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  • Queensland University of Technology  (565)
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    Online Resource
    Online Resource
    Queensland University of Technology ; 2010
    In:  M/C Journal Vol. 13, No. 5 ( 2010-10-18)
    In: M/C Journal, Queensland University of Technology, Vol. 13, No. 5 ( 2010-10-18)
    Abstract: Introduction With a deluge of mouthwatering pre-publicity, the opening of The Spotted Pig, the USA’s first self-identified British-styled gastropub, in Manhattan in February 2004 was much anticipated. The late Australian chef, food writer and restauranteur Mietta O’Donnell has noted how “taking over a building or business which has a long established reputation can be a mixed blessing” because of the way that memories “can enrich the experience of being in a place or they can just make people nostalgic”. Bistro Le Zoo, the previous eatery on the site, had been very popular when it opened almost a decade earlier, and its closure was mourned by some diners (Young; Kaminsky “Feeding Time”; Steinhauer & McGinty). This regret did not, however, appear to affect The Spotted Pig’s success. As esteemed New York Times reviewer Frank Bruni noted in his 2006 review: “Almost immediately after it opened […] the throngs started to descend, and they have never stopped”. The following year, The Spotted Pig was awarded a Michelin star—the first year that Michelin ranked New York—and has kept this star in the subsequent annual rankings. Writing Restaurant Biography Detailed studies have been published of almost every type of contemporary organisation including public institutions such as schools, hospitals, museums and universities, as well as non-profit organisations such as charities and professional associations. These are often written to mark a major milestone, or some significant change, development or the demise of the organisation under consideration (Brien). Detailed studies have also recently been published of businesses as diverse as general stores (Woody), art galleries (Fossi), fashion labels (Koda et al.), record stores (Southern & Branson), airlines (Byrnes; Jones), confectionary companies (Chinn) and builders (Garden). In terms of attracting mainstream readerships, however, few such studies seem able to capture popular reader interest as those about eating establishments including restaurants and cafés. This form of restaurant life history is, moreover, not restricted to ‘quality’ establishments. Fast food restaurant chains have attracted their share of studies (see, for example Love; Jakle & Sculle), ranging from business-economic analyses (Liu), socio-cultural political analyses (Watson), and memoirs (Kroc & Anderson), to criticism around their conduct and effects (Striffler). Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal is the most well-known published critique of the fast food industry and its effects with, famously, the Rolling Stone article on which it was based generating more reader mail than any other piece run in the 1990s. The book itself (researched narrative creative nonfiction), moreover, made a fascinating transition to the screen, transformed into a fictionalised drama (co-written by Schlosser) that narrates the content of the book from the point of view of a series of fictional/composite characters involved in the industry, rather than in a documentary format. Akin to the range of studies of fast food restaurants, there are also a variety of studies of eateries in US motels, caravan parks, diners and service station restaurants (see, for example, Baeder). Although there has been little study of this sub-genre of food and drink publishing, their popularity can be explained, at least in part, because such volumes cater to the significant readership for writing about food related topics of all kinds, with food writing recently identified as mainstream literary fare in the USA and UK (Hughes) and an entire “publishing subculture” in Australia (Dunstan & Chaitman). Although no exact tally exists, an informed estimate by the founder of the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards and president of the Paris Cookbook Fair, Edouard Cointreau, has more than 26,000 volumes on food and wine related topics currently published around the world annually (ctd. in Andriani “Gourmand Awards”). The readership for publications about restaurants can also perhaps be attributed to the wide range of information that can be included a single study. My study of a selection of these texts from the UK, USA and Australia indicates that this can include narratives of place and architecture dealing with the restaurant’s location, locale and design; narratives of directly food-related subject matter such as menus, recipes and dining trends; and narratives of people, in the stories of its proprietors, staff and patrons. Detailed studies of contemporary individual establishments commonly take the form of authorised narratives either written by the owners, chefs or other staff with the help of a food journalist, historian or other professional writer, or produced largely by that writer with the assistance of the premise’s staff. These studies are often extensively illustrated with photographs and, sometimes, drawings or reproductions of other artworks, and almost always include recipes. Two examples of these from my own collection include a centennial history of a famous New Orleans eatery that survived Hurricane Katrina, Galatoire’s Cookbook. Written by employees—the chief operating officer/general manager (Melvin Rodrigue) and publicist (Jyl Benson)—this incorporates reminiscences from both other staff and patrons. The second is another study of a New Orleans’ restaurant, this one by the late broadcaster and celebrity local historian Mel Leavitt. The Court of Two Sisters Cookbook: With a History of the French Quarter and the Restaurant, compiled with the assistance of the Two Sisters’ proprietor, Joseph Fein Joseph III, was first published in 1992 and has been so enduringly popular that it is in its eighth printing. These texts, in common with many others of this type, trace a triumph-over-adversity company history that incorporates a series of mildly scintillating anecdotes, lists of famous chefs and diners, and signature recipes. Although obviously focused on an external readership, they can also be characterised as an instance of what David M. Boje calls an organisation’s “story performance” (106) as the process of creating these narratives mobilises an organisation’s (in these cases, a commercial enterprise’s) internal information processing and narrative building activities. Studies of contemporary restaurants are much more rarely written without any involvement from the eatery’s personnel. When these are, the results tend to have much in common with more critical studies such as Fast Food Nation, as well as so-called architectural ‘building biographies’ which attempt to narrate the historical and social forces that “explain the shapes and uses” (Ellis, Chao & Parrish 70) of the physical structures we create. Examples of this would include Harding’s study of the importance of the Boeuf sur le Toit in Parisian life in the 1920s and Middlebrook’s social history of London’s Strand Corner House. Such work agrees with Kopytoff’s assertion—following Appadurai’s proposal that objects possess their own ‘biographies’ which need to be researched and expressed—that such inquiry can reveal not only information about the objects under consideration, but also about readers as we examine our “cultural […] aesthetic, historical, and even political” responses to these narratives (67). The life story of a restaurant will necessarily be entangled with those of the figures who have been involved in its establishment and development, as well as the narratives they create around the business. This following brief study of The Spotted Pig, however, written without the assistance of the establishment’s personnel, aims to outline a life story for this eatery in order to reflect upon the pig’s place in contemporary dining practice in New York as raw foodstuff, fashionable comestible, product, brand, symbol and marketing tool, as well as, at times, purely as an animal identity. The Spotted Pig Widely profiled before it even opened, The Spotted Pig is reportedly one of the city’s “most popular” restaurants (Michelin 349). It is profiled in all the city guidebooks I could locate in print and online, featuring in some of these as a key stop on recommended itineraries (see, for instance, Otis 39). A number of these proclaim it to be the USA’s first ‘gastropub’—the term first used in 1991 in the UK to describe a casual hotel/bar with good food and reasonable prices (Farley). The Spotted Pig is thus styled on a shabby-chic version of a traditional British hotel, featuring a cluttered-but-well arranged use of pig-themed objects and illustrations that is described by latest Michelin Green Guide of New York City as “a country-cute décor that still manages to be hip” (Michelin 349). From the three-dimensional carved pig hanging above the entrance in a homage to the shingles of traditional British hotels, to the use of its image on the menu, website and souvenir tee-shirts, the pig as motif proceeds its use as a foodstuff menu item. So much so, that the restaurant is often (affectionately) referred to by patrons and reviewers simply as ‘The Pig’. The restaurant has become so well known in New York in the relatively brief time it has been operating that it has not only featured in a number of novels and memoirs, but, moreover, little or no explanation has been deemed necessary as the signifier of “The Spotted Pig” appears to convey everything that needs to be said about an eatery of quality and fashion. In the thriller Lethal Experiment: A Donovan Creed Novel, when John Locke’s hero has to leave the restaurant and becomes involved in a series of dangerous escapades, he wants nothing more but to get back to his dinner (107, 115). The restaurant is also mentioned a number of times in Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell’s Lipstick Jungle in relation to a (fictional) new movie of the same name. The joke in the book is that the character doesn’t know of the restaurant (26). In David Goodwillie’s American Subversive, the story of a journalist-turned-blogger and a homegrown terrorist set in New York, the narrator refers to “Scarlett Johansson, for instance, and the hostess at the Spotted Pig” (203-4) as the epitome of attractiveness. The Spotted Pig is also mentioned in Suzanne Guillette’s memoir, Much to Your Chagrin, when the narrator is on a dinner date but fears running into her ex-boyfriend: ‘Jack lives somewhere in this vicinity […] Vaguely, you recall him telling you he was not too far from the Spotted Pig on Greenwich—now, was it Greenwich Avenue or Greenwich Street?’ (361). The author presumes readers know the right answer in order to build tension in this scene. Although this success is usually credited to the joint efforts of backer, music executive turned restaurateur Ken Friedman, his partner, well-known chef, restaurateur, author and television personality Mario Batali, and their UK-born and trained chef, April Bloomfield (see, for instance, Batali), a significant part has been built on Bloomfield’s pork cookery. The very idea of a “spotted pig” itself raises a central tenet of Bloomfield’s pork/food philosophy which is sustainable and organic. That is, not the mass produced, industrially farmed pig which produces a leaner meat, but the fatty, tastier varieties of pig such as the heritage six-spotted Berkshire which is “darker, more heavily marbled with fat, juicier and richer-tasting than most pork” (Fabricant). Bloomfield has, indeed, made pig’s ears—long a Chinese restaurant staple in the city and a key ingredient of Southern US soul food as well as some traditional Japanese and Spanish dishes—fashionable fare in the city, and her current incarnation, a crispy pig’s ear salad with lemon caper dressing (TSP 2010) is much acclaimed by reviewers. This approach to ingredients—using the ‘whole beast’, local whenever possible, and the concentration on pork—has been underlined and enhanced by a continuing relationship with UK chef Fergus Henderson. In his series of London restaurants under the banner of “St. John”, Henderson is famed for the approach to pork cookery outlined in his two books Nose to Tail Eating: A Kind of British Cooking, published in 1999 (re-published both in the UK and the US as The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating), and Beyond Nose to Tail: A Kind of British Cooking: Part II (coauthored with Justin Piers Gellatly in 2007). Henderson has indeed been identified as starting a trend in dining and food publishing, focusing on sustainably using as food the entirety of any animal killed for this purpose, but which mostly focuses on using all parts of pigs. In publishing, this includes Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s The River Cottage Meat Book, Peter Kaminsky’s Pig Perfect, subtitled Encounters with Some Remarkable Swine and Some Great Ways to Cook Them, John Barlow’s Everything but the Squeal: Eating the Whole Hog in Northern Spain and Jennifer McLagan’s Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes (2008). In restaurants, it certainly includes The Spotted Pig. So pervasive has embrace of whole beast pork consumption been in New York that, by 2007, Bruni could write that these are: “porky times, fatty times, which is to say very good times indeed. Any new logo for the city could justifiably place the Big Apple in the mouth of a spit-roasted pig” (Bruni). This demand set the stage perfectly for, in October 2007, Henderson to travel to New York to cook pork-rich menus at The Spotted Pig in tandem with Bloomfield (Royer). He followed this again in 2008 and, by 2009, this annual event had become known as “FergusStock” and was covered by local as well as UK media, and a range of US food weblogs. By 2009, it had grown to become a dinner at the Spotted Pig with half the dishes on the menu by Henderson and half by Bloomfield, and a dinner the next night at David Chang’s acclaimed Michelin-starred Momofuku Noodle Bar, which is famed for its Cantonese-style steamed pork belly buns. A third dinner (and then breakfast/brunch) followed at Friedman/Bloomfield’s Breslin Bar and Dining Room (discussed below) (Rose). The Spotted Pig dinners have become famed for Henderson’s pig’s head and pork trotter dishes with the chef himself recognising that although his wasn’t “the most obvious food to cook for America”, it was the case that “at St John, if a couple share a pig’s head, they tend to be American” (qtd. in Rose). In 2009, the pigs’ head were presented in pies which Henderson has described as “puff pastry casing, with layers of chopped, cooked pig’s head and potato, so all the lovely, bubbly pig’s head juices go into the potato” (qtd. in Rose). Bloomfield was aged only 28 when, in 2003, with a recommendation from Jamie Oliver, she interviewed for, and won, the position of executive chef of The Spotted Pig (Fabricant; Q & A). Following this introduction to the US, her reputation as a chef has grown based on the strength of her pork expertise. Among a host of awards, she was named one of US Food & Wine magazine’s ten annual Best New Chefs in 2007. In 2009, she was a featured solo session titled “Pig, Pig, Pig” at the fourth Annual International Chefs Congress, a prestigious New York City based event where “the world’s most influential and innovative chefs, pastry chefs, mixologists, and sommeliers present the latest techniques and culinary concepts to their peers” (Starchefs.com). Bloomfield demonstrated breaking down a whole suckling St. Canut milk raised piglet, after which she butterflied, rolled and slow-poached the belly, and fried the ears. As well as such demonstrations of expertise, she is also often called upon to provide expert comment on pork-related news stories, with The Spotted Pig regularly the subject of that food news. For example, when a rare, heritage Hungarian pig was profiled as a “new” New York pork source in 2009, this story arose because Bloomfield had served a Mangalitsa/Berkshire crossbreed pig belly and trotter dish with Agen prunes (Sanders) at The Spotted Pig. Bloomfield was quoted as the authority on the breed’s flavour and heritage authenticity: “it took me back to my grandmother’s kitchen on a Sunday afternoon, windows steaming from the roasting pork in the oven […] This pork has that same authentic taste” (qtd. in Sanders). Bloomfield has also used this expert profile to support a series of pork-related causes. These include the Thanksgiving Farm in the Catskill area, which produces free range pork for its resident special needs children and adults, and helps them gain meaningful work-related skills in working with these pigs. Bloomfield not only cooks for the project’s fundraisers, but also purchases any excess pigs for The Spotted Pig (Estrine 103). This strong focus on pork is not, however, exclusive. The Spotted Pig is also one of a number of American restaurants involved in the Meatless Monday campaign, whereby at least one vegetarian option is included on menus in order to draw attention to the benefits of a plant-based diet. When, in 2008, Bloomfield beat the Iron Chef in the sixth season of the US version of the eponymous television program, the central ingredient was nothing to do with pork—it was olives. Diversifying from this focus on ‘pig’ can, however, be dangerous. Friedman and Bloomfield’s next enterprise after The Spotted Pig was The John Dory seafood restaurant at the corner of 10th Avenue and 16th Street. This opened in November 2008 to reviews that its food was “uncomplicated and nearly perfect” (Andrews 22), won Bloomfield Time Out New York’s 2009 “Best New Hand at Seafood” award, but was not a success. The John Dory was a more formal, but smaller, restaurant that was more expensive at a time when the financial crisis was just biting, and was closed the following August. Friedman blamed the layout, size and neighbourhood (Stein) and its reservation system, which limited walk-in diners (ctd. in Vallis), but did not mention its non-pork, seafood orientation. When, almost immediately, another Friedman/Bloomfield project was announced, the Breslin Bar & Dining Room (which opened in October 2009 in the Ace Hotel at 20 West 29th Street and Broadway), the enterprise was closely modeled on the The Spotted Pig. In preparation, its senior management—Bloomfield, Friedman and sous-chefs, Nate Smith and Peter Cho (who was to become the Breslin’s head chef)—undertook a tasting tour of the UK that included Henderson’s St. John Bread & Wine Bar (Leventhal). Following this, the Breslin’s menu highlighted a series of pork dishes such as terrines, sausages, ham and potted styles (Rosenberg & McCarthy), with even Bloomfield’s pork scratchings (crispy pork rinds) bar snacks garnering glowing reviews (see, for example, Severson; Ghorbani). Reviewers, moreover, waxed lyrically about the menu’s pig-based dishes, the New York Times reviewer identifying this focus as catering to New York diners’ “fetish for pork fat” (Sifton). This representative review details not only “an entree of gently smoked pork belly that’s been roasted to tender goo, for instance, over a drift of buttery mashed potatoes, with cabbage and bacon on the side” but also a pig’s foot “in gravy made of reduced braising liquid, thick with pillowy shallots and green flecks of deconstructed brussels sprouts” (Sifton). Sifton concluded with the proclamation that this style of pork was “very good: meat that is fat; fat that is meat”. Concluding remarks Bloomfield has listed Michael Ruhlman’s Charcuterie as among her favourite food books. Publishers Weekly reviewer called Ruhlman “a food poet, and the pig is his muse” (Q & A). In August 2009, it was reported that Bloomfield had always wanted to write a cookbook (Marx) and, in July 2010, HarperCollins imprint Ecco publisher and foodbook editor Dan Halpern announced that he was planning a book with her, tentatively titled, A Girl and Her Pig (Andriani “Ecco Expands”). As a “cookbook with memoir running throughout” (Maurer), this will discuss the influence of the pig on her life as well as how to cook pork. This text will obviously also add to the data known about The Spotted Pig, but until then, this brief gastrobiography has attempted to outline some of the human, and in this case, animal, stories that lie behind all businesses. References Andrews, Colman. “Its Up To You, New York, New York.” Gourmet Apr. (2009): 18-22, 111. Andriani, Lynn. “Ecco Expands Cookbook Program: HC Imprint Signs Up Seven New Titles.” Publishers Weekly 12 Jul. (2010) 3 Sep. 2010 http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/book-news/cooking/article/43803-ecco-expands-cookbook-program.html Andriani, Lynn. “Gourmand Awards Receive Record Number of Cookbook Entries.” Publishers Weekly 27 Sep. 2010 http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/book-news/cooking/article/44573-gourmand-awards-receive-record-number-of-cookbook-entries.html Appadurai, Arjun. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspectives. Cambridge (UK): Cambridge University Press, 2003. First pub. 1986. Baeder, John. Gas, Food, and Lodging. New York: Abbeville Press, 1982. Barlow, John. Everything But the Squeal: Eating the Whole Hog in Northern Spain. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. Batali, Mario. “The Spotted Pig.” Mario Batali 2010. 3 Sep. 2010 http://www.mariobatali.com/restaurants_spottedpig.cfm Boje, David M. “The Storytelling Organization: A Study of Story Performance in an Office-Supply Firm.” Administrative Science Quarterly 36.1 (1991): 106-126. Brien, Donna Lee. “Writing to Understand Ourselves: An Organisational History of the Australian Association of Writing Programs 1996–2010.” TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses Apr. 2010 http://www.textjournal.com.au/april10/brien.htm Bruni, Frank. “Fat, Glorious Fat, Moves to the Center of the Plate.” New York Times 13 Jun. 2007. 3 Sep. 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/13/dining/13glut.html Bruni, Frank. “Stuffed Pork.” New York Times 25 Jan. 2006. 4 Sep. 2010 http://events.nytimes.com/2006/01/25/dining/reviews/25rest.html Bushnell, Candace. Lipstick Jungle. New York: Hyperion Books, 2008. Byrnes, Paul. Qantas by George!: The Remarkable Story of George Roberts. Sydney: Watermark, 2000. Chinn, Carl. The Cadbury Story: A Short History. Studley, Warwickshire: Brewin Books, 1998. Dunstan, David and Chaitman, Annette. “Food and Drink: The Appearance of a Publishing Subculture.” Ed. David Carter and Anne Galligan. Making Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2007: 333-351. Ellis, W. Russell, Tonia Chao and Janet Parrish. “Levi’s Place: A Building Biography.” Places 2.1 (1985): 57-70. Estrine, Darryl. Harvest to Heat: Cooking with America’s Best Chefs, Farmers, and Artisans. Newton CT: The Taunton Press, 2010 Fabricant, Florence. “Food stuff: Off the Menu.” New York Times 26 Nov. 2003. 3 Sep. 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/26/dining/food-stuff-off-the-menu.html?ref=april_bloomfield Fabricant, Florence. “Food Stuff: Fit for an Emperor, Now Raised in America.” New York Times 23 Jun. 2004. 2 Sep. 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/23/dining/food-stuff-fit-for-an-emperor-now-raised-in-america.html Farley, David. “In N.Y., An Appetite for Gastropubs.” The Washington Post 24 May 2009. 1 Sep. 2010 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/22/AR2009052201105.html Fearnley-Whittingstall, Hugh. The River Cottage Meat Book. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2004. Food & Wine Magazine. “Food & Wine Magazine Names 19th Annual Best New Chefs.” Food & Wine 4 Apr. 2007. 3 Sep. 2010 http://www.foodandwine.com/articles/2007-best-new-chefs Fossi, Gloria. Uffizi Gallery: Art, History, Collections. 4th ed. Florence Italy: Giunti Editore, 2001. Garden, Don. Builders to the Nation: The A.V. Jennings Story. Carlton: Melbourne U P, 1992. Ghorbani, Liza. “Boîte: In NoMad, a Bar With a Pub Vibe.” New York Times 26 Mar. 2010. 3 Sep. 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/fashion/28Boite.html Goodwillie, David. American Subversive. New York: Scribner, 2010. Guillette, Suzanne. Much to Your Chagrin: A Memoir of Embarrassment. New York, Atria Books, 2009. Henderson, Fergus. Nose to Tail Eating: A Kind of British Cooking. London: Pan Macmillan, 1999 Henderson, Fergus and Justin Piers Gellatly. Beyond Nose to Tail: A Kind of British Cooking: Part I1. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2007. Hughes, Kathryn. “Food Writing Moves from Kitchen to bookshelf.” The Guardian 19 Jun. 2010. 1 Sep. 2010 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jun/19/anthony-bourdain-food-writing Jakle, John A. and Keith A. Sculle. Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1999. Jones, Lois. EasyJet: The Story of Britain's Biggest Low-cost Airline. London: Aurum, 2005. Kaminsky, Peter. “Feeding Time at Le Zoo.” New York Magazine 12 Jun. 1995: 65. Kaminsky, Peter. Pig Perfect: Encounters with Some Remarkable Swine and Some Great Ways To Cook Them. New York: Hyperion 2005. Koda, Harold, Andrew Bolton and Rhonda K. Garelick. Chanel. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2005. Kopytoff, Igor. “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process.” The Social Life of things: Commodities in Cultural Perspectives. Ed. Arjun Appadurai.  Cambridge (UK): Cambridge U P, 2003. 64-94. (First pub. 1986). Kroc, Ray and Robert Anderson. Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald’s, Chicago: H. Regnery, 1977 Leavitt, Mel. The Court of Two Sisters Cookbook: With a History of the French Quarter and the Restaurant. Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing, 2005. Pub. 1992, 1994, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2003. Leventhal, Ben. “April Bloomfield & Co. Take U.K. Field Trip to Prep for Ace Debut.” Grub Street 14 Apr. 2009. 3 Sep. 2010 http://newyork.grubstreet.com/2009/04/april_bloomfield_co_take_uk_field_trip_to_prep_for_ace_debut.html Fast Food Nation. R. Linklater (Dir.). Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2006. Liu, Warren K. KFC in China: Secret Recipe for Success. Singapore & Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley (Asia), 2008. Locke, John. Lethal Experiment: A Donovan Creed Novel. Bloomington: iUniverse, 2009. Love, John F. McDonald’s: Behind the Arches. Toronto & New York: Bantam, 1986. Marx, Rebecca. “Beyond the Breslin: April Bloomfield is Thinking Tea, Bakeries, Cookbook.” 28 Aug. 2009. 3 Sep. 2010 http://blogs.villagevoice.com/forkintheroad/archives/2009/08/beyond_the_bres.php Maurer, Daniel. “Meatball Shop, April Bloomfield Plan Cookbooks.” Grub Street 12 Jul. 2010. 3 Sep. 2010 http://newyork.grubstreet.com/2010/07/meatball_shop_april_bloomfield.html McLagan, Jennifer. Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2008. Michelin. Michelin Green Guide New York City. Michelin Travel Publications, 2010. O’Donnell, Mietta. “Burying and Celebrating Ghosts.” Herald Sun 1 Dec. 1998. 3 Sep. 2010 http://www.miettas.com.au/restaurants/rest_96-00/buryingghosts.html Otis, Ginger Adams. New York Encounter. Melbourne: Lonely Planet, 2007. “Q and A: April Bloomfield.” New York Times 18 Apr. 2008. 3 Sep. 2010 http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/18/q-and-a-april-bloomfield Rodrigue, Melvin and Jyl Benson. Galatoire’s Cookbook: Recipes and Family History from the Time-Honored New Orleans Restaurant. New York: Clarkson Potter, 2005. Rose, Hilary. “Fergus Henderson in New York.” The Times (London) Online, 5 Dec. 2009. 23 Aug. 2010 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/food_and_drink/recipes/article6937550.ece Rosenberg, Sarah & Tom McCarthy. “Platelist: The Breslin’s April Bloomfield.” ABC News/Nightline 4 Dec. 2009. 23 Aug. 2010 http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/april-bloomfield-spotted-pig-interview/story?id=9242079 Royer, Blake. “Table for Two: Fergus Henderson at The Spotted Pig.” The Paupered Chef 11 Oct. 2007. 23 Aug. 2010 http://thepauperedchef.com/2007/10/table-for-two-f.html Ruhlman, Michael and Brian Polcyn. Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing. New York: W. Norton, 2005. Sanders, Michael S. “An Old Breed of Hungarian Pig Is Back in Favor.” New York Times 26 Mar. 2009. 23 Aug. 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/01/dining/01pigs.html?ref=april_bloomfield Schlosser, Eric. “Fast Food Nation: The True History of the America’s Diet.” Rolling Stone Magazine 794 3 Sep. 1998: 58-72. Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. Severson, Kim. “From the Pig Directly to the Fish.” New York Times 2 Sep. 2008. 23 Aug. 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/03/dining/03bloom.html Severson, Kim. “For the Big Game? Why, Pigskins.” New York Times 3 Feb. 2010. 23 Aug. 2010 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9502E2DB143DF930A35751C0A9669D8B63 & ref=april_bloomfield Sifton, Sam. “The Breslin Bar and Dining Room.” New York Times 12 Jan. 2010. 3 Sep. 2010 http://events.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/dining/reviews/13rest.htm Southern, Terry & Richard Branson. Virgin: A History of Virgin Records. London: A. Publishing, 1996. Starchefs.com. 4th Annual StarChefs.com International Chefs Congress. 2009. 1 Sep. 2010 http://www.starchefs.com/cook/icc-2009 Stein, Joshua David. “Exit Interview: Ken Friedman on the Demise of the John Dory.” Grub Street 15 Sep. 2009. 1 Sep. 2010 http://newyork.grubstreet.com/2009/09/exit_interview_ken_friedman_on.html Steinhauer, Jennifer & Jo Craven McGinty. “Yesterday’s Special: Good, Cheap Dining.” New York Times 26 Jun. 2005. 1 Sep. 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/26/nyregion/26restaurant.html Striffler, Steve. Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. The Spotted Pig (TSP) 2010 The Spotted Pig website http://www.thespottedpig.com Time Out New York. “Eat Out Awards 2009. Best New Hand at Seafood: April Bloomfield, the John Dory”. Time Out New York 706, 9-15 Apr. 2009. 10 Sep. 2010 http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/eat-out-awards/73170/eat-out-awards-2009-best-new-hand-at-seafood-a-april-bloomfield-the-john-dory Vallis, Alexandra. “Ken Friedman on the Virtues of No Reservations.” Grub Street 27 Aug. 2009. 10 Sep. 2010 http://newyork.grubstreet.com/2009/08/ken_friedman_on_the_virtues_of.html Watson, James L. Ed. Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia. Stanford: Stanford U P, 1997.Woody, Londa L. All in a Day's Work: Historic General Stores of Macon and Surrounding North Carolina Counties. Boone, North Carolina: Parkway Publishers, 2001.  Young, Daniel. “Bon Appetit! It’s Feeding Time at Le Zoo.” New York Daily News 28 May 1995. 2 Sep. 2010 http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/lifestyle/1995/05/28/1995-05-28_bon_appetit__it_s_feeding_ti.html    
    Type of Medium: Online Resource
    ISSN: 1441-2616
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    Publisher: Queensland University of Technology
    Publication Date: 2010
    detail.hit.zdb_id: 2018737-3
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    Online Resource
    Online Resource
    Queensland University of Technology ; 2003
    In:  M/C Journal Vol. 6, No. 2 ( 2003-04-01)
    In: M/C Journal, Queensland University of Technology, Vol. 6, No. 2 ( 2003-04-01)
