‘It doesn’t make me feel the way you do’: Reading dating apps and digital intimacies in Smiley (Netflix 2022)

In the context of deep media society, digital intimacy has become one of the core forms of social media user interaction. As a group of content creators relying on emotional needs, the emotional connection and trust relationship built on youtube and tiktok platforms has typical research value. Supported by digital intimacy theory, use and satisfaction theory and post subculture theory, this paper compares and analyzes the content production logic, interaction mechanism and trust building path of the two platforms. It is found that through the transformation of "local knowledge", algorithmic adaptive content design, ritual interaction and personalized modeling, fortune telling influencers build differentiated digital intimacy in two scenarios of fragmentation and deep immersion; Trust building has experienced a progressive process from emotional resonance, value recognition to decision dependence, accompanied by the potential risk of algorithmic alienation. The conclusions provide an empirical reference for understanding the new form of emotional labor in the social media era and the construction logic of digital intimacy.

This study explores the datafication of digital intimacy in female-oriented otome games, analyzing how these games construct databases of idealized masculinities and romantic narratives, balancing empowerment and commodification. Through digital ethnography, walkthrough, and interviews with Chinese women players between 2023 and 2024, we reveal how otome games mediate intimacies between women players and virtual male characters, reflecting sociocultural values and shaping affective experiences. These women-oriented games collect intimate data to optimize design and profitability, offering immersive, customizable romantic experiences while commodifying emotional investments. This dual dynamic underscores a tension in emotional capitalism, where intimacy is both enriched and exploited. By examining the interplay between digital intimacy, datafication, and emotional capitalism, our study further contributes to the critical discourse on how role-playing games monetize personal and emotional experiences, emphasizing the need to safeguard user sovereignty as digital platforms capitalize on affective labor.

This study employs the walkthrough method and digital ethnography of six streamers over two years to examine streamer – viewer interactions on Lespark, a lesbian dating and live-streaming platform, with particular attention to the cultural meanings embedded in digital gifting practices. The findings demonstrate that, alongside the three core affordances of live streaming – commodification, connection, and aspiration – gamification functions as a structuring force in mediating intimate relationships through digital gifts. Through leaderboards, badges, and tiered rewards, commercial transactions are transformed into performative expressions of chivalry and romantic intimacy, embedding emotions within economic exchanges while reinforcing viewer engagement. This study introduces the concept of conspicuous display gifting, extending beyond conventional gifting paradigms to show how the Lespark communities use high-value gifts to simultaneously assert social status and foster community cohesion – creating a distinctive tension between hierarchical visibility and shared connection. On platforms like Lespark, such gifting practices serve not only as a status marker but also as a mechanism that reconfigure emotional labor into participatory branding. By analyzing these patterns of imaginative, emotional, and intimate exchange, this study contributes to platform and digital intimacy studies, while addressing key gaps in research on lesbian dating and live-streaming communities.

Reviewed by: Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance José Medina Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance. Edited by Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. Pp. 276. $28.95 pbk. 978-0-7914-7102-9. Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance is collaborative philosophy at its very best. The essays that the editors have assembled constitute a very successful critical intervention in philosophy through a set of challenging dialogues on race and epistemic practices. This critical intervention raises exciting questions for future generations of scholars in epistemology, race theory, political philosophy, and philosophy more generally. Drawing on the pioneering work of Charles Mills and standpoint epistemologists (e.g., Marilyn Frye and Sandra Harding), the essays in this volume identify problematic limitations and assumptions in traditional ways of philosophizing that have been pervasive. They delineate the contours of blind spots that operate both in academia and in the social world outside it, tracing their origins and their consequences. They identify questions that have gone not only unanswered but unasked for too long. The critical work that this volume does is innovative and at the same time firmly grounded in rich theoretical traditions that have been marginalized by the philosophical establishment (race theory, feminist theory, and—more recently—queer theory). In this sense, Lorraine Code calls attention to the philosophical excavations of Michèle Le Doeuff, who uncovers a forgotten critical tradition of women philosophers (such as Gabrielle Suchon in the seventeenth century) who offered critical reflections on the exclusions and distortions of masculine knowledge, providing critical tools to develop alternative epistemic practices. On the other hand, in African American philosophy there has been a long and important tradition of critical discourses that identify and diagnose racially motivated forms of ignorance. From DuBois to contemporary race theorists, racial ignorance has been shown to involve entrenched habits and attitudes that go well beyond a mere absence of true belief or a mere presence of false belief; racial ignorance has been shown to be based on a lack of interest to know and a lack of opportunities to explore social realities pertaining to race. As Elizabeth Spelman points out, this is the centerpiece of James Baldwin's powerful indictment of white America: "that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it" (119). This ignorance is based on a deeply seated epistemic resistance to know. It is a very active and resilient form of not-knowing, not a mere unwillingness to believe, not a mere casual neglect or a simple form of self-deception. It is an ignorance that requires a carefully orchestrated and laboriously maintained form of epistemic neglect, an unknowingness carefully [End Page 313] generated and supported by an entire range of institutions, practices, habits, and attitudes. This ignorance does not bear the mark of passivity but actually takes a lot of agency. As Spelman puts it, this form of ignorance is "an appalling achievement" that requires "grotesquely prodigious effort" (120); it is an ignorance that needs management. Spelman's analysis of epistemic management sketches a "route to undoing such ignorance" through an understanding of "the labor it takes to create and sustain it" (123). As many of the essays in this volume show, the proactive lack of epistemic concern for racial others is also a lack of concern for oneself in relation to these others, that is, an ignorance of one's racial positionality and responsibility. This ignorance—far from being a mere ideological excrescence, an accidental side effect of relations of oppression—is actually a fundamental cultural mechanism for safeguarding privilege and domination. Relations of oppression are protected by being erased from the minds of those who perpetrate them and sometimes (when possible) from the minds of those who suffer them. Sarah Hoagland offers an analysis of racial ignorance as based on a denial of meaningful relationality, which simultenously produces a lack of understanding of oneself and a lack of understanding of others with whom one is constitutively related. Paul Taylor and Shannon Sullivan illustrate this relational ignorance and its consequences by showing how U.S. citizens' ignorance of Haiti and Puerto Rico...

