School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Research Publications
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ItemThe rules of the game: Evil dead II . . . meet thy doom(Duke University Press, 2002)Interdimensional doorways finally make possible space travel between the two moons of Mars: Phobos and Deimos. The Union Aerospace Corporation's research into interdimensional travel is a success. Or is it? In a climactic series of events, things start to go terribly wrong. Some people sent through the gateways disappear. Others return from Mars's moons as zombies. Then the moon Deimos vanishes without a trace. Enter the hero-leader of a specialized team of space marines. He sends his troops ahead of him through the interdimensional gateway; armed with a Space Marine Corporation gun, he follows them through, but once on Phobos his worldview changes. The space marines have vanished. Instead, dark surroundings envelop him, and eerie, atmospheric music accentuates the suspense-filled moments. The marine leader begins to scour the corporate installation in search of any living human being ... but it's not the living who come to greet him. Seemingly out of nowhere, an array of bizarre creatures charge down dim-lit corridors and through automatic doors: zombified humans, demons, imps, minotaur-like forms, evil spirits. And so it begins. He must explore the installation to find out what happened, then get the hell out of there at any cost! Picking up weapons along the way, he attacks the monsters like a man gone berserk-with fists, chainsaw, gun, rifle, and missile launcher. His body takes a beating, but his victims also pay the price. Hundreds of those demonic bodies audibly erupt, explode, and splatter before him-and he revels in every gory detail. A sequel to Aliens: Aliens Meets the Demons of Hell? Or perhaps Evil Dead II in outer space? This is no film space. The horror of this story belongs to the cult computer game released by id Software in 1993: Doom: Evil Unleashed.
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ItemLucio Fontana: the post-Fascist masculine figure( 2005)The ‘cut’ paintings of the Italian artist Lucio Fontana (1899 – 1968) are intensely sexual objects. For many viewers, their rawly coloured surfaces ruptured by deep vertical gashes strongly evoke female genitalia. Fontana’s violent cutting of the canvas has also been compared to the muscular gestures of male ‘action’ painters such as Jackson Pollock. What such interpretations fail to grasp, however, is the critique of gender identity, and in particular masculine identity, at the heart of Fontana’s work. However, as I will show, Fontana relied on an inversion of diametrically opposed notions of maleness and femaleness rather than any deconstruction of the opposition itself. As I outline in my paper, Fontana’s critique first emerges in the artist’s depictions of the male body immediately after Italy’s military defeat in WWII. Fontana’s limp and mangled clay warriors splashed with oozing layers of reflective glaze directly challenge the hard, ballistic ideal of the masculine body theorized in the proto-fascist writings of the Italian Futurist poet Filippo Tomasso Marinetti. Drawing on the work of Hal Foster and Jeffrey Schnapp on the representation of fascist masculinity, I argue that Fontana developed an alternative model of maleness to that encountered in the official culture of Mussolini’s Italy. Accordingly, as I also demonstrate, his work gives insight into the extraordinary transformations in male body imagery that took place in avant-garde and official cultural circles in Italy during the first half of the 20th century.
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ItemBeauty contest for the British bulldogs? Negotiating (trans)national identities in suburban Melbourne(Melbourne University Press, 2003-11)‘Britfest’ is a local festival held in the Melbourne suburb of Frankston. Like the numerous festivals of ethnicity in Australia that simultaneously celebrate cultural distinction and national incorporation, Britfest offers a historically specific reaction to the re-imagining of the nation. This article examines this new expressive tendency within the context of recent debates about Britishness in Australia, and explores the ramifications for identity formation and cultural affiliation among British migrants. By locating this analysis in Frankston, we aim to provide a situated example of the ways in which British ethnic identities are being negotiated. Such localised and specific responses, however, are operating within and are influenced by the broader context of shifting representations of a diverse British diaspora. Like British-Australians, members of this diaspora also inhabit nations shaped by the legacies of British imperialism, colonisation and migration. Shifting meanings of Britishness also represent and inform a more general ‘crisis of whiteness’, indicating how culturally embedded the colonial equation of Britishness with whiteness has been for those who imagine themselves at the core of the contemporary Australian nation.