categories of the human is complete. The medical profession finally fulfils the cultural compulsion to abstract peculiar bodily characteristics into symptoms, and, as Foucault says in The Birth of the Clinic, these symptoms become surveillable, and controllable, within an objective schema of human biology. Physical differences and idiosyncrasies are “enclosed within the singularity of the patient, in that region of ‘subjective symptoms’ that—for the doctor—defines not only the mode of knowledge, but the world of objects to be known” (xi). The freak body becomes no more than an example of human misfortune, to be examined, categorised and cared for by medical experts behind closed doors, and the freakshow fades from the stage of popular culture (Garland-Thomson Extraordinary Bodies 70). There can, of course, be no denying the need to protect people with disabilities from exploitation at the service of a cultural fetish that enacts a compulsion to define and control bodily difference. However, recent debates in disability, cultural and performance studies have been characterised by the desire to reconsider the freakshow as a site for contesting some of the cultural logics it enacts. Theorists like Synder and Mitchell argue that medical discourse “disarms the [disabled] body of its volatile potency” (378), in the process denying people with disabilities a potentially interesting site to contest the cultural logics by which their bodies are defined. The debate begins with Bogdan’s discussion of the ways in which well-meaning disability activists may, in their desire to protect people with disabilities from exploitative practices and producers, have overlooked the fact that freakshows provided people with disabilities a degree of independence and freedom otherwise impossible (280-81). After all, as disabled performer Mat Fraser says in his documentary Born Freak, The Victorian marvels found fame and some fortune, and this actually raised the visibility, even the acceptability, of disabled people in general during a time when you could be attacked on the streets just for looking different. These disabled performers found independence and commanded respect.… If I had been born a hundred years ago, given the alternatives of—what? living the life of a village monster or idiot or being poked or prodded for cataloguing by medical types—there’s no doubt about it, I would have wanted to be in show business. (Born Freak) This question of agency extends to discussion of whether disabled performers like Fraser can, by consciously appropriating the figures, symbols and scenography of the freakshow, start to deconstruct the mechanisms by which this contested sphere of cultural practice has historically defined them, confronting spectators with their own complicity in the construction of the freak. In her analysis of Coney Island’s Sideshows by the Seashore, Elizabeth Stephens reflects on this contemporary sideshow’s capacity to reclaim the political currency of the freak. For Stephens, sideshows are sites in which norms about the body, its limits and capabilities, are theatricalized and transformed into spectacle, but, in which, for this very reason, they can also be contested. Non-normative bodies are not simply exhibited or put on display on the sideshow stage, but are rather performed as the unstable—indeed, destabilising—product of the dynamic interrelationship between performer, audience and theatrical space. (486) Theorists like Stephens (487) point to disabled performers who manipulate the scopic and discursive mechanisms of the sideshow, street performance and circus, setting them against more or less personal accounts of the way their bodies have historically been seen, to disrupt the modes of subjection the freak spectacle makes possible and precipitate a crisis in prescribed categories of meaning. Stephens (485-498) writes of Mat Fraser, who reperformed the historical personal of the short-armed Sealo the Sealboy, and Jennifer Miller, who reperformed the persona of Zenobia the bearded lady, at Sideshows by the Seashore. Sharon Mazer (257-276) writes of Katy Dierlam, who donned a Dolly Dimples babydoll dress to reperform the clichéd fat lady figure Helon Melon, again at Sideshows by the Seashore, counterposing Melon’s monstrous obesity with comments affirming her body’s potent humanity, and quotes from feminist scholars and artists such as Suzy Orbach, Karen Finley and Annie Sprinkle. Sharon Synder and David Mitchell (383) write of Mary Duffy, who reperforms the armless figure of the Venus de Milo. These practices constitute performative interventions into the cultural sphere, aligned with a broader set of contemporary performance practices which contest the symbolic frameworks by which racial and gender characteristics are displayed on the popular stage in similar ways. Their confrontational performance strategies recall, for instance, the work of American performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña, who reappropriates colonial and pop cultural figurations of the racialised body in works like Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit…, in which he and Coco Fusco cast themselves as two caged savages. In such works, Gómez-Peña and his collaborators use parallel performance strategies to engage the “spectacle of the Other-as-freak” (297). “The idea is to exaggerate the features of fear and desire in the Anglo imagination and ‘spectacularize’ our ‘extreme identities’, so to speak, with the clear understanding that these identities have been invented by the surgery of the global media” (297) Gómez-Peña says. These remobilisations of the monstrous operate within the paradigm of the explicit, a term Schneider coined a decade ago to describe the performance art practices of women who write the animalised, sexualised characteristics with which they are symbolically aligned across their own corporeally ‘suitable’ bodies, replaying their culturally assigned identities “with a voluble, ‘in your face’ vengeance” (100), “a literal vengeance” (109). Such practices reclaim the destablising potential of the freak spectacle, collapsing, complicating or exploding the space between signifier and signified to show that the freak is a discursive construct (22-23), and thus for Schneider, following Benjamin, threatening the whole symbolic system with collapse (2, 6). By positioning their bodies as a ground that manifestly fails to ground the reality they represent, these performers play with the idea that the reality of the freak is really just part of the order of representation. There is nothing behind it, nothing beyond it, nothing up the magician’s sleeve—identity is but a sideshow hall of mirrors in which the ‘blow off’ is always a big disappointment. Bodies marked by disability are not commodified, or even clearly visible, in the Western capitalist scopic economy in the same way as Schneider’s women performers. Nevertheless, disabled performers still use related strategies to reclaim a space for what Schneider calls a postmodern politics of transgression (4), exposing “the sedimented layers of signification themselves” (21), rather than establishing “an originary, true or redemptive body” (21) beneath. The contestational logic of these modes of practice notwithstanding, Stephens (486) notes that performers still typically cite a certain ambivalence about their potential. There are, after all, specific risks for people with disabilities working in this paradigm that are not fully drawn out in the broader debate about critical reappropriation of racist and sexist imagery in performance art. Mobilisations of the freak persona are complicated by the performer’s own corporeal ‘suitability’ to that persona, by the familiar theatrical mechanisms of recognition and reception (which can remain undertheorised in meta-level considerations of the political currency of the freakshow in disability and cultural—rather than performance—studies), and by a dominant cultural discourse that insists on configuring disability as an individual problem detached from the broader sphere of identity politics (Sandahl 598-99). In other words, the territory that still needs to be addressed in this emergent field of practice is the ethics of reception, and the risk of spectatorial (mis)recognitions that reduce the political potency of the freak spectacle. The main risk, of course, is that mobilisations of the freak persona may still be read by spectators as part of the phenomenon they are trying to challenge, the critical counterpositions failing to register, or failing to disrupt fully the familiar scopic and discursive framework. More problematically, the counterpositions themselves may be reduced by spectators to a rhetorical device that distances them from the corporeal reality of the encounter with the other, enabling them to interpret or explain the experience of disability as a personal experience by which an individual comes to accommodate their problems. Whilst the human desire to construct narrative and psychological contexts for traumatic experience cannot be denied, Carrie Sandahl (583) notes that there is a risk that the encounter with the disabled body will be interpreted as part of the broader phenomenon Synder and Mitchell describe in Narrative Prosthesis, in which disability is little more than a metaphor for the problems people have to get past in life. In this interpretative paradigm, disability enters a discursive and theoretical terrain that fails to engage fully the lived experience of the other. Perhaps most problematically, mobilisations of the freak persona may be read as one more manifestation of the distinctively postmodern desire to break free from the constraints of culturally condoned identity categories. This desire finds expression in the increasingly prevalent cultural phenomenon of voluntary enfreakment, in which people voluntarily differentiate, or queer their own experience of self. As Fraser says when he finds out that a company of able-bodied freaks is competing with him for audiences at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, “[t]he irony is, these days, everyone is trying to get in on our act” (Born Freak). In a brave new world where everybody wants to be a freak, activist artists “must be watchful”, Gómez-Peña warns, “for we can easily get lost in the funhouse of virtual mirrors, epistemological inversions, and distorted perceptions” (288). The reclamation of disability as a positive metaphor for a more dispersed set of human differences in the spectacle of daily life (287-98), and in theoretical figurations of feminist philosophy that favour the grotesque, the monstrous and the mechanical (Haraway Simians, Cyborgs and Women; Braidotti Nomadic Subjects), raises questions for Garland-Thomson (“Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory” 9) and Sandahl (581-83). If “disability serves as a master trope for difference,” Sandahl says, then anybody can adopt it “…to serve as a metaphor expressing their own outsider status, alienation and alterity, not necessarily the social, economic and political concerns of actual disabled people” (583). The work of disabled performers can disappear into a wider sphere of self-differentiated identities, which threatens to withdraw ‘disability’ as a politically useful category around which a distinctive group of people can generate an activist politics. To negotiate these risks, disabled performers need to work somewhere between a specific, minoritarian politics and a universal, majoritarian politics, as Sedgwick describes in Epistemology of the Closet (91; cf. Garland-Thompson “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory” 5; cf. Stephens 493). Performers need to make their experience of otherness explicit, so that their corporeal specificity is not abstracted into a symbolic system that serves the dominant cultural logic. Performers need to contextualise this experience in social terms, so that it is not isolated from the sphere of identity politics. But performers cannot always afford to allow the freak persona to become one more manifestation of the myriad idiosyncratic identities that circulate in the postmodern popular imaginary. It is by negotiating these risks that performers encourage spectators to experience—if only fleetingly, and provisionally—a relationship to the other that is characterised not by generalisation, domestication and containment (Levinas “Substitution” 80, 88), but by respect for the other’s radical alterity, by vulnerability, and, in Derrida’s reformation of Levinasian ethics, by a singular, reciprocal and undecidable responsibility towards the other (Derrida 60-70). This is what Levinas would call an ethical relationship, in which the other exists, but as an excess, a class of being that can be recognised but never seized by comprehension (“Is Ontology Fundamental?” 7, “Transcendence and Height” 17), or sublimated as a category of, or complement to, the same (13, “Meaning and Sense” 51). Mat Fraser’s mobilisation of Sealo the Sealboy is one of the most engaging examples of the way disabled performers negotiate the complexities of this terrain. On his website, Fraser says he has always been aware of the power of confrontational presentations of his own body, and has found live forms that blur the boundaries between freakshow, sideshow and conventional theatre the best forums for “the more brutal and confrontational aspect of my investigation into disability’s difficult interface with mainstream cultural concerns” (MatFraser.co.uk). Fraser’s appropriation of Sealo was born of a fascination with the historical figure of Stanley Berent. “Stanley Berent was an American freakshow entertainer from the 1940s who looked like me,” Fraser says. “He had phocomelia. That’s the medical term for my condition. It literally means seal-like limbs. Berent’s stage name was Sealo the Sealboy” (Born Freak). Fraser first restaged Sealo after a challenge from Dick Zigun, founder of the modern Sideshows by the Seashore. He restaged Berant’s act, focused on Berant’s ability to do basic things like shaving and sawing wood with his deformed hands, for the sideshow’s audiences. While Fraser had fun playing the character on stage, he says he felt a particular discomfort playing the character on the bally platform used to pull punters into the sideshow from the street outside. “There is no powerful dynamic there,” Fraser laments. “It’s just ‘come look at the freak’” (Born Freak). Accordingly, after a season at Sideshows by the Seashore, Fraser readapted the experience as a stage play, Sealboy: Freak, in which Sealo is counterposed with the character Tam, “a modern disabled actor struggling to be seen as more than a freak” (Born Freak). This shift in the theatrical mechanisms by which he stages the freak gives Fraser the power to draw contemporary, politically correct spectators at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival into the position of sideshow gawkers, confronting them with their own fascination with his body. A potent example is a post-audition scene, in which Tam says I read this book once that said that the mainstream will only see a disabled performer in the same way they view a performing seal. Very clever, but just mimicry. No. No it can’t be like that anymore. We’ve all moved on. People are no longer more fascinated by how I do things, rather than what I say. I am an actor, not a fucking freak. (Born Freak) But, as Tam says this, he rolls a joint, and spectators are indeed wrapped up in how he does it, hardly attending to what he says. What is interesting about Fraser’s engagement with Sealo in Sealboy: Freak is the way he works with a complicated—even contradictory—range of presentational strategies. Fraser’s performance becomes explicit, expositional and estranging by turns. At times, he collapses his own identity into that of the freak, the figure so stark, so recognisable, so much more harshly drawn than its real-life referent, that it becomes a simulacrum (cf. Baudrillard 253-282), exceeding and escaping the complications of the human corporeality beneath it. Fraser allows spectators to inhabit the horror, and the humour, his disabled identity has historically provoked, reengaging the reactions they hide in everyday life. And, perhaps, if they are an educated audience at the Fringe, applauding themselves for their own ability to comprehend the freak, and the crudity of sideshow display. However, self-congratulatory comprehension of the freak persona is interrupted by the discomforting encounter with Tam, suspending—if only provisionally—spectators’ ability to reconcile this reaction with their credentials as a politically correct audience. What a closer look at mobilisations of the freak in performances such as Fraser’s demonstrates is that manipulating the theatrical mechanisms of the stage, and their potential to rapidly restructure engagement with the extraordinary body, enables performers to negotiate the risk of (mis)recognition embedded in the face-to-face encounter between self and spectator. So configured, the stage can become a site for contesting the cultural logic by which the disabled body has historically been defined. It can challenge spectators to experience—if fleetingly—the uncertainties of the face-to-face encounter with the extraordinary body, acknowledging this body’s specificity, without immediately being able to abstract, domesticate or abdicate responsibility for it—or abdicate responsibility for their own reaction to it. Whilst spectators’ willingness to reflect further on their complicity in the construction of the other remains an open and individual question, these theatrical manipulations can at least increase the chance that the cathartic effect of the encounter with the so-called freak will be disrupted or deferred. References Adams, Rachel. Sideshow USA: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination. Chicago, IL: University of Chigaco Press, 2001. Baudrillard, Jean. “The Precision of Simulacra”. Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation. Ed. Brian Wallis. Boston, MA: David R. Godine, 1984, 253-282. Born Freak. Dir. Paul Sapin. Written Paul Sapin and Mat Fraser. Planet Wild for Channel 4 UK, 2001. Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Thought. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1994. Bogdan, Robert. Freakshow: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Derrida, Jacques. Gift of Death. Trans. David Wills. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Fraser, Mat. “Live Art”. MatFraser.co.uk. n.date. 30 April 2008 ‹http://www.matfraser.co.uk/live_art.php›. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception. Trans. AM Sheridan Smith. London: Routledge, 1976. Garland-Thomson, Rosmarie. “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory”. NSWA Journal 14.3 (2002): 1-33. ———. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1997. ———. “Introduction: From Wonder to Error—A Genealogy of Freak Discourse”. Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. Ed. Rosmarie Garland-Thomspon. New York, NY and London: New York University Press, 1996. Gómez-Peña, Guillermo. “Culture-in-extremis: Performing Against the Cultural Backdrop of the Mainstream Bizarre”. The Performance Studies Reader. Ed. Henry Bial. London and New York: Routledge, 2004, 287-298. Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs and Women. New York, NY: Routledge, 1991. Kuppers, Petra. Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge. New York, NY: Routledge, 2004. Levinas, Emmanuel. “Is Ontology Fundamental?”. Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings. Ed. Adriaan Peperzak, Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 1-10. ———. “Transcendence and Height”. Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings. Ed. Adriaan Peperzak, Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 11-31. ———. “Meaning and Sense”. Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings. Ed. Adriaan Peperzak, Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 33-64. ———. “Substitution”. Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings. Ed. Adriaan Peperzak, Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 79-95. Mazer, Sharon. “‘She’s so fat…’ Facing the Fat Lady at Coney Island’s Sideshows by the Seashore”. Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression. Ed. Jana Evens Braziel and Kathryn LeBesco. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001, 257-276. Sandahl, Carrie. “Black Man, Blind Man: Disability Identity Politics and Performance”. Theatre Journal 56 (2004): 597-602. Schneider, Rebecca. The Explicit Body in Performance. New York, NY and London: Routledge, 1997. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990. Snyder, Sharon L. and David T Mitchell. “Re-engaging the Body: Disability Studies and the Resistance to Embodiment”. Public Culture, 13.3 (2001): 367-389. ———. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Stephens, Elizabeth. “Cultural Fixations of the Freak Body: Coney Island and the Postmodern Sideshow”. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 20.4 (2006): 485-498. Acknowledgements An earlier version of this paper was presented at “Extreme States: Issues of Scale—Political, Performative, Emotional”, the Australasian Association for Drama Theatre and Performance Studies Annual Conference 2007.

Abstract Background While evidence has shown an association between place of birth and birth outcomes, factors contributing to the choice of home birth have not been adequately investigated in Tanzania while more than 30% of deliveries occur outside of health care facilities, and more than 95% of those deliveries are assisted by non-medical providers who are often unskilled. The use of unskilled birth attendants has been cited as a factor contributing to the high maternal and neonatal mortalities in low-resources countries. This study aimed to identify determinants of choice for home birth over health care facility birth in Tanzania. Method: This study used the 2015-16 Tanzania Demographic and Health Survey and Malaria Indicator Survey (2015-16 TDHS-MIS) dataset. A total of 2286 women of reproductive age (15–49 years) who gave birth within one year preceding the survey were included in the analysis. Both univariate and multivariable regression analyses were used to determine predictors for the choice of home-based childbirth over health care facility delivery. Results A total of 805 (35.2%) women had a home birth. After adjusting for confounders, the determinants for choice of home birth were: the level of education (primary education [AOR = 0.666; p = 0.001]; secondary and higher education [AOR = 0.417; p < 0.001]), in reference to no formal education; not owning a mobile phone (AOR = 1.312; p = 0.018); parity (parity 2–4 [AOR = 1.594; p = 0.004], parity 5 and above [AOR = 2.158; p < 0.001] in reference to parity 1); inadequate antenatal visits (AOR = 1.406; p = 0.001); wealth index (poorest (AOR = 9.395, p < 0.001); poorer (AOR = 7.701; p < 0.001); middle (AOR = 5.961; p < 0.001); richer (AOR = 2.557; p < 0.001)] in reference to richest women; and Zones (Southern Highlands, [AOR = 0.189; p < 0.001]; Southern, [AOR = 0.225; p < 0.001]; Zanzibar, [AOR = 2.55; p < 0.001]) in reference to Western zone. Conclusions A large proportion of women birth at home. Unskilled providers such as traditional birth attendants (TBAs), relatives or friends attend most of them. Predictors for home-based childbirth included lack of formal education, poor access to telecommunication, poor uptake of antenatal visits, low socio-economic status, and geographical zone. Innovative strategies targeting these groups are needed to increase the use of health care facilities for childbirth, thereby reducing maternal and neonatal mortality in Tanzania.

