Journal articles: 'Gays – United States – Social life and customs' – Grafiati (2024)

Abstract:

This article reviews the death-related experiences and concerns of Hmong refugees from Laos. Traditional funerary and burial practices of the Hmong and the barriers to maintaining these practices in the United States are discussed. To understand the losses suffered by the Hmong, parallels are drawn between their experiences and those of holocaust victims. Because of their immense losses, many older Hmong are experiencing severe mental health problems. For those professionals and service providers who work with the dying and grieving, it is essential that they be aware of the customs and values of the population with whom they are working.

Abstract:

Although long-distance parenting is often depicted as a response to crisis (e.g., economic) or other stressful life events, it is sometimes undertaken in various culturally normative situations. This current study explores the motivations of South Asian Indian immigrant parents for sending their young children to India to live temporarily with their grandparents. This qualitative study involves in-depth interviews with first generation immigrant parents about their experiences and motivations for sending their children to India. Analysis of the data revealed five themes, namely, (a) contextual and daily challenges in caring for their children in the United States, (b) parents’ concern around paid group childcare, (c) grandparents as ideal caregivers but unable to stay in the United States, (d) presence of other extended network of relationships and support in India and (e) parents wanting their children to maintain their language and customs. Findings suggest culturally grounded beliefs around optimal childrearing (e.g., grandparents as ideal caregivers, presence of extended network of support in India and maintaining Indian traditions and values) and parents’ contextual needs (e.g., parents’ busy schedule around job and education) when traditional caregiving context changes due to migration to a new country. Implications for researchers are discussed.

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AbstractDr Crabbe presents a broad overview of the sociohistory of Hawaii following western contact and its colonisation by the United States (US). He describes the constant political, societal, and psychological struggles of Kānaka Maoli (native Hawaiians) against the never-ending tides of foreign influences to the shores of Hawaii. Within his sociohistorical overview, three significant issues for Kānaka Maoli are emphasised. One issue is that of 'Āina land. (The word 'Āina is capitalised throughout because, in the Native Hawaiian worldview, 'Āina is a living entity who gives and sustains life; it is an ancestor of the Hawaiian people, and it is important to the existence of Kānaka Maoli.) The second issue has to do with Kānaka Maoli is identity, which has been impacted by various foreign contacts and US colonisation that has negatively impacted traditional Hawaiian practices, customs, beliefs, language, and society. The constant struggle of Kānaka Maoli in regaining sovereignty, or self-determination, is a third issue of significance in Dr Crabbe's article. This article will briefly discuss the interplay among, and significance of, these three issues: 'Āina, Kānaka Maoli, and sovereignty, focusing on the importance and relevance of the first for the second and third.

Abstract:

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to study ethics, values and cross-cultural differences in China, Mexico or the United States. Three distinct and unique nations, the USA, Mexico and China, have different political structures, historical backgrounds and economical systems. While each of these nations can be considered an integral part to the world economy, each nation has their own distinct ethics, values and culture which serve as the backbone of the particular region. To be successful in international business, knowledgeable as an expatriate and culturally or ethically aware of key nations in the global market, individuals need to have researched information pertaining to the ethics, cultures and values of the USA, Mexico or China to blend in and succeed with the foreign cultural environment. Design/methodology/approach – This research paper will focus extensively on the impact values, ethics and cultural differences (based majorly and solely on the Rokeach Values Survey, Forsyth Studies and Hofsteade’s Model) have on the societies of the USA, Mexico or China. A review of the empirical studies will demonstrate the importance values, ethics and culture have on individual life or business environment for the USA, Mexico or China. Findings – Culture can be a factor which heavily influences a region or nation’s ethics and values. Research limitations/implications – When discussing culture, there are many factors such as values, religion, societal norms, customs, beliefs or deeply rooted faiths which can impact a nation’s overall collective culture. As a result, cross-cultural differences among a variety of nations, countries, regions or sub-regions may vary when compared with one another. Through more empirical investigation, research or study of a nation’s cultural values may there be a more profound, detailed and legitimate basis for assessing a nation’s ethical constructs. Practical implications – Understanding the differences of ethics, values and culture of the USA, China or Mexico can impact an individual’s experience if serving as an expatriate at the particular location. Each nation has its own distinct and unique social, business and cultural environment. To successfully accomplish international business or to operate a multinational corporation in a global market, individuals need to have a prior understanding of varying cultures, ethical standards or values in a particular region. Originality/value – This research paper will present and deliver pertinent information to individuals interested in serving as an expatriate in the USA, China or Mexico. Individuals can also read this paper to understand, comprehend or consume more general knowledge of the ethics, values and culture of the researched locations.

Abstract:

This essay describes how the Italians who settled in Nashville between the end of the nineteenth century and before the outburst of the First World War favoured first and foremost their occupational mobility thus prioritizing their integration in the economic fabric of a thriving city. Initially, they kept their cultural heritage alive but aimed to gain solid knowledge of the English language and American customs in order to apply for American citizenship as soon as possible, thus avoiding the severe discrimination endured by other Italian communities in southern states. Among the Italians of Nashville, Primo Bartolini stands out as a unique example of successful cultural and social hybridization and of the making of Italian American identity in Nashville and the South. Bartolini moved to Music City in 1908, after a short experience as a teacher in Indiana, and he was the first non-native of Tennessee to be drafted in 1917 to serve for his adoptive country during the First World War. A poet and a scholar, he wrote more than 300 poems on nostalgia, love, and patriotism. In these unpublished works, Bartolini shows how his identity progressively became Americanized: his writing style changed over time while still maintaining certain prosodic elements proper to his Italian culture and education. Bartolini’s experience, along with those of his compatriot who found their new home in Nashville, also confirms the integrating effect that the Great War had on Italians. Indeed, in the United States, a blend of old loyalties and the strong desire for acceptance and recognition drew the entire community into the public life of their adopted cities.

Abstract:

Education is not only a science but an art. During the children's entire education, school education is in a dominant position but family education plays a key role. Children's growth needs education, help, and guide from parents. With the development of Chinese society and economy, the importance of family education of children grows more and more significant. But because of cultural traditions, lifestyle, social customs, ideas and sense of heritage, family education in China is still a weak part. The traditional concept of family education is being challenged. And many parents lack understanding of physiological and psychological development of the children during their growth, and lack proper education and effective methods to face the different stages of children's development. Consequently, parents tend to miss crucial educational opportunities. With different history, culture and social economic conditions between China and America, the formations of family education are producing a huge impact. American high level of culture and education also determines the United States the world leader in science and technology. The US has not only advanced school education but advanced family education, and their advanced educational concepts and teaching approaches are in line so that we can learn from American family education in a lot of places.Through questionnaire investigation and contrastive analysis, this thesis studies the differences between Chinese and American family educational approaches by three main aspects of intellectual education, moral and physical education, and life education. Firstly, this thesis discusses the reasons on the historical and cultural backgrounds and social conditions. Then this thesis describes the specific performance including the different status and contents, the comparison of parenting methods. In the end, this thesis has a brief summary of advantages and disadvantages of Chinese and American family educational approaches. This thesis tries to briefly describes and compares the intellectual education, moral and physical education and life education. Therefore, the aim of this thesis is in order to improve the quality of our family education. By studying the differences of family educational style between China and America, we do not mean to belittle our Chinese family education but is a kind of reflection. Absorbing American family education's advantages and removing the disadvantages of our family education style as well as keep our Chinese traditional merits of family education could make a benign circulation of healthy personnel training in our country. Thus, we could gain a competitive advantage in the future competition and gradually adapt to the world trend of the future.

Abstract:

AbstractForeign Direct Investment (FDI) in recent years has created a positive impact for ASEAN countries. FDI give spillover effects that directly contribute capital improvements, technological developments, and global market access, also skills and managerial transfers. In order to attract FDI inflow into country, ASEAN member countries need to know what factors which attract investment related to the needs of infrastructure types and other factors. The purpose of this study is examine the determinant of FDI in ASEAN countries. This research method used is panel data regression period 2005-2015 from 10 countries in ASEAN. The results showed simultaneously and partially telecommunication infrastructure, market size, trade openness, and labor force variable have significant relationship with FDI inflows in ASEAN countries.Keywords: panel data regression, telecommunication infrastructure, market size, trade openness, labor force, FDI.ReferencesAppleyard, DR. 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Abstract:

Education in Oceania continues to reflect the embedded implicit and explicit colonial practices and processes from the past. This paper conceptualises a cultural approach to education and leadership appropriate and relevant to the Republic of the Marshall Islands. As elementary school leaders, we highlight Kanne Lobal, a traditional Marshallese navigation practice based on indigenous language, values and practices. We conceptualise and develop Kanne Lobal in this paper as a framework for understanding the usefulness of our indigenous knowledge in leadership and educational practices within formal education. Through bwebwenato, a method of talk story, our key learnings and reflexivities were captured. We argue that realising the value of Marshallese indigenous knowledge and practices for school leaders requires purposeful training of the ways in which our knowledge can be made useful in our professional educational responsibilities. Drawing from our Marshallese knowledge is an intentional effort to inspire, empower and express what education and leadership partnership means for Marshallese people, as articulated by Marshallese themselves. Introduction As noted in the call for papers within the Waikato Journal of Education (WJE) for this special issue, bodies of knowledge and histories in Oceania have long sustained generations across geographic boundaries to ensure cultural survival. For Marshallese people, we cannot really know ourselves “until we know how we came to be where we are today” (Walsh, Heine, Bigler & Stege, 2012). Jitdam Kapeel is a popular Marshallese concept and ideal associated with inquiring into relationships within the family and community. In a similar way, the practice of relating is about connecting the present and future to the past. Education and leadership partnerships are linked and we look back to the past, our history, to make sense and feel inspired to transform practices that will benefit our people. In this paper and in light of our next generation, we reconnect with our navigation stories to inspire and empower education and leadership. Kanne lobal is part of our navigation stories, a conceptual framework centred on cultural practices, values, and concepts that embrace collective partnerships. Our link to this talanoa vā with others in the special issue is to attempt to make sense of connections given the global COVID-19 context by providing a Marshallese approach to address the physical and relational “distance” between education and leadership partnerships in Oceania. Like the majority of developing small island nations in Oceania, the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) has had its share of educational challenges through colonial legacies of the past which continues to drive education systems in the region (Heine, 2002). The historical administration and education in the RMI is one of colonisation. Successive administrations by the Spanish, German, Japanese, and now the US, has resulted in education and learning that privileges western knowledge and forms of learning. This paper foregrounds understandings of education and learning as told by the voices of elementary school leaders from the RMI. The move to re-think education and leadership from Marshallese perspectives is an act of shifting the focus of bwebwenato or conversations that centres on Marshallese language and worldviews. The concept of jelalokjen was conceptualised as traditional education framed mainly within the community context. In the past, jelalokjen was practiced and transmitted to the younger generation for cultural continuity. During the arrival of colonial administrations into the RMI, jelalokjen was likened to the western notions of education and schooling (Kupferman, 2004). Today, the primary function of jelalokjen, as traditional and formal education, it is for “survival in a hostile [and challenging] environment” (Kupferman, 2004, p. 43). Because western approaches to learning in the RMI have not always resulted in positive outcomes for those engaged within the education system, as school leaders who value our cultural knowledge and practices, and aspire to maintain our language with the next generation, we turn to Kanne Lobal, a practice embedded in our navigation stories, collective aspirations, and leadership. The significance in the development of Kanne Lobal, as an appropriate framework for education and leadership, resulted in us coming together and working together. Not only were we able to share our leadership concerns, however, the engagement strengthened our connections with each other as school leaders, our communities, and the Public Schooling System (PSS). Prior to that, many of us were in competition for resources. Educational Leadership: IQBE and GCSL Leadership is a valued practice in the RMI. Before the IQBE programme started in 2018, the majority of the school leaders on the main island of Majuro had not engaged in collaborative partnerships with each other before. Our main educational purpose was to achieve accreditation from the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC), an accreditation commission for schools in the United States. The WASC accreditation dictated our work and relationships and many school leaders on Majuro felt the pressure of competition against each other. We, the authors in this paper, share our collective bwebwenato, highlighting our school leadership experiences and how we gained strength from our own ancestral knowledge to empower “us”, to collaborate with each other, our teachers, communities, as well as with PSS; a collaborative partnership we had not realised in the past. The paucity of literature that captures Kajin Majol (Marshallese language) and education in general in the RMI is what we intend to fill by sharing our reflections and experiences. To move our educational practices forward we highlight Kanne Lobal, a cultural approach that focuses on our strengths, collective social responsibilities and wellbeing. For a long time, there was no formal training in place for elementary school leaders. School principals and vice principals were appointed primarily on their academic merit through having an undergraduate qualification. As part of the first cohort of fifteen school leaders, we engaged in the professional training programme, the Graduate Certificate in School Leadership (GCSL), refitted to our context after its initial development in the Solomon Islands. GCSL was coordinated by the Institute of Education (IOE) at the University of the South Pacific (USP). GCSL was seen as a relevant and appropriate training programme for school leaders in the RMI as part of an Asia Development Bank (ADB) funded programme which aimed at “Improving Quality Basic Education” (IQBE) in parts of the northern Pacific. GCSL was managed on Majuro, RMI’s main island, by the director at the time Dr Irene Taafaki, coordinator Yolanda McKay, and administrators at the University of the South Pacific’s (USP) RMI campus. Through the provision of GCSL, as school leaders we were encouraged to re-think and draw-from our own cultural repository and connect to our ancestral knowledge that have always provided strength for us. This kind of thinking and practice was encouraged by our educational leaders (Heine, 2002). We argue that a culturally-affirming and culturally-contextual framework that reflects the lived experiences of Marshallese people is much needed and enables the disruption of inherent colonial processes left behind by Western and Eastern administrations which have influenced our education system in the RMI (Heine, 2002). Kanne Lobal, an approach utilising a traditional navigation has warranted its need to provide solutions for today’s educational challenges for us in the RMI. Education in the Pacific Education in the Pacific cannot be understood without contextualising it in its history and culture. It is the same for us in the RMI (Heine, 2002; Walsh et al., 2012). The RMI is located in the Pacific Ocean and is part of Micronesia. It was named after a British captain, John Marshall in the 1700s. The atolls in the RMI were explored by the Spanish in the 16th century. Germany unsuccessfully attempted to colonize the islands in 1885. Japan took control in 1914, but after several battles during World War II, the US seized the RMI from them. In 1947, the United Nations made the island group, along with the Mariana and Caroline archipelagos, a U.S. trust territory (Walsh et al, 2012). Education in the RMI reflects the colonial administrations of Germany, Japan, and now the US. Before the turn of the century, formal education in the Pacific reflected western values, practices, and standards. Prior to that, education was informal and not binded to formal learning institutions (Thaman, 1997) and oral traditions was used as the medium for transmitting learning about customs and practices living with parents, grandparents, great grandparents. As alluded to by Jiba B. Kabua (2004), any “discussion about education is necessarily a discussion of culture, and any policy on education is also a policy of culture” (p. 181). It is impossible to promote one without the other, and it is not logical to understand one without the other. Re-thinking how education should look like, the pedagogical strategies that are relevant in our classrooms, the ways to engage with our parents and communities - such re-thinking sits within our cultural approaches and frameworks. Our collective attempts to provide a cultural framework that is relevant and appropriate for education in our context, sits within the political endeavour to decolonize. This means that what we are providing will not only be useful, but it can be used as a tool to question and identify whether things in place restrict and prevent our culture or whether they promote and foreground cultural ideas and concepts, a significant discussion of culture linked to education (Kabua, 2004). Donor funded development aid programmes were provided to support the challenges within education systems. Concerned with the persistent low educational outcomes of Pacific students, despite the prevalence of aid programmes in the region, in 2000 Pacific educators and leaders with support from New Zealand Aid (NZ Aid) decided to intervene (Heine, 2002; Taufe’ulungaki, 2014). In April 2001, a group of Pacific educators and leaders across the region were invited to a colloquium funded by the New Zealand Overseas Development Agency held in Suva Fiji at the University of the South Pacific. The main purpose of the colloquium was to enable “Pacific educators to re-think the values, assumptions and beliefs underlying [formal] schooling in Oceania” (Benson, 2002). Leadership, in general, is a valued practice in the RMI (Heine, 2002). Despite education leadership being identified as a significant factor in school improvement (Sanga & Chu, 2009), the limited formal training opportunities of school principals in the region was a persistent concern. As part of an Asia Development Bank (ADB) funded project, the Improve Quality Basic Education (IQBE) intervention was developed and implemented in the RMI in 2017. Mentoring is a process associated with the continuity and sustainability of leadership knowledge and practices (Sanga & Chu, 2009). It is a key aspect of building capacity and capabilities within human resources in education (ibid). Indigenous knowledges and education research According to Hilda Heine, the relationship between education and leadership is about understanding Marshallese history and culture (cited in Walsh et al., 2012). It is about sharing indigenous knowledge and histories that “details for future generations a story of survival and resilience and the pride we possess as a people” (Heine, cited in Walsh et al., 2012, p. v). This paper is fuelled by postcolonial aspirations yet is grounded in Pacific indigenous research. This means that our intentions are driven by postcolonial pursuits and discourses linked to challenging the colonial systems and schooling in the Pacific region that privileges western knowledge and learning and marginalises the education practices and processes of local people (Thiong’o, 1986). A point of difference and orientation from postcolonialism is a desire to foreground indigenous Pacific language, specifically Majin Majol, through Marshallese concepts. Our collective bwebwenato and conversation honours and values kautiej (respect), jouj eo mour eo (reciprocity), and jouj (kindness) (Taafaki & Fowler, 2019). Pacific leaders developed the Rethinking Pacific Education Initiative for and by Pacific People (RPEIPP) in 2002 to take control of the ways in which education research was conducted by donor funded organisations (Taufe’ulungaki, 2014). Our former president, Dr Hilda Heine was part of the group of leaders who sought to counter the ways in which our educational and leadership stories were controlled and told by non-Marshallese (Heine, 2002). As a former minister of education in the RMI, Hilda Heine continues to inspire and encourage the next generation of educators, school leaders, and researchers to re-think and de-construct the way learning and education is conceptualised for Marshallese people. The conceptualisation of Kanne Lobal acknowledges its origin, grounded in Marshallese navigation knowledge and practice. Our decision to unpack and deconstruct Kanne Lobal within the context of formal education and leadership responds to the need to not only draw from indigenous Marshallese ideas and practice but to consider that the next generation will continue to be educated using western processes and initiatives particularly from the US where we get a lot of our funding from. According to indigenous researchers Dawn Bessarab and Bridget Ng’andu (2010), doing research that considers “culturally appropriate processes to engage with indigenous groups and individuals is particularly pertinent in today’s research environment” (p. 37). Pacific indigenous educators and researchers have turned to their own ancestral knowledge and practices for inspiration and empowerment. Within western research contexts, the often stringent ideals and processes are not always encouraging of indigenous methods and practices. However, many were able to ground and articulate their use of indigenous methods as being relevant and appropriate to capturing the realities of their communities (Nabobo-Baba, 2008; Sualii-Sauni & Fulu-Aiolupotea, 2014; Thaman, 1997). At the same time, utilising Pacific indigenous methods and approaches enabled research engagement with their communities that honoured and respected them and their communities. For example, Tongan, Samoan, and Fijian researchers used the talanoa method as a way to capture the stories, lived realities, and worldviews of their communities within education in the diaspora (Fa’avae, Jones, & Manu’atu, 2016; Nabobo-Baba, 2008; Sualii-Sauni & Aiolupotea, 2014; Vaioleti, 2005). Tok stori was used by Solomon Islander educators and school leaders to highlight the unique circles of conversational practice and storytelling that leads to more positive engagement with their community members, capturing rich and meaningful narratives as a result (Sanga & Houma, 2004). The Indigenous Aborigine in Australia utilise yarning as a “relaxed discussion through which both the researcher and participant journey together visiting places and topics of interest relevant” (Bessarab & Ng’andu, 2010, p. 38). Despite the diverse forms of discussions and storytelling by indigenous peoples, of significance are the cultural protocols, ethics, and language for conducting and guiding the engagement (Bessarab & Ng’andu, 2010; Nabobo-Baba, 2008; Sualii-Sauni & Aiolupotea, 2014). Through the ethics, values, protocols, and language, these are what makes indigenous methods or frameworks unique compared to western methods like in-depth interviews or semi-structured interviews. This is why it is important for us as Marshallese educators to frame, ground, and articulate how our own methods and frameworks of learning could be realised in western education (Heine, 2002; Jetnil-Kijiner, 2014). In this paper, we utilise bwebwenato as an appropriate method linked to “talk story”, capturing our collective stories and experiences during GCSL and how we sought to build partnerships and collaboration with each other, our communities, and the PSS. Bwebwenato and drawing from Kajin Majel Legends and stories that reflect Marshallese society and its cultural values have survived through our oral traditions. The practice of weaving also holds knowledge about our “valuable and earliest sources of knowledge” (Taafaki & Fowler, 2019, p. 2). The skilful navigation of Marshallese wayfarers on the walap (large canoes) in the ocean is testament of their leadership and the value they place on ensuring the survival and continuity of Marshallese people (Taafaki & Fowler, 2019; Walsh et al., 2012). During her graduate study in 2014, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner conceptualised bwebwenato as being the most “well-known form of Marshallese orality” (p. 38). The Marshallese-English dictionary defined bwebwenato as talk, conversation, story, history, article, episode, lore, myth, or tale (cited in Jetnil Kijiner, 2014). Three years later in 2017, bwebwenato was utilised in a doctoral project by Natalie Nimmer as a research method to gather “talk stories” about the experiences of 10 Marshallese experts in knowledge and skills ranging from sewing to linguistics, canoe-making and business. Our collective bwebwenato in this paper centres on Marshallese ideas and language. The philosophy of Marshallese knowledge is rooted in our “Kajin Majel”, or Marshallese language and is shared and transmitted through our oral traditions. For instance, through our historical stories and myths. Marshallese philosophy, that is, the knowledge systems inherent in our beliefs, values, customs, and practices are shared. They are inherently relational, meaning that knowledge systems and philosophies within our world are connected, in mind, body, and spirit (Jetnil-Kijiner, 2014; Nimmer, 2017). Although some Marshallese believe that our knowledge is disappearing as more and more elders pass away, it is therefore important work together, and learn from each other about the knowledges shared not only by the living but through their lamentations and stories of those who are no longer with us (Jetnil-Kijiner, 2014). As a Marshallese practice, weaving has been passed-down from generation to generation. Although the art of weaving is no longer as common as it used to be, the artefacts such as the “jaki-ed” (clothing mats) continue to embody significant Marshallese values and traditions. For our weavers, the jouj (check spelling) is the centre of the mat and it is where the weaving starts. When the jouj is correct and weaved well, the remainder and every other part of the mat will be right. The jouj is symbolic of the “heart” and if the heart is prepared well, trained well, then life or all other parts of the body will be well (Taafaki & Fowler, 2019). In that light, we have applied the same to this paper. Conceptualising and drawing from cultural practices that are close and dear to our hearts embodies a significant ontological attempt to prioritize our own knowledge and language, a sense of endearment to who we are and what we believe education to be like for us and the next generation. The application of the phrase “Majolizing '' was used by the Ministry of Education when Hilda Heine was minister, to weave cultural ideas and language into the way that teachers understand the curriculum, develop lesson plans and execute them in the classroom. Despite this, there were still concerns with the embedded colonized practices where teachers defaulted to eurocentric methods of doing things, like the strategies provided in the textbooks given to us. In some ways, our education was slow to adjust to the “Majolizing '' intention by our former minister. In this paper, we provide Kanne Lobal as a way to contribute to the “Majolizing intention” and perhaps speed up yet still be collectively responsible to all involved in education. Kajin Wa and Kanne Lobal “Wa” is the Marshallese concept for canoe. Kajin wa, as in canoe language, has a lot of symbolic meaning linked to deeply-held Marshallese values and practices. The canoe was the foundational practice that supported the livelihood of harsh atoll island living which reflects the Marshallese social world. The experts of Kajin wa often refer to “wa” as being the vessel of life, a means and source of sustaining life (Kelen, 2009, cited in Miller, 2010). “Jouj” means kindness and is the lower part of the main hull of the canoe. It is often referred to by some canoe builders in the RMI as the heart of the canoe and is linked to love. The jouj is one of the first parts of the canoe that is built and is “used to do all other measurements, and then the rest of the canoe is built on top of it” (Miller, 2010, p. 67). The significance of the jouj is that when the canoe is in the water, the jouj is the part of the hull that is underwater and ensures that all the cargo and passengers are safe. For Marshallese, jouj or kindness is what living is about and is associated with selflessly carrying the responsibility of keeping the family and community safe. The parts of the canoe reflect Marshallese culture, legend, family, lineage, and kinship. They embody social responsibilities that guide, direct, and sustain Marshallese families’ wellbeing, from atoll to atoll. For example, the rojak (boom), rojak maan (upper boom), rojak kōrā (lower boom), and they support the edges of the ujelā/ujele (sail) (see figure 1). The literal meaning of rojak maan is male boom and rojak kōrā means female boom which together strengthens the sail and ensures the canoe propels forward in a strong yet safe way. Figuratively, the rojak maan and rojak kōrā symbolise the mother and father relationship which when strong, through the jouj (kindness and love), it can strengthen families and sustain them into the future. Figure 1. Parts of the canoe Source: https://www.canoesmarshallislands.com/2014/09/names-of-canoe-parts/ From a socio-cultural, communal, and leadership view, the canoe (wa) provides understanding of the relationships required to inspire and sustain Marshallese peoples’ education and learning. We draw from Kajin wa because they provide cultural ideas and practices that enable understanding of education and leadership necessary for sustaining Marshallese people and realities in Oceania. When building a canoe, the women are tasked with the weaving of the ujelā/ujele (sail) and to ensure that it is strong enough to withstand long journeys and the fierce winds and waters of the ocean. The Kanne Lobal relates to the front part of the ujelā/ujele (sail) where the rojak maan and rojak kōrā meet and connect (see the red lines in figure 1). Kanne Lobal is linked to the strategic use of the ujelā/ujele by navigators, when there is no wind north wind to propel them forward, to find ways to capture the winds so that their journey can continue. As a proverbial saying, Kanne Lobal is used to ignite thinking and inspire and transform practice particularly when the journey is rough and tough. In this paper we draw from Kanne Lobal to ignite, inspire, and transform our educational and leadership practices, a move to explore what has always been meaningful to Marshallese people when we are faced with challenges. The Kanne Lobal utilises our language, and cultural practices and values by sourcing from the concepts of jouj (kindness, love), kautiej (respect), and jouj eo mour eo (reciprocity). A key Marshallese proverb, “Enra bwe jen lale rara”, is the cultural practice where families enact compassion through the sharing of food in all occurrences. The term “enra” is a small basket weaved from the coconut leaves, and often used by Marshallese as a plate to share and distribute food amongst each other. Bwe-jen-lale-rara is about noticing and providing for the needs of others, and “enra” the basket will help support and provide for all that are in need. “Enra-bwe-jen-lale-rara” is symbolic of cultural exchange and reciprocity and the cultural values associated with building and maintaining relationships, and constantly honouring each other. As a Marshallese practice, in this article we share our understanding and knowledge about the challenges as well as possible solutions for education concerns in our nation. In addition, we highlight another proverb, “wa kuk wa jimor”, which relates to having one canoe, and despite its capacity to feed and provide for the individual, but within the canoe all people can benefit from what it can provide. In the same way, we provide in this paper a cultural framework that will enable all educators to benefit from. It is a framework that is far-reaching and relevant to the lived realities of Marshallese people today. Kumit relates to people united to build strength, all co-operating and working together, living in peace, harmony, and good health. Kanne Lobal: conceptual framework for education and leadership An education framework is a conceptual structure that can be used to capture ideas and thinking related to aspects of learning. Kanne Lobal is conceptualised and framed in this paper as an educational framework. Kanne Lobal highlights the significance of education as a collective partnership whereby leadership is an important aspect. Kanne Lobal draws-from indigenous Marshallese concepts like kautiej (respect), jouj eo mour eo (reciprocity), and jouj (kindness, heart). The role of a leader, including an education leader, is to prioritise collective learning and partnerships that benefits Marshallese people and the continuity and survival of the next generation (Heine, 2002; Thaman, 1995). As described by Ejnar Aerōk, an expert canoe builder in the RMI, he stated: “jerbal ippān doon bwe en maron maan wa e” (cited in Miller, 2010, p. 69). His description emphasises the significance of partnerships and working together when navigating and journeying together in order to move the canoe forward. The kubaak, the outrigger of the wa (canoe) is about “partnerships”. For us as elementary school leaders on Majuro, kubaak encourages us to value collaborative partnerships with each other as well as our communities, PSS, and other stakeholders. Partnerships is an important part of the Kanne Lobal education and leadership framework. It requires ongoing bwebwenato – the inspiring as well as confronting and challenging conversations that should be mediated and negotiated if we and our education stakeholders are to journey together to ensure that the educational services we provide benefits our next generation of young people in the RMI. Navigating ahead the partnerships, mediation, and negotiation are the core values of jouj (kindness, love), kautiej (respect), and jouj eo mour eo (reciprocity). As an organic conceptual framework grounded in indigenous values, inspired through our lived experiences, Kanne Lobal provides ideas and concepts for re-thinking education and leadership practices that are conducive to learning and teaching in the schooling context in the RMI. By no means does it provide the solution to the education ills in our nation. However, we argue that Kanne Lobal is a more relevant approach which is much needed for the negatively stigmatised system as a consequence of the various colonial administrations that have and continue to shape and reframe our ideas about what education should be like for us in the RMI. Moreover, Kannel Lobal is our attempt to decolonize the framing of education and leadership, moving our bwebwenato to re-framing conversations of teaching and learning so that our cultural knowledge and values are foregrounded, appreciated, and realised within our education system. Bwebwenato: sharing our stories In this section, we use bwebwenato as a method of gathering and capturing our stories as data. Below we capture our stories and ongoing conversations about the richness in Marshallese cultural knowledge in the outer islands and on Majuro and the potentialities in Kanne Lobal. Danny Jim When I was in third grade (9-10 years of age), during my grandfather’s speech in Arno, an atoll near Majuro, during a time when a wa (canoe) was being blessed and ready to put the canoe into the ocean. My grandfather told me the canoe was a blessing for the family. “Without a canoe, a family cannot provide for them”, he said. The canoe allows for travelling between places to gather food and other sources to provide for the family. My grandfather’s stories about people’s roles within the canoe reminded me that everyone within the family has a responsibility to each other. Our women, mothers and daughters too have a significant responsibility in the journey, in fact, they hold us, care for us, and given strength to their husbands, brothers, and sons. The wise man or elder sits in the middle of the canoe, directing the young man who help to steer. The young man, he does all the work, directed by the older man. They take advice and seek the wisdom of the elder. In front of the canoe, a young boy is placed there and because of his strong and youthful vision, he is able to help the elder as well as the young man on the canoe. The story can be linked to the roles that school leaders, teachers, and students have in schooling. Without each person knowing intricately their role and responsibility, the sight and vision ahead for the collective aspirations of the school and the community is difficult to comprehend. For me, the canoe is symbolic of our educational journey within our education system. As the school leader, a central, trusted, and respected figure in the school, they provide support for teachers who are at the helm, pedagogically striving to provide for their students. For without strong direction from the school leaders and teachers at the helm, the students, like the young boy, cannot foresee their futures, or envisage how education can benefit them. This is why Kanne Lobal is a significant framework for us in the Marshall Islands because within the practice we are able to take heed and empower each other so that all benefit from the process. Kanne Lobal is linked to our culture, an essential part of who we are. We must rely on our own local approaches, rather than relying on others that are not relevant to what we know and how we live in today’s society. One of the things I can tell is that in Majuro, compared to the outer islands, it’s different. In the outer islands, parents bring children together and tell them legends and stories. The elders tell them about the legends and stories – the bwebwenato. Children from outer islands know a lot more about Marshallese legends compared to children from the Majuro atoll. They usually stay close to their parents, observe how to prepare food and all types of Marshallese skills. Loretta Joseph Case There is little Western influence in the outer islands. They grow up learning their own culture with their parents, not having tv. They are closely knit, making their own food, learning to weave. They use fire for cooking food. They are more connected because there are few of them, doing their own culture. For example, if they’re building a house, the ladies will come together and make food to take to the males that are building the house, encouraging them to keep on working - “jemjem maal” (sharpening tools i.e. axe, like encouraging workers to empower them). It’s when they bring food and entertainment. Rubon Rubon Togetherness, work together, sharing of food, these are important practices as a school leader. Jemjem maal – the whole village works together, men working and the women encourage them with food and entertainment. All the young children are involved in all of the cultural practices, cultural transmission is consistently part of their everyday life. These are stronger in the outer islands. Kanne Lobal has the potential to provide solutions using our own knowledge and practices. Connie Joel When new teachers become a teacher, they learn more about their culture in teaching. Teaching raises the question, who are we? A popular saying amongst our people, “Aelon kein ad ej aelon in manit”, means that “Our islands are cultural islands”. Therefore, when we are teaching, and managing the school, we must do this culturally. When we live and breathe, we must do this culturally. There is more socialising with family and extended family. Respect the elderly. When they’re doing things the ladies all get together, in groups and do it. Cut the breadfruit, and preserve the breadfruit and pandanus. They come together and do it. Same as fishing, building houses, building canoes. They use and speak the language often spoken by the older people. There are words that people in the outer islands use and understand language regularly applied by the elderly. Respect elderly and leaders more i.e., chiefs (iroj), commoners (alap), and the workers on the land (ri-jerbal) (social layer under the commoners). All the kids, they gather with their families, and go and visit the chiefs and alap, and take gifts from their land, first produce/food from the plantation (eojōk). Tommy Almet The people are more connected to the culture in the outer islands because they help one another. They don’t have to always buy things by themselves, everyone contributes to the occasion. For instance, for birthdays, boys go fishing, others contribute and all share with everyone. Kanne Lobal is a practice that can bring people together – leaders, teachers, stakeholders. We want our colleagues to keep strong and work together to fix problems like students and teachers’ absenteeism which is a big problem for us in schools. Demetria Malachi The culture in the outer islands are more accessible and exposed to children. In Majuro, there is a mixedness of cultures and knowledges, influenced by Western thinking and practices. Kanne Lobal is an idea that can enhance quality educational purposes for the RMI. We, the school leaders who did GCSL, we want to merge and use this idea because it will help benefit students’ learning and teachers’ teaching. Kanne Lobal will help students to learn and teachers to teach though traditional skills and knowledge. We want to revitalize our ways of life through teaching because it is slowly fading away. Also, we want to have our own Marshallese learning process because it is in our own language making it easier to use and understand. Essentially, we want to proudly use our own ways of teaching from our ancestors showing the appreciation and blessings given to us. Way Forward To think of ways forward is about reflecting on the past and current learnings. Instead of a traditional discussion within a research publication, we have opted to continue our bwebwenato by sharing what we have learnt through the Graduate Certificate in School Leadership (GCSL) programme. Our bwebwenato does not end in this article and this opportunity to collaborate and partner together in this piece of writing has been a meaningful experience to conceptualise and unpack the Kanne Lobal framework. Our collaborative bwebwenato has enabled us to dig deep into our own wise knowledges for guidance through mediating and negotiating the challenges in education and leadership (Sanga & Houma, 2004). For example, bwe-jen-lale-rara reminds us to inquire, pay attention, and focus on supporting the needs of others. Through enra-bwe-jen-lale-rara, it reminds us to value cultural exchange and reciprocity which will strengthen the development and maintaining of relationships based on ways we continue to honour each other (Nimmer, 2017). We not only continue to support each other, but also help mentor the next generation of school leaders within our education system (Heine, 2002). Education and leadership are all about collaborative partnerships (Sanga & Chu, 2009; Thaman, 1997). Developing partnerships through the GCSL was useful learning for us. It encouraged us to work together, share knowledge, respect each other, and be kind. The values of jouj (kindness, love), kautiej (respect), and jouj eo mour eo (reciprocity) are meaningful in being and becoming and educational leader in the RMI (Jetnil-Kijiner, 2014; Miller, 2010; Nimmer, 2017). These values are meaningful for us practice particularly given the drive by PSS for schools to become accredited. The workshops and meetings delivered during the GCSL in the RMI from 2018 to 2019 about Kanne Lobal has given us strength to share our stories and experiences from the meeting with the stakeholders. But before we met with the stakeholders, we were encouraged to share and speak in our language within our courses: EDP05 (Professional Development and Learning), EDP06 (School Leadership), EDP07 (School Management), EDP08 (Teaching and Learning), and EDP09 (Community Partnerships). In groups, we shared our presentations with our peers, the 15 school leaders in the GCSL programme. We also invited USP RMI staff. They liked the way we presented Kannel Lobal. They provided us with feedback, for example: how the use of the sail on the canoe, the parts and their functions can be conceptualised in education and how they are related to the way that we teach our own young people. Engaging stakeholders in the conceptualisation and design stages of Kanne Lobal strengthened our understanding of leadership and collaborative partnerships. Based on various meetings with the RMI Pacific Resources for Education and Learning (PREL) team, PSS general assembly, teachers from the outer islands, and the PSS executive committee, we were able to share and receive feedback on the Kanne Lobal framework. The coordinators of the PREL programme in the RMI were excited by the possibilities around using Kanne Lobal, as a way to teach culture in an inspirational way to Marshallese students. Our Marshallese knowledge, particularly through the proverbial meaning of Kanne Lobal provided so much inspiration and insight for the groups during the presentation which gave us hope and confidence to develop the framework. Kanne Lobal is an organic and indigenous approach, grounded in Marshallese ways of doing things (Heine, 2002; Taafaki & Fowler, 2019). Given the persistent presence of colonial processes within the education system and the constant reference to practices and initiatives from the US, Kanne Lobal for us provides a refreshing yet fulfilling experience and makes us feel warm inside because it is something that belongs to all Marshallese people. Conclusion Marshallese indigenous knowledge and practices provide meaningful educational and leadership understanding and learnings. They ignite, inspire, and transform thinking and practice. The Kanne Lobal conceptual framework emphasises key concepts and values necessary for collaborative partnerships within education and leadership practices in the RMI. The bwebwenato or talk stories have been insightful and have highlighted the strengths and benefits that our Marshallese ideas and practices possess when looking for appropriate and relevant ways to understand education and leadership. Acknowledgements We want to acknowledge our GCSL cohort of school leaders who have supported us in the development of Kanne Lobal as a conceptual framework. A huge kommol tata to our friends: Joana, Rosana, Loretta, Jellan, Alvin, Ellice, Rolando, Stephen, and Alan. References Benson, C. (2002). Preface. In F. Pene, A. M. Taufe’ulungaki, & C. Benson (Eds.), Tree of Opportunity: re-thinking Pacific Education (p. iv). Suva, Fiji: University of the South Pacific, Institute of Education. Bessarab, D., Ng’andu, B. (2010). Yarning about yarning as a legitimate method in indigenous research. International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies, 3(1), 37-50. Fa’avae, D., Jones, A., & Manu’atu, L. (2016). Talanoa’i ‘a e talanoa - talking about talanoa: Some dilemmas of a novice researcher. AlterNative: An Indigenous Journal of Indigenous Peoples,12(2),138-150. Heine, H. C. (2002). A Marshall Islands perspective. In F. Pene, A. M. Taufe’ulungaki, & C. Benson (Eds.), Tree of Opportunity: re-thinking Pacific Education (pp. 84 – 90). Suva, Fiji: University of the South Pacific, Institute of Education. Infoplease Staff (2017, February 28). Marshall Islands, retrieved from https://www.infoplease.com/world/countries/marshall-islands Jetnil-Kijiner, K. (2014). Iep Jaltok: A history of Marshallese literature. (Unpublished masters’ thesis). Honolulu, HW: University of Hawaii. Kabua, J. B. (2004). We are the land, the land is us: The moral responsibility of our education and sustainability. In A.L. Loeak, V.C. Kiluwe and L. Crowl (Eds.), Life in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, pp. 180 – 191. Suva, Fiji: University of the South Pacific. Kupferman, D. (2004). Jelalokjen in flux: Pitfalls and prospects of contextualising teacher training programmes in the Marshall Islands. Directions: Journal of Educational Studies, 26(1), 42 – 54. http://directions.usp.ac.fj/collect/direct/index/assoc/D1175062.dir/doc.pdf Miller, R. L. (2010). Wa kuk wa jimor: Outrigger canoes, social change, and modern life in the Marshall Islands (Unpublished masters’ thesis). Honolulu, HW: University of Hawaii. Nabobo-Baba, U. (2008). Decolonising framings in Pacific research: Indigenous Fijian vanua research framework as an organic response. AlterNative: An Indigenous Journal of Indigenous Peoples, 4(2), 141-154. Nimmer, N. E. (2017). Documenting a Marshallese indigenous learning framework (Unpublished doctoral thesis). Honolulu, HW: University of Hawaii. Sanga, K., & Houma, S. (2004). Solomon Islands principalship: Roles perceived, performed, preferred, and expected. Directions: Journal of Educational Studies, 26(1), 55-69. Sanga, K., & Chu, C. (2009). Introduction. In K. Sanga & C. Chu (Eds.), Living and Leaving a Legacy of Hope: Stories by New Generation Pacific Leaders (pp. 10-12). NZ: He Parekereke & Victoria University of Wellington. Suaalii-Sauni, T., & Fulu-Aiolupotea, S. M. (2014). Decolonising Pacific research, building Pacific research communities, and developing Pacific research tools: The case of the talanoa and the faafaletui in Samoa. Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 55(3), 331-344. Taafaki, I., & Fowler, M. K. (2019). Clothing mats of the Marshall Islands: The history, the culture, and the weavers. US: Kindle Direct. Taufe’ulungaki, A. M. (2014). Look back to look forward: A reflective Pacific journey. In M. ‘Otunuku, U. Nabobo-Baba, S. Johansson Fua (Eds.), Of Waves, Winds, and Wonderful Things: A Decade of Rethinking Pacific Education (pp. 1-15). Fiji: USP Press. Thaman, K. H. (1995). Concepts of learning, knowledge and wisdom in Tonga, and their relevance to modern education. Prospects, 25(4), 723-733. Thaman, K. H. (1997). Reclaiming a place: Towards a Pacific concept of education for cultural development. The Journal of the Polynesian Society, 106(2), 119-130. Thiong’o, N. W. (1986). Decolonising the mind: The politics of language in African literature. 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Abstract:

