Cultural Studies: Volume 10, Issue 3: Australian Feminisms

CULTURAL STUDIES Volume 10 Number 3 October 1996 Special Issue: Australian Feminisms

Edited by RITA FELSKI and ZOË SOFIA

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Advertisements: Enquiries to Routledge Journals, 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE, UK. Subscription Rates (calendar year only): UK/EC individuals: c26; institutions £70; North America: individuals $45; institutions $75; rest of the world: individuals £128; institutions £175; all rates include postage. Subscriptions to: Subscriptions Department, Routledge, Cheriton House, North Way, Andover, Hants SPlO 5BE, UK. Single copies available on request. ISSN 0950–2386 © 1996 Routledge

ISBN 0-203-99078-1 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-415-14569-4 (Print Edition)

Editorial Board

EDITORS Lawrence Grossberg University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill USA Della Pollock University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill USA ASSOCIATE EDITOR Mark J.V.Olson University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill USA ASSISTANT EDITOR Ted Striphas University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill USA BOOK REVIEW EDITORS John Frow University of Queensland Tim O’Sullivan De Monttort University UK Jennifer Daryl Slack Michigan Technological University USA EDITORIAL COMMITTEE Lila Abu-Lughod New York University USA Charles ACland University of Calgary Canada len Ang Murdoch University Australia Anne Balsamo Georgia Institute of Technology USA Tony Bennett Griffith University Australia Jody Berland York University Canada Lauren Berlant University of Chicago USA Angie Chabram-Dernersesian University of California—Davis USA lain Chambers Instituto Universitario Orientale Italy Kuan-Hsing Chen National Tising Hua University Taiwan John Clarke The Open University UK James Clifford University of California—Santa Cruz USA Dwight Conquergood Northwestern University USA Richard Dyer University of Warwick UK Keya Ganguly Carnegie Mellon University USA Dilip Goankar University of—Urbana/Champaign USA Paul Gilroy Goldsmith’s College UK Henry A.Giroux Penn State University USA Andrew Goodwin University of San Fransisco USA Herman Gray University of California—Santa Cruz USA Ghassan Hage University of Sydney Australia

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John Hartley Edith Cowan University Australia James Hay University of Illinois Urbana/Champaign USA Dick Hebdige California Institute of the Arts USA May Joseph New York University Cameron McCarthy University of Illinois Urbana/Champaign USA Angela McRobbie Ealing College UK Dave Morley Goldsmith’s College UK Meaghan Morris (Independent) Australia Steven Muecke University of technology Australia Cindy Patton Temple University USA Peggy Phelan New York University USA Elspeth Probyn University of Montreal Canada Jan ice Radway Duke University USA Andrew Ross New York University USA Bill Schwarz Goldsmiths’ College UK Hortense Spillers Cornell University USA Will Straw McGill University Canada Graeme Turner University of Queensland Australia Gail Valaskakis Concordia University Canada Michele Wallace City College of New York USA George Yudice City University of New York USA

EDITORIAL STATEMENT

In the ten years since this journal was founded, the field of cultural studies has expanded and flourished. It has at once become broader and more focused, facing as it does the challenges of global economic, cultural and political reconfiguration on the one hand, and of new attacks on the university and intellectual work on the other. As we look forward to the next decade, we expect Cultural Studies to continue to contribute to both the expansion and the integration of cultural studies. With this expectation in mind, the journal seeks work that explores the relation between everyday life, cultural practices, and material, economic, political, geographical and historical contexts; that understands cultural studies as an analytic of social change; that addresses a widening range of topic areas, including post- and neocolonial relations, the politics of popular culture, issues in nationality, transnationality and globalization, the performance of gendered, sexual and queer identities, and the organization of power around differences in race, class, ethnicity, etc.; that reflects on the changing status of cultural studies; and that pursues the theoretical implications and underpinnings of practical inquiry and critique. Cultural Studies welcomes work from a variety of theoretical, political and disciplinary perspectives. It assumes that the knowledge formations that make up cultural studies are as historically and geographically contingent as any other cultural practice or configuration and that the work produced within or at its permeable boundaries will therefore be diverse. We hope not only to represent this diversity but to enhance it. We want to encourage significant intellectual and political experimentation, intervention and dialogue. Some issues will focus on special topics, often not traditionally associated with cultural studies. Occasionally, we will make space to present a body of work representing a specific national, ethnic or disciplinary tradition. Whenever possible, we intend to represent the truly international nature of contemporary work, without ignoring the significant differences that are the result of speaking from and to specific contexts, but we also hope to avoid defining any context as normative. We invite articles, reviews, critiques, photographs and other forms of ‘artistic’ production, and suggestions for special issues. And we invite readers to comment on the strengths and weaknesses, not only of the project and progress of cultural studies, but of the project and progress of Cultural Studies as well. Lawrence Grossberg Della Pollock

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Contributions should be sent to Professors Lawrence Grossberg and Della Pollock, Dept. of Communication Studies, CB #3285, 113 Bingham Hall, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599– 3285, USA. They should be in triplicate and should conform to the reference system set out in the Notes for Contributors. An abstract of up to 300 words (including 6 keywords) should be included for purposes of review. Submissions undergo blind peer review. Therefore, the author’s name, address and e-mail should appear only on a detachable cover page and not anywhere else on the manuscript. Every effort will be made to complete the review process within six months of submission. A disk version of the manuscript must be provided in the appropriate software format upon acceptance for publication. Reviews, and books for review, should be sent to Tim O’Sullivan, School of Arts, de Montfort University, The Gateway, Leicester LE1 9BH; or to John Frow, Dept. of English, University of Queensland, St Lucia, Queensland 4072, Australia; or to Jennifer Daryl Slack, Dept. of Humanities, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI 49931, USA.

CONTENTS

AUSTRALIAN FEMINISMS Introduction Rita Felski and Zoë Sofia

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ARTICLES Claiming Truganini: Australian national narratives in the year of indigenous peoples Suvendrini Perera

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The anorexic body: reading disorders Abigail Bray

411

Body shopping: maternity and alterity in Mamatoto Michele Grossman and Denise Cuthbert

427

‘As housewives we are worms’: women, modernity and the home question Lesley Johnson

444

Cooking up: intestinal economies and the aesthetics of specular orality Maria Angel and Zoë Sofia

457

Transvestophilia and gynemimesis: performative strategies and feminist theory Rachel Fensham

474

REVIEW ARTICLE Modern girls Rita Felski

488

COMMENTARY Response to Stuart Hall Saba Mahmood

495

BOOK REVIEWS ‘There’s a raft of norms at stake in the media’, Jason Philip Bell

498

Boundary riders of the new literary studies K.K.Ruthven

502

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‘White, male and middle class’ Ann Curthoys

506

Re-viewing the gaze Barry Howell

510

Look and listen, see and hear: books that show and tell in the age of interactive multimedia David Leviatin

515

Re-visioning the classroom: agency and possibility in Giroux’s ‘Living Dangerously’ Julie Drew

527

Playing the game of culture Tony Bennett

530

Chucky’s children Steve Chibnall

538

How ads work (they don’t) John O.Thompson

543

Stop the show! Joel Woller

548

Understanding the contemporary museum: implications for Cultural Studies? Andrea Witcomb

553

We might get fooled again Jason Toynbee

556

Notes on contributors

561

Call for papers

563

INTRODUCTION RITA FELSKI AND ZOE SOFIA

To begin an article by acknowledging the problematic and provisional status of one’s terms of reference has become a routine gesture in recent years, yet such rhetorical banality seems unavoidable in the case of a journal issue on the topic of ‘Australian feminism’. In recent years this term has come to acquire a certain intellectual cachet; as the work of such scholars as Moira Gatens, Liz Grosz, Sneja Gunew and Meaghan Morris has become more widely known overseas, so ‘new Australian feminism’ is increasingly hailed as an innovative presence in critical theory (Barrett, 1988: xxix). After beer and cinema, is feminism poised to emerge as the next successful Australian export? If so, what are the implications of this example of ‘travelling theory’? Does it point to the co-option and commodification of a local product by increasingly rapacious multinational knowledge industries? Or should we view this dissemination of ideas in a more optimistic light, as enabling productive forms of dialogue between feminist scholars and cultural theorists within a transnational context? And how local a product is ‘Australian feminism’ anyway? The contributors to this volume embody, both in their diverse biographies and their various methodologies, a sustained challenge to any notion of a singular, self-identical standpoint derived from their putative ‘Australianness’. From a standpoint sensitive to both gender and postcolonial politics, any such invocations of national identity must inevitably provoke ambivalent and contradictory, though not necessarily negative, responses (the once common perception of nation as nothing more than a category of false consciousness seems to have been finally put to rest in recent years). In assembling this collection we did not demand of contributors that their writing conform to or exemplify some imaginary ideal of what constitutes Australian feminism. Rather, we simply invited articles from scholars with expertise in the domain of feminism and cultural studies who also have an extended biographical connection to Australia. Some of our contributors were born in Australia, others are recent migrants, others currently live elsewhere. A number of factors, including race, class, country of origin and intellectual affiliations, shape their specific relationship to questions of nation in numerous, not always predictable ways. Some of our writers explicitly offer a feminist analysis of aspects of Australian culture and selfconsciously investigate the implications of their own geopolitical positioning. Others are not primarily interested in addressing the ‘Australianness’ of their feminism at all,

Cultural Studies 10(3) 1996:383–392

© 1996 Routledge 0950–2386

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and remain suspicious of the assumption that theory from the periphery only becomes acceptable for international consumption insofar as it flaunts its antipodean exoticism. Furthermore, if hybridity and métissage have become the buzz-words of postcolonial feminism, this experience of transculturation indelibly marks the biographies of the editors. One of us was born in Australia of Greek parentage and partly educated in the United States, the other grew up in England with Polish/Czech parents, spent fourteen years in Australia and is a current aspirant for an American green card. Coincidentally, we share the same birthday (yes, we’re Aries!), but this happy astrological synchrony is not necessarily matched by a common array of theoretical or political concerns. This collection, then, does not aim to offer a comprehensive overview of the current condition of Australian feminism. It originated in a seminar series held at Murdoch University in Western Australia and expanded through personal and institutional networks to include the work of various other writers. We are pleased to include material from younger, up-and-coming feminist scholars as well as those more established in the field. As is the case with any such collection, its content was partially shaped by random factors: who was willing to contribute to such a volume, who was already committed elsewhere, who could get material to the editors by the specified time (we regret the late withdrawal of articles by Kay Schaffer and Vicky Kirby due to unforeseen delays in the publication of this issue). Inevitably, many important aspects of Australian feminist cultural studies are not covered in this collection (for further material, see Sheridan, 1988; Gunew and Yeatman, 1993; Langton, 1993; Caine and Pringle, 1995; Grieve and Burns, 1995). Nevertheless, there are a number of interconnections among the different articles (one might speak of family resemblances rather than a shared essence), which feed directly into the critical field known as ‘Australian feminism’. Before exploring these resemblances in more detail, it may be helpful to situate them within a broader theoretical and social framework. The question of what constitutes Australian cultural studies is too vast to be dealt with here, and has in any case been extensively addressed in recent publications (Turner, 1993; Frow and Morris, 1993; Craven, 1994). We will briefly note, however, some significant divergences from the analytical framework first established by the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies. Admittedly, the traditional British focus on working-class culture and (male) subcultures was partially carried over into the Australian context, such that a concern with investigating the lived practices of ‘Australianness’ seemed at times to translate into an uncritical endorsement of the traditionally white male culture of the pub and ‘footy’ (Australian rules football). Some influential works of Australian cultural studies such as Myths of Oz (Fiske et al., 1987) were thus subject to criticism for paying insufficient attention to the race and gender inflections of popular culture. Nevertheless, much cultural studies work in Australia has attempted to free itself from the hegemonic grip of British cultural studies. There has been strong interest in analysing distinctive Australian sites of suburban life (the barbecue, the beach, the shopping mall), and in developing critical readings of the texts and myths of nation as articulated through culturally specific signifiers of nature (landscape, the bush), or history (monuments, museums). More generally, the cultural studies that emerged in Australia have often been shaped by distinctive research agendas, ideological conditions and theoretical investments. These have included a less sustained commitment to strict Marxist tenets and a keen interest in contemporary French theory and philosophy. Such writers as Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari, Irigaray, Foucault

INTRODUCTION 385

and Lyotard, for example, were being read and discussed by sections of the Australian intelligentsia before becoming widely known in Britain and the US. Thus in the 1970s a number of Australian theorists became involved in translating new material coming out of France and publishing it under the aegis of small presses (e.g. The Working Papers in Sex, Culture and Society). Among these figures was Meaghan Morris, a prominent international presence in cultural studies who first became known as a proponent of French theory and a translator of Foucault. A glance at the contents page of The Pirate’s Fiancée (1988) reveals the diversity of influences and currents of thought which have fed into both Australian cultural studies and Australian feminism. The book includes essays on feminist theory and philosophy, on styles of film criticism, readings of various photographic works, discussions of Lyotard and Baudrillard, and an exploration of the high/popular culture question in relation to the Australian export Croco dile Dundee. Morris’s work has insistently and acerbically questioned both the male biases of cultural studies and the traditional Euro-American focus of much feminist scholarship. Her readings of shopping centres, motels, the ‘I Love Lucy’ Show and other texts and artefacts of Australian everyday life have profoundly altered our understanding of the gendering of popular culture and its intersection with the politics of space and locality. Thus the traditional taxonomies which have often been used to distinguish between American gynocriticism, French feminism and English socialist feminism are largely inappropriate to Australian feminism, which has been characterized from its origins by a heady mélange of theoretical and political concerns. Furthermore, the relatively small academic scene in Australia has encouraged a significant degree of contact and intellectual exchange between feminists in different fields. The phenomenon all too frequent in the United States, whereby feminist scholars in history, English or philosophy attend their own conferences, read discipline-specific journals and have minimal interpersonal contact is much less common in Australia. This is partly a question of the size of the feminist academic community, and partly the result of lesser anxiety about disciplinary accreditation and the need for professionalization at graduate level. As a result, the distinctions between intellectual disciplines are often blurred, and much significant work occurs in the boundaries between these fields. While history and sociology have been mainstays of Australian women’s studies and are firmly established in publishers’ lists, Australian feminists have also been highly active in the field of critical theory and French philosophy. A key moment here was the splitting of Sydney University’s philosophy department in 1973 to create a separate branch called ‘General Philosophy’, a split directly associated with agitation by feminist teachers and students for the inclusion of courses on women and philosophy. Those involved in this dispute include Elizabeth Grosz and Moira Gatens, scholars who have inspired colleagues and several cohorts of feminist students to pursue philosophical studies around questions of subjectivity, political citizenship, ethics and most especially corporeality. Indeed, questions of sexuality and textuality first raised in the work of French feminists have been extensively elaborated, but also creatively reconfigured in much of this recent scholarship. Commentators are increasingly referring to an identifiable Australian ‘school’ of corporeal feminism, characterized by a concern with theorizing bodily morphologies as simultaneously material and semiotic phenomena (Gatens, 1983, 1991; Grosz, 1989, 1990, 1994; Diprose and Ferrell, 1992; Diprose, 1994). The impact of this work on Australian feminism more generally manifests itself in often leaky boundaries between such distinct subject areas as philosophy, psychoanalysis and cultural studies. This disciplinary hybridity is evident in several

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texts in this collection, for example, the article by Maria Angel and Zoe Sofia, which may not be instantly recognizable as ‘cultural studies’ to some US readers. The authors draw on film theory, psycho-analysis and the Freudo-Marxist tradition to read two films concerned with food as elaborations of the erotic (especially oral) logics associated with late-twentieth-century cultures of visual consumption. This work understands ‘erotic formations’ as cultural formations that can be usefully charted in attempting to grasp the symbolic logic of late capitalist consumer culture as it shapes the production of texts in England and the United States. Angel and Sofia read Peter Greenaway alongside Adrian Lynne and juxtapose ‘art’ cinema against soft pornography. Like a number of other contributors to this collection, the authors refuse to limit the scope of feminist cultural studies to the analysis of texts that attract mass audiences. Cultural studies, especially in the British framework, has often sought to invert and reinscribe a pre-existing dichotomy, such that the high is brought low while the previously degraded is elevated to the realm of the authentic. Popular culture is thereby celebrated as a redemptive site of carnivalesque desires and resistive bodily pleasures, while high culture is peremptorily dismissed as an elitist tool of bourgeois hegemony. Given the remarkably diverse institutional sites, knowledge complexes and artistic activities subsumed within this exceedingly vague term, it is surprising how little attention has been paid to delineating the actual practices of high culture and their various and contradictory political implications. Yet in Australia, while sport often grabs the limelight as a nationally prized activity, ‘high art’ is at least an equally popular pursuit, with more Australians said to attend arts events than sporting functions annually. A broad range of governmentsponsored grants and subsidies for arts organizations, special festival events and diverse arts activities, coupled with sustained attention to local, regional and international arts on national public radio and television stations, help to ensure that the supposedly high arts are potentially accessible throughout various communities. The traditional conceptualization of the high/popular distinction in terms of an antithesis between bourgeois and working-class culture seems to be increasingly implausible in this context, and has inspired some Australian theorists to challenge the theoretical and sociological legitimacy of such essentialist oppositions (Frow, 1995). Such factors in turn invite a reconsideration of the politics of high culture in relation to feminist concerns. It is often far easier, for example, for women to gain access to small gallery spaces, than to exercise direct influence on the production and dissemination of mass media texts. To rule the analysis of such texts out of bounds because they do not reach a mass audience seems an unfortunate loss for feminist cultural studies, in evading the key question of the possibilities and limitations of this kind of cultural intervention. While the analysis of more experimental forms of women’s art cannot ignore questions of audience and needs to avoid fetishizing the political effects of avant-gardism, it is equally reductive to assume that any such art is simply buying into a pre-existing structure of patriarchal elitism. Thus some of the most interesting recent work in feminist cultural studies has moved beyond the high/ low opposition by examining the interrelations and connections between constructions of femininity across different cultural spaces and discursive fields (Nead, 1992). This collection is thus symptomatic of an increasing feminist interest in analysing popular and high cultural texts in conjunction. Rachel Fensham’s article Transvestophilia and Gynemimesis’, for example, suggestively juxtaposes readings of cross-dressing and drag across a variety of cultural fields, from the avant-garde dance of Pina Bausch to the recent Australian hit movie Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

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Similarly, Suvendrini Perera tracks contemporary Australian representations of female Aboriginality, as encoded in the polyvalent figure of Truganini, across diverse cultural genres and contexts, from rock music to popular history to museum art. Rather than depicting high art as irrevocably opposed to the realm of the popular, the author exposes suggestive parallels and interconnections as well as differences between various Australian texts when viewed from a post-colonial feminist perspective. Other articles in this issue critically address feminism’s own continuing reliance upon many of the traditional values and assumptions underpinning the high/popular culture dichotomy. Thus Abigail Bray’s article ‘The Anorexic Body’ offers a provocative critique of recent feminist discussions of eating disorders, arguing that such appropriations of the anorexic subject as an allegory of oppressed femininity reproduce many of the traditional paternalistic stereotypes of women in positing them as uncritical and irrational consumers of mass culture images. This vision of victimized women passively imbibing toxic media messages about ideal female embodiment should give way, Bray suggests, to a more historically nuanced and less reductive account of modern weight-loss regimens, as practices of female self-formation and self-surveillance shaped by new biomedical discourses of the body. In a related challenge to feminist idées reçues, Lesley Johnson questions those discourses and narratives that have routinely equated women’s freedom with the process of leaving home, whether symbolically or literally. According to Johnson, such discourses merely reiterate and reinforce the conventional—and gendered— association of modernity with mobility, independence and public space, and of the home with tradition, stasis and dependence. Through an analysis of postwar representations of Australian femininity, home ownership and the role of the housewife, Johnson sketches the outline of an alternative feminist sociology of modernity, which would seek to understand the realm of the home as an active and always historical ‘practising of place’. Besides this interdisciplinary eclecticism and a questioning of conventional high/ popular oppositions, a key feature of much Australian feminist cultural studies has been a growing engagement with questions of national identity, postcolonialism and multiculturalism. The increased stress on ‘Australianness’ in popular culture, academic discourse and government legislation in recent years does not simply herald the final flowering of an already given identity, but helps to bring that identity into being through a repertoire of representations that are in turn shaped by perceptions of Australia overseas. As Tim Rowse notes, ‘We become ourselves when recognized as different by the other’ (Rowse, 1985:77). From this perspective, the question of what constitutes Australia is inseparable from a relatively peripheral positioning in the world global and cultural economy. Moreover, in contrast to the United States, whose media representations routinely equate the interests of that nation with ‘the world’ (‘we are the world…’), people in Australia do not perceive themselves as occupying the centre of global culture, and are more likely to seek an internationalist view of overseas cultures and events, both via the media and through travel and tourism. In recent years, official efforts have been made to foster political, economic and cultural links with various nations in the Asian region. And where, not long ago, critics referred to Australia’s ‘cultural cringe’— a sycophantic fawning upon any cultural import as automatically superior to local products—this cultural anxiety has given way to a greater confidence in the intellectual and cultural creativity made possible in a context at once internationally

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oriented and locally founded. Thus, instead of being embarrassed by the limited horizons of Australian culture, Australians are now far more likely to criticize, for example, United States imports, as being excessively parochial and moralistic. Whereas postcolonial theory often addresses the exterior determination of claims to national or ethnic identity and their necessarily complex relationship with the colonizing ideologies they simultaneously contest, multiculturalism, by contrast, signals a concern with heterogeneity and diversity within the confines of the nationstate. In Australia the impact of multiculturalism has not been confined to the realm of identity politics and critical theory. Rather, it has emerged as a key term of government policy and legislation, as a once powerful rhetoric of assimilation has given way to official recognition of the ethnic and cultural diversity of Australia’s numerous migrant populations from both Europe and Asia. The term is not, however, an uncontested one, insofar as some critics perceive the new ideology of multiculturalism as encouraging a tokenistic tolerance of cultural differences rather than helping to rectify structural inequalities between different ethnic groups (Hage, 1994; see also Gunew, 1990). In this context, Ien Ang (1995) has developed a suggestive comparison between multiculturalist ideology and the ‘new’ feminist politics of difference. Increasingly, she argues, mainstream feminism is professing an openness to racial and cultural diversity; like the Australian nation, it no longer subscribes to assimilationist goals but fervently proclaims an ethos of enlightened multiculturalism. For Ang, however, any such vision of diversity-within-community remains a highly questionable one in glossing over systematic inequalities between women of different races, while often subsuming racial difference by reading it as a mere analogue of sexual difference. As a result, white Western women are implicated in ‘a symbolic annihilation of otherness which is all the more pernicious precisely because it occurs in the context of a claimed solidarity with the other’ (Ang, 1995: 61). Instead, Ang argues, mainstream feminism needs to surrender the fantasy that it can provide a ‘home’ for all women, and accept the necessary limits and partiality of its own politics. Ang’s argument carries particular resonances for Australian readers, bringing to mind a widely publicized recent dispute about the possibilities and limits of crosscultural feminist work. The article at the heart of this controversy, ‘Speaking about rape is everyone’s business’ (Bell and Nelson, 1989), took as its topic the incidence of intraracial rape within the Aboriginal community. It provoked an angry response from a number of Aboriginal women, who saw the article as an imperialistic appropriation of Aboriginal social problems by white anthropologist Diane Bell to serve a white radical feminist agenda (Huggins et al., 1991). This dispute, which received extensive coverage in Australian journals, conferences and the media, pointed up the stark incommensurabilities between Aboriginal women who often experience white women as colonizers and oppressors rather than allies, and white radical feminists who are insistent that ‘systemic male violence against women…knows neither class, race nor cultural boundaries’ (Klein, 1991; for an overview of the debate and Bell’s response, see Bell, 1990; Larbalestier, 1990). In the meantime, Aboriginal women are gradually gaining access to public fora such as journals, and as a result are beginning to present their own differing accounts of their histories and identities (Huggins, 1992; Holt, 1993). One might further note that the usual association of multiculturalism with what used to be called ‘New Australians’ has obscured the distinctive positioning and problems of Aboriginal peoples. Similarly, the effects of Australia’s colonialist and potentially genocidal practices are still too traumatically close for postcolonialism to mean much

INTRODUCTION 389

in relation to Aboriginal and Torres Strait islanders peoples, many of whom are still seeking reunification with families from whom they were separated by official agencies until as late as the 1960s. However, moves towards reconciliation between Aboriginal and white Australia have been made in recent years. These include an official apology to Aboriginal people from Prime Minister Paul Keating; ongoing efforts towards greater cross-cultural understanding, prompted in part by the findings of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (1991 to 1994); and most significantly, the Australian High Court’s Mabo decision in 1992, which upheld the claims of traditional ownership of land by Eddie Mabo on behalf of the Meriam people in the Torres Strait, a decision that has paved the way for Aboriginal land claims across the country. In 1995 the distinctive black, red and yellow Aboriginal Land Rights flag was recognized as an official flag of Australia, and while not all Aboriginal groups are happy about the appropriation of this symbol of resistance, it is symptomatic of an official desire to acknowledge indigenous peoples’ interests as part of Australia’s national interests. Questions of postcolonialism and the process of reconciliation form the background for Perera’s analysis of competing representations of Truganini, often depicted as ‘the last Tasmanian’ and hence a tragic symbol of Aboriginal extinction. For Perera, such representations of the female indigene remain complex and indeterminate; while helping to inspire struggles against colonization, they may also serve to ‘objectify, marginalize and entomb, affixing Aboriginal cultures within mausoleums of authenticity and primitivism’. A related argument is taken up by Denise Cuthbert and Michele Grossman in their detailed reading of images of indigenous maternity disseminated in the promotional texts of the Body Shop. The alliance of New Age ideology with Western feminism’s cult of the body has encouraged a pervasive romanticized vision of motherhood as an authentic transcultural experience unifying all women. This motif is both adopted and extended in the Body Shop’s troping of the Third World woman-as-mother, whose body comes to symbolize both a universal experience of maternity and an exoticized symbol of ahistorical otherness. In conclusion, we would like to note that geopolitical questions of positioning were by no means absent from the production of this issue. We would acknowledge genuine problems in the dissemination of ideas and information in a global context. Work first published in the United States, for example, can sometimes take months or even years to reach Australia (the reverse is also true, though a US feminist is unlikely to be chastised for her lack of familiarity with Australian theory). Nevertheless, it also seemed to us that Australian feminism, hailed in one context as the cutting-edge, can in another context be too easily dismissed as passé. For example, Grossman and Cuthbert’s article seemed to us an original and compelling analysis of the Western fascination with the trope of indigenous maternity. We were thus surprised when the general editors of Cultural Studies called for major revisions on the grounds that the Body Shop had already been exhaustively discussed in England and the US. We were even more surprised when we were subsequently directed to a single article on Anita Roddick’s trading and hiring practices published in the Chicago-based magazine In these Times. Left-wing social reportage versus a postcolonial feminist analysis of the semiotics of maternity; we were amazed that what seemed to us such radically different intellectual enterprises, both methodologically and politically, could so easily be translated into instances of sameness. Coincidentally, as this collection was going to press, a postcolonial feminist discussion of the Body Shop appeared in the US journal Social Text. We wonder whether its author was also subject to criticism for her

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intellectual belatedness (we think it unlikely), or whether Australian feminism lends itself more easily to such a perception. We would like, finally, to express our gratitude to various friends and colleagues who have helped in the publication of this issue. Special thanks go to John Hartley for his support of the original feminist seminar series (through Murdoch University’s Centre for Research in Culture and Communication), for his help in facilitating publication of this collection and for his encouragement throughout. We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of those who refereed articles or otherwise helped in production of the issue, including Ien Ang, Moira Gatens, Larry Grossberg, Alison Lewis, Alan Mansfield, Mudrooroo, Della Pollock, Jan Radway and Cathy Waldby. And most importantly, we wish to thank our contributors for the patience, good humour and fortitude through what seemed at times to be an interminable process. Meanwhile, we hope readers of Cultural Studies will enjoy this sampling of feminist works from a Southern periphery.

References Ang, Ien (1995). ‘I’m a feminist but…“Other” women and postnational feminism’, in Caine and Pringle (1995). Barrett, Michele (1988) Women’s Oppression Today, 2nd edn, London: Verso. Bell, Diane (1990) ‘Reply’, Anthropological Forum, 6(2): 158–65. Bell, Diane and Nelson, Topsy Napurrula (1989) ‘Speaking about rape is everyone’s business’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 12(4): 403–16. Caine, Barbara and Pringle, Rosemary (eds) (1995) Transitions: New Australian Feminisms, New York: St Martin’s Press. Craven, Ian (ed.) (1994) Australian Popular Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Diprose, Rosalyn (1994) The Bodies of Women: Ethics, Embodiment and Sexual Difference, London: Routledge. Diprose, Rosalyn and Ferrell, Robyn (eds) (1992) Cartographies: Poststructuralism and the Mapping of Bodies and Spaces, Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Fiske, John, Hodge, Bob and Turner, Graeme (1987) Myths of Oz: Reading Aus tralian Popular Culture, Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Frow, John (1995) Cultural Studies and Cultural Value, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Frow, John and Morris, Meaghan (eds) (1993) Australian Cultural Studies: A Reader, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Gatens, Moira (1983) ‘A critique of the sex/gender distinction’, in J.Allen and P. Patton (eds) Beyond Marxism, Leichardt: Intervention. —— (1991) Feminism and Philosophy: Perspectives on Difference and Equality, Cambridge: Polity Press. Grieve, Norma and Burns, Ailsa (eds) (1995) Australian Women: Contemporary Feminist Thought, Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Grosz, Elizabeth (1989) Sexual Subversions, Sydney: Allen & Unwin. —— (1990) Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction , London: Allen & Unwin. —— (1994) Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism , Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Gunew, Sneja (1990) ‘Denaturalizing cultural nationalisms: multicultural readings of “Australia”’, in Homi K.Bhabha (ed.) Nation and Narration, London: Routledge. Gunew, Sneja and Yeatman, Anna (eds) (1993) Feminism and the Politics of Differ ence, Sydney: Allen & Unwin.

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Hage, Ghassan (1994) ‘Locating multiculturalism’s Other: a critique of practical tolerance’, New Formations, 24:19–34. Holt, Lillian (1993) ‘One Aboriginal woman’s identity: walking in both worlds’, Australian Feminist Studies, 18:175–9. Huggins, Jackie (1992) ‘Towards a biography of Rita Huggins’, Australian Femin ist Studies, 16:71–85 . Huggins, Jackie et al. (1991) ‘Letter to the Editors’, Women’s Studies International Forum 14(5): 506–7. Klein, Renate (1991) ‘Editorial’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 14(5): 505–6. Langton, Marcia (1993) Well I Heard it on the Radio and I Saw it on the Television, Sydney: Australian Film Commission. Larbalestier, Jan (1990) ‘The politics of representation: Australian Aboriginal women and feminism’, Anthropological Forum, 6(2): 143–57. Morris, Meaghan (1988) The Pirate’s Fiancée, London: Virago. Nead, Lynda (1992) The Female Nude, London: Routledge. Rowse, Tim (1985) Arguing the Arts: The Funding of the Arts in Australia, Ringwood: Penguin Australia. Sheridan, Susan (1988) Grafts: Feminist Cultural Criticism, London: Verso. Turner, Graeme (ed.) (1993) Nation, Culture, Text: Australian Cultural and Media Studies, London: Routledge.

ARTICLES

CLAIMING TRUGANINI: AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL NARRATIVES IN THE YEAR OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES* SUVENDRINI PERERA

ABSTRACT

In this article I consider some representations of the figure of the indigene in contemporary Australia, and their implications for a range of issues and debates in cultural theory. In particular, I examine the positioning of the indigenous body within two related discourses that I term ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘hybridity’, or the discourses of happy hyphenation and happy hybridization, respectively. These discourses, I want to suggest, raise specific problems in an Australian historical context, where the effects of scientific racism are being confronted by indigenous peoples in relation to land rights claims and, more generally, the dominant culture’s demands for an ‘authentic’, visible and unproblematic Aboriginality that can be both clearly marked and contained. The figure of Truganini has particular significance in these debates, precisely because her body has figured as the site of geneticist practices and discourses. Simultaneously I locate these representations in the context(s) of the monument year of 1993, contexts that encompass a mesh of interrelated cultural concerns sometimes simplified under the heading of ‘Australian national identity’.

KEYWORDS Aboriginality; hybridity; Truganini; indigene; Australia; gender and imperialism I, Burnam Burnam, being an aristocratic nobleman of ancient Australia do hereby take possession of England on behalf of the Aboriginal crown. In claiming this colonial outpost, we wish no harm to you natives…. At the end of two hundred years, we will make a treaty to validate occupation by peaceful means…. We do not intend to souvenir, pickle and preserve the heads of 2000 of your people, nor to publicly display the skeletal remains of your Royal Highness, as was done to our Queen Truganninni for 50 years. (Extract from The Burnam Burnam Declaration of 26 January 1988) In Australia 1993 marks, in multiple ways, a year of returns. The past, exhumed, incarnate, confronts and unsettles us, resolutely contemporary, inescapably political. It returns, through compulsive interrogations and incantations, as forms and phrases

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(most significantly in ‘terra nullius’, but also in ‘civilization’, ‘heritage’ and ‘history’ itself), as texts (the flag, Manning Clarke’s The History of Australia, the substitution of ‘settlement’ for ‘invasion’ in Queensland primary school source books by order of that state’s Premier);1 also, palpably, the past returns as bodies. A few weeks after the Prime Minister asked if the Australian blood enriching French earth could realize returns in French support for GATT trade agreements, an unknown soldier of the Great War was recovered from a cemetery in France to be reinterred in Canberra at a remarkable ceremony, combining the full military honours of a Field Marshall with an invocation of ‘the God of the Dreamtime…the Great Spirit of this timeless land’. The ceremony can be understood easily enough as a formal reincorporation of the past, an enactment of government policies refiguring Australia’s relations with Europe and reassessing old-time colonial connections. A more complicated reading of the new monument in Canberra, however, might pair the return of the Great War soldier with another, less heralded, return: that of a Palm Island man known as Tambo (originally Wangang or Dianarah), kidnapped in 1885 for Barnum and Bailey’s circus and recently found, embalmed and unburied, in a funeral parlour in Cleveland, Ohio. The Aboriginal body as object of display marks the site of a number of intersecting discourses of colonization—discourses of knowledge, desire, science, value, ‘race’ and commodification—as recognized by Burnam Burnam in the epigraph above; in turn, as he also suggests, to reposition or incorporate that body becomes crucial to any project of renewal or reconciliation. If, unlike the body of the Unknown Soldier, the less anonymous Palm Island body cannot publicly represent political and symbolic capital, its proclaimed return still bears powerful cultural meaning. Within the global and domestic contexts of 1993, the ceremony in Canberra might be read, perhaps, as also functioning at once as surrogate and displacement, yet another attempt to incorporate the body of the indigene within an authorized (new and improved) narrative of nationhood. The reactionary historian Geoffrey Blainey, for one, did not fail to make this connection. He described the Prime Minister’s funeral oration as ‘another veiled attack on the legitimacy and history of the nation that the unknown soldier gave his life to defend. Here was [the Prime Minister’s] preamble to the Mabo legislation’ (1993:2).2

Engenderings The most telling artefact of the colonizing process is the indigenous body as exhibit and commodity, a production still operative and at its logical extreme in the infamous Human Genome Project currently sponsored by the US National Institute of Health (RAFI, 1993:1).3 As Burnam Burnam indicates, it is also the most compelling of the stories of Australian colonization. According to the title of a study by the distinguished historian Bernard Smith (1980), the figure whose name has been familiarized as Truganini is a persistent, unquiet ‘spectre’ in the popular imagination.4 Her official story, piously enshrined for generations as the last sad episode in the history of a doomed people, reveals in its less sanitized versions the significance of the indigenous body as a trophy of colonization: the 16-year-old girl who persuaded her people into state-provided sanctuaries; slow to die as her companions succumbed to their inevitable ends attended by careful government ministrations; coveted in her declining years as the last of her species by the Royal Society and its rivals; secretly exhumed after burial; her remains preserved and displayed as a monument to both scientific racism and successful colonization by the state museum in Tasmania.

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Smith’s term ‘spectre’ encompasses both Truganini’s wider status as an icon of indigeneity as well as, more uneasily, the particular atrocities attached to her story, atrocities effectively redeployed by Burnam Burnam in his Declaration. Marcia Langton has described the operation of ‘Aboriginality…[as] a field of intersubjectivity in that it is remade over and over again in a process of dialogue, of imagination, of representation and interpretation’ (1993:33). Within this field, Truganini is a marker of semiotic complexity; in tellings and retellings by both colonized and colonizers her body is the site of competing narratives about power and powerlessness: agent or object, hostage or traitor, final victim or ultimate survivor? Implicitly or explicitly, these are narratives enmeshed at a number of levels with multiple discourses of sex/gender. Most immediately, they sexualize questions of female agency in individual representations of Truganini (Mudrooroo, 1983; Rae-Ellis, 1976/1981; Ryan, 1986). Preeminently, they are myths of origin—beginnings, sources, foundations: engenderings. Simultaneously, they are narratives gendered within the scheme of European power relations. In colonial discourse the space of the colonial is always already gendered feminine (Kolodny, 1975; Certeau, 1988); this collective symbolic gendering of colonized populations as feminized is reinforced by a range of specific sexual practices and discourses within which the colonized body is constructed.5 At the intersection of these overlapping discourses of gendering, engendering and sexualization is the body of the female indigene, a body, I will suggest, that is directly and indirectly invoked in contemporary debates around the formation of national cultural identities. This article examines a number of texts which position the historical body of the indigene as a means of centring concerns about contemporary Australian identity. I began with one such text, Burnam Burnam’s counter-Bicentenary Declaration, which mobilizes Truganini in its attempt to reorient the history of colonialism in Australia. The significance of this text exceeds its immediate occasion, the official festivities on the anniversary of invasion. The foundational myths persistently recreated in such commemorations and so necessary to the continuing project of empire are mimicked and mocked in Burnam Burnam’s reenactment. Burnam Burnam’s counter-invasion of Dover Beach is in effect an astute staging of various narratives of return that have become key strategies of the decolonizing process; its multiple levels of repetition and parody refer both to the ‘internal’ anxieties of British politics as well as to ‘writings back’ from former outposts of empire. My article originally cited this declaration in another, this time internationally observed, monument year, the Year of Indigenous Peoples, itself the outcome of still another monumental celebration in 1992, the year of the Columbus Quincentenary.6 Through commemorative public erections and ritual observances such markers seal their claim to authority, seeking to close off and insulate the historical moment from interrogation or contestation; simultaneously they exclude other histories and other stories by attempting to fix permanently the meaning of the historical in particular societies (Perera and Pugliese, 1992).7 If 1988 and 1992 attempted to monumentalize the achievement of colonization, 1993, the year dedicated to acknowledging the targets of those exercises, monumentalized both the successes and failures of the colonizing project.8 At its strongest, as a testimony of survival, the Year of Indigenous Peoples itself represented a narrative of return; yet, like the spectre of Truganini, it spoke double. At once monument and counter-monument, the Year of Indigenous Peoples on the one hand empowered its subjects in continuing struggles against colonization; on the other, it functioned once again to objectify, marginalize and

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entomb, affixing Aboriginal cultures within mausoleums of authenticity and primitivism. In this article I consider some representations of the figure of the indigene in contemporary Australia, and their implications for a range of issues and debates in cultural theory. In particular, I examine the positioning of the indigenous body within two related discourses which I term ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘hybridity’, or the discourses of happy hyphenation and happy hybridization, respectively; these discourses, I want to suggest, raise specific problems in an Australian historical context, where the effects of scientific racism are being confronted by indigenous peoples in relation to land rights claims and, more generally, the dominant culture’s demands for an ‘authentic’, visible and unproblematic Aboriginality that can be both clearly marked and contained. The figure of Truganini has particular significance in these debates precisely because her body has figured as the site of geneticist practices and discourses. Simultaneously I locate these representations in the context(s) of the monument year of 1993, contexts that encompass a mesh of interrelated cultural concerns that are sometimes simplified under the heading ‘national identity’: the aftermath of the Mabo judgement (see Note 1); the Labour government’s loud official endorsement of Republicanism, which has revived a reassessment of Australia’s relations with both Britain and an amorphously conceptualized ‘Asia’, as well as promoting domestic initiatives of reconciliation with those dispossessed by colonization; a related collective reconfiguration in Australia of ‘Asia’ as a horizon of desire; and finally, renewed speculation about multiculturalism as a factor in these developments. These are the contexts, I would argue, that make pivotal the question of the indigenous, as it was publicly posed and re-posed in the monument year of 1993. Teresa de Lauretis has proposed that ‘feminist theory came into its own, or became possible as such…in a postcolonial mode’. She elaborates: By this I mean it came into its own with the understanding of the interrelatedness of discourses and social practices, and of the multiplicity of positionalities concurrently available in the social field seen as a field of forces: not a single system of power. (1990:131) My article considers the ways in which the figure of Truganini and her surrogates signify in the particular force field I have outlined. In doing so I hope not to reinscribe Truganini as a historical figure to be restored or spoken for, nor to uncover a set of truths about indigeneity. Rather, I want to consider the ways in which such figures are mobilized in present-day cultural debates as a way of negotiating questions about ‘Australia’, ‘Aboriginality’, ‘race’, ‘reconciliation’, ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘national identity’. My project may be seen as in turn enlisting the figure of Truganini, or of the indigenous, to its own purposes, both known and unknown. I would not wish to forestall such a critique except by saying that my study is less ‘about’ Truganini than it is ‘about’ a range of mobilizations of that figure and its surrogates and substitutes. In its inconsistencies and discontinuities the article marks my own multiple, uneven investments—as a non-white, non-Aboriginal, non-mainstream feminist in the Australian academy—in the engagement of cultural theory/ies with the agendas of Australian anti-racism.

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‘Truganini’ and the cultural politics of 1993 Early in 1993 the Australian rock group Midnight Oil released a new album, Earth and Sun and Moon. Included among the tracks dealing with the band’s customary themes of environmentalism, anti-racism and celebrations of the Australian landscape was ‘Truganini’ (written by Rob Hirst and Jim Moginie), a song of rural recession and despair. Sleeve notes identified Truganini as ‘the last Tasmanian’, a description not given anywhere in the lyrics themselves. A spokesperson for Tasmanian Aboriginal groups objected to the notes, protesting Midnight Oil’s participation in the myth of Tasmanian extinction—an issue that has serious implications, in particular for ongoing Aboriginal land claims in Tasmania. The band’s response was dismissive; those who objected to Midnight Oil’s characterization, they suggested, had the wrong priorities: the enemy was not Midnight Oil but out there. Citing their substantial contribution over the years to land rights and other Aboriginal causes, the band rejected the objections as a misdirection of protesters’ energies. The controversy around ‘Truganini’ offers a small but significant instance of the playing out of current critical disputes about representations and their regulation. Midnight Oil’s suggestion that the protesters’ energies were misguided participates in a broader climate of impatience, a sense of marginal groups in general having ‘gone too far’ over issues of representation. Intoxicated by their new power to gain attention, an extreme version of the argument goes, such groups are turning against even their own best friends in an excess of political zeal. The band’s response confined the discussion to the ground of intentionality, of good or bad motives based on the evidence of their previous commitment to a progressive agenda. To situate the argument in this way, within the realm of individual intentions and experience, of course, is to leave unexamined wider questions of reception and the complex play of meanings within a culture. Explanations relying solely on intention to determine a text’s meaning assume the free play of representations in a field unmarked by historical forces or the asymmetrical power relations within which meanings are contested and constructed. By using the most popularly available gloss for the name Truganini, the notes to the Midnight Oil album reproduce a long-established liberal narrative that is at once wellintentioned and destructive. Terry Goldie writes in Fear and Temptation, his study of representations of the indigene in Canadian, Australian and New Zealand literature: The rejection of the possibility of live Tasmanian indigenes would be less surprising if it were the sentiment of only overtly anti-Aboriginal factions. That it is not suggests the importance of the sign of the dead Tasmanian, particularly in Truganini, ‘last of the Tasmanians.’ As symbol of both white guilt and of the Aborigine as figure of the past, not present, she has incredible power. She resonates as the individual sign of Doomsday…. Even while still alive Truganini asserts her role as antecedent. (Goldie, 1989:155) To claim Truganini as antecedent is to perform the double manoeuvre of placing the figure of the indigene firmly in the past while also mobilizing that figure as foundational in the formation of new national narratives. Such a gesture can be traced in the lyrics of the Midnight Oil song with its enlistment of ‘Truganini’ in its support for Australian republicanism; however, the Midnight Oil album is also an instance of the competing and contradictory meanings to which the sign of Truganini can be

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recruited. Where Goldie argues that the invocation of the Tasmanian Aboriginal is always a movement of closure, where ‘the unchanging semiotic field of the indigene is no longer a problem, because the dead cannot be expected to change’ (p. 155) and that ‘the image of the indigene…[i]n the context of Tasmania…means prehistoric and dead’ (p. 156), I want to propose that this moment of closure is also, at least potentially, a moment of reopening. While, in their combination of republican and nationalist sentiments with the rhetoric of Aboriginal oppression, Midnight Oil’s lyrics bear more than a passing resemblance to the national agenda as outlined in speeches from Canberra, Earth and Sun and Moon in its various productions—the use of colour and graphics on its record and CD material, the outback settings of its video, as well as in its lyrics—directly and indirectly references Aboriginal cultures as both source and horizon for its particular brand of conservationist politics. What I want to point to here is not an appropriation of Aboriginality by Midnight Oil, but the centrality assigned to the space of the Aboriginal in Midnight Oil’s self-representation—a space that is simultaneously closed and unstable. In his essay ‘What is this “Black” in Black Popular Culture?’ Stuart Hall (1992) has identified ‘two continuous grand counternarratives…either total victory or total incorporation which almost never happens in cultural politics, but with which cultural critics always put themselves to bed’ (p. 24). Shuttling between these mutually exclusive counternarratives, the critic’s position is one of interminably adjudicating good and bad representations, a position that privileges the point of enunciation but fails to take into account the process of contestation around the reception of representations. In the case of Earth and Sun and Moon, the more interesting critical work may be in examining the practice of cultural politics it brings into operation. The album’s generation of an exchange about indigenous resistance suggests that, far from being ‘prehistoric and dead’, the sign of the Tasmanian Aboriginal is both current and very much alive. Recontextualized within a popular culture that is no more the exclusive preserve of colonizers’ representations, the sign of Truganini can be challenged and even refigured through an interventionist cultural politics. The overlap or intersection between Hall’s grand counternarratives coincides with a space of overlap and confrontation between representations by colonizers and colonized, indigene and settler/migrant. This is the space where narratives of incorporation may be resisted or subverted in their reception and re-representation, or where a dynamic of struggle is continually enacted between conflicting discourses competing for the same sign. This volatile space of exchange and contestation, however, frequently remains unacknowledged in existing studies which examine Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal texts (the latter are, of course, far more numerous) in isolation from one another. This form of textual segregation might spring from unimpeachable motives, from non-Aboriginal writers’ anxieties about appropriating or ‘speaking for’ the other, or from a sense of responsibility for scrutinizing their own histories first. To cite Goldie’s Introduction, his main interest, he explains, is ‘not in the indigenes but in the image of the indigenes, a white image’ (p. 11). The ‘white image’ of the indigenes is indisputably in need of critical reexamination, but, isolated from its operation among white and non-white recipients, any scrutiny of the image remains inescapably one-sided. What the self-imposed limits of such studies necessarily exclude are the counter-images and counter-discourses generated by dominant constructions, which function in an ongoing, mutually constitutive relation with them. In 1993, the Midnight Oil album was not the only cultural artefact to engage such questions about the representations of the indigene; another instance is the highly

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public controversy generated around Germaine Greer’s critique of David Malouf’s Booker prize nomination Remembering Babylon. (Remembering Babylon has since been awarded the world’s richest literary prize, the Dublin Prize, in 1994). Although Remembering Babylon was generally respectfully received on publication, it might be argued that it was Greer’s attack, titled ‘Malouf’s objectionable whitewash’, that galvanized critical enthusiasm for the novel in Australia. The figure of Greer, publicly positioned as unrepentant expatriate as well as feminist, focused nationalist and masculinist anxieties in the general rush to defend Remembering Babylon, as an undeserving native daughter Greer was represented as both envious of Malouf’s ‘major’ status and soured by her failure to be honoured in her own land (Craven, 1993). My interest here is in how these factors served to deflect a particular critique of Remembering Babylon. The focus on Greer acted to make invisible her questioning of Malouf’s representation of the figure of the indigene. In the context of the last-gasp resistance to native title legislation, denunciations of ‘PC’ and ‘the guilt industry’ were easily used to exempt Malouf’s text from deeper public examination.9 The reception of Remembering Babylon, I would argue, cannot be separated from the contexts of its appearance, not only in the International Year of Indigenous Peoples, and in the year of the first significant attempt to recognize the invalidity of the doctrine of terra nullius, but also as a contribution to current explorations of ‘the hybrid’ as a viable identity for post-Dominion settler societies such as Australia and Canada. Malouf’s text participates in these debates through its central story of a white boy involuntarily ‘gone native’ (and ‘simple’) after being rescued from a shipwreck by Aboriginals; and through its troping of colonized land as the metaphorical ground upon which the alternatives of redemption/damnation and Jerusalem/Babylon suggested in the title are enacted by the various colonists in the novel. The spiritualization of the contest over naming the country (is it Babylon? is it Jerusalem?) erases other forms of contestation over land, inscribing them within a providentialist narrative of colonization, a narrative that reemerged also in the Columbus Quincentenary celebrations of 1992 (Perera and Pugliese, 1992). Such a narrative easily absorbs the discourse of happy hybridization as a desirable goal for settler societies. In the Australian context the hybrid is a term heavily implicated in geneticist practices and discourses of racial purity, genocide and assimilation. Such practices and discourses have continuing meaning in the story of Truganini and are ongoing sites of struggle for indigenous activists, as the response to the Midnight Oil album demonstrated.10 Within an Australian ‘postcolonial theory’ that tends to draw uncritically on US and British-based models, however, these implications are often overlooked, so that the discourse of hybridity tends to refer more frequently to the new identities assumed by settler/migrant populations in the colonized country rather than to the effects of earlier discourses of hybridity on indigenous peoples. As I have suggested elsewhere (Perera, 1994), Remembering Babylon is a prime instance of this act of substitution, eliding the status of the indigenous body, as it focuses on the culturally hybridized white body as the key artefact of colonization. If the discourse of hybridity is one means by which the Aboriginal body can be reinscribed as the fetishized object of a new-look settler romance, a paired strategy for containing and naturalizing the indigenous body is through common-sense understandings of ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘difference’, the dubious phenomenon which Hall has described as ‘the difference that may not make a difference, which marks the ambiguous appearance of ethnicity at the heart of the global postmodern’ (1992:23).

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Some of the problems attached to this discourse are expressed in a passage of Stephen Muecke’s Textual Spaces. Discussing the success of the rock band Yothu Yindi, Muecke writes: In fact it’s still very hard for Aboriginal groups to get on mainstream TV, just as it’s very hard to find an Aboriginal model or air stewardess, and you don’t find tourist brochures selling tropical paradises with the charms of the local women. As ‘suss’ as they are, these stereotypes are still off-limits for Aboriginal people. The marketing manager says the product just won’t sell, so we continue only to hear stories about Aborigines based on primitivism, repression/ liberation, or ghetto failure. So, while some sympathetic white kids sing illconceived songs about their guilt, Yothu Yindi has come along with a quite shockingly assertive statement about really being quite normal and okay. (Muecke, 1992:182) As a comment on the visibility/invisibility of bodies, the need to mark bodies unambiguously as Aboriginal within a regularizing promise of the normal, the passage suggests ways in which understandings of Aboriginality are still tied to essentialist notions of identifiable biological racial difference. As a variation on the discourse of happy hyphenation, this desire is also for a clearly marked (female) Aboriginal body that will take its place among the comfortable pluralist panoply of multicultural Australia.11 The ‘suss…stereotypes’ referenced by Muecke relate to the models of Aboriginality produced by the consumerization of multiculturalism, an outcome of the global situation described by Hall, but also of local—national and regional—developments. Within this climate, the naturalization of the indigene as an item of the ethnic smorgasbord—particularly as it is spread out for the tourist trade, which Muecke singles out—is perhaps a normalizing gesture that cannot be long in coming. In settler societies, ‘the ethnic’ has emerged as a sign that is less forbidding than that of the indigene; Mudrooroo (1990) has referred to the political implications of constructing indigenous populations as the first in a long line of diverse ethnicities, a naturalizing of the process of nation-making that subsumes the earliest inhabitants within ‘a country of immigrants’.12 A significant feature of the pluralist discourse referenced by Muecke is its barely concealed desire for the female Aboriginal body as a national symbol (‘it’s hard to find an Aboriginal model or air stewardess, and you don’t find tourist brochures selling tropical paradises with the charms of the local women’). Signalled here is a return to the desire for a narrative of authenticated—and authenticating—nationhood or national essence posited on the body of the female indigene. In the following section I examine the implications of the construction of this national narrative through two familiar historical representations of Truganini.

Claiming Truganini From her he will make a historical body—a blazon—of his labours and phantasms. Michel de Certeau, ‘America’

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At the threshold of foundational, self-authorizing narratives of empire is the figure of the female indigene. Embodied in her are the permeable boundaries of the space-to-becolonized, the illusion of an unmanned vacancy of terra nullius; simultaneously, as custodian and bearer of language, she marks the place of the cultural. In this she is powerful as well as powerless, agent as well as object. Acting at once as ground and guide, such women mediate the colonizer’s entry into possession. As mediator or intermediary—one who both enables and qualifies—these figures are two-faced signifiers in the annals of (de)colonization, available to be read as both heroine and hostage, betrayer and betrayed. Although the specificities of colonial discourse mark variations of time and place, these foundational narratives occur in a range of locations. Such ambiguities attach from the beginning to the story of Malintzin Tenepal, the ‘Dona Marina’ of Bernal Diaz’s foundational sixteenth-century account of Cortes’ campaign in Mexico, The Conquest of New Spain. Known by her contemporaries as La Malinche (Malinche, the local people’s name for Cortes), her indigenous name is elided somewhere between the Christianizing elevation to ‘Dona Marina’ and a (contemptuous?) incorporation into the title of her conqueror/keeper. In an ambiguous authorizing gesture that seemingly honours but simultaneously tarnishes her, Diaz positions ‘Dona Marina’s story at the outset of his narrative, marking her as the guarantor of Spanish victory: This [Cortes’ acquisition of La Malinche] was the great beginning of our conquests, and thus, praise be to God, all things prospered with us. I have made a point of telling the story, because without Dona Marina we could not have understood the language of New Spain and Mexico. (Diaz, 1963:87) ‘La Lengua’ (the tongue) was the objectifying title by which Spanish historians signified Malintzin’s role as Cortes’ translator (Alarcon, 1994:111). Diaz assigns La Lengua a power greater than that of Cortes’ army: Spanish conquest is at once displaced (‘without Dona Maria…’) and vindicated (‘thus…all things prospered with us’) by Malintzin’s incorporation into the project. Providential sanction, however, cannot quite cover over sexual transgression. The Latin roots of ‘translator’ and ‘traitor’ are closely related: in the masculinist narratives of Mexican nationalism, La Malinche is figured as the dishonoured mother, whose sons can neither forgive her seduction by the colonizer nor escape self-hatred for her shameful legacy (Franco, 1989:131; Alarcon, 1994:110–31). If Malintzin, unambiguously the mistress of Cortes, represents the ‘bad’ indigenous woman, whose children suffer the consequences of her sexual treachery, a chaste Northern counterpart is the Algonquin ‘Princess’ Pocahontas, later transformed by conversion and marriage into an English gentlewoman, Lady Rebecca Rolfe. In the journals of the colonist John Smith a 9-year-old Pocahontas is credited with throwing herself upon his body in order to save him from her father’s sentence of execution. Predictably reworked in the colonial imagination, as Peter Hulme has pointed out, the story of Pocahontas can be explained only by sexualizing her actions as a ‘spontaneous gesture of instant love’ (1989:151). Incorporated in the fantasies of the twentieth-century United States—most recently in the Disney animation where an adult Pocahontas is coupled with a John Smith character speaking in the dubbed voice of Mel Gibson—Pocahontas figures as the heroine of assimilation and benign multiculturalism alike, her story a conciliatory ‘legend…about love and marriage between an ethnic woman and a white man’ (Dearborn, 1986:97). Reimagined as ‘an

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ethnic woman’ in a country of immigrants, Pocahontas’ indigenous status is comfortably erased. An Australian text which bears a foundational status comparable to Diaz’s and Smith’s writings is Benjamin Duterrau’s much reproduced 1840 painting The Conciliation. In the mid-1830s Duterrau had planned a major ‘National Picture’ centred on the activities of the state sanctioned ‘Conciliator’ and missionary George Augustus Robinson in Tasmania (Thomas, 1988:76). Even if it is not the ‘National Picture’ originally envisioned by Duterrau, The Conciliation can be read as an authorizing and foundational text of Australian colonization, representing a formal meeting between the indigenous Tasmanians who persisted in warring against the invaders, and Robinson, who negotiated with them to accept his protection and follow him to a new homeland. The painting authorizes Australian colonization—by representing a ‘voluntary’ capitulation on the part of the indigenes—and/or marks one of its foundational moments, the formalization of an agreement between two powers. As such the painting records a moment of treaty, of ‘conciliation’ on either side. (Not insignificantly, terms like ‘treaty’ and ‘reconciliation’ have re-emerged as keywords in national Aboriginal policy in the 1990s.) A central figure in accounts of Robinson’s mission is his Bruny Island interpreter and guide, the ‘Antipodean Pocahontas’ (Pybus, 1991/1992: 170) ‘Trugernanner’, later familiarized in the history books as ‘Truganini’. In representations by both colonizers and colonized Trugernanner usually figures as the enabler of Robinson’s project; as in the cases of Malintzin and Pocahontas this enabling is always represented in gendered terms, both in the sexualized function of whore/wife or in the cultural and linguistic treachery of ‘La Lengua’. In Mudrooroo’s Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World (1983), for example, the character Trugernana functions as both interpreter and good wife (though not sexual partner) to Robinson, feeding and cooking for him and nursing his wounds, actions that ensure his survival in the bush. In assigning the crucial role in Robinson’s success to Truganini, such accounts, like the American models above, suggest the enabling of colonizing fictions by the central positioning of the female indigene. As Michel de Certeau has written of the figure ‘America’: ‘From her he [the colonizer] will make a historical body—a blazon—of his labours and phantasms’ (1988: xxv). The importance of fixing historically—of bodying forth—this phantasmic indigenous body is demonstrated by the repeated attempts to place the Truganini figure in Duterrau’s painting. Over the years a number of different female characters in the painting have been identified as Truganini in order to validate varying versions of her role in the moment of conciliation/capitulation. Vivian Rae-Ellis’s sensationalist study, Trucanini: Queen or Traitor ? (1976/1981), for example, hinges on differentiating her ‘Trucanini’ from the figure identified by earlier scholars. Where previous accounts had focused on the female figure standing solidly beside Robinson, pointing towards him in a gesture of transferring authority, Rae-Ellis herself identified ‘Trucanini’ as a far more active and mobile figure in the text, a figure straddling the space between Robinson and the group around him, her leg and arm outstretched in the act of drawing her people towards Robinson, her stance echoing that of the spearbearing warrior behind her. Such a representation is in keeping with Rae-Ellis’ main argument. As the betrayer of her people this Truganini figure must be the focus of the painting, with the rest of the action composed in relation to her. A more recent reading of the painting by Lyndall Ryan, however, makes explicit the ideological meanings of Rae-Ellis’ identification. In Ryan’s reading Truganini

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appears in the painting as a barely visible head behind Robinson’s right shoulder. She is hiding behind the bank…with her husband Wooradi…. These Aborigines [who accompanied Robinson] felt very frightened of the Big River people…. This is… a moment of high drama and uncertainty…. Truganini and Wooradi are frightened that these Aboriginal people here with the spears might suddenly start throwing them. They won’t be throwing them at Robinson, they’ll be throwing them at…Wooraddi and so on. I think it is interesting that as this painting lost political significance…the individual Aboriginal people were forgotten in the painting, and that as Truganini gained greater significance as the last of the full-blooded Aborigines she began to be blamed for everything that happened to them.…Blaming it on a single person being responsible…for their own demise…means that white people don’t have to take any political responsibility for what happened. How convenient to blame an Aboriginal person for the demise of a whole people. And how wonderful to have visual evidence of Truganini in action, actually doing it. (Ryan, 1991) Ryan’s reading destabilizes the foundational status of The Conciliation, detailing the situational and contingent ways in which meanings are produced, and revealing the acts of public forgetting upon which the authority of the text is grounded. In rehistoricizing Duterrau’s text, Ryan takes account of local differences between the indigenous figures in the painting: they are no longer homogenized as ‘Aboriginals’ in a relation of simple opposition/submission to the white man, Robinson. Instead, the tensions Ryan points to, between the restless Big River peoples and Robinson’s nervous supporters, inscribe opposition at the centre of The Conciliation. The spearbearing warrior and the active female figure are no longer Robinson’s eager helpers but images of menace, threatening the fragile treaty with the invader. The posture of the leading Big River woman is rewritten to signify dissent and defiance rather than ‘Truganini in action, actually doing it’, i.e. leading ‘her people’ into submission and destruction. Ryan’s reading displaces Truganini from the centre of the text, refocusing attention on the political process it documents. Similarly, in Steve Thomas’ 1993 film Black Man’s Houses, the historian Henry Reynolds proposes that The Conciliation records a contract guaranteeing a separate homeland to the Big River and other local peoples at Wybalenna, a contract that their descendants are now seeking to implement. No longer posited upon the body of Truganini in an act of visible surrender to Robinson, the painting fragments into a series of separate and contradictory negotiations, negotiations that foreground the troubled nature of colonial authority, negotiations that may be continued or reopened in the present in particular struggles by local Aboriginal groups. Simultaneously, the authorizing body of the colonized woman literally disappears, to be replaced by a number of separate bodies, irreducible to a single unified meaning either of resistance or submission. The representations by Ryan and Thomas suggest that dismantling Truganini is necessary to the political agenda of Tasmanian Aboriginal groups in their current land rights and social justice claims. Simultaneously, Ian Anderson has argued in a fine pictorial essay ‘Reclaiming Tru-ger-nan-ner Decolonising the Symbol’, that her figure represents a way station rather than a full stop to narratives of Aboriginal identity: ‘the spectre of Truganini’ identified by Bernard Smith is displaced by a reclaimed Tru-ger-

Figure 1. The Conciliation, Benjamin Duterrau, 1840. Oil on canvas 121×170.5. Reproduced by permission of the Tasmanian Musuem and Art Gallery, Hobart.