Introduction Feline Hitler look-alikes. Dogs attired in hats and bow-ties. Rabbits wearing lace bonnets. Images of these animals abound on the Internet with a host of websites paying homage to their cuteness. Emphasising the cuteness of non-human animals by anthropomorphising them is a common trend online, but there is also another side to the human relationship with other animals that has created a different category of cuteness. The blogger, Tiffiny Carlson, remarks that there has been an “onslaught of virtual love for disabled animals” who are not dressed to look like humans or imagined as human look-alikes to signify as cute. Rather, an animal’s disability becomes the signifier for cuteness. Carlson defines this as “cute-ifying disability” wherein disability is what makes an animal cute. In this context, a dog with an artificial leg, a gold-fish with a “wheelchair”, and a cat with visible breathing difficulties register as cute precisely because of their disabilities. In this paper, I draw on Carlson’s idea of “cute-ifying” disability to analyse the popularity of the cat, Lil Bub (https://www.facebook.com/iamlilbub). In doing so, I name non-human animals as animals and human-animals as humans. This is not to state that humans are not animals, but rather to use these terms to make visible the hierarchical relationship developed between them. (Re)defining Disability and Cuteness Critical disability studies aims to challenge and unpack the norms through which disability is dominantly represented, understood and politicised in terms of a “lack”. In keeping with this intention, Tanya Titchkosky argues that perceptions about disability need to move away from defining disability as an object of knowledge. Instead, Titchkosky advocates for an experience that conceives of disability as a “space of interpretive encounter” (56) that enables a “way of perceiving and orienting toward the world” (4). Here, Titchkosky discusses disability in terms of the norms through which disability is treated, thus intimating that “disability” and “ability” are socio-cultural constructs that establish the norms through which human capacity and capability (mental, physical and emotional) are understood. In line with this observation, this section intends to analyse the norms through which disability is formed, and in turn, how these norms inform human-animal relations and their impact on “cuteness”. One of the fundamental norms that undergirds understandings of disability is the idea that disability is inferior to “ability”, so much so that the philosopher, Paul W. Taylor suggests that human illness and disablement equates to an animal’s existence, regardless if they are disabled or not. He specifies, “We [humans] have a sense of gratitude at the good fortune that we were not born one of them [animals], a sense that comes sharply into focus when, through some abnormality of birth or by some accident or disease a human being is reduced to leading an animal’s simple kind of life…In comparison with the severely restricted kind of existence that is the lot of plants and animals, our own human modes of life are naturally appreciated for being so much richer, fuller, more interesting and desirable in every way” (158). Taylor asserts that disability becomes equated to animality through defining both as simpler examples of existence. Animals are therefore recognised in a similar way to disabled humans, wherein both are rendered as reduced facsimiles of “interesting” and “desirable” human existence. Other scholars of critical human-animal studies, such as Kari Weil and Cary Wolfe also make a connection between animality and disability, but do so in such a way that challenges normative assumptions about both as lacking agency. Kari Weil argues that the normative ways in which the complexity of human expression and consciousness is measured according to linguistic ability is not necessarily correct, rather, it is “an obstacle to a…fullness of vision” (88). Weil claims that this “fullness of vision” is expressed by “beings who are removed from ‘normal’ sociolinguistic behavior. These beings may be nonhuman animals as well as persons with certain linguistic and cognitive disabilities” (88-89). Drawing on the example of Temple Grandin, (who has written about her life with autism and how this has enabled her to form a bond with animals), both Weil and Wolfe state that the idea of animals and disabled humans as “simple” needs re-assessment. Wolfe makes this clear when she cites Grandin’s first book, Emergence: Labeled Autistic, as demonstrating the interior narrative to autistic thought and experience, and therefore enabling an “unthinkable” act “because it had been medical dogma…that there was no ‘inside,’ no inner life, in the autistic…” (111). Wolfe uses this re-conception of the inner life of disability to think through the complexity of animals’ “interior” life. This is not to conflate animals with disabled humans, but instead, to offer a more nuanced understanding of representations of difference. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson analyses how these representations of difference normalise disability as a spectacle. She writes, “the history of disabled people in the Western world is in part the history of being on display, of being visually conspicuous while politically and socially erased” (56). Disability, then, is visibilised as a spectacle to be looked at as “other”, and in this act of looking, disabilities are rendered as irrelevant to “ordinary” normality. Garland- Thomson further indicates that curiosity preoccupies the human eye when gazing on perceived disabilities, wherein the compulsion to “gawk with abandon at the prosthetic hook, the empty sleeve, the scarred flesh…” occurs without seeing (or wanting to see) the whole body “of the person with a disability” (57). In this context, those who gawk fail to see the interior life Wolfe and Weir state is taken away from disability. Instead, disabled people are labelled in terms of their perceived anomalies to a normative social order. Garland-Thomson states that this process of looking at disability is considered “illicit” (2002: 57) and therefore the need to look away accompanies the compulsion to “gawk”. Why is this process of looking illicit? The stories of those who contend with disabilities provide an explanation. For example, the blogger, BigMamaDiva2, writes about how her son’s diagnosis of PDD-NOS (Pervasive Development Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified) was the official label used to identify the series of “symptoms” her son was exhibiting (1). PDD-NOS is under the umbrella of the Autism spectrum of diagnoses. In her blog, BigMamaDiva2 narrates how people perceive her son through a narrow lens defined by the hegemony of normalcy and the assumptions attached to autism. Through this lens, her son is deemed “limited” and “rude”. Part of the reason that he is perceived in this manner is the fact that he looks back and even stares intently at the people who misjudge him. The look of judgement people give him is thrown back in their faces, accounted for, and not dismissed. Even if BigMamaDiva2’s son does not intend to challenge these people, the fact that he does not give them the opportunity to look away, or to look with impunity, creates a sense of discomfort for those who mark out his “disability” and look down on him because of it. This exchange in looking/being looked at contributes to the illicitness in looking at disability because of the discomfort it brings to those who stare and those who are stared at. There is a message that informs this sense of discomfort; it is a message that tells those who are looked at that they are being judged as helpless and inferior. Extending this discomfort is the fact that those who are looked at can look back and stare in response to those who castigate them. This desire to “look away”, as Garland-Thomson puts it, intimates the need to look away before the person being stared at has the chance to look back. In this context, this sense of looking at/looking away attempts to construct a hierarchy wherein the exceptional is pathologized and the “ordinary” is normalised (Garland-Thomson 56). However, when a person views animals, a different kind of gaze can be evoked. This kind of gaze is informed by cuteness and how it frames some animals as human objects of appreciation and adoration. By “cuteness,” I refer to Joshua Dale’s definition of “cute” as: juvenile features that cause an affective reaction, somatic cuteness…namely, large head and small, round body; short extremities; big eyes; small nose and mouth. Whether genetic, or activated by learned signals, the cuteness response is also associated with a range of behavioral aspects, including: childlike, dependent, gentle, intimate, clumsy, and nonthreatening. Such physical and behavioral features trigger an attachment based on the desire to protect and take care of the cute object. (1) The reasons that contribute to the illicitness of looking at human disability are the factors which “cute-fy” animals and disability. It is precisely because of the animals’ supposed “disabled” characteristics of helplessness, inferiority and child-like appeal that package them as cute. In this context, this kind of animal refers to a domesticated pet. If that pet has a disability, this sense of cuteness is enhanced as it emphasises the factors which construct them as cute in the first place. Disability is thus “cute-fied” through asserting signifiers of disability as cute. The following section draws on this process of cute-fying disability to chart the ways in which animals are framed in a human/animal hierarchy that conceptualises disabled animals as commodified spectacles for human consumption. The following section also demonstrates how cute-fying disability also engenders a re-reading of disability in the manner advocated by Titchkosky, Weir, and Wolfe to “see” and contend with disabilities in a more ethical manner. Lil Bub: Commodity, Charity and Companion Lil Bub, a cat which has become a celebrity, is an example of how “cute-ifying” disability occurs online. According to Mike Bridavsky (Lil Bub’s carer/owner), this cat was: discovered as the runt of a healthy feral litter in a tool shed in rural Indiana, she was taken in as a rescue when it was clear that she would require special care. BUB was born with a multitude of genetic anomalies […] She is a “perma-kitten”, which means she will stay kitten sized and maintain kitten-like features her entire life. She also has an extreme case of dwarfism, which means her limbs are disproportionately small relative to the rest of her body and she has some difficulty moving around. She has very short, stubby legs and a weird, long, serpent-like body. Her lower jaw is significantly shorter than her upper jaw, and her teeth never grew in which is why her tongue is always hanging around. (1) As of the 16th of April 2014, Lil Bub’s genetic anomalies have garnered 669,617 likes on the Facebook page dedicated to her. This page has links to an online shop selling merchandise (for example, shirts, calendars, and mugs) highlighting Lil Bub’s genetic anomalies, as well as a YouTube channel which showcases Lil Bub’s disability as cuteness. A documentary about Lil Bub (Lil Bub & Friendz) also won the award for best online feature film at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival. On both the Facebook page and the YouTube channel, people have written about how cute Lil Bub is. Many use highly emotive language to express how cute they think Lil Bub is, writing that they are “dying” from Lil Bub’s cuteness to how “overwhelmingly sweet” Lil Bub’s face is. These comments are predominantly in response to images of Lil Bub walking and sitting. On the Facebook page, these images are paired with captions written by Lil Bub’s owner and fans of Lil Bub. These captions imagine a context to Lil Bub’s expression of permanent cuteness, which shows her tongue hanging out and eyes that boggle in a look of surprise. For example, the caption “Friday!” is written above a picture of Lil Bub staring at the camera. Another caption, “must be raining yoghurt” is written above a picture of Lil Bub with a similar expression. Images of Lil Bub are predominantly the same, but the captions change to add diversity to what viewers can see on Facebook. Lil Bub also features on the online portal, I Can Has Cheezburger, which has a page dedicated to animals with disabilities (http://icanhas.cheezburger.com/tag/disabled). Carlson questions the popularity of these animals, and more specifically, why animal disabilities are considered as cute. Taking the definition of cute as categorising something/one as infantilised, needing assistance, and simpler than oneself, it can be argued that this definition matches with the views expressed by Taylor, as well as akin to how disability is seen in terms of “normality”. In this context, cuteness can encourage reductive ideas about disability and those who are differently-abled as “simple”. In Lil Bub’s case, several memes are made about her, including one with her usual look of surprise. This meme (http://cheezburger.com/7459833088#comments), which features on I Can Has Cheezburger, notes, “most cats look at you, questioning your intelligence…not this one.” The assumption that Lil Bub is not “condescending” (like other cats are supposed to be) is due to the fact that her tongue is sticking out because she has not grown any teeth. Her disability is framed as non-threatening, less confrontational than other cats, and therefore is a cuter, loveable option. In this context, disability is used to neutralise and make disability a manageable spectacle that can be commented on. Consequently, cuteness makes disability palatable by rearranging how people can consume and grasp the spectacle of disability. As mentioned earlier in this paper, Garland-Thomson writes about the illicitness which surrounds looking at disability. Cute-ifying disability through animals can remove the illicitness that informs the interaction Garland-Thomson describes. The online presence of cute animals, who are “cute” because of their disabilities, invites the human gaze to rest on their disabilities and encourages them to linger, to keep looking without feeling the need to look away. This desire to linger on the cute animal informs the commodification of Lil Bub. For example, the range of products produced to celebrate Lil Bub’s cuteness highlight how viewers are invited to visually absorb everything to do with Lil Bub. Cute-ifying disability, in terms of packaging “cute disabilities” as commodities, re-signifies how humans can perceive and view disability through rearranging the “awkward partnership” between disability and ability. Disability, in this case, can be marketed as “cute” and bought and sold because of its cuteness. However, the marketing of cuteness can also act as an entry point to think through and create awareness about complex social issues. For instance, cuteness can promote awareness about the “right to life” of disabled animals, which is one of Bridavsky’s aims. On a fact sheet written by Bridavsky, the message of celebrating difference is expressed: Beyond being overwhelmingly cute, exceptionally smart and painfully witty, BUB is an advocate for homeless and special needs pets all over the universe. Since before she was a star she has made it a point to spread a message of positivity. She proves that being different is better and she encourages the adoption of pets and helping those less fortunate. To date Lil BUB has directly raised more than $60,000 for various charities through her online store and meet-and-greets at animal shelters all of the country while spreading awareness about the importance of adoption, and spaying and neutering your pets. (1) While Bridavsky focuses on difference through the figure of Lil Bub’s cuteness, this does not detract from the potential cuteness has to expand normative horizons and go beyond acting in the service of enabling reductive norms. For instance, through Bridavsky’s initiative, Lil Bub has partnered with the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) to generate funds for cats with special needs. In this context, Lil Bub’s “cute-fied” disability enables humans to think charitably towards animals with disabilities, and brings awareness to animals with special needs. Moreover, the online presence of Lil Bub and other disabled animals, and their packaging as cute creatures, can operate in the service of disabled people. This is not to state that animals are only relevant in terms of human existence, but to specify that representations of disabilities can resignify normative ideas about disability as something that is other to the complexity of human existence. Viewing an animal’s disability online can be a recuperative process with humans with disabilities. For instance, Nancy, a person who commented on Carlson’s idea of “cute-ifying disability” on 24 February 2014, remarked: “Children identify with cartoons and animals. A lot. Children have told me how Winter the dolfin has a fake tail, and relate it to their leg brace. Or how they saw a dog in a wheelchair and they identified with it since they are in a wheelchair [sic]” (1). Conclusion As the examples above demonstrate, Lil Bub’s popularity can be read in terms of the interaction between the commodification and characterisation of animals as cute, the use of cuteness and disability to raise awareness and funding for charities, and the relationship between animals and humans as companions and sources of inspiration for one another. Cute-fying disability is informed through this complex assemblage that reorients one-sided ideas of cuteness as simply enabling ethical engagements with disability or disenabling such negotiations. At the heart of this is the question: “in whose interest is this for?” As Carlson notes, the issue is not so much in seeing animals as cute, but in not seeing humans with disabilities in a way that sees them as human beings (1). Carlson takes issue with the fact that the same level of benevolence and friendliness offered to disabled animals online is not extended to humans with disabilities. By this, Carlson is not suggesting that people see other people with disabilities as “cute”. Rather, she, like Garland-Thomson, advocate for the “process of dismantling the institutional, attitudinal, legislative, economic, and architectural barriers that keep people with disabilities from full participation in society” (75). The example of Lil Bub demonstrates the various ways through which these barriers are erected and challenged. For instance, Lil Bub has been framed in terms of a human/animal hierarchy that positions her as figure for human entertainment. Her disabilities have also positioned her within another kind of hierarchy wherein she is packaged as less complex and less threatening than “normal” cats, as suggested by the meme that claims that Lil Bub does not judge people, unlike other cats. Simultaneously, Lil Bub’s popularity has garnered awareness towards animals with disabilities and the help humans can offer to assist them. Moreover, Lil Bub, and other disabled animals that are represented as cute, are relatable as companions for humans and can be a source of inspiration for many people. In mapping out the nuances to cute-fying disability in Lil Bub’s case, this paper is not invested in stating whether cute-fying disability is wrong or right, but rather, to point towards the ways in which cute-fying disability can simultaneously work for and against ethical engagements with disability for humans and animals. References BigMamaDiva2. “Winn-ER son!!!” BigMamaDiva2, 2014. 10 Jan. 2014 ‹http://bigmamadiva2.blogspot.com.au/›. Bridavsky, Mike. Lil Bub: About. n.d. 2 Apr. 2014 ‹http://lilbub.com/about›. Carlson, Tiffiny. “Animals and Wheelchairs: Cute-ifying Disability.” Easy Stand Blog, 19 Feb. 2013. 17 Feb. 2014 ‹http://blog.easystand.com/2013/02/animals-and-wheelchairs-cute-ifying-disability/›. Dale, Joshua. Cute Studies, 2014. 17 Feb. 2014 ‹http://www.academia.edu/5132057/CFP_Cute_Studies›. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. “The Politics of Staring: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography.” In Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, eds. Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. New York: Modern Language Association, 2002. 56–75. Taylor, Paul W. “Are Humans Superior to Animals and Plants?” Environmental Ethics (Summer 1984): 149–160. Titchkosky, Tanya. The Question of Access: Disability, Space, Meaning. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. Weil, Kari. “Killing Them Softly: Animal Death, Linguistic Disability, and the Struggle for Ethics.” Configurations 14.1-2 (2006): 87–96. Wolfe, Cary. “Learning from Temple Grandin, or Animal Studies, Disability Studies, and Who Comes after the Subject.” New Formations (Spring 2008): 110–123.

