Pub Date : 2018-05-18DOI: 10.1080/20004214.2018.1443648
Lee Mackinnon, N. Thylstrup, Kristin Veel
The nexus between love and digitization has become a significant matter of concern in contemporary society. On the one hand, the romantic subject has never had more help at hand to seek out love through apps and platforms. On the other, hand, these very same aids are claimed to signal the end of romantic love. While there is much debate on whether or not digitization and love are incompatible systems, and much time has been devoted to exploring the new technical devices and their methods, little attention has been given to the other part of the equation: namely what we mean by love. Instead, love is taken for granted in these discussions as a stabilized, if not stabilizing, entity. This special issue unsettles this focus, by exploring not only the effects of new technologies and big data methods on amorous love, but also what we mean when we talk about love. Co-authored introduction in The Journal of Aesthetics and Culture. A special edition that I co-authored entitled The Techniques and Aesthetics of Love in the Age of Big Data
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Pub Date : 2018-05-18DOI: 10.1080/20004214.2017.1385366
Rune Gade
ABSTRACT The essay reflects upon the function of images within the love encounter, drawing on the personal experience of the author and his partner, visual artist Stense Andrea Lind-Valdan. Mixing personal experiences, diaristic notes and academic reflections, the essay moves beyond conventional scholarly style and experiments with more personal and anecdotal modalities, thus creating a text that re-enacts the fascination and imaginary entrapments involved in the love encounter while simultaneously reflecting upon these aspects of love.
本文通过作者和他的伴侣——视觉艺术家Stense Andrea Lind-Valdan的个人经历，思考了图像在爱情邂逅中的作用。结合个人经历、日记笔记和学术反思，这篇文章超越了传统的学术风格，并尝试了更多的个人和轶事形式，从而创造了一篇文章，再现了爱情遭遇中所涉及的魅力和想象的陷阱，同时反思了爱情的这些方面。
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Pub Date : 2018-05-18DOI: 10.1080/20004214.2018.1438735
Lee Mackinnon
ABSTRACT Modern romantic love is contemplated in association with industrial forms of production and labour. Attention is paid to the ways in which women are industrialisation’s automatic operatives par excellence, as well as the subjects and objects of love.
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Pub Date : 2018-04-02DOI: 10.1080/20004214.2017.1404890
Elisabeth Oxfeldt
ABSTRACT The article analyzes Annette K. Olesen’s Little Soldier (Lille Soldat, 2008), from the perspective of “white guilt” (or the “white man’s burden”) as it is thematized in the film. It furthermore critiques the film’s portrayal of the two female protagonists, Lotte and Lily, as racialized opposites. This is done from the perspective of postfeminism and critical race and whiteness studies. The readings include an evaluation of the film as a globalized, postfeminist version of Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver as well as an interpretation of the film as a national allegory. Overall, I argue that while the film contains many pertinent, well-chosen images and symbols of a destructive form of white guilt, it is ultimately based on two female figures whose opposite character traits come across as founded on, and thus also as perpetuating, stereotypical racial imagery.
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Pub Date : 2018-04-02DOI: 10.1080/20004214.2018.1438732
Anders Marklund
ABSTRACT This article explores the similarities between the two most successful Swedish films of the past years. Through a focus on the two elderly protagonists the article discusses how the films acknowledge challenges in these men’s lives and in both contemporary and past society, but effectively repackage any serious issue in a form that remains palatable to audiences in Sweden and internationally. Themes discussed include the Swedish welfare state, community and new families of choice, as well as aspects of globalization.