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nan-ner. To reclaim Tru-ger-nan-ner, for Anderson, is not to restore her as a historical figure but to rehistoricize, a process that involves rewriting his own autobiographical understanding of her meaning(s) in exchange with the public cultural meanings that are attributed to her. What this process yields is not a unitary significance that can be incorporated into a project of national reconciliation, for example, such as that put forward in the popular 1978 film The Last Tasmanian. Participating in the optimism of the Labour reforms of the early 1970s, The Last Tasman ian focused on the recovery of Truganini’s body from the vaults of the Tasmanian museum in Hobart as a new beginning for relations between colonizers and colonized, an infamous episode of history also laid to rest as her ashes disperse into the ocean. Anderson’s essay teaches us to be sceptical of such teleological narratives. If 1976, the centenary of her death, the year of her burial in the channel between her birthplace on Bruny Island and her prison/exhibition site on mainland Tasmania, functioned as a monument to an infamous story of the colonial era, it also functioned to place that story firmly in the past. Anderson’s essay suggests that recuperating the body of Truganini cannot be taken as a movement of closure in the continuing process of ‘Reclaiming Tru-ger-nan-ner’; her foundational authority also needs to be dispelled and disturbed in response to the politics of the monument and its attendant discourses of national identity, in 1993 and after.

Postscript Joseph Pugliese has reminded me that my narrative of The Conciliation must not exclude its location in the present, nor those unauthorized histories marked as belonging to the footnotes of academic research. One afternoon early in January 1994, then, I visited the painting in the Tasmanian Museum in Hobart. The Conciliation and Duterrau’s other paintings of the Robinson expedition are housed on the second floor with an assortment of other colonial artefacts. It is a medium-sized gallery, the only one in the museum with its own security guard; The Conciliation is under glass, the only painting in the room to be so protected. My question to the security officer about the reasons for this precaution elicited a rather curious response in the negative: ‘It isn’t,’ she assured me, ‘because it was attacked by an Aborigine with a knife.’ She went on to tell me how old paintings needed to be carefully preserved from dust and sunlight. There was no explanation of why other, equally old, paintings in the room didn’t merit similar care; nor did I ask. Still, my question must have caused discomfort, because, about ten minutes later, after she had checked whether there was anyone in the museum who could tell me more (there wasn’t), my companion and I were asked to leave. It was still two hours or more to closing time, but the guard herself was going off duty now. The room couldn’t be left without a guard: the museum was short-staffed. The request was eminently justifiable and couched in the language of regretful reasonableness: ‘I’ll have to ask you to leave.’ Is this (only) a story about scandalously low levels of staffing at the Tasmanian Museum? It seems to me a story compounded by the inadequacies of terms like ‘black’, ‘white’, ‘non-white’ and especially ‘race’ in the contexts of the misrecognition or visibility/invisibility of Aboriginal bodies I have discussed above. Is it also a gendered story about a white woman guard alone in a museum room with a black/non-white woman and man? Remember that already, in the first sentence of the exchange, a knife was mentioned. Is it a story about institutions versus ‘difficult’ clients? About the opposition among ‘locals’ to ‘foreigners’/‘tourists’? Above all, the story suggests to me

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the continuing importance attached to The Conciliation by its official custodians; the materiality of its continuing status as a foundational text of Australian nationhood. I will end with the Tasmanian Museum, the home of The Conciliation and, for seventy-six years, the holding place of Trugernanner’s remains.13 In Community of Thieves Cassandra Pybus has written about her childhood as the descendant of a proud settler family in Tasmania: One of the most persistent memories of my Tasmanian childhood was Truganini’s skeleton on display in the Hobart museum. Of course I could not have seen it, because it was taken away the year I was born. [The remains were taken off display and stored in the museum vaults from 1947 to 1976.] (1991/1992:176–7) Pybus pairs this impossible memory with that of one of her contemporaries who ‘confused Truganini’s fabled skeleton with the Egyptian mummy on show under the stairs’ (1992:179). In both instances the children remember not the visible but the underlying truth of the Tasmanian Museum as marking a triumph of colonization. Monument and mausoleum as well as museum, this is a site symbolically and historically grounded upon the body of Truganini. What continues to underwrite the museum’s meaning is the presence/absence of ‘Truganini’: the presence/absence of Trugernanner’s ‘fabled skeleton’ as well as Truganini’s presence/absence at the centre of The Conciliation. As national narrative, the museum functions continually to repeat and disown the same story; both its denial and its insistence invoke a stable history familiar to us all. I am reminded by this two-faced gesture of one last representation of Aboriginal identity in 1993, the film adaptation of Archie Weller’s Blackfellas. A nagging assertion, repeated over and over in Blackfellas, is ‘yesterday’s history’, a refrain that builds up grating emotional intensity as character echoes character dismissively, naively, ironically, in the refusal to connect today and yesterday, ‘history’ and contemporaneity. The ‘cure’ for history, Christina Crosby has written, is history, a Derridean pharmakon, ‘both poison and remedy’ (1991:155). It is in this light that I interpret the necessity of ‘reclaiming Tru-ger-nan-ner’ in our refusals of her foundational authority: an act that, unlike the different kinds of ‘claiming’ I have discussed above, asserts the currency of other and more histories, defying enlistment in narratives of inclusion or nationhood.

Notes *This article was close to completion when I heard Ian Anderson’s paper ‘Reclaiming Tru-ger-nan-ner’ at the Speaking Positions Conference at the Victoria University of Technology in December 1993. The pairing of our titles is therefore unintended, but suggests one of the ways in which the studies may be read in an exchange with one another. My thanks and appreciation to the following: Ian Anderson for his perceptive comments; Lyndall Ryan and Steve Thomas for permission to quote from an interview recorded for Black Man’s Houses; Philippa Sawyer for showing me the text of Burnam Burnam’s Declaration; Joseph Pugliese for insisting on the need for a postscript. Part of my discussion of Remembering Babylon appeared in different form in Meridian (1994).

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1 For the benefit of non-Australian readers: I am alluding here to a series of public controversies in Australia during 1993, most of them triggered by a High Court decision, popularly known as the Mabo judgement, which in 1992 recognized for the first time the existence of indigenous land title prior to white invasion in 1788, and in certain cases held that title not to have been automatically invalidated by the principle of terra nullius (unowned land) imposed by the colonizers. The Mabo decision prompted lengthy negotiations in parliament throughout 1993 to enact legislation recognizing native land title in certain (very rigidly defined) circumstances. In response to these moves, conservative historians disputed whether terms such as ‘civilization’ or ‘history’ could be used to describe the Aboriginal past (see Cowlishaw, 1993), while a dispute also erupted over the terminology used in certain school textbooks to describe the invasion of 1788. Simultaneously, government initiatives toward achieving a truly ‘post-colonial’ Australia included the push for a republic (i.e. one no longer based on the sovereignty of a British monarch) and a new national flag (no longer featuring the Union Jack). The allusion to Manning Clarke’s History of Australia refers to debate generated by an attack on the credibility of Australia’s most canonical Labour historian. 2 On the Mabo legislation, see note 1. See also the continuing controversy over the absence of explicit Christian references in the burial service of the Unknown Soldier in Daley, 1994. For an account of the significance of the ceremony for a Republican Australia see Ingliss, 1994. 3 The Human Genome Project collects DNA samples from target indigenous peoples (designated as ‘Isolates of Historic Interest’ or ISI) with the aim of preserving and patenting their genetic material. 4 See Anderson (1993) for a discussion of the various spellings of her name and their cultural significance. I have used ‘Truganini’ except when quoting or referring to characters in other representations. 5 In his discussion of American colonization Louis Montrose usefully summarizes these as ‘the projection into the New World of European representations of gender’; the projection of ‘European sexual conduct, a distinct but equally cul tural phenomenon [;] and [finally] the articulation of those representations with new projects of economic exploitation and of geopolitical domination’ (1991: 2). 6 Monumental history, a term developed by Nietzsche, refers to a nation’s memorializations of individual acts of adventure and conquest. This type of history constructs a monument of seeming closure which annuls the complex contestatory force active in any historical field. In this sense, monument history is a type of historicidal historiography: a type of institutionalized history that so positions particular elements of an historical culture as to make them systematically self-eliminating. Monument history is what generates instances of collective amnesia, as it literally attempts to finish off history by reducing it to the level of one more disposable calendar event: 1492 or 1788. (Perera and Pugliese, 1992) 7 I insert here a detailed note that Ian Anderson has sent me on this passage: ‘1876 functions as a monumental year which intersects with this narrative. There is (I

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think) something to be said by placing 1876 in association with its shadow, 1976.’ Anderson outlines a sequence of dates from Tru-ger-nan-ner’s burial in 1876, the year when indigenous peoples could be declared officially extinct in Tasmania, marking the end of one phase of colonization. In 1877/1878 Tru-ger-nan-ner’s body was exhumed by the Royal Society and in about 1904 the remains officially went on show in the Tasmanian Museum in Hobart. In the 1970s a resurgence of Aboriginal activism combined with agitation for the return of Truger-nan-ner’s remains. Anderson refers to the activists ‘Mansell and Langford addressing a stunned audience of anthropologists in Hobart’. In 1976 the remains were ceremonially cremated with participation by Victorian Kooris of Tasmanian ancestry. Anderson (personal communication) asks: ‘did [1976] then function as an event which buried the idea of a triumphant colonialism, anticipating a postcolonial era, or did it signal the end of such questions [about Truger-nan-ner’s infamous treatment, for instance] closing off and insulating the colonial era from interrogation?’ See the final section of this essay for a further discussion of this question. 8 On the 1988 celebrations as monumental history, see Davison, 1988. 9 For example, News that Germaine Greer hates this book has doubled my enthusiasm for it. Unlike Greer, Malouf has not made a career out of feeding off yuppie guiltanxieties, so he can allow himself to see more than guilty cliches in the story of early European civilisation in Australia. (Salusinszky, 1993) 10 On the discourse of ‘hybrids’ in Australia in the wake of the presumed demise of ‘pure-blood’ indigenes such as Truganini, see Anderson, 1993/1994. Anderson discusses the generation of a whole new system, ‘assimilation colonialism’, by the Australian state for managing ‘hybrids’, forever doomed, by the terms of this discourse, to remain ‘black-bit white-bit people’ (p. 11). On the problems more generally involved in contemporary cultural theory’s use of hybridity, see Young (1995:27–8): Hybridity…shows the connections between the racial categories of the past and contemporary cultural discourse: it may be used in different ways, given different inflections and apparently discrete references, but it always reiterates and reinforces the dynamics of a conflictual economy whose tensions and divisions it reenacts in its own antithetical structure…. Today it is common to claim that…we have moved from biologism and scientism to the safety of culturalism…but that shift has not been so absolute…. The interval that we assert between ourselves and the past may be much less than we assume. 11 I borrow the term ‘happy hyphenation’ from Meaghan Morris’s lecture ‘White Panic…’ (1991) where it was, however, used in a somewhat different context. 12 On Australia’s official construction as a ‘nation of immigrants’, see also Pugliese, 1995.

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13 After the secret exhumation by the Royal Society in 1877 her body was housed in the society’s collection before being transferred to the museum in 1900 (Pybus, 1992:176).

References BOOKS AND ARTICLES Alarcon, Norma (1994) ‘Traddutora, traditora: a paradigmatic figure of Chicana feminism’, in Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (eds) Scattered Hegemonies, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 110–33. Anderson, Ian (1993/1994) ‘Reclaiming Tru-ger-nan-ner Decolonising the symbol’, in Art Monthly , 66 : 10–14. Blainey, Geoffrey (1993) ‘In God he trusted’, in The Age, 20 November . Burnam Burnam (1988) The Burnam Burnam Declaration of 26th January 1988 . Certeau, Michel de (1988) The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley, New York: Columbia University Press. Cowlishaw, Gillian (1993) ‘Mabo breeds a sinister new form of racism’, in The Age, 31 July . Craven, Peter (1993) ‘An ad for Philistinism’, in The Australian, 10 November . Crosby, Christina (1991) The Ends of History, New York: Routledge. Daley, Paul (1994) ‘Unknown soldier row erupts’, in The Age, 14 February . Davison, Graeme (1988) ‘The use and abuse of Australian history’, in Susan Janson and Stuart MacIntyre (eds) Making the Bicentenary . Special issue of Australian Historical Studies , 23(91): 54–6. Dearborn, Mary (1986) Pocahontas’s Daughters: Gender and Ethnicity in Ameri can Culture, New York: Oxford University Press. Diaz, Bernal (1963) The Conquest of New Spain, trans. J.M.Cohen, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Franco, Jean (1989) Plotting Women, New York: Columbia University Press. Goldie, Terry (1989) Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian and New Zealand Literatures, Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Greer, Germaine (1993) ‘Malouf’s objectionable whitewash’, in The Age, 3 November . Hall, Stuart (1992) ‘What is this “black” in black popular culture?’, in Gina Dent (ed.) Black Popular Culture, Seattle: Bay Press: 21–33. Hulme, Peter (1989) Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, London: Methuen. Ingliss, Ken (1994) ‘The rite stuff’, in Eureka Street, 4(1): 23–7. Kolodny, Annette (1975) The Lay of the Land, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Langton, Marcia (1993) ‘Well I Heard it on the Radio and I Saw it on the Tele vision…’ , Sydney: Australian Film Commission. Larbalestier, Jan (1990) ‘The politics of representation: Australian Aboriginal women and feminism,’ in Anthropological Forum, 6(2): 144–57. Lauretis, Teresa, de (1990) ‘Eccentric subjects: feminist theory and historical consciousness’, in Feminist Studies, 16(1): 115–50.

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Malouf, David (1993) Remembering Babylon, Milson’s Point: Random House. Montrose, Louis (1991) ‘The work of gender in the discourse of discovery’, in Rep resentations, 33:1–41. Morris, Meaghan (1991) ‘White panic or Max and the sublime (the costs of multiculturalism)’, Mari Kuttna Lecture on Film, University of Sydney, 17 September 1991 (forthcoming, The Power Institute, University of Sydney). Mudrooroo (Colin Johnson) (1983) Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World, South Yarra: Hyland House. —— (Mudrooroo Narogin) (1990) Writing from the Fringe , South Yarra: Hyland House. Muecke, Stephen (1992) Textual Spaces: Aboriginality and Cultural Studies Kensington: New South Wales University Press. Perera, Suvendrini (1994) ‘Unspeakable bodies: representing the Aboriginal in Australian critical discourse’, in Meridian, 13(1): 15–26. Perera, Suvendrini and Pugliese, Joseph (1992) ‘Constructing 1492: the poetics and politics of ravishment’, paper delivered at Columbus Quincentenary Conference (forthcoming). Plomley, N.J.B. (1966) Friendly Mission; The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson, 1829–34, Hobart: Tasmanian Historical Research Association. Pugliese, Joseph (1995) ‘Assimilation, unspeakable traces and the ontologies of nation’, in Suvendrini Perera (ed.) Asian and Pacific Inscriptions: Identities/Eth nicities/ Nationalities, Melbourne: Meridian: 228–54. Pybus, Cassandra (1991/1992) Community of Thieves, Port Melbourne: Minerva. Rae-Ellis, Vivienne (1976/1981) Trucanini: Queen or Traitor?, Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI) (1993) ‘Patents, indigenous peoples, and human genetic diversity’, in RAFI Communique, May . Ryan, Lyndall (1986) ‘Aboriginal women and agency in the process of conquest: a review of some recent work’, in Australian Feminist Studies 2 : 35–43. —— (1991) Interview for Black Man’s Houses . Salusinszky, Imre (1993) ‘The best in new books’, in Weekend Australian, 11–12 December . Smith, Bernard (1980) The Spectre of Truganini, Sydney: Australian Broadcasting Commission. Thomas, Daniel (ed.) (1988) Creating Australia: 200 Years of Art, Canberra: Australian Bicentennial Authority. Young, Robert (1995) Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, London: Routledge. FILM AND AUDIO:

Blackfellas (1993) Director James Ricketson, Home Cinema Group. Black Man’s Houses (1992) Director Steve Thomas, Open Studio. Earth and Sun and Moon (1993) Midnight Oil, Warner. The Last Tasmanian (1978) Director Tom Haydon, Artis Films.

THE ANOREXIC BODY: READING DISORDERS ABIGAIL BRAY

ABSTRACT

This article examines the feminist interpretation of self-starvation or anorexia nervosa as a pathology brought about by women’s consumption of media images of thin femininity. The anorexic subject is presented as a synecdoche for the alienated female body in general; female corporeality is damaged by the consumption of phallocentric representations. This negative view of women’s uncritical ‘consumption’ of media texts can be connected to nineteenth-century discussions of the causes of hysteria, revealing a similar pathologization of women’s reading practices. An alternative framework for conceptualizing eating disorders is outined. First, closer attention to the biomedical identity construct of anorexia nervosa reveals it to be contested by the very subjects it names. Second, a consideration of the continuum between the disordered practices of self-starvation and weight-loss regimens more generally suggests that both are informed by the biomedical discourse of metabolism, as a framework which inscribes the body as a calculable source of energy. The practices of anorexia nervosa are thus situated within a genealogy of weight-loss regimens which in turn produce narratives about the female body.

KEYWORDS anorexia; body; representation; media; reading; metabolism Anorexia nervosa and the less ‘spectacular’ eating disorder bulimia have engendered a multiplicity of discourses on the female body. In particular, the public fascination with the figure of the anorexic amounts to a fetishization; like the mute and malleable fetish object, the anorexic body has been inscribed, diagnosed and translated by various interpretive technologies. Following Paula Treichler’s (1987) ironic listing of the almost limitless interpretations of the AIDS body, the list below exemplifies the ways in which eating disorders are constituted by an ‘epidemic of signification’. Eating disorders are: 1 A slimmers’ epidemic which is destroying the lives of mostly young, intelligent, white, middle-class women.

Cultural Studies 10(3) 1996:413–429

© 1996 Routledge 0950–2386

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2 ‘A kind of mourning for a pre-Oedipal (i.e. precastrated) body and a corporeal connection to the mother that women in patriarchy are required to abandon’ (Grosz, 1994:40). 3 Evidence of the mass media’s sadistic brainwashing of women into complying with unrealistic beauty ideals (Chernin, 1989; Wolf, 1990). 4 A form of perverse feminine narcissism (Kaplan, 1991:453–84). 5 The shadow of the astronaut’s body (Romanyshyn, 1989:133–75). 6 A non-productive, reactive body without organs (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987:151). 7 A psychosomatic phenomenon which articulates the pathologies of the patriarchal capitalist nuclear family (Orbach, 1984; Robertson, 1992). 8 An obsessive-compulsive disorder best treated with benzodiazepines, haloperidol, thioridazine, trazodone, maprotiline, bilateral ECT or, if all else fails, a stereotactic limbic leucotomy (aka lobotomy).1 9 A rejection of the role of adult femininity and a retreat into the asexual body of a child (Boskind-White, 1979; Brown, 1985). 10 A pathology which flourishes in matriarchal households (Turner, 1984: 196). 11 A mental illness created by gay fashion designers who want women to look like young boys. 12 A pathological fear of menarches and the implications of fertility (Chernin, 1989). 13 A mass-marketed dieting disorder (Wooley and Wooley, 1982). 14 Phallogocentrism’s brutal marginalization of the female imaginary and the materiality of the body (Robertson, 1992; Rothfield, 1994). 15 The introjection of a bad object and the consequent internalization of a ‘false body’ (Orbach, 1986:90). 16 An emblem of twentieth-century fin-de-siècle decadence. 17 Hunger art (Ellmann, 1993). 18 An experimental becoming (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987). 19 Something women catch from television, the disease of the McLuhan age (Ellmann,1993:24). 20 A reading disorder. This taxonomy demonstrates that the body of the woman who practises eating disorders presents a coding problem. As the ‘dark continent of femininity’, the territory of the anorexic body has been colonized by a motley group of discourses contesting the truth of anorexic lack. Furthermore, biomedical professionals have yet to locate an unequivocal aetiology for practices such as self-starvation, and as Matra Robertson observes, treatment effectivity has not improved in the last fifty years (Robertson, 1992:70). Rather than reproducing yet another prescriptive diagnosis of women’s eating disorders, I shall investigate the formation of a dominant paradox which has been mapped on to the anorexic subject. The paradox articulates itself through a theorization of food refusal as the direct result of the consumption of media representations of idealized thin femininity. An excessive consumption of media images is perceived to activate a pathological fear of corporeal consumption: overreading produces under-eating. This paradoxical description of consumption, I will argue, represents the imagined reading practices of female audiences within modernity as quintessentially irrational.

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At stake in the analysis of anorexic reading practices is a contestation over the relationship between representation and material reality, epistemology and the female body, and, in turn, economies of reading and eating as they are articulated through the metaphor of consumption. As Treichler asserts (1987:265), ‘illness is metaphor’, and in relation to eating disorders the metaphor most at work is that of ‘consumption’. In order to situate my argument within a conceptual history, I offer a critical appraisal of some feminist approaches to anorexic reading practices. I will not attempt to account for all feminist interpretations of eating disorders; to do so would be reductive and misleading. Needless to say, such interpretations are not univocal, and I cannot represent adequately the variety of disciplinary approaches and methodologies currently in use. What I do want to foreground, however, are specific accounts of anorexic reading practices within this dispersed field. Second, I will analyse the potential correspondences between feminist conceptualizations of anorexic reading practices and representations of the mass audience within the history of cultural criticism. Finally, I will question the assumption that anorexic identity is a fixed construction and suggest that this agency also produces oppositional inscriptions. In this context I argue for an attention to the genealogy of everyday practices of weightloss regimens.

Toxic texts and poisoned bodies Janice Radway (1986) has alerted us to the rhetorical operations of the metaphor of consumption as a way of devaluing the reception of mass-produced texts. The analogy between eating and reading evoked in this metaphor fictionalizes (and displaces) cerebral activity as a simple alimentary process. Lacking the discerning palate of the educated elite, the masses uncritically consume anything and everything produced by the media. It is interesting to note in this context that Bernard Rosenberg’s description of mass culture does indeed evoke an association with eating disorders (Rosenberg, 1957:9–10; Radway, 1986:10). In effect, Rosenberg describes a habit-forming diet of little nourishment which, rather than satiating, produces greater hunger: the ‘masses’ suffer from a reading (eating) disorder. Furthermore, it becomes apparent that mass cultural artefacts such as popular women’s magazines or romances are endowed with the ability to poison their consumers. As Radway notes, not only is popular fiction metaphorized as ‘rubbish’, ‘trash’ or ‘junk’, but it is perceived as a toxic pollutant, corrupting a pure premodern body. Moreover, the literal meaning of the verb ‘consume’ as denoting the annihilation or exhaustion of an object takes on a strange twist in relation to the imagined reading practices of anorexics; they are thought to consume representations of their gender only to suffer from a literal, corporeal consumption as their bodies are ‘eaten away’. In other words, the consumption of images of an idealized and commodified self is interpreted as an autophagic process in which the subject is transformed into the object of narcissistic consumption.

Toxic bodies and poisoned texts The contaminating relationship of textuality and materiality, representations and real bodies, is powerfully evoked in the recent controversy around the fashion industry’s ‘waif’ look. The popularity of this new ‘thin’ look prompted many to argue that it would cause a further escalation in what is already seen as an epidemic of eating

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disorders. Thus thin models are frequently pathologized as suffering from eating disorders to such an extent that their appearance in popular culture texts is hailed as dangerously contagious. The Australian magazine Who recently addressed this issue with the help of a psychiatrist, who diagnosed such models as anorexic and warned that these popular representations were potentially fatal to the women who consume them. Arguing that Twiggy caused an escalation in anorexia, Professor Ross Kelucy is quoted as saying that if the waif look ‘follows the Twiggy trend, [there will be] a worsening of what is already a big problem in the next 18 months’ (Lynn, 1993:15). On Australian television the news programme Lateline also addressed this question and spoke to psychiatric experts in the field, who similarly diagnosed the consumption of popular representations of thin women as a strong cause of eating disorders among the female audience. Moreover, this particular understanding of the causal relationship between representations and material bodies is so much a part of the ‘common sense’ of popular women’s magazines that we are currently witnessing attempts to counteract the valorization of this contaminating ‘thin’ ideal. A plethora of articles dealing with the problem of eating disorders and the fatal desire to actualize a fashionable thinness circulated within women’s magazines and campus papers during the early 1990s (Bray, 1994). The public confession of anorexia by celebrities became a common motif within these magazines. Indeed, the idea that advertisements representing thin models coerce women into anorexia has passed from a form of oppositional sense to common sense. To articulate this position is to sign oneself as occupying a critical space in relation to the oppressive influences of the mass media—as being in the know, in this case, about the operations of patriarchal power. The prevalence of the anorexic stereotype in the popular media and the circulation of this psychiatric label as a ‘folk’ term attests to the way this figure is folded into the discursive construction of contemporary femininity.

Irrational consumption As Matra Robertson points out in Starving in the Silences, the diagnostic category ‘anorexia nervosa’ invokes the authority of medical discourse over experiences of female embodiment (Robertson, 1992:74). The medicalization of self-starvation is far from innocent; rather, as Robertson argues, it is caught up in the operations of power at the site of the body. Central to these operations is the act of diagnosis, where symptoms are read through an established grid which functions to fix the truth of the subject. Fiona Place writes in her confessional narrative Cardboard: Life, for people who have been using anorexic eyes/metaphors long term, has often become only the description of the symptoms of their illness, and possibly of numerous admissions and discharges over the years or experiences of other methods of treatment. They so often reach the stage whereby they give their life history as a psychiatric history, using solely the associated jargon and therefore experiencing it as such. (Place, 1989:257) Place points out that the authority of clinical language functions to capture and translate the subject’s life story into the form of the psychiatric case history. This process also involves the rarefaction of clinical language as an objective and rational

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tool which is capable of revealing the truth of everyday practices. In this way nonspecialist interpretations are discarded and replaced by the authority of psychiatric knowledge, which potentially frames all practices as symptoms of anorexia. Given the androcentric bias of psychiatry, the traditional alignment of femininity with irrationality and the understanding that disease is a form of moral decay, any diagnosis of ‘anorexia’, ‘bulimia’, or more recently ‘sub-clinical eating disorders’, is caught up in a complex web of social meanings. Far from being neutral, biomedical discourses are historically situated representations of human behaviour that are irrevocably connected to and influenced by wider representations of sex, class and ethnicity. The classification of insanity relies on the image of a normal healthy body that is often equated, as various feminists have argued, with a white adult male body (Gatens, 1991; Diprose, 1994). Corporeal practices which deviate from this normative ideal function as a synecdoche for the non-healthy and the non-rational, such that, for example, hysteria and eating disorders are translated as representative of female irrationality in general. Ironically perhaps, this process is also noticeable in some of the early feminist interpretations of eating disorders. M.Boskind-White, for example, argues that ‘bulimarexics’ ‘have devoted their lives to fulfilling the feminine role rather than the individual person’ (1979:438). Depicting anorexia as a hyperbolic expression of an alienated femininity, the author diagnoses the ‘bulimarexic’ as the perfect victim of discourses which attempt to coerce all women into occupying the shrunken space of a childlike femininity. Indeed, as Robertson observes, eating disorders are frequently theorized by feminists as a quintessential symbol of the oppression of all women (1992:52), such that the anorexic functions as a synecdoche for women’s alienated body image in general. More recently, accounts of anorexia within Australian ‘corporeal feminism’ have tended to argue from a similar position (Grosz, 1994; Rothfield, 1994). The anti-rationalist, anti-Cartesian project of thinking through the body views all representational systems as phallocentric and thus as denials of the positive specificity of female embodiment. Within these terms it is possible to argue that women’s body image is modelled on lack, and even that women consider themselves to be castrated (Grosz, 1994:72). Thus the incorporation of phallocentric representations leads to an inauthentic and potentially lethal body image in all women. Feminist theorists have also focused on issues of social and psychical space. Kim Chernin, Susie Orbach, Linda Brown, and to a lesser extent, Naomi Wolf have all argued that the aestheticization of thin femininity reflects a fear of female power. In Womansize: The Tyranny of Slenderness, for example, Chernin argues that the patriarchal mass media have responded to feminist demands for greater social, economic and sexual space by insisting that women reduce themselves physically (Chernin, 1989: 96–110). The celebration of the slender body is thus seen as a direct political weapon against women, even as fat becomes a symbol of prohibited female power and fertility. Similarly, Susie Orbach (1984) argues that fat is used by women as a protective barrier against an oppressive patriarchal environment, while Linda Brown agrees that feminine frailty is privileged by patriarchy because it represents the conquest of female power (Brown, 1985:63; see also MacLeod, 1981). Many of these arguments were recycled and developed in Naomi Wolf’s bestselling book The Beauty Myth (1990), which claimed that the media and fashion industries were attempting to sabotage the gains of the last twenty years by coercing women into maintaining an impossible thin and immaculate appearance. According to Wolf, anorexia should be

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recognized as ‘political damage’ (171) and women who diet are ‘politically castrated’ (164). While these texts offer important critiques of the formation of female body image, they tend to present culture as a monolithic patriarchal system while romanticizing the pre-cultural as the space of non-alienated female embodiment. Chernin, for example, argues that a connection with the ‘primordial female’ (representing the soul of mother earth and an Edenic pre-patriarchal past) has been sacrificed in a modernized patriarchal culture (Chernin, 1989: 135–44). The essentialist dichotomy between authenticity-femininity-nature and inauthenticity-masculinity-culture leads to a reductive account of women’s oppression and fails to explain why not all women suffer from eating disorders.

Reading/eating disorders The idea that representations are harmful to women’s bodies became popular during the nineteenth century, when biomedical professionals entered into the debate over women’s education. Hysteria and neurasthenia were framed as the ‘new woman’s’ diseases: the more educated the woman, the more likely she was to suffer from nervous complaints. Indeed it was even argued that the education of women would lead to the atrophy of the reproductive organs and the degeneration of the human race. The consumption of popular literature and magazines was also linked to the enfeeblement of the mind and body. In her discussion of the medical, physiological and psychoanalytic accounts of the woman reader during this time, Kate Flint writes that ‘no body was perceived as being more vulnerable to impure mental foods than that of the young woman’ (Flint, 1993: 53). In other words, the infantilization of women’s reading practices as necessarily detrimental to their minds and bodies has an extensive history within modernity. More recently, the consumption of mass media images is depicted as having a similar effect on the female viewer or reader. Television in particular is frequently cited as the most dangerous influence in arguments about eating disorders. For example, Orbach’s analysis of anorexia nervosa in Hunger Strike posits anorexia as an unconscious protest against patriarchal oppression (Orbach, 1986:97–118). However, Orbach suggests that the female experience of embodiment is formed through the consumption of representations of femininity within the mass media, and that this process of consumption largely determines the protest of anorexia (Orbach, 1986:36). Orbach’s description of female embodiment as an interpellation of media representations suggests that women only come to know themselves through the media, ignoring the significance of work, sexual relationships or motherhood as means to corporeal knowledge and relying on an image of a docile and childlike female viewer. Hilde Bruch, the author of the influential study on anorexia nervosa The Golden Cage (1978), also interprets self-starvation as a reading disease. Briefly, Bruch argues that anorexia nervosa is a response to the contradictory roles of adult, white, middleclass femininity. As an attempt to reconcile the cultural dictate to be economically independent while remaining emotionally dependent, anorexia is interpreted as a retreat into a childlike body. Unable to synthesize cultural double-binds, anorexics opt for an excessive control of their own bodies in an attempt to exercise sovereignty. Bruch argues that the fashion industry’s valorization of the slender body coerces women into this response. ‘Magazines and movies carry the same message, but the most persistent is television, drumming it in, day in day out, that one can only be

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loved and respected when slender’ (Bruch, 1978: viii). Anorexia is therefore an example of being interpellated as the ideal reader. Furthermore, in Conversations with Anorectics Bruch (1988:4) suggests that the popular dissemination of anorexia and bulimia in the mass media acts pedagogically insofar as these representations instruct women on how to reproduce the symptoms of eating disorders. As Maud Ellmann comments, ‘the fact that they believe they have contracted their disorder from the media suggests that anorexia is the disease of the McLuhan age, disseminated by telecommunications rather than by contact’ (Ellmann, 1993:24, my emphasis). This notion that forms of telecommunication are viral is a seductive one. Indeed, the idea that television acts as a form of social and political contagion, as a ‘dirty’ medium, is explored by John Hartley in Tele-ology (1992:21–44). Here Hartley argues that television has been traditionally condemned for corrupting the ‘tastes and habits of the rising generation’ (Spens Committee, 1938; Hartley, 1992:25). In relation to eating disorders this corruption of tastes and habits takes on a new and literal meaning. The protectionist and paternalistic rhetoric operative in traditional cultural criticism regarding the negative effects of television is taken to an absurd level: to argue that women contract psychiatric diseases from television is to enter the realm of science fiction. As Hartley points out, the ‘paedocratization’ of the television audience by both cultural critics and the television industry is indicative of an undemocratic class-consciousness (Hartley, 1992:101–46). And yet the force of this idea remains remarkably unchallenged. In ‘Anorexia nervosa: psychopathology as the crystallization of culture’, Susan Bordo (1992) concludes with a description of ‘anorexic’ reading practices as necessarily negative. Locating television advertisements as the perfect medium for the indoctrination of body insecurity, Bordo describes the female audience as passively consuming poisonous messages about female embodiment. The apocalyptic tone of her writing is noticeable in the following: Watching the commercials are thousands of anxiety-ridden women and adolescents…. And watching the commercials is the anorexic, who associates her relentless pursuit of thinness with power and control, but who in fact destroys her health and imprisons her imagination. She is surely the most startling and stark illustration of how cavalier power relations are with respect to the motivations and goals of individuals, yet how deeply they are etched on our bodies, and how well our bodies serve them. (Bordo, 1992:47) Bordo’s positioning of the female audience as potential anorexics paints an unbearably oppressive social environment. Audience pleasure would in this case be diagnosed merely as a form of masochism. Indeed, it is no surprise to discover that Bordo is the author of a paper entitled ‘How television teaches women to hate their hungers’ (1986). While eating disorders are clearly sociopolitical problems, to devalue women’s abilities to resist media interpellation is to frame the female audience (and thus women in general) as weak-minded, docile bodies. The anorexic body is thus simply read as an example of a deep etching of power on the ‘paedocratized’ bodies of the female audience. Within this critical paradigm, anorexia is the result of consuming too many ideologically unsound representations of women on television. In this way, the anorexic is either performing an over-determined (hysterical) reaction to ideology, or occupying the space of the ideal reader in a response to dominant injunctions to be

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thin. The causal logic of this argument understands anorexia as merely another example of being interpellated and coerced into occupying preferred reading positions. Elspeth Probyn argues that ‘what we can clearly hear from these descriptions is that women are pathologically sus ceptible to media images’ (Probyn, 1987:203, my emphasis). Indeed, one of the more insidious, and perhaps unintentional, consequences of these arguments is that they potentially pathologize the female audience en masse. For, if all women are perceived to be preoccupied with their weight, primarily because of their consumption of mass-produced images of idealized thin femininity, then the female audience is framed as neurotically vulnerable to late twentieth-century media representations. This assumption can be seen as a continuation of a paternalistic and moralistic history of academic research into the assumed effects of television violence on women and children. It is no coincidence that women and children are frequently cited as subjects peculiarly vulnerable to the effects of television. Censorship is never for the protection of white, middle-class men, as though the economic security of their citizenship were somehow to inoculate them against the contaminating effects of media representations. It is also interesting to note that advertisements are frequently targeted by critics such as Bordo as highly influential in the production of eating disorders. Describing the evangelical logic underpinning cultural criticism of advertising, Helen Irving contends that it is typically seen to produce false consciousness by clouding the material reality of viewers’ lives (Irving, 1991:100). However, it is often the occupant of Karl Popper’s Third World’ (1983:58), the impossibly pure critic, who pontificates on false and true consciousness, fabricated and authentic needs, without any selfreflexive consideration of the materiality of their own everyday life as part of the ‘masses’. To privilege the mass media as the most effective means of moulding minds is to ignore the multiplicity of social contexts operating in the everyday. It is this disregard for wider and less consignable contexts which is so lacking in the theorization of anorexia. As Irving asks, ‘Can we never escape from the legacy of the Frankfurt School which saw the individual in mass capitalist culture as having lost all powers of critical perspectives, as moronically equating movies “directly with reality?”’ (Irving, 1991:99). In her discussion of the assumptions embedded within nineteenth-century criticisms of consumer culture and its perceived negative effects on the (apparently asexual) social body, Rita Felski argues that, ‘given a prevalent equation of bourgeois masculinity with reason and self-restraint, it was above all through the representation of the consuming woman that writers criticised the crass materialism brought about by capitalist development’ (Felski, 1995:88). As a popular stereotypical representation of the ‘consuming woman’, the woman who practises eating/reading disorders is similarly imbricated within the pathologizing discourse of psychiatry. The perverse irrationality of ‘anorexic’ reading practices, whereby consumption facilitates autophagy, serves to highlight this critical agenda; the effects of crass materialism are identified with a perverted feminine appetite. The image of women consuming television advertisements presented by Bordo unfortunately perpetuates this stereotype. Given the degree of cultural paranoia attached to the object of television, eating disorders thus become merely another item on the list of social problems caused by the medium. Patrice Petro argues that this critical paradigm leads to a devaluing of television through recourse to gendered binaries in which the passive consumption of the popular is feminized in opposition to the active and thus masculine consumption

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of art (Petro, 1986:14). Such a gendered division privileges distanced critical judgement over a sensual engagement with the object. The female subject’s purported close identification with the text is read as undermining impartial judgement and the capacity for objective and rational reading. At issue within this paradigm is the conception of female desire within modernity as the expression of an uncritical hunger for representations of a commodified self. ‘How can feminists challenge the power structures of male-stream knowledge’, asks Matra Robertson, ‘without at the same time becoming entangled in reductionist concepts of the object, i.e. the anorexic?’ (1992:53). Probyn suggests that we examine the local specificity of everyday anorexic practices and the ways in which anorexia articulates various discourses of femininity (1987:210). While eating disorders are arguably inscribed by phallocentric power at the site of the body, it is reductive to argue that anorexia is a synecdoche for all women’s pathological vulnerability to phallocentric representational systems, or that the perfect medium for the articulation of this oppression is television or mass culture.

Rewriting ‘anorexia’ Several points can be drawn from this brief analysis of the discourses in operation within the formation of anorexia nervosa as the disease of the McLuhan age. First, the idea that women ‘catch’ psychiatric diseases from the media constitutes a form of (scientifically sanctioned) common sense. Second, given the prevalence of what psychiatrists are now terming ‘normative eating disorders’ among women, this common sense understanding (in which the reading practices of women with eating disorders are framed as perversely autophagic) demonstrates an infantilization of the female audience as pathologically suggestible to media representations. Participation as readers in the late twentieth-century media-scape is thus imagined to be a potentially lethal activity for women in general. However, the problem of how to approach the subject of eating disorders remains. The following sections have a dual purpose: first, to render problematic totalizing definitions of the identity of the anorexic subject, and second, to investigate the genealogy of the everyday techniques of eating disorders. It is not my intention to suggest that anorexia or self-starvation can be read as the positive articulation of a resistive agency. Such a task would obviously be insensitive—self-starvation is a deadly activity. Nor is it my intention to offer an account of anorexia which collapses the historical differences between its medieval and contemporary actualizations: the self-starvation of St Catherine of Siena, for instance, has little in common with contemporary anorexia, apart from the fact that both involve relinquishing food. The forms of such practices are articulated according to the techniques provided by historical and cultural contexts. The purpose of this section is not to establish a new methodology as such, but rather to suggest questions for future analysis. In Sexing the Self, Probyn describes the reception of her article The anorexic body’, and remarks on the fact that her passing words ‘I became anorexic’ functioned to contaminate the text as a confession (1993:12). For example, Eva Szekely argues that Probyn’s article neglected to foreground the ‘body, in its vitality, emotionality, sweat and trepidation’, and openly criticizes Probyn for absenting her own anorexic body from the text (1988: 10). On the other hand, Arthur Frank interpreted Probyn’s article simply as a’confession of anorexia’ and an example of a postmodern American ethnology of the self (1990:148–9). Both interpretations assumed that Probyn was confessing to an essential and static truth of her personal identity.

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Against these readings Probyn describes the articulation of the self as a situated narrative of becoming rather than an indication of a fixed identity: while the self is clearly constructed, it is not closed by that same construction. Similarly, in Gender Trouble Judith Butler points out that while identity is constructed, which is to say signified, it does not follow that identity is therefore fully determined by this construction—such an argument would deny the possibility of agency. ‘Construction is not opposed to agency,’ Butler writes, ‘it is the necessary scene of agency, the very terms in which agency is articulated and becomes culturally intelligible’ (1990:147). Instead of attempting to locate anorexic identity, a project which seems embedded in the reductionist quest for the truth of the anorexic lack, one might recognize that the subject who practises self-starvation exemplifies a point of agency which is not fully commensurable with the psychiatric label ‘anorexia nervosa’. This is not to affirm the existence of a pre-discursive body which is beyond signification, but rather to recognize that agency is a performative act constructed but not fully determined by discursive contexts. For example, the psychiatric label anorexia nervosa identifies a group of indistinguishable subjects; the imagined repetition of the anorexic identity which is assumed to occur under this sign needs to be contested if the stasis of such an identity is to be challenged. It is not enough, however, to oppose sameness with a multiplicity of differences; such an approach risks a relativism resulting in empty rhetoric rather than intervention. For example, an instance of anorexia in an elderly, blind, working-class man might very well trouble the common-sense understanding of the anorexic identity, and produce potentially interesting psychoanalytic, postmodern, sociological or cultural critiques, but it would do little to explain why the majority of anorexics are women. Rather, the point is to locate a subversive repetition within the signifying practices which construct gender identity (Butler, 1990:146). In other words, transformations occur through the repetition of elements, such that ‘agency is to be located within the possibility of a variation on that repetition’ (145). For Butler, agency is thus only possible in relation to the signifying practices which enable and constrain identity. An articulation of agency within the psychiatric formation of the anorexic identity would therefore involve a subversive re-signification of that same psychiatric discourse. To clarify this point, it is worth recalling an example from the nineteenth century. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The yellow wallpaper’ (1892) is a semi-autobiographical account of the experience of a woman diagnosed as hysterical. The text describes Silas Weir Mitchell’s popular rest-cure of enforced passivity and confinement, and represents the effects of his instruction to Gilman to avoid all forms of intellectual stimulation. Indeed, Gilman’s text actively criticizes the very terms used by the medical profession in the diagnosis of hysteria, while also condemning prevailing methods of treatment. The hysterical woman in Gilman’s text suffers from the construction of her identity as merely hysterical; any understanding of her identity in alternative terms is excluded, including her own perception that she is in fact imprisoned by the sentence of hysteria. Gilman’s text has since become a feminist classic precisely because of its chilling depiction of the effects of androcentric medical discourses on female identity. While anorexia is not simply the contemporary equivalent of hysteria, Gilman’s narrative exemplifies the ways in which biomedical or psychiatric constructions of identity can be re-signified by the very subjects which they claim to define. In relation to anorexia, one might locate a similar pattern of subversion in both confessional genres and general fiction written by women who have been coded as practising eating disorders. As I have argued elsewhere, one of the consistent criticisms voiced

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by such women in popular women’s magazines is a dissatisfaction with the clinical definition of the anorexic identity and its use to justify problematic forms of medical interventions (Bray, 1994). In her confessional narrative, Fiona Place argues that the clinical definition of anorexia nervosa creates the identity of the subject who practises self-starvation by excluding everyday language: any other understanding of the anorexic’s identity is marginalized. Likewise, the anorexic ‘Ellen West’ wrote of her experience of being psychoanalysed: ‘the anal-erotic connection is purely theoretical. It is completely incomprehensible to me. I don’t understand my self at all…I confront myself as a strange person’ (Binswanger, 1958:254). West’s critical description of the identity constructed for her by psychoanalysis suggests, at least, a signifying practice not fully determined by its terms. A re-signification of anorexia might entail an intervention into the discourses which construct it, of which biomedical knowledge is arguably the most authoritative, and the production of a counter-discourse on the biomedical formation of anorexic identities. This is not a romantic project: that electroshock treatment and the surgical mutilation of the brain known politely as ‘stereotactic limbic leucotomy’ are still used on women who practise eating disorders should be cause for concern. By contesting the neutrality of biomedical knowledge and recognizing that scientific representations of the body have calculable effects, it might be possible to transform the normative discourses which form anorexia nervosa. However, I also want to resist rarefying anorexic practices as a ‘new’ pathology. While seemingly existing outside normal regimens of food consumption, they exemplify a grammar similar to other contemporary dietetic discourses. I am not suggesting here that all women are latent anorexics, or that contemporary forms of diet management lead inexorably to self-starvation. Rather, I am interested in the question of the cultural conditions which enable the practice of contemporary eating disorders. In order to explore this question it is necessary to turn to a consideration of the historical specificity of contemporary dietetic regimens.

The metabolic body The genealogy of the formation of weight-loss regimens as everyday practices, whether or not they are considered to be disordered, thus needs to be addressed if a clearer understanding of the everyday constructions of anorexic identity is to be achieved. After all, a preoccupation with losing weight is not restricted to women with eating disorders; the weight-loss industry extracted around $5 billion from its American consumers in 1985 alone (Brumberg, 1988:270). Thus calorie counting and the weighing and measuring of the body are prevalent techniques not only in selfstarvation but also in contemporary popular practices of weight control. In The Use of Pleasure Foucault argues that the practice of specific dietetic and exercise regimens is a central organizing principle in the formation of ethical subjects and constitutes an art of living or an ascetics of the self (1992:101). These techniques of ascetic and ethical self-transformation rely on a meticulous measuring and regulation: the measurement of corporeal activities is coded as a moral activity (102). In classical Greece an attention to this type of measurement enabled an ‘equilibrium of the body’ which ‘was one of the conditions for the proper hierarchy of the soul’ (103–4). Without denying the historical differences between ancient ‘pagan’ practices and our own time, one might also recognize that contemporary weight-loss regimens deploy related techniques in the name of an ethics of self-care, involving a similar transformation of the self through processes of measurement.

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The biomedical discourse of metabolism serves to organize such everyday techniques of weight loss within modernity. Its cultural prevalence is evident in popular women’s magazines, diet books, television programmes and multinational weight-loss clinics, which function pedagogically to instruct women how to eat and manage their weight. ‘Burn fat faster’ is the title of a recent article in a women’s magazine; the reader is informed that ‘when dieting won’t shift stubborn kilos, you may need to beat your sluggish metabolism’, and that ‘the latest research proves there’s plenty we can do to increase our ability to burn kilojoules and excess body fat faster’ (Brody, 1994:98). Indeed, the colloquialism ‘going for the burn’ describes the catabolism of fat. The article lists methods for achieving a faster metabolism, while criticizing ‘crash’ diets that purportedly slow down metabolic rates. The key to achieving the thin ideal is described as the attainment of an ideal metabolic equilibrium, defined in terms of a harmony between the ‘fuel’ consumed and the ‘fuel’ exerted in work. Excess fat is represented in this discourse as marking an asymmetrical relation between working and consuming; it is a sign both of an unruly metabolism and of a subject’s inability to maintain a specified balance between production and consumption. I am not implying here that women are indoctrinated by the evil discourse of metabolism, but simply noting that weight-loss regimens within modernity are organized around this concept, which provides the biomedical grammar through which such regimens are expressed in the everyday. The calorie or kilojoule which measures heat and food is central to contemporary forms of weight control. Popularized by the chemistry professor Wilbur O.Atwater in 1895 during the progressive era in America, the introduction of the calorific unit into the everyday lives of women recodified consumption (Brumberg, 1988:232–8). Thus the calculation of calories became an important methodological technique within the discourse of contemporary dietetics. In this way the private sphere of the kitchen/ dining room was transformed into a quasi-chemical laboratory, where middle-class women juggled with various kinds of scientifically coded food or fuel in order to produce meals which would ensure the normalization of their families’ body weight and health. Concurrently, public schools participated in massive weighing programmes (Brumberg, 1988:237). The first bestselling weight control book, published in America in 1918, not only demonstrated that weight loss was a popular concern among women but that counting calories was central to the operation of these regimens. In the words of the book’s author, Lulu Hunt Peters, ‘hereafter you are going to eat calories of food. Instead of saying one slice of bread, or a piece of pie, you will say 100 calories of bread, 350 calories of pie’ (Brumberg, 1988: 241). Furthermore, the description of calorie-counting in this same book depicts it as an act of patriotism and humanitarianism, informed by a meritocratic ideology of consumption. Brumberg neatly summarizes the effects of the popularization of calorie-counting when she writes that ‘physical features once regarded as natural—such as appetite and body weight—were designated as objects of conscious control’ (1988:243). Indeed, this particular type of calculation enabled new forms of bodily surveillance. In Eating Our Hearts Out: Personal Accounts of Women’s Relationships to Food, for example, Jan Wienpahl discusses the practice of calorie-counting in weight-loss regimens, describing the self-management of the body as a ‘calorie-balance machine, counting calories in and calories out’ (1993:160). The pervasiveness of such calculation has now assumed absurd limits, as food and drink is packaged and sold according to its low-calorific merits. The bottlers of Evian water, for example, find it necessary to reassure their consumers that water contains no calories, as if they imagine that these

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consumers suffer from a form of arithnomania, whereby they are compelled to measure the consumption of every single calorie. This obsessive attention to the calculation of calories, alongside what appears to be a compulsion to fetishize the measuring of body weight and dress size, indicates that weight-loss regimens, disordered or otherwise, articulate the body through a numerical grammar involved in an eschatology of the flesh. The counting down of this body and that which it consumes is acted out with deathly rigour in anorexia. Furthermore, the frenetic exercise which often accompanies anorexia can be read as caught up with this same discourse of metabolism. Burning fat faster, or increasing the basal metabolic rate, is the expressed goal, not only of the anorexic who eventually catabolizes much more than just fat, but also of contemporary weight-loss regimens as a whole. Here one might usefully explore Paul Virilio’s claim in The Aesthetics of Disappearance (1991:43) that the body within modernity is speed. The cultural preoccupation with the rate at which fat is consumed points to the suggestive historical interconnections between the trope of speed and an aesthetics of disappearing flesh. Further attention to the archaeology of metabolism and its impact on weight-loss regimens might clarify the ways in which the feminine body is organized and rendered legible in modernity. The impact of the seemingly innocent and trivial calorie, for example, recodified consumption and body weight to the extent that every single calorie is calculated in the act of consumption, just as every pound lost or gained is measured.

Notes 1 This information comes from The International Journal of Eating Disorders. In the article ‘Recovery in anorexia nervosa—the patient’s perspective’, Hsu et al. (1992) relate the case histories of six recovered anorexic women. Case 5, ‘got out of family and leucotomy’ reports that after the operation on her brain she lacked the willpower to diet. The authors conclude that ‘the leucotomy seemed to have broken the obsessional habit of counting calories and having only a certain amount of food to eat each time’. After acknowledging the positive effects of surgical intervention they also suggest that clomipramine and fluoxtine should be ‘given a fair trial’ (346). In The use of electroconvulsive therapy in patients with intractable anorexia nervosa’ (Ferguson, 1993), it is reported that Ms C., ‘a 23-year old single woman’ who was raped when she was fourteen, was subjected to ‘16 bilateral ECT treatments after she attempted suicide and became anorexic. Due to treatment related cognitive deficits, ECT was abandoned’ (199). And yet Ferguson concludes by affirming that ‘it is possible that anorexia nervosa may respond to ECT by virtue of the same well documented effects on brain catecholamine systems that have been proposed to underlie the anti-depressant effect of ECT’Z (200). It seems that while these authors speculate on the effects of various treatments, they all agree that brain damage in the form of leucotomies and ECT abuse seems to ‘cure’ anorexia.

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References Binswanger, Ludwig (1958) ‘The case of Ellen West’, trans. Werner M.Mendal and Joseph Lyons, in Rollo May, Ernest Angel and Henri F.Ellenberger (eds), Exist ence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology, New York: Basic Books. Bordo, Susan (1986) ‘How television teaches women to hate their hungers’, Mirror Images (Newsletter of Anorexia/Bulimia Support, Syracuse, New York), 4(1): 8–9. —— (1990) ‘Reading the slender body’, in M.Jacobus, E.Fox Keller and S.Shuttleworth (eds) Body/Politics: Women and the Discourse of Science, New York: Routledge. —— (1992) ‘Anorexia nervosa: psychopathology as the crystallization of culture’, in Deane W.Curtin and Lisa M.Heldke (eds), Cooking, Eating, Thinking: Trans formative Philosophies of Food, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Boskind-White, M. (1979) ‘Cinderella’s stepsisters: a feminist perspective on anorexia nervosa and bulimia’, Signs, 2:342–56. Bray, Abigail (1994) ‘The edible woman: reading/eating disorders and femininity’, Media Information Australia, 27, May: 4–10. Brody, Liz (1994) ‘Burn fat faster’, She, June: 98–100. Brown, L. (1985) ‘Women, weight and power: feminist theoretical and therapeutic issues’, Women and Therapy, 1:61–71. Bruch, Hilde (1978) The Golden Cage: The Enigma of Anorexia Nervosa, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. —— (1988) Conversations with Anorectics , Danita Czyzewski and Melanie A. Suhr (eds), New York: Basic Books. Brumberg, Joan Jacobs (1988) Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia as a Modern Disease, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Butler, Judith (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge. Chernin, Kim (1989) Womansize: The Tyranny of Slenderness, London: The Women’s Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Parnet, Claire (1987) Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, New York: Columbia University Press. Diprose, Rosalyn (1994) The Bodies of Women: Ethics, Embodiment and Sexual Difference, New York: Routledge. Ellmann, Maud (1993) The Hunger Artists: Eating, Writing and Imprisonment, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Felski, Rita (1995) The Gender of Modernity, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Ferguson, James (1993) ‘The use of electroconvulsive therapy in patients with intractable anorexia nervosa’, The International Journal of Eating Disorders, 13(2): 195–201. Flint, Kate (1993) The Woman Reader: 1837–1914, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Foucault, Michel (1992) The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Frank, Arthur W. (1990) ‘Bringing bodies back in: a decade in review’, Theory, Culture and Society, 7:131–62. Gatens, Moira (1991) ‘Corporeal representations in/and the body politic’, in Rosalyn Diprose and Robyn Ferrell (eds), Cartographies: Poststructuralism and the Mapping of Bodies and Spaces, Sydney: Allen & Unwin.

