This article offers a discussion of two eco-horror feature films, each released in 2021: Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth, and Jaco Bouwer’s Gaia. With a pandemic theme, both film fictions feature sentient woods and forests which infect humans with fungal spores. This is the non-human world enlisting human collaboration. Both films break the mould of the traditional eco-horror; invariably, the latter dramatizes how the natural world avenges itself on humankind. This storytelling mode involves the use of catastrophe narratives. Elizabeth Parker has explored the alternative genre, the ‘ecoGothic’ (), which stimulates ambiguous emotional responses to human–non-human hybrid forms. To date, there is little scholarship which analyses such hybrids through the lens of queer ecology. Therefore, I will bring Timothy Morton’s theory of queer ecology (), dark ecology () and his concept of the spectral non-human world () into dialogue with Simon C. Estok’s term ‘the slimic imagination’ (). My thesis is that both films engage an interaction between queer and slimic narratives in order to undo the catastrophe narrative. Queer slime is that which destabilizes gender binaries as a means of creating uneasy but intimate collaborations between the human and non-human world.
{"title":"Sexy, slimy, monstrous: Infection as collaboration in Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth and Jaco Bouwer’s Gaia","authors":"Catherine Lord","doi":"10.1386/ajpc_00056_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ajpc_00056_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article offers a discussion of two eco-horror feature films, each released in 2021: Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth, and Jaco Bouwer’s Gaia. With a pandemic theme, both film fictions feature sentient woods and forests which infect humans with fungal spores. This is the non-human world enlisting human collaboration. Both films break the mould of the traditional eco-horror; invariably, the latter dramatizes how the natural world avenges itself on humankind. This storytelling mode involves the use of catastrophe narratives. Elizabeth Parker has explored the alternative genre, the ‘ecoGothic’ (), which stimulates ambiguous emotional responses to human–non-human hybrid forms. To date, there is little scholarship which analyses such hybrids through the lens of queer ecology. Therefore, I will bring Timothy Morton’s theory of queer ecology (), dark ecology () and his concept of the spectral non-human world () into dialogue with Simon C. Estok’s term ‘the slimic imagination’ (). My thesis is that both films engage an interaction between queer and slimic narratives in order to undo the catastrophe narrative. Queer slime is that which destabilizes gender binaries as a means of creating uneasy but intimate collaborations between the human and non-human world.","PeriodicalId":29644,"journal":{"name":"Australasian Journal of Popular Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48607630","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Renters, an Aotearoa New Zealand reality television programme by Greenstone productions, is currently in its ninth season with 77 episodes at the time of writing. It is clearly a popular series, but why? According to Kristeva (1980), we are morbidly drawn to the abject and subsequently enjoy the cathartic experience of purification. However, the psychology of dirt means that we are simultaneously compelled to reject the creator of the dirt that provokes our disgust, particularly when they belong to an extreme out-group. Disgust prompted by dirtiness may therefore fuel dehumanization and diminish sympathy and engagement of the viewer towards the tenants featured in the series. Renters satisfies by providing the viewer with ‘filth porn’ and a rewarding clean-up with the bonus of a marginalized other to condemn. The morality play element is a familiar format that validates the viewer’s in-group status and sanctions judgemental impulses. An underlying subtext exhibits a neo-liberal attitude to the poorest elements in society, blaming them for their own predicament. This article will analyse selected scenes from Renters to highlight how the producers promote stereotypes that marginalize and dehumanize the underclass of unsuccessful renters, or ‘dirty poor’, in Aotearoa New Zealand.
