School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemDiscourses of affinity in the reading communities of Geoffrey Chaucer(Ohio State University Press, 1999)
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ItemWinner and waster(Garland, 1998)
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Item"Evil will walk once more": phantasmagoria - the stalker film as interactive movie?(New York University Press, 1999)Two distinct tales of horror. Two heroines. Two psycho-killers. Two small-town communities. In the first story, the horror begins when a deranged murderer (possibly also the bogeyman himself) interrupts the peace of a small town. Lurking in the shadows, he emerges only to butcher a stream of unsuspecting young victims. At the end of the tale, the story's victimized and only surviving character, Laurie, rises to status of hero as she confronts the "bogeyman" head-on. Trapped in a house with him, her life balancing on a fine line, she has no option but to bring him out in the open and lure him to his own destruction. In the second story, the horror emerges when the heroine-to-be's husband develops psychotic, serial killer tendencies. The peace of their idyllic home and community is shattered and the psycho-killer's victim list builds up. Then Adrienne, the killer's wife, is left with no other option: she must engage him in final battle and, likewise, set him up for his own bloody annihilation. Two defeated psycho-killers. Two female victors.
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ItemDocumentary meanings and interpretive contexts: observations on Indian 'repertoires'(Arnold, 1998)My main concern in this chapter is to elaborate on a particular aspect of a larger project examining the interpretation of environmental documentaries by audiences in India and Britain, the empirical part of which was designed to illustrate/substantiate theoretical interventions aiming to rectify a perceived lacuna in the attempts in communication research to make a connection between the socially culturally situated audiences and their interpretive practices. In this chapter, I isolate for closer inspection a specific strand from the web of data, with the intention of demonstrating both the presence of different interpretive repertoires in India, as well as the role of higher education as a relevant factor in the creation of these repertoires. This chapter examines the possible links between cultural contexts and the reception of documentaries, and interrogates en route the idea of culture as context. What is postulated here is a conceptualization of context based on phenomenological hermeneutics, which it is argued, accommodates the complexity and diversity of collectivities within 'national cultures'.
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ItemIntroduction(Cambridge University Press, 1997)As a collection of British colonies and then a nation, Australia came into existence as a product of both colonialism and modernity; proud of its fancied youth and eager for the fruits of civilisation, enamoured with progress yet yearning for tradition. Historical accounts of Australia have equally been products of colonialism and modernity. More often than not, the mission of history has been to remember the triumph of colonising a continent and forming a modern nation state with destiny on its side. While the historical legacies of colonialism and modernity remain palpable, many of the dreams of colonialism and modernity lie in ruins. This is a book from these 'ruins' in the sense that it discusses both the colonial past of former colonies and the colonising of indigenous people in Australia. But ruins are never simply gone or in the past; ruins are enduring traces; spaces of romantic fancies and forgetfulness where social memories imagine the persistence of time in records of destruction. Thus this book is about the past in the present, it is written from within contemporary cultures of history. It moves from Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal accounts of Captain Cook, jumps to the installation of history in museums and school curricula, glides through the historiography of archetypal historical events. This is a book with strong hopes for history and social memory. My interest is not in hammering home the constructedness of history, nor in the important task of diversifying and proliferating accounts of neglected historical actors but in thinking historically about existing social memory. It is a gesture towards learning to inhabit landscapes of memory which are, in part, landscapes littered with ruins; some archaic and others nightmarish, some quaint simulations and others desperate echoes. I imagine such a landscape of memories not as homeless place for lost souls but a ground from which new flights of historical imagination might depart and to which they might return, differently.