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Gilman, Charlotte Perkins (1892) ‘The yellow wallpaper’, in Catherine Golden (ed.), The Captive Imagination: A Casebook on ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ ( 1992 ), New York: The Feminist Press. Grosz, Elizabeth (1994) Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Hartley, John (1992) Tele-ology: Studies in Television, London: Routledge. Hsu, L.K.George, Crisp, Arthur H., and Callender, John S. (1992) ‘Recovery in anorexia nervosa—the patient’s perspective’, The International Journal of Eating Disorders, 11(4): 341–50. Irving, Helen (1991) ‘Little elves and mind control: advertising and its critics’, Con tinuum: An Australian Journal of the Media, 4(2): 98–111. Kaplan, Louise J. (1991) Female Perversions: The Temptations of Madame Bovary, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Lynn, Allison (1993) ‘Skin and bone’, Who Weekly, 19 July: 46–53. MacLeod, Sheila (1981) The Art Of Starvation, London: Virago. Orbach, Susie (1984) Fat is a Feminist Issue, London: Paddington Press. —— (1986) Hunger Strike: The Anorectic’s Struggle as a Metaphor for our Age, London: Faber & Faber. Petro, Patrice (1986) ‘Mass culture and the feminine: the “place” of television in film studies’, Cinema Journal, 25(3) 5–21. Place, Fiona (1989) Cardboard, Sydney: Local Consumption. Popper, Karl (1983) ‘Knowledge: subjective versus objective’, in David Miller (ed.), A Pocket Popper, London: Fontana. Probyn, Elspeth (1987) ‘The anorexic body’, in A. and M.Kroker (eds), Body Invaders: Sexuality and the Postmodern Condition, New York: St. Martin’s Press. —— (1993) Sexing the Self: Gendered Positions in Cultural Studies , New York: Routledge. Radway, Janice A. (1986) ‘Reading is not eating: mass-produced literature and the theoretical, methodological, and political consequences of a metaphor’, Book Research Quarterly, 2(3): 7–29. Robertson, Matra (1992) Starving in the Silences: An Exploration of Anorexia Nervosa, Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Romanyshyn, Robert (1989) Technology as Symptom and Dream, London: Routledge. Rosenberg, Bernard (1957) ‘Mass culture in America’, in Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White (eds), Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, Glencoe, Ill: Free Press. Rothfield, Philippa (1994) ‘A conversation between bodies’, Melbourne Journal of Politics, 22:30–44. Spens Committee (1938) Report of the Consultative Committee on Secondary Edu cation, with Special Reference to Grammar Schools and Technical High Schools, London: HMSO. Szekely, Eva (1988) ‘Reflections on the body in the anorexia discourse’, New Feminist Research, 17(4): 8–11. Treichler, Paula A. (1987) ‘AIDS, homophobia and biomedical discourse: an epidemic of signification’, Cultural Studies, 1(3): 263–305. Turner, Bryan S. (1984) The Body And Society: Explorations in Social Theory, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Virilio, Paul (1991) The Aesthetics of Disappearance, trans. Philip Beitchman, New York: Columbia University Press.

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Wienpahl, Jan (1993) ‘Fourteen days in the High Sierra…excerpts from a diary’, in Leslea Newman (ed.), Eating Our Hearts Out: Personal Accounts of Women’s Relationship to Food, Freedom, California: The Crossing Press. Wolf, Naomi (1990) The Beauty Myth, London: Chatto & Windus. Wooley, O.Wayne and Wooley, Susan (1982) ‘The Beverly Hills eating disorder: the mass marketing of anorexia nervosa’, The International Journal of Eating Dis orders, 1(3): 57–69 .

BODY SHOPPING: MATERNITY AND ALTERITY IN MAMATOTO1 MICHELE GROSSMAN AND DENISE CUTHBERT

ABSTRACT

The products and practices of The Body Shop, both material and rhetorical, can be inserted into a number of competing discourses along the axes of feminist interests in the body and its relation to culture. We focus here on The Body Shop’s Mamatoto range as it relates to contemporary Western discursive formations of maternity, alterity, and the vexed constructions of ‘difference’ and ‘globalism’ that emerge from them. Among the meta-products of Mamatoto are discursive formations of the body itself which, while they appear to endorse, even to celebrate, an active engagement with transcultural specificity and difference, actually reinstate the Western, white body of ‘woman’ as the ‘gold standard’ against which the exoticized currency of other women can be classified, appropriated and disowned. Within this framework, maternity itself is deployed by The Body Shop as a richly suggestive trope that serves to represent the problematics of body-as-nature, body-as-culture and body-as-identity that continue to preoccupy feminists across a wide range of political and cultural agendas.

KEYWORDS The Body Shop, feminism, maternity, postcolonialism, representation, women of colour Our discussion about the meta-discourses of The Body Shop began with a trip to a Melbourne shopping mall. The Body Shop had been a favourite of ours for some time; neither of us had thought to question its cultural discourses or practices until we were brought up short (individually, and for different reasons) by its range of products for mother and child, marketed as Mamatoto, and including an eponymous book (1991) which provides a dazzling and unsettling excursion into cross-cultural motherhood. Between 1987 and 1992, we had noticed a creeping yet definitive change in the air of Australian popular media reporting on issues connected to motherhood and the family, more conservative and fulsome than in recent years. One of us perceived a contemporary resurgence of an old phenomenon: the woman who is not ‘simply’ a

Cultural Studies 10(3) 1996:430–448

© 1996 Routledge 0950–2386

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woman, but a ‘not-mother’, a woman without, both lacking and somehow positioned outside of emergent discourses of femininity within Australian social and cultural formations. This construction of the childless woman as lack—particularly in the form of a perverse commodity deficiency, in which a woman’s purchase on her female identity might literally be equated with the purchase of a child—became a source of passionate discussion between us as we negotiated our respective personal circumstances in relation to such formations. In this context, the concerns that The Body Shop’s retailing of motherhood and difference raised for us, both separately and conjointly as friends and colleagues of long standing, began to resonate with the ways in which we—as white, feminist, noteverywhere-and-always-middle-class academics working across areas of postcoloniality and feminism—were positioned in relation to the cultural texts that lay behind and beyond our long-term consumption of various Body Shop emollients. Why, one of us (the neo-Australian, the ex-New Yorker) wondered, did Mamatoto, a putatively transcultural compendium of maternal resources and knowledges, include references to Australian indigenous traditions regarding spirit babies (10, 11, 12), but exclude the culturally specific Anglo/Australian practice of administering gripe-water to colicky infants? Come to think of it, why did the traffic in maternal ‘exotica’ seem to run only one way, from ‘non-West’ to West, from out-land to at-home? Wasn’t this The Body Shop, the beacon of socially responsive and responsible alternative products that made you feel good about your skin on all levels? The analysis of The Body Shop that follows grew directly out of our lived personal and political experience in a major urban centre of Australia. Beyond that, it carries little in the way of a specifically Australian inflection, feminist or otherwise. When we began this work, we were intrigued to find that feminist critique of The Body Shop was virtually non-existent, with only a few articles published in business and other magazines beginning to pose questions regarding the disjunctures between the rhetoric and the practice of Body Shop politics. Several important pieces have since been published on The Body Shop; the framework of feminist and representational critique in which we situate our discussion has been enriched by the work of Caren Kaplan (1995) on transnationalism and The Body Shop, as well as by that of more materialist, less representationally oriented perspectives such as that of Shekar Deshpande and Andy Kurtz (1994; see also Ware, 1992; Moberg, 1994). We have argued elsewhere that the politics of representation is also always a politics of the material (Cuthbert and Grossman, 1994:13). As Paul Smith exhorts, cultural critics need to recognize ‘the ways in which social representations accompany, adapt to, and even formulate the nature of changes and trends in the capitalist economy’. Smith continues, Capital’s claims for the legitimation of contemporary social and economic structures are made largely at the level of the consumer, who is never the consumer of just a commodity but equally of the commodity’s text and ideology…the production of this commodity text is indefeasibly bound up with more widespread and general shifts in the modalities of both representation and subjectivities. (Smith, 1988:139) Consequently, our focus here is less directly on class and advertising—on which more work needs to be done, particularly on alternative and resistant forms of gendered consumption—and more on a reading of The Body Shop’s discourses relating to

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women, maternity and difference as they are culturally retailed through The Body Shop and, specifically, Mamatoto as commodity text. Australia, with its fifty-six franchised stores and an annual turnover of $70 million, is one of more than forty countries in which The Body Shop has demonstrated that its particular brand of ointments and unctions marketed together with liberal, progressive causes—rainforests, whales, et al.—is big business. The popularity of The Body Shop, and the significance of its position in responding to and influencing aspects of Western women’s attitudes towards consumption, pleasure and the body, is well earned in several respects.2 The early signatures of The Body Shop’s image in the mid-1970s and throughout the 1980s—no animal testing, environmentally supportive packaging, the encouragement of recycling and the mobilizing of an individualist approach to the combination of fragrance and body-care products that encouraged both autonomy and play—were enormously appealing to Western middle-class women who were beginning to question, challenge and transform themselves and their lives in the context of ‘second-wave’ feminism. The Body Shop’s products were (then) relatively inexpensive, and enticingly different from the mass-market, cloyingly feminine ranges peddled by mainstream cosmetic companies. Most importantly, they reflected the growing awareness of and concern for connections between capitalist profit, environmental exploitation and women’s oppression that informed Western cultures in the postwar period. The Body Shop not only responded to these concerns, it actively addressed them, literally setting an example which competitors in the industry were compelled, however reluctantly, to follow (Zinn, 1991:115). The Body Shop was founded in 1976 by British entrepreneur Anita Roddick in Brighton, England. Eighteen years later, with over 1, 100 retail outlets spanning more than forty-three countries, a range that has swollen from a modest fifteen skin- and hair-care products to more than 250, and retail sales that hit £400 million in 1994, The Body Shop is serious business. It is precisely the success of The Body Shop in capitalizing upon changes in the cultural and economic status of women in (primarily) industrialized countries in the last quarter of the twentieth century that now invites scrutiny. How has The Body Shop survived and prospered within emerging formations of late capitalism? What matrix of contemporary issues and concerns does it now address? And to what extent can we gauge, in the current discourses of The Body Shop’s product ranges and promotions, traces of Western women’s current preoccupations with technology, gender, politics, culture and the body? The nexus of these preoccupations is, in our view, both animated and dominated by what we term a politics of anxiety: the alternating stimulation and suppression of the fears, desires, conflicts and dis-eases of first world women regarding their status as privileged subjects within a global economy of cultural and gendered differences that are structured materially and unevenly (Kaplan, 1995). The current popularity of aromatherapy and massage, for instance, which provides a demilitarized zone in the culture wars between medicalized, sexualized, and spiritualized discourses of women’s bodies, permits a conception of the body as a place of retreat, sanctuary and homecoming, far from the madding crowds of interventionist technologies and competing feminist/womanist/backlash imperatives. Yet in this formulation, the body as DMZ3 risks becoming a depoliticized zone as well, particularly when allied with the transcendent, individualist ideologies associated with strands of contemporary New Age rhetoric. As Rosalind Coward (1989) has argued, while ‘the new concern with the body is a place where people can express dissatisfaction with contemporary society and feel they can do something personally to resist’ its encroachments, this is ‘rarely a journey toward social rebellion but more often…a journey of personal

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transformation’, with an emphasis on ‘fantasies of wholeness, of integration, and of the individual as origin of everthing good and bad in their life’. Similarly, Andrew Ross (1991:54) points out that the New Age body, inasmuch as it is aligned with ‘nature’s ways’, is quite ahistorical; it is therefore immune, and often strictly opposed, to any conception of ‘nature’ as a social construct…. In this respect, New Age advocates of the ‘natural’ have developed some affinity with certain radical feminist and ecofeminist ideas about woman-as-nature. Naturally, the products and practices of The Body Shop, both material and rhetorical, can be inserted into a number of competing discourses along the axes of feminist interests in the body and its relation to culture. We focus here on The Body Shop as it relates to contemporary Western discursive formations of maternity, alterity and the vexed constructions of ‘difference’ and ‘globalism’ that emerge from them, drawing upon analyses of resurgent primitivism and the commodification of cultural difference provided by Torgovnick (1990) and hooks (1992). Among the meta-products of The Body Shop are discursive formations of ‘the body’ itself which, while they appear to endorse, even to celebrate, an active engagement with transcultural specificity and difference, actually reinstate the Western, white body of ‘woman’ as the ‘gold standard’ against which the exoticized currency of ‘other women’ can be classified, appropriated and disowned.4 Within this framework, maternity itself is deployed by The Body Shop as a richly suggestive trope that serves to represent the problematics of body-as-nature, body-as-culture and body-as-identity that continue to preoccupy feminists across a wide range of political and cultural agendas. Coward’s and Ross’s comments on the political displacements set in motion by New Age paradigms of the individualist body suggest some intriguing parallels between this anti-constructionist construct of the body and the ‘body language’ of The Body Shop’s promotional discourses. Indeed, the company’s highly buffed, anticorporate corporate public relations strategy relies to a large extent on a combination of ‘primitivist’ and agricultural motifs that minimize the vulgarity of profits and promote the ‘naturally based’ image of its financial and marketing operations. The phenomenon of the anti-corporate corporation, which markets without a marketing department,5 is a particular manifestation of late capitalism—the friendly, wellscrubbed face of Ernest Mandel’s third machine age (Jameson, 1991:35)—of which The Body Shop is both a typical and exceptional exponent. Its discourses blur distinctions, mask its practices and deal in obfuscation: ‘The Body Shop is skin and hair colour and care and commitment and choice and facts and fun and against animal testing all over the world.’6 R&D becomes the quest for the greater good of all humanity; anthropologists are corporate executives and vice versa; and promotional brochures are replete with enthusiasm for ‘harvesting’ and ‘gleaning’ bodycare practices from ‘other lands’, perhaps to enrich the sadly leached soil of Western attitudes impoverished by centuries of Cartesianism. Within this framework, motherhood, like the body, is a marketing category not to be sneezed at. The Body Shop inaugurated the 1990s by launching its Mamatoto range for mother and baby, ‘carefully and imaginatively planned’, so the brochures tell us, ‘to meet the real needs of real people’. The splashy bright colours and fruity cocktails and confections that characterize Body Shop products elsewhere on its premises here give way to something different: buff, the colour of unbleached calico, combined with pale blue for baby, and royal blue in the packaging of products for Mum. In the best

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spirit of total marketing, there are sweatshirts and tote bags and an array of other products for mother and child in the same colourways. The colours of Mamatoto speak. The pale blue soothes, whispers asepsis, neutralizes the colours of gestation and parturition: the reds and browns of blood, engorged tissue, darkened pigmentation. The royal blue, on the other hand, proclaims heraldry, status. Linking these blues are other associations perhaps not anticipated by the designer: depression, despair. The calico, by contrast, reassures: it is scrubbed, ‘natural’, homely. The term ‘Mamatoto’ itself, we are told, is ‘adapted from the Swahili for mother and child’ (Body Shop, 1990). What does ‘adapted’ mean? And how are we meant to respond to the troubling resonances of the phrase, which artfully yokes together the separate subjectivities of the woman who is a mother and the individual who is her child, and simultaneously elides and universalizes the cultural differences among Western and non-Western women on several levels? The casual ‘adaptation’ of Swahili is both a form of linguistic appropriation and also an exoticization of non-Western cultures and, along with them, maternity. This proprietary stance is repeated in the Mamatoto brochure, which uses as a border device the words for ‘mother’ and ‘baby’ from over a dozen languages: ‘Mama… Mutter…Äiti…Mor…Toto…Bebe…Mwpó…Dít ’. Relegated to a border territory, these words nevertheless centrally influence The Body Shop’s universalizing, undifferentiated claims regarding intercultural experiences of maternity. What appears as an ostensible celebration of cultural difference amounts, in effect, to a discourse which both essentializes and universalizes motherhood. In keeping with its corporate philosophy of peace, love, ‘trade not aid’ and the salvaging of endangered species and fun, The Body Shop engages in a transculturalism that thinly masks the essentially imperial nature of its global projects; it is, after all, ‘all over the world’. The fullest expression of The Body Shop’s efforts at the retailing of maternity and alterity as allegedly ‘transcultural’ commodities can be discerned in Mamatoto: A Celebration of Birth (Aria et al., 1991). Compiled by The Body Shop Team’ and Barbara Aria, and co-published with Virago Press, Mamatoto is 172 pages of exuberantly illustrated text covering the ‘celebration of birth’ across many cultures and historical periods. The contradictions of Mamatoto’s cultural politics are well illustrated in the contrast between its purported celebration of pluralism, difference and variety and the title’s announcement of ‘birth’ as a singular yet universal experience. Many of the strategies at work in the promotional literature surrounding Mamatoto are evident here in a more fully developed form: there is, on virtually every page, an apparently random decontextualization of cultural practices. The myriad activities and rituals connected with pregnancy and birth across cultures are ‘harvested’ and co-opted into a totalizing discourse which both exoticizes ‘primitive’ cultures and attempts to situate motherhood as a universal source of overly romanticized ‘primitive’ or ‘primal’ values. These overt narratives of the valorized primitive and the universalized maternal work in turn partially to obscure but also to reveal at various points the more persistent neocolonial tales that underwrite the retailing of cultural difference within the dominant ideology of the West. Overwhelmingly a text whose meanings circulate through an amalgam of visual and verbal codes, Mamatoto invests heavily in a self-conscious but never self-ironizing compendium of representational styles, flirting with many, exploring or challenging none. Yet opposed to the gestures toward pastiche and its potential decentring and destabilizing of representational hierarchies is the consistently binary idiom in which white infants and mums on the one hand and babies and mothers of colour on the

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other are articulated. In many ways, these divergent and often inverted grammars of race, caste and class that function in Mamatoto to represent Western versus nonWestern remedies, practices and wisdoms surrounding maternity constitute a maternalized ‘exotic other’ (Clifford, 1988:265) as a subject for scrutiny and edification under imperial eyes. But if a Western ‘cultural order’ of maternity is here ‘defined externally’ through the trope of ‘exotic others’, how does that account for the pervasive appeals to the maternal as a trope of transcendent, organic unity that sutures the wounds of difference even as they are repeatedly splayed open in the images proffered by Mamatoto? In what is essentially a structural-anthropological move, a ‘deep’ universal is posited as a site of displacement (if not a guise) that absorbs and neutralizes a more politicized notion of how differences are structured and perpetuated. The simultaneous splitting off and suturing together of the maternal as both celebration of women’s specificity and homogenizing of women’s diversity becomes a way of negotiating the neocolonial politics in which the The Body Shop participates, operating as it does within an economy that treats cultural diversity as a process of appropriation and accumulation, production and consumption. The unifying trope of motherhood across cultures thus becomes a way of speaking about the neonatal at the expense of the neocolonial, so that the struggle to bring a biological birth to a healthy conclusion stands in the place of and effaces the struggle to bring other kinds of births—political, cultural, epistemological—to fruition. The images we discuss here invest heavily in the mutually complicit strategies of celebrating nostalgia for a colonialist age (Rosaldo, 1989), even while denying that the neocolonialist structures in which that nostalgia may now find form still exist. If the non-Western other has repeatedly been figured as a child in relation to the Westerner as patriarch/parent/paternalist, a similar distribution across the ‘primitivecivilized’ divide represents the other as savage: ‘wild’ in every one of the richly ambivalent connotations which the phrase carried in European metropolitan terms, but capable, like all ‘wild beasts’, of being domesticated and turned to use. The first image we analyse is the photographic assemblage on page 148, which, through its suggestive conjunction of visual image and textual overlay, calls attention to an important aspect of the politics of representation in Mamatoto. Here, competing notions of cultural inscription and the legitimation of Western readings of the ‘other (as) body’ as a decipherable/re-encodable text are played out. In this image, a (putatively) African woman balances a baby on her back and a bowl or basket on her head. There is no caption for this photograph, but there is a translucent text box laid over most of the page. In her wake plods an ox, heavily laden with packs, burdened with a wooden yoke, and bearing a human passenger too shadowy to discern in anything more than misty silhouette. To ask where the woman ends and the ox begins sounds at first like idiocy or insult. Yet the strategic placement of the text box makes the question a pertinent one: the continuity between woman and animal that articulates the continuum of the non-West and the ‘primitive’ is effected here via the suturing of hindquarters. While most of the woman’s body is visible outside the text box, a small portion of her hips and buttocks is obscured, so that her hindquarters are slightly truncated. By contrast but also by extension, the ox is almost wholly contained within the text box, with only its hindquarters exposed at the other end, protruding slightly beyond the borders. The position and gait of the woman’s legs visually mimic those of the ox: they are paced and yoked in tandem. Thus aligned, the domesticated beast of burden and the African woman as domesticized beast (not to mention the mother as ‘woman’ domesticized,

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her wildness constrained by the twin labours of maternity and economy) are rendered visually and imaginatively continuous: where one ends, the other begins. Moreover, the text box not only overlays the image and invokes the enmeshing of woman and beast, but quite literally overwrites it: it is, after all, a text box as well as a graphic device. In relation to the text box, the woman herself appears to escape inscription— just. Yet in the very process of seemingly avoiding or resisting inscription by Western tropes of the primitivized maternal, she is visually positioned beyond linguistic borders or spaces of any kind. Placed outside language as she is discursively placed outside historical time and national or cultural identity, with no speech, no caption, no communicative link forged between text box and image, she becomes, in the memorable terms re-invoked by Gayatri Spivak, an ‘instrumentum semi-vocale’, or ‘working beast’, midway between an ‘instrumentum vocale’, or agrarian slave, and the ‘instrumentum mutum’, an agricultural tool or appliance (Spivak, 1988:247; 304n). All we ever discover about this woman and her baby is that their photograph was taken by Carol Beckwith. The headline within the text box reads ‘Return to the World’. Yet it must be ‘our’ imaginative return to a fantasy of ‘their’ world of which Mamatoto speaks here, for the woman herself is not returning anywhere, but is heading straight for the caption ‘Bottle feeding is killing babies in the third world’ on the facing page. The pervasive binarism that structures and divides West and non-West paradoxically renders Mamatoto’s pictorial representation of women and children of colour quite monotonous—with a few exceptions, they are offered to our gaze in straight, full colour anthropological documentary style. Shot almost exclusively outdoors, in deserts, forests, often coupled directly or indirectly with animals, and very often captured photographically while bathing or washing an infant, the nonwhite woman and mother is always ‘at home’. Yet despite Mamatoto’s numerous references to ‘birth rooms’, ‘birth huts’, the preparation of the home and the statement that ‘about 80 percent of the world’s babies—nearly all babies in non-industrial cultures—are born at home’ (67) (our emphasis), there is not a single image of any woman of colour occupying a built interior. In photographs where houses or buildings do appear, the woman is inevitably positioned outside them (65, 139, 128–9, 67). While there may be contextual reasons for this (a photographer unwelcome in or reluctant to enter the birthing domain of her or his subject, for example), it remains a remarkably consistent pattern. The contrast between this visual idiom and that used to represent white women and their babies is striking. The ‘this is your life, not my art’ mode of documentary is abandoned in favour of a distinctively artful deployment of pastiche: the admixture of line art and computer-generated images mingled with selectively colourized monochromes, serial montages that trumpet their self-conscious constructedness, the frequent use of visual collage in a distinctly anti-realist/anti-naturalist fashion (31, 131, 157, 169) and the ‘snapshot’ or family album style of framing (in which the infants are almost inevitably fully clothed). These graphic techniques aggressively foreground the agency involved in creating and assembling these images of ourselves, an agency miraculously camouflaged in the National Geographic idiom used to represent the other (Lutz and Collins, 1993). Both in ambience and in substance, the repeated juxtaposition of ‘art’ shots and ‘life’ shots on successive pages graphically informs and reinforces the ideological juxtapositions of progress and primitivism, science and folklore, knowledge and ignorance that discursively mark the boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ throughout Mamatoto.

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The double-page spread on pages 120–1, with its dramatically contrasting representations of infancy, is one of many such structuring devices. On the left is a photograph of a white baby—clothed, solitary, individuated and howling—multiple signifiers that work to confer subject status upon this lachrymose infant. On the far right of the facing page there is a photograph of black babies. The contrasts are instructive. The nostalgic sepia tones of the photograph to the left give way to bright colour on the right; the style of privatized, ‘old-fashioned’ domestic photography is replaced by a more public and contemporary mode that blends and blurs a documentary record of the exotic, the ‘outlandish’, with more recognizably commodified forms such as fashion and commercial photography. Although this image is highly and selfconsciously stylized—unusual framing, artful angles, graphic composition, dramatic colour—its substance argues against an untroubled alliance with the cheerful artifice that characterizes the representation of Western infants. Unlike the white baby to the left, the black babies in buckets are shown at an angle which obscures their faces, denying them the status of subjects. The individuated infant gives way to multiple babies, and the framing suggests that we see but a fraction of an infantile multitude, invoking the notion of teeming peoples characterizing the West’s imaginary conception of the Third World. The Western child, clothed and posed, presents as a finished product. The nonWestern babies are shown in series and in process; set in an institutional space— clinic? hospital? orphanage?—their toilet is subject to the public gaze, with an unpleasant implication that hygiene is an imperative necessarily imposed institutionally and en masse. Lined up in identical red plastic buckets for their public toilet, the children are thus associated with metaphors of mass production. The foreshortened perspective of the photograph, which produces an effect of elongation, extends this notion of an assembly line which pours out red plastic buckets and black babies in equal and endless supply, even surplus. The construction of black babies as surplus is not far from the surface here: the bucket here has dual valency, its industrial mode of production paving the way for the notion of mass production at the same time that its disturbing connotations as a receptacle for waste, for refuse and for aborted foetuses intrude on the edges of the image. Mamatoto’s emphasis on infertility in the West—the first of five alarm-ringing ‘Facts You Don’t Want to Know’ deals with this subject—targets the current anxieties of an increasing number of Westerners who, it seems, now view babies as elusive objects of desire. Elusive to many in the West, available in oversupply in the nonWest: supply and demand: the economic logic of the imagery grinds ineffably to its conclusion. Page after page offers brown-skinned babies for our visual appropriation, there for the imaginative if not the actual taking. Most troubling, for us, is the commodification of non-white children through a visual semiotics that bears affinities, as we have argued elsewhere (Cuthbert and Grossman, 1993), with the eroticized commodification of children in Asian child-sex tourism and, more generally, with the marketing of non-Western babies for ‘purchase’ or adoption in the West.7 While the visual codes of Mamatoto work to establish clear, even crude lines of demarcation between West and non-West, ‘us’ and ‘them’, the verbal text appears at times to invoke a more complex version of the undifferentiated ‘multiethnic’, what Stuart Hall (1992:23) calls ‘a certain kind of difference…a touch of ethnicity, a taste of the exotic’. By way of example, the chapter in Mamatoto entitled ‘The Baby is at the Door’ is a cornucopia of information and anecdote about aspects of bringing on

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baby, including hastening cervical dilation, coping with contractions, expediting birth and minimizing discomfort during labour. In a brief glance at the role of pitocin (the synthetic version of the hormone oxytocin produced during labour, breast-feeding and sexual arousal) we race within a single paragraph from the Jicarillo Indian women of Mexico, make a brief pit-stop in Yemen, catch our breath among the Zulu women of South Africa and arrive flushed and expectant in the next paragraph at the miraculously entwined doorsteps of the Lepchas women of Sikkim and the Siriono in Bolivia, with whom we tweak nipples in unison and cluck sympathetically over the exclusion of fathers from the ‘physical process of birthing’ (96). The dizzying speed at which Mamatoto moves here, as elsewhere, to establish equivalencies, assert affinities and piously legitimate ‘primitive’ or ‘tribal’ practices by associating them with those available in a ‘Western hospital’ is paced out narratively in the present tense . In other words, all these different women, different practices, different worlds are linked discursively through an undifferentiated eternal present (Fabian, 1983:71–104)—one that disintegrates spectacularly, however, with the arrival of the British at the bottom of the page. ‘Some of the strangest sounding methods’, Mama toto announces triumphantly, ‘have a practical basis for hastening a long and difficult labour’: During the sixteenth century English midwives would blow sneezing powder or pepper up a woman’s nostrils if labour had been going on for a long time. Sneezing actually causes the diaphragm to press on the uterus, as does retching. Perhaps this explains why a Mayan midwife breaks two raw eggs directly into the mother’s mouth. (Aria et al., 1991:96) (our emphasis) The only way that Western women can be inserted into this discourse without disrupting the allochronic, allotopic (Haraway, 1989:298) axes of ‘primitivist’ or ‘naturalist’ tropes is by dredging them up from the remote historical past. The ‘strange sounding’ inflections of non-Western women’s beliefs and practices in the present can be narratively mirrored only by the ‘strange sounding’ practices of our own Western past. By simultaneously exhuming the English midwife from her 400-year-old resting place and inter-ring her Mayan counterpart in the unmarked grave of the eternal present, Mamatoto delineates clearly the strategies by which the ‘universalism’ of maternity is constructed. ‘They’ are body, they exist in a ‘here’ and a ‘now’ ‘uninterrupted’, in the text’s wishful terms, not only by ‘science and technology’ (4) but by history and, ultimately, alterity. ‘We’, on the other hand, embody history, constantly moving on and through time, through space, endlessly rediscovering that reports of our own alterity have been greatly exaggerated, that we are in truth just like ‘them’. But evidently we are not, for the slippage between mother and child evinced in Mamatoto can now be refigured as the slippage between the Westerner as parent and the non-Westerner as child. This slippage, in which non-Western, non-whites are continuously represented as occupying either the eternal present or the dawn of time, their natural habitat perennially that of nature itself, their knowledges marked everywhere by instinct and innocence, is enacted in the final pages of the text: There is an enormous amount children can teach us about ourselves. Who knows—maybe babies do come from falling stars, as the Indians in Guatemala

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believe. Maybe they know more than we do. Maybe they are wiser, as the Hopi Indians believe. (170) ‘Maybe they know more than we do…’. The ambiguous syntax of ‘they’ serves doubly here to embrace ‘children’ on the one hand and ‘the Indians in Guatemala’ on the other, yoking them together as equivalent possessors and practitioners of such ‘alternative’ wisdoms. Yet elsewhere in the book, Mamatoto is at great pains to distinguish ‘our’ epistemologies from ‘their’ wisdoms, despite its claims of real respect for the knowledges of ‘traditional cultures’. Roddick writes: So much of the information we gathered made so much sense to me that I can’t help but ask why it is not considered ‘real knowledge’. At best, it is absolutely accurate, at worst, curiously interesting What pleases me about this book and about the lore it collects is that the information here is more like a conversation or a dialogue which sparks debate. (Aria et al., 1991:4) But a conversation with whom? Indeed, the emphasis on the ‘curious’ throughout Mamatoto (signalled among other places by the reference to ‘outlandish ideas’ on the back cover) and the narrative mode of address (non-Western women remain ‘they’, Western women are interpellated as ‘you’), combine with some of the representational strategies discussed above, to function not as conversation, but as gossip in the terms set out by Roland Barthes (1975:428–31) and extended by Trinh Minh-ha (1989: 67). Gossip in this sense is a conversation between ‘us’ and ‘us’ about ‘them’, as distinct from a conversation, or dialogue, between ‘us’ and ‘them’. For despite Roddick’s claim in the introduction to Mamatoto to have ‘gossiped with’ women ‘south of the equator’ (4), the text itself amounts to a collection of gossip about non-Western women related courtesy of The Body Shop to ‘us’. In this sense, first world consumers of Mamatoto’s discourses and products are encouraged to become consumers of gossip itself as a mode of cultural purchase and translation. Indeed, the only explicitly declared speaking position in Mamatoto is that of its founder, who provides an introduction to the volume (Aria et al., 1991: 4–5) that is vintage Roddick (see also Roddick, 1991). Her fondest hopes for a ‘gentler future’, she tells us, revolve around the conviction that a New World order can be brought about by recovering the ‘most elemental language of touch’. Not surprisingly, we find that in the utopian vision of The Body Shop, some kinds of touch are better than others: massage, aromatherapy, bathing and breast-feeding, all of which The Body Shop caters for with myriad lubricants, are proffered as the ideal regime for remedying the ills not just of the body but of the world. Yet for all the rhetoric of a New Age-New World order and the conspicuous textual displays of ‘the weak pluralism of utopian post-modernism’ (Bennett, 1993: x), Roddick’s persona here resurrects and endorses not the goddess but the archetypal colonial adventurer, a ‘girl’s own’ traveller to the ‘outlands’, as the reader is initiated into a (neo)colonialist paradigm of voyage and discovery, exploration and colonization. She begins: Frequent travels south of the equator, where I gossiped and shared life stories with women, made me realize that there was a wealth of knowledge about birth, virtually hidden from us in the Western world. I was amazed by the lore…. We

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began gathering stories from indigenous cultures and scouring our own past for gleanings. (Aria et al., 1991:4) Written in a style that bears some resemblance to other narratives within the burgeoning genre of New Age feminist ‘magical autobiography’ (Ross, 1991:55), Roddick collapses her adventures into foreign countries and cultures as ‘travels south of the equator’. The division here is between industrialized England, Roddick’s geographically and ideologically lived centre, and those marginalized ‘outlands’ between which all difference may be erased, since they function merely as the exotic ‘south’ to England’s normative north. The metanarrative here, we would argue, concerns the intrepid efforts of Roddick herself as colonial heroine in bringing these treasures to the gaze (and the shopping malls) of gaping Westerners. More subtly, lurking within this neocolonial romance with/of the other, are false homologies established between ‘their stories’ and ‘our past’. Thus if the historicity of Roddick’s discursive position is relatively smoothly articulated, or at least articulable, within Mamatoto, the same can hardly be said for non-Western women and their children. By contrast, their discursive positioning in Mamatoto seems more closely aligned with Bakhtin’s concept of a chronotopic formation, denoting ‘a configuration of spatial and temporal indicators in a fictional setting where (and when) certain stories take place’ (Clifford, 1988:236). The chronotope Clifford has in mind here is that of Levi-Strauss’ New York in the 1930s and 1940s. In Mamatoto, however, it is not only ethnicity but maternity which is refigured chronotopically, so that the constructions of maternity assigned to nonWestern women become part of the (colonially resonant) cultural shipwreck that yields ‘remnants and shards, good to evoke in escapist reveries, good to collect as art… and “good to think with” in salvaging the cultural structures of a transhistorical esprit humain’ (Clifford, 1988:241). Ultimately, a version of colonialism itself is chronotopically both registered and resisted in Mamatoto: the ‘remnants and shards’, at least, of the imperial period can be sustained, remain ‘uninterrupted’, by the protests, transformations and disruptions of modernity or the resistances staged by those people consigned materially and imaginatively to its margins. The final image that we consider suggests some of the entanglements and consequences of this chronotopic figuring. A black woman and a female toddler gaze affectionately at each other rather than at the camera (168). The toddler perches on a milk crate once owned by ‘Prairie Farms’, while the woman is seated firmly and, by the looks of it, comfortably on a wooden bench. The lush greenery of the landscape naturalizes the background of the photograph, as does the felled tree-trunk which works as a visual slash to bisect yet bind together (Jagose, 1993) the photograph’s compositional elements into the familiar split of nature (bushes, grass, the tree-trunk itself) and culture (the plastic milk crates, the plastic bucket, towel, brown paper). The woman herself is bisected at groin level by the tree-trunk: nature claims the upper half of her body, while her feet are firmly planted in culture. Although no fish or fishing gear are discernible, the photograph’s caption declaims, with grim determination, ‘Mother and child out fishing. St. Louis, Missouri’. The photo credit listed under ‘Acknowledgments’ belongs to Thomas Kelly; like all the images in the book, undated and otherwise unsourced. While on one level this African-American woman and daughter may indeed be in St Louis, on another level they are situated well beyond the boundaries of the United

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States and of Western cultures. The English-language tags of the milk crate and the child’s blouse, the contemporary Western mode of dress, the abundance of plastic containers, the woman’s watch with its connotations of modern technology (and thus her provisional insertion into modern history) all function within the photograph to signal location within an industrialized culture. Yet while the information provided by both image and caption places mother and daughter squarely within the industrialized West, the photographic style of the shot suggests otherwise, incorporating them into Mamatoto’s primitivized, naturalized visual grammar of choice for representing the (undifferentiated) non-white. The pastoral bliss that serves as a trope for Western fantasies of an agrarian paradise, and for which the non-industrial other serves as both tenant and caretaker, is symbolized by the caption’s insistence that the pair are ‘out fishing’—never mind that there is no hint of a waterway, let alone fish, anywhere in sight. The location of the mother’s head in among the fertile vegetation of the background securely grounds her consciousness in a nature persistently, tediously opposed to culture, and while the mutuality of their gazes can arguably be read as an exclusive bond between subjects that renders a spectator marginal and irrelevant, another reading might imply that the absence of a reciprocal gaze reproduces the absence of a reciprocal subjectivity. The National Geographic documentary style is at work again, as we encounter ‘other’ people in their native habitat. At once Westernized and naturalized, historicized and eternalized, situated and universalized, the African-American mother and child strain the seams of Mamatoto’s binarisms of race and alterity to bursting point. In our reading, then, this pair function as exoticized foreigners in their own land. By means of fashioning a pre-industrial scenario within an ambivalently represented postindustrial context, the ‘outlandish’ otherness of the African-American woman and her progeny can be quietly and safely maintained. And for whom? For the mother’s and child’s visual antagonist: the snapshot, family album, framed-in-Mamatoto-bluecolour-wash white infant boy installed on the facing page (169), whose direct (if squint-eyed) gaze and confident laughter speak of the reciprocal subjectivity that a white male child may literally assume from the cradle. The concerns and issues that preoccupy the lives of the non-Western women (on to whom sub-standard Western products such as surplus breast-milk substitutes are dumped, for example) remain outside Mama toto’s idealized picturing of the eternal primitive, as do, finally, the women themselves. Mamatoto flaunts this exclusion where the performative aspects of the text are strongest, at the level of visual representation. Five ‘silent howls of protest’ comprise the tellingly thin gestures of Mamatoto towards the struggles of the women subsumed within its margins. Thus, in a text that constructs in its entirety a scopophiliac’s paradise, there are five stark pages of black background with small white print. Each of these is headed ‘Facts You Don’t Want to Know’, and each details some aspect of the dark side of pregnancy and childbirth for women within and across various cultures. The first deals with the increase in Western rates of infertility, citing statistics garnered from the World Health Organisation, yet providing examples only from the US (25). Later pages deal with the dangers of smoking in pregnancy (61); the comparative ‘horrors of the state’ in relation to the policing of population growth and reproduction in Tibet and Romania (81); statistics on global childbirth deaths (113), and, finally, the problems caused by bottle-feeding in the Third World (149). While Mamatoto appears to be insisting that we do need to know (they are telling us, there it is in black and white), we read these pages as obligingly refusing to tell us what we don’t want to see. The sombre style of representation—funereal, stripped

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bare, appealing to the implied dignity of an absence of adornment—registers counterdiscursively as an absence within the mode of fulsome visual presence accorded to ‘the celebration’ of maternity elsewhere. The images that might disturb and subvert the pleasures of looking, of complacent tourism and consumption, are withheld at precisely the moment when they might usefully intrude and force us (as consumers on many levels) to interrogate both the nature of those pleasures and the sources of exploitation, exclusion and abuse upon which they are founded. ‘The Facts You Don’t Want to Know’ thus become the facts that Mamatoto does not compel us to know by marginalizing them representationally so that they all but cease to exist, easily discarded in favour of a return to four-colour, full-frontal fantasies of motherhood and the primitive. This marginalization is confirmed by the strategic placement of these five pages at the end of each chapter; they function as afterthoughts, endnotes, or, alternatively, delineate the space between one chapter and the next, so that their presence is only minimally disruptive. The intersection of black and white in these token gestures towards the ‘unfortunate side effects’ of global capitalism—the white inscription on the black background of other histories, other cultures—reminds us that it is this territory that constitutes the truly ‘foreign lands’ in which we dare not travel imaginatively, empathetically, with a loving look, since we cannot, perforce, love looking at what we might see were such realities visually imaged. When the pleasures of scopophilia are confronted by the necropolis, the blinds are quietly but firmly drawn down. In broadening our earlier exploration (Cuthbert and Grossman, 1993) of The Body Shop’s ‘cultural marketing’ practices—especially the marketing of maternity and alterity, race and gender—we have wanted to look at how these are positioned within and contribute to the ‘culture wars’ still being contested within and between feminisms along constructivist versus essentialist axes. In this essay we have tried to delineate the trajectory by which The Body Shop seemingly places a bet each way, and with devastating consequences for a transculturally and politically engaged feminism. Thus Western women are permitted access to and aligned with constructivist paradigms of subjectivity and selfhood, while women situated discursively beyond the West are condemned to take up, without remission, permanent tenancy in the prison-house of essentialism, treading the well-worn path of colonial consignment to an eternalized present where ‘nature’ always triumphs over ‘history’. In this calculus, the history of certain women can only be recuperated at best as a primitivized version of ‘natural history’. The position of The Body Shop within such formations is far from unique. On the contrary, it is indicative of an increasingly explicit tendency in contemporary global capitalism—witness Benetton (Giroux, 1994; Wark, 1992)—and therefore serves as an index to a powerful and influential matrix of neocolonial tropes that have gained considerable currency in the cultural marketplace as part of the larger effort of ‘capitalism’s renewed attempt at recasting itself in an aura of multi-national benevolence’ (Deshpande and Kurtz, 1994:33). In its scramble for a Western fantasy of the ‘authentic-natural’, and in ‘celebrating’ ‘the historically risky compartmentalization of otherness that masquerades under the title of multiculturalism’ (Suleri, 1992:765),8 The Body Shop discursively exploits what Sara Suleri calls ‘feminism skin deep’, in which biological readings of race and difference reliant upon an ‘originary concept of whiteness’ both maintain divisions and inhibit enquiry into alternative modes of resistance and change. In an August 1994 in-store window poster promoting its range of moisturizers, The Body Shop featured a double

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photographic portrait of two (‘white’) women, one a radiant teenager, the other a healthy-looking fiftysomething. The poster’s caption read: ‘Moisture is the difference between a grape and a raisin.’ Difference skin-deep?9

Notes 1 We are very grateful to Katrina Beard for research assistance in gathering and collating the business literature on The Body Shop, and to Rita Felski, Suvendrini Perera, Zoe Sofoulis, Julie Stephens and Terry Threadgold for their comments on earlier drafts. 2 The Body Shop’s success and the hallmarks of that success—‘ethical trading’, the disavowal of conventional marketing in favour of publicity through espousing particular causes, its ‘green’ profile, the ideological education of consumers and employees—have received prominent, if not critical, coverage in the pages of the business press and journals specializing in business, management and marketing. See, for example, Dutton (1992); Haggin and Kartomtem (1992); Miller (1992a, 1992b); Hawken (1992); Sherman Chatzy (1992); Cooperman (1992); Jacob (1992); Poirer (1992); Seward (1990); Magrath (1990); Wilder (1990); Wallace (1990); Burlingham (1990); Zinn (1991). 3 This seems a far cry from the days when the Boston Women’s Health Collective produced Our Bodies, Our Selves (1971), in which reconceptualizing the (female) body was seen as a crucial element in the front line struggles for collective liberation. 4 We follow here Donna Haraway’s (1992) argument that Thomas Laqueur’s discussion of sixteenth-through nineteenth-century medical and political representations of female bodies…may be extended to the late twentieth century: the universalised natural body remains the gold standard of hegemonic discourse’ (146). 5 Like the ‘alternative’ status of its products, The Body Shop’s alternative to conventional advertising has been to generate publicity and exposure by pursuing links with the social/political causes it espouses, such as ecological sustainability and anti-nuclear testing (Greenpeace), an end to state-sponsored political imprisonment and torture (Amnesty International) and alternatives to world hunger (Oxfam), all of which contribute prominently placed in-store and shopfront displays, literature and petitions. It is a mutually beneficial arrangement through which, by eschewing conventional advertising and opting instead for the promotion of ‘causes’, The Body Shop does not advertise its products but advertises itself as ‘socially responsible’. Other forms of non-advertising promotion and circulation include arrangements with magazines such as the UK’s Health and Fitness, which offers its readers discount tours of The Body Shop headquarters in Littlehampton (1993). 6 This slogan appears on a number of different pieces of Body Shop literature, including a 1993 promotional brochure, ‘What is The Body Shop?’ and the recycled brown paper wrapping and bags in which purchases are taken home. 7 The links between the politics/economics of the representation of infants by The Body Shop and in other contemporary cultural sites constitute a line of enquiry we would like to pursue further. For a pertinent survey of shifting modes of pictorial representation of non-Western children, see ‘In black & white’ (1992). For

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slippages between child as victim, child as commodity and child as sex object, compare the reliance on photographic representation of non-Western children in Waterstone (1993) and Cook (1993). 8 Joan Morgan (1994:33), writing in the premiere issue of Rebelle, puts it slightly differently: ‘We are expected to lay out a cultural smorgasbord while white America shows up with a very big fork.’ 9 We anticipate that some readers may wonder, if only in passing, whether we continue to be consumers of The Body Shop’s products since beginning this project. One of us has stopped using as well as purchasing Body Shop products; the other is still working through her stock-piled supply. Both of us miss our Banana Hair Putty. Ironically, The Body Shop’s success in the ‘hair and skin care’ niche of the cosmetic market has contributed to the wealth of product choices now available in Australia. The most notable (meaning our favourites) are the Red Earth range, an Australianized version of Body Shop-style products, and the Koori range, an Aboriginal-owned and marketed concern.

References Aria, Barbara and The Body Shop Team (Carol Dunham, Frances Myers, Neil Barnden, Alan McDougall and Thomas L.Kelly) (1991) Mamatoto: A Cel ebration of Birth, London: Virago. Barthes, Roland (1975) ‘[from] A lover’s discourse’, trans. Richard Howard [1978], in Susan Sontag (ed.) (1982), A Roland Barthes Reader, New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. Bennett, David (1993) ‘Introduction’, in his (ed.), Cultural Studies: Pluralism and Theory, Melbourne: Department of English, University of Melbourne. Body Shop International PLC (1990) Mamatoto: Mother and Baby Range (brochure). (1993) What is The Body Shop? (brochure). Boston Women’s Health Collective (1971) Our Bodies, Our Selves, New York: Simon & Schuster. Burlingham, Bo (1990) ‘This woman has changed business forever’, Inc., 12(6): 34–47. Clifford, James (1988) The Predicament of Culture, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cook, Margie (1993) ‘Cry freedom’, Good Weekend (magazine supplement to The Age , Melbourne), 27 November: 12–20. Cooperman, Rhonda (1992) ‘Better tomorrow starts today’, Direct Marketing, 54(11): 36– 7. Coward, Rosalind (1989) The Whole Truth: The Myth of Alternative Health, London and Boston: Faber. Cuthbert, Denise and Grossman, Michele (1993) ‘Mamatoto: consuming difference’, Australian Women’s Book Review, 5(3): 23–26. —— (1994) ‘Cultural studies I: ethnographycentrism’ (letter), Arena Magazine, 10:13. Deshpande, Shekar and Kurtz, Andy (1994) ‘Trade tales’, Mediations, 18(1): 33– 52. Dutton, Barbara (1992) ‘What price knowledge?’, Manufacturing Systems, 10(8): 3. Fabian, Johannes (1983) Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, New York: Columbia University Press. Giroux, Henry A. (1994) ‘Consuming social change: the “United Colors of Benetton”’, Cultural Critique, Winter: 5–32.

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Haggin, Jeff and Kartomtem, Bjorn (1992) ‘Show your consumers respect!’, Catalog Age, 9(1): 91–2. Hall, Stuart (1992) ‘What is this “black” in black popular culture?’, in Gina Dent (ed.), Black Popular Culture, Seattle: Bay Press. Haraway, Donna (1989) ‘Monkeys, aliens, and women: love, science, and politics at the intersection of feminist theory and colonial discourse’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 12(3): 295–312. —— (1992) ‘Investment strategies for the evolving portfolio of primate females’, in Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller and Sally Shuttleworth (eds), Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science, London: Routledge. Hawken, Paul (1992) ‘The ecology of commerce’, Inc., 14(4): 93–100. Hooks, Barbara (1995) ‘The body corporate’, The Qantas Club, July: 34–6. hooks, bell (1992) ‘Eating the other: desire and resistance’, in Black Looks: Race and Representation , Boston: South End Press. ‘In black & white’ (1992) New Internationalist, February: 8–9. Jacob, Rahul (1992) ‘Body Shop International: what selling will be like in the ‘90s’, Fortune, 125(1): 63–4. Jagose, Annamarie (1993) ‘Slash and suture: post/colonialism in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza’, in Sneja Gunew and Anna Yeatman (eds), Femin ism and The Politics of Difference, Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Jameson, Fredric (1991) Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London: Verso. Kaplan, Caren (1995) ‘“A world without boundaries”: The Body Shop’s trans/national geographics’, Social Text, 4(3): 45–66. Lutz, Catherine A. and Collins, Jane L.(1993) Reading National Geographic, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Magrath, Allan J. (1990) ‘Contrarian marketing’, Across the Board, 27(10): 46–50. Miller, Cyndee (1992a) ‘Promoting voting: it’s goodwill—and good business too’, Marketing News, 26(2): 1, 8–9. —— (1992b) ‘Amnesty International injects pizzazz into its marketing approach’, Marketing News, 26(4): 9. Moberg, David (1994) ‘Skin deep’, In These Times, 19 September: 12–16. Morgan, Joan (1994) ‘A farewell to multiculturalism from a sista scorned’, Rebelle, 1 (Summer): 32–5. Poirer, Mark (1992) ‘Environmental fairy tales’, Catalog Age, 9(6): 75–9. Roddick, Anita (with Russell Miller) (1991) Body and Soul, London: Ebury Press. Rosaldo, Renato (1989) ‘Imperialist nostalgia’, in Culture and Truth: The Remak ing of Social Analysis, Boston: Beacon. Ross, Andrew (1991) Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits, London: Verso. Seward, Hilary (1990) ‘Establishing a social conscience at work’, New England Business, 12(11): 97–8. Sherman Chatzy, Jean (1992) ‘Changing the world’, Forbes, 149(5): 83–84. Smith, Paul (1988) ‘Visiting the Banana Republic’, in Andrew Ross (ed.) Universal Abandon: The Politics of Postmodernism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1988) In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, New York and London: Routledge. Suleri, Sara (1992) ‘Woman skin deep: feminism and the postcolonial condition’, Critical Inquiry, 18(4):756–69.

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Torgovnick, Marianna (1990) Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Trinh, T.Minh-ha (1989) Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Wallace, Connie (1990) ‘Lessons in marketing—from a maverick’, Working Woman, 15 (10): 81–4. Ware, Vron (1992) Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History, London: Verso. Wark, McKenzie (1992) ‘Still life today: the Benetton campaign’, Photofile, 36:33–6. Waterstone, Richard (1993) ‘Black market babies’, New Woman, June: 44–9. Wilder, Clinton (1990) ‘More than skin deep’, Computerworld, 24:67–8. Zinn, Laura (1991) ‘Whales, human rights, rain forests—and the heady smell of profits’, Business Week, 15 July: 114–15 .

‘AS HOUSEWIVES WE ARE WORMS’: WOMEN, MODERNITY AND THE HOME QUESTION LESLEY JOHNSON1

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the possibility of a feminist understanding of the concept of home. It begins with an analysis of the way in which a number of feminist scholars utilize a concept of home that retains the gendered dichotomies characteristic of modernism. The writings of feminists as diverse as Betty Friedan and Teresa de Lauretis are examined to indicate the pervasiveness of this tendency. The paper then goes on to argue that an historical investigation of women’s experiences of modernity provides a way of rethinking the concept of home and its place in the modern world. It discusses the different meanings given to one particular image of the home in Australia in the first decade after the Second World War. This material demonstrates the historical and contested nature of our understandings of both home and modernity. But more importantly, it points to an understanding among women, and in some of the discourses through which they were addressed in the popular press at this time, of home as an active creating of place. As such, this space was not seen as opposed to or a place to retreat from the modern world. On the contrary, it represented a different vision of what modernity should be about. A rethinking of home and its relationship to modernity is necessary, it is suggested, if feminism is to destabilize those very oppositions that have been central to how womanhood has been defined in Western cultural traditions. A number of writers in recent years have canvassed the possibility of a feminist sociology of modernity (e.g. Wolff, 1990). Others have pointed to the gendered character of the traditions of modernism (Huyssen, 1986; Morris, 1988) and to the instability of notions of modernity itself (Felski, 1994). A central concern in this literature is to disrupt the dichotomies that have prevailed in Western traditions of defining and critiquing modernity. These dichotomies, as many feminist scholars have now pointed out, are implicitly or explicitly gendered, constituting women either as ‘other’ to the male modernist writer or as ‘trapped’ in ‘tradition’, represented in this context as modernity’s ‘other’. But there are ways in which these modernist dichotomies continue to prevail even in the very feminist literature that ostensibly sets out to challenge their pervasiveness elsewhere. This paper begins with an analysis of the various concepts of home in feminist writing, arguing that such concepts often retain certain key dichotomies relied on by modernism, in particular home/voyage,

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statis/movement, private/public, tradition/modernity, connectedness/autonomy. It then turns to examine a body of historical material which suggests that women have struggled at various times to overturn precisely this concept of home. This material provides insights into women’s different historical experiences as well as their potentially different visions of modernity. But it also demonstrates some of the limitations of current feminist understandings of the modern, which are unable to acknowledge the potential of those different historical experiences.