When we think of disability today in the Western world, Christopher Reeve most likely comes to mind. A film star who captured people’s imagination as Superman, Reeve was already a celebrity before he took the fall that would lead to his new position in the fame game: the role of super-crip. As a person with acquired quadriplegia, Christopher Reeve has become both the epitome of disability in Western culture — the powerful cultural myth of disability as tragedy and catastrophe — and, in an intimately related way, the icon for the high-technology quest for cure. The case of Reeve is fascinating, yet critical discussion of Christopher Reeve in terms of fame, celebrity and his performance of disability is conspicuously lacking (for a rare exception see McRuer). To some extent this reflects the comparative lack of engagement of media and cultural studies with disability (Goggin). To redress this lacuna, we draw upon theories of celebrity (Dyer; Marshall; Turner, Bonner, & Marshall; Turner) to explore the production of Reeve as celebrity, as well as bringing accounts of celebrity into dialogue with critical disability studies. Reeve is a cultural icon, not just because of the economy, industrial processes, semiotics, and contemporary consumption of celebrity, outlined in Turner’s 2004 framework. Fame and celebrity are crucial systems in the construction of disability; and the circulation of Reeve-as-celebrity only makes sense if we understand the centrality of disability to culture and media. Reeve plays an enormously important (if ambiguous) function in the social relations of disability, at the heart of the discursive underpinning of the otherness of disability and the construction of normal sexed and gendered bodies (the normate) in everyday life. What is distinctive and especially powerful about this instance of fame and disability is how authenticity plays through the body of the celebrity Reeve; how his saintly numinosity is received by fans and admirers with passion, pathos, pleasure; and how this process places people with disabilities in an oppressive social system, so making them subject(s). An Accidental Star Born September 25, 1952, Christopher Reeve became famous for his roles in the 1978 movie Superman, and the subsequent three sequels (Superman II, III, IV), as well as his role in other films such as Monsignor. As well as becoming a well-known actor, Reeve gained a profile for his activism on human rights, solidarity, environmental, and other issues. In May 1995 Reeve acquired a disability in a riding accident. In the ensuing months, Reeve’s situation attracted a great deal of international attention. He spent six months in the Kessler Rehabilitation Institute in New Jersey, and there gave a high-rating interview on US television personality Barbara Walters’ 20/20 program. In 1996, Reeve appeared at the Academy Awards, was a host at the 1996 Paralympic Games, and was invited to speak at the Democratic National Convention. In the same year Reeve narrated a film about the lives of people living with disabilities (Mierendorf). In 1998 his memoir Still Me was published, followed in 2002 by another book Nothing Is Impossible. Reeve’s active fashioning of an image and ‘new life’ (to use his phrase) stands in stark contrast with most people with disabilities, who find it difficult to enter into the industry and system of celebrity, because they are most often taken to be the opposite of glamorous or important. They are objects of pity, or freaks to be stared at (Mitchell & Synder; Thomson), rather than assuming other attributes of stars. Reeve became famous for his disability, indeed very early on he was acclaimed as the pre-eminent American with disability — as in the phrase ‘President of Disability’, an appellation he attracted. Reeve was quickly positioned in the celebrity industry, not least because his example, image, and texts were avidly consumed by viewers and readers. For millions of people — as evident in the letters compiled in the 1999 book Care Packages by his wife, Dana Reeve — Christopher Reeve is a hero, renowned for his courage in doing battle with his disability and his quest for a cure. Part of the creation of Reeve as celebrity has been a conscious fashioning of his life as an instructive fable. A number of biographies have now been published (Havill; Hughes; Oleksy; Wren). Variations on a theme, these tend to the hagiographic: Christopher Reeve: Triumph over Tragedy (Alter). Those interested in Reeve’s life and work can turn also to fan websites. Most tellingly perhaps is the number of books, fables really, aimed at children, again, on a characteristic theme: Learning about Courage from the Life of Christopher Reeve (Kosek; see also Abraham; Howard). The construction, but especially the consumption, of Reeve as disabled celebrity, is consonant with powerful cultural myths and tropes of disability. In many Western cultures, disability is predominantly understood a tragedy, something that comes from the defects and lack of our bodies, whether through accidents of birth or life. Those ‘suffering’ with disability, according to this cultural myth, need to come to terms with this bitter tragedy, and show courage in heroically overcoming their lot while they bide their time for the cure that will come. The protagonist for this this script is typically the ‘brave’ person with disability; or, as this figure is colloquially known in critical disability studies and the disability movement — the super-crip. This discourse of disability exerts a strong force today, and is known as the ‘medical’ model. It interacts with a prior, but still active charity discourse of disability (Fulcher). There is a deep cultural history of disability being seen as something that needs to be dealt with by charity. In late modernity, charity is very big business indeed, and celebrities play an important role in representing the good works bestowed on people with disabilities by rich donors. Those managing celebrities often suggest that the star finds a charity to gain favourable publicity, a routine for which people with disabilities are generally the pathetic but handy extras. Charity dinners and events do not just reinforce the tragedy of disability, but they also leave unexamined the structural nature of disability, and its associated disadvantage. Those critiquing the medical and charitable discourses of disability, and the oppressive power relations of disability that it represents, point to the social and cultural shaping of disability, most famously in the British ‘social’ model of disability — but also from a range of other perspectives (Corker and Thomas). Those formulating these critiques point to the crucial function that the trope of the super-crip plays in the policing of people with disabilities in contemporary culture and society. Indeed how the figure of the super-crip is also very much bound up with the construction of the ‘normal’ body, a general economy of representation that affects everyone. Superman Flies Again The celebrity of Christopher Reeve and what it reveals for an understanding of fame and disability can be seen with great clarity in his 2002 visit to Australia. In 2002 there had been a heated national debate on the ethics of use of embryonic stem cells for research. In an analysis of three months of the print media coverage of these debates, we have suggested that disability was repeatedly, almost obsessively, invoked in these debates (‘Uniting the Nation’). Yet the dominant representation of disability here was the cultural myth of disability as tragedy, requiring cure at all cost, and that this trope was central to the way that biotechnology was constructed as requiring an urgent, united national response. Significantly, in these debates, people with disabilities were often talked about but very rarely licensed to speak. Only one person with disability was, and remains, a central figure in these Australian stem cell and biotechnology policy conversations: Christopher Reeve. As an outspoken advocate of research on embryonic stem-cells in the quest for a cure for spinal injuries, as well as other diseases, Reeve’s support was enlisted by various protagonists. The current affairs show Sixty Minutes (modelled after its American counterpart) presented Reeve in debate with Australian critics: PRESENTER: Stem cell research is leading to perhaps the greatest medical breakthroughs of all time… Imagine a world where paraplegics could walk or the blind could see … But it’s a breakthrough some passionately oppose. A breakthrough that’s caused a fierce personal debate between those like actor Christopher Reeve, who sees this technology as a miracle, and those who regard it as murder. (‘Miracle or Murder?’) Sixty Minutes starkly portrays the debate in Manichean terms: lunatics standing in the way of technological progress versus Christopher Reeve flying again tomorrow. Christopher presents the debate in utilitarian terms: CHRISTOPHER REEVE: The purpose of government, really in a free society, is to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people. And that question should always be in the forefront of legislators’ minds. (‘Miracle or Murder?’) No criticism of Reeve’s position was offered, despite the fierce debate over the implications of such utilitarian rhetoric for minorities such as people with disabilities (including himself!). Yet this utilitarian stance on disability has been elaborated by philosopher Peter Singer, and trenchantly critiqued by the international disability rights movement. Later in 2002, the Premier of New South Wales, Bob Carr, invited Reeve to visit Australia to participate in the New South Wales Spinal Cord Forum. A journalist by training, and skilled media practitioner, Carr had been the most outspoken Australian state premier urging the Federal government to permit the use of embryonic stem cells for research. Carr’s reasons were as much as industrial as benevolent, boosting the stocks of biotechnology as a clean, green, boom industry. Carr cleverly and repeated enlisted stereotypes of disability in the service of his cause. Christopher Reeve was flown into Australia on a specially modified Boeing 747, free of charge courtesy of an Australian airline, and was paid a hefty appearance fee. Not only did Reeve’s fee hugely contrast with meagre disability support pensions many Australians with disabilities live on, he was literally the only voice and image of disability given any publicity. Consuming Celebrity, Contesting Crips As our analysis of Reeve’s antipodean career suggests, if disability were a republic, and Reeve its leader, its polity would look more plutocracy than democracy; as befits modern celebrity with its constitutive tensions between the demotic and democratic (Turner). For his part, Reeve has criticised the treatment of people with disabilities, and how they are stereotyped, not least the narrow concept of the ‘normal’ in mainstream films. This is something that has directly effected his career, which has become limited to narration or certain types of television and film work. Reeve’s reprise on his culture’s notion of disability comes with his starring role in an ironic, high-tech 1998 remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (Bleckner), a movie that in the original featured a photojournalist injured and temporarily using a wheelchair. Reeve has also been a strong advocate, lobbyist, and force in the politics of disability. His activism, however, has been far more strongly focussed on finding a cure for people with spinal injuries — rather than seeking to redress inequality and discrimination of all people with disabilities. Yet Reeve’s success in the notoriously fickle star system that allows disability to be understood and mapped in popular culture is mostly an unexplored paradox. As we note above, the construction of Reeve as celebrity, celebrating his individual resilience and resourcefulness, and his authenticity, functions precisely to sustain the ‘truth’ and the power relations of disability. Reeve’s celebrity plays an ideological role, knitting together a set of discourses: individualism; consumerism; democratic capitalism; and the primacy of the able body (Marshall; Turner). The nature of this cultural function of Reeve’s celebrity is revealed in the largely unpublicised contests over his fame. At the same time Reeve was gaining fame with his traditional approach to disability and reinforcement of the continuing catastrophe of his life, he was attracting an infamy within certain sections of the international disability rights movement. In a 1996 US debate disability scholar David T Mitchell put it this way: ‘He’s [Reeve] the good guy — the supercrip, the Superman, and those of us who can live with who we are with our disabilities, but who cannot live with, and in fact, protest and retaliate against the oppression we confront every second of our lives are the bad guys’ (Mitchell, quoted in Brown). Many feel, like Mitchell, that Reeve’s focus on a cure ignores the unmet needs of people with disabilities for daily access to support services and for the ending of their brutal, dehumanising, daily experience as other (Goggin & Newell, Disability in Australia). In her book Make Them Go Away Mary Johnson points to the conservative forces that Christopher Reeve is associated with and the way in which these forces have been working to oppose the acceptance of disability rights. Johnson documents the way in which fame can work in a variety of ways to claw back the rights of Americans with disabilities granted in the Americans with Disabilities Act, documenting the association of Reeve and, in a different fashion, Clint Eastwood as stars who have actively worked to limit the applicability of civil rights legislation to people with disabilities. Like other successful celebrities, Reeve has been assiduous in managing his image, through the use of celebrity professionals including public relations professionals. In his Australian encounters, for example, Reeve gave a variety of media interviews to Australian journalists and yet the editor of the Australian disability rights magazine Link was unable to obtain an interview. Despite this, critiques of the super-crip celebrity function of Reeve by people with disabilities did circulate at the margins of mainstream media during his Australian visit, not least in disability media and the Internet (Leipoldt, Newell, and Corcoran, 2003). Infamous Disability Like the lives of saints, it is deeply offensive to many to criticise Christopher Reeve. So deeply engrained are the cultural myths of the catastrophe of disability and the creation of Reeve as icon that any critique runs the risk of being received as sacrilege, as one rare iconoclastic website provocatively prefigures (Maddox). In this highly charged context, we wish to acknowledge his contribution in highlighting some aspects of contemporary disability, and emphasise our desire not to play Reeve the person — rather to explore the cultural and media dimensions of fame and disability. In Christopher Reeve we find a remarkable exception as someone with disability who is celebrated in our culture. We welcome a wider debate over what is at stake in this celebrity and how Reeve’s renown differs from other disabled stars, as, for example, in Robert McRuer reflection that: ... at the beginning of the last century the most famous person with disabilities in the world, despite her participation in an ‘overcoming’ narrative, was a socialist who understood that disability disproportionately impacted workers and the power[less]; Helen Keller knew that blindness and deafness, for instance, often resulted from industrial accidents. At the beginning of this century, the most famous person with disabilities in the world is allowing his image to be used in commercials … (McRuer 230) For our part, we think Reeve’s celebrity plays an important contemporary role because it binds together a constellation of economic, political, and social institutions and discourses — namely science, biotechnology, and national competitiveness. In the second half of 2004, the stem cell debate is once again prominent in American debates as a presidential election issue. Reeve figures disability in national culture in his own country and internationally, as the case of the currency of his celebrity in Australia demonstrates. In this light, we have only just begun to register, let alone explore and debate, what is entailed for us all in the production of this disabled fame and infamy. Epilogue to “Fame and Disability” Christopher Reeve died on Sunday 10 October 2004, shortly after this article was accepted for publication. His death occasioned an outpouring of condolences, mourning, and reflection. We share that sense of loss. How Reeve will be remembered is still unfolding. The early weeks of public mourning have emphasised his celebrity as the very embodiment and exemplar of disabled identity: ‘The death of Christopher Reeve leaves embryonic-stem-cell activism without one of its star generals’ (Newsweek); ‘He Never Gave Up: What actor and activist Christopher Reeve taught scientists about the treatment of spinal-cord injury’ (Time); ‘Incredible Journey: Facing tragedy, Christopher Reeve inspired the world with hope and a lesson in courage’ (People); ‘Superman’s Legacy’ (The Express); ‘Reeve, the Real Superman’ (Hindustani Times). In his tribute New South Wales Premier Bob Carr called Reeve the ‘most impressive person I have ever met’, and lamented ‘Humankind has lost an advocate and friend’ (Carr). The figure of Reeve remains central to how disability is represented. In our culture, death is often closely entwined with disability (as in the saying ‘better dead than disabled’), something Reeve reflected upon himself often. How Reeve’s ‘global mourning’ partakes and shapes in this dense knots of associations, and how it transforms his celebrity, is something that requires further work (Ang et. al.). The political and analytical engagement with Reeve’s celebrity and mourning at this time serves to underscore our exploration of fame and disability in this article. Already there is his posthumous enlistment in the United States Presidential elections, where disability is both central and yet marginal, people with disability talked about rather than listened to. The ethics of stem cell research was an election issue before Reeve’s untimely passing, with Democratic presidential contender John Kerry sharply marking his difference on this issue with President Bush. After Reeve’s death his widow Dana joined the podium on the Kerry campaign in Columbus, Ohio, to put the case herself; for his part, Kerry compared Bush’s opposition to stem cell research as akin to favouring the candle lobby over electricity. As we write, the US polls are a week away, but the cultural representation of disability — and the intensely political role celebrity plays in it — appears even more palpably implicated in the government of society itself. References Abraham, Philip. Christopher Reeve. New York: Children’s Press, 2002. Alter, Judy. Christopher Reeve: Triumph over Tragedy. Danbury, Conn.: Franklin Watts, 2000. Ang, Ien, Ruth Barcan, Helen Grace, Elaine Lally, Justine Lloyd, and Zoe Sofoulis (eds.) Planet Diana: Cultural Studies and Global Mourning. Sydney: Research Centre in Intercommunal Studies, University of Western Sydney, Nepean, 1997. Bleckner, Jeff, dir. Rear Window. 1998. Brown, Steven E. “Super Duper? The (Unfortunate) Ascendancy of Christopher Reeve.” Mainstream: Magazine of the Able-Disabled, October 1996. Repr. 10 Aug. 2004 http://www.independentliving.org/docs3/brown96c.html>. Carr, Bob. “A Class Act of Grace and Courage.” Sydney Morning Herald. 12 Oct. 2004: 14. Corker, Mairian and Carol Thomas. “A Journey around the Social Model.” Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Theory. Ed. Mairian Corker and Tom Shakespeare. London and New York: Continuum, 2000. Donner, Richard, dir. Superman. 1978. Dyer, Richard. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. London: BFI Macmillan, 1986. Fulcher, Gillian. Disabling Policies? London: Falmer Press, 1989. Furie, Sidney J., dir. Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. 1987. Finn, Margaret L. Christopher Reeve. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 1997. Gilmer, Tim. “The Missionary Reeve.” New Mobility. November 2002. 13 Aug. 2004 http://www.newmobility.com/>. Goggin, Gerard. “Media Studies’ Disability.” Media International Australia 108 (Aug. 2003): 157-68. Goggin, Gerard, and Christopher Newell. Disability in Australia: Exposing a Social Apartheid. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2005. —. “Uniting the Nation?: Disability, Stem Cells, and the Australian Media.” Disability & Society 19 (2004): 47-60. Havill, Adrian. Man of Steel: The Career and Courage of Christopher Reeve. New York, N.Y.: Signet, 1996. Howard, Megan. Christopher Reeve. Minneapolis: Lerner Publications, 1999. Hughes, Libby. Christopher Reeve. Parsippany, NJ.: Dillon Press, 1998. Johnson, Mary. Make Them Go Away: Clint Eastwood, Christopher Reeve and the Case Against Disability Rights. Louisville : Advocado Press, 2003. Kosek, Jane Kelly. Learning about Courage from the Life of Christopher Reeve. 1st ed. New York : PowerKids Press, 1999. Leipoldt, Erik, Christopher Newell, and Maurice Corcoran. “Christopher Reeve and Bob Carr Dehumanise Disability — Stem Cell Research Not the Best Solution.” Online Opinion 27 Jan. 2003. http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=510>. Lester, Richard (dir.) Superman II. 1980. —. Superman III. 1983. Maddox. “Christopher Reeve Is an Asshole.” 12 Aug. 2004 http://maddox.xmission.com/c.cgi?u=creeve>. Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1997. Mierendorf, Michael, dir. Without Pity: A Film about Abilities. Narr. Christopher Reeve. 1996. “Miracle or Murder?” Sixty Minutes. Channel 9, Australia. March 17, 2002. 15 June 2002 http://news.ninemsn.com.au/sixtyminutes/stories/2002_03_17/story_532.asp>. Mitchell, David, and Synder, Sharon, eds. The Body and Physical Difference. Ann Arbor, U of Michigan, 1997. McRuer, Robert. “Critical Investments: AIDS, Christopher Reeve, and Queer/Disability Studies.” Journal of Medical Humanities 23 (2002): 221-37. Oleksy, Walter G. Christopher Reeve. San Diego, CA: Lucent, 2000. Reeve, Christopher. Nothing Is Impossible: Reflections on a New Life. 1st ed. New York: Random House, 2002. —. Still Me. 1st ed. New York: Random House, 1998. Reeve, Dana, comp. Care Packages: Letters to Christopher Reeve from Strangers and Other Friends. 1st ed. New York: Random House, 1999. Reeve, Matthew (dir.) Christopher Reeve: Courageous Steps. Television documentary, 2002. Thomson, Rosemary Garland, ed. Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. New York: New York UP, 1996. Turner, Graeme. Understanding Celebrity. Thousands Oak, CA: Sage, 2004. Turner, Graeme, Frances Bonner, and David P Marshall. Fame Games: The Production of Celebrity in Australia. Melbourne: Cambridge UP, 2000. Wren, Laura Lee. Christopher Reeve: Hollywood’s Man of Courage. Berkeley Heights, NJ : Enslow, 1999. Younis, Steve. “Christopher Reeve Homepage.” 12 Aug. 2004 http://www.fortunecity.com/lavender/greatsleep/1023/main.html>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Goggin, Gerard & Newell, Christopher. "Fame and Disability: Christopher Reeve, Super Crips, and Infamous Celebrity." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/02-goggin.php>. APA Style Goggin, G. & Newell, C. (Nov. 2004) "Fame and Disability: Christopher Reeve, Super Crips, and Infamous Celebrity," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/02-goggin.php>.

