School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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Item“Revolting Developments”: productive shame in the graphic narratives of Phoebe Gloeckner and Aline Kominsky-Crumb( 2019)“Revolting Developments” presents the first extended, comparative analysis of Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Phoebe Gloeckner’s comics, prose and visual works through the critical framework of shame as an affective mode. These two innovative cartoonists, as well as being contemporaries and peers, have both produced formally and affectively disruptive representations of subjectivity over time, negotiating and subverting the gendered conventions of genre in order to instantiate a new, more productive relationship with their readers. The politics and poetics of looking and the gaze are refigured through Kominsky-Crumb and Gloeckner’s anti-confessional, testimonial representations of sexual violence and psychological parental abuse, their tentative embrace of abjection, and their resistance to prescriptive discourses of childhood. Kominsky-Crumb’s autobiographical comics refuse the categorisation of passive victimhood. Her representation of past trauma troubles the distinction between tragedy and comedy. Gloeckner’s representations of violence interrogate agency, complicity and the mutating power shifts that her young protagonists experience. Although these cartoonists approach shame differently (stylistically as well as conceptually), they both ultimately demonstrate a similar feminist politic. Orienting their texts through the history of the gendering of autobiographic strategies, the assignation of abjection, and the fragility and vulnerability of childhood, I argue that the critical lens of affect, specifically that of shame, provides a productive means of interrogating and analysing Gloeckner’s and Kominsky-Crumb’s negotiation of gendered interpellation and formal subversion of generic modes in order to represent serialised subjectivity. This thesis examines how the affective states of shame and abjection are registered and subverted in Gloeckner and Kominsky-Crumb’s work; following on from the work of Silvan Tomkins, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Hillary Chute it asks how these writers represent shame and how they make this affect and experience productive for the female-gendered subject. Structured through shame’s identity-constituting delineation of subjectivity, heightened sense of embodiment, and identificatory relationality, this thesis analyses Kominsky-Crumb and Gloeckner’s negotiation of autobiographic strategies, subversion of gendered and cultural abjection, and critique of the discursive construction of girlhood. Their instantiation of an alternative relational identification is limited to a racially bounded image of girls, as Gloeckner, and to a lesser extent Kominsky-Crumb, instrumentalise a covetous and objectifying American Africanism in order to exploit the association of white fragility and feminine value.
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ItemThe challenges of valuing culture in Australia, and the role of symbiosis in understanding cultural interactions( 2019)This research examines the conditions and narratives that surround cultural value, particularly within the fields of cultural diplomacy, cultural policy and the arts. These conditions and narratives are situated within the context of knowledge or innovation-based societies where, over the past two decades, a rise in cultural value discourse has occurred. Knowledge-based societies also feature post-industrial economies and, therefore, in this thesis, the tendency to value culture in terms of economics is of particular significance. In Australia, this is evident across various municipal levels, from local councils to the federal government. Through a series of case studies encompassing the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the City of Melbourne and a federal policy proposal for a National Programme for Excellence in the Arts, I argue a common approach to the valuation of culture is evident, and is one that is rooted in instrumentalisation—or what Yudice characterises as expediency, where ‘culture-as-resource’ is a means to an end. However, this narrow scope limits the possibility to understand more about the different types of value that culture (such as the arts) can have, particularly when it comes to aesthetic exploration of new knowledges, global networks and relationships. To explore alternative considerations of what value culture can offer to both societies and people alike, I consider European theatre collective Rimini Protokoll’s ability to display the culture of nations in their touring performance of 100% City. Here, another realisation of the value of culture is discernible. In political terms, this is cultural value that resides outside the typical state-to-public facilitation of public diplomacy and rests on a people-to-people mode of communication. As a result, I argue that the current, utilitarian vocabulary surrounding the value of culture should be expanded and developed further to reflect its operation today in the age of global networks and relationships. Such an expansion incorporates a symbiotic consideration of the interactions that occur over the course of cultural relationships and counterbalances the over-reliance on economic and political factors and evaluations. My proposal serves to further refine understandings of ‘the cultural’ within the discourse of cultural value. To do so, I draw upon the biological understanding of relationships, referred to as symbiosis, to study how cultural value is understood amongst the private and public sector actors across three key dimensions: the economic, the political and the social. As a result, I propose cultural symbiosis as a conceptual metaphor that assists in the articulation of the more complex and multifaceted relations that cultural activity can generate. This conceptualisation provides the basis for an approach that better articulates the relations of cultural activity and one that extends the neoliberal vocabulary currently used to describe culture and the discourse of cultural value.
