School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, Monash University

Vampires, Vamps and Va Va Voom | Lenis Prater In my paper I contend that the genre of paranormal romance can provide new and more equitable narrations of sex and gender, but that this is rarely the case. The ‘self-evident’ (and self-perpetuating) construction of men as stronger than women justifies problematic power relations in most romance novels. Indeed, many feminist scholars such as Winifred Woodhull and Sharon Marcus have noted that the normalisation of sexual and domestic violence is due, in part, to the attribution of power to men and powerlessness to women. In paranormal romance, where vampires, werewolves, shape shifters and witches abound, common-sense understandings of men’s and women’s bodies can be undermined. Unfortunately, paranormal romance authors often create myths or pairings where the heroes are more monstrous and powerful than the heroines. Women in these novels are not correspondingly monstrous or animalistic; they are, for example, far more likely to be virgins and less likely to attack the hero. In order to articulate my arguments, I will examine two paranormal romance series in depth. The Immortals After Dark series by Kresley Cole exemplifies the problems associated with the paranormal romance genre. I will contrast this with the Black Dagger Brotherhood series by J.R. Ward that provides a framework in which men are at least held responsible for their misuse of power and demonstrates how paranormal romance can undermine anti-feminist constructions of gender and sexuality. Lenise Prater BA (Hons) is currently writing her PhD in literature on the torture memoirs produced in the ‘war on terror’. Her honours project was a feminist account of the romance ‘subgenre’ of ‘romantic suspense’. She also spoke at the After Harry symposium about the construction of romance in the Harry Potter series.

A Historiography of Psychoanalytic Film in Hollywood, 1920-1960 | Sian Mitchell This seminar looks at some of the films influenced by the introduction of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic practice to the United States in the early 1900s. This was a period where psychoanalysis grew in popularity and support within mass culture before undergoing a crisis within academic and professional circles. Films that will be discussed in this seminar include Carefree (Mark Sandrich, 1938), Lady in the Dark (Mitchell Leisen, 1944), Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945), and Freud (John Huston, 1962). Elements such as the image of the analyst and the neurotic patient within these films form an exaggerated and sometimes melodramatic (mis)representation of psychoanalytic practice, however, such insistence on therapy as a narrative device has assisted in its popularisation and ongoing love/hate relationship psychoanalysis has with American cinema. Sian Mitchell is a PhD candidate in Film and Television Studies at Monash University, researching parody, psychoanalysis, and therapy culture in the films of Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze.

Negotiating the Sacred: Siobhan McHugh Marrying out: Catholic/Protestant unions in Australia 1920s-70s Siobhan McHugh For over 150 years, until post-war migration diluted the mix, Australia was polarised between the majority Anglo Protestant Establishment and a minority Irish Catholic underclass. Religious differences reflected social and political tensions derived from colonial days and exacerbated by organisations like Freemasons, the Orange Lodge and Catholic secret societies. A self-imposed religious apartheid often saw Catholics go to Catholic schools, socialise in Catholic groups and work in traditional Catholic areas like the public service. Protestants likewise mingled mostly with their own, as a 1930s brochure, The Protestant’s Guide to Shopping in Rockhampton, hilariously demonstrates. Following the 1908 Ne Temere papal decree, religious and family protocols strongly discouraged inter-faith marriages – yet a quarter of Australian Catholics continued to marry ‘out’ until the late 1960s (Mol 1970). Such ‘mixed marriages’ often caused deep family divisions, from disinheritance to social exclusion. Children brought up in such marriages sometimes suffered a confused identity, not fully accepted by either ‘side’. The sectarian attitudes of the period no longer apply to Catholics and Protestants in Australia, but parallels can be drawn with post 9/11 attitudes towards Muslims – the new ‘Other’. This paper is based on 42 oral histories of participants in a mixed marriage, children reared in one, or Protestant and Catholic clerics. The research will be the basis for a Doctorate in Creative Arts.

