Australasian Journal of Popular Culture - Volume 1, Issue 3, 2011

This article considers the methodological possibilities for making political and theoretical sense of a rise in same-sex kissing in the media. A 2010 Gawker article examining the recent abundance of celebrity girl/girl kissing suggested that such kisses are less a positive development in lesbian and gay visibility than a commercially contrived bid for publicity. While acknowledging that the kinds of kisses that the Gawker article highlights cannot unproblematically be described as 'lesbian', this article argues that a media moment in which same-sex kissing has become relatively commonplace represents a significant shift in a cultural landscape dominated by the visual imperatives of heteronormativity. Rather than adjudicating on where such kisses sit on a spectrum of sexual subjectivity, it argues that examining what this might mean for the troubling of heteronormativity might more productively begin by examining the discursive network in which the meaning of 'the same-sex kiss' is produced. In doing so it draws on the framework of genealogical critique deployed by Michel Foucault, Judith Butler and others in the field of queer theory.

Popular cultural formations are rich sites for examining how a nation shores up its boundaries in the wake of powerful global forces at the same time as intra-national differences seek to assert themselves and unsettle the terms on which a nation is articulated. This article examines two recent New Zealand reality TV programmes that dramatize shifting discourses of cultural and national belonging within postcolonial Aotearoa/New Zealand. By examining how the TV3 outdoor challenge programme The Summit and Ma¯ori Television's language competition programme Waka Reo share aspects of the American reality show Survivor, this article investigates the ways in which global television formatting can illuminate competing claims to cultural belonging and national identity. While media scholars have accused Survivor of perpetuating American neo-imperialist notions of cultural belonging, this article examines how the process of drawing upon the Survivor format for a New Zealand audience reveals the intra-national struggles of a postcolonial nation and the need for new narratives of the nation. As we argue, the Survivor format serves many different interests and can be used to perpetuate settler-centric narratives of the nation at the same time as fuel iwi initiatives to revitalize language and culture.

Crime fiction is particularly relevant to the interrogation of contemporary societies, as a genre that once tended towards a quest for singular identity in order to reinforce the status quo has been gradually enlarged into a broader social enquiry. Pakeha writers using Maori as central characters is a particularly revealing choice, along with all the potential pitfalls, for the vital exercise of negotiating identities in a postcolonial context. This article analyses and juxtaposes the deployment of two Maori detectives in New Zealand crime fiction: Hoani Mata (in Valerie Grayland's series published in the 1960s) and Tito Ihaka (the main protagonist of Paul Thomas's series published in the 1990s). The examination of their modus operandi, the types of crimes they investigate, the way in which they interact with people and how colleagues view them provides a frame of reference into New Zealand and its shifting intercultural relations over almost half a century. Ultimately, our analysis of these two series set in different periods of New Zealand history, belonging to two different crime fiction subgenres (the Golden Age 'whodunnit' story and the 'hardboiled' novel), inscribes the arc of an ever-evolving society as it interrogates itself on the changing meaning and values of being a 'New Zealander'.

In recent years, food has become a recurrent part of popular culture. Occupying a privileged space between necessity and luxury, food features in numerous popular media, ranging from television shows to metaphorical uses of 'hunger' in cinematographic adaptations of the latest vampire phenomena. Food acts not only as a cultural projection of social, ethnic and national affiliation but also bridges the gap between cultural tendencies, mainstream preferences and consumerist desires. Taking eating's popularized status as a point of departure, this article analyses the multiple representations of food and hunger in Matt Groening's Futurama. Focusing on specific examples from the series, I discuss how, through images of food, Futurama offers parodied critiques of late twentieth- and twenty-first-century commercial and cultural trends. I aim to show that, while hinting at connections to popular history, Futurama's improbable foods pluralize the political, intellectual and aesthetic colonization of everyday life by brands, media and product.

According to Stephen Prince in his 2009 book, Firestorm: American Film in the Age of Terrorism, 'For filmmakers concerned about any aspect of 9/11 or its aftermath, the attacks and their legacy offer a tremendously rich and challenging body of material'. It is very difficult to generalize about the response to 9/11 in American film, ranging as it does from its egregious use as a plot twist at the conclusion of the recent romantic drama Remember Me (Allen Coulter, 2010) to more substantive examinations such as In the Valley of Elah (Paul Haggis, 2007) or Jarhead (Sam Mendes, 2005). One might think, however, despite this range, that the most effective way of anatomizing how American film has responded to 9/11, and especially the issue of whether the medium has turned inward in a gesture of self-absorption or outward to engage the world outside the United States, would be to study films that engage directly and explicitly with the events of September 11, 2001. This article takes a different tack by arguing that the most symptomatic American films of the post-9/11 era are the Saw series (beginning with Saw, directed by James Wan in 2004), some of the most financially successful films of recent years, and films that nowhere reference the events of 9/11 explicitly. The article analyses the reasons for the popularity of the Saw films in a post-9/11 context, concentrating in particular on the perverse pleasure American audiences derive from the franchise's suggestion that terror is a self-imposed punishment that takes place in highly scripted situations designed to reveal moral strength, rather than a threatening force imposed from the outside, seemingly at random and with no warning. This emphasis reveals that post-9/11 American film prefers to focus on threats regarded as internal to the United States than to engage with an outside world that is seen in terms of an otherness perceived as more threatening and destabilizing than ever.

Material objects are imbued with accumulated meanings. This article explores the migrating meanings of vintage popular cultural artefacts in New Zealand. These once mundane household items are now treasured collectibles known as 'kiwiana'. In the face of the risk of annihilation of difference through the impacts of globalization, these collectibles are valued for their idiosyncratic localness. With the inundation of cheap generic imported merchandise onto the market, there is a revival of enthusiasm for insistently local materiality. As souvenirs of everyday life of the past, they enable collectors to perform a version of the self while reiterating populist cultural mythologies of nation.

There are personal inscriptions on roads and sidewalks everywhere - artworks, romantic longings, political rants - and yet this kind of graffiti often goes unnoticed. In this article I peruse the pavements to see what the writing there might reveal. I find that, like the graffiti on vertical surfaces, pavement inscriptions are declarations of identity, but they often lack a sense of deliberate subversiveness. Many have been written by ordinary people overcome by some momentary preoccupation, but their choice of pavement as canvas is not arbitrary. It seems that beneath the everyday world there is another one, familiar but strangely distorted like reflections on a wet roadway. My explorations suggest that pavement inscriptions float on the surface between these two worlds. Like marker buoys they indicate the presence of unconscious aspirations and anxieties submerged below.

GENDERED TRANSFORMATIONS: THEORIES AND PRACTICES ON GENDER AND MEDIA, TONNY KRUNEN, CLAUDIA ALVARES AND SOFIE VAN BAUMEL (EDS) (2011) Bristol, UK: Intellect, 239 pp., ISBN 9781841503660, Paperback, AUS$40 PUSH COMES TO SHOVE: NEW IMAGES OF AGGRESSIVE WOMEN, MAUD LAVIN (2010) Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 300 pp., ISBN 9780262123099, Hardback, AUD$42.99, US$27.95 DIRECTORY OF WORLD CINEMA: AUSTRALIA & NEW ZEALAND, BEN GOLDSMITH AND GEOFF LEALAND (EDS) (2010) Bristol: Intellect, 344 pp., ISBN 9781841503738, Paperback, AUS$44.95 FRIDAY ON OUR MINDS: POPULAR CULTURE IN AUSTRALIA SINCE 1945, MICHELLE ARROW (2009) Sydney: UNSW Press, 274 pp., ISBN 9780868406626, Paperback, AUS$39.95