{"title":"No country for old men: utopian stories of welfare society’s shortcomings in A Man Called Ove and The 100-Year-Old Man","authors":"Anders Marklund","doi":"10.1080/20004214.2018.1438732","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20004214.2018.1438732","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article explores the similarities between the two most successful Swedish films of the past years. Through a focus on the two elderly protagonists the article discusses how the films acknowledge challenges in these men’s lives and in both contemporary and past society, but effectively repackage any serious issue in a form that remains palatable to audiences in Sweden and internationally. Themes discussed include the Swedish welfare state, community and new families of choice, as well as aspects of globalization.","PeriodicalId":43229,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aesthetics & Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2018-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20004214.2018.1438732","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42176191","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}
Pub Date : 2018-04-02DOI: 10.1080/20004214.2018.1447218
Adriana Margareta Dancus
ABSTRACT When a young Norwegian man talked openly about being raped by a Somali asylum seeker and for feeling guilty about the rapist’s deportation, the news went viral not only in Norway, but also abroad. Several British and American tabloid newspapers as well as news and opinion websites from the UK, the US, Russia, Poland, Croatia and the Czech Republic reported about the Norwegian “politician” who felt “guilty” that Norwegian authorities sent his rapist back to Somalia. This article closely investigates the mediation of this story with a focus on how the emotion of guilt was staged in a national televised and digital media context in Norway before it reached the international tabloid media and opinion websites like Breitbart.com. It demonstrates how guilt functions as an affective nodal point at the intersection of many dimensions of identity, such as gender, sexuality, race, able-bodiedness, national identity, and political affiliation. The article also shows how a story of male rape from Norway facilitated an opportunity for tabloid journalists to rally against the Norwegian, and by extension, the European political Left, which they constructed as weak, feminine, and raped from behind by the very immigrants it seeks to protect.
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Pub Date : 2018-04-02DOI: 10.1080/20004214.2018.1438725
Elisabeth Oxfeldt
The Scandinavian countries are known as being wealthy, egalitarian, and “happy”. Since the first publication in 2012 of the United Nations’ World Happiness Reports, for instance, the Scandinavians have been ranked as the happiest nations in the world. This high level of self-reported life satisfaction is generally understood as caused by the social democratic welfare-state model. Emotionally, however, happiness is not necessarily the most dominant affect characterizing Scandinavians. In fact, the first Happiness Report shows that while Danes ranked no. 1 worldwide when it came to evaluative happiness, they ranked no. 100 when it came to affective happiness (answering the question of how they felt yesterday) (Helliwell et al. 2012). A dark side of happiness and privilege is guilt. Time and again, we encounter narratives in which Scandinavians are confronted with an unhappy, less privileged global other. Additionally, we also see representations of the ostracized self—“one of us”—a fellow Scandinavian who does not fit the image and status of the “happy” Scandinavian. Often, these external and internal others evoke guilt feelings based on a realization that one’s own happiness and privileges are, or have been, attained at the expense of suffering others. Also, in cases where one does not see a direct connection between one’s own privileges and the suffering of others, one may still feel responsible for alleviating the suffering of others—and guilty when not succeeding in doing so. These feelings of guilt may in turn be 1) foregrounded, debated, and attempted dealt with in order to promote social change, or 2) covered up, repressed, and redirected in order to maintain an image of individual and/or national coherence and innocence. In this volume, scholars from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden critically explore how such guilt is framed in contemporary Scandinavian film, television, and other visual media, including factual and fictional visual narratives, popular and art house genres. How are notions of guilt and guilt feelings evoked in and by narratives of privilege and lack? What does guilt do? How does guilt travel? How do gender, race, ethnicity, class, health, and age play into such narratives? How, overall, do such narratives reflect Scandinavian societies and set a moral compass for Scandinavian spectators (or not)? How does guilt serve to create affective communities? This special issue explores the visual narratives aesthetically and culturally by, on the one hand, close-reading the works, tending to the medium and genre specificity of film, television, and social media and, on the other hand, by situating the works in a particular Scandinavian context and further tracing guilt, guilt feeling, and guilt aversion across production processes and reception. This contextualization allows us to explore how guilt is redirected, reframed, and coopted for new ideological and rhetorical purposes in the Scandinavian welfare state and beyond. Framing guilt
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Pub Date : 2018-04-02DOI: 10.1080/20004214.2018.1438733
C. M. Reestorff
ABSTRACT This article is based on a study of the collaboration between the Danish pop singer Medina and Act Alliance, the TV-program Medina and the Refugees—Access with Abdel and the harsh attacks on Medina and her humanitarian engagement on social media. The article follows three trajectories. Firstly, I suggest that Act Alliance uses celebrity advocacy in a mediatized campaign effort to mobilize young Instagrammers accustomed to peer-to-peer communication. Secondly, I suggest that Medina’s advocacy manifests as a particular form of politics of guilt, which on the one hand positions her as an “icon-body” that reproduces the classic distinction between active Westerners and passive sufferers and on the other hand challenges this distinction when her celebrity body becomes agentic. The politics of guilt is crucial because Medina and Act Alliance ask for recognition of a collective Scandinavian guilt, i.e. guilt about being on the receiving end of global inequality and consequently redemption through aid. Thirdly, I study the ways in which the politics of guilt is rejected when newspapers, bloggers and Facebook users cross-feed each other and affectively intensify a collective shaming of Medina. This kind of shaming, it is argued, is a way of rejecting guilt towards suffering others by shaming and denying Medina agency and insisting that she is merely an icon-body. Finally, while the article distinguished between politics of guilt and the shaming strategies directed at Medina, both work according to the logics of affective governmentality, seeking to govern who has agency and what the appropriate affects in the face of suffering might be. In this context, the analysis shows, shaming reflects a neoliberal and ethnocentric welfare-protectionism that conceals its own anti-refugee ideology.