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ItemThe Secret Object of Sacrifice after Luce Irigaray( 2019)This thesis studies the concept of “new sacrifice” in the work of Luce Irigaray. According to Irigaray, the patriarchal order is founded on the masculine subject’s hidden sacrifice of the woman-object—the secret object of sacrifice. She proposes that the emergence of a new sacrificial order requires the formation of a new sociality and economy, one which sacrifices the patriarchal order and in turn allows for the cultivation of the feminine. Critics argue that Irigaray’s vision is utopian and that she does not clarify the way in which a new sacrificial—theorists also use the word “nonsacrificial,” however for this thesis I use Irigaray’s own phrase “new sacrifice”—order may emerge. I argue that Irigaray’s account of a new sacrificial process of becoming occurs through a mystical encounter with abjection, where the object becomes (a new kind of) subject. To support this argument I turn to Kristeva’s theory of abjection, and Moten’s theory of Blackness in the preliminary chapters of this thesis. The differences and similarities between the work of these theorists and that of Irigaray allow me to identify a latency in Irigaray’s work in regard to the secret object of sacrifice, its transformation, and the emergence of a new sacrificial order. After comparing philosophical texts, I apply the theory I have developed to literature and film texts.
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Item'Once we had bread here, you gave us stone'. Food as a technology of biopower in the stories of Jack Davis, Ruby Langford Ginibi, and Alexis Wright( 2019)This thesis presents the first comprehensive study of food in the works of Indigenous Australian storytellers. It uses Foucault’s analyses of biopower as a grid of intelligibility through which to describe food’s various functions and effects as they are recorded, reproduced, refracted, and resisted in Jack Davis’s, Ruby Langford Ginibi’s, and Alexis Wright’s storytelling. The thesis reads food as a technology of biopower: a means by which life ‘passe[s] into knowledge's field of control and power's sphere of intervention’ (Foucault 1978, 142). Following a Foucaultian methodology, it presents close and contextualised readings of the ways that food is instrumentalised as a technology of biopower and the functions, effects, and networks of biopower that result in and through the storytellers’ works. The specific topics the thesis engages include accounts of rationing and food-centric resistance in Davis’s plays, food insecurity and obesity discourse in Langford Ginibi’s life stories, and food’s relationship with alcohol and imperilment in Wright’s stories. It traces continuities between the storytellers’ treatment of food as well as identifying the way food generates and is implicated in evolving configurations and networks of biopower. It explores various resistance strategies and their efficacy in and through their stories, as well as the new subjects, hegemonic relations, institutions, forms of government, and fields of power-knowledge that result.
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ItemLights and shadows in Australian historical fiction: how does historical fiction deal with how Australia comes to know its past?( 2019)This thesis examines how recent Australian historical fiction, particularly that of Kim Scott and Kate Grenville, re-imagines and reframes Australia’s past and how it offers new ways of relating to that past. It does so with an emphasis on the perceived disconnect between what is available to archive-based academic historiography and the current understanding of the historical issues most relevant to modern Australians. It is presented in three sections. The first section focuses particularly on how fiction writers address the historical archives, with examples drawn mainly from works about the early frontier between Indigenous and settler Australians. It examines how different fiction styles and techniques address the construction of history, particularly the contrast between traditional realist narrative fiction and more postmodern techniques, with reference to parallel movements in the writing of non-fiction history. It asks how the concept of the “truth” about the past is dealt with differently in historical fiction, compared to historiography. This section concludes that historical fiction, particularly fiction that uses less traditional forms offers culturally useful ways of addressing modern questions about the past, and relationships with the past. The second section of the thesis is an extended examination of the process of creating a work of research fiction based on historical material. It begins with a short historical account of the subject of the author’s research, and goes on to offer a detailed examination of the research process. It considers in more depth the issue of archival research as it relates to the creation of stories in the past. The original research for this thesis was carried out both online and in physical archives, and the second section discusses how the archival research process influenced the fictional work in terms of both form and content. The second section also discusses how the works and techniques examined in the first section influenced the creation of the research fiction, with additional discussion of the genre of fictional historical biography. The final part of the thesis is a creative work in the form of an extended extract from a historical novel, based on the life of the 19th century historical figure Edward Oxford. The novel, titled Lights and Shadows of Melbourne Life, is a first-person narrative that incorporates both real and fictional archival material. It interrogates questions of memory, identity, colonial attitudes to migration to Australia, and through its inclusion of archives and “archives”, contrasted with the narrator’s commentary, deals with questions of archival reliability.