    Abstract: The whole problem of speaking about the end…is that you have to speak of what lies beyond the end and also, at the same time, of the impossibility of ending. Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End(110) Jean Baudrillard’s insights into finality demonstrate that “ends” always prompt cultures to speculate on what can or will happen after these terminations and to fear those traumatic ends, in which the impossible actually occurs, may only be the beginning of chaos. In the absence of “rational” explanations for catastrophic ends and in the whirlwind of emotional responses that are their after-effects, the search for beginnings and origins – the antitheses of Baudrillard’s finality – characterises human response to tragedy. Strangely, Baudrillard’s engagement with the end is linked to an articulation predicated on our ability “to speak” events into existence, to conjure and to bridle those events in terms of recognisable, linear, and logical arrangements of words. Calling this verbal ordering “the poetry of initial conditions” (Baudrillard 113) in which memory imposes a structure so that the chaotic/catastrophic may be studied and its elements may be compared, Baudrillard suggests that this poetry “fascinates” because “we no longer possess a vision of final conditions” (113). The images of contemporary catastrophes and their subsequent visualisation serve as the ultimate reminders that we, as viewers and survivors, were not there – that visualisation itself involves a necessary distance between the horrified viewer and the viewed horror. In the case of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Centre, the need to “be there,” to experience vicariously a trauma as similarly as possible to those who later became its victims, perhaps explains why images of the planes first slamming into each of the towers were played and repeated ad nauseam. As Baudrillard suggests, “it would be interesting to know whether…effects persist in the absence of causes … whether something can exist apart from any origin and reference” (111). The ongoing search for these causes – particularly in the case of the World Trade Centre’s obliteration – has manifested itself in a persistent cycle of image production and consumption, prompting those images to serve as the visible/visual join between our own survival and the lost lives of the attacks or as surrogates for those whose death we could not witness. These images frequently allowed the West to legitimise its mourning, served as the road map by which we could (re-)explore the halcyon days prior to September 11, and provided the evidence needed for collective retribution. Ultimately, images served as the fictive embodiments of unseen victims and provided the vehicle by which mourning could be transformed from an isolated act to a shared experience. Visitors on the Rooftop: Visualising Origins and the Moments before Destruction It goes without saying that most have seen the famous photograph of the bundled-up tourist standing on the observation deck of the World Trade Centre with one of the jets ready to strike the tower shortly thereafter (see Figure 1). Though the photograph was deemed a macabre photo-manipulation, it reached thousands of e-mail inboxes almost two weeks following the horrific attacks and led many to ponder excitedly whether this image truly was the “last” image of a pre-September 11 world. Many openly debated why someone would fabricate such an image, yet analysts believe that its creation was a means to heal and to return to the unruffled days prior to September 11, when terrorism was thought to be a phenomenon relegated to the “elsewhere” of the Middle East. A Website devoted to the analysis of cultural rumours, Urban Legends, somewhat melodramatically suggested that the photograph resurrects what recovery efforts could not re-construct – a better understanding of the moments before thousands of individuals perished: The online world is fraught with clever photo manipulations that often provoke gales of laughter in those who view them, so we speculate that whoever put together this particular bit of imaging did so purely as a lark. However, presumed lighthearted motives or not, the photo provokes sensations of horror in those who view it. It apparently captures the last fraction of a second of this man’s life ... and also of the final moment of normalcy before the universe changed for all of us. In the blink of an eye, a beautiful yet ordinary fall day was transformed into flames and falling bodies, buildings collapsing inwards on themselves, and wave upon wave of terror washing over a populace wholly unprepared for a war beginning in its midst…The photo ripped away the healing distance brought by the nearly two weeks between the attacks and the appearance of this digital manipulation, leaving the sheer horror of the moment once again raw and bared to the wind. Though the picture wasn’t real, the emotions it stirred up were. It is because of these emotions the photo has sped from inbox to inbox with the speed that it has. (“The Accidental Tourist”) While the photograph does help the viewer recall the times before our fears of terrorism, war, and death were realised, this image does not episodically capture “the last fraction of a second” in a man’s life, nor does it give credibility to the “blink-of-an-eye” shifts between beautiful and battered worlds. The photographic analysis provided by Urban Legends serves as a retrospective means of condensing the space of time in which we must imagine the inevitable suffering of unseen individuals. Yet, the video of the towers, from the initial impacts to their collapse, measured approximately 102 minutes – a massive space of time in which victims surely contemplated escape, the inevitability of escape, the possibility of their death, and, ultimately, the impossibility of their survival (“Remains of a Day” 58). Post-traumatic visualising serves as the basis for constructing the extended horror as instantaneous, a projection that reflects how we hoped the situation might be for those who experienced it, rather than an accurate representation of the lengthy period of time between the beginning and end of the attacks. The photograph of the “accidental tourist” does not subscribe to the usual tenets of photography that suggest the image we see is, to quote W.J.T. Mitchell, “a purely objective transcript of reality” (Mitchell 281). Rather, this image invites a Burginian “inva[sion] by language in the very moment it is looked at: in memory, in association, [where] snatches of words and images continually intermingle and exchange one for the other” (Burgin 51). One sees the tourist in the photograph as a smiling innocent, posing at the wrong place and at the wrong time. Through that ascription, viewers may justify their anger and melancholy as this singular, visible body (about to be harmed) stands in for countless, unseen others awaiting the same fate. Its discrepancies with the actual opening hours of the WTC observation deck and the positioning of the aircraft largely ignored, the “accidental tourist” photo-manipulation was visualised by countless individuals and forwarded to a plethora of in-boxes because September 11 realities could not be shared intimately on that day, because the death of aircraft passengers, WTC workers, and rescue personnel was an inevitable outcome that could not be visualised as even remotely “actual” or explainable. Computer-based art and design have shown us that approximations to reality often result in its overall conflation. Accordingly, our desperate hope that we have seen glimpses of the moments before tragedy is ultimately dismantled by an acknowledgement of the illogical or impossible elements that go against the basic rules of visualisation. The “accidental tourist” is a phenomenon that not only epitomises Baudrillard’s search for origins in the wake of catastrophic effects, but underscores a collective need t o visualise bodies as once-living rather than presently and inevitably dead. Faces in the Smoke: Visualising the Unseen Although such photo-manipulations were rampant in the days and weeks following the attack, many people constructed their own realities in the untouched images that the media streamed to them. The World Trade Centre disaster seemed to implore photography, in particular, to resurrect both the unseen, unremembered moments prior to the airliners’ slamming into the building and to perform two distinct roles as the towers burned: to reaffirm the public’s perception of the attack as an act of evil and to catalyse a sense of hope that those who perished were touched by God or ushered peacefully to their deaths. Within hours of the attacks, photographic stills captured what many thought to be the image of Satan – complete with horns, face, eyes, nose, and mouth – within the plumes of smoke billowing from one of the towers (see Figure 2 and its detail in Figure 3). The Associated Press, whose footage was most frequently used to reference this visual phenomenon, quickly dismissed the speculation; as Vin Alabiso, an executive photo editor for AP, observed: AP has a very strict policy which prohibits the alteration of the content of a photo in any way…The smoke in this photo combined with light and shadow has created an image which readers have seen in different ways. (“Angel or Devil?”) Although Alabiso’s comments defended the authenticity of the photographs, they also suggested the ways in which visual representation and perception could be affected by catastrophic circumstances. While many observers openly questioned whether the photographs had been “doctored,” others all too willingly invested these images with ethereal qualities by asking if the “face” they saw was that of Satan – a question mirroring their belief that such an act of terrorism was clear evidence of evil masterminding. If, as Mitchell has theorised, photographs function through a dialogical exchange of connotative and denotative messages, the photographs of the burning towers instead bombarded viewers with largely connotative messages – in other words, nothing that could precisely link specific bodies to the catastrophe. The visualising of Satan’s face happens not because Satan actually dwells within the plumes of smoke, but because the photograph resists Mitchell’s dialogue with the melancholic eye. The photograph refuses to “speak” for the individuals we know are suffering behind the layers of smoke, so our own eye constructs what the photograph will not reveal: the “face” of a reality we wish to be represented as deplorably and unquestionably evil. Barthes has observed that such “variation in readings is not … anarchic, [but] depends on the different types of knowledge … invested in the image…” (Barthes 46). In traumatic situations, one might amend this analysis to state that these various readings occur because of gaps in this knowledge and because visualisation transforms into an act based on knowledge that we wish we had, that we wish we could share with victims and fellow mourners. These visualisations highlight a desperate need to bridge the viewer’s experience of survival and their concomitant knowledge of others’ deaths and to link the “safe” visualisation of the catastrophic with the utter submission to catastrophe likely felt by those who died. Explaining the faces in the smoke as “natural indentations” as Alabiso did may be the technical and emotionally neutral means of cataloguing these images; however, the spotting of faces in photographic stills is a mechanism of visualisation that humanises a tragedy in which physical bodies (their death, their mutilation) cannot be seen. Other people who saw photographic stills from other angles and degrees of proximity were quick to highlight the presence of angels in the smoke, as captured by WABC from a perspective entirely different from that in Figure 2 (instead, see Figure 3). In either scenario, photography allows the visual personification of redemptive or evil influences, as well as the ability to visualise the tragedy not just as the isolated destruction of an architectural marvel, but as a crime against humanity with cosmic importance. Sharing the Fall: Desperation and the Photographing of Falling Bodies Perhaps what became even more troubling than the imagistic conjuring of human forms within the smoke was the photographing of bodies falling from the upper floors of the North Tower (see Figure 5). Though newspapers (re-)published photographs of the debris and hysteria of the attacks and television networks (re-)broadcast video sequences of the planes’ crashing into the towers and their collapse, the pictures of people jumping from the building were rarely circulated by the media. Dennis Cauchon and Martha T. Moore characterised these consequences of the terrorist attacks as “the most sensitive aspect of the Sept. 11 tragedy … [that] shocked the nation” (Cauchon and Moore). A delicate balance certainly existed between the media’s desire to associate faces with the feelings of desperation we know those who died must have experienced and a now-numb general public who ascribed to the photographs an unequivocal “too-muchness.” To read about those who jumped to escape smoke and flames reveals a horrific and frightfully swift narrative of panic: For those who jumped, the fall lasted 10 seconds. They struck the ground at just less than 150 miles per hour – not fast enough to cause unconsciousness while falling, but fast enough to ensure instant death on impact. People jumped from all four sides of the north tower. They jumped alone, in pairs and in groups. (Cauchon and Moore) The text contextualises these leaps to death in terms that are understandable to survivors who read the story and later discover these descriptions can never approximate the trauma of “being there”: Why did they jump? How fast were they travelling? Did they feel anything when their bodies hit the ground? Were they conscious during their jump? Did they die alone? These questions and their answers put into motion the very moment that the photograph of the jumping man has frozen. Words act as extensions of the physical boundaries of the photograph and underscore the horror of that image, from the description of the conditions that prompted the jump to the pondering of the death that was its consequence. If, as Jonathan Crary’s analysis of photographic viewing might intimate, visualisation prompts both an “autonomy of vision” and a “standardisation and regulation of the observer” (Crary 150), the photograph of a man plummeting to his death fashions the viewer’s eye as autonomous and alive because the image he/she views is the undeniable representation of a now-deceased Other. Yet, as seen in the often-hysterical responses to the threats of terrorism in the days following September 11, this “Other” embodies the very possibility of our own demise. Suddenly, the man we see in mid-air becomes the visualised “Every(wo)man” whose photographic representation also represents our unacknowledged vulnerabilities. Thus, trauma is shared through a poignant visual negotiation of dying: the certainty of the photographed man’s death juxtaposed with the newly realised or conjured threat of the viewer’s own death. In terms of humanness, those who witnessed these falls firsthand recall the ways in which the falling people became objectified – their fall seemingly robbing them of any visible sense of humanity. Eric Thompson, an employee on the seventy-seventh floor of the South Tower, shared an instantaneous moment with one of the victims: Thompson looked the man in the face. He saw his tie flapping in the wind. He watched the man’s body strike the pavement below. “There was no human resemblance whatsoever,” Thompson says. (Cauchon and Moore) Obviously, the in-situ experience of viewing these individuals hopelessly jumping to their deaths served as the prompt to run away, to escape, but the photograph acts as the frozen-in-time re-visitation and sharing of – a turning back toward – this scenario. The act of viewing the photographs reinstates the humanness that the panic of the moment seemingly removed; yet, the disparity between the photograph’s foreground (the jumping man) and its background (the building’s façade) remains its greatest disconcerting element. Unlike those photographic portraits that script behaviours and capture us in our most presentable states of being, this photograph reveals the unwilling subject – he who has not consented to share his state of being with the camera. Though W.J.T. Mitchell suggests that “[p] hotographs…seem necessarily incomplete in their imposition of a frame that can never include everything that was there to be…‘taken’” (Mitchell 289), the eye in times of catastrophe shifts between its desire to maintain the frame (that does not visually engage the inferno from which the man jumped or the concrete upon which he died) and its inability to do so. This photograph, as Mitchell might assert, “speaks” because visualisation allows its total frame of reference to extend beyond its physical boundaries and, as evidenced by post-September 11 phobias and our responses to horrific images, to affect the very means by which catastrophe is imagined and visualised. Technically speaking, the negotiated balance between foreground and background in the photograph is lost: the desperation of the falling man juxtaposed with a seemingly impossible background that should not have been there. Lost, too, is the viewer’s ability to “connect” visually with – literally, to share – that experience, to see oneself within the contexts of that particular visual representation. This inability to see the viewing self in the photograph is an ironic moment of experiential possibility that lingers still in the Western world’s fears surrounding terrorism: when the supposedly impossible act is finally visualised, territorialised, and rendered as possible. Dead Art: The Destructions and Resurrections of Works by Rodin In many ways, the photographing of those experiences so divorced from our own contributed to intense discussions of perspective in visualisation: the viewer’s witnessing of trauma by means of a camera and photographer that captured the image from a “safe” distance. However, the recovery of artwork that actually suffered damage as a result of the World Trade Centre collapse prompted many art historians and theorists to ponder the possibilities of art’s death and to contemplate the fate of art that is physically victimised. In an anticipatory vein, J.M. Bernstein suggests that “art ends as it becomes progressively further distanced from truth and moral goodness, as it loses its capacity to speak the truth about our most fundamental categorical engagements…” (Bernstein 5). If Bernstein’s theory is applied to those works damaged at the World Trade Centre site, the sculptures of Rodin, so famously photographed in the weeks of excavation that followed September 11, could be categorised as “dead” – distanced from the “truth” of human form that Rodin cast, even further from the moral goodness and the striving toward global peace that the Cantor Fitzgerald collection aimed to embrace. While many art critics believed that the destroyed works should not be displayed again, many (including Fritz Koenig, who designed The Sphere, which was damaged in the terrorist attacks) believe that such “dead art” deserves, even requires, resuscitation (see Figure 6). Much like the American flags that survived the infernos at the World Trade Centre and Pentagon site, these lost and re-discovered artworks have served as rallying points to accomplish both the sharing of trauma and an artistically inspired foundation for the re-development of the lower Manhattan site. In the case of Rodin’s The Thinker, which was recovered at the site and later presumed stolen, the statue’s discovery alongside aircraft parts and twisted steel girders served as a unique and rare survival story, almost as the surrogate representative body for those human bodies that were never found, never seen. Dan Barry and William K. Rashbaum recall that in the days following the sculpture’s disappearance, “investigators have been at Fresh Kills [landfill] and at ground zero in recent weeks, flashing a photograph of ‘The Thinker’ and asking, in effect: Have you seen this symbol of humanity” (Barry and Rashbaum)? Given such symbolic weight, sculpture most certainly took on superhuman proportions. Yet, in the days that followed the discovery of artwork that survived the attacks, only passing references were made to those figurative paintings and drawings by Picasso, Hockney, Lichtenstein, and Miró that were lost – perhaps because their subject matter or manner of artistic representation did not (or could not) reflect a “true” infliction of damage and pain the way a three-dimensional, human-like sculpture could. Viewers visualised not only the possibility of their own cultural undoing by seeing damaged Rodins, but also the embodiment of unseen victims’ bodies that could not be recovered. In a rousing speech about September 11 as an attack upon the humanities and the production of culture, Bruce Cole stated that “the loss of artifacts and art, no matter how priceless and precious, is dwarfed by the loss of life” (Cole). Nevertheless, the visualisation of maimed, disfigured art was the lens through which many individuals understood the immensity of that loss of life and the finality of their loved ones’ disappearances. What the destruction and damaging of artwork on September 11 created was an atmosphere in which art, traditionally conjured as the studied and inanimate subject, transformed from a determined to a determining influence, a re-working of Paul Smith’s theory in which “the ‘subject’ … is determined – the object of determinant forces; whereas ‘the individual’ is assumed to be determining” (Smith xxxiv). Damaged sculptures gave representative form to the thousands of victims we, as a visualising public, knew were inside the towers, but their survival spoke to larger artistic issues: the impossibility of art’s end and the foiling of its death. Baudrillard’s notion of the “impossibility of ending” demonstrates that the destruction of art (in the capitalistic sense that is contingent on its undamaged condition and its prescribed worth and “value”) does not equate to the destruction of meaning as such, but that the new and re-negotiated meanings deployed by injured art frighteningly implicate us – viewers who once assigned meaning becoming the subjects who long to be assigned something, anything, be it solace, closure, or retribution. Importantly, the latest plans for the re-vitalised World Trade Centre site indicate that the damaged Rodin and Koenig sculptures will semiotically mediate the significations established when the original World Trade Centre was a vital nexus of activity in lower Manhattan, the shock and pain experienced when the towers collapsed and individuals were searching for meaning in art’s destruction and survival, and the hope many have invested in the new buildings and their role in the maintenance and recovery of memory. A Concluding Thought Digital manipulation, photography, and the re-contextualisation of artistic “masterpieces” from their hermetic placement in the gallery to their brutal dumping in a landfill have served as the humanistic prompts that actively determined the ways in which culture grappled with and shared unimaginable horror. Images have transformed in purpose from static re(-)presentations of reality to active, changing conduits by which pasts can be remembered, by which the intangibility of death can be given substance, by which unshared moments can be more intimately considered. Oddly, visualisation has performed simultaneously two disparate functions: separating the living from the dead through a panoply of re-affirming visual experiences and permitting the re-visitation of those times, events, and people that the human eye could not see itself. Ultimately, what the manipulations, misinterpretations, and destructions of art show us is that the conveyance of meaning between individuals, whether dead or alive, whether seen or unseen, is the image’s most pressing and difficult charge. Works Cited “Angel or Devil? Viewers See Images in Smoke.” Click on Detroit. 17 Sep. 2001. 10 February 2003 〈 http://www.clickondetroit.com/sh/news/stories/nat-news-96283920010917-120936.php 〉 . Barry, Dan, and William K. Rashbaum. “Rodin Work from Trade Center Survived, and Vanished.” New York Times. 20 May 2002: B1. Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. Baudrillard, Jean. The Illusion of the End. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994. Bernstein, J.M. The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992. Burgin, Victor. The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Post-Modernity. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1986. Cauchon, Dennis and Martha T. Moore. “Desperation Drove Sept. 11 Victims Out World Trade Center Windows.” Salt Lake Tribune Online. 4 September 2002. 19 Jan. 2003 〈 http://www.sltrib.com/2002/sep/09042002/nation_w/768120.htm 〉 . Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990. Mitchell, W.J.T. Picture Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago P, 1994. “Remains of a Day.” Time 160.11 (9 Sep. 2002): 58. Smith, Paul. Discerning the Subject. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988. “The Accidental Tourist.” Urban Legends. 20 Nov. 2001. 21 Feb. 2003 〈 http://www.snopes2.com/rumors/crash.htm 〉 . Links http://www.clickondetroit.com/sh/news/stories/nat-news-96283920010917-120936.html http://www.sltrib.com/2002/sep/09042002/nation_w/768120.htm http://www.snopes2.com/rumors/crash.htm Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Smith, Royce W.. "The Image Is Dying" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 〈 http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/09-imageisdying.php 〉 . APA Style Smith, R. W. (2003, Apr 23). The Image Is Dying. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6, 〈 http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/09-imageisdying.php 〉
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    Publisher: Queensland University of Technology
    Publication Date: 2003
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    Queensland University of Technology ; 2021
    In:  M/C Journal Vol. 24, No. 1 ( 2021-03-15)
    In: M/C Journal, Queensland University of Technology, Vol. 24, No. 1 ( 2021-03-15)
    Abstract: Introduction: Bubbles and Sport The ephemeral materiality of bubbles – beautiful, spectacular, and distracting but ultimately fragile – when applied to protect or conserve in the interests of sport-media profit, creates conditions that exacerbate existing inequalities in sport and society. Bubbles are usually something to watch, admire, and chase after in their brief yet shiny lives. There is supposed to be, technically, nothing inside them other than one or more gasses, and yet we constantly refer to people and objects being inside bubbles. The metaphor of the bubble has been used to describe the life of celebrities, politicians in purpose-built capital cities like Canberra, and even leftist, environmentally activist urban dwellers. The metaphorical and material qualities of bubbles are aligned—they cannot be easily captured and are liable to change at any time. In this article we address the metaphorical sporting bubble, which is often evoked in describing life in professional sport. This is a vernacular term used to capture and condemn the conditions of life of elite sportspeople (usually men), most commonly after there has been a sport-related scandal, especially of a sexual nature (Rowe). It is frequently paired with connotatively loaded adjectives like pampered and indulged. The sporting bubble is rarely interrogated in academic literature, the concept largely being left to the media and moral entrepreneurs. It is represented as involving a highly privileged but also pressurised life for those who live inside it. A sporting bubble is a world constructed for its most prized inhabitants that enables them to be protected from insurgents and to set the terms of their encounters with others, especially sport fans and disciplinary agents of the state. The Covid-19 pandemic both reinforced and reconfigured the operational concept of the bubble, re-arranging tensions between safety (protecting athletes) and fragility (short careers, risks of injury, etc.) for those within, while safeguarding those without from bubble contagion. Privilege and Precarity Bubble-induced social isolation, critics argue, encourages a loss of perspective among those under its protection, an entitled disconnection from the usual rules and responsibilities of everyday life. For this reason, the denizens of the sporting bubble are seen as being at risk to themselves and, more troublingly, to those allowed temporarily to penetrate it, especially young women who are first exploited by and then ejected from it (Benedict). There are many well-documented cases of professional male athletes “behaving badly” and trying to rely on institutional status and various versions of the sporting bubble for shelter (Flood and Dyson; Reel and Crouch; Wade). In the age of mobile and social media, it is increasingly difficult to keep misbehaviour in-house, resulting in a slew of media stories about, for example, drunkenness and sexual misconduct, such as when then-Sydney Roosters co-captain Mitchell Pearce was suspended and fined in 2016 after being filmed trying to force an unwanted kiss on a woman and then simulating a lewd act with her dog while drunk. There is contestation between those who condemn such behaviour as aberrant and those who regard it as the conventional expression of youthful masculinity as part of the familiar “boys will be boys” dictum. The latter naturalise an inequitable gender order, frequently treating sportsmen as victims of predatory women, and ignoring asymmetries of power between men and women, especially in homosocial environments (Toffoletti). For those in the sporting bubble (predominantly elite sportsmen and highly paid executives, also mostly men, with an array of service staff of both sexes moving in and out of it), life is reflected for those being protected via an array of screens (small screens in homes and indoor places of entertainment, and even smaller screens on theirs and others’ phones, as well as huge screens at sport events). These male sport stars are paid handsomely to use their skill and strength to perform for the sporting codes, their every facial expression and bodily action watched by the media and relayed to audiences. This is often a precarious existence, the usually brief career of an athlete worker being dependent on health, luck, age, successful competition with rivals, networks, and club and coach preferences. There is a large, aspirational reserve army of athletes vying to play at the elite level, despite risks of injury and invasive, life-changing medical interventions. Responsibility for avoiding performance and image enhancing drugs (PIEDs) also weighs heavily on their shoulders (Connor). Professional sportspeople, in their more reflective moments, know that their time in the limelight will soon be up, meaning that getting a ticket to the sporting bubble, even for a short time, can make all the difference to their post-sport lives and those of their families. The most vulnerable of the small minority of participants in sport who make a good, short-term living from it are those for whom, in the absence of quality education and prior social status, it is their sole likely means of upward social mobility (Spaaij). Elite sport performers are surrounded by minders, doctors, fitness instructors, therapists, coaches, advisors and other service personnel, all supporting athletes to stay focussed on and maximise performance quality to satisfy co-present crowds, broadcasters, sponsors, sports bodies and mass media audiences. The shield offered by the sporting bubble supports the teleological win-at-all-costs mentality of professional sport. The stakes are high, with athlete and executive salaries, sponsorships and broadcasting deals entangled in a complex web of investments in keeping the “talent” pivotal to the “attention economy” (Davenport and Beck)—the players that provide the content for sale—in top form. Yet, the bubble cannot be entirely secured and poor behaviour or performance can have devastating effects, including permanent injury or disability, mental illness and loss of reputation (Rowe, “Scandals and Sport”). Given this fragile materiality of the sporting bubble, it is striking that, in response to the sudden shutdown following the economic and health crisis caused by the 2020 global pandemic, the leaders of professional sport decided to create more of them and seek to seal