Artículos de revistas sobre el tema "Silky shark – Behavior"

There is a lack of studies on how provisioning may influence shark numbers and behaviour. The effects of long-term provisioning were investigated at a Red Sea reef, where both grey reef shark (Carcharhinus amblyrhynchos) and silky shark (Carcharhinus falciformis) occurred. Initially, grey reef sharks outnumbered silky sharks, but over 6 years, silky shark numbers increased almost 20-fold, whereas grey-reef sightings decreased >90%. Following this, silky-shark sightings also declined considerably (>80%). It is suggested that these declines could relate to local overfishing. Many silky sharks were identified individually through distinctive markings or conventional tagging. Some individual silky sharks were recorded regularly over 2 years or more, but most appeared to be transient visitors. Sighting records indicated that provisioning extended the residency of transient individuals. If visiting silky sharks were drawn from a larger regional population, this would explain both their initial accumulation and why, to begin with, sightings were sustained despite local fishing pressure. Conversely, the site fidelity typical of grey reef sharks would have made them more susceptible to local depletion. Silky sharks were recorded as behaving more boldly when present in greater numbers, but the decline in grey reef sharks appears to be unrelated to the initial increase in the numbers of silky shark.

Many shark populations are experiencing critical declines from overfishing, triggering potentially detrimental cascade effects on marine ecosystems. Silky sharks, Carcharhinus falciformis, have experienced some of the most severe declines, yet little information exists on their behavioural ecology to inform management decisions. In the present study, the movement patterns of a sexually segregated subpopulation of female silky sharks on reefs in the Central Red Sea were investigated using acoustic telemetry to characterise habitat-use and residency patterns. Frequent baiting of sharks at a particular reef-site significantly increased time spent in the vicinity, although no increases in use of other reef areas 5–10 and 50–60 km away were recorded, and regular use of all three reef areas persisted in the absence of bait. Observed residency patterns varied considerably, from being present almost year-round to visiting only intermittently. The sharks spent significantly longer times at study reefs during daylight hours, even within bait-free regions, suggesting the diel bias is normal. This pattern became less distinct nearer the full moon when there is more ambient light. The regular, perennial use of these reefs by mature and near-mature female silky sharks highlights the importance of this habitat in the Red Sea for recruitment into the local shark population.

Characterizing the vulnerability of both target and non-target (bycatch) species to a fishing gear is a key step towards an ecosystem-based fisheries management approach. This study addresses this issue for the tropical tuna purse seine fishery that uses fish aggregating devices (FADs). We used passive acoustic telemetry to characterize, on a 24 h scale, the associative patterns and the vertical distribution of skipjack (Katsuwonus pelamis), yellowfin (Thunnus albacares), and bigeye tuna (Thunnus obesus) (target species), as well as silky shark (Carcharhinus falciformis), oceanic triggerfish (Canthidermis maculata), and rainbow runner (Elagatis bipinnulata) (major non-target species). Distinct diel associative patterns were observed; the tunas and the silky sharks were more closely associated with FADs during daytime, while the rainbow runner and the oceanic triggerfish were more closely associated during the night. Minor changes in bycatch to catch ratio of rainbow runner and oceanic triggerfish could possibly be achieved by fishing at FADs after sunrise. However, as silky sharks display a similar associative pattern as tunas, no specific change in fishing time could mitigate the vulnerability of this more sensitive species. For the vertical distribution, there was no particular time of the day when any species occurred beyond the depth of a typical purse seine net. While this study does not provide an immediate solution to reduce the bycatch to catch ratios of the FAD-based fishery in the western Indian Ocean, the method described here could be applied to other regions where similar fisheries exist so as to evaluate potential solutions to reducing fishing mortality of non-target species.

There is great concern about the future of sharks in Ecuador because of the lack of biological knowledge of most species that inhabit the region. This paper analyzes the feeding behavior of the pelagic thresher shark (Alopias pelagicus), the blue shark (Prionace glauca) and the silky shark (Carcharhinus falciformis) through the use of stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen (δ13C and δ15N), with the aim of determining the degree of interaction between these species in the Galapagos Marine Reserve. No interspecific differences were found in use of oceanic vs. inshore feeding areas (δ13C: Kruskal–Wallis test, p = 0.09). The position in the hierarchy of the food web where A. pelagicus feeds differed from that of the other species (δ15N: Kruskal–Wallis test, p = 0.01). There were no significant differences in δ13C and δ15N values between males and females of the three species (Student’s t-test, p > 0.05), which suggests that both sexes have a similar feeding behavior. A specialist strategy was observed in P. glauca (trophic niche breadth TNB = 0.69), while the other species were found to be generalist (A. pelagicus TNB = 1.50 and C. falciformis TNB = 1.09). The estimated trophic level (TL) varied between the three species. C. falciformis occupied the highest trophic level (TL = 4.4), making it a quaternary predator in the region. The results of this study coincide with the identified behavior in these predators in other areas of the tropical Pacific (Colombia and Mexico), and suggest a pelagic foraging strategy with differential consumption of prey between the three species. These ecological aspects can provide timely information when implementing in conservation measures for these shark species in the Tropical Pacific and Galapagos Marine Reserve.

The paired olfactory organs of both the lemon shark (Negaprion brevirostris) and the silky shark (Carcharhinus falciformis) are located in solid cartilaginous nasal capsules, which open at the ventral side of the snout and are entirely separate from the mouth. The olfactory rosette consists of two rows of lamellae arising from a central raphe. The lamellae possess secondary folds covered with sensory epithelium, which contains microvillous receptor cells, supporting cells with both cilia and microvilli, basal cells, and goblet cells. No ciliated receptor cells were found. Gaps between facing lamellae connect the inlet chamber with the outlet chamber. The inlet chamber receives the ventilatory water through the incurrent nostril and the outlet chamber discharges the water through the excurrent nostril. A nasal flap, a septum, and paired valve flaps form an incomplete barrier between incurrent and excurrent nostrils and may have hydrodynamic functions, which are discussed.

The shape of shark teeth varies among species, but traditional testing protocols have revealed no predictive relationship between shark tooth morphology and performance. We developed a dynamic testing device to quantify cutting performance of teeth. We mimicked head-shaking behaviour in feeding large sharks by attaching teeth to the blade of a reciprocating power saw fixed in a custom-built frame. We tested three tooth types at biologically relevant speeds and found differences in tooth cutting ability and wear. Teeth from the bluntnose sixgill ( Hexanchus griseus ) showed poor cutting ability compared with tiger ( Galeocerdo cuvier ), sandbar ( Carcharhinus plumbeus ) and silky ( C. falciformis ) sharks, but they also showed no wear with repeated use. Some shark teeth are very sharp at the expense of quickly dulling, while others are less sharp but dull more slowly. This demonstrates that dynamic testing is vital to understanding the performance of shark teeth.

Silks play an important role in the life of various arthropods. A highly neglected prerequisite to make versatile use of silks is sufficient attachment to substrates. Although there have been some studies on the structure and mechanics of silk anchorages of spiders, for insects only anecdotal reports on attachment-associated spinning behaviour exist. Here, we experimentally studied the silk attachment of the pupae and last instar caterpillars of the tea bagworm Eumeta minuscula (Butler 1881) (Lepidoptera, Psychidae) to the leaves of its host plant Ilex chinensis . We found that the bagworms spin attachment discs, which share some structural features with those of spiders, like a plaque consisting of numerous overlaid, looped glue-coated silk fibres and the medially attaching suspension thread. Although the glue, which coats the fibres, cannot spread and adhere very well to the leaf surface, high pull-off forces were measured, yielding a mean safety factor (force divided by the animal weight) of 385.6. Presumably, the bagworms achieve this by removal of the leaf epidermis prior to silk attachment, which exposes the underlying tissue that represents a much better bonding site. This ensures a reliable attachment during the immobile, vulnerable pupal stage. This is the first study on the biomechanics and structure of silk attachments to substrates in insects.

Dense plant cultivation is an efficient approach to improve maize production by maximizing the utilization of energy and nutrients. However, dense plant populations may aggravate the abortion rate of young grains, resulting in fewer kernels per ear. The rate and duration of grain-filling play decisive roles in maize grain yield. Therefore, to increase plant density, enhancing the grain-filling rate, extending the growth period of individual maize plants and regulating crop senescence would be the first priority. In this study, we examined the regulatory effects of GA4+7 under two application methods: shanks and silks were moistened by cotton full with GA4+7 solution at concentrations of 0, 10, 60, and 120 mg L−1. The results showed that GA4+7 improved the grain-filling rate by increasing the content of auxin, gibberellin, zeatin, and abscisic acid in grains compared to control plants. In addition, the auxin, gibberellin, and zeatin contents in the grains were positively and significantly correlated with the maximum grain weight and the maximum and mean grain-filling rates. Moreover, GA4+7 increased the activities of superoxide dismutases, catalases, and peroxidases and reduced the malondialdehyde content in leaves compared with untreated plants. At the concentration of 60 mg L−1, GA4+7 showed the greatest effect on shank and silk applications (Sh-60 and Si-60) followed by 10 mg L−1 (Sh-10) for shank treatment and 120 mg L−1 (Si-120) for silk treatment. Our results suggest that a concentration of 60 mg L−1 GA4+7 for shank and silk application may be efficiently used for changing the level of hormones in grains and antioxidant enzymes in ear leaves, which may be useful for enhancing grain-filling rate and delaying leaf senescence, resulting in an increase in maize grain yield.

Scientists aboard French purse seine vessels recorded the number and condition of silky sharks (Carcharhinus falciformis) caught during three fishing cruises in the Indian Ocean. A sample of 31 individuals that showed signs of life were tagged with satellite tags to investigate their postrelease mortality. The majority of individuals (95%) were brought on board using the brailer. Combining the proportion of sharks that were dead (72%) and the mortality rate of those released (48%), the overall mortality rate of brailed individuals was 85%. Few individuals (5%) were not brailed as they were entangled and landed during the hauling process. The survival rate of these individuals was high, with an overall mortality rate of meshed individuals of 18%. The combination of these two categories led to an overall mortality rate of 81%. This high value reflects the harsh conditions encountered by sharks during the purse seine fishing process. Consequently, methods that prevent sharks being brought on board are a priority for future investigations, but good handling practices should also be promoted as they could reduce mortality by at least 19%.

We report finding Strumigenys thaxteri Wheeler in the Amazonian foothills of southeastern Ecuador, over 2000 km to the west of previously known records for the species in Trinidad and Guyana. Field observations suggest it is a sit and wait ambush predator that captures insects that alight on the vegetation upon which they position themselves. Once prey is subdued they descend with it to ground level, where they presumably nest. Their massive mandibles, robust claws, dense body cover of long silky hairs, and sting may all contribute to detecting, trapping, and subduing larger sized, flying prey. This type of predation is hitherto unreported for the genus. Strumigenys reticeps (Kempf), an apparently closely related species from southern Brazil, may share the same behavior but its key morphological traits are of a lesser degree of development than in S. thaxteri. Both species are redescribed and their morphological variability is discussed. High resolution images of both species are provided. The more frequent use of vegetation beating for ant-collecting is urged. Strumigenys lojanensis Lattke & Aguirre is synonymized as a junior synonym of S. onorei Baroni Urbani & De Andrade.

Male choice has been associated with situations in which there is variation in the quality and reproductive status of females within a population. However, few studies have looked at the ability of males to discriminate between females of different reproductive status when the intensity of the sex pheromone produced by these females is known. Here we investigated the ability of male wolf spiders, Schizocosa malitiosa, to discriminate between silk-born sex pheromones produced by females of different age and mating status using a T-maze system. In particular, we analysed male sexual response between young virgin (YV) and old recently mated (ORM) females, two different reproductive groups that produce similar intensities of sex pheromone. We found that males chose and displayed more courtship behaviour in the silk thread from old virgin females (OV). However, males did not show any preference between silk thread of YV versus ORM females, and there were no differences in courtship behaviours. According to our results, male decision will be constrained by the sex pheromones produced by YV and ORM females. YV females are receptive to mates and do not have any sperm stored, while ORM females are partially reluctant to re-mate and male would share paternity. In other species, females change the composition, or stop the production of the sex pheromone providing information on their reproductive status. However, in this species it seems that females are not emitting clear information about their mating status, which will in turn affect the reproductive decisions of the male.

In Canada, silky prairie-clover (Dalea villosa var. villosa (Nutt.) Spreng) is a nationally rare plant, growing only in sand dunes in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Previous research indicates that this species is incapable of self-pollination, making it dependent on insect pollinators for successful reproduction. The insect visitor community to D. villosa in Spruce Woods Provincial Park (SWPP), Manitoba, was documented and compared with that of 13 co-flowering plants that share some of its insect visitors. In total, 29 insect taxa were observed feeding on nectar or pollen from D. villosa. Hymenoptera were the most frequent visitors, comprising 60.7% of the taxa and making 93.5% of all visits. The visitation rate per stem to D. villosa (0.0042 stems·min–1) was the second highest of all of the plants with which it was compared. The insect visitor diversity was 4.0 (Simpson’s reciprocal index), and the constancy index was 0.72. The high visitation rate, diversity, and constancy to this species may be due to a lack of competition for pollinators. Over half of the insect visitor taxa (54%) and visits (68%) were by omnivorous insects, as opposed to herbivorous ones. This means that there is interconnectivity between a mutualistic network involving D. villosa and several antagonistic networks.

Laboratory studies were conducted to compare the response of Diatraea grandiosella (Dyar) larvae to lyophilized transgenic corn tissue expressing the Cry1Ab endotoxin protein of Bacillus thuringiensis (Berliner) (Bt) with conventional corn tissue incorporated into a BioServ™ artificial diet. Whorl leaf, stalk, shank, husk, silk or kernel tissues were tested independently in the diet. Larvae fed diet containing conventional corn weighed more and were longer in length than larvae fed diet containing Bt corn for all tissue types included in the study. The number of larvae that survived depended on the tissue type and age of the tissue. Larvae fed diet with kernel tissue expressing Bt toxin had greater weight and body length than larvae fed the other Bt tissue types. The negative effects of Bt corn tissues expressing the Cry1Ab endotoxin protein on growth of D. grandiosella was observed, even at the diluted concentrations of toxic tissues incorporated into the diet in this study.

In Why We Cooperate (2009), Tomasello addresses the problem of human uniqueness, which has become the focus for a lot of recent research at the frontier between the Humanities and the Life Sciences. Being both a developmental psychologist and a primatologist, Tomasello is especially well suited to tackle the subject, and the present book is the most recent one in a series of books and papers by himself and his colleagues (see below). Tomasello’s basic position is squarely a dual-inheritance account, in which human uniqueness is explained both through genetics and through culture (in other words, both through natural and through cultural evolution). The main idea is that the phylogenetic specificity of humankind rests in its species-specific adaptation for sociability. The account offered by Tomasello contrasts human cooperation and altruism with nonhuman primate competition, and proposes that human altruism leads to shared intentionality (the ability to share attention to a third object and, more generally, to share beliefs and intentions). The evolutionary explanation Tomasello offers is that human ancestors were led through some kind of selection pressure to common foraging leading to collaboration and sharing. After outlining Tomasello’s position as it is described in the book, as well as the comments by Dweck, Spelke, Silk, and Skyrms which follow, I discuss Tomasello’s thesis, noting a few problems with his approach. These criticisms are based on his own work and on a number of his own other books and papers, as well as on other relevant work in the domain.

In the light of China’s rise, it is of great interest to consider the views that are widespread in the PRC on the nature of Chinese state and the proper mode of international relations. Considering that Chinese leadership has proclaimed the goal of "rejuvenation" of the Chinese nation, modern assessments of China's historical past allow us to take a fresh look at the prospects for China's internal development as well as Chinese foreign policy in Asia. In this regard the era of the Qing Dynasty is of particular interest. During that period Chinese territory expanded approximately to its modern borders, and the relations with the neighbors underwent a transition from the tributary system to the modern Westphalian type of international relations. There exist various interpretations of Chinese foreign policy’s traditions. Those interpretations are largely determined by the attitude to China's current behavior at the international stage. While the Chinese rulers have adopted the concept of traditional Chinese world order that is of Western origin, many Western researchers nowadays question this concept and tend to describe pre-revolutionary China as one of many expansionist empires in Eurasia. That point of view is subject to sharp criticism from Chinese authors. The portrayal of Qing China as one of the empires can entail serious consequences for international relations as well as the territorial integrity of the PRC. In order to achieve their goals in domestic and foreign policy, Chinese leaders strive to build a historical narrative in such a way that it combines the elements of various historical periods which are most profitable in the current circumstances, including the history of Silk Road.

Silky sharks (Carcharhinus falciformis) represent a major component of global shark catch, both directly and as bycatch, and populations are declining as a result. An improved understanding of their movement ecology is needed to support conservation efforts. We deployed satellite and acoustic tags (2013–2018) and analyzed historical fisheries records (1997–2009), to investigate the spatial ecology of silky sharks in the central Indian Ocean and a large Marine Protected Area (MPA; 640,000 km2) around the Chagos Archipelago. We observed high fidelity to the MPA, and a sustained diurnal association with a seamount complex, with individuals moving off at night and returning at sunrise. Yet, we also observed large-scale divergent movements in two satellite tagged individuals and documented the furthest recorded displacement distance for a satellite tagged silky shark to date, with one individual moving from the MPA to the Kenyan coast—a displacement distance of 3,549 km (track distance ∼4,782 km). Silky sharks undertook diel vertical migrations and oscillatory diving behavior, spending > 99% of their time in the top 100 m, and diving to depths of greater than 300 m, overlapping directly with typical deployments of purse seine and longline sets in the Indian Ocean. One individual was recorded to a depth of 1,112 m, the deepest recorded silky shark dive to date. Individuals spent 96% of their time at liberty within water temperatures between 24 and 30°C. Historic fisheries data revealed that silky sharks were a major component of the shark community around the archipelago, representing 13.69% of all sharks caught by longlines before the fishery closed in 2010. Over half (55.88%) of all individuals caught by longlines and purse seiners were juveniles. The large proportion of juveniles, coupled with the high site fidelity and residence observed in some individuals, suggests that the MPA could provide considerable conservation benefits for silky sharks, particularly during early life-history stages. However, their high mobility potential necessitates that large MPAs need to be considered in conjunction with fisheries regulations and conservation measures in adjacent EEZs and in areas beyond national jurisdiction.

Silky sharks (Carcharhinus falciformis) represent a major component of global shark catch, both directly and as bycatch, and populations are declining as a result. An improved understanding of their movement ecology is needed to support conservation efforts. We deployed satellite and acoustic tags (2013–2018) and analyzed historical fisheries records (1997–2009), to investigate the spatial ecology of silky sharks in the central Indian Ocean and a large Marine Protected Area (MPA; 640,000 km2) around the Chagos Archipelago. We observed high fidelity to the MPA, and a sustained diurnal association with a seamount complex, with individuals moving off at night and returning at sunrise. Yet, we also observed large-scale divergent movements in two satellite tagged individuals and documented the furthest recorded displacement distance for a satellite tagged silky shark to date, with one individual moving from the MPA to the Kenyan coast—a displacement distance of 3,549 km (track distance ∼4,782 km). Silky sharks undertook diel vertical migrations and oscillatory diving behavior, spending > 99% of their time in the top 100 m, and diving to depths of greater than 300 m, overlapping directly with typical deployments of purse seine and longline sets in the Indian Ocean. One individual was recorded to a depth of 1,112 m, the deepest recorded silky shark dive to date. Individuals spent 96% of their time at liberty within water temperatures between 24 and 30°C. Historic fisheries data revealed that silky sharks were a major component of the shark community around the archipelago, representing 13.69% of all sharks caught by longlines before the fishery closed in 2010. Over half (55.88%) of all individuals caught by longlines and purse seiners were juveniles. The large proportion of juveniles, coupled with the high site fidelity and residence observed in some individuals, suggests that the MPA could provide considerable conservation benefits for silky sharks, particularly during early life-history stages. However, their high mobility potential necessitates that large MPAs need to be considered in conjunction with fisheries regulations and conservation measures in adjacent EEZs and in areas beyond national jurisdiction.

Abstract The silky shark Carcharhinus falciformis regularly associates with floating objects in the open ocean, resulting in relatively high levels of bycatch in industrial tuna purse seine fisheries using drifting fish aggregating devices (FADs). This bycatch has contributed to concerns regarding the sustainability of this fishery and its impact on silky shark populations. To investigate fishery interactions, movements of 28 silky sharks (86–235 cm TL, mean = 118 cm) fitted with pop-up and archival tags in the western Indian Ocean, between 2010 and 2012, were examined. Monthly overlap between probability surfaces of sharks and two fishery metrics (FAD-tuna catches and FAD positions) were calculated. Vertical habitat use overlapped almost entirely with operational gear depth. Horizontal movements were extensive (3–5024 km) and covered large areas of the western Indian Ocean. Monthly overlap with FAD distributions was consistently high (64.03–100%) highlighting the need for compliance with FAD design regulations to avoid entanglement. Monthly overlap with tuna catches was more variable (8.43–51.83%). The observed movement patterns suggest static spatial management measures would be have limited conservation impact, however dynamic approaches could be appropriate. Limiting fishery activities directly will likely have the greatest conservation outcomes for silky sharks in the purse seine fishery.

Abstract The silky shark (Carcharhinus falciformis) is one of the most heavily fished tropical shark species globally, and currently there is increasing concern for its conservation status. However, large differences and ambiguity in life history parameter estimates among regions complicates its conservation and fisheries management. Using a Leslie matrix model that incorporated stochastic effects, we analysed the intraspecific demography of C. falciformis using available life history data from seven regions. Among regions, large differences were observed in generation time and age-specific reproductive contributions. Carcharhinus falciformis generally had low resilience to fishing mortality (F) throughout its distribution. Age-at-first-capture and age-at-last-capture management approaches resulted in substantial differences among regions. This was largely influenced by age-at-maturity. However, in scrutinizing some regional life history studies, it is likely that sampling design and methodological differences among regions have resulted in inaccuracies in life history parameter estimates and subsequent demographic attributes. This implies that age and life-stage-dependent management approaches using these possibly inaccurate life history parameters may be inappropriate. We suggest that a greater emphasis needs to be placed on eliminating human sources of error in elasmobranch life history studies to ensure management for wide-ranging species, such as C. falciformis, is most effective.

Abstract Quantifying vertical distributions of pelagic predators elucidates pelagic ecosystem structure and informs fisheries management. In the tropical South Atlantic Ocean, the recently designated large-scale marine protected area around Ascension Island hosts diverse pelagic predators for which basin-specific vertical habitat information is minimal or absent. We used pop-up satellite archival tags to analyse vertical habitat use in 12 species (bigeye tuna Thunnus obesus, blue marlin Makaira nigricans, blue shark Prionace glauca, dolphinfish Coryphaena hippurus, Galapagos shark Carcharhinus galapagensis, oceanic whitetip Carcharhinus longimanus, sailfish Istiophorus albicans, silky shark Carcharhinus falciformis, swordfish Xiphias gladius, tiger shark Galeocerdo cuvier, wahoo Acanthocybium solandri, and yellowfin tuna Thunnus albacares) and quantify parameters (temperature, dissolved oxygen, diel cycles, lunar phase) known to constrain vertical movements. Predator depth distributions varied widely, and classification trees grouped predators into four clades: (i) primarily epipelagic; (ii) partial thermocline use; (iii) oscillatory diving with thermocline/sub-thermocline use; and (iv) extensive use of sub-thermocline waters. Vertical habitat differences were linked to thermal physiology and foraging ecology, and species-specific physical constraints from other ocean basins were largely conserved in the South Atlantic. Water column features defined species-specific depth distributions, which can inform fisheries practices and bycatch risk assessments and population estimates.

Aims: This study was to establish the feeding habits of silky shark Carcharhinus falciformis in waters off Côte d’Ivoire. Study design: All stomachs of the specimens were collected using a standard method and analysed at laboratory. Place and Duration of Study: The study of the diet of C. falciformis was carried out at the laboratory of the Oceanological Research Centre (ORC) between April 2019 and August 2020. Methodology: To carry out this study, measurements and extractions of the stomachs of silky sharks were performed using a tape measure and dissection kit. Diet was described using the Index of Relative Importance (%IRI). The food overlap between sexes, size groups and marine seasons were analysed using the Morisita index. Results: A total of 265 specimens ranging in size from 79 to 254 cm total length were used. Of the stomachs examined, 163 individuals had food contents (61.51%), whilst 102 were empty (38.49%). The results indicated that silky shark has epipelagic and mesobathypelagic feeding habits, preying upon a wide number of prey taxa (33 species) but with a diet dominated by teleost fishes, especially Thunnus albacares (60.62%IRI) and Katsuwonus pelamis (33.18%IRI). The Morisita index and the Spearman rank correlation coefficient showed similarity of the diet between sexes (Cλ > 0.60; Rs = 0.776 and p = 0.001 and marine seasons (Cλ > 0.60; Rs = 0.658 and p = 0.001). The juveniles and adults did not show any overlap. The Amundsen graphical (Fig. 3) analysis suggested that silky shark displays specialist feeding behaviour in this area. Conclusion: Diet consisted mainly of T. albacares and K. pelamis, the proportions of which varied according to size and marine seasons. Carcharhinus falciformis is considered to be a specialist predator.