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ItemSolving Suspicion in Mystery Films( 2019)This thesis seeks to understand how viewers engage mystery films, and how they are engaged by them. Mystery films present a problem for the viewer to solve, from identifying a killer to uncovering a conspiracy, and engage viewers in solving this problem by arousing suspicion. This feeling of suspicion represents points of fixation for viewers within a film’s narrative. Mystery films arouse suspicion using repetition, isolation, duration, and predisposition, and by playing on viewer expectations surrounding the mystery genre and type. When viewer suspicion is aroused, they engage in a form of problem solving to try and resolve ambiguity in the text and reach a solution to the problem in the film. To address these research questions, this thesis employs a range of empirical methods, including quantitative analysis of editing data, neoformalist analysis of mystery films, and a human experiment to determine how specific film practices influence viewer’s perception of suspicion. By focusing only on what can be observed and comprehended, and not on interpretations of a text, Neoformalist analysis may be considered an empirical research method. This range of methods is directed by a set of guiding principles that underpin the thesis, aimed at contributing to our understanding of the experience-of-film. In total, the thesis examines 87 mystery films from 2004-2013 to provide a comprehensive study of contemporary mystery cinema. The thesis demonstrates that viewers primarily engage with mystery films through a form of problem solving, guided by their experience of suspicion. Mystery films are constructed to arouse suspicion and encourage viewers to attempt to solve the problem at the centre of a film. Mystery films use editing structure, problem types, filmic practices, and expectations of genre to curate the viewing experience, attempting to prevent viewers from reaching a solution prematurely. This is largely achieved by cultivating recognition in viewers, ensuring they identify important clues within the film, but fail to synthesise this information into a solution. Viewers can draw on meta-knowledge in an attempt to decode and decipher these practices, leading to new forms of engagement with mystery films. Finally, this thesis illustrates the potential for an empirically informed, interdisciplinary approach to researching screen texts, and the potential for future investigations into the viewing experience.
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ItemSomaletheia: Cultural Techniques of Biosensing( 2019)Biosensors are sensor technologies designed to produce data about the functions or vital capacity of the body. While biosensing has often been analysed in presentist terms, this thesis attempts to account for the long history of biosensors, the better to frame an understanding of the contemporary ‘sensor society’. This thesis proposes two ‘births’ of the sensor society – the first occurring in the mid-19th century, and the second in the early 21st century. This thesis considers the Quantified Self movement as serving to problematize the conditions of this ‘second’ sensor society, at the same time as critical questioning of the significance of biosensors has exceeded the form of praxis promoted by the movement. This thesis argues that biosensors figure the body as both the bearer of truth, as well as that which frustrates this truth through the exigencies of biological errancy. I refer to this metrological dynamic of bodily veiling/unveiling as ‘somaletheia’, a portmanteau combining the words ‘soma’ for ‘body’ and ‘(a)letheia’ for ‘(un)concealment’. This thesis draws upon cultural techniques theory to genealogically analyse the way that this dynamic has conditioned biosensors’ place in the clinic, the workplace, and the home, from the mid-19th century to the present day. Cultural Techniques theory analyses chains of ontic operations which coalesce into what are referred to as ‘operative ontologies’ – the production of ontological distinctions which are in retrospect understood