There is a growing global interest in Arctic natural resources that have a strong influence on the local economies. The Arctic economy is a rather unique phenomenon encompassing Indigenous practices, local economic activities, and industrial development. Indigenous economies vary across the Arctic states and exhibit divergent economic mixtures. In globalizing societies and full market economies, traditional Indigenous economies are changing and perceived especially by the non-Indigenous to be a tribute to old customs rather than a way of life that is being followed by the young generation. However, certain groups of the contemporary Indigenous populations in the Arctic continue to preserve their culture and ensure the continuation of Indigenous ways of life. The development of Indigenous communities is closely linked to their economic well-being, on the one hand, and to their culture and traditions, on the other. Our article contributes to the discussion on the significance of Indigenous economies in providing sustainability in terms of Indigenous communities, their culture, and traditions. The research objective is to identify strategies and tools that sustain Indigenous economies as well as the goals of various stakeholders in encouraging and supporting the traditional economic activities of Indigenous peoples. We contrast three countries—Russia, Finland, and the United States (Alaska)—and discuss some governmental strategies that can be employed for preserving unique Indigenous economies. The research methods consist of a content analysis of state and regional legislation and strategies, social studies of stakeholders’ opinions, case studies describing market infrastructure, and economic activities as well as features of traditional lifestyles and Indigenous knowledge typical of these regions.

Abstract:

We Break Up, I Publish: Theorising and Emotional Processing like Taylor Swift In 2007 after the rather painful end of my first long-term same-sex relationship I asked myself two questions (and like a good graduate student wrote a paper about it that was subsequently published): (1) what is love; (2) and if love exists, are queer and straight love somehow different. I asked myself the second question because, unlike my previous “straight” breakups (back when I honestly thought I was straight), this one was different, was far more messy, and seemed to have a lot to do with the fact that my then fresh ex-boyfriend and I had dramatically different ideas about how the relationship should look, work, be codified, or if it should or could be codified. It was an eye-opening experience since the truth that these different ideas existed—basically his point of view—really only “came out” in my mind through the act and learning involved in that breakup. Until then, from a Queer Theory perspective, you could have described me as a “man who had sex with men,” called himself hom*osexual, but was so hom*onormative that if you’d approached me with even a light version of Michel Foucault’s thoughts on “Friendship as a Way of Life” I’d have looked at you as queerly, and cluelessly, as possible. Mainstream Queer Theory would have put the end of the relationship down to the difference and conflict between what is pejoratively called the “marriage-chasing-Gay-normaliser,” represented by me, and the “radical-Queer(ness)-of-difference” represented by my ex-boyfriend, although like a lot of theory, that misses the personal (which I recall being political...), and a whole host of non-theoretical problems that plagued that relationship. Basically I thought Queer/hom*osexual/Lesbian/Transgendered and the rest of the alphabet soup was exactly the same as Straight folks both with respect to a subjective understanding of the self, social relations and formations, and how you acted or enacted yourself in public and private except in the bedroom.. I thought, since Canada had legalised same-sex marriage, all was well and equal (other than the occasional hate-crime which would then be justly punished). Of course I understood that at that point Canada was the exception and not the rule with respect to same-sex rights and same-sex marriage, so it followed in my mind that most of our time collectively should be spent supporting those south of the border or overseas who still faced restrictions on these basic rights, or out-and-out violence, persecution and even state-sanctioned death for just being who they are and/or trying to express it. And now, five years on, stating that Canada is the exception as opposed to the rule with respect to the legalisation of same-sex marriage and the codification of same-sex rights in law has the potential to be outdated as the recent successes of social movements, court rulings and the tenor of political debate and voting has shifted internationally with rapid speed. But it was only because of that breakup that these theoretical and practical issues had come out of my queer closet and for the first time I started to question some necessary link between love and codification (marriage), and how the queer in Queer relationships does or potentially can disrupt this link. And not just for Queers, but for Straight folk too, which is the primary point that should be underlined now and is addressed at the end of this paper. Because, embittered as I was at the time, I still basically agree with the theoretical position that I came to in that paper on love—based on a queering of the terms of Alain Badiou—where I affirmed that love resisted codification, especially in its queer form, because it is fidelity to an act and truth between two or more partners which resists the rigid walls of State-based codification (Potts, Love Hurts; Badiou, Ethics and Saint Paul). But as one of the peer reviewers for this paper rightly pointed out, the above distinctions between my ex and myself implicitly rely upon a State-centric model of rights and freedoms, which I attacked in the first paper, but which I freely admit I am guilty of utilising and arguing in favour of here. But that is because I am interested, here, not in talking about love as an abstract concept towards which we should work in our personal relationships, but as the state of things, and specifically the state of same-sex marriage and the discourse and images which surrounds it, which means that the State does matter. This is specifically so given the lack of meaningful challenges to the State System in Canada and the US. I maintain, following Butler, that it is through power, and our response to the representatives of power “hailing us,” that we become bodies that matter and subjects (Bodies That Matter; The Psychic Life of Power; and Giving An Account of Oneself). While her re-reading of Althusser in these texts argues that we should come to a philosophical and political position which challenges this State-based form of subject creation and power, she also notes that politically and philosophically we have yet to articulate such a position clearly, and I’d say that this is especially the case for what is covered and argued in the mainstream (media) debate on same-sex marriage. So apropos what is arguably Foucault’s most mature analysis of “power,” and while agreeing that my State-based argument for inclusion and rights does indeed strengthen the “biopolitical” (The History of Sexuality 140 and 145) control over, in this case, Queer populations, I argue that this is nonetheless the political reality with which we are working in and analyzing, and that is my concern here. Despite a personal desire that this not be the case, the State or state sanctioned institutions do continue to hold a monopoly of power in conferring subjecthood and rights. To take a page from Jeremy Bentham, I would say that arguing from a position which does not start from or seriously consider the State as the current basis for rights and subjecthood, though potentially less ethically problematic and more in line with my personal politics, is tantamount to talking and arguing about “nonsense on stilts.” “Caught in a Bad Romance?” Comparing hom*onationalist Trajectories and the Appeal of Militarist Discourse to LGBT Grassroots Organisations In comparing the discourses and enframings of the debate over same-sex marriage between Canada in the mid 1990s and early 2000s and in the US today, one might presume that how it came to say “I do” in Canada and how it might or might not get “left at the altar” in the US, is the result of very different national cultures. But this would just subscribe to one of a number of “cultural explanations” for perceived differences between Canada and the US that are usually built upon straw-man comparisons which then pillorise the US for something or other. And in doing so it would continue an obscuration that Canada, unlike the US, is unproblematically open and accepting when it comes to multicultural, multiracial and multisexual diversity and inclusion. Which Canada isn’t nor has it ever been. When you look at the current discourse in both countries—by their key political representatives on the international stage—you find the opposite. In the US, you have President Barack Obama, the first sitting President to come out in favour of same-sex marriage, and the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, setting same-sex rights at home and abroad as key policy planks (Gay Rights are Human Rights). Meanwhile, in Canada, you have Prime Minister Stephen Harper, in office since 2006, openly support his Conservative Party’s “traditional marriage” policy which is thankfully made difficult to implement because of the courts, and John Baird, the badly closeted Minister of Foreign Affairs, who doesn’t mention same-sex rights at home or with respect to foreign relations—unless it is used as supplementary evidence to further other foreign policy goals (c.f. Seguin)—only showing off his sexuality outside of the press-gallery to drum up gay-conservative votes or gay-conservative fundraising at LGBTQ community events which his government is then apt to pull funding for (c.f. Bradshaw). Of course my point is not to just reverse the stereotypes, painting an idyllic picture of the US and a grim one of Canada. What I want to problematise is the supposed national cultural distinctions which are naturalised when arguments are made through them as to why same-sex marriage was legalised in Canada, while the Defense of Marriage Act still stands in the US. To follow and extend Jasbir Puar’s argument from Terrorist Assemblages, what we see in both same-sex marriage debates and discourses is really the same phenomenon, but, so far, with different outcomes and having different manifestations. Puar contends that same-sex rights, like most equalising rights for minority groups, are only granted when all three of the following conditions prevail: (1) in a state or narrative of exception, where the nation grants a minority group equal rights because “the nation” feels threatened from without; (2) only on the condition that normalisation (or hom*onormalisation in the case of the Queer community) occurs, with those who don’t conform pushed further from a place in the national-subject; (3) and that the price of admission into being the “allowed Queer” is an ultra-patriotic identification with the Nation. In Canada, the state or narrative of exception was an “attack” from within which resulted in the third criterion being downplayed (although it is still present). Court challenges in a number of provinces led in each case to a successful ruling in favour of legalising same-sex marriage. Appeals to these rulings made their way to the Supreme Court, who likewise ruled in favour of the legalisation of same-sex marriage. This ruling came with an order to the Canadian Parliament that it had to change the existing marriage laws and definition of marriage to make it inclusive of same-sex marriage. This “attack” was performed by the judiciary who have traditionally (c.f. Makin) been much less partisan in appointment or ruling than their counterparts in the US. When new marriage laws were proposed to take account of the direction made by the courts, the governing Liberal Party and then Prime Minister Paul Martin made it a “free vote” so members of his own party could vote against it if they chose. Although granted with only lacklustre support by the governing party, the Canadian LGBTQ community rejoiced and became less politically active, because we’d won, right? International Queers flocked to Canada—one in four same-sex weddings since legalisation in Canada have been to out of country residents (Postmedia News)—as long as they had the proper socioeconomic profile (which is also a racialised profile) to afford the trip and wedding. This caused a budding same-sex marriage tourism and queer love normalisation industry to be built around the Canada Queer experience because especially at the time of legalisation Canada was still one of the few countries to allow for same-sex marriages. What this all means is that hom*onationalism in Canada is much less charged. It manifests itself as fitting in and not just keeping up with the Joneses when it comes to things like community engagement and Parent Teacher Association (PTA) meetings, but trying to do them one better (although only by a bit so as not to offend). In essence, the comparatively bland process in the 1990s by which Canada slowly underwent a state of exception by a non-politically charged and non-radical professional judiciary simply interpreting the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms at the provincial and then the federal level is mirrored in the rather bland and non-radical hom*onationalism which resulted. So unlike the US, the rhetoric of the LGBT community stays subdued unless there’s a hint that the right to same-sex divorce might get hit by Conservative Party guns, in which case all hell breaks loose (c.f. Ha). While the US is subject to the same set of logics for the currently in-progress enactment of legalising same-sex marriage, the state of exception is dramatically different. Puar argues it is the never-ending War on Terror. This also means that the enframings and debate in the US are exceptionally charged and political, leading to a very different type of hom*onationalism and hom*onationalist subject than is found in Canada. American hom*onationalism has not radically changed from Puar’s description, but due to leadership from the top (Obama, Clinton and Lady Gaga) the intensity and thereby structured confinement of what is an acceptable Queer-American subject has become increasingly rigid. What is included and given rights is the hyper-patriotic queer-soldier, the defender of the nation. And what reinforces the rigidity of what amounts to a new “glass closet” for queers is that grassroots organisations have bought into the same rhetoric, logic, and direction as to how to achieve equality as the Homecoming advertisem*nt from the Equal Love Campaign in Britain shows. For the other long-leading nation engaged in the War on Terror narrative, Homecoming provides the imagery of a gay member of the armed services draped in the flag proposing to his partner at the end of duty overseas that ends with the following text: “All men can be heroes. All men can be husbands. End discrimination.” Can’t get more patriotic—and heteronormative with the use of the term “husbands”—than that. Well, unless you’re Lady Gaga. Now Lady Gaga stands out as a public figure whom has taken an explicitly pro-queer and pro-LGBT stance from the outset of her career. And I do not want to diminish the fact that she has been admirably effective in her campaigning and consistent pro-queer and pro-LGBT stance. While above I characterised her input above as leadership from the top, she also, in effect, by standing outside of State Power unlike Obama and Clinton, and being able to be critical of it, is able to push the State in a more progressive direction. This was most obviously evidenced in her very public criticism of the Democratic Party and President Obama for not moving quickly enough to adopt a more pro-queer and pro-LGBT stance after the 2008 election where such promises were made. So Lady Gaga plays a doubled role whereby she also acts as a spokesperson for the grassroots—some would call this co-opting, but that is not the charge made here as she has more accurately given her pre-existing spotlight and Twitter and Facebook presence over to progressive campaigns—and, given her large mainstream media appeal and willingness to use this space to argue for queer and LGBT rights, performs the function of a grassroots organisation by herself as far as the general public is concerned. And in her recent queer activism we see the same sort of discourse and images utilised as in Homecoming. Her work over the first term of Obama’s Presidency—what I’m going to call “The Lady Gaga Offensive”—is indicative: she literally and metaphorically wrapped herself in the American flag, screaming “Obama, ARE YOU LISTENING!!! Repeal ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ and [have the hom*ophobic soldiers] go home, go home, go home!” (Lady Gaga Rallies for Repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell). And presumably to the same home of otherness that is occupied by the terrorist or anything that falls under the blanket of “anti-American” in Puar’s critique of this approach to political activism. This speech was modelled on her highly successful one at the National Equality March in 2009, which she ended with “Bless God and Bless the Gays.” When the highly watched speeches are taken together you literally can’t top them for Americanness, unless it is by a piece of old-fashioned American apple-pie bought at a National Rifle Association (NRA) bake-sale. And is likely why, after Obama’s same-sex “evolution,” the pre-election ads put out by the Democratic Party this year focused so heavily on the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and the queer patriotic soldier or veteran’s obligation to or previous service in bearing arms for the country. Now if the goal is to get formal and legal equality quickly, then as a political strategy, to get people onside with same-sex marriage, and from that place to same-sex rights and equal social recognition and respect, this might be a good idea. Before, that is, moving on to a strategy that actually gets to the roots of social inequality and doesn’t rely on “hate of ‘the other’” which Puar’s analysis points out is both a byproduct of and rooted in the base of any nationalist based appeal for minoritarian rights. And I want to underline that I am here talking about what strategy seems to be appealing to people, as opposed to arguing an ethically unproblematic and PC position on equality that is completely inclusive of all forms of love. Because Lady Gaga’s flag-covered and pro-military scream was answered by Obama with the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and the extension of some benefits to same-sex couples, and has Obama referring to Gaga as “your leader” in the pre-election ads and elsewhere. So it isn’t really surprising to find mainstream LGBT organisations adopting the same discourse and images to get same-sex rights including marriage. One can also take recent poll numbers from Canada as indicative as well. While only 10 percent of Canadians have trust in political parties, and 17 and 16 percent have trust in Parliament and Prime Minister Harper respectively, a whopping 53 percent have trust in the Canadian Forces (Leblanc). One aspect that undergirds Puar’s argument is that especially at a "time of war," more than average levels of affection or trust is shown for those institutions that defend “us,” so that if the face of that institution is reinscribed to the look of the hyper-patriotic queer-soldier (by advertising of the Homecoming sort which is produced not by the State but by grassroots LGBT organisations), then it looks like these groups seem to be banking that support for Gays and Lesbians in general, and same-sex marriage in specific, will further rise if LGBT and Queer become substantively linked in the imagination of the general public with the armed forces. But as 1980s Rockers Heart Asked: “But There’s Something That You Forgot. What about Love?” What these two hom*onationalist trajectories and rhetorics on same-sex marriage entirely skip over is how exactly you can codify “love.” Because isn’t that the purpose of marriage? Saying you can codify it is like grasping at a perfectly measured and exact cubic foot of air and telling it to stay put in the middle of a hurricane. So to return to how I ended my earlier exploration of love and if it could or should be codified: it means that as I affirm love, and as I remain in fidelity to it, I subject myself in my fundamental weakness constantly to the "not-known;" to constant heartbreak; to affirmations which I cannot betray as it would be a betrayal of the truth process itself. It's as if at the very moment the Beatles say the words 'All you need is love' they were subjected to wrenching heartbreak and still went on: 'All you need is love...' (Love Hurts) Which is really depressing when I look back at it now. But it was a bad breakup, and I can tend to the morose in word choice and cultural references when depressed. But it also remains essentially my position. If you impose “till death or divorce do us part” on to love you’re really only just participating in the chimera of static love and giving second wind to a patriarchal institution which has had a crappy record when it comes to equality. It also has the potential to preserve asymmetrical roles “traditional marriage” contains from when the institution was only extended to straight couples. And isn’t equality the underlying philosophical principle and political position that we’re supposedly fighting for if we’re arguing for an equal right to get married? Again, it’s important to try and codify the same rights for everyone through the State at the present time because I honestly don’t see major changes confronting the nation state system in Canada or the US in the near future. We remain the play-children of a digitally entrenched form of Foucaultian biopower that is State and Capital directed. Because while the Occupy Wall Street movements got a lot of hay in the press, I’ve yet to see any substantive or mainstreamed political change come out of them—if someone can direct me to their substantive contribution to the recent US election I’d be happy to revise my position—which is likely to our long term detriment. So this is a pragmatic analysis, one of locating one node in the matrices of power relations, of seeing how mainstream LGBT political organisations and Lady Gaga are applying the “theoretical tool kits” given to us by Foucault and Puar, and seeing how these organisations and Gaga are applying them, but in this case in a way that is likely counter to authorial intention(s) and personal politics (Power/Knowledge 145, 193; Terrorist Assemblages). So what this means is that we’re likely to continue to see, in mainstream images of same-sex couples put out by grassroots LGBT organisations, a hom*onationalism and ideological construction that grows more and more out of touch with Queer realities—the “upper-class house-holding PTA Gay”; although on a positive note I should point out that the Democratic Party in the US seems to be at least including both white and non-white faces in their pre-election same-sex marriage ads—and one that most Queers don’t or can’t fit themselves into especially when it comes down to the economic aspect of that picture, which is contradictory and problematic (c.f. Christopher). It also means that in the US the hom*onationalism on the horizon looks the same as in Canada except with a healthy dose of paranoia of outsiders and “the other” and a flag draped membership in the NRA, that is, for when the queer super-soldier is not in uniform. It’s a straightjacket for a closet that is becoming smaller because it seeks, through the images projected, inclusion for only a smaller and smaller social sub-set of the Lesbian and Gay community and leaves out more and more of the Queer community than it was five years ago when Puar described it. So instead of trying to dunk the queer into the institution of patriarchy, why not, by showing how so many Queers, their relationships, and their loving styles don’t fit into these archetypes help give everyone, including my “marriage-chasing-Gay-normaliser” former self a little “queer eye, for all eyes.” To look at and see modern straight marriage through the lenses and reasons LGBT and Queer communities (by-and-large) fought for years for access to it: as the codification and breakdown of some rights and responsibilities (i.e. taking care of children); as an act which gives you straightforward access to health benefits and hospital visitation rights; as an easy social signifier for others of a commitment to another person that doesn’t use diluted language like “special friend;” and because when it comes down to it that “in sickness and in health” part of the vow—in the language of a queered Badiou, a vow can be read as the affirmation of a universal and disinterested truth (love) and a moment which can’t be erased retrospectively, say, by divorce—seems like a sincere way to value at least one of those you really care for in the world. And hopefully it, as a side-benefit, it acts as a reminder but is not the actuality of that first fuzzy feeling which (hopefully) doesn’t go away. But I learned my lesson the first time and know that the fuzzy feeling might disappear as it often does. It doesn’t matter how far we try and cram it into any variety of hom*onationalist closets, since it’ll always find a way to not be there, no matter how tight you thought you’d locked the door to keep it in for good if it wants out. Because you can’t keep emotions by contract: so at the end of the day the logical, ethical and theoretically sound position is to argue for the abolition of marriage as an institution. However, Plato and others have been making that argument for thousands of years, and it still doesn’t seem to have gained popular traction. And we also need to realise, contrary to the opinion of my former self and The Beatles, that you really do need more than love as fidelity to an event of you and your partner’s making when you are being denied your partners health benefits just because you are a same-sex couple, especially when those health benefits could be saving your life. And if same-sex marriage codification is a quick fix for that and similar issues for those who can fit into the State sanctioned same-sex marriage walls, which admittedly leaves some members of the Queer community who don’t overlap out, as part of an overall and more inclusive strategy that does include them then I’m in favour of it. That is, till the time comes that Straight and Queer can, over time and with a lot of mutual social learning, explore how to recognise and give equal rights with or without State based codification to the multiple queer and sometimes polyamorous relationship models that already populate the Gay and Straight worlds right now. So in the meantime continue to count me down as a “marriage-chasing-Gay.” But just pragmatically, not to normalise, as one of a diversity of political strategies for equality and just for now. References Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. New York: Verso, 2001. ———. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003. Bradshaw, James. “Pride Toronto Denied Federal Funding.” The Globe and Mail. 7 May. 2012 ‹http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/pride-toronto-denied-federal-funding/article1211065/›. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge,1990. ———. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York: Routledge, 1993. ———. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge, 1997. ———. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997. ———. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham UP, 2005. Christopher, Nathaniel. “Openly Gay Men Make Less money, Survey Shows.” Xtra! .5 Nov. 2012 ‹http://www.xtra.ca/public/Vancouver/Openly_gay_men_make_less_money_survey_shows-12756.aspx›. Clinton, Hillary. “Gay Rights Are Human Rights, And Human Rights Are Gay Rights.” United Nations General Assembly. 26 Dec. 2011 ‹http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2011/12/06/383003/sec-clinton-to-un-gay-rights-are-human-rights-and-human-rights-are-gay-rights/?mobile=nc›. Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. Trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, Kate Soper. New York: Random House,1980. —. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Toronto: Random House, 1977. —. The History of Sexuality Volume One: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Random House, 1978. Heart. “What About Love.” Heart. Capitol Records, 1985. CD. Ha, Tu Thanh. “Dan Savage: ‘I Had Been Divorced Overnight’.” The Globe and Mail. 12 Jan. 2012 ‹http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/dan-savage-i-had-been-divorced-overnight/article1358211/›. “Homecoming.” Equal Love Campaign. ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a54UBWFXsF4›. Leblanc, Daniel. “Harper Among Least Trusted Leaders, Poll Shows.” The Globe and Mail. 12 Nov. 2012 ‹http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/harper-among-least-trusted-leaders-poll-shows/article5187774/#›. Makin, Kirk. “The Coming Conservative Court: Harper to Reshape Judiciary.” The Globe and Mail. 24 Aug. 2012 ‹http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/the-coming-conservative-court-harper-to-reshape-judiciary/article595398/›. “Lady Gaga Rallies for Repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ in Portland, Maine.” 9 Sep. 2010 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4rGla6OzGc›. “Lady Gaga Speaks at Gay Rights Rally in Washington DC as Part of the National Equality March.” 11 Oct. 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jepWXu-Z38›. “Obama’s Stirring New Gay Rights Ad.” Newzar.com. 24 May. 2012 ‹http://newzar.com/obamas-stirring-new-gay-rights-ad/›. Postmedia News. “Same-sex Marriage in Canada will not be Revisited, Harper Says.” 12 Jan. 2012 ‹http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/01/12/same-sex-marriage-in-canada-will-not-be-revisited-harper-says/›. Potts, Graham. “‘Love Hurts’: Hunter S. Thompson, the Marquis de Sade and St. Paul Queer Alain Badiou’s Truth and Fidelity.” CTheory. rt002: 2009 ‹http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=606›. Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: hom*onationalism in Queer Times. London: Duke UP, 2007. Seguin, Rheal. “Baird Calls Out Iran on Human Rights Violations.” The Globe and Mail. 22 Oct. 2012 ‹http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/baird-calls-out-iran-on-human-rights-violations/article4628968/›.