the metaphorical and material space with unprecedented efficiency. The outcome was a multi-sided tale of mobility, confinement, capital, labour, and the gendering of sport and society. The Covid-19 Gilded Cage Sociologists such as Zygmunt Bauman and John Urry have analysed the socio-politics of mobilities, whereby some people in the world, such as tourists, can traverse the globe at their leisure, while others remain fixed in geographical space because they lack the means to be mobile or, in contrast, are involuntarily displaced by war, so-called “ethnic cleansing”, famine, poverty or environmental degradation. The Covid-19 global pandemic re-framed these matters of mobilities (Rowe, “Subjecting Pandemic Sport”), with conventional moving around—between houses, businesses, cities, regions and countries—suddenly subjected to the imperative to be static and, in perniciously unreflective technocratic discourse, “socially distanced” (when what was actually meant was to be “physically distanced”). The late-twentieth century analysis of the “risk society” by Ulrich Beck, in which the mysterious consequences of humans’ predation on their environment are visited upon them with terrifying force, was dramatically realised with the coming of Covid-19. In another iteration of the metaphor, it burst the bubble of twenty-first century global sport. What we today call sport was formed through the process of sportisation (Maguire), whereby hyper-local, folk physical play was reconfigured as multi-spatial industrialised sport in modernity, becoming increasingly reliant on individual athletes and teams travelling across the landscape and well over the horizon. Co-present crowds were, in turn, overshadowed in the sport economy when sport events were taken to much larger, dispersed audiences via the media, especially in broadcast mode (Nicholson, Kerr, and Sherwood). This lucrative mediation of professional sport, though, came with an unforgiving obligation to generate an uninterrupted supply of spectacular live sport content. The pandemic closed down most sports events and those that did take place lacked the crucial participation of the co-present crowd to provide the requisite event atmosphere demanded by those viewers accustomed to a sense of occasion. Instead, they received a strange spectacle of sport performers operating in empty “cathedrals”, often with a “faked” crowd presence. The mediated sport spectacle under the pandemic involved cardboard cut-out and sex doll spectators, Zoom images of fans on large screens, and sampled sounds of the crowd recycled from sport video games. Confected co-presence produced simulacra of the “real” as Baudrillardian visions came to life. The sporting bubble had become even more remote. For elite sportspeople routinely isolated from the “common people”, the live sport encounter offered some sensory experience of the social – the sounds, sights and even smells of the crowd. Now the sporting bubble closed in on an already insulated and insular existence. It exposed the irony of the bubble as a sign of both privileged mobility and incarcerated athlete work, both refuge and prison. Its logic of contagion also turned a structure intended to protect those inside from those outside into, as already observed, a mechanism to manage the threat of insiders to outsiders. In Australia, as in many other countries, the populace was enjoined by governments and health authorities to help prevent the spread of Covid-19 through isolation and immobility. There were various exceptions, principally those classified as essential workers, a heterogeneous cohort ranging from supermarket shelf stackers to pharmacists. People in the cultural, leisure and sports industries, including musicians, actors, and athletes, were not counted among this crucial labour force. Indeed, the performing arts (including dance, theatre and music) were put on ice with quite devastating effects on the livelihoods and wellbeing of those involved. So, with all major sports shut down (the exception being horse racing, which received the benefit both of government subsidies and expanding online gambling revenue), sport organisations began to represent themselves as essential services that could help sustain collective mental and even spiritual wellbeing. This case was made most aggressively by Australian Rugby League Commission Chairman, Peter V’landys, in contending that “an Australia without rugby league is not Australia”. In similar vein, prominent sport and media figure Phil Gould insisted, when describing rugby league fans in Western Sydney’s Penrith, “they’re lost, because the football’s not on … . It holds their families together. People don’t understand that … . Their life begins in the second week of March, and it ends in October”. Despite misgivings about public safety and equality before the pandemic regime, sporting bubbles were allowed to form, re-form and circulate. The indefinite shutdown of the National Rugby League (NRL) on 23 March 2020 was followed after negotiation between multiple entities by its reopening on 28 May 2020. The competition included a team from another nation-state (the Warriors from Aotearoa/New Zealand) in creating an international sporting bubble on the Central Coast of New South Wales, separating them from their families and friends across the Tasman Sea. Appeals to the mental health of fans and the importance of the NRL to myths of “Australianness” notwithstanding, the league had not prudently maintained a financial reserve and so could not afford to shut down for long. Significant gambling revenue for leagues like the NRL and Australian Football League (AFL) also influenced the push to return to sport business as usual. Sport contests were needed in order to exploit the gambling opportunities – especially online and mobile – stimulated by home “confinement”. During the coronavirus lockdowns, Australians’ weekly spending on gambling went up by 142 per cent, and the NRL earned significantly more than usual from gambling revenue—potentially $10 million above forecasts for 2020. Despite the clear financial imperative at play, including heavy reliance on gambling, sporting bubble-making involved special licence. The state of Queensland, which had pursued a hard-line approach by closing its borders for most of those wishing to cross them for biographical landmark events like family funerals and even for medical treatment in border communities, became “the nation's sporting hub”. Queensland became the home of most teams of the men’s AFL (notably the women’s AFLW season having been cancelled) following a large Covid-19 second wave in Melbourne. The women’s National Netball League was based exclusively in Queensland. This state, which for the first time hosted the AFL Grand Final, deployed sport as a tool in both national sports tourism marketing and internal pre-election politics, sponsoring a documentary, The Sporting Bubble 2020, via its Tourism and Events arm. While Queensland became the larger bubble incorporating many other sporting bubbles, both the AFL and the NRL had versions of the “fly in, fly out” labour rhythms conventionally associated with the mining industry in remote and regional areas. In this instance, though, the bubble experience did not involve long stays in miners’ camps or even the one-night hotel stopovers familiar to the popular music and sport industries. Here, the bubble moved, usually by plane, to fulfil the requirements of a live sport “gig”, whereupon it was immediately returned to its more solid bubble hub or to domestic self-isolation. In the space created between disciplined expectation and deplored non-compliance, the sporting bubble inevitably became the scrutinised object and subject of scandal. Sporting Bubble Scandals While people with a very low risk of spreading Covid-19 (coming from areas with no active cases) were denied entry to Queensland for even the most serious of reasons (for example, the death of a child), images of AFL players and their families socialising and enjoying swimming at the Royal Pines Resort sporting bubble crossed our screens. Yet, despite their (players’, officials’ and families’) relative privilege and freedom of movement under the AFL Covid-Safe Plan, some players and others inside the bubble were involved in “scandals”. Most notable was the case of a drunken brawl outside a Gold Coast strip club which led to two Richmond players being “banished”, suspended for 10 matches, and the club fined $100,000. But it was not only players who breached Covid-19 bubble protocols: Collingwood coaches Nathan Buckley and Brenton Sanderson paid the $50,000 fine imposed on the club for playing tennis in Perth outside their bubble, while Richmond was fined $45,000 after Brooke Cotchin, wife of team captain Trent, posted an image to Instagram of a Gold Coast day spa that she had visited outside the “hub” (the institutionally preferred term for bubble). She was subsequently distressed after being trolled. Also of concern was the lack of physical distancing, and the range of people allowed into the sporting bubble, including babysitters, grandparents, and swimming coaches (for children). There were other cases of players being caught leaving the bubble to attend parties and sharing videos of their “antics” on social media. Biosecurity breaches of bubbles by players occurred relatively frequently, with stern words from both the AFL and NRL leaders (and their clubs) and fines accumulating in the thousands of dollars. Some people were also caught sneaking into bubbles, with Lekahni Pearce, the girlfriend of Swans player Elijah Taylor, stating that it was easy in Perth, “no security, I didn’t see a security guard” (in Barron, Stevens, and Zaczek) (a month later, outside the bubble, they had broken up and he pled guilty to unlawfully assaulting her; Ramsey). Flouting the rules, despite stern threats from government, did not lead to any bubble being popped. The sport-media machine powering sporting bubbles continued to run, the attendant emotional or health risks accepted in the name of national cultural therapy, while sponsorship, advertising and gambling revenue continued to accumulate mostly for the benefit of men. Gendering Sporting Bubbles Designed as biosecurity structures to maintain the supply of media-sport content, keep players and other vital cogs of the machine running smoothly, and to exclude Covid-19, sporting bubbles were, in their most advanced form, exclusive luxury camps that illuminated the elevated socio-cultural status of sportsmen. The ongoing inequalities between men’s and women’s sport in Australia and around the world were clearly in evidence, as well as the politics of gender whereby women are obliged to “care” and men are enabled to be “careless” – or at least to manage carefully their “duty of care”. In Australia, the only sport for women that continued during the height of the Covid-19 lockdown was netball, which operated in a bubble that was one of sacrifice rather than privilege. With minimum salaries of only $30,000 – significantly less than the lowest-paid “rookies” in the AFL – and some being mothers of small children and/or with professional jobs juggled alongside their netball careers, these elite sportswomen wanted to continue to play despite the personal inconvenience or cost (Pavlidis). Not one breach of the netballers out of the bubble was reported, indicating that they took their responsibilities with appropriate seriousness and, perhaps, were subjected to less scrutiny than the sportsmen accustomed to attracting front-page headlines. National Netball League (also known after its Queensland-based naming rights sponsor as Suncorp Super Netball) players could be regarded as fortunate to have the opportunity to be in a bubble and to participate in their competition. The NRL Women’s (NRLW) Premiership season was also completed, but only involved four teams subject to fly in, fly out and bubble arrangements, and being played in so-called curtain-raiser games for the NRL. As noted earlier, the AFLW season was truncated, despite all the prior training and sacrifice required of its players. Similarly, because of their resource advantages, the UK men’s and boy’s top six tiers of association football were allowed to continue during lockdown, compared to only two for women and girls. In the United States, inequalities between men’s and women’s sports were clearly demonstrated by the conditions afforded to those elite sportswomen inside the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) sport bubble in the IMG Academy in Florida. Players shared photos of rodent traps in their rooms, insect traps under their mattresses, inedible food and blocked plumbing in their bubble accommodation. These conditions were a far cry from the luxury usually afforded elite sportsmen, including in Florida’s Walt Disney World for the men’s NBA, and is just one of the many instances of how gendered inequality was both reproduced and exacerbated by Covid-19. Bursting the Bubble As we have seen, governments and corporate leaders in sport were able to create material and metaphorical bubbles during the Covid-19 lockdown in order to transmit stadium sport contests into home spaces. The rationale was the importance of sport to national identity, belonging and the routines and rhythms of life. But for whom? Many women, who still carry the major responsibilities of “care”, found that Covid-19 intensified the affective relations and gendered inequities of “home” as a leisure site (Fullagar and Pavlidis). Rates of domestic violence surged, and many women experienced significant anxiety and depression related to the stress of home confinement and home schooling. During the pandemic, women were also more likely to experience the stress and trauma of being first responders, witnessing virus-related sickness and death as the majority of nurses and care workers. They also bore the brunt of much of the economic and employment loss during this time. Also, as noted above, livelihoods in the arts and cultural sector did not receive the benefits of the “bubble”, despite having a comparable claim to sport in contributing significantly to societal wellbeing. This sector’s workforce is substantially female, although men dominate its senior roles. Despite these inequalities, after the late March to May hiatus, many elite male sportsmen – and some sportswomen - operated in a bubble. Moving in and out of them was not easy. Life inside could be mentally stressful (especially in long stays of up to 150 days in sports like cricket), and tabloid and social media troll punishment awaited those who were caught going “over the fence”. But, life in the sporting bubble was generally preferable t o the daily realities of those afflicted by the trauma arising from forced home confinement, and for whom watching moving sports images was scant compensation for compulsory immobility. The ethical foundation of the sparkly, ephemeral fantasy of the sporting bubble is questionable when it is placed in the service of a voracious “media sports cultural complex” (Rowe, Global Media Sport) that consumes sport labour power and rolls back progress in gender relations as a default response to a global pandemic. Covid-19 dramatically highlighted social inequalities in many areas of life, including medical care, work, and sport. For the small minority of people involved in sport who are elite professionals, the only thing worse than being in a sporting bubble during the pandemic was not being in one, as being outside precluded their participation. Being inside the bubble was a privilege, albeit a dubious one. But, as in wider society, not all sporting bubbles are created equal. Some are more opulent than others, and the experiences of the supporting and the supported can be very different. The surface of the sporting bubble may be impermanent, but when its interior is opened up to scrutiny, it reveals some very durable structures of inequality. Bubbles are made to burst. They are, by nature, temporary, translucent structures created as spectacles. As a form of luminosity, bubbles “allow a thing or object to exist only as a flash, sparkle or shimmer” (Deleuze, 52). In echoing Deleuze, Angela McRobbie (54) argues that luminosity “softens and disguises the regulative dynamics of neoliberal society”. The sporting bubble was designed to discharge that function for those millions rendered immobile by home confinement legislation in Australia and around the world, who were having to deal with the associated trauma, risk and disadvantage. Hence, the gender and class inequalities exacerbated by Covid-19, and the precarious and pressured lives of elite athletes, were obscured. We contend that, in the final analysis, the sporting bubble mainly serves those inside, floating tantalisingly out of reach of most of those outside who try to grasp its elusive power. Yet, it is a small group beyond who wield that power, having created bubbles as armoured vehicles to salvage any available profit in the midst of a global pandemic. References AAP. “NRL Makes Desperate Plea to Government as It Announces Season Will Go Ahead.” 7News.com.au 15 Mar. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 〈 https://7news.com.au/sport/rugby-league/nrl-makes-desperate-plea-to-government-as-it-announces-season-will-go-ahead-c-745711 〉 . Al Jazeera English. “Sports TV: Faking Spectators and Spectacles.” The Listening Post 26 Sep. 2020 〈 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AlD63s26sQ & feature=youtu.be & t=827 〉 . 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Hooper, James. “10 Broncos Hit with Fines as Club Cops Huge Sanction over Pub Bubble Breach.” Fox Sports 18 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 〈 https://www.foxsports.com.au/nrl/nrl-premiership/teams/broncos/nrl-2020-brisbane-broncos-pub-covid19-bubble-breach-fine-sanctions-who-was-at-the-pub/news-story/d3bd3c559289a8b83bc3fccbceaffe78 〉 . Hytner, Mike. “AFL Suspends Season and Cancels AFLW amid Coronavirus Crisis.” The Guardian 22 Mar. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 〈 https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2020/mar/22/afl-nrl-and-a-league-press-on-despite-restrictions 〉 . Jones, Wayne. “Ray of Hope for Medical Care across Border.” Echo Netdaily 14 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 〈 https://www.echo.net.au/2020/08/ray-of-hope-for-medical-care-across-border 〉 . Jouavel, Levi. “Women’s Football Shutdowns: ‘It’s Unfair Boys’ Academies Can Still Play’.” BBC News 10 Nov. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 〈 https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-54876198 〉 . Keh, Andrew. “We Hope Your Cheers for This Article Are for Real.” The New York Times 16 June 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 〈 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/16/sports/coronavirus-stadium-fans-crowd-noise.html 〉 . Kennedy, Else. “‘The Worst Year’: Domestic Violence Soars in Australia during COVID-19.” The Guardian 1 Dec. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 〈 https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/dec/01/the-worst-year-domestic-violence-soars-in-australia-during-COVID-19 〉 . Keoghan, Sarah. “‘Everyone’s Concerned’: Players Cop 70% Pay Cut.” Sydney Morning Herald 28 Mar. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 〈 https://www.smh.com.au/sport/netball/everyone-s-concerned-players-cop-70-per-cent-pay-cut-20200328-p54esz.html 〉 . Knox, Malcolm. “Gambling’s Share of NRL Revenue Could Well Double: That Brings Power.” Sydney Morning Herald. 15 May 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 〈 https://www.smh.com.au/sport/gambling-s-share-of-nrl-revenue-could-well-double-that-brings-power-20200515-p54tbg.html 〉 . McGrath, Pat. “Racing Victoria Got $16.6 Million in Emergency COVID Funding: Then Online Horse Racing Gambling Revenue Skyrocketed.” ABC News 3 Nov. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 〈 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-11-03/racing-victoria-emergency-coronavirus-COVID-funding/12838012 〉 . McRobbie, Angela. The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009. Madden, Helena. “Lebron James’s Suite in the NBA Bubble Is Fit for a King.” Robb Report 16 Sep. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 〈 https://robbreport.com/travel/hotels/lebron-james-nba-bubble-suite-1234569303 〉 . Maguire, Joseph. “Sportization.” The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology. Ed. George Ritzer. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. 4710–11. Mathieson, Craig. “Michael Jordan Pierces the Bubble of Elite Sport in Juicy ESPN Doco.” Sydney Morning Herald. 13 May 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 〈 https://www.smh.com.au/culture/tv-and-radio/michael-jordan-pierces-the-bubble-of-elite-sport-in-juicy-espn-doco-20200511-p54rwc.html 〉 . Maurice, Megan. “Australia’s Summer of Cricket during COVID Is about Money and Power—and Men”. 6 Jan. 2021. 8 Mar. 2021 〈 https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/jan/06/australias-summer-of-cricket-during-COVID-is-about-money-and-power-and-men 〉 . Murphy, Catherine. “Cricket Australia Contributed to Circumstances Surrounding Ball-Tampering Scandal, Review Finds”. ABC News 20 Oct. 2018. 8 Mar. 2021 〈 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-10-29/scathing-report-released-into-cricket-australia-culture/10440972 〉 . News.com.au. “How an AFL Star Wide’s Instagram Post Led to a Hefty Fine and a Journalist Being Stood Down.” NZ Herald 3 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 〈 https://www.nzherald.co.nz/sport/how-an-afl-star-wifes-instagram-post-led-to-a-hefty-fine-and-a-journalist-being-stood-down/7IDR4SXQ6QW5WDFBV42BK3M7YQ 〉 . Nicholson, Matthew, Anthony Kerr, and Merryn Sherwood. Sport and the Media: Managing the Nexus. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2015. Pavlidis, Adele. “Being Grateful: Materialising ‘Success’ in Women’s Contact Sport.” Emotion, Space and Society 35 (2020). 8 Mar. 2021 〈 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1755458620300207 〉 . Phillips, Sam. “‘The Future of the Season Is in Their Hands’: Palaszczuk’s NRL Warning.” Sydney Morning Herald 10 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 〈 https://www.smh.com.au/sport/nrl/the-future-of-the-season-is-in-their-hands-palaszczuk-s-nrl-warning-20200810-p55k7j.html 〉 . Pierik, Jon, and Ryan, Peter. “‘I Own the Consequences’: Stack, Coleman-Jones Apologise for Gold Coast Incident.” The Age 5 Sep. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 〈 https://www.theage.com.au/sport/afl/i-own-the-consequences-stack-apologises-for-gold-coast-incident-20200905-p55spq.html 〉 . Poposki, Claudia, and Louise Ayling. “AFL Star’s Wife Who Caused Uproar by Breaching Quarantine to Go to a Spa Reveals She’s Been Smashed by Vile Trolls.” Daily Mail Australia 29 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 〈 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8674083/AFL-WAG-Brooke-Cotchin-breached-COVID-19-quarantine-spa-cops-abuse-trolls.html 〉 . Ramsey, Michael. “Axed Swan Spared Jail over Ex-Girlfriend Assault.” AFL.com.au 2 Dec. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 〈 https://www.afl.com.au/news/526677/axed-swan-spared-jail-over-ex-girlfriend-assault 〉 . Read, Brent. “The NRL Is Set to Finish the Season on a High after Stunning Financial Results.” The Australian 1 Dec. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 〈 https://www.theaustralian.com.au/sport/nrl/the-nrl-is-set-to-finish-the-season-on-a-high-after-stunning-financial-results/news-story/1ce9c2f9b598441d88daaa8cc2b44dc1 〉 . Reel, Justine, J., and Emily Crouch. “#MeToo: Uncovering Sexual Harassment and Assault in Sport.” Journal of Clinical Sport Psychology 13.2 (2018): 177–79. Rogers, Michael. “Buckley, Sanderson to Pay Pies’ Huge Fine for COVID Breach.” AFL.com.au 1 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 〈 https://www.afl.com.au/news/479118/buckley-sanderson-to-pay-pies-huge-fine-for-COVID-breach 〉 . Richardson, David, and Richard Denniss. “Gender Experiences during the COVID-19 Lockdown: Women Lose from COVID-19, Men to Gain from Stimulus.” The Australia Institute June 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 〈 https://australiainstitute.org.au/report/gender-experiences-during-the-COVID-19-lockdown 〉 . Rowe, David. “All Sport Is Global: A Hard Lesson from the Pandemic.” Open Forum 28 Mar. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 〈 https://www.openforum.com.au/all-sport-is-global-a-hard-lesson-from-the-pandemic 〉 . ———. “And the Winner Is … Television: Spectacle and Sport in a Pandemic.” Open Forum 19 Sep. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 〈 https://www.openforum.com.au/and-the-winner-istelevision-spectacle-and-sport-in-a-pandemic 〉 . ———. Global Media Sport: Flows, Forms and Futures. 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    ISSN: 1441-2616
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    Publisher: Queensland University of Technology
    Publication Date: 2021
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    Queensland University of Technology ; 2015
    In:  M/C Journal Vol. 18, No. 1 ( 2015-03-15)
    In: M/C Journal, Queensland University of Technology, Vol. 18, No. 1 ( 2015-03-15)
    Abstract: Authenticity is the value of our times. From reality television and self-help literature to expectations to find the “real you” in work, love and relationships, authenticity pervades contemporary social and cultural life (Vannini and Williams). In contemporary Western culture the ideal of living authentically, of being “true to yourself,” is ubiquitous. Authenticity is “taken for granted” as an absolute value in a multitude of areas, from music, to travel to identity (Lindholm 1). We seek to perform authentically, to consume authentic products and to be authentic people. To describe something as inauthentic is the critic's cruellest barb, implying that the product or person under review is contrived, insincere, or at worst, soulless.The prevalence of authenticity is linked to what Charles Taylor (26) calls the “massive subjective turn of modern culture.” As religion and other traditional forms of authority weaken in modern secular societies, individuals need to draw on their inner resources to find answers to life’s big questions. It is in this context that ethical ideals of authenticity—wrapped in notions of self-discovery, self-fulfilment and personal improvement—come to play a central role in modern Western culture. While Taylor posits that authenticity can be a worthwhile moral ideal, it has tended to get a bad wrap in much cultural diagnosis. From Lasch to Bauman, authenticity is routinely linked to narcissism and declining care for others.For this issue of M/C Journal we wanted to develop a more nuanced conception of authenticity that moved outside abstracted theoretical accounts such as those provided by Taylor, Lasch and Bauman. We wanted to curate an issue that captured the concrete and situated ways in which authenticity is mobilised in everyday life and use this to interrogate the meaning and consequences of authenticity for contemporary living. In aiming to do this, the issue builds upon a one-day symposium—Cultures of Authenticity—we organised in our roles as co-conveners of The Australian Sociological Association (TASA) Cultural Sociology group. The symposium was held at Flinders University City campus in Adelaide on 28 November 2014 and supported by TASA thematic group funding.Building on the focus of the symposium, we invited papers for this issue of M/C Journal to analyse the role of authenticity in late-modern life and its real world meanings, applications and consequences. We asked for papers to investigate the significance of authenticity across diverse areas of media and culture. The result is an exciting collection of articles that address authenticity from a variety of angles that draw upon established and innovative empirical sources, including blogs, internet forums, reality TV, radio transcripts, interviews and focus-groups.   Our feature article by Patrick Williams and Xiang Goh offers an emotionally powerful account of how discourses of authenticity are constructed on a breast cancer Internet forum. Using qualitative research methods, the article analyses two key dimensions of authenticity: 1) the existential, which focuses on cancer patients’ ability to face crisis and death; and 2) the interactional, which focuses on the collaborative making of the authentic cancer survivor.Nicholas Hookway and Akane Kanai also use online mediums to excavate contemporary applications of authenticity. Hookway uses blog data to show the prevalence of “being true to yourself” as a contemporary moral ideal, but suggests that the version of authenticity produced by the bloggers tends to miss the relational basis of self and morality. Kanai engages with the topic of authenticity as it applies to Tumblr blogs, arguing that they produce a concept of authenticity constituted in tension between individuality and belonging.The following three papers address the significance of authenticity in relation to work, religion and authenticity. Sara James shows that constructions of authentic selfhood in relation to work can offer existential answers to questions of meaning in disenchanted times. Steve Taylor looks at how authenticity as originality is claimed by alternative Christian communities and appropriated by mainstream groups in the UK while Ramon Menendez Domingo explores the different meanings that individuals from diverse ethnic backgrounds associate with being authentic. The next two papers address the production of authenticity in chat-based radio and reality TV. Kate Ames uses Kyle Sandilands to examine authentic performance in the chat-based radio genre, before Ava Parsemain moves our attention to how authenticity as truthfulness is deployed as a pedagogical strategy in the SBS show Who Do You Think You Are.Amy Bauder and David Inglis then close out the issue with analyses of country music and wine. Focusing on Bob Corbett and the Roo Grass Band, Bauder offers an ethnographic account of the role of authenticity in country music, arguing that family is used as a central vehicle to authenticate the genre. Inglis book-ends the issue by challenging readers to consider authenticity in wine production and consumption not simply as a social construction.Highlighting the importance of developing specific accounts of authenticity, Inglis argues that unlike the example of country music, authenticity in wine is never solely a cultural fabrication. Specifically, Inglis urges us to consider the importance of terroir to authenticity, not simply as the branding of place but also the physical and chemical components involved in wine making. Inglis’s paper was a fitting way to close the issue—it not only highlights the importance of authenticity as a modern value it also underscores the importance of historising the concept, demonstrating that demand for “authentic” wine is not just a modern value but one that has ancient roots.Putting together such a project involves the support and cooperation of a large numbers of people. Thanks to the authors for their wonderful contributions, the reviewers for their generous comments and The Australian Sociological Association, Flinders University and the Australian Cultural Sociology group for your support and advice. Thank you to Axel Bruns and the M/C Journal team for supporting not only this issue but also providing an exciting avenue to share new research and ideas.  This is an on-going project but we feel this issue makes an important contribution to the operationalisation and application of authenticity to the study of self, culture and society. We hope you agree.ReferencesBauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity, 2000.Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. New York: W.W. Norton and Co, 1979.Lindholm, Charles. Culture and Authenticity. Malden: Blackwell, 2008.Taylor, Charles. Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991.Vannini, Phillip, and J. Patrick Williams, eds. Authenticity in Culture, Self, and Society. Ashgate, 2009.