to function as ‘essential’ truths about a given domain of experience. I trace the cultural techniques of biosensing across the fields of the clinic, the workplace, and the home, demonstrating how biosensing produces a mode of measure which is at once troubled as well as propelled by its ‘working through’ of the difficulty of a body which is figured as errant. I analyse the difficulties surrounding the tools of 19th century biosensors like the sphygmograph and the haemautograph, the techniques of the ‘educated finger’, the tools of the post-Taylorist European Science of Work and Human Relations studies, and early servant-managing home security technologies. I compare these with contemporary digital, networked biosensor technologies like the Apple Watch, the Sociometer, and Amazon Key, to demonstrate how their associated cultural techniques have been reworked and extended as tools of governmentality. This thesis contributes to a consideration of media critique which grapples with the difficulty of aporia and error as a material force. While the vital capacity of the human body has often been argued to hold an immanently resistant capacity, this thesis analyses how ‘biological errancy’ is managed as a productive aspect of the biosensing apparatus. This thesis argues that this dynamic be understood neither from the perspective of media as ‘Enframing’, but nor from the perspective of a normatively understood vital body. Instead, this thesis proposes an approach which charts the genealogical production of a form of bodily truth which emerges in the complex interplay between human activity and an evolving and intimate form of measure.
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ItemDemocratising orchestras: How do player-governed orchestras sustain their governance?( 2019)Player-governed orchestras use democratic and participatory organisational models that give musicians governance control and have sustained these governance structures over many decades. The labour-management literature suggests, however, that worker governance can be difficult to sustain. This study investigates the research question: how do player-governed orchestras sustain their governance structures? Using qualitative interviews with musicians and managers in five orchestras and one contemporary music ensemble, based in Germany and the UK, I investigate the sustainability of governance by musicians and how these organisations have achieved it. My research appraises the economic, artistic, organisational and cultural challenges facing player-governance and the responses to them that these firms have developed. Three key findings emerged from the study. Firstly, the sustainability of player-governance depends on orchestras’ ability to adapt labour-management principles to the parameters of work in orchestras. Orchestras create unique challenges for the realisation of labour-management, but their ability to master these challenges is crucial for the sustainability of player-governance. Secondly, strategies to facilitate and channel the participation and social energy at the core of player-governance are essential to its sustainability. Player-governance is sustained by the fostering of virtuous circles that arise when the opportunities for enhanced governance participation among members facilitate high levels of engagement, commitment and feelings of responsibility. Finally, mastering the challenges of performance optimisation in the context of democratic control is essential to sustaining player-governance in orchestras. Navigating the challenges of managing performance quality in a democratic context is critical for sustaining player-governance. The research applies labour-management theory to creative-industries and not-for-profit firms while isolating and illuminating the strategies involved in sustaining worker control in such a context. The thesis considers orchestras and a contemporary-music ensemble that were established in the last three decades, thus highlighting the viability and potential of labour-management as an alternative organisational form in contemporary performing-arts companies.