{"title":"Renters: Disgust, judgement and marginalization of the dirty poor","authors":"J. Burn","doi":"10.1386/ajpc_00053_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ajpc_00053_1","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Renters, an Aotearoa New Zealand reality television programme by Greenstone productions, is currently in its ninth season with 77 episodes at the time of writing. It is clearly a popular series, but why? According to Kristeva (1980), we are morbidly drawn to the abject and subsequently enjoy the cathartic experience of purification. However, the psychology of dirt means that we are simultaneously compelled to reject the creator of the dirt that provokes our disgust, particularly when they belong to an extreme out-group. Disgust prompted by dirtiness may therefore fuel dehumanization and diminish sympathy and engagement of the viewer towards the tenants featured in the series. Renters satisfies by providing the viewer with ‘filth porn’ and a rewarding clean-up with the bonus of a marginalized other to condemn. The morality play element is a familiar format that validates the viewer’s in-group status and sanctions judgemental impulses. An underlying subtext exhibits a neo-liberal attitude to the poorest elements in society, blaming them for their own predicament. This article will analyse selected scenes from Renters to highlight how the producers promote stereotypes that marginalize and dehumanize the underclass of unsuccessful renters, or ‘dirty poor’, in Aotearoa New Zealand.","PeriodicalId":29644,"journal":{"name":"Australasian Journal of Popular Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43996935","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Joan Didion famously described the 1960s as ending abruptly on 9 August 1969 when word spread of the murders of seven people including Hollywood actor Sharon Tate. Fifty years on and the ‘Manson murders’ remain a focal point of interest in American popular culture and media. Netflix’s recent true-crime drama Mindhunter (2017–19) and Quentin Tarantino’s Once upon a Time in Hollywood () represent but two popular examples invoking the crimes. What is consistent across most popular renderings of the murders is the representation of the Family, and of their leader Charles Manson especially, as monstrous, warranting investigation. Utilizing both Jeffrey foundational text ‘Monster culture (seven theses)’ and Natasha Mikles and Joseph Laycock’s () ‘Five further theses on monster theory and religious studies’, this article examines the creation and representation of Charles Manson as a serial killer, a cult leader, but especially as a monster, in the popular culture context.
{"title":"Charles Manson and his Family: ‘Human monsters, human mutants’","authors":"L. McLean, Jenny Wise","doi":"10.1386/ajpc_00058_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ajpc_00058_1","url":null,"abstract":"Joan Didion famously described the 1960s as ending abruptly on 9 August 1969 when word spread of the murders of seven people including Hollywood actor Sharon Tate. Fifty years on and the ‘Manson murders’ remain a focal point of interest in American popular culture and media. Netflix’s recent true-crime drama Mindhunter (2017–19) and Quentin Tarantino’s Once upon a Time in\u0000 Hollywood () represent but two popular examples invoking the crimes. What is consistent across most popular renderings of the murders is the representation of the Family, and of their leader Charles Manson especially, as monstrous, warranting investigation. Utilizing both Jeffrey foundational text ‘Monster culture (seven theses)’ and Natasha Mikles and Joseph Laycock’s () ‘Five further theses on monster theory and religious studies’, this article examines the creation and representation of Charles Manson as a serial killer, a cult leader, but especially as a monster, in the popular culture context.","PeriodicalId":29644,"journal":{"name":"Australasian Journal of Popular Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41809802","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Review of: Gothic Metaphysics: From Alchemy to the Anthropocene, Jodey Castricano (2021) Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 282 pp., ISBN 978-1-78683-794-3, h/bk, USD 88
{"title":"Gothic Metaphysics: From Alchemy to the Anthropocene, Jodey Castricano (2021)","authors":"Tof Eklund","doi":"10.1386/ajpc_00060_5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ajpc_00060_5","url":null,"abstract":"Review of: Gothic Metaphysics: From Alchemy to the Anthropocene, Jodey Castricano (2021)\u0000 Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 282 pp.,\u0000 ISBN 978-1-78683-794-3, h/bk, USD 88","PeriodicalId":29644,"journal":{"name":"Australasian Journal of Popular Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47216870","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The ‘gentlemen of the flashing blade’ laboured in an occupation that no longer exists in Australia: canecutting. It was a hard job done by hard men, and its iconic figure – the canecutter – survives as a Queensland legend, so extensively romanticized in the popular culture of the time as to constitute a subgenre characterized by subject matter and motifs particular to the pre-mechanization sugar country culture. Yet, it may seem like the only canecutters immortalized in the arts are Summer of the Seventeenth Doll’s Roo and Barney. To show the breadth and diversity of this subgenre, and the legend of the canecutter and sugar country culture, this article reviews a selection of novels, memoirs, plays, short stories, cartoons, verse, song, film, television, radio and children’s books. These works address the racial, cultural and industrial politics of the sugar industry and its influence on the economic and social development of Queensland. The parts played by the nineteenth-century communities of indentured South Sea Islanders and the European immigrants who followed are represented along with those of the itinerant Anglos. These works depict, and celebrate, a colourful, often brutal, part of Queensland’s past and an Australian icon comparable with the swaggie or the shearer.
