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- Volume 11, Issue 1, 2022
Australasian Journal of Popular Culture - Volume 11, Issue 1-2, 2022
Volume 11, Issue 1-2, 2022
- Editorial
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Evolving identities in popular culture
Authors: Lorna Piatti-Farnell, Gwyneth Peaty and Ashleigh ProsserIn our twenty-first century context, we tell stories through the foods we eat, the images we share, the people we follow on social media, the shows we watch and the music we listen to. From film to television, from Twitter accounts to the latest fandom trend, popular culture provides us with channels through which our narratives of everyday can transform from immaterial notions to very material and tangible objects of consumption. At the centre of our ways of storytelling lies the formation of our identities. This editorial introduces a Special Issue of the Australasian Journal of Popular Culture that is focused on exploring the many complex intersections between storytelling, identity and popular culture.
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- Articles
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The me you see: The creative identity as constructed in music documentaries
More LessStereotypically, creative people are considered intelligent, immature, demanding, aware, receptive, autonomous, flexible, introverted, self-confident, unconventional and asocial. They are driven by a desire to create, peer acceptance and, to an extent, commercial gain. They negotiate their creative persona by seeking validation from others. Accordingly, creative people are active agents in the negotiation of their identities, and they can communicate their attitudes and feelings towards their work through the stories depicted in documentaries. Netflix has released several documentaries capturing the creative process and projects of musicians and singers, which offer a ‘behind the scenes’ account of what it is like working in the music industry. These same documentaries offer insights into what it means to be a creative navigating the trappings of project-based work, questions of authenticity, audience and management demands, and the pressures of making successful music. The purpose of this research is to use thematic analysis to explore the documentaries of Shawn Mendes, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Ariana Grande and Queen + Adam Lambert for how they conceptualize the creative identity and whether they maintain or challenge the stereotypes that continue to be perpetuated in the media.
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The autosomamediality of neurodivergent folks’ Facebook pages
More LessThis article employs life narrative scholarship to examine four neurodivergent (ND) folks’ public Facebook (FB) pages that are making important contributions to the growing representation of ND culture in online spaces and social media. It argues that the participatory, networked, digital, online space of FB facilitates autobiographical acts at the intersection of automedia and autosomatography, where the latter finds its most realized form, and where these multimodal, connected, dynamic manifestations of disabled lives are best defined by an elision of the two terms (automedia and autosomatography): autosomamedia.
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The legend of the ‘gentlemen of the flashing blade’: The canecutter in the Australian imagination
By Kerry BoyneThe ‘gentlemen of the flashing blade’ laboured in an occupation that no longer exists in Australia: canecutting. It was a hard job done by hard men, and its iconic figure – the canecutter – survives as a Queensland legend, so extensively romanticized in the popular culture of the time as to constitute a subgenre characterized by subject matter and motifs particular to the pre-mechanization sugar country culture. Yet, it may seem like the only canecutters immortalized in the arts are Summer of the Seventeenth Doll’s Roo and Barney. To show the breadth and diversity of this subgenre, and the legend of the canecutter and sugar country culture, this article reviews a selection of novels, memoirs, plays, short stories, cartoons, verse, song, film, television, radio and children’s books. These works address the racial, cultural and industrial politics of the sugar industry and its influence on the economic and social development of Queensland. The parts played by the nineteenth-century communities of indentured South Sea Islanders and the European immigrants who followed are represented along with those of the itinerant Anglos. These works depict, and celebrate, a colourful, often brutal, part of Queensland’s past and an Australian icon comparable with the swaggie or the shearer.1
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Australian women writers’ popular non-fiction prose in the pre-war period: Exploring their motivations
Authors: Alison Owens and Donna Lee BrienSince the 1970s, feminist scholars have undertaken important critical work on Australian women’s writing of earlier eras, profiling and promoting their fiction. Less attention has been afforded to the popular non-fiction produced by Australian women writers and, in particular, to that produced before the Second World War. Yet this writing is important for several reasons. First, the non-fiction writing of Australian women was voluminous and popular with readers. Second, this popular work critically engaged with a tumultuous political, social and moral landscape in which, as women’s rights were increasingly realized through legislation, the subjectivity of women themselves was fluid and contested. Third, as many of these women were also, or principally, fiction writers, their non-fiction can be shown to have informed and influenced many of their fictional interests, themes and characters. Lastly, and critically, popular non-fiction publication helped to financially sustain many of these writers. In proposing a conceptual framework informed by the work of Pierre Bourdieu to analyse examples of this body of work, this article not only suggests that important connections exist between popular and mainstream non-fiction works – newspaper and magazine articles, essays, pamphlets and speeches – and the fictional publications of Australian women writers of the early twentieth century but also suggests that these connections may represent an Australian literary habitus where writing across genre, form and audience was a professional approach that built and sustained literary careers.