Dominant discourses on telecare technologies often celebrate the erasure of distance and place. This paper provides a critical intervention into these discourses by investigating how spaces still matter, despite the move from physical to virtual encounters between healthcare professionals and patients. I argue that science and technology studies (STS) research on telecare, as well as other technologies, can be enriched by including a focus on place to understand the dynamic interactions between people and things. Adopting insights of human geographers, I show how places in which technologies are used affect how technologies enable or constrain human actions and identities. Whereas some spaces may facilitate the incorporation of technologies, others may resist technologies. A focus on how places matter is important for understanding how telecare technologies reorder and redefine healthcare. Although other healthcare technologies are also important actors in transforming healthcare, telecare technologies do this in a very specific way: they redefine the spatial dimensions of healthcare. To capture and further explore this changing spatial configuration of healthcare, I introduce the notion of technogeography of care. This concept provides a useful heuristic to study how places matter in healthcare. Although telecare technologies introduce virtual encounters between healthcare providers and patients, the use of telecare devices still largely depends on locally grounded, situated care acts. Based on interviews with users of several cardiac telecare applications, including healthcare professionals and patients in Germany and The Netherlands, the paper shows how patients' homes and public spaces are important for shaping the implementation and use of telecare technologies, and vice versa. Last, but not least, telecare devices are implicated as well. The paper emphasizes the place-dependency of the use and meaning of technical devices by showing how the same technological device can do and mean different things in different places.

This article analyses the trend of violent romantic comedies in Spain that, following the nation’s economic crisis (loosely 2008–2017), swap adoration for marital discord and divorce. Unlike screwball ‘comedies of remarriage’, the gallows humour of Miamor perdido (Emilio Martínez-Lázaro, 2018), Bajo el mismo techo (Juana Macías, 2019) and Mamá o papá (Dani de la Orden, 2021) defers reconciliation through rampant physical and emotional cruelty, challenging traditional genre and gender dynamics. Analysing casting, marketing, mise-en-scène and narrative structure, the study interrogates the limits of sadism within romcom and identifies an ambivalent ‘Schrödinger’s love’ of simultaneous sincerity and falsity.