Negotiating the Sacred | John Bradley ‘The things we dare to presume’ Family, identity and country John Bradley The intervention into Indigenous communities has drawn Australia’s gaze to northern Australia. Indigenous communities have been portrayed as lacking in social capital, human values; they are seen to be violent and dysfunctional places while through silence the rest of Australia is seen to be functional. This presentation seeks to explore some life from within one particular community in the south west Gulf of Carpentaria and present another view of what communities are doing, where despite adversity and the lack of Governmental ears in regard to what may ‘needed’, issues of identity and what the sacred may be in 2008 are still important issues that are worth constant engagement. Biographical note John Bradley is a Senior Lecturer and Deputy Director of the Centre for Australian Indigenous Studies at Monash University. The majority of his research has been undertaken in the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria with particular emphasis on the marine and island environments of the Sir Edward Pellew Group of Islands, the country of the Yanyuwa people. Much of this work has dealt with the value of intangible heritage and how it can be utilised in regard to joint protection of both biological species and heritage sites. My most important contributions to this field has been in regard to ethno-biology, Indigenous language maintenance, land and sea rights and documenting Indigenous knowledge. His recent work has involved working with the Yanyuwa people in the storyboarding of 400 kilometres of song lines and 30 other major texts with a view to animation. He is also a member of a UNESCO panel that is concerned with the future of Indigenous knowledge in the 21st century.

Negotiating the Sacred: Chandran Kukathas Do children have interests? Chandran Kukathas It is widely held that children have interests that deserve protection, by the law, by the state, and by international conventions. But before we can consider the merits of different measures to protect children it is important to ask whether or not children do indeed have interests and, if they do, what these might be. In this paper I suggest that children do not have interests and therefore that, whatever protections they require must have some other basis than that of attending to their interests. I also suggest that they have many fewer claims to protection than is sometimes asserted. Biographical note Chandran Kukathas is Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics. He previously taught at the University of Utah, and was also for many years taught political theory at the Australian Defence Force Academy. He is the author of Hayek and Modern Liberalism (OUP 1989) and The Liberal Archipelago: A Theory of Diversity and Freedom (OUP 2003). He has also published widely on such topics as multiculturalism, immigration, freedom, equality, and global justice.

Slashing and Subtitles | Tessa Dwyer Slashing and Subtitles: Romanian Media Piracy, Censorship and Translation Based on research undertaken in collaboration with Romanian national Ioana Uricaru, this paper focuses on media piracy in pre-1989 communist Romania involving the translation of banned foreign-language films and television programs. Noting how translation can function both in the service and subversion of censorship, and how both roles are complicated by contradictory notions of quality and authenticity, I begin by pitting Romania’s government-sanctioned translation methods against the unofficial, amateur practices that typify piracy operations. I then proceed to unpack and expand notions of media piracy to include niche, expert and online modes of engagement. It is my contention that the audiovisual translation techniques that accompany both censorship and piracy processes provide a largely unexamined angle from which to interrogate the politics of film exhibition, distribution and reception. Tessa Dwyer is a doctoral candidate in the School of Culture and Communication, the University of Melbourne, researching issues surrounding film and translation. Her film articles have been published in journals such as The South Atlantic Quarterly, Polygraph and Linguistica Antverpiensia, and in the anthology A Deleuzian Century? (1995). Currently co-editing a special issue of the online journal Refractory on the subject of the split screen, she is the former Director of the Centre for Contemporary Photography and a member of the World Picture e-journal advisory board. Her article ‘Slashings and Subtitles’ on which this talk is based, is forthcoming in The Velvet Light Trap.

Negotiating the Sacred | Lori Beaman Religious diversity and family matters: Polygamy and the limits of the law Lori G. Beaman Polygamy has been the topic of much debate and controversy in Canada and the United States in the past year, often making the news with dramatic events involving alleged child and woman abuse, police raids, and the deliberate ‘flaunting’ of illegal activities. How can we make sense of this seeming sudden attention to a family form that has existed relatively quietly for at least a century in communities across Canada and the United States? Lori G. Beaman holds a Canada Research Chair in the Contextualization of Religion in a Diverse Canada at the University of Ottawa. Trained in sociology, law and philosophy, she brings an interdisciplinary perspective to her central research focus which is religious freedom and its regulation. Her books include Defining Harm: Religious Freedom and the Limits of the Law, _Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press (2008); _Religion and Canadian Society: Traditions, Transitions and Innovations, Toronto: Scholar’s Press (2006) and Religion, Globalization and Culture, edited with Peter Beyer, Leiden: Brill Academic Press (2007). She presents her work regularly at international conferences, and has published articles in numerous scholarly journals, including Nova Religio, Sociology of Religion, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion and Church and State.