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Othering the ‘bag-lady’: Examining stereotypes of vulnerable and homeless women in popular culture
Authors: Sue Smith and Jo CoghlanTo protect their membership rights to social resources, services and benefits, Australian citizens constantly renegotiate and reconceptualize sociocultural and political parameters around who belongs as a rights-worthy member of their society. Popular culture has the potential to shape the social, cultural and political attitudes that underpin these considerations. Popular culture mediums such as film and television are visual and narrative devices that posit binaries such as good/bad, men/women, citizen/non-citizen and so on. In particular, the binary of good/bad acts as a discourse through which audiences develop an understanding of what actions and behaviours are considered socially and culturally acceptable, and what actions and behaviours are not. This article seeks to broaden understandings of popular culture’s potential to influence how a society construes its social strictures around who is a member of the hegemonic group and who is the ‘other’. It examines depictions of poor, vulnerable and homeless women characters in film that frame them as the monstrous ‘other’ and argues that these representations negatively impact the visibility of real women who are poor, vulnerable and homeless in Australia, within spaces of sociopolitical discourse. The ongoing repercussions of which, it is contended, are that the needs of this cohort are less visible to the governments and policymakers who are tasked with protecting them.
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Renters: Disgust, judgement and marginalization of the dirty poor
By Jo Anna BurnRenters, an Aotearoa New Zealand reality television programme by Greenstone productions, is currently in its ninth season with 77 episodes at the time of writing. It is clearly a popular series, but why? According to Kristeva (1980), we are morbidly drawn to the abject and subsequently enjoy the cathartic experience of purification. However, the psychology of dirt means that we are simultaneously compelled to reject the creator of the dirt that provokes our disgust, particularly when they belong to an extreme out-group. Disgust prompted by dirtiness may therefore fuel dehumanization and diminish sympathy and engagement of the viewer towards the tenants featured in the series. Renters satisfies by providing the viewer with ‘filth porn’ and a rewarding clean-up with the bonus of a marginalized other to condemn. The morality play element is a familiar format that validates the viewer’s in-group status and sanctions judgemental impulses. An underlying subtext exhibits a neo-liberal attitude to the poorest elements in society, blaming them for their own predicament. This article will analyse selected scenes from Renters to highlight how the producers promote stereotypes that marginalize and dehumanize the underclass of unsuccessful renters, or ‘dirty poor’, in Aotearoa New Zealand.
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Pop art meets pop culture: A semiotic reading of Bephen Bahana’s The Curry Bunch
Authors: Lindsay Neill and Lavanya BasnetInspired by Barthes’s analysis of a Paris Match cover image, our paper semiotically explores two oil-on-canvas images by New Zealand-born Indian artist Bephen Bahana. Within our exploration, we use constructs of denotation, connotation, myth and archetype to illuminate those images. Our research aim was to find the meaning behind the two portraits’ visual aesthetics. In doing so, we reveal Bahana’s The Curry Bunch (2012) images to be a visual shorthand signifying Indian history and the ways in which American media influence impacts notions of identity. Specifically, our insights reveal the ways in which many contemporary Indian people might ‘see themselves’. While our work concentrates upon Indian imagery, myth and archetype, those considerations have pan-cultural connections. In these ways, our paper links pop art to popular culture and, in doing so, raises questions about how the canon and hierarchy of art have come to reflect and reinforce wider sociocultural norms. Our paper offers a voice of resistance, in much the same style as Bahana’s images.
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Sons, husbands, brothers: The Gothic worlds of Thai men in the films of Kongkiat Khomsiri
More LessGothic has long been theorized as the domain of the feminine, the queer or the ‘soft masculine’, and most discussions of Gothic masculinity propose to see it in terms of a split of the masculine subject at the level of rationality and sexuality. This article examines the construction of Gothic masculinities in the films of the Thai director Kongkiat Khomsiri in the context of the Thai gender system and Thai heroic masculine ideologies their protagonists embody. While Thai horror films abound in depictions of feminine evil, interestingly the Gothic cinescapes of Khomsiri are the domain of tough masculine men. The article discusses the director’s first three features: Chaiya (2007), Slice (2009), and TheGangster (2012), bringing into focus the films’ portrayals of their working-class underdog heroes and their ‘hard’ masculinity. The discussion also highlights the visual aesthetics of Khomsiri’s films and their reliance on the Gothic conventions in the construction of the characters and the environments they inhabit.