The perverse ambition of Mikimoto Ryuzo was to transform Japanese modernity through the dissemination of the writing of the Victorian art critic and socialist John Ruskin, whose work he assiduously collected, translated, and glossed. Mikimoto—the son of Mikimoto Kokichi, a successful Meiji businessman who developed a technique for artificially culturing pearls—founded both a library and a society in Tokyo to assist in the circulation of Ruskin's work, and in 1930 he launched a monthly journal, in which he published his own translations of critical essays about Ruskin by major British scholars, including the socialist anticolonial writer J. A. Hobson and the philosopher R. G. Collingwood, as well as many essays and memoirs and sketches of his own composition, in both English and Japanese. Yet while Mikimoto's careful work in establishing a Japanese readership for Ruskin flourished in Taisho Japan, a place characterized by broad cultural obsessions with labor, aesthetics, and crafts, what remains of that effort is confined to a rarely visited collection in a small Tokyo office, a fragile testimony to the intensity of feelings of an unusually enthusiastic reader of Victorian literature. Mikimoto was a bricoleur, experimenting with and recontextualizing Ruskin in the service of new personal and political demands, his library evidence of the capacity of literary writing to shape, and be shaped by, distant acts of reception. His always insightful and often outrageous writing on Ruskin records the triumphs of a scholarly son of wealth and narrates a relationship with a father whose successful business was a source of a shame freighted with gendered meanings. Yet his work always braids his own familial dissent with broad political reflections, reflections on the violence of Japanese modernization, on the history of racism, and on the crimes of empires, producing an immanent critique of capitalism, the theoretical coordinates of which are to be found not only in Ruskinian socialism but also in Marxist commodity theory and in the syncretic anticapitalist writings of his mentor, Kawakami Hajime. What Mikimoto learned from Ruskin above all were the radical possibilities for a life in which emotional and political commitments could be considered part of a single, breathtakingly complex whole, which was reflected in what Caroline Levine calls “the close intertwining of Ruskin's iconoclastic aesthetics with his radical political principles.”1Recent scholarship on Ruskin has striven to find a singular theme underlying his work, a unifying notion that might yoke together texts as diverse as Modern Painters and the Fors Clavigera letters. Questioning a long-held dissatisfaction with what early reviewers called his “crotchety contradictions and peevish paradoxes” and “if not insanity, sheer extravagance,” the aim has been to recover Ruskin as a systematic thinker after all. While scholars such as Levine and Jonah Siegel, among others, have done much to reveal Ruskin's philosophical sophistication, they have inevitably underplayed the almost manic energy that characterized Ruskin's literary style from his earliest texts through until his last, almost incoherent, letters.2 Consider the following passage from “The Nature of Gothic,” the excerpt of The Stones of Venice that was printed as a pamphlet in 1854 and that circulated among working men's clubs: And, on the other hand, go forth again to gaze upon the old cathedral front, where you have smiled so often at the fantastic ignorance of the old sculptors: examine once more those ugly goblins, and formless monsters, and stern statues, anatomiless and rigid; but do not mock at them, for they are signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone; a freedom of thought, and rank in scale of being, such as no laws, no charters, no charities can secure; but which it must be the first aim of all Europe at this day to regain for her children.3 Ranging freely between gothic fiction, instructional literature, and art criticism, Ruskin's prose models the very liberty that he attributes to the free laborer and picks up most of the qualities he attributes to Gothic architecture: savageness, changefulness, naturalism, grotesqueness, rigidity, and redundance. Even nineteenth-century critics of Ruskin were quick to note that much of his reputation derived from the intensity of his style rather than from his claims or readings, with one commentator comparing him to Thomas de Quincey, who, he euphemistically notes, “sought to obtain by prose effects commonly associated with poetry.”4 As the comparison implicitly suggests, the disruptive, aggressive force of Ruskin's prose was not merely purple but pushed against boundaries of acceptable discourse. Such a force is legible without relying on what Raymond Williams called the “almost wholly irresponsible biographical attention” that Ruskin has received, but the affective incoherence of Ruskin's prose is only amplified by his biography, beset as it was by sexual scandals and madness.5 The work of freedom as Ruskin records it is autopoietic and hysterical, a stylistic practice whose effects are felt as emotions rather than internalized as doctrine.To treat Ruskin as a dilettante is not necessarily to blunt the force of his social criticism but to relocate it. Ruskin himself understood that the value of a work of criticism did not depend on its engagement with existing sources or its conceptual completeness—indeed, in The Political Economy of Art, he explores ways in which such a dependence might itself befuddle a critical insight: “The statements of economical principle given in [this] text, though I know that most, if not all, of them are accepted by existing authorities on the science, are not supported by references, because I have never read any author on political economy, except Adam Smith, twenty years ago. Whenever I have taken up any modern book upon the subject, I have usually found it encumbered with inquiries into accidental or minor commercial results, … by the complication of which, it seemed to me, the authors themselves had been not unfrequently prevented from seeing to the root of the business.”6 To engage with the habitual vocabulary of a discipline, even with the intention of displacing that vocabulary or radically undoing the structures of its claims to legitimacy, is inevitably to reinforce many of the structuring assumptions of that discipline. This inconvenient truth of humanistic study—flashes of which were already visible in the central texts of Victorian radicalism—was, for the better part of the twentieth century, treated as one among many unpleasant but inevitable symptoms of the saturation of language by sovereign power. Deconstruction has proven an especially helpful theory for critics grappling with this problem. Derrida's description of paleonymy as “the ‘strategic’ necessity that requires the occasional maintenance of an old name in order to launch a new concept” effectively defined the scope and ambitions of the deconstructive political project: to wrest control of semiotics from dominant regimes of power—and, in opening up new possibilities in language, to begin to produce new acts of resistance.7I propose that affirmative readings (such as that on which paleonymic politics is built) depend on a nonconceptual cognitive practice—a “yes” whose meaning is ultimately affective. Though such a separation of conceptual from affective forms would no doubt seem naïve to Derrida, the recent turn to affect has opened up new possibilities for evaluating naive criticisms and faddish enthusiasms.8 How are we to approach the uncritical Ruskinism of Mikimoto Ryuzo, which makes itself known in spasmodic bursts of genre-subverting adoration? The middle section of his essay “Ruskin's Views of Economic Art” turns on just such a moment, in which Mikimoto recognizes the illegitimacy and excessive emotion of his interest in Ruskin: I do not like exaggeration and overestimation. I am criticising Ruskin. I think Masashige Kusunoko was a great man. And I think Napoleon was a great man, too. I think Carlyle was a great man, and that Mr. Kosen Sakai is praise-worthy. I have once wept over Mr. Natsume's Sore-Kara, and [have been] deeply moved by Dr. Kawakami's Story of Poverty. Though criticising Ruskin, I feel tears stand in my eyes when I think of his love affairs.With such a sentiment I keep studying Ruskin. I sometimes wish I would rather be influenced by his personality than by his reasonings. A merchant's son should be a merchant. If I am gently engaged in accounting, I can do without Ruskin, and can go to the Kabukiza Theatre or a London comedy month.9 This jarring confessional moment intrudes into a text that has hitherto restricted itself to a descriptive précis of Ruskin's essay “On the Political Economy of Art” (1857) and returns both Mikimoto and his readers to a set of painful feelings. The poignancy of Ruskin's ill-fated love affairs urgently demands that the author veer off course, necessitating the still-greater confession that even Mikimoto's veneration of Ruskin is the result of a substantial failure to conform to the plot attached to his name. This moment of reflection might serve as an emblem for the entire project of transnational aestheticism, formalizing as it does a broad array of aestheticist themes: an intense homosocial affection distributed among a pantheon of great men of letters, a dissent from the scripts of gender patrolled by capitalism, and a desire for greater intimacy with a thinker than the mere act of reading can provide. Casting himself as Dorian Gray and Ruskin as Lord Henry, Mikimoto theorizes the scope and limits of his own experience of textual influence and treats the transcultural counterarchive as simultaneously momentous and incomplete.What does the reading practice exhibited in “Ruskin's Views of Economic Art” have to say about the way we read Victorian literature now? Like the surface readers described by Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, Mikimoto responds to the affective life of his subject and is unwilling to engage in symptomatic reading.10 Like those surface readers, moreover, Mikimoto embraces sympathetic reading as an ethics, even at the expense of his social legibility: as he puts it in another essay entitled “What Is Ruskin in Japan?” “though some may censure me for believing Ruskin too much and for not noticing his errors, yet my belief in him will never decrease” (19). Mikimoto's sense of the racial and transnational differences that separate him from Ruskin results in an discipleship that also foreshadows Anne Cheng's call for a “hermeneutics of susceptibility” that would follow the contradictions of racial, gendered embodiment under the conditions of modernity rather than preempt such contradictions with a critical intervention or conceptualization.11 Cheng's approach to primitivism turns on the aesthetic pleasure that modernism derived from racial structures of knowledge and from the dramatic staging of racial performance on which such pleasure depended. The history of the Ruskin