Negotiating the Sacred | Gary Bouma Religion and governing the family Gary D. Bouma All religions have images and ideals of the human family. These images and ideals range widely and are in no small part informed by social and cultural factors. For example, polygamy is more likely to emerge in societies with a high mortality rate among young males. Once in place, these images and ideals are likely to be given religious sanction – ‘God wants(ed) it thus’. A religiously plural society like Australia is likely to experience contestation between different religious groups as they seek to use the state to enforce their religiously sanctioned images and ideals. This is evident in the current debates about gay marriage and polygamy, the earlier debate about re-marriage of divorced persons, and debates about other aspects of family life from contraception and abortion to the provision of facilities suitable to couples in their senescence. In all of this it is the temptation, or in the case of some – e.g. Calvinists, Catholics and Wahabbi Muslims – the perceived requirement to use the state to impose on others the views of some poses a threat to the smooth functioning of democracy in a religiously plural society. There may also be situations where secularists impose their images and ideals upon others using the state. Gary D. Bouma is Professor Emeritus of Sociology and UNESCO Chair in Intercultural and Interreligious Relations – Asia Pacific at Monash University and Chair of Board of Directors for The Parliament of the World’s Religions 2009. He is Associate Priest in the Anglican Parish of St John’s East Malvern. His research in the sociology of religion examines the management of religious diversity in plural multicultural societies, postmodernity as a context for doing theology, religion and terror, inter-cultural communication, religion and public policy, women and religious minorities, and gender factors in clergy careers. Recent books include: Australian Soul: Religion and Spirituality in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge University Press) and _Democracy in Islam _(Routledge) which he has written with Sayed Khatab.

The Third Wave of Disaster | James Curnow The science fiction disaster film has had sporadic success over the last 60 years, the peaks of which can be seen in three distinct waves – those of the 1950s, the 1990s and the 21st century. The wave of the 1950s has largely been seen as a kind of response to the social anxiety brought about by the nuclear threat exemplified by the cold war. The wave of the 1990s can be seen as the result of a rapid increase in special effects technologies and a decade of mild paranoia brought about by millennialism, as well as being a kind of nostalgic reinvention of the SF disaster films of the 1950s, appropriating the imagery whilst detaching it from any real social anxiety. This paper focuses on a third wave of science fiction (SF) disaster films that has come about in the 21st century as a response to present social anxiety.

Provisional Insight Colloquium: Helen Grace Indissoluble Girl Clusters: Kracauer in China At the beginning of ‘The Mass Ornament’, Kracauer makes an audacious statement which sets the tone not only for this essay but in many ways for his entire oeuvre: ‘The position that an epoch occupies in the historical process can be determined more strikingly from an analysis of its inconspicuous surface-level expressions than from that epoch’s judgments about itself’. This claim for the high significance of ephemeral aspects of culture is perhaps the reason for the enduring attraction of Kracauer’s work and in this paper I want to consider a recent instance which suggests the fresh relevance of this work. In the recruitment by the Beijing Olympics Organizing Committee of young women to act as official guides, a set of very precise physical characteristics detailed the principle qualifications which women were required to have – from height, to facial symmetry and bodily proportion. In this new case of the formation of ‘indissoluble girl clusters whose movements are demonstrations of mathematics’, a new development is discernible. If in Kracauer’s original example, the ‘mass ornament’ is considered an end in itself, the production of regularity of appearance, in the case I am discussing, overturns the original distinction which Kracauer makes between ‘living star formations’, evacuated of meaning, on the one hand and on the other, military exercises designed to arouse patriotic feelings, suggesting new meanings and the possibility of a new ‘mass ornament’ form, in the service of a new ‘fairy tale’. This paper will also reflect on the use of Kracauer’s thought in the development of film theory in China precisely as an alternative to the sole use of cinema as a propaganda tool and in general, some discussion of the complexities of propaganda will be considered.