Abstract:

Introduction How do we measure intimacy? What are its impacts on our social, political and personal lives? Can we claim a politics to our intimate lives that escapes the normative confines of archaic institutions, while making social justice claims for relationship recognition? Negotiating some of these disparate questions requires us to think more broadly in contemporary public debates on equality and relationship recognition. Specifically, by outlining the impacts of the popular "gay marriage" debate, this paper examines the impacts of queer theory in association with public policy and community lobbying for relationship equality. Much of the debate remains polarised: eliminating discrimination is counterposed to religious or reproductive narratives that suggest such recognition undermines the value of the "natural" heterosexual family. Introducing queer theory into advocacy that oscillates between rights and reproduction problematises indexing intimacy against normative ideas of monogamy and family. While the arguments circulated by academics, lawyers, politicians and activists have disparate political and ethical impacts, when taken together, they continue to define marriage as a public regulation of intimacy and citizenship. Citizenship, measured in democratic participation and choice, however, can only be realised through reflexive politics that value difference. Encouraging critical dialogue across disparate areas of the marriage equality debate will have a significant impact on how we make ethical claims for recognising intimacy. (Re)defining Marriage In legislative terms, marriage remains the most fundamental means through which the relationship between citizenship and intimacy is crystallised in Australia. For example, in 2004 the Federal Liberal Government in Australia passed a legislative amendment to the Marriage Act 1961 and expressly defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman. By issuing a public legislative amendment, the Government intended to privilege monogamous (in this case understood as heterosexual) intimacy by precluding same-sex or polygamous marriage. Such an exercise had rhetorical rather than legal significance, as common law principles had previously defined the scope of marriage in gender specific terms for decades (Graycar and Millbank 41). Marriage as an institution, however, is not a universal or a-historical discourse limited to legal or political constructs. Socialist feminist critiques of marriage in the 1950s conceptualised the legal and gender specific constructs in marriage as a patriarchal contract designed to regulate female bodies (Hannam 146). However, Angela McRobbie notes that within a post-feminist context, these historical realities of gendered subjugation, reproduction or domesticity have been "disarticulated" (26). Marriage has become a more democratic and self-reflexive expression of intimacy for women. David Shumway elaborates this idea and argues that this shift has emerged in a context of "social solidarity" within a consumer environment of social fragmentation (23). What this implies is that marriage now evokes a range of cultural choices, consumer practices and affective trends that are incommensurable to a singular legal or historical term of reference. Debating the Politics of Intimacy and Citizenship In order to reflect on this shifting relationship between choice, citizenship and marriage as a concept, it is necessary to highlight that marriage extends beyond private articulations of love. It is a ritualised performance of heterosexual individual (or coupled) citizenship as it entrenches economic and civil rights and responsibilities. The private becomes public. Current neo-liberal approaches to same-sex marriage focus on these symbolic and economic questions of how recognising intimacy is tied to equality. In a legal and political context, marriage is defined in s5 Marriage Act as "the union between a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life." While the Act does not imbue marriage with religious or procreative significance, such a gender dichotomous definition prevents same-sex and gender diverse partners from entering into marriage. For Morris Kaplan, this is a problem because "full equality for lesbian and gay citizens requires access to the legal and social recognition of our intimate associations" (201). Advocates and activists define the quest for equal citizenship by engaging with current religious dogma that situates marriage within a field of reproduction, whereby same-sex marriage is seen to rupture the traditional rubric of monogamous kinship and the biological processes of "gender complementarity" (Australian Christian Lobby 1). Liberal equality arguments reject such conservative assertions on the basis that desire, sexuality and intimacy are innate features of human existence and hence always already implicated in public spheres (Kaplan 202). Thus, legal visibility or state recognition becomes crucial to sustaining practices of intimacy. Problematising the broader social impact of a civil rights approach through the perspective of queer theory, the private/public distinctions that delineate citizenship and intimacy become more difficult to negotiate. Equality and queer theory arguments on same-sex marriage are difficult to reconcile, primarily because they signify the different psychic and cultural investments in the monogamous couple. Butler asserts that idealisations of the couple in legal discourse relates to norms surrounding community, family and nationhood (Undoing 116). This structured circulation of sexual norms reifies the hetero-normative forms of relationships that ought to be recognised (and are desired) by the state. Butler also interrogates this logic of marriage, as a heterosexual norm, and suggests it has the capacity to confine rather than liberate subjects (Undoing 118-20). The author's argument relies upon Michel Foucault's notion of power and subjection, where the subject is not an autonomous individual (as conceived in neo liberal discourses) but a site of disciplined discursive production (Trouble 63). Butler positions the heterosexuality of marriage as a "cultural and symbolic foundation" that renders forms of kinship, monogamy, parenting and community intelligible (Undoing 118). In this sense, marriage can be a problematic articulation of state interests, particularly in terms of perpetuating domesticity, economic mobility and the heterosexual family. As former Australian Prime Minister John Howard opines: Marriage is … one of the bedrock institutions of our society … marriage, as we understand it in our society, is about children … providing for the survival of the species. (qtd. in Wade) Howard's politicisation of marriage suggests that it remains crucial to the preservation of the nuclear family. In doing so, the statement also exemplifies hom*ophobic anxieties towards non-normative kinship relations "outside the family". The Prime Ministers' words characterise marriage as a framework which privileges hegemonic ideas of monogamy, biological reproduction and gender dichotomy. Butler responds to these hom*ophobic terms by alluding to the discursive function of a "heterosexual matrix" which codes and produces dichotomous sexes, genders and (hetero)sexual desires (Trouble 36). By refusing to accept the binary neo-liberal discourse in which one is either for or against gay marriage, Butler asserts that by prioritising marriage, the individual accepts the discursive terms of recognition and legitimacy in subjectifying what counts as love (Undoing 115). What this author's argument implies is that by recuperating marital norms, the individual is not liberated, but rather participates in the discursive "trap" and succumbs to the terms of a heterosexual matrix (Trouble 56). In contradistinction to Howard's political rhetoric, engaging with Foucault's broader theoretical work on sexuality and friendship can influence how we frame the possibilities of intimacy beyond parochial narratives of conjugal relationships. Foucault emphasises that countercultural intimacies rely on desires that are relegated to the margins of mainstream (hetero)sexual culture. For example, the transformational aesthetics in practices such as sadomasochism or queer polyamorous relationships exist due to certain prohibitions in respect to sex (Foucault, History (1) 38, and "Sex" 169). Foucault notes how forms of resistance that transgress mainstream norms produce new experiences of pleasure. Being "queer" (though Foucault does not use this word) becomes identified with new modes of living, rather than a static identity (Essential 138). Extending Foucault, Butler argues that positioning queer intimacies within a field of state recognition risks normalising relationships in terms of heterosexual norms whilst foreclosing the possibilities of new modes of affection. Jasbir Puar argues that queer subjects continue to feature on the peripheries of moral and legal citizenship when their practices of intimacy fail to conform to the socio-political dyadic ideal of matrimony, fidelity and reproduction (22-28). Puar and Butler's reluctance to embrace marriage becomes clearer through an examination of the obiter dicta in the recent American jurisprudence where the proscription on same-sex marriage was overturned in California: To the extent proponents seek to encourage a norm that sexual activity occur within marriage to ensure that reproduction occur within stable households, Proposition 8 discourages that norm because it requires some sexual activity and child-bearing and child-rearing to occur outside marriage. (Perry vs Schwarzenegger 128) By connecting the discourse of matrimony and sex with citizenship, the court reifies the value of marriage as an institution of the family, which should be extended to same-sex couples. Therefore, by locating the family in reproductive heterosexual terms, the court forecloses other modes of recognition or rights for those who are in non-monogamous relationships or choose not to reproduce. The legal reasoning in the case evinces the ways in which intimate citizenship or legitimate kinship is understood in highly parochial terms. As Kane Race elaborates, the suturing of domesticity and nationhood, with the rhetoric that "reproduction occur within stable households", frames heterosexual nuclear bonds as the means to legitimate sexual relations (98). By privileging a familial kinship aesthetic to marriage, the state implicitly disregards recognising the value of intimacy in non-nuclear communities or families (Race 100). Australia, however, unlike most foreign nations, has a dual model of relationship recognition. De facto relationships are virtually indistinguishable from marriage in terms of the rights and entitlements couples are able to access. Very recently, the amendments made by the Same-Sex Relationships (Equal Treatment in Commonwealth Laws - General Reform) Act 2008 (Cth) has ensured same-sex couples have been included under Federal definitions of de facto relationships, thereby granting same-sex couples the same material rights and entitlements as heterosexual married couples. While comprehensive de facto recognition operates uniquely in Australia, it is still necessary to question the impact of jurisprudence that considers only marriage provides the legitimate structure for raising children. As Laurent Berlant suggests, those who seek alternative "love plots" are denied the legal and cultural spaces to realise them ("Love" 479). Berlant's critique emphasises how current "progressive" legal approaches to same-sex relationships rely on a monogamous (heterosexual) trajectory of the "love plot" which marginalises those who are in divorced, single, polyamorous or multi-parent situations. For example, in the National Year of Action, a series of marriage equality rallies held across Australia over 2010, non-conjugal forms of intimacy were inadvertently sidelined in order to make a claim for relationship recognition. In a letter to the Sydney Star Observer, a reader laments: As a gay man, I cannot understand why gay people would want to engage in a heterosexual ritual called marriage … Why do gay couples want to buy into this ridiculous notion is beyond belief. The laws need to be changed so that gays are treated equal under the law, but this is not to be confused with marriage as these are two separate issues... (Michael 2) Marriage marks a privileged position of citizenship and consumption, to which all other gay and lesbian rights claims are tangential. Moreover, as this letter to the Sydney Star Observer implies, by claiming sexual citizenship through the rubric of marriage, discussions about other campaigns for legislative equality are effectively foreclosed. Melissa Gregg expands on such a problematic, noting that the legal responses to equality reiterate a normative relationship between sexuality and power, where only couples that subscribe to dyadic, marriage-like relationships are offered entitlements by the state (4). Correspondingly, much of the public activism around marriage equality in Australia seeks to achieve its impact for equality (reforming the Marriage Act) by positioning intimacy in terms of state legitimacy. Butler and Warner argue that when speaking of legitimacy a relation to what is legitimate is implied. Lisa Bower corroborates this, asserting "legal discourse creates norms which universalise particular modes of living…while suppressing other practices and identities" (267). What Butler's and Bower's arguments reveal is that legitimacy is obtained through the extension of marriage to hom*osexual couples. For example, Andrew Barr, the current Labor Party Education Minister in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), noted that "saying no to civil unions is to say that some relationships are more legitimate than others" (quoted in "Legal Ceremonies"). Ironically, such a statement privileges civil unions by rendering them as the normative basis on which to grant legal recognition. Elizabeth Povinelli argues the performance of dyadic intimacy becomes the means to assert legal and social sovereignty (112). Therefore, as Jenni Millbank warns, marriage, or even distinctive forms of civil unions, if taken alone, can entrench inequalities for those who choose not to participate in these forms of recognition (8). Grassroots mobilisation and political lobbying strategies around marriage equality activism can have the unintentional impact, however, of obscuring peripheral forms of intimacy and subsequently repudiating those who contest the movement towards marriage. Warner argues that those who choose to marry derive pride from their monogamous commitment and "family" oriented practice, a privilege afforded through marital citizenship (82). Conversely, individuals and couples who deviate from the "normal" (read: socially palatable) intimate citizen, such as promiscuous or polyamorous subjects, are rendered shameful or pitiful. This political discourse illustrates that there is a strong impetus in the marriage equality movement to legitimate "hom*osexual love" because it mimics the norms of monogamy, stability, continuity and family by only seeking to substitute the sex of the "other" partner. Thus, civil rights discourse maintains the privileged political economy of marriage as it involves reproduction (even if it is not biological), mainstream social roles and monogamous sex. By defining social membership and future life in terms of a heterosexual life-narrative, same-sex couples become wedded to the idea of matrimony as the basis for sustainable intimacy and citizenship (Berlant and Warner 557). Warner is critical of recuperating discourses that privilege marriage as the ideal form of intimacy. This is particularly concerning when diverse erotic and intimate communities, which are irreducible to normative forms of citizenship, are subject to erasure. Que(e)rying the Future of Ethics and Politics By connecting liberal equality arguments with Butler and Warner's work on queer ethics, there is hesitation towards privileging marriage as the ultimate form of intimacy. Moreover, Butler stresses the importance of a transformative practice of queer intimacy: It is crucial…that we maintain a critical and transformative relation to the norms that govern what will not count as intelligible and recognisable alliance and kinship. (Undoing 117) Here the author attempts to negotiate the complex terrain of queer citizenship and ethics. On one hand, it is necessary to be made visible in order to engage in political activism and be afforded rights within a state discourse. Simultaneously, on the other hand, there is a need to transform the prevailing hetero-normative rhetoric of romantic love in order to prevent pathologising bodies or rendering certain forms of intimacy as aberrant or deviant because, as Warner notes, they do not conform to our perception of what we understand to be normal or morally desirable. Foucault's work on the aesthetics of the self offers a possible transformational practice which avoids the risks Warner and Butler mention because it eludes the "normative determinations" of moralities and publics, whilst engaging in an "ethical stylization" (qtd. in Race 144). Whilst Foucault's work does not explicitly address the question of marriage, his work on friendship gestures to the significance of affective bonds. Queer kinship has the potential to produce new ethics, where bodies do not become subjects of desires, but rather act as agents of pleasure. Negotiating the intersection between active citizenship and transformative intimacy requires rethinking the politics of recognition and normalisation. Warner is quite ambivalent as to the potential of appropriating marriage for gays and lesbians, despite the historical dynamism of marriage. Rather than acting as a progressive mechanism for rights, it is an institution that operates by refusing to recognise other relations (Warner 129). However, as Alexander Duttmann notes, recognition is more complex and a paradoxical means of relation and identification. It involves a process in which the majority neutralises the difference of the (minority) Other in order to assimilate it (27). However, in the process of recognition, the Other which is validated, then transforms the position of the majority, by altering the terms by which recognition is granted. Marriage no longer simply confers recognition for heterosexual couples to engage in reproduction (Secomb 133). While some queer couples may subscribe to a monogamous relationship structure, these relationships necessarily trouble conservative politics. The lamentations of the Australian Christian Lobby regarding the "fundamental (anatomical) gender complementarity" of same-sex marriage reflect this by recognising the broader social transformation that will occur (and already does with many heterosexual marriages) by displacing the association between marriage, procreation and parenting (5). Correspondingly, Foucault's work assists in broadening the debate on relationship recognition by transforming our understanding of choice and ethics in terms of "queer friendship." He describes it as a practice that resists the normative public distinction between romantic and platonic affection and produces new aesthetics for sexual and non-sexual intimacy (Foucault, Essential 170). Linnell Secomb argues that this "double potential" alluded to in Foucault and Duttman's work, has the capacity to neutralise difference as Warner fears (133). However, it can also transform dominant narratives of sexual citizenship, as enabling marriage equality will impact on how we imagine traditional heterosexual or patriarchal "plots" to intimacy (Berlant, "Intimacy" 286). Conclusion Making an informed impact into public debates on marriage equality requires charting the locus of sexuality, intimacy and citizenship. Negotiating academic discourses, social and community activism, with broader institutions and norms presents political and social challenges when thinking about the sorts of intimacy that should be recognised by the state. The civil right to marriage, irrespective of the sex or gender of one's partner, reflects a crucial shift towards important democratic participation of non-heterosexual citizens. However, it is important to note that the value of such intimacy cannot be indexed against a single measure of legal reform. While Butler and Warner present considered indictments on the normalisation of queer intimacy through marriage, such arguments do not account for the impacts of que(e)rying cultural norms and practices through social and political change. Marriage is not a singular or a-historical construction reducible to state recognition. Moreover, in a secular democracy, marriage should be one of many forms of diverse relationship recognition open to same-sex and gender diverse couples. In order to expand the impact of social and legal claims for recognition, it is productive to rethink the complex nature of recognition, ritual and aesthetics within marriage. In doing so, we can begin to transform the possibilities for articulating intimate citizenship in plural democracies. References Australian Christian Lobby. "Submission to the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee Inquiry into the Marriage Equality Amendment Bill 2009." Deakin: ACL, 2009. Australian Government. "Sec. 5." Marriage Act of 1961 (Cth). 1961. ———. Same-Sex Relationships (Equal Treatment in Commonwealth Laws - General Reform) Act 2008 (Cth). 2008. Bell, David, and John Binnie. The Sexual Citizen: Queer Politics and Beyond. Oxford: Polity P, 2000. Berlant, Lauren. "Intimacy: A Special Issue." Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 281-88. ———. "Love, a Queer Feeling." hom*osexuality and Psychoanalysis. Eds. Tim Dean and Christopher Lane. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001:432-52. Berlant, Lauren, and Michael Warner. "Sex in Public." Ed. Lauren Berlant. Intimacy. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2000: 311-30. Bower, Lisa. "Queer Problems/Straight Solutions: The Limits of a Politics of 'Official Recognition'" Playing with Fire: Queer Politics, Queer Theories. Ed. Shane Phelan. London and New York: Routledge, 1997: 267-91. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London: Routledge, 1990. ———. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004. Duttmann, Alexander. Between Cultures: Tensions in the Struggle for Recognition. London: Verso, 2000. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality (1): The Will to Knowledge. London: Penguin Books, 1977. ———. "Sex, Power and the Politics of Identity." Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Ed. Paul Rabinow. London: Allen Lange/Penguin, 1984. 163-74. ———. Essential Works of Foucault: 1954-1984: Ethics, Vol. 1. London: Penguin, 2000. Graycar, Reg, and Jenni Millbank. "From Functional Families to Spinster Sisters: Australia's Distinctive Path to Relationship Recognition." Journal of Law and Policy 24. 2007: 1-44. Gregg, Melissa. "Normal Homes." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). 27 Aug. 2007 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/02-gregg.php›. Hannam, Jane. Feminism. London and New York: Pearson Education, 2007. Kaplan, Morris. "Intimacy and Equality: The Question of Lesbian and Gay Marriage." Playing with Fire: Queer Politics, Queer Theories. Ed. Shane Phelan. London and New York: Routledge, 1997: 201-30. "Legal Ceremonies for Same-Sex Couples." ABC Online 11 Nov. 2009. 13 Dec. 2011 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/11/11/2739661.htm›. McRobbie, Angela. The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change. London and New York: Sage, 2008. Michael. "Why Marriage?" Letter to the Editor. Sydney Star Observer 1031 (20 July 2010): 2. Millbank, Jenni. "Recognition of Lesbian and Gay Families in Australian Law - Part One: Couples." Federal Law Review 34 (2008): 1-44. Perry v. Schwarzenegger. 3: 09 CV 02292. United States District Court for the Northern District of California. 2010. Povinelli, Elizabeth. Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy and Carnality. Durham: Duke UP, 2006. Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: hom*onationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. Race, Kane. Pleasure Consuming Medicine: The Queer Politics of Drugs. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2009. Secomb, Linnell. Philosophy and Love. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007. Shumway, David. Modern Love: Romance, Intimacy and the Marriage Crisis. New York: New York UP, 2003. Wade, Matt. "PM Joins Opposition against Gay Marriage as Cleric's Election Stalls." The Sydney Morning Herald 6 Aug. 2003. Warner, Michael. The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics and the Ethics of Queer Life. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999.

Abstract:

Sharing this article, the act of writing and then having it read, legitimises the point of it – that is, we (and we speak on behalf of each other here) managed to negotiate western academic expectations and norms from a just-as-legitimate-but-not-always-heard female Buginese perspective written in Standard Australian English (not my first choice-of-language and I speak on behalf of myself). At times we transgressed roles, guiding and following each other through different academic, cultural, social, and linguistic domains until we stumbled upon ways of legitimating our entanglement of experiences, when we heard the similar, faint, drum beat across boundaries and journeys.This article is one storying of the results of this four year relationship between a Buginese PhD candidate and an Indigenous Australian supervisor – both in the writing of the article and the processes that we are writing about. This is our process of knowing and validating knowledge through sharing, collaboration and cultural exchange. Neither the successful PhD thesis nor this article draw from authoethnography but they are outcomes of a lived, research standpoint that fiercely fought to centre a Muslim-Buginese perspective as much as possible, due to the nature of a postgraduate program. In the effort to find a way to not privilege Western ways of knowing to the detriment of my standpoint and position, we had to find a way to at times privilege my way of knowing the world alongside a Western one. There had to be a beat that transgressed cultural and linguistic differences and that allowed for a legitimised dialogic, intersubjective dance.The PhD research focused on potential dialogue between Australian culture and Buginese culture in terms of feminism and its resulting cultural hybridity where some Australian feminist thoughts are applicable to Buginese culture but some are not. Therefore, the PhD study centred a Buginese standpoint while moving back and forth amongst Australian feminist discourses and the dominant expectations of a western academic process. The PhD research was part of a greater Indonesian tertiary movement to include, study, challenge and extend feminist literary programs and how this could be respectfully and culturally appropriately achieved. This article is written by both of us but the core knowledge comes from a Buginese standpoint, that is, the principal supervisor learned from the PhD candidate and then applied her understanding of Indigenous standpoint theory, Tuhiwahi Smith’s decolonising methodologies and Spivakian self-reflexivity to aid the candidate’s development of her dancing methodology. For this reason, the rest of this article is written from the first-person perspective of Dr Abbas.The PhD study was a literary analysis on five stories from Helen Garner’s Postcards from Surfers (1985). My work translated these five stories from English into Indonesian and discussed some challenges that occurred in the process of translation. By using Edward Said’s work on contrapuntal reading and Robert Warrior’s metaphor of the subaltern dancing, I, the embodied learner and the cultural translator, moved back and forth between Buginese culture and Australian culture to consider how Australian women and men are represented and how mainstream Australian society engages with, or challenges, discourses of patriarchy and power. This movement back and forth was theorised as ‘dancing’. Ultimately, another dance was performed at the end of the thesis waltz between the work which centred my Buginese standpoint and academia as a Western tertiary institution.I have been dancing with Australian feminism for over four years. My use of the word ‘dancing’ signified my challenge to articulate and engage with Australian culture, literature, and feminism by viewing it from a Buginese perspective as opposed to a ‘Non-Western’ perspective. As a Buginese woman and scholar, I centred my specific cultural standpoints instead of accepting them generally and therefore dismissed the altering label of ‘Non-Western’. Juxtaposing Australian feminism with Buginese culture was not easy. However, as my research progressed I saw interesting cultural differences between Australian and Buginese cultures that could result in a hybridized way of engaging feminist issues. At times, my cultural standpoint took the lead in directing the research or the point, at other times a Western beat was more prominent, for example, using the English language to voice my work.The Buginese, also known as the Bugis, along with the Makassar, the Mandar, and the Toraja, are one of the four main ethnic groups of the province of South Sulawesi in Indonesia. The population of the Buginese in South Sulawesi spreads into major states (Bone, Wajo, Soppeng, and Sidenreng) and some minor states (Pare-Pare, Suppa, and Sinjai). Like other ethnic groups living in other islands of Indonesia such as the Javanese, the Sundanese, the Minang, the Batak, the Balinese, and the Ambonese, the Buginese have their own culture and traditions. The Buginese, especially those who live in the villages, are still bounded strictly by ade’ (custom) or pangadereng (customary law). This concept of ade’ provides living guidelines for Buginese and consists of five components including ade’, bicara, rapang, wari’, and sara’. Pelras clarifies that pangadereng is ‘adat-hood’, a corpus of interlinked ruling principles which, besides ade’ (custom), includes also bicara (jurisprudence), rapang (models of good behaviour which ensure the proper functioning of society), wari’ (rules of descent and hierarchy) and sara’ (Islamic law and institution, derived from the Arabic shari’a) (190). So, pangadereng is an overall norm which includes advice on how Buginese should behave towards fellow human beings and social institutions on a reciprocal basis. In addition, the Buginese together with Makassarese, mind what is called siri’ (honour and shame), that is the sense of honour and shame. In the life of the Buginese-Makassar people, the most basic element is siri’. For them, no other value merits to be more detected and preserved. Siri’ is their life, their self-respect and their dignity. This is why, in order to uphold and to defend it when it has been stained or they consider it has been stained by somebody, the Bugis-Makassar people are ready to sacrifice everything, including their most precious life, for the sake of its restoration. So goes the saying.... ‘When one’s honour is at stake, without any afterthought one fights’ (Pelras 206).Buginese is one of Indonesia’s ethnic groups where men and women are intended to perform equal roles in society, especially those who live in the Buginese states of South Sulawesi where they are still bound strictly by ade’ (custom) or pangadereng (customary law). These two basic concepts are guidelines for daily life, both in the family and the work place. Buginese also praise what is called siri’, a sense of honour and shame. It is because of this sense of honour and shame that we have a saying, siri’ emmi ri onroang ri lino (people live only for siri’) which means one lives only for honour and prestige. Siri’ had to remain a guiding principle in my theoretical and methodological approach to my PhD research. It is also a guiding principle in the resulting pedagogical praxis that this work has established for my course in Australian culture and literature at Hasanuddin University. I was not prepared to compromise my own ethical and cultural identity and position yet will admit, at times, I felt pressured to do so if I was going to be seen to be performing legitimate scholarly work. Novera argues that:Little research has focused specifically on the adjustment of Indonesian students in Australia. Hasanah (1997) and Philips (1994) note that Indonesian students encounter difficulties in fulfilling certain Western academic requirements, particularly in relation to critical thinking. These studies do not explore the broad range of academic and social problems. Yet this is a fruitful area for research, not just because of the importance of Indonesian students to Australia, and the importance of the Australia-Indonesia relationship to both neighbouring nations, but also because adjustment problems are magnified by cultural differences. There are clear differences between Indonesian and Australian cultures, so that a study of Indonesian students in Australia might also be of broader academic interest […]Studies of international student adjustment discuss a range of problems, including the pressures created by new role and behavioural expectations, language difficulties, financial problems, social difficulties, homesickness, difficulties in dealing with university and other authorities, academic difficulties, and lack of assertiveness inside and outside the classroom. (467)While both my supervisor and I would agree that I faced all of these obstacles during my PhD candidature, this article is focusing solely on the battle to present my methodology, a dialogic encounter between Buginese feminism and mainstream Australian culture using Helen Garner’s short stories, to a Western process and have it be “legitimised”. Endang writes that short stories are becoming more popular in the industrial era in Indonesia and they have become vehicles for writers to articulate the realities of social life such as poverty, marginalization, and unfairness (141-144). In addition, Noor states that the short story has become a new literary form particularly effective for assisting writers in their goal to help the marginalized because its shortness can function as a weapon to directly “scoop up” the targeted issues and “knock them out at a blow” (Endang 144-145). Indeed, Helen Garner uses short stories in a way similar to that described by Endang: as a defiant act towards the government and current circ*mstances (145). My study of Helen Garner’s short stories explored the way her stories engage with and resist gender relations and inequality between men and women in Australian society through four themes prevalent in the narratives: the kitchen, landscape, language, and sexuality. I wrote my thesis in standard Australian English and I complied with expected forms, formatting, referencing, structuring etc. My thesis also included the Buginese translations of some of Garner’s work. However, the theoretical approaches that informed my analysis cannot be separated from the personal. In the title, I use the term ‘dancing’ to indicate a dialogue with white Australian women by moving back and forth between Australian culture and Buginese culture. I use the term ‘dancing’ as an extension of Edward Said’s work on contrapuntal reading but employ it as a signifier of my movement between insider and outsider (of Australian feminism), that is, I extend it from just a literary reading to a whole body experience. According to Ashcroft and Ahluwalia, the “essence of Said’s argument is to know something is to have power over it, and conversely, to have power is to know the world in your own terms” (83). Ashcroft and Ahluwalia add how through music, particularly the work of pianist Glenn Gould, Said formulated a way of reading imperial and postcolonial texts contrapuntally. Such a reading acknowledges the hybridity of cultures, histories and literatures, allowing the reader to move back and forth between an internal and an external standpoint of cultural references and attitudes in “an effort to draw out, extend, give emphasis and voice to what is silent or marginally present or ideologically represented” (Said 66). While theorising about the potential dance between Australian and Buginese feminisms in my work, I was living the dance in my day-to-day Australian university experience. Trying to accommodate the expected requirements of a PhD thesis, while at the same time ensuring that I maintained my own personal, cultural and professional dignity, that is ade’, and siri’, required some fancy footwork. Siri’ is central to my Buginese worldview and had to be positioned as such in my PhD thesis. Also, the realities that women are still marginalized and that gender inequality and disparities persist in Indonesian society become a motivation to carry out my PhD study. The opportunity to study Australian culture and literature in that country, allowed me to increase my global and local complexity as an individual, what Pieterse refers to as “ a process of hybridization” and to become as Beck terms an “actor” and “manager’’ of my life (as cited in Edmunds 1). Gaining greater autonomy and reconceptualising both masculinity and femininity, while dominant themes in Garner’s work, are also issues I address in my personal and professional goals. In other words, this study resulted in hybridized knowledge of Australian concepts of feminism and Buginese societies that offers a reference for students to understand and engage with different feminist thought. By learning how feminism is understood differently by Australians and Buginese, my Indonesian students can decide what aspects of feminist ideas from a Western perspective can be applied to Buginese culture without transgressing Buginese customs and habits.There are few Australian literary works that have been translated into Indonesian. Those that have include Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang (2007) and My Life is a Fake (2009), James Vance Marshall’s Walkabout (1957), Emma Darcy’s The Billionaire Bridegroom (2010) , Sally Morgan’s My Place (1987), and Colleen McCullogh’s The Thorn Birds (1978). My translation of five short stories from Postcards from Surfers complemented these works and enriched the diversity of Indonesian translations of world literary works, the bulk of which tends to come from the United Kingdom, America, the Middle East, and Japan. However, actually getting through the process of PhD research followed by examination required my supervisor and I to negotiate cross-cultural terrain, academic agendas and Western expectations of what legitimate thesis writing should look like. Employing Said’s contrapuntal pedagogy and Warrior’s notion of subaltern dancing became my illegitimate methodological frame.Said points out that contrapuntal analysis means that students and teachers can cross-culturally “elucidate a complex and uneven topography” (318). He adds that “we must be able to think through and interpret together experiences that are discrepant, each with its particular agenda and pace of development, its own internal formations, its internal coherence and system of external relationships, all of them co-existing and interacting with others” (32). Contrapuntal is a metaphor Said derived from musical theory, meaning to counterpoint or add a rhythm or melody, in this case, Buginese and Anglo-Australian feminisms. Warrior argues for an indigenous critique of how power and knowledge is read and in doing so he writes that “the subaltern can dance, and so sometimes can the intellectual” (85). In his rereading of Spivak, he argues that subaltern and intellectual positions can meet “and in meeting, create the possibility of communication” (86). He refers to this as dancing partly because it implicitly acknowledges without silencing the voices of the subaltern (once the subaltern speaks it is no longer the subaltern, so the notion of dancing allows for communication, “a movement from subalternity to something else” (90) which can mark “a new sort of non-complicitous relationship to a family, community or class of origin” (91). By “non-complicit” Warrior means that when a member of the subaltern becomes a scholar and therefore a member of those who historically silence the subaltern, there are other methods for communicating, of moving, between political and cultural spaces that allow for a multiplicity of voices and responses. Warrior uses a traditional Osage in-losh-ka dance as an example of how he physically and intellectually interacts with multiple voices and positions:While the music plays, our usual differences, including subalternity and intellectuality, and even gender in its own way, are levelled. For those of us moving to the music, the rules change, and those who know the steps and the songs and those who can keep up with the whirl of bodies, music and colours hold nearly every advantage over station or money. The music ends, of course, but I know I take my knowledge of the dance away and into my life as a critic, and I would argue that those levelled moments remain with us after we leave the drum, change our clothes, and go back to the rest of our lives. (93)For Warrior, the dance becomes theory into practice. For me, it became not only a way to soundly and “appropriately” present my methodology and purpose, but it also became my day to day interactions, as a female Buginese scholar, with western, Australian academic and cultural worldviews and expectations.One of the biggest movements I had to justify was my use of the first person “I”, in my thesis, to signify my identity as a Buginese woman and position myself as an insider of my community with a hybrid western feminism with Australia in mind. Perrault argues that “Writing “I” has been an emancipatory project for women” (2). In the context of my PhD thesis, uttering ‘I’ confirmed my position and aims. However, this act of explicitly situating my own identity and cultural position in my research and thesis was considered one of the more illegitimate acts. In one of the examiner reports, it was stated that situating myself centrally was fraught but that I managed to avoid the pitfalls. Judy Long argues that writing in the female first person challenges patriarchal control and order (127). For me, writing in the first person was essential if I had any chance of maintaining my Buginese identity and voice, in both my thesis and in my Australian tertiary experience. As Trinh-Minh writes, “S/he who writes, writes. In uncertainty, in necessity. And does not ask whether s/he is given permission to do so or not” (8).Van Dijk, cited in Hamilton, notes that the west and north are bound by an academic ethnocentrism and this is a particular area my own research had to negotiate. Methodologically I provided a comparative rather than a universalising perspective, engaging with middle-class, heterosexual, western, white women feminism but not privileging them. It is important for Buginese to use language discourses as a weapon to gain power, particularly because as McGlynn claims, “generally Indonesians are not particularly outspoken” (38). My research was shaped by a combination of ongoing dedication to promote women’s empowerment in the Buginese context and my role as an academic teaching English literature at the university level. I applied interpretive principles that will enable my students to see how the ideas of feminism conveyed through western literature can positively improve the quality of women’s lives and be implemented in Buginese culture without compromising our identity as Indonesians and Buginese people. At the same time, my literary translation provides a cultural comparison with Australia that allows a space for further conversations to occur. However, while attempting to negotiate western and Indonesian discourses in my thesis, I was also physically and emotionally trying to negotiate how to do this as a Muslim Buginese female PhD candidate in an Anglo-Australian academic institution. The notion of ‘dancing’ was employed as a signifier of movement between insider and outsider knowledge. Throughout the research process and my thesis I ‘danced’ with Australian feminism, traditional patriarchal Buginese society, Western academic expectations and my own emerging Indonesian feminist perspective. To ensure siri’ remained the pedagogical and ethical basis of my approach I applied Edward Said’s work on contrapuntal reading and Robert Warrior’s employment of a traditional Osage dance as a self-reflexive, embodied praxis, that is, I extended it from just a literary reading to a whole body experience. The notion of ‘dance’ allows for movement, change, contact, tension, touch and distance: it means that for those who have historically been marginalised or confined, they are no longer silenced. The metaphoric act of dancing allowed me to legitimise my PhD work – it was successfully awarded – and to negotiate a western tertiary institute in Australia with my own Buginese knowledge, culture and purpose.ReferencesAshcroft., B., and P. Ahluwalia. Edward Said. London: Routledge, 1999.Carey, Peter. True History of the Kelly Gang: A Novel. Random House LLC, 2007.Carey, Peter. My Life as a Fake: A NNovel. Random House LLC, 2009.Darcy, Emma. Billionaire Bridegroom 2319. Harlequin, 2010.Endang, Fransisca. "Disseminating Indonesian Postcoloniality into English Literature (a Case Study of 'Clara')." Jurnal Sastra Inggris 8.2: 2008.Edmunds, Kim. "The Impact of an Australian Higher Education on Gender Relations in Indonesia." ISANA International Conference "Student Success in International Education", 2007Garner, Helen. Postcards from Surfers. Melbourne: McPhee/Gribble, 1985.Hamilton, Deborah, Deborah Schriffrin, and Heidi E. Tannen, ed. The Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Victoria: Balckwll, 2001.Long, Judy. 1999. Telling Women's Lives: Subject/Narrator/Reader/Text. New York: New York UP, 1999.McGlynn, John H. "Silent Voices, Muted Expressions: Indonesian Literature Today." Manoa 12.1 (2000): 38-44.Morgan, Sally. My Place. Fremantle Press, 1987.Pelras, Christian. The Bugis. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Perreault, Jeanne. Writing Selves: Contemporary Feminist Autography. London & Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1995.Pieterse, J.N. Globalisation as Hybridisation. In M. Featherstone, S. Lash, and R. Robertson, eds., Global Modernities. London: Sage Publications, 1995.Marshall, James V. Walkabout. London: Puffin, 1957.McCullough, C. The Thorn Birds Sydney: Harper Collins, 1978.Minh-ha, Trinh T. Woman, Native, Other: Writing, Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University, 1989.Novera, Isvet Amri. "Indonesian Postgraduate Students Studying in Australia: An Examination of Their Academic, Social and Cultural Experiences." International Education Journal 5.4 (2004): 475-487.Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Book, 1993. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Zed Books, 1999.Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" In C. Nelson and L. Grossberg, eds., Marxism and Interpretation of Culture. Chicago: University of lllinois, 1988. 271-313.Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Routledge, 1988.Warrior, Robert. ""The Subaltern Can Dance, and So Sometimes Can the Intellectual." Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 13.1 (2011): 85-94.