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  • 5
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    Online Resource
    Queensland University of Technology ; 2023
    In:  M/C Journal Vol. 26, No. 4 ( 2023-08-25)
    In: M/C Journal, Queensland University of Technology, Vol. 26, No. 4 ( 2023-08-25)
    Abstract: We are living in uncertain times. Recent and ongoing crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change and natural disasters, and increasing geopolitical and economic instability, have arguably led to a growing awareness of our existential precarity. Recent studies suggest that mental health is poor: among the general population, 24.4% experience anxiety and 22.9% suffer from symptoms of depression. These figures rise to an alarming 41.1% and 32.5% respectively in vulnerable populations (Bower et al.). As Maree Teesson, Director of the University of Sydney’s Matilda Centre for Research in Mental Health and Substance Use, points out, “what worries me is that rather than having an intense recovery phase [after the pandemic] in Australia we’ve had further crises, including marked increases in costs of living and natural disasters, all of which we know exacerbate mental health problems” (anon.). How do we not only survive but flourish in such times? As we are coming up against the financial as well as conceptual limitations of biomedically informed approaches to mental health (McDonald and Hollenbach 5), the therapeutic potential of the arts is receiving renewed attention. While art, music, and writing therapy are widely recognised, bibliotherapy, although practiced in clinical as well as many informal settings, is less prominent in our cultural imagination – perhaps because the creativity in the act of reading is less obvious, perhaps because our reading practices tend to bleed into each other: we read for pleasure, distraction, information, guidance, etc., often all at the same time. And yet, research shows that bibliotherapy can make significant contributions to mental health (Monroy-Fraustro et al.). In our article, we explore how the practice of Shared Reading, a form of creative bibliotherapy, can nurture the wellbeing of individuals and communities in our uncertain times. Neither a book club nor a self-help group, Shared Reading brings a small group of people together to listen to a story and a poem, which are read out by a trained facilitator, who gently guides the conversation to tease out the emotional undercurrents of the text, to reflect on literary characters and their predicaments, and generally use literature as a springboard for broader reflections on life and personal experience. The format combines the benefits of reading with those of being part of a community. The positive effects have been documented in a range of studies: Shared Reading has the capacity to reduce anxiety, alleviate symptoms of depression, increase confidence, and, importantly, create a sense of connectedness and social inclusion in a non-medicalised setting (see Billington Reading; Davis Literature; Dowrick et al.; Pettersson). While Shared Reading has been extensively researched from the perspective of specific mental health issues, less attention has been paid to how it contributes to an overall sense of flourishing in which a person feels good about their life (emotional wellbeing) and functions well within it (psychological and social wellbeing) – as opposed to subsisting in a state of languishing characterised by feelings of “emptiness”, “stagnation”, and “quiet despair” (Keyes 210), without amounting to actual mental illness (Keyes et al. 2367). The distinction between languishing and mental illness is crucial to avoid conflation of “normal human sadness” (Haslam and DeDeyne n.p.) and “common human sorrows – normality under severe strain” (Billington, Literature 2) – with the pathological psychological states of mental illness. Understanding what makes us flourish is important, not least because Keyes’s findings suggest that flourishing in life may foster resilience and provide a “stress buffer” against challenging life events and transitions (218), while languishing individuals may be more susceptible to mental illness (213). The flourishing individual, it seems, is better placed to make the best of ‘the mingled yarn’ of their life (All’s Well That Ends Well, Act 4, Scene 3). The workings and effects of Shared Reading can best be captured with current concepts of eudaimonic wellbeing, which expand Aristotle’s notion of human flourishing by integrating the fulfilment of psychological needs (see Huta; Besser-Jones). Aristotle’s idea of eudaimonia is characterised by reason and moderation in aiming for an embodiment of particular virtues or excellences. Ryan, Huta, and Deci update Aristotle’s normative concept of the good life into the mindful, freely chosen pursuit of intrinsic goals, such as personal growth, relationships, and community. A eudaimonic life, they argue, will satisfy basic psychological needs for autonomy, relatedness, and compe tence. Like Aristotle, they consider pleasure and positive affect as welcome by-products rather than goals in themselves. Besser-Jones concurs: we have needs to experience competency over our environments and as such to engage in experiences that allow us to exercise our skills; to experience belongingness with others, to both care for others and be cared for by others; to experience autonomy through selecting and pursuing goals with which we identify. When we engage in these activities in an ongoing fashion, we experience eudaimonic well-being. (Besser-Jones 190) Significantly, the eudaimonic life is one of active reflection and conscious volition (Besser-Jones 187), rather than passive acquiescence to either outside forces or inner drives. Mindfulness is a crucial ingredient, enabling a person to see “what is true” in their inner and outer experience (Ryan, Huta, & Deci 158). Research suggests that the fruits of such a life may include a sense of meaning, enhanced vitality, inner peace, and even physical health (Ryan, Huta, & Deci 161–2). Shared Reading contributes to eudaimonic wellbeing in several ways. Rather than fostering wellbeing through a cumulation of moments of hedonic pleasure (see Diener), Shared Reading does not provide exclusively pleasurable experiences; instead it creates “a little community ... whose first concern is the serious business of living” (Billington, Literature 132). While this undoubtedly affords moments of heightened positive affect, participants may also experience heightened negative affect. However, engagement with the negative through literature can, in fact, positively contribute to a deepened sense of purpose, meaning, and connection with others (Ryff & Singer 10), and thereby contribute to an improved sense of psychological wellbeing (Billington et al. 267-8; see also Davis et al., Literature 19) as tensions, uncertainties, and memories can be articulated, contextualised and, ultimately, integrated (McNicol 23–40). In that respect Shared Reading resonates with Vittersø’s reflection that “eudaimonic well-being is strange. It contains a kind of complex goodness that is not necessarily associated with pleasure – and it may be valued only after a bit of reflection” (Vittersø 254). As a practice, Shared Reading unfolds its full potential over time in accordance with eudaimonism, which defines wellbeing as “an active state ... that, while experiential, requires agency and ongoing activity” (Besser-Jones 187). Given the limited scope of this article, we want to focus on just some of the ways in which Shared Reading contributes to eudaimonic wellbeing by offering opportunities for self-growth and greater autonomy through a sense of connectedness, which may lead to a greater sense of overall liveness and a fuller experience of the amplitude of human life. Corcoran and Oatley note that “the interpersonal context in which to think about human challenges and complex, day-to-day human situations” in reading groups is “a luxury that is not typically afforded by pressured, busy and demanding lives, but which is invaluable as an underpinning life resource to enhance sustainable psychological wellbeing” (338). Throughout our exploration, we will draw on surveys and interviews with Shared Reading participants from a pilot study at La Trobe University, in which, together with Senior Lecturer Sara James, we ran five groups for eight weeks in a range of community settings in greater Melbourne. Three of these groups, at Yarra Libraries and the La Trobe University Library as well as the Warrandyte Neighbourhood House, were conducted face-to-face. Two more groups, one with outpatient cancer survivors at Ringwood Hospital and one with La Trobe University alumni, were held on Zoom. The study consisted of 27 participants – 20 female, 6 male, and one non-binary – ranging from young adulthood to elderly. All participants self-selected to join after advertising campaigns in conjunction with our partner institutions; participation in the research component of the project was entirely voluntary. All participants, whose statements we quote, have been de-identified. The positive effects on both a sense of personal autonomy and social connection are reflected in our research findings: 92.5% of the participants found they had grown more confident since joining the group. 92.6% of the participants reported that the groups helped them understand themselves better, while 77.7% found the sessions helped them relate to others in a deeper way. In Shared Reading the connection between reader and text expands into connections formed within the group. Recognising aspects of one’s own life in a story is powerful in “confirming that I am not entirely alone, that there are others who think or feel like me. Through this experience of affiliation, I feel myself acknowledged; I am rescued from the fear of invisibility, from the terror of not being seen” (Felski 54). In this way, even solitary reading has the capacity to normalise a broad range of individual experiences and to stave off loneliness. We find friends in books. In Shared Reading this moment of connection is intensified and multiplied by also offering recognition from others – groups bond quickly. Beth, a shy participant who struggles with anxiety, found “it was really, really special to find a way to really honestly understand someone else without judgement, which is hard to do”. She reported that the sessions had increased her confidence because she “felt seen” within the group. A number of participants commented on the depth and quality of the conversations and found the groups “nourishing” or “nurturing”. By focussing on the text, meaningful and even personal conversations spring up that are not easily had in other contexts. Such rich and intimate encounters with the text and others are predicated on the practice of joint “close” or “deep” reading. By immersing oneself in the text, the borders between self and text become porous. In “bringing the work into existence as an imaginary space within oneself” (Miller 38), we allow the text to “get under our skin” in an act of “compenetration” (Rosenblatt 12). This process holds significant transformative potential, as Radway notes: when reading, “‘I’ become something other than what I have been and inhabit thoughts other than those I have been able to conceive before” (13). Billington credits reading as a unique form of thinking in its own right (Literature 115–37). Thinking with the text collaboratively can deepen into self-reflection through our internal and external conversations with the voices of others (Archer 458–472). Self-reflexivity becomes a relational process in which individuals experiment with new modes of selfhood and ways of relating to others (Holmes 139–41). This resonates with research into Shared Reading, which suggests an “impact upon psychological wellbeing by improving a sense of personal growth through increased self-development” (Davis et al., Values 7). In fact, one of the strongest themes to emerge from the post-program interviews was how strongly participants appreciated the broadening of inner horizons through the group conversations. Reading itself offers “a literary rendering of how worlds create selves, but also of how selves perceive and react to worlds made up of other selves” (Felski 132). It involves exercising the imagination; it is the practice of “going out from one’s self toward other lives” and stimulates “sympathy, fellowship, spirituality and [the] morality of being human” (Donoghue 73; see also Charon). Shared Reading fosters self-growth as a relational activity, as group participant Ian describes: [Shared Reading] will open up a world to your own feelings and views ... and expand that beyond your expectations ... . As a group you have that cross-fertilisation of emotions, feelings, experiences. ... It is amazing what it will do for your own mental wellbeing, your own intellectual stimulation, and your sense of engagement with your fellow human being. Ian’ s statement captures something integral to Shared Reading and to eudaimonic flourishing: a sense of “liveness” and vibrancy. Participants experience the literature freshly during the session, without preparation – indeed without warning – as to what will be encountered (Davis, Reading 4). Participant Anna notes: “you really have to be in the moment, present to the text”. Nina likens this quality of attention to that of “meditating and connecting at the same time”, which resonates with the mindfulness of a eudaimonic life (Ryan, Huta, & Deci 158). Literature can enliven us by disrupting habitual patterns of response, defences, pat attitudes and opinions; it nudges us, so to speak, out of the “insidiously lazy default language” (Davis, Reader 3) of familiar, well-worn conceptual and linguistic paths into unexplored territory. The reader may be caught off guard when a story abruptly triggers an emotion, a memory, or some other element of inner experience (Billington, Literature 91–93), which then emerges, often haltingly, into the light of conscious thought. Such ambushing is recognised by both facilitators and researchers when a participant’s normal fluency falters or breaks down into a “creative inarticulacy” (Davis et al. 11–14) as they actively, arduously attempt to express what the literature has summoned (Billington, Literature 91–2). Such linguistic groping signals the emergence of fresh insight; it is personal growth in action. Anna relates how Sharma Shields’s story “The Mcgugle Account” exhumed a long-buried memory: “it really disturbed me a lot. And it was not until a week or so later that I recognised what it was … that it summoned up in me, a memory of something that had happened … [that] I’d always felt a lot of shame about. And I’ve never, I’ve never really shared it with anybody”. She continues, “and it was so good to talk about it and process something I’ve not been able to [indistinct] for 30 years”. Anna experiences a moment of “recovery” or “awakening” (Billington, Literature 88) as a “second chance” (Davis, Reading 14) to return to an experience and reframe, maybe even redeem it. Davis notes that literature widens and enriches the human norm [by] accepting and allowing for trauma, troubles, inadequacies, and other experiences usually classed as negative or even pathological. It is a process of recovery – in the deeper sense of spontaneously retrieving for use experiences and qualities that were lost, regretted or made redundant. (Davis et al. Values, 33) Similarly, Beth describes what happened when another participant recalled an argument with his ex-wife: we all laughed, really, which is quite a tender moment and it’s really a vulnerable expression of something that was potentially really painful in someone’s past. But for some reason we all laughed, and it was fine. He was happy with us laughing too …. . I can’t remember many, many moments like that where we just – yeah , collectively kind of laughed about this. This life. Yeah. The laughter shared during such moments expresses relief, reassurance that we are not alone in the painful experiences of “this life”. These are moments of connection and of re-storying or recuperating a painful past. The sense of vitality is often palpable, manifesting sometimes as an alert stillness – a taut “leaning in” (Davis et al., Value 9) to what’s being read –, at others as an eruption into laughter as we have seen. In its embrace of the full spectrum of human experience it is “as though literature itself said implicitly ‘Nothing human is alien to me’” (Billington, Literature 3). Within this capacious, generous space, participants can grow into a more expansive self-awareness. Beth explains: I find it hard to understand what I’m feeling sometimes and articulate that, and through the stories and through the group and through the process, I found that easier. Which was such a surprise to me. Because that wasn’t what I thought would happen. … I can’t quite place what it is about the experience that had that catalyst for me … . And there was something in each of the stories that was really relatable, and I found that it just drew something out of me that I wasn’t expecting then. “Alive”, “enriched”, and “stimulated” are some of the participants’ descriptors for how they feel in Shared Reading sessions. As with any practice, these feelings deepen and spread into other areas of life over time. Tom, who describes “reading as a way of life”, explains its power: “to be an appreciator of the text is a practice in itself without being a writer of text or a critic. … And the more I appreciate, the better my life becomes”. After the program, Beth reported that she started exploring the library in more detail, and one of the groups started meeting at the pub to share reading tips, discuss “ideas”, and catch up. As has perhaps become clear, in Shared Reading the individual aspects of a eudaimonic life work together synergistically to promote a sense of eudaimonic wellbeing. The attentive and sincere engagement with literature and its representations of human complexity facilitates connection and reflection that may inspire self-growth and an overall sense of vitality. In the practice of reading together these aspects remain entangled and interdependent, reinforcing each other over time into a sense of eudaimonic wellbeing that can accommodate pain or negative affect and potentially transform them into something meaningful. The process of restoration, of unfolding, articulating, and reintegrating what was submerged, considered lost, or pushed aside is never linear, often surprising, and never complete, just as expressions of eudaimonic flourishing are unique to each individual and bear all the complexity of human experience. References Anon. “Moving On from COVID Means Facing Its Impact on Mental Health, Say Experts.” Sydney University, 9 Mar. 2023. 〈 https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2023/03/09/moving-on-from-covid-means-facing-its-impact-on-mental-health--s.html 〉 . Archer, Margaret. Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Besser-Jones, Lorraine. “Eudaimonism.” The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Well-Being. Ed. Guy Fletcher. London: Routledge, 2015. 187–96. Billington, Josie. Is Literature Healthy? Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016. Billington, Josie, ed. Reading and Mental Health, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Billington, Josie, Rhiannon Corcoran, Megan Watkins, Mette Steenberg, Charlotte Christiansen, Nicolai Ladegaard, and Don Kuiken. “Quantitative Methods.” Reading and Mental Health. Ed. Josie Billington. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 265–92. Bower, Marlee, Scarlett Smout, Amarina Donohoe-Bales, Siobhan O’Dean, Lily Teesson, Julia Boyle, Denise Lim, Andrew Nguyen, Alison L. Calear, Philip J. Batterham, Kevin Gournay, and Maree Teesson. “A Hidden Pandemic? An Umbrella Review of Global Evidence on Mental Health in the Time of COVID-19.” Frontiers in Psychiatry 14 (Mar. 2023): 1–19. Charon, Rita. “The Narrative Road to Empathy.” Empathy and the Practice of Medicine: Beyond Pills and the Scalpel. Eds. H.M. Spiro, M.G. McCrea Curnen, E. Peschel and D. St. James. New Haven: Yale UP. 147-59. Corcoran, Rhiannon, and Keith Oatley. “Reading and Psychology I. Reading Minds: Fiction and Its Relation to the Mental Worlds of Self and Others.” Reading and Mental Health. Ed. Josie Billington. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 331–43. Davis, Philip. Reading and the Reader: The Literary Agenda. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013. ———. Reading for Life. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020. Davis, Philip, et al. Cultural Value: Assessing the Intrinsic Value of The Reader Organisation’s Shared Reading Scheme. The Reader Organisation UK, 2014. 〈 https://www.thereader.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Cultural-Value.pdf 〉 . Davis, Philip, et al. What Literature Can Do (An Investigation into the Effectiveness of Shared Reading as a Whole Population Health Intervention). The Reader Org anisation UK, 2015. 〈 https://www.thereader.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/What-Literature-Can-Do.pdf 〉 . Diener, Edward. The Science of Wellbeing: The Collected Works of Ed Diener. New York: Springer, 2009. Donoghue, Denis. The Practice of Reading. New Haven CT: Yale UP, 2000. Dowrick, Christopher, Josie Billington, Jude Robinson, Andrew Hamer, and Clare Williams. “Get into Reading as an Intervention for Common Mental Health Problems: Exploring Catalysts for Change.” Medical Humanities 38.1 (2012): 15–20. Felski, Rita. Uses of Literature. Chichester: Wiley, 2011. Monroy-Fraustro, Daniela, Isaac Maldonado-Castellanos, Monical Aboites-Molina, Susana Rodriguez, Perla Sueiras, Nelly F. Altamirano-Bustamante, Adalberto de Hoyos-Bermea, and Myriam M. Altamirano-Bustamante. “Bibliotherapy as a Non-Pharmaceutical Intervention to Enhance Mental Health in Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Mixed Methods Systematic Review and Bioethical Meta-Analysis.” Frontiers in Public Health 9 (Mar. 2021): 1-15. Haslam, N., and Simon De Deyne, “Mental Health vs. Wellbeing, Health and Medicine.”Pursuit 19 July 2021. 〈 https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/mental-health-wellbeing 〉 . McDonald, Robin Alex, and Julie Hollenbach. Introduction. Re/Imagining Depression: Creative Approaches to “Feeling Bad”. Eds. Julie Hollenbach and Robin Alex McDonald. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. 1–11. Holmes, Mary. “The Emotionalization of Reflexivity.” Sociology 44.1 (2010): 139–54. Huta, Veronika. “Eudaimonia.” Oxford Handbook of Happiness. Eds. Ilona Boniwell, Susan A. David, and Amanda Conley Ayers. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013. 201–13. Keyes, Corey L.M. “The Mental Health Continuum: From Languishing to Flourishing in Life.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 43.2 (June 2002): 207–22. Keyes, Corey L.M., Satvinder S. Dhingra, and Eduardo J. Simoes. “Change in Level of Positive Mental Health as a Predictor of Future Risk of Mental Illness.” American Journal of Public Health 100.12 (Dec. 2010): 2366–71. McNicol, Sarah. “Theories of Bibliotherapy.” Bibliotherapy. Eds. Sarah McNichol and Liz Brewster. London: Facet Publishing, 2018. 23–40. Miller, J. Hillis. On Literature. London: Routledge, 2002. Pettersson, Cecilia. “Psychological Well-Being, Improved Self-Confidence, and Social Capacity: Bibliotherapy from a User Perspective.” Journal of Poetry Therapy 31.2 (2018): 124–34. Radway Janice A. A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire. Chapel Hill: U North Carolina P, 1997. Rosenblatt, Louise M. The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois UP, 1978. Ryan, Richard M., Veronika Huta, and Edward L. Deci. “Living Well: A Self-Determination Theory Perspective on Eudaimonia.” Journal of Happiness Studies 9 (2008): 139–70. Ryff, Carol D., and Burton H. Singer. “The Contours of Positive Human Health.” Psychological Inquiry 9.1 (1998): 1–28. Vittersø, Joar. “The Feeling of Excellent Functioning: Hedonic and Eudaimonic Emotions.” Handbook of Eudaimonic Well-Being. Ed. Joar Vittersø. Cham: Springer, 2016. 253–76.