Jessica craned her head to take in the imposing, stone building, then lowered her gaze to the gold-plated sign at the base of the steps. “Institute of Methodology”, it read. Inside the heavy iron doors, a woman sat at a desk, her face devoid of expression. “Subject area?” asked the woman. “Uhmm, feminism ... and fiction, I think.” “Turn right.” “Do you have a map?” “No.” “How am I meant to find things?” “Each has their own method; it’s not up to us to prescribe that.” Jessica sighed, readjusted her handbag and turned right. A corridor stretched out before her. She set off, her stiletto boots echoing on the hard wooden floor. The first door she arrived at had the words “Deleuze and Guattari” positioned squarely in the middle. She hesitated, then turned the doorknob. The room was white and empty. A male voice issued from somewhere but she couldn’t tell the direction from which it came. It droned on, with some inflection, but there was no way of knowing where the sentences started and finished. She picked out a few words: a thousand plateaus, becoming, burrowing, but couldn’t piece them into anything meaningful. She backed out of the room, frowning, and asked me, How am I going to learn anything if they only have these voices? I can’t lipread them. And how can I produce something factual if I haven’t heard it all? I might make stuff up. You always make things up anyway. After the barrier of disembodied sound, the silence of the corridor was soothing. Jessica always had difficulty with hearing men’s voices, for their registers were lower. Sometimes, she wondered if this was the reason she’d become interested in feminism: women were simply easier to understand. The next door was labelled “Facets of Phenomenology.” After that was “Post-It Notes and Poststructuralism”, “Interpretation of Geometric Design”, “Knitting Class” and “Cyberspace and Geography.” None of these were very helpful. She wanted something on bodies and writing. She walked on. It was, she soon realised, so terribly easy to lose one’s way. The corridors continued. She turned right most of the time, and occasionally left. Her arches began to ache. After a while she came to the conclusion that she had no idea of where she was. Immediately, a bird appeared and dived down her throat. Trapped, it thudded against her ribs. Breathe, I told her. Breathe. She put a hand out to the wall. Outside another door she heard, a voice with a distinct Australian accent. She checked the label on the door. “Fictocriticism,” it read. The door opened. The bird climbed out of her chest and flew away. A young woman stood before her, wearing bright red lipstick. “We saw your shadow beneath the door.” She pointed to Jessica’s feet. “We don’t like barriers, so come in.” The room was airy and brilliantly lit, with a high ceiling patterned with pressed metal vines and flowers. A man and a handful of women sat at a table covered with papers, bottles of wine, brie, sundried tomatoes and crackers. “Wine?” asked the woman, a bottle in her hand. “It’s from Margaret River.” “Oh yes, please.” Jessica pulled out a chair from the table. The people’s faces looked friendly. “What brings you here?” The woman with red lipstick asked, handing her a glass. “I’m trying to find a writing style that’s comfortable for me to use. I just can’t relate to abstract texts, like those by Deleuze and Guattari.” Jessica eyed the cheese platter on the table. She was hungry. “Help yourself,” said the man. Jessica picked up the cheese knife and a cracker. “You’d like my essay, then, ‘Me and My Shadow.’” It was an older woman speaking, with soft grey hair and luminous eyes. “In it I assert that Guattari’s Molecular Revolution is distancing and, she pushed the pile of paper napkins towards Jessica, ‘totally abstract and impersonal. Though the author uses the first person (‘The distinction I am proposing’, ‘I want therefore to make it clear’), it quickly became clear to me that he had no interest whatsoever in the personal, or in concrete situations as I understand them – a specific person, a specific machine, somewhere in time and space, with something on his/her mind, real noises, smells, aches and pains” (131). Jessica thought about the first room, where Deleuze’s and Guattari’s voices had seemed to issue from nowhere. “Of course,” she said. “If my comprehension comes from reading faces and bodies, it follows that those writers who evince themselves in the text will be the ones that appeal to me.” The rest of the table was silent. “I’m deaf,” Jessica explained. “I’ve no hearing in my left ear and half in my right, but people don’t know until I tell them.” “I’d never have guessed,” said the woman with red lipstick. “I’m good at faking it,” Jessica replied wryly. “It seems to me that, if I only hear some things and make the rest up, then my writing should reflect that.” “We might be able to help you — we write about, and in the style of, fictocriticism.” Two women were talking at once. It was difficult to tell who was saying what. “But what is it?” Jessica asked. “That’s a problematic question. It resists definition, you see, for the form it takes varies according to the writer.” She glanced from one woman to the other. It was hard to keep up. They went on, “Fictocriticism might most usefully be defined as hybridised writing that moves between the poles of fiction (‘invention’/‘speculation’) and criticism (‘deduction’/‘explication’), of subjectivity (‘interiority’) and objectivity (‘exteriority’). It is writing that brings the ‘creative’ and the ‘critical’ together – not simply in the sense of placing them side by side, but in the sense of mutating both, of bringing a spotlight to bear upon the known forms in order to make them ‘say’ something else” (Kerr and Nettlebeck 3). “It began to incorporate narratives and styles that wrote against omniscience in favour of fragmentary, personal perspectives.” Concentrating on cutting and spreading her brie, Jessica couldn’t see who had said this. She looked up, trying to see who had spoken. “In addition,” said a young, slim woman, “The use of autobiographical elements in ficto-criticism that include the body and personal details … realises a subjectivity that is quite different from the controlling academic critical subject with their voice from on high” (Flavell 77). Jessica bit into her cracker. The brie was creamy, but rather too strong. She piled sundried tomatoes onto it. “It is of course, a capacious category,” the man added, “as it must be if it is inspired by the materials and situation at hand. One might urge the interested writer not to feel that their practice has to conform to one or another model, but to have the confidence that the problem characterising the situation before them will surprise them into changing their practices. Like all literature, fictocriticism experiments with ways of being in the world, with forms of subjectivity if you like” (Muecke 15). Jessica nodded, her mouth full of biscuit and brie. Oil dripped from the tomatoes down her fingers. “Yes,” it was the two women in their duet, “in fictocritical writings the ‘distance’ of the theorist/critic collides with the ‘interiority’ of the author. In other words, the identity of the author is very much at issue. This is not to say that an ‘identity’ declares itself strictly in terms of the lived experience of the individual, but it does declare itself as a politic to be viewed, reviewed, contested, and above all engaged with” (Kerr and Nettlebeck 3). “That makes sense,” Jessica thought aloud. “Everything I write is an amalgam of fact and fiction, because I hear some things and make the rest up. Deafness influences the way I process and write about the world, so it seems I can’t avoid my body when I write.” She lifted a napkin from the pile and wiped her oily fingers. “Yet, to use a language of the body, or écriture féminine, is also to run the risk of essentialism, of assuming that, for example when we write long, silky sentences, we are saying that this is how every woman would write. It’s also true that, when writing, we don’t have to be limited to our own bodies – we can go beyond them.” She paused, thinking. “It’s been said that sign language is a form of écriture féminine, for a person who signs literally writes with their hands. Where are my notes?” She ferreted through her handbag, pushing aside tubes of lip gloss and hand cream, a bus pass and mirror, and extracted some folded pieces of paper. “Here, H-Dirksen L. Bauman comments on the possibilites of écriture féminine for the disabled, writing that, The project of recognizing Deaf identity bears similarities to the feminist project of re-gaining a ‘body of one’s own’ through linguistic and literary practices. Sign, in a more graphic way, perhaps, than l’écriture féminine is a ‘writing of/on the body.’ The relation between Sign and l’écriture féminine raises questions that could have interesting implications for feminist performance. Does the antiphonocetric nature of Sign offer a means of averting these essentializing tendency of l’écriture féminine? Does the four-dimensional space of performance offer ways of deconstructing phallogocentric linear discourse? (359) “As Sign is a writing by the body, it could be argued that each body produces an original language. I think it’s this, rather than antiphonocentrism — that is, refusing to privilege speech over writing, as has been the tradition — that represents the destabilising effects of Sign.” “Here’s Jamming the Machinery.” The slim woman pushed a book towards Jessica. “It’s about contemporary Australian écriture féminine.” Jessica opened the covers and began reading: As a counter-strategy, écriture féminine, it is argued, is theoretically sourced in the bodies of women. Here, the body represents one aspect of what it ‘means’ to be a woman, but of course our bodies are infinitely variable as are our socio-historical relations and the way that we live through and make meaning of our particular bodies. Texts, however, are produced through the lived practices of being socially positioned as (among other things) women, so those effects will be inscribed in actively inventing ways for women to speak and write about ourselves as women, rather than through the narrative machinery of patriarchy (Bartlett 1-2). I agree with that, Jessica mused to herself. Even if, on paper, écriture féminine does run the risk of essentialism, it’s still a useful strategy, so long as one remains attentive to the specificity of each individual body. She looked up. The conversation was becoming loud, joyful and boisterous. It was turning into a party. Sadly, she stood. “I’d like to stay, but I have to keep thinking.” She pushed in her chair. “Thank you for your ideas.” “Goodbye and good luck!” they chorused, and replenished their wine glasses. Outside, it was getting dark. She trailed her fingers along the wall for balance. Her sight orientated her; without it, she was liable to fall over, particularly in stilettos. Seeing a movement near the ceiling, Jessica stopped and peered upwards. Dragons! she cried. Sitting in the rafters were three small, pearly white dragons, their scaly hides gleaming in the darkness. Here, she called, stretching out a hand. One dropped, swooping, and landed on her wrist, its talons gripping her arm. Ouch! It looked at her curiously with its small gold eyes, then stretched its wings proudly. Dark blue veins ran across the soft membrane. You’re not very cuddly, she told it, but you are exquisite. Tell me, are you real? For an answer, it leaned over and gently nipped her thumb, drawing blood. Its tail swished like a cat’s in a frisky mood. Stop making things up, I scolded her. This is supposed to be serious. Abruptly, the dragon sprang from her wrist, winging gracefully back to the ceiling. Jessica rubbed her arm and continued, feeling ripples of unevenly applied paint beneath her fingertips. Let me pose a question, I suggested: if a fairy godmother offered you your hearing, would you take it? Well, deafness has made me who I am— You mean, an opinionated, obnoxious, feminist thinker and writer? Yes, exactly. So perhaps I wouldn’t take it. And where would you be without silence, which has given you the space in which to think, and which has shaped you as a writer? Without silence, you wouldn’t have turned to words. Hmmm, yes. She slowed. It’s awfully dark in here now. And quiet. For deaf people, silence has often been yoked together with negative connotations – it’s a cave, a prison, a tomb. Sometimes it can feel like this, but, as you know, at other times it’s liberating. You don’t have to listen to someone yakking on their mobile phone on the bus, nor overhear your flatmate having loud sex in the room above; you can simply switch off your hearing aid and keep reading your book, or thinking your thoughts. In a somewhat similar situation, Stephen Hawking, the theoretical physicist, has said that ‘his disability has given him the advantage of having more time to think,’ although Susan Wendell points out that he is only able to do this ‘because of the help of his family, three nurses, a graduate student who travels with him to maintain his computer-communications systems’ – resources which are unavailable to many disabled people” (109). Thus although disability has been largely theorised as lack, it would seem that the contrary is the case: disability brings with it a wealth of possibility. Jessica slowed, feeling vibrations in the wall and beneath our feet. Her heartbeat quickened. Maybe it’s music. It’s not. It’s irregular. Then we heard the sound, like distant thunder. Get back against the wall, I ordered her. Seconds later a crowd of creatures ran past, rattling the floorboards. They were so black we couldn’t see them. What was that? she asked. They smelled like horses. Musky, but sharp too. Let’s get moving. And I told you to stop making things up. I didn’t make that up! she protested. Her pulse was still rapid, so I kept talking to distract her. The difficulty is to avoid referring to the disabled person as having lost something. Of course, you can lose your hearing, but you gain infinitely more in other ways – your senses of touch, taste, smell and sight are augmented. In the current climate of thinking, this is easier said than done. Lennard Davis indicates with distaste that discussions of disability stop theorists in their tracks. Disability, as it has been formulated, is a construct that is defined by lack. Rather than face this ragged imaged [of the disabled individual], the critic turns to the fluids of sexuality, the gloss of lubrication, the glossary of the body as text, the heteroglossia of the intertext, the glossolalia of the schizophrenic. But almost never the body of the differently abled (5). Theorists of disability consistently point out that, if more effort and energy were directed towards the philosophical implications of the disabled body, a wealth of new material and ideas would emerge that would shatter existing presumptions about the corporeal. For example, there are still immense possibilities thrown up by theorising a jouissance, or pleasure, in the disabled body. As Susan Wendell points out, “paraplegics and quadriplegics have revolutionary things to teach us about the possibilities of sexuality which contradict patriarchal culture’s obsessions with the genitals” (120). Thus if there were more of a focus on the positive aspects of disability and on promoting the understanding that disability is not about lack, people could see how it fosters creativity and imagination. Jessica saw with relief that there was a large bay window at the end of a corridor, looking out onto the Institute’s grounds. She collapsed onto the bench beneath it, which was layered with cushions. The last of the sun was fading and the grass refracted a golden sheen. She unzipped her boots and swung her legs onto the bench. Leaning her head back against the wall, she remembered a day at primary school when she was eleven. She sat on the blue seat beneath the Jacaranda tree, a book open in her lap. It was lunchtime, the sun was warm and purple Jacaranda blossoms lay scattered at her feet, some squidged wetly into the cement. She looked up from the book to watch her classmates playing soccer on the field, shouting and calling. She would have joined them, except that of late she had felt awkwardness, where before she had been blithe. She, who was so used to scrambling over the delightful hardness of wool bales in the shearing shed, who ran up and down the banks of creeks and crawled into ti trees, flakes of bark sticking to her jumper, had gradually, insidiously, learnt a consciousness of her body. She was not like them. We were silent. The electric lights on the walls of the building came on, illuminating sections of the stonework. At the time, she hated being isolated, but it forced to look at the world differently. Spending so much time on her own also taught her to listen to me, her imagination, and because of that her writing flourished. There was a flutter in the hallway. The tiny dragon had returned. It braked in the air, circled, and floated gently onto her skirt. Was this your doing? She asked me suspiciously. Maybe. She held out her palm. The dragon jumped into it, squeaking, its tail whipping lazily. Jessica smiled. References Bartlett, Alison. Jamming the Machinery: Contemporary Australian Women’s Writing. Toowoomba: Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 1998. Bauman, H-Dirksen L. “Toward a Poetics of Vision, Space and the Body.” The Disability Studies Reader. Ed. Lennard J. Davis. Hoboken: Routledge, 2006. 355-366. Davis, Lennard J. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. London: Verso, 1995. Flavell, Helen. Writing-Between: Australian and Canadian Ficto-Criticism. Ph.D. Thesis. Murdoch University, 2004. Gibbs, Anna. “Writing and the Flesh of Others.” Australian Feminist Studies 18 (2003): 309–319. Kerr, Heather, and Amanda Nettlebeck. “Notes Towards an Introduction.” The Space Between: Australian Women Writing Fictocriticism. Ed. Heather Kerr and Amanda Nettlebeck. Nedlands: U of Western Australia P, 1998. 1-18. Muecke, Stephen. Joe in the Andamans: And Other Fictocritical Stories. Erskineville: Local Consumption Publications, 2008. Tompkins, Jane. “Me and My Shadow.” Gender and Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism. Ed. Linda Kauffman. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. 121-139. Wendell, Susan. “Towards a Feminist Theory of Disability.” Hypatia 4 (1989): 104–124.