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ItemThe ‘Black ghost’ of bermondsey: gender, crime and murder in Victorian England( 2019)This thesis examines the cultural impact of a sensational murder case that took place in London in 1849. The so-called ‘Bermondsey murder’ involved the violent murder of a man by Frederick and Maria Manning, a married couple who were tried, found guilty and executed for their crime. Public interest in the story – and in Maria especially – was enormous, overshadowing both her co-conspirator husband, and also that of five other women found guilty of murder the same year; Mary Anne Geering, Rebecca Smith, Mary Ball, Sarah Harriet Thomas, and Charlotte Harris. Located simultaneously in the fields of feminist, historical, literary and cultural studies, my project examines how six women were imagined in popular discourse and how, in turn, these representations both reflected and—as is especially evident in Maria’s case—contested mid nineteenth-century conceptions of gender, sexuality, class, nationality, religion and criminality. The primary interest of my research is the public representation of female criminals in mid-century England, with a particular focus on Maria’s exceptional status as a ‘great’ criminal of the age, her excessive representation in popular culture and the unusual themes and anxieties evoked by her case. The year 1849 is particularly notable as it saw the highest recorded rate of female executions over a 121-year period, from 1843, when statistics began to differentiate between the sexes, to 1964, when the last hanging took place. While the other women of 1849 were fundamentally comprehensible, Maria by contrast represented a distinctly aberrant female outside the boundaries of existing gendered, social and criminological categorisation. Her case generated its own specific sets of concerns and responses that, in turn, worked to differentiate her greatly from other female homicides of the period. The magnitude of public interest in Maria was exceptional, as too was public ambivalence about her. The press and others moralised about her shocking and atypical criminal behaviour, while marvelling at her, and holding her in awe: she was admired and condemned in equal measure. The figure of Maria Manning defied allocation to the established categories and explanations of the age and can be seen as an example that throws into relief the range, complexity and suggestiveness of Victorian discourses concerning the most violent of female offenders. Just as Maria was rendered exceptional by the press and other popular accounts in relation to other female murders of the period, she was also distinguished from her husband and accomplice Frederick. One of the most compelling features of the Mannings’ case was the construction of a gendered role reversal between the couple. In the decades following the Mannings’ execution, Maria continued to remain a figure of fascination. While her husband Frederick was all but forgotten, Maria’s image inspired an ongoing textual afterlife. The lack of resolution surrounding Maria’s image, as well as the themes evoked by the case fed into later representations, including significant literary contributions by Charles Dickens and others. Most notably, the attendant ambiguities surrounding Maria’s legibility, in terms of her appearance, behaviour, and background, influenced Dickens's portrayal of two violent and vengeful female characters, Mademoiselle Hortense, Lady Dedlock’s murderous French lady’s maid in the novel Bleak House (1852-53) and Madame Defarge, the fearful revolutionary in A Tale of Two Cities (1859). There are numerous thematic and descriptive parallels between popular depictions of Maria Manning and Dickens’s two fictional incarnations. These contributions, in turn, have helped ensure that aspects of Maria’s image continue to be read, remembered and reinterpreted today.
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ItemFigures-in-the-making: Figurations of AI and gender in science, popular culture, and everyday life( 2019)Artificial intelligence is often considered the science of making intelligent machines. Unavoidable are the ways in which gender informs and shapes what constitutes intelligence, yet rarely is gender explicitly addressed as a topic of research. At best, gender is reduced to an empirical question of counting gendered bodies. Indeed, by studies of gender, what many actually mean is a study of women—their presence or exclusion, their representation, or the ways in which their lives are affected by systems and technologies. Even in studies of AI that foreground feminist readings of science and technology, gender is a taken for granted relation —the stable backdrop against which AI is enacted rather than something which is itself under revision. Gender, in this context, is conceptualised as a predetermined, preformed category; already made rather than something that is constituted through the practice of history or technology making itself. This thesis considers how, in the making of artificial intelligence, gender too is being made. Drawing on methods and theory from feminist science and technology studies, cultural studies, film and media studies, and queer and gender studies, it examines how AI and gender are co-constituted across different sites in technoscientific culture. It develops the concept of “figuration” as a critical methodology and applies this to a number of case studies that span across sites of science, popular culture, and everyday life. The case studies addressed include: Alan Turing and the Turing test, the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, the 2008 film WALL-E, the 2014 film Ex Machina, Apple’s digital personal assistant Siri, and finally, Amazon’s digital domestic assistant Alexa. The main argument of the thesis is that consistently, across technoscientific culture, gender both figures, and is figured by, AI. On the one hand, gender fundamentally constitutes how AI figures are made intelligible as subjects and objects. Gender is what mediates expectations and makes the role of an AI clear to a user, consumer, or audience. Conversely, as technologies are figured by gender, gender itself becomes technologised. Gender is figured as an artifice, as a performative and imitative category that even a machine following the correct procedures can also enact. This thesis demonstrates how it is not only gendered bodies that are at stake in algorithmic and AI culture but gender itself as a socio-cultural system. In doing so, the thesis contributes to a broader narrative of gender’s ongoing role in the conceptualisation and materialisation of technoscientific objects and figures.