“I’m fat–and it’s okay! It doesn’t mean I’m stupid, or ugly, or lazy, or selfish. I’m fat!” so proclaims Joy Nash in her YouTube video, A Fat Rant. “Fat! It’s three little letters–what are you afraid of?!” This is the question I pose to my class on day one of Fat Studies. Sadly, many college students do fear fat, and negative attitudes toward fat people are quite prevalent in this population (Ambwani et al. 366). As I teach it, Fat Studies is cross-listed between Psychology and Gender Studies. However, most students who enrol have majors in Psychology or other behavioural health science fields in which weight bias is particularly pronounced (Watkins and Concepcion 159). Upon finding stronger bias among third- versus first-year Physical Education students, O’Brien, Hunter, and Banks (308) speculated that the weight-centric curriculum that typifies this field actively engenders anti-fat attitudes. Based on their exploration of textbook content, McHugh and Kasardo (621) contend that Psychology too is complicit in propagating weight bias by espousing weight-centric messages throughout the curriculum. Such messages include the concepts that higher body weight invariably leads to poor health, weight control is simply a matter of individual choice, and dieting is an effective means of losing weight and improving health (Tylka et al.). These weight-centric tenets are, however, highly contested. For instance, there exists a body of research so vast that it has its own name, the “obesity paradox” literature. This literature (McAuley and Blair 773) entails studies that show that “obese” persons with chronic disease have relatively better survival rates and that a substantial portion of “overweight” and “obese” individuals have levels of metabolic health similar to or better than “normal” weight individuals (e.g., Flegal et al. 71). Finally, the “obesity paradox” literature includes studies showing that cardiovascular fitness is a far better predictor of mortality than weight. In other words, individuals may be both fit and fat, or conversely, unfit and thin (Barry et al. 382). In addition, Tylka et al. review literature attesting to the complex causes of weight status that extend beyond individual behaviour, ranging from genetic predispositions to sociocultural factors beyond personal control. Lastly, reviews of research on dieting interventions show that these are overwhelmingly ineffective in producing lasting weight loss or actual improvements in health and may in fact lead to disordered eating and other unanticipated adverse consequences (e.g., Bacon and Aphramor; Mann et al. 220; Salas e79; Tylka et al.).The newfound, interdisciplinary field of scholarship known as Fat Studies aims to debunk weight-centric misconceptions by elucidating findings that counter these mainstream suppositions. Health At Every Size® (HAES), a weight-neutral approach to holistic well-being, is an important facet of Fat Studies. The HAES paradigm advocates intuitive eating and pleasurable physical activity for health rather than restrictive dieting and regimented exercise for weight loss. HAES further encourages body acceptance of self and others regardless of size. Empirical evidence shows that HAES-based interventions improve physical and psychological health without harmful side-effects or high dropout rates associated with weight loss interventions (Bacon and Aphramor; Clifford et al. “Impact of Non-Diet Approaches” 143). HAES, like the broader field of Fat Studies, seeks to eradicate weight-based discrimination, positioning weight bias as a social justice issue that intersects with oppression based on other areas of difference such as gender, race, and social class. Much like Queer Studies, Fat Studies seeks to reclaim the word, fat, thus stripping it of its pejorative connotations. As Nash asserts in her video, “Fat is a descriptive physical characteristic. It’s not an insult, or an obscenity, or a death sentence!” As an academic discipline, Fat Studies is expanding its visibility and reach. The Fat Studies Reader, the primary source of reading for my course, provides a comprehensive overview of the field (Rothblum and Solovay 1). This interdisciplinary anthology addresses fat history and activism, fat as social inequality, fat in healthcare, and fat in popular culture. Ward (937) reviews this and other recently-released fat-friendly texts. The field features its own journal, Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society, which publishes original research, overview articles, and reviews of assorted media. Both the Popular Culture Association and National Women’s Studies Association have special interest groups devoted to Fat Studies, and the American Psychological Association’s Division on the Psychology of Women has recently formed a task force on sizism (Bergen and Carrizales 22). Furthermore, Fat Studies conferences have been held in Australia and New Zealand, and the third annual Weight Stigma Conference will occur in Iceland, September 2015. Although the latter conference is not necessarily limited to those who align themselves with Fat Studies, keynote speakers include Ragen Chastain, a well-known member of the fat acceptance movement largely via her blog, Dances with Fat. The theme of this year’s conference, “Institutionalised Weightism: How to Challenge Oppressive Systems,” is consistent with Fat Studies precepts:This year’s theme focuses on the larger social hierarchies that favour thinness and reject fatness within western culture and how these systems have dictated the framing of fatness within the media, medicine, academia and our own identities. What can be done to oppose systemised oppression? What can be learned from the fight for social justice and equality within other arenas? Can research and activism be united to challenge prevailing ideas about fat bodies?Concomitantly, Fat Studies courses have begun to appear on college campuses. Watkins, Farrell, and Doyle-Hugmeyer (180) identified and described four Fat Studies and two HAES courses that were being taught in the U.S. and abroad as of 2012. Since then, a Fat Studies course has been taught online at West Virginia University and another will soon be offered at Washington State University. Additionally, a new HAES class has been taught at Saint Mary’s College of California during the last two academic years. Cameron (“Toward a Fat Pedagogy” 28) describes ways in which nearly 30 instructors from five different countries have incorporated fat studies pedagogy into university courses across an array of academic areas. This growing trend is manifested in The Fat Pedagogy Reader (Russell and Cameron) due out later this year. In this article, I describe content and pedagogical strategies that I use in my Fat Studies course. I then share students’ qualitative reactions, drawing upon excerpts from written assignments. During the term reported here, the class was comprised of 17 undergraduate and 5 graduate students. Undergraduate majors included 47% in Psychology, 24% in Women Studies, 24% in various other College of Liberal Arts fields, and 6% in the College of Public Health. Graduate majors included 40% in the College of Public Health and 60% in the College of Education. Following submission of final grades, students provided consent via email allowing written responses on assignments to be anonymously incorporated into research reports. Assignments drawn upon for this report include weekly reading reactions to specific journal articles in which students were to summarise the main points, identify and discuss a specific quote or passage that stood out to them, and consider and discuss applicability of the information in the article. This report also utilises responses to a final assignment in which students were to articulate take-home lessons from the course.Despite the catalogue description, many students enter Fat Studies with a misunderstanding of what the course entails. Some admitted that they thought the course was about reducing obesity and the presumed health risks associated with this alleged pathological condition (Watkins). Others understood, but were somewhat dubious, at least at the outset, “Before I began this class, I admit that I was skeptical of what Fat Studies meant.” Another student experienced “a severe cognitive dissonance” between the Fat Studies curriculum and that of a previous behavioural health class:My professor spent the entire quarter spouting off statistics, such as the next generation of children will be the first generation to have a lower life expectancy than their parents and the ever increasing obesity rates that are putting such a tax on our health care system, and I took her words to heart. I was scared for myself and for the populations I would soon be working with. I was worried that I was destined to a chronic disease and bothered that my BMI was two points above ‘normal.’ I believed everything my professor alluded to on the danger of obesity because it was things I had heard in the media and was led to believe all my life.Yet another related, “At first, I will be honest, it was hard for me to accept a lot of this information, but throughout the term every class changed my mind about my view of fat people.” A few students have voiced even greater initial resistance. During a past term, one student lamented that the material represented an attack on her intended behavioural health profession. Cameron (“Learning to Teach Everybody”) describes comparable reactions among students in her Critical Obesity course taught within a behavioural health science unit. Ward (937) attests that, even in Gender Studies, fat is the topic that creates the most controversy. Similarly, she describes students’ immense discomfort when asked to entertain perspectives that challenge deeply engrained ideas inculcated by our culture’s “obesity epidemic.” Discomfort, however, is not necessarily antithetical to learning. In prompting students to unlearn “the biomedically-informed truth of obesity, namely that fat people are unfit, unhealthy, and in need of ‘saving’ through expert interventions,” Moola at al. recommend equipping them with an “ethics of discomfort” (217). No easy task, “It requires courage to ask our students to forgo the security of prescriptive health messaging in favour of confusion and uncertainty” (221). I encourage students to entertain conflicting perspectives by assigning empirically-based articles emanating from peer-reviewed journals in their own disciplines that challenge mainstream discourses on obesity (e.g., Aphramor; Bombak e60; Tomiyama, Ahlstrom, and Mann 861). Students whose training is steeped in the scientific method seem to appreciate having quantitative data at their disposal to convince themselves–and their peers and professors–that widely held weight-centric beliefs and practices may not be valid. One student remarked, “Since I have taken this course, I feel like I am prepared to discuss the fallacy of the weight-health relationship,” citing specific articles that would aid in the effort. Likewise, Cameron’s (“Learning to Teach Everybody”) students reported a need to read research reports in order to begin questioning long-held beliefs.In addition, I assign readings that provide students with the opportunity to hear the voices of fat people themselves, a cornerstone of Fat Studies. Besides chapters in The Fat Studies Reader authored by scholars and activists who identify as fat, I assign qualitative articles (e.g., Lewis et al.) and narrative reports (e.g., Pause 42) in which fat people describe their experiences with weight and weight bias. Additionally, I provide positive images of fat people via films and websites (Clifford et al. HAES®; Watkins; Watkins and Doyle-Hugmeyer 177) in order to counteract the preponderance of negative, dehumanising portrayals in popular media (e.g., Ata and Thompson 41). In response, a student stated:One of the biggest things I took away from this term was the confidence I found in fat women through films and stories. They had more confidence than I have seen in any tiny girl and owned the body they were given.I introduce “normal” weight allies as well, most especially Linda Bacon whose treatise on thin privilege tends to set the stage for viewing weight bias as a form of oppression (Bacon). One student observed, “It was a relief to be able to read and talk about weight oppression in a classroom setting for once.” Another appreciated that “The class did a great job at analysing fat as oppression and not like a secondhand oppression as I have seen in my past classes.” Typically, fat students were already aware of weight-based privilege and oppression, often painfully so. Thinner students, however, were often astonished by this concept, several describing Bacon’s article as “eye-opening.” In reaction, many vowed to act as allies:This class has really opened my eyes and prepared me to be an ally to fat people. It will be difficult for some time while I try to get others to understand my point of view on fat people but I believe once there are enough allies, people’s minds will really start changing and it will benefit everyone for the better.Pedagogically, I choose to share my own experiences as they relate to course content and encourage students, at least in their written assignments, to do the same. Other instructors refrain from this practice for fear of reinforcing traditional discourses or eliciting detrimental reactions from students (Watkins, Farrell, and Doyle-Hugmeyer 191). Nevertheless, this tack seems to work well in my course, with many students opting to disclose their relevant circumstances during classroom discussions: Throughout the term I very much valued and appreciated when classmates would share their experiences. I love listening and hearing to others experiences and I think that is a great way to understand the material and learn from one another.It really helped to read different articles and hear classmates discuss and share stories that I was able to relate to. The idea of hearing people talk about issues that I thought I was the only one who dealt with was so refreshing and enlightening.The structure of this class allowed me to learn how this information is applicable to my life and made it deeper than just memorising information.Thus far, across three terms, no student has described iatrogenic effects from this process. In fact, most attribute positive transformations to the class. These include enhanced body acceptance of self and others: This class decreased my fat phobia towards others and gave me a better understanding about the intersectionality of one’s weight. For example, I now feel that I no longer view my family in a fat phobic way and I also feel responsible for educating my brother and helping him develop a strong self-esteem regardless of his size.I never thought this class would change my life, almost save my life. Through studies shown in class and real life people following their dreams, it made my mind completely change about how I view my body and myself.I can only hope that in the future, I will be more forgiving, tolerant, and above all accepting of myself, much less others. Regardless of a person’s shape and size, we are all beautiful, and while I’m just beginning to understand this, it can only get better from here.Students also reported becoming more savvy consumers of weight-centric media messages as well as realigning their eating and exercise behaviour in accordance with HAES: I find myself disgusted at the television now, especially with the amount of diet ads, fitness club ads, and exercise equipment ads all aimed at making a ‘better you.’ I now know that I would never be better off with a SlimFast shake, P90X, or a Total Gym. I would be better off eating when I’m hungry, working out because it is fun, and still eating Thin Mints when I want to. Prior to this class, I would work out rigorously, running seven miles a day. Now I realise why at times I dreaded to work out, it was simply a mathematical system to burn the energy that I had acquired earlier in the day. Instead what I realise I should do is something I enjoy, that way I will never get tired of whatever I am doing. While I do enjoy running, other activities would bring more joy while engaging in a healthy lifestyle like hiking or mountain biking.I will never go on another diet. I will stop choosing exercises I don’t love to do. I will not weigh myself every single day hoping for the number on the scale to change.A reduction in self-weighing was perhaps the most frequent behaviour change that students expressed. This is particularly valuable in that frequent self-weighing is associated with disordered eating and unhealthy weight control behaviours (Neumark-Sztainer et al. 811):I have realised that the number on the scale is simply a number on the scale. That number does not define who you are. I have stopped weighing myself every morning. I put the scale in the storage closet so I don’t have to look at it. I even encouraged my roommate to stop weighing herself too. What has been most beneficial for me to take away from this class is the notion that the number on the scale has so much less to do with fitness levels than most people understand. Coming from a numbers obsessed person like myself, this class has actually gotten me to leave the scales behind. I used to weigh myself every single day and my self-confidence reflected whether I was up or down in weight from the day before. It seems so silly to me now. From this class, I take away a new outlook on body diversity. I will evaluate who I am for what I do and not represent myself with a number. I’m going to have my cake this time, and actually eat it too!Finally, students described ways in which they might carry the concepts from Fat Studies into their future professions: I want to go to law school. This model is something I will work toward in the fight for social justice.As a teacher and teacher of teachers, I plan to incorporate discussions on size diversity and how this should be addressed within the field of adapted physical education.I do not know how I would have gone forward if I had never taken this class. I probably would have continued to use weight loss as an effective measure of success for both nutrition and physical activity interventions. I will never be able to think about the obesity prevention movement in the same way.Since I am working toward being a clinical psychologist, I don’t want to have a client who is pursuing weight loss and then blindly believe that they need to lose weight. I’d rather be of the mindset that every person is unique, and that there are other markers of health at every size.Jones and Hughes-Decatur (59) call for increased scholarship illustrating and evaluating critical body pedagogies so that teachers might provide students with tools to critique dominant discourses, helping them forge healthy relationships with their own bodies in the process. As such, this paper describes elements of a Fat Studies class that other instructors may choose to adopt. It additionally presents qualitative data suggesting that students came to think about fat and fat people in new and divergent ways. Qualitative responses also suggest that students developed better body image and more adaptive eating and exercise behaviours throughout the term. Although no students have yet described lasting adverse effects from the class, one stated that she would have preferred less of a focus on health and more of a focus on issues such as fat fashion. Indeed, some Fat Studies scholars (e.g., Lee) advocate separating discussions of weight bias from discussions of health status to avoid stigmatising fat people who do experience health problems. While concerns about fostering healthism within the fat acceptance movement are valid, as a behavioural health professional with an audience of students training in these fields, I have chosen to devote three weeks of our ten week term to this subject matter. Depending on their academic background, others who teach Fat Studies may choose to emphasise different aspects such as media representations or historical connotations of fat.Nevertheless, the preponderance of positive comments evidenced throughout students’ assignments may certainly be a function of social desirability. Although I explicitly invite critique, and in fact assign readings (e.g., Welsh 33) and present media that question HAES and Fat Studies concepts, students may still feel obliged to articulate acceptance of and transformations consistent with the principles of these movements. As a more objective assessment of student outcomes, I am currently conducting a quantitative evaluation, in which I remain blind to students’ identities, of this year’s Fat Studies course compared to other upper division/graduate Psychology courses, examining potential changes in weight bias, body image and dieting behaviour, adherence to appearance-related media messages, and obligatory exercise behaviour. I postulate results akin to those of Humphrey, Clifford, and Neyman Morris (143) who found reductions in weight bias, improved body image, and improved eating behaviour among college students as a function of their HAES course. As Fat Studies pedagogy proliferates, instructors are called upon to share their teaching strategies, document the effects, and communicate these results within and outside of academic spheres.ReferencesAmbwani, Suman, Katherine M. Thomas, Christopher J. Hopwood, Sara A. Moss, and Carlos M. Grilo. “Obesity Stigmatization as the Status Quo: Structural Considerations and Prevalence among Young Adults in the U.S.” Eating Behaviors 15.3 (2014): 366-370. Aphramor, Lucy. “Validity of Claims Made in Weight Management Research: A Narrative Review of Dietetic Articles.” Nutrition Journal 9 (2010): n. pag. 15 May 2015 ‹http://www.nutritionj.com/content/9/1/30›.Ata, Rheanna M., and J. Kevin Thompson. “Weight Bias in the Media: A Review of Recent Research.” Obesity Facts 3.1 (2010): 41-46.Bacon, Linda. “Reflections on Fat Acceptance: Lessons Learned from Thin Privilege.” 2009. 23 Apr. 2015 ‹http://www.lindabacon.org/Bacon_ThinPrivilege080109.pdf›.Bacon, Linda, and Lucy Aphramor. “Weight Science: Evaluating the Evidence for a Paradigm Shift.” Nutrition Journal 10 (2011). 23 Apr. 2015 ‹http://www.nutritionj.com/content/10/1/9›.Barry, Vaughn W., Meghan Baruth, Michael W. Beets, J. Larry Durstine, Jihong Liu, and Steven N. Blair. “Fitness vs. Fatness on All-Cause Mortality: A Meta-Analysis.” Progress in Cardiovascular Diseases 56.4 (2014): 382-390.Bergen, Martha, and Sonia Carrizales. “New Task Force Focused on Size.” The Feminist Psychologist 42.1 (2015): 22.Bombak, Andrea. “Obesity, Health at Every Size, and Public Health Policy.” American Journal of Public Health 104.2 (2014): e60-e67.Cameron, Erin. “Learning to Teach Everybody: Exploring the Emergence of an ‘Obesity” Pedagogy’.” The Fat Pedagogy Reader: Challenging Weight-Based Oppression in Education. Eds. Erin Cameron and Connie Russell. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, in press.Cameron, Erin. “Toward a Fat Pedagogy: A Study of Pedagogical Approaches Aimed at Challenging Obesity Discourses in Post-Secondary Education.” Fat Studies 4.1 (2015): 28-45.Chastain, Ragen. Dances with Fat. 15 May 2015 ‹https://danceswithfat.wordpress.com/blog/›.Clifford, Dawn, Amy Ozier, Joanna Bundros, Jeffrey Moore, Anna Kreiser, and Michele Neyman Morris. “Impact of Non-Diet Approaches on Attitudes, Behaviors, and Health Outcomes: A Systematic Review.” Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior 47.2 (2015): 143-155.Clifford, Dawn, Patti Lou Watkins, and Rebecca Y. Concepcion. “HAES® University: Bringing a Weight Neutral Message to Campus.” Association for Size Diversity and Health, 2015. 23 Apr. 2015 ‹https://www.sizediversityandhealth.org/content.asp?id=258›.Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society. 23 Apr. 2015 ‹http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ufts20/current#.VShpqdhFDBC›.Flegal, Katherine M., Brian K. Kit, Heather Orpana, and Barry L. Graubard. “Association of All-Cause Mortality with Overweight and Obesity Using Standard Body Mass Index Categories: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” Journal of the American Medical Association 309.1 (2013): 71-82.Humphrey, Lauren, Dawn Clifford, and Michelle Neyman Morris. “Health At Every Size College Course Reduces Dieting Behaviors and Improves Intuitive Eating, Body Esteem, and Anti-Fat Attitudes.” Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, in press.Jones, Stephanie, and Hilary Hughes-Decatur. “Speaking of Bodies in Justice-Oriented Feminist Teacher Education.” Journal of Teacher Education 63.1 (2012): 51-61.Lee, Jenny. Embodying Stereotypes: Memoir, Fat and Health. Fat Studies: Reflective Intersections, July 2012, Wellington, NZ. Unpublished conference paper.Lewis, Sophie, Samantha L. Thomas, Jim Hyde, David Castle, R. Warwick Blood, and Paul A. Komesaroff. “’I Don't Eat a Hamburger and Large Chips Every Day!’ A Qualitative Study of the Impact of Public Health Messages about Obesity on Obese Adults.” BMC Public Health 10.309 (2010). 23 Apr 2015 ‹http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/10/309›.Mann, Traci, A. Janet Tomiyama, Erika Westling, Ann-Marie Lew, Barbara Samuels, and Jason Chatman. “Medicare’s Search for Effective Obesity Treatments: Diets Are Not the Answer.” American Psychologist 62.3 (2007): 220-233.McAuley, Paul A., and Steven N. Blair. “Obesity Paradoxes.” Journal of Sports Sciences 29.8 (2011): 773-782. McHugh, Maureen C., and Ashley E. Kasardo. “Anti-Fat Prejudice: The Role of Psychology in Explication, Education and Eradication.” Sex Roles 66.9-10 (2012): 617-627.Moola, Fiona J., Moss E. Norman, LeAnne Petherick, and Shaelyn Strachan. “Teaching across the Lines of Fault in Psychology and Sociology: Health, Obesity and Physical Activity in the Canadian Context.” Sociology of Sport Journal 31.2 (2014): 202-227.Nash, Joy. “A Fat Rant.” YouTube, 17 Mar. 2007. 23 Apr. 2015 ‹https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUTJQIBI1oA›.Neumark-Sztainer, Dianne, Patricia van den Berg, Peter J. Hannan, and Mary Story. “Self-Weighing in Adolescents: Helpful or Harmful? Longitudinal Associations with Body Weight Changes and Disordered Eating.” Journal of Adolescent Health 39.6 (2006): 811–818.O’Brien, K.S., J.A. Hunter, and M. Banks. “Implicit Anti-Fat Bias in Physical Educators: Physical Attributes, Ideology, and Socialization.” International Journal of Obesity 31.2 (2007): 308-314.Pause, Cat. “Live to Tell: Coming Out as Fat.” Somatechnics 2.1 (2012): 42-56.Rothblum, Esther, and Sondra Solovay, eds. The Fat Studies Reader. New York: New York University Press, 2009.Russell, Connie, and Erin Cameron, eds. The Fat Pedagogy Reader: Challenging Weight-Based Oppression in Education. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, in press. Salas, Ximena Ramos. “The Ineffectiveness and Unintended Consequences of the Public Health War on Obesity.” Canadian Journal of Public Health 106.2 (2015): e79-e81. Tomiyama, A. Janet, Britt Ahlstrom, and Traci Mann. “Long-Term Effects of Dieting: Is Weight Loss Related to Health?” Social and Personality Psychology Compass 7.12 (2013): 861-877.Tylka, Tracy L., Rachel A. Annunziato, Deb Burgard, Sigrun Daníelsdóttir, Ellen Shuman, Chad Davis, and Rachel M. Calogero. “The Weight-Inclusive versus Weight-Normative Approach to Health: Evaluating the Evidence for Prioritizing Well-Being over Weight Loss.” Journal of Obesity (2014). 23 Apr. 2015 ‹http://www.hindawi.com/journals/jobe/2014/983495/›.Ward, Anna E. “The Future of Fat.” American Quarterly 65.4 (2013): 937-947.Watkins, Patti Lou. “Inclusion of Fat Studies in a Difference, Power, and Discrimination Curriculum.” The Fat Pedagogy Reader: Challenging Weight-Based Oppression in Education. Eds. Erin Cameron and Connie Russell. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, in press. Watkins, Patti Lou, and Rebecca Y. Concepcion. “Teaching HAES to Health Care Students and Professionals.” Wellness Not Weight: Motivational Interviewing and a Non-Diet Approach. Ed. Ellen Glovsky. San Diego: Cognella Academic Publishing, 2014: 159-169. Watkins, Patti Lou, and Andrea Doyle-Hugmeyer. “Teaching about Eating Disorders from a Fat Studies Perspective. Transformations 23.2 (2013): 147-158. Watkins, Patti Lou, Amy E. Farrell, and Andrea Doyle Hugmeyer. “Teaching Fat Studies: From Conception to Reception. Fat Studies 1.2 (2012): 180-194. Welsh, Taila L. “Healthism and the Bodies of Women: Pleasure and Discipline in the War against Obesity.” Journal of Feminist Scholarship 1 (2011): 33-48. Weight Stigma Conference. 23 Apr. 2015 ‹http://stigmaconference.com/›.