Library of Tokyo attests to the racial limits placed on Mikimoto's capacity to pass as a legitimate Ruskinian—limits placed both by the British contemporaries who received him on his many trips to Brantwood and by the posthumous scholarly reviewers who take great pleasure in the spectacle of a Japanese Ruskin enthusiast without in the least engaging him as a reader of Ruskin.Nonetheless Mikimoto's reading habits fail to conform to the ethics of reception espoused by Best, Marcus, and others in one very important sense. Over the past decade or so, Victorianists have preferred to affirm the critical perceptiveness of Victorian writers wherever possible, a sign of this turn being that the rhetorical structure “x was a theorist rather than a symptom of y” has become ubiquitous. Amanda Anderson's defense of the position is trenchant and precise: she notes that the “polemical thrust” of her book The Powers of Distance is “to take seriously the specific ways in which individual Victorians constructed their ideals, to consider not only the limits but also the distinctive virtues of their conceptions of enabling detachment.”12 Eve Sedgwick, making a similar point to a different end, cannily notes that “paranoia has by now candidly become less a diagnosis than a prescription” and that a “reparative” reading can work toward remedying problems at which more aggressive critical practices can only harrumph.13 Anderson and Sedgwick both oppose the heroic critical intervention with a gentler rehabilitation and calmly situate the Victorian writer by insisting on the explanatory power of her conceptual creations. Yet reading practices sometimes attributed to the affective turn in Victorian studies have generally restricted themselves to a single affect—that of emollient, complicit appreciation. As Elaine Freedgood and Emily Apter put it, “The recalcitrant, mystified, out-of-control, and conflicted texts of Marxist-psychoanalytic reading have been replaced by texts that are friendly, frank, generous, self-conscious, autocritiquing, and unguarded.”14 At the core of such an opposition is an Arnoldian faith in the soothing, and possibly improving, power of literature, a faith Mikimoto could certainly be said to have shared. His encounters with Ruskin, however, confront him with a text that is neither friendly nor frank but as monstrous as the fantasies of Sedgwick's paranoid reader. His response is to amplify, rather than resolve, Ruskin's incoherence—he performs, in other words, an affirmative reading practice predicated on feelings far uglier, and far more risky, than those of subdued respect or generous deference. It would be tempting to invoke Homi Bhabha's theory of mimicry in order to explain a hyperbolic anglicization of Japanese culture, to argue that Mikimoto rehabilitates colonial discourse on the unstable discursive terrain of the excluded other with the effect of deconstructing such discourse's underlying assumptions.15 Yet rather than treat Mikimoto as a deconstructive function of discourse, here I treat his engagement with Ruskin as a self-conscious experiment with the poetics and politics of readerly fidelity. The Tokyo library offers contemporary readers of Ruskin particular insights into the affective labor that sustains literary reception and that ensures that literature can continue to generate new meanings in contexts remote from the scene of their composition.Yet the key questions raised by Mikimoto's work concern the collector's painful consciousness of his distance from Ruskin—a distance with implications for both his body and his soul. At the heart of “Ruskin's Views of Economic Art” is a desire for intimacy with Ruskin's “personality” rather than his “reasonings.” What are the politics of a sympathetic reading that fails to achieve sympathy? Further, how are the sympathetic readings of professional critics interrupted or complicated by the hysterically affirmative readings of the dilettante, the dogmatist, the uncritical acolyte? These questions have begun to surface in our own moment, particularly in Carolyn Dinshaw's moving image of queer reception, the “touch across time,” the desire for “partial, affective connection” in the distant past that might ground alternative communities in the present.16 But when Mikimoto remarks that he wishes to be influenced by Ruskin's personality, he also points to the necessary failure that structures all such attempts to find community. The two are separated by something other than the passage of time: a history that disqualified Mikimoto's love for Ruskin. (Such a disqualification, incidentally, also characterizes the few notices that the Ruskin Library of Tokyo's publications have received among Western scholars since its reopening in 1984.) In the end, the Jamesonian ontology of the history that hurts is not incompatible with the Marcusian ethics of unsuspicious reading—such readings and reconstitutions can be and have been a strategy for processing trauma and loss and for building a politics of radical affirmation in the present.Let me constellate the terrain of what I am calling “affirmative reading” with two other of whose to Victorian literature derived more from the affect and style of that literature than from any of its In the to his of Ruskin's This to his work as a “What is not a of This but a as a would not be particularly to the readers of Even the has not been but as of as that was what Ruskin at in writing this a syncretic Ruskin who might serve the of the veneration of British writers in the colonial in order to dissent and of the of such a that would on the of to the colonial while violence at and and even the fragile that had the British no less the that to Ruskin In his with its capacity for records reading This as a moment of rather than one of could not any that I to my life in with the of the of the can be with the theory of with which characterizes his relationship to to a relationship to after the successful of the of that the part of writing is his and that the notion of not the uncritical of the results of like a for reading that is not on any particular Marxist His is in and his are complex and has even in the as to what the of and which it is to and even without the to the of In it to be to of old texts with a of an of the These it was had been by modern criticism and they should no be as the of the were to be in of such a it would at a But in it is not never has so for the of that recent had once and for all every one of individual Even if this were to be every Marxist would be to all such modern without and all of in to his for a single The desire to Marxist of any and it with a whose most is “the between subject and in the be taken at of who has read that this description will for The Marxist of the is in its between and in a rhetorical no doubt to own prose which called note of and which is felt in every of Yet in a text whose is to recover from the of style a if not that to the Marxist is to be in the of enthusiastic of a of stylistic to our critical in to a new for sympathetic and sympathetic a by the of the the most affirmation is neither radical nor can do it. Yet the of and more than a or a desire to without to new meanings from old literary texts by with a writing subject rather than a Mikimoto this as but and to it as just with a different a of a than the text A deconstructive reading would no doubt such a to the of cognitive function as claims to knowledge than would itself to Yet contexts the ways in which affirmation is a particularly strategy for excluded from the project of the and to name the of authors In such a affirmative reading turns a response to the political of Such a response is by for to Ruskin both and do not even if the me to And if is any one who at me, I think I will him to read G. G. But such a reading is also part of a set of that have since the of how to begin the structures of power that the dominant colonial order of without the possibilities by such Mikimoto's response is not to Europe but to and its cultural to Victorian gaze in a of and In order to the of such a I turn first to Mikimoto's of the differences between and Ruskin and to the transnational of and he his own of his from Ruskin were usually to those of the readers of had read at least and The and himself as a to Ruskin, a who his among Japanese Japanese was in and a of especially among and until many of its were on But the that and Ruskin were was the of Japanese in the were read and in at under Kawakami who was the most for Marxist critique in Kawakami's early socialist of published in on both Marxist and both Ruskin and but in he the Marxist on as well as writing on in a array of radical Kawakami's influence at a called the whose a of the and a who in off from the in of the of The radical of is to how Ruskin seemed to who him with more say that Ruskin is not In some he may seem But is an or order in The society which is by is a of society which may on is And Ruskin is great as comparison to as it may on an essay called the by a of the British the which was published in a collection of essays published by Ruskin's own and to Ruskin's the old attributed to the that the to than to of the as an of Ruskinian think when the is and if this great experiment from its and you will find that and his less to than to John no but in the between and Ruskin as for was the socialist had already published an of Ruskin's work to him as the of under the The of John Ruskin on of Fors in which Ruskin himself of the old also of the The passage has less known than the similar in of Fors and my father was me, a of the old political position Ruskin preferred at a given moment, he certainly preferred it to be the old Mikimoto was of the of comparing Ruskin to the more and it is that the he derived from Ruskinian was its capacity to work on the individual that political is the with an I have Ruskin as a who me to Yet Mikimoto's to separate such a politics from a one was and in his The first of such itself in the of Kawakami whose reputation as a Marxist to his to far greater than his to To Kawakami was a Ruskinian first and a Marxist the Ruskin had been the subject of and by a of literary critics and art in Japan, including the who of Modern and the who a section on Ruskinian aesthetics in his book of But Kawakami was the first professional in to on Ruskin, and he had also the to of This Mikimoto his at in a in of the at in called “Ruskin's in calling his “the … and most to Ruskinian In it, Kawakami also Ruskin and though he does so more than to the critique of political had two but forms of discourse, which he called by and by Ruskin though such a would from the of Western Mikimoto not only that a of and was but also that Kawakami had that such a was in Ruskin has been though by Dr. Kawakami to the as Even his many Mikimoto was to the particular of a Japanese critic to the project of reading Ruskin. In the he that may be an that the in has once been so Ruskinian that he was called the Japanese Ruskin by his Mikimoto's that being by Ruskin was not just a of but also of in neither “Ruskin's Views of