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Sexy, slimy, monstrous: Infection as collaboration in Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth and Jaco Bouwer’s Gaia
More LessThis article offers a discussion of two eco-horror feature films, each released in 2021: Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth, and Jaco Bouwer’s Gaia. With a pandemic theme, both film fictions feature sentient woods and forests which infect humans with fungal spores. This is the non-human world enlisting human collaboration. Both films break the mould of the traditional eco-horror; invariably, the latter dramatizes how the natural world avenges itself on humankind. This storytelling mode involves the use of catastrophe narratives. Elizabeth Parker has explored the alternative genre, the ‘ecoGothic’ (2020), which stimulates ambiguous emotional responses to human–non-human hybrid forms. To date, there is little scholarship which analyses such hybrids through the lens of queer ecology. Therefore, I will bring Timothy Morton’s theory of queer ecology (2010), dark ecology (2007) and his concept of the spectral non-human world (2017) into dialogue with Simon C. Estok’s term ‘the slimic imagination’ (2022). My thesis is that both films engage an interaction between queer and slimic narratives in order to undo the catastrophe narrative. Queer slime is that which destabilizes gender binaries as a means of creating uneasy but intimate collaborations between the human and non-human world.
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Breast augmentation and artificial insemination: Monstrous medicine and the female body in recent fiction
By Amber MoffatRecent fiction that depicts medical intervention upon the female body as monstrous reveals societal anxiety around aesthetic and reproductive medicine. As biotechnology rapidly advances, the female body continues to be a site on which improvements, efficiencies and controls are imposed. While Kristeva’s abject and Creed’s ‘monstrous-feminine’ explain the capacity of the female body to imbue horror, this literary analysis explores how the experience of the medicalized female body can convey anxiety relating to escalating aesthetic and reproductive demands. Works of fiction by Kawakami, Mazza, Hortle, Booth, Giddings, Gildfind and Taylor are considered in terms of medicine and the female body, with the narratives revealing common themes of monstrosity. Bakhtin’s grotesque and Kristeva’s abject informs the analysis, as does Foucault’s concept of the ‘medical gaze’. Bartky’s ‘fashion-beauty complex’ frames the investigation into depictions of cosmetic surgery, while the impact of capitalism is considered in relation to reproductive technologies and medical experimentation. The power structures that medicine operates within are considered and the article argues that the representation of medicine as monstrous in relation to the female body expresses collective unease about the increasingly unstable boundaries of the human body itself.
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Charles Manson and his Family: ‘Human monsters, human mutants’
Authors: Lesley McLean and Jenny WiseJoan Didion famously described the 1960s as ending abruptly on 9 August 1969 when word spread of the murders of seven people including Hollywood actor Sharon Tate. Fifty years on and the ‘Manson murders’ remain a focal point of interest in American popular culture and media. Netflix’s recent true-crime drama Mindhunter (2017–19) and Quentin Tarantino’s Once upon a Time inHollywood (2019) represent but two popular examples invoking the crimes. What is consistent across most popular renderings of the murders is the representation of the Family, and of their leader Charles Manson especially, as monstrous, warranting investigation. Utilizing both Jeffrey Cohen’s (1996) foundational text ‘Monster culture (seven theses)’ and Natasha Mikles and Joseph Laycock’s (2021) ‘Five further theses on monster theory and religious studies’, this article examines the creation and representation of Charles Manson as a serial killer, a cult leader, but especially as a monster, in the popular culture context.
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- Book Reviews
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Australian Radio Listeners and Television Viewers: Historical Perspectives, Bridget Griffen-Foley (2020)
More LessReview of: Australian Radio Listeners and Television Viewers: Historical Perspectives, Bridget Griffen-Foley (2020)
Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 167 pp.,
ISBN 978-3-03054-636-6, h/bk, AUD 79
ISBN 978-3-03054-639-7, p/bk, AUD 79
ISBN 978-3-03054-637-3, e-book, AUD 66
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Gothic Metaphysics: From Alchemy to the Anthropocene, Jodey Castricano (2021)
By Tof EklundReview of: Gothic Metaphysics: From Alchemy to the Anthropocene, Jodey Castricano (2021)
Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 282 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-78683-794-3, h/bk, USD 88
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Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Aoife Mary Dempsey (2022)
More LessReview of: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Aoife Mary Dempsey (2022)
Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 214 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-78683-827-8, h/bk, USD 94.07
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Playfulness in Shakespearean Adaptations, Marina Gerzic and Aidan Norrie (eds) (2020)
More LessReview of: Playfulness in Shakespearean Adaptations, Marina Gerzic and Aidan Norrie (eds) (2020)
Abingdon: Routledge, 270 pp.,
ISBN 978-0-36725-646-3, h/bk, AUD 273
ISBN 978-0-36750-464-9, p/bk, AUD 77.99
ISBN 978-0-42928-880-7, e-book, AUD 62.09
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- Television Review
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