Volume 12 of the Journal of Jungian Scholarly Studies (JJSS) introduces a grounding initiative: the inclusion of poems and visual art as forms of knowing that exist in conversation with the article form of scholarship. The proposal for this innovation emerged from reflection by members of the editorial board upon the presentations at the Jungian Society of Scholarly Studies’ (JSSS) conference on the theme of Earth/Psyche held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 2016. The conference began with JSSS President Susan Rowland hosting an evening of poetry featuring the cosmology poems of Joel Weishaus and including poems written and read by a few attendees. During the body of the conference, a remarkable number of the speakers included either poems or visual art or both in their talks. To communicate their research concerning Earth’s relations to psyche, presenters repeatedly turned to art to share their knowledge. This volume harvests developed versions of eight of those presentations as articles and publishes them juxtaposed with poems and visual art selected by our journal’s new poetry and art editors. The juxtaposition is intended to spark connections—conceptual, emotional, kinesthetic, and aesthetic—between the complex analyses offered in the articles and the levels of consciousness stirred by the art. Perceiving such connections will affirm the overarching theme that the authors of the articles independently of one another claim as premise: the interconnectedness of being. In that spirit, I offer in this introduction a ample of points of connection between the articles. The topics of the articles address a range of subject matter: the impact of imagination, particularly the practice of active imagination, in transforming human consciousness and behavior, thus advancing planetary individuation; the synchronous relationships between body and earth in the healing modality of Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy; the existence of a salt daemon working to increase harmonious relations between material, alchemical, and psychic levels of being; Christianity’s evolving relations to Earth and reclaimed approaches to scripture that enable Christians to participate in divinized creation; the psyche of a specific place, Cornwall, England, and the psychic image of a place, Santa Fe, New Mexico, including the shadow aspects caused by colonization; and the possibility of utilizing the common characteristics of large-group identities to integrate difference so as to develop conscience enabling constructive political action. Themes that resonate with one another in the various articles include imagination, the psychoid, the feminine, the body, and transformation. Not only is the present volume distinguished by the inclusion of poems and visual art; it also contains more narratives of personal experience than in the past. It has been the policy of JJSS only to publish personal experience if it supports a new idea, not merely illustrates an established one. That policy partially continues, but it turns out that examining the relations of Earth/Psyche has elicited the experiential in research in ways more numerous than illustration or support. Personal experience as numinous encounter initiates Susan Courtney’s discovery of the salt daemon and her subsequent research into parallels between physical salts, alchemical salts, and the psychoid nature of earth and psyche, research leading to her contributing to Jungian theory the idea of a salt daemon as an inherent movement of multi-faceted being toward bringing coherence to the ever unfolding series of incoherent states. Personal experience as numinous dreams leading to an understanding of his calling to speak for the psyche of a place motivates Guy Dargert’s exploration of the folklore and colonized history of the inhabitants of Cornwall and of the psychological dangers in the allurement of Cornwall’s beguiling beauty. Personal experience as numinous dreams, but also as embodied practices of active imagination, animates Ciuin Doherty’s call for collective understanding that all that exists, including each human being, is the current realization of over 13 billion years of the evolution of the universe. The ramifications of that understanding include reconceiving the import of individuation, recognizing that humans individuate not only for themselves, but also as expressions of planet Earth’s individuating through them. Understanding the permeability of personal experience, its unconscious connections with other beings and the environment through synchronicities capable of being made conscious enough for healing to occur, is given life in Jane Shaw’s article on the therapeutic power of Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy. Other authors refer to personal experience in more traditional ways. David Barton, in his article on the psychic image of Santa Fe, reports on experiencing the profound alterity of the Laguna Pueblo culture as he listened to Leslie Marmon Silko speak of rescuing a rattlesnake. Like Dargert, Barton acknowledges the shadow of centuries of colonization. He reports being told by young natives of their despairing sense of entrapment in New Mexico. Johnathan Erickson, concerned about negative attitudes toward Christianity’s teachings about the Earth, shares that his efforts to underscore the vein in Christian teachings that counters the scripture about human dominance over nature are motivated by his being the son of a Christian minister and of a mother with pagan leanings. Peter Dunlap offers his experience as an illustration of the psychocultural work he is hoping Jungian clinicians will engage in to bring the healing power of psychological understanding to cultural dilemmas. And while Nanette Walsh does not share personal experience of her own, she calls on the scholarship concerning the personal experience of women in Jesus’s time to argue for interpreting scripture in a way that divinizes the experience of female persons, a step toward knowing the divine in all creation. Writing about the psychological relations of Earth/Psyche apparently elicits the grounding of thought in personal experience, a grounding typically invisible in abstract scholarly communications. Personal experience obviously is the ground for art. Our journal’s call for visual art related to Earth/Psyche invited artists to submit commentary along with their work. Judging from the responses that we received, the artists whose work is published here experience artistic creation as transformation of matter with abstract implications: turning clay into a holding vessel like that of analysis (Kristine Anthis), turning chance happenings into a creation (Marilyn DeMario), turning disparate materials into an integrated piece (Diane Miller), turning reversals into continuity (S. Sowbel), turning visual metaphor into ensouling symbol (Heather Taylor-Zimmerman), and turning the relation of abstract numbers/concrete matter into paintings echoing the composition of our world (Lucia Grossberger-Morales). The poems on the theme of Earth/Psyche selected for this volume reflect the distinguishing power of individuation in their range of subject and style. Margaret Blanchard’s poems address the changing nature of the poet’s relation to the Earth over time; Judith Capurso’s not only challenge human assertion of dominance over the Earth, but also liberate people from the inflation of that dominance; Ursula Shields-Huemer’s haiku grace imaginings of the natural word through presence; Brown Dove’s poem juxtaposes shifting evaluations of idols and continuity of Earth’s rhythms; and S. Sowbel’s focuses attention on what does not get reborn in her rendering of generativity. Certain concepts are explored in more than one of the articles which suggests their inherent significance in considering the relations of Earth/Psyche. In particular, Jung’s relatively neglected concept of the psychoid receives thoughtful elaboration, especially in the articles by Courtney and Shaw. Shaw applies the concept in her explanation of the healing power of the Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy treatment (BCST). Courtney provides scientific data connecting rhythms of the body to the environment. Shaw’s account of the intelligence of the body during the giving and receiving of a BCST treatment resonates with Courtney’s account of electrolytic solution and of rhythmic entrainment. Doherty also contributes to reevaluating the body in terms of its knowingness through his exploration of the perspective of right-brain knowing. The theme of the body’s intelligence flows directly from the premise of interconnectedness attributing psyche to Earth. Another thread through the articles concerns the way the interconnectedness of being is conceived. Courtney references Jung’s concept or Eros as well as British anthropologist Timothy Ingold’s conception of humans as a “‘relational constitution of being’ enmeshed in a planetary ‘domain of entanglement’ of ‘interlaced lines of relationship.’” Doherty connects Eckhart’s description of the divine as emptiness with the quantum physics description of the emergence and disappearance of elementary particles from and into nothingness to assert that creative intelligence is inherent in all being. Dargert proposes that places are infused with their own form of psyche through the existence of an enveloping continuum. Dunlap points to Jung’s idea of a superconsciousness in the unconscious. The authors writing about religion, Erickson and Walsh, see God as the source of being’s interconnectedness. Erickson traces the evolution in Western Christianity of an understanding that the Earth as God’s creation deserves care, an understanding receiving recent expression in Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’: On Care for our Common Home. Walsh through the concept of practical divinization attempts to rectify the omission of ecology, women, and psychology in traditional Christian practice of divinization. She links aspects of the historical lineage of the idea of person and Jung’s articulation of individuation to argue for knowing divine wisdom in all that exists. Most of the authors assert that integration of the feminine is key to addressing ecological crises, often specifying that by the feminine they are referring to Eros. Walsh, however, argues for redefining what the feminine is in terms of women’s experience and for using women’s imaginative works to understand the feminine. For example, she cites Annis Pratt who, after surveying over 300 novels written by women, concludes that transformation for women occurs through the “green epiphany,” that is, through their relationship with nature. Walsh’s article provides a significant counterpoint to traditional Jungian understanding of the feminine and of what it would mean to integrate it for the purpose of addressing our ecological crises. Finally, Peter Dunlap’s article grapples with how to bring Jung’s understanding of the collective unconscious to a psychocultural practice of confronting the capacity of large groups to degenerate into mass-mindedness. He argues for confronting that tendency by consciously applying techniques to help large groups develop a sense of shared identity capable of integrating difference, thus making possible development of conscience about relations to the rest of the world. His article shares recent social science research about how to attempt that process, including an illustration of his own experience of applying some of those techniques. His essay gestures toward the goal of bringing psychological knowledge into civic life to enable constructive political action, a goal implicit in the conference on the relations of Earth/Psyche and in this volume of JJSS issuing from it. Inez MartinezEditor

On 10 September 2012, a cat named Tuxedo Stan launched his campaign for mayor of the Halifax Regional Municipality in Nova Scotia, Canada (“Tuxedo Stan for Mayor”). Backed by his human supporters in the Tuxedo Party, he ran on a platform of animal welfare: “Tuxedo Stan for Mayor Because Neglect Isn’t Working.” Artwork Courtesy of Joe Popovitch As a feline activist, Tuxedo Stan joins an unexpected—if not entirely unprecedented—cohort of cats that advocate for animal welfare through their “cute” appeals for humane treatment. From Tuxedo Stan’s internet presence to his appearance on Anderson Cooper’s CNN segment “The RidicuList,” Tuxedo Stan’s cute campaign opens space for a cultural imaginary that differently envisions animals’ and humans’ political responsibilities. Who Can Be a Moral Agent? Iris Marion Young proposes “political responsibility” as a way to answer a question central to human and animal welfare: “How should moral agents—both individual and organizational—think about their responsibilities in relation to structural social injustice?” (7). In legal frameworks, responsibility is connected to liability: an individual acts, harm occurs, and the law decides how much liability the individual should assume. However, Young redefines responsibility in relation to structural injustices, which she conceptualizes as “harms” that result from “structural processes in which many people participate.” Young argues that “because it is therefore difficult for individuals to see a relationship between their own actions and structural outcomes, we have a tendency to distance ourselves from any responsibility for them” (7). Young presents political responsibility as a call to share the responsibility “to engage in actions directed at transforming the structures” and suggests that the less-advantaged might organize and propose “remedies for injustice, because their interests [are] the most acutely at stake” and because they are vulnerable to the actions of others “situated in more powerful and privileged positions” (15). Though Young does not address animals, her conception of responsible agency raises a question: who can be a moral agent? Arguably, the answer to this question changes as cultural imaginaries expand to accommodate difference, including gender- and species-difference. Corey Wrenn analyzes a selection of anti-suffragette postcards that equate granting votes to women as akin to granting votes to cats. Young shifts responsibility from a liability to a political frame, but Wrenn’s work suggests that a further shift is necessary where responsibility is gendered and tied to domestic, feminized roles: Cats and dogs are gendered in contemporary American culture…dogs are thought to be the proper pet for men and cats for women (especially lesbians). This, it turns out, is an old stereotype. In fact, cats were a common symbol in suffragette imagery. Cats represented the domestic sphere, and anti-suffrage postcards often used them to reference female activists. The intent was to portray suffragettes as silly, infantile, incompetent, and ill-suited to political engagement. (Wrenn) Dressing cats in women’s clothing and calling them suffragettes marks women as less-than-human and casts cats as the opposite of human. The frilly garments, worn by cats whose presence evoked the domestic sphere, suggest that women belong in the domestic sphere because they are too soft, or perhaps too cute, to contend with the demands of public life. In addition, the cards that feature domestic scenes suggest that women should account for their families’ welfare ahead of their own, and that women’s refusal to accept this arithmetic marks them as immoral—and irresponsible—subjects. Not Schrödinger's Cat In different ways, Jacques Derrida and Carey Wolfe explore the question Young’s work raises: who can be a moral agent? Derrida and Wolfe complicate the question by adding species difference: how should (human) moral agents think about their responsibilities (to animals)? Prompted by an encounter with his cat, Jacques Derrida follows the figure of the animal, through a variety of texts, in order to make sensible the trace of “the animal” as it has appeared in Western traditions. Derrida’s cat accompanies him as Derrida playfully, and attentively, deconstructs the rationalist, humanist discourses that structure Western philosophy. Discourses, whose tenets reflect the systems of beliefs embedded within a culture, are often both hegemonic and invisible; at least for those who enjoy privileged positions within the culture, discourses may simply appear as common sense or common knowledge. Derrida argues that Western, humanist thinking has created a discourse around “the human” and that this discourse deploys a reductive figure of “the animal” to justify human supremacy and facilitate human exceptionalism. Human exceptionalism is the doctrine that humans’ superiority to animals exempts humans from behaving humanely towards those deemed non-human, and it is the hegemony of the discourse of human exceptionalism that Derrida contravenes. Derrida interrupts by entering the discourse with “his” cat and creating a counter-narrative that troubles “the human” hegemony by redefining what it means to think. Derrida orients his intellectual work as surrender—he surrenders to the gaze of his cat and to his affectionate response to her presence: “the cat I am talking about is a real cat, truly, believe me, a little cat. The cat that looks at me naked and that is truly a little cat, this cat I am talking about…It comes to me as this irreplaceable living being that one day enters my space, into this place where it can encounter me, see me, even see me naked” (6-9, italics in original). The diminutive Derrida uses to describe his cat, she is little and truly a little cat, gestures toward affection, or affect, as the “thing…philosophy has, essentially, had to deprive itself of” (7). For Derrida, rationalist thinking hurries to “enclose and circumscribe the concept of the human as much as that of reason,” and it is through this movement toward enclosure that rationalist humanism fails to think (105). While Derrida questions the ethics of humanist philosophy, Carey Wolfe questions the ethics of humanism. Wolfe argues that “the operative theories and procedures we now have for articulating the social and legal relation between ethics and action are inadequate” because humanism imbues discourses about human and/or animal rights with utilitarian and contractarian logics that are inherently speciesist and therefore flawed (192). Utilitarian approaches attempt to determine the morality of a given action by weighing the act’s aggregate benefit against its aggregate harm. Contractarian approaches evaluate a given (human or animal) subject’s ability to understand and comply with a social contract that stipulates reciprocity; if a subject receives kindness, that subject must understand their implied, moral responsibility to return it. When opponents of animal rights designate animals as less capable of suffering than humans and decide that animals cannot enter moral contracts, animals are then seen as not only undeserving of rights but as incapable of bearing rights. As Wolfe argues, rights discourse—like rationalist humanism—reaches an impasse, and Wolfe proposes posthumanist theory as the way through: “because the discourse of speciesism…anchored in this material, institutional base, can be used to mark any social other, we need to understand that the ethical and philosophical urgency of confronting the institution of speciesism and crafting a posthumanist theory of the subject has nothing to do with whether you like animals” (7, italics in original). Wolfe’s strategic statement marks the necessity of attending to injustice at a structural level; however, as Tuxedo Stan’s campaign demonstrates, at a tactical level, how much you “like” an animal might matter very much. Seriously Cute: Tuxedo Stan as a Moral Agent Tuxedo Stan’s 2012-13 campaign pressed for improved protections for stray and feral cats in the Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM). While “cute” is a subjective, aesthetic judgment, numerous internet sites make claims like: “These 30 Animals With Their Adorable Miniature Versions Are The Cutest Thing Ever. Awwww” (“These 30 Animals”). From Tuxedo Stan’s kitten pictures to the plush versions of Tuxedo Stan, available for purchase on his website, Tuxedo Stan’s campaign positioned him within this cute culture (Chisolm “Official Tuxedo Stan Minion”). Photo Courtesy of Hugh Chisolm, Tuxedo Party The difference between Tuxedo Stan’s cute and the kind of cute invoked by pictures of animals with miniature animals—the difference that connects Tuxedo Stan’s cute to a moral or ethical position—is the narrative of political responsibility attached to his campaign. While existing animal protection laws in Halifax’s Animal Protection Act outlined some protections for animals, “there was a clear oversight in that issues related to cats are not included” (Chisolm TuxedoStan.com). Hugh Chisholm, co-founder of the Tuxedo Party, further notes: There are literally thousands of homeless cats — feral and abandoned— who live by their willpower in the back alleys and streets and bushes in HRM…But there is very little people can do if they want to help, because there is no pound. If there’s a lost or injured dog, you can call the pound and they will come and take the dog and give it a place to stay, and some food and care. But if you do the same thing with a cat, you get nothing, because there’s nothing in place. (Mombourquette) Tuxedo Stan’s campaign mobilizes cute images that reveal the connection between unnoticed and unrelieved suffering. Proceeds from Tuxedo Party merchandise go toward Spay Day HRM, a charity dedicated to “assisting students and low-income families” whose financial situations may prevent them from paying for spay and neuter surgeries (Chisholm TuxedoStan.com). According to his e-book ME: The Tuxedo Stan Story, Stan “wanted to make a difference in the lives of tens of thousands of homeless, unneutered cats in [Halifax Regional Municipality]. We needed a low-cost spay/neuter clinic. We needed a Trap-Neuter-Return and Care program. We needed a sanctuary for homeless, unwanted strays to live out their lives in comfort” (Tuxedo Stanley and Chisholm 14). As does “his” memoir, Tuxedo Stan’s Pledge of Compassion and Action follows Young’s logic of political responsibility. Although his participation is mediated by human organizers, Tuxedo Stan is a cat pressing legislators to “pledge to help the cats” by supporting “a comprehensive feline population control program to humanely control the feline population and prevent suffering” and by creating “an affordable and accessible spay/neuter program” (Chisholm TuxedoStan.com). While framing the feral cat population as a “problem” that must be “fixed” upholds discourses around controlling subjected populations’ reproduction, Tuxedo Stan’s campaign also opens space for a counternarrative that destabilizes the human exceptionalism that encompasses his campaign. A Different ‘Logic’, a Different Cultural Imaginary As Tuxedo Stan launched his campaign in 2012, fellow feline Hank ran for the United States senate seat in Virginia – he received approximately 7,000 votes and placed third (Wyatt) – and “Mayor” Stubbs celebrated his 15th year as the honorary mayor of Talkeetna, Alaska, also in the United States: Fifteen years ago, the citizens of Talkeetna (pop. 800) didn’t like the looks of their candidates for mayor. Around that same time resident Lauri Stec, manager of Nagley’s General Store, saw a box of kittens and decided to adopt one. She named him Stubbs because he didn’t have a tail and soon the whole town was in love with him. So smitten were they with this kitten, in fact, that they wrote him in for mayor instead of deciding on one of the two lesser candidates. (Friedman) Though only Stan and Hank connect their candidacy to animal welfare activism, all three cats’ stories contribute to building a cultural imaginary that has drawn responses across social and news media. Tuxedo Stan’s Facebook page has 19,000+ “likes,” and Stan supporters submit photographs of Tuxedo Stan “minions” spreading Tuxedo Stan’s message. The Tuxedo Party’s website maintains a photo gallery that documents “Tuxedo Stan’s World Tour”: “Tuxedo Stan’s Minions are currently on their world tour spreading his message of hope and compassion for felines around the globe" (Chisholm TuxedoStan.com). Each minion’s photo in the gallery represents humans’ ideological and financial support for Tuxedo Stan. News media supported Tuxedo Stan, Hank for Senate, and Mayor Stubbs’s candidacies in a more ambiguous fashion. While Craig Medred argues that “Silly 'Alaska cat mayor' saga spotlights how easily the media can be scammed” (Medred), a CBC News video announced that Tuxedo Stan was “interested in sinking his claws into the top seat at City Hall” and ready to “mark his territory around the mayor's seat” (“Tuxedo Stan the cat chases Halifax mayor chair”), and Lauren Strapagiel reported on Halifax’s “cuddliest would-be mayor.” In an unexpected echo of Derrida’s language, as Derrida repeats that he is truly talking about a cat, truly a little cat, CNN journalist Anderson Cooper endorses Tuxedo Stan for mayor and follows his endorsement with this statement: If he’s serious about a career in politics, maybe he should come to the United States. Just look at the mayor of Talkeetna, Alaska. That’s Stubbs the cat, and he’s been the mayor for 15 years. I’m not kidding…Not only that, but right now, as we speak, there is a cat running for Senate from Virginia. (Cooper) As he introduces a “Hank for Senate” campaign video, again Cooper mentions that he is “not kidding.” While Cooper’s “not kidding” echoes Derrida’s “truly,” the difference in meanings is différance. For Derrida, his encounter with his cat is “a matter of developing another ‘logic’ of decision, of the response and of the event…a matter of reinscribing the différance between reaction and response, and hence this historicity of ethical, juridical, or political responsibility, within another thinking of life, of the living, within another relation of the living, to their own…reactional automaticity” (126). Derrida proceeds through the impasse, the limit he identifies within philosophical engagements with animals, by tracing the ways his little cat’s presence affects him. Derrida finds another logic, which is not logic but surrender, to accommodate what he, like Young, terms “political responsibility.” Cooper, however, applies the hegemonic logic of human exceptionalism to his engagement with feline interlocutors, Tuxedo Stan, Hank for Senate, and Mayor Stubbs. Although Cooper’s segment, called “The RidicuList,” makes a pretense of political responsibility, it is different in kind from the pretense made in Tuxedo Stan’s campaign. As Derrida argues, a “pretense…even a simple pretense, consists in rendering a sensible trace illegible or imperceptible” (135). Tuxedo Stan’s campaign pretends that Tuxedo Stan fits within humanist, hegemonic notions of mayoral candidacy and then mobilizes this cute pretense in aid of political responsibility; the pretense—the pretense in which Tuxedo Stan’s human fans and supporters engage—renders the “sensible” trace of human exceptionalism illegible, if not imperceptible. Cooper’s pretense, however, works to make legible the trace of human exceptionalism and so to reinscribe its discursive hegemony. Discursively, the political potential of cute in Tuxedo Stan’s campaign is that Tuxedo Stan’s activism complicates humanist and posthumanist thinking about agency, about ethics, and about political responsibility. Thinking about animals may not change animals’ lives, but it may change (post)humans’ responses to these questions: Who can be a moral agent? How should moral agents—both individual and organizational, both human and animal—“think” about how they respond to structural social injustice? Epilogue: A Political Response Tuxedo Stan died of kidney cancer on 8 September 2013. Before he died, Tuxedo Stan’s campaign yielded improved cat protection legislation as well as a $40,000 endowment to create a spay-and-neuter facility accessible to low-income families. Tuxedo Stan’s litter mate, Earl Grey, carries on Tuxedo Stan’s work. Earl Grey’s campaign platform expands the Tuxedo Party’s appeals for animal welfare, and Earl Grey maintains the Tuxedo Party’s presence on Facebook, on Twitter (@TuxedoParty and @TuxedoEarlGrey), and at TuxedoStan.com (Chisholm TuxedoStan.com). On 27 February 2014, Agriculture Minister Keith Colwell of Nova Scotia released draft legislation whose standards of care aim to prevent distress and cruelty to pets and to strengthen their protection. They…include proposals on companion animal restraints, outdoor care, shelters, companion animal pens and enclosures, abandonment of companion animals, as well as the transportation and sale of companion animals…The standards also include cats, and the hope is to have legislation ready to introduce in the spring and enacted by the fall. (“Nova Scotia cracks down”) References Chisolm, Hugh. “Tuxedo Stan Kitten.” Tuxedo Party Facebook Page, 20 Oct. 2012. 2 Mar. 2014. Chisholm, Hugh. “Official Tuxedo Stan Minion.” TuxedoStan.com. Tuxedo Stanley and the Tuxedo Party. 2 Mar. 2014. Chisolm, Hugh. “You're Voting for Fred? Not at MY Polling Station!” Tuxedo Party Facebook Page, 20 Oct. 2012. 2 Mar. 2014. Chisholm, Hugh, and Kathy Chisholm. TuxedoStan.com. Tuxedo Stanley and the Tuxedo Party. 2 Mar. 2014. Cooper, Anderson. “The RidicuList.” CNN Anderson Cooper 360, 24 Sep. 2012. 2 Mar. 2014. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989: 139–67. 2 Mar. 2014. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Trans. David Willis. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Friedman, Amy. “Cat Marks 15 Years as Mayor of Alaska Town.” Newsfeed.time.com, 17 July 2012. 2 March 2014. Medred, Craig. “Silly ‘Alaska Cat Mayor’ Saga Spotlights How Easily the Media Can Be Scammed.” Alaska Dispatch, 11 Sep. 2014. 2 Mar. 2014. Mombourquette, Angela. “Candidate’s Ethics Are as Finely Honed as His Claws.” The Chronicle Herald, 27 Aug. 2012. 2 Mar. 2014. “Nova Scotia Cracks Down on Tethering of Dogs.” The Chronicle Herald 27 Feb. 2014. 2 Mar. 2014. Pace, Natasha. “Halifax City Council Doles Out Cash to Help Control the Feral Cat Population.” Global News 14 May 2013. 2 Mar. 2014. Popovitch, Joe. “Tuxedo Stan for Mayor Because Neglect Isn’t Working.” RefuseToBeBoring.com. 2 Mar. 2014. Strapagiel, Lauren. “Tuxedo Stan, Beloved Halifax Cat Politician, Dead at 3.” OCanada.com, 9 Sep. 2013. 2 Mar. 2014. “These 30 Animals with Their Adorable Miniatures Are the Cutest Thing Ever. Awwww.” WorthyToShare.com, n.d. 2 Mar. 2014. “Tuxedo Stan for Mayor Dinner Highlights.” Vimeo.com, 2 Mar. 2014. Tuxedo Stanley, and Kathy Chisholm. ME: The Tuxedo Stan Story. Upper Tantallon, Nova Scotia: Ailurophile Publishing, 2014. 2 Mar. 2014. “Tuxedo Stan the Cat Chases Halifax Mayor Chair.” CBC News, 13 Aug. 2012. 2 Mar. 2014. Wolfe, Cary. Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Wrenn, Corey. “Suffragette Cats Are the Original Cat Ladies.” Jezebel.com, 6 Dec. 2013. 2 Mar. 2014. Wyatt, Susan. “Hank, the Cat Who Ran for Virginia Senate, Gets MMore than 7,000 Votes.” King5.com The Pet Dish, 7 Nov. 2012. 2 Mar. 2014. Young, Iris Marion. “Political Responsibility and Structural Injustice.” Lindley Lecture. Department of Philosophy, University of Kansas. 5 May 2003.