The integration of digital technologies in home-based exercise (HBE) has emerged as a critical public health intervention, particularly following the COVID-19 pandemic. However, comprehensive understanding of how digital technologies influence HBE research evolution and practice remains limited. This systematic review aims to: (1) map the knowledge evolution of digital technology-supported HBE research, (2) analyze innovative applications and value propositions of digital technologies in HBE, (3) identify key determinants of HBE participation in the digital era, and (4) predict future development trends. Following PRISMA guidelines, we conducted a comprehensive search of the Web of Science database from 2000 to 2024, yielding 311 articles for bibliometric analysis using CiteSpace and VOSviewer. Results indicated that digital technology-supported HBE research has grown exponentially, peaking in 2022. We identified seven core research themes, including intelligent exercise training, AI-driven fall prevention, wearable device interventions, virtual reality rehabilitation, mobile health applications, cancer patient tracking systems, and remote diagnostics. These themes highlight innovative approaches to personalized training, remote monitoring, and immersive rehabilitation experiences, demonstrating significant value in enhancing exercise adherence and health outcomes. Key determinants of HBE participation were identified at personal (social support, professional guidance, self-efficacy) and technological (digital literacy, accessibility, user interface design, data privacy) levels. Digital technologies demonstrate substantial potential for enhancing HBE accessibility, improving adherence, and reducing public health burden. Future research should prioritize addressing digital equity and developing evidence-based implementation frameworks to ensure sustainable and inclusive digital health interventions.