The ‘home question’ Janet Wolff has argued that nearly all accounts of modernity have focused on the worlds of work, politics and city life. Despite the presence of some women in these realms of the ‘public sphere’, they are primarily areas in which women have been excluded, made invisible (Wolff, 1990:34). The literature of modernity has been predominantly concerned with men’s experience. But its silence about the ‘private sphere’, and hence about the experience of women, is detrimental, Wolff suggests, not only to an understanding of the lives of women, but of men too: it ignores ‘a crucial part of men’s lives’. She calls for an investigation of the experience of the modern in its private manifestations, as well as of ‘the very different nature of the experience of those women who did appear in the public arena’ (Wolff, 1990:47). Thus, while making an important call for the development of a feminist sociology of modernity, Wolff retains a distinction between the ‘private’ and the ‘public’. Her argument resembles the inclusion model of feminist history (now thoroughly critiqued) that seeks only to ‘add women’s experiences’ to discussions of modernity but not to overturn the frameworks through which they have been understood. Elizabeth Wilson has challenged Wolff’s argument but has focused primarily on claiming the city as a public space in which women have participated both actively and passively (Wilson 1991:56). For her, women’s experiences of the city have been ambiguous. We need to be aware, she says, of both its pleasures and dangers for women. Nevertheless, she argues, ‘urban life, however fraught with difficulty, has emancipated women more than rural life or suburban domesticity’ (Wilson, 1991:10). For Wilson, ‘suburban domesticity’, the world of the private, ordinary home, needs to be left behind by women in the pursuit of their fully developed personhood. Instead, she proclaims the public spaces of the city as the sphere of women’s potential emancipation in opposition to this everyday world of domestic life and a homely existence in the suburbs. Wilson is not alone among contemporary feminists in setting up notions of home as a place necessarily to be left behind in the formation of the feminist subject—in her terms, of the emancipated woman. Perhaps the most important text in establishing this narrative as a central legacy for second-wave feminism was Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963/1983). Defining home as the place of the suburban housewife, Friedan told the story of women’s emancipation in the form of the classical account of the emergence of the modern subject. Women in the early 1960s, she said, were increasingly finding the sphere of the home too limiting, a trap they had to escape. This home was a place in which they were identified solely as wives and mothers rather than fully developed individuals. A life of domesticity, of household chores, cleaning, cooking and caring for others, was not enough if a woman was to be an individual, ‘free to develop her own potential’ (Friedan, 1983:60). Friedan claimed that it was only since the Second World War that the lives of twentieth-century women had become so confined, so destructive of their personhood. Before the war,

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they had been surrounded by images of the ‘new woman’. The heroines of women’s magazines in the 1930s were career women who showed immense ‘spirit, courage, independence, determination’ (Friedan, 1983:34). What was it, Friedan wanted to know, which had so successfully displaced this image and ensured that women would give up all that they had gained to want to ‘go home again’? American capitalism in the 1950s, she concluded, was conspiring to ensnare women in the home with its images of material wealth and its false promises that women could express themselves as individuals through the acquisition of commodities. In her analysis of the desire of women in the 1960s to throw off these imposed definitions of femininity, Friedan recruited the standard narrative concerning the formation of the modern subject. As accounts of the modernist legacy, like those by Marshall Berman (1985) make clear, ideas of the modern subject rely on claims about its incommensurability with other forms of subjectivity. Its uniqueness is defined as historical, a way of being in the world that entails leaving behind the past. This past may perhaps continue to inspire nostalgic desires for a world of security and order that has now been lost, but it is nevertheless a past to be free of, to go beyond. Just as the history of modernity is defined as a process of breaking with ‘the past’, with a world that is constituted as ‘tradition’, so each individual must replicate this journey in their own life. To become the autonomous, self-defining subject of modernity, each person must break with the safe and comforting sphere of their childhood where their identity was defined for them by others. The modern subject is thus characterized, according to Berman, precisely by this capacity to embrace and celebrate the absence of security and order characteristic of contemporary social existence. Betty Friedan firmly placed feminism within this modernist framework: she called on women to reject tradition in the form of the ascribed roles of wife and mother that tied them to the domestic world of the suburban home. The project of feminism, in her terms, should awaken women to the freedom and responsibilities of being modern individuals (see Johnson, 1993). Many feminist histories have continued to rely on this same form of emancipatory narrative in their analyses of the 1950s. Popular histories produced in the 1970s and early 1980s about the emergence of contemporary feminism, for instance, frequently spoke of women successfully operating in the public world of work during the Second World War, only to be forced ‘back home’ in the 1950s (see, for example, the films For Love or Money, 1983; The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, 1980). These analyses of the beginnings of second-wave feminism understood the late 1960s as the period when women began to ‘break out’, leave their homes, to demand full participation in the public spheres of work and political life. Feminist histories of suburbia in Australia have also relied on a similar set of themes, structuring their discussion of the 1950s around an assumption that women were being forced ‘back home’ in this period. Programmes of slum clearance and urban planning in the postSecond World War period are understood as relying on and ensuring that women’s ‘traditional’ roles of wife and mother again dominated their lives. In the suburbs of the 1950s, it is claimed, women found themselves having to ‘stay at home’, while men went ‘out to work’ (see Allport, 1986:233). Similarly, critiques of the rise of the consumer culture in the 1950s represent women as bombarded by images of inauthentic desires for home, from which feminism is seen implicitly or explicitly to rescue them (see Game and Pringle, 1979). These histories all share the format of the home-and-away story of the modern subject. But feminism in the 1980s developed a powerful critique of this notion of the modern subject—in particular, of its cultural ideal of the self-determining, autonomous individual. According to Carol Gilligan (1982) and others, this ideal has

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become a normative model in twentieth-century notions of human development. Developmental psychology depicts the processes of identity formation in young people as requiring a period of adolescence in which they throw off the relationships of childhood, separate from parental authority, and come to define an identity for themselves. These universalizing claims of psychological literature, Gilligan argues, do not accord with the experiences of young women. Growing up, for young women, involves conflicting loyalities as they learn to become responsible for themselves at the same time as retaining their sense of connectedness with others. Young women, she suggests, have found a way of defining the self in which dependence does not mean a loss of control or powerlessness. They have learned to shape a self-in-relationship that does not require separation, leaving home. While Gilligan’s work has itself been interpreted in some contexts as a set of normative claims about authentic feminine selves (Johnson, 1993:15), a number of feminist theorists have sought to build on her work to develop a fundamental reassessment of the concepts of the individual and personhood. Seyla Benhabib (1992), for instance, interrogates the gendered subtext that underlies the concept of the self-defining individual. The individual, unrestrained by private or domestic responsibilities, possessing a rational mind freed from the distorting effects of the emotions and the needs of the body, represents values and characteristics historically associated with the masculine. These characteristics have achieved their meaning and their status, she points out, by establishing a series of negations identified with the feminine. In making a self, the modern subject, as noted above, is imagined as breaking all ties, freeing ‘himself’ from the social relationships and influences of childhood, putting aside all emotional ties and the bodily restraints of domestic existence and entering the public world of men as a fully formed individual. But this disembedded, disembodied subject is an illusion, says Benhabib, that has long ceased to convince. It cannot do justice to those contingent processes of socialization, the diverse and multiple determinations that shape who ‘we are’ (Benhabib, 1992:5). Benhabib argues for the recognition of a situated self, a self that is not closed off, separate from the social relations that shape it. This self does not have to imagine itself as ‘leaving home’ to become a self; selfhood is formed precisely by the social relationships of everyday existence, including those of domestic life. But these critiques have not necessarily rid feminism of a reliance on notions of ‘leaving home’ in accounts of the conditions of emergence of the feminist subject. Teresa de Lauretis (1990), for instance, invokes this narrative in her analysis of what she refers to as the ‘eccentric subject’ of feminism. She sets out to identify a shift in historical consciousness in a range of contemporary texts of feminist critical theory which, she believes, seek to stand both inside and outside the sociocultural formations which have been the enabling conditions of modern feminism. According to de Lauretis (1990:138), this historical consciousness recognizes the assumptions and conditions that made modern feminism possible, at the same time as it attempts to go beyond previous discursive boundaries, to ‘dis-locate’ itself. It understands feminism as a community whose boundaries shift, are fluid, and ‘whose differences can be expressed and renegotiated through connections both interpersonal and political’ (de Lauretis, 1990:137). This shift in historical consciousness entails a dis-placement and a self-displacement: leaving or giving up a place that is safe, that is ‘home’—physically, emotionally, linguistically, epistemologically— for another place that is unknown and risky, that is not only emotionally but conceptually other; a place of discourse from which speaking and thinking are at

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best tentative, uncertain, unguaranteed. But the leaving is not a choice: one could not live there in the first place. (de Lauretis, 1990:138) Yet de Lauretis describes a project which ironically echoes that outlined by Marshall Berman in one key respect. ‘To be modernist’, he says, ‘is to make oneself at home in the maelstrom’ (Berman, 1985:345). Similarly, de Lauretis describes a ‘leaving or giving up’ of a space called ‘home’ for another place that is ‘risky’, ‘unknown’. In this move she retains the oppositions between home/voyage and statis/movement that Berman also fails to question in his defence of modernism. Though no privileged subjectivity is available as an already existing collectivity to take on this voyage, nevertheless in speaking of the ‘eccentric subject’ de Lauretis constitutes an ‘other’: the one who stays at home. But is not this ‘other’, bound down by tradition, embedded in the mundanities of everyday life, trapped in the private domain, is she not the figure of (the ordinary) woman, the contemporary ‘suburban’ or ‘home town girl’ that Friedan also wished to reject, or at least rescue? De Lauretis sets up a normative definition of womanhood in which desires for home as comfort, intimacy and everydayness appear to be what ‘we’ both want to and ought to be leaving behind. I want to suggest, then, that an historical investigation of women’s experiences of modernity might provide a way of rethinking both our concept of home and our understanding of our desires for such a place in the modern world. Such a process is necessary if feminism is to destabilize those very oppositions that have been central to the definition of womanhood in Western cultural traditions. But we also need to avoid setting up our own normative definitions of womanhood in which desires for connectedness, intimacy and everydayness are constituted as inappropriate, even perhaps shameful, something that we hope to move ‘beyond’. In this context I will look at the instability of notions of ‘home’ as a central concept in defining Australian modernity in the decade or so following the Second World War. In particular, I am interested in how women’s relationship to this place was defined by others and how it was negotiated by women themselves. A number of social historians have begun to analyse the modernizing forces that have shaped women’s domestic lives in the twentieth century. This work points to an understanding of modernity and its history in which women feature as central participants rather than as convenient figures to represent some notion of modernity’s ‘other’: ‘tradition’, embodiment, dependence. Kerreen Reiger’s The Disenchantment of the Home (1985) provides a detailed analysis of moves to change the patterns of women’s daily lives and the way in which they understood their work as housewives in Australia during the period from 1880 to 1940. Notions of the modern, she argues, were deployed in this context to persuade women of the importance of deferring to a range of new medical, psychological and educational experts and their ‘scientific knowledges’ in the conduct of their daily household and childcare tasks. Similarly, Martin Pumphrey (1987) has argued that an analysis of the images of both ‘the flapper’ and ‘the housewife’ in the 1920s points to the necessity of a more gendered understanding of modernity. Lifestyle advertising of this period claimed that the modern, defined as science in this instance, would make the lives of both types of women healthy, happier and more fulfilling. The redefinitions of femininity being mobilized in this context, Pumphrey suggests, established a new vision of modernity as responsive to human needs. In these representations of modernity the individual’s personal and domestic life was claimed to be part of, rather than an impediment or irrelevant to, the great changes being wrought on social existence. At the same time,

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these advertising images drew on and reworked the modernist images of a science fiction metropolis, creating a frightening picture of modern, public life ‘to encourage that retreat into privacy, into pastoral suburbia…that has come to have such power in twentieth century consumer consciousness’ (Pumphrey, 1987:193). These histories of the role of modernization processes in transforming the everyday lives of women in the early decades of the twentieth century demonstrate Rita Felski’s argument that ‘modernity’ is a contested concept, ‘open to appropriation and redefinition in struggles over meaning and interpretation’ (Felski, 1994:152). Images of the modern were recruited in the 1920s, for instance, to create a sense of excitement and inevitability about the new modes of social existence emerging in conjunction with the various technological and economic developments occurring in this period. I want to extend this analysis into a discussion of the changes being wrought on women’s lives in Australia in the 1940s and early 1950s, to look at the struggles that took place over the concept of home and its place in the modern world. I have chosen this period because of the mythical role it plays in popular histories as the time when large sections of the Australian population began to pursue enthusiastically suburban domesticity as a world of security and safety (see Lees and Senyard, 1987; Townsend, 1988). I want to analyse the desire for home being invoked in various contexts in the 1940s and 1950s as unstable and contested. While the definition of home as the owner-occupied, suburban house and garden was fairly constant, the meanings attributed to what is now considered an icon of the ‘Australian way of life’ were more fluid.

‘The women’s view’ The newspaper article entitled ‘As housewives, we are worms’ appeared in 1945 in a newspaper column typical of the period. On a page that usually gave the weather forecasts and shipping news, the Sydney Morning Herald ran a series of columns for women. Some covered social events, others provided pictures of women in uniform during the war, some were entitled ‘The Women’s View’, and there was usually a column such as this written ‘by one of them’. This particular article appeared on 26 May 1945 and it declared a housewives’ strike to be long overdue. The writer complained vehemently of electricity, gas, water and food shortages and of railway, tram and bus strikes. As housewives, she said: we women have been worms for too long. All those pretty phrases about the hand that carries the string-bag being the hand that rules the world or something are as empty as the butchers’ shops. (Sydney Morning Herald, 26 May 1945:9) Her proposed ‘sit down strike’, she announced, would bring ‘the life of the home’ to a standstill for men—‘these great tough creatures’—while she would be found ‘preferably in a nice comfortable chair with a picnic basket beside me’. This text is clearly, among other things, about power and the struggle for empowerment. The article is about the housewife as a form of agency, a form of personhood, which has a sphere of activity, a world to act upon, capacities, responsibilities and powers. Organizations like the Housewives’ Association provided one of the clearest contexts in which this understanding of ‘the housewife’s role’ was articulated. Meredith Foley (1984) has traced the early years of the formation of this organization in New South Wales. Founded during the First World War, it set out to mobilize the discontent of

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women in that period with the difficulties caused by rising prices and declining real wages. At times more conservative, philanthropic and dominated by middle-class women than others, this organization nevertheless became a significant voice speaking of women as a collectivity with a shared set of interests (Foley, 1984). A one-day conference in March 1945, for instance, was arranged to discuss the problems of and strategies for ‘the woman in the home, the housing problem, and help for mothers’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 3 March 1945:6). Women spoke ‘as housewives’ in a variety of contexts during the war and in the years immediately following, through bodies like the Housewives’ Association, in individual letters to the editors of newspapers, as representatives on the bodies of planning agencies like the Commonwealth Housing Commission (see Allport, 1990: 243), and through the words of publications like the Australian Women’s Weekly. These statements made ‘as housewives’ mobilized and shaped a form of identification that took on more than private significance as women protested about how the shortages of food and other amenities were being handled during and after the war. ‘The truth is’, noted an editorial in the Australian Women’s Weekly (1946:10), ‘men are intimidated by women in the mass’. Women found a voice ‘as housewives’ as they developed and pressed their claims for the proper organization and recognition of the space of everyday life. A central preoccupation in the articulation of these concerns was the problem of housing, of adequate accommodation. But what were the meanings given to this issue by women at this time? During the war, Australians were spoken about as ‘homehungry’ and ex-servicemen were reported as holding protest marches to demand that higher government priority be given to housing (Australian Women’s Weekly, 2 March 1946:18). The problem of the ‘housing shortage’ continued for some time after the war. W.J.McKell, the leader of the New South Wales Labor Government, announced in 1946 that there was a shortage of 90,000 homes in Sydney and its suburbs (Spearritt, 1978:86). But such calculations did not acknowledge that not only the numbers of domestic buildings but also the types of accommodation and housing tenure represented matters of considerable political significance. Clearly the political rhetoric of the period as well as the growing significance of consumer culture played a powerful part in shaping the meanings given to the kinds of choices the Australian population was seeking to exert at this time. Allan and Crow (1989:9) argue in the British context that, after the Second World War, ‘a home of one’s own’ came to mean something which is not fully achieved without ownership of a dwelling. Successive government policies since the 1950s, they point out, have promoted the idea that home ownership is a ‘natural’ aspiration. Similarly, it is clear that government policy in Australia not only encouraged home ownership, but also shaped the desires of its citizens in this way. Carolyn Allport (1990: 237) points, for instance, to low interest rates, war service loans, lump sum cash for ex-service personnel, and the expansion of the lending policies of banks and co-operative building societies as producing a rapid rise in rates of home ownership from 52.7 per cent in 1947 to 63 per cent in 1954 and 70 per cent in 1961. ‘Home’ was defined as a suburban house which the nuclear family either owned or was buying with assistance of such financial institutions. Policy makers fervently believed in the national importance of ensuring that every family lived in a home of their own. J.T Purcell, the Chairman of the Housing Commission of New South Wales, for instance, wrote a passionate account of the ‘housing shortage’ in 1954, in which he spoke of the horror of the man who must return each night to his family when they are not adequately housed in a home of their

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own. The ‘vain and unsuccessful striving for the modest home…is disheartening and soul destroying’, he said. But more than this, he went on, the ‘social value’ of home ownership cannot be over-emphasized: It is justly claimed that it encourages and develops initiative, self-reliance, thrift, responsible citizenship and other good qualities which strengthen the moral fibre of the nation…. To a community it gives stability, and to the owner it gives a constant sense of security, pride and well-being. (Purcell, 1954:30) Such sentiments were reiterated in the popular press. The Australian Women’s Weekly, for instance, declared that ‘homes and hearts are still being broken for the lack of a place to live’ (12 September 1956:2). Home ownership, this editorial insisted, was a necessity in providing such places, for it would safeguard ‘the backbone of national stability’. ‘A home of one’s own’ guaranteed a solid and loyal citizenry. But it also meant a population that would embrace and participate in the making of the new, postwar world. Despite the shortage of building materials and the struggle of a significant section of the population simply to find any sort of accommodation during the war and in the years following, advertisements abounded in newspapers and magazines about the pleasures of owning a modern house, a new home. Similarly, advertisements for commodities to fill that house and make it a ‘home’ evoked the comforts and delights of a ‘home of your own’. This publicity material spoke of dreams that were modern not only in their desire for newness, the latest designs or technological developments or the efficient and rational organization of everyday life (see, for example, Australian Women’s Weekly, 25 May 1946:33). The very forms of dreams themselves were modern: they involved rational planning and thinking about the future and they involved adventure, a commitment to progress and the making of a new world. ‘Designing the home in which you will live so many years of your life’, said an advertisement for masonite, termed ‘the wonder board with 1000 uses’, was a ‘great adventure’ (Australian Women’s Weekly, 14 April 1945:32). In her social realist novel set in the 1950s, Bobbin Up, Dorothy Hewett (1961) interweaves the stories of a group of women whose lives are brought together by their work at a clothing mill in Sydney. As a text of the period, it demonstrates how these dreams of a ‘home of one’s own’ in the form of the suburban house with a garden promoted by both policy makers and consumer culture had taken a powerful grip on the cultural imaginary of the nation. But it also indicates how ‘home’ defined in these terms played a powerful role in women’s lives. Though the situations of the central characters are very different outside the workplace, they all share the desire for a home of their own. Alice longs for the ‘business girl’s dream in House and Garden’, but shares a bedsitting room in a lodging house with her sister (Hewett, 1961:69). Jean’s dream of a ‘house with the bright garden, shining from the kitchen to the bedrooms with its compact newness’ enables her to cope with grinding factory work and the struggle to pay the rent on the decaying house in Five Dock (Hewett, 1961: 235). But Jessie has already achieved her dream in the form of a suburban home in Tempe where the smell of new-mown grass and the companionship of her husband and son greet her when she returns from the mill on a hot summer’s afternoon (Hewett, 1961:100–1). These women struggle to create an everyday life for themselves and their families at the same time as the publicity images of dream homes sustain them with a belief in a future of a bright and comfortable modernity.

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A bright, new home of one’s own in advertisements and articles of the popular press frequently appeared to be the means by which the individual could express themselves as individuals. Though this publicity material sometimes seemed to be addressing a male readership, more frequently it was women who were being called on to express themselves through their choice of modern home decorations or through the very design of the home itself. An article in Australian House and Garden (February 1949:24–7), for instance, told the story of how a course on ‘Marriage and the home’ had awakened the writer to the possibilities of designing her own modern house in terms of what she wanted or imagined her future to be rather than what she was used to in the past. She rejected the house designs of her childhood which she described as intimidating, with their Gothic facades, dark colours and high ceilings. She decided instead that she wanted light, friendly rooms with a modern, compact Ushaped kitchen, a workroom for her husband-to-be and a living room where her children could play. By drawing the ‘plan and elevations of the perfect house’, the writer explained, she went through a process of self-realization, coming to know herself (in the future) as wife and mother. But most of all, the modern suburban home represented for women a proper place to bring up children, just as it had in this story of a woman discovering a clear sense of herself and her future. As Carolyn Steedman (1986:108) notes in the British context, the 1950s was a ‘watershed in the historical process by which children have come to be thought of as repositories of hope, and objects of desire’. Children (and the reproductive capacities of women) became central to governmental programmes in Australia for building a ‘modern nation’, just as they became central to the life plans of individual women as they sought to establish a sense of a future for themselves. A letter to the Australian Women’s Weekly entitled ‘Flats can never be real homes’ exemplifies the connections being made between owning your own home, having children and being part of the future of the nation. Flats, the author writes, are ‘spurious, counterfeit homes’, and she calls for the plea for homes from ‘flat-dwellers and others less fortunate’ to be heard: Our children don’t know what it is to build a cubby house—to have a sandpit— to own a dog. We all want to be home-owners and citizens in the fullest sense. When we give our addresses we want to be able to quote a house number…not Flat 1, or 3, or 18. We want our children to grow up in safety in their own gardens. (Australian Women’s Weekly, 28 June 1947:354) Steedman makes the point that the desire to have children is historically determined. Why women have children, and the meanings they give to that expectation (or its refusal), is shaped by a range of discourses and social practices in any historical period (Steedman, 1986:81). Children as the repositories of hope, for whom safe places—homes with particular characteristics—were needed, represented the focus of a set of gendered desires in the 1950s, not for the past, for tradition, but for a commitment to and an expectation that ‘as housewives’ women were part of the nation —citizens in the fullest sense—and part of its future. But these understandings of the desires of women, articulated by publicity material in the popular press as well as in the letters and stories of women themselves, were to be destabilized or contested, at least in the 1950s. The conservative politician Robert Menzies, who was to become Prime Minister in 1949, both enlisted and sought to reshape these desires in his political crusades of the 1940s and 1950s. Judith Brett

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examines the way Menzies elaborated a set of political values focused on an image of the home. In seeking to mobilize and recruit the Australian population in his campaign to regain (and then to retain) power, Menzies set out to establish a new form of political and social identification through developing a particular understanding of the nature of ‘the middle class’. His famous 1942 speech, ‘The Forgotten People’, claimed the home to be the central and defining value commitment of this class: a commitment, he insisted, that upheld the fundamental importance of ‘homes material, homes human, and homes spiritual’. This, he said, was where the life of the nation was to be found and this was where people were to find true expression of their individuality (Brett, 1992:44–6). Women were a particular target of Menzies’ campaign, argues Brett (1992:52). He addressed them indirectly in ‘The Forgotten People’ when he spoke of ‘the real life of the nation [that] is to be found in the homes of people who are nameless and unadvertised, and who…see in their children their greatest contribution to the immortality of the race’. He also addressed them directly, as in a speech in 1946, when he spoke of their hardships during the war and claimed that ‘it is the women of Australia who most eagerly seek those policies which will build homes, will banish the fear of depression, will hold out the hope of advancement for husband or son or daughter’ (Brett, 1992:56–8; see also Australian Women’s Weekly, 6 August 1949: 32). Menzies’ appeal to women as ‘housewives’ built on and sought to translate that social identification into the major form of political identity available to them. But he translated this identity into one in which they would be spoken for rather than one on the basis of which they would seek to establish their own voice, to take action on their own behalf. This political rhetoric reworked the image of the home for women as a site in which they would be valued but silent. It was a place of traditional values, Menzies claimed, where women would exist in a safe, secure, bounded existence, waiting for their husbands to return from work each day. For men, on the other hand, home ownership meant independence and the manly virtues of self-reliance; owning your own home—‘one little piece of earth with a house and a garden which is ours’—guaranteed their manhood, both in terms of a sense of individual agency and of citizenship (Brett, 1992:73). In challenging the Labor Party’s hold over Australian politics in the 1940s, Menzies set out to destabilize its capacity to mobilize the population politically as ‘workers’. In the 1950s, communism became a crucial target in this campaign as he exploited the themes of individual independence versus an overweening state—a state, he declared, that by continuing to nurse its citizens throughout their lives would reduce all men to children. Brett (1992:47) points to the way Menzies set up an opposition between the world of work and the economy—aspects of modern life which he represented as diminishing the individual’s agency—and the home as a place to which a man could withdraw, a bounded space where these processes of modernization could be excluded, just as could all strangers and unwanted intruders (Brett, 1992:73). Here, too, for men, the home signified tradition, security, a place to withdraw into—to come back to. Menzies translated a fortress view of the self into a political platform.

Women’s modernity? I have been tracking, then, the instability of notions of home and modernity in the lives of women in the 1940s and 1950s in Australia. In this sense, this paper argues that the desire for home cannot be seen as an existential longing. Such is the claim now made for it by some recent post-colonialist writings (see, for example, Said:

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1984). As Jenny Bourne Taylor (1992:92) points out, some kind of ‘native experience’, an experience of home, community or locality, functions as a kind of cultural imaginary of a past form of social existence for these writers, to which exile— claimed to be the characteristic experience of the (post)modern age—is opposed. Similarly, I am rejecting claims such as those made by David Harvey (1989:292) that the private home now represents the focus of a desire for escape where material objects are collected in the form of a ‘private museum to guard against the ravages of time-space compression’. Such theorists, in spite of their overt commitment to historical and political analysis, nevertheless in practice retain a nostalgic and universalistic concept of home that retains its gendered subtext. I have suggested that in certain contexts in the 1940s and 1950s, home represented, for women, the site of their agency. Defined as the suburban house with its modern appliances, planned spaces, garden and comfortable domestic existence, it constituted the sphere of everyday life which they were actively involved in making. Home was not a place separate from the contingencies of the modern world to withdraw into, but a place to be created—and if necessary, to go on strike for—if the future was to be possible. Women were involved, in de Certeau’s (1984:117) terms, in an ‘active practising of place’. Their capacities and responsibilities in this sphere gave women a stake, as they saw it, in the life of the nation and in building modern life in Australia. In this scenario, women were active participants in modern social existence; they were central to what they believed to be the project of this new world—ensuring people could be in control of their own lives, to define their futures. The modern for them did not mean undertaking heroic voyages or making great scientific discoveries in a world from which the traveller could then return to existing security, to home as tradition. No such place existed for them. Home was not a bounded space, a fortress into which the individual could withdraw and from which all others could be excluded. Their modernity was about actively creating a place called home, securing a future for their children and an everyday life in which personal and intimate bodily relations could be properly looked after. The political rhetoric of R.G.Menzies, however, sought to rework this sense of home. He employed the same image of home as the suburban house and garden, but the role of women in this space was transformed. Menzies represented the social identification of housewife not as a form of agency but as a defensive solidarity into which women should withdraw to be ‘spoken for’, rather than to ‘speak as’. He defined women in the home as constituting a sustaining world of tradition for men that could enable them to go out into the public sphere—fortified, strengthened against the terrors and risks of a society in which the individual was battered by forces beyond ‘his’ control. The ‘modern housewife’ became traditional in his terms. Modernity was the world of men, a world in which no one felt comfortable, but nevertheless a world that had to be. Oppositions between home/voyage, tradition/modernity, dependence/independence were employed in ways that had been irrelevant in the arguments made by housewives in the 1940s and 1950s about how the nation should understand its political priorities. This history clearly demonstrates that a feminist sociology of modernity needs, first and foremost, to recognize the fluidity of the very term itself and the way that moves are constantly being made to recruit images of the modern to reassert and naturalize certain gendered representations of the social world. On the one hand, such a sociology only has a point if it attempts to challenge the full range of distinctions and oppositions—including those based around ideas of home—that implicitly or explicitly tie women to imposed definitions of femininity. On the other hand,

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however, it also needs to question the assumption that the desire for home is necessarily linked to the realm of tradition and opposed to self-definition and autonomy. Thus the voices of women speaking ‘as housewives’ in the 1940s and 1950s articulated a quite different vision of modernity. They spoke of domesticity and home, not as a world to return to, not as an escape from modernity, but precisely as what modernity should be. It is not the desire for home that is the problem, in other words, but the way it is interpreted as a desire for a space cut off from the rest of the social world and whatever else we imagine modernity and its feminist future to be.

Note 1 The author wishes to thank Julie Langsworth for her contribution to the research for this paper and Paula Hamilton and Pauline Johnson for their comments on an ealier draft.

References Allan, Graham and Crow, Graham (eds) (1989) Home and Family. Creating the Domestic Sphere, London: Macmillan. Allport, Carolyn (1986) ‘Women and suburban housing: post war planning in Sydney, 1943–61’, in J.B.McLoughlin and M.Huxley (eds), Urban Planning in Australia: Critical Readings, Melbourne: Longman Cheshire. —— (1990) ‘Women and public housing in Sydney, 1930–1961’, unpublished doctoral thesis: Macquarie University. Benhabib, Seyla (1987) ‘The generalized and the concrete other: the Kohlberg-Gilligan controversy in feminist theory’, in S.Benhabib and D.Cornell (eds), Feminism as Critique, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —— (1992) Situating the Self. Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Con temporary Ethics, Cambridge: Polity Press. Berman, Marshall (1985) All that is Solid Melts into Air, London: Verso. Bourne Taylor, Jenny (1992) ‘Re-locations—from Bradford to Brighton’, New For mations, 17:86–94 . Brett, Judith (1992) Robert Menzies’s Forgotten People, Sydney: Pan Macmillan. de Certeau, Michel (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S.F.Rendall, Berkeley: University of California Press. de Lauretis, Teresa (1990) ‘Eccentric subjects: feminist theory and historical consciousness’, Feminist Studies, 16(1): 115–50. Felski, Rita (1994) ‘The gender of modernity’, in Sally Ledger et al. (eds), Political Gender: Texts and Contexts, New York: Harvester. Field, Connie (1980) The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, Franklin Lakes, NJ: Clarity Educational Productions. Foley, Meredith (1984) ‘From ‘thrift’ to ‘scientific spending’: the Sydney House-wives’ Association between the wars’, Sydney Gazette , 6 March 1984:9–19. Friedan, Betty (1983) The Feminine Mystique, Harmondsworth: Penguin (originally published 1963). Game, Ann and Pringle, Rosemary (1979) ‘Sexuality and the suburban dream’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology, 15(2): 4–15. Gilligan, Carol (1982) In a Different Voice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Harvey, David (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Hewett, Dorothy (1961) Bobbin Up , Berlin: Seven Seas Books. Huyssen, Andreas (1986) ‘Mass culture as woman: modernism’s other’, in Tania Modleski (ed.), Studies in Entertainment. Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Johnson, Lesley (1993) The Modern Girl. Girlhood and Growing Up, Sydney: Allen & Unwin; Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Lees, S. and Senyard, J. (1987) The 1950s…How Australia Became a Modern Society, and Everyone got a House and a Car, Melbourne: Hyland House. McMurchy, Megan et al. (c.1983) ‘For Love or Money’: A History of Women and Work in Australia, Sydney: Flashback Films. Morris, Meaghan (1988) ‘Things to do with shopping centres’, in Susan Sheridan (ed.), Grafts. Feminist Cultural Criticism , London: Verso. Pumphrey, Martin (1987) ‘The flapper, the housewife and the making of modernity’, Cultural Studies , 1(2): 179–94. Purcell, J.T. (1954) ‘Home sweet? (a study of the housing problem)’, unpublished manuscript, 1 March 1954, Semi-personal file of J.T.Purcell, 1952–4, 1969, File No. 7/7580, New South Wales State Archives. Reiger, Kerreen (1985) The Disenchantment of the Home. Modernizing the Aus tralian Family, Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Said, Edward (1984) ‘Reflections on exile’, Granta. After the Revolution, 13: 159–72. Spearritt, Peter (1978) Sydney Since the Twenties, Sydney: Hale & Iremonger. Steedman, Carolyn (1986) Landscape for a Good Woman, London: Virago. Townsend, Helen (1988) The Baby Boomers: Growing up in Australia in the 1940s, 50s and 60s , Brookvale: Simon & Schuster. Wilson, Elizabeth (1991) The Sphinx in the City. Urban Life, the Control of Dis order, and Women, Berkeley: University of California Press. Wolff, Janet (1990) Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture, Oxford: Polity Press.

COOKING UP: INTESTINAL ECONOMIES AND THE AESTHETICS OF SPECULAR ORALITY MARIA ANGEL AND ZOË SOFIA

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to make a psychoanalytical contribution to a cultural studies understanding of the logics—and fantasies—of commmodity consumption in the visual culture of late capitalism. Taking up the metaphor of the gut as a discriminating organ and of cooking as a textual production, we examine the relations between oral and ocular consumption, and between aliment and excrement, as expressed in two films from the 1980s which are centred around themes of food and money. Adrian Lynne’s 9½ Weeks and Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and her Lover employ quite different aesthetics and display contrasting inflections of what we call ‘the edible complex’. The first fantasizes wealth as enabling an unstructured excess of consumption that can only end in exhaustion; the second reaffirms the structured distinctions associated with ‘quality’ in a class-divided society where wealth alone does not secure status or legitimacy. From a feminist perspective, the male characters in each text are interesting examples of masculinities not organized around the phallus, but around anal and oral eroticisms and a more primitive oral morality.

KEYWORDS visual culture, consumption, orality, masculinities The intestine [or gut] is a long and flexuous tube; it moves with sluggish contractions that spread like waves, rippling downwards. Its function is double: to retain and to expel. Thus its wisdom vastly surpasses the [lowly] estimates made of it: it must discern what is useful and what is waste. [so too] Ultimately the concern of intelligence is to distinguish between grain and chaff. It is no small irony that this discrimination is entrusted to both the most valued and most disdained of our parts. Yet the greater irony is…that when it comes down to competence and trustworthiness, the scale weighs heavily on the side of the most disdained. (Gonzales-Crussi, 1986:126)

Cultural Studies 10(3) 1996:464–482

© 1996 Routledge 0950–2386

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The practice of textual criticism has been frequently imagined as a project of forensic anatomy, a cutting into and displaying of the depths of a textual body or corpus (Angel, forthcoming). Alternatively, in a deconstructive semiotics, criticism can be reimagined as a kind of ‘lover’s discourse’ that offers no depths or sure horizons but many plateaux, endless possibilities for indulging in meaning-making in a play of sheer différance. In this paper, we want to entertain a metaphor of critical practice that is more vital and perhaps less liable to lose discriminatory powers in rhetorical delirium, a model of reading that can appreciate both the sadistic and analytical as well as the absorptive and reparative aspects of our textual encounters. Meaghan Morris’ (1988) persuasive critique of intestinal rhetoric in cultural analysis notwithstanding, we here seek to praise and emulate the wise and flexuous alimentary canal. The underpublicized gut provides us with a complex model of zones, organs, spaces and processes by which a critical and knowledge-seeking reader might encounter items on cultural and theoretical menus, sort them out into unwanted and useful parts, excreting the former and absorbing the latter, thereby transforming and being transformed by what they ingest. Critical practice is not just a matter of the reader’s digestion; it is also a work of creation, a labour of preparation. Cooking is a transformational process which governs particular types of cultural logics: the separation of food from not food, feasts from ordinary meals, the metamorphosis of the raw into the cooked. Like digestion, cooking blends sadistic and (ana)lytic as well as (p)reparative and nurturing processes. To make a meal, ingredients may have to be killed, plucked, pounded, sliced, grated, mashed, chopped. To write a paper together, as we have done, is to dig out, chop up and pare away texts as we cook up a plot, perhaps thicken it…coauthoring as a conspiratorial co-kniving. Meals are prepared not only for their nutritive ‘use value’ but also for the gustatory, visual and other sensual pleasures they afford; foods may be likewise consumed for their social and aesthetic ‘sign values’. As Marx understood it, the logic of the commodity form was indifferent to whether a commodity fed a physical or an imaginary need: A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy makes no difference. (Marx, 1867:437) This quotation suggests to us that the analysis of commodities—and by extension the cultural formations entailed in their consumption—cannot confine itself to the empirical or ‘objective’ realities of actual consumption practices, but must also seek to understand the ‘phantasmic’ components of desire attendant upon them. To exclude psychoanalysis from the field of cultural studies—perhaps on the grounds that it is too psychological, individualistic or universal—is to risk reproducing oppositions between ‘reality’ and ‘fantasy’, between ‘public life’ and ‘private desire’, which are themselves products of social operations and ideology. As the editors of For mations of Fantasy suggest in their Introduction to a collection of essays on the intersections of fantasy and cultural formations, psychoanalysis can help deconstruct ‘the positivist dichotomy’ which opposes fantasy to reality; it ‘dismantles such a “logic of supplement” to reveal the supposedly marginal operations of fantasy at the centre of all our perceptions, beliefs and actions’ (Burgin et al., 1986:2).

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In a discussion of Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies in the same volume, Turner and Carter cite Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of an occidental tradition which recognizes desire only in relation to fantasies about objects which we ‘lack’ in reality. From their alternative perspective, ‘lack is no longer seen as the universal prerequisite of desire; instead, it is produced as such within specific historical configurations’ (204). Turner and Carter give the example of advertising as a means of awakening desires and opening new markets by ‘implanting’ lack in consumers. ‘The visual fantasies offered by advertisements do not accompany, oppose or even supplement “real” needs: they hold a position in modern market economies as the dominant manifestations of a socially legitimated desire’ (204). Our paper makes a similar claim about the texts of ‘specular orality’ which we analyse: that they are symptomatic as well as productive of desires that are socially legitimated within market economies. We are interested in the interchangeability of phantasmic and alimentary wants, and more specifically in the close relations of ocular and oral consumption in contemporary forms of commodification. On our menu is a concern with the relation of vision (and specular erotics) to a late twentieth-century field of practices that includes the production and ingestion of images as commodities, and the eroticization of orality as a general metaphor of capitalist processes of commodification and consumption. The following textual offering explores these relations in a psychoanalytically flavoured discussion centred around two films which feature scenes of food preparation and consumption in relation to sex and money. One of the difficulties of undertaking psychoanalytic readings within a cultural studies framework arises from the struggle to find a balance between the seemingly ‘universal’ or canonical accounts of the formations of subjects and fantasies, and the production of readings which are sensitive to the peculiar features and logics of the specific text. Psychoanalytic readings of cultural artefacts need not repeat those textual moves characteristic of 1980s’ feminist psychoanalysis, imposing upon literary or film texts a predetermined ‘grid’ or falsely universal master narrative to which they would inevitably be seen to conform (Sofia, 1992). Rather than thinking of psychoanalysis as an interpretive grid forced upon a text, we use it as a kind of translating or transcoding device capable of appreciating specific textual and cultural logics. Because psychoanalysis can deconstruct the conventional oppositions between the ‘inside’ (or the fantasy world) and the ‘outside’ (or ‘objective’ social reality), it can facilitate a form of cultural critique which mediates between different levels and types of cultural practices, for example, between the consumption (or production) of ‘high art’ (such as a Peter Greenaway film), of ‘mass culture’ (such as Hollywood-style soft porn), and the ingestion—or preparation—of a meal. Adrian Lynne’s 9½ Weeks and Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover both operate around visually eroticized oral economies and present male protagonists whose business is money and whose after-hours pleasure is food. In 9½ Weeks a yuppie who buys and sells money on the New York Stock Exchange admits, ‘I like to cook’. In The Cook, a film which Greenaway himself describes as ‘a movie about consumer society, it’s about greed—a society’s, a man’s’ (Smith, 1990: 55), the central figure is a loud-mouthed, working-class thief and gourmand who proclaims: ‘money is my business and eating’s my pleasure.’ These texts inscribe forms of masculine sexuality not organized around the oedipal fixture of the phallus and the problematics of lack. Rather, they speak to us of ‘pregenital’ forms of libidinal organization, focused on oral and anal zones, and characterized by a relatively fluid and ‘polymorphously perverse’ flow of libidinal energies between different organs and organ symbols. We have chosen these films

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because, while they both revolve around logics of oral and visual consumption, they do so according to quite different aesthetic codes, and, as we suggest in the conclusion to this paper, they may express certain cultural differences even within a global culture of consumption. While our ‘sample’ is too small to make any generalizations about these differences, we try to demonstrate a method of psychoanalytic interpretation which is potentially sensitive to the nuanced variations between texts from different authors and divergent political and cultural contexts. Important features of this symbolic/libidinal topography are outlined in various of Freud’s papers (1905, 1908a, 1908b, 1913, 1916) on infantile sexuality and anality, which trace the metaphorical associations between the penis and the ‘stick’ of faeces, the rectum and the vagina, faeces and babies (anus as womb; faeces as child), and between excrement, gifts and money (see also Borneman, 1976). Other associations may be made between breasts and buttocks (as in the golden arches of the junk, i.e. ‘waste’ food giant McDonald’s), and between aliment and excrement. Food is the precursor of faeces, and in fantasy the relations may be reversed so that ‘excrement becomes aliment; the shameful substance which has to be concealed turns into a secret which enriches the world’ (Freud, 1908a:31). Related fantasies pervade capitalist production, where through a sublime alchemy (effected in practice by labour and exchange), one can consume resources and transform ‘shit into shinola’, accumulating wealth (‘filthy lucre’, the shit that shines) by selling excremental goods, or in the more noble aspirations of Frankensteinian fantasy, enrich the world with a brainchild fresh from the labs of ‘filthy creation’. The psychoanalysis of orality interprets suckling as a conjoining of sexual and nutritive satisfactions in a self-constitutive act (Freud, 1905:48), where physical ingestion is paralleled by psychical introjection. An image of the object/other is incorporated as part of the self (Klein, 1928; 1936), so that we are not only what, but also whom we eat, or whom we imagine we eat. Oral pleasures include both blissful sucking and sadistic biting (Abraham, 1916, 1924). Cannibalistic fantasies of greedily devouring and destroying the object may inspire anxiety about object loss and prompt desires to make reparation (for example, by producing a new body—a gift/baby/faeces —or perhaps a lavish meal?) in expiation of cannibal guilt (Klein, 1937). Oral morality is both primitive and ambiguous. There is a fundamental tension between oral impulses of love and aggression (Sagan, 1974): do we consume something because we love it to bits, or because we hate it so much that we want to tear it to shreds? Do we eat in memorium or for revenge? Do we devour our friends or our enemies? The ambiguities of cannibalistic impulses are signalled in a scene from The Cook where Georgina (the thief’s wife) asks Borst (the cook) to bake her murdered lover: Georgina: Cook Michael for me! This was his favourite restaurant. It’s also mine. Borst: Do you have some idea that by eating him he can become a part of you? You can’t believe that by eating him you will always be together! Georgina: No. I’m not eating him—Albert is. Here the cook incorrectly assumes that the wife wants to engage in a mortuary cannibalism of her lover, whereas she plans revenge by forcing her husband to pursue his sadism to its ultimate conclusion: devouring his rival. Oral metaphors are not only associated with the mouth and eating, for in fantasy, any receptive organ might be a symbolic mouth. Smelling, breathing, hearing and seeing can all be imagined as quasi-oral ingestions of the world (Klein, 1936). The eye or camera might be a cannibal eye, or a vagina-mouth that feasted on light,

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devoured sights and was pregnable by images (Fenichel, 1935). The screens of dream or cinematic projection may have their prototypes in the simultaneously seen and eaten breast, which is not just one object introjected among others, but becomes the image on to which other desired objects may be projected (Lewin, 1946, 1948; Baudry, 1976), as represented in those scenes of rolling hills, clouds and mountains often conjured as preliminaries to dreams or movies. Although food advertising constantly plays on the closeness of oral and ocular consumption, direct representations of oral-ocular fusions are more rare, and quite bizarre, as in Rene Magritte’s painting The Rape, which depicts a woman’s head with a body where her face ought to be (breasts for eyes, navel for nose, vagina for mouth). While researching this paper we came upon a contemporary image which brings together breasts, eyes and mouth. This was a magazine advertisement for a chocolate milk powder in which white disposable cups full of hot chocolate are superimposed over a woman’s eyes. The roundness of the woman’s protruding polystyrene milkfilled eye-breasts is set off by the circle of her open mouth waiting to be filled. The roundness of the eyes (cups) and mouth suggests the equivalence between these organs. The relation between aliment and excrement (food and shit) is also hinted at via the brown milky chocolate—a kind of ‘sweet caca’ (cf. Freud, 1908a:31)—in distinction to the salty varieties of brown excremental foods (peanut butter or vegemite). While the relations specifically linking the excremental, the oral and the ocular are rather too obscure to be summarized adequately here (see Sofoulis, 1988; Sofia, 1992), they too are entailed in the following analyses, which suggest that anal and excremental metaphors play a part in mediating the relations of orality and vision. The rectum and the eye may each serve as symbolic vaginas in projects of technological creation where ‘excremental’ resources are impregnated and animated by shiny ideals. Film itself is interpretable as an excremental vision and projection: the (electro) chemical remains of some formerly present life are smeared on film and reactivated for ocular consumption. A cultural context of visual commodification and high consumption favours idealized representations of the ‘shiny good’ products of industry (which so often are junk and end up as waste). Usually left off-screen are the ‘slimy-bads’, the toxic by-products that capitalism bestows on us as unwanted offspring of its creative labours. Nevertheless, the question of waste and its transformation haunts us in spectral and material forms, along with the knowledge that every production requires a prior consumption, and that every subsequent consumption will also result in a waste product. The films we are about to discuss address these issues in quite distinct aesthetic and political modalities.

9½ Weeks and the specular aesthetics of orality Adrian Lynne’s 9½ Weeks is obsessive in its representation of scenarios set around the marketplace and the purchase, display and consumption of food. A very brief plot summary of the film could go something like this. A divorced manager of an art gallery, Elizabeth, goes shopping for a dinner party. While in an oriental delicatessen she fleetingly encounters a man whom she later meets again at the local market. John works in arbitrage—the buying and selling of money. He buys her an expensive shawl and they dine at a restaurant where he feeds her pasta and red wine. John likes to cook and spend money. They begin a relationship based on the playing out of various sexual fantasies which in some way involve food, the marketplace or both. He cooks for her, takes her on shopping sprees to buy clothes,

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gifts, flowers; she shoplifts, spends an evening at a restaurant dressed as a man, plays the prostitute while he throws money at her and so on. Finally there is the fantasy which is the male character’s downfall. He rents a dingy hotel room and pays a hooker to arouse Elizabeth while he looks on. This is too much for Elizabeth; she can’t play the game any more and calls a halt to the relationship. She feels used up, and the film ends with her leaving John. The film presents an interesting gastronomic parallel to the fate of Elizabeth. Near the beginning we get a shot of Elizabeth and friend looking at a live, wriggling fish in a delicatessen. Around the middle of the film, the camera stops to focus on a dead fish that an artist has caught and will presumably paint, or eat or both. Near the end, at the same time that Elizabeth realizes she can no longer go on with the relationship, we get the final fish scene: a cooked, semi-devoured fish laid out on a dish at a party. Perhaps, apart from paralleling the fate of Elizabeth, the moral of this story is that what is beheld by the eye ends up on the table. (We recall the weak joke about being on a ‘seafood diet—I see food, and I eat it!’) This ending signals a narrative telos of exhaustion (in contrast to The Cook and its telos of (m)oral revenge). This film intricately folds together the relationship between capital, consumption and eroticism. The male character exchanges money, and spends it on the ‘props’ for the fantasy sexual scenarios he initiates. (Perhaps he’s like the viewer who buys and consumes the erotic visual experience of the film itself.) Interestingly, the male who figures ‘capital’ (or money) also cooks, traditionally a maternal activity. While the figure of a nurturing and indulgent money-seller doesn’t match the archetype of a repressive ‘capitalist patriarch’, it does fit nicely with the fantasy of capitalist abundance: the free market as a garden of paradise where every imaginable commodity is there for the taking to make our lives more comfortable, productive and satisfying (at least for those with the money). Arguably, this character is a synecdoche for late capitalism as it tends towards a form of post-patriarchy, where the phallic man no longer necessarily occupies the symbolic centre. Power resides less in the hands of the father or Big Brother than with the corporate Big Mothers that have taken over many maternal functions, their junk foods competing with home cooking. At first glance, John’s position with respect to Elizabeth conforms to conventional models of heterosexual masculinity: a man controls the sexual scenario (and the woman) from a voyeuristic and sadistic position. But a closer look suggests that the kinky capitalist may be enacting a variant of ‘feminine’ masochism, i.e. a male masochism based on feminine/maternal identification (Freud, 1919; Deleuze, 1971; Studlar, 1985; Silverman, 1988). ‘Feminine’ masochism is associated with the ‘negative Oedipus complex’, in which a boy may remain identified with the mother and desire the father as a love object. This form of masochism may involve fantasies of being controlled by the powerful oral mother or her ‘cold’ and emotionally indifferent substitute, and submitting to her will (often via contractual agreements). Sexual union with such a being is both enticing and threatening: it raises the prospect of castration or annihilation through an encounter with the vagina dentata, an encounter deferred by many titillating means (including fetishistic deployment of props, costumes, furs, etc. that signal yet mask the feared/desired organs of the woman). Like such masochists, the male protagonist of 9½ Weeks exhibits fetishistic interests in sexual props and cross-dressing, as well as typically ‘feminine’ involvements in shopping, cooking and feeding. That he occupies a controlling and somewhat sadistic role suggests he is playing the part of the oral mother rather than submissive son—or phallic father. Like many other supposedly ‘straight’ men (and the pornography directed at them), John expresses his feminine identification in a

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Figure 1. Oral sadomasochism: the food orgy in 9½ Weeks.

scenario of lesbian sex, which he can voyeuristically consume while enjoying the fantasy of being either or both of the female partners. However, the juiciest sex scene in this film is not the lesbian episode but a food orgy that takes place in the kitchen, occupying the narrative moment usually reserved for a scene of intercourse in soft porn. It opens with a closeup of John slicing a red pepper. Wearing a white bathrobe, Elizabeth enters the kitchen, and John asks her to close her eyes and get down on the floor. There follow close-ups of him separating a raw egg, slicing a boiled egg, opening a can and feeding her an olive. To the nondiegetic sounds of a rock and roll song (‘I feel like bread and butter/I feel like toast and jam’) and glimpses of the bright white open fridge in the background, we see John feed Elizabeth maraschino cherries, strawberries, champagne, Vicks cough mix, a pasta spiral, red jelly and a raw green chilli (see Figure 1), followed by a large glass of milk (much of which flows down the side of her face). John then opens a bottle of carbonated water and sprays her body with it, including the area between her legs. After telling her to ‘be good’, he drizzles honey on her tongue and her legs, then rubs it in. We see red and green peppers in the white fridge behind them. The scene ends with open-mouthed kissing, and the red and green colours of the peppers are replaced by the red and green lights of a busy street scene faded in over the lovers. This food-sex scenario was quoted by a Diet Coke television advertisement, where, to the sound of a song Hungry Eyes and intercut with close-ups of frosty cans and bottles of Diet Coke, glances of desire are exchanged between a (probably post-coital) young couple. The man opens a refrigerator (which continues to crop up in frame) containing Coke bottles and a sexually suggestive arrangement of a banana and a bunch of grapes. In shots almost identical to those of the movie, he uses an egg-slice, then a grater, and a knife for slicing tomato, salami, celery. Looking on is a woman in a white bathrobe, who, in contrast to the film’s closed-eyed Elizabeth, is endowed

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with ‘hungry eyes’. She actively takes things to eat (see Figure 2) and at one moment is shown menacingly scraping a knife and fork together in front of her face. The sequence ends when the man slides her a long bread roll and a glass of Diet Coke across the counter (see Figure 3). Both scenes centre around men’s presentation of food to women in white bathrobes. Fridge doors open to reveal contents bathed in light. Through backlighting and extreme close-ups the shapes and colours of foods and drinks are emphasized. The scenes both draw explicit connections between sex, eating and vision, the latter emphasized in the film through the notion of Elizabeth not looking, and in the advertisement by the constant cuts to eyes that are hungry for food and sex. It was not surprising to learn that Adrian Lynne used to make advertisements before he became a recognized film maker. The film 9½ Weeks is ‘beautifully shot’. Like a luminous and glossy advertisement, it displays a fetishistic fascination with food, bodies and technological objects. The techniques of making advertisements and commercially successful soft porn are interrelated: they sell fantasies by calling upon some of the same technologies and cultural myths to appeal to consumers’ ‘hungry eyes’. The film’s food scene can be quoted as a vehicle for selling Diet Coke because of the relationship established between seeing, desire, eating and consumption, a relationship we might label ‘a specular aesthetics of orality’, in which over-tones of devouring and eating are explicitly linked to the pleasurable consumption of commodities and images. The film’s folding together of seeing, eating or consuming and commodification (the specular aesthetics of orality) is revealingly achieved in shots of a technological commodity that seems to exhibit its own oral eroticism. When Elizabeth first visits John’s minimalist high-tech apartment, she notices that all four of his televisions are switched on (one monitoring the New York Stock Exchange), and recalls a televisioncrazed uncle. As she speaks of him, John’s sleek media array appears in profile against bright light from large windows in the background. A transparent cassette bay pops out and in, then the machine seems to ‘poke out its tongue’—a thin rectangular control panel which John’s fingers press and push back in. This shiny audio equipment smoothly and slickly swallows up its ‘food’ at John’s command, as Elizabeth will later in the scene with the luminous refrigerator. The refrigerator is one of those technologies whose body prototypes are organs of containment and storage—the womb, the breast, perhaps the gut (Mumford, 1966:140– 1). It is also interpretable as a domestic version of the corporate maternal technospace which (re)issues resourced materials as consumable products. The ‘icebox’ is an ice queen, an illuminated artificial womb-breast that appears as source or origin of the foods within it, preserving them against time and decay. The ultimate food within this hightech logic has no weight or nutrition at all: it is anti-gravitational, luminous, ultra-light, and like Diet Coke it results in no waste/no waist. The film 9½ Weeks shares with many advertisements a look of cleanliness and lightness: ‘gritty’ (or grotty) social realism isn’t part of the aesthetics of specular orality. We don’t see the kitchen in the aftermath of the food orgy. Even ‘filthy lucre’ appears in the sublimated form of luminous pixels on computer or television screens. The absence of waste helps to sustain the fantasy that the production and consumption of commodities does not produce any ‘shit’. Significantly—in accordance with psychoanalytic theories of anality and money—the film’s two most explicit anal references involve bargaining and the market. In the first of these, John comes upon Elizabeth as she bargains with a fat street marketeer for a wind-up chicken which moves around excreting eggs (symbolically

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Figure 2. Diet Coke advertisement: hungry eyes, menacing mouth.

also babies and visually suggestive of faeces). These excremental egg-babies are later recontextualized as ‘food’ in the kitchen scene, where the first items shown are raw and hard-boiled eggs. The second explicit anal reference occurs when the couple are accosted on a pier by a group of children who plan to ‘take them’ for five dollars. A thin, bespectacled boy asks John for five dollars—but accepts one dollar—to hear his fat friend fart the theme from Jaws. When, after much huffing and straining the boy only produces a short fart, John demands his money back, but the young entrepreneur explains that his friend ‘only does the first couple of bars’, and the children run away with the dollar. These scenes humorously illustrate some of the excremental aspects of commodity consumption. Corporate cannibals, like the mechanical hen, produce consumable excrement. In a commodity-oriented society like the US, everything is possible: one can put a bitey fart on the market and sell it. That the fart, like the Diet Coke, has very little substance does not matter, since people will pay even for a quote that recalls a previously experienced text, a synecdoche of another collection of signs. The children’s farting enterprise illustrates the drive to perversity inherent in commodification: producing commodities is about finding new ways or angles of selling just about anything through the creation of desire (can the kid really fart the theme to Jaws?). With its simultaneous reference to the anus and mouth, the particular commodity marketed here expresses another fantasy: the immediate and useful recycling of excrement, its instant commodification. Capitalism, in this fantasy, makes everything useful. Its power to commodify anything is an alchemy miraculously transforming waste into wealth.

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Figure 3. Diet Coke advertisement: appeasement of eye and mouth via an edible phallus?

Voluptuous dirt and excremental consumption: The Cook Peter Greenaway’s film The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover also presents many of these connections between excrement and aliment, sex and vision, though it uses quite different aesthetic codes. Whereas Lynne’s 9½ Weeks emphasizes the slickness and luminosity of commodities that seem to glow (for example, peppers that turn into traffic lights), the ‘voluptuously dirty’ aesthetic of Greenaway’s film presents, along with its very formal compositions, scenes of intricately filled spaces and highly decorated surfaces, and violent images of excremental consumption. Considered in terms of anality, the ‘look’ of 9½ Weeks invokes the thrifty compulsiveobsessive side of the anal character who desires to maintain order and control over excrement. The Cook portrays a more lax revelling in anal expenditure: even the highly decorated restaurant is not lavish enough for Spica, who declares he’d like to spray it with gold (more filthy lucre). But when questions of order and discrimination are considered in terms of orality, the films will be seen to occupy reversed positions: at the core of the ‘tight-assed’ control fantasies are desires for abundant waste. The basic plot of Greenaway’s film runs like this. The poised and aristocratic Georgina is the wife of the brutal and loud-mouthed thief Spica, owner of the restaurant where the Frenchman, Borst, is the chef. Georgina begins an affair with Michael, who dines alone at the restaurant. They meet over what we could call an ‘alimentary parapraxis’, a ‘slip off the tongue’ (sic) committed by Michael, who, absorbed in his reading, doesn’t notice that an item of food has fallen off his fork and takes an empty mouthful. Looking up in embarrassment, he finds Georgina unable to suppress a smile (see Figures 4 and 5). In the course of the film, which covers several nights, each one marked by a new menu, Georgina and Michael first make love in the toilet, and then, with the connivance of the cook, have sex in various places in the

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kitchen storage areas. When Spica finds out, and threatens to kill and eat Michael, the cook helps the lovers to escape in a truck filled with rotting meat. They are taken to Michael’s business, a book repository. Spica and his offsiders torture a singing kitchenhand and, when Georgina visits the boy in hospital, they kill Michael, stuffing his nose and mouth with pages torn from a book on the French Revolution. This killing of the reader by the speaker (Spica) could be read as a metaphor of the Thatcherite nouveau riche attacking the left-liberal petit bourgeoisie. Be that as it may, the wife then persuades the cook to bake her lover and feed him to her husband. During the film’s title sequence a man is forced to eat dog shit and is pissed on by Spica. We might recall the phrase inter urinas et faeces nascimur—we are born between faeces and urine. We later see him being hosed down at the back entrance to the restaurant. Like a new-born baby, this figure represents man ‘in the raw’, who stands at the cloaca—or is it the maw?—of the restaurant, near the other delivered goods (for example, the trucks of stolen meat and seafood). And like the fish in 9½ Weeks, this naked figure will also undergo a transformation from the raw to the cooked by the end of the story, appearing finally in the form of the murdered Michael presented as homme au broccoli. Both films depict the kitchen as an important venue for erotic activity, but its function as a site of ordering and transforming is further elaborated in The Cook, where the culinary becomes a superordinate frame that organizes and locates other categories and spaces within its domain. Such categories as the raw and the cooked (and the rotten), food and not-food (or excrement) are made possible through the transformations produced in the kitchen. Even the passage of days is measured by changes in the menu. In the narrative’s long opening segment, there is a fluid tracking of the camera from the dark, wet and blue outside, where there are dogs, a naked man, raw meat and fish, in via the scullery, through the predominantly green and yellow kitchen where a multitude of culinary operations are proceeding, and via two smaller red vestibules (from which the toilets are accessed) into the sumptuous red interior of the restaurant, past tables laden with artistically arranged delicacies, against the background of a large reproduction of The Councillors of Antwerp, whose costumes are imitated by Spica and his men. This arrangement of spaces in the restaurant could be imagined as analogous to the gut, taking in the raw from outside, washing, plucking, chopping, stirring and baking it, then conveying it to the tables where people stuff their faces and afterwards, as Spica likes to point out, go to the toilet and feed the sewers. The Cook makes many overt connections between food and faeces. Lacking the American prudery which relegates the work of conveying perverse associations between excrement and aliment to peripheral humorous plot elements (the chicken, the five-dollar fart), this European co-production begins and ends with overt scenes of scatological ingestion (eating dog shit, or the lover’s remains). These scenes are ‘obscene’ in the traditional sense of that which is usually kept out of view, off-stage, though this obscenity is counterbalanced, if inadequately for some viewers,1 by the film’s voluptuous visual aesthetics. Like the male protagonist in 9½ Weeks, Spica is a man whose sexuality does not appear to be primarily centred around the phallus. Where John’s sadomasochism placed him as the nurturing and controlling mother, Spica is positioned as the greedy oral and anal sadistic infant who acts out violent fantasies of controlling the mother (for example, beating up his wife), and who in the end is reduced to a bumbling, terrified child with no choice but to obey her at gunpoint (‘Eat, Albert!’). Georgina describes to her dead lover how sex with her husband was anal-sadistic, and how it

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Figures 4 and 5. The Cook: Michael’s ‘alimentary parapraxis’ is observed with amusement by Georgina.

also involved him inserting objects such as a toothbrush and a toy train inside her. The phallic function has devolved to the detachable faeces, equated with toys, and subjected to oral-genital confusion (for example, the toothbrush). The oral-anal equation is also implied through Spica’s dialogue: this man who professes delight in

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oral consumption produces a voluptuously dirty stream of words—classic verbal diarrhoea. In the first meal scene, Spica emits a loud belch (an oral fart) and spells out the connections between eating, sex, money and excrement: Spica: You know I’m an artist the way I combine my business and my pleasure. Money is my business and eating’s my pleasure. And Georgie’s my pleasure too, though in a more private kind of way than stuffing the mouth and feeding the sewers. Though the pleasures are related—‘cos the naughty bits and the dirty bits are so close together that it just goes to show how eating and sex are related. These last words are uttered as voice-over to a shot of Michael eating and looking at Spica’s wife, with whom he will soon have sex in the toilet and pantries. As in the early scene of 9½ Weeks, where the money-seller shifts the topic of conversation from stock exchange reports to his after-hours culinary pleasures (‘I like to cook’), here the thief counterposes both his sub-limated and unsublimated anal interests (i.e. money and defecation) with his oral pleasures. For Spica, the pleasures of eating involve the entire digestive process, including the anal production of food for the sewer. Also interfolded with these associations of sex, orality and excrementality are concerns with aesthetics and vision. In this film, where characters’ costumes change colour to match the set decor and lighting, it is notable that the toilets are the brightest, whitest, cleanest spaces, their luminosity reminiscent of the inside of a refrigerator, or perhaps an operating theatre. In this transversal of values, shit is elevated to the place of the luminous and pure: the site of excremental production is a theatre for light consumption. Further connections between eating, excrement and vision are elaborated in relation to reading. Eating is a primal form of knowing: in order to know an object, a baby tries to eat it. And if eating is a mode of self-formation—we fashion our identity from whom or what we eat—so too is reading. Through visual ingestion we take in ‘food for thought’ and make it part of ourself. As Spica returns from the bright toilet, he comes up to Michael’s table and aggressively asks: What, reading again? This is a restaurant, not a library. The only thing you’re allowed to read in here is the menu. You are insulting the chef. Reading gives you indigestion. Didn’t you know that? Don’t read at the table. [Snatches book away] Y’know, I’ve just been reading stuff to make your hair curl. Out there, in the toilet. That’s the sort of stuff people read, not this sort of thing…. [Georgina] spends hours sitting on the bed reading. She even reads on the john. In his paper ‘Some unconscious factors in reading’ James Strachey (1930) applied Kleinian theory to the ingestion of written knowledge. Books, he argued, were representative of paternal or maternal bodies; inked words on a page were like smeared faeces; reading was an anal-sadistic and cannibalistic act of stealing faeces from the parental/textual body. Thus in a certain sense Michael and Spica are of the same trade. The reader is a kind of thief; reading, as de Certeau (1984) has pointed out, is a form of ‘poaching’. The coprophagic associations of reading underlie the common perversion of reading while on the toilet, thus balancing excremental output with mental input. The writers of toilet graffiti—the ‘low’ kind of popular culture Spica values—could thus be said to make two kinds of excremental productions at a s (h)itting. Conversely, members of ‘high’ culture, like Michael, like to feed their faces and their minds at once in a double consumption which may, according to both Spica

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and Chinese medical theory, be bad for the digestion.2 While Spica in other respects conflates the oral and anal, he insists on a separation where Michael’s reading is concerned: reading is OK on the john, barely tolerated in bed, and completely verboten at table, where the only mental coprophagy allowed is that of reading the menu, whose words are soon realized as comestibles. He is offended by Michael’s reading as an exclusionary, elitist and antisocial act. Spica aims to better himself by cultivating a gourmet’s knowledge of food, a knowledge attainable through direct physical incorporation. He later tortures this reader in his book repository—a store of food for the eye and mind—by forcing him to ingest and inhale printed pages. Spica describes this stylized revenge murder as a ‘metaphorical’ killing of someone with the tools of their trade, but it actually involves the literalization of a metaphor: the word made flesh. The ingestion of words as food is a theme that recurs in the final scene, where, even though he’d earlier expressed his cannibalistic wish, the thief is surprised to find out that the object of his hatred is on the menu. The speaker is forced to eat his words and ingest the remains of the reader. We have a final reminder of oral sexuality, and a simultaneous invocation of both mental and physical acts of knowing, when Georgina invites Albert to ‘eat the cock…it’s a delicacy’, and reassures him that ‘at least you know where it’s been’. These two films deal with a similar constellation of metaphors and organ symbols related to consumption, which we could jokingly call ‘the edible complex’. Partial analysis of the network of associations established in these texts reveals an extraordinary mobility and confusion of organs and spaces and the things that go in and out of them. The erotic metaphorology of consumption is not restricted to its ‘proper’ zone, the oral region, but diffuses across other organs and sites/sights, to include the eyes (‘cannibaleyes’ which take in food as images and images as food, and ingest bodies, images and words in order to create the self), the vagina (a devouring mouth feared and desired by the masochistic man) and the entire gastrointestinal tract, especially the anus (whose products are equated with food and money, and which is also associated with light and vision). However, each film represents a different inflection of ‘the edible complex’ that is perhaps suggestive of more general transatlantic cultural differences. In the extravagant excesses of food consumption in The Cook, the entire culinary transformative process is of interest to the characters. Foods are presented with detailed attention to the quality and preparation of ingredients, the niceties of visual display and table etiquette (although this is constantly breached). Consumption proceeds according to a highly aestheticized code, displayed in the form of the orderly syntagmatic combinations and paradigmatic selections laid out in the menus that separate each act in the drama. In contrast with the orderly array of menus in The Cook, the food orgy by the refrigerator in 9½ Weeks is a paratactic and ‘ungrammatical’ sequence, which presents all kinds of foods as substitutes and equivalents of each other: the structure is simply a +b+c+.…Food here is primarily an element of exchange, a gift presented in an orally focused sex scene where neither its nutritive nor ‘semantic’ content is relevant: it could be cherries or cough mixture, gourmet or junk. As ‘gift’ and commodity, food is subject to the same paratactic logic that applies to the amassing of wealth, where mere quantity is transmuted into quality. In the spectacular expenditures of late capitalist logic the obverse process is also represented: excremental and oral pleasures are to be had in turning shinola into shit, consuming those shiny goods, indiscriminately taking all that glowing food from the luminous fridge and trashing the spotless kitchen, while

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stuffing food into a woman whose masochistic pleasure is to not know or see what she is eating. The food orgy portrays a consumerist fantasy of abundance as an unstructured euphoric excess of wanting, having, giving it all, and having enough to waste. In this world the only antidote to endless acquisition appears to be simple exhaustion: the fridge is emptied, the fish picked to shreds, and the woman emotionally wrung out. In The Cook, by contrast, where questions of justice and morality are central to the Jacobean plot, society is not classless and quality is still valued, even if the nouveaux riches (of whom Spica may be a metaphor) are seen as ‘debasing’ it by turning it into a purchasable commodity. Money itself is not enough to secure status in a strongly class-divided society, so the thief attempts self-improvement through acquiring an upper-class wife and a knowledge of gourmet food. Precisely because he appreciates the closeness between sex, excrement and aliment, Spica can discriminate between them; indeed, he needs liminal distances between the ‘naughty’ and the ‘dirty’ bits. These distances are maintained through alimentary, aesthetic and architectural codes that on the one hand distinguish the raw from the cooked, the excremental from the mental and the alimental, and on the other allow meanings and materials to be circulated between these positions. This circulation is in turn propelled in the narrative by the relentlessness of Spica’s speaking, his excessive oral production, but is halted when the distances are collapsed and he is forced into an overtly cannibalistic and coprophagic act. Through this discussion we hope to have shown that, like the gut, psychoanalytically informed textual analysis can prove itself a discriminating and flexible medium for ‘digesting’ those aspects of cultural texts that aren’t easily processed through canonical models of sexual difference defined by the phallus. For, despite the exhaustion of these models within feminist and screen theory, other culturally relevant erotic economies remain open for psychoanalytic investigation. These include, we have suggested, the increasingly ‘desublimated’ fantasies of excremental, oral and ocular consumption and production associated with capitalism and commodification in contemporary visual culture.