The theme of the 1990s -- for the English-speaking middle-classes in consumer societies -- has been the Internet. The decade started with only a handful of people sensing the potential of online communication, but the following years have been characterised by an exponential growth in awareness as the Internet has established itself as the fastest growing medium in history (Arens 513). Ten years on, and fifty million users later, it's hard to remember that things were ever any different. Nonetheless, some aspects of the initial hesitancy about online are retained in everyday speech. 'Virtual community' is an example of such an anachronism; it harks back to a time of uncertainty. By the time a movement reaches double digits in age -- and the population of a medium-sized country -- it deserves to be taken seriously. For the Internet, and especially for social uses of the Internet, that means it's time to put an end to the virtual community. For those of us interested to read it, there's a wealth of learned opinion about what constitutes 'community'. From the early days, when Baym discussed computer-mediated community in terms of Usenet groups, to her more current work, the theme has been one of comparison: how does online differ from 'real life' (RL)? RL has been established as the standard against which online is measured. When this happened in the 1970s (and for me the 1970s was the decade of second-wave feminism) these 'naming rights' were challenged early on. Who were these people who claimed to have the right to judge -- and how appropriate was the standard they were using? Whose interests are served by judging online against the real? It's clear that the aim is to 'otherise' online, to marginalise it as a site for genuine experience. Let's end the implied discrimination here and now -- from 01/01/2000 (assuming we all survive Y2K), let's work for Online Liberation! Completeness demands that I play the game of comparing online and RL once more, however. As the Internet became 'adopted' (welcomed into some households, smuggled into others), those with a disposable income came to worry about more than Telstra and ISP bills. They began to consider the nature and status of their social contact in the online environment and started to interrogate the quality of the community they found there. There tend to be two big stumbling blocks to recognising online as community. Online participants didn't share geographical space, and they didn't 'really' know each other. As Stone (in Benedickt 82-3) documents, some people on the Internet have been taken in by a middle-aged male psychiatrist who pretended to be a woman. This could be a dreadful problem in RL, but do RL notions of space and identity matter online? More positively, what does online have that RL doesn't? When we turn the focus, and judge RL according to the standards of online -- accepting online at its own value -- we find RL lacking in many desirable features. In RL, for example: Participants are constrained by their age, sex, appearance, class etc; There are geographical limitations; Night tends to be a time for sleep (indeed the concept of night, as such, only pertains to RL); People make negative judgements if you go off in private with someone as soon as they say something interesting. Let's face it, RL's got a lot of drawbacks. Especially for baby boomers who want an acceptable venue to act the age they feel (cusp of thirty). In tandem with RL's drawbacks online offers a number of positive benefits, including: Participants can act the age they feel without looking silly; Ease of access to other people (given access to the technology); The combination of intensity and variety through simultaneous intimate conversations over an extended period of time; and It's a publishing platform for personal opinion (useful if you aren't a Packer or Murdoch). Looking at features which online and RL have in common, we find that the more an individual invests in a community (or any relationship) the more they are likely to benefit from that community. Deposits of social capital work in both locations (but in RL it's harder to draw upon investments at 3.00 am). In both locations people are attracted to others of like mind and interests, and then find their exchanges centre on the exploration of differences. Both settings let us learn about ourselves, but online allows us far more freedom to explore the 'real' person behind the a/s/l (age, sex, location) bounded persona. Online, like RL, has developed its own slang (did that originally mean 'short language'?). On my computer, for example, it's hard to type :), it automatically becomes ;). For the past four months I have been working on a collaborative participant-research project with a group of students whose ages range from 18-43. We have been developing a theory of involvement in online community. The engagement patterns identified now require more investigation with a wider cross-section of Net users and neophytes. It is to be expected that online participation -- as with audience membership -- may reflect 'age and stage' in terms of the nature and intensity of online involvement (notwithstanding the fluidity of a/s/l in cyberspace). Initial impressions from this research with Net users indicates that we judge 'community' according to our level of emotional investment; that online can involve huge emotional investment; and that vulnerability is as relevant to social behaviour online as it is in RL. Keen Netizens also reckon that only academics and people who have never 'lived' online are worried about whether online community 'really exists'. They take it as self-evident that online communities are ... online communities. And as for the concern of many that online seduces teenagers and young adults away from family life (echoes of all those early 'displacement studies' of television viewing in the 1950s), the experience of these participants is that much of family life centres around online. There's full and frank discussion of time spent online -- versus time spent in study -- not to mention phone bills, calls not getting through etc. Nonetheless, it's a pretty tame way to make one's transitional-adult presence felt, compared with a hard drug addiction or a full-face tattoo. And what about the 'dark side' of online -- the porn, the (consensual but wacky) cybersex groups, the MA-rated games, hate sites, gambling and genocide showcases? What about the fifty-something men pretending to be pre-teen girls on the my.chickclick.com chat lines? I rest my case. These are all features of community -- the good, the bad, the ugly and the exploited. Like any self-respecting social system, both RL and online are never manifest in just 'one' community but have members who interact in a number of contexts across a range of interests. Perhaps the fear that RL feels about online (which makes RL keen to label 'online' as 'virtual') centres on the fact that the 'dark side' in online is an illumination of the hidden and the marginalised in RL. We all know what happens with the return of the repressed. (It's larger than life!) The history of media studies shows displacement research, followed by effects research, content and semiotic analysis, the uses and gratifications perspective, and audience and consumption studies ethnography. Episodes of moral panic liberally laced these approaches, driving the research programme and making some funding applications more attractive than others. Online has an open research agenda and huge potential to inform us about ourselves, as well as about the medium and its characteristics. It has already attracted displacement research, and triggered a number of moral panics. Interactivity makes online a far more exciting and challenging venue for research than straightforward consumption studies of mass media. Online communities offer sites of maximum interactivity and social creativeness. They are the natural starting point for the post-Y2K research era. Growing up is learning to judge yourself by your own standards -- and not having to conform to other people's. It tends to start in our second decade and, for the more interesting among us, it never ends. The phrase 'online community' accepts the community within the context of its environment and its communications ecology. Virtual is the name given by others; online is what the community members choose to call themselves. Let's mark the end of the Internet's first decade by paying it the respect it deserves. The virtual is dead! Long live online! The author acknowledges the particular contributions of Russell Carman, Marian Palandri and an anonymous reviewer to this paper. References Arens, W. Contemporary Advertising. 7th ed. US: Irwin/McGraw-Hill, 1999. Baym, N. "The Emergence of Community in Computer-Mediated Communication." CyberSociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community. Thousand Oaks, Cal.: Sage, 1995. 138-63. Benedickt, M. Cyberspace: First Steps. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1991. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Lelia Green. "The End of the Virtual Community." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.8 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/virtual.php>. Chicago style: Lelia Green, "The End of the Virtual Community," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 8 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/virtual.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Lelia Green. (1999) The end of the virtual community. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(8). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/virtual.php> ([your date of access]).

Amongst the hundreds of emails that made their way to error@media-culture.org.au over the last ten months, I received the following correspondence: Failure noticeHi. This is the qmail-send program at sv01.wadax.ne.jp.I’m afraid I wasn’t able to deliver your message to the following addresses.This is a permanent error; I’ve given up. Sorry it didn’t work out.namewithheld@s.vodafone.ne.jp>:210.169.171.135 does not like recipient.Remote host said: 550 Invalid recipient:namewithheld@s.vodafone.ne.jp>Giving up on 210.169.171.135. Email of this sort marks a moment that is paradoxically odd and all too familiar in the digital exchanges of everyday life. The failure message arrives to tell me something “didn’t work out.” This message shows up in my email account looking no different from any other correspondence—only this one hails from the system itself, signalling a failure to communicate. Email from the “mailer-daemon” calls attention to both the logic of the post that governs email (a “letter” sent to an intended address at the intention of some source) and the otherwise invisible logic of informatic protocols, made visible in the system failure of a “permanent error.” In this particular instance, however, the failure notice is itself a kind of error. I never emailed namewithheld@s.vodafone.ne.jp—and by the mailer-daemon’s account, such a person does not exist. It seems that a spammer has exploited an email protocol as a way of covering his tracks: when a deliver-to path fails, the failure notice bounces to a third site. The failure notice marks the successful execution of a qmail protocol, but its arrival at our account is still a species of error. In most circumstances, error yields an invalid result. In calculation, error marks a kind of misstep that not only corrupts the end result, but all steps following the error. One error begets others. But as with the failure notice, error often marks not only the misdirections of a system, but also the system’s internal logic. The failure notice corresponds to a specific category of error—a potential error that the system must predict before it has actually occurred. While the notice signals failure (permanent error), it does so within the successful, efficient operation of a communicative system. What is at issue, then, is less a matter of whether or not error occurs than a system’s ability to handle error as it arises. Control systems attempt to close themselves off to error’s misdirections. If error signals a system failure, the “failure notice” of error foregrounds the degree to which in “societies of control” every error is a fatal error in that Baudrillardian sense—a failure that is subsumed in the operational logic of the system itself (40). Increasingly, the networks of a global marketplace require a rationalisation of processes and an introduction of informatic control systems to minimise wastage and optimise output. An informatic monoculture expresses itself through operational parameters that define communication according to principles of maximum transmission. In effect, in the growing dominance of a network society, we are witnessing the transcendence of a social and cultural system that must suppress at all costs the failure to communicate. This global communication system straddles a paradoxical moment of maximum exchange and maximum control. With growing frequency, social and commercial processes are governed by principles of quality assurance, what Lyotard defined nearly thirty years ago as a “logic of maximum performance” (xxiv). As Six Sigma standards migrate from the world of manufacturing to a wide range of institutions, we find a standard of maximum predictability and minimum error as the latest coin of the realm. Utopia is now an error-free world of 100% efficiency, accuracy, and predictability. This lure of an informatic “monoculture” reduces communication to a Maxwell’s demon for capturing transmission and excluding failure. Such a communicative system establishes a regime of signs that thrives upon the drift and flow of a network of signifiers, but that affirms its power as a system in its voracious incorporation of signs within a chain of signification (Deleuze and Guattari 111-117). Error is cast out as abject, the scapegoat “condemned as that which exceeds the signifying regime’s power of deterritorialization” (Deleuze and Guattari 117). Deleuze and Guattari describe this self-cycling apparatus of capture as “a funeral world of terror,” the terror of a black-hole regime that ultimately depends upon a return of the same and insures that everything that circulates communicates…or is cast off as abject (113). This terror marks a relation of control, one that depends upon a circulation of signs but that also insists all flows fall within its signifying regime. To speak of the “terror of information” is more than metaphorical to the extent that this forced binary (terror of signal/error of noise) imposes a kind of violence that demands a rationalisation of all singularities of expression into the functionalities of a quantifiable system. To the extent that systems of information imply systems of control, the violence of information is less metaphor than metonym, as it calls into high relief the scapegoat error—the abject remainder whose silenced line of flight marks the trajectory of the unclean. This cybernetic logic of maximum performance demands that error is either contained within the predictable deviations of a system’s performance, or nullified as outlying and asignifying. Statistics tells us that we are best off ignoring the outlier. This logic of the normal suggests that something very risky occurs when an event or an instance falls outside the scope of predicable variance. In the ascendancy of information, error, deviance, and outlying results cast a long shadow. In Norbert Wiener’s account of informatic entropy, this drift from systematic control marked a form of evil—not a Manichean evil of bad actors, but rather an Augustinian evil: a falling away from the perfection of order (34-36). Information utopia banishes error as a kind of evil—an aberration that is decidedly off the path of order and control. This cybernetic logic functions at all levels, from social systems theory to molecular biology. Our diseases are now described as errors in coding, transcription, or transmission—genetic anomalies, cancerous loop scripts, and neurochemical noise. Mutation figures as an error in reproduction—a straying from faithful replication and a falling away from the Good of order and control. But we should keep in mind that when we speak of “evil” in the context of this cybernetic logic, that evil takes on a specific form. It is the evil of the errant. Or to put it another way: it is the evil of the Sesame Street Muppet, Bert. In 2001, a U.S. high school student named Dino Ignacio created a graphic of the Muppet, Bert, with Osama bin Laden—part of his humorous Website project, “Bert is Evil.” A Pakistani-based publisher scanning the Web for images of bin Laden came across Ignacio’s image and, apparently not recognising the Sesame Street character, incorporated it into a series of anti-American posters. According to Henry Jenkins’s account of the events, in the weeks that followed, “CNN reporters recorded the unlikely sight of a mob of angry protestors marching through the streets chanting anti-American slogans and waving signs depicting Bert and bin Laden” (1-2). As the story of the Bert-sighting spread, new “Bert is evil” Websites sprang up, and Ignacio found himself the unwitting centre of a full-blown Internet phenomenon. Jenkins finds in this story a fascinating example of what he calls convergence culture, the blurring of the line between consumer and producer (3). From a somewhat different critical perspective, Mark Poster reads this moment of misappropriation and misreading as emblematic of global networked culture, in which “as never before, we must begin to interpret culture as multiple cacophonies of inscribed meanings as each cultural object moves across cultural differences” (11). But there is another moral to this story as well, to the extent that the convergence and cacophony described here occur in a moment of error, an errant slippage in which signification escapes its own regime of signs. The informatic (Augustinian) evil of Bert the Muppet showing up at an anti-American rally in Pakistan marks an event-scene in which an “error” not only signifies, but in its cognitive resonance, begins to amplify and replicate. At such moments, the “failure notice” of error signals a creative potential in its own right—a communicative context that escapes systemic control. The error of “evil Bert” introduces noise into this communicative system. It is abject information that marks an aberration within an otherwise orderly system of communication, an error of sorts marking an errant line of flight. But in contrast to the trance-like lure of 100% efficiency and maximum performance, is there not something seductive in these instances of error, as it draws us off our path of intention, leading us astray, pulling us toward the unintended and unforeseen? In its breach of predictable variance, error gives expression to the erratic. As such, “noise” marks a species of error (abject information) that, by failing to signify within a system, simultaneously marks an opening, a poiesis. This asignifying poetics of “noise,” marked by these moments of errant information, simultaneously refuses and exceeds the cybernetic imperative to communicate. This poetics of noise is somewhat reminiscent of Umberto Eco’s discussion of Claude Shannon’s information theory in The Open Work. For Shannon, the gap between signal and selection marks a space of “equivocation,” what Warren Weaver calls “an undesirable … uncertainty about what the message was” (Shannon and Weaver 21). Eco is intrigued by Shannon’s insight that communication is always haunted by equivocation, the uncertainty that the message received was the signal sent (57-58). Roland Barthes also picks up on this idea in S/Z, as N. Katherine Hayles notes in her discussion of information theory and post-structuralism (46). For these writers, equivocation suggests a creative potential in entropy, in that noise is, in Weaver’s words, “spurious information” (Shannon and Weaver 19). Eco elaborates on Shannon and Weaver’s information theory by distinguishing between actual communication (the message sent) and its virtuality (the possible messages received). Eco argues, in effect, that communication reduces information in its desire to actualise signal at the expense of noise. In contrast, poetics generates information by sustaining the equivocation of the text (66-68). It is in this tension between capture and escape marked by the scapegoats of error and noise that I find a potential for a contemporary poetics within a global network society. Error reveals the degree to which everyday life plays itself out within this space of equivocation. As Stuart Moulthrop addressed nearly ten years ago, our frequent encounters with “Error 404” on the Web calls attention to “the importance of not-finding”: that error marks a path in its own right, and not merely a misstep. Without question, this poetics of noise runs contrary to a dominant, cybernetic ideology of efficiency and control. By paying attention to drift and lines of flight, such erratic behaviour finds little favour in a world increasingly defined by protocol and predictable results. But note how in its attempt to capture error within its regime of signs, the logic of maximum performance is not above recuperating the Augustinian evil of error as a form of “fortunate fall.” Even in the Six Sigma world of 100% efficiency, does not corporate R & D mythologise the creative moment that allows error to turn a profit? Post-It Notes® and Silly Putty® present two classic instances in which happenstance, mistake, and error mark a moment in which “thinking outside of the box” saves the day. Error marks a kind of deviation from—and within—this system: a “failure” that at the same time marks a potential, a virtuality. Error calls attention to its etymological roots, a going astray, a wandering from intended destinations. Error, as errant heading, suggests ways in which failure, mutation, spurious information, and unintended results provide creative openings and lines of flight that allow for a reconceptualisation of what can (or cannot) be realised within social and cultural forms. While noise marks a rupture of signification, it also operates within the framework of a cybernetic imperative that constantly attempts to capture the flows that threaten to escape its operational parameters. As networks become increasingly social, this logic of rationalisation and abstraction serves as a dialectical enclosure for an information-based culture industry. But error also suggests a strategy of misdirection, getting a result back other than what one expected, and in doing so turns the cybernetic imperative against itself. “Google-bombing,” for example, creates an informatic structure that plays off of the creative potential of equivocation. Here, error of a Manichean sort introduces noise into an information system to produce unexpected results. Until recently, typing the word “failure” into the search engine Google produced as a top response George Bush’s Webpage at www.whitehouse.gov. By building Webpages in which the text “failure” links to the U.S. President’s page, users “hack” Google’s search algorithm to produce an errant heading. The cybernetic imperative is turned against itself; this strategy of misdirection enacts a “fatal error” that evokes the logic of a system to create an opening for poeisis, play, and the unintended. Information networks, no longer secondary to higher order social and cultural formations, now define the function and logic of social space itself. This culture of circulation creates equivalences by way of a common currency of “information,” such that “viral” distribution defines a social event in its own right, regardless of the content of transmission. While a decade earlier theorists speculated on the emergence of a collective intelligence via global networks, the culture of circulation that has developed online would seem to indicate that “emergence” and circulation are self-justifying events. In the moment of equivocation—not so much beyond good and evil, but rather in the spaces between signal and noise—slippage, error, and misdirection suggest a moment of opening in contrast to the black hole closures of the cybernetic imperative. The violence of an informatic monoculture expresses itself in this moment of insistence that whatever circulates signifies, and that which cannot communicate must be silenced. In such an environment, we would do well to examine these failures to communicate, as well as the ways in which error and noise seduce us off course. In contrast to the terror of an eternal return of the actual, a poetics of noise suggests a virtuality of the network, an opening of the possible in an increasingly networked society. The articles in this issue of M/C Journal approach error from a range of critical and social perspectives. Essays address the ways in which error marks both a misstep and an opening. Throughout this issue, the authors address error as both abject and privileged instance in a society increasingly defined by information networks and systems of control. In our feature article, “Revealing Errors,” Benjamin Mako Hill explores how media theorists would benefit from closer attention to errors as “under-appreciated and under-utilised in their ability to reveal technology around us.” By allowing errors to communicate, he argues, we gain a perspective that makes invisible technologies all the more visible. As such, error provides a productive moment for both interpretive and critical interventions. Two essays in this issue look at the place of error and noise within the work of art. Rather than foregrounding a concept of “medium” that emphasises clear, unimpeded transmission, these authors explore the ways in which the errant and unintended provide for a productive aesthetic in its own right. Using Shannon’s information theory, and in particular his concept of equivocation, Su Ballard’s essay, “Information, Noise, and et al.’s ‘maintenance of social solidarity-instance 5,” explores the productive error of noise in the digital installation art of a New Zealand artists’ collective. Rather than carefully controlling the viewer’s experience, et al.’s installation places the viewer within a field of equivocation, in effect encouraging misreadings and unintended insertions. In a similar vein, Tim Barker’s essay, “Error, the Unforeseen, and the Emergent: The Error of Interactive Media Art” examines the productive error of digital art, both as an expression of artistic intent and as an emergent expression within the digital medium. This “glitch aesthetic” foregrounds the errant and uncontrollable in any work of art. In doing so, Barker argues, error also serves as a measure of the virtual—a field of potential that gestures toward the “unforeseen.” The virtuality of error provides a framework of sorts for two additional essays that, while separated considerably in subject matter, share similar theoretical concerns. Taking up the concept of an asignifying poetics of noise, Christopher Grant Ward’s essay, “Stock Images, Filler Content, and the Ambiguous Corporate Message” explores how the stock image industry presents a kind of culture of noise in its attempt to encourage equivocation rather than control semiotic signal. By producing images that are more virtual than actual, visual filler provides an all-too-familiar instance of equivocation as a field of potential and a Derridean citation of undecidibility. Adi Kuntsman takes a similar theoretic tack in “‘Error: No Such Entry’: Haunted Ethnographies of Online Archives.” Using a database retrieval error message, “no such entry,” Kuntsman reflects upon her ethnographic study of an online community of Russian-Israeli queer immigrants. Error messages, she argues, serve as informatic “hauntings”—erasures that speak of an online community’s complex relation to the construction and archiving of a collective history. In the case of a database retrieval error—as in the mailer-daemon’s notice of the “550” error—the failure of an address to respond to its hailing calls attention to a gap between query and expected response. This slippage in control is, as discussed above, and instance of an Augustinian error. But what of the Manichean—the intentional engagement in strategies of misdirection? In Kimberly Gregson’s “Bad Avatar! Griefing in Virtual Worlds,” she provides a taxonomy of aberrant behaviour in online gaming, in which players distort or subvert orderly play through acts that violate protocol. From the perspective of many a gamer, griefing serves no purpose other than annoyance, since it exploits the rules of play to disrupt play itself. Yet in “Amazon Noir: Piracy, Distribution, Control,” Michael Dieter calls attention to “how the forces confined as exterior to control (virality, piracy, noncommunication) regularly operate as points of distinction to generate change and innovation.” The Amazon Noir project exploited vulnerabilities in Amazon.com’s Search Inside!™ feature to redistribute thousands of electronic texts for free through peer-to-peer networks. Dieter demonstrates how this “tactical media performance” challenged a cybernetic system of control by opening it up to new and ambiguous creative processes. Two of this issue’s pieces explore a specific error at the nexus of media and culture, and in keeping with Hill’s concept of “revealing errors,” use this “glitch” to lay bare dominant ideologies of media use. In her essay, “Artificial Intelligence: Media Illiteracy and the SonicJihad Debacle in Congress,” Elizabeth Losh focuses on a highly public misreading of a Battlefield 2 fan video by experts from the Science Applications International Corporation in their testimony before Congress on digital terrorism. Losh argues that Congress’s willingness to give audience to this misreading is a revealing error in its own right, as it calls attention to the anxiety of experts and power brokers over the control and distribution of information. In a similar vein, in Yasmin Ibrahim’s essay, “The Emergence of Audience as Victims: The Issue of Trust in an Era of Phone Scandals,” explores the revealing error of interactive television gone wrong. Through an examination of recent BBC phone-in scandals, Ibrahim explores how failures—both technical and ethical—challenge an increasingly interactive audience’s sense of trust in the “reality” of mass media. Our final essay takes up the theme of mutation as genetic error. Martin Mantle’s essay, “‘Have You Tried Not Being a Mutant?’: Genetic Mutation and the Acquisition of Extra-ordinary Ability,” explores “normal” and “deviant” bodies as depicted in recent Hollywood retellings of comic book superhero tales. Error, he argues, while signalling the birth of superheroic abilities, marks a site of genetic anxiety in an informatic culture. Mutation as “error” marks the body as scapegoat, signalling all that exceeds normative control. In each of these essays, error, noise, deviation, and failure provide a context for analysis. In suggesting the potential for alternate, unintended outcomes, error marks a systematic misgiving of sorts—a creative potential with unpredictable consequences. As such, error—when given its space—provides an opening for artistic and critical interventions. References “Art Fry, Inventor of Post-It® Notes: ‘One Man’s Mistake is Another’s Inspiration.” InventHelp. 2004. 14 Oct. 2007 http://www.inventhelp.com/articles-for-inventors-art-fry.asp>. Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974. Baudrillard, Jean. The Transparency of Evil. Trans. James Benedict. New York: Verso, 1993. Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59 (Winter 1992): 3-7. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1987. Eco, Umberto. The Open Work. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989. “Googlebombing ‘Failure.’” Official Google Blog. 16 Sep. 2005. 14 Oct. 2007 http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/09/googlebombing-failure.html>. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1999. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture. New York: NYU Press, 2006. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1984. Moulthrop, Stuart. “Error 404: Doubting the Web.” 2000. 14 Oct. 2007 http://iat.ubalt.edu/moulthrop/essays/404.html>. Poster, Mark. Information Please. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2006. Shannon, Claude, and Warren Weaver. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana: U Illinois P, 1949. “Silly Putty®.” Inventor of the Week. 3 Mar. 2003. 14 Oct. 2007 http://web.mit.edu/Invent/iow/sillyputty.html>. Wiener, Norbert. The Human Use of Human Beings. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 1988. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Nunes, Mark. "Failure Notice." M/C Journal 10.5 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/00-editorial.php>. APA Style Nunes, M. (Oct. 2007) "Failure Notice," M/C Journal, 10(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/00-editorial.php>.

