FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts
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Playful Culture and the Glamorization of Everyday (Virtual) Life: Elements of Play in Facebook Applications
Get PDFIn the general frame of a “ludification of culture” (Raessens 1) we are witnessing the rise of hybrid entertainment products such as Facebook Applications, media phenomena difficult to define as “games” or “play”, that carry a large share in the responsibility for social interaction within social networks. Are Facebook Applications and its clones in other networks like Bebo or MySpace a form of casual games, are they “just for fun”, how do they participate in the general cultural trend that incorporates play elements in non-play environments?This paper, in order to answer these questions, relates to the two separated fields of game studies and media sociology, with the aim of gaining a better understanding of the role of play in media culture, as well as enter the recent discussion on casual games from a lateral perspective, introducing elements from media psychology and anthropology. This presentation is preliminary to a qualitative research on the use of Facebook Applications among Facebook users, whose results are still not complete
Moving Like a Ghost: Tarquin’s Specter and Agentive Objects in The Rape of Lucrece, Julius Caesar, and Macbeth
Get PDFAll good ghost stories strike us as immediately familiar. As Shakespeare’s heirs, we know the story well, but from where? Is that Macbeth we see before us, his hand on Duncan’s door? Or do we spy on Brutus, reading a cryptic message in his balmy Mediterranean orchard? ‘Speak, strike, redress.’ The lightning suddenly becomes a meteor shower raining down on Rome. Perhaps we still misread—we see not Macbeth, nor Brutus, but Tarquin, the last Roman prince, stealing into Collatine’s room to rape his wife. The light dims to a candle flame—but only for a moment, until it falls prey to a cold tongue of midnight air.For four centuries, we have read this way, dissecting Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists backwards, opening first their souls, then their minds, and, finally, their bodies to our critical gaze. More recent scholarship implores us to rethink the reading and writing of history and explore alternative histories, especially the histories of nature, of objects, of things
The Shanghai Gesture
Get PDFMany classical films noirs rely upon Orientalist elements of mise-en-scène to convey a sense of enigma or unintelligibility. This article gives a name to this visual trope, “the Shanghai gesture,” and describes how Asian objects in Hollywood cinema have come to be associated with the irrational. In The Maltese Falcon (Huston, 1941) and The Big Sleep (Hawks, 1946), elements of Orientalist décor function to evoke a sense of mystery or exoticism. In many cases, these elements are little more than exoticist set-dressing. However, in some cases they come to bear the burden of explanation for unresolved aspects of the plot, or even to suggest a limit-point of western rationality. This article concludes with a discussion of The Shanghai Gesture (Sternberg, 1941), addressing both mise-en-scène and the unique circumstances that surrounded its production. Based on a play by John Colton, the property was greatly sought after by all the major Hollywood studios, and rejected numerous times by the Hays Office for its “sordid” depictions of Shanghai bawdy-houses and casinos. Archival correspondence reveals that Hays and others linked the script’s sordidness to its Asian setting. Both a hot commodity and an object in need of censorship, The Shanghai Gesture itself became an over-determined Orientalist object, at once coveted and taboo, desirable and incomprehensible
The Politics of Dancing: Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo
Get PDFLes Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo (nicknamed "The Trocks") have been performing "serious" ballets en travesti since 1974. Acclaimed worldwide, the Trocks are on tour forty weeks a year. Last time they performed in New York, Time Out New York listed them as "pick of the week," in three categories simultaneously: best dance performance, best gay & lesbian event, and best children\u27s activity (Chung). What does all this popularity mean, politically? Is it necessary to concede that the Trocks are merely another lovably harmless manifestation of drag, just as well assimilated as Mrs. Doubtfire and Dame Edna, or can we trace from their double heritage - edgy 1970\u27s gay performance tactics, and those monumentally iconic Russian prima ballerinas - an underlying political strategy of activism and cultural relevance? In this article, I will argue that political motivation is embedded in each of these traditions, in a number of different ways. The strategies of resistance employed by the Ballets Trockadero draw on each of these inherited histories in order to mount a camp performance that confronts the tenets of gender identity, of classical ballet, of issues of race and class in the performing arts, of enforced theatrical illusion - and even of drag itself.
