School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemHow to do things with sadness : from ontology to ethics in Derrida(University of Melbourne, 2010)
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ItemWays of listening : dramaturgy as deep mapping in intercultural-Indigenous performance(University of Melbourne, 2010)
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ItemThe mediatization of Malcolm X( 2010)In the aftermath of the end of Cold War, the ideological restructuring that took place fundamentally affected the representation of one of the African American public figures of the 1970’s that was portrayed as deviant by the media and yet up that until that enjoyed time relative obscurity: Malcolm X. After the Spike Lee biopic, interest in his figure was rekindled albeit in an entirely new direction after the Watts Riots of 1992. Due to this shift, a cultural commodification of his figure undermined the subversiveness of his message and two decades later, there is still need for an extensive discussion to re-conceptualize the subtle reinforcement of hegemonic structures in the mediatization process and address the political context in the commodification of Malcolm X. In that vein. this article applies the notion of mediatization of the figure of Malcolm X on film and television as analyzed through the lens of cultural commodification.
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ItemHollywood Holidays: case studies of global film tourism sites and their ideological impacts( 2011)This thesis presents a study of film tourism through considering the emergence of the film tourist and of film tourist sites in the mid twentieth century in California. The thesis traces the development of the phenomenon globally over the century and into the new millennium. This area is now a vibrant field of research in tourism studies and my own focus for the thesis is on the concept of the film tourist gaze as it is enunciated in the work of John Urry and others. This study explores the rise of film tourism and its impacts, through a cinema-culture conduit: both studio-created tourism and locations-based travel. I investigate the real impacts of film spectatorship upon local ecologies, and national branding campaigns on national cinemas. I argue that film tourism sites, through acts of “real-life” visitation after a screening experience, enhance the ideological messages contained in originating film texts through the tourist’s repetition of the film’s core narrative and themes at film sites. The practice of film tourism materialises the ideological fantasies contained within the cinema form, yielding interesting insights into the motivations of the film tourist. In each chapter, both the narrative of the individual film(s) and the tourist space itself are interrogated for their prevailing ideologies. The capitalist modes of consumption and production and the fetishisation of loss that the locations invoke, are revealed. From an analysis of five case studies – including three location-based case studies and two studio-based – I map out a constellation of cinematic cultural sites that are crucial to understanding the development of the contemporary film tourist gaze. I consider how film tourism has the power to convey negative stereotypes and damaging images about place/race onto locations that are destinations in the second last chapter and in the last chapter, I examine how national cinemas may become susceptible to tourism sector policy shifts as the economic benefits of film tourism become globally recognised. I show how this has the potential to impact upon the types of films and narratives that are selected and utilised by national cinemas for film tourism campaigns.
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ItemForeign correspondents and fixers: an investigation of teamwork in international television newsgathering( 2011)This thesis considers the relationship between television foreign correspondents and their locally-hired 'fixers' in order to ascertain the centrality and significance of this relationship in facilitating international news production. The design of this research project, with its emphasis on news production practice, was guided by scholars in the sociology of news tradition, such as Jeremy Tunstall, Michael Schudson, Stephen Reese, Pamela Shoemaker and Simon Cottle. The main research question asks to what extent, and how, is the relationship between the correspondent and the fixer important to newsgathering? Drawing on the theories of Pierre Bourdieu concerning the journalistic field and the acquisition of cultural capital, this research demonstrates how fixers possess vital stores of capital which foreign correspondents borrow in order to be successful in the field. This thesis explores in depth how the players work in tandem to overcome the difficulties posed by multi-skilling, parachuting, instant live reporting, and the 24-hour news cycle. Current newsgathering practice in Iraq is investigated as a case study, which reveals the difficulties of reporting from this dateline and reflects on how the level of danger has changed the nature of the correspondent-fixer relationship. Within this relationship, where a correspondent has the ultimate power to hire and fire, a fixer nonetheless brings significant influence to bear on story generation and story coverage. But does this influence bring into the Western news agenda stories that genuinely reflect localised, indigenous viewpoints? Or, in this globalised world, are fixers simply 'People Like Us' (PLU), who have absorbed Western news values and will reinforce them through the stories that they propose? In other words, are correspondents likely to gain an insight into localised communities and their problems that they might not otherwise have understood, or will they have their own views and presumptions reflected back at them? This thesis examines what the use of fixers reveals about the political economy of news and the changing context of international news production. It asks whether the growing importance of fixers in newsgathering reflects a move by media companies to eventually outsource international newsgathering to local employees. This thesis employs a qualitative methodological approach involving semi-structured interviews with foreign correspondents and fixers to explore their modus operandi and to investigate the building of overseas news teams.