From elephants to ABBA fans, silicon to hormone, the following discussion uses a new research method to look at printed text, motion pictures and a teenage rebel icon. If by ‘print’ we mean a mechanically reproduced impression of a cultural symbol in a medium, then printing has been with us since before microdot security prints were painted onto cars, before voice prints, laser prints, network servers, record pressings, motion picture prints, photo prints, colour woodblock prints, before books, textile prints, and footprints. If we accept that higher mammals such as elephants have a learnt culture, then it is possible to extend a definition of printing beyond Homo sapiens. Poole reports that elephants mechanically trumpet reproductions of human car horns into the air surrounding their society. If nothing else, this cross-species, cross-cultural reproduction, this ‘ability to mimic’ is ‘another sign of their intelligence’. Observation of child development suggests that the first significant meaningful ‘impression’ made on the human mind is that of the face of the child’s nurturer – usually its mother. The baby’s mind forms an ‘impression’, a mental print, a reproducible memory data set, of the nurturer’s face, voice, smell, touch, etc. That face is itself a cultural construct: hair style, makeup, piercings, tattoos, ornaments, nutrition-influenced skin and smell, perfume, temperature and voice. A mentally reproducible pattern of a unique face is formed in the mind, and we use that pattern to distinguish ‘familiar and strange’ in our expanding social orbit. The social relations of patterned memory – of imprinting – determine the extent to which we explore our world (armed with research aids such as text print) or whether we turn to violence or self-harm (Bretherton). While our cultural artifacts (such as vellum maps or networked voice message servers) bravely extend our significant patterns into the social world and the traversed environment, it is useful to remember that such artifacts, including print, are themselves understood by our original pattern-reproduction and impression system – the human mind, developed in childhood. The ‘print’ is brought to mind differently in different discourses. For a reader, a ‘print’ is a book, a memo or a broadsheet, whether it is the Indian Buddhist Sanskrit texts ordered to be printed in 593 AD by the Chinese emperor Sui Wen-ti (Silk Road) or the US Defense Department memo authorizing lower ranks to torture the prisoners taken by the Bush administration (Sanchez, cited in ABC). Other fields see prints differently. For a musician, a ‘print’ may be the sheet music which spread classical and popular music around the world; it may be a ‘record’ (as in a ‘recording’ session), where sound is impressed to wax, vinyl, charged silicon particles, or the alloys (Smith, “Elpida”) of an mp3 file. For the fine artist, a ‘print’ may be any mechanically reproduced two-dimensional (or embossed) impression of a significant image in media from paper to metal, textile to ceramics. ‘Print’ embraces the Japanese Ukiyo-e colour prints of Utamaro, the company logos that wink from credit card holographs, the early photographs of Talbot, and the textured patterns printed into neolithic ceramics. Computer hardware engineers print computational circuits. Homicide detectives investigate both sweaty finger prints and the repeated, mechanical gaits of suspects, which are imprinted into the earthy medium of a crime scene. For film makers, the ‘print’ may refer to a photochemical polyester reproduction of a motion picture artifact (the reel of ‘celluloid’), or a DVD laser disc impression of the same film. Textualist discourse has borrowed the word ‘print’ to mean ‘text’, so ‘print’ may also refer to the text elements within the vision track of a motion picture: the film’s opening titles, or texts photographed inside the motion picture story such as the sword-cut ‘Z’ in Zorro (Niblo). Before the invention of writing, the main mechanically reproduced impression of a cultural symbol in a medium was the humble footprint in the sand. The footprints of tribes – and neighbouring animals – cut tracks in the vegetation and the soil. Printed tracks led towards food, water, shelter, enemies and friends. Having learnt to pattern certain faces into their mental world, children grew older and were educated in the footprints of family and clan, enemies and food. The continuous impression of significant foot traffic in the medium of the earth produced the lines between significant nodes of prewriting and pre-wheeled cultures. These tracks were married to audio tracks, such as the song lines of the Australian Aborigines, or the ballads of tramping culture everywhere. A typical tramping song has the line, ‘There’s a track winding back to an old-fashion shack along the road to Gundagai,’ (O’Hagan), although this colonial-style song was actually written for radio and became an international hit on the airwaves, rather than the tramping trails. The printed tracks impressed by these cultural flows are highly contested and diverse, and their foot prints are woven into our very language. The names for printed tracks have entered our shared memory from the intersection of many cultures: ‘Track’ is a Germanic word entering English usage comparatively late (1470) and now used mainly in audio visual cultural reproduction, as in ‘soundtrack’. ‘Trek’ is a Dutch word for ‘track’ now used mainly by ecotourists and science fiction fans. ‘Learn’ is a Proto-Indo-European word: the verb ‘learn’ originally meant ‘to find a track’ back in the days when ‘learn’ had a noun form which meant ‘the sole of the foot’. ‘Tract’ and ‘trace’ are Latin words entering English print usage before 1374 and now used mainly in religious, and electronic surveillance, cultural reproduction. ‘Trench’ in 1386 was a French path cut through a forest. ‘Sagacity’ in English print in 1548 was originally the ability to track or hunt, in Proto-Indo-European cultures. ‘Career’ (in English before 1534) was the print made by chariots in ancient Rome. ‘Sleuth’ (1200) was a Norse noun for a track. ‘Investigation’ (1436) was Latin for studying a footprint (Harper). The arrival of symbolic writing scratched on caves, hearth stones, and trees (the original meaning of ‘book’ is tree), brought extremely limited text education close to home. Then, with baked clay tablets, incised boards, slate, bamboo, tortoise shell, cast metal, bark cloth, textiles, vellum, and – later – paper, a portability came to text that allowed any culture to venture away from known ‘foot’ paths with a reduction in the risk of becoming lost and perishing. So began the world of maps, memos, bills of sale, philosophic treatises and epic mythologies. Some of this was printed, such as the mechanical reproduction of coins, but the fine handwriting required of long, extended, portable texts could not be printed until the invention of paper in China about 2000 years ago. Compared to lithic architecture and genes, portable text is a fragile medium, and little survives from the millennia of its innovators. The printing of large non-text designs onto bark-paper and textiles began in neolithic times, but Sui Wen-ti’s imperial memo of 593 AD gives us the earliest written date for printed books, although we can assume they had been published for many years previously. The printed book was a combination of Indian philosophic thought, wood carving, ink chemistry and Chinese paper. The earliest surviving fragment of paper-print technology is ‘Mantras of the Dharani Sutra’, a Buddhist scripture written in the Sanskrit language of the Indian subcontinent, unearthed at an early Tang Dynasty site in Xian, China – making the fragment a veteran piece of printing, in the sense that Sanskrit books had been in print for at least a century by the early Tang Dynasty (Chinese Graphic Arts Net). At first, paper books were printed with page-size carved wooden boards. Five hundred years later, Pi Sheng (c.1041) baked individual reusable ceramic characters in a fire and invented the durable moveable type of modern printing (Silk Road 2000). Abandoning carved wooden tablets, the ‘digitizing’ of Chinese moveable type sped up the production of printed texts. In turn, Pi Sheng’s flexible, rapid, sustainable printing process expanded the political-cultural impact of the literati in Asian society. Digitized block text on paper produced a bureaucratic, literate elite so powerful in Asia that Louis XVI of France copied China’s print-based Confucian system of political authority for his own empire, and so began the rise of the examined public university systems, and the civil service systems, of most European states (Watson, Visions). By reason of its durability, its rapid mechanical reproduction, its culturally agreed signs, literate readership, revered authorship, shared ideology, and distributed portability, a ‘print’ can be a powerful cultural network which builds and expands empires. But print also attacks and destroys empires. A case in point is the Spanish conquest of Aztec America: The Aztecs had immense libraries of American literature on bark-cloth scrolls, a technology which predated paper. These libraries were wiped out by the invading Spanish, who carried a different book before them (Ewins). In the industrial age, the printing press and the gun were seen as the weapons of rebellions everywhere. In 1776, American rebels staffed their ‘Homeland Security’ units with paper makers, knowing that defeating the English would be based on printed and written documents (Hahn). Mao Zedong was a book librarian; Mao said political power came out of the barrel of a gun, but Mao himself came out of a library. With the spread of wireless networked servers, political ferment comes out of the barrel of the cell phone and the internet chat room these days. Witness the cell phone displays of a plane hitting a tower that appear immediately after 9/11 in the Middle East, or witness the show trials of a few US and UK lower ranks who published prints of their torturing activities onto the internet: only lower ranks who published prints were arrested or tried. The control of secure servers and satellites is the new press. These days, we live in a global library of burning books – ‘burning’ in the sense that ‘print’ is now a charged silicon medium (Smith, “Intel”) which is usually made readable by connecting the chip to nuclear reactors and petrochemically-fired power stations. World resources burn as we read our screens. Men, women, children burn too, as we watch our infotainment news in comfort while ‘their’ flickering dead faces are printed in our broadcast hearths. The print we watch is not the living; it is the voodoo of the living in the blackout behind the camera, engaging the blood sacrifice of the tormented and the unfortunate. Internet texts are also ‘on fire’ in the third sense of their fragility and instability as a medium: data bases regularly ‘print’ fail-safe copies in an attempt to postpone the inevitable mechanical, chemical and electrical failure that awaits all electronic media in time. Print defines a moral position for everyone. In reporting conflict, in deciding to go to press or censor, any ‘print’ cannot avoid an ethical context, starting with the fact that there is a difference in power between print maker, armed perpetrators, the weak, the peaceful, the publisher, and the viewer. So many human factors attend a text, video or voice ‘print’: its very existence as an aesthetic object, even before publication and reception, speaks of unbalanced, and therefore dynamic, power relationships. For example, Graham Greene departed unscathed from all the highly dangerous battlefields he entered as a novelist: Riot-torn Germany, London Blitz, Belgian Congo, Voodoo Haiti, Vietnam, Panama, Reagan’s Washington, and mafia Europe. His texts are peopled with the injustices of the less fortunate of the twentieth century, while he himself was a member of the fortunate (if not happy) elite, as is anyone today who has the luxury of time to read Greene’s works for pleasure. Ethically a member of London and Paris’ colonizers, Greene’s best writing still electrifies, perhaps partly because he was in the same line of fire as the victims he shared bread with. In fact, Greene hoped daily that he would escape from the dreadful conflicts he fictionalized via a body bag or an urn of ashes (see Sherry). In reading an author’s biography we have one window on the ethical dimensions of authority and print. If a print’s aesthetics are sometimes enduring, its ethical relationships are always mutable. Take the stylized logo of a running athlete: four limbs bent in a rotation of action. This dynamic icon has symbolized ‘good health’ in Hindu and Buddhist culture, from Madras to Tokyo, for thousands of years. The cross of bent limbs was borrowed for the militarized health programs of 1930s Germany, and, because of what was only a brief, recent, isolated yet monstrously horrific segment of its history in print, the bent-limbed swastika is now a vilified symbol in the West. The sign remains ‘impressed’ differently on traditional Eastern culture, and without the taint of Nazism. Dramatic prints are emotionally charged because, in depicting Homo sapiens in danger, or passionately in love, they elicit a hormonal reaction from the reader, the viewer, or the audience. The type of emotions triggered by a print vary across the whole gamut of human chemistry. A recent study of three genres of motion picture prints shows a marked differences in the hormonal responses of men compared to women when viewing a romance, an actioner, and a documentary (see Schultheiss, Wirth, and Stanton). Society is biochemically diverse in its engagement with printed culture, which raises questions about equality in the arts. Motion picture prints probably comprise around one third of internet traffic, in the form of stolen digitized movie files pirated across the globe via peer-to-peer file transfer networks (p2p), and burnt as DVD laser prints (BBC). There is also a US 40 billion dollar per annum legitimate commerce in DVD laser pressings (Grassl), which would suggest an US 80 billion per annum world total in legitimate laser disc print culture. The actively screen literate, or the ‘sliterati’ as I prefer to call them, research this world of motion picture prints via their peers, their internet information channels, their television programming, and their web forums. Most of this activity occurs outside the ambit of universities and schools. One large site of sliterate (screen literate) practice outside most schooling and official research is the net of online forums at imdb.com (International Movie Data Base). Imdb.com ‘prints’ about 25,000,000 top pages per month to client browsers. Hundreds of sliterati forums are located at imdb, including a forum for the Australian movie, Muriel’s Wedding (Hogan). Ten years after the release of Muriel’s Wedding, young people who are concerned with victimization and bullying still log on to http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0110598/board/> and put their thoughts into print: I still feel so bad for Muriel in the beginning of the movie, when the girls ‘dump’ her, and how much the poor girl cried and cried! Those girls were such biartches…I love how they got their comeuppance! bunniesormaybemidgets’s comment is typical of the current discussion. Muriel’s Wedding was a very popular film in its first cinema edition in Australia and elsewhere. About 30% of the entire over-14 Australian population went to see this photochemical polyester print in the cinemas on its first release. A decade on, the distributors printed a DVD laser disc edition. The story concerns Muriel (played by Toni Collette), the unemployed daughter of a corrupt, ‘police state’ politician. Muriel is bullied by her peers and she withdraws into a fantasy world, deluding herself that a white wedding will rescue her from the torments of her blighted life. Through theft and deceit (the modus operandi of her father) Muriel escapes to the entertainment industry and finds a ‘wicked’ girlfriend mentor. From a rebellious position of stubborn independence, Muriel plays out her fantasy. She gets her white wedding, before seeing both her father and her new married life as hollow shams which have goaded her abandoned mother to suicide. Redefining her life as a ‘game’ and assuming responsibility for her independence, Muriel turns her back on the mainstream, image-conscious, female gang of her oppressed youth. Muriel leaves the story, having rekindled her friendship with her rebel mentor. My methodological approach to viewing the laser disc print was to first make a more accessible, coded record of the entire movie. I was able to code and record the print in real time, using a new metalanguage (Watson, “Eyes”). The advantage of Coding is that ‘thinks’ the same way as film making, it does not sidetrack the analyst into prose. The Code splits the movie print into Vision Action [vision graphic elements, including text] (sound) The Coding splits the vision track into normal action and graphic elements, such as text, so this Coding is an ideal method for extracting all the text elements of a film in real time. After playing the film once, I had four and a half tightly packed pages of the coded story, including all its text elements in square brackets. Being a unique, indexed hard copy, the Coded copy allowed me immediate access to any point of the Muriel’s Wedding saga without having to search the DVD laser print. How are ‘print’ elements used in Muriel’s Wedding? Firstly, a rose-coloured monoprint of Muriel Heslop’s smiling face stares enigmatically from the plastic surface of the DVD picture disc. The print is a still photo captured from her smile as she walked down the aisle of her white wedding. In this print, Toni Collette is the Mona Lisa of Australian culture, except that fans of Muriel’s Wedding know the meaning of that smile is a magical combination of the actor’s art: the smile is both the flush of dreams come true and the frightening self deception that will kill her mother. Inserting and playing the disc, the text-dominant menu appears, and the film commences with the text-dominant opening titles. Text and titles confer a legitimacy on a work, whether it is a trade mark of the laser print owners, or the household names of stars. Text titles confer status relationships on both the presenters of the cultural artifact and the viewer who has entered into a legal license agreement with the owners of the movie. A title makes us comfortable, because the mind always seeks to name the unfamiliar, and a set of text titles does that job for us so that we can navigate the ‘tracks’ and settle into our engagement with the unfamiliar. The apparent ‘truth’ and ‘stability’ of printed text calms our fears and beguiles our uncertainties. Muriel attends the white wedding of a school bully bride, wearing a leopard print dress she has stolen. Muriel’s spotted wild animal print contrasts with the pure white handmade dress of the bride. In Muriel’s leopard textile print, we have the wild, rebellious, impoverished, inappropriate intrusion into the social ritual and fantasy of her high-status tormentor. An off-duty store detective recognizes the printed dress and calls the police. The police are themselves distinguished by their blue-and-white checked prints and other mechanically reproduced impressions of cultural symbols: in steel, brass, embroidery, leather and plastics. Muriel is driven in the police car past the stenciled town sign (‘Welcome To Porpoise Spit’ heads a paragraph of small print). She is delivered to her father, a politician who presides over the policing of his town. In a state where the judiciary, police and executive are hijacked by the same tyrant, Muriel’s father, Bill, pays off the police constables with a carton of legal drugs (beer) and Muriel must face her father’s wrath, which he proceeds to transfer to his detested wife. Like his daughter, the father also wears a spotted brown print costume, but his is a batik print from neighbouring Indonesia (incidentally, in a nation that takes the political status of its batik prints very seriously). Bill demands that Muriel find the receipt for the leopard print dress she claims she has purchased. The legitimate ownership of the object is enmeshed with a printed receipt, the printed evidence of trade. The law (and the paramilitary power behind the law) are legitimized, or contested, by the presence or absence of printed text. Muriel hides in her bedroom, surround by poster prints of the pop group ABBA. Torn-out prints of other people’s weddings adorn her mirror. Her face is embossed with the clown-like primary colours of the marionette as she lifts a bouquet to her chin and stares into the real time ‘print’ of her mirror image. Bill takes the opportunity of a business meeting with Japanese investors to feed his entire family at ‘Charlie Chan’’s restaurant. Muriel’s middle sister sloppily wears her father’s state election tee shirt, printed with the text: ‘Vote 1, Bill Heslop. You can’t stop progress.’ The text sets up two ironic gags that are paid off on the dialogue track: “He lost,’ we are told. ‘Progress’ turns out to be funding the concreting of a beach. Bill berates his daughter Muriel: she has no chance of becoming a printer’s apprentice and she has failed a typing course. Her dysfunction in printed text has been covered up by Bill: he has bribed the typing teacher to issue a printed diploma to his daughter. In the gambling saloon of the club, under the arrays of mechanically repeated cultural symbols lit above the poker machines (‘A’ for ace, ‘Q’ for queen, etc.), Bill’s secret girlfriend Diedre risks giving Muriel a cosmetics job. Another text icon in lights announces the surf nightclub ‘Breakers’. Tania, the newly married queen bitch who has made Muriel’s teenage years a living hell, breaks up with her husband, deciding to cash in his negotiable text documents – his Bali honeymoon tickets – and go on an island holiday with her girlfriends instead. Text documents are the enduring site of agreements between people and also the site of mutations to those agreements. Tania dumps Muriel, who sobs and sobs. Sobs are a mechanical, percussive reproduction impressed on the sound track. Returning home, we discover that Muriel’s older brother has failed a printed test and been rejected for police recruitment. There is a high incidence of print illiteracy in the Heslop family. Mrs Heslop (Jeannie Drynan), for instance, regularly has trouble at the post office. Muriel sees a chance to escape the oppression of her family by tricking her mother into giving her a blank cheque. Here is the confluence of the legitimacy of a bank’s printed negotiable document with the risk and freedom of a blank space for rebel Muriel’s handwriting. Unable to type, her handwriting has the power to steal every cent of her father’s savings. She leaves home and spends the family’s savings at an island resort. On the island, the text print-challenged Muriel dances to a recording (sound print) of ABBA, her hand gestures emphasizing her bewigged face, which is made up in an impression of her pop idol. Her imitation of her goddesses – the ABBA women, her only hope in a real world of people who hate or avoid her – is accompanied by her goddesses’ voices singing: ‘the mystery book on the shelf is always repeating itself.’ Before jpeg and gif image downloads, we had postcard prints and snail mail. Muriel sends a postcard to her family, lying about her ‘success’ in the cosmetics business. The printed missal is clutched by her father Bill (Bill Hunter), who proclaims about his daughter, ‘you can’t type but you really impress me’. Meanwhile, on Hibiscus Island, Muriel lies under a moonlit palm tree with her newly found mentor, ‘bad girl’ Ronda (Rachel Griffiths). In this critical scene, where foolish Muriel opens her heart’s yearnings to a confidante she can finally trust, the director and DP have chosen to shoot a flat, high contrast blue filtered image. The visual result is very much like the semiabstract Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints by Utamaro. This Japanese printing style informed the rise of European modern painting (Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, etc., were all important collectors and students of Ukiyo-e prints). The above print and text elements in Muriel’s Wedding take us 27 minutes into her story, as recorded on a single page of real-time handwritten Coding. Although not discussed here, the Coding recorded the complete film – a total of 106 minutes of text elements and main graphic elements – as four pages of Code. Referring to this Coding some weeks after it was made, I looked up the final code on page four: taxi [food of the sea] bq. Translation: a shop sign whizzes past in the film’s background, as Muriel and Ronda leave Porpoise Spit in a taxi. Over their heads the text ‘Food Of The Sea’ flashes. We are reminded that Muriel and Ronda are mermaids, fantastic creatures sprung from the brow of author PJ Hogan, and illuminated even today in the pantheon of women’s coming-of-age art works. That the movie is relevant ten years on is evidenced by the current usage of the Muriel’s Wedding online forum, an intersection of wider discussions by sliterate women on imdb.com who, like Muriel, are observers (and in some cases victims) of horrific pressure from ambitious female gangs and bullies. Text is always a minor element in a motion picture (unless it is a subtitled foreign film) and text usually whizzes by subliminally while viewing a film. By Coding the work for [text], all the text nuances made by the film makers come to light. While I have viewed Muriel’s Wedding on many occasions, it has only been in Coding it specifically for text that I have noticed that Muriel is a representative of that vast class of talented youth who are discriminated against by print (as in text) educators who cannot offer her a life-affirming identity in the English classroom. Severely depressed at school, and failing to type or get a printer’s apprenticeship, Muriel finds paid work (and hence, freedom, life, identity, independence) working in her audio visual printed medium of choice: a video store in a new city. Muriel found a sliterate admirer at the video store but she later dumped him for her fantasy man, before leaving him too. One of the points of conjecture on the imdb Muriel’s Wedding site is, did Muriel (in the unwritten future) get back together with admirer Brice Nobes? That we will never know. While a print forms a track that tells us where culture has been, a print cannot be the future, a print is never animate reality. At the end of any trail of prints, one must lift one’s head from the last impression, and negotiate satisfaction in the happening world. References Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “Memo Shows US General Approved Interrogations.” 30 Mar. 2005 http://www.abc.net.au>. British Broadcasting Commission. “Films ‘Fuel Online File-Sharing’.’’ 22 Feb. 2005 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3890527.stm>. Bretherton, I. “The Origins of Attachment Theory: John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth.” 1994. 23 Jan. 2005 http://www.psy.med.br/livros/autores/bowlby/bowlby.pdf>. Bunniesormaybemidgets. Chat Room Comment. “What Did Those Girls Do to Rhonda?” 28 Mar. 2005 http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0110598/board/>. Chinese Graphic Arts Net. Mantras of the Dharani Sutra. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.cgan.com/english/english/cpg/engcp10.htm>. Ewins, R. Barkcloth and the Origins of Paper. 1991. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.justpacific.com/pacific/papers/barkcloth~paper.html>. Grassl K.R. The DVD Statistical Report. 14 Mar. 2005 http://www.corbell.com>. Hahn, C. M. The Topic Is Paper. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.nystamp.org/Topic_is_paper.html>. Harper, D. Online Etymology Dictionary. 14 Mar. 2005 http://www.etymonline.com/>. Mask of Zorro, The. Screenplay by J McCulley. UA, 1920. Muriel’s Wedding. Dir. PJ Hogan. Perf. Toni Collette, Rachel Griffiths, Bill Hunter, and Jeannie Drynan. Village Roadshow, 1994. O’Hagan, Jack. On The Road to Gundagai. 1922. 2 Apr. 2005 http://ingeb.org/songs/roadtogu.html>. Poole, J.H., P.L. Tyack, A.S. Stoeger-Horwath, and S. Watwood. “Animal Behaviour: Elephants Are Capable of Vocal Learning.” Nature 24 Mar. 2005. Sanchez, R. “Interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policy.” 14 Sept. 2003. 30 Mar. 2005 http://www.abc.net.au>. Schultheiss, O.C., M.M. Wirth, and S.J. Stanton. “Effects of Affiliation and Power Motivation Arousal on Salivary Progesterone and Testosterone.” Hormones and Behavior 46 (2005). Sherry, N. The Life of Graham Greene. 3 vols. London: Jonathan Cape 2004, 1994, 1989. Silk Road. Printing. 2000. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.silk-road.com/artl/printing.shtml>. Smith, T. “Elpida Licenses ‘DVD on a Chip’ Memory Tech.” The Register 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02>. —. “Intel Boffins Build First Continuous Beam Silicon Laser.” The Register 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02>. Watson, R. S. “Eyes And Ears: Dramatic Memory Slicing and Salable Media Content.” Innovation and Speculation, ed. Brad Haseman. Brisbane: QUT. [in press] Watson, R. S. Visions. Melbourne: Curriculum Corporation, 1994. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Watson, Robert. "E-Press and Oppress: Audio Visual Print Drama, Identity, Text and Motion Picture Rebellion." M/C Journal 8.2 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/08-watson.php>. APA Style Watson, R. (Jun. 2005) "E-Press and Oppress: Audio Visual Print Drama, Identity, Text and Motion Picture Rebellion," M/C Journal, 8(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/08-watson.php>.