The Garden of Eden is the original surveillance state. God creates the heavens and the earth, turns on the lights, inspects everything that he has made and, behold, finds it very good. But then the creation attempts to acquire the surveillant properties of the creator. In Genesis 3, a serpent explains to Eve the virtues of forbidden fruit: “Ye shall not die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3: 4–5). Adam’s and Eve’s eyes are certainly opened (sufficiently so to necessitate figleaves), but in the next verse, God’s superior surveillance system has found them out. The power relationship Genesis illustrates has prompted many – the Romantics in their seditious appropriations of Paradise Lost, for instance – to question whether Eden is all that “good” after all. Why was God so concerned for Eve and Adam not to see? For that matter, why was he not there to intercept the serpent, but so promptly on the scene of humanity’s crime? Various answers (that God planned the Fall because it would enable him to demonstrate supreme love through Jesus, that Eve and Adam were wilfully wrong to grasp for equality with the Creator of the Universe, that God could not intervene in the temptation because it would compromise humanity’s free will) do not alter the flaw in God’s perfect garden state. Consciousness of this imperfection surfaces repeatedly in Western utopian narratives. The very existence of such narratives points to a humanist distrust in God as social engineer; the fact that these secular Edens are themselves often flawed suggests both a parody of the original Eden and an admission that humans are not up to the task of social engineering either. Thomas More’s Utopia and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner – one the ostensible depiction of a new Eden, the other an outright dystopic inferno – address the association of Eden (or the Creator) with surveillance, and so undermine the ideality of the prelapsarian Garden. The archetypal power relationship, that of All-Seeing Creator with always-seen creation, is reconfigured sans God: in Utopia, with society itself performing the work of a transcendent surveillance system; in Blade Runner, with the multi-planetary Tyrell corporation doing so. In both cases, the Omnisurveillant is stripped of the mitigating quality of being God, and so exposed as oppressive, unjust, an affront to the idea of perfection. Like Eden, the eponymous island of Thomas More’s Utopia is a surveillance state. Glass, we read, “is there much used” (More 55). Surveillance is decentralised and patriarchal: wives are expected to confess to their husbands, children to their mothers (More 65). Each year, every thirty families select a “syphogrant”, whose “chief and almost … only office … is to see and take heed that no man sit idle, but that every one apply his own craft with earnest diligence” (More 57). In the mess halls, “The Syphogrant and his wife sit in the midst of the high table … because from thence all the whole company is in their sight” (More 66). Elders are ranged amongst the young men so that “the sage gravity and reverence of the elders should keep the youngsters from wanton licence of words and behaviour. Forasmuch as nothing can be so secretly spoken or done at the table, but either they that sit on the one side or on the other must needs perceive it” (More 66). Not only are the Utopians subject to social surveillance, but also to a conviction of its inescapability. Believing that the dead move among them, the Utopians feel that they are being watched (even when they are not) and thus regulate their own behaviour. In his preface to The Panopticon, Jeremy Bentham extols the virtues of his surveillance machine: “Morals reformed – health preserved – industry invigorated instruction diffused – public burthens lightened – Economy seated, as it were, upon a rock – the gordian knot of the Poor-Laws are not cut, but untied – all by a simple idea in Architecture!” (Bentham 29). As Foucault points out in “Panopticism”, the Panopticon works so well because the prisoner can never know when she or he is being watched, and this uncertainty compels the prisoner into constant discipline. Atheist Bentham had created a transcendent surveillance system that would replace God in (he trusted) an increasingly secular society. Bentham’s catalogue of the Panopticon’s benefits is something of a Utopian manifesto in its own right, and his utilitarianism, based on the “greatest-happiness principle”, was prepared to embrace the surveillance system so long as that system maximised overall happiness. Perhaps Thomas More was a proto-utilitarian, prepared to take up the repressive aspects of panopticism in exchange for moral reform, health preservation, the invigoration of industry and the lightening of public burdens. On the other hand, Utopia is widely read as a deliberately ironic representation of the ideal state. Stephen Greenblatt has pointed out that More “remained ambivalent about many of his most intensely felt perceptions” in Utopia, and he offers the text’s various ironising elements (such as the name of More’s fictitious interlocutor, Hythlodaeus, “well learned in nonsense”) as evidence (Greenblatt 54). Even the text’s title undermines its Edenic vision: as Louis Marin argues, “Utopia” could derive equally from Greek ou-topos, no-place, or eu-topos, good-place (Marin 85). More’s ambivalence about Utopia – to the extent of attributing his account of No-place to a character called Nonsense – suggests his impatience with his own flawed social vision. While Utopia is ambivalent in its depiction of the perfect state, more recent utopian narratives – Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1931), for instance, or George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) – are unequivocally ironic about the subordination of the individual to the perfect state. The Bible’s account of human society begins with Eden and ends with Apocalypse, in which divine surveillance reaches its inevitable conclusion in divine judgement. The utopian genre has undergone a very similar trajectory, beginning with what seem to be sincere attempts to sketch the perfect state, briefly flourishing as Europeans became first aware of Cytherean islands in the South Pacific, and, more recently, representing outright apocalypse (as in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale [1986] and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner [1992]), or at least responding pessimistically to human attempts at social engineering. Blade Runner’s dystopic inversion of biblical creation illustrates an enduring distrust in both human and divine attempts to establish Eden. The year is 2019 (only one year off 2020, perfect vision); the place is Los Angeles, the City of Angels. Corporate biomechanic Eldon Tyrell manufactures a race of robots, “replicants”, who are physically indistinguishable from humans, capable of developing emotional responses, but burdened with a four-year self-destruct mechanism. When the replicants rebel, their leader, Roy Batty, demands of Tyrell, “I want more life, Father”. Tyrell is not only “Father”, but “the god of biomechanics”; and Batty is simultaneously a reworking of Adam (the disaffected creation), Lucifer (the rebel angel) and Christ (as shown in the accompanying iconography of crucifixion and doves). The Bible’s leading actors are all present, but the City of Angels, 2019, is unmistakeably not Eden. It is a polluted, dank, flame-spewing dragon of a city, more Inferno than human habitation. The film’s oppressive film noir atmosphere relays the nausea induced by the Tyrell Corporation’s surveillance system. The Voight-Kamff test – a means of assessing emotional response (and thus determining whether an individual is human or replicant) by scanning the pupils – is a surveillance mechanism so intrusive it measures not only behaviour, but feelings. The optical imagery throughout the film reinforces the idea of permanent visibility. The result is a claustrophobic paranoia. Blade Runner is unambiguous in its pessimism about human attempts to regulate society (attempts which it shows to be reliant on surveillance, slavery and swift punishment). It seems unlikely that the God of Genesis is specifically targeted by this film’s parody of the Creator-creation power relationship – its critiques of capitalism and environmental mismanagement are much more overt – but by configuring its dramatis personae in biblical roles, Blade Runner demonstrates that the paradigm for omnisurveillant creators comes from the Bible. In turn, by placing Los Angeles, 2019, at such a distant aesthetic remove from Eden, the film portrays the omnisurveillant creator unrelieved by natural beauty. Foucault’s formulation of panopticism, that power is seeing without being seen, that being seen without seeing is disempowerment, informs all three texts – Genesis, Utopia and Blade Runner. What differentiates them, determines how perfect each text would have its world believed to be, is the extent to which its authors approve this power relationship. References Bentham, Jeremy. The Panopticon; or, The Inspection House (1787). In The Panopticon Writings. Ed. Miran Bozovic. London: Verso, 1995. 29-95. Foucault, Michel. “Panopticism”. In Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan (1977). New York: Vintage Books, 1995. 195–228. Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1980. Marin, Louis. Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces. Trans. Robert A. Vollrath. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1990. More, Thomas. Utopia (1516). In Susan Brice, ed. Three Early Modern Utopias: Utopia, New Atlantis, The Isle of Pines. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Scott, Ridley. Blade Runner: The Director’s Cut. United States, 1992. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Harley, Alexis. "Resurveying Eden: Panoptica in Imperfect Worlds." M/C Journal 8.4 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0508/02-harley.php>. APA Style Harley, A. (Aug. 2005) "Resurveying Eden: Panoptica in Imperfect Worlds," M/C Journal, 8(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0508/02-harley.php>.

There is an expression, in recent Marvel superhero films, of a social anxiety about genetic science that, in part, replaces the social anxieties about nuclear weapons that can be detected in the comic books on which these films are based (Rutherford). Much of the analysis of superhero comics – and the films on which they are based – has focussed its attention on the anxieties contained within them about gender, sexuality, race, politics, and the nation. Surprisingly little direct critique is applied to the most obvious point of difference within those texts, namely the acquisition, display, and use of extra-ordinary abilities. These superhero films represent some of the ways that audiences come to understand genetics. I am interested in this essay in considering how the representation of genetic mutation, as an error in a bio-chemical code, is a key narrative device. Moreover, mutation is central to the way the films explore the social exclusion of characters who acquire super-abilities. My contention is that, in these Marvel comic films, extra-ordinary ability, and the anxieties expressed about those abilities, parallels some of the social and cultural beliefs about the disabled body. The impaired body thus becomes a larger trope for any deviation from the “normal” body and gives rise to the anxieties about deviation and deviance explored in these films. Impairment and illness have historically been represented as either a blessing or a curse – the source of revelation and discovery, or the site of ignominy. As Western culture developed, the confluence of Greek and Judeo-Christian stories about original sin and inherited punishment for parental digression resulted in the entrenchment of beliefs about bent and broken bodies as the locus of moral questions (and answers) about the abilities and use of the human body (Sontag 47). I want to explore, firstly, in the film adaptations of the Marvel comics X-Men, Spiderman, Fantastic Four, and The Hulk, the representation of changes to the body as the effect of invisible bio-chemical states and processes. It has been impossible to see DNA, whether with the human eye or with technical aid; the science of genetics is largely based on inference from other observations. In these superhero films, the graphic display of DNA and genetic restructuring is strikingly large. This overemphasis suggests both that the genetic is a key narrative impetus of the films and that there is something uncertain or disturbing about genetic science. One such concern about genetic science is identifying the sources of oppression that might underlie the, at times understandable, desire to eliminate disease and congenital defect through changes to the genetic code or elimination of genetic error. As Adrienne Asch states, this urge to eliminate disease and impairment is problematic: Why should it be acceptable to avoid some characteristics and not others? How can the society make lists of acceptable and unacceptable tests and still maintain that only disabling traits, and not people who live with those traits, are to be avoided? (339) Asch’s questioning ends with the return to the moral concerns that have always circulated around the body, and in particular a body that deviates from a norm. The maxim “hate the sin, not the sinner” is replaced by “eradicate the impairment, not the impaired”: it is some kind of lack of effort or resourcefulness on the part of the impaired that is detectable in the presence of the impairment. This replacement of sin by science is yet another example of the trace of the body as the site of moral arguments. As Bryan Turner argues, categories of disease, and by association impairment, are intrinsic to the political discourse of Western societies about otherness and exclusion (Turner 216). It is not surprising then, that characters that experience physical changes caused by genetic mutation may take on for themselves the social shame that is part of the exclusion process. As genetic science has increasingly infiltrated the popular imagination and thus finds expression in cinema, so too has this concern of shame and guilt become key to the narrative tension of films that link changes in the genetic code to the acquisition of super-ability. In the X-Men franchise, the young female character Rogue (Anna Paquin), acquires the ability to absorb another’s life force (and abilities), and she seeks to have her genetic code resequenced in order to be able to touch others, and thus by implication have a “normal” life. In X2 (Bryan Singer, 2003), Rogue’s boyfriend, Iceman (Shawn Ashmore), who has been largely excluded from her touch, returns home with other mutants. After having hidden his mutant abilities from his family, he finally confesses to them the truth about himself. His shocked mother turns to him and asks: “Have you tried not being a mutant?” Whilst this moment has been read as an expression of anxiety about homosexuality (“Pop Culture: Out Is In”; Vary), it also marks a wider social concern about otherness, including disability, and its attendant social exclusion. Moreover, this moment reasserts the paradigm of effort that underlies anxieties about deviations from the norm: Iceman could have been normal if only he had tried harder, had a different girlfriend, remained at home, sought more knowledge, or had better counsel. Science, and more specifically genetic science, is suggested in many of these films as the site of bad counsel. The narratives of these superhero stories, almost without exception, begin or hinge on some kind of mistake by scientists – the escaped spider, the accident in the laboratory, the experiment that gets out of control. The classic image of the mad scientist or Doctor Frankenstein type, locked away in his laboratory is reflected in the various scenes in all these films, in which the scientists are separated from wider society. In Fantastic 4 (Tim Story, 2005), the villain, Dr Von Doom (Julian McMahon), is located at the top of a large multi-story building, as too are the heroes. Their separation from the rest of society is made even more dramatic by placing the site of their exposure to cosmic radiation, the source of the genetic mutation, in a space station that is empty of anyone else except the five main characters whose bodies will be altered. In Spiderman (Sam Raimi, 2002), the villain is a scientist whose experiments are kept secret by the military, emphasising the danger inherent in his work. The mad-scientist imagery dominates the representation of Bruce Bannor’s father in Hulk (Ang Lee, 2003), whose experiments have altered his genetic code, and that alteration in genetic structure has subsequently been passed onto his son. The Fantastic 4 storyline returns several times to the link between genetic mutation and the exposure to cosmic radiation. Indeed, it is made explicit that human existence – and by implication the human body and abilities – is predicated on this cosmic radiation as the source of transformations that formed the human genetic code. The science of early biology thus posits this cosmic radiation as the source of what is “normal,” and it is this appeal to the cosmos – derived from the Greek kosmos meaning “order” – that provides, in part, the basis on which to value the current human genetic code. This link to the cosmic is also made in the opening sequence of X-Men in which the following voice-over is heard as we see a ball of light form. This light show is both a reminder of the Big Bang (the supposed beginning of the universe which unleased vast amounts of radiation) and the intertwining of chromosomes seen inside biological nuclei: Mutation, it is the key to our evolution. It has enabled us to evolve from a single celled organism to the dominant species on the planet. This process is slow, normally taking thousands and thousands of years. But every few hundred millennia evolution leaps forward. Whilst mutation may be key to human evolution and the basis for the dramatic narratives of these superhero films, it is also the source of social anxiety. Mutation, whilst derived from the Latin for “change,” has come to take on the connotation of an error or mistake. Richard Dawkins, in his celebrated book The Selfish Gene, compares mutation to “an error corresponding to a single misprinted letter in a book” (31). The language of science is intended to be without the moral overtones that such words as “error” and “misprint” attract. Nevertheless, in the films under consideration, the negative connotations of mutation as error or mistake, are, therefore, the source of the many narrative crises as characters seek to rid themselves of their abilities. Norman Osborn (Willem Dafoe), the villain of Spiderman, is spurred on by his belief that human beings have not achieved their potential, and the implication here is that the presence of physical weakness, illness, and impairment is the supporting evidence. The desire to return the bodies of these superheroes to a “normal” state is best expressed in_ Hulk_, when Banner’s father says: “So you wanna know what’s wrong with him. So you can fix him, cure him, change him.” The link between a mistake in the genetic code and the disablement of the these characters is made explicit when Banner demands from his father an explanation for his transformation into the Hulk – the genetic change is explicitly named a deformity. These films all gesture towards the key question of just what is the normal human genetic code, particularly given the way mutation, as error, is a fundamental tenet in the formation of that code. The films’ focus on extra-ordinary ability can be taken as a sign of the extent of the anxiety about what we might consider normal. Normal is represented, in part, by the supporting characters, named and unnamed, and the narrative turns towards rehabilitating the altered bodies of the main characters. The narratives of social exclusion caused by such radical deviations from the normal human body suggest the lack of a script or language for being able to talk about deviation, except in terms of disability. In Spiderman, Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) is doubly excluded in the narrative. Beginning as a classic weedy, glasses-wearing, nerdy individual, unable to “get the girl,” he is exposed to numerous acts of humiliation at the commencement of the film. On being bitten by a genetically altered spider, he acquires its speed and agility, and in a moment of “revenge” he confronts one of his tormentors. His super-ability marks him as a social outcast; his tormentors mock him saying “You are a freak” – the emphasis in speech implying that Parker has never left a freakish mode. The film emphasises the physical transformation that occurs after Parker is bitten, by showing his emaciated (and ill) body then cutting to a graphic depiction of genes being spliced into Parker’s DNA. Finally revealing his newly formed, muscular body, the framing provides the visual cues as to the verbal alignment of these bodies – the extraordinary and the impaired bodies are both sources of social disablement. The extreme transformation that occurs to Ben Grimm (Michael Chiklis), in Fantastic 4, can be read as a disability, buying into the long history of the disabled body as freak, and is reinforced by his being named “The Thing.” Socially, facial disfigurement may be regarded as one of the most isolating impairments; for example, films such as The Man without a Face (Mel Gibson, 1993) explicitly explore this theme. As the only character with a pre-existing relationship, Grimm’s social exclusion is reinforced by the rejection of his girlfriend when she sees his face. The isolation in naming Ben Grimm as “The Thing” is also expressed in the naming of Bruce Banner’s (Eric Bana) alter ego “Hulk.” They are grossly enlarged bodies that are seen as grotesque mutations of the “normal” human body – not human, but “thing-like.” The theme of social exclusion is played alongside the idea that those with extra-ordinary ability are also emblematic of the evolutionary dominance of a superior species of which science is an example of human dominance. The Human Genome Project, begun in 1990, and completed in 2003, was in many ways the culmination of a century and a half of work in biochemistry, announcing that science had now completely mapped the human genome: that is, provided the complete sequence of genes on each of the 46 chromosomes in human cells. The announcement of the completed sequencing of the human genome led to, what may be more broadly called, “genomania” in the international press (Lombardo 193). But arguably also, the continued announcements throughout the life of the Project maintained interest in, and raised significant social, legal, and ethical questions about genetics and its use and abuse. I suggest that in these superhero films, whose narratives centre on genetic mutation, that the social exclusion of the characters is based in part on fears about genetics as the source of disability. In these films deviation becomes deviance. It is not my intention to reduce the important political aims of the disability movement by equating the acquisition of super-ability and physical impairment. Rather, I suggest that in the expression of the extraordinary in terms of the genetic within the films, we can detect wider social anxieties about genetic science, particularly as the representations of that science focus the audience’s attention on mutation of the genome. An earlier film, not concerned with superheroes but with the perfectibility of the human body, might prove useful here. Gattaca (Andrew Nicol, 1997), which explores the slippery moral slope of basing the value of the human body in genetic terms (the letters of the title recall the chemicals that structure DNA, abbreviated to G, A, T, C), is a powerful tale of the social consequences of the primacy of genetic perfectibility and reflects the social and ethical issues raised by the Human Genome Project. In a coda to the film, that was not included in the theatrical release, we read: We have now evolved to the point where we can direct our own evolution. Had we acquired this knowledge sooner, the following people may never have been born. The screen then reveals a list of significant people who were either born with or acquired physical or psychological impairments: for example, Abraham Lincoln/Marfan Syndrome, Jackie Joyner-Kersee/Asthma, Emily Dickinson/Manic Depression. The audience is then given the stark reminder of the message of the film: “Of course the other birth that may never have taken place is your own.” The social order of Gattaca is based on “genoism” – discrimination based on one’s genetic profile – which forces characters to either alter or hide their genetic code in order to gain social and economic benefit. The film is an example of what the editors of the special issue of the Florida State University Law Journal on genetics and disability note: how we look at genetic conditions and their relationship to health and disability, or to notions of “normalcy” and “deviance,” is not strictly or even primarily a legal matter. Instead, the issues raised in this context involve ethical considerations and require an understanding of the social contexts in which those issues appear. (Crossley and Shepherd xi) Implicit in these commentators’ concern is the way an ideal body is assumed as the basis from which a deviation in form or ability is measured. These superhero films demonstrate that, in order to talk about super-ability as a deviation from a normal body, they rely on disability scripts as the language of deviation. Scholars in disability studies have identified a variety of ways of talking about disability. The medical model associates impairment or illness with a medical tragedy, something that must be cured. In medical terms an error is any deviation from the norm that needs to be rectified by medical intervention. By contrast, in the social constructivist model, the source of disablement is environmental, political, cultural, or economic factors. Proponents of the social model do not regard impairment as equal to inability (Karpf 80) and argue that the discourses of disability are “inevitably informed by normative beliefs about what it is proper for people’s bodies and minds to be like” (Cumberbatch and Negrine 5). Deviations from the normal body are classification errors, mistakes in social categorisation. In these films aspects of both the medical tragedy and social construction of disability can be detected. These films come at a time when disability remains a site of social and political debate. The return to these superheroes, and their experiences of exclusion, in recent films is an indicator of social anxiety about the functionality of the human body. And as the science of genetics gains increasing public representation, the idea of ability – and disability – that is, what is regarded as “proper” for bodies and minds, is increasingly related to how we regard the genetic code. As the twenty first century began, new insights into the genetic origins of disease and congenital impairments offered the possibility that the previous uncertainty about the provenance of these illnesses and impairments may be eliminated. But new uncertainties have arisen around the value of human bodies in terms of ability and function. This essay has explored the way representations of extra-ordinary ability, as a mutation of the genetic code, trace some of the experiences of disablement. A study of these superhero films suggests that the popular dissemination of genetics has not resulted in an understanding of ability and form as purely bio-chemical, but that thinking about the body as a bio-chemical code occurs within already present moral discourses of the body’s value. References Asch, Adrienne. “Disability Equality and Prenatal Testing: Contradictory or Compatible?” Florida State University Law Review 30.2 (2003): 315-42. Crossley, Mary, and Lois Shepherd. “Genes and Disability: Questions at the Crossroads.” Florida State University Law Review 30.2 (2003): xi-xxiii. Cumberbatch, Guy, and Ralph Negrine. Images of Disability on Television. London: Routledge, 1992. Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. 30th Anniversary ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Karpf, A. “Crippling Images.” Framed: Interrogating Disability in the Media. Eds. A. Pointon and C. Davies. London: British Film Institute, 1997. 79-83. Lombardo, Paul A. “Taking Eugenics Seriously: Three Generations Of ??? Are Enough.” Florida State University Law Review 30.2 (2003): 191-218. “Pop Culture: Out Is In.” Contemporary Sexuality 37.7 (2003): 9. Rutherford, Adam. “Return of the Mutants.” Nature 423.6936 (2003): 119. Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. London: Penguin, 1988. Turner, Bryan S. Regulating Bodies. London: Routledge, 1992. Vary, Adam B. “Mutant Is the New Gay.” Advocate 23 May 2006: 44-45. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Mantle, Martin. "“Have You Tried Not Being a Mutant?”: Genetic Mutation and the Acquisition of Extra-ordinary Ability." M/C Journal 10.5 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/10-mantle.php>. APA Style Mantle, M. (Oct. 2007) "“Have You Tried Not Being a Mutant?”: Genetic Mutation and the Acquisition of Extra-ordinary Ability," M/C Journal, 10(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/10-mantle.php>.