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ItemPositive images: gay men and HIV/AIDS in the culture of 'post-crisis' (c.1996-)( 2011)Since HIV/AIDS entered public consciousness as `GRID' (Gay Related Immune Deficiency) in 1981, an epidemic of media representations have shaped the social processes and semantics underlying all aspects of the pandemic, including conceptions of risk, identity and sexuality. Spectacularized images of gay male bodies, lifestyles and identities dominated early imaginings of the disease in the global north, constructing HIV/AIDS as constitutive of, or as an effect of, male homosexuality itself. In the intervening thirty years there have been multiple and significant transformations in the knowledge, management, and demographics of the pandemic. `Epidemic' has become `global pandemic', and the actual and perceived AIDS crisis zones have shifted from the communities of gay men, IV drug users and other minorities in the west to large parts of the `developing world'. For those of us living in parts of the world with the privilege of access to treatment, the advent of antiretroviral therapies (c.1996) and other HIV management strategies have heralded significant changes to the cultural profile of the disease, shifting its status from almost definitely terminal `AIDS' to chronic manageable `HIV'. This thesis analyzes the changing cultural politics of popular representations of gay men and HIV/AIDS in this changed cultural landscape of `post-crisis'. The term `post crisis' emerged in the fields of HIV/AIDS social research and health promotion where it has been used as a general description of the altered conditions of HIV/AIDS among western gay men. In this thesis, I develop this term as part of a descriptive, periodizing and theoretical framework with which to historicize the transformed landscape of representations of gay men and HIV/AIDS that has emerged since the advent of antiretrovirals, and to highlight specific changing logics of representation. Using a range of Anglo-American texts as case studies, I argue that the discourses of this latter historical moment of post-crisis are underwritten by a 'bi-polar' cultural logic, in which both male homosexuality and HIV vacillate between the extraordinary and the mundane. This is a historically conditioned dialectic that has evolved from the legacy of the phobic discourses of AIDS crisis (`crisis discourse') alongside transformations in the cultural profile of HIV. Each chapter examines this dialectic in case studies selected to illustrate a range of its manifestations and implications. The first of these is the context of expanded images of gay men in American popular culture of `the Gay 90s' - specifically the Hollywood gay man/straight woman buddy comedy - where a disavowal of crisis discourse is at work in the production of the `New Gay Man'. In this instance, a domesticated gayness is produced through a ritual disavowal and spectacularized objectification of repositories of AIDS signification_ I then examine Queer as Folk, which dramatizes this unresolvable post-crisis tension between spectacularized otherness and normativity together within the body of the PLWHA. A case of Australian media sex panic around barebacking and reckless infection is then used to identify an emphatic, albeit recalibrated revivification of crisis discourse and a series of paradoxes produced in the tension generated by the dialectic of crisis/post-crisis. Finally, I consider the ambivalent production of `AIDS heritage' as a post-crisis memory practice that is also conditioned by this historically conditioned dialectic. These case studies are organized roughly chronologically as a means of historicizing this trajectory `out of' the spectacular moment of `crisis' toward a quotidian, normative `post'. However, all of these case studies illustrate an ambivalent and unresolved reckoning with the immediate legacy of AIDS crisis discourses, which may either be unsuccessfully disavowed or spectacularly revivified, and which vie for representational supremacy with images of gay men and HIV that are normal, normative, quotidian, mundane or invisible.