Provisional Insight Colloquium: Lesley Stern “Tenuous Intrigues”: Killing Sheep and Killing Time Kracauer talks of the “tenuous intrigues” that characterize certain films, films that navigate between the genres of story and non-story, or experimental films and films of fact. He identifies a “conflict between intrigue and poetry” manifested “in the nature of real-life episodes.” In this paper I explore Kracauer’s “tenuous intrigues” in two pairs of films by two film-makers: Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep and Warming by the Devil’s Fire, and Agnes Vardas’ Cleo from 5 to 7 and Vagabond. Lesley Stern is Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of The Scorsese Connection and The Smoking Book and co-editor of Falling for You: Essays on Cinema and Performance. She has published widely in areas of film, performance, photography, art and cultural studies and also writes fiction. She is currently writing a book called Gardening in a Strange Land.

Provisional Insight Colloquium: Adrian Martin Last Day Every Day: Figural Thinking in Auerbach, Kracauer, Benjamin and Some Others In “A Philosophical Interpretation of Freud”, Paul Ricoeur (drawing upon Hegel) remarks: “The appropriation of a meaning constituted prior to me presupposes the movement of a subject drawn ahead of itself by a succession of ‘figures’, each of which finds its meaning in the ones which follow it.” The notion of the figural has recently become popular in European film theory and analysis, especially due to the work of Nicole Brenez – in which the figure stands for “the force … of everything that remains to be constituted” in a character, object, social relation or idea. Her use of the term refers back to magisterial work of German literary philologist Erich Auerbach (Mimesis), who decoded the religious interpretive system wherein all persons and events are grasped as significant only insofar as they prefigure their fulfilment on the ‘last day’ of divine judgement. Auerbach’s 1920s work on figuration in Dante was an important influence on his friend Walter Benjamin; and it was this ‘theological’ aspect of Benjamin’s thought that caught Kracauer’s attention, leading to the problematic of the redemption of worldly things. In this lecture I will trace the notion of figural thinking from Weimar then to Paris (and beyond) today, taking in writings by William Routt and Giorgio Agamben, as well as two filmmakers also touched by figural thinking: Josef von Sternberg and Douglas Sirk. Adrian Martin is Senior Research Fellow in Film and Television Studies, Monash University (Melbourne, Australia). His books include What is Modern Cinema? (Uqbar 2008), Raul Ruiz: Magnificent Obsessions (Altamira 2004), The Mad Max Movies (Screensound/Currency 2003), Once Upon a Time in America (BFI 1998) and Phantasms (Penguin 1994), and he has regular columns in Film Quarterly (US), De Filmkrant (Holland) and Cahiers du cinéma España (Spain). He is the Co-editor of Movie Mutations (BFI 2003) and the Internet film magazine Rouge.