IntroductionThis paper is concerned with recent attempts to develop the creative economy in rural Scotland. Research shows that the creative economy is far from self-organising, and that an appropriate institutional landscape is important to its development (Andersson and Henrekson). In Scotland, there is a proliferation of support mechanisms – from those designed to help creative entrepreneurs improve their business, management, or technical expertise, to infrastructure projects, to collective capacity-building. In rural Scotland, this support landscape is particularly cluttered. This article tackles the question: How do rural creative entrepreneurs negotiate this complex funding and support landscape, and how do they aid the development of the rural creative economy ‘from below’? From Creative Industries to the Creative EconomyThe creative industries have been central to the UK’s economic growth strategy since the 1990s. According to the Centre for Economics and Business Research the creative industries contributed £5.9bn to the economy in 2013 (CEBR 17). In the last five years there have been significant improvements in ICTs, leading to growth in digital creative production, distribution, and consumption. The established creative industries, along with the nascent ‘digital industries’ are often grouped together as a separate economic sector – the ‘creative economy’ (Nesta A Manifesto for the Creative Economy).Given its close association with creative city discourses (see Florida 2002), research on the creative economy remains overwhelmingly urban-focused. As a result of this urban bias, the rural creative economy is under-researched. Bell and Jayne (209) note that in the last decade a small body of academic work on the rural creative economy has emerged (Harvey et al.; White). In particular, the Australian context has generated a wealth of discussion as regards national and regional attempts to develop the rural creative economy, the contribution of ‘creativity’ to rural economic and social development, sustainability and resilience, and the role that individual creative practitioners play in developing the rural creative economy (see Argent et al.; Gibson, Gibson and Connell; Waitt and Gibson).In the absence of suitable infrastructure, such as: adequate transport infrastructure, broadband and mobile phone connectivity, workspaces and business support, it often falls to rural creative practitioners themselves to ‘patch the gaps’ in the institutional infrastructure. This paper is concerned with the ways in which rural creative practitioners attempt to contribute to the development of the creative economy ‘from below’. ICTs have great potential to benefit rural areas in this respect, by “connecting people and places, businesses and services” (Townsend et al. Enhanced Broadband Access 581).The Scottish InfrastructureSince 1998, cultural policy has been devolved to Scotland, and has fallen under the control of the Scottish Government and Parliament. In an earlier examination of a Scottish creative business support agency, I noted that the Scottish Government has adopted a creative industries development strategy broadly in line with that coming out of Westminster, and subsequently taken up worldwide, and that the Scottish institutional infrastructure is extremely complex (Schlesinger et al.). Crucially, the idea of ‘intervention’, or, the availability of a draw-down programme of funding and support that will help creative practitioners develop a business from their talent, is key (Schlesinger).The main funder for Scottish artists and creative practitioners is Creative Scotland, who distribute money from the Scottish Government and the National Lottery. Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE) also offer funding and support for creative practitioners working in the Highlands and Islands region. Further general business support may be drawn down from Business Gateway (who work Scotland-wide but are not creative-industries specific), or Scottish Enterprise (who work Scotland-wide, are not creative-industries specific, and are concerned with businesses turning over more than £250,000 p.a.). Additionally, creative-sector specific advice and support may be sought from Cultural Enterprise Office (based in Glasgow and primarily serving the Central Belt), Creative Edinburgh, Dundee or Stirling (creative networks that serve their respective cities), the Creative Arts and Business Network (based in Dumfries, serving the Borders), and Emergents (based in Inverness, dealing with rural craftspeople and authors).MethodologyThe article draws on material gathered as part of three research projects, all concerned with the current support landscape for creative practitioners in Scotland. The first, ‘Supporting Creative Business’ was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the second, ‘Towards a model of support for the rural creative industries’ was funded by the University of Glasgow and the third, ‘The effects of improved communications technology of rural creative entrepreneurs’ funded by CREATe, the Research Council's UK Centre for the Study of Copyright and New Business Models in the Creative Economy.In all three cases, the research was theoretically and practically informed by the multi-sited ethnographies of cultural, creative and media work conducted by Moeran (Ethnography at Work, The Business of Ethnography) and Mould et al. Whilst the methodology for all three of my projects was ethnography, the methods utilised included interviews (n=23) – with interviewees drawn from across rural Scotland – participant and non-participant observation, and media and document analysis. Interviewees and study sites were accessed via snowball sampling, which was enabled by the measure of continuity between the three projects. This paper draws primarily on interview material and ethnographic ‘vignettes’. All individuals cited in the paper are anonymised in line with the University of Glasgow’s ethics guidelines.Cities, Creativity, and ‘Buzz’As noted earlier, cities are seen as the driving force behind the creative industries; and accordingly, much of the institutional infrastructure that supports the rural creative industries is modelled on urban systems of intervention. Cities are seen as breeding grounds for creativity by virtue of what Storper and Venables call their ‘buzz’ – consider, for example, the sheer numbers of creative practitioners that congregate in cities, the presence of art schools, work spaces and so on. Several of the creative practitioners I spoke to identified the lack of ‘buzz’ as one key difference between working in cities and working from rural places:It can be isolating out here. There are days when I miss art school, and my peers. I really valued their support and just the general chit chat and news. […] And having everything on your doorstep. (Visual artist, Argyll)Of course, rural creatives didn’t equate the ‘buzz’ of activity in cities with personal or professional creative success. Rather, they felt that developing a creative business was made easier by the fact that most funders and support agencies were based in Scotland’s Central Belt. The creatives resident there were able to take advantage of that proximity and the relationships that it enabled them to build, but also, the institutional landscape was supplemented by the creative ‘buzz’, which was difficult to quantify and impossible to replicate in rural areas.Negotiating the Funding and Support LandscapeI spoke to rural creative practitioners about whether the institutional infrastructure – in this case, relevant policy at national and UK level, funding and support agencies, membership bodies etcetera – was adequate. A common perspective was that the institutional infrastructure was extremely complex, which acted as a barrier for creatives seeking funding and support:Everything works ok, the problem is that there’s so many different places to go to for advice, and so many different criteria that you have to meet if you wanted funding, and what’s your first port of call, and it’s just too complicated. I feel that as a rural artist I fall between the cracks […] am I a creative business, a rural creative business, or just a rural business? (Craftsperson, Shetland) Interviewees suggested that there were ‘gaps’ in the institutional infrastructure, caused not by the lack of appropriate policy, funders, or support agencies but rather by their proliferation and a sense of confusion about who to approach. Furthermore, funding agencies such as Creative Scotland have, in recent years, come under fire for the complexity of their funding and support systems:They have simplified their application process, but I just can’t be bothered trying to get anything out of Creative Scotland at the moment. I don’t find their support that useful and they directed me to Cultural Enterprise Office when I asked for advice on filling in the form and tailoring the application, and CEO were just so pushed for time, I couldn’t get a Skype with them. The issue with getting funding from anywhere is the teeny tiny likelihood of getting money, coupled with how time-consuming the application process is. So for now, I’m just trying to be self-sufficient without asking for any development funds. But I am not sure how sustainable that is. (Craftsperson, Skye, interview) There was a sense that ‘what works’ to enable urban creative practitioners to develop their practice is not necessarily sufficient to help rural creatives. Because most policymakers, funders and support bodies are based in the Central Belt, rural creatives feel that the challenges they face are poorly understood. One arts administrator summed up why, statingthe problem is that people in the Central Belt don’t get what we’re dealing with up here, unless they’ve actually lived here. The remoteness, poor transport links, internet and mobile access […] it impacts on your ability to develop your business. If I want to attend a course, some organisations will pay travel and accommodation. But they don’t account for the fact that if I travel from Eigg, I’ll need to work around the ferry times, which might mean two extra nights’ accommodation plus the cost of travel … we’re excluded from opportunities because of our location. (Arts administrator, the Small Isles) A further issue identified by several participants in this research is that funding and support agencies Scotland-wide tend to work to standardised definitions of the creative industries that privilege high-growth sectors (see Luckman). This led to many heritage and craft businesses feeling excluded. One local authority stakeholder told me,exactly what the creative industries are, well that might be obvious on paper but real life is a bit more complicated. Where do we put a craftsperson whose craft work is done in her spare time but pays just enough to stop her needing a second job? How do we tell people like this, who say they are in the creative industries, that they aren’t actually according to this criteria or that criteria? (Local authority stakeholder, Shetland, interview)Creating Virtual ‘Buzz’? The Potential of ICTsAccording to 2015 OFCOM figures (10-12), in rural Scotland 85.9% of households can receive broadband, and 6.3% can receive superfast. The Scottish Government’s ambition is to deliver superfast broadband to up to 90 per cent of premises in Scotland by March 2016, and to extend this to 95 per cent by 2017. Whilst the current landscape as regards broadband provision is far from ideal, there are signs that improved provision is profoundly affecting the way that rural creatives develop their practice, and the way they engage with the institutional infrastructure set up to support them.At an industry event run by HIE in July 2015, a diverse panel of rural creatives spoke of how they exploited the possibilities associated with improved ICTs in order to offset some of the aforementioned problems of working from rural and remote areas. As the event was conducted under Chatham House rules, the following is adapted from field notes,It was clear from the panel and the Q&A that followed that improved ICTs meant that creatives could access training and support in new ways–online courses and training materials, webinars, and one-on-one Skype coaching, training and mentoring. Whilst of course most people would prefer face-to-face contact in this respect, the willingness of training providers to offer online solutions was appreciated, and most of the creatives on the panel (and many in the audience) had taken advantage of these partial solutions. The rural creatives on the panel also detailed the tactics that they used in order to ‘patch the gaps’ in the institutional infrastructure:There were four things that emerged from the panel discussion, Q&A and subsequent conversations I had on how technology benefited rural creatives: peer support, proximity to decision-makers, marketing and sales, and heritage and provenance.In terms of peer support, the panel felt that improved connectivity allowed them to access ‘virtual’ peer support through the internet. This was particularly important in terms of seeking advice regarding funding, business support and training, generating new creative ideas, and seeking emotional support from others who were familiar with the strains of running a creative business.Rural creatives found that social media (in particular) meant that they had a closer relationship with ‘distant’ decision-makers. They felt able to join events via livestreaming, and took advantage of hash tagging to take part in events, ‘policy hacks’ and consultations. Attendees I spoke to also mentioned that prominent Government ministers and other decision-makers had a strong Twitter presence and made it clear that they were at times ‘open’ to direct communication. In this way, rural creatives felt that they could ‘make their voices heard’ in new ways.In terms of marketing and sales, panel members found social media invaluable in terms of building online ‘presence’. All of the panel members sold services and products through dedicated websites (and noted that improved broadband speeds and 3G meant that these websites were increasingly sophisticated, allowing them to upload photographs and video clips, or act as client ‘portals’), however they also sought out other local creatives, or creatives working in the same sector in order to build visible networks on social media such as Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. This echoes an interview I conducted with a designer from Orkney, who suggested that these online networks allowed designers to build a rapport with customers, but also to showcase their products and build virtual ‘buzz’ around their work (and the work of others) in the hope their designs would be picked up by bloggers, the fashion press and stylists.The designer on the panel also noted that social media allowed her to showcase the provenance of her products. As she spoke I checked her Twitter and Instagram feeds, as well as the feeds of other designers she was linked to; a large part of their ‘advertising’ through these channels entailed giving followers an insight into life on the islands. The visual nature of these media also allowed them to document how local histories of making had influenced their practice, and how their rural location had influenced their work. It struck me that this was a really effective way to capture consumers’ imaginations. As we can see, improved ICTs had a substantial impact on rural creatives’ practice. Not only did several of the panel members suggest that improved ICTs changed the nature of the products that they could produce (by enabling them to buy in different materials and tools, and cultivate longer and more complex supply chains), they also noted that improved ICTs enabled them to cultivate new markets, to build stronger networks and to participate more fully in discussions with ‘distant’ policymakers and decision makers. Furthermore, ICTs were seen as acting as a proxy for ‘buzz’ for rural creatives, that is, face-to-face communication was still preferred, but savvy use of ICTs went some way to mitigating the problems of a rural location. This extends Storper and Venables’s conceptualisation of the idea, which understands ‘buzz’ as the often-intangible benefits of face-to-face contact.Problematically however, as Townsend et al. state, “rural isolation is amplified by the technological landscape, with rural communities facing problems both in terms of broadband access technologies and willingness or ability of residents to adopt these” (Enhanced Broadband Access 5). As such, the development activities of rural creatives are hampered by poor provision and a slow ‘roll out’ of broadband and mobile coverage. ConclusionsThis paper is concerned with recent attempts to develop the rural creative economy in Scotland. The paper can be read in relation to a small but expanding body of work that seeks to understand the distinctive formation of the rural creative industries across Europe and elsewhere (Bell and Jayne), and how these can best be developed and supported (White). Recent, targeted intervention in the rural creative industries speaks to concerns about the emergence of a ‘two tier’ Europe, with remote and sparsely-populated rural regions with narrow economic bases falling behind more resilient cities and city-regions (Markusen and Gadwa; Wiggering et al.), yet exactly how the rural creative industries function and can be further developed is an underdeveloped research area.In order to contribute to this body of work, this paper has sketched out some of the problems associated with recent attempts to develop the creative economy in rural Scotland. On a Scotland-wide scale, there is a proliferation of policies, funding bodies, and support agencies designed to organise and regulate the creative economy. In rural areas, there is also an ‘overlap’ between Scotland-wide bodies and rural-specific bodies, meaning that many rural creatives feel as if they ‘fall through the cracks’ in terms of funding and support. Additionally, rural creatives noted that Central Belt-based funders and support agencies struggled to fully understand the difficulties associated with making a living from a rural location.The sense of being distant from decision makers and isolated in terms of practice meant that many rural creatives took it upon themselves to develop the creative economy ‘from below’. The creatives that I spoke to had an array of ‘tactics’ that they used, some of which I have detailed here. In this short paper I have focused on one issue articulated within interviews – the idea of exploiting ICTs in order to build stronger networks between creatives and between creatives and decision makers within funding bodies and support agencies. Problematically, however, it was recognised that these creative-led initiatives could only do so much to mitigate the effects of a cluttered, piecemeal funding and support landscape.My research suggests that as it stands, ‘importing’ models from urban contexts is alienating and frustrating for rural creatives and targeted, rural-specific intervention is required. Research demonstrates that creative practitioners often seek to bring about social and cultural impact through their work, rather than engaging in creative activities merely for economic gain (McRobbie Be Creative, Rethinking Creative Economies; Waitt and Gibson). Whilst this is true of creatives in both urban and rural areas, my research suggests that this is particularly important to rural creatives, who see themselves as contributing economically, social and culturally to the development of the communities within which they are embedded (see Duxbury and Campbell; Harvey et al.). ‘Joined up’ support for this broad-based set of aims would greatly benefit rural creatives and maximise the potential of the rural creative industries.ReferencesAndersson, Martin, and Magnus Henrekson. "Local Competiveness Fostered through Local Institutions for Entrepreneurship." Research Institute on Industrial Economics Work Paper Series (2014), 0-57. Argent, Neil, Matthew Tonts, Roy Jones and John Holmes. “A Creativity-Led Rural Renaissance? Amenity-Led Migration, the Creative Turn and the Uneven Development of Rural Australia.” Applied Geography 44 (2013): 88-98.Bell, David, and Mark Jayne. "The Creative Countryside: Policy and Practice in the UK Rural Cultural Economy." Journal of Rural Studies 26.3 (2010): 209-18.Centre for Economic and Business Research. The Contribution of the Arts and Culture to the National Economy. London: CEBR, 2013. 1-13.Duxbury, Nancy, and Heather Campbell. “Developing and Revitalizing Rural Communities through Arts and Culture.” Small Cities Imprint 3.1 (2011): 1-7.Florida, Richard. The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. London: Basic Books, 2002.Gibson, Chris. “Cultural Economy: Achievements, Divergences, Future Prospects.” Geographical Research 50.3 (2012): 282-290.Gibson, Chris, and Jason Connell. “The Role of Festivals in Drought-Affected Australian Communities.” Event Management 19.4 (2015): 445-459.Harvey, David, Harriet Hawkins, and Nicola Thomas. "Thinking Creative Clusters beyond the City: People, Places and Networks." Geoforum 43.3 (2012): 529-39.Luckman, Susan. Locating Cultural Work: The Politics and Poetics of Rural, Regional and Remote Creativity. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.McRobbie, Angela. Be Creative! London: Polity, 2016.———. “Rethinking Creative Economies as Radical Social Enterprise.” Variant 41 (2011): 32–33 Moeran, Brian. Ethnography at Work. London: A&C Black, 2007.———. The Business of Ethnography. London: Berg, 2005.Mould, Oliver, Tim Vorley, and Kai Liu. “Invisible Creativity? Highlighting the Hidden Impact of Freelancing in London's Creative Industries.” European Planning Studies 12 (2014): 2436-55.Nesta. Creative Industries and Rural Innovation. London: Nesta, 2007.———. A Manifesto for the Creative Economy. London: Nesta, 2013.Oakley, Kate. "Good Work? Rethinking Cultural Entrepreneurship." Handbook of Management and Creativity (2014): 145-59.O'Brien, Dave, and Peter Matthews. After Urban Regeneration: Communities, Policy and Place. London: Policy Press, 2015.Office of the Communications Regulator. Communications Market Report 2015. London: OFCOM, 2015. i-431.Schlesinger, Philip. “Foreword.” In Bob Last, Creativity, Value and Money. Glasgow: Cultural Enterprise Office, forthcoming 2016. 1-2.Schlesinger, Philip, Melanie Selfe, and Ealasaid Munro. Curators of Cultural Enterprise: A Critical Analysis of a Creative Business Intermediary. London: Springer, 2015. 1-134.Storper, Michael, and Anthony J. Venables. "Buzz: Face-to-Face Contact and the Urban Economy." Journal of Economic Geography 4.4 (2004): 351-70.Townsend, Leanne, Arjun Sathiaseelan, Gorry Fairhurst, and Claire Wallace. "Enhanced Broadband Access as a Solution to the Social and Economic Problems of the Rural Digital Divide." Local Economy 28.6 (2013): 580-95.Townsend, Leanne, Claire Wallace, Alison Smart, and Timothy Norman. “Building Virtual Bridges: How Rural Micro-Enterprises Develop Social Capital in Online and Face-to-Face Settings.” Sociologia Ruralis 56.1 (2016): 29-47.Waitt, Gordon, and Chris Gibson. “The Spiral Gallery: Non-Market Creativity and Belonging in an Australian Country Town.” Journal of Rural Studies 30 (2013): 75-85.White, Pauline. "Creative Industries in a Rural Region: Creative West: The Creative Sector in the Western Region of Ireland." Creative Industries Journal 3.1 (2010): 79-88.