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ItemThe art school and the university: research, knowledge, and creative practices( 2011)This thesis tracks changes in ‘research’ and ‘knowledge’ emerging from the incorporation of the art school into the university through the end of the 20th century. Identifying the need for historicised accounts of these contemporary institutions, the thesis synthesises the historical transformation of i) the modern university; ii) the art academy; and iii) the genre of the Ph.D. thesis that holds disciplinary knowledge in the arts and sciences through the 19th and 20th centuries. A key finding of this investigation is that these institutional forms have been revised according to different philosophical bases at different times, which is particularly evident in the substitution of science and natural philosophy for theology as the secular organising principle for the modern university. This displacement, which is also a repetition of its Christian heritage, begins in Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, finally dominating higher research study by the 20th century. The investigation also finds that while studio art education has aspired to the status of liberal knowledge since at least the 15th century, its role as a university discipline remains conflicted, lacking a widely-held shared rationale for its modes of research that are nevertheless spreading rapidly through the provision of practice-based doctorates. The thesis argues that as with other new disciplines to the university, it will be through elaboration of a discipline-specific discourse drawn from the field itself that sustains its institutional acceptance, rather than the simple borrowing of other research definitions from other knowledge paradigms. Based on these findings, the final chapters of the thesis use scholarship in the history and philosophy of science to critique the Protestant-dominated moral economies embedded in scientific research paradigms that influence academic justifications for practice based research, with attention to postcolonial and feminist analyses of constitutive subjectivities underpinning these paradigms. The thesis then uses the work of Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler on archives of knowledge to elaborate a process of performative individuation in relation to material ‘bodies of knowledge’, arguing that such a process differs from idealist scientific relationships to constative knowledge, and that this offers a more appropriate paradigm for considering the contributions to knowledge of the visual arts. Drawing upon Derrida’s account of the ‘university without condition’ (2002) and Spivak’s account of humanities learning, the thesis argues that the critical culture of ‘singularisation’ customary to the visual arts can productively address current transformations in the mission and operations of the university. A short postscript considers the implications of this argument for academic policies governing practice-led doctoral qualifications.
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ItemEvolving multilingualisms in poetry: third culture as a window on multilingual poetic praxis( 2011)In this thesis, I compare the understanding and construction of multilingualism across linguistics, cultural studies and literature in an effort to interrogate the popular notion that multilingual individuals – and creative writers in particular – are conflicted and fragmented as a result of their multilingualism. I locate the source of that assumption in the monolingual bias that arose when Western European thinkers adopted the idea that nations should be built around and defined by language. I then trace its development and influence on attitudes towards multilingualism and multilingual expression across disciplines to the present day. In particular, I examine the work of contemporaneous multilingual writers and assess how their work is both shaped by and resists these developing popular and academic conceptions of multilingualism. I identify three distinct types of multilingual writers in the process, who I refer to as traditional multilingual poets, cross culture polyglot poets and third culture polyglot poets. The first write in only one language at a time and do not mix codes, the second combine two languages usually connected through a history of colonialism, switching between them in the body of a single poem, and the third weave three or more languages that may or may not have any colonial history into poetry that is meant to be performed rather than read. I argue that polyglot poetry, particularly third culture poetry, as it is marked by a lack of conflict between the languages, represents a challenge to the dominant monolingual perception of multilingualism. Polyglot poetry reframes the idea of the fractured multilingual as a multifaceted one, with each identity and language representing not a shattered fragment but a new dimension. Creating polyglot poetry, then, is a political act in that it takes a dominant, sometimes colonizing, language, claims ownership of it, and then infuses it with the music of the Other. Rather than see their multifaceted identities as a hindrance to national belonging, I argue that polyglot poets represent a large number of people around the world – multilinguals all – whose identities exist harmoniously across multiple languages and national affiliations. This thesis puts forward a new framework for studying the movement of multilinguals between their languages, and specifically provides a new language for studying highly activated multilinguals.