Susanne Bier and David Farr’s 2016 television adaptation of John le Carré’s novel The Night Manager (“Manager”) indexes the resilience of traditional Christian misogyny in contemporary British-American media. In the first episode of the series, Sophie (Aure Atika)’s partner Freddie Hamid (David Avery) brutally beats her. In the subsequent scene, despite her scars, Sophie has a sex scene with the eponymous night manager Pine (Tom Hiddlestone). Sophie’s eye socket and the left side of her face bear fresh bruises and wounds throughout the sex scene. And in the sixth and final episode, Pine and Jed (Elizabeth Debicki) have sex after she has been tortured at length by her partner Roper’s (Hugh Laurie) henchman, at Roper’s request. Jed’s neck, face, and arms bear bruises from the torture.These sex scenes function as a space of revelation. I interpret the women’s wounds and injuries alongside a feminist-critical tradition of reading noir on screen. Inaugurated by Ann Kaplan’s 1978 Women in Film Noir, many feminist commentators have since made the claim that women in noir achieve a peculiar significance, and their key scenes a subversive meaning; “in excess of” their punitive treatment within the narrative (Kaplan 5; Harvey 31; Tasker Working Girls 117). My reading emphasizes a tension between Manager’s patriarchal narrative framing and these two sex scenes that I argue disrupt and subvert the former.That Sophie and Jed are brutalised by their partners does not tell us much: it is a routine expectation in British-American film and television that “bad guys” are tough on “their” chicks. It is only after these violent encounters with their partners, when the women share “romantic” moments with Pine, that the text’s patriarchal entitlement is laid bare (“revelation” stems from Late Latin revelare to “lay bare”). Forgetting about their cuts, injuries and bruises, they desire Pine, remove their clothes, and are stimulated, stimulating, pleasuring, and pleasured. Director Bier and writer Farr assume that a 2016 British and American audience will (i) find these encounters between Sophie and Pine, and Pine and Jed, to be romantic and tender; and also (ii) find Pine’s behavior consistent with that of a “savior”. These expectations regarding audience complicity are truly revelatory.Sophie and Jed’s wounds constitute a space of revelation: the wounds are in excess of, and spill over, the patriarchal narrative framing. Their wounds indicate that the narrative has approached a moment of excessive patriarchal entitlement—emphasising extreme power imbalances between Pine and the women—and break through the narrative framing and encourage feminist enquiry. I use feminist legal theorist Catharine MacKinnon’s theory of consent to argue that, given this blatant power inequity, it could be interpreted the characters have different perspectives of the sexual act and it is questionable whether the women are in fact consenting (182).Critical ReceptionAcademic engagement with John le Carré’s well-respected espionage novels continues to emerge, including the books of Myron Aronoff, Tony Barley, Matthew Bruccoli and Judith Baughman, John Cobbs, David Monaghan, Peter Lewis and Peter Wolfe. There are a small number of academic commentaries exploring the screen adaptations of his novels, including Eric Morgan’s “Whores and Angels” and Geraint D’Arcy’s “Essentially, Another Man’s Woman”. Unfortunately, there are almost no academic commentaries on Manager, with the exception of Gunhild Agger’s “Geopolitical Location and Plot in The Night Manager”, and none that focus on the handling of gender themes within it.However, there are abundant mainstream media articles and reviews of Manager. I randomly selected seven of these articles and reviews in order to gauge the response to these sex scenes within a 2016 British-American media community. I looked at articles and reviews by Hal Boedeker, Caitlin Flynn, Tim Goodman, Jeff Jensen, Tom Lamont, Jasper Rees, and Claire Webb. None of the articles mention the theme of “gender” or note the gendered violence in the series. The reviews are complicit with the patriarchal narrative framing, and introduce Sophie and Jed in terms of their physical appearances and in their relation to principal male characters. “Beautiful and pale” Jed is “girlfriend of Bogeyman arms dealer” (Jensen), and is also referred to as “Roper’s long-legged trophy girlfriend” (Rees). Sophie, in a “sultry brunette corner” is a “tempting, tragic damsel-in-distress” (Rees) and “arouses Pine” (Jensen). However, reviewers describe the character Burr (who is male in the novel but played by Olivia Colman in the series) with greater dignity and detail. Introducing the character Sophie (Aure Atika), reviewer Tom Goodman does not refer to her by character or actress name despite the fact he introduces male characters by both. Instead, Sophie is a “beautiful connected woman” and is subsequently referred to as “the woman” (Goodman). This anonymity of Sophie as character, and Atika as actor, indexes the Christian misogyny in operation here: in Genesis, Adam only names Eve after the fall of man (New International Version, Gen. 3:20). Goodman’s textual erasure supports Sophie’s vulnerability and expendability within the narrative logic. Indeed, the reviews recapitulate stock noir themes, suggesting that the women are seductively manipulative: Goodman implies that both Bier and Debicki both deploy beauty so as to distract or beguile (Goodman), and Jensen notes that the women are “sultry with danger” (Jensen).Commentators and reviewers have likened Manager, with good reason, to screen adaptations of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. This is a useful comparison for the purposes of clarifying my own analytical approach. Lisa Funnell and Klaus Dodds’s Geographies, Genders and Geopolitics of James Bond, endorse a feminist geopolitical sensibility that audits which bodies are vulnerable, and which are disposable (14). Bond, like Manager’s Pine, is fundamentally privileged and invulnerable (14). Their account of Bond also describes Pine: “white, cis-gender, middle-class, heterosexual, able-bodied… British, attended Cambridge… he can move, act, and perform; gain access to places, spaces and resources” (1). Sophie’s vulnerability counterpoints Pine’s privilege. Against Pine’s athletic form and blond features stands the “foreign” Sophie, iterated through an emphasis on her dark features, silk dresses (that reference kaftans), and accented language (she delivers English language lines with a strong accent and discloses to Pine that she has tried to “Anglicise” her identity and has changed name). Sophie’s social and financial precarity seems behind her decision to become the mistress of violent gangster Freddie Hamid (in “Episode One” Sophie explains that Hamid “owns her”). By the end of this episode Hamid has violently beaten her then later murdered her. And even though the character Jed is white and American, it is implied that financial necessity is behind her choice of Richard Roper as partner. Jed is violently tortured and beaten in “Episode Six”.Funnell and Dodds also note Bond’s capacity to sexually satisfy women as a key dimension of his hegemonic masculinity (1). In Manager, the spectator is presumed complicit with the narrative framing and is expected to uncritically accept Pine’s extreme desirability to women. The assumption of Pine’s sexiness and sexual competency together constitute his entitlement, made clear in sex scenes between him and Sophie, and him and Jed. These sex scenes follow events of gendered violence and I raise the possibility that they also constitute instances of gendered violence.Noir Feminine ArchetypesReviewers have pointed out that Manager engages with the noir tradition (Jensen). Sophie and Jed are both “fallen” women, reflecting the Christian heritage of the noir tradition, though incarnate different noir archetypes (Allen 6). Mysterious and seductive Sophie emerges as a femme fatale in the first episode: the dark and seductive girlfriend of gangster Freddie Hamid, Sophie entrusts Pine with delicate and dangerous information, leading him into a dark world. In Milton’s Paradise Lost, the snake convinces Eve that the fruit does not bring death but instead knowledge. Eve wishes to share this knowledge with her partner “but keep the odds of knowledge in my power / without co-partner?” ultimately precipitating the fall of Adam and mankind (Milton 818). Sophie shares information regarding Hamid and Roper’s illegal arms deal with Pine. There are two transgressions on her part: she shares her partner’s confidential information with Pine and then has an affair with him. Hamid murders Sophie for the betrayals. However, Sophie’s murder does not erase her narrative significance: the event motivates protagonist Pine in his chief quest to ‘bring Roper down’, and as Boedeker concurs, the narrative’s action is “driven by this event”. Indeed, Yvonne Tasker notes the dual function of the femme fatale: she is both “an archetype which suggests an equation between female sexuality, death and danger” and also “functions as the vibrant centre of the narrative” (Tasker 117).Pine’s later love interest Jed is an example of the more complicated “good-bad girl” noir type, as Andrew Spicer has usefully coined it (92). The “good-bad girl” occupies a morally ambiguous space between the (dangerously sexy) femme fatale and (fundamentally decent) “girl-next-door” (Spicer 92). Both “good” and “bad”, Jed is unmarried but living with villain Roper, whom she has presumably selected out of economic necessity; she is a mother, but this does not bestow her with maternal legitimacy as she keeps her son a secret and is physically remote from him. Jed finds “real love” with Pine and betrays Roper in assisting Pine’s espionage plot. Roper’s henchman punishes Jed for the betrayal (in the torture scene Roper laments “I saw how you looked at him last night”; “Episode 6”).Despite the routine sexism and punitive thrust of the noir narrative, the women’s “romantic” sex scenes with Pine are laden with subversive significance. In her analysis of women in noir, Sylvia Harvey argues:Despite the ritual punishment of acts of transgression, the vitality with which these acts are endowed produces an excess of meaning which cannot finally be contained. Narrative resolutions cannot recuperate their subversive significance. (31)The visibility of Sophie and Jed’s wounds throughout their respective sex scenes with Pine signals an excessive patriarchal entitlement that disrupts the narrative logic and invites us to question the women’s perspectives. My analysis of the scenes is informed by feminist legal theorist Catharine MacKinnon’s argument that under unequal power relations consent is fraught, if not impossible (180). MacKinnon argues that women’s beliefs and reactions are shaped by power inequality, including the threat of male violence, economic dependence, and need (175).Analysis of Sophie and Pine’s InteractionsI first analyse Sophie’s dialogue because I seek to demonstrate that there is a communication breakdown in play: Sophie is asking Pine for help and safety while Pine thinks she is seducing him. Sophie’s verbal exchanges with Pine can be read in two different ways: (i) according to the patriarchal narrative framing (the spectator is positioned alongside Pine, seeing Sophie as scopophilic object); or (ii) from a feminist perspective that takes Sophie’s situation and perspective into account (Mulvey 835-36). Sophie’s language is legible as flirtation. If we are uncritically complicit with the narrative framing, Sophie is usually trying to arrange time alone with Pine because she desires him. However, if we emphasise Sophie’s perspective, she is asking for privacy, discretion, and help to stay alive (and to save the lives of others too, given that she is foiling an arms deal). Catharine MacKinnon’s observation that “men are systematically conditioned not even to notice what women want” plays out elegantly in the scenes between Pine and Sophie (181). Pine manages to discern that Sophie needs some sort of help, but shows no regard for her perspective or the significant power inequality between the two of them. From their earliest interaction in “Episode One” Sophie addresses Pine in a flirtatious way. In an audacious request, although it is ‘below’ his duties as manager she insists he make her a coffee and cheekily demands he sit with her while she drinks it. Their interaction is a standard flirtatious tête-à-tête, entailing the playful query “what do you [Pine] know of me?” Sophie begs Pine to copy some documents for her in his office even though he points out that his colleague performs such duties. Sophie suggestively demands “I would prefer to use your office”. It seems that by insisting on time alone with him, Sophie’s goal is that Pine does the task, rather than the task be done per se. However, it promptly transpires that Sophie sought a private location in order to share classified information with him, having noted at an earlier date Pine’s friendship with a British diplomat. She asks him to “hold onto” the documents “in case something happens to her”.Pine nonetheless passes on these classified documents to this contact.Sophie and Pine’s next interaction follows a similar pattern: she rings him from her hotel room and asks him to bring her a scotch. He suggests alternative ways she can procure a drink, yet she confirms the real object of her desire (“I want you”). Pine smirks as he approaches her room. Sophie’s declaration appears as (i) a desirous statement and invitation to come to her room for sex but it is in fact (ii) a demand that Pine (specifically) comes to her room, because she wants to know with whom he shared the documents and to reveal to him the injuries she received as a punishment for his leak.After realising the danger he has put her in, Pine takes her to a remote house to secure her safety. Once inside, she implores “why do you sit so far away?” which sounds like a request for closeness, perhaps even that he touch her. Yet the extent of her desired proximity, and the nature of the touch she requests, can be interpreted in (at least) two ways. Certainly, Pine believes that she desires sexual intercourse with him. The spectator is meant to interpret this request along those lines by virtue of Atika’s seductive delivery. Pine explains that he sits with distance “out of respect” and Sophie teases “is that why you came all the way here, to respect me?” This remark reveals Sophie’s assumption that Pine’s assistance has been transactional (help in exchange for sex) and the content indicates the kind of sex she assumes he expects (“disrespectful” sex, or at least sex that playfully skirts the boundaries of respect). In a declaration that stands up as a positive affirmation of consent under British and American law, Sophie announces: “I want one of your many selves to sleep with me tonight.”From a freshly bruised eye socket, Sophie lovingly stares at Pine. Extra-diegetic strings instruct us that the moment is romantic. Pine strokes the (unbruised side) side of her face. Could her question “why do you sit so far away?” have been a request that he sit near her, place an arm around her shoulder, hold her hand, stroke her forehead, perhaps even tend to her wounds? Might the request that he “sleep with [her] tonight” have been a request that he sleep in the cottage, albeit on the floor?Sophie and Pine are subsequently displayed naked, limbs entangled. A new shot, a close-up of the right side of her face, displays a scab atop her eyebrow, a deeply bruised eye socket, further bruises down her cheeks, and a split lip. The muscular, broad Pine is atop Sophie and thrusting; Sophie’s split lip smiles in ecstasy and gratitude. A post-coital shot follows: she stares lovingly down at him with her facial injuries on full display, her dark eyes stare into his lucid green. Pine asks Sophie’s “real name”. Samira recounts that she changed her name to Sophie in order to “be more Western”. The power inequality is manifest on gendered, cultural, social, and physical lines: in order to advance her social position, Samira has sought to Anglicise herself and partnered with a violent (though influential) criminal (who has recently brutalised her). Her life is in danger, she is (depicted as) dark and foreign and ostensibly has no social or support network (is isolated enough to appeal to a hotel manager for help). Meanwhile, Pine is Western university-educated, a spectacle of white male athletic privilege, and has elite connections with British intelligence.Catharine MacKinnnon argues that consent is only a meaningful option if the parties are equally powerful (174). Sophie’s extreme vulnerability renders their situations patently unequal. As MacKinnon argues “when perspective is bound up with situation, and [that] situation is unequal, whether or not a contested interaction is authoritatively considered rape comes down to whose meaning wins” (182). I do not argue that Pine rapes Sophie per se. However, the revealing of Sophie’s injuries efficiently articulates the power inequality in their situations and thus problematises a straightforward assumption of her consent. MacKinnon’s argues that rape occurs “somewhere between” the following three factors (182). First, “what the woman actually wanted” (Sophie wanted to save the lives of others (by foiling an arms deal) and not die for the breach). Second, “what she was able to express about what she wanted” (class/gender/race power dynamics may have frustrated Sophie’s ability to articulate her needs and might have motivated her sexually suggestive tenor). Third, “what the man comprehended she wanted” (Pine assumes that Sophie, like all women, sexually desire him).Analysis of Jed and Pine’s InteractionsThe injustice of Pine and Sophie’s sexual encounter finds its counterpart in Pine’s sexual encounter with Jed in the final episode of the series (“Episode Six”). Roper discovers that Jed has given a third party (Pine and his colleagues) access to his private (incriminating) files. Roper instructs his henchman to torture Jed until she identifies this third party. The henchman holds Jed by the back of her neck and dunks her head repeatedly into bathwater. The camera reveals deep bruises on her arms. Jed refuses to identify her beloved (Pine) as the ‘rat’, yet the astute Roper nevertheless surmises “you must care deeply about the person you are protecting”.Alas, the dominant narrative must go on: Roper and Pine attend to an arms deal; the deal fails because Pine has set Roper up to appear as though he has robbed the buyers (and so on). Burr and Pine’s mission to “bring down” Roper has been completed. I keep wondering what Roper’s henchman has been doing to Jed during this “men’s business”. Alas, after Pine has completed the job, we encounter Jed again. She is in bed, her limbs entangled with Pine’s. The camera positioning and shot sequencing are almost identical to the sex scene between Pine and Sophie in “Episode One”. A medium close-up from the left reveals Pine thrusting atop Jed. Through pale moonlight the viewer discerns injures on Jed’s face and chin.The morning after this (brief) sex scene, Pine and Jed discuss her imminent departure (“home” to New York, to be reunited with her son). Debicki’s performance is tremendously tender: her lip trembles, her voice shakes as she swallows tears. Jed is sad because she is bidding Pine farewell, and, as she verbalises to Pine, she is nervous about whether her son will “recognise her”. Does Jed’s torture also give her grounds to weep and tremble? Ever a gentleman, Pine clasps her hand, and while marching her to her taxi, we see more bruises atop her left arm.I am also not arguing that Pine raped Jed. Yet given what Jed had endured earlier that day – torture by drowning, as commissioned and witnessed by her own partner – was sexual intercourse what she desired or needed? The visibility of Jed’s injuries throughout the sex scene marks an apotheosis of patriarchal entitlement. Might a fraternal or (even remedial) touch have been Pine’s first priority? Does Jed need a hug? Does she need ice? Had Pine been educated or socialised in a different tradition, one remotely attuned to what anyone might need after a disastrously traumatic and violent event, he might not have found penetrative sex an appropriate remedy. Pine’s absolute security in his own sexual desirability meant that he found the activity suitable, yet her injuries break my blind faith in his sexiness. I wish to raise the possibility that intercourse after this event might have compounded the violent events Jed endured that day. Contrary to the narrative’s implication, penetrative intercourse (even with Tom Hiddleston) might not heal Sophie or Jed’s wounds.ConclusionI am not a humourless feminist immune to the entertaining (and often entertainingly preposterous) dimensions of the spy and action genre. In fact, I enthusiastically await subsequent screen adaptations of le Carré’s work and the next Bond instalment. This is not a call to “cancel” a genre, text, director or writer. Biblically, a “revelation” has always instructed humans on how to live in this life. These sex scenes do not merely lay bare extreme patriarchal entitlement but might instruct directors and writers working within the genre to keep wounds, and wounded women, out of their sex scenes. I think that is a modest request. ReferencesAgger, Gunhild. “Geopolitical Location and Plot in The Night Manager.” Journal of Scandinavian Cinema 7 (2017): 27-42.Allen, Virginia. The Femme Fatale: Erotic Icon. Troy, New York: The Whitston Publishing Company, 1983.Aronoff, Myron. The Spy Novels of John le Carré: Balancing Ethics and Politics. New York: St. Martin’s, 1999.Barley, Tony. Taking Sides: The Fiction of John le Carré. Philadelphia: Open U, 1986.Boedeker, Hal. “‘Night Manager’: Check in for Tom Hiddleston.” Orlando Sentinel, 16 Apr. 2016. 7 June 2020 <https://www.orlandosentinel.com/entertainment/tv-guy/os-night-manager-check-in-for-tom-hiddleston-20160416-story.html>.Bruccoli, Matthew, and Judith Baughman. Conversations with John le Carré. Oxford: U of Mississippi P, 2004.Cobbs, John. Understanding John le Carré. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1998.D’arcy, Geraint. “‘Essentially, Another Man’s Woman’: Information and Gender in the Novel and Adaptations of John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.” Adaptation 7.3 (2014): 275-90.Funnell, Lisa, and Klaus Dodds. Geographies, Genders and Geopolitics of James Bond. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.Flynn, Caitlin. “Who Is Sophie on ‘The Night Manager’? Aure Atika’s Character Will Drive the Thriller.” Bustle, 20 Apr. 2016. 7 June 2020 <https://www.bustle.com/articles/155498-who-is-sophie-on-the-night-manager-aure-atikas-character-will-drive-the-thriller>. Goodman, Tim. “Critic's Notebook: 'The Night Manager' Glosses over Its Flaws with Beauty and Talent.” Hollywood Reporter, 28 Apr. 2016. 7 June 2020 <https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/bastard-machine/critics-notebook-night-manager-glosses-888648>.Harvey, Sylvia. “Woman’s Place: The Absent Family of Film Noir.” Women in Film Noir. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. London: British Film Institute, 1980. 30-38.Jackson, Emily. “Catharine MacKinnon and Feminist Jurisprudence: A Critical Appraisal.” Journal of Law and Society 19.2 (1992): 195-213.Jensen, Jeff. “‘The Night Manager’: EW Review.” Entertainment Weekly, 14 Apr. 2016. 7 June 2020 <https://ew.com/article/2016/04/14/the-night-manager-review/>. Kaplan, E. Ann. “Introduction.” Women in Film Noir. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. London: British Film Institute, 1980. 1-5.Lamont, Tom. “Elizabeth Debicki: ‘We Fought about How Sexy I Should Be’.” The Guardian, 8 Oct. 2016. 7 June 2020 <https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/oct/08/elizabeth-debicki-fought-a-lot-how-sexy-should-be-the-night-manager>. Lewis, Peter. John le Carré. New York: Ungar, 1985.MacKinnon, Catharine. Towards a Feminist Theory of the State. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989.Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Eds. Mary Waldrep and Susan Rattiner. United States: Dover Publications, 2005.Monaghan, David. The Novels of John le Carré: The Art of Survival. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985.———. Smiley’s Circus: A Guide to the Secret World of John le Carré. New York: St. Martin’s, 1986.Morgan, Eric. “Whores and Angels of Our Striving Selves: The Cold War Films of John le Carré, Then and Now.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 36.1 (2016): 88-103.Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema.” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. 833-44.The Night Manager. Dir. S. Bier. Screenplay D. Farr. UK/USA: BBC and AMC, 2016.Rees, Jasper. “The Night Manager, Episode 1: Brilliant Event Drama.” The Telegraph, 20 Apr. 2016. 2 June 2020 <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/2016/02/19/the-night-manager-episode-1-event-drama-of-the-highest-calibre/>.Scheppele, Kim. “The Reasonable Woman.” The Responsive Community, Rights and Responsibilities 1.4 (1991): 36–47.Tasker, Yvonne. Working Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Popular Cinema. London: Routledge, 1998.———. “Women in Film Noir.” A Companion to Film Noir. Eds. Andrew Spicer and Helen Hanson. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. 353-68.Sauerberg, Lars Ole. Secret Agents in Fiction. London: Macmillan, 1984.Webb, Claire. “Where to Find the Plush Hotels and Lush Locations in The Night Manager”. Radio Times, 21 Feb. 2016. 2 June 2020 <http://www.radiotimes.com/ news/2016-02-21/where-to-find-the-plush-hotels-and-lush-locations-inthe-night-manager>.Wolfe, Peter. Corridors of Deceit: The World of John le Carré. Madison, WI: Popular P, 1987.