Notes 1 This film is famous for causing Richard Neville, champion of free speech at the Oz obscenity trial, to reverse his position on censorship (Neville, 1990). 2 In traditional Chinese medical theory, the energies of the small intestine are associated with the cognitive functions of separation, absorption and transformation of ideas, and thinking, such that eating is considered to strain the digestive system unduly by putting two discriminatory processes in competition with each other (Hammer, 1990:217, 363).

References BOOKS AND ARTICLES Abraham, Karl (1916) ‘The first pre-genital stage of the libido’, in his (1966) On Character and Libido Development: Six Essays, trans. Douglas Bryan and Alix Strachey, New York: Norton.

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—— (1924) ‘The influence of oral eroticism on character-formation’, in Abraham ( 1966 ). Angel, Maria (forthcoming) Ph.D. dissertation, School of Humanities, Murdoch University. Baudry, Jean (1976) ‘The apparatus: metapsychological approaches to the impression of reality in cinema’, in Mast, Cohen and Braudy (eds) ( 1992 ). Borneman, Ernest (ed.) (1976) The Psychoanalysis of Money, New York: Urizen Books. Burgin, Victor, Donald, James and Kaplan, Cora (eds) (1986) Formations of Fantasy, London and New York: Methuen. Carter, Erica and Turner, Chris (1986) ‘Political somatics: notes on Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies’, in Burgin et al. (eds) ( 1986 ). de Certeau, Michel (1984) ‘Reading as poaching’, in his The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1971) Masochism: An Interpretation of Coldness and Cruelty, trans. Jean McNeil, New York: George Braziller. Fenichel, Otto (1935) ‘Scoptophilic instinct and identification’, in his (1954) Col lected Papers: Second Series, New York: Norton. Freud, Sigmund (1905) Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. J.Strachey, Standard Edition, 7, 125–245 ; republished in 1975, New York: Basic Books. —— (1908a) ‘Character and anal eroticism’, trans. R.C.McWatters, in P.Rieff (ed.) ( 1963 ), Collected Papers—Character and Culture, New York: Collier. —— (1908b) ‘On the sexual theories of children’, trans. Douglas Bryan, in P.Rieff (ed.) ( 1963 ), Collected Papers—The Sexual Enlightenment of Children , New York: Collier. —— (1913) ‘The excretory functions in psychoanalysis and folklore’, trans. J. Strachey, in P.Rieff (ed.) ( 1963 ), Collected Papers—Character and Culture, New York: Collier. —— (1916) ‘On the transformation of instincts with special reference to anal eroticism’, trans. Edward Glover, in P.Rieff (ed.) ( 1963 ), Collected Papers—Charac ter and Culture, New York: Collier. —— (1919) ‘A child is being beaten’, in P.Rieff (ed.) ( 1963 ), Collected Papers— The Sexual Enlightenment of Children, New York: Collier. Gonzales-Crussi, F. (1986) Three Forms of Sudden Death, and Other Reflections on the Grandeur and Misery of the Body, London: Picador. Hammer, Leon (1990) Dragon Rises, Red Bird Flies: Psychology and Chinese Medi cine, Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press. Klein, Melanie (1928) ‘Early stages of the Oedipus conflict’, in Klein ( 1975 ). —— (1936) ‘Weaning’, in Klein ( 1975 ). —— (1937) ‘Love, guilt and reparation’, in Klein ( 1975 ). —— (1975) Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921–1945 , ed. R.E. MoneyKyrle, London: Hogarth Press/Institute of Psychoanalysis. Lewin, Bertrand (1946) ‘Sleep, the mouth, and the dream screen’, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 12:419–43 . —— (1948) ‘Inferences from the dream screen’, International Journal of Psycho analysis, 29:224–431. Marx, Karl (1867) ‘Chapter 1: “Commodities”’; excerpt from Capital, Vol. 1, in Eugene Kamenka (ed.) ( 1983 ), The Portable Karl Marx, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Mast, Gerald, Cohen, Marshall and Braudy, Jean (eds) (1992) Film Theory and Criticism (4th edn), New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Morris, Meaghan (1988) ‘Indigestion: a rhetoric of reviewing’, in her The Pirate’s Fiancée, London and New York: Verso. Mumford, Lewis (1966) The Myth of the Machine IV: Technics and Human Development, New York: Harcourt Brace. Neville, Richard (1990) ‘The cook the thief his wife and the old hippie’, West Aus tralian Magazine, 30 June: 10–12. Sagan, Eli (1974) Cannibalism: Human Aggression and Cultural Form, New York and London: Harper. Silverman, Kaja (1988) ‘Masochism and male subjectivity’, Camera Obscura, 17 (May): 30–67. Smith, Gavin (1990) ‘Food for thought: Peter Greenaway interviewed by Gavin Smith’, Film Comment, 26(3) 54–60. Sofia, Zoë (1992) ‘Hegemonic irrationalities and psychoanalytic cultural critique’, Cultural Studies, 6(3): 376–94. Sofoulis, Zoë (1988) Through the Lumen: Frankenstein and the Optics of Re Origination, Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz. —— (1991) ‘Frankenstein’s Hystera: Heidegger, Irigaray, and the optics of reorigination’, Agenda Contemporary Art Magazine (Melbourne), 19:13–15. Strachey, James (1930) ‘Some unconscious factors in reading’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 11:322–31. Studlar, Gaylyn (1985) ‘Masochism and the perverse pleasures of the cinema’, in Mast, Cohen and Braudy (eds) ( 1992 ). Theweleit, Klaus (1987; 1977–1978) Male Fantasies, trans. S.Conway, E.Carter, C.Turner, 2 vols, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. FILMS

9½ Weeks (1984) Director Adrian Lynne, Producer Anthony Rufus, Isaacs and Zalman King, Jonesfilm/Galactic Films/Triple AJAXX. The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1990) Director Peter Greenaway, Allarts/Erato Films/Films Inc.

TRANSVESTOPHILIA AND GYNEMIMESIS: PERFORMATIVE STRATEGIES AND FEMINIST THEORY RACHEL FENSHAM

ABSTRACT

This article considers cross-dressing within feminist and cultural theory from the perspective of performance. It offers a close reading of the materiality of particular examples of transvestism, mostly drawn from the Australian context. The specificity of these performances reveals that bodies can both reproduce and fail to comply with discursive regimes of gender.

KEYWORDS transvestism, gender, performance theory, burlesque, stereotypes, incomplete performance The suburban bus passing my street carries the promotional slogan ‘have you been with Priscilla?’, a reference to the recent video release of the Australian film Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. The boys at my daughter’s school camp decide to dress in drag for the final party, in imitation of this film which most of them haven’t seen. They dance and everyone loves it; and I wonder about the critical attention given to crossdressing in feminist theory and more recently in queer theory.1 Transvestism has helped to focus attention on the fluidity of social gender and its representations, yet it remains a not unproblematic analytical tool. In this article, without upholding fixed binary categories, I wish to reappraise the current celebration of cross-dressing. My own interest is in performance events, deliberately theatrical occasions that can be analysed as representations but also as processes in which gender codes, identifications and pleasures are enacted and refashioned. I propose to examine several different sites of gender as performance, from both high and popular culture, in Australia and elsewhere. In doing so, I want to consider the ways in which transvestism may or may not be ‘troubling’ in particular contexts. Within the broad rubric of performance, it is the concepts of mimesis and masquerade that have most frequently been explored by feminists. Thus for Luce Irigaray, mimicry is the path historically assigned to the feminine, but it is also one that can, and should, be recuperated. ‘To play with mimesis is…for a woman, to try to recover the place of her exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself to be simply reduced to it’

Cultural Studies 10(3) 1996:483–497

© 1996 Routledge 0950–2386

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(1985:76). Mimesis is therefore a game, investing eros and logos with the power of play, and a delight in the aesthetic capacity to seduce and deceive.2 Toril Moi, however, questions whether the stagings of mimesis will not lead feminist theory towards ‘miming the miming imposed on women’ (1985:140), thus reinforcing traditional patterns of idealization through imitation. The equally ambiguous notion of masquerade has also been investigated by psychoanalysis and subsequently by feminism as a strategy of disguise. Joan Riviere famously proposed that the ‘mask of womanliness’ involves the display of ostensible characteristics opposed to the masculine, but that it also operates as a defence, protecting ‘woman’ from over-identification with the father (1986:38). Yet there is a danger that ‘in this masquerade of femininity, the woman loses herself, and loses herself by playing on her femininity’ (Irigaray, 1985:84). The familiarity of the mask of womanliness as a recognizable set of characteristics (lipstick, curved eyebrows, styled hair) can become fixed through repetition, denying women the freedom of other social appearances.3 In research involving workshops and performances of dressing ‘like a woman’, my students and I explored how acts of speaking, gesturing and appearing can disrupt gender conventions. If, in male/female transvestism, masquerade and mimesis converge around the image of the feminine, then what social or psychological organizations of gendered subjectivity are manipulated in the reversals of masculine/ feminine? I should emphazise that I do not consider play and performance to be necessarily subversive or transgressive; rather, performative acts can both expose and conceal binary relationships. And if they do in fact destabilize gender, does this mean that the feminine and feminist theory risk becoming resubsumed within the masculine in the exchanges of cross-dressing (Showalter, 1987)? Does this new dress of a playful feminism give women the freedom to dress up or dress down? One response to this question might be to explain that this article has twice been actualized in performance, as a way of supplementing its theoretical concerns. First of all I dressed ‘as a woman’ to deliver my inaugural public lecture at Murdoch University, incorporating a mini-performative sequence of ambiguous gestures and the showing of a dance video segment into my presentation. Audience feedback would indicate that my ‘overtly feminized’ intervention—pink fake-fur coat, red satin dress, red and black fluffy pillbox hat, fish-net stockings, black suede high heels, diamanté earrings—heightened the impact of the text and unsettled the usual sombre and individuated responses of an academic audience. Many women have subsequently affirmed their pleasure in my parodic presentation of femininity in such a context. Second, I performed the same paper in the same costume at a large dance event presented in a conventional theatre over three nights, accompanied by a male friend dressed as a woman.4 We were surrounded by many overtly theatrical sequences, including mildly amusing variations on the cross-dressing theme. But it was my direct public address from a lectern that drew attention to the limitations of elaborate but unspecified play. Unintentionally my performance began to function as an organizing commentary upon the entire theatrical event, receiving the longest byline in the published review: A smartly dressed woman delivered an academic speech from a lectern on the subject of feminism and trans-sexuality, until she was lured away by a transsexual. (The Age, 22 January 1993)

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Was she or wasn’t she? For theoretical enquiry which foregrounds performance practices, the differences between these two presentations are important indicators of the social, temporal and spatial specificity of ‘appearance’ and the significations operating on the body. While the critique of discourse current in other disciplines also informs performance analysis, it is equally necessary to insist on a corporeal reality that is often displaced in such representational schemas. Ontological questions within feminist theory arising from visual, temporal and enunciative modes of representation can be re-examined in the negotiations between material bodies. For example, what constitutes absence and presence in any given circumstances? Who and what is there? Who is speaking? How? Who is seeing? Who is acting? Performance and performance analysis can investigate not only the illusions, but also the conventions, through which gender identities function within a social formation.

Transvestophilia and gynemimesis Investigating cross-dressing as transgressive performance also involved more conventional modes of cultural analysis. I read extensively, watched films and videos, studied famous transvestites, visited a transvestite night club, watched ‘Raunchy Girls’ in the pub, read the biography of Gertrude Stein, looked at photos of transvestites in San Francisco and Sydney, investigated legal history and so on. At this point, the meanings accruing to these diverse social practices became increasingly clouded, so that I turned to a medical treatise called Gay, Straight and In-Between: The Sexology of Erotic Orientation (Money, 1988). Money’s book provides a sympathetic analysis of the instability of cultural conceptions of gender and sex, even as it organizes and classifies diverse gender codings through the framework of clinical pathology. While such diagnostic taxonomies have been resisted by transvestites and transsexuals for political reasons, I would like to take up these categories, not in order to ascribe fixed behavioural characteristics to bodies but rather as terms that suggest the complex operations of imitation and desire associated with performing gender. Transvestism is, according to Money, ‘any act of cross dressing’, whether it take the form of party gag, entertainment act, undercover espionage, entrapment stratagem or expression of a ‘sexological syndrome’. In sexological discourse, persistent transvestism exists on a continuum with, and may in turn lead to, transvestophilia, gynemimesis, or perhaps the surgical changes of transsexuality. Transvestophilia is in turn defined as ‘the fetishistic dependence on cross dressing for erotic arousal’ (Money, 1988:94). Money argues that this fetishism is more common in men than women and that wearing women’s garments may be the ‘partial manifestation of a more extensive gender crosscoding from male to female that includes also the body image’ (94). Playing at being a woman may include a fluttering desire to be fulfilled in private by the practices of femininity, as described in Freud’s famous case study of Judge Schreber: ‘I am sometimes to be found standing before the mirror or elsewhere, with the upper portion of my body bared, and wearing sundry feminine adornments, such as ribbons, false necklaces, and the like. This only occurs, I may add, when I am by myself’ (Freud, 1991:151). In the contemporary context there are many publicly sanctioned occasions for these ‘small pretences’, whether at the elaborate country weekends organized by the Beaumont Society of London, or the ritualized cross-dressings that are enjoyed in male social groupings, such as football clubs. Money claims that men are much more likely than women to experience erotic arousal from the reversal of their gender status. However, given the less developed

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literature on female eroticism, women wearing men’s clothes may be one of many ‘unmarked’, unnoticed spaces that have escaped his gender coding. Marjorie Garber makes the point that ‘many transvestites and transsexuals affirm the reality of pleasure, sexual as well as cultural, in female-to-male as well as male-to-female crossdressing’ (1992:4). The ‘gay boy’ look, for instance, has been popularized for women, while the butchfemme dichotomy has been variously reworked in lesbian subcultures.5 Gynemimesis is the permanent shift to living like a woman while continuing to have a penis. In many cultures there are established communities where individuals live as members of the opposite sex, either permanently or for a prescribed period. Gayle Rubin cites several socially sanctioned examples of gynemimesis and andromimesis, whereby ‘an anatomical man could become a woman by means of a special ceremony, and an anatomical woman could in the same way become a man. The transvestite then took a wife or husband of her/his own anatomical sex and opposite social sex’ (1975:181). In contemporary society, gynemimetics can work as transvestite entertainers ‘pretending that they cross-dress optionally’ (Money, 1988: 100), rather than claiming impersonation as their permanent social identity. The fictional frame of popular theatre sanctions a gender doubling that does not always challenge the social construction of gender under other circumstances. In Jennie Livingstone’s film Paris is Burning (1990), for example, the world of black drag balls in New York operates as a sanctuary from a still hostile ‘outside’ world in which racial and gender difference is maintained through violent regulation (Phelan, 1993). These various kinds of ‘eonism’,6 whether enacted in the theatre or in everyday life, are not adequately explained by an analysis based on a restrictive Oedipal scenario or a notion of innate biological orientation. The terms ‘transvestophilia’ and ‘gynemimesis’, I have suggested, foreground the persistence of desire, imitation and public liminality in understanding gender identities, and it is the fragility of these concepts that I will discuss in relation to various performances of ‘woman’.

Cross-sexual acts The man who, for the first time, or in repetition of an act of childhood, slips his foot into a woman’s shoe will hesitate—the foot is contained, pressured, exposed by the shape of the leather. The mass of his body is dislocated by the remoulding of the foot. His walk, with its speed, gait, weight distribution, is re-patterned; he may find his head at a different angle and the direction of his gaze altered; perhaps a more tentative awareness of the ground ensues. The walk is already a text with a particular morphology and history but new movement patterns can be acquired or added. These acts shift and reorient his ‘performance of sex’. The attention to detail fascinates, and the intricacies of the feminine produce a compelling fiction for the male performer. There is a seductive pleasure in the repetition of the toilette, a reiterated grooming that gives the performer permission to gaze upon the disguise of a woman/self. He discovers and owns the feminine while remaining in possession of a hidden male sex. His desire can be studied, not taken for granted. His arousal happens all over his skin, as this desire takes external form. The performance may be received with applause, or praise, or condemnation. Its presentation provides new cause to consider these acts, to repeat them, to stylize them, to enjoy them or reject them. Each movement is singular; though it becomes familiar, it can always be separated from the others which have accumulated. These acts become ‘second nature’, a mimetic performance that can be repeated. They can

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be observed and described in microcosmic detail and this commentary registers the performance which produces the commentary. And so, the transvestite man becomes ‘like a woman’. Judith Butler has proposed that this process of accumulation, or sedimentation, constitutes gender identity and that neither gender nor sex can be conceptualized in relation to an ontology of the male or female body. The sexed body has no a priori constitution, nor does it simply exist as a blank slate to be written upon by social discourses; rather, corporeality is actively produced and reproduced through the intersection and elaboration of multiple semiotic systems. ‘As a result, it becomes impossible to separate out “gender” from the political and cultural intersections in which it is invariably produced and maintained’ (Butler, 1990a:3). What we think of as gender identity is fundamentally embedded within the fabric of the social texts that produce it. In its crudest sense identity is materialized through a double process of corporeal stylization and embodiment rehearsals (practice), an accumulation that represents the social text of femininity (or the style of a subculture for that matter). It is not possible, however, to escape, deny or simply oppose the reproduction of binary gender identities. Butler disagrees with l’écriture féminine as a potential elsewhere for ‘woman’ outside a masculine Symbolic, but also with a view of woman as a unitary oppressed body within patriarchal social structures. A feminist identity politics that polarizes masculine and feminine reifies existing distinctions within language and culture which support compulsory heterosexuality and a hierarchical binarism. Instead, Butler argues for a critical genealogy of the institutional and discursive means through which gender differences are inscribed, a theoretical strategy to be supplemented by ‘a politics of performative acts’. ‘From a feminist point of view, one might try to reconceive the gendered body as the legacy of sedimented acts rather than a predetermined or foreclosed structure, essence or fact, whether natural, cultural or linguistic’ (Butler, 1990b:274). An abiding gendered self only takes shape through the organization of familiar and mundane bodily gestures, movements and enactments of various kinds, whose repetition and sedimentation produce maleness or femaleness. Stage actors are familiar with this process and typically retain an awareness of self as non-unitary, even as they try to produce actions, sounds and gestures which pertain to particular dramatic characters. Reg Livermore, a well-known Australian actor, explicitly defines his role as the larger-than-life figure Betty Blokk-Buster as theatrical pretence: Drag is the great overstatement. It is grotesque, it is outrageous, it is bizarre, it is never pretty or glamorous. It is ultimately, I hope, poignant, lonely, pathetic, and then beautiful. But I never want my audience to believe I am the woman in question. I sometimes appear as a man also. (Kenna, 1977:9) The performer is rearranged and reconstituted as a set of possibilities, or potential actualities, as required by the mise-en-scène of the performance. Edna Everage, the stage double of Australia’s most famous cross-dresser Barry Humphries, has evolved over many years from a frumpish suburban housewife to Dame Edna, a zealous caricature of the British aristocracy. Humphries notes, ‘there is very little danger of Edna going out of character unless I lose the falsetto’ (Lahr, 1984: 60). According to critic John Lahr, when Humphries performed in New York in 1977, the depiction of a ‘man dressed as a woman’ was ‘alien to the American theatre’ (not

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so today!), but this ‘didn’t worry anyone because most thought Edna was a woman’ (59). Humphries works the gender binary carefully and viciously. He has no doubt that he is a man impersonating a woman who happens to be prone to excesses of style: ‘labia-like’ lips, pink hair and winged glasses. Indeed, as Lahr says, ‘Edna works the room masterfully ‘(60, my emphasis). Humphries incisively deploys his feminine alter ego to create a mock identification with the women in the audience. ‘We have these little ducts, don’t we?’ he trills in a conversation about female organs and hormones. Having invited a woman to tell all in front of the audience, he slowly humiliates her: ‘and they squirt, don’t they, in embarrassing places?’ He plays the role of maternal confidante, only to attack the women in the audience with alacrity, undermining their spectatorial and sexual autonomy. Here the character of Dame Edna draws directly on the traditionally misogynistic figure of the pantomime dame as a conservative historical force (Fantasia, forthcoming). Over the years this superstar performer has covered up the cracks in his woman’s disguise, so that she is now a smooth, highly constructed replica of her former self.7 Not only does Humphries produce a perfected copy of a woman but he does not allow his status as a man in charge to be questioned by the audience. He explains: ‘they came in as adults, individuals; and then you reduce them to the level of childish obedience. So in the end, they will do the most infantile things’ (Lahr, 1984:59). His popularity may reside in the desire of audiences to submit to regressive patterns of torment and pleasure inflicted by a figure who is both cruel mother and detached father. Edna thus reinforces rather than disturbs gender binaries in her show. Barry Humphries has become an increasingly orthodox figure in Australian political culture as well as an established representative of the arts and international commentator; Dame Edna, predictably, has declared herself to be against an Australian republic. What may once have contested the social mores of postwar suburban Australia has become conservative; in this cross-dresser, gender parody is no longer critical.

Incomplete performance Perhaps there are other ways of thinking about the performative appropriation of gender as a resistive mode of practice. Monique Wittig, well known for her work on the ‘lesbian body’ (1976) and the claim ‘One is Not Born a Woman’ (1992), has also researched gender disruption through theatre. She and her collaborator Sande Zeig started a theatre for ‘lesbian actors’ whose gestures would be neither masculine nor feminine (Zeig, 1985). Wittig wanted to discover whether there might be a lesbian language of gesture—that is, a bodily language that does not predicate itself on a normative heterosexuality. Rather than impersonating one or other sex, actors were to perform a multiplicity of roles that would subvert notions of a definitive sexual identity as well as masculine pleasure in spectacle. For Wittig, feminism has involved a ‘strategy of reappropriation and subversive redeployment of precisely those “values” (or gestures) that have belonged to the masculine domain’ (Butler, 1990a:126). Manipulating the significations of the body was one way to enact a challenge to phallocentric fields of representation. Wittig’s ‘lesbian actor’ was not intended as a category necessarily linked to sexual preference, but rather as a position open to anyone who reappropriates gestural codes to the point where they no longer denote a fixed sex for a particular character. (Don Quixote can become Red Riding Hood, for instance.) Wittig thus proposes a performative, as well as critical, model for manipulating gender signifiers.

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Although Butler only partially acknowledges theatre as a mode of investigation, she has argued for a proliferation of performative acts that can parody or mock naturalized gender divisions. The transvestite does ‘more than express the distinction between sex and gender’; rather, he/she challenges, ‘at least implicitly, the distinction between appearance and reality that structures a good deal of popular thinking about gender identity’ (1990b:278). There can be no recourse to an essential ‘sex’ which is then expressed by gender, because ‘the transvestite’s gender is as fully real as anyone whose performance complies with social expectations’ (278). Transvestism thus undermines the notion of a true or original sex, thereby exposing the inevitably artificial and restrictive nature of gender identity. Yet not all gender parody is ‘troubling’; the transvestite entertainer, as in the case of Barry Humphries, may reproduce, impersonate and exaggerate the feminine in a way that is seductive but not unsettling of gender norms. While drag performances are often associated with the imitation of the feminine, the repetition and modification of gestures may also, however, destabilize fixed notions of masculinity. Whereas traditional theatre often relies on notions of identity embodied through narrative, genre and character, dance explicitly draws our attention to such bodily signifiers as movement, gesture and costume. Thus the work of Pina Bausch, choreographer at the Wuppertaler DanzTeatr in Germany, distinctively tests the boundaries between everyday ritual and stylized movement. Although Bausch does not identify herself as a feminist artist, her investigation of the social codes inherent in masculine and feminine gesture frequently exposes the oppression and commodification of women. As Elizabeth Wright notes, ‘she reveals the masquerade that both sexes have to perform in order to survive as gendered subjects’ (1989:117). Bausch does this by asking her dancers to repeat in real time phrases of movement that they have often generated themselves. The excess of articulation generated by individuating and framing these physical gestures can evoke intense emotional responses not only in the audience, but also in the dancing subject. In one sequence from Chantal Akerman’s (1986) film featuring Bausch’s company in rehearsal as well as on stage, a female announcer welcomes us to a performance where rows of men and women dressed as ballet dancers are waiting. A male dancer comes forward, dressed in a ballet gown that is not the usual young girl’s pink, but rather a sombre black. It does not do up at the back, it does not fit—the seams are splitting. S/he is under pressure to perform, s/he wants to show us that s/he can dance. S/he must do these difficult and absurd steps of the classical ballet. S/he must clear the space of its clutter before s/he can dance, so s/he yells at everyone ‘to move the chairs’. S/he dances frantically to the limits of his/her technical ability. S/he asks of the audience, vulnerable in an aspiration to fulfil its desire: what more must I show you? How can this body reveal itself more, must woman dance as a sublime being? S/ he collapses, s/he breaks down: ‘I can’t do any more’. The performance appears uncontrolled, the performer appearing to lose him/herself. While this performance parodies the ballerina, it does not offer the spectator a unified text/body/meaning of man/woman. The actor’s status as virtuoso performer is disrupted by a display of frantic and futile gestures and an inglorious anger. His performance exposes the oppressive fictions of balletic femininity, at the same time as the frantic micro-sequences of bodily acts disturb the compulsory division of gestures into masculine/feminine. The question remains: is the actor in control of his breakdown or is there real anger? Is this a critique of feminine performance from the perspective of the male subject? Or, alternatively, from the perspective of the female choreographer? The spectator must consider all these possibilities.

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Australian actor Reg Livermore also manipulates the juxtaposition of ballet dancer and male performer in his appearance as ‘The leading male prima ballerina of the Australian Rules Ballet’ (‘Australian Rules’ refers to Australian football). This figure appears in one of the sketches in his very successful vaudeville show The Betty BlokkBuster Follies. Livermore wears ‘toe shoes, football socks, a tu-tu, football guernsey and a swan head-dress. He is very ocker, not too bright and he swears, spits, scratches his backside and dances on point’ (Fletcher, 1995:14). The sketch revolves around the tensions and rivalry that circulate in the demanding performance domains of both ballet and football, posing the question: which is really tougher? Livermore is, in fact, a fine dancer and when he takes to his toes he begins to demonstrate his prowess. Yet the spotlight refuses to follow him and he keeps ending up in stage darkness. He also erupts in anger and swears with a peculiarly Australian vigour, combining sexual innuendo with crude repetition. This breakdown further stretches the credibility of this ballet dancer-cum-football player. Both dancers and football players serve as cultural icons, attracting public admiration for their disciplined control of their actions and bodies. The football player, however, is allowed to express anger in a socially sanctioned form by shouting at other players and at the referee. The ballet dancer, on the other hand, is expected to remain mute, silently complicit with the role she performs. Both forms of spectacle are in the business of normalizing gender identities and constructing two different kinds of viewing public. By combining these two representative figures and showing their equivalences and excesses, Livermore subverts the regulatory authority of gender. Both Bausch’s dancer and Livermore could be described as instances of incomplete performance. They create and expose key elements of an idealized femininity, while simultaneously destabilizing the notion of a cohesive and controlling male identity behind the feminine mask (it is here that they differ most clearly from Barry Humphries). Rather, one is confronted with an excess of signification which dramatically exemplifies Butler’s claim: ‘The injunction to be a given gender produces necessary failures, a variety of incoherent configurations that in their multiplicity exceed and defy the injunction by which they are generated’ (1990a:145). Sign systems (including gestural, spatial and vestimentary codes) can serve to render gender incoherent, even as the shifting between genres of film and theatre, high art and popular culture, rehearsal and stage, vocal expletives and gesture, deliberately invite the spectator’s attention. In repeating the socially hegemonic, the performer does not simply reiterate its power, but rather points to some of the cultural and material boundaries associated with particular bodies. Unable to disguise himself adequately in a feminized costume, the performer thereby reveals the failure of a masculinity that would give him mastery and control over appearance. This incomplete or confused overacting of gender can also be found in other popular settings. Some years ago, a group of actors from West Theatre in Melbourne founded the Essendon Policewomen’s Marching Band, an itinerant street performance that has become a favourite at agricultural shows and festivals both in Australia and the United States. The performers draw upon a stock range of culturally entrenched gender identifications, which they then disorder in marvellous carnivalesque fashion. Essendon is the home of an ‘Aussie Rules’ football team and is perceived as the average, middle-class Australian suburb (coincidentally bordering on Edna Everage’s Moonee Ponds). The police are often disliked as authority figures in Australia, while policewomen are relatively rare and regarded as ‘unfeminine’; and Marching Bands are associated with quasi-military groups and twirling batons in public processions.

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Out of these signifiers was created a Latin American-style musical cabaret of surly men and women who roamed outdoor locations. Dressed in policewomen’s uniforms and laddered stockings or droopy socks, with all manner of wigs and make-up (including fake tattoos), they would routinely stop for brief sketches, in which ‘Mavis’ would be lined up for ‘lessons in domestic economy’ on the end of a stretchy rope. The burlesque gags played on, and off, the audience’s uncertainty as to whether these grotesque feminine figures were really men or women or even disorderly police officers. A similar subversion of gender stereotypes takes place in the hugely successful film Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994). Here the genre of the road movie is taken over by a troupe of drag queens on a flamboyant journey from inner suburban Sydney to the central Australian desert. The film unashamedly celebrates transvestophilia while also dealing sensitively with the life of the gynemimetic via its seemingly inconsequential plot. The queens camp it up through a range of encounters that address pervasive mythic symbols of rural Australia—the country town, the pub (hotel bar), the Aboriginal community and the mining town. Their extravagant costumes are crucial to the film’s parodistic spirit, seizing upon and comically exaggerating other icons of Australianness—the thong, the Sydney opera house, emblematic fauna and so on. The criticism levelled at Tootsie by Elaine Showalter (1987) seems irrelevant here, since these boys (best known as straight male actors in other roles) are for the most part not trying to usurp the role and position of women or indeed to ‘pass’ as women in any convincing way. Local critics were initially enthusiastic about this film but seem currently undecided as to whether it represents a weakening portrait of national character. When they complain that the film shows the ugly side of Australian life rather than ‘searching for certain truths and meanings about what it is to be an Australian’ (The Australian, 29 October 1994), they appear to have missed the point of this troubling parody altogether. What is perhaps most successful about Priscilla is its disruption of vernacular representations and images of Australian masculinity associated with such figures as Paul Hogan. Towards the end of the film, when Hugo Weaving appears in rawhide trousers and Akubra hat, every image of the Australian stockman, he looks for the first time as if he is really in drag. The film has also, however, provoked critical responses for its reproduction of gender and racial stereotypes. Some gays and lesbians tried to disassociate themselves from the film, regarding it as a misrepresentation of their cultural identities through its exclusive focus on a highly spectacular element. Furthermore, the Centre for Philippine Concerns-Australia has condemned the film’s representation of Cynthia, a Filipina unhappily married to a rural car mechanic, as a ‘gold-digger, prostitute, sex entertainer, bad wife, manic depressive, alcoholic and vulgar’ (The Australian, 8 October 1994). Thus Cynthia interrupts the unappreciated entertainment of the drag queens in a country hotel with an erotic stage show that includes popping ping-pong balls at a cheering all-male audience. This ‘real woman’ both shocks and usurps the position of the drag pretenders, while at the same time invoking deeper anxieties about sexual exploitation and anti-Asian sentiment in Australia. In narrative terms, however, she is not without power; she chooses to come to Australia, even if it turns out not quite to be what she expected, and the arrival of the three protagonists in turn provides the catalyst for her to defiantly leave her husband. This brief episode in the film displaces attention from the celebratory performances of the frocked female impersonators to an under class whose political concerns continue to need examination.8

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As a popular culture text, then, Priscilla has engendered multiple reactions to its disturbing as well as pleasurable performances that are fabricated from the stereotypes and myths of urban and rural Australia. The willingness of Australian audiences to laugh at themselves in this film, in spite of discomfort about its representation of an appropriate masculinity, has created an opportunity for community debate on different gender issues in the context of mainstream cultural politics. The popular dissemination of images of gender transgression cannot, in other words, simply be reduced to evidence of mass-market co-option. And it is precisely because the performances in Priscilla remain ambiguous that they demand analysis, since the actions of Cynthia and of the other women in the film are indeed as sexually and semiotically loaded as those of the three queens.

The politics of performance Butler’s original emphasis on ‘drag’ was strategic and not intended to be adopted literally as the quintessential model for subverting gender. None the less, Butler’s arguments have had a strong influence on both activist and performative projects in Australia, indicating that even seemingly esoteric theories can have politically powerful effects. Thus in a recent Australian film on transgender politics, On Becoming, members of the Transvestite Liberation Coalition in Sydney quote Butler to authorize their own refusal to co-operate with prevailing medical and legal definitions of gender (On Becoming, 1993). However, Butler has been troubled by the convergence of her own arguments with the current media obsession with what I’ve termed ‘transvestophilia and gynemimesis’. Her subsequent book Bodies that Matter (1993) partially attempts to clarify the critical potential of a performative theory of gender. Transvestism, she now suggests, should not be seen as ‘exemplary of performativity’ (230), nor is it a matter of choice. Gender is not optional, but enacted in the context of binding conventions that precede and condition the formation of the subject. Heterosexuality remains the normative condition underpinning social discourses—legal, medical, pedagogic, theatrical—whose legislative powers regulate the appearance of bodies. Butler thus cautions against overestimating the effectiveness of performance as a strategy within feminist theory. Yet she fails to account adequately for the problematic question of agency: how is change possible if subjects are already written? Here Butler’s approach to performance as discourse seems insufficiently attentive to the specificity and materiality of particular performances. Susan Bordo writes, ‘Butler’s analyses of how gender is constituted and subverted take the body as just such a text whose meanings can be analyzed in abstraction from experience, history, material practice, and context’ (1993:292). In her essay ‘Critically queer’ (1993), however, Butler offers a more nuanced analysis of the meanings and political communities associated with the term ‘queer’. Here she acknowledges the theatricalization of queer activism as a positive contribution to policy changes in the AIDS debate. She also, however, suggests that the denaturalizing of gender at the drag balls in Paris is Burning may be less significant than the film’s documentation of alternative patterns of kinship within the black community. Ultimately, Butler seems to be increasingly uneasy about the politics of performance: ‘The reach of…signifiability cannot be controlled by the one who utters or writes, since such productions are not owned by the one who utters them. They continue to signify in spite of…’ (1993:241).

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Such questions clearly cannot be resolved beyond the particularities of specific texts, sites and bodies. Thus the value of performance theory lies in investigating the accumulation and coding of stylized repetitive acts, whether masculine or feminine, to be found in many and diverse ‘scripts’. This form of analysis acknowledges that gestures, voices, clothing and scripts contribute to social, ritualized and mediated patterns of communication as well as shaping the specific interactions between particular bodies. Research into the performances of gender, whether their context be the law, cinema, academia, popular culture or theatre, requires deciphering the conventions through which particular representations of masculinity and femininity are given power. Here the actual practice of performance, in workshops and discussions, can provide a useful supplement to the critique of existing texts. Individuals can dismantle takenfor-granted social conventions by not showing what is said; dis/covering what is not said; acting not like a woman; showing there is no semblance to a woman. In this way, bodies can resist the seduction of imitation by questioning what is already an image, a mask or a reflection of gender, by undoing the performative acts of gender as opposed to constructing genders. Sometimes these gaps are revealed in non-mimetic actions or non-lovely bodies: a falter in the voice, a breaking sound, a hiccup, a stifled (laugh), a slurred tone, choking; bodies which are disconnected, disjointed, segmented, dismembered, desynchronized; clothes and masks which undress, strip off, are taken off; when someone loses face; about-faces; is effaced or effacing; has no front; is faceless; and the performance is an undecided w/hole, a between-ness. It is such imperfections of representation in performance which can expose the fictions of gender identity. When Bob Hawke, the one time Australian Prime Minister, cried in front of television cameras at a time of personal vulnerability, the image of his quivering face was widely circulated. While an unusual response for a prominent male public figure, it did not undermine his popularity; rather, viewers sought to make sense of the relationship between his public role and private life. This unrehearsed moment nevertheless upset the power of normative significations linking masculinity, authority and nation. It is this kind of sliding between categories which can be most provocative in performance, marking a point of rupture in the reproduction of gender. The fascination with cross-dressing in feminist and cultural theory may be reaching its end, yet it has usefully focused attention on the relationship between differently sexed bodies and processes of cultural identification. Here the value of performance for cultural studies lies in its interest in the incompleteness of identity, the moments when gender fails to perform a ‘mimesis’ well, or when a ‘philia’ becomes an odium. In performance actors are not simply vehicles of discursive regimes, but material bodies differentially positioned in space and time—bodies able to demonstrate both the power as well as the fragility of prevailing fictions of gender.

Notes 1 Thus Marjorie Garber regards the transvestite as ‘an index of category destabilisation’ (1992:36), while Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1988) explore crossdressing as a metaphor for modernist women writers. Male/female transvestism is extensively discussed and celebrated in much recent theatre criticism (Freedman, 1991; Kaite, 1988; Dolan, 1985; Davy, 1989; Ferris, 1993),

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2 3 4 5

6 7 8

while Judith Butler (1990a) has influentially argued for the cultural significance of drag as potentially troubling gender categories. Froma Zeitlin’s discussion of the powers of mimesis in her essay on ‘Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazousae’ (1981) is exemplary in drawing out the complexity of imitations and the price attached to mimesis. 1970s feminism, with its emphasis on no make-up and other refusals of conventionalized feminine appearance, was clearly a rebellion against these overcodings of the mask. The performance event was called ‘Dance’ and was organized by Jude Walton for the Green Mill Dance Project, Melbourne 1993. Kath Weston’s analysis (1993) of a lesbian prom night describes the varied pleasures of appearing as butch or femme, while arguing forcefully for the examination of social relations rather than performance alone. ‘Gender no more resides in gesture or apparel than it lies buried in bodies and psyches’ (17). The term ‘eonism’ as a synonym for cross-dressing was coined by Havelock Ellis (1936), referencing the infamous eighteenth-century Chevalier d’Eon de Beaumont. So precise is this impersonation that Edna Everage look-alikes frequently appear at parties, and her characteristic glasses are available in costume shops. The Australian media has subsequently given considerable attention to this issue (see, for example, The Australian, 6 May 1995), and changes in migration law are being investigated to protect sponsored Filipina brides.

References BOOKS AND ARTICLES Bordo, Susan (1993) Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body, Berkeley: University of California Press. Butler, Judith (1990a) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge. —— (1990b) ‘Performative acts and gender constitution: an essay in phenomenology and feminist theory’, in Sue Ellen Case (ed.), Performing Feminisms: Femin ist Critical Theory and Theatre, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. —— (1993) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ , New York: Routledge. Davy, Kate (1989) ‘Reading past the heterosexual imperative: dress suits to hire’, TDR, 33 (1), (T121) Spring: 153–70. Dolan, Jill (1985) ‘Gender impersonation onstage: destroying or maintaining the mirror of gender roles?’, Women and Performance, 2(2)#4:5–11. Ellis, Havelock (1936) Studies in the Psychology of Sex, New York: Random House. Fantasia, Josephine (forthcoming) ‘Pantomimes and empires: J.C.Williamson’s presentation of pantomimes 1883–1914’, Ph.D. dissertation, Sydney University. Ferris, Lesley (1993) Crossing the Stage: Controversies on Cross-Dressing, London: Routledge. Fletcher, Nadia (1995) ‘Reg Livermore: a laugh in the wilderness’, Australasian Drama Studies, 29, April: 4–21.

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Freedman, Barbara (1991) Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis and Shakespearean Comedy, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Freud, Sigmund (1991) ‘Psychoanalytical notes on an autobiographical account of a case of paranoia’ ( 1911 ), trans. James Strachey, in Angela Richard (ed.), Case Histories 2, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Garber, Marjorie (1992) Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, London: Routledge. Gilbert, Sandra and Gubar, Susan (1988) ‘Cross and re-dressing: transvestism as metaphor’, in No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century , Vol. 2 : Sexchanges, New Haven: Yale University Press. Irigaray, Luce (1985) This Sex Which is Not One, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Kaite, Berkeley (1988) ‘The pornographic body double: transgression is the law’, in Arthur and Marilouise Kroker (eds), Body Invaders: Sexuality and the Post- modern Condition, New York: Macmillan. Kenna, Peter (1977) Drag Show: featuring Peter Kenna’s ‘Mates’ and Steve J. Spears’ ‘The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin’, Woollahra, New South Wales: Currency Press. Lahr, John (1984) Automatic Vaudeville, London: Heinemann. Moi, Toril (1985) Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, London: Routledge. Money, John (1988) Gay, Straight and Inbetween: The Sexology of Erotic Orien tation, New York: Oxford University Press. Phelan, Peggy (1993) Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, New York: Routledge. Riviere, Joan (1986) ‘Womanliness as a masquerade’, in Victor Burgin et al. (eds), Formations of Fantasy, London: Methuen (originally published in 1929). Rubin, Gayle (1975) ‘The traffic in women: notes on the “political economy” of sex’, in Rayna Reiter (ed.), Towards an Anthropology of Women, New York and London: Monthly Review Press. Showalter, Elaine (1987) ‘Critical cross dressing; male feminists and the woman of the year’, in Alice Jardine and Paul Smith (eds), Men in Feminism, New York: Methuen. Weston, Kath (1993) ‘Do clothes make the woman?: gender, performance theory, and lesbian eroticism’, Genders, 17:1–21. Wittig, Monique (1976) The Lesbian Body, trans. Peter Owen, New York: Avon. —— (1992) ‘One is not born a woman’, in her The Straight Mind and Other Essays, Boston: Beacon Press. Wright, Elizabeth (1989) Postmodern Brecht: A Re-Presentation, London: Routledge. Zeig, Sande (1985) ‘The actor as activator: deconstructing gender through gesture’, Women and Performance, 2(4): 12–17. Zeitlin, Froma (1981) ‘Travesties of gender and genre in Aristophanes’ “Thesmophoriazousae’”, Critical Inquiry, 8:301–27. FILMS

On Becoming (1993) Director Teresa Rizzo. Murdoch University and Film and Television Institute (Western Australia). Paris is Burning (1990) Director Jennie Livingstone. Off White Productions, dist. Miramax. Pina Bausch and the Wuppertal Danztheater (1986) Director Chantal Akerman. A2-BRT-INA-RTBf-RMArts. Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) Director Stephen Elliot. Latent Image/ Specific Films Production, dist. Polygram Filmed Entertainment.

REVIEW

MODERN GIRLS RITA FELSKI

Lesley Johnson, The Modern Girl: Girlhood and Growing Up 184pp., ISBN: 1– 86373–431–7 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1993); Gail Reekie, Temptations: Sex, Selling and the Department Store 257pp., ISBN: 1–86373–342–6 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1993). Modernity, it seems, is back with a vengeance. The flood of books and articles on postmodernism has yielded in recent times to a new interest in the modern and an ongoing reassessment of its ambiguous cultural and political legacies. A cynical observer might interpret such a phenomenon as nothing more than the ultimate instance of the postmodern cannibalization of history, its rapacious consumption of its own past. To the often asked question, ‘what comes after the postmodern?’ comes the inevitable answer—the return to the modern, of course, reappropriated and recycled in the ultimate gesture of retro chic and tongue-in-cheek nostalgia. Yet there may be more substantive reasons for the renewed interest in the modern in contemporary critical theory. The honing of new methodologies of cultural analysis has inspired a proliferation of historical and theoretical perspectives on the nature and meanings of modernity which differ sharply from the established discourses of modernization in sociology and modernism in literary criticism respectively. Particular disciplinary frameworks, it has become clear, dramatically shape the way in which an object of analysis is constituted and interpreted; the contours of a historical period shift and change when viewed through a different analytical lens. At the same time, the concept of modernity is also being retrieved and reconfigured by theorists of gender, race and sexuality who are beginning to question the routine conflation of the modern with the interests of white heterosexual patriarchy. Insisting upon the complex entanglements and investments of subaltern identities with the history that they simultaneously contest, they compellingly show that attention to such identities requires us to rethink the theoretical and historical categories through which the modern has conventionally been understood (Gilroy, 1993). Rather then embodying a uniform, all-encompassing historical logic, in other words, modernity plays itself out differentially across the particularities of cultural context, group identity and embodied experience.

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These two phenomena are clearly not unrelated. The growing interest in reclaiming the modern as a category central to the formation of marginal as well as hegemonic groupings calls for, and is in turn made possible by, the fashioning of new methodologies that may prove more hospitable to such analyses. Feminist theory, for example, has typically conceptualized the modern according to the instrumental/ expressive dichotomy underpinning established sociological thought. Here modernity is gendered as ineluctably and iredeemably masculine through its identity with the rational and the public, encompassing a pervasive and inexorable historical logic of instrumentality, calculation and repression. Woman is thereby defined as its necessary other, epitomizing a remaining authentic measure of sentiment, corporeality and nonalienated subjectivity. Positioned on the side of tradition rather than modernity, of Gemeinschaft rather than Gesellschaft, woman thus inevitably serves as either the tragic victim of processes of modernization or else as the redemptive symbol of a Utopian promesse de bonheur beyond the constraints of patriarchal social and symbolic systems. Within the domain of art and aesthetic theory, by contrast, the modern has often been conceptualized in a manner more open to the potential complexities and indeterminacies of gender identity. Indeed, literary modernity has often been coded as feminine in its contestatory relationship to processes of social modernization and its antagonistic relationship to norms of bourgeois masculinity. The self-reflexive, parodistic polyvocality of experimental writing is thus deemed, within one influential critical tradition, to subvert the repressive structures of the patriarchal logos through its liberation of linguistic plurality and feminine difference. Increasingly, however, feminists have become sceptical of the utility of a textual theory which assigns subversive femininity to the formal structures of a largely male avant-garde tradition while simultaneously marginalizing, or dismissing as old-fashioned, the actual cultural preferences and practices of many women. In this context, an elective affinity has emerged between the loose configuration of reading positions organized around the rubric of cultural studies and new historicism and the concerns of those feminist theorists and historians seeking a more nuanced and richly inflected understanding of the complex intersections of women and modernity. Much of this recent feminist work explicitly questions the private versus public, instrumental versus expressive distinction which has traditionally informed the writings of critics as well as defenders of the modern. Thus the identification of recent history with a masculine symbolic order of rationalization, disenchantment and repression becomes harder to sustain once the aestheticized and eroticized domains of mass culture and consumerism are redefined as integral to the culture of modernity. At the same time, the ‘feminine’ domain of the familial, affective and expressive is itself reconceptualized as a complex array of historically particular cultural practices intimately implicated in regimes of power. Recent feminist appropriations of Foucault have been productive in this regard in enabling new and suggestive historical analyses of the discursive formation of women as modern subjects (Armstrong, 1987; Walkowitz, 1992). Thus a shift in methodological perspective makes it possible for women and questions of femininity to assume a central and defining role in the culture of modernity, even as it also compels us to reconsider the ways in which the modern has conventionally been represented. Gail Reekie’s Temptations: Sex, Selling and the Department Store and Lesley Johnson’s The Modern Girl: Girlhood and Growing Up are two important additions to this growing body of feminist work. Dealing with different, though overlapping periods of Australian history, they jointly refute any lingering perception of modernity and femininity as antithetical phenomena. Instead, through a reading of diverse

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cultural fields—consumerism, the mass media, the education system—which span and detabilize the public/private divide, they address the status of women as exemplary subjects in the discourses and iconographies of Australian modernity. They thereby ably convey its complex meanings for women as exemplifying new pleasures and freedoms as well as new regulations and constraints. Rejecting the tragic feminist narrative of woman as victim of the modern, Reekie and Johnson offer a more nuanced and differentiated reading of the status of women as historical subjects. Reekie’s Temptations is a comprehensive cultural history of the development of the Sydney department store from the late nineteenth century to the present. Insisting on the key significance of the department store in the formation of modern sexed subjectivity, Reekie explores its gradual transformation from a paternalistic bourgeois institution into a sophisticated site of scientifically managed mass marketing. Her analysis moves from discussions of particular stores and the commodities they offered, to readings of the multifarious texts of department store culture, such as shopping catalogues, retailing magazines and personnel training manuals, and to more general questions of sexuality, mass culture and modernity. The purpose of her book, she writes, is to show how ‘by providing popular and accessible models of sexual identities and conduct, the department store reformulated and gave specifically modern meanings to male and female bodies, to definitions of manhood and womanhood and to models of heterosocial and heterosexual interaction’ (xix). While Reekie’s general argument is not as ground-breaking as she sometimes implies, given the extensive body of recent feminist work on consumption, she nevertheless provides a compelling and comprehensive account of the relationship between gender, modernity and commodity culture in the context of Australian culture. The text is at its best in detailing the diverse and complex minutiae through which the department store affirmed particular and often highly elaborated norms of sexed subjectivity. Plotting the ornate protocols of shop window display, spatial organization and interior decor, Reekie convincingly shows how these were densely charged at every point with changing, but always carefully differentiated, signifiers of masculinity and femininity. From the 1920s onwards the discourses of psychology and sexology increasingly shaped marketing and retail trade literature, creating new scientific knowledges of the female psyche and body and detailed taxonomies of consumer behaviour. Women in turn drew on and contested these definitions in their own interactions with the department store, as Reekie shows in her fascinating discussion of feminist consumer politics and the complex negotiations and transactions between female shoppers and retailers. At a more general level, Reekie ably conveys the ambiguous meanings of consumption in relation to shifting definitions of the modern. While prevailing attitudes often codified men as the progressive and women as the traditional sex, the discourses of consumerism reversed these assumptions in order to contrast men’s hidebound and conservative shopping practices to the radical modernity of women. Women, it was argued, were attracted to the temptations of the city because of their highly strung nervous temperament, their fits of depression and their craving for constant change, features that were also seen (pace Simmel, 1971) to typify the quintessentially modern personality. The growth of consumerism could be seen as epitomizing the ultimate instance of male regulation of female desire, yet, as Reekie notes, the department store was also a distinctively feminine public space where male shoppers were often made to feel ill at ease and out of place. Department store retailers and cultural critics concurred in their view of women as passive, pliable and easily manipulated victims of modern retailing strategies, yet representations of

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female consumers also reveal recurring fears of women’s active and even threatening desire for commodities, which, once aroused, could spill over into a variety of other realms. In other words, the culture of consumerism both made and unmade gender hierarchies in a manner that complicates any automatic assumptions about the seamless identity of patriarchal and capitalist interests. In this context, however, Reekie’s own explicit theoretical pronouncements on the sexual politics of consumption are not always fully consistent. At certain moments, she invokes the work of radical feminists such as Sheila Jeffreys to interpret the sexualization of consumer culture as signalling the exercise of ever greater control over women through their incorporation into a repressive matrix of male-defined heterosexual desire. Such a stance seems strangely at odds with the author’s later recourse to a Fiskean vocabulary of resistance, tactics and consumer guerrilla warfare, where female power and pleasure triumphs over the disciplinary strategies of the retailing apparatus. A more extensive mediation between these seemingly incommensurate positions through an explicit engagement with recent theories of power and agency would have improved the discussion by providing it with a stronger conceptual frame. The strength of Reekie’s book, however, lies in her elegant and detailed readings of the various facets of department store culture, readings which constitute an exemplary instance of recent feminist work on consumerism. Lesley Johnson’s The Modern Girl is more ambitious and wide-ranging, if also less cohesive, in scope. It aims to situate the cultural problematic of the modern in relation to changing conceptions of both gender and youth, while simultaneously engaging in a critique of mainstream feminist positions. Johnson charts changing definitions of girlhood and growing up in Australian society in the 1950s and early 1960s, reading an array of texts from works of educational psychology to modern sociology to newspapers and magazines in terms of their representations of adolescent femininity. Analysing the rhetoric of tradition and modernity shaping the cultural formation of young women during the period, she goes on to argue that this same dualistic vocabulary still continues to haunt recent feminist discourse in unproductive and even damaging ways. In the narrative of origin deployed by mainstream Western feminism, the 1950s are often depicted as women’s darkest hour, a picture usefully complicated by Johnson in her discussion of the formation of teenage femininity. Rather than embodying a unified ideological imperative, she argues, the ‘modern girl’ was a multi-faceted discursive category which played itself out differentially across particular contexts, as postwar conceptions of youth intermeshed and interacted with prevailing cultural norms of gender. Drawing on Franco Moretti’s analysis of the linking of youth and modernity through the narrative framework of Bildung, Johnson persuasively shows how this ideal of individual self-formation was translated into the new psychological and sociological vocabularies of the 1950s and disseminated through the structure of the secondary education system. While these norms of the autonomous, selfdetermining citizen were clearly gendered, Johnson refrains from proposing any counter-model of authentic female maturation. Insisting that discourses of subjectivity create rather than express identity, she explores the contradictory positioning of young women between competing discourses of the self. Actively interpellated and often enabled by the vocabulary of modern personhood as a process of achievement and self-creation through education, they were simultaneously steered towards an alternative ideal of female maturity identified with domesticity and motherhood. In other institutional contexts the image of the modern girl was to resonate rather differently. Within the realm of advertising and popular culture, young people were

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being newly addressed as independent consumers with distinctive needs and desires, even as youth subcultures, teenage fans and other images of rebellious or excessive youth began to impose themselves on public consciousness. Representations of the teenage girl in Australian newspapers and magazines crystallized such associations of youthful exhilaration, excitement and hedonistic pleasure, at the same time as they also promoted forms of female self-surveillance and bodily management through techniques of grooming, posture and fashionable dress. This democratization of glamour is depicted by Johnson as a complex process, which encouraged young women to discipline and regulate their bodies at the same time as it also helped to engender a more playful sense of the artificiality of femininity itself, as a mask to be reworked, manipulated and discarded if so desired. Here as elsewhere, Johnson’s readings are impressively subtle in charting the multi-faceted meanings of particular discourses of gender at given historical moments. Representations of the modern girl in the 1950s and early 1960s were thus shifting and often heterogeneous signifiers rather than markers of a unitary ideological identity. Nevertheless, they all agreed that the young woman was a distinctive category of person whose sense of self depended upon successfully completing the task of growing up. Insofar as this period also constituted the prehistory of secondwave feminism, Johnson argues that many of these norms of self-development have been taken over into feminist discourse itself, which repeatedly draws upon narratives of awakening and development to describe women’s liberation from the repressive world of tradition and the home and their entry into the public world as fully fledged modern subjects. Alternative feminist voices such as that of Carol Gilligan have posited an autonomous and distinctively female path to maturation, yet this response remains equally problematic for Johnson because of its own continuing reliance upon a telos of female self-development. While conceding the potential strategic value of collective acts of identification, she concludes that feminism’s positing of a normative female identity engenders a degree of closure unable to engage the complex, shifting and open-ended nature of the modern self. Here, however, Johnson’s discussion of the history of modern feminism denies it the same complexity which she so compellingly charts in the discourses of femininity in the 1950s. She attributes to figures such as Betty Friedan or Carol Gilligan a hegemonic authority that they no longer possess (if indeed they ever did). Contemporary feminists are often, to the contrary, very nervous of defining the category of woman in the wake of poststructuralist critiques as well as extended challenges to its racist, heterosexist and classist assumptions (Bordo, 1990). Thus feminist discourse is a far more dispersed and contradictory field than Johnson’s account allows. Even within the genre of popular feminism, the new media celebrities such as Naomi Wolf or Susan Faludi undoubtedly draw upon, yet also configure differently, the inspiratory narratives of an earlier feminist generation. Johnson’s attribution of a hegemonic power to particular norms of identity within feminism seems to be insufficiently nuanced to historical specificity and context, and strangely at odds with her own insistence on the shifting modalities and meanings of particular discourses of femininity at an earlier historical moment. Johnson’s illuminating reading of these discourses could instead have been usefully supplemented by some concluding reflections on their broader implications for a feminist understanding of modernity. On the one hand, she situates the humanist project of knowing and achieving the self at the very heart of the modern, even as she valuably insists on addressing both the enabling and constraining dimensions of such a project. Yet her discussion of consumerism and popular culture simultaneously

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elaborates a dimension of the modern that seems antithetical to any such humanist ideal in its alliance with an aesthetics of performance, hedonism and masquerade. Given the indeterminacies of the term and its shifting periodicity, does ‘modernity’ ultimately possess any meaning or value as an analytical category? Can it be usefully deployed by feminism, or does it remain irredeemably compromised by an ideology of progress which valorizes the new and the now over the inauthenticity of tradition and the past? And to what extent does Johnson’s own commitment to an open-ended and ongoing process of self-fashioning move beyond or remain within such a progressivist, modernist rubric? I remain sceptical about any assumption that feminism can simply free itself from teleology, historical narrative and appeals to truth, a claim that is both made yet simultaneously undermined by Johnson in her own avowed preference for ‘recent developments’ in feminism over earlier (more traditional?) models. A final question which came to mind while reading both Reekie and Johnson was the potential significance of geopolitical and national contexts in complicating or reconfiguring the gender/modernity relationship. While Reekie emphasizes the continuity between sexualized images of consumption in Europe and Australia, Johnson briefly considers the ways in which images of youthful femininity were used to shape myths of Australia as a modern democratic nation. Her comments invite a whole range of further questions relating to the intersection of logics of temporality with race, gender and nation. How, I wonder, is the rhetoric of the modern affected by its appropriation in a settler society such as Australia, with its highly fraught relations to the temporalities of indigenous Aboriginal cultures? And how is it inflected by a centre-periphery relationship where Australia is always already defined as either more modern (youthful, energetic) or less modern (old-fashioned, parochial) than the EuroAmerican centre? To what extent does the iconography of gender cut across or reaffirm such distinctions? Here a reliance on theories of modernity drawn from the study of nineteenth-century Europe might be usefully supplemented or challenged by recent postcolonial discussions of temporality and non-sychronicity, such as Homi Bhabha’s (1994) suggestive if elusive development of the notion of time-lag. Such a project, of course, takes us well beyond the scope of any single volume towards the extended questioning and reformulation of theories of modernity and postmodernity that is currently being undertaken on the part of feminist and postcolonial critics. The modern, it has become increasingly clear, is neither stable nor univocal, but is always already configured differently across its particular contexts of enunciation.