Adopting a poststructuralist theoretical approach, this study explored the emotion‐laden tensions, emotion labor, and identity constructions of university female English language teachers within the changing institutional and sociocultural contexts in China. Data were collected through narrative frames and follow‐up interviews with 13 female English language teachers in mainland Chinese universities. The findings revealed that female teachers' emotion‐laden tensions and emotion labor were shaped by a complex interplay of institutional and sociocultural expectations, which were both demanding and sometimes competing. With emotions creating a space for them to reflect upon their experiences, they developed a deeper understanding of the contextual realities and (re)negotiated their identities in response to the contextual expectations, characterized by a “compliance–resistance” duality. The study contributes to a nuanced understanding of how neoliberal institutional ethos, centralized socialist management origins, and Chinese traditional gender discourses intertwine and are co‐opted to shape female teachers' emotions. It also generates new insights into how teachers actively engage with dominant discourses to construct identities that align with their internal subjectivities. The study offers implications for the professional development and well‐being of female academics, as well as for higher education policies in China and beyond.

This article analyses the architecture of online environments as facilitating both the performance and the staging, within a Brazilian context, of a sexualised femininity that is stereotypically reductive to hegemonic definitions of body image and bodily practices. While online performances can be considered as postfeminist attempts at reclaiming agency through the reappropriation of traditional signifiers of femininity, this staging of femininity ultimately objectifies women by stabilising boundaries of gendered power relations, thus reinforcing a normative connection between gender and sexuality. By focusing on three recent cases of online harassment that occurred in Brazilian social media, I unravel the connection between misogyny and a neoliberal culture of hypersexualized performance of femininity, which commodifies the signifiers of gendered difference. Despite the differences involved in each of the case-studies analysed, they all demonstrate how digital intimacy articulates “a particular knowledge about the other,” ascribing value to certain bodies over others. Using discourse analysis of corpus data, I investigate how language is used to categorise and identify the female protagonists in these case-studies, so as to include and exclude particular forms of “femininity” from discourse. The article concludes that the subversive potential of social media is constituted, in the Brazilian context, not so much by the postfeminist capacity to playfully create a rupture with a prevalent culture of gendered normativity, but rather by the possibility of surveilling and disciplining the boundaries of femininity, with a punitive dimension of “public exposure” that violently reinforces gendered power relations.