Hundreds of thousands of Australian children were born in the shadow of the Great War, fathered by men who had enlisted between 1914 and 1918. Their lives could be and often were hard and unhappy, as Anzac historian Alistair Thomson observed of his father’s childhood in the 1920s and 1930s. David Thomson was son of a returned serviceman Hector Thomson who spent much of his adult life in and out of repatriation hospitals (257-259) and whose memory was subsequently expunged from Thomson family stories (299-267). These children of trauma fit within a pattern suggested by Marianne Hirsch in her influential essay “The Generation of Postmemory”. According to Hirsch, “postmemory describes the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right” (n.p.). This article attempts to situate George Johnston’s novel My Brother Jack (1964) within the context of postmemory narratives of violence that were complicated in Australia by the Anzac legend which occluded any too open discussion about the extent of war trauma present within community, including the children of war.“God knows what damage” the war “did to me psychologically” (48), ponders Johnston’s protagonist and alter-ego David Meredith in My Brother Jack. Published to acclaim fifty years after the outbreak of the First World War, My Brother Jack became a widely read text that seemingly spoke to the shared cultural memories of a generation which did not know battlefield violence directly but experienced its effects pervasively and vicariously in the aftermath through family life, storytelling, and the memorabilia of war. For these readers, the novel represented more than a work of fiction; it was a touchstone to and indicative of their own negotiations though often unspoken post-war trauma.Meredith, like his creator, is born in 1912. Strictly speaking, therefore, both are not part of the post-war generation. However, they are representative and therefore indicative of the post-war “hinge generation” which was expected to assume “guardianship” of the Anzac Legend, though often found the narrative logic challenging. They had been “too young for the war to have any direct effect”, and yet “every corner” of their family’s small suburban homes appear to be “impregnated with some gigantic and sombre experience that had taken place thousands of miles away” (17).According to Johnston’s biographer, Garry Kinnane, the “most teasing puzzle” of George Johnston’s “fictional version of his childhood in My Brother Jack is the monstrous impression he creates of his returned serviceman father, John George Johnston, known to everyone as ‘Pop.’ The first sixty pages are dominated by the tyrannical figure of Jack Meredith senior” (1).A large man purported to be six foot three inches (1.9 metres) in height and weighing fifteen stone (95 kilograms), the real-life Pop Johnston reputedly stood head and shoulders above the minimum requirement of five foot and six inches (1.68 metres) at the time of his enlistment for war in 1914 (Kinnane 4). In his fortieth year, Jack Johnston senior was also around twice the age of the average Australian soldier and among one in five who were married.According to Kinnane, Pop Johnston had “survived the ordeal of Gallipoli” in 1915 only to “endure three years of trench warfare in the Somme region”. While the biographer and the Johnston family may well have held this to be true, the claim is a distortion. There are a few intimations throughout My Brother Jack and its sequel Clean Straw for Nothing (1969) to suggest that George Johnston may have suspected that his father’s wartime service stories had been embellished, though the depicted wartime service of Pop Meredith remains firmly within the narrative arc of the Anzac legend. This has the effect of layering the postmemory violence experienced by David Meredith and, by implication, his creator, George Johnston. Both are expected to be keepers of a lie masquerading as inviolable truth which further brutalises them.John George (Pop) Johnston’s First World War military record reveals a different story to the accepted historical account and his fictionalisation in My Brother Jack. He enlisted two and a half months after the landing at Gallipoli on 12 July 1915 and left for overseas service on 23 November. Not quite the imposing six foot three figure of Kinnane’s biography, he was fractionally under five foot eleven (1.8 metres) and weighed thirteen stone (82.5 kilograms). Assigned to the Fifth Field Engineers on account of his experience as an electric tram fitter, he did not see frontline service at Gallipoli (NAA).Rather, according to the Company’s history, the Fifth Engineers were involved in a range of infrastructure and support work on the Western Front, including the digging and maintenance of trenches, laying duckboard, pontoons and tramlines, removing landmines, building huts, showers and latrines, repairing roads, laying drains; they built a cinema at Beaulencourt Piers for “Brigade Swimming Carnival” and baths at Malhove consisting of a large “galvanised iron building” with a “concrete floor” and “setting tanks capable of bathing 2,000 men per day” (AWM). It is likely that members of the company were also involved in burial details.Sapper Johnston was hospitalised twice during his service with influenza and saw out most of his war from October 1917 attached to the Army Cookery School (NAA). He returned to Australia on board the HMAT Kildonian Castle in May 1919 which, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, also carried the official war correspondent and creator of the Anzac legend C.E.W. Bean, national poet Banjo Paterson and “Warrant Officer C G Macartney, the famous Australian cricketer”. The Herald also listed the names of “Returned Officers” and “Decorated Men”, but not Pop Johnston who had occupied the lower decks with other returning men (“Soldiers Return”).Like many of the more than 270,000 returned soldiers, Pop Johnston apparently exhibited observable changes upon his repatriation to Australia: “he was partially deaf” which was attributed to the “constant barrage of explosions”, while “gas” was suspected to have “left him with a legacy of lung disorders”. Yet, if “anyone offered commiserations” on account of this war legacy, he was quick to “dismiss the subject with the comment that ‘there were plenty worse off’” (Kinnane 6). The assumption is that Pop’s silence is stoic; the product of unspeakable horror and perhaps a symptom of survivor guilt.An alternative interpretation, suggested by Alistair Thomson in Anzac Memories, is that the experiences of the vast majority of returned soldiers were expected to fit within the master narrative of the Anzac legend in order to be accepted and believed, and that there was no space available to speak truthfully about alternative war service. Under pressure of Anzac expectations a great many composed stories or remained selectively silent (14).Data gleaned from the official medical history suggest that as many as four out of every five returned servicemen experienced emotional or psychological disturbance related to their war service. However, the two branches of medicine represented by surgeons and physicians in the Repatriation Department—charged with attending to the welfare of returned servicemen—focused on the body rather than the mind and the emotions (Murphy and Nile).The repatriation records of returned Australian soldiers reveal that there were, indeed, plenty physically worse off than Pop Johnston on account of bodily disfigurement or because they had been somatically compromised. An estimated 30,000 returned servicemen died in the decade after the cessation of hostilities to 1928, bringing the actual number of war dead to around 100,000, while a 1927 official report tabled the medical conditions of a further 72,388 veterans: 28,305 were debilitated by gun and shrapnel wounds; 22,261 were rheumatic or had respiratory diseases; 4534 were afflicted with eye, ear, nose, or throat complaints; 9,186 had tuberculosis or heart disease; 3,204 were amputees while only; 2,970 were listed as suffering “war neurosis” (“Enlistment”).Long after the guns had fallen silent and the wounded survivors returned home, the physical effects of war continued to be apparent in homes and hospital wards around the country, while psychological and emotional trauma remained largely undiagnosed and consequently untreated. David Meredith’s attitude towards his able-bodied father is frequently dismissive and openly scathing: “dad, who had been gassed, but not seriously, near Vimy Ridge, went back to his old job at the tramway depot” (9). The narrator-son later considers:what I realise now, although I never did at the time, is that my father, too, was oppressed by intimidating factors of fear and change. By disillusion and ill-health too. As is so often the case with big, strong, athletic men, he was an extreme hypochondriac, and he had convinced himself that the severe bronchitis which plagued him could only be attributed to German gas he had swallowed at Vimy Ridge. He was too afraid to go to a doctor about it, so he lived with a constant fear that his lungs were decaying, and that he might die at any time, without warning. (42-3)During the writing of My Brother Jack, the author-son was in chronically poor health and had been recently diagnosed with the romantic malady and poet’s disease of tuberculosis (Lawler) which plagued him throughout his work on the novel. George Johnston believed (correctly as it turned out) that he was dying on account of the disease, though, he was also an alcoholic and smoker, and had been reluctant to consult a doctor. It is possible and indeed likely that he resentfully viewed his condition as being an extension of his father—vicariously expressed through the depiction of Pop Meredith who exhibits hysterical symptoms which his son finds insufferable. David Meredith remains embittered and unforgiving to the very end. Pop Meredith “lived to seventy-three having died, not of German gas, but of a heart attack” (46).Pop Meredith’s return from the war in 1919 terrifies his seven-year-old son “Davy”, who accompanies the family to the wharf to welcome home a hero. The young boy is unable to recall anything about the father he is about to meet ostensibly for the first time. Davy becomes overwhelmed by the crowds and frightened by the “interminable blaring of horns” of the troopships and the “ceaseless roar of shouting”. Dwarfed by the bodies of much larger men he becomestoo frightened to look up at the hours-long progression of dark, hard faces under wide, turned-up hats seen against bayonets and barrels that are more blue than black ... the really strong image that is preserved now is of the stiff fold and buckle of coarse khaki trousers moving to the rhythm of knees and thighs and the tight spiral curves of puttees and the thick boots hammering, hollowly off the pier planking and thunderous on the asphalt roadway.Depicted as being small for his age, Davy is overwrought “with a huge and numbing terror” (10).In the years that follow, the younger Meredith desires emotional stability but remains denied because of the war’s legacy which manifests in the form of a violent patriarch who is convinced that his son has been rendered effeminate on account of the manly absence during vital stages of development. With the return of the father to the household, Davy grows to fear and ultimately despise a man who remains as alien to him as the formerly absent soldier had been during the war:exactly when, or why, Dad introduced his system of monthly punishments I no longer remember. We always had summary punishment, of course, for offences immediately detected—a cuffing around the ears or a sash with a stick of a strap—but Dad’s new system was to punish for the offences which had escaped his attention. So on the last day of every month Jack and I would be summoned in turn to the bathroom and the door would be locked and each of us would be questioned about the sins which we had committed and which he had not found out about. This interrogation was the merest formality; whether we admitted to crimes or desperately swore our innocence it was just the same; we were punished for the offences which, he said, he knew we must have committed and had to lie about. We then had to take our shirts and singlets off and bend over the enamelled bath-tub while he thrashed us with the razor-strop. In the blind rages of these days he seemed not to care about the strength he possessed nor the injuries he inflicted; more often than not it was the metal end of the strop that was used against our backs. (48)Ironically, the ritualised brutality appears to be a desperate effort by the old man to compensate for his own emasculation in war and unresolved trauma now that the war is ended. This plays out in complicated fashion in the development of David Meredith in Clean Straw for Nothing, Johnston’s sequel to My Brother Jack.The imputation is that Pop Meredith practices violence in an attempt to reassert his failed masculinity and reinstate his status as the head of the household. Older son Jack’s beatings cease when, as a more physically able young man, he is able to threaten the aggressor with violent retaliation. This action does not spare the younger weaker Davy who remains dominated. “My beating continued, more ferociously than ever, … . They ceased only because one day my father went too far; he lambasted me so savagely that I fell unconscious into the bath-tub, and the welts across my back made by the steel end of the razor-strop had to be treated by a doctor” (53).Pop Meredith is persistently reminded that he has no corporeal signifiers of war trauma (only a cough); he is surrounded by physically disabled former soldiers who are presumed to be worse off than he on account of somatic wounding. He becomes “morose, intolerant, bitter and violently bad-tempered”, expressing particular “displeasure and resentment” toward his wife, a trained nurse, who has assumed carer responsibilities for homing the injured men: “he had altogether lost patience with her role of Florence Nightingale to the halt and the lame” (40). Their marriage is loveless: “one can only suppose that he must have been darkly and profoundly disturbed by the years-long procession through our house of Mother’s ‘waifs and strays’—those shattered former comrades-in-arms who would have been a constant and sinister reminder of the price of glory” (43); a price he had failed to adequately pay with his uncompromised body intact.Looking back, a more mature David Meredith attempts to establish order, perspective and understanding to the “mess of memory and impressions” of his war-affected childhood in an effort to wrest control back over his postmemory violation: “Jack and I must have spent a good part of our boyhood in the fixed belief that grown-up men who were complete were pretty rare beings—complete, that is, in that they had their sight or hearing or all of their limbs” (8). While the father is physically complete, his brooding presence sets the tone for the oppressively “dark experience” within the family home where all rooms are “inhabited by the jetsam that the Somme and the Marne and the salient at Ypres and the Gallipoli beaches had thrown up” (18). It is not until Davy explores the contents of the “big deep drawer at the bottom of the cedar wardrobe” in his parents’ bedroom that he begins to “sense a form in the shadow” of the “faraway experience” that had been the war. The drawer contains his father’s service revolver and ammunition, battlefield souvenirs and French postcards but, “most important of all, the full set of the Illustrated War News” (19), with photographs of battlefield carnage. These are the equivalent of Hirsch’s photographs of the Holocaust that establish in Meredith an ontology that links him more realistically to the brutalising past and source of his ongoing traumatistion (Hirsch). From these, Davy begins to discern something of his father’s torment but also good fortune at having survived, and he makes curatorial interventions not by becoming a custodian of abjection like second generation Holocaust survivors but by disposing of the printed material, leaving behind artefacts of heroism: gun, the bullets, the medals and ribbons. The implication is that he has now become complicit in the very narrative that had oppressed him since his father’s return from war.No one apparently notices or at least comments on the removal of the journals, the images of which become linked in the young boys mind to an incident outside a “dilapidated narrow-fronted photographer’s studio which had been deserted and padlocked for as long as I could remember”. A number of sun-damaged photographs are still displayed in the window. Faded to a “ghostly, deathly pallor”, and speckled with fly droppings, years earlier, they had captured young men in uniforms before embarkation for the war. An “agate-eyed” boy from Davy’s school joins in the gazing, saying nothing for a long time until the silence is broken: “all them blokes there is dead, you know” (20).After the unnamed boy departs with a nonchalant “hoo-roo”, young Davy runs “all the way home, trying not to cry”. He cannot adequately explain the reason for his sudden reaction: “I never after that looked in the window of the photographer’s studio or the second hand shop”. From that day on Davy makes a “long detour” to ensure he never passes the shops again (20-1). Having witnessed images of pre-war undamaged young men in the prime of their youth, he has come face-to-face with the consequences of war which he is unable to reconcile in terms of the survival and return of his much older father.The photographs of the young men establishes a causal connection to the physically wrecked remnants that have shaped Davy’s childhood. These are the living remains that might otherwise have been the “corpses sprawled in mud or drowned in flooded shell craters” depicted in the Illustrated News. The photograph of the young men establishes Davy’s connection to the things “propped up our hallway”, of “Bert ‘sobbing’ in the backyard and Gabby Dixon’s face at the dark end of the room”, and only reluctantly the “bronchial cough of my father going off in the dawn light to the tramways depot” (18).That is to say, Davy has begun to piece together sense from senselessness, his father’s complicity and survival—and, by association, his own implicated life and psychological wounding. He has approached the source of his father’s abjection and also his own though he continues to be unable to accept and forgive. Like his father—though at the remove—he has been damaged by the legacies of the war and is also its victim.Ravaged by tuberculosis and alcoholism, George Johnston died in 1970. According to the artist Sidney Nolan he had for years resembled the ghastly photographs of survivors of the Holocaust (Marr 278). George’s forty five year old alcoholic wife Charmian Clift predeceased him by twelve months, having committed suicide in 1969. Four years later, in 1973, George and Charmian’s twenty four year old daughter Shane also took her own life. Their son Martin drank himself to death and died of organ failure at the age of forty three in 1990. They are all “dead, you know”.ReferencesAWM. Fifth Field Company, Australian Engineers. Diaries, AWM4 Sub-class 14/24.“Enlistment Report”. Reveille, 29 Sep. 1928.Hirsch, Marianne. “The Generation of Postmemory.” Poetics Today 29.1 (Spring 2008): 103-128. <https://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article/29/1/103/20954/The-Generation-of-Postmemory>.Johnston, George. Clean Straw for Nothing. London: Collins, 1969.———. My Brother Jack. London: Collins, 1964.Kinnane, Garry. George Johnston: A Biography. Melbourne: Nelson, 1986.Lawler, Clark. Consumption and Literature: the Making of the Romantic Disease. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.Marr, David, ed. Patrick White Letters. Sydney: Random House, 1994.Murphy, Ffion, and Richard Nile. “Gallipoli’s Troubled Hearts: Fear, Nerves and Repatriation.” Studies in Western Australian History 32 (2018): 25-38.NAA. John George Johnston War Service Records. <https://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/ViewImage.aspx?B=1830166>.“Soldiers Return by the Kildonan Castle.” Sydney Morning Herald, 10 May 1919: 18.Thomson, Alistair. Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend. Clayton: Monash UP, 2013.