References Armstrong, Nancy (1987) Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bhabha, Homi K. (1994) The Location of Culture, London: Routledge. Bordo, Susan (1990) ‘Feminism, postmodernism and gender-scepticism’, in Linda Nicholson (ed.) Feminism/Postmodernism, New York: Routledge. Gilroy, Paul (1993) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Simmel, Georg (1971) ‘The metropolis and mental life’, in Donald N.Levine (ed.), Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Walkowitz, Judith R. (1992) City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian England, Chicago: Chicago University Press.

COMMENTARY

This is the first in a new series of short essays to be published regularly in Cultural Studies. In providing this space for responses to previously pub lished essays and/or comments on recent developments in cultural studies, we invite authors and readers to engage in ongoing conversation about issues of general interest. Submissions to ‘Commentary’ may be 2–10 manuscript pages and should be made directly to the editors, following standard submission procedures.

A brief response to Stuart Hall’s comments on my essay ‘Cultural studies and ethnic absolutism’ Saba Mahmood.

It is unfortunate that Stuart Hall chose to read my response to his essay as a wilful and persistent misreading of his arguments, intended to saddle him with the views of modernization theorists with whom he disagrees significantly. Far from making Hall a ‘substitute target’ for my arguments with modernization theorists, my intent was to problematize how the most progressive and well-intentioned arguments can evoke paradigms that, once made explicit, would be unacceptable to those of us who are committed to challenging Euro-Enlightenment oriented policies. In fact it is precisely because I respect Hall’s sensitivity to such issues, that I tried to sketch the genealogy of, and inherent assumptions in, particular analyses of nationalism since the 1960s, taking care to point out where Hall’s argument seems to concur and depart from this genealogy. Hall’s contextualization of his views on nationalism through a discussion of the conflict between Wales and England is helpful in locating the historical and geographical compass of his theorizing. My disagreement is more with attempts at explicating the rest of the nationalist movements in the world through a theoretical skeleton derived from a historical context that is too often located in the West. While I understand the need to do away with the binarism of the ‘First and Third world’, I feel that the equation of a specific Western history (which claims to be universal) with the phenomenon of modernity that indeed has become globalized remains poorly theorized in most discussions on modernity in the non-Western world. In short, what difference, if any, does the consideration of specific cultural and social history make to theorizations of modernity? Unfortunately Hall does not engage this question. A second point I would like to clarify is that my opposition to the use of the term ‘fundamentalism’ to explain a variety of disparate movements (including white supremacists in Western Europe, religio-political movements of the Islamic world, and nationalist movements in Eastern Europe) does not in any way imply that I am uncritical of political developments in countries like Iran, Sudan or Algeria. On the contrary, as Hall acknowledges, my brief reference to the situation in Pakistan shows quite the opposite. Even if we ignore the historical baggage that this carries from its inception in twentieth-century Protestant Christian battles, I would like to ask, what is entailed in the insistence on calling particular movements fundamentalist? What do we gain analytically by such a process of naming? If it is to identify, categorize and challenge certain conservative political tendencies, then would it not be more helpful to do this on specific grounds? Political categorizations are not innocent of the

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meanings they carry, and I remain sceptical of the reductionism entailed in terms such as fundamentalism—especially at a time when the complexity of political movements is bleeding through categories even as basic as ‘the right and the left’. Finally, I will reiterate what I hoped was quite clear in my earlier essay. My writing does not suggest a distortion of, or disrespect for, Hall’s work, but is motivated by the desire to challenge the adequacy of our inherited analytical tools in understanding political challenges that we currently face in the world.

REVIEWS

‘There’s a raft of norms at stake in the media’, Jason Philip Bell

Stuart Cunningham and Graeme Turner (eds), The Media in Australia: Industries, Texts, Audiences (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1993) 414pp. The publication of a large-format undergraduate textbook is a sure sign that a discipline or field of study has developed, if not an orthodoxy, then at least a body of facts and relatively uncontroversial research approaches. These can be listed as a potential table of contents which publishers translate into a formula of student readers multiplied by the number of relevant university courses, to produce a (new) market. The resulting textbook (maligned and relied upon in equal measure) is worrying, if only because textbooks, in effect, predetermine the structure of the courses for which they are intended. Yet they can be a very useful resource. And undergraduates like useful resources! Teachers were once students, and were probably themselves subjected to many similarly heavy textbooks in which contestable concepts were hidden behind factual generalizations, lists and diagrams. So it was with trepidation that I approached The Media in Australia: Industries, Texts, Audiences. I feared empiricist orthodoxy; I envisaged objective tests based on such an imposingly comprehensive resource. Here was the field mapped out: the industry(ies), the texts, the audiences, each with its own unanswerable closure, each implicitly bounded by a little box, with the ambiguous arrow of causality or interaction linking it to the other boxed-in members of the trinity. Although these fears proved not to be entirely justified, the phenomenon of the ‘textbook’ remained problematic after I’d digested its 414 pages. In particular, the implicit (and occasionally explicit) nationalistic and functionalist assumptions which underpin some, at least, of the authors’ ‘norms’, seem quite problematic. I’ll return to these concerns later in this review, because they seem to underlie much of the book’s ostensibly descriptive overviews of the field. The Media in Australia presents an economic, industrial and historical contextualization of the principal ‘mass’ media, including book publishing and popular music. Succinct empirical overviews are provided by specialists in the respective medium or industry. These are followed by a somewhat redundant set of essays on the various production processes in the principal media. Next, ‘Media texts and messages’ and ‘Media audiences’ are covered in overviews by Graeme Turner and Virginia

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Nightingale respectively, while Stuart Cunningham concludes the collection with a discussion of ‘Media futures’. As anyone who knows the various writers would expect, the empirical overviews are informative, up to date and thorough. They provide a detailed resumé of the histories, structure, regulation and ownership of the Australian media. I was a little worried by the claim that these essays would provide ‘greater understanding of the processes which construct us as subjects of a common culture’ (p. 15) which suggested a complacency about what ‘we’ used to call the ideological role of the media, not to mention the hint of an implicit nationalism. The idea that the media are ‘the glue that holds together much of our sense of ourselves as a society’ (p. 19) is merely asserted as an unarguable assumption, even as the principal reason for studying the media, but not as a theoretically contentious issue. Indeed, such consensualism seems at odds with the frequent highlighting by the book of various ‘public interest(s)’, conflict over ownership and control, and the ‘domination [sic] by foreign, mainly American products’ (p. 255) in particular media. It also seems to undermine the populist nationalism that informs much of the textual analysis presented in Part 4 of the textbook. Any model of the media-as-consensualizing-glue raises the question of whether this is seen as a problem (theoretically, politically) or as a natural condition of modern (or postmodernizing) ‘information’ societies. The book comes perilously close to endorsing the latter alternative, being content to examine conflict over what it calls ‘norms’ in a very complacent way. Media studies, as reflected in this text at least, seems to have moved beyond the critical, oppositional analysis that was the hallmark of earlier sociologically based media theory by overlooking one of the latter’s principal tenets. The ideological neutrality of the concepts which frame the various chapters on the media production process confirm this judgement. Creativity becomes agency, while economic and symbolic forms in society are even more euphemistically labelled ‘structure’. So, following Giddens, the section dealing with production claims, unsurprisingly, to concentrate on the ‘contextually situated activities of definite groups of actors’ (p. 132) who produce television or radio programmes, newspapers, films or advertisements. Despite the virtually tautologous new labels, however, these studies are as eclectic as their authors’ usual approaches, with Tiffen and Jacka, for example, typically quite different in emphasizing respectively the day-to-day particularities of journalism and the ‘field forces’ of the institutionalized Australian film industry respectively. By treating the film industry’s structure as the embodiment of historically abstract forces, Jacka gets beyond the rather limited descriptiveness of some of the other pieces in this section of the book. Sinclair, for example, shows how advertising can be understood as a particular kind of business, but this approach may constitute a sort of apology-by-explanation, rather than an insight into why the products produced are as they are. Certainly, we are a long way from Bonney and Wilson’s discussion of this industry published a decade ago. The ‘texts’ part of the book raises the most difficult problems intellectually and pedagogically, for it cannot cover semiotics and discourse analysis thoroughly, yet it must try to provide typical readings of (and methods of reading) TV programmes, advertisements and other media products-as-texts. The principal writer, Graeme Turner, points out that cultural studies (cf. media studies) has relied on textual studies, and summarizes some of the many approaches to reading texts, beginning with Barthes and others in the 1970s. Unfortunately, necessary theoretical concepts are not clearly explicated, and the result is a very loosely defined or exemplified vocabulary used to anchor only tentatively, discourse-identifying readings of various kinds. For

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example, ‘myth’ is defined parenthetically as ‘groups of meanings organized around a particular signified’. It is hard to imagine a more confusing definition, especially as Barthes (and others) have given a particular meaning to this term which has gained wide currency. Ironically, myth is denied its radical, Barthesian meaning in just the way that it is depoliticized according to Barthes’ own analysis in the famous example he discussed of the soldier saluting the tricolour! Hence, myths are seen everywhere— showbiz myths, myth of male sexuality, etc, and the potential value of the concept for breaking open ideologically closed meanings-as-natural is completely lost. In the absence of any semiotics other than that which replaces ‘meaning’ by ‘signified’, for example, we get discourse analysis which apparently needs no precise semiotic theory and reads like any other conventional interpretive strategy. Discourses are defined vaguely as ‘ways of thinking that have become grouped and organized within the culture in particular ways, and often to particular, ideological effect.’ Again, the potential precision of semiotics is surrendered. Moreover, the examples of discourse analysis which are discussed are sometimes presented in the most clichéd ways: ‘Perfect Match occupies a complicated discursive grid which is continually traversed by contradictory and opposing [sic] discourses of race, gender, class and the whole battery of “lifestyle” mythologies’ (p. 229). Other examples of textual analysis might also intimidate the potential semiotician. In an introductory book, the readings offered appear too sophisticated and subtle without the provision of explicit definitions. One excerpt reads, inter alia: In his Late Night Live metacommentary on his own practice, Vicary [the presenting journalist] confirmed that this telos was, paradoxically, processural, that it necessarily involved an endless process of self-problematisation rather than a completed product. If nothing else, one person can only know, speak, and understand so much. (p. 230) The book cites these examples as evidence that the current focus of textual analysis is media texts as ‘complex formations of meaning and pleasure’. This may be so, but it ignores the growing body of semiologically precise literature, much of it published within Australia by local academics, which offers social-semiotic methods for the analysis of cultural texts, including images (e.g., the work of Kress, Threadgold, van Leeuwen or Hodge), as well as the work on narrative and genre which has been influential on media studies. Instead, the book offers ‘myth’ without Barthes, ‘discourse’ without Foucault or socio-linguistics, and ‘ideology’ without the embarrassment of Marx. It thereby avoids taking seriously the 1970s precursors to the now severely neutralized vocabulary of much of 1990s textual and media analysis. In an ostensibly comprehensive textbook, this way of glossing (over) semiotically and critically informed cultural studies seems to be a serious impediment to its use in any courses concerned with how or what media texts mean. By not providing precise analytical tools, it does not invite, let alone challenge, the reader to engage semiologically with the social meanings which the media help to construct. Audience research is dealt with more adequately, although this may reflect the less technically complex questions that it covers. Virginia Nightingale surveys a wide range of methodologies without reducing these to caricature. However, like the rest of the textbook, this section perhaps places too much emphasis on drawing general conclusions and too little on showing how to formulate and research the issues it addresses. Graeme Turner adds a timely caution on the way the ‘active audience’ has been conceptualized in reception theory approaches, although he doesn’t really clarify

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how an ethnography of audiences and reception studies generally are ‘optimistic’ or ‘non-deterministic’ (both of which he seems to favour). Because such metatheoretical questions are not considered explicitly in the book, these judgements are likely to be lost on the novice undergraduate reader. What, they may ask, is pessimistic or deterministic research? Most of The Media in Australia is concerned with the economic/production/ policy/ industry nexus, so it returns to this in its closing section, ‘Media futures’, written by Stuart Cunningham, who is not immune to the journalistic cliché: The 1990s will be a challenging time in Australian television’, for example. Unfortunately, it’s not clear whom these challenges will confront, other than the policy-makers (and those who write about them!). However, this concluding essay does attempt to outline current policy dilemmas and refers to public interests in the context of an ‘informatised’ society. It provides very useful data on the changing structure of the Australian economy and media industries. But it fails to provide genuinely critical perspectives on the state, the media and ‘citizens’ in the technoutopian future. ‘Cultural mandates’ and ‘cultural protection’ are dealt, with, again in a strangely nationalistic way, despite the claim that protectionism is itself a ‘moralistic’ defence against ‘ugly Americanisms’ (p. 347). Media studies in the future are seen, rather instrumentally, as ways of encouraging analysis of the benefits of ‘Australian-produced audio-visual material as perceived by its audiences’. A very parochial future. This section ends where the book began, with the ‘media-as-glue’ analogy, echoing the strangely contradictory theoretical structure of the whole project. The emphasis on empirical details of the industries and their regulation in the ‘public interest’ implies power and conflict as analytically necessary concepts. This is especially so if the ‘glue’ that holds society together is interpreted as ideologically consensual, not as merely a voluntary nationalistic consensus. The Media in Aus tralia avoids clarifying what is at stake in these contrary interpretations of the media’s political significance. The media are ‘crossed’ by various ‘discourses’; but the unquestioned discourse which underpins the book itself is best labelled nationalism. There may be a ‘raft of norms at stake in the media’, as Cunningham claims, but The Media in Australia is not sufficiently theoretically reflexive about questions of value, and is too frequently only timidly empiricist in its presentation of what could be at stake. Sometimes it reads like history of, say, the manufacturing sector, as though programmes, movies and music are dead consumables, and do not involve contestable, negotiable, claims about reality. While this comprehensive resource will be useful, it will need to be treated as one partial way (in both senses) of thinking about the Australian media. It won’t open up the delights, the potentially empowering delights, of critically reading the ‘facts’ produced by the media; it won’t excite students to compare, to criticize, to historically recontextualize pop records, nationalistic advertisements or what Optus means, let alone to see the media as a domain of actual or potential public (and that means political) contestation. Textbooks may be the most important publications in their field. For they are the foundations on which students build their knowledge; they help to construct the discourses which constitute particular disciplines. The best way to use a textbook such as The Media in Australia might be to subject its text and various subtexts to the rigorous analysis that media studies used to apply to the ephemeral constructions of reality that we recognize as genres of the media themselves.

Boundary riders of the new literary studies K.K.Ruthven

Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (eds) Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transform ation of English and American Literary Studies (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1992) vii+595pp, no price given Redrawing the Boundaries is slightly dated because it was so long in the making that it includes few references to work more recent than 1990. Hardly surprising, then, that its editors think their job will have to be done again ‘in another decade or so’ (p. 10). The book’s projected readership is neither the trend-setters of literary studies nor their shadows, the trend-spotters. Instead, it addresses ‘those burdened with heavy teaching loads who work at some distance from major centers of research activity’ (2–3), and have observed their subject turn into something quite different from the one they originally graduated in. Such people need an alternative to those reactionary accounts of changes in the humanities inaugurated by Allan Bloom’s best-selling jeremiad, The Closing of the American Mind (1987). That book not only encouraged the globalization of theory-bashing as a media spectacle but was almost certainly the adversarial stimulus for Redrawing the Boundaries, in which the Modern Language Association of America gives its institutional imprimatur to some mainly favourable but never uncritical accounts of recent goings-on in English studies. Here the principal logomachies of the last two decades are recapitulated. After an introduction by Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn, whose business is among other things to trouble-shoot problems with what we are about to encounter, different narrators assess upheavals in eight provinces in the domain of English studies. And because the book is designed for North American teachers of English, Cecilia Tichi reports on American literary studies ‘to’—and Philip Fisher on American literary and cultural studies ‘since’—the American Civil War. After that, attention switches from the battlegrounds to the tactics and strategies used there, with analyses of feminist criticism by Catharine R.Stimpson, gender criticism (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick), African American criticism (Henry Louis Gates), Marxist criticism (Walter Cohen), psychoanalytic criticism (Meredith Skura), deconstruction (Deborah Esch), new historicisms (Louis Montrose), cultural criticism (Gerald Graff and Bruce Robbins), and postcolonial criticism (Homi K.Bhabha). A couple of concluding items again signal this book’s predominantly North American orientation: Richard Marius on composition studies, and Donald McQuade on their relation to literary studies. Each essay concludes with a selected bibliography, whose items reappear in a cumulative list of ‘works cited’ that runs to fifty-six pages and creates the impression that no usable

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development in the humanities or social sciences is likely to avoid being annexed to those redrawn boundaries which guarantee the new English studies its Lebensraum. The book ends with a fifteen-page index of names but unfortunately not of topics, which makes it more difficult than it should have been to trace either the affiliations of different critical approaches or the varying inflections of the ‘same’ problematic in studies of different literary periods. The absence of a topics index reinforces the laminated structure of this book as an amalgam of discrete methodologies and discrete areas of inquiry. Unfortunately, the names-only index also erases distinctions between activities excluded altogether (such as stylometrics) and those that are in fact mentioned, although exactly where is anybody’s guess. For instance, the transformation of physical bibliography (as advocated by Fredson Bowers: not mentioned) into what D.F.McKenzie calls ‘the sociology of texts’ is classified not as a methodology but as a development in Renaissance studies, although (given Jerome McGann’s work on Don Juan) it is equally characteristic of Romanticism studies. The index nominum registers influence quantitatively in terms of citations. Foucault (61 page references) is evidently more pervasive than either Derrida (48) or Lacan (38). Fredric Jameson (30) is clearly ahead of both Raymond Williams (26) and T.S.Eliot (26 also: who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him?). Following Paul de Man (24), Mikhail Bakhtin and Terry Eagleton (19 each) are just ahead of Stephen Greenblatt and Geoffrey Hartman (18 each). Northrop Frye (6) and Frank Kermode (4) appear now to be yesterday’s men and in worse shape than such daybefore-yesterday’s men as Cleanth Brooks (8), René Wellek and Arthur O. Lovejoy (7 each). Freud (45) currently has more clout than Marx (13), and Hegel (21), than either Heidegger (6) or Kristeva (3). With the exception of Spivak (16), no feminists are in the big league, which is surprising, given the number of contributors who tell us how influential feminism has been. The revolution in English studies, these statistics suggest, is largely the work of American scholars inspired by the soixante-huitards. There is no mention of British theorists such as Catherine Belsey and Christopher Norris, and Peter Widdowson’s Re-Reading English (1982) is not even listed in the bibliography. One of the most radical moves in this revisionist account of English studies occurs in its very first chapter, where Anne Middleton outlines an institutional history of medieval studies from its disastrous secession from mainstream English a quarter of a century ago to its recent and productive engagements with critical theory. AngloSaxonists, however, might well feel anxious on discovering from her frame of reference that by ‘medieval’ she seems to mean the period after the Norman Conquest. With no chapter devoted exclusively to Old English studies, Redrawing the Boundaries appears to have dispensed with a corpus of writing whose show-pieces are Beowulf and The Exeter Book, and which is where English literary history was assumed to begin in that earlier and philological model of the subject designed (in the masculinist discourse of yesteryear) to stiffen an otherwise soft option. Like Middleton, Leah Marcus favours developments that dissociate the study of the past from mere antiquarianism and redefine it (in the spirit of Foucault) as a history of the present. Her own patch is what Eng.Lit.ers are accustomed to call ‘the Renaissance’, although she herself prefers the historians’ term, ‘early modern’, because it enables the period to be re-examined top-down from a postmodernist age preoccupied with a nexus of problems (‘authorship’, ‘textuality’, ‘subjectivity’) closely associated with the emergence of print culture in Europe. From the vantagepoint of our own post-book culture of fluid and computer-generated hypertexts we are better placed, she argues, to understand that earlier technological moment

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when the printing press first created the illusion—demystified in recent textual studies of Shakespeare—that meaning can be stabilized authoritatively in mechanically reproducible texts. William Kerrigan also operates in an area overrun by new historicists and theorists of various persuasions, but unlike Marcus he thinks their activities are a diversion that seventeenth-century studies could generally do without. The only newcomers to meet with his approval are those feminist scholars who add to knowledge by recovering lost texts and reconstituting lost genres. For Kerrigan, the main roads in seventeenthcentury studies lead to Milton, and the fact that Milton resists fashionable theory in a way that Shakespeare does not, proves among other things that slovenly writing attracts slovenly theorizing. Marcus, however, draws the opposite conclusion that Milton’s academic reputation will continue to decline unless better ways of reading him can be found than that older historicism admired by Kerrigan, who has no time for criticism which forgets ‘the perennial lessons of the Old Philology’ (p. 77). Unlike Kerrigan, who criticizes in detail the work of his contemporaries, John Bender chooses not to engage directly with those twenty-eight contributions to eighteenth-century studies he supplies two-line notes on. Instead, he describes and contextualizes various revisionist methodologies (feminist, new historicist, and cultural materialist) which enable him to reread Enlightenment writing against the grain of its own ideology and thus avoid merely reproducing it, ventriloquially, as he had done when he was a graduate student in the 1960s. For Bender, the new historicism is not the source of the tendencies Kerrigan deplores but symptomatic of a crisis of legitimation in literary studies itself. Frances Ferguson is similarly reluctant to fill her allocated space with an exhaustive account of positions and practices in recent work on Romanticism, preferring instead to historicize the assumptions behind the arguments. Her archaeology of Romanticism studies begins with a critique of McGann’s 1983 critique of Wellek’s 1949 critique of Lovejoy’s famous 1924 essay on the discrimination of Romanticisms, all of which gives her a purchase on versions of Romanticism by Harold Bloom, Hartman and de Man. The studies which interest her most are those which respect the central legacy (in her opinion) of Romanticism, namely that ‘the mere act of seeing the world of matter as nature makes ideology less a cultural construction than an assertion of the constructedness of seeing a world of things’ (p. 122). The comparable existence of a ‘plurality of Victorianisms’ does not shake George Levine’s conviction that the term remains a ‘working and workable concept’ (p. 131), especially in the interdisciplinary sense institutionalized in the journal Vic torian Studies. Levine’s sympathetic account of a generational break with the immediate post-war version of Victorian studies is neither a triumphalist goodbyeto-all-that nor a neophobic those-were-the-days. He thinks it both inevitable and necessary that a postmodernist Victorianism should be in the process of being manufactured nowadays by people skilled in the newer critical technologies. In the last twenty-odd years, studies of literary modernism have tended to abandon what Marjorie Perloff calls the ‘advocacy criticism’ pioneered by Hugh Kenner, and have favoured instead a politicizing approach which castigates modernist writing for being reactionary if not fascist, and sexist if not misogynist. Perloff finds both criticisms limited: left-wingers predictably uncover the same right-wing crypto-politics in different texts, and feminist rewritings of modernist literary history can be as oneeyed in their separatism as the masculinist accounts they contest. She predicts a new interest in the multiplicity of modernisms ‘after’ theory, when students of modernism ‘return to the eros of its wonderfully various texts’ (p. 175).

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Perloff objects also to anti-modernist accounts which attribute to postmodernist writing certain formal properties which are in fact characteristic of modernist writing. Such discriminations do not concern John Carlos Rowe in his own assessment of postmodernist studies, because ‘literature’ is for him no longer a privileged category. The kind of postmodernism which is thematized in phenomena like post-modern fiction—and which is responsible for many of those disturbances in literary studies that Redrawing the Boundaries seeks to contain—is for Rowe merely a ‘restricted’ version of a far more important phenomenon. Unlike the other contributors, he finds no justification for reconstituting literary studies in ‘what we now live as the postmodern condition’ (p. 179). ‘Literature as it was can’t be saved’, he writes, and even if it could we might not want to save it, ‘knowing what we do now about its own contributions to ideology’ (p. 204). If literary scholars want to survive in ‘the predominantly electronic cultures of a new global postmodernity’, he concludes, they ‘will have to take seriously the influence and complexity of mass media and elaborate the existing logics of poststructuralism to deal more concretely with the aesthetic ideologies of postmodern societies’ (p. 204). Although the logics which lead Rowe to this conclusion are helpfully described in detail in the chapters on critical theory, they are somewhat neutralized by being framed as ways of renewing literary studies in the 1990s. Readers of this book are reassured time and again that English as an academic subject has successfully accommodated the radical theories designed to torpedo it. Go-ahead departments nowadays teach the deconstruction of English studies as part of English studies, and keep the canonical texts in circulation by training students in how to produce noncanonical readings of them. The packaging has changed, and a wider range of commodities is on offer, but it is still business as usual. There is no indication in Redrawing the Boundaries that English studies might be superseded by cultural studies, which occupies a mere couple of pages here in the section devoted to cultural criticism. Instead, we find massive support for the claim by Lisa Jardine (not mentioned) that ‘the area where key issues about our culture and our society are informally debated’ is nowadays English and not, ‘as in the great days of English intellectual life’, philosophy (Higher Education Supplement, 11 June 1993:17).

References Bloom, Allan (1987) The Closing of the American Mind, New York: Simon. Widdowson, Peter (1982) Re-Reading English, London: Methuen.

‘White, male and middle class’ Ann Curthoys

Catherine Hall, White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992) viii+307pp. Here is Catherine Hall’s collection of work written over a thirteen-year span, a book which both exemplifies and tells the story of her personal engagement with feminist history. As I leaf through it, White, Male and Middle Class seems to me to be from very much the same kind of world that I inhabit, indicating a somewhat similar journey through Marxism, feminism, history, cultural studies, poststructuralism, wrestling with issues of concern to do with class, gender and race. I approach this book with a strange feeling, for I produced a work somewhat similar in intent and structure six years ago, tracing feminist theoretical and historical debates as they occurred in Australia from 1970 (Curthoys, 1988). Here is, perhaps, I think, a very different version of my own endeavours, from the other side of the globe, from the other side of what was once ‘the Empire’. Here is a book which will perhaps tell me what I missed out on, living on the ‘wrong’ side of the post-imperial world. She speaks from the centre, I muse, and I speak from the margin. And so this book is of interest even before I have read past the acknowledgments and the first few pages of the introduction. I bring to it all kinds of expectations, what Australian historians of an earlier generation were fond of calling ‘cultural baggage’. Here is the nineteenth-century British history which for me is a kind of homeland, a place where true history is done, where my own understanding of history was shaped through my undergraduate education at the University of Sydney in the 1960s. Indeed, it was this kind of history which underlay my own doctoral study of the formation of ideas of race, ethnicity and colonial identity in nineteenth-century New South Wales. And here is the British feminist tradition which provided so many of the ideas Australian feminists once debated, while trying to put together our socialist and feminist and haltingly postcolonial traditions and inheritances, trying to create a coherent and unified worldview out of very disparate elements. We have been on the see-through side of a one way mirror, while they, the British feminists, have been on the other side, seeing themselves, but not us seeing them. This situation seems to me to be at last changing, as more international dialogue emerges, helped along by new communication technologies, increased international conferences and visits, and international journals like Cul tural Studies itself. Perhaps my assumptions about centres and margins will need some rethinking. The book contains eleven essays, including a specially written introduction on Catherine Hall’s own experiences as a feminist and a historian. The rest are reprinted

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essays, all but one, the last, from edited collections, most of which were important in developing the fields of women’s studies, feminist history, and, later, cultural studies. For those of us engaged in teaching in these fields in Australia at least, these collections sit on our bookshelves, a valued resource. In the introductory ‘Feminism and feminist history’, Catherine Hall describes her own life-long engagement with history, especially her ‘long love-affair with the British Marxist historians’. Her early influences were the Communist Party Historians Group, Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill, Edward Thompson, and Eric Hobsbawm, in politics the Young Socialists and YCND. Then there was Women’s Liberation, a group of women first meeting in Birmingham in February 1970, mainly university educated left-wing young mothers. (At exactly the same time, in the early months of 1970, we in Sydney were meeting in the Glebe Women’s Liberation group, also left wing, also university educated, though few of us yet mothers.) Hall describes the exhilaration of combining the insights of Women’s Liberation with those of history, asking how had women lived in the past, and how had the sexual divisions women’s liberationists opposed actually come about. If sexual inequality was not ordained by nature but by society, these historians in Women’s Liberation asked, then how had it happened? Hall describes the growth of feminist history in Britain, its engagement with socialism and class politics, and her interest in developing a feminist account of men as much as of women. The last part of this introductory chapter describes the impact of black feminism, especially black American feminism, on British feminist historical work. Catherine Hall responded by rethinking her own work, and the meaning of black women’s critiques for feminism generally. ‘Racism, imperialism, colonialism’, she writes, ‘—these are issues for white women in Britain because they have shaped our histories, structured our stories, formed our identities. The ‘Empire’ is not just out there, it is inside us too.’ Accordingly, she sets out to ‘take up questions of race, ethnicity, and difference, to work at the demolition of the categories of metropolis and periphery, and understand the ways in which the margins are determining of the centre.’ The reprinted essays exemplify this narrative. While many of them are familiar, the new context changes their meaning. Now they seem much more concentrated and focused, and closely related to Hall and Leonore Davidoff’s book on gender and the middle class, Family Fortunes (1987). In the first essay, ‘The history of the housewife’, which I remember hearing at a conference in London in 1973, the themes are introduced with the broad sweep and generalizations typical of much feminist history in the 1970s. There is a concern with the meaning for women of the separation between work and home, especially from the late eighteenth century. The relative independence and political organization of peasant women is contrasted with the lack of freedom of aristocratic women, and the special dependence of twentieth-century British housewives. The separation of the place of work from the home, Hall suggests, made it more difficult for women (and children) to be engaged in productive activity, and women came to be defined as secondary, confined to the privatized world of the home. It is this economic separation which lies at the heart of sexual ideologies. The next six essays, first published between 1979 and 1990 (we could call this period ‘the long 1980s’), deal with aspects of the gendered character of class formation in England, mainly Birmingham, between 1780 and 1850. There is through these essays a continuing interest in Evangelical conceptions of the properly gendered roles of men and women, and of the ideal family. Another theme is the greater opportunities for women in political terms in informal settings, and their lesser and

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secondary role in the organized politics of the period. Crucial to middle-class men’s political life was the establishment of clubs of every kind, from masonic to drinking, which gave middle-class men a new sense of collective identity. Located as so many of them were in the tavern, women’s exclusion was reinforced. (This tradition seems to me to still exist; in my experience political meetings are far more likely to be held in a pub in Britain than in Australia.) The final essay in this series on gender, class and politics in England discusses middle-class women’s employment in early nineteenthcentury England, noting their confined employment opportunities and the growth of concern about their plight by the middle of the century. The last two essays investigate the construction of English middle-class gendered national identities in the mid nineteenth century, especially in relation to English power and influence in Jamaica. To my mind, these essays are the most lively and challenging, combining dense historical analysis with a strong narrative line and argument. It is as if the painstaking work of building up a picture of the gendered character of the Birmingham middle class, undertaken through the essays of the 1980s, has borne new fruit in an ability to interpret the fierce debates over racial issues conducted by this same class. Catherine Hall knows this early-to-mid nineteenthcentury Birmingham middle class very well indeed by now, and so can point out to us the various nuances of its forms of racial thinking and ethnic identity. Her analysis is quite a complex one, tracing a change from the dominant definition of Englishness in 1833 as a liberator of enslaved Africans to the explicit and more aggressive biological racism of the mid 1860s. The earlier phase is traced in detail through a study of the Baptist missionaries in Jamaica in the 1830s and 1840s, while the debate over Governor Eyre’s brutal suppression of a riot in Jamaica in 1865 provides a way of investigating the shift from one kind of racial thinking to another. Hall also manages to keep questions of gender to the forefront, drawing attention to the different roles of men and women in the anti-slavery organizations of the period. Although written over a longish period, and despite clear changes in language and method as the impact of poststructuralist approaches is registered, the reprinted essays form a remarkably consistent whole. The book is unified in period and place, and most of the essays deal with a particular emerging class, the English middle class. Certain themes recur, such as the impact of the separation of work and home on gender relations, class identities, and ideas about men’s and women’s proper place in society; and the importance of evangelical religion in the emergence of a gender-divided middle-class culture. The theme of anti-slavery movements grows as the book progresses, from being seen as one indication of gendered middle-class Birmingham politics to occupying the centre of the analysis. The book’s real forte, it seems to me, is not so much in describing the experiences and ideas of middle-class women, as in evoking the lives and habits of thought of mid-nineteenth-century middle-class white English men in relation to various others, particularly middle-class white women in England and enslaved black men in Jamaica. The title, White, Male and Middle Class, is, though at first surprising, entirely appropriate. Hall’s book illustrates very well just what history can gain from cultural studies: a consciousness of method, language, textuality and mode of address, a complex sense of the meaning of ‘culture’ itself, and cultural difference. It indicates equally well what cultural studies can gain from history: a concern with the specificities of time and place, and the narrative techniques that can assist us in attempting the difficult tasks of exploring and trying to relate to one another those processes we call class, race and gender. While influenced by poststructuralist and psychoanalytic concerns with subjectivity, language and power, White, Male and Middle Class does not

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abandon historians’ traditional efforts to explore and reconstruct the past in a new way, and to tackle questions of determination, causation and social relationships.

Postscript Shortly after I completed this review, Edward Thompson, that truly important British historian died. His death gives us all pause for thought about his immense intellectual legacy. I am thinking particularly of his influence on what has come to be called ‘cultural studies’, especially on those of us who work, as Catherine Hall does, at its intersection with history. But I am thinking also of Thompson’s limitations as an interpreter and romanticizer of ‘Englishness’. These reflections affect my reading of White, Male and Middle Class; I can see both its clear expression of considerable intellectual debt to leading British historians such as Thompson, and its major departure from them in the way it treats both gender and race, and especially the relationship between them. Reading Hall’s book, and thinking again about Thompson’s work, has made me pleased, all over again, that some of us at least continue to live (if uncomfortably at times) at the history-cultural-studies intersection, with no fixed address.

Reference Curthoys, Ann (1988) For and Against Feminism: A Personal Journey into Femin ist Theory and History, Sydney: Allen & Unwin.

Re-viewing the Gaze Barry Howell

Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) 287 pp., ISBN: 0520079167 Hbk $28.00 When does postmodernity begin? And why do women love to shop? And what does any of this have to do with the cinema? In Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern, Anne Friedberg, associate professor of Film Studies at the University of California, turns her gaze upon the nineteenth century for an answer, and argues that the architecture of the city, consumerism and photography produced the decentered, dehistoricized, detemporalized subjectivity often called the ‘postmodern condition’. She argues for the need to ‘reintroduce history into the debate about postmodernism’ (p. 5). Providing an often fascinating account of how the everyday experiences of the mid-nineteenth century, with the rise of the consumer culture, department-store shopping, packaged tourism, and photography led to a ‘mobilized visuality’, and a new sense of distance and time, Friedberg argues that a ‘prehistory of postmodernity’ was thus already ‘present at the beginnings of the break into the “modern”’ (p. 6). Also present, she argues, were women gaining a new freedom and power within the formerly male-dominated public space. Her analysis is a productive and entertaining journey through a variety of texts, from modernist writings to contemporary films, as well as through architecture and cinematic apparatuses. Central to Friedberg’s concerns are the many contemporary debates and ‘potentially conflicting discourses’ of feminist studies, and the ‘often warring methodologies of film history and film theory’ (p. 5). Growing out of a series of lectures dating to 1988, Window Shopping’s four chapters thus present several lines of argument, though the effects of visual culture on subjectivity via film and architecture ground each. Friedberg negotiates the disjunctions between the four chapters (and arguments) primarily in two ways: first with the Introduction, in which she sets out her argument (s) and key terms—which she quite helpfully defines (including the now much reviled ‘postmodern’, or ‘P’ word, as she calls it); and secondly with what she calls ‘passages’, or ‘transitional texts designed to illustrate the movement’ of her argument through ‘a range of interdisciplinary examples from literature, architecture, and film’ (p. 11). The seams of the book are therefore fairly wide, though the general features for her argument are present in each chapter. But there is considerable overlap, so as a whole the book is often curiously disjointed yet repetitive. This is unfortunate since, as a cultural study, the convergence of theoretical and historical inquiry combined with the material (and virtual) circumstances of everyday life has a lot to offer. Friedberg’s reading of modernity, postmodernity, and feminism is nevertheless

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compelling, and often more provocative, especially in her move toward ‘pursuing a corrective to previously gender-blind work’ in relation to ‘accounts of modernity’ (p. 9). One of the links between theories and chapters is the guiding trope of the ‘flâneur’, the ‘fundamental paradigm of the subject in modernity’, a ‘conceit’ borrowed from ‘social and textual accounts of the nineteenth century’ (p. 3). As a key trope, flâneur (and its female equivalent, ‘flâneuse’) serve a variety of functions, conflating the ‘mobilized gaze’ with the ‘virtual gaze’ (a ‘received perception mediated through representation’) (p. 2) and drawing attention to the ‘gendering of power and visuality in the configurations of modernity’ (p. 3). ‘Flânerie’ also serves ‘as an explanatory device to trace changes in representation and the aesthetic experience in the nineteenth century’ (p. 3). This ‘device’ works quite well to establish a theoretical model for reading the modernist experience and connecting it to gender, architecture, film, shopping, looking, and subjectivity in imaginative ways. This also allows Friedberg to analyze subjectivity through Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, and to use Walter Benjamin’s work on modernity, based upon that collection of poems in his study of Paris arcades. Hence, the original title of Friedberg’s book was to be Les Flâneurs du Mall, an obvious pun on the Baudelaire which took up the various themes. The first two chapters focus on modernity, specifically the urban space of Paris through the latter half of the nineteenth century. With its profusion of new visual wonders—panoramas, dioramas, amusement parks, photography, and so forth—the technology of the nineteenth century created a ‘frenzy of the visible’. Refuting Foucault’s theory of the Benthamic panopticon as the best architectural model of power and visuality in modernity, Friedberg argues that the panorama and diorama provide better models for both ‘protocinematic apparatuses’ as well as the precinematic gaze’, and that the shifts in subjectivity are found in the consumption of images not only from ‘apparatuses’, but in the city itself. In her (re)vision, the nineteenth-century Baudelarian flâneur is set in motion as the ‘fluid subject’, the walker in the modern city, consuming the spectacles of the new public spaces. And here, amid the shop window displays and department stores, with its items on display, Friedberg’s mobilized urban subject is engendered—as the flâneuse. Baudelaire’s flâneur was male, a consumer whose gaze equated women with the ‘lure of the commodity’, in the arcades and streets. But, Friedberg argues, the flâneuse was present as well, drawn to the shop window and department stores. There, according to Friedberg, she gained a ‘power of choice and incorporation through purchase’ (p. 34). Neither the ‘woman of the streets’ nor the ‘respectable married woman’ (p. 36), the flâneuse in the nineteenth century found freedom in the new privilege of shopping, since she could not walk the city alone until then. But, as Friedberg notes, the ‘female flâneur’, despite her appearance in the public spaces of department stores, was ‘addressed in ways that played on deeply rooted cultural constructions of gender’ (p. 36). The empowerment of the flâneuse is thus paradoxical. Friedberg wants to argue for her, however, and situate women within the history of modernity, within its public space, if nothing else as a shopper and consumer. The pleasures and desires found in (or created by) museum-going, exhibition-going, packaged tourism, panoramas, dioramas, and shopping worked on the desires of both women and men, as well as on the ‘visual register’, and ‘helped to ensure the predominance of the gaze in capitalist society’ (p. 37). In addition to her argument about the role of women inscribed in modernity’s public spaces as consumers with a ‘mobilized virtual gaze’, Friedberg provides wonderful descriptions, and some illustrations, of the various new forms of

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entertainment and their construction: phantasmagorias, panoramas, dioramas. These were apparatuses that ‘relied on spectator immobility, but offered a visual excursion and a virtual release from the confinements of everyday space and time’ (p. 2). Combined with the rising popularity of photography and the ‘rapid global deployment’ of people with cameras, these apparatuses ‘transformed the “field of visible”’ (p. 31). Chapter Two follows the ‘passage’ through Zola’s The Ladies Paradise. In this chapter, Friedberg’s reading of modernity relies on Benjamin’s study of flânerie, arcades, ‘commodity experiences’, ‘memory, on the cinema and photography’, in The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’. With a strongly Marxist analysis, Friedberg considers the effects of ‘commodity experiences’ on subjectivity, and how mechanical reproductions like photography ‘annihilated time and space’, creating a sense of ‘the new, the already past, and the ever same’. Tourism (Thomas Cook’s popular tours most notably here, with ‘prearranged sights in narrative sequence’), produced a commodified ‘combination of voyeurism (sightseeing) and narrative [which] grew in parallel with the industries of telegraphy, photography, and the cinema.’ ‘The subjective effects of tourism,’ she asserts, are ‘not unlike those of the cinema spectator’, allowing a ‘transgression of one’s static, stable, or fixed location’ (p. 59). Iron and glass made possible massive architectural structures like the market hall of Paris, Les Halles, London’s King’s Cross Station, and the Crystal Palace. These spaces, like the panorama and diorama, brought the country to the city, here with ‘winter gardens’, and created a sense of timelessness. Glass shop windows became show windows (following L.Frank Baum, writer of The Wizard of Oz, who published a treatise on window display), and are clearly analogous to the cinema screen, Friedberg maintains. Much of this chapter describes in detail and analyzes how the various forms of architecture, exhibitions, amusement parks, and early film-making (Edwin S. Porter, for example) at the turn of the century served as a kind of time travel that transported people into a past, present and future without really going anywhere, except for into an ‘imaginary elsewhere and elsewhen’. The ‘passage’ between Chapter Two and Three moves her argument from a turn-of-the-century Paris to a contemplation of contemporary American malls, as she considers the time-travel machine effects of films like René Clair’s 1923 Paris Qui Dort, Chris Marker’s 1962 La Jetée, Jean Luc Godard’s 1965 Alphaville, and George Pal’s 1960 version of H.G.Wells’s 1895 novel The Time Machine. The latter is most appropriate, since the main character sees the passage of time by looking at a shop window through the window of his laboratory. ‘The shop window is his marker of temporality: the new, the already past, the ever same. The mannequin and the shop window remain constant, the clothes and accessories are the new and the already past’ (p. 104). In the third chapter we arrive in contemporary America, ‘from the beginnings of the rupture of modernity to its present-day remains.’ Here in America, she argues, the shopping malls are the contemporary arcades of the nineteenth century, providing an illusion of travel, a sense of timelessness, and the ultimate commodified public space of consumption for flânerie. Here, too, is the contemporary flâneuse, in the postmodern ‘Ladies Paradise’. Is there still a connection between female empowerment and shopping? On this count, Friedberg is unavoidably ambivalent, although the argument for it would likely have some appeal to women who love to shop. Either way, she argues, the shopping mall, and its logical ‘apparatical extension

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the shopping mall cinema—offers a safe transit into other spaces, other times, other imaginaries’ (p. 121). Using the 1991 Paul Mazursky film Scenes from a Mall, Friedberg asserts that both the film and malls now offer the ‘spectator-shopper’ different identities and character transformations. Mall shops and multiplex theatres are sites of departure and return from the body. Her analysis of the film is convincing from this perspective, as the story’s main characters (Deborah Feingold Fifer, played by Bette Midler, and Woody Allen as her husband, Nick Fifer) live out their relationship through the many temporal and subjective loci of the shopping mall and cinema. Displayed in the mall’s bookstore window is her marriage-counselor’s book; the couple’s ‘desire is rekindled’ in front of a screening of the ‘neorealist Indian film’ Salaam Bombay (p. 124). The shopping mall is then the place that offers meaning and a sense of social reality, though it is all ‘virtual’, through simulations and representations. Television and VCRs (and soon, virtual reality technologies) offer a similar ‘ubiquity’ of ‘simulated experiences’ that ‘foster an increasingly derealized sense of presence and identity’ (p. 125). In the last chapter, Friedberg gets to her long-delayed discussion of the postmodern. Here she distinguishes between postmodernity (referring to the period of time) and postmodernism (referring to style), and considers architectural historian Charles Jencks’s definitions. But either way, the term ‘postmodern’ is confusing and problematic for her, not only because there is no easy fit between the periods of modernity/modernism and postmodernity/postmodernism, but because, she says, the ‘very apparatus of the cinema makes stylistic categories inappropriate’ (p. 162). The ‘avant garde’ as a third term only complicates the critical, stylistic, and historical categories further. Her discussion of Peter Bürger, Andreas Huyssen, and J. Hoberman’s readings of avant-garde art also demonstrates this difficulty. But the crucial point for Friedberg is really that all cinematic forms are ‘postmodern’, given the derealized sense of time, and loss of historical reference, and decenteredness they produce: the subjectivity deemed the ‘postmodern condition’. She critiques Fredric Jameson’s taxonomy of film that categorizes as postmodern those that may be analyzed as ‘nostalgic’, or intertextually self-referential. All films, she argues, have the same ‘jumbled relation to the historic referent’ that Jameson ‘finds exclusively in the nostalgic film’ (p. 168–9). Endlessly replayable, films provide a temporal mobility for the spectator as ‘time-tourist’. And a self-referential quality can be shown in remakes of films from the early twentieth century, she argues, citingD. W.Griffith’s remake of The Lonedale Operator (1911) as The Girl and her Trust a year later in 1912, and others (p. 175). The term ‘postmodernism’, though now unavoidable (not least because it has become a popular buzz-word for all that is new and different) is then problematic for Friedberg since its features have been present from the mid-nineteenth century. That is, adding the ‘post’ to the ‘modern’ marks a periodization that refuses a recognition of the ‘instrumentalization of features implicit (from the start) in cinema spectatorship: the production of a virtual elsewhere and elsewhen, and the commodification of a gaze that is mobilized in both time and space’ (p. 179). But what of Friedberg’s flâneuse? ‘Post-script: the fate of feminism in postmodernity’, takes up the growing concern that the discourse of the postmodern has displaced feminist critique, taking the focus away from otherwise more important debates. As a contribution to cultural studies, Window Shopping may have more to say about gender, history and the effects of consumer capitalism than about film or postmodernism. Instead, her focus on the ‘everyday’, on the lived experiences of women

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in particular adds another voice to an analysis of the construction of identity (and possible alternatives). Though Friedberg’s elliptical style often makes her point elusive, her use of language is intelligently playful, and her pluralistic study of culture is worth considering.

Look and listen, see and hear: books that show and tell in the age of interactive multimedia David Leviatin

Carole Gallagher, American Ground Zero: The Secret Nuclear War (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993) ISBN 0–262–07146–0, $39.95 Hbk Michael Frisch and Milton Rogovin, Portraits in Steel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993) $49.95 Hbk, $28.95 Pbk Larry Sultan, Pictures from Home (New York: Harry N.Abrams, Inc., 1993) ISBN 0–8109–3721–2 $39.95 Hbk

Videodisc, CD-ROM, DVI, CD-I, fiber optics, interactive, multimedia, virtual reality These are some of high technology’s latest buzzwords, the terms of a new language associated with the much heralded communication revolution. If the prophets of this revolution are correct, a new medium of communication—one combining the television, the telephone, and the computer—will soon be massaging the many messages of our culture.1 Once the cable is laid and the new machinery is installed, all aspects of our lives, we are told, will be transformed. By packaging a greater quantity of material more efficiently, interactive multimedia technology promises to make us all more productive and creative, perhaps even a bit smarter. The mundane routine of paying bills will be simplified, the sublime experience of reading Hamlet heightened.2 The new medium is destined to change both the form of what we read as well as the process governing how we read. The ‘book’ of the twenty-first century, consisting of a disc encoded with digital matter scanned by a laser, will wed text and sound with moving and still images and be part of a vast electronic library. ‘Readers’,3 in addition to learning how to process multimedia materials, will move away from their once familiar roles as the members of a passive audience and instead participate in the stories they experience, enticed by audio and visual commands to enter the narrative and contribute a riff of their own. By clicking and dragging icons, the distinction between author and audience will be blurred, threatening to erase the sacrilized distance between the creator and the consumer of culture.4 Like all technological advances, the potential of this latest awe-inspiring wave generates excitement and concern. While the allure of experiencing new methods of communication is made more tempting, the fear of losing old ones grows stronger. For example, when the new technology goes ‘on line’, what will become of the printed documentary photo-text? Will it suffer a fate similar to the picture magazines of the 1950s when the nation turned on the television?5 Will the harmony of printed text and image—an achievement that began with the appearance in the 1870s of two

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works by the English photographer John Thomson, was followed in 1890 by Jacob Riis’s somewhat dissonant but pathbreaking work, How the Other Half Lives, was refined throughout the 1930s, some argue reaching its zenith during what might be called a classic period,6 and is presently in the midst of a renaissance—be overwhelmed by the videodisc and CD-ROM? Will the focus and style of the documentary photo-text shift as we move from turning pages to scrolling? Or, will the printed documentary photo-text endure, providing something the new technology lacks? While it is still too early to see how the future of the printed documentary phototext will develop, the current scene appears vigorous and dynamic, suggesting either the final flash of a brilliant star or, more likely, evidence of the form’s ability to anticipate and incorporate elements of tomorrow’s vision. Three recent documentary photo-texts reveal how the traditional method of presenting text and image (and in these cases transcribed oral material as well—what I like to call ‘almost sound’) has absorbed recent trends and may influence future developments. As we prepare to plug ourselves into interactive multimedia, these three printed phototexts offer valuable insights.7 Of the three documentary photo-texts reviewed, Carole Gallagher’s American Ground Zero: The Secret Nuclear War, is by far the most conventional. The focus, style and tone of Gallagher’s expose position it neatly alongside the classic documentary photo-texts.8 Gallagher’s subject, the effects of the US government’s above-ground atomic bomb testing program, is the archetypical stuff from which traditional documentary phototexts are made.9 Good and evil are clearly drawn. We are offered a seat at the ringside from which we expect to witness a lopsided and cruel battle: the omnipotent militaryindustrial complex vs. the meek common folk. The drama begins on 27 January 1951 when a B-50 bomber drops an atomic bomb in the Nevada desert. This bomb is followed by the explosion of others, at least 126, until above-ground testing is banned in 1963. Dropped on a 1,350 square mile area known as the Nevada Test Site, experts contend that ‘each of the pink clouds that drifted across the flat mesas and forbidden valleys of the atomic proving grounds contained levels of radiation comparable to the amount released after the explosion in 1986 of the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl’ (Gallagher, 1993: xv). Consequently, Test Site workers, soldiers, and ‘downwinders’—people who lived under the drifting clouds—were exposed to damaging, often lethal doses of radiation. Evidence suggests that the government was well aware of the harm that would result from its decision to bomb Nevada but in the interest of national security went ahead with the testing anyway. In fact, in an Atomic Energy Commission memo, ‘the people living downwind of the Nevada Test Site during the atmospheric testing era were described as “a low-use segment of the population”’ (Gallagher, 1993: xxiii). In other words, expendable. Further, in a publication titled Armed Forces Talk, ‘used to instruct soldiers before they would attempt their atomic maneuvers at the Test Site, the magazine described this part of the West as “a damn good place to dump used razor blades”’ (Gallagher, 1993: xxiv). This script, focusing on the exploitation of the ‘people’ by the ‘interests’, is the typical conflict offered by the classic documentary photo-text.10 Considering style and tone, American Ground Zero is organized and presented in a manner also consistent with the standards of tradition. The work is designed to move its audience to action. From its opening pages, American Ground Zero is animated by Gallagher’s anger. The author’s contempt for a government that covered up, lied about and, in several shocking instances, attempted to justify the hazards of atomic testing, is immediately made palpable. Gallagher’s note of outrage is supported by a

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chorus of portraits and voices. These images—the visual and textual traces of the affects of the nuclear fall-out—build in intensity producing a number of discrete explosions before finally forming a critical mass that leads to a cumulative blast of light. The book’s heavy message is reinforced literally by its size and weight. A ten-inch square containing 430 pages of heavily coated stock, American Ground Zero weighs in at more than three pounds. The book’s presence emphasizes the seriousness of its message. Like Riis’s How the Other Half Lives, American Ground Zero is designed to reach out and grab its readers, shocking and shaking them violently. Reliance on black-and-white film, no longer the only option as it once was, is consistent with the vision of the ‘old school’ as well. Reality must be revealed straight and unadorned; the ‘truth’ is not pretty or colorful; it is stark, hard and clearly drawn. Black and white emphasizes these ‘facts’. Gallagher intensifies the severity of her visual revelations by using filtration to darken and, in many cases, blacken the sky in her photographs. This creates a sense of grim foreboding and tragedy reminiscent of the brooding prints made by W.Eugene Smith.11 Gallagher further locates her book squarely within the tradition of classic documentary photo-texts by sprinkling some of the canon’s relics throughout her work. She does this by integrating among her own photographs several images of the same part of Utah made by Dorothea Lange in the 1950s.12 In addition to appropriating the canon’s look, Gallagher also adopts what she identifies as its philosophy. In American Ground Zero’s prologue, Gallagher writes that ‘while studying a biography of the American photographer Dorothea Lange, I discovered she had always pinned to her darkroom door a thought by Francis Bacon: “the contemplation of things as they are, without error or confusion, without substitution or imposture, is in itself a nobler thing than a whole harvest of invention”’ (Gallagher, 1993: xxiii). Gallagher notes that discovering Bacon’s observation at the same time that she was in the midst of ‘researching the nuclear military-industrial complex’ helped ‘change the direction of my life’ (Gallagher, 1993: xxiii). For Gallagher, as for so many of the giants of the documentary tradition, moving people to action was part of a larger mission of reform. This mission was based on the assumption that ‘the contemplation of things as they are, without error or confusion, without substitution or imposture’ was not only possible but a necessary step toward uncovering the ‘truth’. Once the ‘truth’ was revealed, changes could be made and society ultimately improved. Lange’s guiding light, similar to that followed by many of those associated with the documentary tradition, is also Gallagher’s.13 American Ground Zero’s subject, its ‘look’, and its author’s devotion to the belief that it is possible to objectively document reality, uncover ‘truth’ and then change the ‘truth’ recorded, make it a contemporary version of the classic documentary photo-text. For all of its affinities with the documentary photo-texts of the past, American Ground Zero does still reflect a few current cultural trends, especially some of those influenced by television.14 Looking through this heavy, television-screen sized book, one realizes that the oral histories included are brief and each is accompanied by a full-page portrait of the speaker. Turning the pages of these bursts of image-textimage-text feels oddly like watching television with a channel-surfing thirteen-yearold.15 While the influence of the remote control and quick-cut editing may have been adopted—either consciously or not by author and/or designer—to reach an audience with a limited attention span, the resulting lay-out also does something else. For example, a photograph on the left-hand page does not simply illustrate the text on the right-hand page; and the text does not merely describe the photograph. Each must be ‘read’ and then reread in light of each other if the entire picture is to be