    Type of Medium: Online Resource
    ISSN: 1441-2616
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  • 6
    Online Resource
    Online Resource
    Queensland University of Technology ; 2023
    In:  M/C Journal Vol. 26, No. 1 ( 2023-03-14)
    In: M/C Journal, Queensland University of Technology, Vol. 26, No. 1 ( 2023-03-14)
    Abstract: Introduction Since his election to the papacy in 2013, Pope Francis has garnered international headlines for his environmental activism. His decision to adopt Francis as his papal name communicated to the public how his papacy would be advocating the environmental ethics associated with his namesake Saint Francis of Assisi. As part of his environmental activism and commitment to centring the socioeconomic injustices faced by the poor in public messages, Pope Francis deliberately incorporates modest, rather bare vestments into his papal uniform. He has emerged as a men’s fashion icon primarily due to his humble institutional uniform and public critiques of the wasteful consumerism commonly associated with contemporary consumer culture and the fashion industry. Pope Francis’s individualised approach to the papal uniform is not unique to his papacy. His selection of vestments and regalia is situated within a larger visual history of pontiffs selecting their religious uniform to brand and circulate their papal persona in public discourse and popular culture, evident through the actions of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. As the leader of the Catholic Church, the pontiff represents the institution’s brand identity. Following Naomi Klein’s analysis of institutional branding, the characteristics associated with a pontiff’s public image provide an opportunity for the Catholic Church to revitalise its image for global audiences (Klein “How Corporate”). Through a textual analysis of select media coverage of pontiffs and their approach to the papal uniform, this article discusses how Pope Francis’s religious uniform functions as a mechanism to extend the symbolic institutional power of the Catholic Church as a brand in popular culture by negotiating ideas of austerity. The Institutional Politics of the Uniform as a Form of Communication Fashion and clothing are important modes of communication that enable an individual to nonverbally signal their identity and belonging to various social groups, causes, and institutions (Barnard; Coghlan; Craik). An understudied but widespread element of everyday life, the uniform is a powerful signifier of the ideological and discursive formations reproduced by social institutions (Craik). Uniforms played not only an essential role for social organisation within modernity, but for Jane Tynan and Lisa Godson their materiality has significantly shaped the imagery of visual culture (8). Scholars including Jennifer Craik, William Keenan, and Q. Colville have addressed how uniforms negotiate gendered politics due to the prevalence of such garments within institutional spheres such as the military, healthcare, and religion. Influenced by Foucault’s view of the uniform as a mechanism to brand the body as under the power, authority, and control of the institution, Tynan and Godson have extended this argument to identify the relationship between uniforms, social structures, and violent practices of colonisation and imperial dominance (10-15). The institutional power of the uniform also extends to the papacy and the Catholic Church. In her historical analysis of papal regalia, Maureen C. Miller argues that during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the uniform may not have been viewed by large audiences, but popes were beginning to understand how their vestments were a powerful communicative tool shaping their public image. Combined with the increasing theatrically of the pontiff, Miller argues that “performative uses of clothing were significant not for the complexity of the messages they conveyed but for their strategic aim to make simple points memorably and to promote their diffusion” (293). Her analysis underscores how the papal uniform – and the individual way in which different pontiffs have approached donning vestments – represents a significant visual communicative history which continues to intensify in contemporary media culture. In a retrospective discussing papal regalia, Vanity Fair alluded to this extensive history. Evoking the theatricality discussed by Miller, Vanity Fair compared previous popes’ uniform choices to rap artists and the individuality of Sex and the City characters, noting that the Catholic Church’s leaders “have historically exhibited a daring sense of style over their 2,000 years in the high office” (Miller). Following Miller’s argument, Pope Francis’s approach to his papal uniform is purposefully designed to memorably communicative his environmental message, a core aspect of his brand identity. The message of his simple approach to the papal uniform cannot be adequately addressed without placing it within the sartorial choices of his predecessors, especially Pope Benedict XVI and his preference for communicating authority and power through opulence. Approaches to the Papal Uniform since the 1960s Fashion has always played a significant role in communicating the institutional power and brand identity of the Catholic Church. Beginning in the mid-1960s with the creation of the Second Vatican Council by Pope Paul VI, the vestments comprising the papal uniform became the subject of increased media attention. Pope Paul VI’s move towards eliminating the more ostentatious robes and accessories associated with the papacy included his “dramatic gesture” to auction a papal tiara – which The New York Times estimated was worth roughly $80,000 in 1964 – with proceeds donated to charities and organisations assisting the poor (“Pope Paul Donates His Jeweled Tiara to Poor of World”). In a sociohistorical analysis of papal fashion, The Guardian argued that the decision by Pope Paul VI to auction the accessories of the papal uniform that were intended to mediate the Catholic Church’s institutional power represented his mandate to appear “more in touch with the people” (Conway). Pope Paul VI’s understanding of the communicative power of the papal uniform to symbolise the institutional values of the Catholic Church’s brand identity draws parallels to Pope Francis. The strategic curation of papal vestments and accessories demonstrates that the role of institutional uniforms for practices of brand and image management is not unique to the contemporary cultural moment. Although Pope John Paul II was known to enjoy a fondness for Rolex watches (which Teen Vogue cites as an iconic papal fashion moment), the papacy of Pope Benedict XVI coincided with a drastic resurgence in the grandiose garments neglected by his predecessors (Webster). With a preference for pre-Vatican II luxurious self, velvet, and fur pieces like the cape-style mozzetta, The Guardian contends that Pope Benedict XVI’s papal uniform represented a shift away from the communal emphasis of Pope Paul VI towards reviving the Catholic Church’s hegemonic heritage and tradition within visual culture. The Guardian argues that “at a time of global economic uncertainty, and with the Church struggling to retain its flock in an increasingly secularised world, reinforcing tradition and underlining the continuity of ritual was a bold and, Benedict felt, necessary direction” (Conway). The newspaper situates Pope Benedict XVI’s sartorial preference for his papal uniform within the larger trend of couture houses like Alexander McQueen and Chanel revisiting their archives. Pope Benedict XVI’s papacy oversaw the Catholic Church experiencing a significant decline in global authority and symbolic power due to the continued fallout from numerous scandals, including the longstanding history of sexual abuse allegations and charges of embezzlement at the Institute for the Works of Religion, the official bank of the Vatican. Combined with his highly conservative doctrinal approach and unwillingness to adapt the church’s position on key human rights and social justice issues, including LGBQT+ acceptance within the institution, Pope Benedict XVI’s conspicuous taste and approach to the papal uniform was symbolic of his leadership. His regalia and vestments mediated an undesirable brand identity as a pontiff largely disconnected from the realities of his public. Pope Benedict was also reported by the press to enjoy conspicuous designer accessories, in particular his Gucci sunglasses and, most notably, allegedly preferred to wear Prada for his papal shoes. In line with his symbolic approach to the papacy, Benedict revived the wearing of red shoes by the pope (with red a signifier of martyrs’ blood). Esquire labelled Pope Benedict XVI as their 2007 “Accessorizer of the Year”, primarily for incorporating a signature “ornate” footwear into his institutional religious uniform (“Best Dressed Men in America”). Conversely, Pope John Paul II’s papacy signified a shift away from this aspect of the papal uniform, preferring burgundy over a blood red colouring. The Vatican subsequently corrected that Pope Benedict XVI’s red papal shoes were not Prada but rather commissioned specifically for him by Italian cobblers (Fetters Maloy). However, the idea that Benedict incorporated Prada shoes into the institutional papal uniform had become repeated by numerous cultural intermediaries ranging from the Associated Press to Women’s Wear Daily,to the extent that it is now entrenched into the popular imaginary. Upon his retirement in 2013, The Cut argued Pope Benedict would be primarily remembered for the “pair of bright red Prada loafers that he almost always wore beneath his robes” (Cowles). When Pope Francis arrived in Washington, D.C. for his 2015 visit to the United States, USA Today celebrated the event with the brazen headline, “Pope Francis arrives and he’s not the ‘Prada Pope’” (Puente). Reflecting upon his divisive legacy after his death in December 2022, The Daily Beast continued circulating this narrative, writing that when Benedict XVI was elected to the papacy, he donned “Prada slippers and stumbled his way through a papacy fraught with controversy” (Latza Nadeau). It is within this context of Pope Benedict’s hegemonically ornate approach to the papal uniform that Pope Francis’s modest and humble styling of his vestments registered with the public as a mechanism for branding his public image. The Role of the Uniform for Pope Francis’s Brand Identity For his public introduction after the 2013 papal conclave to those pilgrims gathered in St. Peters Square, Pope Francis shaped the tone, narrative, and messaging of his papacy through his unique and calculated approach to the Church’s institutional uniform. His decision to appear on the balcony wearing a basic white cassock with an unadorned crucifix around his neck exemplifies Tynan and Godson’s argument that uniforms can act as a form of “self-preservation” within the context of institutional power (18). Pope Francis is not only the pontiff, but his image and persona work to maintain the institutional brand identity of the Catholic Church (Moir). His selection and wearing of a cassock demonstrate that Pope Francis is aware of how his image and persona will be critiqued by the public and cultural intermediaries. Pope Francis’s first encyclical published in 2015, Laudato Si’, argues that the environmental crisis (which he blames on wasteful consumerism) disproportionally impacts on the planet’s most socioeconomically marginalised communities. The correlation of climate change with the injustices faced by the poor is highlighted by scholars including Bruno Latour and Anne F. MacLennan for exemplifying Pope Francis’s radical approach prioritising empathy to the papacy. Pope Francis’s uniform performs his environmental activism by signifying how discourses of sustainability and ethical consumption are core social justice issues for the Church. Through rejecting the opulent vestments for a modest white cassock and wearing sandals rather than red shoes, sartorial decisions were strategically made to communicate his symbolic approach to the papacy through the power of the uniform. His sartorial approach to the papal regalia comprising his religious uniform ignited extensive public conversations concerning how Pope Francis’s image – humble, modest, advocating for the poor, environmental activist – would improve the Catholic Church’s brand identity amidst numerous scandals. Fashion critic Vanessa Friedman’s discussion of Pope Francis is a potent example of the type of public commentary from cultural intermediaries that framed the symbolic power of his papal uniform for the Church’s re-branding efforts: Pope Francis hasn’t really had a chance to do anything in terms of influencing doctrine – except appear in moments broadcast to millions … they can all make their own assumption based on how he looks. There was a very clear rationale behind his decision to eschew the more fancy, ermine-trimmed red and purple robes of Pope Benedict in favour of plain white vestments; to swap the fold cross for an iron version. The choices telegraphed the importance of humility; the importance of recognizing and working with the poor; and the need, in a time of austerity, to acknowledge the suffering and deprivations of others. It was a discreet but unmistakable announcement of a new agenda, using the tools most immediately and least aggressively available. (“Pope and Circumstance”) Friedman’s analysis is particularly noteworthy because she underlines how the papal uniform has always been subject to personal interpretation based upon the brand identity of the pontiff. More significantly, she connects Pope Francis’s selection of papal regalia to his environmental politics and social justice activism. The uniform possesses greater symbolic power than Pope Francis’s actions. His uniform emphasises the frames, narratives, and discursive schemas grounding his brand identity that is then circulated by cultural intermediaries as in the example of Friedman’s analysis. In a feature detailing the impact of Pope Francis’s papacy on the fashion industry, The New York Times highlighted the cultural impact of the pontiff’s religious uniform. Italian fashion designer Silvia Venturini Fendi is cited by The New York Times as recognising the rise of sustainability in high fashion, making a direct association to Pope Francis’s criticism of wasteful consumerism: “we have a new pope going back to real Christianity, which lately was far from the church … . People are looking for meaning, and the real meaning of fashion is as a tool to express yourself. Sometimes fashion hides your language, but we look for meaning in materials and fabrics to allow true personality to come out” (Menkes). Esquire named Pope Francis their “Best Dressed Man of 2013”, an honour bestowed upon the pontiff for how his sartorial approach to the papal uniform signified the Catholic Church’s rebranding efforts. Justifying their selection over other candidates like Bradley Cooper and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Esquire cites New York University professor Ann Pellegrini, who situates Pope Francis’s papal uniform as a powerful signifier of his brand identity: “the humility of his garments offers a way to visibly display his theological and material concerns for the poor. This Holy Roman emperor really does have new clothes” (Berlinger). Fendi and Esquire’s positioning of Pope Francis’s papal regalia as an institutional yet personal communicative tool underscores how his religious uniform performs a critical function to reshape the public narratives and discourses shaping judgements on the Catholic Church. Pope Francis’s celebrity status and the deliberate rejection of lavish vestments helped initiate a wider discourse on the politics of the papal uniform in media and popular culture. In 2018, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute debuted their annual fashion exhibit Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination, showcasing both the influence of Catholicism for numerous designers (such as Alexander McQueen and Versace) as well as the visual politics of the Church’s institutional uniform (Bolton). The debut of Heavenly Bodies was the focus of the 2018 Costume Institute Gala, the prestigious – and highly exclusionary – annual fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Rihanna attended wearing a papal-inspired Margiela bejewelled minidress with a matching jacket and mitre (Syme). Proclaimed as “Pope Rihanna” by Twitter users, her choice of embodying an opulent imagination of the papal uniform received extensive attention by the press and the public on social media (“The Most Hilarious Twitter Reactions to Rihanna’s Met Gala Look”). Teen Vogue argued that Rihanna’s thematic outfit functioned as a form of activism by highlighting the gender discrimination within the organisational structure of the Catholic Church (Papisova). Despite advocating against social injustices, Pope Francis’s continued denial of women becoming priests remains one of the major criticisms of his papacy. Although Pope Francis has employed his papal vestments and regalia to perform a social justice-oriented mandate for his papacy, there are limits to the advocacy of his institutional uniform which must balance and negotiate the complex politics of the Catholic Church. Conclusion Papal vestments and regalia play an important communicative role in visual culture. Prior to 2018’s Met Gala, Vox argued that “instead of watching celebrities at the MET Gala Monday night, pay attention to what the pope wears everyday” (Burton). Vox highlights the symbolic power of the pontiff as an institutional figure to negotiate various trends and social shifts circulating in public discourse. Heavenly Bodies and the larger discussions by cultural intermediaries analysing papal fashion exemplifies how the papal uniform contributes to the symbolic power of the Catholic Church in public discourse and media culture. The papal vestments comprising the pontiff’s institutional uniform is a critical element of Pope Francis’s public persona, and his sartorial tactics signify a larger visual history of institutional branding through fashion. Pope Francis is an intriguing example of a celebrated public figure utilising the iconicity of his institutional uniform to mediate ideas about sustainability, environmental ethics, austerity, and consumption. However, cultural intermediaries focussing on the symbolism of such regalia shift attentions away from the Catholic Church’s institutional power and reduce opportunities to critique Pope Francis on key social justice issues, such as the treatment of women, the role of the Church in colonisation, and continued sexual abuse allegations. References Barnard, Malcolm. “Fashion as Communication Revisited.” Popular Communication 18.4 (2020): 259-271. Berlinger, Max. “The Best Dressed Man of 2013: Pope Francis.” Esquire, 27 Dec. 2013. 25 Jan. 2023 〈 https://www.esquire.com/style/mens-fashion/a26527/pope-francis-style-2013/ 〉 . “Best Dressed Men in America: The Awards.” Esquire, 20 Aug. 2007. 25 Jan. 2023 〈 https://www.esquire.com/style/a3312/bestdressedawards0907/ 〉 . Bolton, Andrew. Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018. Coghlan, Jo. “Dissent Dressing: The Colour and Fabric of Political Rage.” M/C Journal 22.1 (2019). DOI: 10.5204/mcj.1497. Conway, Henry. “Pope Benedict: His True Legacy is His Fashion Sense.” The Guardian, 3 March 2013. 25 Jan. 2023 〈 https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/fashion-blog/2013/mar/03/pope-benedict-true-legacy-fashion-sense 〉 . Cowles, Charlotte. “An Ode to Pope Benedict XVI’s Sassy Footwear.” The Cut, 11 Feb. 2013. 25 Jan. 2023 〈 https://www.thecut.com/2013/02/ode-to-pope-benedict-xvis-sassy-footwear.html 〉 . Craik, Jennifer. “The Cultural Politics of the Uniform.” Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture 7.2 (2003): 127-147. ———. Fashion: The Key Concepts. Berg, 2009. Fetters Maloy, Ashley. “The Hidden Meanings of Pope Benedict XVI’s Ruby-Red Shoes.” The Washington Post, 31 Dec. 2022. Friedman, Vanessa. “Pope and Circumstance.” Financial Times, 20 Mar. 2013. 25 Jan. 2023 〈 https://www.ft.com/content/e81f0f66-9234-11e2-851f-00144feabdc0 〉 . Keenan, William J.F. “Dissolving Vatican Uniform Hegemony: The Marist Road to Dress Freedom .” Uniform: Clothing and Discipline in the Modern World. Eds. Jane Tynan and Lisa Godson. Bloomsbury, 2019. 87-106. Klein, Naomi. “How Corporate Branding Has Taken Over America.” The Guardian, 16 Jan. 2010. 25 Jan. 2023 〈 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jan/16/naomi-klein-branding-obama-america 〉 . Latour, Bruno. “The Immense Cry Channeled by Pope Francis.” Environmental Humanities 8.2 (2016). 251-255. Latza Nadeau, Barbie. “Death of Pope Benedict XVI Raises Question of His Legacy as Protector of Predator Priests.” The Daily Beast, 31 Dec. 2022. 25 Jan. 2023 〈 https://www.thedailybeast.com/pope-benedict-xvi-will-be-remembered-as-the-enabler-and-protector-of-predator-priests 〉 . MacLennan, Anne F. “Promoting Pity or Empathy? Poverty and Canadian Charitable Appeals.” Advertising, Consumer Culture, and Canadian Society. Ed. Kyle Asquith. Oxford: Oxford UP 2019. 225-243. Menkes, Suzy. “Fashion and the Power of the Pulpit.” The New York Times, 15 July 2013. 25 Jan. 2023 〈 https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/16/fashion/16iht-frome16.html 〉 . Miller, Julie. “From Lipstick-Red Loafers to Pontiff Bling Rings, the Most Fascinating Papal Fashion Choices.” Vanity Fair, 14 Mar. 2013. 25 Jan. 2023 〈 https://www.vanityfair.com/style/photos/2013/03/pope-francis-jorge-mario-bergoglio-papal-fashion 〉 . Miller, Maureen C. “Clothing as Communication? Vestments and Views of the Papacy c. 1300.” Journal of Medieval History 44.3 (2018): 280-293. Moir, Aidan. Punk, Obamacare, and a Jesuit: Branding the Iconic Ideals of Vivienne Westwood, Barack Obama, and Pope Francis. 2021. PhD thesis. York University. 25 Jan. 2023 〈 https://yorkspace.library.yorku.ca/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10315/38473/Moir_Aidan_M_2021_Phd.pdf?sequence=2 & isAllowed=y 〉 . Papisova, Vera. “The Catholic Church Should Learn from Rihanna’s 2018 Met Gala Look.” Teen Vogue, 8 May 2018. 25 Jan. 2023 〈 https://www.teenvogue.com/story/the-catholic-church-should-learn-from-rihannas-2018-met-gala-look 〉 . “Pope Paul Donates His Jeweled Tiara to Poor of World.” The New York Times, 14 Nov. 1964. 25 Jan. 2023 〈 https://www.nytimes.com/1964/11/14/archives/pope-paul-donates-his-jeweled-tiara-to-poor-of-world.html 〉 . Puente, Maria. “Pope Francis Arrives and He’s Not the ‘Prada Pope.’” USA Today, 23 Sep. 2015. 25 Jan. 2023 〈 https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2015/09/22/pope-francis-arrives-and-hes-not-prada-pope/72634962/ 〉 . Syme, Rachel. “Pope Rihanna and Other Revelations from the Catholic-Theme 2018 Met Gala.” The New Yorker, 8 May 2018. 25 Jan. 2023 〈 https://www.newyorker.com/culture/on-and-off-the-avenue/pope-rihanna-and-other-revelations-from-the-catholic-themed-2018-met-gala 〉 . “The Most Hilarious Twitter Reactions to Rihanna’s Met Gala Look.” Harper’s Bazaar, 8 May 2018. 25 Jan. 2023 〈 https://www.harpersbazaar.com.sg/life/celebrities/twitter-reaction-rihanna-met-gala-look/ 〉 . Tynan, Jane, and Lisa Godson. “Understanding Uniform: An Introduction.” Uniform: Clothing and Discipline in the Modern World. Eds. Jane Tynan and Lisa Godson. Bloomsbury, 2019. 1-22. Webster, Emma Sarran. “10 Iconic Moments in Papal Fashion History to Celebrate Met Gala 2018.” Teen Vogue, 3 May 2018. 25 Jan. 2023 〈 https://www.teenvogue.com/gallery/pope-fashion-history-met-gala-2018 〉 . Zargani, Luisa. “Pope Francis’ Simple Style Statement.” Women’s Wear Daily, 21 Sep. 2015. 25 Jan. 2023 〈 https://wwd.com/eye/people/pope-francis-simple-style-statement-10235021/ 〉 .
