Australasian Journal of Popular Culture - Volume 2, Issue 2, 2013

This article analyses the Australian lesbian sex magazines, Wicked Women (1988–1996) and Slit (2002–) to examine the nature and shape of Australian lesbian pornography magazines, and hence to explore the ways in which these publications put pornography in the service of lesbians. I outline the conditions of these magazines’ emergence, and then discuss the representational strategies of each, including imagery, layout, tropes and narratives. These magazines, and their changing modes of making lesbian porn, show the development of a lesbian porn aesthetic. Further, they offer a unique sight of the discursive construction of lesbian identities and communities across more than three decades, and reveal another facet of the troubled relationship between feminism and lesbians.

During the twentieth century, cargo pants have gone from a traditional military uniform to a popular casual pant worn by almost every segment in the global consumer market. Since the 1970s, when hippies wore army surplus vintage styles as a sign of protesting the Vietnam War until today, cargo pants have undergone a considerable transformation, changing in both fabrications and form. This article will examine the origins, histories and myths surrounding the development of cargo pants as a military garment. It will highlight the rise of cargo pants into mass culture through various popular culture intermediaries such as the military, subcultural style, film, media, retail and merchandising; demonstrating how this garment has become part of world dress and transnational mass fashion, as well as an icon in global popular culture.

We take a fictocritical approach, shifting between critical and creative discourses, to centre on the process of creating a memory piece, a collaboration in textile narrative between a creative writer and a textile artist. The basis of the memory dress is a green-and-white-checked empire line cotton pinafore. The writer, here called M, bought the garment at Sydney's Saturday Paddington Markets because of its colour, empire line and its label which was 'Frank', her father's name. The textile artist, here called D, works with recycled fabrics to create wearable artworks and textile sculptures on life-sized mannequins. In her sewing process, each figure she creates emerges with a personality. These personalities are recorded in short fictional histories, or 'backstories'. The memory piece, Miss Liberty's Pinafore, traces the collaborative process of making life fictions between M's fabric scraps, her childhood memories and writing, and D's creative costuming. Miss Liberty's Pinafore could not exist without an analysis of the metaphorical capacity of fabric and dress, the affects resonant between cloth, memory and identity, and the process of making art.

Former print and television journalist Di Morrissey is Australia's biggest-selling writer of popular fiction. Her novels incrementally construct an Australia re-shaped for the new century through the interplay of significant social forces and demographic shifts. Her imaginary also places Australian culture within a global network of affiliations generated by the colonial and imperial past, as well as by more recent strategic alliances, and encompasses some of the darker elements of Australia's collective inheritance. The critical reception of Morrissey's work, however, has hitherto been scant and dismissive. Yet the Pacific Rim novels - Tears of the Moon, Scatter the Stars, Kimberley Sun, Monsoon, and The Plantation - can be read within perspectives afforded by dark tourism research and theories of cognitive dissonance, revealing that they subvert widely received understandings of Australia's relationships within the Pacific region and constitute a subliminal force for public education.

Numerous researchers have commented unfavourably on the classist, sexist and assimilationist nature of contemporary American makeover programs; this article examines Extreme Makeover, The Swan, and What Not To Wear in order to identify the narrative paradigms most commonly used to cloak such conformist pressures in more socially acceptable guises. A close analysis demonstrates how frameworks such as initiation rituals, aesthetic ideals, market values, self-empowerment, and fairy tales ultimately overlap to deflect attention from feminist concerns about larger social issues and serve to demonstrate how these pervasive cultural ideas have been reworked to serve political and commercial ends.

Science Fiction (SF) articulates many of the central issues faced in culture and society and none greater than the role, capacities and implications of scientific knowledge. As a genre it displays a heightened capacity to engage in philosophical debates giving salient insights. Contemporary scientific knowledge or 'mainstream science' provides the critical grounding on which the extraordinary worlds of SF are naturalized. However, complete adherence to known facts would render SF incapable of facilitating the speculative dimensions in which it revels. To counter-balance this, marginal science is often engaged as a means to extend the known and explore new possibilities whilst maintaining a noticeable link to scientific rationality. Invader ZIM (Nicktoon Productions 2001-2003, 2006), an animated television (TV) series about an alien's efforts to conquer Earth and the attempts of a young paranormal enthusiast to stop him, provides a way to articulate this positioning of science.