The use of the family home as a setting for television sitcoms (situation comedies) has long been recognised for its ability to provide audiences with an identifiable site of ontological security (much discussed by Giddens, Scannell, Saunders and others). From the beginnings of American sitcoms with such programs as Leave it to Beaver, and through the trail of The Brady Bunch, The Cosby Show, Roseanne, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, and on to Home Improvement, That 70s Show and How I Met Your Mother, the US has led the way with screenwriters and producers capitalising on the value of using the suburban family dwelling as a fixed setting. The most obvious advantage is the use of an easily constructed and inexpensive set, most often on a TV studio soundstage requiring only a few rooms (living room, kitchen and bedroom are usually enough to set the scene), and a studio audience. In Singapore, sitcoms have had similar successes; portraying the lives of ‘ordinary people’ in their home settings. Some programs have achieved phenomenal success, including an unprecedented ten year run for Phua Chu Kang Pte Ltd from 1996-2007, closely followed by Under One Roof (1994-2000 and an encore season in 2002), and Living with Lydia (2001-2005). This article furthers Blunt and Dowling’s exploration of the “critical geography” of home, by providing a focused analysis of home-based sitcoms in the nation-state of Singapore. The use of the home tells us a lot. Roseanne’s cluttered family home represents a lived reality for working-class families throughout the Western world. In Friends, the seemingly wealthy ‘young’ people live in a fashionable apartment building, while Seinfeld’s apartment block is much less salubrious, indicating (in line with the character) the struggle of the humble comedian. Each of these examples tells us something about not just the characters, but quite often about class, race, and contemporary societies. In the Singaporean programs, the home in Under One Roof (hereafter UOR) represents the major form of housing in Singapore, and the program as a whole demonstrates the workability of Singaporean multiculturalism in a large apartment block. Phua Chu Kang Pte Ltd (PCK) demonstrates the entrepreneurial abilities of even under-educated Singaporeans, with its lead character, a building contractor, living in a large freestanding dwelling – generally reserved for the well-heeled of Singaporean society. And in Living with Lydia (LWL) (a program which demonstrates Singapore’s capacity for global integration), Hong Kong émigré Lydia is forced to share a house (less ostentatious than PCK’s) with the family of the hapless Billy B. Ong. There is perhaps no more telling cultural event than the sitcom. In the 1970s, The Brady Bunch told us more about American values and habits than any number of news reports or cop shows. A nation’s identity is uncovered; it bares its soul to us through the daily tribulations of its TV households. In Singapore, home-based sitcoms have been one of the major success stories in local television production with each of these three programs collecting multiple prizes at the region-wide Asian Television Awards. These sitcoms have been able to reflect the ideals and values of the Singaporean nation to audiences both at ‘home’ and abroad. This article explores the worlds of UOR, PCK, and LWL, and the ways in which each of the fictional homes represents key features of the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural Singapore. Through ownership and regulation, Singaporean TV programs operate as a firm link between the state and its citizens. These sitcoms follow regular patterns where the ‘man of the house’ is more buffoon than breadwinner – in a country defined by its neo-Confucian morality, sitcoms allow a temporary subversion of patriarchal structures. In this article I argue that the central theme in Singaporean sitcoms is that while home is a personal space, it is also a valuable site for national identities to be played out. These identities are visible in the physical indicators of the exterior and interior living spaces, and the social indicators representing a benign patriarchy and a dominant English language. Structure One of the key features of sitcoms is the structure: cold open – titles – establishing shot – opening scene. Generally the cold opening (aka “the teaser”) takes place inside the home to quickly (re)establish audience familiarity with the location and the characters. The title sequence then features, in the case of LWL and PCK, the characters outside the house (in LWL this is in cartoon format), and in UOR (see Figure 1) it is the communal space of the barbeque area fronting the multi-story HDB (Housing Development Board) apartment blocks. Figure 1: Under One Roof The establishing shot at the end of each title sequence, and when returning from ad breaks, is an external view of the characters’ respective dwellings. In Seinfeld this establishing shot is the New York apartment block, in Roseanne it is the suburban house, and the Singaporean sitcoms follow the same format (see Figure 2). Figure 2: Phua Chu Kang External Visions of the Home This emphasis on exterior buildings reminds the viewer that Singaporean housing is, in many ways, unique. As a city-state (and a young one at that) its spatial constraints are particularly limiting: there simply isn’t room for suburban housing on quarter acre blocks. It rapidly transformed from an “empty rock” to a scattered Malay settlement of bay and riverside kampongs (villages) recognisable by its stilt houses. Then in the shadow of colonialism and the rise of modernity, the kampongs were replaced in many cases by European-inspired terrace houses. Finally, in the post-colonial era high-rise housing began to swell through the territory, creating what came to be known as the “HDB new town”, with some 90% of the population now said to reside in HDB units, and many others living in private high-rises (Chang 102, 104). Exterior shots used in UOR (see Figure 3) consistently emphasise the distinctive HDB blocks. As with the kampong housing, high-rise apartments continue notions of communal living in that “Living below, above and side by side other people requires tolerance of neighbours and a respect towards the environment of the housing estate for the good of all” (104). The provision of readily accessible public housing was part of the “covenant between the newly enfranchised electorate and the elected government” (Chua 47). Figure 3: Establishing shot from UOR In UOR, we see the constant interruption of the lives of the Tan family by their multi-ethnic neighbours. This occurs to such an extent as to be a part of the normal daily flow of life in Singaporean society. Chang argues that despite the normally interventionist activities of the state, it is the “self-enforcing norms” of behaviour that have worked in maintaining a “peaceable society in high-rise housing” (104). This communitarian attitude even extends to the large gated residence of PCK, home to an almost endless stream of relatives and friends. The gate itself seems to perform no restrictive function. But such a “peaceable society” can also be said to be a result of state planning which extends to the “racial majoritarianism” imposed on HDB units in the form of quotas determining “the actual number of households of each of the three major races [Chinese, Malay and Indian] … to be accommodated in a block of flats” (Chua 55). Issues of race are important in Singapore where “the inscription of media imagery bears the cultural discourse and materiality of the social milieu” (Wong 120) perhaps nowhere more graphically illustrated than in the segregation of TV channels along linguistic / cultural lines. These 3 programs all featured on MediaCorp TV’s predominantly English-language Channel 5 and are, in the words of Roland Barthes, “anchored” by dint of their use of English. Home Will Eat Itself The consumption of home-based sitcoms by audiences in their own living-rooms creates a somewhat self-parodying environment. As John Ellis once noted, it is difficult to escape from the notion that “TV is a profoundly domestic phenomenon” (113) in that it constantly attempts to “include the audiences own conception of themselves into the texture of its programmes” (115). In each of the three Singaporean programs living-rooms are designed to seat characters in front of a centrally located TV set – at most all the audience sees is the back of the TV, and generally only when the TV is incorporated into a storyline, as in the case of PCK in Figure 4 (note the TV set in the foreground). Figure 4: PCK Even in this episode of PCK when the lead characters stumble across a pornographic video starring one of the other lead characters, the viewer only hears the program. Perhaps the most realistic (and acerbic) view of how TV reorganises our lives – both spatially in the physical layout of our homes, and temporally in the way we construct our viewing habits (eating dinner or doing the housework while watching the screen) – is the British “black comedy”, The Royle Family. David Morley (443) notes that “TV and other media have adapted themselves to the circumstances of domestic consumption while the domestic arena itself has been simultaneously redefined to accommodate their requirements”. Morley refers to The Royle Family’s narrative that rests on the idea that “for many people, family life and watching TV have become indistinguishable to the extent that, in this fictional household, it is almost entirely conducted from the sitting positions of the viewers clustered around the set” (436). While TV is a central fixture in most sitcoms, its use is mostly as a peripheral thematic device with characters having their viewing interrupted by the arrival of another character, or by a major (within the realms of the plot) event. There is little to suggest that “television schedules have instigated a significant restructuring of family routines” as shown in Livingstone’s audience-based study of UK viewers (104). In the world of the sitcom, the temporalities of characters’ lives do not need to accurately reflect that of “real life” – or if they do, things quickly descend to the bleakness exemplified by the sedentary Royles. As Scannell notes, “broadcast output, like daily life, is largely uneventful, and both are punctuated (predictably and unpredictably) by eventful occasions” (4). To show sitcom characters in this static, passive environment would be anathema to the “real” viewer, who would quickly lose interest. This is not to suggest that sitcoms are totally benign though as with all genres they are “the outcome of social practices, received procedures that become objectified in the narratives of television, then modified in the interpretive act of viewing” (Taylor 14). In other words, they feature a contextualisation that is readily identifiable to members of an established society. However, within episodes themselves, it as though time stands still – character development is almost non-existent, or extremely slow at best and we see each episode has “flattened past and future into an eternal present in which parents love and respect one another, and their children forever” (Taylor 16). It takes some six seasons before the character of PCK becomes a father, although in previous seasons he acts as a mentor to his nephew, Aloysius. Contained in each episode, in true sitcom style, are particular “narrative lines” in which “one-liners and little comic situations [are] strung on a minimal plot line” containing a minor problem “the solution to which will take 22 minutes and pull us gently through the sequence of events toward a conclusion” (Budd et al. 111). It is important to note that the sitcom genre does not work in every culture, as each locale renders the sitcom with “different cultural meanings” (Nielsen 95). Writing of the failure of the Danish series Three Whores and a Pickpocket (with a premise like that, how could it fail?), Nielsen (112) attributes its failure to the mixing of “kitchen sink realism” with “moments of absurdity” and “psychological drama with expressionistic camera work”, moving it well beyond the strict mode of address required by the genre. In Australia, soap operas Home and Away and Neighbours have been infinitely more popular than our attempts at sitcoms – which had a brief heyday in the 1980s with Hey Dad..!, Kingswood Country and Mother and Son – although Kath and Kim (not studio-based) could almost be counted. Lichter et al. (11) state that “television entertainment can be ‘political’ even when it does not deal with the stuff of daily headlines or partisan controversy. Its latent politics lie in the unavoidable portrayal of individuals, groups, and institutions as a backdrop to any story that occupies the foreground”. They state that US television of the 1960s was dominated by the “idiot sitcom” and that “To appreciate these comedies you had to believe that social conventions were so ironclad they could not tolerate variations. The scripts assumed that any minute violation of social conventions would lead to a crisis that could be played for comic results” (15). Series like Happy Days “harked back to earlier days when problems were trivial and personal, isolated from the concerns of a larger world” (17). By the late 1980s, Roseanne and Married…With Children had “spawned an antifamily-sitcom format that used sarcasm, cynicism, and real life problems to create a type of in-your-face comedy heretofore unseen on prime time” (20). This is markedly different from the type of values presented in Singaporean sitcoms – where filial piety and an unrelenting faith in the family unit is sacrosanct. In this way, Singaporean sitcoms mirror the ideals of earlier US sitcoms which idealise the “egalitarian family in which parental wisdom lies in appeals to reason and fairness rather than demands for obedience” (Lichter et al. 406). Dahlgren notes that we are the products of “an ongoing process of the shaping and reshaping of identity, in response to the pluralised sets of social forces, cultural currents and personal contexts encountered by individuals” where we end up with “composite identities” (318). Such composite identities make the presentation (or re-presentation) of race problematic for producers of mainstream television. Wong argues that “Within the context of PAP hegemony, media presentation of racial differences are manufactured by invoking and resorting to traditional values, customs and practices serving as symbols and content” (118). All of this is bound within a classificatory system in which each citizen’s identity card is inscribed as Chinese, Malay, Indian or Other (often referred to as CMIO), and a broader social discourse in which “the Chinese are linked to familial values of filial piety and the practice of extended family, the Malays to Islam and rural agricultural activities, and the Indians to the caste system” (Wong 118). However, these sitcoms avoid directly addressing the issue of race, preferring to accentuate cultural differences instead. In UOR the tables are turned when a none-too-subtle dig at the crude nature of mainland Chinese (with gags about the state of public toilets), is soon turned into a more reverential view of Chinese culture and business acumen. Internal Visions of the Home This reverence for Chinese culture is also enacted visually. The loungeroom settings of these three sitcoms all provide examples of the fashioning of the nation through a “ubiquitous semi-visibility” (Noble 59). Not only are the central characters in each of these sitcoms constructed as ethnically Chinese, but the furnishings provide a visible nod to Chinese design in the lacquered screens, chairs and settees of LWL (see Figure 5.1), in the highly visible pair of black inlaid mother-of-pearl wall hangings of UOR (see Figure 5.2) and in the Chinese statuettes and wall-hangings found in the PCK home. Each of these items appears in the central view of the shows most used setting, the lounge/family room. There is often symmetry involved as well; the balanced pearl hangings of UOR are mirrored in a set of silk prints in LWL and the pair of ceramic Chinese lions in PCK. Figure 5.1: LWL Figure 5.2: UOR Thus, all three sitcoms feature design elements that reflect visible links to Chinese culture and sentiments, firmly locating the sitcoms “in Asia”, and providing a sense of the nation. The sets form an important role in constructing a realist environment, one in which “identification with realist narration involves a temporary merger of at least some of the viewer’s identity with the position offered by the text” (Budd et al. 110). These constant silent reminders of the Chinese-based hegemon – the cultural “majoritarianism” – anchors the sitcoms to a determined concept of the nation-state, and reinforces the “imaginative geographies of home” (Blunt and Dowling 247). The Foolish “Father” Figure in a Patriarchal Society But notions of a dominant Chinese culture are dealt with in a variety of ways in these sitcoms – not the least in a playful attitude toward patriarchal figures. In UOR, the Tan family “patriarch” is played by Moses Lim, in PCK, Gurmit Singh plays Phua and in LWL Samuel Chong plays Billy B. Ong (or, as Lydia mistakenly refers to him Billy Bong). Erica Sharrer makes the claim that class is a factor in presenting the father figure as buffoon, and that US sitcoms feature working class families in which “the father is made to look inept, silly, or incompetent have become more frequent” partly in response to changing societal structures where “women are shouldering increasing amounts of financial responsibility in the home” (27). Certainly in the three series looked at here, PCK (the tradesman) is presented as the most derided character in his role as head of the household. Moses Lim’s avuncular Tan Ah Teck is presented mostly as lovably foolish, even when reciting his long-winded moral tales at the conclusion of each episode, and Billy B. Ong, as a middle-class businessman, is presented more as a victim of circumstance than as a fool. Sharrer ponders whether “sharing the burden of bread-winning may be associated with fathers perceiving they are losing advantages to which they were traditionally entitled” (35). But is this really a case of males losing the upper hand? Hanke argues that men are commonly portrayed as the target of humour in sitcoms, but only when they “are represented as absurdly incongruous” to the point that “this discursive strategy recuperates patriarchal notions” (90). The other side of the coin is that while the “dominant discursive code of patriarchy might be undone” (but isn’t), “the sitcom’s strategy for containing women as ‘wives’ and ‘mothers’ is always contradictory and open to alternative readings” (Hanke 77). In Singapore’s case though, we often return to images of the women in the kitchen, folding the washing or agonising over the work/family dilemma, part of what Blunt and Dowling refer to as the “reproduction of patriarchal and heterosexist relations” often found in representations of “the ideal’ suburban home” (29). Eradicating Singlish One final aspect of these sitcoms is the use of language. PM Lee Hsien Loong once said that he had no interest in “micromanaging” the lives of Singaporeans (2004). Yet his two predecessors (PM Goh and PM Lee Senior) both reflected desires to do so by openly criticising the influence of Phua Chu Kang’s liberal use of colloquial phrases and phrasing. While the use of Singlish (or Singapore Colloquial English / SCE) in these sitcoms is partly a reflection of everyday life in Singapore, by taking steps to eradicate it through the Speak Good English movement, the government offers an intrusion into the private home-space of Singaporeans (Ho 17). Authorities fear that increased use of Singlish will damage the nation’s ability to communicate on a global basis, withdrawing to a locally circumscribed “pidgin English” (Rubdy 345). Indeed, the use of Singlish in UOR is deliberately underplayed in order to capitalise on overseas sales of the show (which aired, for example, on Australia’s SBS television) (Srilal). While many others have debated the Singlish issue, my concern is with its use in the home environment as representative of Singaporean lifestyles. As novelist Hwee Hwee Tan (2000) notes: Singlish is crude precisely because it’s rooted in Singapore’s unglamorous past. This is a nation built from the sweat of uncultured immigrants who arrived 100 years ago to bust their asses in the boisterous port. Our language grew out of the hardships of these ancestors. Singlish thus offers users the opportunity to “show solidarity, comradeship and intimacy (despite differences in background)” and against the state’s determined efforts to adopt the language of its colonizer (Ho 19-20). For this reason, PCK’s use of Singlish iterates a “common man” theme in much the same way as Paul Hogan’s “Ocker” image of previous decades was seen as a unifying feature of mainstream Australian values. That the fictional PCK character was eventually “forced” to take “English” lessons (a storyline rapidly written into the program after the direct criticisms from the various Prime Ministers), is a sign that the state has other ideas about the development of Singaporean society, and what is broadcast en masse into Singaporean homes. Conclusion So what do these home-based sitcoms tell us about Singaporean nationalism? Firstly, within the realms of a multiethnic society, mainstream representations reflect the hegemony present in the social and economic structures of Singapore. Chinese culture is dominant (albeit in an English-speaking environment) and Indian, Malay and Other cultures are secondary. Secondly, the home is a place of ontological security, and partial adornment with cultural ornaments signifying Chinese culture are ever-present as a reminder of the Asianness of the sitcom home, ostensibly reflecting the everyday home of the audience. The concept of home extends beyond the plywood-prop walls of the soundstage though. As Noble points out, “homes articulate domestic spaces to national experience” (54) through the banal nationalism exhibited in “the furniture of everyday life” (55). In a Singaporean context, Velayutham (extending the work of Morley) explores the comforting notion of Singapore as “home” to its citizens and concludes that the “experience of home and belonging amongst Singaporeans is largely framed in the materiality and social modernity of everyday life” (4). Through the use of sitcoms, the state is complicit in creating and recreating the family home as a site for national identities, adhering to dominant modes of culture and language. References Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. Home. London: Routledge, 2006. Budd, Mike, Steve Craig, and Clay Steinman. Consuming Environments: Television and Commercial Culture. New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1999. Chang, Sishir. “A High-Rise Vernacular in Singapore’s Housing Development Board Housing.” Berkeley Planning Journal 14 (2000): 97-116. Chua, Beng Huat. “Public Housing Residents as Clients of the State.” Housing Studies 15.1 (2000). Dahlgren, Peter. “Media, Citizenship and Civic Culture”. Mass Media and Society. 3rd ed. Eds. James Curran and Michael Gurevitch. London: Arnold, 2000. 310-328. Ellis, John. Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982. Hanke, Robert. “The ‘Mock-Macho’ Situation Comedy: Hegemonic Masculinity and its Reiteration.” Western Journal of Communication 62.1 (1998). Ho, Debbie G.E. “‘I’m Not West. I’m Not East. So How Leh?’” English Today 87 22.3 (2006). Lee, Hsien Loong. “Our Future of Opportunity and Promise.” National Day Rally 2004 Speech. 29 Apr. 2007 http://www.gov.sg/nd/ND04.htm>. Lichter, S. Robert, Linda S. Lichter, and Stanley Rothman. Prime Time: How TV Portrays American Culture. Washington D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 1994. Livingstone, Sonia. Young People and New Media: Childhood and the Changing Media Environment. London: Sage, 2002 Morley, David. “What’s ‘Home’ Got to Do with It? Contradictory Dynamics in the Domestication of Technology and the Dislocation of Domesticity.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 6 (2003). Noble, Greg. “Comfortable and Relaxed: Furnishing the Home and Nation.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 16.1 (2002). Rubdy, Rani. “Creative Destruction: Singapore’s Speak Good English Movement.” World Englishes 20.3 (2001). Scannell, Paddy. “For a Phenomenology of Radio and Television.” Journal of Communication 45.3 (1995). Scharrer, Erica. “From Wise to Foolish: The Portrayal of the Sitcom Father, 1950s-1990s.” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 45.1 (2001). Srilal, Mohan. “Quick Quick: ‘Singlish’ Is Out in Re-education Campaign.” Asia Times Online (28 Aug. 1999). Tan, Hwee Hwee. “A War of Words over ‘Singlish’: Singapore’s Government Wants Its Citizens to Speak Good English, But They Would Rather Be ‘Talking Cock’.” Time International 160.3 (29 July 2002). Taylor, Ella. “From the Nelsons to the Huxtables: Genre and Family Imagery in American Network Television.” Qualitative Sociology 12.1 (1989). Velayutham, Selvaraj. “Affect, Materiality, and the Gift of Social Life in Singapore.” SOJOURN 19.1 (2004). Wong, Kokkeong. Media and Culture in Singapore: A Theory of Controlled Commodification. New Jersey: Hampton Press, 2001. Images Under One Roof: The Special Appearances. Singapore: Television Corporation of Singapore. VCD. 2000. Living with Lydia (Season 1, Volume 1). Singapore: MediaCorp Studios, Blue Max Enterprise. VCD. 2001. Phua Chu Kang Pte Ltd (Season 5, Episode 10). Kuala Lumpur: MediaCorp Studios, Speedy Video Distributors. VCD. 2003. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Pugsley, Peter. "At Home in Singaporean Sitcoms: Under One Roof, Living with Lydia and Phua Chu Kang." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/09-pugsley.php>. APA Style Pugsley, P. (Aug. 2007) "At Home in Singaporean Sitcoms: Under One Roof, Living with Lydia and Phua Chu Kang," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/09-pugsley.php>.

The release of the film Fight Club (Dir. David Fincher, 1999) was met with an outpouring of contradictory reviews. From David Ansen’s [Newsweek] claim that “Fight Club is the most incendiary movie to come out of Hollywood in a long time” (Fight Club DVD insert) to LA Times’s Kenneth Turan who proclaimed Fight Club to be “…a witless mishmash of whiny, infantile philosophising and bone-crushing violence that actually thinks it’s saying something of significance” (Fight Club DVD insert), everyone, it seemed, needed to weigh in with their views. Whether you think the film is a piece of witless and excessive trash, or believe, as Fight Club novelist Chuck Palahniuk hopes “it would offer more people the idea that they could create their own lives outside the existing blueprint for happiness offered by society,” this is a film that people react strongly to (Fight Club DVD insert). Whether or not the film is successful in the new ‘blueprint’ area is debatable and one focus of this essay. It isn’t difficult to spot the focus of the film Fight Club. The title and the graphic, edgy trailers for the film leave no doubt in the viewer’s mind that this film is about fighting. But fighting what and why are the questions that unveil the deeper edge to the film, an edge that skirts the abyss of deep psychological schism: man’s alienation from man, society and self, and the position of the late twentieth century male whose gendered potentialities have become muted thanks to corporate cookie-cutter culture and the loss of a ‘hunter-gatherer’ role for men. In a nutshell, the film explores the psychic rift of the main character, unnamed for the film, but conventionally referred to as “Jack” (played by Ed Norton). Jack leads a life many late twentieth century males can identify with, a life without real grounding, focus or passion. It is the kind of life that has become a by-product of the “me” generation and corporate/consumer culture. Aside from Jack’s inability to find real satisfaction in his love life, friendships, job, or sense of self, he also suffers from an identity disorder. While there are few people who are unaware of the mind-numbing (and in some cases, audience-alienating) “twist” offered near the end of the film, it bears repeating that the compelling character of Tyler Durden (played by Brad Pitt) who shapes and influences the changes in Jack’s life is actually revealed near the end of the film as a manifestation of Jack’s alter ego. Jack and Tyler are the same person. The two conspire to start ‘Fight Club’, where men hit other men. Hard. The Club becomes an underground sensation, expanding to other communities and cities and eventually spawns the offshoot Project Mayhem whose goal it is to ultimately erase individual debt so everyone (all consumers) can start at zero. In order to manage this affair, several large buildings are slated for destruction by the Mayhem team. Of course no people will be in the buildings at the time, but all the records will be destroyed. This is the core of the film, but there are several other interesting sidelights that will become important to this discussion, including the lone female character Marla who becomes the love interest of Jack/Tyler, and the friend Bob, whom Jack meets during his insomniac foray into the seedy underworld of the self help meeting. The film itself seems to cry out for a psychoanalytic reading. Its thinly veiled references to Freudian concepts and subliminal tricks aside, it also makes the inner world of the protagonist its landscape and backdrop. In a film dominated by a psychological and psychical problem, psychoanalysis seems an excellent tool for delving more deeply into the symbols and attitudes of the piece. I have chosen both Kleinian object relations and Julia Kristeva’s understanding of abjection to help illuminate some issues in the film. Object relations helps to make clear both the divergence of personality and the emergence of a ‘repaired’ protagonist at the end of the film as Jack first creates and then destroys his alter ego. Kristeva initially explored abjection theory via literature in Powers of Horror (1982), but Barbara Creed’s Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis (1993) opened wide the door for applications of the theory to film studies. Creed uses abjection to explore issues of gender in the horror film, focusing on the role and depiction of women as abject. Here, I have adapted some of her ideas and intend to explore the role of abjection in the male identification process. In this film fighting operates as both reality and metaphor, on both the physical and psychical levels, encompassing the internal and external fight within the mind and body of the protagonist. Jack’s main problem is a lack of concrete identity and self-realization. Numbed by his willing and eager participation in consumer culture and his tacit compliance with the gritty underworld of his job as an automotive ‘recall coordinator’, his life’s work is estimating the cost effectiveness of saving lives by calculating the cost of death. In Jack’s world, meaning is derived solely through the external—external products he consumes and collects. Jack’s consumer-based emasculation is expressed when he states, “Like so many others I had become a slave to the Ikea nesting instinct.” In this sentence he clarifies his disempowerment and feminisation in one swoop. Having few, if any, relationships with human beings, meaningful or otherwise, Jack never reaches a level of social maturity. His only solace comes from visiting anonymous help groups for the terminally ill. Although Jack is physically fine (aside from his insomnia) a part of him is clearly dying, as his sense of who he is in a postmodern culture is hopelessly mediated by advertisements that tell him what to be. In the absence of a father, Jack appears to have had no real role models. Made ‘soft’ by his mother, Jack exhibits a not so subtle misogyny that is illustrated through his relationship with fellow ‘tourist’ in the self-help circles, Marla Singer. Jack’s identity issues unfold via various conflicts, each of which is enmeshed in the club he starts that revolves around the physical pain of hand-to-hand, man-on-man combat. Jack’s conflicts with himself, others and society at large are all compressed within the theme and practice of fighting and the fight clubs he institutes. Fighting for Jack (and the others who join) seems the answer to life’s immediate problems. This essay looks deeply into Jack’s identity conflict, viewing it as a moment of psychic crisis in which Jack creates an alternate personality deeply steeped in and connected to the ‘abject’ in almost every way. Thus, Jack forces himself to confront the abject in himself and the world around him, dealing with abjection on several levels all with a view to expelling it to restore the ‘clean and proper’ boundaries necessary in the ‘whole’ self. Viewed though the lens of psychoanalysis, particularly Klein’s work on object relations and Kristeva’s work with abjection, allows a reading in which the film expresses the need for and accomplishment of a self-activated encounter with the abject in order to redraw ‘clean and proper’ boundaries of self. This film’s tag lines, ‘Mischief, Mayhem and Soap’—illustrate both the presence (Mischief, Mayhem) and function (Soap) of the abject—the interaction with the abject will lead to a ‘clean’ subject—a proper subject, a restored subject. Before continuing, a brief discussion of abjection and object relations and the ways in which they are utilized in this essay is essential here. One of Klein’s major propositions is that “the neonate brings into the world two main conflicting impulses: love and hate” (Mitchell 19). Each of these conflicting impulses must be dealt with, usually by either “bringing them together in order to modify the death drive along with the life drive or expelling the death drive into the outside world” (19). Along with this conflict arises the conflict of a primary relationship with the mother, which is seen as both satisfying and frustrating, and then later complicated with the addition of the father. The main conflicting love/hate binary is reflective of a number of ‘sets’ of dualities that surface when looking into the mother/child relationship. Besides love and hate, there is the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mother, the mother as symbolic of both life and death, the symbolic (paternal) and semiotic (maternal), total oneness and total autonomy. The curious ‘split’ nature of the infant’s perception of the maternal figure recalls a kind of doppelganger, a doubling of the maternal (in positive and negative incarnations), that can be seen as abject. In the film, this informs the relationship between both Jack and Marla and Jack and Tyler, as I argue Tyler and Marla serve as parental substitutes at one part in the film. This is clarified in Jack’s statements about his relationship with the two of them: “My parents pulled this exact same act for years” and “I am six years old again, passing messages between parents.” This imaginary relationship allows Jack to re-experience some of his early identification processes, while effectively trading out the gender responsibilities to the point where Tyler symbolically takes the place of the ‘mother’ and Marla the place of the ‘father’. The result of this action is an excess of male gendered experiences in which Jack in crisis (emasculated) is surrounded by phalluses. Kristeva’s work with abjection is also important here. I am especially interested in her understanding of the mother/child relationship as connected with abjection, particularly the threat the mother represents to the child as wanting to return to a state of oneness. The abject functions in Fight Club as a means for the protagonist to re-configure his own autonomy. For Kristeva, the abject is that which is cast out in order that “I” may exist. It exists at the borders of the self and continually draws the subject into it. As the subject revolts and pulls away, its resistance cues the process of defining itself as separate, proper and autonomous. When the narrative of Jack’s life refuses to make sense to him, and his experiences seem like “a copy of a copy of a copy,” Jack turns inward for help. Kristeva says that the abject is “experienced at the peak of its strength when that subject, weary of fruitless attempts to identify with something on the outside, finds the impossible within” (5). Thus Jack ‘finds’ Tyler. The abject, [represented by Bob, Tyler and Marla in the film] is that which disturbs “identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules” (Kristeva 4). As the abject is that which blurs boundaries borders and classification, the film itself is steeped in abject images and ideas. The discrete categories of inside/outside, asleep/awake, male/female, and self/other are continually troubled throughout the narrative. The two most confused binaries are male/female and self/other. As the film is about Jack’s own experience of emasculation it is not until the male/female gender issues are resolved that his self/other issues can be resolved. Through the re-ordering of gender he is able to take his place in society alongside Marla, finally viewed as not his mother or friend but lover. Jack Versus Himself: A Cult Of One Jack is able to re-vamp his personality through exposure to the abject and the replaying of certain key object relations moments in his childhood. He engages with this ‘inner child’ to reconnect with psychically difficult moments in which his ‘self’ emerged. Jack, however, twists the typical plot of maternal and paternal bonding in ways that speak to the underlying misogyny of the film and of late twentieth century society as well. While the story begins with both male and female characters in unnatural roles with unnatural and abject body parts, by the end of the film, these ‘abnormalities’ or abject objects are erased, ejected from the text so Jack is restored to the ‘safety’ of a compulsory heterosexuality. Bob, Tyler and Marla’s characters are three examples of gender twisting expressed in the film. In psychoanalytic literature, the child bonds first to the mother (via feeding from the breast and in-utero existence) and experiences a feeling of total oneness impossible to duplicate. Eventually the child seeks autonomy and breaks from the mother and her clinging ways with the help of the father and the phallus. So in basic terms, the female is abject, representing infantile regression and oneness, and the male represents taking the proper place in the symbolic order. When the female (mother) is denied, the male accepts his natural place in culture and society. However, in this film, Tyler (the male) is the abject presence in the text, that which threatens to consume and subsume the narrator’s personality. It is Marla, the phallic woman, who interposes herself in this dyad and becomes the correct choice for Jack, allowing him to proceed into ‘normal relations.’ Early in the film, Jack is unable to envision a female partner with whom he can open up and share, instead substituting Bob—and his doubly signified ‘bitch-tits’—as a locus of comfort. In Bob’s ample bosom, Jack finds the release he is looking for, though it is unnatural in more ways than one. The feminised Bob [testicular cancer patient] comforts and coddles Jack so much that he feels the same idyllic bliss experienced by the infant at the mother’s breast; Jack feels “lost in oblivion, dark and silent and complete.” That night he is able for the first time in months to sleep: “Babies don’t sleep this well.” This illustrates Jack’s longing for the safety and security of the mother, complicated by his inability to bond with a female, replaced with his deep need for identification with a male. Continuing the twist, it is Marla who foils Jack’s moment of infantile bliss: “She ruined everything” with her presence, Jack sneers. Jack’s regression to this infantile bliss with either man or woman would be perceived as abject, (disrupting system and order) but this particular regression is at least doubly abject because of Bob’s unnatural breasts and lack of testicles. Both Bob, and to some degree Tyler, offer abjection to Jack as a way of dealing with this complexities of autonomous living. While my argument is that Tyler takes the traditional ‘female’ role in the drama, as a figure (like Bob) who lures Jack into an unnatural oneness that must ultimately be rejected, it is true that even in his position as abject ‘female’ (mother), Tyler is overwhelmingly phallic. His ‘jobs’ consist of splicing shots of penises into films, urinating and masturbating into restaurant food and engaging in acrobatic sex with Marla. Since Marla, who occupies the position of father bringing Jack into society away from the influence of Tyler, is also coded phallic, Jack’s world is overwhelmingly symbolically male. This appears to be a response to the overwhelming physical presence of Jack’s mother of which Tyler comments, “We’re a generation of men raised by women. I am wondering if another woman is really the answer we need?” During this same scene, Jack clarifies his regressive dilemma: “I can’t get married, I am a thirty year old boy.” Thus while Tyler campaigns for a world without women, Jack must decide if this is the correct way to go. Immersion in the world of uber-maleness only seems to make his life worse. It is only after he ‘kills’ Tyler and accepts Marla as a partner that he can feel successful. In another help meeting, one of the guided meditations emphasizes his regression by asking him to go to his “cave” and locate his “power animal.” This early in the film, Jack can only envision his power animal as a rather silly penguin, which, although phallic to some extent, is undercut by the fact that it speaks with a child’s voice. In the next visualization of the ‘power animal’, the animal becomes Marla—clarifying her influence over Jack’s subconscious. The threat of Marla’s sexuality is on one level explored with Jack’s counterpart Tyler, the one who dares to go where Jack will not, but their encounters are not shown in a ‘natural’ or fully mature light. They are instead equated with childhood experimentation and regressive fantasies as Marla responds that she “hasn’t been fucked like that since grade school” and Tyler proclaims the relationship is mere “sportfucking.” It is Tyler who discovers Marla’s oversized dildo proudly displayed on a dresser, of which she states “Don’t worry its not a threat to you.” This phallicized Marla refers to herself as “infectious human waste,” clearly abject. Marla’s power must be muted before Jack can truly relate to her. This is illustrated in two separate ‘visions’ of sexual intercourse—one between Marla and Tyler early in the film in which Marla assumes the dominant position, and then later near the end of the film when the same encounter is replayed with Jack taking Tyler’s place, Marla now in the standard missionary position on her back: Proper. Jack’s struggle with self is played out via his relationship with Tyler (and Marla to some degree). Once Jack has been exposed to the various levels of abject behaviour offered by Tyler and Project Mayhem, he chooses to go it alone, no longer needing the double he himself created. After experiencing and rejecting the abject, Jack redraws his boundaries and cleanses his soul. Jack Versus Society—The Personal Is Political Jack’s personal struggle becomes political—and communal. Another attempt at forming identity, Fight Club is bound to fail because it offers not autonomy but a group identity substituted for an individual one. While Jack loathes his ‘single serving life’ before Fight Club, he must come to realize that a group identity brings more problems than solutions in an identity crisis. While the comfort of ‘oneness’ is alluring, it is also abject. As Jack is able to finally refuse the safely and oneness offered by Tyler’s existence, he must also deny the safety in numbers offered by Fight Club itself. The cult he creates swallows members whole, excreting them as the “all singing all dancing crap of the world.” They eat, drink and sleep Fight Club and eventually its ‘evolutionary’ offshoot, Project Mayhem. During his involvement with Fight Club and Project Mayhem, Jack is exposed to three levels of abjection including food loathing, bodily wastes, and the corpse, each of which threaten to draw him to the “place where meaning collapses” (Kristeva 2). Jack’s first experience involves Tyler’s (a)vocation as a waiter who urinates and probably masturbates into patrons’ food. This mingling of bodily wastes and nourishment represents the most elementary form of abjection: food loathing. While Jack appears amused at Tyler’s antics in the beginning, by the end of the film, he illustrates his movement closer to self-identification, by calling for “clean food, please” signalling his alliance with the clean and proper. Bodily wastes, the internal made visible, represent the most extended contact Jack has with the abject. These experiences, when what is properly outside ends up inside and vice versa, begin with bloody hand-to-hand combat, including Tyler’s vomiting of blood into the mouth of an unwilling Fight Club participant “Lou”, causing another witness to vomit as well. The physical aversion to abject images (blood, pus, excrement) is part of the redrawing of self—the abject is ejected –via nausea/vomiting. Kristeva explains: “I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit” (3). The images continue to pile up as Jack describes life in the Paper Street house: “What a shit hole.” The house slowly decomposes around them, leaking and mouldy, releasing its own special smell: the rot of a “warm stale refrigerator” mixed with the “fart smell of steam” from a nearby industrial plant. While at Paper Street, Tyler decides to make soap. Soap in itself is an agent of cleanliness, but in this context it is abject and defiled by being composed of human waste. In a deeply abject moment, Jack is accidentally covered in refuse that spills from a ripped bag full of human fat pilfered from a liposuction clinic. Even at this profoundly disturbing moment, Jack is unwilling to give up his associations with Tyler and Project Mayhem. It is only after his encounter with a corpse that he changes his tune. While Fight Club attempted to blur physical boundaries via hand-to-hand combat and exchange of blood and blows, Project Mayhem threatens the psychic boundaries of self, a deeper danger. While a loud speaker drones “we are all part of the same compost heap” and a fellow occupant reminds Jack “In project mayhem we have no names,” Jack realizes he is truly losing himself, not gaining strength. Mayhem’s goal of ‘oneness’, like the maternal and infant experience, is exposed via slogans like “you are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else.” Tyler finally puts his cards on the table and asks Jack to “stop trying to control everything and just let go.” For Kristeva, “If dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything”(3). The corpse of Bob causes Jack to confront the boundaries of life and death, both spiritual and physical, as he opens his eyes to the damaging effects of the cult-like environment into which he has fallen. Jack’s momentary indecision morphs into action after Bob’s death becomes just one more mantra for the zombie-like Project Mayhemers to chant: “His name was Robert Paulson.” Jack’s internal and external struggles are compressed into one moment when he commits homo(sui)cide. Placing a gun in his mouth, he attempts to rid himself of Tyler forever, his final words to Tyler: “My eyes are open now”. At this point, Jack is psychically ready to take charge of his life and confidently eject the abject from the narrative of his life. He wants no more to do with Project Mayhem gang and is reunited with Marla with whom he finally appears ready to have a fully realized relationship. His masculinity and identity restoration are made blindingly apparent by the final splice in the film—the image of Marla and Jack hand in hand overlooking the new view out of the tower, spliced with the shot of a semi-erect penis—back to shot of Marla and Jack. The message is clear: Jack is a man, he has a woman, and he knows who he is because of it. While Fight Club novelist Palahniuk hopes the film offers options for life “outside the existing blueprint offered by society” (Fight Club DVD insert). On the other hand, it’s unclear how well the film pulls this off. On one hand, its lambasting of the numbing effects of blind and excessive consumerism seems well explored, it’s unclear what options really surface by the end of the film. Although many targeted buildings have been destroyed, through which the viewer can assume some or even most records of individual debt were erased, the building in which Marla and Jack stand (initially slated for destruction) remains. Perhaps this is meant to signify the impossibility of true financial equality in American society. But it seems to me that the more pressing issues are not the ones openly addressed in the film (that of money and consumerism) but rather the more internalised issues of self-actualisation, gender identity and contentment. In a postmodern space ripe for the redrawing and redefinition of gender stereotypes, this film carefully reinscribes not only compulsory heterosexuality but also the rigid boundaries of acceptable male and female behaviour. For this film, the safest route to repairing male identity and self-hood threatened by the emasculating practices of a consumer culture is a route back. Back to infantile and childhood fantasy. While it dances provocatively around the edges of accepting a man with ‘bitch tits’ and a woman with a dick, ultimately Bob is killed and Marla reclaimed by Jack in an ‘I’m ok you’re ok’ final scene: “Look at me Marla, I am really OK”. Jack’s immersion in an all male cult(ure) is eschewed for the comfort of real breasts. Works Cited Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1993. Fight Club. Dir. David Fincher. 1999. Fight Club DVD edition. Dir. David Fincher. 2000. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay On Abjection. New York: Columbia Press: 1982. Mitchell, Juliet. The Selected Melanie Klein. New York: The Free Press, 1986. Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Caldwell, Tracy M.. "Identity Making from Soap to Nuts" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 6.1 (2003). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/10-identitymaking.php>. APA Style Caldwell, T. M., (2003, Feb 26). Identity Making from Soap to Nuts. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,(1). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/10-identitymaking.html

