Australasian Journal of Popular Culture - Volume 10, Issue 1-2, 2021

Street photography has hardly lacked for popular cultural currency, as attested by those ubiquitous black framed prints and coffee table tomes. However, it has long been a relatively marginalized genre within photography that has seen relative critical neglect even compared to other demotic forms concerned with the everyday, such as the family portrait (Bourdieu) and snapshot (Barthes). This article seeks to sketch a series of potential intersections between street photography’s antecedent, formative and breakout phases on both sides of the Atlantic and the Situationist International’s (1957–72) embodied practices surrounding the dérive, détournement and psychogeography more generally. Arguably, remediating street photographic practice and composition in relation to these disruptive strategies can provide a kind of corrective to the more formalistic conception of the former, as exemplified in the reification of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s famous dictum of the ‘decisive moment’. I will argue that Situationist discourse helps reframe these moments of the street as ‘situations’ in the Situationist sense, lines of flight that became explicit when the development of street photography in Europe is overlaid with that of the United States, Paris with New York. Such détournement arguably brings into view vectors between street photography and revolutionary art practices often neglected in discussions of these dérives of the street, and gestures towards – at least in potentia – a kind of afterlife of post-/Situationist praxis in the practices of street photographers.

Directed by Kore’eda Hirokazu (b. 1962, winner 2018 Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or), the 2009 film, Kūki ningyō (Air Doll), tells of a sex doll who comes to life. Once she acquires ‘a heart that I was not supposed to have’, the work moves through rom-com to Romeo and Juliet-esque tragedy. Although rated relatively lowly on reception websites, Air Doll is a complex reflection on the ‘hollow life’ created by hyper-capitalism and related issues including gender and class. The film is enhanced by Korean actor Bae Doona’s whimsical doll performance, while Mark Lee Ping-bing’s cinematic genius invokes the dreamy effect of In the Mood for Love. This article focuses on the film’s dense intertextual references which evoke both E. T. A. Hoffmann’s ‘Sandman’ and Freud’s ‘uncanny’ response. The doll’s CD rental store part-time job further permits Kore’eda to incorporate a tour de force series of other film references.

Stories of pain stretch metaphors and similes. They infuse verbs into the narrative: stab, pulse and ache. While all of these may create a reference point in a listener’s mind, a sufferer may never be able to communicate the reality of pain’s hold on her body. And when there is no evidence – no bleeding wound to strike a visual connection, for instance – the metaphor can disappear completely. With its disappearance goes the possibility of connection. And when the pain does not go, the sufferer may begin to doubt the validity of her own body. This leads the sufferer of chronic illness into another indescribable void: isolation. However, storytellers can provide a voice for the invisible and create conversations that change cultural perceptions that perpetuate marginalization. This article argues that an effective genre to undertake on this task is comedy, and discusses the work of Jenny Lawson.

This article identifies the dominant modes of discourse and critiques the problematic tropes and conventions at work in a selection of contemporary young adult fiction novels about young people with queer gender identities. Beginning with the role of young adult fiction, the importance of resisting models of binary gender, the trope of coming out and the convention of the hero’s journey, this article then analyses transphobic tropes: how the narrative lens of pathos functions in these texts to reduce the queer to a state of victimization, invisibility, mental illness, otherness, isolation and not belonging. This article uses the phrase ‘queer genders’ and the term ‘trans*’ to encompass transgender, non-binary, genderqueer, genderfluid and other gender non-conforming identities. ‘Trans’ without the asterisk is the shortened form of ‘transgender’.

This article starts with the key figure of Frankenstein’s monster and traces it from its tragic Gothic origins to its use in transphobic scholarship and on to its reclamation both by queer scholars and a growing trend in queer culture towards claiming monsters and monstrosity as their own. Gothic and psychoanalytic understandings of monstrosity, the uncanny and the abject are explored in relationship to queer theory about performativity, failure and ‘anarchitectural’ identity formation. The social media phenomenon ‘the Babadook is Gay’ and the figure of the mutant in popular culture bridge to the new Gothic and the formulation of the ‘genderpunk gayme’ as an aesthetic and political form with a commitment to queer acceptance and intersectional solidarity.

This article surveys book-length writing for a general readership about one of Australia’s most well-known and popular beaches, Sydney’s Bondi Beach. Having located narratives about Bondi Beach in a range of popular fiction and non-fiction writing, this investigation uses thematic analysis to examine these publications. Ten themes were identified in this analysis, revealing not only the wide range of topics related to Bondi Beach that are of interest to writers but also a series of tensions across these representations, as well as what is missing across these volumes.

The series Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries (2011–15) and the film Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears (2020) are examples of female-led transnational quality drama. This article argues that both the characters and the series itself are good examples of the negotiations of identity required both of the postmodern layered (Straubhaar 2007, 2012) or fractured but functional globalized or transnational self, which can give the series increased emotional resonance to the modern audience at a ‘safe’ temporal remove. This is, of course, critically important to transnational sales. This article analyses the negotiations of identity of the regular characters (and, as space allows, recurring characters) that are evident throughout the three series and subsequent film. It focuses on the negotiations regarding national identity and its intersections, which illustrate how the series negotiates between a patina of ‘authenticity’ and the expectations of a modern audience. Where relevant, the spinoff series Ms Fisher’s Modern Murder Mysteries (2019–present) is also discussed.

Tim Burton’s stop motion-animated remake of his 1984 short film, Frankenweenie was produced and released by Walt Disney Studios. In the film, a young suburban Victor Frankenstein’s dog, Sparky, dies in an accident. In keeping with Burton’s absurd, macabre and Gothic auteurism’s, Frankenstein resurrects his pet. This ultimately leads to a series of chaotic events where the other students discover Frankenstein’s creation and subsequently resurrect of all of their deceased pets which reflect the form of other popular monsters such as, Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula, the Wolfman, the Mummy and the Creature from the Black Lagoon, among many others. I will analyse these satirical reflections of popular monsters through the lens of the whimsical Gothic and seek to identify the implications of Burton’s work to Disney’s brand and aesthetic through the popular monster outside of Disney’s popular repertoire of ‘child friendly’ fairy tales.

Review of: Young Adult Gothic Fiction: Monstrous Selves/Monstrous Others, Michelle J. Smith and Kristine Moruzi (eds) (2021)

Cardiff, Wales, UK: University of Wales Press, 320 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-78683-750-9, hardback, £70 GBP

eISBN 978-1-78683-751-6, e-book, £70 GBP

Review of: Monstrous Textualities: Writing the Other in Gothic Narratives of Resistance, Anya Heise-von der Lippe (2021)

Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 304 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-78683-758-5, hardback, AUD 127

eISBN 978-1-78683-760-8, epub, AUD 127