Crisis memes are the ghoulish and satirical posts that spread through social media concurrently with serious journalistic reportage. They are folk productions that respond to challenging events based on thematic and structural templates of popular online image macros. This article explores how templatability is relevant to the underpinnings, development, structure and value of crisis memes. The combination of frivolity and ghoulishness that is typical of crisis memes may be criticized for not being reasoned discourse, reinforcing cultural divides and making use of copyrighted content without permission and in ways that the copyright holder may not wish. However, the value of crisis memes lies not in their content but rather their place as a public voice that sidesteps the constraints of traditional media and as an illustration of freedom of expression that may be threatened by increasingly restrictive copyright regimes.

Reykjavik police detective Erdendur's tight hold on the customs and culture of Iceland's historic past have frozen him in time. As he solves murders, the chill of death, the Icelandic cold, and the winter in his own heart combine to remind readers of loss that knows no borders. Erlendur serves as a cautionary tale about standing still, in a blizzard or in life.

This article acknowledges the established links between popular/science fiction and colonialism and identifies a gap in the body of knowledge; the link between science fiction and Australian colonialism. It begins by indicating how this gap affects the way we view both the colonized and the colonizer before going on to show how this blind spot can be revealed using literary analysis. The article begins with a textual analysis of Douglas Adams' Life the Universe and Everything to demonstrate how it can be read as a post colonial text, then the work of prominent cultural and critical theorists is drawn upon to demonstrate why it should be read as a postcolonial text. This is achieved by first showing that the text is clearly a reflection and explanation of the effects of, and workings behind, colonial discourse. We then go on to address the question of why it is important that this text, which is often labeled as comedic science fiction, is in fact making a poignant political comment on the effects and inner workings of colonial discourse, that it succeeds in bringing postcolonial theory into the present, appropriating the contemporary connotations of science fiction and the accessibility of popular comedy, in order to enable a wide and varied audience to become aware of their own blind spot when it comes to the subject of colonialism.

DIASPORAS OF AUSTRALIAN CINEMA, CATHERINE SIMPSON, RENATA MURAWSKA AND ANTHONY LAMBERT (EDS),(2009) Bristol, UK: Chicago, USA: Intellect, ISBN 978-1-84150-197-0, p/bk, 128 pp., US$40

SAVAGE OR CIVILISED: MANNERS IN COLONIAL AUSTRALIA, PENNY RUSSELL (2010) Sydney: New South Wales University Press, 368 pp., ISBN 9780868408606, p/bk, AU$34.95

MEDIA & JOURNALISM: NEW APPROACHES TO THEORY AND PRACTICE, JASON BAINBRIDGE, NICOLA GOC AND LIZ TYNAN (2011) 2nd ed., Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 492 pp., ISBN 9780195574104, p/bk, AU$78.95

AUSTRALIAN POSTWAR DOCUMENTARY FILM: AN ARC OF MIRRORS, DEANE WILLIAMS (2008) Bristol, Chicago: Intellect, 165 pp., ISBN 978-1-84150-210-6, h/bk, $47.95AUS

DEATH OR LIBERTY. REBELS AND RADICALS TRANSPORTED TO AUSTRALIA 1788–1868, TONY MOORE (2010) Sydney: Pier 9, Murdoch Books, 431 pp., ISBN 978-1-74196-140-9, p/bk, $34.95AUS

VØICE: VOCAL AESTHETICS IN DIGITAL ARTS AND MEDIA, NORIE NEUMARK, ROSS GIBSON AND THEO VAN LEEUWEN (EDS) (2010) Cambridge, MA; London, UK: MIT Press, 440 pp., ISBN 978-0-262-01390-1, h/bk, $40

McQueen’s new York MoMent – a review of savage BeautY, Metropolitan MuseuM of art May 4 –July 31, 2011 and daphne Guiness, MuseuM at fit septe Mber 16 – January 7, 2012