Camp Cures (the Stigma of Illness). Escaping the Tyranny of Caring, Charity, and Positive Thinking in Adam Mars-Jones\u27 "Slim"
Get PDFIn the slang of the caring profession, there is an enduring use of the personal pronoun "we" whose infantilising effect – and I am sure "we" all share this view - is indeed hard to endure. Pronoun it may be, personal it surely isn\u27t. On a larger scale, the inadequacy of this pathetic, in fact pseudo-empathetic, babble becomes increasingly apparent, especially for two reasons whose incompatibility exposes the true dimension of the dilemma. Firstly, this sort of talk excruciatingly extends into an overkill of compassion, well-meaning, and good advice, whose self-righteousness in time results in normative stereotypes of healthy living: positive thinking, creative visualisations, and not least, physical exercise. Secondly and simultaneously, though, this tyranny of caring can barely conceal the fact that illness is still widely viewed as a stigma. Entering the present discourse of HIV and AIDS at this point, one can hardly fail to notice that it is this very stigma that increasingly forces gay men into normative spectacles of health, even though, as Dollimore accurately contends, "contesting these negative representations (homosexuality = pathology = death) could never be just a question of substituting positive ones (homosexuality = health = life)" (Dollimore, Death, Desire and Loss xi). Put simply, there is urgent need for a cure against the stigma of illness, a cure that successfully counters both the debilitating, indeed incapacitating, treatment of the patient and his called-for charade of healthy living. One such cure is camp
Musical Apocalypse: Tom Waits’ Bone Machine
Get PDFApocalypse derives from the Greek apocalypsis, meaning the act of uncovering, unveiling, or revelation. While the apocalyptic theme or genre continues to inform and inspire a number of different media and discourses into the twenty-first century, the representation of apocalypse within popular music remains a largely overlooked field of enquiry. Therefore in this paper I would like to discuss Tom Waits\u27 1992 CD, Bone Machine, as a popular musical rendition of the apocalyptic theme, in order to explore what the apocalyptic might sound like, were it to be rendered musically. To do so, I will be drawing on Jacques Derrida\u27s essay "Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy," in which he formulates an understanding of the apocalyptic as "tone": the "revelator of some unveiling in process." Like Derrida\u27s apocalyptic tone, Bone Machine can be interpreted as registering an idea of the apocalyptic as process and movement, wherein the act of revelation is conceived as a continual, often turbulent and confusing, unveiling. This apocalyptic process is registered both through the album\u27s production - wherein the sounds are continually being stripped back and built on to one another to form unstable, transient song structures - and through its vocal delivery - which foregrounds the way in which tone can subvert and destabilize the meaning of the lyrics. The result is an idea of apocalypse which is not simply an ending to a narrative trajectory, nor which relies on genre-specific imagery or themes, but rather which obscures as much as it reveals, always drawing attention back to itself as a revelatory gesture. Indeed, the apocalyptic tone destabilizes and undermines some of the dominant assumptions central to narrative-based understandings of apocalypse, and as such my analysis aims to foreground the ways in which Bone Machine enables an original and, at times, subversive musical perspective on what has proven to be a remarkably resilient cultural theme
Behind the Veil: Gender and Apocalypse in George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil (1859) and Wilkie Collins’s The Two Destinies (1876)
Get PDFAlthough the term \u27apocalypse\u27 is often used to refer to a catastrophic event it literally means \u27to unveil\u27 and, pre-biblically, signified the unveiling of a virgin bride. It is in the sense of the apocalypse as an \u27unveiling\u27 that, in a discussion of George Eliot\u27s 1859 novella The Lifted Veil and Wilkie Collins\u27s 1876 novel The Two Destinies, I will explore the links between the notion of apocalypse and the \u27secret\u27 of female sexuality. In Eliot\u27s and Collin\u27s stories, I argue, female sexuality is portrayed as an apocalyptic secret that exists above and beyond the play of veiling and unveiling. Indeed, when the veil concealing this apocalyptic secret is lifted, in Eliot\u27s and Collins\u27s text, the revelation reveals only a blank, an absence. In this sense, I claim, The Lifted Veil and The Two Destinies can be said to anticipate Jacques Derrida\u27s assertion, in his essay "Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy," that the final veil of the apocalypse cannot be lifted, that it remains always \u27to come.\u27 The apocalyptic secret of female sexuality, which lies behind the veil in Eliot\u27s and Collins\u27s texts, I conclude, mirrors the secret that literature itself represents: a secret that, like the apocalypse and female sexuality, is radically unknowable. For both Eliot and Collins, it seems, the apocalypse is never \u27now,\u27 but only ever the constantly deferred promise of an unveiling \u27to come.\u2
Filmic Eco-warnings and Television: Rolf de Heer’s Epsilon (1995) and Dr. Plonk (2007)
Get PDFThe possibility is considered that Australian film-maker Rolf de Heer has followed Epsilon (1995) with another filmic eco-warning, Dr. Plonk (2007), in which, as Mark J. Lacy despairs, heroic "dynamic individuals" unhelpfully "reinforce a (neo)liberal imaginary" (2001: 636), thus obliging Judith Hess Wright\u27s allegation that genre films maintain the social status quo by offering "absurd solutions to economic and social conflicts" (2003: 42). But rather than \u27shouting\u27 the message that a messianic hero-figure can save the world as in his first eco-politically correct film, it is argued that de Heer has subsequently made a silent film in which the saviour fails: the eponymous Dr. Plonk is imprisoned and makes a subtle, unspoken plea to the audience to get out from in front of their television sets and save the world from ecological apocalypse themselves. De Heer has expressed considerable disdain towards television but this paper suggests that to maximise reception of their eco-warnings the eco-conscious film-maker needs to recognise the potential of interactive television and other new media technologies to increase voter turnout and to effect the aversion of global apocalypse through audiences taking individual responsibility
Charles Hawtrey, Kenneth Williams, and Susan Sontag: Campaigners of Camp and the Carry On films.
Get PDFIf Camp was the twentieth century carminative for fear of "Being-as-Playing-a-Role," (Sontag 280) Queer, its efficacy as a laxative for such a depraving "social disease" in the twenty-first century, is quite ineffective. As Roger Lewis points out, "Everything has to be Camp now, from Eddie Izzard to Graham Norton" (68). To be Camp is not to be a la commodious. It has passed into the mainstream. It is a la mode. How has this happened? Homosexuality had to be douched by lavatorial comedy
The Wide Camp Sea, or Notes on Sontag
Get PDFJust as camp under-girds my persona, it contains my project. It provides the universe for my work; it sets the physical laws, determines the essential relationships, and establishes the particular gravity that holds down my ideas. Understand: I don\u27t want to define camp. I\u27ll approach definition, as a by-product of my explications. I make no pretense to tracing limits. If anything, I want to be expansive. I might fail in my attempt at expansiveness, but that\u27s alright; camp has a particular generosity towards failure. Didn\u27t Susan Sontag declare, on camp\u27s behalf, that it consists in "a seriousness that fails"? (285