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ItemThe flapper's ontological ambivalence: prosthetic visualities, the feminine and modernity(Department of History, University of Melbourne, 1997)In this article, I want to discuss modernity's particular scopic conditions through the concept of prosthetic visualities – or vision extended through industrialised and popularised communication technologies – and their cultural attachment to the feminine. While these visual forms were characteristic of the shared experiences of modernity throughout Western nations, through both its modes of production and modes of self-representation, I focus on the particular meanings these assumed in Australia – for example with its anxieties about national boundaries projected onto the feminine – while retaining a view of modernity's common perceptual field. I hope to set out the possible relationship of women to the visual conditions as mobile spectacles and as subjects who acted through appearing. My argument is that appearing was constructed as a subject position for some women, particularly young, white women, through the conditions of their visibility in modernity.
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ItemThe postcolonial uncanny: on reconciliation, (dis)possesion and ghost stories(Melbourne University Publishing, 1998)It is time to introduce the concept of the ‘uncanny’ and to say something about its value in relation to postcolonial Australia. This concept comes into modern thinking through Sigmund Freud’s influential essay, ‘The “Uncanny”’, an essay published in 1919, four years after Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Freud’s primary concern is certainly with the psyche, but the essay is also about one’s sense of place in a modern, changing environment, and it attends to anxieties which are symptomatic of an ongoing process of realignment in the post-war modern world. In brief, Freud elaborates the ‘uncanny’ by way of two German words whose meanings, which at first seem diametrically opposed, in fact circulate through each other. These two words are: heimlich, which Freud glosses as ‘home’, a familiar or accessible place; and unheimlich, which is unfamiliar, strange, inaccessible, unhomely. An ‘uncanny’ experience may occur when one’s home is rendered, somehow and in some sense, unfamiliar; one has the experience, in other words, of being in place and ‘out of place’ simultaneously. This simultaneity is important to stress since, in Freud’s terms, it is not simply the unfamiliar in itself which generates the anxiety of the uncanny; it is specifically the combination of the familiar and the unfamiliar—the way the one seems always to inhabit the other. In postcolonial Australia, and in particular after the Mabo decision in 1992, Freud’s ‘uncanny’ might well be applied directly to those emergent (that is, yet-to-be established) procedures for determining rights over land. In this moment of decolonisation, what is ‘ours’ is also potentially, or even always already, ‘theirs’: the one is becoming the other, the familiar is becoming strange.
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ItemCrying in public places: neoconservatism and victim panic(Random House, 1997)Being a self-professed feminist heretic is big business these days. It’s certainly where the kudos is in mainstream journalistic writing about feminism. As the successes of writers such as Helen Garner and Katie Roiphe have shown, it’s possible to maintain a strong media presence through attacking feminisms. So formulaic has the business become, that lately, touching base with feminist commentators in the media has been like listening to a bad commercial radio station. You keep hearing the same old song over and over again, like a ‘classic rock’ hit from the seventies, repeated ad nauseam. It’s either a tune about ‘victim feminism’ or ‘puritan feminism’, and it’s played mainly by feminists who were around then. Beatrice Faust, for example, calls ‘victim feminism’ ‘wimp feminism’, and says: ‘Wimp victims believe that they will be victims for the rest of their lives’, and that it is ‘revolutionary feminism gone to seed’. Susan Mitchell asks ‘was it for this that feminists had fought so hard’, lamenting what she sees as the new scourge of ‘victimhood’ among young feminists on campus. Bettina Arndt worries that sexual harassment legislation and amendments to the Victorian Domestic Violence Act potentially usher in a new era of punitiveness and retribution by feminist ideologues with a victim mentality and a taste for ‘vengeance’. Helen Garner speaks of ‘this determination to cling to victimhood at any cost, which seems to have become the loudest voice of feminism today’.
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ItemKate Fischer, John Howard and shrinking voices in the field of social action(School of English, La Trobe University, 1997)At a public forum hosted by Derryn Hinch for Channel 9, I found myself inadvertently wrestling with Kate Fischer over the role of the public intellectual. Kate was part of a panel which included Sam Newman and the Cappers, called in and dressed up to discuss 'The Battle of the Sexes' with a studio audience, amongst whom were seated various advocates for the feminist and men's movements.