Abstract:

Introduction This article aims to explore some of the ideological discourses that reinforce marriage as a central social and cultural institution in US-American society. Andrew Cherlin argues that despite social secularisation, rising divorce rates and the emergence of other, alternative forms of love and living, marriage “remains the most highly valued form of family life in American culture, the most prestigious way to live your life” (9). Indeed, marriage in the US has become an ideological and political battlefield, with charged debates about who is entitled to this form of state-sanctioned relationship, with the government spending large sums of money to promote the value of marriage and the highest number of people projected to get married (nearly 90 per cent of all people) compared to other Western nations (Cherlin 4). I argue here that the idea of marriage as the ideal form for an intimate relationship permeates US-American culture to an extent that we can speak of a marital hegemony. This hegemony is fuelled by and reflected in the saturation of American popular culture with celebratory depictions of the white wedding as public performance and symbolic manifestation of the values associated with marriage. These depictions contribute to the discursive production of weddings as “one of the major events that signal readiness and prepare heterosexuals for membership in marriage as an organizing practice for the institution of marriage” (Ingraham 4). From the representation of weddings as cinematic climax in a huge number of films, to TV shows such as The Bachelor, Bridezillas and Race to the Altar, to the advertisem*nt industry and the bridal magazines that construct the figure of the bride as an ideal that every girl and woman should aspire to, popular discourses promote the desirability of marriage in a wide range of media spheres. These representations, which I call bridal fictions, do not only shape and regulate the production of gendered, raced, classed and sexual identities in the media in fundamental ways. They also promote the idea that marriage is the only adequate framework for an intimate relationship and for the constitution of an acceptable gendered identity, meanwhile reproducing heterosexuality as norm and monogamy as societal duty. Thus I argue that we can understand contemporary bridal fictions as a symbolic legitimation of marital hegemony that perpetuates the idea that “lifelong marriage is a moral imperative” (Coontz 292). Marital Hegemony By drawing on Gramsci’s term and argument of cultural hegemony, I propose that public, political, religious and popular discourses work together in intersecting, overlapping, ideologically motivated and often even contradictory ways to produce what can be conceptualised as marital hegemony. Gramsci understands the relationship between state coercion and legitimation as crucial to an understanding of constituted consensus and co-operation. By legitimation Gramsci refers to processes through which social elites constitute their leadership through the universalizing of their own class-based self-interests. These self-interests are adopted by the greater majority of people, who apprehend them as natural or universal standards of value (common sense). This ‘hegemony’ neutralizes dissent, instilling the values, beliefs and cultural meanings into the generalized social structures. (Lewis 76-77)Marital hegemony also consists of those two mechanisms, coercion and legitimation. Coercion by the social elites, in this case by the state, is conducted through intervening in the private life of citizens in order to regulate and control their intimate relationships. Through the offering of financial benefits, medical insurance, tax cuts and various other privileges to married partners only (see Ingraham 175-76), the state withholds these benefits from all those that do not conform to this kind of state-sanctioned relationship. However, this must serve as the topic of another discussion, as this paper is more interested in the second aspect of hegemony, the symbolic legitimation. Symbolic legitimation works through the depiction of the white wedding as the occasion on which entering the institution of marriage is publicly celebrated and marital identity is socially validated. Bridal fictions work on a semiotic and symbolic level to display and perpetuate the idea of marriage as the most desirable and ultimately only legitimate form of intimate, heterosexual relationships. This is not to say that there is no resistance to this form of hegemony, as Foucault argues, eventually there is no “power without resistances” (142). However, as Engstrom contends, contemporary bridal fictions “reinforce and endorse the idea that romantic relationships should and must lead to marriage, which requires public display—the wedding” (3). Thus I argue that we can understand contemporary bridal fictions as one key symbolic factor in the production of marital hegemony. The ongoing centrality of marriage as an institution finds its reflection, as Otnes and Pleck argue, in the fact that the white wedding, in spite of all changes and processes of liberalisation in regard to gender, family and sexuality, “remains the most significant ritual in contemporary culture” (5). Accordingly, popular culture, reflective as well as constitutive of existing cultural paradigms, is saturated with what I have termed here bridal fictions. Bridal representations have been subject to rigorous academic investigation (c.f. Currie, Geller, Bambacas, Boden, Otnes and Pleck, Wallace and Howard). But, by using the term “bridal fictions”, I seek to underscore the fictional nature of these apparent “representations”, emphasising their role in producing pervasive utopias, rather than representing reality. This is not to say that bridal fictions are solely fictive. In fact, my argument here is that these bridal fictions do have discursive influence on contemporary wedding culture and practices. With my analysis of a bridal advertisem*nt campaign later on in this paper, I aim to show exemplarily how bridal fictions work not only in perpetuating marriage, monogamy and heteronormativity as central organizing principles of intimate life. But moreover, how bridal fictions use this framework to promote certain kinds of white, heterosexual, upper-class identities that normatively inform our understanding of who is seen as entitled to this form of state-sanctioned relationship. Furthermore my aim is to highlight the role of postfeminist frames in sustaining marital hegemony. Second Wave feminism, seeing marriage as a form of “intimate colonization” (in Finlay and Clarke 416), has always been one of the few sources of critique in regard to this institution. In contrast, postfeminist accounts, now informing a significant amount of contemporary bridal fictions, evoke marriage as actively chosen, unproblematic and innately desired state of being for women. By constructing the liberated, self-determined figure of the postfeminist bride, contemporary bridal fictions naturalise and re-modernise marriage as framework for the constitution of modern feminine identity. An analysis of postfeminist bridal identities, as done in the following, is thus vital to my argument, because it highlights how postfeminist accounts deflect feminism’s critique of marriage as patriarchal, political and hegemonic institution and hence contribute to the perpetuation and production of marital hegemony. The Postfeminist Bride Postfeminism has emerged since the early 1990s as the dominant mode of constructing femininities in the media. Angela McRobbie understands postfeminism as “to refer to an active process by which feminist gains of the 1970s and 80s come to be undermined”, while simultaneously appearing to be “a well-informed and even well-intended response to feminism” (“Postfeminism” 255). Based on the assumption that women nowadays are no longer subjected to patriarchal power structures anymore, postfeminism actively takes feminism into account while, at the same time, “undoing” it (McRobbie “Postfeminism” 255). In contemporary postfeminist culture, feminism is “decisively aged and made to seem redundant”, which allows a conscious “dis-identification” and/or “forceful non-identity” with accounts of Second Wave feminism (McRobbie Aftermath 15). This demarcation from earlier forms of feminism is particularly evident with regard to marriage and wedding discourses. Second wave feminist critics such as Betty Friedan (1973) and Carole Pateman were critical of the influence of marriage on women’s psychological, financial and sexual freedom. This generation of feminists saw marriage as a manifestation of patriarchal power, which is based on women’s total emotional and erotic loyalty and subservience (Rich 1980), as well as on “men’s domination over women, and the right of men to enjoy equal sexual access to women” (Pateman 1988 2). In contrast, contemporary postfeminism enunciates now that “equality is achieved, in order to install a whole repertoire of new meanings which emphasise that it [feminism] is no longer needed, it is a spent force” (McRobbie “Postfeminism” 255). Instead of seeing marriage as institutionlised subjugation of women, the postfeminist generation of “educated women who have come of age in the 1990s feel that the women’s liberation movement has achieved its goals and that marriage is now an even playing field in which the two sexes operate as equal partners” (Geller 110). As McRobbie argues “feminism was anti-marriage and this can now to be shown to be great mistake” (Aftermath 20). Accordingly, postfeminist bridal fictions do not depict the bride as passive and waiting to be married, relying on conservative and patriarchal notions of hegemonic femininity, but as an active agent using the white wedding as occasion to act out choice, autonomy and power. Genz argues that a characteristic of postfemininities is that they re-negotiate femininity and feminism no longer as mutually exclusive and irreconcilable categories, but as constitutive of each other (Genz; Genz and Brabon). What I term the postfeminist bride embodies this shifted understanding of feminism and femininity. The postfeminist bride is a figure that is often celebrated in terms of individual freedom, professional success and self-determination, instead of resting on traditional notions of female domesticity and passivity. Rather than fulfilling clichés of the homemaker and traditional wife, the postfeminist bride is characterised by an emphasis on power, agency and pleasure. Characteristic of this figure, as with other postfemininities in popular culture, is a simultaneous appropriation and repudiation of feminist critique. Within postfeminist bridal culture, the performance of traditional femininity through the figure of the bride, or by identification with it, is framed in terms of individual choice, depicted as standing outside of the political and ideological struggles surrounding gender, equality, class, sexuality and race. In this way, as Engstrom argues, “bridal media’s popularity in the late 20th and early 21st centuries in the United States as indicative of a postfeminist cultural environment” (18). And although the contemporary white wedding still rests on patriarchal traditions that symbolise what the Second Wave called an “intimate colonization” (such as the bride’s vow of obedience; the giving away of the bride by one male chaperone, her father, to the next, the husband; her loss of name in marriage etc.), feminist awareness of the patriarchal dimensions of marriage and the ritual of the wedding is virtually absent from contemporary bridal culture. Instead, the patriarchal customs of the white wedding are now actively embraced by the women themselves in the name of tradition and choice. This reflects a prevailing characteristic of postfeminism, which is a trend towards the reclamation of conservative ideals of femininity, following the assumption that the goals of traditional feminist politics have been attained. This recuperation of traditional forms of femininity is one key characteristic of postfeminist bridal culture, as Engstrom argues: “bridal media collectively have become the epitomic example of women’s culture, a genre of popular culture that promotes, defends, and celebrates femininity” (21). Bridal fictions indeed produce traditional femininity by positioning the cultural, social and historical significance of the wedding as a necessary rite of passage for women and as the most important framework for the constitution of their (hetero)sexual, classed and gendered identities. Embodied in its ritual qualities, the white wedding symbolises the transition of women from single to belonging, from girlhood to womanhood and implicitly from childlessness to motherhood. However, instead of seeing this form of hegemonic femininity as a product of unequal, patriarchal power relations as Second Wave did, postfeminism celebrates traditional femininity in modernised versions. Embracing conservative feminine roles (e.g. that of the bride/wife) is now a matter of personal choice, individuality and freedom, characterised by awareness, knowingness and sometimes even irony (McRobbie “Postfeminism”). Nevertheless, the wedding is not only positioned as the pinnacle of a monogamous, heterosexual relationship, but also as the climax of a (female) life-story (“the happiest day of the life”). Combining feminist informed notions of power and choice, the postfeminist wedding is constructed as an event which supposedly enables women to act out those notions, while serving as a framework for gendered identity formation and self-realisation within the boundaries of an officialised and institutionalised relationship. “Modern” Brides I would like to exemplarily illustrate how postfeminism informs contemporary bridal fictions by analysing an advertising campaign of the US bridal magazine Modern Bride that paradigmatically and emblematically shows how postfeminist frames are used to construct the ‘modern’ bride. These advertisem*nts feature American celebrities Guiliana Rancic (“host of E! News”), Daisy Fuentes (“host of Ultimate Style”) and Layla Ali, (“TV host and world champion”) stating why they qualify as a “modern bride”. Instead of drawing on notions of passive femininity, these advertisem*nts have a distinct emphasis on power and agency. All advertisem*nts include the women’s profession and other accomplishments. Rancic claims that she is a modern bride because: “I chased my career instead of guys.” These advertisem*nts emphasise choice and empowerment, the key features of postfeminism, as Angela McRobbie (“Postfeminism”) and Rosalind Gill argue. Femininity, feminism and professionalism here are not framed as mutually exclusive, but are reconciled in the identity of the “modern” bride. Marriage and the white wedding are clearly bracketed in a liberal framework of individual choice, underpinned by a grammar of self-determination and individualism. Layla Ali states that she is a modern bride: “Because I refuse to let anything stand in the way of my happiness.” This not only communicates the message that happiness is intrinsically linked to marriage, but clearly resembles the figure that Sharon Boden terms the “super bride”, a role which allows women to be in control of every aspect of their wedding and “the heroic creator of her big day” while being part of a fairy-tale narrative in which they are the centre of attention (74). Agency and power are clearly visible in all of these ads. These brides are not passive victims of the male gaze, instead they are themselves gazing. In Rancic’s advertisem*nt this is particularly evident, as she is looking directly at the viewer, where her husband, looking into another direction, remains rather face- and gazeless. This is in accord with bridal fictions in general, where husbands are often invisible, serving as bystanders or absent others, reinforcing the ideal that this is the special day of the bride and no one else. Furthermore, all of these advertisem*nts remain within the limited visual repertoire that is common within bridal culture: young to middle-aged, heterosexual, able-bodied, conventionally attractive women. The featuring of the non-white bride Layla Ali is a rare occasion in contemporary bridal fictions. And although this can be seen as a welcomed exception, this advertisem*nt remains eventually within the hegemonic and racial boundaries of contemporary bridal fictions. As Ingraham argues, ultimately “the white wedding in American culture is primarily a ritual by, for, and about the white middle to upper classes. Truly, the white wedding” (33). Furthermore, these advertisem*nts illustrate another key feature of bridal culture, the “privileging of white middle- to upper-class heterosexual marriage over all other forms” (Ingraham 164). Semiotically, the discussed advertisem*nts reflect the understanding of the white wedding as occasion to perform a certain classed identity: the luscious white dresses, the tuxedos, the jewellery and make up, etc. are all signifiers for a particular social standing. This is also emphasised by the mentioning of the prestigious jobs these brides hold, which presents a postfeminist twist on the otherwise common depictions of brides as practising hypergamy, meaning the marrying of a spouse of higher socio-economic status. But significantly, upward social mobility is usually presented as only acceptable for women, reinforcing the image of the husband as the provider. Another key feature of postfeminism, the centrality of heterosexual romance, becomes evident through Daisy Fuentes’ statement: “I’m a modern bride, because I believe that old-school values enhance a modern romance.” Having been liberated from the shackles of second wave feminism, which dismissed romance as “dope for dupes” (Greer in Pearce and Stacey 50), the postfeminist bride unapologetically embraces romance as central part of her life and relationship. Romance is here equated with traditionalism and “old school” values, thus reinforcing sexual exclusiveness, traditional gender roles and marriage as re-modernised, romantic norms. Angela McRobbie describes this “double entanglement” as a key feature of postfeminism that is comprised of “the co-existence of neo-conservative values in relation to gender, sexuality and family life […] with processes of liberalisation in regard to choice and diversity in domestic, sexual and kinship relations” (“Postfeminism” 255–56). These advertisem*nts illustrate quite palpably that the postfeminist bride is a complex figure. It is simultaneously progressive and conservative, fulfilling ideals of conservative femininity while actively negotiating in the complex field of personal choice, individualism and social conventions; it oscillates between power and passivity, tradition and modern womanhood, between feminism and femininity. It is precisely this contradictory nature of the postfeminist bride that makes the figure so appealing, as it allows women to participate in the fantasy world of bridal utopias while still providing possibilities to construct themselves as active and powerful agents. Conclusion While we can generally welcome the reconfiguration of brides as powerful and self-determined, we have to remain critical of the postfeminist assumption of women as “autonomous agents no longer constrained by any inequalities or power imbalances whatsoever” (Gill 153). Where marriage is assumed to be an “even playing field” as Geller argues (110), feminism is no longer needed and traditional marital femininity can be, once again, performed without guilt. In these ways postfeminism deflects feminist criticism with regard to the political dimensions of marital femininity and thus contributes to the production of marital hegemony. But why is marital hegemony per se problematic? Firstly, by presenting marital identity as essential for the construction of gendered identity, bridal fictions leave little room for (female) self-definition outside of the single/married binary. As Ingraham argues, not only “are these categories presented as significant indices of social identity, they are offered as the only options, implying that the organization of identity in relation to marriage is universal and in no need of explanation” (17). Hence, by positioning marriage and singledom as opposite poles on the axis of proper femininity, bridal fictions stigmatise single women as selfish, narcissistic, hedonistic, immature and unable to attract a suitable husband (Taylor 20, 40). Secondly, within bridal fictions “weddings, marriage, romance, and heterosexuality become naturalized to the point where we consent to the belief that marriage is necessary to achieve a sense of well-being, belonging, passion, morality and love” (Ingraham 120). By presenting the white wedding as a publicly endorsed and visible entry to marriage, bridal fictions produce in fundamental ways normative notions about who is ‘fit’ for marriage and therefore capable of the associated cultural and social values of maturity, responsibility, ‘family values’ and so on. This is particularly critical, as postfeminist identities “are structured by, stark and continuing inequalities and exclusions that relate to ‘race’ and ethnicity, class, age, sexuality and disability as well as gender” (Gill 149). These postfeminist exclusions are very evident in contemporary bridal fictions that feature almost exclusively young to middle-aged, white, able-bodied couples with upper to middle class identities that conform to the heteronormative matrix, both physically and socially. By depicting weddings almost exclusively in this kind of raced, classed and gendered framework, bridal fictions associate the above mentioned values, that are seen as markers for responsible adulthood and citizenship, with those who comply with these norms. In these ways bridal fictions stigmatise those who are not able or do not want to get married, and, moreover, produce a visual regime that determines who is seen as entitled to this kind of socially validated identity. The fact that bridal fictions indeed play a major role in producing marital hegemony is further reflected in the increasing presence of same-sex white weddings in popular culture. These representations, despite their message of equality for everyone, usually replicate rather than re-negotiate the heteronormative terms of bridal culture. This can be regarded as evidence of bridal fiction’s scope and reach in naturalising marriage not only as the most ideal form of a heterosexual relationship, but increasingly as the ideal for any kind of intimate relationship. References Bambacas, Christyana. “Thinking about White Weddings.” Journal of Australian Studies 26.72 (2002): 191–200.The Bachelor, ABC, 2002–present. Boden, Sharon. Consumerism, Romance and the Wedding Experience. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Bridezillas, We TV, 2004–present. Cherlin, Andrew. The-Marriage-Go-Round. The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today. New York: Vintage, 2010. Coontz, Stephanie. Marriage. A History. New York: Penguin, 2005. Currie, Dawn. “‘Here Comes the Bride’: The Making of a ‘Modern Traditional’ Wedding in Western Culture.” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 24.3 (1993): 403–21. Engstrom, Erika. The Bride Factory. Mass Portrayals of Women and Weddings. New York: Peter Lang, 2012. Fairchild Bridal Study (2005) 27 May 2012. ‹http://www.sellthebride.com/documents/americanweddingsurvey.pdf›. Finlay, Sara-Jane, and Victoria Clarke. “‘A Marriage of Inconvenience?’ Feminist Perspectives on Marriage.” Feminism & Psychology 13.4 (2003): 415–20. Foucault, M. (1980) “Body/Power and Truth/Power” in Gordon, C. (ed.) Michel Foucault: Power/Knowledge, Harvester, U.K. Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1973. Geller, Jaqlyn. Here Comes the Bride. Women, Weddings, and the Marriage Mystique. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2001. Genz, Stéphanie. Postfemininities in Popular Culture. New York: Palgrave, 2009. Genz, Stéphanie, and Benjamin Brabon. Postfeminsm. Cultural Texts and Theories. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. Gill, Rosalind. “Postfeminist Media Culture. Elements of a Sensibility.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 10.2 (2007): 147–66. Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971. Howard, Vicki. Brides, Inc. American Weddings and the Business of Tradition. Philadelphia: U of Pen Press, 2006. Ingraham, Chrys. White Weddings. Romancing Heterosexuality in Popular Discourse. New York: Routledge, 1999. Lewis, Jeff. Cultural Studies. London: Sage, 2008. McRobbie, Angela. “Post-Feminism and Popular Culture.” Feminist Media Studies 4.3 (2004): 255– 64. McRobbie, A. (2009). The Aftermath of Feminism. Gender, Culture and Social Change. London: Sage. Modern Bride, Condé Nast. Otnes, Cele, and Elizabeth Pleck. Cinderella Dreams. The Allure of the Lavish Wedding. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003. Pateman, Carole. The Sexual Contract. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988. Pearce, Lynn, and Jackie Stacey. Romance Revisited. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1995. Race to the Altar, NBC, 2003. Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Signs Summer.5 (1980): 631–60. Taylor, Anthea. Single Women in Popular Culture. The Limits of Postfeminism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Wallace, Carol. All Dressed in White. The Irresistible Rise of the American Wedding. London: Penguin Books, 2004. Advertisem*nts Analysed Guiliana Rancic. 29 Sept. 2012 ‹http://slackerchic.blogspot.de/2008/06/im-modern-bride-because-my-witness-was.html›. Daisy Fuentes. 29 Sept. 2012 ‹http://slackerchic.blogspot.de/2008/06/im-modern-bride-because-my-witness-was.html›. Layla Ali. 29 Sept. 2012 ‹http://slackerchic.blogspot.de/2008/06/im-modern-bride-because-my-witness-was.html›.