The whole problem of speaking about the end…is that you have to speak of what lies beyond the end and also, at the same time, of the impossibility of ending. Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End(110) Jean Baudrillard’s insights into finality demonstrate that “ends” always prompt cultures to speculate on what can or will happen after these terminations and to fear those traumatic ends, in which the impossible actually occurs, may only be the beginning of chaos. In the absence of “rational” explanations for catastrophic ends and in the whirlwind of emotional responses that are their after-effects, the search for beginnings and origins – the antitheses of Baudrillard’s finality – characterises human response to tragedy. Strangely, Baudrillard’s engagement with the end is linked to an articulation predicated on our ability “to speak” events into existence, to conjure and to bridle those events in terms of recognisable, linear, and logical arrangements of words. Calling this verbal ordering “the poetry of initial conditions” (Baudrillard 113) in which memory imposes a structure so that the chaotic/catastrophic may be studied and its elements may be compared, Baudrillard suggests that this poetry “fascinates” because “we no longer possess a vision of final conditions” (113). The images of contemporary catastrophes and their subsequent visualisation serve as the ultimate reminders that we, as viewers and survivors, were not there – that visualisation itself involves a necessary distance between the horrified viewer and the viewed horror. In the case of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Centre, the need to “be there,” to experience vicariously a trauma as similarly as possible to those who later became its victims, perhaps explains why images of the planes first slamming into each of the towers were played and repeated ad nauseam. As Baudrillard suggests, “it would be interesting to know whether…effects persist in the absence of causes … whether something can exist apart from any origin and reference” (111). The ongoing search for these causes – particularly in the case of the World Trade Centre’s obliteration – has manifested itself in a persistent cycle of image production and consumption, prompting those images to serve as the visible/visual join between our own survival and the lost lives of the attacks or as surrogates for those whose death we could not witness. These images frequently allowed the West to legitimise its mourning, served as the road map by which we could (re-)explore the halcyon days prior to September 11, and provided the evidence needed for collective retribution. Ultimately, images served as the fictive embodiments of unseen victims and provided the vehicle by which mourning could be transformed from an isolated act to a shared experience. Visitors on the Rooftop: Visualising Origins and the Moments before Destruction It goes without saying that most have seen the famous photograph of the bundled-up tourist standing on the observation deck of the World Trade Centre with one of the jets ready to strike the tower shortly thereafter (see Figure 1). Though the photograph was deemed a macabre photo-manipulation, it reached thousands of e-mail inboxes almost two weeks following the horrific attacks and led many to ponder excitedly whether this image truly was the “last” image of a pre-September 11 world. Many openly debated why someone would fabricate such an image, yet analysts believe that its creation was a means to heal and to return to the unruffled days prior to September 11, when terrorism was thought to be a phenomenon relegated to the “elsewhere” of the Middle East. A Website devoted to the analysis of cultural rumours, Urban Legends, somewhat melodramatically suggested that the photograph resurrects what recovery efforts could not re-construct – a better understanding of the moments before thousands of individuals perished: The online world is fraught with clever photo manipulations that often provoke gales of laughter in those who view them, so we speculate that whoever put together this particular bit of imaging did so purely as a lark. However, presumed lighthearted motives or not, the photo provokes sensations of horror in those who view it. It apparently captures the last fraction of a second of this man’s life ... and also of the final moment of normalcy before the universe changed for all of us. In the blink of an eye, a beautiful yet ordinary fall day was transformed into flames and falling bodies, buildings collapsing inwards on themselves, and wave upon wave of terror washing over a populace wholly unprepared for a war beginning in its midst…The photo ripped away the healing distance brought by the nearly two weeks between the attacks and the appearance of this digital manipulation, leaving the sheer horror of the moment once again raw and bared to the wind. Though the picture wasn’t real, the emotions it stirred up were. It is because of these emotions the photo has sped from inbox to inbox with the speed that it has. (“The Accidental Tourist”) While the photograph does help the viewer recall the times before our fears of terrorism, war, and death were realised, this image does not episodically capture “the last fraction of a second” in a man’s life, nor does it give credibility to the “blink-of-an-eye” shifts between beautiful and battered worlds. The photographic analysis provided by Urban Legends serves as a retrospective means of condensing the space of time in which we must imagine the inevitable suffering of unseen individuals. Yet, the video of the towers, from the initial impacts to their collapse, measured approximately 102 minutes – a massive space of time in which victims surely contemplated escape, the inevitability of escape, the possibility of their death, and, ultimately, the impossibility of their survival (“Remains of a Day” 58). Post-traumatic visualising serves as the basis for constructing the extended horror as instantaneous, a projection that reflects how we hoped the situation might be for those who experienced it, rather than an accurate representation of the lengthy period of time between the beginning and end of the attacks. The photograph of the “accidental tourist” does not subscribe to the usual tenets of photography that suggest the image we see is, to quote W.J.T. Mitchell, “a purely objective transcript of reality” (Mitchell 281). Rather, this image invites a Burginian “inva[sion] by language in the very moment it is looked at: in memory, in association, [where] snatches of words and images continually intermingle and exchange one for the other” (Burgin 51). One sees the tourist in the photograph as a smiling innocent, posing at the wrong place and at the wrong time. Through that ascription, viewers may justify their anger and melancholy as this singular, visible body (about to be harmed) stands in for countless, unseen others awaiting the same fate. Its discrepancies with the actual opening hours of the WTC observation deck and the positioning of the aircraft largely ignored, the “accidental tourist” photo-manipulation was visualised by countless individuals and forwarded to a plethora of in-boxes because September 11 realities could not be shared intimately on that day, because the death of aircraft passengers, WTC workers, and rescue personnel was an inevitable outcome that could not be visualised as even remotely “actual” or explainable. Computer-based art and design have shown us that approximations to reality often result in its overall conflation. Accordingly, our desperate hope that we have seen glimpses of the moments before tragedy is ultimately dismantled by an acknowledgement of the illogical or impossible elements that go against the basic rules of visualisation. The “accidental tourist” is a phenomenon that not only epitomises Baudrillard’s search for origins in the wake of catastrophic effects, but underscores a collective need to visualise bodies as once-living rather than presently and inevitably dead. Faces in the Smoke: Visualising the Unseen Although such photo-manipulations were rampant in the days and weeks following the attack, many people constructed their own realities in the untouched images that the media streamed to them. The World Trade Centre disaster seemed to implore photography, in particular, to resurrect both the unseen, unremembered moments prior to the airliners’ slamming into the building and to perform two distinct roles as the towers burned: to reaffirm the public’s perception of the attack as an act of evil and to catalyse a sense of hope that those who perished were touched by God or ushered peacefully to their deaths. Within hours of the attacks, photographic stills captured what many thought to be the image of Satan – complete with horns, face, eyes, nose, and mouth – within the plumes of smoke billowing from one of the towers (see Figure 2 and its detail in Figure 3). The Associated Press, whose footage was most frequently used to reference this visual phenomenon, quickly dismissed the speculation; as Vin Alabiso, an executive photo editor for AP, observed: AP has a very strict policy which prohibits the alteration of the content of a photo in any way…The smoke in this photo combined with light and shadow has created an image which readers have seen in different ways. (“Angel or Devil?”) Although Alabiso’s comments defended the authenticity of the photographs, they also suggested the ways in which visual representation and perception could be affected by catastrophic circumstances. While many observers openly questioned whether the photographs had been “doctored,” others all too willingly invested these images with ethereal qualities by asking if the “face” they saw was that of Satan – a question mirroring their belief that such an act of terrorism was clear evidence of evil masterminding. If, as Mitchell has theorised, photographs function through a dialogical exchange of connotative and denotative messages, the photographs of the burning towers instead bombarded viewers with largely connotative messages – in other words, nothing that could precisely link specific bodies to the catastrophe. The visualising of Satan’s face happens not because Satan actually dwells within the plumes of smoke, but because the photograph resists Mitchell’s dialogue with the melancholic eye. The photograph refuses to “speak” for the individuals we know are suffering behind the layers of smoke, so our own eye constructs what the photograph will not reveal: the “face” of a reality we wish to be represented as deplorably and unquestionably evil. Barthes has observed that such “variation in readings is not … anarchic, [but] depends on the different types of knowledge … invested in the image…” (Barthes 46). In traumatic situations, one might amend this analysis to state that these various readings occur because of gaps in this knowledge and because visualisation transforms into an act based on knowledge that we wish we had, that we wish we could share with victims and fellow mourners. These visualisations highlight a desperate need to bridge the viewer’s experience of survival and their concomitant knowledge of others’ deaths and to link the “safe” visualisation of the catastrophic with the utter submission to catastrophe likely felt by those who died. Explaining the faces in the smoke as “natural indentations” as Alabiso did may be the technical and emotionally neutral means of cataloguing these images; however, the spotting of faces in photographic stills is a mechanism of visualisation that humanises a tragedy in which physical bodies (their death, their mutilation) cannot be seen. Other people who saw photographic stills from other angles and degrees of proximity were quick to highlight the presence of angels in the smoke, as captured by WABC from a perspective entirely different from that in Figure 2 (instead, see Figure 3). In either scenario, photography allows the visual personification of redemptive or evil influences, as well as the ability to visualise the tragedy not just as the isolated destruction of an architectural marvel, but as a crime against humanity with cosmic importance. Sharing the Fall: Desperation and the Photographing of Falling Bodies Perhaps what became even more troubling than the imagistic conjuring of human forms within the smoke was the photographing of bodies falling from the upper floors of the North Tower (see Figure 5). Though newspapers (re-)published photographs of the debris and hysteria of the attacks and television networks (re-)broadcast video sequences of the planes’ crashing into the towers and their collapse, the pictures of people jumping from the building were rarely circulated by the media. Dennis Cauchon and Martha T. Moore characterised these consequences of the terrorist attacks as “the most sensitive aspect of the Sept. 11 tragedy … [that] shocked the nation” (Cauchon and Moore). A delicate balance certainly existed between the media’s desire to associate faces with the feelings of desperation we know those who died must have experienced and a now-numb general public who ascribed to the photographs an unequivocal “too-muchness.” To read about those who jumped to escape smoke and flames reveals a horrific and frightfully swift narrative of panic: For those who jumped, the fall lasted 10 seconds. They struck the ground at just less than 150 miles per hour – not fast enough to cause unconsciousness while falling, but fast enough to ensure instant death on impact. People jumped from all four sides of the north tower. They jumped alone, in pairs and in groups. (Cauchon and Moore) The text contextualises these leaps to death in terms that are understandable to survivors who read the story and later discover these descriptions can never approximate the trauma of “being there”: Why did they jump? How fast were they travelling? Did they feel anything when their bodies hit the ground? Were they conscious during their jump? Did they die alone? These questions and their answers put into motion the very moment that the photograph of the jumping man has frozen. Words act as extensions of the physical boundaries of the photograph and underscore the horror of that image, from the description of the conditions that prompted the jump to the pondering of the death that was its consequence. If, as Jonathan Crary’s analysis of photographic viewing might intimate, visualisation prompts both an “autonomy of vision” and a “standardisation and regulation of the observer” (Crary 150), the photograph of a man plummeting to his death fashions the viewer’s eye as autonomous and alive because the image he/she views is the undeniable representation of a now-deceased Other. Yet, as seen in the often-hysterical responses to the threats of terrorism in the days following September 11, this “Other” embodies the very possibility of our own demise. Suddenly, the man we see in mid-air becomes the visualised “Every(wo)man” whose photographic representation also represents our unacknowledged vulnerabilities. Thus, trauma is shared through a poignant visual negotiation of dying: the certainty of the photographed man’s death juxtaposed with the newly realised or conjured threat of the viewer’s own death. In terms of humanness, those who witnessed these falls firsthand recall the ways in which the falling people became objectified – their fall seemingly robbing them of any visible sense of humanity. Eric Thompson, an employee on the seventy-seventh floor of the South Tower, shared an instantaneous moment with one of the victims: Thompson looked the man in the face. He saw his tie flapping in the wind. He watched the man’s body strike the pavement below. “There was no human resemblance whatsoever,” Thompson says. (Cauchon and Moore) Obviously, the in-situ experience of viewing these individuals hopelessly jumping to their deaths served as the prompt to run away, to escape, but the photograph acts as the frozen-in-time re-visitation and sharing of – a turning back toward – this scenario. The act of viewing the photographs reinstates the humanness that the panic of the moment seemingly removed; yet, the disparity between the photograph’s foreground (the jumping man) and its background (the building’s façade) remains its greatest disconcerting element. Unlike those photographic portraits that script behaviours and capture us in our most presentable states of being, this photograph reveals the unwilling subject – he who has not consented to share his state of being with the camera. Though W.J.T. Mitchell suggests that “[p]hotographs…seem necessarily incomplete in their imposition of a frame that can never include everything that was there to be…‘taken’” (Mitchell 289), the eye in times of catastrophe shifts between its desire to maintain the frame (that does not visually engage the inferno from which the man jumped or the concrete upon which he died) and its inability to do so. This photograph, as Mitchell might assert, “speaks” because visualisation allows its total frame of reference to extend beyond its physical boundaries and, as evidenced by post-September 11 phobias and our responses to horrific images, to affect the very means by which catastrophe is imagined and visualised. Technically speaking, the negotiated balance between foreground and background in the photograph is lost: the desperation of the falling man juxtaposed with a seemingly impossible background that should not have been there. Lost, too, is the viewer’s ability to “connect” visually with – literally, to share – that experience, to see oneself within the contexts of that particular visual representation. This inability to see the viewing self in the photograph is an ironic moment of experiential possibility that lingers still in the Western world’s fears surrounding terrorism: when the supposedly impossible act is finally visualised, territorialised, and rendered as possible. Dead Art: The Destructions and Resurrections of Works by Rodin In many ways, the photographing of those experiences so divorced from our own contributed to intense discussions of perspective in visualisation: the viewer’s witnessing of trauma by means of a camera and photographer that captured the image from a “safe” distance. However, the recovery of artwork that actually suffered damage as a result of the World Trade Centre collapse prompted many art historians and theorists to ponder the possibilities of art’s death and to contemplate the fate of art that is physically victimised. In an anticipatory vein, J.M. Bernstein suggests that “art ends as it becomes progressively further distanced from truth and moral goodness, as it loses its capacity to speak the truth about our most fundamental categorical engagements…” (Bernstein 5). If Bernstein’s theory is applied to those works damaged at the World Trade Centre site, the sculptures of Rodin, so famously photographed in the weeks of excavation that followed September 11, could be categorised as “dead” – distanced from the “truth” of human form that Rodin cast, even further from the moral goodness and the striving toward global peace that the Cantor Fitzgerald collection aimed to embrace. While many art critics believed that the destroyed works should not be displayed again, many (including Fritz Koenig, who designed The Sphere, which was damaged in the terrorist attacks) believe that such “dead art” deserves, even requires, resuscitation (see Figure 6). Much like the American flags that survived the infernos at the World Trade Centre and Pentagon site, these lost and re-discovered artworks have served as rallying points to accomplish both the sharing of trauma and an artistically inspired foundation for the re-development of the lower Manhattan site. In the case of Rodin’s The Thinker, which was recovered at the site and later presumed stolen, the statue’s discovery alongside aircraft parts and twisted steel girders served as a unique and rare survival story, almost as the surrogate representative body for those human bodies that were never found, never seen. Dan Barry and William K. Rashbaum recall that in the days following the sculpture’s disappearance, “investigators have been at Fresh Kills [landfill] and at ground zero in recent weeks, flashing a photograph of ‘The Thinker’ and asking, in effect: Have you seen this symbol of humanity” (Barry and Rashbaum)? Given such symbolic weight, sculpture most certainly took on superhuman proportions. Yet, in the days that followed the discovery of artwork that survived the attacks, only passing references were made to those figurative paintings and drawings by Picasso, Hockney, Lichtenstein, and Miró that were lost – perhaps because their subject matter or manner of artistic representation did not (or could not) reflect a “true” infliction of damage and pain the way a three-dimensional, human-like sculpture could. Viewers visualised not only the possibility of their own cultural undoing by seeing damaged Rodins, but also the embodiment of unseen victims’ bodies that could not be recovered. In a rousing speech about September 11 as an attack upon the humanities and the production of culture, Bruce Cole stated that “the loss of artifacts and art, no matter how priceless and precious, is dwarfed by the loss of life” (Cole). Nevertheless, the visualisation of maimed, disfigured art was the lens through which many individuals understood the immensity of that loss of life and the finality of their loved ones’ disappearances. What the destruction and damaging of artwork on September 11 created was an atmosphere in which art, traditionally conjured as the studied and inanimate subject, transformed from a determined to a determining influence, a re-working of Paul Smith’s theory in which “the ‘subject’ … is determined – the object of determinant forces; whereas ‘the individual’ is assumed to be determining” (Smith xxxiv). Damaged sculptures gave representative form to the thousands of victims we, as a visualising public, knew were inside the towers, but their survival spoke to larger artistic issues: the impossibility of art’s end and the foiling of its death. Baudrillard’s notion of the “impossibility of ending” demonstrates that the destruction of art (in the capitalistic sense that is contingent on its undamaged condition and its prescribed worth and “value”) does not equate to the destruction of meaning as such, but that the new and re-negotiated meanings deployed by injured art frighteningly implicate us – viewers who once assigned meaning becoming the subjects who long to be assigned something, anything, be it solace, closure, or retribution. Importantly, the latest plans for the re-vitalised World Trade Centre site indicate that the damaged Rodin and Koenig sculptures will semiotically mediate the significations established when the original World Trade Centre was a vital nexus of activity in lower Manhattan, the shock and pain experienced when the towers collapsed and individuals were searching for meaning in art’s destruction and survival, and the hope many have invested in the new buildings and their role in the maintenance and recovery of memory. A Concluding Thought Digital manipulation, photography, and the re-contextualisation of artistic “masterpieces” from their hermetic placement in the gallery to their brutal dumping in a landfill have served as the humanistic prompts that actively determined the ways in which culture grappled with and shared unimaginable horror. Images have transformed in purpose from static re(-)presentations of reality to active, changing conduits by which pasts can be remembered, by which the intangibility of death can be given substance, by which unshared moments can be more intimately considered. Oddly, visualisation has performed simultaneously two disparate functions: separating the living from the dead through a panoply of re-affirming visual experiences and permitting the re-visitation of those times, events, and people that the human eye could not see itself. Ultimately, what the manipulations, misinterpretations, and destructions of art show us is that the conveyance of meaning between individuals, whether dead or alive, whether seen or unseen, is the image’s most pressing and difficult charge. Works Cited “Angel or Devil? Viewers See Images in Smoke.” Click on Detroit. 17 Sep. 2001. 10 February 2003 <http://www.clickondetroit.com/sh/news/stories/nat-news-96283920010917-120936.php>. Barry, Dan, and William K. Rashbaum. “Rodin Work from Trade Center Survived, and Vanished.” New York Times. 20 May 2002: B1. Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. Baudrillard, Jean. The Illusion of the End. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994. Bernstein, J.M. The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992. Burgin, Victor. The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Post-Modernity. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1986. Cauchon, Dennis and Martha T. Moore. “Desperation Drove Sept. 11 Victims Out World Trade Center Windows.” Salt Lake Tribune Online. 4 September 2002. 19 Jan. 2003 <http://www.sltrib.com/2002/sep/09042002/nation_w/768120.htm>. Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990. Mitchell, W.J.T. Picture Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago P, 1994. “Remains of a Day.” Time 160.11 (9 Sep. 2002): 58. Smith, Paul. Discerning the Subject. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988. “The Accidental Tourist.” Urban Legends. 20 Nov. 2001. 21 Feb. 2003 <http://www.snopes2.com/rumors/crash.htm>. Links http://www.clickondetroit.com/sh/news/stories/nat-news-96283920010917-120936.html http://www.sltrib.com/2002/sep/09042002/nation_w/768120.htm http://www.snopes2.com/rumors/crash.htm Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Smith, Royce W.. "The Image Is Dying" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/09-imageisdying.php>. APA Style Smith, R. W. (2003, Apr 23). The Image Is Dying. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/09-imageisdying.php>