    Type of Medium: Online Resource
    ISSN: 1441-2616
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    Publisher: Queensland University of Technology
    Publication Date: 2023
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    Online Resource
    Online Resource
    Queensland University of Technology ; 2017
    In:  M/C Journal Vol. 20, No. 5 ( 2017-10-13)
    In: M/C Journal, Queensland University of Technology, Vol. 20, No. 5 ( 2017-10-13)
    Abstract: IntroductionAs both a historical and cultural entity, the city of New Orleans has long-maintained a reputation as a centre for hedonistic and carnivaleque pleasures. Historically, images of mardi gras, jazz, and parties on the shores of the Mississippi have pervaded the cultural vision of the city as a “mecca” for “social life” (Marina 2), and successfully fed its tourism narratives. Simultaneously, however, a different kind of narrative also exists in the historical folds of the city’s urban mythology. Many tales of vampire sightings and supernatural accounts surround the area, and have contributed, over the years, to the establishment and mystification of New Orleans as a ‘vampire city’. This has produced, in turn, its own brand of vampire tourism (Murphy 2015). Mixed with historical rumours and Gothic folklore, the recent narratives of popular culture lie at the centre of the re-imagination of New Orleans as a vampire hub. Taking this idea as a point of departure, this article provides culturally- and historically-informed critical considerations of New Orleans as a ‘vampire city’, especially as portrayed in The Originals (2013-2017), a contemporary television series where vampires are the main protagonists. In the series, the historical narratives of New Orleans become entangled with – and are, at times, almost inseparable from – the fictional chronicles of the vampire in both aesthetic and conceptual terms.The critical connection between urban narratives and vampires representation, as far as New Orleans is concerned, is profoundly entangled with notions of both tourism and fictionalised popular accounts of folklore (Piatti-Farnell 172). In approaching the conceptual relationship between New Orleans as a cultural and historical entity and the vampire — in its folkloristic and imaginative context — the analysis will take a three-pronged approach: firstly, it will consider the historical narrative of tourism for the city of New Orleans; secondly, the city’s connection to vampires and other Gothicised entities will be considered, both historically and narratively; and finally, the analysis will focus on how the connection between New Orleans and Gothic folklore of the vampire is represented in The Originals, with the issue of cultural authenticity being brought into the foreground. A critical footnote must be given to the understanding of the term ‘New Orleans’ in this article as meaning primarily the French Quarter – or, the Vieux Carre – and its various representations. This geographical focus principally owes its existence to the profound cultural significance that the French Quarter has occupied in the history of New Orleans as a city, and, in particular, in its connection to narratives of magic and Gothic folklore, as well as the broader historical and contemporary tourism structures.  A History of TourismSocial historian Kevin Fox Gotham agues that New Orleans as a city has been particularly successful in fabricating a sellable image of itself; tourism, Gotham reminds us, is about “the production of local difference, local cultures, and different local histories that appeal to visitors’ tastes for the exotic and the unique” (“Gentrification” 1100). In these terms, both the history and the socio-cultural ‘feel’ of the city cannot be separated from the visual constructs that accompany it. Over the decades, New Orleans has fabricated a distinct network of representational patterns for the Vieux Carre in particular, where the deployment of specific images, themes and motifs – which are, in truth, only peripherally tied to the city’ actual social and political history, and owe their creation and realisation more to the success of fictional narratives from film and literature – is employed to  “stimulate tourist demands to buy and consume” (Gotham, “Gentrification” 1102).  This image of the city as hedonistic site is well-acknowledged, has to be understood, at least partially, as a conscious construct aimed at the production an identity for itself, which the city can in turn sell to visitors, both domestically and internationally. New Orleans, Gotham suggests, is a ‘complex and constantly mutating city’, in which “meanings of place and community” are “inexorably intertwined with tourism” (Authentic 5). The view of New Orleans as a site of hedonistic pleasure is something that has been heavily capitalised upon by the tourism industry of the city for decades, if not centuries. A keen look at advertising pamphlets for the city, dating form the late Nineteenth century onwards, provides an overview of thematic selling points, that primarily focus on notions of jazz, endless parties and, in particular, nostalgic and distinctly rose-tinted views of the Old South and its glorious plantations (Thomas 7).  The decadent view of New Orleans as a centre of carnal pleasures has often been recalled by scholars and lay observers alike; this vision of he city indeed holds deep historical roots, and is entangled with the city’s own economic structures, as well as its acculturated tourism ones.  In the late 19th and early 20th century one of the things that New Orleans was very famous for was actually Storyville, the city’s red-light district, sanctioned in 1897 by municipal ordinance. Storyville quickly became a centralized attraction in the heart of New Orleans, so much so that it began being heavily advertised, especially through the publication of the ‘Blue Book’, a resource created for tourists. The Blue Book contained, in alphabetical order, information on all the prostitutes of Storyville. Storyville remained very popular and the most famous attraction in New Orleans until its demolition in 1919 Anthony Stanonis suggests that, in its ability to promote a sellable image for the city, “Storyville meshed with the intersts of business men in the age before mass tourism” (105).Even after the disappearance of Storyville, New Orleans continued to foster its image a site of hedonism, a narrative aided by a favourable administration, especially in the 1930s and 1940s. The French Quarter, in particular, “became a tawdry mélange of brothers and gambling dens operating with impunity under lax law enforcement” (Souther 16).  The image of the city as a site for pleasures of worldly nature continued to be deeply rooted, and even survives in the following decades today, as visible in the numerous exotic dance parlours located on the famous Bourbon Street.Vampire TourismSimultaneously, however, a different kind of narrative also exists in the recent historical folds of the city’s urban mythology, where vampires, magic, and voodoo are an unavoidable presence. Many tales of vampire sightings and supernatural accounts surround the area, and have contributed, over the years, to the establishment and mystification of New Orleans as a ‘vampire city’. Kenneth Holditch contends that ‘”New Orleans is a city in love with its myths, mysteries and fantasies” (quoted in McKinney 8). In the contemporary era, these qualities are profoundly reflected in the city’s urban tourism image, where the vampire narrative is pushed into the foreground. When in the city, one might be lucky enough to take one of the many ‘vampire tours’ — often coupled with narratives of haunted locations — or visit the vampire bookshop, or even take part in the annual vampire ball. Indeed, the presence of vampires in New Orleans’s contemporary tourism narrative is so pervasive that one might be tempted to assume that it has always occupied a prominent place in the city’s cultural fabric. Nonetheless, this perception is not accurate: the historical evidence from tourism pamphlets for the city do not make any mentions of vampire tourism before the 1990s, and even then, the focus on the occult side of new Orleans tended to privilege stories of voodoo and hoodoo — a presence that still survives strongly in the cultural narrative city itself (Murphy 91). While the connection between vampires and New Orleans is a undoubtedly recent one, the development and establishment of New Orleans as vampire city cannot be thought of as a straight line. A number of cultural and historical currents appear to converge in the creation of the city’s vampire mystique. The history and geography of the city here could be an important factor, and a useful starting point; as the site of extreme immigration and ethnic and racial mingling New Orleans holds a reputation for mystery. The city was, of course, the regrettable site of a huge marketplace for the slave trade, so discussions of political economy could also be important here, although I’ll leave them for another time. As a city, New Orleans has often been described – by novelists, poets, and historians alike – as being somewhat ‘peculiar’. Simone de Behaviour was known to have remarked that that the city is surrounded by a “pearl grey” and ‘luminous’ air” (McKinney 1). In similar fashion, Oliver Evans claims the city carries “opalescent hints” (quoted in McKinney 1). New Orleans is famous for having a quite thick mist, the result of a high humidity levels in the air. To an observing eye, New Orleans seems immersed in an almost otherworldly ‘glow’, which bestows upon its limits an ethereal and mysterious quality (Piatti-Farnell 173). While this intention here is not to suggest that New Orleans is the only city to have mist – especially in the Southern States – one might venture to say that this physical phenomenon, joined with other occurrences and legends, has certainly contributed to the city’s Gothicised image. The geography of the city also makes it sadly famous for floods and their subsequent devastation, which over centuries have wrecked parts of the city irrevocably. New Orleans sits at a less than desirable geographical position, is no more than 17 feet above sea level, and much of it is at least five feet below (McKinney 5). In spite of its lamentable fame, hurricane Katrina was not the first devastating geo-meteorological phenomenon to hit and destroy most of New Orleans; one can trace similar hurricane occurrences in 1812 and 1915, which at the time significantly damaged parts of the French Quarter. The geographical position of New Orleans also owes to the city’s well-known history of disease such as the plague and tuberculosis – often associated, in previous centuries, with the miasma proper to reclaimed river lands. In similar terms, one must not forget New Orleans’s history of devastating fires – primarily in the years 1788, 1794, 1816, 1866 and 1919 – which slowly destroyed the main historical parts of the city, particularly in the Vieux Carre, and to some extent opened the way for regeneration and later gentrification as well. As a result of its troubled and destructive history, Louise McKinnon claims that the city ‒ perhaps unlike any others in the United States ‒ hinges on perpetual cycles of destruction and regeneration, continuously showing  “the wear and tear of human life” (McKinney 6).It is indeed in this extremely important element that New Orleans finds a conceptual source in its connection to notions of the undead, and the vampire in particular. Historically, one can identify the pervasive use of Gothic terminology to describe New Orleans, even if, the descriptions themselves were more attuned to perceptions of the city’s architecture and metrological conditions, rather than the recollection of any folklore-inspired narratives of unread creatures. Because of its mutating, and often ill-maintained historical architecture – especially in the French Quarter - New Orleans has steadily maintained a reputation as a city of “splendid decay” (McKinney, 6). This highly lyrical and metaphorical approach plays an important part in building the city as a site of mystery and enchantment. Its decaying outlook functions as an unavoidable sign of how New Orle ans continues to absorb, and simultaneously repel, as McKinney puts it, “the effects of its own history” (6).Nonetheless, the history of New Orleans as a cultural entity, especially in terms of tourism, has not been tied to vampires for centuries, as many imagine, and the city itself insists in its contemporary tourism narratives. Although a lot of folklore has survived around the city in connection to magic and mysticism, for a number of reasons, vampires have not always been in the foreground of its publicised cultural narratives. Mixed with historical rumours and Gothic folklore, the recent narratives of popular culture lie at the centre of the re-imagination of New Orleans as a vampire spot: most scholars claim that it all started with the publication of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976), but actually evidence shows that the vampire narrative for the city of New Orleans did not fully explode until the release of Neil Jordan’s cinematic adaptation of Interview with the Vampire (1994). This film really put New Orleans at the centre of the vampire narrative, indulging in the use of many iconic locations in the city as tied to vampire, and cementing the idea of New Orleans as a vampiric city (Piatti-Farnell 175). The impact of Rice’s work, and its adaptations, has also been picked up by numerous other examples of popular culture, including Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire mystery series, and its well-known television adaptation True Blood.  Harris herself states in one of her novels: “New Orleans had been the place to go for vampires and those who wanted to be around them ever since Anne Rice had been proven right about their existence” (2). In spite of the fact that popular culture, rather than actual historical evidence, lies at the heart of the city’s cultural relationship with vampires, this does not detract from the fact that vampires themselves – as fabricated figures lying somewhere between folklore, history, and fiction – represent an influential part of New Orleans’s contemporary tourism narrative, building a bridge between historical storytelling, mythologised identities, and consumerism. The Originals: Vampires in the CityIndeed, the impact of popular culture in establishing and re-establishing the success of the vampire tourism narrative in New Orleans is undeniable. Contemporary examples continue to capitalise on the visual, cultural, and suggestively historical connection between the city’s landmarks and vampire tales, cementing the notion of New Orleans as a solid entity within the Gothic tourism narrative. One such successful example is The Originals. This television show is actually a spin-off of the Vampires Diaries, and begins with three vampires, the Mikaelson siblings (Niklaus, Elijah, and Rebekkah) returning to the city of New Orleans for the first time since 1919, when they were forced to flee by their vengeful father. In their absence, Niklaus's protégé, Marcel, took charge of the city. The storyline of The Originals focuses on battles within the vampire factions to regain control of the city, and eliminate the hold of other mystical creatures such as werewolves and witches (Anyiwo 175). The central narrative here is that the city belongs to the vampire, and there can be no other real Gothic presence in the Quarter. One can only wonder, even at this embryonic level, how this connects functions in a multifaceted way, extending the critique of the vampire’s relationship to New Orleans from the textual dimension of the TV show to the real life cultural narrative of the city itself. A large number of the narrative strands in The Originals are tied to city and its festivals, its celebrations, and its visions of the past, whether historically recorded, or living in the pages of its Gothic folklore.  Vampires are actually claimed to have made New Orleans what it is today, and they undoubtedly rule it. As Marcel puts it: “The blood never stops flowing, and the party never ends” (Episode 1, “Always and Forever”). Even the vampiric mantra for New Orleans in The Originals is tied to the city’s existing and long-standing tourism narrative, as “the party never ends” is a reference to one of Bourbon Street’s famous slogans. Indeed, the pictorial influence of the city’s primary landmarks in The Originals is undeniable. In spite of the fact the inside scenes for The Originals were filmed in a studio, the outside shots in the series reveal a strong connections to the city itself, as viewers are left with no doubt as to the show’s setting. New Orleans is continuously mentioned and put on show – and pervasively referred to as “our city”, by the vampires. So much so, that New Orleans becomes the centre of the feud between supernatural forces, as the vampires fight witches and werewolves – among others- to maintain control over the city’s historical heart. The French Quarter, in particular, is given renewed life from the ashes of history into the beating heart of the vampire narrative, so much so that it almost becomes its own character in its own right, instrumental in constructing the vampire mystique. The impact of the vampire on constructing an image for the city of New Orleans is made explicit in The Originals, as the series explicitly shows vampires at the centre of the city’s history. Indeed, the show’s narrative goes as far as justifying the French Quarter’s history and even legends through the vampire metaphor. For instance, the series explains the devastating fire that destroyed the French Opera House in 1919 as the result of a Mikaelson vampire family feud. In similar terms, the vampires of the French Quarter are shown at the heart of the Casquette Girls narrative, a well-known tale from Eighteenth-century colonial New Orleans, where young women were shipped from France to the new Louisiana colony, in order to marry. The young women were said to bring small chests – or casquettes – containing their clothes (Crandle 47). The Originals, however, capitalises on the folkloristic interpretation that perceives the girls’ luggage as coffins potentially containing the undead, a popular version of the tale that can often be heard if taking part in one of the many vampire tours in New Orleans.  One can see here how the chronicles of the French Quarter in New Orleans and the presumed narratives of the vampire in the city merge to become one and the same, blurring the lines between history and fiction, and presenting the notion of folklore as a verifiable entity of the everyday (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 25) It is essential to remember, en passant, that, as far as giving the undead their own historical chronicles in connection to New Orleans, The Originals is not alone in doing this. Other TV series like American Horror Story have provided Gothicised histories for the city, although in this case more connected to witchcraft, hoodoo, and voodoo, rather than vampires.What one can see taking place in The Originals is a form of alternate and revisionist history that is reminiscent of several instances of pulp and science fiction from the early 20th century, where the Gothic element lies at the centre of not only the fictional narrative, but also of the re-conceptualisation of historical time and space, as not absolute entities, but as narratives open to interpretation (Singles 103). The re-interpretation here is of course connected to the cultural anxieties that are intrinsic to the Gothic – of changes, shifts, and unwanted returns - and the vampire as a figure of intersections, signalling the shift between stages of existence. If it is true that, to paraphrase Paul Ricoeur’s famous contention, the past returns to “haunt” us (105), then the history of New Orleans in The Originals is both established and haunted by vampires, a pervasive shadow that provides the city itself with an almost tangible Gothic afterlife. This connection, of course, extends beyond the fictional world of the television series, and finds fertile ground in the cultural narratives that the city constructs for itself. The tourism narrative of New Orleans also lies at the heart of the reconstructive historical imagination, which purposefully re-invents the city as a constructed entity that is, in itself, extremely sellable. The Originals mentions on multiple occasions that certain bars — owned, of course, by vampires — host regular ‘vampire themed events’, to “keep the tourists happy”. The importance of maintaining a steady influx of vampire tourism into the Quarter is made very clear throughout, and the vampires are complicit in fostering it for a number of reasons: not only because it provides them and the city with a constant revenue, but also because it brings a continuous source of fresh blood for the vampires to feed on. As Marcel puts it: “Something's gotta draw in the out-of-towners. Otherwise we'd all go hungry” (Episode 1, “Always and Forever”). New Orleans, it is made clear, is not only portrayed as a vampire hub, but also as a hot spot for vampire tourism; as part of the tourism narratives, the vampires themselves — who commonly feign humanity — actually further ‘pretend’ to be vampires for the tourists, who expect to find vampires in the city. It is made clear in The Originals that vampires often put on a show – and bear in mind, these are vampires who pretend to be human, who pretend to be vampires for the tourists. They channel stereotypes that belong in Gothic novels and films, and that are, as far as the ‘real’ vampires of the series, are concerned, mostly fictional. The vampires that are presented to the tourists in The Originals are, inevitably, inauthentic, for the real vampires themselves purposefully portray the vision of vampires put forward by popular culture, together with its own motifs and stereotypes. The vampires happily perform their popular culture role, in order to meet the expectations of the tourist.  This interaction — which sociologist Dean MacCannell would refer to, when discussing the dynamics of tourism, as “staged authenticity” (591) — is the basis of the appeal, and what continues to bring tourists back, generating profits for vampires and humans alike. Nina Auerbach has persuasively argued that the vampire is often eroticised through its connections to the “self-obsessed’ glamour of consumerism that ‘subordinates history to seductive object” (57).With the issue of authenticity brought into sharp relief, The Originals also foregrounds questions of authenticity in relation to New Orleans’s own vampire tourism narrative, which ostensibly bases into historical narratives of magic, horror, and folklore, and constructs a fictionalised urban tale, suitable to the tourism trade.  The vampires of the French Quarter in The Originals act as the embodiment of the constructed image of New Orleans as the epitome of a vampire tourist destination. ConclusionThere is a clear suggestion in The Originals that vampires have evolved from simple creatures of old folklore, to ‘products’ that can be sold to expectant tourists. This evolution, as far as popular culture is concerned, is also inevitably tied to the conceptualisation of certain locations as ‘vampiric’, a notion that, in the contemporary era, hinges on intersecting narratives of culture, history, and identity. Within this, New Orleans has successfully constructed an image for itself as a vampire city, exploiting, in a number ways, the popular and purposefully historicised connection to the undead. In both tourism narratives and popular culture, of which The Originals is an ideal example, New Orleans’s urban image — often sited in constructions and re-constructions, re-birth and decay — is presented as a result of the vampire’s own existence, and thrives in the Gothicised afterlife of imagery, symbolism, and cultural persuasion. In these terms, the ‘inauthentic’ vampires of The Originals are an ideal allegory that provides a channelling ground for the issues surrounding the ‘inauthentic’ state of New Orleans a sellable tourism entity. As both hinge on images of popular representation and desirable symbols, the historical narratives of New Orleans become entangled with — and are, at times, almost inseparable from — the fictional chronicles of the vampire in both aesthetic and conceptual terms. ReferencesAnyiwo, U. Melissa. “The Female Vampire in Popular Culture.” Gender in the Vampire Narrative. Eds. Amanda Hobson and U. Melissa Anyiwo. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2016. 173-192. Auerbach, Nina. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.Crandle, Marita Woywod. New Orleans Vampires: History and Legend. Stroud: The History Press, 2017.Gotham, Kevin Fox. Authentic New Orleans: Tourism, Culture, and Race in the Big Easy. New York: New York University Press, 2007.———. “Tourism Gentrification: The Case of New Orleans’ Vieux Carre’.” Urban Studies 42.7 (2005): 1099-1121. Harris, Charlaine. All Together Dead. London: Gollancz, 2008.Interview with the Vampire. Dir. Neil Jordan. Geffen Pictures, 1994. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. “Mistaken Dichotomies.” Public Folklore. Eds. Robert Baron and Nick Spitzer. Oxford: University of Missisippi Press, 2007. 28-48.Marina, Peter J. Down and Out in New Orleans: Trangressive Living in the Informal Economy. New York: Columia University Press, 2017. McKinney, Louise. New Orleans: A Cultural History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.Murphy, Michael. Fear Dat New Orleans: A Guide to the Voodoo, Vampires, Graveyards & Ghosts of the Crescent City. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2015.Piatti-Farnell, Lorna. The Vampire in Contemporary Popular Literature. London: Routledge, 2014. Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Singles, Kathleen. Alternate History: Playing with Contingency and Necessity. Boston: de Gruyter, 2013.Souther, Mark. New Orleans on Parade: Tourism and the Transformation of the Crescent City. Baton Rouge: University of Louisiana Press, 2006. Stanonis, Anthony J. Creating the Big Easy: New Orleans and the Emergence of Modern Tourism, 1918-1945. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006.The Originals. Seasons 1-4. CBS/Warner Bros Television. 2013-2017.Thomas, Lynell. Desire and Disaster in New Orleans: Tourism, Race, and Historical Memory. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.
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    Queensland University of Technology ; 2000
    In:  M/C Journal Vol. 3, No. 1 ( 2000-03-01)
    In: M/C Journal, Queensland University of Technology, Vol. 3, No. 1 ( 2000-03-01)
    Abstract: Introduction The recent AOL/Time-Warner merger invites us to re-think the relationships amongst content producers, distributors, and audiences. Worth an estimated $300 billion (US), the largest Internet transaction of all time, the deal is 45 times larger than the AOL/Netscape merger of November 1998 (Ledbetter). Additionally, the Time Warner/EMI merger, which followed hard on the heels of the AOL/Time-Warner deal and is itself worth $28 billion (US), created the largest content rights organisation in t he music industry. The joining of the Internet giant (AOL) with what was already the world's largest media corporation (Time-Warner-EMI) has inspired some exuberant reactions. An Infoworld column proclaimed: The AOL/Time-Warner merger signals the demise of traditional media companies and the ascendancy of 'new economy' media companies that will force any industry hesitant to adopt a complete electronic-commerce strategy to rethink and put itself on Internet time. (Saap & Schwarrtz) This comment identifies the distribution channel as the dominant component of the "new economy" media. But this might not really be much of an innovation. Indeed, the assumption of all industry observers is that Time-Warner will provide broadband distribution (through its extensive cable holdings) as well as proprietary content for AOL. It is also expected that Time-Warner will adopt AOL's strategy of seeking sponsorship for development projects as well as for content. However, both of these phenomena -- merger and sponsorship -- are at least as old as radio. It seems that the Internet is merely repeating an old industrial strategy. Nonetheless, one important difference distinguishes the Internet from earlier media: its characterisation of the audience. Internet companies such as AOL and Microsoft tend towards a simple and simplistic media- centred view of the audience as market. I will show, however, that as the Internet assumes more of the traditional mass media functions, it will be forced to adopt a more sophisticated notion of the mass audience. Indeed, the Internet is currently the site in which audience definitions borrowed from broadcasting are encountering and merging with definitions borrowed from marketing. The Internet apparently lends itself to both models. As a result, definitions of what the Internet does or is, and of how we should understand the audience, are suitably confused and opaque. And the behaviour of big Internet players, such as AOL and MSN, perfectly reflects this confusion as they seem to careen between a view of the Internet as the new television and a contrasting view of the Internet as the new shopping mall. Meanwhile, Internet users move in ways that most observers fail to capture. For example, Baran and Davis characterise mass communication as a process involving (1) an organized sender, (2) engaged in the distribution of messages, (3) directed toward a large audience. They argue that broadcasting fits this model whereas a LISTSERV does not because, even though the LISTSERV may have very many subscribers, its content is filtered through a single person or Webmaster. But why is the Webmaster suddenly more determining than a network programmer or magazine editor? The distinction seems to grow out of the Internet's technological characteristics: it is an interactive pipeline, therefore its use necessarily excludes the possibility of "broadcasting" which in turn causes us to reject "traditional" notions of the audience. However, if a media organisation were to establish an AOL discussion group in order to promote Warner TV shows, for example, would not the resulting communication suddenly fall under the definition as set out by Baran and Davis? It was precisely the confusion around such definitions that caused the CRTC (Canada's broadcasting and telecommunications regulator) to hold hearings in 1999 to determine what kind of medium the Internet is. Unlike traditional broadcasting, Internet communication does indeed include the possibility of interactivity and niche communities. In this sense, it is closer to narrowcasting than to broadcasting even while maintaining the possibility of broadcasting. Hence, the nature of the audience using the Internet quickly becomes muddy. While such muddiness might have led us to sharpen our definitions of the audience, it seems instead to have led many to focus on the medium itself. For example, Morris & Ogan define the Internet as a mass medium because it addresses a mass audience mediated through technology (Morris & Ogan 39). They divide producers and audiences on the Internet into four groups: One-to-one asynchronous communication (e-mail); Many-to-many asynchronous communication (Usenet and News Groups); One-to-one, one-to-few, and one-to-many synchronous communication (topic groups, construction of an object, role-playing games, IRC chats, chat rooms); Asynchronous communication (searches, many-to-one, one-to-one, one to- many, source-receiver relations (Morris & Ogan 42-3) Thus, some Internet communication qualifies as mass communication while some does not. However, the focus remains firmly anchored on either the sender or the medium because the receiver --the audience -- is apparently too slippery to define. When definitions do address the content distributed over the Net, they make a distinction between passive reception and interactive participation. As the World Wide Web makes pre-packaged content the norm, the Internet increasingly resembles a traditional mass medium. Timothy Roscoe argues that the main focus of the World Wide Web is not the production of content (and, hence, the fulfilment of the Internet's democratic potential) but rather the presentation of already produced material: "the dominant activity in relation to the Web is not producing your own content but surfing for content" (Rosco 680). He concludes that if the emphasis is on viewing material, the Internet will become a medium similar to television. Within media studies, several models of the audience compete for dominance in the "new media" economy. Denis McQuail recalls how historically, the electronic media furthered the view of the audience as a "public". The audience was an aggregate of common interests. With broadcasting, the electronic audience was delocalised and socially decomposed (McQuail, Mass 212). According to McQuail, it was not a great step to move from understanding the audience as a dispersed "public" to thinking about the audience as itself a market, both for products and as a commodity to be sold to advertisers. McQuail defines this conception of the audience as an "aggregate of potential customers with a known social- economic profile at which a medium or message is directed" (McQuail, Mass 221). Oddly though, in light of the emancipatory claims made for the Internet, this is precisely the dominant view of the audience in the "new media economy". Media Audience as Market How does the marketing model characterise the relationship between audience and producer? According to McQuail, the marketing model links sender and receiver in a cash transaction between producer and consumer rather than in a communicative relationship between equal interlocutors. Such a model ignores the relationships amongst consumers. Indeed, neither the effectiveness of the communication nor the quality of the communicative experience matters. This model, explicitly calculating and implicitly manipulative, is characteristically a "view from the media" (McQuail, Audience 9). Some scho lars, when discussing new media, no longer even refer to audiences. They speak of users or consumers (Pavick & Dennis). The logic of the marketing model lies in the changing revenue base for media industries. Advertising-supported media revenues have been dropping since the early 1990s while user-supported media such as cable, satellite, online services, and pay-per-view, have been steadily growing (Pavlik & Dennis 19). In the Internet-based media landscape, the audience is a revenue stream and a source of consumer information. As Bill Gates says, it is all about "eyeballs". In keeping with this view, AOL hopes to attract consumers with its "one-stop shopping and billing". And Internet providers such as MSN do not even consider their subscribers as "audiences". Instead, they work from a consumer model derived from the computer software industry: individuals make purchases without the seller providing content or thematising the likely use of the software. The analogy extends well beyond the transactional moment. The common practice of prototyping products and beta-testing software requires the participation of potential customers in the product development cycle not as a potential audience sharing meanings but as recalcitrant individuals able to uncover bugs. Hence, media companies like MTV now use the Internet as a source of sophisticated demographic research. Recently, MTV Asia established a Website as a marketing tool to collect preferences and audience profiles (Slater 50). The MTV audience is now part of the product development cycle. Another method for getting information involves the "cookie" file that automatically provides a Website with information about the user who logs on to a site (Pavick & Dennis). Simultaneously, though, both Microsoft and AOL have consciously shifted from user-subscription revenues to advertising in an effort to make online services more like television (Gomery; Darlin). For example, AOL has long tried to produce content through its own studios to generate sufficiently heavy traffic on its Internet service in order to garner profitable advertising fees (Young). However, AOL and Microsoft have had little success in providing content (Krantz; Manes). In fact, faced with the AOL/Time-Warner merger, Microsoft declared that it was in the software rather than the content business (Trott). In short, they are caught between a broadcasting model and a consumer model and their behaviour is characteristically erratic. Similarly, media companies such as Time-Warner have failed to establish their own portals. Indeed, Time-Warner even abandoned attempts to create large Websites to compete with other Internet services when it shut down its Pathfinder site (Egan). Instead it refocussed its Websites so as to blur the line between pitching products and covering them (Reid; Lyons). Since one strategy for gaining large audiences is the creation of portals - - large Websites that keep surfers within the confines of a single company's site by providing content -- this is the logic behind the AOL/Time-Warner merger though both companies have clearly been unsuccessful at precisely such attempts. AOL seems to hope that Time- Warner will act as its content specialist, providing the type of compelling material that will make users want to use AOL, whereas Time- Warner seems to hope that AOL will become its privileged pipeline to the hearts and minds of untold millions. Neither has a coherent view of the audience, how it behaves, or should behave. Consequently, their efforts have a distinctly "unmanaged" and slighly inexplicable air to them, as though everyone were simultaneously hopeful and clueless. While one might argue that the stage is set to capitalise on the audience as commodity, there are indications that the success of such an approach is far from guaranteed. First, the AOL/Time-Warner/EMI transaction, merely by existing, has sparked conflicts over proprietary rights. For example, the Recording Industry Association of America, representing Sony, Universal, BMG, Warner and EMI, recently launched a $6.8 billion lawsuit against MP3.com -- an AOL subsidiary -- for alleged copyright violations. Specifically, MP3.com is being sued for selling digitized music over the Internet without paying royalties to the record companies (Anderson). A similar lawsuit has recently been launched over the issue of re- broadcasting television programs over the Internet. The major US networks have joined together against Canadian Internet company iCravetv for the unlawful distribution of content. Both the iCravetv and the MP3.com cases show how dominant media players can marshal their forces to protect proprietary rights in both content and distribution. Since software and media industries have failed to recreate the Internet in the image of traditional broadcasting, the merger of the dominant players in each industry makes sense. However, their simultaneous failure to secure proprietary rights reflects both the competitive nature of the "new media economy" and the weakness of the marketing view of the audience. Media Audience as Public It is often said that communication produces social cohesion. From such cohesion communities emerge on which political or social orders can be constructed. The power of social cohesion and attachment to group symbols can even create a sense of belonging to a "people" or nation (Deutsch). Sociologist Daniel Bell described how the mass media helped create an American culture simply by addressing a large enough audience. He suggested that on the evening of 7 March 1955, when one out of every two Americans could see Mary Martin as Peter Pan on television, a kind of social revolution occurred and a new American public was born. "It was the first time in history that a single individual was seen and heard at the same time by such a broad public" (Bell, quoted in Mattelart 72). One could easily substitute the 1953 World Series or the birth of little Ricky on I Love Lucy. The desire to document such a process recurs with the Internet. Internet communities are based on the assumption that a common experience "creates" group cohesion (Rheingold; Jones). However, as a mass medium, the Internet has yet to find its originary moment, that event to which all could credibly point as the birth of something genuine and meaningful. A recent contender was the appearance of Paul McCartney at the refurbished Cavern Club in Liverpool. On Tuesday, 14 December 1999, McCartney played to a packed club of 300 fans, while another 150,000 watched on an outdoor screen nearby. MSN arranged to broadcast the concert live over the Internet. It advertised an anticipated global audience of 500 million. Unfortunately, there was such heavy Internet traffic that the system was unable to accommodate more than 3 million people. Servers in the United Kingdom were so congested that many could only watch the choppy video stream via an American link. The concert raises a number of questions about "virtual" events. We can draw several conclusions about measuring Internet audiences. While 3 million is a sizeable audience for a 20 minute transmission, by advertising a potential audience of 500 million, MSN showed remarkably poor judgment of its inherent appeal. The Internet is the first medium that allows access to unprocessed material or information about events to be delivered to an audience with neither the time constraints of broadcast media nor the space limitations of the traditional press. This is often cited as one of the characteristics that sets the Internet apart from other media. This feeds the idea of the Internet audience as a participatory, democratic public. For example, it is often claimed that the Internet can foster democratic participation by providing voters with uninterpreted information about candidates and issues (Selnow). However, as James Curran argues, the very process of distributing uninterrupted, unfiltered information, at least in the case of traditional mass media, represents an abdication of a central democratic function -- that of watchdog to power (Curran). In the end, publics are created and maintained through active and continuous participation on the part of communicators and audiences. The Internet holds together potentially conflicting communicative relationships within the same technological medium (Merrill & Ogan). Viewing the audience as co-participant in a communicative relationship makes more sense than simply focussing on the Internet audience as either an aggregate of consumers or a passively constructed symbolic public. Audience as Relationship Many scholars have shifted attention from the producer to the audience as an active participant in the communication process (Ang; McQuail, Audience). Virginia Nightingale goes further to describe the audience as part of a communicative relationship. Nightingale identifies four factors in the relationship between audiences and producers that emphasize their co-dependency. The audience and producer are engaged in a symbiotic relationship in which consumption and use are necessary but not sufficient explanations of audience relations. The notion of the audience invokes, at least potentially, a greater range of activities than simply use or consumption. Further, the audience actively, if not always consciously, enters relationships with content producers and the institutions that govern the creation, distribution and exhibition of content (Nightingale 149-50). Others have demonstrated how this relationship between audiences and producers is no longer the one-sided affair characterised by the marketing model or the model of the audience as public. A global culture is emerging based on critical viewing skills. Kavoori calls this a reflexive mode born of an increasing familiarity with the narrative conventions of news and an awareness of the institutional imperatives of media industries (Kavoori). Given the sophistication of the emergent global audience, a theory that reduces new media audiences to a set of consumer preferences or behaviours will inevitably prove inadequate, just as it has for understanding audience behavior in old media. Similarly, by ignoring those elements of audience behavior that will be easily transported to the Web, we run the risk of idealising the Internet as a medium that will create an illusory, pre-technological public. Conclusion There is an understandable confusion between the two models of the audience that appear in the examples above. The "new economy" will have to come to terms with sophisticated audiences. Contrary to IBM's claim that they want to "get to know all about you", Internet users do not seem particularly interested in becoming a perpetual source of market information. The fragmented, autonomous audience resists attempts to lock it into proprietary relationships. Internet hypesters talk about creating publics and argue that the Internet recreates the intimacy of community as a corrective to the atomisation and alienation characteristic of mass society. This faith in the power of a medium to create social cohesion recalls the view of the television audience as a public constructed by the common experience of watching an important event. However, MSN's McCartney concert indicates that creating a public from spectacle it is not a simple process. In fact, what the Internet media conglomerates seem to want more than anything is to create consumer bases. Audiences exist for pleasure and by the desire to be entertained. As Internet media institutions are established, the cynical view of the audience as a source of consumer behavior and preferences will inevitably give way, to some extent, to a view of the audience as participant in communication. Audiences will be seen, as they have been by other media, as groups whose attention must be courted and rewarded. Who knows, maybe the AOL/Time-Warner merger might, indeed, signal the new medium's coming of age. References Anderson, Lessley. "To Beam or Not to Beam. MP3.com Is Being Sued by the Major Record Labels. Does the Digital Download Site Stand a Chance?" Industry Standard 31 Jan. 2000. 〈 http://www.thestandard.com 〉 . Ang, Ien. Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination. London: Methuen, 1985. Baran, Stanley, and Dennis Davis. Mass Communication Theory: Foundations, Ferment, and Future. 2nd ed. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth 2000. Curran, James. "Mass Media and Democracy Revisited." Mass Media and Society. Eds. James Curran and Michael Gurevitch. New York: Hodder Headline Group, 1996. Darlin, Damon. "He Wants Your Eyeballs." Forbes 159 (16 June 1997): 114-6. Egan, Jack, "Pathfinder, Rest in Peace: Time-Warner Pulls the Plug on Site." US News and World Report 126.18 (10 May 1999): 50. Gomery, Douglas. "Making the Web Look like Television (American Online and Microsoft)." American Journalism Review 19 (March 1997): 46. Jones, Steve, ed. CyberSociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1995. Kavoori, Amandam P. "Discursive Texts, Reflexive Audiences: Global Trends in Television News Texts and Audience Reception." Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 43.3 (Summer 1999): 386-98. Krantz, Michael. "Is MSN on the Block?" Time 150 (20 Oct. 1997): 82. Ledbetter, James. "AOL-Time-Warner Make It Big." Industry Standard 11 Jan. 2000. 〈 http://www.thestandard.com 〉 . Lyons, Daniel. "Desparate.com (Media Companies Losing Millions on the Web Turn to Electronic Commerce)." Forbes 163.6 (22 March 1999): 50-1. Manes, Stephen. "The New MSN as Prehistoric TV." New York Times 4 Feb. 1997: C6. McQuail, Denis. Audience Analysis. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1997. ---. Mass Communication Theory. 2nd ed. London: Sage, 1987. Mattelart, Armand. Mapping World Communication: War, Progress, Culture. Trans. Susan Emanuel and James A. Cohen. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994. Morris, Merrill, and Christine Ogan. "The Internet as Mass Medium." Journal of Communicati ons 46 (Winter 1996): 39-50. Nightingale, Virginia. Studying Audience: The Shock of the Real. London: Routledge, 1996. Pavlik, John V., and Everette E. Dennis. New Media Technology: Cultural and Commercial Perspectives. 2nd ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1998. Reid, Calvin. "Time-Warner Seeks Electronic Synergy, Profits on the Web (Pathfinder Site)." Publisher's Weekly 242 (4 Dec. 1995): 12. Rheingold, Howard. Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. New York: Harper, 1993. Roscoe, Timothy. "The Construction of the World Wide Web Audience." Media, Culture and Society 21.5 (1999): 673-84. Saap, Geneva, and Ephraim Schwarrtz. "AOL-Time-Warner Deal to Impact Commerce, Content, and Access Markets." Infoworld 11 January 2000. 〈 http://infoworld.com/articles/ic/xml/00/01/11/000111icimpact.xml 〉 . Slater, Joanna. "Cool Customers: Music Channels Hope New Web Sites Tap into Teen Spirit." Far Eastern Economic Review 162.9 (4 March 1999): 50. Trott, Bob. "Microsoft Views AOL-Time-Warner as Confirmation of Its Own Strategy." Infoworld 11 Jan. 2000. 〈 http://infoworld.com/articles/pi/xml/00/01/11/000111pimsaoltw.xml 〉 . Yan, Catherine. "A Major Studio Called AOL?" Business Week 1 Dec. 1997: 1773-4. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Daniel M. Downes. "The Medium Vanishes? The Resurrection of the Mass Audience in the New Media Economy." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.1 (2000). [your date of access] 〈 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/mass.php 〉 . Chicago style: Daniel M. Downes, "The Medium Vanishes? The Resurrection of the Mass Audience in the New Media Economy," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 1 (2000), 〈 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/mass.php 〉 ([your date of access]). APA style: Daniel M. Downes. (2000) The Medium Vanishes? The Resurrection of the Mass Audience in the New Media Economy. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(1). 〈 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/mass.php 〉 ([your date of access]).
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    Publisher: Queensland University of Technology
    Publication Date: 2000
    detail.hit.zdb_id: 2018737-3
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  • 9
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    Online Resource
    Queensland University of Technology ; 2011
    In:  M/C Journal Vol. 14, No. 5 ( 2011-10-18)
    In: M/C Journal, Queensland University of Technology, Vol. 14, No. 5 ( 2011-10-18)
    Abstract: Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. —Marshall McLuhan. What is visible and tangible in things represents our possible action upon them. —Henri Bergson. Introduction: Subjective Maps as ‘Contact Zones’ Maps feature heavily in a variety of media; they appear in textbooks, on television, in print, and on the screens of our handheld devices. The production of cartographic texts is a process that is imbued with power relations and bound up with the production and reproduction of social life (Pinder 405). Mapping involves choices as to what information is and is not included. In their organisation, categorisation, modeling, and representation maps show and they hide. Thus “the idea that a small number of maps or even a single (and singular) map might be sufficient can only apply in a spatialised area of study whose own self-affirmation depends on isolation from its context” (Lefebvre 85–86). These isolations determine the way we interpret the physical, biological, and social worlds. The map can be thought of as a schematic for political systems within a confined set of spatial relations, or as a container for political discourse. Mapping contributes equally to the construction of experiential realities as to the representation of physical space, which also contains the potential to incorporate representations of temporality and rhythm to spatial schemata. Thus maps construct realities as much as they represent them and coproduce space as much as the political identities of people who inhabit them. Maps are active texts and have the ability to promote social change (Pickles 146). It is no wonder, then, that artists, theorists and activists alike readily engage in the conflicted praxis of mapping. This critical engagement “becomes a method to track the past, embody memories, explain the unexplainable” and manifest the latent (Ibarra 66). In this paper I present a short case study of Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies a new media art project that aims to model a citizen driven effort to participate in a critical form of cartography, which challenges dominant representations of the city-space. I present a critical textual analysis of the maps produced in the workshops, the artist statements relating to these works used in the exhibition setting, and statements made by the participants on the project’s blog. This “praxis-logical” approach allows for a focus on the project as a space of aggregation and the communicative processes set in motion within them. In analysing such projects we could (and should) be asking questions about the functions served by the experimental concepts under study—who has put it forward? Who is utilising it and under what circumstances? Where and how has it come into being? How does discourse circulate within it? How do these spaces as sites of emergent forms of resistance within global capitalism challenge traditional social movements? How do they create self-reflexive systems?—as opposed to focusing on ontological and technical aspects of digital mapping (Renzi 73). In de-emphasising the technology of digital cartography and honing in on social relations embedded within the text(s), this study attempts to complement other studies on digital mapping (see Strom) by presenting a case from the field of politically oriented tactical media. Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies has been selected for analysis, in this exploration of media as “zone.” It goes some way to incorporating subjective narratives into spatial texts. This is a three-step process where participants tapped into spatial subjectivities by data collection or environmental sensing led by personal reflection or ethnographic enquiry, documenting and geo-tagging their findings in the map. Finally they engaged an imaginative or ludic process of synthesising their data in ways not inherent within the traditional conventions of cartography, such as the use of sound and distortion to explicate the intensity of invisible phenomena at various coordinates in the city-space.   In what follows I address the “zone” theme by suggesting that if we apply McLuhan’s notion of media as environment together with Henri Bergson’s assertion that visibility and tangibility constitutes the potential for action to digital maps, projects such as Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies constitute a “contact zone.” A type of zone where groups come together at the local level and flows of discourse about art, information communication, media, technology, and environment intersect with local histories and cultures within the cartographic text. A “contact zone,” then, is a site where latent subjectivities are manifested and made potentially politically potent. “Contact zones,” however, need not be spaces for the aggrieved or excluded (Renzi 82), as they may well foster the ongoing cumulative politics of the mundane capable of developing into liminal spaces where dominant orders may be perforated. A “contact zone” is also not limitless and it must be made clear that the breaking of cartographic convention, as is the case with the project under study here, need not be viewed as resistances per se. It could equally represent thresholds for public versus private life, the city-as-text and the city-as-social space, or the zone where representations of space and representational spaces interface (Lefebvre 233), and culture flows between the mediated and ideated (Appadurai 33–36). I argue that a project like Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies demonstrates that maps as urban text form said “contact zones,” where not only are media forms such as image, text, sound, and video are juxtaposed in a singular spatial schematic, but narratives of individual and collective subjectivities (which challenge dominant orders of space and time, and city-rhythm) are contested. Such a “contact zone” in turn may not only act as a resource for citizens in the struggle of urban design reform and a democratisation of the facilities it produces, but may also serve as a heuristic device for researchers of new media spatiotemporalities and their social implications. Critical Cartography and Media Tactility Before presenting this brief illustrative study something needs to be said of the context from which Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies has arisen. Although a number of Web 2.0 applications have come into existence since the introduction of Google Maps and map application program interfaces, which generate a great deal of geo-tagged user generated content aimed at reconceptualising the mapped city-space (see historypin for example), few have exhibited great significance for researchers of media and communications from the perspective of building critical theories relating to political potential in mediated spaces. The expression of power through mapping can be understood from two perspectives. The first—attributed largely to the Frankfurt School—seeks to uncover the potential of a society that is repressed by capitalist co-opting of the cultural realm. This perspective sees maps as a potential challenge to, and means of providing emancipation from, existing power structures. The second, less concerned with dispelling false ideologies, deals with the politics of epistemology (Crampton and Krygier 14). According to Foucault, power was not applied from the top down but manifested laterally in a highly diffused manner (Foucault 117; Crampton and Krygier 14). Foucault’s privileging of the spatial and epistemological aspects of power and resistance complements the Frankfurt School’s resistance to oppression in the local. Together the two perspectives orient power relative to spatial and temporal subjectivities, and thus fit congruently into cartographic conventions. In order to make sense of these practices the post-oppositional character of tactical media maps should be located within an economy of power relations where resistance is never outside of the field of forces but rather is its indispensable element (Renzi 72). Such exercises in critical cartography are strongly informed by the critical politico-aesthetic praxis of political/art collective The Situationist International, whose maps of Paris were inherently political. The Situationist International incorporated appropriated texts into, and manipulated, existing maps to explicate city-rhythms and intensities to construct imaginative and alternate representations of the city. Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies adopts a similar approach. The artists’ statement reads: We build our subjective maps by combining different methods: photography, film, and sound recording; […] to explore the visible and invisible […] city; […] we adopt psycho-geographical approaches in exploring territory, defined as the study of the precise effects of the geographical environment, consciously developed or not, acting directly on the emotional behaviour of individuals. The project proposals put forth by workshop participants also draw heavily from the Situationists’s A New Theatre of Operations for Culture. A number of Situationist theories and practices feature in the rationale for the maps created in the Bangalore Subjective Cartographies workshop. For example, the Situationists took as their base a general notion of experimental behaviour and permanent play where rationality was approached on the basis of whether or not something interesting could be created out of it (Wark 12). The dérive is the rapid passage through various ambiences with a playful-constructive awareness of the psychographic contours of a specific section of space-time (Debord). The dérive can be thought of as an exploration of an environment without preconceptions about the contours of its geography, but rather a focus on the reality of inhabiting a place. Détournement involves the re-use of elements from recognised media to create a new work with meaning often opposed to the original. Psycho-geography is taken to be the subjective ambiences of particular spaces and times. The principles of détournement and psycho-geography imply a unitary urbanism, which hints at the potential of achieving in environments what may be achieved in media with détournement. Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies carries Situationist praxis forward by attempting to exploit certain properties of information digitalisation to formulate textual representations of unitary urbanism.  Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies is demonstrative of a certain media tactility that exists more generally across digital-networked media ecologies and channels this to political ends. This tactility of media is best understood through textual properties awarded by the process and logic of digitalisation described in Lev Manovich’s Language of New Media. These properties are: numerical representation in the form of binary code, which allows for the reification of spatial data in a uniform format that can be stored and retrieved in-silico as opposed to in-situ; manipulation of this code by the use of algorithms, which renders the scales and lines of maps open to alteration; modularity that enables incorporation of other textual objects into the map whilst maintaining each incorporated item’s individual identity; the removal to some degree of human interaction in terms of the translation of environmental data into cartographic form (whilst other properties listed here enable human interaction with the cartographic text), and the nature of digital code allows for changes to accumulate incrementally creating infinite potential for refinements (Manovich 49–63). The Subjective Mapping of Bangalore Bangalore is an interesting site for such a project given the recent and rapid evolution of its media infrastructure. As a “media city,” the first television sets appeared in Bangalore at some point in the early 1980s. The first Internet Service Provider (ISP), which served corporate clients only, commenced operating a decade later and then offered dial-up services to domestic clients in the mid-1990s. At present, however, Bangalore has the largest number of broadband Internet connections in India. With the increasing convergence of computing and telecommunications with traditional forms of media such as film and photography, Bangalore demonstrates well what Scott McQuire terms a media-architecture complex, the core infrastructure for “contact zones” (vii). Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies was a workshop initiated by French artists Benjamin Cadon and Ewen Cardonnet. It was conducted with a number of students at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology in November and December 2009. Using Metamap.fr (an online cartographic tool that makes it possible to add multimedia content such as texts, video, photos, sounds, links, location points, and paths to digital maps) students were asked to, in groups of two or three, collect and consult data on ‘felt’ life in Bangalore using an ethnographic, transverse geographic, thematic, or temporal approach. The objective of the project was to model a citizen driven effort to subvert dominant cartographic representations of the city. In doing so, the project and this paper posits that there is potential for such methods to be adopted to form new literacies of cartographic media and to render the cartographic imaginary politically potent.   The participants’ brief outlined two themes. The first was the visible and symbolic city where participants were asked to investigate the influence of the urban environment on the behaviours and sensations of its inhabitants, and to research and collect signifiers of traditional and modern worlds. The invisible city brief asked participants to consider the latent environment and link it to human behaviour—in this case electromagnetic radiation linked to the cities telecommunications and media infrastructure was to be specifically investigated. The Visible and Symbolic City During British rule many Indian cities functioned as dual entities where flow of people and commodities circulated between localised enclaves and the centralised British-built areas. Mirroring this was the dual mode of administration where power was shared between elected Indian legislators and appointed British officials (Hoselitz 432–33). Reflecting on this diarchy leads naturally to questions about the politics of civic services such as the water supply, modes of public communication and instruction, and the nature of the city’s administration, distribution, and manufacturing functions. Workshop participants approached these issues in a variety of ways. In the subjective maps entitled Microbial Streets and Water Use and Reuse, food and water sources of street vendors are traced with the aim to map water supply sources relative to the movements of street vendors operating in the city. Images of the microorganisms are captured using hacked webcams as makeshift microscopes. The data was then converted to audio using Pure Data—a real-time graphical programming environment for the processing audio, video and graphical data. The intention of Microbial Streets is to demonstrate how mapping technologies could be used to investigate the flows of food and water from source to consumer, and uncover some of the latencies involved in things consumed unhesitatingly everyday.  Typographical Lens surveys Russell Market, an older part of the city through an exploration of the aesthetic and informational transformation of the city’s shop and street signage. In Ethni City, Avenue Road is mapped from the perspective of local goldsmiths who inhabit the area. Both these maps attempt to study the convergence of the city’s dual function and how the relationship between merchants and their customers has changed during the transition from localised enclaves, catering to the sale of particular types of goods, to the development of shopping precincts, where a variety of goods and services can be sought. Two of the project’s maps take a spatiotemporal-archivist approach to the city. Bangalore 8mm 1940s uses archival Super 8 footage and places digitised copies on the map at the corresponding locations of where they were originally filmed. The film sequences, when combined with satellite or street-view images, allow for the juxtaposition of present day visions of the city with those of the 1940s pre-partition era. Chronicles of Collection focuses on the relationship between people and their possessions from the point of view of the object and its pathways through the city in space and time. Collectors were chosen for this map as the value they placed on the object goes beyond the functional and the monetary, which allowed the resultant maps to access and express spatially the layers of meaning a particular object may take on in differing contexts of place and time in the city-space.  The Invisible City In the expression of power through city-spaces, and by extension city-texts, certain circuits and flows are ossified and others rendered latent. Raymond Williams in Politics and Letters writes: however dominant a social system may be, the very meaning of its domination involves a limitation or selection of the activities it covers, so that by definition it cannot exhaust all social experience, which therefore always potentially contains space for alternative acts and alternative intentions which are not yet articulated as a social institution or even project. (252) The artists’ statement puts forward this possible response, an exploration of the latent aesthetics of the city-space: In this sense then, each device that enriches our perception for possible action on the real is worthy of attention. Even if it means the use of subjective methods, that may not be considered ‘evidence’. However, we must admit that any subjective investigation, when used systematically and in parallel with the results of technical measures, could lead to new possibilities of knowledge. Electromagnetic City maps the city’s sources of electromagnetic radiation, primarily from mobile phone towers, but also as a by-product of our everyday use of technologies, televisions, mobile phones, Internet Wi-Fi computer screens, and handheld devices. This map explores issues around how the city’s inhabitants hear, see, feel, and represent things that are a part of our environment but invisible, and asks: are there ways that the intangible can be oriented spatially? The intensity of electromagnetic radiation being emitted from these sources, which are thought to negatively influence the meditation of ancient sadhus (sages) also features in this map. This data was collected by taking electromagnetic flow meters into the suburb of Yelhanka (which is also of interest because it houses the largest milk dairy in the state of Karnataka) in a Situationist-like derive and then incorporated back into Metamap. Signal to Noise looks at the struggle between residents concerned with the placement of mobile phone towers around the city. It does so from the perspectives of people who seek information about their placement concerned about mobile phone signal quality, and others concerned about the proximity of this infrastructure to their homes due to to potential negative health effects. Interview footage was taken (using a mobile phone) and manipulated using Pure Data to distort the visual and audio quality of the footage in proportion to the fidelity of the mobile phone signal in the geographic area where the footage was taken. Conclusion The “contact zone” operating in Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies, and the underlying modes of social enquiry that make it valuable, creates potential for the contestation of new forms of polity that may in turn influence urban administration and result in more representative facilities of, and for, city-spaces and their citizenry. Robert Hassan argues that: This project would mean using tactical media to produce new spaces and temporalities that are explicitly concerned with working against the unsustainable “acceleration of just about everything” that our present neoliberal configuration of the network society has generated, showing that alternatives are possible and workable—in ones job, home life, family life, showing that digital [spaces and] temporality need not mean the unerring or unbending meter of real-time [and real city-space] but that an infinite number of temporalities [and subjectivities of space-time] can exist within the network society to correspond with a diversity of local and contextual cultures, societies and polities. (174) As maps and locative motifs begin to feature more prominently in media, analyses such as the one discussed in this paper may allow for researchers to develop theoretical approaches to studying newer forms of media. References Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. “Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies.” 25 July 2011 ‹http://bengaluru.labomedia.org/page/2/›. Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911.  Crampton, Jeremy W., and John Krygier. “An Introduction to Critical Cartography.” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geography 4 (2006): 11–13.  Chardonnet, Ewen, and Benjamin Cadon. “Semaphore.” 25 July 2011 ‹http://semaphore.blogs.com/semaphore/spectral_investigations_collective/›. Debord, Guy. “Theory of the Dérive.” 25 July 2011 ‹http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/2.derive.htm›. Foucault, Michel. Remarks on Marx. New York: Semitotext[e], 1991.Hassan, Robert. The Chronoscopic Society: Globalization, Time and Knowledge in the Networked Economy. New York: Lang, 2003.  “Historypin.” 4 Aug. 2011 ‹http://www.historypin.com/›.  Hoselitz, Bert F. “A Survey of t he Literature on Urbanization in India.” India’s Urban Future Ed. Roy Turner. Berkeley: U of California P, 1961. 425-43.  Ibarra, Anna. “Cosmologies of the Self.” Elephant 7 (2011): 66–96.  Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.  Lovink, Geert. Dark Fibre. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002.  Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000.  “Metamap.fr.” 3 Mar. 2011 ‹http://metamap.fr/›.  McLuhan, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore. The Medium Is the Massage. London: Penguin, 1967.  McQuire, Scott. The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space. London: Sage, 2008.  Pickles, John. A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping and the Geo-Coded World. London: Routledge, 2004.  Pinder, David. “Subverting Cartography: The Situationists and Maps of the City.” Environment and Planning A 28 (1996): 405–27.  “Pure Data.” 6 Aug. 2011 ‹http://puredata.info/›.  Renzi, Alessandra. “The Space of Tactical Media” Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times. Ed. Megan Boler. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008. 71–100.  Situationist International. “A New Theatre of Operations for Culture.” 6 Aug. 2011 ‹http://www.blueprintmagazine.co.uk/index.php/urbanism/reading-the-situationist-city/›.  Strom, Timothy Erik. “Space, Cyberspace and the Interface: The Trouble with Google Maps.” M/C Journal 4.3 (2011). 6 Aug. 2011 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/370›.  Wark, McKenzie. 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008.  Williams, Raymond. Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review. London: New Left, 1979.