{"title":"The legend of the ‘gentlemen of the flashing blade’: The canecutter in the Australian imagination","authors":"Kerry Boyne","doi":"10.1386/ajpc_00050_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ajpc_00050_1","url":null,"abstract":"The ‘gentlemen of the flashing blade’ laboured in an occupation that no longer exists in Australia: canecutting. It was a hard job done by hard men, and its iconic figure – the canecutter – survives as a Queensland legend, so extensively romanticized in the popular culture of the time as to constitute a subgenre characterized by subject matter and motifs particular to the pre-mechanization sugar country culture. Yet, it may seem like the only canecutters immortalized in the arts are Summer of the Seventeenth Doll’s Roo and Barney. To show the breadth and diversity of this subgenre, and the legend of the canecutter and sugar country culture, this article reviews a selection of novels, memoirs, plays, short stories, cartoons, verse, song, film, television, radio and children’s books. These works address the racial, cultural and industrial politics of the sugar industry and its influence on the economic and social development of Queensland. The parts played by the nineteenth-century communities of indentured South Sea Islanders and the European immigrants who followed are represented along with those of the itinerant Anglos. These works depict, and celebrate, a colourful, often brutal, part of Queensland’s past and an Australian icon comparable with the swaggie or the shearer.","PeriodicalId":29644,"journal":{"name":"Australasian Journal of Popular Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46032419","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Review of: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Aoife Mary Dempsey (2022) Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 214 pp., ISBN 978-1-78683-827-8, h/bk, USD 94.07
回顾:Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Aoife Mary Dempsey(2022)卡迪夫:威尔士大学出版社，214页，ISBN 978-1-78683-827-8, h/bk, 94.07美元
{"title":"Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Aoife Mary Dempsey (2022)","authors":"Matthew J. Thompson","doi":"10.1386/ajpc_00061_5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ajpc_00061_5","url":null,"abstract":"Review of: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Aoife Mary Dempsey (2022)\u0000 Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 214 pp.,\u0000 ISBN 978-1-78683-827-8, h/bk, USD 94.07","PeriodicalId":29644,"journal":{"name":"Australasian Journal of Popular Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45057132","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Painfully Neurotypical: A Review of Love on the Spectrum, Cian O'Clery (Dir.) (2019–21), Australia: Northern Pictures","authors":"Chloe T. Rattray","doi":"10.1386/ajpc_00063_5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ajpc_00063_5","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":29644,"journal":{"name":"Australasian Journal of Popular Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48544803","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Gothic has long been theorized as the domain of the feminine, the queer or the ‘soft masculine’, and most discussions of Gothic masculinity propose to see it in terms of a split of the masculine subject at the level of rationality and sexuality. This article examines the construction of Gothic masculinities in the films of the Thai director Kongkiat Khomsiri in the context of the Thai gender system and Thai heroic masculine ideologies their protagonists embody. While Thai horror films abound in depictions of feminine evil, interestingly the Gothic cinescapes of Khomsiri are the domain of tough masculine men. The article discusses the director’s first three features: , , and The , bringing into focus the films’ portrayals of their working-class underdog heroes and their ‘hard’ masculinity. The discussion also highlights the visual aesthetics of Khomsiri’s films and their reliance on the Gothic conventions in the construction of the characters and the environments they inhabit.