Introduction Lillian Ng was born in Singapore and lived in Hong Kong and the United Kingdom before migrating to Australia with her daughter and Ah Mah Yin Jie (“Ah Mahs are a special group of people who took a vow to remain unmarried … [so they] could stick together as a group and make a living together” (Yu 118)). Ng studied classical Chinese at home, then went to an English school and later on studied Medicine. Her first book, Silver Sister (1994), was short-listed for the inaugural Angus & Robertson/Bookworld Prize in 1993 and won the Human Rights Award in 1995. Ng defines herself as a “Chinese living in Australia” (Yu 115). Food, flesh and meat are recurrent topics in Lillian Ng´s second novel Swallowing Clouds, published in 1997. These topics are related to desire and can be used as a synecdoche (a metaphor that describes part/whole relations) of the human body: food is needed to survive and pleasure can be obtained from other people´s bodies. This paper focuses on one type of meat and animal, pork and the pig, and on the relation between the two main characters, Syn and Zhu Zhiyee. Syn, the main character in the novel, is a Shanghainese student studying English in Sydney who becomes stranded after the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 1989. As she stops receiving money from her mother and fears repression if she goes back to China, she begins to work in a Chinese butcher shop, owned by Zhu Zhiyee, which brings her English lessons to a standstill. Syn and Zhu Zhiyee soon begin a two-year love affair, despite the fact that Zhu Zhiyee is married to KarLeng and has three daughters. The novel is structured as a prologue and four days, each of which has a different setting and temporal location. The prologue introduces the story of an adulterous woman who was punished to be drowned in a pig´s basket in the HuanPu River in the summer of 1918. As learnt later on, Syn is the reincarnation of this woman, whose purpose in life is to take revenge on men by taking their money. The four days, from the 4th to the 7th of June 1994, mark the duration of a trip to Beijing and Shanghai that Syn takes as member of an Australian expedition in order to visit her mother with the security of an Australian passport. During these four days, the reader learns about different Chinese landmarks, such as the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, the Ming Tomb and the Summer Palace, as well as some cultural events, such as a Chinese opera and eating typical foods like Peking duck. However, the bulk of the plot of the book deals with the sexual relationship, erotic games and fantasies of Syn and Zhu Zhiyee in the period between 1989 and 1992, as well as Syn´s final revenge in January 1993. Pigs The fact that Zhu Zhiyee is a butcher allows Lillian Ng to include references to pigs and pork throughout the novel. Some of them refer to the everyday work of a butcher shop, as the following examples illustrate: “Come in and help me with the carcass,” he [Zhu Zhiyee] pointed to a small suckling pig hung on a peg. Syn hesitated, not knowing how to handle the situation. “Take the whole pig with the peg,” he commanded (11).Under dazzling fluorescent tubes and bright spotlights, trays of red meat, pork chops and lamb cutlets sparkled like jewels … The trays edged with red cellophane frills and green underlay breathed vitality and colour into the slabs of pork ribs and fillets (15).Buckets of pig´s blood with a skim of froth took their place on the floor; gelled ones, like sliced cubes of large agate, sat in tin trays labelled in Chinese. More discreetly hidden were the gonads and penises of goats, bulls and pigs. (16)These examples are representative of Syn and Zhu Zhiyee´s relationship. The first quotation deals with their interaction: most of the time Zhu Zhiyee orders Syn how to act, either in the shop or in bed. The second extract describes the meat’s “vitality” and this is the quality of Syn's skin that mesmerised Zhu when he met her: “he was excited, electrified by the sight of her unblemished, translucent skin, unlined, smooth as silk. The glow of the warmth of human skin” (13). Moreover, the lights seem to completely illuminate the pieces of meat and this is the way Zhu Zhiyee leers at Syn´s body, as it can be read in the following extract: “he turned again to fix his gaze on Syn, which pierced and penetrated her head, her brain, eyes, permeated her whole body, seeped into her secret places and crevices” (14). The third excerpt introduces the sexual organs of some of the animals, which are sold to some customers for a high price. Meat is also sexualised by Zhu Zhiyee´s actions, such as his pinching the bottoms of chickens and comparing them with “sacrificial virgins”: “chickens, shamelessly stripped and trussed, hung by their necks, naked in their pimply white skin, seemed like sacrificial virgins. Syn often caught Zhu pinching their fleshy bottoms, while wrapping and serving them to the housewives” (15-16). Zhu also makes comments relating food with sex while he is having lunch next to Syn, which could be considered sexual harassment. All these extracts exemplify the relationship between Syn and Zhu Zhiyee: the orders, the looks and the implicit sexuality in the quotidian activities in the butcher´s shop. There are also a range of other expressions that include similes with the word `pig´ in Ng´s novel. One of the most recurrent is comparing the left arm and hand of Zhu Zhiyee´s mother with a “pig´s trotter”. Zhu Zhiyee´s mother is known as ZhuMa and Syn is very fond of her, as ZhuMa accepts her and likes her more than her own daughter-in-law. The comparison of ZhuMa´s arm and hand with a trotter may be explained by the fact that ZhuMa´s arm is swollen but also by the loving representation of pigs in Chinese culture. As Seung-Og Kim explains in his article “Burials, Pigs, and Political Prestige in Neolithic China”: In both Melanesia and Asia, pigs are viewed as a symbolic representation of human beings (Allen 1976: 42; Healey 1985; Rappaport 1967: 58; Roscoe 1989: 223-26). Piglets are treated as pets and receive a great deal of loving attention, and they in turn express affection for their human “parents.” They also share some physiological features with human beings, being omnivorous and highly reproductive (though humans do not usually have multiple litters) and similar internal anatomy (Roscoe 1989: 225). In short, pigs not only have a symbiotic relationship with humans biologically but also are of great importance symbolically (121). Consequently, pigs are held in high esteem, taken care of and loved. Therefore, comparing a part of a human´s body, such as an arm or a hand, for example, to a part of a pig´s body such as a pig´s trotter is not negative, but has positive connotations. Some descriptions of ZhuMa´s arm and hand can be read in the following excerpts: “As ZhuMa handed her the plate of cookies Syn saw her left arm, swollen like a pig´s trotter” (97); “Syn was horrified, and yet somewhat intrigued by this woman without a breast, with a pig´s trotter arm and a tummy like a chessboard” (99), “mimicking the act of writing with her pig-trotter hand” (99), and ZhuMa was praising the excellence of the opera, the singing, acting, the costumes, and the elaborate props, waving excitedly with her pig trotter arm and pointing with her stubby fingers while she talked. (170) Moreover, the expression “pig´s trotters” is also used as an example of the erotic fetishism with bound feet, as it can be seen in the following passage, which will be discussed below: I [Zhu Zhiyee] adore feet which are slender… they seem so soft, like pig´s trotters, so cute and loving, they play tricks on your mind. Imagine feeling them in bed under your blankets—soft cottonwool lumps, plump and cuddly, makes you want to stroke them like your lover´s hands … this was how the bound feet appealed to men, the erotic sensation when balanced on shoulders, clutched in palms, strung to the seat of a garden swing … no matter how ugly a woman is, her tiny elegant feet would win her many admirers (224).Besides writing about pigs and pork as part of the daily work of the butcher shop and using the expression “pig´s trotter”, “pig” is also linked to money in two sentences in the book. On the one hand, it is used to calculate a price and draw attention to the large amount it represents: “The blouse was very expensive—three hundred dollars, the total takings from selling a pig. Two pigs if he purchased two blouses” (197). On the other, it works as an adjective in the expression “piggy-bank”, the money box in the form of a pig, an animal that represents abundance and happiness in the Chinese culture: “She borrowed money from her neighbours, who emptied pieces of silver from their piggy-banks, their life savings”(54). Finally, the most frequent porcine expression in Ng´s Swallowing Clouds makes reference to being drowned in a pig´s basket, which represents 19 of the 33 references to pigs or pork that appear in the novel. The first three references appear in the prologue (ix, x, xii), where the reader learns the story of the last woman who was killed by drowning in a pig´s basket as a punishment for her adultery. After this, two references recount a soothsayer´s explanation to Syn about her nightmares and the fact that she is the reincarnation of that lady (67, 155); three references are made by Syn when she explains this story to Zhu Zhiyee and to her companion on the trip to Beijing and Shanghai (28, 154, 248); one refers to a feeling Syn has during sexual intercourse with Zhu Zhiyee (94); and one when the pig basket is compared to a cricket box, a wicker or wooden box used to carry or keep crickets in a house and listen to them singing (73). Furthermore, Syn reflects on the fact of drowning (65, 114, 115, 171, 172, 173, 197, 296) and compares her previous death with that of Concubine Pearl, the favourite of Emperor Guanxu, who was killed by order of his aunt, the Empress Dowager Cixi (76-77). The punishment of drowning in a pig´s basket can thus be understood as retribution for a transgression: a woman having an extra-marital relationship, going against the establishment and the boundaries of the authorised. Both the woman who is drowned in a pig´s basket in 1918 and Syn have extra-marital affairs and break society’s rules. However, the consequences are different: the concubine dies and Syn, her reincarnation, takes revenge. Desire, Transgression and Eroticism Xavier Pons writes about desire, repression, freedom and transgression in his book Messengers of Eros: Representations of Sex in Australian Writing (2009). In this text, he explains that desire can be understood as a positive or as a negative feeling. On the one hand, by experiencing desire, a person feels alive and has joy de vivre, and if that person is desired in return, then, the feelings of being accepted and happiness are also involved (13). On the other hand, desire is often repressed, as it may be considered evil, anarchic, an enemy of reason and an alienation from consciousness (14). According to Pons: Sometimes repression, in the form of censorship, comes from the outside—from society at large, or from particular social groups—because of desire´s subversive nature, because it is a force which, given a free rein, would threaten the higher purpose which a given society assigns to other (and usually ideological) forces … Repression may also come from the inside, via the internalization of censorship … desire is sometimes feared by the individual as a force alien to his/her true self which would leave him/her vulnerable to rejection or domination, and would result in loss of freedom (14).Consequently, when talking about sexual desire, the two main concepts to be dealt with are freedom and transgression. As Pons makes clear, “the desiring subject can be taken advantage of, manipulated like a puppet [as h]is or her freedom is in this sense limited by the experience of desire” (15). While some practices may be considered abusive, such as bondage or sado-masochism, they may be deliberately and freely chosen by the partners involved. In this case, these practices represent “an encounter between equals: dominance is no more than make-believe, and a certain amount of freedom (as much as is compatible with giving oneself up to one´s fantasies) is maintained throughout” (24). Consequently, the perception of freedom changes with each person and situation. What is transgressive depends on the norms in every culture and, as these evolve, so do the forms of transgression (Pons 43). Examples of transgressions can be: firstly, the separation of sex from love, adultery or female and male homosexuality, which happen with the free will of the partners; or, secondly, paedophilia, incest or bestiality, which imply abuse. Going against society’s norms involves taking risks, such as being discovered and exiled from society or feeling isolated as a result of a feeling of difference. As the norms change according to culture, time and person, an individual may transgress the rules and feel liberated, but later on do the same thing and feel alienated. As Pons declares, “transgressing the rules does not always lead to liberation or happiness—transgression can turn into a trap and turn out to be simply another kind of alienation” (46). In Swallowing Clouds, Zhu Zhiyee transgresses the social norms of his time by having an affair with Syn: firstly, because it is extra-marital, he and his wife, KarLeng, are Catholic and fidelity is one of the promises made when getting married; and, secondly, because he is Syn´s boss and his comments and ways of flirting with her could be considered sexual harassment. For two years, the affair is an escape from Zhu Zhiyee´s daily worries and stress and a liberation and fulfillment of his sexual desires. However, he introduces Syn to his mother and his sisters, who accept her and like her more than his wife. He feels trapped, though, when KarLeng guesses and threatens him with divorce. He cannot accept this as it would mean loss of face in their neighbourhood and society, and so he decides to abandon Syn. Syn´s transgression becomes a trap for her as Zhu, his mother and his sisters have become her only connection with the outside world in Australia and this alienates her from both the country she lives in and the people she knows. However, Syn´s transgression also turns into a trap for Zhu Zhiyee because she will not sign the documents to give him the house back and every month she sends proof of their affair to KarLeng in order to cause disruption in their household. This exposure could be compared with the humiliation suffered by the concubine when she was paraded in a pig´s basket before she was drowned in the HuangPu River. Furthermore, the reader does not know whether KarLeng finally divorces Zhu Zhiyee, which would be his drowning and loss of face and dishonour in front of society, but can imagine the humiliation, shame and disgrace KarLeng makes him feel every month. Pons also depicts eroticism as a form of transgression. In fact, erotic relations are a power game, and seduction can be a very effective weapon. As such, women can use seduction to obtain power and threaten the patriarchal order, which imposes on them patterns of behaviour, language and codes to follow. However, men also use seduction to get their own benefits, especially in political and social contexts. “Power has often been described as the ultimate aphrodisiac” (Pons 32) and this can be seen in many of the sexual games between Syn and Zhu Zhiyee in Swallowing Clouds, where Zhu Zhiyee is the active partner and Syn becomes little more than an object that gives pleasure. A clear reference to erotic fetishism is embedded in the above-mentioned quote on bound feet, which are compared to pig´s trotters. In fact, bound feet were so important in China in the millennia between the Song Dynasty (960-1276) and the early 20th century that “it was impossible to find a husband” (Holman) without them: “As women’s bound feet and shoes became the essence of feminine beauty, a fanatical aesthetic and sexual mystique developed around them. The bound foot was understood to be the most intimate and erotic part of the female anatomy, and wives, consorts and prostitutes were chosen solely on the size and shape of their feet” (Holman). Bound feet are associated in Ng’s novel with pig´s trotters and are described as “cute and loving … soft cottonwool lumps, plump and cuddly, [that] makes you want to stroke them like your lover´s hands” (224). This approach towards bound feet and, by extension, towards pig´s trotters, can be related to the fond feelings Melanesian and Asian cultures have towards piglets, which “are treated as pets and receive a great deal of loving attention” (Kim 121). Consequently, the bound feet can be considered a synecdoche for the fond feelings piglets inspire. Food and Sex The fact that Zhu Zhiyee is a butcher and works with different types of meat, including pork, that he chops it, sells it and gives cooking advice, is not gratuitous in the novel. He is used to being in close proximity to meat and death and seeing Syn’s pale skin through which he can trace her veins excites him. Her flesh is alive and represents, therefore, the opposite of meat. He wants to seduce her, which is human hunting, and he wants to study her, to enjoy her body, which can be compared to animals looking at their prey and deciding where to start eating from. Zhu´s desire for Syn seems destructive and dangerous. In the novel, bodies have a price: dead animals are paid for and eaten and their role is the satiation of human hunger. But humans, who are also animals, have a price as well: flesh is paid for, in the form of prostitution or being a mistress, and its aim is satiation of human sex. Generally speaking, sex in the novel is compared to food either in a direct or an indirect way, and making love is constantly compared to cooking, the preparation of food and eating (as in Pons 303). Many passages in Swallowing Clouds have cannibalistic connotations, all of these being used as metaphors for Zhu Zhiyee’s desire for Syn. As mentioned before, desire can be positive (as it makes a person feel alive) or negative (as a form of internal or social censorship). For Zhu Zhiyee, desire is positive and similar to a drug he is addicted to. For example, when Zhu and Syn make delivery rounds in an old Mazda van, he plays the recordings he made the previous night when they were having sex and tries to guess when each moan happened. Sex and Literature Pons explains that “to write about sex … is to address a host of issues—social, psychological and literary—which together pretty much define a culture” (6). Lillian Ng´s Swallowing Clouds addresses a series of issues. The first of these could be termed ‘the social’: Syn´s situation after the Tiananmen Massacre; her adulterous relationship with her boss and being treated and considered his mistress; the rapes in Inner Mongolia; different reasons for having an abortion; various forms of abuse, even by a mother of her mentally handicapped daughter; the loss of face; betrayal; and revenge. The second issue is the ‘psychological’, with the power relations and strategies used between different characters, psychological abuse, physical abuse, humiliation, and dependency. The third is the ‘literary’, as when the constant use of metaphors with Chinese cultural references becomes farcical, as Tseen Khoo notes in her article “Selling Sexotica” (2000: 164). Khoo explains that, “in the push for Swallowing Clouds to be many types of novels at once: [that is, erotica, touristic narrative and popular], it fails to be any one particularly successfully” (171). Swallowing Clouds is disturbing, full of stereotypes, and with repeated metaphors, and does not have a clear readership and, as Khoo states: “The explicit and implicit strategies behind the novel embody the enduring perceptions of what exotic, multicultural writing involves—sensationalism, voyeuristic pleasures, and a seemingly deliberate lack of rooted-ness in the Australian socioscape (172). Furthermore, Swallowing Clouds has also been defined as “oriental grunge, mostly because of the progression throughout the narrative from one gritty, exoticised sexual encounter to another” (Khoo 169-70).Other novels which have been described as “grunge” are Edward Berridge´s Lives of the Saints (1995), Justine Ettler´s The River Ophelia (1995), Linda Jaivin´s Eat Me (1995), Andrew McGahan´s Praise (1992) and 1988 (1995), Claire Mendes´ Drift Street (1995) or Christos Tsiolkas´ Loaded (1995) (Michael C). The word “grunge” has clear connotations with “dirtiness”—a further use of pig, but one that is not common in the novel. The vocabulary used during the sexual intercourse and games between Syn and Zhu Zhiyee is, however, coarse, and “the association of sex with coarseness is extremely common” (Pons 344). Pons states that “writing about sex is an attempt to overcome [the barriers of being ashamed of some human bodily functions], regarded as unnecessarily constrictive, and this is what makes it by nature transgressive, controversial” (344-45). Ng´s use of vocabulary in this novel is definitely controversial, indeed, so much so that it has been defined as banal or even farcical (Khoo 169-70).ConclusionThis paper has analysed the use of the words and expressions: “pig”, “pork” and “drowning in a pig’s basket” in Lillian Ng´s Swallowing Clouds. Moreover, the punishment of drowning in a pig’s basket has served as a means to study the topics of desire, transgression and eroticism, in relation to an analysis of the characters of Syn and Zhu Zhiyee, and their relationship. This discussion of various terminology relating to “pig” has also led to the study of the relationship between food and sex, and sex and literature, in this novel. 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