First, I'd like to offer analysis of Halasek's and Bernard-Donals' utterances, but it may also be taken as rhetorical or tendentious characterization of them. If we begin with the two points of reference provided by our session's title, and Rhetorical Criticism, I think we can say that Halasek identifies herself as rhetorical critic or theorist who belongs to community of like-minded rhetorical critics and theorists, one that together poststructuralist thought, social constructivism, and writing and pedagogy. For them Bakhtin's vilification of is problem and his alternative rhetorical tradition is an opportunity. Halasek can summarize the Bakhtin attacks and distance herself from it as a definition of that is not ours and she can appropriate as much more congenial to herself and her fellow rhetoricians the rhetorical tradition of oppositional genres and discourse moves with which Bakhtin identifies the novel. She imagines Bakhtin's hostility to as consequence of his hostility to the official languages of Russia during his lifetime and imagines herself and her colleagues as also opposed to a of oppression but apparently not confronted with similar authoritarian political situation. Instead of identifying herself exclusively with parodic rhetoric opposed to an official monologic she posits dialogic rhetoric which can contemplate the tensions between polemic and rhetorics in the professional and pedagogical tasks of textual and cultural analysis. Bakhtin offers her better way of doing what rhetorical critics were already doing. Halasek welcomes Bakhtin's tension-filled genres and joyful relativity in prose that is relatively free from tension and clear about where it stands. She can separate Bakhtin's vilification of from his celebration of it, choose one side over the other, and even explain away Bakhtin's adherence to the side she rejects as function of his particular historical situation. She is at home with the listeners she posits and brings them Bakhtin they can use without having to change their minds about or politics. Bemard-Donals, on the other hand, writes tension-filled and ambivalent prose in the name of escaping from relativism and uncertainty. He is not at one with what he takes to be the community of contemporary rhetorical but sees it as plagued by the collapse of distinction between science and that he somehow wants to reassert He persists in commitment to theory or science or dialectic or history that he believes rhetorical critics like Fish and Rorty have subsumed under rhetoric, and he turns to Bakhtin not to assimilate him to the consensus in current rhetorical but to find way out of the impasse of current rhetorical theory. The Bakhtin he needs for his purposes is not the celebrant of parody and joyful relativity but the theorist of the socially constituted subject who can provide rhetorical criticism with scientific model for understanding how subjects are formed in language. In effect, he wants to substitute Bakhtin's sociolinguistics of the subject for the psychology of the subject Plato calls for in the Phaedrus as the scientific foundation for that could then know, as he put it in his

