School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemBogan: exploring images of Australian cultural marginalisation( 2004)This thesis engages with a pressing contemporary concern: the negotiation of Australian national identity. Specifically, it argues that Australian media practitioners reconcile some of the complexity and ambivalence of Australian identity by deploying a discourse called 'bogan'. The bogan discourse creates a mediatised figure of the bogan, which is innately 'Australian' yet is also a social outcast for Australians to laugh at and loathe. By personifying traits and practices that do not accord with pre-existing ideologies of Australianness, the figure of the bogan helps reconcile contested and ambivalent ideas of national identity. Despite its assumed contemporary roots and actual existence, the bogan is purely discursive; and many of the rhetorical techniques used to produce bogans today were developed as long ago as the 1860s. This thesis assembles journalistic, literary, filmic and televisual conceptions of bogans through discussions of case studies including nineteenth-century larrikinism, the murder of Jaidyn Leskie, and the pilloried Paxton family. The bogan discourse operates in and through very different cultural contexts, without being limited to a particular era or location, because it is articulated through ideologies of national identity that are the subject of cultural anxiety and contest. These nationalist ideologies include the 'bush hero', the 'battler', 'community parenthood' and the 'do-it-yourself' ethos. While it has come to seem ‘true’ that the figure of the bogan is innately deviant and monstrous, and while the bogan discourse certainly requires and refers to empirical social realities, the figure of the bogan does not reflect the material conditions of a socioeconomic class, nor the self-articulated formations of a subculture. Rather, the bogan discourse produces understandings of reality through representations in journalism and popular culture. The social processes this thesis analyses, while anecdotally well-known, have never been studied academically as a social phenomenon. Thus this thesis proves its originality and importance by identifying a central figure in the Australian national imagination.
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ItemTheatre of body in Japan: Ankoku Butoh (Dance of Darkness)- Gekidan Kaitaisha (Theatre of Deconstruction)( 2004)This thesis is an analysis of two Japanese theatres of body; Ankoku Butoh (Dance of Darkness) and Gekidan Kaitaisha (Theatre of Deconstruction), and a practical and theoretical investigation of the possibilities for an embodied political philosophy. It is divided into two chapters. The first identifies the genesis and development of the philosophy and methodology of Hijikata Tatsumi's Ankoku Butoh in a chronological analysis beginning in late 1950s Japan. Apart from introducing some new material to the study of Ankoku Butoh and analyzing Hijikata's concepts, the first chapter serves as a genealogical source for the examination of the theatre of body of Gekidan Kaitaisha in the second chapter: the practice, philosophy, and productions within the social and political context. Flowing on from Hijikata's radically subjective work born from and profoundly rooted in an ethos and socio-political context of rebellion, Kaitaisha's theatre responds to 'what is' and refuses to accept it is all there is. Both Ankoku Butoh and Gekidan Kaitaisha are designed to actually deconstruct physical and perceptual codes integrated in the body to create the conditions for the body to become itself. While implicitly showing how one has informed the other, debate is focused on their distinct methods of embodied resistance to social conformity and on interpretations in relation to the political environment. The methods of Kaitaisha described in this thesis are generally based on the principle of 'moving the inside out to allow the outside in'. In tracing the evolution of two theatres of body in Japan) parallels are made with the conditions of the period, beginning with the transformations of late 1950s modernity, through the 1970s and the birth of post-modernity to its results being carried from the twentieth into the twenty-first century in the bodies of Kaitaisha.