Abstract:

Introduction Eating is one of the most quintessential activities of human life. Because of this primacy, eating is, as food anthropologist Sidney Mintz has observed, “not merely a biological activity, but a vibrantly cultural activity as well” (48). This article posits that the current awareness of climate change in the Western world is animating such cultural activity as the Slow Food movement and is, as a result, stimulating what could be seen as an evolutionary change in popular foodways. Moreover, this paper suggests that, in line with modelling provided by the Slow Food example, an increased awareness of the connections of climate change to the social injustices of food production might better drive social change in such areas. This discussion begins by proposing that contemporary foodways—defined as “not only what is eaten by a particular group of people but also the variety of customs, beliefs and practices surrounding the production, preparation and presentation of food” (Davey 182)—are changing in the West in relation to current concerns about climate change. Such modification has a long history. Since long before the inception of modern hom*o sapiens, natural climate change has been a crucial element driving hominidae evolution, both biologically and culturally in terms of social organisation and behaviours. Macroevolutionary theory suggests evolution can dramatically accelerate in response to rapid shifts in an organism’s environment, followed by slow to long periods of stasis once a new level of sustainability has been achieved (Gould and Eldredge). There is evidence that ancient climate change has also dramatically affected the rate and course of cultural evolution. Recent work suggests that the end of the last ice age drove the cultural innovation of animal and plant domestication in the Middle East (Zeder), not only due to warmer temperatures and increased rainfall, but also to a higher level of atmospheric carbon dioxide which made agriculture increasingly viable (McCorriston and Hole, cited in Zeder). Megadroughts during the Paleolithic might well have been stimulating factors behind the migration of hominid populations out of Africa and across Asia (Scholz et al). Thus, it is hardly surprising that modern anthropogenically induced global warming—in all its’ climate altering manifestations—may be driving a new wave of cultural change and even evolution in the West as we seek a sustainable homeostatic equilibrium with the environment of the future. In 1962, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring exposed some of the threats that modern industrial agriculture poses to environmental sustainability. This prompted a public debate from which the modern environmental movement arose and, with it, an expanding awareness and attendant anxiety about the safety and nutritional quality of contemporary foods, especially those that are grown with chemical pesticides and fertilizers and/or are highly processed. This environmental consciousness led to some modification in eating habits, manifest by some embracing wholefood and vegetarian dietary regimes (or elements of them). Most recently, a widespread awareness of climate change has forced rapid change in contemporary Western foodways, while in other climate related areas of socio-political and economic significance such as energy production and usage, there is little evidence of real acceleration of change. Ongoing research into the effects of this expanding environmental consciousness continues in various disciplinary contexts such as geography (Eshel and Martin) and health (McMichael et al). In food studies, Vileisis has proposed that the 1970s environmental movement’s challenge to the polluting practices of industrial agri-food production, concurrent with the women’s movement (asserting women’s right to know about everything, including food production), has led to both cooks and eaters becoming increasingly knowledgeable about the links between agricultural production and consumer and environmental health, as well as the various social justice issues involved. As a direct result of such awareness, alternatives to the industrialised, global food system are now emerging (Kloppenberg et al.). The Slow Food (R)evolution The tenets of the Slow Food movement, now some two decades old, are today synergetic with the growing consternation about climate change. In 1983, Carlo Petrini formed the Italian non-profit food and wine association Arcigola and, in 1986, founded Slow Food as a response to the opening of a McDonalds in Rome. From these humble beginnings, which were then unashamedly positing a return to the food systems of the past, Slow Food has grown into a global organisation that has much more future focused objectives animating its challenges to the socio-cultural and environmental costs of industrial food. Slow Food does have some elements that could be classed as reactionary and, therefore, the opposite of evolutionary. In response to the increasing hom*ogenisation of culinary habits around the world, for instance, Slow Food’s Foundation for Biodiversity has established the Ark of Taste, which expands upon the idea of a seed bank to preserve not only varieties of food but also local and artisanal culinary traditions. In this, the Ark aims to save foods and food products “threatened by industrial standardization, hygiene laws, the regulations of large-scale distribution and environmental damage” (SFFB). Slow Food International’s overarching goals and activities, however, extend far beyond the preservation of past foodways, extending to the sponsoring of events and activities that are attempting to create new cuisine narratives for contemporary consumers who have an appetite for such innovation. Such events as the Salone del Gusto (Salon of Taste) and Terra Madre (Mother Earth) held in Turin every two years, for example, while celebrating culinary traditions, also focus on contemporary artisanal foods and sustainable food production processes that incorporate the most current of agricultural knowledge and new technologies into this production. Attendees at these events are also driven by both an interest in tradition, and their own very current concerns with health, personal satisfaction and environmental sustainability, to change their consumer behavior through an expanded self-awareness of the consequences of their individual lifestyle choices. Such events have, in turn, inspired such events in other locations, moving Slow Food from local to global relevance, and affecting the intellectual evolution of foodway cultures far beyond its headquarters in Bra in Northern Italy. This includes in the developing world, where millions of farmers continue to follow many traditional agricultural practices by necessity. Slow Food Movement’s forward-looking values are codified in the International Commission on the Future of Food and Agriculture 2006 publication, Manifesto on the Future of Food. This calls for changes to the World Trade Organisation’s rules that promote the globalisation of agri-food production as a direct response to the “climate change [which] threatens to undermine the entire natural basis of ecologically benign agriculture and food preparation, bringing the likelihood of catastrophic outcomes in the near future” (ICFFA 8). It does not call, however, for a complete return to past methods. To further such foodway awareness and evolution, Petrini founded the University of Gastronomic Sciences at Slow Food’s headquarters in 2004. The university offers programs that are analogous with the Slow Food’s overall aim of forging sustainable partnerships between the best of old and new practice: to, in the organisation’s own words, “maintain an organic relationship between gastronomy and agricultural science” (UNISG). In 2004, Slow Food had over sixty thousand members in forty-five countries (Paxson 15), with major events now held each year in many of these countries and membership continuing to grow apace. One of the frequently cited successes of the Slow Food movement is in relation to the tomato. Until recently, supermarkets stocked only a few mass-produced hybrids. These cultivars were bred for their disease resistance, ease of handling, tolerance to artificial ripening techniques, and display consistency, rather than any culinary values such as taste, aroma, texture or variety. In contrast, the vine ripened, ‘farmer’s market’ tomato has become the symbol of an “eco-gastronomically” sustainable, local and humanistic system of food production (Jordan) which melds the best of the past practice with the most up-to-date knowledge regarding such farming matters as water conservation. Although the term ‘heirloom’ is widely used in relation to these tomatoes, there is a distinctively contemporary edge to the way they are produced and consumed (Jordan), and they are, along with other organic and local produce, increasingly available in even the largest supermarket chains. Instead of a wholesale embrace of the past, it is the connection to, and the maintenance of that connection with, the processes of production and, hence, to the environment as a whole, which is the animating premise of the Slow Food movement. ‘Slow’ thus creates a gestalt in which individuals integrate their lifestyles with all levels of the food production cycle and, hence to the environment and, importantly, the inherently related social justice issues. ‘Slow’ approaches emphasise how the accelerated pace of contemporary life has weakened these connections, while offering a path to the restoration of a sense of connectivity to the full cycle of life and its relation to place, nature and climate. In this, the Slow path demands that every consumer takes responsibility for all components of his/her existence—a responsibility that includes becoming cognisant of the full story behind each of the products that are consumed in that life. The Slow movement is not, however, a regime of abstention or self-denial. Instead, the changes in lifestyle necessary to support responsible sustainability, and the sensual and aesthetic pleasure inherent in such a lifestyle, exist in a mutually reinforcing relationship (Pietrykowski 2004). This positive feedback loop enhances the potential for promoting real and long-term evolution in social and cultural behaviour. Indeed, the Slow zeitgeist now informs many areas of contemporary culture, with Slow Travel, Homes, Design, Management, Leadership and Education, and even Slow Email, Exercise, Shopping and Sex attracting adherents. Mainstreaming Concern with Ethical Food Production The role of the media in “forming our consciousness—what we think, how we think, and what we think about” (Cunningham and Turner 12)—is self-evident. It is, therefore, revealing in relation to the above outlined changes that even the most functional cookbooks and cookery magazines (those dedicated to practical information such as recipes and instructional technique) in Western countries such as the USA, UK and Australian are increasingly reflecting and promoting an awareness of ethical food production as part of this cultural change in food habits. While such texts have largely been considered as useful but socio-politically relatively banal publications, they are beginning to be recognised as a valid source of historical and cultural information (Nussel). Cookbooks and cookery magazines commonly include discussion of a surprising range of issues around food production and consumption including sustainable and ethical agricultural methods, biodiversity, genetic modification and food miles. In this context, they indicate how rapidly the recent evolution of foodways has been absorbed into mainstream practice. Much of such food related media content is, at the same time, closely identified with celebrity mass marketing and embodied in the television chef with his or her range of branded products including their syndicated articles and cookbooks. This commercial symbiosis makes each such cuisine-related article in a food or women’s magazine or cookbook, in essence, an advertorial for a celebrity chef and their named products. Yet, at the same time, a number of these mass media food celebrities are raising public discussion that is leading to consequent action around important issues linked to climate change, social justice and the environment. An example is Jamie Oliver’s efforts to influence public behaviour and government policy, a number of which have gained considerable traction. Oliver’s 2004 exposure of the poor quality of school lunches in Britain (see Jamie’s School Dinners), for instance, caused public outrage and pressured the British government to commit considerable extra funding to these programs. A recent study by Essex University has, moreover, found that the academic performance of 11-year-old pupils eating Oliver’s meals improved, while absenteeism fell by 15 per cent (Khan). Oliver’s exposé of the conditions of battery raised hens in 2007 and 2008 (see Fowl Dinners) resulted in increased sales of free-range poultry, decreased sales of factory-farmed chickens across the UK, and complaints that free-range chicken sales were limited by supply. Oliver encouraged viewers to lobby their local councils, and as a result, a number banned battery hen eggs from schools, care homes, town halls and workplace cafeterias (see, for example, LDP). The popular penetration of these ideas needs to be understood in a historical context where industrialised poultry farming has been an issue in Britain since at least 1848 when it was one of the contributing factors to the establishment of the RSPCA (Freeman). A century after Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (published in 1906) exposed the realities of the slaughterhouse, and several decades since Peter Singer’s landmark Animal Liberation (1975) and Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights (1983) posited the immorality of the mistreatment of animals in food production, it could be suggested that Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth (released in 2006) added considerably to the recent concern regarding the ethics of industrial agriculture. Consciousness-raising bestselling books such as Jim Mason and Peter Singer’s The Ethics of What We Eat and Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (both published in 2006), do indeed ‘close the loop’ in this way in their discussions, by concluding that intensive food production methods used since the 1950s are not only inhumane and damage public health, but are also damaging an environment under pressure from climate change. In comparison, the use of forced labour and human trafficking in food production has attracted far less mainstream media, celebrity or public attention. It could be posited that this is, in part, because no direct relationship to the environment and climate change and, therefore, direct link to our own existence in the West, has been popularised. Kevin Bales, who has been described as a modern abolitionist, estimates that there are currently more than 27 million people living in conditions of slavery and exploitation against their wills—twice as many as during the 350-year long trans-Atlantic slave trade. Bales also chillingly reveals that, worldwide, the number of slaves is increasing, with contemporary individuals so inexpensive to purchase in relation to the value of their production that they are disposable once the slaveholder has used them. Alongside sex slavery, many other prevalent examples of contemporary slavery are concerned with food production (Weissbrodt et al; Miers). Bales and Soodalter, for example, describe how across Asia and Africa, adults and children are enslaved to catch and process fish and shellfish for both human consumption and cat food. Other campaigners have similarly exposed how the cocoa in chocolate is largely produced by child slave labour on the Ivory Coast (Chalke; Off), and how considerable amounts of exported sugar, cereals and other crops are slave-produced in certain countries. In 2003, some 32 per cent of US shoppers identified themselves as LOHAS “lifestyles of health and sustainability” consumers, who were, they said, willing to spend more for products that reflected not only ecological, but also social justice responsibility (McLaughlin). Research also confirms that “the pursuit of social objectives … can in fact furnish an organization with the competitive resources to develop effective marketing strategies”, with Doherty and Meehan showing how “social and ethical credibility” are now viable bases of differentiation and competitive positioning in mainstream consumer markets (311, 303). In line with this recognition, Fair Trade Certified goods are now available in British, European, US and, to a lesser extent, Australian supermarkets, and a number of global chains including Dunkin’ Donuts, McDonalds, Starbucks and Virgin airlines utilise Fair Trade coffee and teas in all, or parts of, their operations. Fair Trade Certification indicates that farmers receive a higher than commodity price for their products, workers have the right to organise, men and women receive equal wages, and no child labour is utilised in the production process (McLaughlin). Yet, despite some Western consumers reporting such issues having an impact upon their purchasing decisions, social justice has not become a significant issue of concern for most. The popular cookery publications discussed above devote little space to Fair Trade product marketing, much of which is confined to supermarket-produced adverzines promoting the Fair Trade products they stock, and international celebrity chefs have yet to focus attention on this issue. In Australia, discussion of contemporary slavery in the press is sparse, having surfaced in 2000-2001, prompted by UNICEF campaigns against child labour, and in 2007 and 2008 with the visit of a series of high profile anti-slavery campaigners (including Bales) to the region. The public awareness of food produced by forced labour and the troubling issue of human enslavement in general is still far below the level that climate change and ecological issues have achieved thus far in driving foodway evolution. This may change, however, if a ‘Slow’-inflected connection can be made between Western lifestyles and the plight of peoples hidden from our daily existence, but contributing daily to them. Concluding Remarks At this time of accelerating techno-cultural evolution, due in part to the pressures of climate change, it is the creative potential that human conscious awareness brings to bear on these challenges that is most valuable. Today, as in the caves at Lascaux, humanity is evolving new images and narratives to provide rational solutions to emergent challenges. As an example of this, new foodways and ways of thinking about them are beginning to evolve in response to the perceived problems of climate change. The current conscious transformation of food habits by some in the West might be, therefore, in James Lovelock’s terms, a moment of “revolutionary punctuation” (178), whereby rapid cultural adaption is being induced by the growing public awareness of impending crisis. It remains to be seen whether other urgent human problems can be similarly and creatively embraced, and whether this trend can spread to offer global solutions to them. References An Inconvenient Truth. Dir. Davis Guggenheim. Lawrence Bender Productions, 2006. Bales, Kevin. Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004 (first published 1999). Bales, Kevin, and Ron Soodalter. The Slave Next Door: Human Trafficking and Slavery in America Today. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962. Chalke, Steve. “Unfinished Business: The Sinister Story behind Chocolate.” The Age 18 Sep. 2007: 11. Cunningham, Stuart, and Graeme Turner. The Media and Communications in Australia Today. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2002. Davey, Gwenda Beed. “Foodways.” The Oxford Companion to Australian Folklore. Ed. Gwenda Beed Davey, and Graham Seal. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1993. 182–85. Doherty, Bob, and John Meehan. “Competing on Social Resources: The Case of the Day Chocolate Company in the UK Confectionery Sector.” Journal of Strategic Marketing 14.4 (2006): 299–313. Eshel, Gidon, and Pamela A. Martin. “Diet, Energy, and Global Warming.” Earth Interactions 10, paper 9 (2006): 1–17. Fowl Dinners. Exec. Prod. Nick Curwin and Zoe Collins. Dragonfly Film and Television Productions and Fresh One Productions, 2008. Freeman, Sarah. Mutton and Oysters: The Victorians and Their Food. London: Gollancz, 1989. Gould, S. J., and N. Eldredge. “Punctuated Equilibrium Comes of Age.” Nature 366 (1993): 223–27. (ICFFA) International Commission on the Future of Food and Agriculture. Manifesto on the Future of Food. Florence, Italy: Agenzia Regionale per lo Sviluppo e l’Innovazione nel Settore Agricolo Forestale and Regione Toscana, 2006. Jamie’s School Dinners. Dir. Guy Gilbert. Fresh One Productions, 2005. Jordan, Jennifer A. “The Heirloom Tomato as Cultural Object: Investigating Taste and Space.” Sociologia Ruralis 47.1 (2007): 20-41. Khan, Urmee. “Jamie Oliver’s School Dinners Improve Exam Results, Report Finds.” Telegraph 1 Feb. 2009. 24 Aug. 2009 < http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/4423132/Jamie-Olivers-school-dinners-improve-exam-results-report-finds.html >. Kloppenberg, Jack, Jr, Sharon Lezberg, Kathryn de Master, G. W. Stevenson, and John Henrickson. ‘Tasting Food, Tasting Sustainability: Defining the Attributes of an Alternative Food System with Competent, Ordinary People.” Human Organisation 59.2 (Jul. 2000): 177–86. (LDP) Liverpool Daily Post. “Battery Farm Eggs Banned from Schools and Care Homes.” Liverpool Daily Post 12 Jan. 2008. 24 Aug. 2009 < http://www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk/liverpool-news/regional-news/2008/01/12/battery-farm-eggs-banned-from-schools-and-care-homes-64375-20342259 >. Lovelock, James. The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth. New York: Bantam, 1990 (first published 1988). Mason, Jim, and Peter Singer. The Ethics of What We Eat. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2006. McLaughlin, Katy. “Is Your Grocery List Politically Correct? Food World’s New Buzzword Is ‘Sustainable’ Products.” The Wall Street Journal 17 Feb. 2004. 29 Aug. 2009 < http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/fairtrade/coffee/1732.html >. McMichael, Anthony J, John W Powles, Colin D Butler, and Ricardo Uauy. “Food, Livestock Production, Energy, Climate Change, and Health.” The Lancet 370 (6 Oct. 2007): 1253–63. Miers, Suzanne. “Contemporary Slavery”. A Historical Guide to World Slavery. Ed. Seymour Drescher, and Stanley L. Engerman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Mintz, Sidney W. Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994. Nussel, Jill. “Heating Up the Sources: Using Community Cookbooks in Historical Inquiry.” History Compass 4/5 (2006): 956–61. Off, Carol. Bitter Chocolate: Investigating the Dark Side of the World's Most Seductive Sweet. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2008. Paxson, Heather. “Slow Food in a Fat Society: Satisfying Ethical Appetites.” Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture 5.1 (2005): 14–18. Pietrykowski, Bruce. “You Are What You Eat: The Social Economy of the Slow Food Movement.” Review of Social Economy 62:3 (2004): 307–21. Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: The Penguin Press, 2006. Regan, Tom. The Case for Animal Rights. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Scholz, Christopher A., Thomas C. Johnson, Andrew S. Cohen, John W. King, John A. Peck, Jonathan T. Overpeck, Michael R. Talbot, Erik T. Brown, Leonard Kalindekafe, Philip Y. O. Amoako, Robert P. Lyons, Timothy M. Shanahan, Isla S. Castañeda, Clifford W. Heil, Steven L. Forman, Lanny R. McHargue, Kristina R. Beuning, Jeanette Gomez, and James Pierson. “East African Megadroughts between 135 and 75 Thousand Years Ago and Bearing on Early-modern Human Origins.” PNAS: Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences of the United States of America 104.42 (16 Oct. 2007): 16416–21. Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. New York: Doubleday, Jabber & Company, 1906. Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation. New York: HarperCollins, 1975. (SFFB) Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity. “Ark of Taste.” 2009. 24 Aug. 2009 < http://www.fondazioneslowfood.it/eng/arca/lista.lasso >. (UNISG) University of Gastronomic Sciences. “Who We Are.” 2009. 24 Aug. 2009 < http://www.unisg.it/eng/chisiamo.php >. Vileisis, Ann. Kitchen Literacy: How We Lost Knowledge of Where Food Comes From and Why We Need to Get It Back. Washington: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 2008. Weissbrodt, David, and Anti-Slavery International. Abolishing Slavery and its Contemporary Forms. New York and Geneva: Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, United Nations, 2002. Zeder, Melinda A. “The Neolithic Macro-(R)evolution: Macroevolutionary Theory and the Study of Culture Change.” Journal of Archaeological Research 17 (2009): 1–63.

Abstract:

Introduction Most developed countries, including Australia, have a strong focus on national, state and local strategies for emergency management and response in the face of disasters and crises. This framework can include coping with catastrophic dislocation, service disruption, injury or loss of life in the face of natural disasters such as major fires, floods, earthquakes or other large-impact natural events, as well as dealing with similar catastrophes resulting from human actions such as bombs, biological agents, cyber-attacks targeting essential services such as communications networks, or other crises affecting large populations. Emergency management frameworks for crisis and disaster response are distinguished by their focus on the domestic context for such events; that is, how to manage and assist the ways in which civilian populations, who are for the most part inexperienced and untrained in dealing with crises and disasters, are able to respond and behave in such situations so as to minimise the impacts of a catastrophic event. Even in countries like Australia that demonstrate a strong public commitment to cultural pluralism and social cohesion, ethno-cultural diversity can be seen as a risk or threat to national security and values at times of political, natural, economic and/or social tensions and crises. Australian government policymakers have recently focused, with increasing intensity, on “community resilience” as a key element in countering extremism and enhancing emergency preparedness and response. In some sense, this is the result of a tacit acknowledgement by government agencies that there are limits to what they can do for domestic communities should such a catastrophic event occur, and accordingly, the focus in recent times has shifted to how governments can best help people to help themselves in such situations, a key element of the contemporary “resilience” approach. Yet despite the robustly multicultural nature of Australian society, explicit engagement with Australia’s cultural diversity flickers only fleetingly on this agenda, which continues to pursue approaches to community resilience in the absence of understandings about how these terms and formations may themselves need to be diversified to maximise engagement by all citizens in a multicultural polity. There have been some recent efforts in Australia to move in this direction, for example the Australian Emergency Management Institute (AEMI)’s recent suite of projects with culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities (2006-2010) and the current Australia-New Zealand Counter-Terrorism Committee-supported project on “Harnessing Resilience Capital in Culturally Diverse Communities to Counter Violent Extremism” (Grossman and Tahiri), which I discuss in a longer forthcoming version of this essay (Grossman). Yet the understanding of ethno-cultural identity and difference that underlies much policy thinking on resilience remains problematic for the way in which it invests in a view of the cultural dimensions of community resilience as relic rather than resource – valorising the preservation of and respect for cultural norms and traditions, but silent on what different ethno-cultural communities might contribute toward expanded definitions of both “community” and “resilience” by virtue of the transformative potential and existing cultural capital they bring with them into new national and also translocal settings. For example, a primary conclusion of the joint program between AEMI and the Australian Multicultural Commission is that CALD communities are largely “vulnerable” in the context of disasters and emergency management and need to be better integrated into majority-culture models of theorising and embedding community resilience. This focus on stronger national integration and the “vulnerability” of culturally diverse ethno-cultural communities in the Australian context echoes the work of scholars beyond Australia such as McGhee, Mouritsen (Reflections, Citizenship) and Joppke. They argue that the “civic turn” in debates around resurgent contemporary nationalism and multicultural immigration policies privileges civic integration over genuine two-way multiculturalism. This approach sidesteps the transculturational (Ortiz; Welsch; Mignolo; Bennesaieh; Robins; Stein) aspects of contemporary social identities and exchange by paying lip-service to cultural diversity while affirming a neo-liberal construct of civic values and principles as a universalising goal of Western democratic states within a global market economy. It also suggests a superficial tribute to cultural diversity that does not embed diversity comprehensively at the levels of either conceptualising or resourcing different elements of Australian transcultural communities within the generalised framework of “community resilience.” And by emphasising cultural difference as vulnerability rather than as resource or asset, it fails to acknowledge the varieties of resilience capital that many culturally diverse individuals and communities may bring with them when they resettle in new environments, by ignoring the question of what “resilience” actually means to those from culturally diverse communities. In so doing, it also avoids the critical task of incorporating intercultural definitional diversity around the concepts of both “community” and “resilience” used to promote social cohesion and the capacity to recover from disasters and crises. How we might do differently in thinking about the broader challenges for multiculturalism itself as a resilient transnational concept and practice? The Concept of Resilience The meanings of resilience vary by disciplinary perspective. While there is no universally accepted definition of the concept, it is widely acknowledged that resilience refers to the capacity of an individual to do well in spite of exposure to acute trauma or sustained adversity (Liebenberg 219). Originating in the Latin word resilio, meaning ‘to jump back’, there is general consensus that resilience pertains to an individual’s, community’s or system’s ability to adapt to and ‘bounce back’ from a disruptive event (Mohaupt 63, Longstaff et al. 3). Over the past decade there has been a dramatic rise in interest in the clinical, community and family sciences concerning resilience to a broad range of adversities (Weine 62). While debate continues over which discipline can be credited with first employing resilience as a concept, Mohaupt argues that most of the literature on resilience cites social psychology and psychiatry as the origin for the concept beginning in the mid-20th century. The pioneer researchers of what became known as resilience research studied the impact on children living in dysfunctional families. For example, the findings of work by Garmezy, Werner and Smith and Rutter showed that about one third of children in these studies were coping very well despite considerable adversities and traumas. In asking what it was that prevented the children in their research from being negatively influenced by their home environments, such research provided the basis for future research on resilience. Such work was also ground-breaking for identifying the so-called ‘protective factors’ or resources that individuals can operationalise when dealing with adversity. In essence, protective factors are those conditions in the individual that protect them from the risk of dysfunction and enable recovery from trauma. They mitigate the effects of stressors or risk factors, that is, those conditions that predispose one to harm (Hajek 15). Protective factors include the inborn traits or qualities within an individual, those defining an individual’s environment, and also the interaction between the two. Together, these factors give people the strength, skills and motivation to cope in difficult situations and re-establish (a version of) ‘normal’ life (Gunnestad). Identifying protective factors is important in terms of understanding the particular resources a given sociocultural group has at its disposal, but it is also vital to consider the interconnections between various protective mechanisms, how they might influence each other, and to what degree. An individual, for instance, might display resilience or adaptive functioning in a particular domain (e.g. emotional functioning) but experience significant deficits in another (e.g. academic achievement) (Hunter 2). It is also essential to scrutinise how the interaction between protective factors and risk factors creates patterns of resilience. Finally, a comprehensive understanding of the interrelated nature of protective mechanisms and risk factors is imperative for designing effective interventions and tailored preventive strategies (Weine 65). In short, contemporary thinking about resilience suggests it is neither entirely personal nor strictly social, but an interactive and iterative combination of the two. It is a quality of the environment as much as the individual. For Ungar, resilience is the complex entanglements between “individuals and their social ecologies [that] will determine the degree of positive outcomes experienced” (3). Thinking about resilience as context-dependent is important because research that is too trait-based or actor-centred risks ignoring any structural or institutional forces. A more ecological interpretation of resilience, one that takes into a person’s context and environment into account, is vital in order to avoid blaming the victim for any hardships they face, or relieving state and institutional structures from their responsibilities in addressing social adversity, which can “emphasise self-help in line with a neo-conservative agenda instead of stimulating state responsibility” (Mohaupt 67). Nevertheless, Ungar posits that a coherent definition of resilience has yet to be developed that adequately ‘captures the dual focus of the individual and the individual’s social ecology and how the two must both be accounted for when determining the criteria for judging outcomes and discerning processes associated with resilience’ (7). Recent resilience research has consequently prompted a shift away from vulnerability towards protective processes — a shift that highlights the sustained capabilities of individuals and communities under threat or at risk. Locating ‘Culture’ in the Literature on Resilience However, an understanding of the role of culture has remained elusive or marginalised within this trend; there has been comparatively little sustained investigation into the applicability of resilience constructs to non-western cultures, or how the resources available for survival might differ from those accessible to western populations (Ungar 4). As such, a growing body of researchers is calling for more rigorous inquiry into culturally determined outcomes that might be associated with resilience in non-western or multicultural cultures and contexts, for example where Indigenous and minority immigrant communities live side by side with their ‘mainstream’ neighbours in western settings (Ungar 2). ‘Cultural resilience’ considers the role that cultural background plays in determining the ability of individuals and communities to be resilient in the face of adversity. For Clauss-Ehlers, the term describes the degree to which the strengths of one’s culture promote the development of coping (198). Culturally-focused resilience suggests that people can manage and overcome stress and trauma based not on individual characteristics alone, but also from the support of broader sociocultural factors (culture, cultural values, language, customs, norms) (Clauss-Ehlers 324). The innate cultural strengths of a culture may or may not differ from the strengths of other cultures; the emphasis here is not so much comparatively inter-cultural as intensively intra-cultural (VanBreda 215). A culturally focused resilience model thus involves “a dynamic, interactive process in which the individual negotiates stress through a combination of character traits, cultural background, cultural values, and facilitating factors in the sociocultural environment” (Clauss-Ehlers 199). In understanding ways of ‘coping and hoping, surviving and thriving’, it is thus crucial to consider how culturally and linguistically diverse minorities navigate the cultural understandings and assumptions of both their countries of origin and those of their current domicile (Ungar 12). Gunnestad claims that people who master the rules and norms of their new culture without abandoning their own language, values and social support are more resilient than those who tenaciously maintain their own culture at the expense of adjusting to their new environment. They are also more resilient than those who forego their own culture and assimilate with the host society (14). Accordingly, if the combination of both valuing one’s culture as well as learning about the culture of the new system produces greater resilience and adaptive capacities, serious problems can arise when a majority tries to acculturate a minority to the mainstream by taking away or not recognising important parts of the minority culture. In terms of resilience, if cultural factors are denied or diminished in accounting for and strengthening resilience – in other words, if people are stripped of what they possess by way of resilience built through cultural knowledge, disposition and networks – they do in fact become vulnerable, because ‘they do not automatically gain those cultural strengths that the majority has acquired over generations’ (Gunnestad 14). Mobilising ‘Culture’ in Australian Approaches to Community Resilience The realpolitik of how concepts of resilience and culture are mobilised is highly relevant here. As noted above, when ethnocultural difference is positioned as a risk or a threat to national identity, security and values, this is precisely the moment when vigorously, even aggressively, nationalised definitions of ‘community’ and ‘identity’ that minoritise or disavow cultural diversities come to the fore in public discourse. The Australian evocation of nationalism and national identity, particularly in the way it has framed policy discussion on managing national responses to disasters and threats, has arguably been more muted than some of the European hysteria witnessed recently around cultural diversity and national life. Yet we still struggle with the idea that newcomers to Australia might fall on the surplus rather than the deficit side of the ledger when it comes to identifying and harnessing resilience capital. A brief example of this trend is explored here. From 2006 to 2010, the Australian Emergency Management Institute embarked on an ambitious government-funded four-year program devoted to strengthening community resilience in relation to disasters with specific reference to engaging CALD communities across Australia. The program, Inclusive Emergency Management with CALD Communities, was part of a wider Australian National Action Plan to Build Social Cohesion, Harmony and Security in the wake of the London terrorist bombings in July 2005. Involving CALD community organisations as well as various emergency and disaster management agencies, the program ran various workshops and agency-community partnership pilots, developed national school education resources, and commissioned an evaluation of the program’s effectiveness (Farrow et al.). While my critique here is certainly not aimed at emergency management or disaster response agencies and personnel themselves – dedicated professionals who often achieve remarkable results in emergency and disaster response under extraordinarily difficult circ*mstances – it is nevertheless important to highlight how the assumptions underlying elements of AEMI’s experience and outcomes reflect the persistent ways in which ethnocultural diversity is rendered as a problem to be surmounted or a liability to be redressed, rather than as an asset to be built upon or a resource to be valued and mobilised. AEMI’s explicit effort to engage with CALD communities in building overall community resilience was important in its tacit acknowledgement that emergency and disaster services were (and often remain) under-resourced and under-prepared in dealing with the complexities of cultural diversity in emergency situations. Despite these good intentions, however, while the program produced some positive outcomes and contributed to crucial relationship building between CALD communities and emergency services within various jurisdictions, it also continued to frame the challenge of working with cultural diversity as a problem of increased vulnerability during disasters for recently arrived and refugee background CALD individuals and communities. This highlights a common feature in community resilience-building initiatives, which is to focus on those who are already ‘robust’ versus those who are ‘vulnerable’ in relation to resilience indicators, and whose needs may require different or additional resources in order to be met. At one level, this is a pragmatic resourcing issue: national agencies understandably want to put their people, energy and dollars where they are most needed in pursuit of a steady-state unified national response at times of crisis. Nor should it be argued that at least some CALD groups, particularly those from new arrival and refugee communities, are not vulnerable in at least some of the ways and for some of the reasons suggested in the program evaluation. However, the consistent focus on CALD communities as ‘vulnerable’ and ‘in need’ is problematic, as well as partial. It casts members of these communities as structurally and inherently less able and less resilient in the context of disasters and emergencies: in some sense, as those who, already ‘victims’ of chronic social deficits such as low English proficiency, social isolation and a mysterious unidentified set of ‘cultural factors’, can become doubly victimised in acute crisis and disaster scenarios. In what is by now a familiar trope, the description of CALD communities as ‘vulnerable’ precludes asking questions about what they do have, what they do know, and what they do or can contribute to how we respond to disaster and emergency events in our communities. A more profound problem in this sphere revolves around working out how best to engage CALD communities and individuals within existing approaches to disaster and emergency preparedness and response. This reflects a fundamental but unavoidable limitation of disaster preparedness models: they are innately spatially and geographically bounded, and consequently understand ‘communities’ in these terms, rather than expanding definitions of ‘community’ to include the dimensions of community-as-social-relations. While some good engagement outcomes were achieved locally around cross-cultural knowledge for emergency services workers, the AEMI program fell short of asking some of the harder questions about how emergency and disaster service scaffolding and resilience-building approaches might themselves need to change or transform, using a cross-cutting model of ‘communities’ as both geographic places and multicultural spaces (Bartowiak-Théron and Crehan) in order to be more effective in national scenarios in which cultural diversity should be taken for granted. Toward Acknowledgement of Resilience Capital Most significantly, the AEMI program did not produce any recognition of the ways in which CALD communities already possess resilience capital, or consider how this might be drawn on in formulating stronger community initiatives around disaster and threats preparedness for the future. Of course, not all individuals within such communities, nor all communities across varying circ*mstances, will demonstrate resilience, and we need to be careful of either overgeneralising or romanticising the kinds and degrees of ‘resilience capital’ that may exist within them. Nevertheless, at least some have developed ways of withstanding crises and adapting to new conditions of living. This is particularly so in connection with individual and group behaviours around resource sharing, care-giving and social responsibility under adverse circ*mstances (Grossman and Tahiri) – all of which are directly relevant to emergency and disaster response. While some of these resilient behaviours may have been nurtured or enhanced by particular experiences and environments, they can, as the discussion of recent literature above suggests, also be rooted more deeply in cultural norms, habits and beliefs. Whatever their origins, for culturally diverse societies to achieve genuine resilience in the face of both natural and human-made disasters, it is critical to call on the ‘social memory’ (Folke et al.) of communities faced with responding to emergencies and crises. Such wellsprings of social memory ‘come from the diversity of individuals and institutions that draw on reservoirs of practices, knowledge, values, and worldviews and is crucial for preparing the system for change, building resilience, and for coping with surprise’ (Adger et al.). Consequently, if we accept the challenge of mapping an approach to cultural diversity as resource rather than relic into our thinking around strengthening community resilience, there are significant gains to be made. For a whole range of reasons, no diversity-sensitive model or measure of resilience should invest in static understandings of ethnicities and cultures; all around the world, ethnocultural identities and communities are in a constant and sometimes accelerated state of dynamism, reconfiguration and flux. But to ignore the resilience capital and potential protective factors that ethnocultural diversity can offer to the strengthening of community resilience more broadly is to miss important opportunities that can help suture the existing disconnects between proactive approaches to intercultural connectedness and social inclusion on the one hand, and reactive approaches to threats, national security and disaster response on the other, undermining the effort to advance effectively on either front. This means that dominant social institutions and structures must be willing to contemplate their own transformation as the result of transcultural engagement, rather than merely insisting, as is often the case, that ‘other’ cultures and communities conform to existing hegemonic paradigms of being and of living. In many ways, this is the most critical step of all. A resilience model and strategy that questions its own culturally informed yet taken-for-granted assumptions and premises, goes out into communities to test and refine these, and returns to redesign its approach based on the new knowledge it acquires, would reflect genuine progress toward an effective transculturational approach to community resilience in culturally diverse contexts.References Adger, W. Neil, Terry P. Hughes, Carl Folke, Stephen R. 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Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton U P, 2000. Mohaupt, Sarah. “Review Article: Resilience and Social Exclusion.” Social Policy and Society 8 (2009): 63-71.Mouritsen, Per. "The Culture of Citizenship: A Reflection on Civic Integration in Europe." Ed. R. Zapata-Barrero. Citizenship Policies in the Age of Diversity: Europe at the Crossroad." Barcelona: CIDOB Foundation, 2009: 23-35. Mouritsen, Per. “Political Responses to Cultural Conflict: Reflections on the Ambiguities of the Civic Turn.” Ed. P. Mouritsen and K.E. Jørgensen. Constituting Communities. Political Solutions to Cultural Conflict, London: Palgrave, 2008. 1-30. Ortiz, Fernando. Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. Trans. Harriet de Onís. Intr. Fernando Coronil and Bronislaw Malinowski. Durham, NC: Duke U P, 1995 [1940]. Robins, Kevin. The Challenge of Transcultural Diversities: Final Report on the Transversal Study on Cultural Policy and Cultural Diversity. Culture and Cultural Heritage Department. Strasbourg: Council of European Publishing, 2006. Rutter, Michael. “Protective Factors in Children’s Responses to Stress and Disadvantage.” Annals of the Academy of Medicine, Singapore 8 (1979): 324-38. Stein, Mark. “The Location of Transculture.” Transcultural English Studies: Fictions, Theories, Realities. Eds. F. Schulze-Engler and S. Helff. Cross/Cultures 102/ANSEL Papers 12. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009. 251-266. Ungar, Michael. “Resilience across Cultures.” British Journal of Social Work 38.2 (2008): 218-235. First published online 2006: 1-18. In-text references refer to the online Advance Access edition ‹http://bjsw.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2006/10/18/bjsw.bcl343.full.pdf>. VanBreda, Adrian DuPlessis. Resilience Theory: A Literature Review. Erasmuskloof: South African Military Health Service, Military Psychological Institute, Social Work Research & Development, 2001. Weine, Stevan. “Building Resilience to Violent Extremism in Muslim Diaspora Communities in the United States.” Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict 5.1 (2012): 60-73. Welsch, Wolfgang. “Transculturality: The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today.” Spaces of Culture: City, Nation World. Eds. M. Featherstone and S. Lash. London: Sage, 1999. 194-213. Werner, Emmy E., and Ruth S. Smith. Vulnerable But Invincible: A Longitudinal Study of\ Resilience and Youth. New York: McGraw Hill, 1982. NotesThe concept of ‘resilience capital’ I offer here is in line with one strand of contemporary theorising around resilience – that of resilience as social or socio-ecological capital – but moves beyond the idea of enhancing general social connectedness and community cohesion by emphasising the ways in which culturally diverse communities may already be robustly networked and resourceful within micro-communal settings, with new resources and knowledge both to draw on and to offer other communities or the ‘national community’ at large. In effect, ‘resilience capital’ speaks to the importance of finding ‘the communities within the community’ (Bartowiak-Théron and Crehan 11) and recognising their capacity to contribute to broad-scale resilience and recovery.I am indebted for the discussion of the literature on resilience here to Dr Peta Stephenson, Centre for Cultural Diversity and Wellbeing, Victoria University, who is working on a related project (M. Grossman and H. Tahiri, Harnessing Resilience Capital in Culturally Diverse Communities to Counter Violent Extremism, forthcoming 2014).