    Type of Medium: Online Resource
    ISSN: 1441-2616
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    Publisher: Queensland University of Technology
    Publication Date: 2011
    detail.hit.zdb_id: 2018737-3
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  • 10
    Online Resource
    Online Resource
    Queensland University of Technology ; 2010
    In:  M/C Journal Vol. 13, No. 3 ( 2010-06-30)
    In: M/C Journal, Queensland University of Technology, Vol. 13, No. 3 ( 2010-06-30)
    Abstract: Cyborgs already walk among us. (“Cures to Come” 76) This essay was begun as a reaction to a Hallmark Hall of Fame television movie called Sweet Nothing in My Ear (2008), which follows the lives of two parents, Dan, who is hearing (played by Jeff Daniels), and Laura, who is deaf (Marlee Matlin), as they struggle to make a decision about whether or not to give their 11-year-old son, Adam (late-deafened), a cochlear implant.  Dan and Laura represent different perspectives, hearing and deaf perspectives. The film dramatizes the parents’  conflict and negotiation, exposing audiences to both sides of the cochlear implant debate, albeit in a fairly simplistic way. Nevertheless, it represents the lives of deaf people and gives voice to debates about cochlear implants with more accuracy and detail than most film and television dramas.    One of the central scenes in the film is what I call the “activation scene”, quite common to cochlear implant narratives.  In the scene, the protagonists witness a child having his implant activated or turned on.  The depiction is reminiscent of the WATER scene in the film about Helen Keller, The Miracle Worker, employing a sentimental visual rhetoric.  First, the two parents are shown seated near the child, clasping their hands as if in prayer.  The audiologist, wielder of technology and therefore clearly the authority figure in the scene, types away furiously on her laptop.  At the moment of being “turned on,” the child suddenly “hears” his father calling “David! David!” He gazes angelically toward heaven as piano music plays plaintively in the background. The parents all but fall to their knees and the protagonist of the film, Dan, watching through a window, weeps.   It is a scene of cure, of healing, of “miracle,” a hyper-sentimentalised portrait of what is in reality often a rather anti-climactic event. It was certainly anti-climactic in my son, Michael’s case.  I was taken aback by how this scene was presented and dismayed overall at some of the inaccuracies, small though they were, in the portrayal of cochlear implants in this film. It was, after all, according to the Nielsen ratings, seen by 8 million people.  I began to wonder what kinds of misconceptions my son was going to face when he met people whose only exposure to implants was through media representations. Spurred by this question, I started to research other recent portrayals of people with implants on U.S. television in the past ten years, to see how cochlear implant (hereafter referred to as CI) identity has been portrayed by American media. For most of American history, deaf people have been portrayed in print and visual media as exotic “others,” and have long been the subject of an almost morbid cultural fascination. Christopher Krentz suggests that, particularly in the nineteenth century, scenes pairing sentimentality and deafness repressed an innate, Kristevan “abject” revulsion towards deaf people.  Those who are deaf highlight and define, through their ‘lack’, the “unmarked” body. The fact of their deafness, understood as lack, conjures up an ideal that it does not attain, the ideal of the so-called “normal” or “whole” body. In recent years, however, the figure of the “deaf as Other” in the media, has shifted from what might be termed the “traditionally” deaf character, to what Brenda Jo Brueggeman (in her recent book Deaf Subjects: Between Identities and Places), calls “the new deaf cyborg” or the deaf person with a cochlear implant (4).  N. Katharine Hailes states that cyborgs are now “the stage on which are performed contestations about the body boundaries that have often marked class, ethnic, and cultural differences” (85).   In this essay, I claim that the character with a CI, as portrayed in the media, is now not only a strange, “marked” “Other,” but is also a screen upon which viewers project anxieties about technology, demonstrating both fascination fear. In her book, Brueggeman issues a call to action, saying that Deaf Studies must now begin to examine what she calls “implanting rhetorics,” or “the rhetorical relationships between our technologies and our identity” and therefore needs to attend to the construction of “the new deaf cyborg” (18). This short study will serve, I hope, as both a response to that injunction and as a jumping-off point for more in-depth studies of the construction of the CI identity and the implications of these constructions. First, we should consider what a cochlear implant is and how it functions. The National Association of the Deaf in the United States defines the cochlear implant as a device used to help the user perceive sound, i.e., the sensation of sound that is transmitted past the damaged cochlea to the brain.  In this strictly sensorineural manner, the implant works:  the sensation of sound is delivered to the brain.  The stated goal of the implant is for it to function as a tool to enable deaf children to develop language based on spoken communication. (“NAD Position”) The external portion of the implant consists of the following parts: a microphone, which picks up sound from the environment, which is contained in the behind-the-ear device that resembles the standard BTE hearing aid; in this “hearing aid” there is also a speech processor, which selects and arranges sounds picked up by the microphone. The processor transmits signals to the transmitter/receiver, which then converts them into electric impulses.  Part of the transmitter sits on the skin and attaches to the inner portion of the transmitter by means of a magnet.  The inner portion of the receiver/stimulator sends the impulses down into the electrode array that lies inside the cochlea, which in turn stimulates the auditory nerve, giving the brain the impression of sound (“Cochlear Implants”). According to manufacturer’s statistics, there are now approximately 188,000 people worldwide who have obtained cochlear implants, though the number of these that are in use is not known (Nussbaum).  That is what a cochlear implant is.  Before we can look at how people with implants are portrayed in the media, before we examine constructions of identity, perhaps we should first ask what constitutes a “real” CI identity? This is, of course, laughable; pinning down a homogeneous CI identity is no more likely than finding a blanket definition of “deaf identity.”  For example, at this point in time, there isn’t even a word or term in American culture for someone with an implant. I struggle with how to phrase it in this essay - “implantee?” “recipient?”  - there are no neat labels. In the USA you can call a person deaf, Deaf (the “D” representing a specific cultural and political identity), hearing impaired, hard of hearing, and each gradation implies, for better or worse, some kind of subject position.  There are no such terms for a person who gets an implant.  Are people with implants, as suggested above, just deaf?  Deaf? Are they hard of hearing?  There is even debate in the ASL community as to what sign should be used to indicate “someone who has a cochlear implant.” If a “CI identity” cannot be located, then perhaps the rhetoric that is used to describe it may be. Paddy Ladd, in Understanding Deaf Culture, does a brilliant job of exploring the various discourses that have surrounded deaf culture throughout history.  Stuart Blume borrows heavily from Ladd in his “The Rhetoric and Counter-Rhetoric of a 'Bionic' Technology”, where he points out that an “essential and deliberate feature” of the history of the CI from the 60s onward, was that it was constructed in an overwhelmingly positive light by the mass media, using what Ladd calls the “medical” rhetorical model.  That is, that the CI is a kind of medical miracle that promised to cure deafness. Within this model one may find also the sentimental, “missionary” rhetoric that Krentz discusses, what Ladd claims is a revival of the evangelism of the nineteenth-century Oralist movement in America. Indeed, newspaper articles in the 1980s and 90s hailed the implant as a “breakthrough”, a “miracle”; even a quick survey of headlines shows evidence of this: “Upton Boy Can Hear at Last!”, “Girl with a New Song in Her Heart”, “Children Head Queue for Bionic Ears” (Lane). As recently as January 2010, an issue of National Geographic featured on its cover the headline Merging Man and Machine: The Bionic Age.  Sure enough, the second photograph in the story is of a child’s bilateral cochlear implant, with the caption “within months of the surgery (the child) spoke the words his hearing parents longed for: Mama and Dada.” “You’re looking at a real bionic kid,” says Johns Hopkins University surgeon John Niparko, proudly (37). To counter this medical/corporate rhetoric of cure, Ladd and Blume claim, the deaf community devised a counter-rhetoric, a discourse in which the CI is not cast in the language of miracle and life, but instead in terms of death, mutilation, and cultural oppression.  Here, the implant is depicted as the last in a long line of sadistic experiments using the deaf as guinea pigs.  Often the CI is framed in the language of Nazism and genocide as seen in the title of an article in the British Deaf News: “Cochlear Implants: Oralism’s Final Solution.”  So, which of these two “implanting rhetorics” is most visible in the current construction of the CI in American television? Is the CI identity presented by rendering people with CIs impossibly positive, happy characters?  Is it delineated using the metaphors of the sentimental, of cure, of miracle? Or is the CI identity constructed using the counter-rhetorical references to death, oppression and cultural genocide? One might hypothesize that television, like other media, cultivating as it does the values of the hearing hegemony, would err on the side of promulgating the medicalised, positivist rhetoric of the “cure” for deafness.  In an effort to find out, I conducted a general survey of American television shows from 2000 to now that featured characters with CIs.  I did not include news shows or documentaries in my survey. Interestingly, some of the earliest television portrayals of CIs appeared in that bastion of American sentimentality, the daytime soap opera.   In 2006, on the show “The Young and the Restless”, a “troubled college student who contracted meningitis” received an implant, and in 2007 “All My Children” aired a story arc about a “toddler who becomes deaf after a car crash.”  It is interesting to note that both characters were portrayed as “late-deafened”, or suddenly inflicted with the loss of a sense they previously possessed, thus avoiding any whiff of controversy about early implantation. But one expects a hyper-sentimentalised portrayal of just about everything in daytime dramas like this.  What is interesting is that when people with CIs have appeared on several “reality” programs, which purport to offer “real,” unadulterated glimpses into people’s lives, the rhetoric is no less sentimentalized than the soaps (perhaps because these shows are no less fabricated).  A good example of this is the widely watched and, I think, ironically named show “True Life” which appears on MTV.  This is a series that claims to tell the “remarkable real-life stories of young people and the unusual subcultures they inhabit.” In episode 42, “ True Life: I’m Deaf”, part of the show follows a young man, Chris, born deaf and proud of it (his words), who decides to get a cochlear implant because he wants to be involved in the hearing world.  Through an interpreter Chris explains that he wants an implant so he can communicate with his friends, talk with girls, and ultimately fulfill his dreams of having a job and getting married (one has to ask: are these things he can’t do without an implant?). The show’s promo asks “how do you go from living a life in total silence to fully understanding the spoken language?”  This statement alone contains two elements common to the “miracle” rhetoric, first that the “tragic” deaf victim will emerge from a completely lonely, silent place (not true; most deaf people have some residual hearing, and if you watch the show you see Chris signing, “speaking” voluminously) to seamlessly, miraculously, “fully” joining and understanding the hearing world.  Chris, it seems, will only come into full being when he is able to join the hearing world. In this case, the CI will cure what ails him.   According to “True Life.” Aside from “soap opera” drama and so-called reality programming, by far the largest dissemination of media constructions of the CI in the past ten years occurred on top-slot prime-time television shows, which consist primarily of the immensely popular genre of the medical and police procedural drama.  Most of these shows have at one time or another had a “deaf” episode, in which there is a deaf character or characters involved, but between 2005 and 2008, it is interesting to note that most, if not all of the most popular of these have aired episodes devoted to the CI controversy, or have featured deaf characters with CIs.  The shows include: CSI (both Miami and New York), Cold Case, Law and Order (both SVU an d Criminal Intent), Scrubs, Gideon’s Crossing, and Bones. Below is a snippet of dialogue from Bones: Zach: {Holding a necklace} He was wearing this.Angela: Catholic boy.Brennan: One by two forceps.Angela {as Brennan pulls a small disc out from behind the victim’s ear} What is that?Brennan: Cochlear implant.  Looks like the birds were trying to get it.Angela: That would set a boy apart from the others, being deaf.(Bones, “A Boy in the Tree”, 1.3, 2005) In this scene, the forensics experts are able to describe significant points of this victim’s identity using the only two solid artifacts left in the remains, a crucifix and a cochlear implant.  I cite this scene because it serves, I believe, as a neat metaphor for how these shows, and indeed television media in general, are, like the investigators, constantly engaged in the business of cobbling together identity: in this particular case, a cochlear implant identity.  It also shows how an audience can cultivate or interpret these kinds of identity constructions, here, the implant as an object serves as a tangible sign of deafness, and from this sign, or clue, the “audience” (represented by the spectator, Angela) immediately infers that the victim was lonely and isolated, “set apart from the others.”  Such wrongheaded inferences, frivolous as they may seem coming from the realm of popular culture, have, I believe, a profound influence on the perceptions of larger society. The use of the CI in Bones is quite interesting, because although at the beginning of the show the implant is a key piece of evidence, that which marks and identifies the dead/deaf body, the character’s CI identity proves almost completely irrelevant to the unfolding of the murder-mystery.  The only times the CI character’s deafness is emphasized are when an effort is made to prove that the he committed suicide (i.e., if you’re deaf you are therefore “isolated,” and therefore you must be miserable enough to kill yourself).  Zak, one of the forensics officers says, “I didn’t talk to anyone in high school and I didn’t kill myself” and another officer comments that the boy was “alienated by culture, by language, and by his handicap” (odd statements, since most deaf children with or without implants have remarkably good language ability). Also, in another strange moment, the victim’s ambassador/mother shows a video clip of the child’s CI activation and says “a person who lived through this miracle would never take his own life” (emphasis mine).  A girlfriend, implicated in the murder (the boy is killed because he threatened to “talk”, revealing a blackmail scheme), says “people didn’t notice him because of the way he talked but I liked him…”  So at least in this show, both types of “implanting rhetoric” are employed; a person with a CI, though the recipient of a “miracle,” is also perceived as “isolated” and “alienated” and unfortunately, ends up dead. This kind of rather negative portrayal of a person with a CI also appears in the CSI: New York episode ”Silent Night” which aired in 2006.  One of two plot lines features Marlee Matlin as the mother of a deaf family.  At the beginning of the episode, after feeling some strange vibrations, Matlin’s character, Gina, checks on her little granddaughter, Elizabeth, who is crying hysterically in her crib.  She finds her daughter, Alison, dead on the floor.  In the course of the show, it is found that a former boyfriend, Cole, who may have been the father of the infant, struggled with and shot Alison as he was trying to kidnap the baby. Apparently Cole “got his hearing back” with a cochlear implant, no longer considered himself Deaf, and wanted the child so that she wouldn’t be raised “Deaf.”  At the end of the show, Cole tries to abduct both grandmother and baby at gunpoint.  As he has lost his external transmitter, he is unable to understand what the police are trying to tell him and threatens to kill his hostages.  He is arrested in the end.  In this case, the CI recipient is depicted as a violent, out of control figure, calmed (in this case) only by Matlin’s presence and her ability to communicate with him in ASL.  The implication is that in getting the CI, Cole is “killing off” his Deaf identity, and as a result, is mentally unstable.  Talking to Matlin, whose character is a stand-in for Deaf culture, is the only way to bring him back to his senses. The October 2007 episode of CSI: Miami entitled “Inside-Out” is another example of the counter-rhetoric at work in the form of another implant corpse.  A police officer, trying to prevent the escape of a criminal en route to prison, thinks he has accidentally shot an innocent bystander, a deaf woman.  An exchange between the coroner and a CSI goes as follows: (Alexx Woods): “This is as innocent as a victim gets.”(Calleigh Duquesne): “How so?”AW: Check this out.”CD: “I don’t understand.  Her head is magnetized? Steel plate?”AW: “It’s a cochlear implant.  Helps deaf people to receive and process speech and sounds.”(CSI dramatization) AW VO: “It’s surgically implanted into the inner ear.  Consists of a receiver that decodes and transmits to an electrode array sending a signal to the brain.”CD: “Wouldn’t there be an external component?”AW: “Oh, she must have lost it before she was shot.”CD: “Well, that explains why she didn’t get out of there.  She had no idea what was going on.”  (TWIZ) Based on the evidence, the “sign” of the implant, the investigators are able to identify the victim as deaf, and they infer therefore that she is innocent.  It is only at the end of the program that we learn that the deaf “innocent” was really the girlfriend of the criminal, and was on the scene aiding in his escape.  So she is at first “as innocent” as they come, and then at the end, she is the most insidious of the criminals in the episode.  The writers at least provide a nice twist on the more common deaf-innocent stereotype. Cold Case showcased a CI in the 2008 episode “Andy in C Minor,” in which the case of a 17-year-old deaf boy is reopened.  The boy, Andy, had disappeared from his high school.  In the investigation it is revealed that his hearing girlfriend, Emma, convinced him to get an implant, because it would help him play the piano, which he wanted to do in order to bond with her.  His parents, deaf, were against the idea, and had him promise to break up with Emma and never bring up the CI again.  His body is found on the campus, with a cochlear device next to his remains.  Apparently Emma had convinced him to get the implant and, in the end, Andy’s father had reluctantly consented to the surgery. It is finally revealed that his Deaf best friend, Carlos, killed him with a blow to the back of the head while he was playing the piano, because he was “afraid to be alone.”  This show uses the counter-rhetoric of Deaf genocide in an interesting way.  In this case it is not just the CI device alone that renders the CI character symbolically “dead” to his Deaf identity, but it leads directly to his being literally executed by, or in a sense, excommunicated from, Deaf Culture, as it is represented by the character of Carlos. The “House Divided” episode of House (2009) provides the most problematic (or I should say absurd) representation of the CI process and of a CI identity.  In the show, a fourteen-year-old deaf wrestler comes into the hospital after experiencing terrible head pain and hearing “imaginary explosions.” Doctors Foreman and Thirteen dutifully serve as representatives of both sides of the “implant debate”: when discussing why House hasn’t mocked the patient for not having a CI, Thirteen says “The patient doesn’t have a CI because he’s comfortable with who he is.  That’s admirable.”  Foreman says, “He’s deaf.  It’s not an identity, it’s a disability.” 13: “It’s also a culture.” F: “Anything I can simulate with $3 earplugs isn’t a culture.” Later, House, talking to himself, thinks “he’s going to go through life deaf.  He has no idea what he’s missing.”  So, as usual, without permission, he orders Chase to implant a CI in the patient while he is under anesthesia for another procedure (a brain biopsy).   After the surgery the team asks House why he did it and he responds, “Why would I give someone their hearing? Ask God the same question you’d get the same answer.”  The shows writers endow House’s character, as they usually do, with the stereotypical “God complex” of the medical establishment, but in doing also they play beautifully into the Ladd and Blume’s rhetoric of medical miracle and cure.  Immediately after the implant (which the hospital just happened to have on hand) the incision has, miraculously, healed overnight.  Chase (who just happens to be a skilled CI surgeon and audiologist) activates the external processor (normally a months-long process).  The sound is overwhelming, the boy hears everything.  The mother is upset.  “Once my son is stable,” the mom says, “I want that THING out of his head.”  The patient also demands that the “thing” be removed.  Right after this scene, House puts a Bluetooth in his ear so he can talk to himself without people thinking he’s crazy (an interesting reference to how we all are becoming cyborgs, more and more “implanted” with technology).  Later, mother and son have the usual touching sentimental scene, where she speaks his name, he hears her voice for the first time and says, “Is that my name? S-E-T-H?” Mom cries.   Seth’s deaf girlfriend later tells him she wishes she could get a CI, “It’s a great thing.  It will open up a whole new world for you,” an idea he rejects.  He hears his girlfriend vocalize, and asks Thirteen if he “sounds like that.”   This for some reason clinches his decision about not wanting his CI and, rather than simply take off the external magnet, he rips the entire device right out of his head, which sends him into shock and system failure.  Ultimately the team solves the mystery of the boy’s initial ailment and diagnoses him with sarcoidosis.  In a final scene, the mother tells her son that she is having them replace the implant.  She says it’s “my call.”  This show, with its confusing use of both the sentimental and the counter-rhetoric, as well as its outrageous inaccuracies, is the most egregious example of how the CI is currently being constructed on television, but it, along with my other examples, clearly shows the Ladd/Blume rhetoric and counter rhetoric at work.  The CI character is on one hand portrayed as an innocent, infantilized, tragic, or passive figure that is the recipient of a medical miracle kindly urged upon them (or forced upon them, as in the case of House). On the other hand, the CI character is depicted in the language of the counter-rhetoric: as deeply flawed, crazed, disturbed or damaged somehow by the incursions onto their Deaf identity, or, in the worst case scenario, they are dead, exterminated.  Granted, it is the very premise of the forensic/crime drama to have a victim, and a dead victim, and it is the nature of the police drama to have a “bad,” criminal character; there is nothing wrong with having both good and bad CI characters, but my question is, in the end, why is it an either-or proposition?  Why is CI identity only being portrayed in essentialist terms on these types of shows?  Why are there no realistic portrayals of people with CIs (and for that matter, deaf people) as the richly varied individuals that they are?  These questions aside, if these two types of “implanting rhetoric”, the sentimentalised and the terminated, are all we have at the moment, what does it mean? As I mentioned early in this essay, deaf people, along with many “others,” have long helped to highlight and define the hegemonic “norm.”  The apparent cultural need for a Foucauldian “marked body” explains not only the popularity of crime dramas, but it also could explain the oddly proliferant use of characters with cochlear implants in these particular shows.  A person with an implant on the side of their head is definitely a more “marked” body than the deaf person with no hearing aid.  The CI character is more controversial, more shocking; it’s trendier, “sexier”, and this boosts ratings.  But CI characters are, unlike their deaf predecessors, now serving an additional cultural function.  I believe they are, as I claim in the beginning of this essay, screens upon which our culture is now projecting repressed anxieties about emergent technology.  The two essentialist rhetorics of the cochlear implant, the rhetoric of the sentimental, medical model, and the rhetoric of genocide, ultimately represent our technophilia and our technophobia.  The CI character embodies what Debra Shaw terms a current, “ontological insecurity that attends the interface between the human body and the datasphere” (85).   We are growing more nervous “as new technologies shape our experiences, they blur the lines between the corporeal and incorporeal, between physical space and virtual space” (Selfe).  Technology either threatens the integrity of the self, “the coherence of the body” (we are either dead or damaged) or technology allows us to transcend the limitations of the body: we are converted, “transformed”, the recipient of a happy modern miracle. In the end, I found that representations of CI on television (in the United States) are overwhelmingly sentimental and therefore essentialist.  It seems that the conflicting nineteenth century tendency of attraction and revulsion toward the deaf is still, in the twenty-first century, evident.  We are still mired in the rhetoric of “cure” and “control,” despite an active Deaf counter discourse that employs the language of the holocaust, warning of the extermination of yet another cultural minority.  We are also daily becoming daily more “embedded in cybernetic systems,” with our laptops, emails, GPSs, PDAs, cell phones, Bluetooths, and the likes.  We are becoming increasingly engaged in a “necessary relationship with machines” (Shaw 91).  We are gradually becoming no longer “other” to the machine, and so our culturally constructed perceptions of ourselves are being threatened.   In the nineteenth century, divisions and hierarchies between a white male majority and the “other” (women, African Americans, immigrants, Native Americans) began to blur.  Now, the divisions between human and machine, as represented by a person with a CI, are starting to blur, creating anxiety.  Perhaps this anxiety is why we are trying, at least in the media, symbolically to ‘cure’ the marked body or kill off the cyborg.  Future examinations of the discourse should, I believe, use these media constructions as a lens through which to continue to examine and illuminate the complex subject position of the CI identity, and therefore, perhaps, also explore what the subject position of the post/human identity will be. References "A Boy in a Tree." Patrick Norris (dir.), Hart Hanson (by), Emily Deschanel (perf.). Bones, Fox Network, 7 Sep. 2005. “Andy in C Minor.”  Jeannete Szwarc (dir.), Gavin Harris (by), Kathryn Morris (perf.).  Cold Case, CBS Network, 30 March 2008. Blume, Stuart.  “The Rhetoric and Counter Rhetoric of a “Bionic” Technology.”  Science, Technology and Human Values 22.1 (1997): 31-56. Brueggemann, Brenda Jo. Deaf Subjects: Between Identities and Places. New York: New York UP, 2009. “Cochlear Implant Statistics.” ASL-Cochlear Implant Community. Blog. Citing Laurent Le Clerc National Deaf Education Center. Gallaudet University, 18 Mar. 2008. 29 Apr. 2010 ‹http:/ /aslci.blogspot.com/2008/03/cochlear-implant-statistics.html›. “Cures to Come.” Discover Presents the Brain (Spring 2010): 76. Fischman, Josh.  “Bionics.”  National Geographic Magazine 217 (2010). “House Divided.”  Greg Yaitanes (dir.), Matthew V. Lewis (by), Hugh Laurie (perf.). House, Fox Network, 22 Apr. 2009. “In side-Out.” Gina Lamar (dir.), Anthony Zuiker (by), David Caruso (perf.). CSI: Miami, CBS Network, 8 Oct. 2007. Krentz, Christopher. Writing Deafness: The Hearing Line in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Chapel Hill: UNC P, 2007. Ladd, Paddy. Understanding Deaf Culture: In Search of Deafhood. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters Limited, 2002. Lane, Harlan.  A Journey Into the Deaf-World. San Diego: DawnSignPress, 1996.  “NAD Position Statement on the Cochlear Implant.” National Association of the Deaf. 6 Oct. 2000. 29 April 2010 ‹http://www.nad.org/issues/technology/assistive-listening/cochlear-implants›. Nussbaum, Debra.  “Manufacturer Information.” Cochlear Implant Information Center.  National Deaf Education Center. Gallaudet University. 29 Apr. 2010 〈 http://clerccenter.gallaudet.edu 〉 . Shaw, Debra.  Technoculture: The Key Concepts.  Oxford: Berg, 2008.  “Silent Night.” Rob Bailey (dir.), Anthony Zuiker (by), Gary Sinise (perf.). CSI: New York, CBS Network, 13 Dec. 2006. “Sweet Nothing in My Ear.”  Joseph Sargent (dir.), Stephen Sachs (by), Jeff Daniels (perf.). Hallmark Hall of Fame Production, 20 Apr. 2008. TWIZ TV scripts.  CSI: Miami, “Inside-Out.” “What Is the Surgery Like?” FAQ, University of Miami Cochlear Implant Center. 29 Apr. 2010 ‹http://cochlearimplants.med.miami.edu/faq/index.asp›.
    Type of Medium: Online Resource
    ISSN: 1441-2616
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    Language: Unknown
    Publisher: Queensland University of Technology
    Publication Date: 2010
    detail.hit.zdb_id: 2018737-3
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