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understood. I found myself reading the photographic portrait and forming an opinion of the character depicted, then reading and ‘listening’ (Gallagher does a good job of evoking conversation and sound by including her own questions and presenting the transcribed oral material in bold type) to the word portrait and comparing the two impressions made. This enrichment of image and text, of the resulting portrait of the narrative voice created, and of the reader’s participation in this process, is fueled further by Gallagher’s decision to have many of those she photographed holding photographs. These images are generally of two types: loved ones who have died of cancers thought to have been caused by the testing, and mushroom clouds produced by the explosions. We now experience a complex of portraits integrating image, text (and ‘sound’) with past and present. By creating discrete, yet interrelated portraits of both image, text (and ‘sound’) that evoke past and present, the reader is required to process different forms of information and put together a portrait, or interpretation of events. By encouraging its audience to reconstruct history in this manner, American Ground Zero flirts with the concept of interactive multimedia, albeit unplugged. At first glance, Portraits in Steel looks like the type of photo-essay that would fit nicely into the established tradition of documentary photo-texts. Both subject and style appear to be of generic stock. Black and white photographs combined with interviews reveal something of the lives of steelworkers while on the job and after being laid off. The book, organized with a ‘gallery’ of photographs in front followed by text, mirrors the design of James Agee’s and Walker Evans’s photo-text, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, originally published in 1941. We learn from the book’s forward, written by Robert Doherty, that photographer Milton Rogovin, a political activist/optometrist, exclusively ‘turned to photography to carry on his crusade to improve the lives of those less fortunate’ after ‘investigation by the House Committee on Unamerican Activities’ and ‘nearly two decades’ of FBI harassment ‘denied [him] the opportunity to work for change in a familiar way’ (pp. xvii, xviii). Rogovin states, ‘Bertolt Brecht’s poem, “A Worker Reads History”, provided me with the key that opened the door to a photographic series that has, many years later, resulted in Portraits in Steel’ (p. vii). Prepared for a passionate study of workers and unemployment, deindustrialization and urban blight—almost certainly accompanied by the familiar strains of the celebration of labor and indictment of capital—the book’s oral historian, Michael Frisch, in his introductory remarks, throws the unsuspecting reader a curve. This book is not a study of deindustrialization in general or of Buffalo’s industrial transformation in particular. Nor is it an analysis of the impact of unemployment on individuals and families, or of working-class culture, community, life, or consciousness in a period of enormous stress and change. In form it is neither a book of photographs accompanied by captions and text, nor a book of interviews illustrated by photographs. Instead, the book proceeds from the belief that all portraiture involves, at its heart, a presentation of self. (p. 2) Portraits in Steel fashions itself as something more than the typical documentary photo-text. While presenting a familiar subject and point of view, Rogovin and Frisch go on to conduct an original seminar devoted to the process of reading. Less interested in documenting the process of making steel than in exploring the process of reading

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documentary presentations of self, Frisch and Rogovin move beyond shining a light on injustice and championing the lives of common folk. Their work attempts to extend the focus of documentary from the practice of exposing to the process of reading the exposure. What American Ground Zero only touches, Por traits in Steel embraces. In the late 1970s, Milton Rogovin completed a series of photographs titled ‘Working People’. The project, consisting of several pairs of images—primarily of iron and steelworkers in the Buffalo, New York area—sought to capture and compare portraits of an individual at work and at home. In the mid-1980s, after the collapse of heavy industry in Buffalo, Rogovin revisited and re-photographed those he had photographed years earlier. Now, in addition to home and work, Rogovin added a ‘third dimension of time and change’ (p. 2). At the same time these follow-up portraits were being made, Rogovin asked Michael Frisch to ‘conduct interviews that might provide a textual parallel, interviews in which the portrait subjects might discuss the work and home lives documented in the original photographs, and what had happened to these lives as iron and steel shut down in the years that followed. Portraits in Steel is the result of our collaboration’ (p. 2). After Frisch introduces Portraits in Steel, establishing its background and disabusing the reader of any preconceived notions he or she might have had concerning the thrust of the work, a ‘Photo Gallery’ follows, reinforcing the book’s claim to be essentially a work of portraiture rather than a traditional documentary expose. While moving through the Gallery, Rogovin’s images of workers on the job, at home, and years later, allow the reader to interact with the portraits, creating a narrative of his or her own by stitching together the scenes of an individual presented in different contexts and at different times. Perhaps the most powerful sequence is the series of portraits of Joseph Kemp. In the first image, we see Kemp at work; he looks directly into the camera (and out at us), his safety goggles are atop his head; his shirtless chest glistens with sweat; in the hands of his two large, vein-rippled arms, Kemp holds a shovel, the shaft of which cuts across his lower body; ripping out above his pants waist is a six-inch scar that spans the length of his torso. This is a tough man engaged in hard work; the two seem made for each other. On the adjacent page we see Kemp at home relaxing with his family. Seated with his wife and their three daughters surrounding them, Kemp’s huge hands are placed on his son’s small thighs as the youngster sits proudly between his father’s legs; the family is well dressed, with Kemp wearing an impressive pair of polished cowboy boots; a Christmas tree in the background, bright light spilling through the window, add to the overall image of security and bliss. Here, Kemp appears as the tender and fortunate family man. The two pictures present Kemp as a man who has it all: job and family, strength and compassion. Turning the page, the reader is shocked and saddened to see what has become of Kemp. His family is gone, replaced by a single woman who stands alongside the wheelchair in which Kemp is sitting. Also missing is Kemp’s left leg. The foot of his remaining leg, no longer shod in one of those fine boots, hangs bare. He appears confined to the small, dark room in which he is seated. The three images provide the reader with plenty of material to construct a ‘Life of Joseph Kemp’. We are offered still more. Having formed a series of stories based on the visual portraits provided by Rogovin in the Photo Gallery, the reader moves on to the text portraits recorded by Frisch. These are keyed to the Photo Gallery by smaller reproductions of the photographs, the work and home pictures appear above the opening lines of each of the interviews and

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the follow-up pictures are placed below the last lines of each of the interviews. The combination of these three types of portraits—photo, reproduced photo, and text— creates a rich composite image and perhaps more importantly, explicitly encourages a new approach to reading only hinted at in American Ground Zero. Frisch beings his conversations by asking his subjects to discuss the photographs Rogovin made of them. The reader has ‘read’ these in the Photo Gallery and is now looking at the smaller reproductions of them. Already something of an active participant in the ‘presentation of self’ being offered in Portraits in Steel, the reader is drawn even further into the book’s circle of interactive discourse, by Frisch’s method of initiating the interviews. For example, Frisch opens the interview with Benjamin Boofer by remarking: Well, I’m here in Lakeview, New York, on a beautiful sunny day sitting in the cab of a pickup and talking to Benjamin Boofer. We’ll start with these two pictures, one of you on break and the other one of you not on break. Tell us a little bit about what your job was and then we’ll trace it back and forth. (p. 81) In an interview with Frank Andrzjewski, Jr., Frisch begins by noting: One of the interesting things about this book is that the people will have these pictures in front of them, so it’s like they’re going to have you looking over their shoulders saying, ‘Well, here’s what’s going on.’ So let’s start with this picture of you taken at work at Atlas Steel, and maybe you could tell us a little bit about what you did there. (p. 269) With the reader now feeling part of the interview process, as if he too was bouncing along in Ben Boofer’s pick-up, the subject begins his or her presentation of self by discussing the picture made at work, then moving on to discuss the home picture, and concluding with comments on the follow-up image. This plan achieves a number of valuable results. First, the images provide the subject with a set of useful reference points, producing a sharply focused narrative. Also, because the subject has something more to do than simply answer a set of questions—in this case he or she is encouraged to reflect on his or her image as well—the material is far more engaging and revealing than the material gleaned from the traditional oral history interview. For example, Kemp’s powerful discussion of the combined tragedy of losing both livelihood and limb, stimulated by the photograph of him sitting in the wheelchair, is far more touching than if we were presented with either text or image. It is the harmonizing of both that truly sings. Finally, discussing the pictures further heightens the interactive multimedia nature of Portraits in Steel. Rogovin looks at the subject and creates a portrait—or story; the reader then looks at Rogovin’s portrait and creates a portrait of his own, we then read and ‘listen to’ (by including his questions throughout and by parenthetically describing the inflection of the subject’s voice at revealing moments: ‘[shocked voice], [snooty voice], [choked voice], [laughs], [gruff voice], [excited voice], [deliberate voice], [stern voice], [whinning voice], [strong voice], [grandly],’ Frisch, awkwardly but effectively, replicates the feel and sound of a conversation) the subject presenting him or herself while we all reflect upon his or her photographic image and

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consider the portraits—stories—we have created from these images. We translate visual signs into mental images, then after having those mental images reshaped further by text, we go back to reread the visual images; we are all involved in the process of reading and comparing self-portraits stitched together from several kinds of material—visual, written, transcribed oral—and given meaning by the interaction of the steelworkers, the activist/photographer, the historian/interviewer, and the reader. Portraits in Steel is about learning how to read traditional documentary materials in a new way: through the lens of interactive multimedia. By offering a helpful lesson on the reading of documentary portraits, Frisch and Rogovin provide a useful service that stretches the boundaries of the traditional phototext a bit further than American Ground Zero. Larry Sultan’s Pictures from Home moves far beyond either work. While Pictures from Home is in many ways an expose in the tradition of American Ground Zero, and one that also requires the sensitive kind of reading outlined in Portraits in Steel, it is perhaps more significant than either because rather than simply encouraging one to read a documentary photo-text interactively, Pictures from Home, by self-consciously and assertively forcing its readers to question the construction of documentary meaning, electrifies the multimedia interaction between reader and text. American Ground Zero is committed primarily to uncovering and exposing the ‘truth’; Portraits in Steel is designed to teach its readers how rich and complex the ‘truth’ can be when a variety of sources are read interactively. Pictures from Home, however, departs from the standard line and asks its readers to consider the meaning and construction of ‘truth’. The first thing one notices about Pictures from Home is the rich color of its photographs. The traditional style of stark monochromatic contrast associated with the documentary photo-text is replaced by a vivid palette of deep four-color images. Saturated reds and yellows, lush blues and greens, all emerge lyrically from the page pleasing and teasing the eye. These vibrant pictures seem to make the book glow and hum in the reader’s hands. Also unlike American Ground Zero and Portraits in Steel, the photographs in Sultan’s work vary in size, placement and kind. For example, a tiny image is surrounded by a page of text; an enlarged view is spread across pages (in one instance requiring the reader to open and unfold the book’s central leaves.) Upon closer inspection, one notices that the painterly images created by Sultan are accompanied by fuzzy stills from home movies, faded color and black-and-white images from family albums, ‘professional’ shots made by studio and corporate photographers; there are still-lifes, landscapes, portraits, genre scenes, product and promotional pictures. Accompanying this wide variety of photographic representations of the Sultan family is a ‘hypertext’ of traditional and transcribed oral material composed in all sorts of type: large and small; plain and italics; black on a white page and white on a black page. Surveying this riot of image and text makes it immediately apparent that Sultan is interested in something more than uncovering a story, or considering new methods of reading old images. For Sultan, ‘the medium is the message’. By refusing to privilege one source of material or author’s point of view, Sultan collapses the distinction between the ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’ storyteller. The resulting narrative, which deems all of its elements as equally valuable, challenges traditional definitions of quality and authority. As the conventional relationship between author and reader

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crumbles, a new more interactive one develops and a complicated redefinition of ‘truth’ emerges. Sultan opens Pictures from Home with a discussion of his ‘project’: These were the Reagan years, when the image and the institution of the family were being used as an inspirational symbol by resurgent conservatives. I wanted to puncture this mythology of the family and to show what happens when we are driven by images of success. What drives me to continue this work is difficult to name. It has more to do with love than with sociology, with being a subject in the drama rather than a witness. (p. 18) The drama’s plot is familiar to us all. A handsome young man (in this episode Sultan’s father) leaves a dead-end job selling clothes in New York and moves to California to find his fortune. After establishing himself, through pluck and luck of course, he sends for his family. The once financially strapped migrant is transformed rapidly into a successful and wealthy salesman of razor blades; the salesman’s good fortune continues to rise: he is made vice-president of the Schick Safety Razor Company. From rags to riches, the American Dream we all know. As quickly as it was made, the salesman’s life begins to unravel. After refusing to relocate, he is fired. Suddenly, the American Dream becomes that nightmare with which we are equally familiar, the Death of a Salesman. Sultan’s work clearly presents and then skillfully ‘punctures’ the rags-to-riches myth, deflating the allure of American culture’s favorite soap opera. But the work is not that simple; it is composed of many layers. First, through the creative integration of photo and text, Sultan opens the door to his home, allowing his readers to enter his family’s past and present. As we look through the family album composed of intimate images, the Sultan story becomes our story, part of our shared mythology. The father, arguably the story’s tragic hero, radiates an image from the book’s pages that looms larger than life; he is transformed—by the interaction of his son’s presentation and the reader’s interpretation—from an elderly Jewish retiree into an icon in the pantheon of American culture. The giant’s rise and fall is a shared experience; Sultan succeeds in translating the particular into the universal. Through the author’s self-conscious and uncertain pose, and his decision to allow us to sift through and organize the artifacts of his family’s life, we see and hear another of the work’s layers, this one more complicated than the social critic’s tale of the American myth’s inflation and deflation, different from the poet’s ability to make the particular universal. In this other realm, one of ‘metahistory’, we listen as son and father grapple over the making of documentary images and debate the construction and transmission of meaning and truth. Every time I try to make a photograph, you give me that steely-eyed look. Maybe you’re looking for a public image of yourself and I’m interested in something more private, in what happens between events—the brief moment between thoughts when you forget yourself. All I know is that when you photograph me I feel everything leave me. The blood drains from my face, my eyelids droop, my thoughts disappear. I can feel my facial muscles go limp. All you have to do is to give me that one cue, ‘Don’t smile,’ and zap. Nothing. That’s what you get.

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No. What I get is an image of you that you don’t like. Doesn’t it come down to vanity and power? A question of how you look and who determines that, who’s in control of the image? I don’t mean to sound so critical. I’m just trying to understand what you see in certain pictures. Like that one you took last time you were here. I can’t figure out why you asked me to dress up in a suit, write on a piece of backdrop paper as though I was giving a lecture and then photograph me standing there with a pen in my hand looking confused, like I didn’t know what I was talking about? Don’t you think that a fiction can suggest a truth? Maybe, but whose truth is it? It’s your picture but my image. There are no clear lines—I don’t know where you stop and I start. Look, I don’t care what you do as long as it’s successful. You worry too much. I’m really happy to help you with your project. Seriously. I just wanted you to know that for the most part that’s not me I recognize in those pictures. [pp. 113–14) This revealing conversation problematizes the traditional notion that documentary work, by depicting ‘reality’ as faithfully as possible, can capture and present an objective ‘truth’ that will serve as the basis for reform. As we try to make sense of the Sultan family’s album of images, the truths presented shift in and out of focus depending on the viewer and his angle of reality. In the background, our busy work is mocked further by the echoing of the father’s suggestive question and answer, ‘but whose truth is it? It’s your picture but my image ’. Is the world presented in Sultan’s pages a dream or a nightmare? What happens when we discover that the means we rely on to read and define cultural signs are also changing products made of the very same stuff they were meant to record and define? Pictures from Home stretches the horizons of documentary work by piercing its fundamental assumptions about ‘truth’. Sultan suggests that the printed photo-text can do more than expose ‘truth’ and/or teach us how to read it more effectively. Sultan’s book, a model of ‘thick description’, encourages those working in documentary to focus on the interactive multimedia construction of narratives as a central part of the process of rendering and reading cultural meaning. While American Ground Zero and Portraits in Steel both reveal the ways in which documentary photo-texts can adapt to changing circumstances, only Pictures from Home provides the vision necessary to ‘read’ in a future that will make increasing use of visual imagery and develop radically different definitions and forms of authorial control and narrative construction. In anticipating some of the changes that will result from the adoption of electronic interactive multimedia, Pic tures from Home serves nicely as a bridge between the culture’s dominant and emerging forms of discourse, preparing us to deal with the challenging question that will only echo more loudly and frequently as we move into the age of interactive multimedia, ‘but whose truth is it?’

Notes 1 For a helpful introduction to interactive multimedia technology see: Feldman (1991); also see: Newsweek, 31 May 1993, for its cover story on interactive multimedia; for the ‘classic’ discussion of the medium and its message, see: Mcluhan and Fiore (1967); Mcluhan and Powers anticipate the future:

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The United States by 2020 will achieve a distinct psychological shift from a dependence on visual, uniform, homogeneous thinking, of a lefthemisphere variety, to a multifaceted configurational mentality…. Most Americans will be able to tolerate many different thought systems at once. (1989:86) 2 For a discussion of the general applications of interactive multimedia technology, see: Feldman (1991). For more specific applications, see: Woodhead (1991); also see Delany and Landow (1991), especially ‘The Shakespeare Project: experiments in multimedia’, by Larry Friedlander (1991:257–71). 3 For the sake of elegance, I will use the term ‘reader’ throughout this essay rather than the more accurate but cumbersome construction, reader/viewer/listener. 4 See: Neuman (1991); Meyrowitz (1985); Barrett (1989, 1992); Pickover (1992), especially ‘Electronic storytelling in the 21st century’ by Judy Malloy (1992:137– 44). 5 See: Goldberg (1991:191–251). 6 Thomson (1873, 1877); Riis (1890); also see: Newhall (1982:84–116, 234–47). 7 I will be using the term interactive multimedia loosely. Rather than following the traditional definition of interactive multimedia as a medium that combines print, sound, film and/or video, I will focus on the interactive multimedia nature of the print medium. 8 See: Bourke-White and Caldwell (1937); Macleish (1938); Nixon (1938); Lange and Taylor (1939); Wright (1941); Agee and Evans (1941); also see Puckett (1984); Hunter (1987); Newhall (1982:234–46). 9 For a definition of traditional documentary work, see Rothstein (1986), especially Chapter 9, ‘The documentary book’ (115–34) and ‘Six qualities that create the documentary approach’ (18). For other views of documentary work, see: Bolton (1989), especially ‘in, around, and afterthoughts (on documentary photography)’ by Martha Rosler (303–40); Newhall (1982:234–67). 10 See especially Smith and Smith (1975). 11 See Smith (1981); Maddow (1985). 12 For a fine selection of Lange’s work, see Lange (1982); for other views of the Test sites, see Misrach (1990); the PBS television documentary Radio Bikini and the 1988 film Nightbreaker. 13 See Rothstein (1986:18) for his definition of documentary work; for biographical information on Lange, see Meltzer (1978) and also the essay by Robert Coles in Lange (1982). Lange died of cancer and, as Gallagher notes, so did John Wayne and Susan Hayward, both of whom also spent time in St George, Utah while filming The Conqueror. 14 See Gitlin (1985), especially ‘The look of the sound’ by Pat Aufderheide (111–35); also see Seiter, Ellen et. al. (1989). 15 On channel-surfing, see Fowler (1992:37): The introduction of cable channels and remote controls has increased the propensity for shallow, scattered viewing. ‘Grazing’ is what Channels magazine labeled the new viewing habits. About threequarters of Americans have remote controls, and of these about half routinely change channels in mid-show. Young adults, the viewers of the future, are especially fervid grazers.

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References Agee, James and Evans, Walker (1941) Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. Barrett, Edward (1989) editor, The Society of Text: Hypertext, Hypermedia, and the Social Construction of Information, Cambridge: MIT Press. —— (1992) Sociomedia: Multimedia, Hypermedia, and the Social Construction of Knowledge, Cambridge: MIT Press. Bolton, Richard (1988) editor, The Contest of Meaning: Critical Visions of Photo graphy, Cambridge: MIT Press. Bourke-White, Margaret and Caldwell, Erskine (1937) You Have Seen Their Faces, New York: Modern Age Books. Delany, Paul and Landow, George (1991) editors, Hypermedia and Literary Studies, Cambridge: MIT Press. Feldman, Tony (1991) Multimedia in the 1990s, London: The British Library. Fowler, Jib (1992) Why Viewers Watch: A Reappraisal of Television’s Effects, Newbury Park, California: Sage. Frisch, Michael and Rogovin, Milton (1993) Portraits in Steel, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Gallagher, Carole (1993) American Ground Zero: The Secret Nuclear War, Cambridge: MIT Press. Gitlin, Todd (1985) editor, Watching Television, New York: Pantheon. Goldberg, Vicki (1991) The Power of Photography: How Photographs Changed Our Lives, New York: Abbeville Press. Hunter, Jefferson (1987) Image and Word: The Interaction of Twentieth-century Photographs and Texts, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Lange, Dorothea (1982) Dorothea Lange: Photographs of a Lifetime, New York: Aperture. Lange, Dorothea and Taylor, Paul (1939) An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion, New York. Macleish, Archibald (1938) Land of the Free, New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. Mcluhan, Marshall and Fiore, Marshall (1967) The Medium is the Message, New York: Random House. Mcluhan, Marshall and Powers, Bruce R. (1989) The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century, New York: Oxford University Press. Maddow, Ben (1985) Let Truth Be the Prejudice: W.Eugene Smith, His Life and Photographs, New York: Aperture. Meyrowitz, Joshua (1985) No Sense of Place: the Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, New York: Oxford University Press. Misrach, Richard (1990) Brava 20: The Bombing of the American West, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins. Meltzer, Milton (1978) Dorothea Lange, A Photographer’s Life, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux. Neuman, W.Russell (1991) The Future of the Mass Audience, Cambridge: MIT Press. Newhall, Beaumont (1982) The History of Photography, New York: The Museum of Modern Art. Nixon, H.C. (1938) Forty Acres and Iran Mules, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Pickover, Clifford (1992) Visions of the Future, New York: St Martin’s Press.

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Puckett, John Rogers (1984) Fire Photo-Textual Documentataries from the Great Depression, Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. Riis, Jacob (1890) How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Rothstein, Arthur (1986) Documentary Photography, Boston: Focal Press. Seiter, Ellen et al. (1989) editors, Remote Control: Television, Audiences, and Cul tural Power, New York: Routledge. Smith, W.Eugene (1981) W.Eugene Smith: Master of the Photographic Essay, New York: Aperture. Smith, W.Eugene and Smith, Aileen M. (1975) Minimata, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Sultan, Larry (1993) Pictures from Home, New York: Harry N.Abrams, Inc. Thomson, John (1873) Illustrations of China and Its People, London: Sampson Low, Marston, Low & Searle. —— (1877) Street Life in London, London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington. Woodhead, Nigel (1991) Hypertext and Hypermedia: Theory and Applications, Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley. Wright, Richard (1941) 12 Million Black Voices, New York.

Re-visioning the Classroom: Agency and Possibility in Giroux’s ‘Living Dangerously’ Julie Drew

Henry A.Giroux, Living Dangerously: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Difference (New York: Peter Lang, 1993) 183pp. $19.95 Pbk Amid the countless academic texts recently published which focus on a pedagogy of multiculturalism, Henry Giroux has produced a substantial work as the first volume in the series Counterpoints: Studies in the Postmodern Theory of Education from Peter Lang Publishing and edited by Joe L.Kincheloe and Shirley R.Steinberg. Giroux’s Living Dangerously: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Difference explores current educational theory from a progressive—perhaps a radical—point of view. Drawing from some of his previous work, Giroux offers an engaging mixed bag of political theory, pedagogy and classroom strategies that leaves the reader recharged for re-entry into her own classroom. Giroux remains true to his previous work in Bordercrossings by engaging in theoretical discourse from an unapologetically moral and political standpoint. Wresting the term ‘democracy’ from the far right, where it has been appropriated as a deflective tool, he illustrates clearly how the insistence upon schools operating within the logic of the marketplace is in direct opposition to what Giroux sees as the project of democracy. Such a project can only be realized by rethinking our notions of identity and race in a postmodern world. Giroux paints a vivid picture of what he describes as the ‘retreat from democracy’ found in America today, to the point of political dysfunction. The language of leadership has become the discourse of the marketplace, and notions of freedom and equality are excluded in any real sense from public life—including the classroom. Giroux seeks to redefine and revive ‘democracy’: Democracy is not simply a lifeless tradition or disciplinary subject that is merely passed on from one generation to the next. Neither is democracy an empty set of regulations and procedures that can be subsumed in the language of proficiency, efficiency, and accountability. Nor is it an outmoded moral and political referent that simply makes governing more difficult in the light of the rise of new rights and entitlements demanded by emerging social movements and grounds. Put simply, democracy is both a discourse and a practice that produces particular narratives and identities in-the-making informed by the principles of freedom, equality, and social justice. It is expressed not in moral platitudes but in concrete struggles and practices that find expression in classroom social relations, everyday life, and memories of resistance and struggle. When wedded to its most emancipatory possibilities, democracy

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encourages all citizens to actively construct and share power over those institutions that govern their lives. (pp. 12–13) With democracy redefined, and a call for a new democratic and critical pedagogy, Giroux develops a hard-hitting critique of America 2000 and its supporters who emphasize issues of standardized testing and choice in order to train educators in ‘the language of management, measurement, and efficiency.’ Throughout, Giroux returns to the necessity for understanding the social construction of identity in a constantly shifting, complex, and conflicting postmodern world. The ahistoricity, the denial of place and culture in the construction of identities that exist in current pedagogical theory continues to ignore the relationship between knowledge and power, to deny difference, and so never comes nearer to finding a place for dialogue. According to Giroux, such a dialogue is the project of democracy because it affords access to the cultural and technological centres necessary for political voice and action: Learning becomes the basis for challenging social practices that produce symbolic and real violence, that makes some students voiceless and thus powerless, and that also implicates teachers in forms of bigotry, colonialism, and racism. Students need to learn that the relationship between knowledge and power can be emancipatory, that their histories and experiences matter, and that what they say and do can count as part of a wider struggle to change the world around them. (p. 25) While Giroux is certainly at his best when engaged in theoretical discourse, he develops throughout this work a sound pedagogical practice which incorporates the popular without simply reinventing the canon. Giroux offers concrete examples of classroom analyses of contemporary films, analyses which do not fall prey to the lure of decontextualizing popular culture and reinscribing a discourse of authenticity. The desires and identifications of students which are produced by viewing popular films need not be erased by critical thinking, but instead may be reworked, extending possibilities through new and greater agency. Overall, Giroux calls for both political leaders and educators to ‘refuse the role of the disconnected expert and specialist, adopting in its place the role of the engaged and transformative intellectual.’ In much the same way that Donna Haraway calls for situated knowledges, constantly shifting boundaries, and contested identities as a means for understanding power relationships and negotiating in a postmodern world, Giroux calls for historically situated educators, a critical pedagogy of place, and cultural workers who are committed to ‘combining intellectual work with social responsibility.’ Language, as always, is an issue in Giroux’s work. He not only develops a new language of pedagogy here, but calls for a ‘language of critique and possibility’. Existing educators and educators in-the-making must have the opportunity to develop such a language which would include historical perspective (‘the way things are is not the way they have always been or must necessarily be in the future’); social criticism (‘to think in oppositional terms, to deconstruct the assumptions and interests that limit and legitimate the very questions we ask’); remembrance (knowledge as a social and historical construction that is always the object of struggle’); and critical imagination (educational leadership that does not begin with the question of raising test scores, but

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with a moral and political vision of what it means to educate students to govern, lead a humane life, and address the social welfare of those less fortunate than themselves’). Equally important to Giroux is the issue of clarity of language which many educators insist upon: Educators who make the call for clear writing…have missed the role that the ‘language of clarity’ plays in a dominant culture that cleverly and powerfully uses ‘clear’ and ‘simplistic’ language to systematically undermine and prevent those conditions necessary for a general public to engage at least in rudimentary forms of critical thinking…the homogenization and standardization of language in the mass media, the schools, and other cultural sites point out how language and power often combine to offer the general public and students knowledge and ideologies cleansed of complex discourses and oppositional insights. (pp. 167–8) If a democratic curriculum is indeed a desirable goal, then the language of educational theory must work toward the recognition and interpolation of multiple ways of reading, writing, speaking, and listening. An appeal to clarity does not further such a project; rather, multiple literacies, not a naturalizing or totalizing theory, reject the view of the other as deficient. Such a language of educational theory, Giroux argues, would enable educators to really address issues of multiculturalism, which is ‘not only about the discourse of alleged others but is also fundamentally about the issue of whiteness as a mark of racial and gender privilege.’ The dominant approach to multiculturalism equates difference with social decay, lower standards, and a threat to national identity. It is this struggle over identity, this ‘crisis of modernism’, that Giroux addresses in his call for a new language of critical pedagogy. Educators must incorporate a politics of identity into their classrooms, contesting the modernist theories of the unified and autonomous subject in order to allow for various literacies and dialogue between the conflicting discourses which construct postmodern subjectivities. Giroux has fashioned a hopeful vision in Living Dangerously, one in which he successfully links theory and practice to a degree that educators might view this work as a handbook of sorts to navigate the often uncharted waters of the classroom. For those who aspire to Giroux’s dream of democracy, this is at once both lofty inspiration and savvy, pragmatic advice to bring to a lesson plan. Finally, Living Dangerously is a pleasurable read: 183 pages, available in paperback for $19.95 (USA), this work is certainly a worthwhile acquisition and an impressive first volume of a promising new book series. The only unfortunate note is the rather large number of typographical errors (which are almost distracting); hopefully this problem will be corrected in future volumes of Counterpoints.

Playing the game of culture Tony Bennett

John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) 392pp. ‘To decline the theoretical and practical labour of analysing pedagogic structures in their institutional sites,’ Guillory argues, ‘is to cede everything to the imaginary, to play the game of culture without understanding it’ (p. 37). The signature of Cul tural Capital, accordingly, consists in the close attention Guillory pays to the institutional and pedagogic underpinnings of literary critical and theoretical programmes. His opening statements make plain enough where he is coming from and the kinds of revaluations he wishes to propose: The largest thesis of this book is that the debate about the canon has been misconceived from the start, and that its true significance is one of which the contestants are not generally aware…. Where the debate speaks of the literary canon, its inclusions and exclusions, I will speak of the school, and the institutional forms of syllabus and curriculum. I will argue that evaluative judgements are the necessary but not sufficient conditions for the process of canon formation, and that it is only by understanding the social function and institutional protocols of the school that we will understand how works are preserved, reproduced, and disseminated over successive generations and centuries. Similarly, where the debate speaks about the canon as representing or failing to represent particular social groups, I will speak of the school’s historical function of distributing, or regulating access to, the forms of cultural capital. (p. vii) The more general aspects of this argument are developed in the introductory and concluding chapters. In the first of these, Guillory takes to task those criticisms of literary canons associated with the socially progressive agendas of what he variously calls liberal pluralism or multiculturalism. His particular concern is with the demands to which these criticisms give rise in requiring that the range of texts taught in literary curricula be broadened to become more adequately socially inclusive and representative. These are familiar demands whose considerable influence has played no small role in fuelling the development of cultural studies. However, Guillory has no trouble in showing that the grounds on which they rest beg more than a question or two.

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Perhaps his most telling argument consists in his insistence on the need to disentangle two processes whose implicit fusion underlies the rationality of the liberalpluralist critique. The first, as Guillory defines it, is ‘the process of exclusion, by which socially defined minorities are excluded from the exercise of power or from political representation’; the second is ‘the process of selection, by which certain works are designated canonical, others noncanonical’ (p. 6). It is the merging of these two processes into one, Guillory argues, that underlies the liberal-pluralist contention that ‘the process of canonical selection is always also a process of social exclusion’ (p. 7). For it is this which justifies the further argument that the non-selection of specific kinds of writers (female, black, ethnic, or working-class) excludes or marginalizes the identities and experiences of the groups or communities those writers are held to represent. The difficulty with this argument, Guillory says, is that it supposes that the university, as the primary institution of canon formation, is a representative space and that, as such, it can intelligibly be required to give equal and fair attention to all contending values and experiences through the cultural artefacts whose teaching it authorizes. This, he states bluntly enough, misunderstands what the university is or might be. Instead, if we want to understand the cultural logic which really informs the processes of canon-formation, then we must view such processes in the light of the role played by education systems in managing and regulating access to cultural literacies of various kinds. If women’s and black writing now have a place in university literary curricula, this has more to do with questions concerning the politics of cultural literacies than it has to do with giving equal weight and value to a representative range of cultural experiences. Women and blacks in universities, Guillory argues, are identifiably specific groups with distinctive cultural interests and trajectories which cannot be equated with those of women or blacks as such or be regarded as generally representative of women’s or black experience. Viewed in this light, Guillory argues that, historically, what has mattered most about the canon is its openness and mobility rather than its closure. It is in pressing this point that he reveals some of the more questionable assumptions underlying conventional forms of canon critique. He deftly shows, for example, how such critiques rely on the assumption that writers can be viewed simply as the representatives of particular constituencies and their values and experiences in ways which entail a more or less complete denial of the arguments that have been made in a range of materialist, structuralist and poststructuralist criticisms regarding the need to subordinate the writer to the history and structures of writing. His arguments concerning the respects in which conventional forms of canon critique rest on a scriptural view of the canon as a closed body of writing are perhaps more far-reaching. It is this view, he suggests, which underlies what he calls the ‘imaginary scene’ implied by conventional forms of canon-critique. In this scene, ‘a group of readers, defined by a form of common social identity and common values, confronts a group of texts with the intention of making a judgement as to canonicity’ (p. 28). It is clear that no such committee ever meets to make judgements of this kind. Even if it did, Guillory observes that such a scene cannot account for the mechanisms of reproduction through which, if it is to be effective, a canon is transmitted to generations of readers. For this it is necessary to attend to the institutional agendas of the school and the university, and the relations between the two. Yet no sooner is this done, Guillory suggests, than the paradox has to be faced that there is in fact nowhere that it is possible to find the canon as such. What one finds, instead, is the list—that is, the reading list for a particular programme of study—he

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canon’s existence taking the form of an imaginary totality, a projection of and from the list. The list, moreover, far from embodying a form of closure which has to be prised open by means of canon critique, is constitutively open. It has been, and still is, liable to a process of incessant modification as it has been successively revised (from Latin to vernacular texts; the inclusion of the novel; the inclusion of women’s writing, etc.) in accordance with changing strategies for organizing distinctive kinds of cultural literacy and regulating access to those capacities as parts of processes of class formation. In the final chapter, Guillory draws on similar arguments in taking to task the assumptions of those Marxist critiques of aesthetics which see aesthetic discourses as camouflaging ruling-class values beneath the mask of universality: It is scarcely surprising that a critique of canon formation which reduces that process to conspiratorial acts of evaluation is compelled to regard the discourse of the aesthetic as merely fraudulent, as a screen for the covert affirmation of hegemonic values which can be shown to be the real qualification for canonicity in the first place. For the same reason that such a critique sees the discourse of the aesthetic only as a mystification of the bias of judgement, it can ignore the mediating functions of the school, reducing that institution to a support for equally fraudulent claims to objectivity or expertise on the part of the judges, the gatekeepers of the canon. (p. 270) Proffering a similar disentangling in which discourses of value are distinguished from aesthetic discourse, Guillory argues that the functioning of the latter has to be assessed in relation to the institutional dynamics of literary and aesthetic education rather than (as is often true of Marxist critiques) this whole domain of literary practice being read off from the evaluative judgements of another imaginary scene in which the aesthetic representatives of the bourgeoisie sit in session in legislating for the principles of taste. There is more to Guillory’s arguments on this topic than I can do justice to here. The relations he traces between the rise of modern theories of the aesthetic and the theories of value associated with classical political economy, for example, are especially interesting. However, the perspectives I have summarized from the first and concluding chapters are those which, in the main, inform the more specific concerns of the intervening chapters. Having argued that conventional forms of canon and aesthetic critique substitute imaginary scenes of judgement for the real processes of canon formation, Guillory’s concern in these middle chapters is to replace such critiques with ‘something like a sociology of writing and reading’ (p. 85) in which the mediating role of educational institutions will be accorded a leading role. His topics include the role of Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard in establishing a literary canon in the vernacular; an assessment of the similarities and differences between the critical projects of Leavis and New Criticism; and a discussion of the extension of the canon to include works of literary theory in the critical practice and pedagogy of de Man. While each of these studies merits extended commentary in its own right, I want, here, to highlight two general matters arising out of these chapters. The first, arising from Guillory’s discussion of de Man and deconstruction, concerns the relations between bureaucratic and charismatic authority in the literary institution. While pointing out that, according to Weber, these are, strictly speaking, separate forms of authority, Guillory argues that there has occurred, in association with the rise of

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literary theory, a ‘routinisation of charisma’ which, in the person of the master theorist, blends the two types of authority. The charismatic authority which the master theorist accumulates through his activities in the relatively autonomous sphere of professional activity (conferences, seminars, public lectures, books) becomes the source of both authority and advancement within the institution. The personal authority and charisma the literary teacher accumulates—even where it may be through activities directed in criticism of the institution itself—is ultimately inseparable from, and the source of, his or her position in the status and authority hierarchy of the institution. It is, moreover, that authority which sanctions the routinization of what are, in the case of deconstruction, highly technical critical and pedagogic procedures. Although conducted in the name of the master (Derrida, de Man), these procedures fit the needs of the institution for bureaucratically administrable and assessable curricula. The second issue I want to note concerns what Guillory regards as a constitutive tension affecting literary pedagogy throughout the modern period, from the formation of a vernacular canon through to the role of theory in the American graduate school. As Guillory puts it: The contradiction between the politico-administrative requirement of linguistic homogeneity and the socioeconomic necessity of distributing unequally every form of cultural capital (including Standard English) burdened the educational system with the impossible task of at once democratising the distribution of knowledges and maintaining class distinctions. (p. 263) The political challenge the book poses concerns whether this contradiction might be overcome or whether, at least for the foreseeable future, it will remain an unavoidable characteristic of modern education systems. So much by way of summary—although I hope that my enthusiasm for the book will also have shown through. It is genuinely bold in design and execution, and consistently challenging and edifying in its approach to a web of interlocking issues and debates. It fully merits both critical success and serious debate. But what are its implications for cultural studies? Although Guillory’s primary engagement is with questions of literary theory and pedagogy, he is aware that many aspects of his argument impinge on current debates within cultural studies. At one point, he throws out an explicit challenge when he states that it is not yet clear ‘whether a “cultural studies” curriculum has been conceived which does not replicate the theoretical and hermeneutic paradigms of literary interpretation’ (p. 265). This formulation suggests that Guillory might think that many aspects of cultural studies are ripe for the kinds of criticism he levels at the liberal-pluralist variant of canon-critique. Whether or not this is so, it’s certainly true that Cultural Capital provides some useful resources for what is now, in my view, a pressing need to think against the grain of some of the more influential self-understandings of cultural studies. Three issues stand to the fore here. The first concerns the suggestion, made at various points in the study, that the rules of ‘the game of culture’ may be changing as a result of what Guillory calls ‘a largescale “capital flight” in the domain of culture’ (p. 45). He attributes this to what he perceives as a declining need for the acquisition and accumulation of cultural capital on the part of the new professional-managerial class. Depending rather on technical knowledge for its mobility and status markers, this class ‘has made the correct assessment that, so far as its future profit is concerned, the reading of great works is

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not worth the investment of very much time or money’ (p. 46). The perceived devaluation of the humanities curriculum, Guillory accordingly suggests, ‘is in reality a decline in its market value’ (p. 46). There are, as I’ll suggest later, some problems here. My interest here, however, is in the respects in which the expansion of the humanities curriculum associated with the development of cultural studies—its extension to encompass culture as a ‘whole way of life’—might not also have been prompted by similar changes in the social composition and social trajectories of the student population. If so, and this brings me to my second point, it will only be possible to think clearly about the implications of such a circumstance if closer attention is paid to the role and place of cultural studies curricula in the context of the changing roles and functions of universities as they increasingly become parts of mass higher education systems. It is here, if anywhere, that Guillory can provide cultural studies with some much-needed medicine in subjecting some of its more outlandish flights of fancy to a little disciplined self-interrogation. For if a failure to attend to the func tioning of pedagogic structures in their institutional sites is ‘to cede everything to the imaginary, to play the game of culture without understanding it’ (p. 37), a good deal of cultural studies must stand guilty as charged. For there has been a strong tradition of thought that has rendered it constitutively blind to such considerations. To the degree that the institutional placement of cultural studies within universities has often been seen as merely a convenience, a contingent place from which to pursue broader political programmes, as if cultural studies were the sovereign subject of its own agendas, then so there has been a systematic overlooking of the respects in which it might more intelligibly, and more usefully, be viewed as the creature of changes taking place in the education system. Guillory’s concerns are, of course, more focused in their exclusive concentration on questions of literary curricula and pedagogy; but a parallel discussion which sought to effect an institutional framing of cultural studies would be of considerable value. The third and related issue concerns the relevance of Guillory’s arguments regarding the ‘routinisation of charisma’. Any direct transposition of these to the field of cultural studies would be mistaken. Guillory is quite clear in relating his arguments on this subject to the specific institutional possibilities generated by the relations between the graduate school and undergraduate literary teaching in the American context. Yet cultural studies has often been characterized by a kind of ‘routinisation of charisma’, albeit one whose effects are virtually the opposite of those Guillory is concerned with. A number of commentators have noted the respects in which cultural studies has reproduced aspects of earlier charismatic forms of intellectual authority in view of the moral authority it frequently accords specific kinds of ‘speaking position’. One consequence of this has been its tendency to devalue technical competences in favour of a capacity to cultivate and exhibit a particular kind of moral persona. While this often seems progressive in view of the radical content of the speaking positions concerned, the ‘political technology of the intellectual’ on which such practices depend is itself regressive when viewed in the context of the social relations of educational institutions. Walter Benjamin, it may be recalled, insisted on the need for intellectuals to transform the relations of intellectual production, seeing this as a technical matter requiring changes to the institutional arrangements of knowledge production rather than simply continuing to supply new intellectual content for old forms of communication. Where a radical content trades on a moralised enunciative stance that is fashioned for the intellectual—through discourses of marginality, for example—we encounter but a variant of the Romantic construction of the critic’s

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persona as a privileged seer. This view of intellectual work needs to be dismantled if cultural studies is to ‘play the game of culture’ with any savvy at all. Guillory quotes a (to my mind) wonderful passage from Bourdieu’s essay ‘The market of symbolic goods’: Intellectual labour carried out collectively, within technically and socially differentiated production units, can no longer surround itself with the charismatic aura attaching to traditional independent production. (p. 256)

Toward the end of his life, Raymond Williams criticized Britain’s Open University for having substituted a centralized curriculum for the concept of a negotiated curriculum arising out of the relations of face-to-face mutuality of the extra-mural class. Other writers have made much of this, arguing that the concerns of cultural studies and mass-delivery open-learning systems sit uneasily with one another. Precisely the opposite is the case. Teaching systems which open up debates in the cultural field to as wide a population as possible and in ways which are not dependent on the personal authority of the teacher can only count as progressive so far as the relations between culture and education are concerned. However, if these are all important questions to raise, how far Guillory’s approach can take us in developing useful answers to them is a moot point. For there are real limitations of both theory and method here. Some of these derive from the somewhat mono-theoretical orientation Guillory adopts throughout his study. It will come as no surprise—given the title of Cultural Capital—to say that Bourdieu is Guillory’s main source of theoretical inspiration. In itself, this is not a problem. What is a problem, however, is the degree to which Bourdieu’s categories are taken more or less on trust and applied with insufficient attention to the need for a clear set of theoretical protocols to govern their use. Even the key term of ‘cultural capital’ is not subjected to any extended definition, a procedure justified in a footnote where Guillory says that, in this, he has simply ‘followed Bourdieu’s own practice in constructing the concept through the contexts of its deployment’ (p. 341). This will not do, however. If Bourdieu does not define cultural capital as such, he is scrupulous, when speaking of cultural capitals of different kinds, in the attention he pays to the need to relate these to the trajectories of different classes and class fractions. Guillory, then, is not as careful as Bourdieu is in handling the theoretically crucial relations between processes of class formation and cultural capital. For Bourdieu, moreover, the class fraction most reliant on cultural capital is not the bourgeoisie but the ‘dominated fraction of the dominant class’—that is, those whose advancement depends on their educational trainings. Why the same should not be true for the professional-managerial class Guillory speaks of needs more justification than he offers. This is especially so as a good deal of survey evidence relating to the use of artistic and cultural institutions in the United States suggests that it is precisely the members of this class who are most likely to trade in cultural capital as a mark of their distinction. Finally, there is a disturbing seamlessness to the way in which Guillory applies the concept of cultural capital to account for the history of canon formation from the medieval period through to de Man. This historical extension of the concept threatens to weaken the respects in which cultural capital should be regarded as, precisely, a form of capital and, as such, a means for securing symbolic distinction that is specific to capitalist societies.

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Guillory’s concluding formulations also leave much to be desired. He sides, straightforwardly enough, with Bourdieu in arguing for a situation in which universalizing the conditions of access to all cultural goods would disconnect the acquisition of cultural capital from processes of class formation. Problems arise, however, when he views such a prospect in the light of Marx’s ‘thought-experiment’ in The German Ideology when, the constraints of the division of labour having been overcome, the specialized functions of artists, painters, etc., will wither away as these become universal competences available to everyone. Guillory then advances a ‘thought-experiment’ of his own in which judgements of aesthetic value would still be made, canons would still be formed, but, as these would now be disconnected from the reproduction of class relations, they would be able to reinstate the formation of social distinctions on an entirely benign basis as simply ‘distinctions in “lifestyle”’ derived from ‘a vast enlargement of the field of aesthetic judgement’ (p. 339). This is to imagine a situation in which we end up playing the same game of culture, but without that game having any negative social consequences: If there is no way out of the game of culture, then, even when cultural capital is the only kind of capital, there may be another kind of game, with less dire consequences for the losers, an aesthetic game. Socialising the means of production and consumption would be the condition of an aestheticism unbound, not its overcoming. (p. 340) The book deserves a better conclusion. In allowing himself the luxury of such a utopian ‘thought-experiment’, Guillory absolves himself from the responsibility of addressing the immediate nitty-gritty institutional curricula and pedagogic issues that the approach he advocates recommends should be at the forefront of our attention. In thus constructing an ‘imaginary scene’ of his own, he shows a remarkable forgetfulness of his own strictures in ways which severely limit the potential practical relevance of his arguments. To simply revive the dream in which the unfolding of history’s development can be expected to beget the conditions in which Schiller’s conception of aesthetics as play can be universally realized—to give us the programme of Lukács or Lifschitz, but to the tune of Bourdieu—does not match the challenge with which, in the rest of the book, Guillory confronts us. That this is so is mainly because, in the end, the singularity of Guillory’s theoretical focus—his more or less exclusive reliance on Bourdieu—leads him astray. For the error into which this leads him consists in the supposition that there is only one game of culture and, accordingly, that a discussion of the role of educational systems in organizing relations of distinction exhausts what might be said about the connections between aesthetic discourses and modern forms of education. This is clearly not so. There is now a developed body of writing, taking its main bearings from Foucault, arguing the respects in which, when translated into the pedagogic techniques of modern literary education, Romantic aesthetics—and Schiller’s work especially—provided the coordinates for programmes of social management. Guillory’s omission of considerations of this kind is a serious shortcoming since it results in a neglect of those aspects of the educational deployment of literary and cultural texts (providing social and moral trainings) which cannot be reduced to the production of social relations of distinction. It is not enough, then, to talk about ‘the game of culture’. For the social business that is conducted by means of the ways in which cultural artefacts are classified,

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canonized, taught, read, and institutionally deployed is never singular. Discourses of aesthetics and practices of aesthetic judgement do not enter the university or the school at only one point or in only one way so as to play, always and everywhere, the same role in relation to the same game. And sometimes the work they perform—for example, in the nineteenth-century context, in managing gender differences—it is not usefully thought of in terms of a game at all. Yet the tenor of these criticisms is, I think, in sympathy with Guillory’s broader purpose—which is to rub our noses in some of the institutional realities governing our practices. In suggesting that those realities are more complex and varied than Guillory’s formulations sometimes allow, my purpose has been to respond to the challenge of his work by identifying aspects of his argument in which the challenge needs to be further developed if it is to be as useful as it promises.

Chucky’s children Steve Chibnall

David Buckingham (ed.), Reading Audiences: Young People and the Media (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993) 223pp., £12.99 Pbk This book arrived on my desk in the same week that the news media went supernova over the verdict in the trial of the ten-year-old killers of two-year-old Jamie Bulger. My reading of David Buckingham’s book was punctuated by images of video nasties smouldering in dustbins and dire warnings about the pernicious effects of Childsplay III. Rarely does a work from the ivory towers refer so directly to the effusions of Fleet Street and Wapping that they could share the same subtitle. ‘Young People and the Media’ was the organizing theme of the media’s coverage of the Bulger tragedy and it confirmed Buckingham’s book as not just timely, but downright overdue. For the student of cultural studies this strange conjunction of morbid spectacle and academic production also serves to demonstrate once again the polysemy of the signifier. ‘Young people and the media’ just does not mean the same thing in the codes of Fleet Street and Academe. As Buckingham’s introduction acknowledges, in the Fleet Street code it signifies a discourse of addiction, degradation and moral depravity, a discourse of ‘perennial anxiety’. The unsupervised consumption of videos, comics and computer games is discussed in terms of doorways to Hell through which demonic Chuckys are invited into the child’s bedroom. In academic parlance the phrase indexes a clash of competing paradigms rather than a simple theory of effects. For most of its young life, media studies has been forced to address itself to the vexing question of effects, like a child goaded to do its homework by a tyrannical parent. Recently it has seemed as if the school holidays were finally here and students of the text could indulge themselves in a little post-structuralist dethroning. But just when we thought it was safe to enter the post-modern play-room there’s Chucky, the devil doll, and he wants to play. Academic discourses about mass media are never entirely removed from those of journalism. Concepts like moral panic, and the notion of media texts as facilitators rather than causes of antisocial behaviour have been absorbed into popular journalism and were evident in the coverage of the Bulger case. But absorption is slow and it is perhaps no surprise that Buckingham’s contributors were not among those pundits wheeled out to comment on Jamie Bulger’s murder. One of them, Julian Wood, might have shed some light on the way in which working-class boys use video and, as a parttime worker at the British Board of Film Classification, his credentials would have been convincing. Unfortunately, his account of video watching might not have meshed easily with a journalistic discourse which seeks to identify and purge evil

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titles. As the Childsplay series was press ganged into the Satanic canon, Wood might have suggested that demonizing texts only serves to increase their attraction as a means of testing individual resilience and cementing peer group solidarity. Locating a copy of Childsplay III and viewing it could well become a popular right of passage for adolescents. For adolescent girls, as Gemma Moss hints in her contribution to Reading Audiences, the adoption of ‘gory’ texts has already become a way of challenging the hegemony of the ‘soppy’ teen romances and questioning restrictive gender identities. Wood and Moss share a general tendency among contributors to this volume to foreground the ways in which texts are used by their readers in discursive battles with their contemporaries and with adult investigators. Individual texts recede into the background as analysts deconstruct the discourses of readers or advocate particular concepts or methods of research. The efficacy of reading histories, discourse registers, readers, contracts, ethnography, discussion groups, viewing diaries, self-administered interviews, and the examination of fan productions all receive consideration in a stimulating grab-bag of analytic tools. There is a refreshing pioneer spirit about all of this, as intrepid explorers in the new world of audience studies set out with only the crudest of map and compass to discover fresh truths, more or less unfettered by the chains of established paradigm. Most have brushed off the clinging dust of structuralism but they carry with them the baggage of their own backgrounds and professional interests. Principally, a number of these explorers are teachers or educationalists associated with the University of London’s Institute of Education. This shows in the attention they give to the individual reader and to the dynamics of the peer group. Child development and media literacy rather than the transmission of dominant ideology or symbolic resistance are the recurrent themes. In fact, the ideology of the text almost disappears from view, introduced only to be buried beneath the weight of data and interpretations stressing either the knowing or unconscious use of texts as commodities which will serve to mark out age statuses and gender identifications. In Reading Audiences texts are usually feeble things, used fleetingly to make social distinctions and then discarded. At their most powerful, they are the primitive weapons young people use to break ‘adult rules about who should know what’ (Gemma Moss, p. 129). This way of understanding the role of the text is partly a construct of the ethnographic and discussion group methods, which tell us more about readers’ relationships with each other than they do about their relationships to the text. The researchers in this book are quite capable of recognizing this problem but few seem capable of solving it successfully. Valerie Walkerdine, one of the most celebrated voices in British cultural studies, is unfortunately a case in point. In her contribution on ‘Young girls and popular television’ she draws our attention to the ‘emotional and unconscious dimensions to meaning-making’—an important observation in a volume which rather neglects the emotional responses of readers. She also alludes to the problems of ethnography but this does not prevent her from using the method to support a romantically fanciful interpretation of the meagerest of data. I enjoyed Walkerdine’s piece in the way one might enjoy the performance of a good theatrical illusionist. It exemplified the magical techniques by which cultural studies is able to levitate a body of understanding without visible means of support. Faced with ethnographic evidence of the audience’s almost total inattention to the text, most researchers might pack up the tape recorder and retire to consider a fresh methodology. Not so the indomitable Professor Walkerdine. Instead, she boldly portrays the video text (the movie Annie) as the central switchboard of family communication. It ‘plays a significant part in the [family’s] domestic practices and the

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attempts of the participants to understand and cope with their situation’ (p. 85). I can only admire her confidence in her interpretive ability and marvel at the sleight of hand involved. Interestingly, the article is credited to ‘Valerie Walkerdine with the assistance of June Meledy’. Well, every magician needs a good assistant. Perhaps this form of attribution is an example of that ‘unconscious dimension to meaning-making’ to which she refers, or even a knowingly ironic comment on her own semantic creativity. Most contributors to Reading Audiences display a laudable awareness of their own subjectivities and the distance between themselves and the objects of their gaze. Sometimes this self-reflexivity can be remarkably frank. Working my way somewhat laboriously through Julian Sefton-Green’s dissection of a piece of imaginative writing by ‘Ponyboy’, a North London teenager, I was struck by the way in which SeftonGreen’s meticulous transcription of the piece seemed to mock the competence of the writer. Would he, I wondered, have reproduced a colleague’s work complete with deletions and mis-spellings. I was rewarded in the conclusion by a disarmingly honest admission of the flip side of intellectual enquiry: As a man I am using the muscles of my intellect and power over language to pin ‘Pony’ down. To an extent I feel as if I am using cultural theory as a way of competing with ‘Pony’ in the arena of my choosing in order to emasculate him and empower myself. (p. 155) Perhaps behind every mild-mannered teacher’s façade there lurks a Schwarzenegger, an academic Terminator with deconstruction as his assault rifle and the pleasures of the people in his sights. In fairness, this is not an image which can be convincingly associated with most of the contributors to this book. In choosing to analyse his daughters’ talk about media texts, Chris Richards lays himself open to all kinds of methodological criticism. Reading the result sometimes feels like an intrusion into the private world of the nuclear family with too few revelations that are in the public interest to justify it; but the father demonstrates a commendable humility. He shows a willingness to learn from his offspring and defend their tastes against conventional interpretive strategies. Richard’s conclusions, questioning the easy attribution of meaning to ‘Barbi dolls, Kylie Minogue or Lil’l Miss Magic Hair’ and calling for the inclusion of agency into Bourdieu’s understanding of taste, certainly warrant further consideration. Marie Gillespie also produces a skilful ethnography in one of Southall’s Punjabi households. There is a strong argument for saying that this type of research is best done by someone from a similar cultural background who is in a better position to pick up the nuances of social interaction and appreciate the connotations of the culture’s linguistic and visual signs. Gillespie, however, copes well with a difficult project and provides a fascinating case study in the use of ‘god films’ (dramatizations of sacred texts) in family ritual and educational practices. The negotiation of meaning around these texts also effectively illustrates generational differences within the British Hindu community. Throughout, Gillespie strikes a happy balance between objectivity and empathy, and treats her research family with the respect and affection they doubtless deserve—not least for accepting their daughter’s teacher into the home to record their domestic discussions. David Buckingham clearly situates his book at the centre of the debate about the power of the text vs. the power of the reader to resist its ideological pull. His own

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article, examining the ways in which boys use popular texts in their discourses on masculinity, studiously avoids deterministic models of media influence and stresses the active construction of meaning through talk: Masculinity…is achieved rather than given. It is something boys do rather than something that is simply done to them—although, equally, it is something they can attempt to do to each other. (p. 97) In boys’ banter, film criticism becomes a metaphorical comparing of dicks, a testosterone test fraught with humiliation. This suggests much about gender but rather less about the emotional impact of the text. Buckingham is always mindful of the constraining power of that text on readers’ interpretive practices. He indulges in the modest amount of Fiske & Willis bashing which seems to be de rigeur these days among academics who wish to exhibit a ‘balanced’ approach to understanding textual power. But his true colours are interventionist—his point is not merely to understand audiences but to change them through media education. It is left to Martin Barker to offer us some account of how charismatic a text can be, to move it from the periphery to the centre, from a conversational resource to a significant element in people’s lives. Barker’s methodology in researching fans of the comic, 2000AD, sets him apart from the other contributors. The man uses questionnaires, for Foucault’s sake! He still believes in quantitative data. In a book which quietly celebrates the joys of ethnography and discourse analysis, Barker is like a man in tweeds on a dancefloor full of lycra bodysuits. He may look like the oldest swinger in town but appearances are deceptive. Barker is one of the Pete Watermans of Cultural Studies, a ‘Hitman’ who can still show the young dudes and fashion victims a thing or two.1 In this case, his technique of inviting selected respondents to record their replies to his questions on a mailed audiotape seems to have generated some fascinating insights into readers’ involvement with a valued text. The findings presented here are only ‘edited highlights’ from a substantial research project, but they are enough to make me impatient to see the full report. That an academic should treat his f ans of popular culture with respect rather than condescension or condemnation may no longer be novel, but it is still very welcome. Barker’s Judge Dredd enthusiasts reveal themselves to be as capable of critical distance from their chosen texts as most of the other audiences in this book. Their knowledge of Dredd’s writers and illustrators makes them acutely aware of the manufactured nature of ‘the galaxy’s greatest comic’. As committed readers they treat the text as something that rewards detailed study and has something to say about the contemporary world; as both an entertainment and a catalyst for thought and imagination. These are not ‘Chucky’s children’, drugged into slavish adoration of the text, but they are, in Barker’s phrase, ‘intoxicated with the medium’ and its possibilities, and they value the opportunity the comic gives them to become experts in a valued field. The significance which Barker accords to his research is both interesting and confusing. His argument that audience research is being cramped by a feminist framework that celebrates female pleasures but pathologizes the male variety is an important one, but it is not made explicit why this should necessitate the return to the class perspective on mass communications which he advocates. Nor is it entirely crystal clear why Barker should so readily reject the notion of fans as resisters when he speaks of the relation of one of his principal informants to the text in terms of

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‘empowerment’ and ‘minor acts of subversion’. The key question is ‘what is being resisted?’, and this takes us to the heart of the complexities and contradictions of contemporary culture. 2000AD is an essentially polysemic text but its preferred meaning is critical of the trajectory of contemporary capitalism. This does not prevent its publication by an organization which is thoroughly stitched into the fabric of capitalist enterprise and seeks to ensure brand loyalty for its product by constructing the position of ‘fan’ for its consumers. Barker himself records the resistance of readers to the ‘fan’ label, the ideology of the marketing text, but prefers to stress their predominant acceptance of the preferred meaning of the graphic narrative and their acquiescence to the system of consumption. Overall, Reading Audiences is a refreshing book, not least because it reports actual research rather than fetishizing the intellectual muscles of Schwarzenegger theorists. Its engagement with the popular debate about the impact of the media on young people is only partial, but there is little here to support the demonizing of the dangerous text. Hasta la vista, Chucky.