Abstract:

The term “coffee palace” was primarily used in Australia to describe the temperance hotels that were built in the last decades of the 19th century, although there are references to the term also being used to a lesser extent in the United Kingdom (Denby 174). Built in response to the worldwide temperance movement, which reached its pinnacle in the 1880s in Australia, coffee palaces were hotels that did not serve alcohol. This was a unique time in Australia’s architectural development as the economic boom fuelled by the gold rush in the 1850s, and the demand for ostentatious display that gathered momentum during the following years, afforded the use of richly ornamental High Victorian architecture and resulted in very majestic structures; hence the term “palace” (Freeland 121). The often multi-storied coffee palaces were found in every capital city as well as regional areas such as Geelong and Broken Hill, and locales as remote as Maria Island on the east coast of Tasmania. Presented as upholding family values and discouraging drunkenness, the coffee palaces were most popular in seaside resorts such as Barwon Heads in Victoria, where they catered to families. Coffee palaces were also constructed on a grand scale to provide accommodation for international and interstate visitors attending the international exhibitions held in Sydney (1879) and Melbourne (1880 and 1888). While the temperance movement lasted well over 100 years, the life of coffee palaces was relatively short-lived. Nevertheless, coffee palaces were very much part of Australia’s cultural landscape. In this article, I examine the rise and demise of coffee palaces associated with the temperance movement and argue that coffee palaces established in the name of abstinence were modelled on the coffee houses that spread throughout Europe and North America in the 17th and 18th centuries during the Enlightenment—a time when the human mind could be said to have been liberated from inebriation and the dogmatic state of ignorance. The Temperance Movement At a time when newspapers are full of lurid stories about binge-drinking and the alleged ill-effects of the liberalisation of licensing laws, as well as concerns over the growing trend of marketing easy-to-drink products (such as the so-called “alcopops”) to teenagers, it is difficult to think of a period when the total suppression of the alcohol trade was seriously debated in Australia. The cause of temperance has almost completely vanished from view, yet for well over a century—from 1830 to the outbreak of the Second World War—the control or even total abolition of the liquor trade was a major political issue—one that split the country, brought thousands onto the streets in demonstrations, and influenced the outcome of elections. Between 1911 and 1925 referenda to either limit or prohibit the sale of alcohol were held in most States. While moves to bring about abolition failed, Fitzgerald notes that almost one in three Australian voters expressed their support for prohibition of alcohol in their State (145). Today, the temperance movement’s platform has largely been forgotten, killed off by the practical example of the United States, where prohibition of the legal sale of alcohol served only to hand control of the liquor traffic to organised crime. Coffee Houses and the Enlightenment Although tea has long been considered the beverage of sobriety, it was coffee that came to be regarded as the very antithesis of alcohol. When the first coffee house opened in London in the early 1650s, customers were bewildered by this strange new drink from the Middle East—hot, bitter, and black as soot. But those who tried coffee were, reports Ellis, soon won over, and coffee houses were opened across London, Oxford, and Cambridge and, in the following decades, Europe and North America. Tea, equally exotic, entered the English market slightly later than coffee (in 1664), but was more expensive and remained a rarity long after coffee had become ubiquitous in London (Ellis 123-24). The impact of the introduction of coffee into Europe during the seventeenth century was particularly noticeable since the most common beverages of the time, even at breakfast, were weak “small beer” and wine. Both were safer to drink than water, which was liable to be contaminated. Coffee, like beer, was made using boiled water and, therefore, provided a new and safe alternative to alcoholic drinks. There was also the added benefit that those who drank coffee instead of alcohol began the day alert rather than mildly inebriated (Standage 135). It was also thought that coffee had a stimulating effect upon the “nervous system,” so much so that the French called coffee une boisson intellectuelle (an intellectual beverage), because of its stimulating effect on the brain (Muskett 71). In Oxford, the British called their coffee houses “penny universities,” a penny then being the price of a cup of coffee (Standage 158). Coffee houses were, moreover, more than places that sold coffee. Unlike other institutions of the period, rank and birth had no place (Ellis 59). The coffee house became the centre of urban life, creating a distinctive social culture by treating all customers as equals. Egalitarianism, however, did not extend to women—at least not in London. Around its egalitarian (but male) tables, merchants discussed and conducted business, writers and poets held discussions, scientists demonstrated experiments, and philosophers deliberated ideas and reforms. For the price of a cup (or “dish” as it was then known) of coffee, a man could read the latest pamphlets and newsletters, chat with other patrons, strike business deals, keep up with the latest political gossip, find out what other people thought of a new book, or take part in literary or philosophical discussions. Like today’s Internet, Twitter, and Facebook, Europe’s coffee houses functioned as an information network where ideas circulated and spread from coffee house to coffee house. In this way, drinking coffee in the coffee house became a metaphor for people getting together to share ideas in a sober environment, a concept that remains today. According to Standage, this information network fuelled the Enlightenment (133), prompting an explosion of creativity. Coffee houses provided an entirely new environment for political, financial, scientific, and literary change, as people gathered, discussed, and debated issues within their walls. Entrepreneurs and scientists teamed up to form companies to exploit new inventions and discoveries in manufacturing and mining, paving the way for the Industrial Revolution (Standage 163). The stock market and insurance companies also had their birth in the coffee house. As a result, coffee was seen to be the epitome of modernity and progress and, as such, was the ideal beverage for the Age of Reason. By the 19th century, however, the era of coffee houses had passed. Most of them had evolved into exclusive men’s clubs, each geared towards a certain segment of society. Tea was now more affordable and fashionable, and teahouses, which drew clientele from both sexes, began to grow in popularity. Tea, however, had always been Australia’s most popular non-alcoholic drink. Tea (and coffee) along with other alien plants had been part of the cargo unloaded onto Australian shores with the First Fleet in 1788. Coffee, mainly from Brazil and Jamaica, remained a constant import but was taxed more heavily than tea and was, therefore, more expensive. Furthermore, tea was much easier to make than coffee. To brew tea, all that is needed is to add boiling water, coffee, in contrast, required roasting, grinding and brewing. According to Symons, until the 1930s, Australians were the largest consumers of tea in the world (19). In spite of this, and as coffee, since its introduction into Europe, was regarded as the antidote to alcohol, the temperance movement established coffee palaces. In the early 1870s in Britain, the temperance movement had revived the coffee house to provide an alternative to the gin taverns that were so attractive to the working classes of the Industrial Age (Clarke 5). Unlike the earlier coffee house, this revived incarnation provided accommodation and was open to men, women and children. “Cheap and wholesome food,” was available as well as reading rooms supplied with newspapers and periodicals, and games and smoking rooms (Clarke 20). In Australia, coffee palaces did not seek the working classes, as clientele: at least in the cities they were largely for the nouveau riche. Coffee Palaces The discovery of gold in 1851 changed the direction of the Australian economy. An investment boom followed, with an influx of foreign funds and English banks lending freely to colonial speculators. By the 1880s, the manufacturing and construction sectors of the economy boomed and land prices were highly inflated. Governments shared in the wealth and ploughed money into urban infrastructure, particularly railways. Spurred on by these positive economic conditions and the newly extended inter-colonial rail network, international exhibitions were held in both Sydney and Melbourne. To celebrate modern technology and design in an industrial age, international exhibitions were phenomena that had spread throughout Europe and much of the world from the mid-19th century. According to Davison, exhibitions were “integral to the culture of nineteenth century industrialising societies” (158). In particular, these exhibitions provided the colonies with an opportunity to demonstrate to the world their economic power and achievements in the sciences, the arts and education, as well as to promote their commerce and industry. Massive purpose-built buildings were constructed to house the exhibition halls. In Sydney, the Garden Palace was erected in the Botanic Gardens for the 1879 Exhibition (it burnt down in 1882). In Melbourne, the Royal Exhibition Building, now a World Heritage site, was built in the Carlton Gardens for the 1880 Exhibition and extended for the 1888 Centennial Exhibition. Accommodation was required for the some one million interstate and international visitors who were to pass through the gates of the Garden Palace in Sydney. To meet this need, the temperance movement, keen to provide alternative accommodation to licensed hotels, backed the establishment of Sydney’s coffee palaces. The Sydney Coffee Palace Hotel Company was formed in 1878 to operate and manage a number of coffee palaces constructed during the 1870s. These were designed to compete with hotels by “offering all the ordinary advantages of those establishments without the allurements of the drink” (Murdoch). Coffee palaces were much more than ordinary hotels—they were often multi-purpose or mixed-use buildings that included a large number of rooms for accommodation as well as ballrooms and other leisure facilities to attract people away from pubs. As the Australian Town and Country Journal reveals, their services included the supply of affordable, wholesome food, either in the form of regular meals or occasional refreshments, cooked in kitchens fitted with the latest in culinary accoutrements. These “culinary temples” also provided smoking rooms, chess and billiard rooms, and rooms where people could read books, periodicals and all the local and national papers for free (121). Similar to the coffee houses of the Enlightenment, the coffee palaces brought businessmen, artists, writers, engineers, and scientists attending the exhibitions together to eat and drink (non-alcoholic), socialise and conduct business. The Johnson’s Temperance Coffee Palace located in York Street in Sydney produced a practical guide for potential investors and businessmen titled International Exhibition Visitors Pocket Guide to Sydney. It included information on the location of government departments, educational institutions, hospitals, charitable organisations, and embassies, as well as a list of the tariffs on goods from food to opium (1–17). Women, particularly the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) were a formidable force in the temperance movement (intemperance was generally regarded as a male problem and, more specifically, a husband problem). Murdoch argues, however, that much of the success of the push to establish coffee palaces was due to male politicians with business interests, such as the one-time Victorian premiere James Munro. Considered a stern, moral church-going leader, Munro expanded the temperance movement into a fanatical force with extraordinary power, which is perhaps why the temperance movement had its greatest following in Victoria (Murdoch). Several prestigious hotels were constructed to provide accommodation for visitors to the international exhibitions in Melbourne. Munro was responsible for building many of the city’s coffee palaces, including the Victoria (1880) and the Federal Coffee Palace (1888) in Collins Street. After establishing the Grand Coffee Palace Company, Munro took over the Grand Hotel (now the Windsor) in 1886. Munro expanded the hotel to accommodate some of the two million visitors who were to attend the Centenary Exhibition, renamed it the Grand Coffee Palace, and ceremoniously burnt its liquor licence at the official opening (Murdoch). By 1888 there were more than 50 coffee palaces in the city of Melbourne alone and Munro held thousands of shares in coffee palaces, including those in Geelong and Broken Hill. With its opening planned to commemorate the centenary of the founding of Australia and the 1888 International Exhibition, the construction of the Federal Coffee Palace, one of the largest hotels in Australia, was perhaps the greatest monument to the temperance movement. Designed in the French Renaissance style, the façade was embellished with statues, griffins and Venus in a chariot drawn by four seahorses. The building was crowned with an iron-framed domed tower. New passenger elevators—first demonstrated at the Sydney Exhibition—allowed the building to soar to seven storeys. According to the Federal Coffee Palace Visitor’s Guide, which was presented to every visitor, there were three lifts for passengers and others for luggage. Bedrooms were located on the top five floors, while the stately ground and first floors contained majestic dining, lounge, sitting, smoking, writing, and billiard rooms. There were electric service bells, gaslights, and kitchens “fitted with the most approved inventions for aiding proficients [sic] in the culinary arts,” while the luxury brand Pears soap was used in the lavatories and bathrooms (16–17). In 1891, a spectacular financial crash brought the economic boom to an abrupt end. The British economy was in crisis and to meet the predicament, English banks withdrew their funds in Australia. There was a wholesale collapse of building companies, mortgage banks and other financial institutions during 1891 and 1892 and much of the banking system was halted during 1893 (Attard). Meanwhile, however, while the eastern States were in the economic doldrums, gold was discovered in 1892 at Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie in Western Australia and, within two years, the west of the continent was transformed. As gold poured back to the capital city of Perth, the long dormant settlement hurriedly caught up and began to emulate the rest of Australia, including the construction of ornately detailed coffee palaces (Freeman 130). By 1904, Perth had 20 coffee palaces. When the No. 2 Coffee Palace opened in Pitt Street, Sydney, in 1880, the Australian Town and Country Journal reported that coffee palaces were “not only fashionable, but appear to have acquired a permanent footing in Sydney” (121). The coffee palace era, however, was relatively short-lived. Driven more by reformist and economic zeal than by good business sense, many were in financial trouble when the 1890’s Depression hit. Leading figures in the temperance movement were also involved in land speculation and building societies and when these schemes collapsed, many, including Munro, were financially ruined. Many of the palaces closed or were forced to apply for liquor licences in order to stay afloat. Others developed another life after the temperance movement’s influence waned and the coffee palace fad faded, and many were later demolished to make way for more modern buildings. The Federal was licensed in 1923 and traded as the Federal Hotel until its demolition in 1973. The Victoria, however, did not succumb to a liquor licence until 1967. The Sydney Coffee Palace in Woolloomooloo became the Sydney Eye Hospital and, more recently, smart apartments. Some fine examples still survive as reminders of Australia’s social and cultural heritage. The Windsor in Melbourne’s Spring Street and the Broken Hill Hotel, a massive three-story iconic pub in the outback now called simply “The Palace,” are some examples. Tea remained the beverage of choice in Australia until the 1950s when the lifting of government controls on the importation of coffee and the influence of American foodways coincided with the arrival of espresso-loving immigrants. As Australians were introduced to the espresso machine, the short black, the cappuccino, and the café latte and (reminiscent of the Enlightenment), the post-war malaise was shed in favour of the energy and vigour of modernist thought and creativity, fuelled in at least a small part by caffeine and the emergent café culture (Teffer). Although the temperance movement’s attempt to provide an alternative to the ubiquitous pubs failed, coffee has now outstripped the consumption of tea and today’s café culture ensures that wherever coffee is consumed, there is the possibility of a continuation of the Enlightenment’s lively discussions, exchange of news, and dissemination of ideas and information in a sober environment. References Attard, Bernard. “The Economic History of Australia from 1788: An Introduction.” EH.net Encyclopedia. 5 Feb. (2012) ‹http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/attard.australia›. Blainey, Anna. “The Prohibition and Total Abstinence Movement in Australia 1880–1910.” Food, Power and Community: Essays in the History of Food and Drink. Ed. Robert Dare. Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 1999. 142–52. Boyce, Francis Bertie. “Shall I Vote for No License?” An address delivered at the Convention of the Parramatta Branch of New South Wales Alliance, 3 September 1906. 3rd ed. Parramatta: New South Wales Alliance, 1907. Clarke, James Freeman. Coffee Houses and Coffee Palaces in England. Boston: George H. Ellis, 1882. “Coffee Palace, No. 2.” Australian Town and Country Journal. 17 Jul. 1880: 121. Davison, Graeme. “Festivals of Nationhood: The International Exhibitions.” Australian Cultural History. Eds. S. L. Goldberg and F. B. Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. 158–77. Denby, Elaine. Grand Hotels: Reality and Illusion. London: Reaktion Books, 2002. Ellis, Markman. The Coffee House: A Cultural History. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004. Federal Coffee Palace. The Federal Coffee Palace Visitors’ Guide to Melbourne, Its Suburbs, and Other Parts of the Colony of Victoria: Views of the Principal Public and Commercial Buildings in Melbourne, With a Bird’s Eye View of the City; and History of the Melbourne International Exhibition of 1880, etc. Melbourne: Federal Coffee House Company, 1888. Fitzgerald, Ross, and Trevor Jordan. Under the Influence: A History of Alcohol in Australia. Sydney: Harper Collins, 2009. Freeland, John. The Australian Pub. Melbourne: Sun Books, 1977. Johnson’s Temperance Coffee Palace. International Exhibition Visitors Pocket Guide to Sydney, Restaurant and Temperance Hotel. Sydney: Johnson’s Temperance Coffee Palace, 1879. Mitchell, Ann M. “Munro, James (1832–1908).” Australian Dictionary of Biography. Canberra: National Centre of Biography, Australian National U, 2006-12. 5 Feb. 2012 ‹http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/munro-james-4271/text6905›. Murdoch, Sally. “Coffee Palaces.” Encyclopaedia of Melbourne. Eds. Andrew Brown-May and Shurlee Swain. 5 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.emelbourne.net.au/biogs/EM00371b.htm›. Muskett, Philip E. The Art of Living in Australia. New South Wales: Kangaroo Press, 1987. Standage, Tom. A History of the World in 6 Glasses. New York: Walker & Company, 2005. Sydney Coffee Palace Hotel Company Limited. Memorandum of Association of the Sydney Coffee Palace Hotel Company, Ltd. Sydney: Samuel Edward Lees, 1879. Symons, Michael. One Continuous Picnic: A Gastronomic History of Australia. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2007. Teffer, Nicola. Coffee Customs. Exhibition Catalogue. Sydney: Customs House, 2005.

Abstract:

1. Guy Debord in the Land of the Long WeekendIt’s the weekend – leisure time. It’s the interlude when, Guy Debord contends, the proletarian is briefly free of the “total contempt so clearly built into every aspect of the organization and management of production” in commodity capitalism; when workers are temporarily “treated like grown-ups, with a great show of solicitude and politeness, in their new role as consumers.” But this patronising show turns out to be another form of subjection to the diktats of “political economy”: “the totality of human existence falls under the regime of the ‘perfected denial of man’.” (30). As Debord suggests, even the creation of leisure time and space is predicated upon a form of contempt: the “perfected denial” of who we, as living people, really are in the eyes of those who presume the power to legislate our working practices and private identities.This Saturday The Weekend Australian runs an opinion piece by Christopher Pearson, defending ABC Radio National’s Stephen Crittenden, whose program The Religion Report has been axed. “Some of Crittenden’s finest half-hours have been devoted to Islam in Australia in the wake of September 11,” Pearson writes. “Again and again he’s confronted a left-of-centre audience that expected multi-cultural pieties with disturbing assertions.” Along the way in this admirable Crusade, Pearson notes that Crittenden has exposed “the Left’s recent tendency to ally itself with Islam.” According to Pearson, Crittenden has also thankfully given oxygen to claims by James Cook University’s Mervyn Bendle, the “fairly conservative academic whose work sometimes appears in [these] pages,” that “the discipline of critical terrorism studies has been captured by neo-Marxists of a postmodern bent” (30). Both of these points are well beyond misunderstanding or untested proposition. If Pearson means them sincerely he should be embarrassed and sacked. But of course he does not and will not be. These are deliberate lies, the confabulations of an eminent right-wing culture warrior whose job is to vilify minorities and intellectuals (Bendle escapes censure as an academic because he occasionally scribbles for the Murdoch press). It should be observed, too, how the patent absurdity of Pearson’s remarks reveals the extent to which he holds the intelligence of his readers in contempt. And he is not original in peddling these toxic wares.In their insightful—often hilarious—study of Australian opinion writers, The War on Democracy, Niall Lucy and Steve Mickler identify the left-academic-Islam nexus as the brain-child of former Treasurer-cum-memoirist Peter Costello. The germinal moment was “a speech to the Australian American Leadership Dialogue forum at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2005” concerning anti-Americanism in Australian schools. Lucy and Mickler argue that “it was only a matter of time” before a conservative politician or journalist took the plunge to link the left and terrorism, and Costello plunged brilliantly. He drew a mental map of the Great Chain of Being: left-wing academics taught teacher trainees to be anti-American; teacher trainees became teachers and taught kids to be anti-American; anti-Americanism morphs into anti-Westernism; anti-Westernism veers into terrorism (38). This is contempt for the reasoning capacity of the Australian people and, further still, contempt for any observable reality. Not for nothing was Costello generally perceived by the public as a politician whose very physiognomy radiated smugness and contempt.Recycling Costello, Christopher Pearson’s article subtly interpellates the reader as an ordinary, common-sense individual who instinctively feels what’s right and has no need to think too much—thinking too much is the prerogative of “neo-Marxists” and postmodernists. Ultimately, Pearson’s article is about channelling outrage: directing the down-to-earth passions of the Australian people against stock-in-trade culture-war hate figures. And in Pearson’s paranoid world, words like “neo-Marxist” and “postmodern” are devoid of historical or intellectual meaning. They are, as Lucy and Mickler’s War on Democracy repeatedly demonstrate, mere ciphers packed with the baggage of contempt for independent critical thought itself.Contempt is everywhere this weekend. The Weekend Australian’s colour magazine runs a feature story on Malcolm Turnbull: one of those familiar profiles designed to reveal the everyday human touch of the political classes. In this puff-piece, Jennifer Hewett finds Turnbull has “a restless passion for participating in public life” (20); that beneath “the aggressive political rhetoric […] behind the journalist turned lawyer turned banker turned politician turned would-be prime minister is a man who really enjoys that human interaction, however brief, with the many, many ordinary people he encounters” (16). Given all this energetic turning, it’s a wonder that Turnbull has time for human interactions at all. The distinction here of Turnbull and “many, many ordinary people” – the anonymous masses – surely runs counter to Hewett’s brief to personalise and quotidianise him. Likewise, those two key words, “however brief”, have an unfortunate, unintended effect. Presumably meant to conjure a picture of Turnbull’s hectic schedules and serial turnings, the words also convey the image of a patrician who begrudgingly knows one of the costs of a political career is that common flesh must be pressed—but as gingerly as possible.Hewett proceeds to disclose that Turnbull is “no conservative cultural warrior”, “onfounds stereotypes” and “hates labels” (like any baby-boomer rebel) and “has always read widely on political philosophy—his favourite is Edmund Burke”. He sees the “role of the state above all as enabling people to do their best” but knows that “the main game is the economy” and is “content to play mainstream gesture politics” (19). I am genuinely puzzled by this and imagine that my intelligence is being held in contempt once again. That the man of substance is given to populist gesturing is problematic enough; but that the Burke fan believes the state is about personal empowerment is just too much. Maybe Turnbull is a fan of Burke’s complex writings on the sublime and the beautiful—but no, Hewett avers, Turnbull is engaged by Burke’s “political philosophy”. So what is it in Burke that Turnbull finds to favour?Turnbull’s invocation of Edmund Burke is empty, gestural and contradictory. The comfortable notion that the state helps people to realise their potential is contravened by Burke’s view that the state functions so “the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection… by a power out of themselves” (151). Nor does Burke believe that anyone of humble origins could or should rise to the top of the social heap: “The occupation of an hair-dresser, or of a working tallow-chandler, cannot be a matter of honour to any person… the state suffers oppression, if such as they, either individually or collectively, are permitted to rule” (138).If Turnbull’s main game as a would-be statesman is the economy, Burke profoundly disagrees: “the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, callico or tobacco, or some other such low concern… It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection”—a sublime entity, not an economic manager (194). Burke understands, long before Antonio Gramsci or Louis Althusser, that individuals or social fractions must be made admirably “obedient” to the state “by consent or force” (195). Burke has a verdict on mainstream gesture politics too: “When men of rank sacrifice all ideas of dignity to an ambition without a distinct object, and work with low instruments and for low ends, the whole composition [of the state] becomes low and base” (136).Is Malcolm Turnbull so contemptuous of the public that he assumes nobody will notice the gross discrepancies between his own ideals and what Burke stands for? His invocation of Burke is, indeed, “mainstream gesture politics”: on one level, “Burke” signifies nothing more than Turnbull’s performance of himself as a deep thinker. In this process, the real Edmund Burke is historically erased; reduced to the status of stage-prop in the theatrical production of Turnbull’s mass-mediated identity. “Edmund Burke” is re-invented as a term in an aesthetic repertoire.This transmutation of knowledge and history into mere cipher is the staple trick of culture-war discourse. Jennifer Hewett casts Turnbull as “no conservative culture warrior”, but he certainly shows a facility with culture-war rhetoric. And as much as Turnbull “confounds stereotypes” his verbal gesture to Edmund Burke entrenches a stereotype: at another level, the incantation “Edmund Burke” is implicitly meant to connect Turnbull with conservative tradition—in the exact way that John Howard regularly self-nominated as a “Burkean conservative”.This appeal to tradition effectively places “the people” in a power relation. Tradition has a sublimity that is bigger than us; it precedes us and will outlast us. Consequently, for a politician to claim that tradition has fashioned him, that he is welded to it or perhaps even owns it as part of his heritage, is to glibly imply an authority greater than that of “the many, many ordinary people”—Burke’s hair-dressers and tallow-chandlers—whose company he so briefly enjoys.In The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Terry Eagleton assesses one of Burke’s important legacies, placing him beside another eighteenth-century thinker so loved by the right—Adam Smith. Ideology of the Aesthetic is premised on the view that “Aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body”; that the aesthetic gives form to the “primitive materialism” of human passions and organises “the whole of our sensate life together… a society’s somatic, sensational life” (13). Reading Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, Eagleton discerns that society appears as “an immense machine, whose regular and harmonious movements produce a thousand agreeable effects”, like “any production of human art”. In Smith’s work, the “whole of social life is aestheticized” and people inhabit “a social order so spontaneously cohesive that its members no longer need to think about it.” In Burke, Eagleton discovers that the aesthetics of “manners” can be understood in terms of Gramscian hegemony: “in the aesthetics of social conduct, or ‘culture’ as it would later be called, the law is always with us, as the very unconscious structure of our life”, and as a result conformity to a dominant ideological order is deeply felt as pleasurable and beautiful (37, 42). When this conservative aesthetic enters the realm of politics, Eagleton contends, the “right turn, from Burke” onwards follows a dark trajectory: “forget about theoretical analysis… view society as a self-grounding organism, all of whose parts miraculously interpenetrate without conflict and require no rational justification. Think with the blood and the body. Remember that tradition is always wiser and richer than one’s own poor, pitiable ego. It is this line of descent, in one of its tributaries, which will lead to the Third Reich” (368–9).2. Jean Baudrillard, the Nazis and Public MemoryIn 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, the Third Reich’s Condor Legion of the Luftwaffe was on loan to Franco’s forces. On 26 April that year, the Condor Legion bombed the market-town of Guernica: the first deliberate attempt to obliterate an entire town from the air and the first experiment in what became known as “terror bombing”—the targeting of civilians. A legacy of this violence was Pablo Picasso’s monumental canvas Guernica – the best-known anti-war painting in art history.When US Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the United Nations on 5 February 2003 to make the case for war on Iraq, he stopped to face the press in the UN building’s lobby. The doorstop was globally televised, packaged as a moment of incredible significance: history in the making. It was also theatre: a moment in which history was staged as “event” and the real traces of history were carefully erased. Millions of viewers world-wide were undoubtedly unaware that the blue backdrop before which Powell stood was specifically designed to cover the full-scale tapestry copy of Picasso’s Guernica. This one-act, agitprop drama was a splendid example of politics as aesthetic action: a “performance” of history in the making which required the loss of actual historical memory enshrined in Guernica. Powell’s performance took its cues from the culture wars, which require the ceaseless erasure of history and public memory—on this occasion enacted on a breathtaking global, rather than national, scale.Inside the UN chamber, Powell’s performance was equally staged-crafted. As he brandished vials of ersatz anthrax, the power-point behind him (the theatrical set) showed artists’ impressions of imaginary mobile chemical weapons laboratories. Powell was playing lead role in a kind of populist, hyperreal production. It was Jean Baudrillard’s postmodernism, no less, as the media space in which Powell acted out the drama was not a secondary representation of reality but a reality of its own; the overheads of mobile weapons labs were simulacra, “models of a real without origins or reality”, pictures referring to nothing but themselves (2). In short, Powell’s performance was anchored in a “semiurgic” aesthetic; and it was a dreadful real-life enactment of Walter Benjamin’s maxim that “All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war” (241).For Benjamin, “Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate.” Fascism gave “these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.” In turn, this required “the introduction of aesthetics into politics”, the objective of which was “the production of ritual values” (241). Under Adolf Hitler’s Reich, people were able to express themselves but only via the rehearsal of officially produced ritual values: by their participation in the disquisition on what Germany meant and what it meant to be German, by the aesthetic regulation of their passions. As Frederic Spotts’ fine study Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics reveals, this passionate disquisition permeated public and private life, through the artfully constructed total field of national narratives, myths, symbols and iconographies. And the ritualistic reiteration of national values in Nazi Germany hinged on two things: contempt and memory loss.By April 1945, as Berlin fell, Hitler’s contempt for the German people was at its apogee. Hitler ordered a scorched earth operation: the destruction of everything from factories to farms to food stores. The Russians would get nothing, the German people would perish. Albert Speer refused to implement the plan and remembered that “Until then… Germany and Hitler had been synonymous in my mind. But now I saw two entities opposed… A passionate love of one’s country… a leader who seemed to hate his people” (Sereny 472). But Hitler’s contempt for the German people was betrayed in the blusterous pages of Mein Kampf years earlier: “The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous” (165). On the back of this belief, Hitler launched what today would be called a culture war, with its Jewish folk devils, loathsome Marxist intellectuals, incitement of popular passions, invented traditions, historical erasures and constant iteration of values.When Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer fled Fascism, landing in the United States, their view of capitalist democracy borrowed from Benjamin and anticipated both Baudrillard and Guy Debord. In their well-know essay on “The Culture Industry”, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, they applied Benjamin’s insight on mass self-expression and the maintenance of property relations and ritual values to American popular culture: “All are free to dance and enjoy themselves”, but the freedom to choose how to do so “proves to be the freedom to choose what is always the same”, manufactured by monopoly capital (161–162). Anticipating Baudrillard, they found a society in which “only the copy appears: in the movie theatre, the photograph; on the radio, the recording” (143). And anticipating Debord’s “perfected denial of man” they found a society where work and leisure were structured by the repetition-compulsion principles of capitalism: where people became consumers who appeared “s statistics on research organization charts” (123). “Culture” came to do people’s thinking for them: “Pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown” (144).In this mass-mediated environment, a culture of repetitions, simulacra, billboards and flickering screens, Adorno and Horkheimer concluded that language lost its historical anchorages: “Innumerable people use words and expressions which they have either ceased to understand or employ only because they trigger off conditioned reflexes” in precisely the same way that the illusory “free” expression of passions in Germany operated, where words were “debased by the Fascist pseudo-folk community” (166).I know that the turf of the culture wars, the US and Australia, are not Fascist states; and I know that “the first one to mention the Nazis loses the argument”. I know, too, that there are obvious shortcomings in Adorno and Horkheimer’s reactions to popular culture and these have been widely criticised. However, I would suggest that there is a great deal of value still in Frankfurt School analyses of what we might call the “authoritarian popular” which can be applied to the conservative prosecution of populist culture wars today. Think, for example, how the concept of a “pseudo folk community” might well describe the earthy, common-sense public constructed and interpellated by right-wing culture warriors: America’s Joe Six-Pack, John Howard’s battlers or Kevin Rudd’s working families.In fact, Adorno and Horkheimer’s observations on language go to the heart of a contemporary culture war strategy. Words lose their history, becoming ciphers and “triggers” in a politicised lexicon. Later, Roland Barthes would write that this is a form of myth-making: “myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things.” Barthes reasoned further that “Bourgeois ideology continuously transforms the products of history into essential types”, generating a “cultural logic” and an ideological re-ordering of the world (142). Types such as “neo-Marxist”, “postmodernist” and “Burkean conservative”.Surely, Benjamin’s assessment that Fascism gives “the people” the occasion to express itself, but only through “values”, describes the right’s pernicious incitement of the mythic “dispossessed mainstream” to reclaim its voice: to shout down the noisy minorities—the gays, greenies, blacks, feminists, multiculturalists and neo-Marxist postmodernists—who’ve apparently been running the show. Even more telling, Benjamin’s insight that the incitement to self-expression is connected to the maintenance of property relations, to economic power, is crucial to understanding the contemptuous conduct of culture wars.3. Jesus Dunked in Urine from Kansas to CronullaAmerican commentator Thomas Frank bases his study What’s the Matter with Kansas? on this very point. Subtitled How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, Frank’s book is a striking analysis of the indexation of Chicago School free-market reform and the mobilisation of “explosive social issues—summoning public outrage over everything from busing to un-Christian art—which it then marries to pro-business policies”; but it is the “economic achievements” of free-market capitalism, “not the forgettable skirmishes of the never-ending culture wars” that are conservatism’s “greatest monuments.” Nevertheless, the culture wars are necessary as Chicago School economic thinking consigns American communities to the rust belt. The promise of “free-market miracles” fails ordinary Americans, Frank reasons, leaving them in “backlash” mode: angry, bewildered and broke. And in this context, culture wars are a convenient form of anger management: “Because some artist decides to shock the hicks by dunking Jesus in urine, the entire planet must remake itself along the lines preferred” by nationalist, populist moralism and free-market fundamentalism (5).When John Howard received the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute’s Irving Kristol Award, on 6 March 2008, he gave a speech in Washington titled “Sharing Our Common Values”. The nub of the speech was Howard’s revelation that he understood the index of neo-liberal economics and culture wars precisely as Thomas Frank does. Howard told the AEI audience that under his prime ministership Australia had “pursued reform and further modernisation of our economy” and that this inevitably meant “dislocation for communities”. This “reform-dislocation” package needed the palliative of a culture war, with his government preaching the “consistency and reassurance” of “our nation’s traditional values… pride in her history”; his government “became assertive about the intrinsic worth of our national identity. In the process we ended the seemingly endless seminar about that identity which had been in progress for some years.” Howard’s boast that his government ended the “seminar” on national identity insinuates an important point. “Seminar” is a culture-war cipher for intellection, just as “pride” is code for passion; so Howard’s self-proclaimed achievement, in Terry Eagleton’s terms, was to valorise “the blood and the body” over “theoretical analysis”. This speaks stratospheric contempt: ordinary people have their identity fashioned for them; they need not think about it, only feel it deeply and passionately according to “ritual values”. Undoubtedly this paved the way to Cronulla.The rubric of Howard’s speech—“Sharing Our Common Values”—was both a homage to international neo-conservatism and a reminder that culture wars are a trans-national phenomenon. In his address, Howard said that in all his “years in politics” he had not heard a “more evocative political slogan” than Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America”—the rhetorical catch-cry for moral re-awakening that launched the culture wars. According to Lawrence Grossberg, America’s culture wars were predicated on the perception that the nation was afflicted by “a crisis of our lack of passion, of not caring enough about the values we hold… a crisis of nihilism which, while not restructuring our ideological beliefs, has undermined our ability to organise effective action on their behalf”; and this “New Right” alarmism “operates in the conjuncture of economics and popular culture” and “a popular struggle by which culture can lead politics” in the passionate pursuit of ritual values (31–2). When popular culture leads politics in this way we are in the zone of the image, myth and Adorno and Horkheimer’s “trigger words” that have lost their history. In this context, McKenzie Wark observes that “radical writers influenced by Marx will see the idea of culture as compensation for a fragmented and alienated life as a con. Guy Debord, perhaps the last of the great revolutionary thinkers of Europe, will call it “the spectacle”’ (20). Adorno and Horkheimer might well have called it “the authoritarian popular”. As Jonathan Charteris-Black’s work capably demonstrates, all politicians have their own idiolect: their personally coded language, preferred narratives and myths; their own vision of who “the people” might or should be that is conjured in their words. But the language of the culture wars is different. It is not a personal idiolect. It is a shared vocabulary, a networked vernacular, a pervasive trans-national aesthetic that pivots on the fact that words like “neo-Marxist”, “postmodern” and “Edmund Burke” have no historical or intellectual context or content: they exist as the ciphers of “values”. And the fact that culture warriors continually mouth them is a supreme act of contempt: it robs the public of its memory. And that’s why, as Lucy and Mickler’s War on Democracy so wittily argues, if there are any postmodernists left they’ll be on the right.Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer and, later, Debord and Grossberg understood how the political activation of the popular constitutes a hegemonic project. The result is nothing short of persuading “the people” to collaborate in its own oppression. The activation of the popular is perfectly geared to an age where the main stage of political life is the mainstream media; an age in which, Charteris-Black notes, political classes assume the general antipathy of publics to social change and act on the principle that the most effective political messages are sold to “the people” by an appeal “to familiar experiences”—market populism (10). In her substantial study The Persuaders, Sally Young cites an Australian Labor Party survey, conducted by pollster Rod Cameron in the late 1970s, in which the party’s message machine was finely tuned to this populist position. The survey also dripped with contempt for ordinary people: their “Interest in political philosophy… is very low… They are essentially the products (and supporters) of mass market commercialism”. Young observes that this view of “the people” was the foundation of a new order of political advertising and the conduct of politics on the mass-media stage. Cameron’s profile of “ordinary people” went on to assert that they are fatally attracted to “a moderate leader who is strong… but can understand and represent their value system” (47): a prescription for populist discourse which begs the question of whether the values a politician or party represent via the media are ever really those of “the people”. More likely, people are hegemonised into a value system which they take to be theirs. Writing of the media side of the equation, David Salter raises the point that when media “moguls thunder about ‘the public interest’ what they really mean is ‘what we think the public is interested in”, which is quite another matter… Why this self-serving deception is still so sheepishly accepted by the same public it is so often used to violate remains a mystery” (40).Sally Young’s Persuaders retails a story that she sees as “symbolic” of the new world of mass-mediated political life. The story concerns Mark Latham and his “revolutionary” journeys to regional Australia to meet the people. “When a political leader who holds a public meeting is dubbed a ‘revolutionary’”, Young rightly observes, “something has gone seriously wrong”. She notes how Latham’s “use of old-fashioned ‘meet-and-greet’campaigning methods was seen as a breath of fresh air because it was unlike the type of packaged, stage-managed and media-dependent politics that have become the norm in Australia.” Except that it wasn’t. “A media pack of thirty journalists trailed Latham in a bus”, meaning, that he was not meeting the people at all (6–7). He was traducing the people as participants in a media spectacle, as his “meet and greet” was designed to fill the image-banks of print and electronic media. Even meeting the people becomes a media pseudo-event in which the people impersonate the people for the camera’s benefit; a spectacle as artfully deceitful as Colin Powell’s UN performance on Iraq.If the success of this kind of “self-serving deception” is a mystery to David Salter, it would not be so to the Frankfurt School. For them, an understanding of the processes of mass-mediated politics sits somewhere near the core of their analysis of the culture industries in the “democratic” world. I think the Frankfurt school should be restored to a more important role in the project of cultural studies. Apart from an aversion to jazz and other supposedly “elitist” heresies, thinkers like Adorno, Benjamin, Horkheimer and their progeny Debord have a functional claim to provide the theory for us to expose the machinations of the politics of contempt and its aesthetic ruses.ReferencesAdorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso, 1979. 120–167.Barthes Roland. “Myth Today.” Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. St Albans: Paladin, 1972. 109–58.Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zorn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 217–251.Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.Charteris-Black, Jonathan. Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1994.Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990.Frank, Thomas. What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2004.Grossberg, Lawrence. “It’s a Sin: Politics, Post-Modernity and the Popular.” It’s a Sin: Essays on Postmodern Politics & Culture. Eds. Tony Fry, Ann Curthoys and Paul Patton. Sydney: Power Publications, 1988. 6–71.Hewett, Jennifer. “The Opportunist.” The Weekend Australian Magazine. 25–26 October 2008. 16–22.Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Trans. Ralph Manheim. London: Pimlico, 1993.Howard, John. “Sharing Our Common Values.” Washington: Irving Kristol Lecture, American Enterprise Institute. 5 March 2008. ‹http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,233328945-5014047,00html›.Lucy, Niall and Steve Mickler. The War on Democracy: Conservative Opinion in the Australian Press. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2006.Pearson, Christopher. “Pray for Sense to Prevail.” The Weekend Australian. 25–26 October 2008. 30.Salter, David. The Media We Deserve: Underachievement in the Fourth Estate. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2007. Sereny, Gitta. Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth. London: Picador, 1996.Spotts, Frederic. Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics. London: Pimlico, 2003.Wark, McKenzie. The Virtual Republic: Australia’s Culture Wars of the 1990s. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1997.Young, Sally. The Persuaders: Inside the Hidden Machine of Political Advertising. Melbourne: Pluto Press, 2004.