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Pub Date : 2018-04-02DOI: 10.1080/20004214.2018.1438731
A. Gjelsvik
ABSTRACT This article discusses the Norwegian film The Pyromaniac (Erik Skjoldbjærg 2016) as an artistic attempt to come to terms with terrorism, and as a cinematic treatment of the Norwegian terror attacks of 22nd of July 2011. The film is discussed in relation with several written accounts on 22nd of July and focus is on the role of the individual, the family and the society when it comes to guilt and shame following incomprehensible events.
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Pub Date : 2018-04-02DOI: 10.1080/20004214.2018.1438730
Julianne Q. M. Yang
ABSTRACT This article analyzes representations of privilege and social inequality in the science fiction TV series Äkta människor (Real Humans) (2012–2013), produced by Sweden’s national public TV broadcaster (SVT). Set in the near future or a parallel present, Real Humans explores an alternative version of Sweden in which more and more human workers are replaced by a type of humanoid robot called “Hubots”. Reviewers and scholars have interpreted the series in light of various contemporary social and political issues, many of which pertain to not only technology, but also social inequality amongst humans. This article connects Real Humans specifically to the recent increase in paid domestic labor in Scandinavia, and argues that the series deals with moral conflicts associated with being privileged and outsourcing household and care work. This is especially evident in the series’ representation of Inger Engman, a Swedish mother, wife, and full-time employee, and her ambivalent relationship to her household and care work Hubot Mimi. Through Inger and Mimi, Real Humans explores moral and affective dimensions of privilege, and brings to mind concerns expressed by parents in Scandinavia who employ domestic workers and au pairs. Inger’s conflicted relationship to Mimi also evokes the concept of maternal guilt. As I show, Real Humans is one of several contemporary Scandinavian narratives that use the au pair figure to comment on social and gender inequality in a globalized age, yet the series stands out in its debt to the science fiction genre. In sum, Real Humans is not only a rare and noteworthy example of a Scandinavian science fiction TV series—it also invites the viewer to reflect on the connections between privilege, social (in)equality, and work in contemporary Scandinavia.
本文分析了瑞典国家公共电视台(SVT)制作的科幻电视剧Äkta människor (Real Humans)(2012-2013)中特权和社会不平等的表现形式。在不久的将来或平行的现在，真实人类探索了瑞典的另一个版本，在那里越来越多的人类工人被一种名为“Hubots”的类人机器人所取代。评论家和学者根据各种当代社会和政治问题来解释这个系列，其中许多问题不仅与技术有关，而且与人类之间的社会不平等有关。本文特别将《真实人类》与斯堪的纳维亚半岛最近有偿家务劳动的增加联系起来，并认为该系列涉及与享有特权和外包家务和护理工作相关的道德冲突。这在该系列对英格·英格曼(Inger Engman)的表现中尤为明显，英格曼是一位瑞典母亲、妻子和全职员工，她与家庭和护理工作Hubot Mimi之间的矛盾关系。通过英格和米米，《真实人类》探索了特权的道德和情感维度，并让人想起斯堪的纳维亚半岛雇佣家政工人和互惠生的父母所表达的担忧。英格与咪咪的矛盾关系也唤起了母性内疚感的概念。正如我所展示的，《真实人类》是当代斯堪的纳维亚叙事作品中的一部，它用互惠生的形象来评论全球化时代的社会和性别不平等，但这部剧却因其对科幻类型的依赖而脱颖而出。总而言之，《真实人类》不仅是斯堪的纳维亚科幻电视剧中一个罕见而值得注意的例子，它还邀请观众反思当代斯堪的纳维亚地区特权、社会平等和工作之间的联系。
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