Provisional Insight Colloquium: Andrew Benjamin and Deane Williams Denaturing Time On a number of occasions in the texts that make up The Mass Ornament Kracauer is concerned to position modernity against nature. Rather than understanding this development as a simple refusal of nature it must be understood as integral to the complex politics of time that mark the advent of modernity. Andrew Benjamin is Professor of Critical Theory and Philosophical Aesthetics at Monash University. He was previously Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Research in Philosophy and Literature at Warwick University. An internationally recognised authority on contemporary French and German critical theory, he has been Visiting Professor at Columbia University in New York and Visiting Critic at the Architectural Association in London. His many books include: What is Deconstruction? (1988), Art, Mimesis and the Avant-Garde (1991), Present Hope: Philosophy, Architecture, Judaism (1997), Philosophy’s Literature (2001) and Disclosing Spaces: On Painting (2004). He also edited The Lyotard Reader(1989), Abjection, Melancholia and Love: the Work of Julia Kristeva(1990) and Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience (1993) and Walter Benjamin and Romanticism (2002). Fertile Grounds: Kracauer’s Realist Film Theory, New York City 1945-1960 This paper seeks to better understand the place of Kracauer’s Theory of Film amongst the debates about filmic realism that occurred in New York City in the immediate post-war years (Eduoard de Laurot, Jonas Mekas, James Agee). In seeking this understanding, this paper will diminish the traditional divide between filmic realism and modernism to propose that in this period, in this culture, that filmic realism was a pre-eminent modernist form. Of course these debates were accompanied by an upsurge in independent realist film making leading to the emergence of what we now call the New American Cinema. Another major aspect of these debates, one that is rarely dealt with and is an instructive and vital component is the films included for discussion. This paper will attend to these, including In the Street (James Agee and Helen Levitt 1953), The Quiet One (Sydney Meyers 1949), On the Bowery (Lionel Rogosin 1956), Little Fugitive (Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin and Ray Ashley 1953) and Cry of Jazz (Edward O. Bland 1959).Deane Williams is Senior Lecturer, Film and Television Studies in the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, Monash University, Melbourne. He has written on realist film in its many forms including documentary film and Australian film history. He is Foundation Editor of Studies in Documentary Film and in 2008 his Australian Postwar Documentary Films: An Arc of Mirrors will be published by Intellect and his (and Brian McFarlane’s) Michael Winterbottom will be published by Manchester University Press.

Provisional Insight Colloquium: Graeme Gilloch Ad Lib: Reflections on Siegfried Kracauer and the Image of Improvisation This paper seeks to explore one of Siegfried Kracauer’s most suggestive but least developed concepts: ‘improvisation’. Improvisation stands in opposition to the ornamental and serves as a key motif in Kracauer’s vision of modern metropolitan experience and his understanding of the potential of the cinematic medium. In his presentation of diverse practices and images of improvisation – bodily, performative, material, textual – Kracauer points to the critical and comic qualities of the felicitously unforeseen. The paper concludes by arguing for the utopian promise of acting ‘according to pleasure’. Graeme Gilloch is a Reader in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University. He has published two monographs on the writings of Walter Benjamin (both with Polity Press, Cambridge: Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City [1996] and Critical Constellations: Walter Benjamin [2002]). In addition, he has published numerous essays exploring Benjamin’s work in relation to more contemporary theorists (especially Jean Baudrillard), writers (Paul Auster, W.G. Sebald, Orhan Pamuk) and artists (Sophje Calle, Janet Cardiff). A former Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at Frankfurt University, he is currently researching and writing an intellectual biography of Siegfried Kracauer.

I Swear I Saw That: A Talk on the Act of Giving Witness | Professor Michael Taussig Professor Michael Taussig (Columbia University) This talk gathers together different disciplinary interests across literature, performance, visual media and communication. It concerns drawings in fieldwork notebooks (Taussig’s own), the relation of text to image, drawing, and the act of giving witness. Michael Taussig is a distinguished anthropologist and cultural theorist, best known for his engagement with Marx’s idea of commodity fetishism, especially in terms of the work of Walter Benjamin. His highly innovative writing pays primary attention to textual construction as a form of analysis in itself, involving a mixture of ethnography, story-telling, meta-ethnography, performance and theory. Taussig has spent over ten years cumulatively doing fieldwork in Colombia, Putumayo, and Venezuela. His work has investigated the history of African slavery, abolition in Western Colombia, popular manifestations of the working of commodity fetishism, the sociology of malnutrition, the impact of colonialism on shamanism and folk healing, the relevance of modernism and post-modernist aesthetics for the understanding of ritual, especially shamanic healing, the making, talking, and writing of terror, mimesis in relation to sympathetic magic, state fetishism and secrecy. Currently a professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, he has been a faculty member at distinguished universities around the world, including professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, and professor of Performance Studies at New York University. He has been guest lecturer, visiting professor, and keynote speaker at distinguished centres of learning around the world. In addition, Taussig has published numerous articles, written and publicly performed two scripts, and has been awarded many honours, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. His most recent book is Walter Benjamin’s Grave (2006). Other Representative Publications: The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (1980); Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (1987); The Nervous System (1992); Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (1993); The Magic of the State (1997); Defacement (1997); Law in a Lawless Land (2003); My Cocaine Museum (2004).