Abstract:

When characters in the Fox Television sitcom The Mindy Project call Mindy Lahiri fat, Mindy sees it as a case of misidentification. She reminds the character that she is a “petite Asian woman,” that she has large, beautiful breasts, that she has nothing in common with fat people, and the terms “chubbster” and “BBW – Big Beautiful Woman” are offensive and do not apply to her. Mindy spends some of each episode on her love for food and more food, and her hatred of fitness regimes, while repeatedly falling for meticulously fit men. She dates, has a string of failed relationships, adventurous sexual techniques, a Bridget Jones-scale search for perfect love, and yet admits to shame in showing her naked body to lovers. Her contradictory feelings about food and body image mirror our own confusions, and reveal the fear and fascination we feel for fat in our fat-obsessed culture. I argue that by creating herself as sexy, successful, popular, sporadically confident and insecure, Mindy works against stigmas that attach both to big women – women who are considered big in comparison to the societal size-zero ideal – and women who have historically been seen as belonging to “primitive” or colonized cultures, and therefore she disrupts the conflation of thinness to civilization. In this article, I look at the performance of fat and ethnic identity on American television, and examine the bodily mechanisms through which Mindy disrupts these. I argue that Mindy uses issues of fat and body image to disrupt stereotypical iterations of race. In the first part of the paper, I look at the construction of South Asian femininity in American pop culture, to set up the discussion of fat, gender and race as interrelated performative categories. Race, Gender, Performativity As Judith Butler says of gender, “performativity must be understood not as a singular or deliberate ‘act,’ but, rather as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names” (Bodies, 2). Bodies produce and perform their gender through repeating and imitating norms of clothing, body movement, choices in gesture, action, mannerism, as well as gender roles. They do so in such a way that the discourses and histories that are embedded in them start to seem natural; they are seen to be the truth, instead of as actions that have a history. These choices do not just reflect or reveal gender, but rather produce and create it. Nadine Ehlers takes performativity into the realm of race. Ehlers says that “racial performativity always works within and through the modalities of gender and sexuality, and vice versa, and these categories are constituted through one another” (65). In this sense, neither race nor gender are produced or iterated without also producing their interrelationship. They are in fact produced through this interrelationship. So, for example, when studying the performativity of black bodies, you would need to specify whether you are looking at black femininity or masculinity. And on the other hand, when studying gender, it is important to specify gender where? And when? You couldn’t simply pry open the link between race and gender and expect to successfully theorize either on its own. Mindy’s performance of femininity, including her questions about body image and weight, her attractive though odd clothing choices, her search for love, these are all bound to her iteration of race. She often explains her body through defining herself as Asian. Yet, I suggest in a seeming contradiction that her othering of herself as a big woman (relative to normative body size for women in American film and television) who breaks chairs when she sits on them and is insecure about her body, keeps the audience from othering her because of race. Her weight, clumsiness, failures in love, her heartbreaks all make her a “normal” woman. They make her easy to identify with. They suggest that she is just a woman, an American woman, instead of othering her as a South Asian woman, or a woman from a “primitive”, colonized or minority culture.Being South Asian on American Television Mindy Lahiri (played by writer, producer and actor Mindy Kaling) is a successful American obstetrician/gynaecologist, who works in a successful practice in New York. She breaks stereotypes of South Asian women that are repeated in American television and film. Opposite to the stereotype of the traditional, dutiful South Asian who agrees to an arranged marriage, and has little to say for him or herself beyond academic achievement that is generally seen in American and British media, Mindy sleeps with as many men as she can possibly fit into a calendar year, is funny, self-deprecating, and has little interest in religion, tradition or family, and is obsessed with popular culture. The stereotypical characteristics of South Asians in the popular British media, listed by Anne Ciecko (69), include passive, law-abiding, following traditional gender roles and traditions, living in the “pathologized” Asian family, struggling to find self-definitions that incorporate their placement as both belonging to and separate from British culture. Similarly, South Asian actors on American television often play vaguely-comic doctors and lawyers, seemingly with no personal life or sexual desire. They are simply South Asians, with no further defining personality traits or quirks. It is as if being South Asian overrides any other character trait. They are rarely in lead roles, and Mindy is certainly the first South Asian-American woman to have her own sitcom, in which she plays the lead. What do South Asians on American television look and sound like? In her study on performativity of race and gender, Ehlers looks at various constructions of black femininity, and suggests that black femininity is often constructed in the media in terms of promiscuity and aggression (83), and, I would add, the image of the mama with the big heart and even bigger bosom. Contrary to black femininity, South Asian femininity in American media is often repressed, serious, concerned with work and achievement or alternatively with menial roles, with little in terms of a personal or sexual life. As Shilpa S. Dave says in her book on South Asians in American television, most South Asians that appear in American television are shown as immigrants with accents (8). That is what makes them recognizably different and other, more so even than any visual identification. It is much more common to see immigrants of Chinese or Korean descent in American television as people with American accents, as people who are not first generation immigrants. South Asians, on the other hand, almost always have South Asian accents. There are exceptions to this rule, however, the exceptions are othered and/or made more mainstream using various mechanisms. Neela in ER (played by Parminder Nagra) and Cece in New Girl (played by Hannah Simone) are examples of this. In both instances the characters are part of either an ensemble cast, or in a supporting role. Neela is a step removed from American and South Asian femininity, in that she is British, with a British accent – she is othered, but this othering makes her more mainstream than the marking that takes place with a South Asian accent. The British accent and a tragic marriage, I would say, allow her to have a personal and sexual life, beyond work. Cece goes through an arranged marriage scenario, full with saris and a South Asian wedding that is the more recognized and acceptable narrative for South Asian women in American media. The characters are made more acceptable and recognizable through these mechanisms. Bhoomi K. Thakore, in an article on the representation of South Asians in American television, briefly explains that after the 1965 Immigration and Nationality act, highly-educated South Asians could immigrate to the United States, either to get further education, or as highly skilled workers (149) – a phenomenon often called “brain-drain.” In addition, says Thakore, family members of these educated South Asians immigrated to the States as well, and these were people that were less educated and worked often in convenience stores and motels. Thakore suggests that immigrants to the United States experience a segmented assimilation, meaning that not all immigrants (first and second generation) will assimilate to the same extent or in the same way. I would say from my own experience that the degree to which immigrants can assimilate into American society often depends on not only financial prospects or education, but also attractiveness, skin tone, accent, English-speaking ability, interests and knowledge of American popular culture, interest in an American way of life and American social customs, and so on. Until recently, I would say that South Asian characters in American television shows have tended to represent either first-generation immigrants with South Asian accents and an inability or lack of desire to assimilate fully into American society, or second-generation immigrants whose personal and sexual lives are never part of the narrative. Examples of the former include South Asians who play nameless doctors and cops in American television. Kal Penn’s character Lawrence Kutner in the television series House is an example of the latter. Kutner, one of the doctors on Dr. House’s team, did not have a South Asian accent. However, he also had no personal narrative. All doctors on House came with their relationship troubles and baggage, their emotional turmoil, their sexual and romantic ups and downs – all but Kutner, whose suicide in the show (when he left it to join the Obama administration) is framed around the question – do we ever really know the people we see every day? Yet, we do know the other doctors on House. But we never know anything about Kutner’s private life. His character is all about academic knowledge and career achievement. This is the stereotype of the South Asian character in American television. Yet, Mindy, with her American accent, sees herself as American, doesn’t obsess about race or skin colour, and has no signs of a poor-me narrative in the way she presents herself. She does not seem to have any diasporic longings or group belongings. Mindy doesn’t ignore race on the show. In fact, she deploys it strategically. She describes herself as Asian on more than one occasion, often to explain her size, her breasts and femininity, and in one episode she goes to a party because she expects to see black sportsmen there, and she explains, “It’s a scientific fact that black men love South Asian girls.” Her production of her femininity is inextricably bound up with race. However, Mindy avoids marking herself as a racial minority by making her quest for love and her confusions about body image something all women can identify with. But she goes further in that she does not place herself in a diaspora community, she does not speak in a South Asian accent, she doesn’t hide her personal life or the contours of her body, and she doesn’t harp on parents who want her to get married. By not using the usual stereotypes of South Asians and Asians on American television, while at the same time acknowledging race, I suggest that she makes herself a citizen of the alleged “melting pot” as the melting pot should be, a hybrid space for hybrid identities. Mindy constructs herself as an American woman, and suggests that being a racial minority is simply part of the experience of being American. I am not suggesting that this reflects the reality of experience for many women in the USA who belong to ethnic minorities. I am suggesting that Mindy is creating a possible or potential reality, in which neither size nor being a racial minority are causes for shame. In a scene in the second season, a police officer chastises Mindy for prescribing birth control to his young daughter. He charges out of her office, and she follows him in to the street. She is wearing a version of her usual gear – a check-pinafore, belted over a printed shirt – her shoulders curved forward, arms folded, in the characteristic posture of the big-breasted, curvy woman. She screams at the officer for his outdated views on birth-control. He questions if she even has kids, suggesting that she knows nothing about raising them. She says, “How dare you? Do I look like a woman who’s had kids? I have the hips of an eleven-year-old boy.” She then informs him that she wolfed down a steak sandwich at lunch, has misgivings about the outfit she is wearing, and says that she is not a sex-crazed lunatic. He charges her for public female hysteria. She screams after him as he drives off, “Everyone see this!” She holds up the citation. “It’s for walking, while being a person of colour.” She manages in the space of a two-minute clip to deploy race, size and femininity, without shame or apology, and with humour. It is interesting to note that, contrary to her persona on the show, in interviews in the media, Kaling suggests that she is not that concerned with the question of weight. She says that though she would like to lose fifteen pounds, she is not hung up on this quest. On the other hand, she suggests that she considers herself a role model for minority women. In fact, in real life she makes the question of race as something more important to her than weight – which is opposite to the way she treats the two issues in her television show. I suggest that in real life, Kaling projects herself as a feminist, as someone not so concerned about size and weight, an intelligent woman who is concerned about race. On the show, however, she plays an everywoman, for whom weight is a much bigger deal than race. Neither persona is necessarily real or assumed – rather, they both reveal the complexities by which race, gender and body size constitute each other, and become cruxes for identification and misidentification. Is It Civilized to Be Fat? When Mindy and her colleague Danny Castellano get together in the second season of the show, you find yourself wondering how on earth they are going to sustain this sitcom, without an on-again/off-again romance, or one that takes about five years to start. When Danny does not want to go public with the relationship, Mindy asks him if he is ashamed of her. Imagine one of the Friends or Sex in the City women asking this question to see just how astonishing it is for a successful, attractive woman to ask a man if he is ashamed to be seen with her. She doesn’t say is it because of my weight, yet the question hangs in the air. When Danny does break up with her, again Mindy feels all the self-disgust of a woman rejected for no clear reason. As Amy Erdman Farrell suggests in her book on fat in American culture and television, fat people are not expected to find love or success. They are expected to be self-deprecating. They are supposed to expect rejection and failure. She says that not only do fat people bear a physical but also a character stigma, in that not only are they considered visually unappealing, but this comes with the idea that they have uncontrolled desires and urges (7-10). Kaling suggests through her cleverly-woven writing that it is because of her body image that Mindy feels self-loathing when Danny breaks up with her. She manages again to make her character an everywoman. Not a fat South Asian woman, but simply an American woman who feels all the shame that seems to go with weight and body image in American culture. However, this assumed connection of fat with immorality and laziness goes a step further. Farrell goes on to say that fat denigration and ethnic discrimination are linked, that popularity and the right to belong and be a citizen are based both on body size and ethnicity. Says Farrell, “our culture assigns many meanings to fatness beyond the actual physical trait – that a person is gluttonous, or filling a deeply disturbed psychological need, or is irresponsible and unable to control primitive urges” (6) – psychological traits that have historically been used to describe people in colonized cultures. Farrell provides an intriguing analysis of Oprah Winfrey and her public ups and downs with weight. She suggests that Winfrey’s public obsession with her own weight, and her struggles with it, are an attempt to be an “everywoman”, to be someone all and not only black women can identify with. Says Farrell, “in order to deracinate herself, to prove that ‘anyone’ can make it, Winfrey must lose weight. Otherwise, the weight of all that fat will always, de facto, mark her as a ‘black woman’, with all the accompanying connotations of inferior, primitive, bodily and out of control” (126). She goes on to say that, “Since the end of the 19th century, fatness has … served as a potent signifier of the line between the primitive and the civilized, feminine and masculine, ethnicity and whiteness, poverty and wealth, hom*osexuality and heterosexuality, past and future” (126). This suggests that Winfrey’s public confrontations with the question of weight help the women in the audience identify with her as a woman, rather than as a black woman. In a volume on fat studies, Farrell explains that health professionals have further demarcated lines between “civilization and primitive cultures, whiteness and blackness, sexual restraint and sexual promiscuity, beauty and ugliness, progress and the past” (260). She suggests that fat is not just part of discourses on health and beauty, but also intelligence, enterprise, work ethics, as well as race, ethnicity, sexuality and class. These connections are of course repeated in media representations, across media genres and platforms. In women’s magazines, an imperative towards weightloss comes hand-in-hand with the search for love, a woman’s ability to satisfy a man’s as well as her own desires, and with success in glamorous jobs. Sitcom couples on American television often feature men who are ineffectual but funny slobs, married to determined, fit women who are mainly homemakers, and in fact, responsible for the proper functioning of the family, and consequentially, society. In general, bigger women in American and British media are on a quest both for love and weight loss, and the implication is that deep-seated insecurities are connected to both weight gain, as well as failures in love, and that only a resolution of these insecurities will lead to weight loss, which will further lead to success in love. Films such as My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Bridget Jones’s Diary are examples of this prevailing narrative. Thakore investigates the changing image of South Asians on American television, suggesting that South Asians are represented more and more frequently, and in increasingly more central roles. However, Thakore suggests that, “all women of colour deal with hegemonic skin tone ideologies in their racial/ethnic communities, with lighter skin tone and Caucasian facial features considered more appealing and attractive … . As media producers favour casting women who are attractive, so too do the same media producers favour casting women of colour who are attractive in terms of their proximity to White physical characteristics” (153). Similarly, Lee and Vaught suggest that in American popular culture, “both White women and women of colour are represented as reflecting a White ideal or aesthetic. These women conform to a body ideal that reflects White middle class ideals: exceedingly thin, long, flowing hair, and voluptuous” (458). She goes on to say that Asian American women would need to take on a White middle class standing and a simultaneous White notion of the exotic in order to assimilate. For Mindy, then, fat allows her to be an everywoman, but also allows her to adopt her own otherness as a South Asian, and make it her own. This trend shows some signs of changing, however, and I expect that women like Lena Dunham in the HBO comedy Girls and Mindy Kaling are leading the march towards productions of diverse femininities that are at the same time iterated as attractive and desirable. On The Hollywood Reporter, when asked about the more ludicrous questions or comments she faces on social media, Kaling puts on a male voice and says, “You’re ugly and fat, it’s so refreshing to watch!” and “We’re used to skinny people, and you’re so ugly, we love it!” On David Letterman, she mentions having dark skin, and says that lazy beach holidays don’t work for her because she doesn’t understand the trend for tanning, and she can’t really relax. Mindy’s confusions about her weight and body image make her a woman for everyone – not just for South Asian women. Whereas Kaling’s concern over the question of race – and her relative lack of concern over weight – make her a feminist, a professional writer, a woman with a conscience. These personas interweave. They question both normative performances of gender and race, and question the historical conflation of size and minority identity with shame and immorality. Butler suggests that gender is “the repeated stylisation of the body” (Gender, 33). She argues that gender roles can be challenged through a “subversive reiteration” of gender (Gender, 32). In this way, women like Dunham and Kaling, through their deployment of diverse female bodies and femininities, can disrupt the normative iteration of gender and race. Their production of femininity in bodies that are attractive (just not normatively so) has more than just an impact on how we look at fat. They bring to us women that are flawed, assertive, insecure, confident, contradictory, talented, creative, that make difficult choices in love and work, and that don’t make an obsession with weight or even race their markers of self worth.References Bridget Jones’s Diary. Dir. Sharon Maguire. Miramax and Universal Pictures, 2001. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. London: Routledge, 1990. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. London: Routledge, 1993. Ciecko, Anne. “Representing the Spaces of Diaspora in Contemporary British Films by Women Directors.” Cinema Journal 38.3 (Spring 1999): 67-90. Dave, Shilpa S. Indian Accents: Brown Voice and Racial Performance in American Television. U of Illinois, 2013. Ehlers, Nadine. Racial Imperatives: Discipline, Performativity, and Struggles against Subjection. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. ER. Warner Bros. Television. NBC, 1994-2009. Farrell, Amy. “‘The White Man’s Burden’”: Female Sexuality, Tourist Postcards, and the Place of the Fat Woman in Early 20th-Century U.S. Culture.” In Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay (eds.), The Fat Studies Reader. New York: New York University Press, 2009. Farrell, Amy Erdman. Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2011. Friends. Warner Bros. Television. NBC, 1994-2004. Girls. HBO Entertainment and Apatow Productions. HBO, 2012-present. House. Universal Television. Fox, 2004-2012. Lee, Stacey J., and Sabina Vaught. “‘You Can Never Be Too Rich or Too Thin’: Popular and Consumer Culture and the Americanization of Asian American Girls and Young Women.” The Journal of Negro Education 72.4 (2003): 457-466. My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Dir. Joel Zwick. Playtone, 2002. New Girl. 20th Century Fox. Fox, 2011-present. Nicholson, Rebecca. “Mindy Kaling: ‘I Wasn’t Considered Attractive or Funny Enough to Play Myself.’” The Observer 1 June 2014. ‹http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/jun/01/mindy-kaling-project›. Sex in the City. Warner Bros. Television and HBO Original Programming. HBO, 1998-2004. Strauss, Elissa. “Why Mindy Kaling – Not Lena Dunham – Is the Body Positive Icon of the Moment.” The Week 22 April 2014. ‹http://theweek.com/article/index/260126/why-mindy-kaling-mdash-not-lena-dunham-mdash-is-the-body-positive-icon-of-the-moment›. Thakore, Bhoomi K. “Must-See TV: South Asian Characterizations in American Popular Media.” Sociology Compass 8.2 (2014): 149-156. The Mindy Project. Universal Television, 3 Arts Entertainment, Kaling International. Fox, 2012-present. Ugly Betty. ABC Studios. ABC, 2006-2010. YouTube. “Mindy Kaling on David Letterman.” 29 April 2013. 21 Oct. 2014 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8K1ye2gnJw›. YouTube. “Mindy on Being Called Fat and Ugly on Social Media.” The Hollywood Reporter 14 June 2014. 21 Oct. 2014 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ockt-BeMOWk›. YouTube. “Chris Messina: ‘I Think Mindy Kaling’s Beautiful.’” HuffPost Live 24 April 2014. 21 Oct. 2014 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HtCjGNERKQ›.