{"title":"Sons, husbands, brothers: The Gothic worlds of Thai men in the films of Kongkiat Khomsiri","authors":"Katarzyna Ancuta","doi":"10.1386/ajpc_00055_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ajpc_00055_1","url":null,"abstract":"Gothic has long been theorized as the domain of the feminine, the queer or the ‘soft masculine’, and most discussions of Gothic masculinity propose to see it in terms of a split of the masculine subject at the level of rationality and sexuality. This article examines the construction of Gothic masculinities in the films of the Thai director Kongkiat Khomsiri in the context of the Thai gender system and Thai heroic masculine ideologies their protagonists embody. While Thai horror films abound in depictions of feminine evil, interestingly the Gothic cinescapes of Khomsiri are the domain of tough masculine men. The article discusses the director’s first three features: , , and The , bringing into focus the films’ portrayals of their working-class underdog heroes and their ‘hard’ masculinity. The discussion also highlights the visual aesthetics of Khomsiri’s films and their reliance on the Gothic conventions in the construction of the characters and the environments they inhabit.","PeriodicalId":29644,"journal":{"name":"Australasian Journal of Popular Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42515211","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Recent fiction that depicts medical intervention upon the female body as monstrous reveals societal anxiety around aesthetic and reproductive medicine. As biotechnology rapidly advances, the female body continues to be a site on which improvements, efficiencies and controls are imposed. While Kristeva’s abject and Creed’s ‘monstrous-feminine’ explain the capacity of the female body to imbue horror, this literary analysis explores how the experience of the medicalized female body can convey anxiety relating to escalating aesthetic and reproductive demands. Works of fiction by Kawakami, Mazza, Hortle, Booth, Giddings, Gildfind and Taylor are considered in terms of medicine and the female body, with the narratives revealing common themes of monstrosity. Bakhtin’s grotesque and Kristeva’s abject informs the analysis, as does Foucault’s concept of the ‘medical gaze’. Bartky’s ‘fashion-beauty complex’ frames the investigation into depictions of cosmetic surgery, while the impact of capitalism is considered in relation to reproductive technologies and medical experimentation. The power structures that medicine operates within are considered and the article argues that the representation of medicine as monstrous in relation to the female body expresses collective unease about the increasingly unstable boundaries of the human body itself.
{"title":"Breast augmentation and artificial insemination: Monstrous medicine and the female body in recent fiction","authors":"Amber Moffat","doi":"10.1386/ajpc_00057_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ajpc_00057_1","url":null,"abstract":"Recent fiction that depicts medical intervention upon the female body as monstrous reveals societal anxiety around aesthetic and reproductive medicine. As biotechnology rapidly advances, the female body continues to be a site on which improvements, efficiencies and controls are imposed. While Kristeva’s abject and Creed’s ‘monstrous-feminine’ explain the capacity of the female body to imbue horror, this literary analysis explores how the experience of the medicalized female body can convey anxiety relating to escalating aesthetic and reproductive demands. Works of fiction by Kawakami, Mazza, Hortle, Booth, Giddings, Gildfind and Taylor are considered in terms of medicine and the female body, with the narratives revealing common themes of monstrosity. Bakhtin’s grotesque and Kristeva’s abject informs the analysis, as does Foucault’s concept of the ‘medical gaze’. Bartky’s ‘fashion-beauty complex’ frames the investigation into depictions of cosmetic surgery, while the impact of capitalism is considered in relation to reproductive technologies and medical experimentation. The power structures that medicine operates within are considered and the article argues that the representation of medicine as monstrous in relation to the female body expresses collective unease about the increasingly unstable boundaries of the human body itself.","PeriodicalId":29644,"journal":{"name":"Australasian Journal of Popular Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43629100","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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