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ItemBitter brothers: representations of the male misanthrope in the films of Joel and Ethan Coen( 2011)This thesis will explore representations of the male misanthrope in the films of Joel and Ethan Coen. Drawing on theories such as Sigmund Freud’s notion of ‘The Uncanny’ and Thomas Schatz’s commentary on integration and order genre tropes in Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System, this thesis will explore how the recurrent figure of the male misanthrope serves a critical function in the films of Joel and Ethan Coen. This character type, it will be argued, is used by the Coen brothers to comment upon the nature of masculinity in their narratives, which is universally bitter. It will be put forward that this character emerges from and distinguishes the Coen brothers’ bending and fusing of these conventions of genre that Schatz establishes, across their filmography. It will be argued that the male misanthrope is a consistent and prominent but overlooked character type in the Coens’ cinematic oeuvre. Far from being a stable character though, this thesis will argue that the male misanthrope appears in multiple forms. In the films selected for analysis here, the male misanthrope appears as five character types: the failed lover; the outlaw/flâneur; the authoritarian; the sidekick; and the intellect. Importantly, these representations of the male misanthrope, it will be argued, are socially detached figures. By the same token, these characters could also be described as embodying what Freud calls the uncanny, that is simultaneously “unheimlich” and “heimlich”, or “unhomely” and “homely” (1919). This aspect of the uncanny situates the filmmaking of the Coens as belonging to ‘familiar’ established cinematic codes and conventions while simultaneously taking leave from – or ‘unfamiliarly’ shifting away from – these familiar structures and functions in order to construct their representations of the male misanthrope. They are characters that are created from and emerge out of the fusion of these traditionally opposed genre structures identified by Schatz. The Coen brothers develop these characters in a way that allows each one to resemble ‘everyday life’ figures, such as: the broken hearted; the detached criminal; the egotistical boss; the loyal but annoying friend; and the intellectual. Representations of these seemingly ‘natural’ character types, however, are compromised by the Coens’ non-naturalistic, caricatured approach to genre, narrativity and characterisation. The Coens’ fusing of genre tropes identified by Schatz works to detach the viewer from the Coen brothers’ narratives while suturing the audience into the familiar style that could be more broadly referred to as ‘Coenesque’. The cinema of Joel and Ethan Coen, thus, emerges as a bitter, masculine, cut off world of failed lovers, outlaw/flâneurs, authoritarians, sidekicks and intellects. Their films, however, employ such character types to bend traditional notions of genre as a way of commenting upon masculinity as something that is inherently bitter and subject to change.
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ItemThere's no 'I' in Ms: from resistance to metramorphosis in women's lyric poetry and domestic animals( 2011)The critical component of this thesis suggests new approaches to the lyric ‘I’ which avoid reading the ‘I’ as the poet while finding a way to account for the form’s intimacy. This is achieved by applying concepts drawn from psychoanalytic theory to readings of several sub-genres of lyric poems written by women. The first chapter considers how Freud’s idea of psychoanalytic ‘resistance’ can be applied to readings of women’s Ars Poetica. It argues that recognising how the ‘I’ resists confession/revelation allows a reader to understand that the ‘I’ reveals itself through its attempts at concealment. The second chapter reads women’s witch poems alongside Jung’s idea of the shadow, and the encounter with the shadow, identifying and analysing the correspondence between the archetypal witch, the shadow, and those feminine creative energies which have historically been repressed. It also contends that recognising the shadow-encounter in lyric poetry has implications for how the ‘I’ is understood - if the ‘I’ can be read as an entity which houses separate identities that do not recognise they are ‘one’, this destabilises the traditional concept of ‘I’ as singular/cohesive, and therefore is a manner of expanding potential readings of who or what constitutes the ‘I’. The third chapter expands this idea to include even more radical possibilities. Drawing on Bracha Ettinger’s theories of matrix and metramorphosis, it argues that the ‘I’ is capable of containing not only a ‘self’-in-parts but any number of voices which weave together in order to speak the poem. It applies these ideas to women’s Persephone and Eurydice poems, suggesting that the underworld becomes for the ‘I’s of these poems a ‘matrixial’ space, in the sense that traditional structures of power and subjectivity no longer apply. The creative half of this thesis comprises a group of lyric poems, titled Domestic Animals, whose sensibility has grown out of the reconsiderations of the lyric ‘I’ and the readings of women’s poems which form the critical discussion. Through evading or minimising the ‘I’, misdirection/indirectness, adopting personae (including mythic characters and witch-figures) and a general refusal of the confessional mode or any ‘self-revelation’, these poems respond to and grow from the theory explored in There’s No ‘I’ in Ms.