Abstract:

IllegitimacyBack in 1987, Gregory Bateson argued that:Kurt Vonnegut gives us wary advice – that we should be careful what we pretend because we become what we pretend. And something like that, some sort of self-fulfilment, occurs in all organisations and human cultures. What people presume to be ‘human’ is what they will build in as premises of their social arrangements, and what they build in is sure to be learned, is sure to become a part of the character of those who participate. (178)The human capacity to marginalise and discriminate against others on the basis of innate and constructed characteristics is evident from the long history of discrimination against people whose existence is ‘illegitimate’, defined as being outside the law. What is inside or outside the law depends upon the context under consideration. For example, in societies such as ancient Greece and the antebellum United States, where slavery was legal, people who were constructed as ‘slaves’ could legitimately be treated very differently from ‘citizens’: free people who benefit from a range of human rights (Northup). The discernment of what is legitimate from that which is illegitimate is thus implicated within the law but extends into the wider experience of community life and is evident within the civil structures through which society is organised and regulated.The division between the legitimate and illegitimate is an arbitrary one, susceptible to changing circ*mstances. Within recent memory a romantic/sexual relationship between two people of the same sex was constructed as illegitimate and actively persecuted. This was particularly the case for same-sex attracted men, since the societies regulating these relationships generally permitted women a wider repertoire of emotional response than men were allowed. Even when lesbian and gay relationships were legalised, they were constructed as less legitimate in the sense that they often had different rules around the age of consent for hom*osexual and heterosexual couples. In Australia, the refusal to allow same sex couples to marry perpetuates ways in which these relationships are constructed as illegitimate – beyond the remit of the legislation concerning marriage.The archetypal incidence of illegitimacy has historically referred to people born out of wedlock. The circ*mstances of birth, for example whether a person was born as a result of a legally-sanctioned marital relationship or not, could have ramifications throughout an individual’s life. Stories abound (for example, Cookson) of the implications of being illegitimate. In some social stings, such as Catherine Cookson’s north-eastern England at the turn of the twentieth century, illegitimate children were often shunned. Parents frequently refused permission for their (legitimate) children to play with illegitimate classmates, as if these children born out of wedlock embodied a contaminating variety of evil. Illegitimate children were treated differently in the law in matters of inheritance, for example, and may still be. They frequently lived in fear of needing to show a birth certificate to gain a passport, for example, or to marry. Sometimes, it was at this point in adult life, that a person first discovered their illegitimacy, changing their entire understanding of their family and their place in the world. It might be possible to argue that the emphasis upon the legitimacy of a birth has lessened in proportion to an acceptance of genetic markers as an indicator of biological paternity, but that is not the endeavour here.Given the arbitrariness and mutability of the division between legitimacy and illegitimacy as a constructed boundary, it is policed by social and legal sanctions. Boundaries, such as the differentiation between the raw and the cooked (Lévi-Strauss), or S/Z (Barthes), or purity and danger (Douglas), serve important cultural functions and also convey critical information about the societies that enforce them. Categories of person, place or thing which are closest to boundaries between the legitimate and the illegitimate can prompt existential anxiety since the capacity to discern between these categories is most challenged at the margins. The legal shenanigans which can result speak volumes for which aspects of life have the potential to unsettle a culture. One example of this which is writ large in the recent history of Australia is our treatment of refugees and asylum seekers and the impact of this upon Australia’s multicultural project.Foreshadowing the sexual connotations of the illegitimate, one of us has written elsewhere (Green, ‘Bordering on the Inconceivable’) about the inconceivability of the Howard administration’s ‘Pacific solution’. This used legal devices to rewrite Australia’s borders to limit access to the rights accruing to refugees upon landing in a safe haven entitling them to seek asylum. Internationally condemned as an illegitimate construction of an artificial ‘migration zone’, this policy has been revisited and made more brutal under the Abbot regime with at least two people – Reza Barati and Hamid Khazaei – dying in the past year in what is supposed to be a place of safety provided by Australian authorities under their legal obligations to those fleeing from persecution. Crock points out, echoing the discourse of illegitimacy, that it is and always has been inappropriate to label “undocumented asylum seekers” as “‘illegal’” because: “until such people cross the border onto Australian territory, the language of illegality is nonsense. People who have no visas to enter Australia can hardly be ‘illegals’ until they enter Australia” (77). For Australians who identify in some ways – religion, culture, fellow feeling – with the detainees incarcerated on Nauru and Manus Island, it is hard to ignore the disparity between the government’s treatment of visa overstayers and “illegals” who arrive by boat (Wilson). It is a comparatively short step to construct this disparity as reflecting upon the legitimacy within Australia of communities who share salient characteristics with detained asylum seekers: “The overwhelmingly negative discourse which links asylum seekers, Islam and terrorism” (McKay, Thomas & Kneebone, 129). Some communities feel themselves constructed in the public and political spheres as less legitimately Australian than others. This is particularly true of communities where members can be identified via markers of visible difference, including indicators of ethnic, cultural and religious identities: “a group who [some 585 respondent Australians …] perceived would maintain their own languages, customs and traditions […] this cultural diversity posed an extreme threat to Australian national identity” (McKay, Thomas & Kneebone, 129). Where a community shares salient characteristics such as ethnicity or religion with many detained asylum seekers they can become fearful of the discourses around keeping borders strong and protecting Australia from illegitimate entrants. MethodologyThe qualitative fieldwork upon which this paper is based took place some 6-8 years ago (2006-2008), but the project remains one of the most recent and extensive studies of its kind. There are no grounds for believing that any of the findings are less valid than previously. On the contrary, if political actions are constructed as a proxy for mainstream public consent, opinions have become more polarised and have hardened. Ten focus groups were held involving 86 participants with a variety of backgrounds including differences in age, gender, religious observance, religious identification and ethnicity. Four focus groups involved solely Muslim participants; six drew from the wider Australian community. The aim was to examine the response of different communities to mainstream Australian media representations of Islam, Muslims, and terrorism. Research questions included: “Are there differences in the ways in which Australian Muslims respond to messages about ‘fear’ and ‘terror’ compared with broader community Australians’ responses to the same messages?” and “How do Australian Muslims construct the perceptions and attitudes of the broader Australian community based on the messages that circulate in the media?” Recent examples of kinds of messages investigated include media coverage of Islamic State’s (ISIS’s) activities (Karam & Salama), and the fear-provoking coverage around the possible recruitment of Australians to join the fighting in Syria and Iraq (Cox). The ten focus groups were augmented by 60 interviews, 30 with respondents who identified as Muslim (15 males, 15 female) and 30 respondents from the broader community (same gender divisions). Finally, a market research company was commissioned to conduct a ‘fear survey’, based on an established ‘fear of rape’ inventory (Aly and Balnaves), delivered by telephone to a random sample of 750 over-18 y.o. Australians in which Muslims formed a deliberative sub-group, to ensure they were over-sampled and constituted at least 150 respondents. The face-to-face surveys and focus groups were conducted by co-author, Dr Anne Aly. General FindingsMuslim respondents indicate a heightened intensity of reaction to media messages around fear and terror. In addition to a generalised fear of the potential impact of terrorism upon Australian society and culture, Muslim respondents experienced a specific fear that any terrorist-related media coverage might trigger hostility towards Muslim Australian communities and their own family members. According to the ‘fear survey’ scale, Muslim Australians at the time of the research experienced approximately twice the fear level of mainstream Australian respondents. Broader Australian community Australian Muslim communityFear of a terrorist attackFear of a terrorist attack combines with the fear of a community backlashSpecific victims: dead, injured, bereavedCommunity is full of general victims in addition to any specific victimsShort-term; intense impactsProtracted, diffuse impactsSociety-wide sympathy and support for specific victims and all those involved in dealing with the trauma and aftermathSociety-wide suspicion and a marginalisation of those affected by the backlashVictims of a terrorist attack are embraced by broader communityVictims of backlash experience hostility from the broader communityFour main fears were identified by Australian Muslims as a component of the fear of terrorism:Fear of physical harm. In addition to the fear of actual terrorist acts, Australian Muslims fear backlash reprisals such as those experienced after such events as 9/11, the Bali bombings, and attacks upon public transport passengers in Spain and the UK. These and similar events were constructed as precipitating increased aggression against identifiable Australian Muslims, along with shunning of Muslims and avoidance of their company.The construction of politically-motivated fear. Although fear is an understandable response to concerns around terrorism, many respondents perceived fears as being deliberately exacerbated for political motives. Such strategies as “Be alert, not alarmed” (Bassio), labelling asylum seekers as potential terrorists, and talk about home-grown terrorists, are among the kinds of fears which were identified as politically motivated. The political motivation behind such actions might include presenting a particular party as strong, resolute and effective. Some Muslim Australians construct such approaches as indicating that their government is more interested in political advantage than social harmony.Fear of losing civil liberties. As well as sharing the alarm of the broader Australian community at the dozens of legislative changes banning people, organisations and materials, and increasing surveillance and security checks, Muslim Australians fear for the human rights implications across their community, up to and including the lives of their young people. This fear is heightened when community members may look visibly different from the mainstream. Examples of the events fuelling such fears include the London police killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian Catholic working as an electrician in the UK and shot in the month following the 7/7 attacks on the London Underground system (Pugliese). In Australia, the case of Mohamed Hannef indicated that innocent people could easily be unjustly accused and wrongly targeted, and even when this was evident the political agenda made it almost impossible for authorities to admit their error (Rix).Feeling insecure. Australian Muslims argue that personal insecurity has become “the new normal” (Massumi), disproportionately affecting Muslim communities in both physical and psychological ways. Physical insecurity is triggered by the routine avoidance, shunning and animosity experienced by many community members in public places. Psychological insecurity includes fear for the safety of younger members of the community compounded by concern that young people may become ‘radicalised’ as a result of the discrimination they experience. Australian Muslims fear the backlash following any possible terrorist attack on Australian soil and describe the possible impact as ‘unimaginable’ (Aly and Green, ‘Moderate Islam’).In addition to this range of fears expressed by Australian Muslims and constructed in response to wider societal reactions to increased concerns over radical Islam and the threat of terrorist activity, an analysis of respondents’ statements indicate that Muslim Australians construct the broader community as exhibiting:Fear of religious conviction (without recognising the role of their own secular/religious convictions underpinning this fear);Fear of extremism (expressed in various extreme ways);Fear of powerlessness (responded to by disempowering others); andFear of political action overseas having political effects at home (without acknowledging that it is the broader community’s response to such overseas events, such as 9/11 [Green ‘Did the world really change?’], which has also had impacts at home).These constructions, extrapolations and understandings by Australian Muslims of the fears of the broader community underpinning the responses to the threat of terror have been addressed elsewhere (Green and Aly). Legitimate Australian MuslimsOne frustration identified by many Muslim respondents centres upon a perceived ‘acceptable’ way to be an Australian Muslim. Arguing that the broader community construct Muslims as a hom*ogenous group defined by their religious affiliation, these interviewees felt that the many differences within and between the twenty-plus national, linguistic, ethnic, cultural and faith-based groupings that constitute WA’s Muslim population were being ignored. Being treated as a hom*ogenised group on a basis of faith appears to have the effect of putting that religious identity under pressure, paradoxically strengthening and reinforcing it (Aly, ‘Australian Muslim Responses to the Discourse on Terrorism’). The appeal to Australian Muslims to embrace membership in a secular society and treat religion as a private matter also led some respondents to suggest they were expected to deny their own view of their faith, in which they express their religious identity across their social spheres and in public and private contexts. Such expression is common in observant Judaism, Hinduism and some forms of Christianity, as well as in some expressions of Islam (Aly and Green, ‘Less than equal’). Massumi argues that even the ways in which some Muslims dress, indicating faith-based behaviour, can lead to what he terms as ‘affective modulation’ (Massumi), repeating and amplifying the fear affect as a result of experiencing the wider community’s fear response to such triggers as water bottles (from airport travel) and backpacks, on the basis of perceived physical difference and a supposed identification with Muslim communities, regardless of the situation. Such respondents constructed this (implied) injunction to suppress their religious and cultural affiliation as akin to constructing the expression of their identity as illegitimate and somehow shameful. Parallels can be drawn with previous social responses to a person born out of wedlock, and to people in same-sex relationships: a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ kind of denial.Australian Muslims who see their faith as denied or marginalised may respond by identifying more strongly with other Muslims in their community, since the community-based context is one in which they feel welcomed and understood. The faith-based community also allows and encourages a wider repertoire of acceptable beliefs and actions entailed in the performance of ‘being Muslim’. Hand in hand with a perception of being required to express their religious identity in ways that were acceptable to the majority community, these respondents provided a range of examples of self-protective behaviours to defend themselves and others from the impacts of perceived marginalisation. Such behaviours included: changing their surnames to deflect discrimination based solely on a name (Aly and Green, ‘Fear, Anxiety and the State of Terror’); keeping their opinions private, even when they were in line with those being expressed by the majority community (Aly and Green, ‘Moderate Islam’); the identification of ‘less safe’ and ‘safe’ activities and areas; concerns about visibly different young men in the Muslim community and discussions with them about their public behaviour and demeanour; and women who chose not to leave their homes for fear of being targeted in public places (all discussed in Aly, ‘Australian Muslim Responses to the Discourse on Terrorism’). Many of these behaviours, including changing surnames, restricting socialisation to people who know a person well, and the identification of safe and less safe activities in relation to the risk of self-revelation, were common strategies used by people who were stigmatised in previous times as a result of their illegitimacy.ConclusionConstructions of the legitimate and illegitimate provide one means through which we can investigate complex negotiations around Australianness and citizenship, thrown into sharp relief by the Australian government’s treatment of asylum seekers, also deemed “illegals”. Because they arrive in Australia (or, as the government would prefer, on Australia’s doorstep) by illegitimate channels these would-be citizens are treated very differently from people who arrive at an airport and overstay their visa. The impetus to exclude aspects of geographical Australia from the migration zone, and to house asylum seekers offshore, reveals an anxiety about borders which physically reflects the anxiety of western nations in the post-9/11 world. Asylum seekers who arrive by boat have rarely had safe opportunity to secure passports or visas, or to purchase tickets from commercial airlines or shipping companies. They represent those ethnicities and cultures which are currently in turmoil: a turmoil frequently exacerbated by western intervention, variously constructed as an il/legitimate expression of western power and interests.What this paper has demonstrated is that the boundary between Australia and the rest, the legitimate and the illegitimate, is failing in its aim of creating a stronger Australia. The means through which this project is pursued is making visible a range of motivations and concerns which are variously interpreted depending upon the position of the interpreter. The United Nations, for example, has expressed strong concern over Australia’s reneging upon its treaty obligations to refugees (Gordon). Less vocal, and more fearful, are those communities within Australia which identify as community members with the excluded illegals. The Australian government’s treatment of detainees on Manus Island and Nauru, who generally exhibit markers of visible difference as a result of ethnicity or culture, is one aspect of a raft of government policies which serve to make some people feel that their Australianness is somehow less legitimate than that of the broader community. AcknowledgementsThis paper is based on the findings of an Australian Research Council Discovery Project (DP0559707), 2005-7, “Australian responses to the images and discourses of terrorism and the other: establishing a metric of fear”, awarded to Professors Lelia Green and Mark Balnaves. The research involved 10 focus groups and 60 individual in-depth interviews and a telephone ‘fear of terrorism’ survey. The authors wish to acknowledge the participation and contributions of WA community members and wider Australian respondents to the telephone survey. ReferencesAly, Anne. “Australian Muslim Responses to the Discourse on Terrorism in the Australian Popular Media.” Australian Journal of Social Issues 42.1 (2007): 27-40.Aly, Anne, and Lelia Green. “Fear, Anxiety and the State of Terror.” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 33.3 (Feb 2010): 268-81.Aly, Anne, and Lelia Green. “Less than Equal: Secularism, Religious Pluralism and Privilege.” M/C Journal 11.2 (2008). 15 Oct. 2009 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/32›.Aly, Anne, and Lelia Green. “‘Moderate Islam’: Defining the Good Citizen”. M/C Journal 10.6/11.1 (2008). 13 April 2008 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/08-aly-green.php›.Aly, Anne, and Mark Balnaves. “‘They Want Us to Be Afraid’: Developing a Metric for the Fear of Terrorism. International Journal of Diversity in Organisations, Communities & Nations 6.6 (2008): 113-122.Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.Bassio, Diana. “‘Be Alert, Not Alarmed’: Governmental Communication of Risk in an Era of Insecurity.” Annual Conference Australian and New Zealand Communication Association, Christchurch, New Zealand, 2005. ‹http://www.anzca.net/documents/anzca-05-1/refereed-proceedings-9/247-be-alert-not-alarmed-governmental-communication-of-risk-in-an-era-of-insecurity-1/file.html›.Bateson, Gregory, and Mary Catherine Bateson. “Innocence and Experience”. Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred. New York: Hampton Press, 1987. 167-182. 11 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.oikos.org/baten.htm›.Cookson, Catherine. Our Kate. London: Corgi, 1969.Cox, Nicole. “Police Probe ‘Die for Syria’ Car Stickers”. WA Today 11 Sep. 2014. 11 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.watoday.com.au/wa-news/police-probe-die-for-syria-car-stickers-20140911-10fmo7.html›.Crock, Mary. “That Sinking Feeling: Correspondence”. Quarterly Essay 54 (June 2014): 75-79.Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger. London: Routledge and Keagan Paul, 1978 [1966].Gordon, Michael. “New UN Human Rights Chief Attacks Australia over Asylum Seeker Rights ‘Violations’.” Sydney Morning Herald 7 Sep. 2014. 11 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/new-un-human-rights-chief-attacks-australia-over-asylum-seeker-rights-violations-20140907-10dlkx.html›.Green, Lelia. “Bordering on the Inconceivable: The Pacific Solution, the Migration Zone and ‘Australia’s 9/11’”. Australian Journal of Communication 31.1 (2004): 19-36.Green, Lelia. “Did the World Really Change on 9/11?” Australian Journal of Communication 29.2 (2002): 1-14.Green, Lelia, and Anne Aly. “How Australian Muslims Construct Western Fear of the Muslim Other”. Negotiating Identities: Constructed Selves and Others. Ed. Helen Vella Bonavita. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011. 65-90. Karam, Zeina, and Vivian Salama. “US President Barack Obama Powers Up to Shut Down Islamic State”. The Australian 11 Sep. 2014. 11 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.theaustralian/world/%20us-president-barak-obama-powers-up-to-shut-down-islamic-state-20140911-10f9dh.html›.Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Raw and the Cooked: Mythologiques, Volume 1. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1969.Massumi, Brian. “Fear (the Spectrum Said).” Positions 13.1 (2005): 31-48.McKay, Fiona H., Samantha, L. Thomas, and Susan Kneebone. “‘It Would Be Okay If They Came through the Proper Channels’: Community Perceptions and Attitudes toward Asylum Seekers in Australia”. Journal of Refugee Studies 25.1 (2011): 113-133.Northup, Solomon. Twelve Years a Slave. New York: Derby & Miller, 1853.Pugliese, Joseph. “Asymmetries of Terror: Visual Regimes of Racial Profiling and the Shooting of John Charles de Menezes in the Context of the War in Iraq.” Borderlands 5.1 (2006). 11 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol5no1_2006/pugliese.htm›.Rix, M. “With Reckless Abandon: Haneef and Ul-Haque in Australia’s ‘War on Terror’.” In K. Michael and M.G. Micheal (eds.), The Third Workshop on the Social Implications of National Security Australia. Canberra, July 2008. 107-122. 11 Sep. 2014 ‹http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1011&context=gsbpapers›.Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Penguin, 1977.Wilson, Lauren. “More Visa Over-Stayers than Asylum-Seekers”. The Australian 11 Oct. 2012. 11 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/immigration/more-visa-over-stayers-than-asylum-seekers/story-fn9hm1gu-1226493178289›.

Abstract:

IntroductionJohn Berger provides a compelling analysis in Ways of Seeing on how we’ve been socialized through centuries of art to see women as objects and men as subjects. This way of seeing men and women is more than aesthetic choices but in fact shapes our ideologies of gender. As Berger asserts: “The art of the past no longer exists as it once did… In its place there is a language of images. What matters now is who uses that language for what purpose” (33).What happens when there are no historical images that represent your identity? How do others learn to see you? How do you learn to represent yourself? This article addresses the challenges that bisexuals face in constructing and contending with media representations of non-normative sexualities. As Berger suggests: “A people or class which is cut off from its own past is far less free to choose and to act as a people or class than one that has been able to situate itself in history” (33). This article seeks to apply Berger’s core concepts in Ways of Seeing studying representations of bisexuality in mainstream media. How bisexuality is represented, and therefore observed, shapes what can ultimately be culturally understood and recognized.This article explores how bisexuals use digital media to construct self-representations and brand a bisexual identity. Bisexual representations are particularly relevant to study as they are often rendered invisible by the cultural hegemony of monosexuality. Cultural norms ideologically shape the intelligibility of representation; bisexuality is often misinterpreted when read within the dominant binaries of heterosexuality and hom*osexuality in Western European culture. This work addresses how users adapt visual, textual, and hyperlinked information in online spaces to create representations that can be culturally recognized. Users want to be seen as bisexuals. The research for this article examined online social spaces created by and for bisexuals between 2013-2015, as well as mainstream media addressing bisexuality or bisexual characters. The social spaces studied included national and regional websites for bisexual organizations, blogs dedicated to bisexual issues and topics, and public bisexual groups on Facebook and Tumblr. Participant observation and semiotic analysis was employed to analyze how bisexual representation was discussed and performed. Learning to See Bisexuality Bisexuality is often constructed within the domain of medical and psychological classification systems as a sexual identity situated between one polarity or the other: between desiring men or desiring women as sexual partners or between being gay or being straight in sexual orientation, as most widely put forth by Alfred Kinsey in the 1950s (Kinsey et al., 1948; e.g., Blumstein, 1977; Diamond, 1993; Weinberg, 1995). This popularly held conception has a particular history that serves to reinforce the normative categories of heterosexuality and monosexuality.This history does not reflect bisexual’s accounts of their own experiences of what it means to be bisexual. Bisexuals in the spaces I study express their sexuality as fluid both in terms of gender (objects of desire do not have to identify as only male or female) as well as in terms of the lifespan (desire based on sex or gender does not have remain consistent throughout one’s life). As one participant remarked: “I think of bisexual as a different orientation from both hom*osexuals (who orient exclusively towards same-sex romance/sexuality) and heterosexuals (who orient exclusively toward opposite-sex romance/sexuality). Bisexuals seem to think about the world in a different way: a world of ‘AND’ rather than a world of ‘OR’.” Or as another participant noted: “I saw video a couple of months ago that described ‘bi’ as being attracted to ‘same and different sexed people.’ I considered my internal debate settled at that point. Yes, it is binary, but only in the broadest sense.”This data from my research is congruent with data from much larger studies that examined longitudinal psycho-social development of bisexual identities (Klein, 1978; Barker, 2007; Diamond, 2008). Individuals’ narratives of a more “fluid” identity suggest an emphasis at the individual level less about fluctuating between “two” possible types of sexual partners than about a dynamic, complex desire within a coherent self. Nevertheless, popular constructions of bisexuality in media continue to emphasize it within hegemonic monosexual ideologies.Heterosexual relationships are overwhelmingly the most dominant relationship type portrayed in media, and the second most portrayed relationship is hom*osexuality, or a serial monogamy towards only one gender. This pairing is not only conveying the dominant hegemonic norms of heterosexuality (and most often paired with serial monogamy as well), but it is equally and powerfully reproducing the hegemonic ideal of monosexuality. Monosexuality is the romantic or sexual attraction to members of one sex or gender group only. A monosexual person may identify as either heterosexual or hom*osexual, the key element being that their sexual or romantic attraction remains consistently directed towards one sex or gender group. In this way, we have all been socialized since childhood to value not only monogamy but monosexuality as well. However, current research on sexuality suggests that self-identified bisexuals are the largest group among non-heterosexuals. In 2011, Dr. Gary Gates, Research Director of the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law, analyzed data collected from nine national health surveys from the USA, United Kindgdom, Canada, Australia and Norway to provide the most comprehensive statistics available to date on how many people self-identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender. While the population percentage of LGBT people varied by country, the ratio of lesbian, gay and bisexuals among LGBT people remained consistent, with self-identified bisexuals accounting for 40-60% of all LGBT populations regardless of country. This data is significant for challenging the popular assumption that bisexuals are a small minority among non-heterosexuals; indeed, this data indicates that non-monosexuals represent half of all non-heterosexuals. Yet we have learned to recognize monosexuality as dominant, normal and naturalized, even within LGBT representations. Conversely, we struggle to even recognize relationships that fall outside of this hegemonic norm. In essence, we lack ways of seeing bisexuals, pansexuals, omnisexuals, asexuals, and all queer-identified individuals who do not conform to monosexuality. We quite literally have not learned to see them, or—worse yet—learned how to not see them.Bisexual representations are particularly relevant to study as they are often rendered invisible in cultures that practice monogamy paired with hegemonic monosexuality. Members of bisexual spaces desire to achieve recognition but struggle to overcome bisexual erasure in their daily lives.Misrepresention: The Triad in Popular MediaWhen bisexuality is portrayed in media it is most commonly portrayed in a disingenuous manner where the bisexual is portrayed as being torn between potential lovers, on a pathway from straight to gay, or as a serial liar and cheater who cannot remain monogamous due to overwhelming attractions. Representations of bisexuals in media are infrequent, but those that are available too often follow these inaccurate stereotypes. By far the most common convention for representing bisexuality in visual media is the use of the triad: three people convey the (mis)representation of bisexuality as a sexuality in the “middle” of heterosexuality and hom*osexuality. For the purpose of this article, data analysis will be limited to print magazines for the sake of length and clarity.The 2014 New York Times Magazine article “The Scientific Quest to Prove Bisexuality Exists” (Denizet-Lewis) addresses the controversial nature of bisexuality. The cover image depicts a close-up of a man’s face, separated into two halves: in one half, a woman is nuzzled up to the man’s cheek, and the other half a man is nuzzled up to his ear. Presumably the man is bisexual and therefore split into two parts: his heterosexual self and his hom*osexual self. This visual depiction of bisexuality reifies the notion that bisexuals are torn between two polar desires and experience equal and concurrent attraction to more than one partner simultaneously. Furthermore, the triad represented in this way suggests that the essential bisexual is having simultaneous liaisons with heterosexual and hom*osexual partners.Within the convention of the triad there is also a sub-genre closely connected with hypersexualization and the male gaze. In these cases, the triad is commonly presented in varying states of undress and/or in a bed. An article in The Guardian from 11 April 2014 with the headline: “Make up your mind! The science behind bisexuality” (Browne) includes an image with three attractive young people in bed together. A man is sitting up between two sleeping women and smoking a cigarette – the cigarette connotes post-coital sexual activity, as does the smirk on his face. This may have been a suitable image if the article had been about having a threesome, but the headline—and the article—are attempting to explain the science behind bisexuality. Furthermore, while the image is intended to illustrate an article on bisexuality, the image is fundamentally misleading. The women in the image are asleep and to the side and the man is awake and in the middle. He is the central figure – it is a picture of him. So who is the bisexual in the image? What is the image attempting to do? It seems that the goal is to titillate, to excite, and to satisfy a particularly heterosexual fantasy rather than to discuss bisexuality. This hypersexualization once again references the mistaken idea (or heterosexual male fantasy) that bisexuality is only expressed through simultaneous sex acts.Many of these examples are salacious but they occur with surprising regularity in the mainstream media. On 17 February 2016, the American Association of Retired Persons posted an article to the front page of their website titled “Am I Discovering I'm Bisexual?” (Schwartz, 2016). In the accompanying image at the top of the article, we see three people sitting on a park bench – two men on either side of a woman. The image is taken from behind the bench so we see their backs and ostensibly they do not see us, the viewer. The man on the left is kissing the woman in the center while also holding hands behind the back of the bench with the man sitting on her other side. The man on the right is looking away from the couple kissing, suggesting he is not directly included in their intimate activity. Furthermore, the two men are holding hands behind the bench, which could also be code for behind the woman’s back, suggesting infidelity to the dyad and depicting some form of duplicity. This triad reinforces the trope of the bisexual as promiscuous and untrustworthy.Images such as these are common and range from the more inoffensive to the salacious. The resulting implications are that bisexuals are torn between their internal hetero and hom*o desires, require simultaneous partners, and are untrustworthy partners. Notably, in all these images it is never clear exactly which individuals are bisexual. Are all three members of the triad bisexual? While this is a possible read, the dominant discourse leads us to believe that one of person in the triad is the bisexual while the others adhere to more dominant sexualities.Participants in my research were acutely aware of these media representations and expressed frequent negative reactions to the implications of the triad. Each article contained numerous online comments expressing frustration with the use of “threesomes.” As one commentator stated: “Without a threesome, we’re invisible. It’s messed up. I always imagine a t-shirt with 3 couples stick figure like: girl + girl, girl + boy, and boy + boy. and it says “6 bisexuals.” What is made clear in many user comments is that the mainstream social scripts used to portray bisexuality are clearly at odds with the ways in which bisexuals choose to describe or portray themselves. Seeing through CapitalismOne of the significant conclusions of this research was the ways in which the misrepresentation of bisexuality results in many individuals feeling underrepresented or made invisible within mainstream media. The most salient themes to emerge from this research is participants’ affective struggle with feeling "invisible.” The frequency of discourse specific to invisibility is significant, as well as its expressed negatively associated experiences and feelings. The public sharing of those reactions among individuals, and the ensuing discourse that emerges from those interactions, include imagining what visibility “looks” like (its semiotic markers and what would make those markers “successful” for visibility), and the articulation of “solutions” to counter perceived invisibility. Notably, participants often express the desire for visibility in terms of commodification. As one participant posted, “their [sic] is no style for bi, there is no voice tone, unless I'm wearing my shirt, how is anyone to know?” Another participant explicated, “I wish there was a look. I wish I could get up every day and put on the clothes and jewelry that identified me to the world when I stepped out of my apartment. I wish I was as visible on the street as I am on facebook.” This longing for a culturally recognizable bisexual identity is articulated as a desire for a market commodification of “bisexual.” But a commodified identity may be a misguided desire. As Berger warns: “Publicity is not merely an assembly of competing messages: it is a language in itself which is always being used to make the same general purpose… It proposes to each of us that we transform ourselves, or our lives, by buying something more” (131). Consumerism—and its bedfellow—marketing, aim to sell the fantasy of a future self whereby the consumer transforms themselves through material objects, not transforming the culture to accept them. Berger further elicits that marketing essentially convinces us that we are not whole the way we are and sells us the idea of a wholeness achieved through consumerism (134). Following Berger’s argument, this desire for a commodified identity, while genuine, may fundamentally undermine the autonomy bisexuals currently have insomuch as without a corporate brand, bisexual representations are more culturally malleable and therefore potentially more inclusive to the real diversity of bisexual identified people.However, Berger also rightly noted that “publicity is the culture of the consumer society. It propagates through images that society’s belief in itself” (139). Without any publicity, bisexuals are not wrong to feel invisible in a consumer culture. And yet “publicity turns consumption into a substitute for democracy. The choice of what one eats (or wears or drives) takes the place of significant political choice” (149). A commodified identity will not likely usher in meaningful political change in a culture where bisexuals experience worse mental health and discrimination outcomes than lesbian and gay people (LGBT Advisory Committee, 2011). Bisexuals Online: New Ways of SeeingThe Internet, which was touted early as a space of great potential for anonymity and exploration where visibility can be masked, here becomes the place where bisexuals try to make the perceived invisible ‘visible.’ Digital technologies and spaces provide particularly useful environments for participants of online bisexual spaces to negotiate issues of invisibility as participants construct visible identities through daily posts, threads, videos, and discourse in which bisexuality is discursively and visually imagined, produced, articulated, defended, and desired. But most importantly these digital technologies provide bisexuals with opportunities to counter misrepresentations in mainstream media. In the frequent example of intimate partners in the physical world rendering a bisexual’s identity invisible, participants of these online communities grapple with the seeming paradox of one’s offline self as the avatar and one’s online self as more fully integrated, represented, and recognized. One participant expressed this experience, remarking:I feel I'm more out online that offline. That's because, in the offline world there's the whole ''social assumptions'' issue. My co-workers, friends, etc, know I have a boyfriend, wich [sic] equals ''straight'' for most ppl out there. So, I'll out myself when the occasion comes (talking abt smn I used to date, the LGBT youth group I used to belong to, or usually just abt some girl I find attractive) and usually ppl are not surprised. Whereas online, my pic at Facebook (and Orkut) is a Bisexual Pride icon. I follow Bi groups on Twitter. I'm a member of bi groups. So, online it's spelled out, while offline ppl usually think me having a bf means I'm straight.The I Am Visible (IAV) campaign is just one example of an organized response to the perceived erasure of bisexuals in mainstream culture. Launched in January 2011 by Adrienne McCue (nee Williams), the executive director of the Bi Social Network, a non-profit organization aimed at bringing awareness to representations of bisexuality in media. The campaign was hosted on bisocialnetwork.com, with the goal to “stop biphobia and bi-erasure in our community, media, news, and entertainment,” Prior to going live, IAV implemented a six-month lead-up advertising campaign across multiple online bisexual forums, making it the most publicized new venture during the period of my study. IAV hosted user-generated videos and posters that followed the vernacular of coming out and provided emotional support for listeners who may be struggling with their identity in a world largely hostile to bisexuality. Perceived invisibility was the central theme of IAV, which was the most salient theme for every bisexual group I studied online.Perhaps the most notable video and still image series to come out of IAV were those including Emmy nominated Scottish actor Alan Cumming. Cumming, a long-time Broadway thespian and acclaimed film actor, openly identifies as bisexual and has criticized ‘gaystream’ outlets on more than one occasion for intentionally mislabeling him as ‘gay.’ As such, Alan Cumming is one of the most prominently celebrated bisexual celebrities during the time of my study. While there are numerous famous out gays and lesbians in the media industry who have lent their celebrity status to endorse LGBT political messages—such as Ellen DeGeneres, Elton John, and Neil Patrick Harris, to name a few—there have been notably fewer celebrities supporting bisexual specific causes. Therefore, Cummings involvement with IAV was significant for many bisexuals. His star status was perceived as contributing legitimacy to bisexuality and increasing cultural visibility for bisexuals.These campaigns to become more visible are based in the need to counteract the false media narrative, which is, in a sense, to educate the wider society as to what bisexuality is not. The campaigns are an attempt to repair the false messages which have been “learnt” and replace them with more accurate representations. The Internet provides bisexual activists with a tool with which they can work to correct the skewed media image of themselves. Additionally, the Internet has also become a place where bisexuals can more easily represent themselves through a wide variety of semiotic markers in ways which would be difficult or unacceptable offline. In these ways, the Internet has become a key device in bisexual activism and while it is important not to uncritically praise the technology it plays an important role in enabling correct representation. ReferencesBarker, Meg. 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