Note 1 The Hitman and Her was a late-night British TV show broadcast from the dancefloor of one of the country’s larger clubs. Pete Waterman (of successful record producers, Stock, Aitken, Waterman) co-presented the programme with the more youthful Michaela Strachan.

How ads work (they don’t) John O.Thompson

Robert Goldman, Reading 256pp, £40 Hbk, £13.99 Pbk

Ads

Socially

(London:

Routledge,

1992)

Robert Goldman got into critical ad analysis thus: ‘One day, by chance, I picked up a fashion magazine and turned to a perfume advertisement. In a sudden flash of recognition I thought I saw revealed in that perfume ad the structural inner workings of the commodity form’ (p. 8). Working on ads over the next decade, teaching in ReaganBush America (‘Because my students were so familiar with advertising texts, using ads in the classroom permitted me to raise critical theory questions that they otherwise refused to tune into’—ah, familiar pedagogic seductiveness of ads!), Goldman extended his Marx/Lukács/Frankfurt School initial grasp of the problem via ‘semiotics’, which here means in particular ‘John Berger’s analysis of photographic meanings and Judith Williamson’s methodological analyses of how ads mean’. The Williamson influence turns out to be especially strong. Teachers who have for years been working with students on ads using Decoding Advertisements aka ‘(Williamson, 1978)’ will find Goldman’s book a useful contribution to the consolidation of that tradition.1 Equally it might provide an occasion for sceptical scrutiny of some of the psychological assumptions which Williamson makes—in what is, after all, a text of great, precocious energy which she wrote in her early twenties. The book consists of nine chapters, six of which have appeared as articles from 1983 to ‘forthcoming’. The tone is relentlessly critical. Goldman clearly has a sense of humour, but he virtually never colludes with the enemy by accepting that an ad could be funny, or ironical, or enabling, intrinsically: likeable ads are only doing the market’s deplorable work yet more efficiently. To make the point about the market’s fundamental wrongness, Goldman’s discussions tend to gravitate towards patently unlikeable ads. American advertising in the eighties did not fail to provide him with these. Another way of putting this: while from the mid-eighties onwards some American ads have turned cleverer, others have been or still are wonderfully straightforward examples of The Stupid. And even the ads Goldman discusses in his last three chapters (‘This Is Not an Ad’; ‘Levi’s 501 and the “Knowing Wink”: Commodity Bricolage’; ‘The Postmodernism That Failed’), which, as the chapter titles suggest, are clever, or would-be clever, reflexive and/or ‘puzzle’ ads of the sort common in Britain, have their own kind of stupidity built into them which emerges interestingly once they are explored in detail.

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Goldman himself defines the damage done by ads in terms of The Oppressive rather than The Stupid. This is not surprising, since social stupidity remains largely untheorized as such, whereas there is a rich tradition of thinking about and working against oppression. Also, stupidity and oppression are often very closely linked. To stupefy or stupidify people is to oppress them; self-deluding oppressors make themselves stupid; to be stupid and powerful is often to be predisposed to oppress; and so on. So concentrating on oppression might seem to accomplish all that’s needed on the other front too, while being both more directly political and less vulnerably ‘pretheoretical’ than an overtly stupidity-oriented critique would be. Marx is the classic name who serves as Goldman’s chosen handle on mundane domination. The currently felt (post-1989) absence of any global, systemic alternative to capitalism doesn’t automatically discredit the Marx who had things to say about the logics of capital, whatever it does to ‘Marxism’. However, Marx clearly did believe that a ‘beyond capitalism’ was possible, and the dissolution or suspension of that belief has consequences for our use of his thought. So, sceptical scrutiny here too? Advertising generates stupid text (if taken ‘to the letter’) in the course of trying to dress the wolfish general register in the sheep’s clothing of the (inevitably fake) particular. In the earliest of his essays, Goldman writes: Appeals to pseudo-individuality in perfume advertisements rest on the unstated premise that each consumer represents a standardized unit of consumption. Qualities of individuality, playfulness and spontaneity seem to emanate from the product: CIE is me. And maybe it’s you too. Imaginative. Soft. Unpredictable…CIE… here to dazzle the free-world of women. The repeated premise is that such qualities are transmitted to the user of the product, who derives her individuality from them. (p. 29) Goldman if anything under-critiques the intrinsic dumbness, not to say looniness, of the phrase ‘here to dazzle the free-world of women’. But the claim that anyone believes, or indeed that the ad seriously proposes, that ‘the user of the product… derives her individuality from’ the qualities of the product seems to me implausible. Certainly the ad proposes that you (qua standardized unit of consumption, inevitably, in Market register—we’re not talking about selling CIE to personal acquaintances of the sales team) buy the product because you want to make individual use of it. You-standard is therefore in some possibly paradoxical relationship to youparticular, you-you. The ad certainly asks you-you to consider subsuming yourself under the category you-standard. But I don’t believe that commodity-form logic either enforces your compliance here, or, should you decide to comply, renders your sense that you are buying CIE for genuinely particular use-purposes (‘I like the smell’) somehow invalid. How far, in this connection, does deploying a version of Marx’s use value/exchange value dichotomy get us these days? The scenario (which may not even be Marxian) whereby, after exchange value’s usurpation, use value’s rights are to be restored by the Revolution, is not viable. Not only is the Revolution not to hand, the usurpation model is questionable. It is one thing to say that the logic of our economy and thus of our polity is given by the market, and that value there is a matter of exchange (‘market forces’); it does not follow that consumers fail to use, often sensibly and with legitimate pleasure, what they buy; or that ‘use’ has somehow been dissolved as

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capitalism extends its grip. Use value and exchange value carry on co-existing as different registers of experience of the commodity. Exchange value, as the general rather than the particular register, is inevitably the motor of the general logic; but to see that logic as dissolving particular use is to take a line about how we live now which seems to me incompatible with one’s experience of and respect for the purchasing habits of those one knows (and why should one’s acquaintances be untypical?). And yet… Say that we really do live in a world in which ‘objects are cast in the language of humans, and humans are simultaneously cast in the language of objects’ (p. 51), and this damages us; or in which ‘ads reframe and position our meaningful relations and discourses to accommodate the meaning of their corporate interests’, in which ‘corporate deities hail us, then replace us, and signify our most valued relationships’ (p. 85, Goldman’s emphasis), and this damages us. The first of these accusations derives from Marx, the second from Williamson. Both of these formulations involve us in the discourse (Aristotle and since) on metaphor; they amount to saying: ‘Under capitalism, things and people are not called by their right names.’ The further accusation is: ‘Hence, people are not treated properly.’ There is a detailed, technical level on which one could challenge Goldman’s view of how meanings move around (and, consequently, Williamson’s). A short review is not the place to attempt this, but anyway it is questionable whether the nub of Goldman’s enterprise depends on his semiotic machinery. As I lived with the book, I found myself more impressed by other types of remark, often summary: in conclusion to the ‘Envy, Desire and Power’ chapter, for instance, speaking of how ‘women have learned there is a kernel of truth to claims that social power hinges on their ability to evoke desire through appearance’: ‘For the rare few, a real social power is gained; but it is gained at the expense of many and it does nothing to challenge the male power to scrutinize and judge’ (p. 129). Or, in the ‘Introduction’, summarizing a line of argument that unfolds especially in the book’s later chapters: As the logic of targeting market niches becomes more sophisticated, viewers grow more alienated as decoders and privatized meanings proliferate. Although bourgeois homilies still punctuate our mass-mediated discourses, the climate of relativism and cynicism fostered by the practices of the culture industry cuts away from the credibility of bourgeois narratives. (p. 14) These are ethical complaints, not startlingly new but by the same token robust. Decoupling such critique decisively from a rhetoric of ‘how the signs work you over’ seems worth thinking about, given that knowingness and cynicism about any immediate working-over now become part of how ads address us. I have sketched elsewhere (Thompson, 1990:208–12) an argument to the effect that readers use ads rationally, in rational-choice-theoretic terms. This claim challenges ‘misleadingness’ accounts, whether crude or, as with Williamson, reasonably sophisticated. However, it is perfectly compatible with the view that the overall context within which readers are operating rationally is a damaged/damaging one. Even if many more than ‘the rare few’ women are power-dressing to good (and legitimately self-gratifying) effect, there is something to the claim that there is a deference to patriarchy involved. Even if there is from one point of view something positively delightful about the awfulness with which the ‘bourgeois narratives’ surrounding the family are undermined by campaigns

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such as the McDonald’s campaign Goldman describes,2 there remains a value to the family in the real world to which advertising-mode simulacral ‘family values’ junk is powerfully and hurtfully corrosive. It all depends on the level at which you want to locate your cultural pessimism. Lyotard’s vision of a primal human ‘infantile’ misery, glimpsable through Freud and the artistic practices around the Kantian sublime and avant-garde écriture, which the Greek/Christian tradition has aimed to master through forgetting, as remaining our only, always-already-defeated resource against the great smiling murderous misery of that mastery’s culmination in ‘the total mobilization of energy (Jünger) in all possible and imaginable forms, which…[unfolds] around us and in us, under the names (or pseudonyms) of developed, or administered, or postmodern, or technoscientific society’ (Lyotard, 1990:40): this is a framework within which to think our sorrows and our stupidities which has greater sweep than Goldman’s. At the same time, in these terms, Goldman’s enterprise can be seen as an attempt to write ‘against development’ in development’s guise as market. Total commodification is one (important) modality of ‘total mobilization of energy’. Everything for sale: implications of. (Discuss.) When Goldman writes that ‘this has been a project aimed at bringing critical theory down to earth by grounding it in the relations and texts of daily life’ (p. 8), the down-side of this grounding, if one has a pessimistic grand theory (however legitimate), is that the analysed texts get nagged at with a certain air of monotony. A theorist like Lyotard chooses to discuss in detail texts of challenging strangeness, not to berate in close-textual-analysis terms kitsch for being kitsch, ‘administered’ texts for serving the ends of administration. When Goldman demonstrates yet again that this or that ad serves (i) its advertisers and (ii) commodification in general, he risks evoking the Mandy Rice-Davies response: Well, it would, wouldn’t it. —But ads are bizarre, and an analysis of them shouldn’t end up looking too ‘samey’ if it is to model them adequately.—Isn’t there a certain ‘banality sandwich’ effect here? The aimed-for strangeness of high-concept ads constitutes a bizarreness (Slice 1) which is patently ‘administered’ enough to neutralize its claimed radicality (leaving us with system-bolstering, banal Filling). At the same time, any kitsch text just is strange (Slice 2). By contrast, daily life, I would say, is both less administered than ad surrealism and less genuinely eerie than the pseudo-‘normal’ evoked creepily in ad reassurance. Yet, to twist the contrast back upon itself again, within daily life, advertising and the markets it serves are, if not central (we get used to trashing or ignoring them cheerily), certainly pervasive: part of the stuff of daily life, therefore. Real everyday life, for Goldman, is the world of production. He berates ‘postmodern theorists’ for being unable or unwilling to go beyond the text into that world, where ‘the society of the spectacle is subsidized by paying substandard wages to an urban service proletariat’ in the USA, or to ‘cheaper, more docile, labour pools in Southeast Asia’ (pp. 230–1). But isn’t this evocation of a generalized unhappiness in production the mirror image of the generalized euphoria in consumption that ads radiate? (Certainly if ads did take on the burden of representing production they would do so euphorically—‘our smiling workforce’.) Real work situations have their ups and downs, with the downs predominant in some cases. I don’t think most people exactly forget this, as they watch their Reebok ads or buy their Reeboks or wear them. It is not at the forefront of their attention; but then it wouldn’t be, would it?—at least, not in the absence of a general alternative to wage labour and the commodity form, which is not currently on offer, or the presence of a

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particular reason to boycott a product as especially vile in its circumstances of production. I sometimes wonder whether what really appeals to us about ads (and clearly we do love them: imagine a world without them and it seems a much colder world) is their stupidity, their failure to be persuasive in the least. Far from achieving identities through purchasing at their behest, we maintain identities effortlessly through our bynow-ingrained ability to ignore them, or despise them, or treat them as sheer entertainment. If we are bound to consumption as on a wheel of fire, as to production, might it be that advertisements are surreptitiously valued as reminders of all the things we don’t work at or work for, and particularly of all the unbought things whose absence leaves some space in our lives? It is a tribute to Goldman’s analyses that between the universality of the commodity and the pathetic particulars of attempts to market particular commodities a palpable gap emerges.

Notes 1 Williamson fans may find, given that her text has always operated as a particularly teachable synthesis of seventies theory importation (Saussure/Lévi-Strauss/Lacan/ Althusser/Barthes), that a Goldman footnote assuring us that ‘the concepts of “deconstruction” and “semiotics” have been made unnecessarily difficult by the mystifications of French intellectual discourse’ (p. 84) grates a little. 2 The detail is marvellous; here a lyric quotation must suffice. ‘You, you’re the one./ You moms and dads and brothers, sisters and sons./We’re stronger for each other./ A family is a feeling that together is more fun./Looking out for one another/That’s the way our families run’ (p. 95; emphasis Goldman’s, or McDonald’s?).

References Lyotard, Jean-François (1990) Heidegger and ‘The Jews’, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Thompson, John O. (1990) ‘Advertising’s rationality’, in Manuel Alvarado and John O.Thompson (eds), The Media Reader, London: BFI Publishing, pp. 208–12.

Stop the show! Joel Woller

Henry Jenkins, What Made Pistachio Nuts? Early Sound Comedy and the Vaude ville Aesthetic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992) 336pp., ISBN 0–31– 07855–2, $15.95 Pbk Like the performers he studies, Henry Jenkins is a virtuoso. In this, his second book, Jenkins employs diverse procedures of cultural analysis: What Made Pistachio Nuts? includes studies of production, of reception, of performance style, of the poetics of genre, of particular film texts, and of the social construction of taste. The result is a complex, provocative, and entertaining assessment of the place of the ‘anarchistic comedy’ subgenre within the comic tradition in the US, and within the history of a crucial transitional period of the comedian comedy film genre in particular. His wellsupported and absolutely convincing thesis is ‘that anarchistic comedy emerged from the classical Hollywood cinema’s attempt to assimilate the vaudeville aesthetic’ (p. 24). Jenkins’s particular interest in the anarchistic moments prominent in certain US films of the early thirties should not diminish his work’s interest for cultural analysts in general, however, for his contribution to Columbia University Press’s ‘Film and Culture’ series (edited by John Belton) represents a theoretically informed engagement with historically significant socio-cultural phenomena. Jenkins’s well-documented book, which includes an index, 176 photographs, and extensive endnotes, is based in part on impressive and painstaking archival research; however, his project is not at all reducible to an antiquarian attempt to resurrect for its own sake the neglected subgenre of anarchistic comedy. On the contrary, Jenkins is interested in this particular marginal cultural form for what it suggests about processes of cultural conflict and negotiation which remain obscured in the standard accounts of the development of the dominant Hollywood aesthetic. Jenkins uses the term ‘anarchistic comedy’ to denote a most extreme version of the performer-centered comedian comedy film tradition: in an anarchistic scene, narrative and performance spectacle war with each other. He draws his evocative title from just such a scene: in Stand Up and Cheer (Fox, 1934), a spectacular performance scene involving backflipping senators and goofy campaign rhetoric (such as ‘What made pistachio nuts?’) yields consequences for the narrative which are not motivated by any realistic or causal logic: spectacle simply invades the narrative space. The question then becomes, for Jenkins, what is the place of such locally ‘anarchistic’ scenes within the larger logic of Hollywood narrative? To this end, Jenkins usefully revises David Bordwell’s largely static and thoroughly formalist account of the nature of Hollywood

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narrative. Jenkins rightly accepts Bordwell’s description of classical Hollywood aesthetic norms (of narrative continuity and coherence, causal plot motivation, character consistency, stylistic transparency, etc.), but he likewise refuses Bordwell’s tendency to reduce genre to a self-contained and self-regulated system of formal conventions. Insisting instead that generic conventions are ‘ways of ordering the spectator’s affective and cognitive experience, ways of exploiting and resolving ideological tensions’ (p. 19), Jenkins cites Stuart Hall (and more generally a certain trend in cultural studies most closely associated with Bakhtin) in order to emphasize the value of examining the ways in which cultural forms are reworked and remade from pre-existing materials: his case in point is the remaking of Hollywood narrative from the fragments of vaudeville, and the concomitant remaking of vaudeville on the ground of Hollywood. The historically marginal and short-lived subgenre of anarchistic comedy, Jenkins suggests, is the result of conflict between two aesthetics of unequal strength—Hollywood’s emphasis on storytelling, and vaudeville’s celebration of showmanship. Socially constructed boundaries in the subjective domain of audience taste are what mediate the processes according to which these (and other) cultural traditions are mutually and continually reconstituted, according to Jenkins. To be sure, Jenkins does not always live up to his promises. Although he is interested in the ways in which ‘genres generate new audiences’ (p. 14), his actual critical practice is mostly limited to the extent to which audiences form new genres; as in his fine book Textual Poachers, though to a lesser extent, in What Made Pis tachio Nuts? Jenkins occasionally neglects to substantiate his high estimation of the degree of autonomy and agency possessed by particular groups of consumers. Jenkins takes a flying leap beyond Bordwell’s formalism, but in the end, like Bordwell, even Jenkins occasionally renders social-historical process as background or context for close readings. His attention rests primarily on the preconditions for, rather than the consequences of, the emergence of anarchistic comedy as a film genre; thus he tends to consider larger social-historical forces only to the extent to which they determine the form of movies, and has relatively little to say about the ways in which movies have changed the look and direction of social and cultural history. In chapter 7, for example, his close reading of the ‘textbook’ anarchistic comedy Diplomaniacs (RKO, 1933), Jenkins awkwardly tacks on an essentially aestheticist and formalist analysis of the style and thematic content of the film to an interesting but nevertheless disconnected discussion of the ways in which censorship and other factors led to the demise of anarchistic comedy. The next two chapters are likewise disappointing in their failure to clearly link historical forces to specific texts. The first of these, an elaboration of the historically durable archetype of the clown, is especially vague. The second, which concerns spectatorship and the reception of female comic stars during the early 1930s, is considerably more successful; Jenkins complicates influential notions about the relations between gender and spectacle in a useful and provocative way. Nevertheless, this chapter also suffers from insufficient attention to the concrete historical links between specific films and particular extra-filmic discourses. The last three chapters of his book, then, have a kind of rough-hewn character in comparison to the high standards Jenkins sets for himself at the outset and in his brief concluding afterword. On the other hand, for most of the first six chapters Jenkins does meet the difficult challenge of historicizing the anarchist comedy subgenre in terms of the social construction of taste. A case in point is the second chapter of Jenkins’s book,’ “How is it possible for a Civilized Man to Live Among People who are always Joking?” Class, Comedy, and Cultural Change in Turn-of-the-Century America’. In this

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chapter, Jenkins addresses a polarization of taste in the first few decades of the twentieth century which greatly influenced the subsequent development of both filmic and non-filmic comedy in the US. Jenkins proposes that the ‘commodification of the joke’ (p. 38) which occurred during this period provided the ground for a bitter battle between a declining but still powerful Victorian ideal of wit and ‘thoughtful laughter’, on the one hand, and an ascending ‘New Humor’ characterized by stress on entertainment, on the other. Thoughtful laughter or ‘true comedy’ was generally associated with realism, whereas the New Humor was part of a larger mass-cultural discourse which, in Jenkins’s words, ‘challenged the necessity of purposeful laughter and questioned the aesthetic centrality of comic realism’ (p. 32). At the risk of interrupting my narrative account of Jenkins’s argument with precisely the kind of anarchic moment which it is perhaps our task to understand rather than emulate, I can’t resist pointing out that Jenkins supports his claims by unearthing side-splitting documents such as the following, a sequence of gags compiled and explicated by burlesque clowns Joe Weber and Lew Fields in response to the eternal question, When do people laugh? (a) (b) (c) (d) (e)

when a man sticks one finger into another man’s eyes; when a man sticks two fingers into another man’s eyes; when a man chokes another man and shakes his head from side to side; when a man kicks another man; when a man steps on another man’s foot.

Human nature—as we have analyzed it, with results that will be told by the cashier at our bank—will laugh louder and oftener at these spectacles, in the respective order we have chronicled them, than at anything else one might name. (p. 35) ‘The history of American popular humor in the first few decades of the twentieth century,’ Jenkins suggests, ‘is really the history of attempts to overcome anxieties about the countercultural impact of the New Humor, to construct modes of popular amusement satisfying middle-class decorum while maintaining the emotional intensity of mass art’ (p. 48); the result, at least for the movies, amounted to a kind of synthesis of Mack Sennett’s low-brow keystone cops aesthetic and the then critically acclaimed comic sophistication of the higher-brow Sidney Drew. To be sure, in this second chapter Jenkins could perhaps be more careful with respect to the ways in which he uses the theories of Pierre Bourdieu to connect taste and ideology. His discussion of debates about popular comic taste is really focused on ideas more than on ideology; that is, his elaboration of the class affiliations of particular styles of humor remains, in the end, a bit thin. Jenkins is likewise a bit too content with the ideological formulas of the period he is studying, in which the lowbrow was associated with the immigrant, the laborer, the masses; he neglects to distinguish between what the advocates of various aesthetics of comedy were doing and what they imagined they were doing. Yet, although the quibbles just outlined are applicable even to some of the best passages of Jenkins’s book, it must be noted that in this stimulating chapter on the social history of struggles over the proper limits and functions of popular humor, Jenkins has already taken on a book-length subject; and although this project remains necessarily unfinished in What Made Pistachio Nuts?, Jenkins’s research in this area should prove invaluable for further inquiry. Whatever its methodological shortcomings, the social history of the conflict between the New Humor and ‘true comedy’ which Jenkins outlined in chapter two is certainly more than adequate for the

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purpose of launching his own particularly interesting project, the analysis of anarchistic comedy in the context of the larger history of the comedian comedy genre as a whole. The character of the turn-of-the-century debate about comedic taste established, Jenkins focuses in his third chapter on reconstructing the vaudeville aesthetic—not only in terms of its generic norms, but also in terms of its institutional context and its relation to general spheres of taste. Jenkins argues that the features of the vaudeville aesthetic—its reliance on star performers, its presentational format, its quick pace, its focus on spectacle rather than narrative, its segmentation of heterogeneous material into distinct units, its topicality, its reliance on a stereotypical stock of characters, its criterion of immediacy, etc.—are determined on the one hand by the institutional constraints of vaudeville (involving the need to produce a standard product for a national circuit, the need to adapt this product to local conditions of censorship and demand, programming time constraints, etc.); on the other hand, less emphasized by Jenkins, the vaudeville aesthetic derives its consistency from its differential relation to the taste represented by the conventions of legitimate theater. By the end of his third chapter, then, Jenkins is able to describe the problem which provides the impetus for his book in precise historical terms. The vaudeville aesthetic was as incompatible with the existing Hollywood aesthetic as it was with the conventions of respectable theater. As vaudeville talent was recruited for sound films, the question arose: how to negotiate the conflict between these competing cultural forms? Thus began a series of unstable compromises between Hollywood and vaudeville, as Jenkins demonstrates in his fascinating history of the production of Hollywood Party (MGM, 1934). Jenkins reads the various delays and reconceptualizations that characterize the development of Hollywood Party as attempts to solve the problem of integrating Hollywood narrative and vaudeville performance. This production history of Hollywood Party ‘reflects changing conceptions about the final product’s placement within a range of generic options open to filmmakers working in 1934’ (p. 127). In the next chapter, the most impressive of the book, Jenkins outlines the full range of subgeneric options within the comedian comedy genre: the revue film, the showcase film, the comic romance, the anarchistic comedy, and the affirmative comedy. Because Jenkins considers each subgenre as a strategy for dealing with the competing aesthetic discourses of vaudeville and Hollywood, his discussion of generic differences lacks the static quality which is typical of such studies. Indeed, the terms provided by his typography of early sound comedy enable Jenkins to propose an incredibly compressed yet persuasive analysis of the social and cultural logic underlying the ‘general movement toward increasing conformity to classical Hollywood norms’ (p. 152). The most interesting chapter of What Made Pistachio Nuts?, however, is Jenkins’s compelling survey of the career of Eddie Cantor, titled ‘“Shall We Make It for New York or for Distribution?” Eddie Cantor, Whoopee, and Regional Resistance to the Talkies’. Here Jenkins engages in very literal terms with the implications of his thesis ‘that anarchistic comedy emerged from the classical Hollywood cinema’s attempt to assimilate the vaudeville aesthetic’ (my emphasis). Jenkins shows that as Broadway acts were increasingly adapted for national screen distribution, a complex series of overdeterminations encouraged Cantor to consolidate a new audience by participating in his own ‘desemitization’. Non-metropolitan audiences would apparently buy the fundamentals of vaudeville performance, but not the ethnic character of its performers. In this chapter Jenkins brilliantly elaborates—and complicates—one of the historical tendencies he refers to in his introduction, ‘the process by which previous social

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connotations are stripped away, the prevailing ideological order is restored, and cultural respectability is reestablished’ (p. 20). Even with its limitations, then, What Made Pistachio Nuts? would be a valuable contribution to fields related to urbanism, ethnicity, film, and culture if it did nothing more than elaborate the argument Jenkins presents in this chapter (which, like several others in the book, has previously appeared in article form). Fortunately, Jenkins’s book does that and much more. I recommend it highly.

References Jenkins, Henry (1992) Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, New York: Routledge.

Understanding the contemporary museum: implications for Cultural Studies? Andrea Witcomb

Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1992) 232pp., ISBN 0–415–07031–7, £19.99 Pbk Traditionally, the study of museums, like museum work itself, has been inwardlooking and anti-theoretical, positing a divide between the practice of museology and academic, theoretical concerns. For a number of reasons this divide is now beginning to break down. Chief among these are the contemporary social, cultural and economic changes which are affecting the contexts within which museums operate. It is not unusual to find many traditional museologists voicing distress as to what is going on in museums—an increasing disrespect for the object, a government bureacracy which questions the value of museums to society and demands accountability, and incomprehension around the political critiques which are mounting against the representations found in museums. And often, the response is to focus even more strongly on collection-management issues—the ‘how to’ of running a museum— rather than to answer the critiques themselves. For Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, this type of reaction is politically naive and irresponsible, a reaction which will work against the future existence of museums. Her book, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, is in large part, a strategic response to this situation. It involves a recognition that museums are now operating in a vastly different context, a context which, if not understood, may indeed mean the end of the museum. The book is also an argument for the importance of breaking down the theory/practice divide, for using cultural theory within museology, a position which is slowly gaining ground as more cultural critics become interested in museums and a greater proportion of curators come into contact with cultural theory in their undergraduate and postgraduate training (see, for example, Lumley, 1988; Vergo, 1989; Karp and Levine, 1991). Her actual theoretical position is informed by the work of Michel Foucault, particularly his concept of the ‘épisteme’ and his notion of ‘effective’ history (Foucault, 1970, 1974). As she points out, the work of Foucault is particularly appropriate to the study of museums although this was one institution that he did not devote singular attention to. Nevertheless, his concept of the ‘disciplinary’ institution, his interest in archives and in the ways in which knowledge is shaped is particularly applicable to museums. Hooper-Greenhill begins her history of the different frameworks of knowledge within which museums have operated in the last six hundred years by positioning herself very strongly against a notion of history which searches for the origins of the present and in so doing glosses over differences and breaks. In refusing to essentialize

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the ‘museum’, Hooper-Greenhill is both signalling that she has problems with a museology which focuses on the ‘how’ of museums and is thus politically naive, as well as positioning herself as informed by recent cultural critiques. Hooper-Greenhill uses the notion of ‘effective’ history to argue against a stable meaning of museums. The book is a search for differences rather than origins or similarities between today’s museums and the private collections of families like the Medici in Florence, the princely cabinets of curiosity or the great public museums of the nineteenth century. Hooper-Greenhill analyses each type of collection within the schema of Foucault’s Renaissance, Classical and Modern épistemes. She points out the different rationales for collecting and display practices in each case, concentrating on the differences between them and thus problematizing the idea of a single museum identity. However, despite her intentions to focus on historical differences, HooperGreenhill cannot escape the traditional museological framework altogether. The object is the one characteristic which remains central to the activities of museums across all the rationales behind museum practices. This characteristic becomes allimportant at the end of her analysis when she attempts to retrieve the object and save it from simulation. She tries to do this by using the notion of ‘effective’ history as an argument for the preservation of a museum practice centered on objects, a practice which is threatened by contextualizing moves which involve photographic, film and electronic reproduction. She argues that if objects have been interpreted over time in radically different ways, according to different rationales, the potential of multiple meanings is as great as the potential for different rationales. Aware of arguments regarding simulations and hyper-reality in today’s mediatized world, Hooper-Greenhill is concerned to safeguard the existence of the object as a point of reference, lest museums lose what makes them distinctive. The question, for this reviewer, however, is whether museums can afford to remain object-oriented if they want to develop and maintain social and cultural relevance, for objects may not be a common point of reference in the future. It may well be that museums may not be able to escape the consequences of the increasing effect of simulations. If that is the case, the strategy then is to let go of the association of objects with museums and to develop new ways of commenting on society. This may well be to continue to move in the direction of networking the museum with other cultural practices, such as those characteristic of the media. Hooper-Greenhill’s interest in Foucault and the application of his work to museums is a strategic one, a response to the current crisis in museum identity. The increasing demand for public accountability from museums, although not unique to Britain, has led to a particularly conservative response from some quarters, a response which Hooper-Greenhill argues, will only help to bury the museum, rather than save it and rearticulate its practices to correspond with the new frameworks for knowledge, frameworks which arise out of changed cultural and economic circumstances due to developments in technology, changing practices of tourism and a new understanding of the consumer. It is in the light of these new frameworks that she ends her analysis with a short description of present museum practices which suggest that the museum is again undergoing a change in identity, a change similar in range to the epistemic changes from the Renaissance to the Classical épistemes and then to the Modern one. In this she explicitly takes up Foucault’s suggestion at the end of The Order of Things (1970) that the modern period, the ‘Age of Man’ is coming to an end and that something else is emerging. Hooper-Greenhill suggests that these changing museum practices are implicated in the epistemic changes we are presently living through. The

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recognition of these changes for what they are is thus important in the struggle to ensure that museums remain a viable institution in the future. Not to do so is to render museums extinct. What, if any, is the relevance of Hooper-Greenhill’s work for Cultural Studies? If we accept the argument for the strategic importance of recognizing difference over similarities, to provide a historical context and to refrain from models of causality (arguments which are also being put forward from within Cultural Studies), the answer must be in the strategic advantage these notions offer for developing critical frameworks which will maintain their political relevance. To take these notions up is to reorient our critical practice so that it is more in line with the emerging context, a reorientation which may involve leaving behind some of our most cherished notions, just as the wish to concentrate on collection management issues in museums may turn into a last act of defiance. Lawrence Grossberg, in We Gotta Get Out of this Place (1992), is particularly clear on the strategic importance of making these moves. As he puts it: How we imagine the future, how we conceptualize the possibilities open to us, depends upon how we interpret our present circumstances. Too many of the stories we are telling ourselves seem to lead nowhere or to some place we would rather not go. Only if we begin to reread our own moment can we begin to rearticulate our future. If you want to change the ending, you have to tell a different story. (p. 11) Acknowledging differences over similarities between the present and the past, without necessarily positing a ‘crisis’ or ‘break’ is an important step towards ‘telling different stories’. For Grossberg this involves letting go of conspiracy theories, causal models of explanation which bring everything back to an ‘evil’, fixed notion of the capitalist system, eurocentric notions of ‘culture’ as well as narratives which are based on an evolutionary time scale. This may well require us to be more modest in our claims for change. It does not mean that we cannot attempt to intervene strategically. This is the value of both Hooper-Greenhill’s work and those in Cultural Studies who are also involved in ‘effective’ history, in displacing similarities and continuities and focusing on differences in order to think strategically about the future.

References Foucault, Michel (1970) The Order of Things: an Archaeology of the Human Sciences, London: Tavistock. —— (1974) The Archaeology of Knowledge , London: Tavistock. Grossberg, Lawrence (1992) We Gotta Get Out of this Place—Popular Conserva tism and Postmodern Culture, New York: Routledge. Karp, Ivan and Levine, Steven D. (1991) editors, Exhibiting Cultures—The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, Washington: Smithsonian Institution. Lumley, Robert (1988) editor, The Museum Time Machine: Putting Cultures on Display, London: Routledge. Vergo, Peter (1989) editor, The New Museology, London: Reaktion Books.

We might get fooled again Jason Toynbee

Tony Bennett, Simon Frith, Lawrence Grossberg, John Shepherd, Graeme Turner (eds), Rock and Popular Music: Politics, Policies, Institutions (London: Routledge, 1993) 306pp. ISBN 0–415–06369–8 £12.99 Pbk, ISBN 0–415–06368– X £35.00 Hbk Krister Malm and Roger Wallis, Media Policy and Music Activity (London: Routledge, 1992) 271 pp. ISBN 0–415–05019–7 £11.99 Pbk, ISBN 0–415–05020– 0 £35.00 Hbk Suddenly two books on popular music and policy appear. In fact these volumes represent quite different research traditions. Rock and Popular Music is propelled by the recent ‘policy turn’ in cultural studies associated with, among others, editors Bennett and Frith. In Bennett’s case Foucault on self and government provides the theoretical frame. Recent work by Frith has been informed more by a pragmatic liberalism; he wants to douse the outdated subcultural ardour which he suspects still glows in the odd academic hearth (slippers, glass of rioja, ‘White Riot’ on the stereo?). In the eighties Frith was instrumental in bringing a new specificity to the study of popular music. Work in the previous decade had treated pop as a soundtrack to subculture. Frith and a handful of other writers like Dave Laing achieved a twofold advance. They showed that rock authenticity was a (renewable) cultural construct; an aesthetic, rather than an oppositional, strategy. At the same time they began to investigate the musical apparatus, examining the processes, institutions and technologies which spanned production and consumption. From this perspective the communality of rock was always already a marketing device. Musicians had to work through the prior commoditization of ‘their’ form. Yet, crucially, industry control seemed to be incomplete. On the one hand young musicians continued to call the aesthetic shots as genres and technologies proliferated. On the other the major record companies were finding it increasingly difficult to regulate markets and modes of distribution. This purview, where industry and art are entwined in a complex field of negotiation, now constitutes a dominant strand in popular music studies. The editors of Rock and Popular Music are keen to present such a position as revisionist though. The book is said to presage ‘new developments’. What is needed is ‘a rereading of the past and past scholarship’ (p. 4). It’s a little surprising, then, to find that some contributions carry a spirited, but in many ways quite traditional, critique of the political economy of the music industry.

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Opening the first section on ‘Government and Rock’ Frith discusses recent British local music initiatives. These had often begun life as musicians’ collectives or community arts projects, but during the eighties they tended to adopt a new rationale so as to attract funding. The big money was now in economic development—job creation through the cultural industries. In Sheffield the Council collaborated with established local bands in order to set up a recording complex. The goal here was a production facility which could compete nationally, and in the British context this meant supplying the global music market. In the end Frith is ambivalent about such rock interventionism. He sees local initiatives as components in ‘an international network of information and sound’ and a potential alternative to ‘the global leisure corporations’ (p. 23). But he also wonders whether state support for music will undermine ‘the meaning of rock—as an aggressively commercial music with an unpredictable cultural edge’ (p. 21). This second view is vigorously affirmed in Peter Wicke and John Shepherd’s piece on ‘Rock culture as state enterprise’ in the former GDR. Writing in sharply critical terms, they trace the development of East German rock policy from the early seventies to the late eighties. Over this period a para-statal Committee for Entertainment Arts organized music activity. Gigs and record releases were scheduled centrally, ticket prices set at a uniform level, musicians paid according to inflexible scales. Wicke and Shepherd argue that because music was isolated from the commercial imperatives of the market in this way the rock apparatus ‘eventually collapsed under the weight of its own cultural inertia’ (p. 35). Yet the writers offer little in the way of aesthetic evaluation in making this judgement. Instead they simply read off the political events of 1989 as an unequivocal indictment of the preceding cultural regime. Other contributors are less sanguine about the possibilities of the market. In an analysis of the English Canadian recording industry Will Straw points out that the advent of state subsidy for domestic recording during the eighties has coincided with a restructuring of the national industry. No longer vertically integrated, small-scale ‘independent’ companies are now reliant on the major multinationals for distribution, enabling the latter to tap ‘a national musical culture without investing funds or allocating resources’ (p. 60). The result has been an increasingly petrified local scene in which the independents have become repositories of back catalogue rather than recruiters of new talent. Marcus Breen is more upbeat about developments in Australia. He traces a dual-track policy (also evident in some of the other case studies) with both economic and cultural aims. Yet despite the setting-up of a national music day, and a few schemes offering music industry training, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that Australian rock policy has been marginal. The major record companies are standing off; sought-for corporate sponsorship remains limited. All this might suggest that government intervention at the level of origination is ineffectual. Indeed Frith proposes that policy-makers should turn to ‘issues of distribution and consumption’ (p. 23) rather than production. For as several contributors argue, mediated consumption of music on radio and television is now more important in economic terms than record buying. In a piece about French language music on Canadian radio, Line Grenier documents the unravelling of the traditional correspondence between record markets and radio audiences. It is the ‘song-unit’, however relayed, rather than a piece of plastic which is now the primary music industry product. Jody Berland has a more critical take on this question. She argues that radio’s ‘reconstruction of the music catalogue [as a] way of constructing its own identity’ (p. 106) misrepresents its distributive function. In this context the elaboration of FM formats in Canada (Middle Of the Road, Contemporary Hit Radio…) has

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actually produced greater homogeneity in programming. Regulation, intended to ensure diversity, has had little impact. Meanwhile the allocation of more licenses simply intensifies competition, further reducing the range of music played. It’s the commercial imperative behind this narrowing of FM formats which Graeme Turner exposes in his analysis of ‘the death of teen radio’ in Australia. Paradoxically the individual tailoring of station playlists through the use of market research rather than Top Forty charts has cut out certain styles. The new dominant Adult Oriented Rock format (‘classic’ tracks, particularly from the seventies) does not just deliver an older audience profile which attracts advertisers. It also keeps listeners through its sheer predictability. Because recognition is what counts, both ‘alternative’ sounds and the new Kylie Minogue record get excluded. All this is alarmingly familiar. The decline of public service media and the ‘opening up’ of the market seem to have hit innovation and diversity in broadcast music even harder than in other forms such as television drama or reportage. And if radio is now the pre-eminent mode of distribution for pop, then the pre-eminent media policy— deregulation—is having a much greater effect on what kind of music gets heard than any of the small-scale local music development schemes documented earlier in the book. The pessimistic thesis on pop and media policy is perhaps best summed up in Roger Wallis and Krister Malm’s chapter concerning the shift from public service monopoly to commercial reconcentration in European radio. They offer a convincing model of the whole process here, one drawn from their larger six-nation study, Media Policy and Music Activity. Whereas Rock and Popular Music deals only with advanced industrialized societies, the Malm and Wallis book takes in Jamaica, Trinidad, Kenya and Tanzania as well as Sweden and Wales. All six were included in their ground-breaking earlier work Big Sounds from Small Peoples (1984). As a result the new volume has a longitudinal dimension which gives it a deal more cogency than some of the rather utopian, and scantily researched, accounts of culture and globalization published recently. Big Sounds could be read as an enquiry into cultural imperialism. The authors’ heterodox (for the early eighties) conclusion was that developments in transnational flows of music, capital and technology had culminated in a relatively equitable ‘transculturation’ of music. Musicians in subaltern societies were able to draw on local traditions while adopting new technologies and reaching larger audiences through the mass media. Although this position is broadly maintained in Media Policy and Music Activity, several caveats are flagged. First a new technology gap has opened up between core and periphery. Undoubtedly the arrival of the easy to copy audio cassette in the mid-seventies was a mixed blessing for local musicians. ‘Pirate’ entrepreneurs, unburdened by first copy costs or royalty payments, effectively undercut local production, swamping the markets with Anglo-American repertoire on tape. In the eighties, though, the massive growth of the CD format has delivered a second blow. While capital intensive CD manufacturing and digital recording facilities are located largely in the North, so too are CD players. In this context the formation of the ‘world music’ genre does not represent global equidistance—a claim made by Kevin Robbins a couple of years ago—so much as a new twist in the articulation of imbalance. Malm and Wallis point to an increasingly common pattern whereby field recordings in poorer countries are made on portable digital equipment and then mixed and mastered on to CD for distribution in the industrialized world. Meanwhile, vinyl manufacturing plants and studios at the periphery are run down as some of this ‘domestic’ material trickles back from the centre on analogue

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formats or radio and TV transmissions. The crucial point which emerges from the careful empirical work in these pages is that, in the case of cultural production at least, globalization often means the destruction of local infrastructure. Given such a scenario the most obvious guardian of music culture might appear to be the domestic broadcasting system. Yet Malm and Wallis point to considerable difficulties here also. Deregulation is now hitting the Third World. The forces at work include pressure from financial institutions, ever widening satellite foot-prints and the increasing costs of state-run services. Strangely, in Jamaica the new commercial regional radio stations may be playing more local music than either the governmentowned Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation or its national competitor, RJR. Policy on Jamaican content is anyway quite contradictory. The Broadcasting Commission excludes music from its quota recommendations, reflecting middle-class concern about reggae’s ‘slack’ lyrics. What has kept national pop on the airwaves are relatively high levels of domestic record production and consumption built in the first place on the international success of reggae in the seventies. The abiding tone of Media Policy and Music Activity is melancholic. None of the policy initiatives described seems to have been very effective. But the problem is not just one of resisting market forces. It also has to do with how culture is conceived in the public sphere. From this angle Malm and Wallis’s formulation of ‘local music activity’ occurring at ‘the level of…the common man [sic] in society’ (p. 22) is surely reductive. The writers themselves describe how struggles to define commonality and locality are as fierce, notions of cultural value as hotly contested, in peripheral music cultures as at the core. In the industrialized world the central aesthetic argument in popular music over the last thirty years has been about the nature and validity of rock as an alternative voice to a posited mainstream. This opposition is not so much analagous to the local/global binary used by Malm and Wallis; genealogically speaking it comes first. It’s impossible to imagine academic discourse on popular music which is not organized, at whatever remove, by polemic from within rock itself—art over commerce, independence versus integration, indulgence against abstemiousness. To a much greater extent than other popular forms the aesthetics of rock are explicitly political and highly elaborated. One group of academic strategies for dealing with this can be ranged along a continuum: from cool deconstruction of terms (authenticity gets contextualized each time it rears its doltish head) to warm engagement (Malm and Wallis, for example, who identify locality with original creativity). In the final section of Rock and Popular Music, about politics, Lawrence Grossberg weighs in as a partisan, focusing on the recent neo-conservative assault on rock in America. Perhaps the most notorious example has been the campaign by the Parents’ Music Resource Centre to clean up rock lyrics. In explaining this repressive turn Grossberg looks to the historical formation of rock culture. While it ‘never renounced the normative passion for comfort and success’ (p. 202), rock did provide an alternative sense of space even as it celebrated ‘insecurity and instability’ (p. 203). Paradoxically, just at the moment of neo-conservative ascendancy, rock’s ‘ability to establish any place’ was broken in the ‘self-referential attack on rock’ launched by punk (p. 208). Circumscribed by a narcissistic logic rock ate its own entrails and settled down to postmodernism around 1980. In an account of how new Aboriginal music has managed to penetrate the Australian record industry Chris Lawe Davies repudiates Grossberg’s pessimism concerning the transgressive power of rock. Yet ultimately both writers agree on the

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potentiality of music-as-politics, no matter how historically or geographically contingent. Ross Harley, on the other hand, stands further back. He’s interested in the nexus between dance music, technology and tradition, and wants to debunk accounts of ‘either a postmodern dreamland or a machine-driven dystopia’ in contemporary music. Rather, the assembly of musical fragments in techno or rap ‘has followed the logic of the previous genres and histories they sample or emulate’ (p. 229). In an important sense Mavis Bayton works beyond this paradigm altogether. Her chapter documents the advent of a feminist music practice in the seventies. The women who became musicians during and after punk introduced a politics which was not just from outside rock—it was also explicitly anti-rock. In creating ‘an alternative musical world of their own’ feminists were able to ‘rewrite the rules’, and promote ‘collectivism and cooperation instead of competitive individualism’ (p. 179). Bayton is particularly illuminating on the aesthetic problems raised by this crush collision and the way they have intersected with developing contradictions in feminism at large. An ‘Afterword’ by Georgina Born brings up issues which it seems to me should be right at the centre of future research in popular music. The first is the question of power. As she points out ‘the basic conditions for…a cultural policy [are] a degree of economic well-being and of political strength and autonomy’ (p. 267). But what emerges time and again in the Malm and Wallis study is that these conditions are not met in poor countries. As Born suggests this political economic problematic represents a direct challenge to the ‘consumption orthodoxy’ in cultural studies where ‘any and all consumption [is] potentially an expression of resistance and autonomy’ (p. 271). In the case of marginal(ized) music cultures such a perspective seems particularly grotesque. But its inadequacy surely points to the need for a reconsideration of cultural production at a more general level. Born’s contribution joins a gathering tide in cultural studies moving towards a more critical, productivist stance. The big question now is how to synthesize this turn with the new politics of identity and difference. Can musical alterity be evaluated; when do rock musicians map a progressive sense of place; why do some people get a recording contract?

Notes on contributors

MARIA ANGEL lectures in writing and textual studies at the University of Western Sydney, Nepean. She is currently completing a dissertation on visual, forensic and pathological metaphors in literary criticism and philosophy…TONY BENNETT teaches at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia and was the founding director of the Centre for Cultural Policy…PHILIP BELL teaches in the School of Linguistics at Macquarie University, Australia…ABIGAIL BRAY teaches at Murdoch University. She has published on media representations of eating disorders and is completing a doctoral thesis on corporeal feminism…STEVE CHIBNALL is a Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK, and is currently researching readers and collectors of genre fiction…ANN CURTHOYS is Professor of History at the Australian National University, Canberra…DENISE CUTHBERT teaches literature, women’s studies and cultural studies at Monash University. She has published on early modern literature and culture, including a monograph on Andrew Marvell (Oxford University Press, 1993). In collaboration with Michele Grossman, she is researching a book on contested representations of indigeneity within contemporary Australian culture…JULIE DREW teaches English at the University of South Florida where she specializes in Rhetoric and Composition and Cultural Studies…RITA FELSKI taught at Murdoch University from 1987 to 1993 and is currently Professor of English at the University of Virginia. Her publications include Beyond Feminist Aesthetics and The Gender of Modernity, both published by Harvard University Press…RACHEL FENSHAM lectures in drama and theatre studies at Monash University. Her research interests include feminist and performance theory in relation to popular culture and performance practices…MICHELE GROSSMAN is a senior lecturer in the Department of Communication and Language Studies at Victoria University of Technology. From 1992 to 1994 she was co-editor (with Barbara Brook) of the Australian Women’s Book Review, and her work on women’s writing and cultural theory has appeared in Arena, Minnesota Review and The Age Monthly Review. In collaboration with Denise Cuthbert she is researching a book on contested representations of indigeneity within contemporary Australian culture…BARRY HOWELL is in the graduate program for Cultural Studies at the University of Pittsburg, Pennsylvania…LESLEY JOHNSON is Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research) and Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney. She has published widely in the fields of cultural studies and gender studies. Her books include The Unseen Voice: A Study of Early Australian Radio and The Modern Girl: Girlhood and Growing Up…SUVENDRINI PERERA, who teaches in the School of English at La Trobe University, is author of Reaches of Empire (Columbia University Press, 1991) and editor of Asian and Pacific Inscriptions: Identities/Ethnicities/Nationalities (Hyland House, 1995). She is currently writing

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Asia for the Australians: ‘Asia’ and the Reorganization of Australian National Desires… KEN RUTHVEN is a Professor in the English Department of the University of Melbourne, Australia…ZOË SOFIA (SOFOULIS) is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies and Women’s Studies at the University of Western Sydney, Nepean. She has published Whose Second Self? (Deakin University Press) on gender and irrationality in computer culture, and is currently working with Virginia Barratt on a study of women electronic artists…JOHN O.THOMPSON has taught Communication Studies at the University of Liverpool and served as Course Tutor on the British Film Institute/ Birbeck College, University of London’s MA in Cinema and Television Studies… JASON TOYNBEE teaches Communication Studies at Coventry University, Coventry, UK…. ANDREA WITCOMB teaches in the School of Humanities at Central Queensland University

Call for Papers

‘More than Cool Reason’: Black Responses to Enslavement, Exile and Resettlement The Institute of Early American History and Culture and the American Studies Program at the University of Haifa will hold a conference at the University of Haifa in 1998 on the values and ideas of enslaved Africans and their descendants during the period of the forced dispersion of Africans which began in the mid-sixteenth century and the establishment of a black diaspora. The meeting will focus on transformations in black perceptions of self and society in response to enslavement, exile and resettlement. Scholars in all disciplines, including European, African and Latin American history, anthropology, literature and cultural studies, are invited to submit proposals describing the substance of their subject. Submissions of between ten and twelve pages in the English language and accompanied by a short CV should be sent to Ronald Hoffman, Director, Institute of Early American History and Culture, PO Box 8781, Williamsburg, VA 23187–8781, by 1 February 1997. The Institute intends to create a publication based on the papers presented at the conference. For further information, contact Ronald Hoffman, Tel. (804) 221–1133, Fax (804) 221–1047, email [email protected].

Call for Papers and Contributions for a Special Issue on The Institutionalization of Cultural Studies The editors propose an issue of Cultural Studies on the question of the institutionalization of cultural studies in the academy. It is obvious that many colleges and universities, journals and publishers are moving, in a variety of ways, to locate themselves within the field of cultural studies. A number of universities already have programs in cultural studies and even more are either just beginning or in the planning stage, although these vary widely. Some have curricular responsibilities at either the undergraduate or graduate level; some offer majors and degrees, while others function as interdisciplinary supplements to existing degree programs. Some are purely involved in encouraging and supporting interdisciplinary activities and scholarship. The status of these programs, as well as their official designation, varies widely. Some are funded by their home institutions while others have received foundation grants to support their activities. Finally,

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different programs, although united in their commitment to cultural studies, define cultural studies very differently, some narrowly and others more broadly. We would like this issue to serve two distinct but related functions: first, as a source of information about existing or planned programs; and second, as a forum for discussions about different strategies for institutionalizing cultural studies and the significance of different strategies for the project of cultural studies itself. We are particularly concerned that this issue be as international as possible. We invite people involved in any existing or planned program in cultural studies, to submit a description of the program. This description should include such things as: the operating definition of cultural studies; the range of activities and responsibilities; institutional forms and powers; sources of funding; a brief history; participating departments and/or faculty; contact address; etc. We will publish these as a resource, both to help create an international network of cultural studies programs, and as a guide for others hoping to create such programs. If your own institution has such a program or is planning such a program, we would appreciate hearing from you. If you know of other institutions which should be included, please pass this call on to them or contact us and we will send them a copy. We will endeavor to update this list on a regular basis. Furthermore, we invite interested people to submit essays on the challenges and dangers of institutionalization for cultural studies. We are hoping that the issue of the journal can address a wide range of viewpoints, including different expectations, attempts, and experiences with institutionalizing cultural studies. Such essays might reflect on the history of the formation of specific programs, or on the politics of specific forms and strategies of institutionalization, or they might address more general themes of interest to cultural studies scholars. Deadline for submissions: January 1997.

Call for Papers ‘The Colour of Money’ We are planning a special issue of Cultural Studies on the significance and meaning of money at the end of the century. There are many possible ways in which this theme can be explored. Most obviously, there is the intensifying commodification of the world, and the merging of economic and symbolic forms. Alternatively, there would be an opportunity to think through conceptually an appropriate ‘philosophy of money’ for late modernity, referring back to the classics of Marx and Simmel. But more low-key investigations would be well received too: the cultural significance of financial institutions in everyday life; the psychic dynamics of credit and debts; the arrival of electronic money; the social imaginary of the lottery; the histories of banknotes, coins and counterfeiting; the revival of systems of barter; the globalization of currencies; junk bonds…. These themes are broad. Short, lively, unusual contributions which open up the conventional purviews of cultural studies itself will be especially welcome. Manuscripts should be sent to Bill Schwarz, guest-editor of the special issue. Address submissions: Bill Schwarz, Department of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths University of London, New Cross, London SE14 6NW, UK. Deadline for submissions: 15 December, 1997.

Other journals in the field of cultural studies

There has been a rapid increase in the number of journals operating both in the field of cultural studies and in overlapping areas of interest. Cultural Studies wants to keep its readers informed of the work being done by these journals. After all, cultural studies is a collective project. disClosure: Journal of Social Theory (c/o Department of Philosophy, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506–0027, USA; Internet e-mail: [email protected]; phone (606) 257 6035). Issue Five: REASON INCorporated. Part One: Nonreflective rationality and Cyborg body politics: Becoming skilled in doing what’s appropriate: the nonreflective rationality of ethical expertise, An Interview with Hubert Dreyfus, Isaac Newton died a virgin, poetry by Michael Caulfield; plastic heart, black box, iron cage: instrument rationality and the Artificial Heart Experiment, essay by Thomas Strong; Representing bounded bodies, review essay by Susan Mains. Part Two: ‘As if the world were split in two’: Contesting dualisms: The end of killing, the law of the Mother, and the non-exclusionary Other, essay by Dianne Rothleder; Reconceptualizing masculinity, review essay by Christine James; The faggot’s claim to name, or deconstructing the breeding game, poetry by Beth Harris; The represented and the ‘real’: Economy, postmodernity and postOrientalist research, an interview with Timothy Mitchell. Part Three: Saving rationality by listening to its critics? Method as the embodiment of reason, essay by Bryan Crable; Cultch, poetry by Carol Denson; Theory and rationality: extending the Foucault/Habermas debate, review essay by Arnold Farr; Cultural theory and intellectual politics, interview with Russel Berman. Post script: I was just getting started when, poetry by Michael Caulfield. Issue Six: reVisioning Justice. Recent convergences in popular and academic discussions of legality and the legal system reveal numerous contradictions in current views of justice. What kinds of rationality are called for in the reconstruction of justice? What are the politics, representations, economy or scale of different conceptions of justice? Are ‘human rights’ a European export? How are they related to local practices? How are different forms of justice inscribed or tattooed on the body’s surface through disciplinary and other practices? How is justice constructed in regard to racial, gender, age, and other social categories? Our next issue will address these questions and others posed by contributors and interviewers. Announcing CULTSTUD-L: a listserv devoted to cultural studies. This is an unmoderated list that aims to provide a forum for a wide discussion of current issues in cultural studies. It is also meant as a place to post relevant calls for

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papers, syllabi, conference information and announcements of cultural-studies-related publications. To subscribe, send an e-mail message to [email protected] in which the body of the message consists of: subscribe CULTSTUD-L For further information about the list, write to Gil Rodman at either [email protected] or [email protected]—or visit the list’s website: http://www.cas.usf.edu/communication/rodman/cultstud/index.html

INDEX VOLUME 10

Articles Ien Ang and Jon Stratton A cultural studies without guarantees: Response to Kuan-Hsing Chen 71 Ien Ang and Jon Stratton Asianing Australia: Notes towards a critical transnationalism in cultural studies 16 Maria Angel and Zoë Sofia Cooking up: intestinal economies 456 James Barrett World music, nation and postcolonialism 237 Tony Bennett Out in the Open: Reflections on the history and practice of cultural studies 133 Abigail Bray The anorexic body: reading disorders 410 Nick Couldry Speaking about others and speaking personally: reflections after Elspeth Probyn’s Sexing the Self 315 Kuan-Hsing Chen Not yet the postcolonial era: The (super) nation-state and transnationalism of cultural studies: Response to Ang and Stratton 37 Rita Felski and Zoë Sofia Australian Feminisms: Introduction viii Rachel Fensham Transvestophilia and gynemimesis: performative strategies and feminist theory 473 Christine Geraghty Reflections on history in teaching cultural studies 345 Michele Grossman and Denise Cuthbert Body shopping: maternity and alterity in Mamatoto 426 Stuart Hall Response to Saba Mahmood 12 Roxy Harris Openings, absences and omissions: aspects of the treatment of ‘race’, culture and ethnicity in British cultural studies 334 Lesley Johnson ‘As housewives we are worms’: women, modernity and the home question 443 Dona Kolar-Panov Video and the disaporic imagination of selfhood: a case study of the Croatians in Australia 288 Henry Krips Quantum mechanics and the postmodern in one country 78 Smadar Lavie and Ted Swedenburg Between and among the boundaries of culture: Bridging text and lived experience in the Third Timespace 154 John Lyne Quantum mechanics, consistency, and the art rhetoric: Response to Krips 115 Angela McRobbie and David Morley Markets, Margins and Migrants: Introduction 180 Saba Mahmood Cultural Studies and ethnic absolutism: Comments on Stuart Hall’s ‘Culture, community, nation’ 1 Richard Maxwell Ethics and identity in global market research 218

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Suvendrini Perera Claiming Truganini: Australian national narratives in the year of indigenous peoples 393 391 Kevin Robins and David Morley Almanci, Yabanci 248 Zafer Senocak War and peace in modernity: reflections on the German-Turkish future (1994) 255 Gareth Stanton Military Rock: a mis-anthropology 270 Bin Zhao and Graham Murdock Young pioneers: children and the making of Chinese Consumerism 201

Commentary Saba Mahmood

Response to Stuart Hall 493

Review article Rita Felski

Modern girls 486

Reviews Alev Adil Feminist contentions 354 Philip Bell There’s a raft of norms at stake in the media’, Jason 496 Tony Bennett Playing the game of culture 529 Steve Chibnall Chucky’s children 537 Jim Cook Problems of perspective 180 Ann Curthoys ‘White, male and middle class’ 505 Julie Drew Re-visioning the classroom: agency and possibility in Giroux’s ‘Living Dangerously’ 525 John Fiske Down under cultural studies 369 Rosalind Gill Rebel radio? 357 Jane Goodall Big pictures 365 Desmond Hesmondhalgh Soundscape 360 Barry Howell Re-viewing the gaze 508 David Leviatin Look and listen, see and hear: books that show and tell in the age of interactive multimedia 513 Jim McGuigan Cultural policy studies or how to be useful and critical 185 Toby Miller The sound of Australian cultural studies 363 K.K.Ruthven Boundary riders of the new literary studies 501 John O.Thompson How ads work (they don’t) 542 Jason Toynbee We might get fooled again 555 Andrea Witcomb Understanding the contemporary museum: implications for Cultural Studies? 551 Joel Woller Stop the show! 547