This article examines the literary and critical heritage of Vladimir Sharov (1952-2018), a contemporary writer and historian. When analyzing his texts in the postmodern paradigm, the authors focus on the urgent literary-theoretical problem of the relationship between genre and discursive traditions. The methodological basis of this research includes M. M. Bakhtin’s idea of separating compositional and architectonic forms in a literary work that opens a new correlation of diachronic and synchronous approaches. The research is based on the book “Temptation by the Revolution” (2009) by Vladimir Sharov, as well as on some metatexts of the 19th century. (P. Ya. Chaadaev, N. I. Nadezhdin, V. G. Belinsky). The research subject is Sharov’s historical narrative and its discursive characteristics. The authors show that substantive-semantic, lexical-grammatical, and stylistic features of V. Sharov’s book revealed by the analysis indicate its affinity to the discourse of the “dispute on Russia” that developed in the 19th century (discussions around the “First Philosophical Letter” by P. Ya. Chaadaev). A comparative analysis results in the main conclusion: at the level of external, compositional forms of text, V. Sharov’s discourse is formed as a part of the historical novel tradition, and at the level of architectonics, implicitly, refers to the discourse of the “dispute on Russia” and is built as its continuation, as a polylogue. It follows that the genre tradition and the discourse tradition interact in the book of V. Sharov ambivalently, and this is fixed in the structure of the narrative itself: the discourse organizes architectonics, the genre organizes the compositional unity of the text. The authors believe that the form of the classical heritage reception presented in the book “Temptation by the Revolution” by Vladimir Sharov, outlines additional opportunities for the study of his historical novels. This is a new and creative actualization form of Russian classics, produced by the writer and constituting a distinctive feature of his discourse.

Recognition and valuing of difference (Education Queensland, 2001) and inclusivity (State of NSW, 2003) are recognised as significant dimensions of quality teaching and learning. Yet they can be too easily forgotten in the push for quality. My research suggests that this is counterproductive since the two dimensions are integrally related, especially for students from non-advantaged backgrounds. In some subjects, the stylistic norms of the culture (cf. Lemke 1990) result in many students feeling excluded from legitimate belonging and hence full access. This can result in lowered intellectual engagement and poor retention rates in the subject, with junior secondary science being a case in point in many Western countries including Australia (cf. Goodrum, Hackling & Rennie 2001). However, there is evidence that some teachers do manage to engage most of their middle years' students in science, which begs the question, How do they do it? This has been the topic of my most recent research project. In this paper I will attempt to demonstrate my findings that such teachers use language in subtle ways that open science up to new audiences. They creatively hybridise the traditional genres, discourses and styles of school science in ways which recognise, value and/or accept - or at least allow for - difference, and which invite and reward active participation by all students. Using the tools of critical discourse analysis (CDA, Fairclough 2003) I will illustrate my points about access-enhancing teacher discourse practices with excerpts from the lessons of two successful science teachers.

Japanese law is going ‘pop’. Since the turn of the century, Japanese popular culture, especially prime-time television, has dedicated more time to legal themes, characters and settings. Lawyers, overwhelmingly women, are the heroes in both dramatic and comedic television series (Nakamura, 2007). Courtroom battles are the scene for plot developments (Ishikawa, 2004). Practising lawyers are the new celebrities, joining actors and singers on the light entertainment talk show circuit. To be sure, law is not a new thematic preoccupation on Japanese network television. Nor is it one that has become so dominant that it overshadows more traditional genres such as workplace romantic comedies, coming-of-age dramas or family soap operas (eg, Dissanayake, 2012, p._194). But, its growing presence on the silver screen in twenty-first-century Japan is a trend that merits analysis. The purpose of this chapter is to explore that socio-legal significance. This presents theoretical and empirical challenges. Theoretically, is there explanatory potential in the link between law and popular culture in Japan? Empirically, does the greater embrace of law-related characters, plots and scenes in prime-time television series since 2001 provide compelling evidence of changing popular attitudes to law and legal process among Japanese viewers? The inspiration for both the title and theme of this chapter comes from Sherwin’s When Law Goes Pop (2000). But it departs from Sherwin in how it defines and analyses the issues. For Sherwin, ‘pop’ means ‘implosion’.

In contemporary China, Otome mobile games—interactive romance simulations designed for female audiences—have emerged as significant cultural spaces where women engage in emotional self-construction, empowerment, and subjective expression. This paper explores how Chinese women utilize Otome games to articulate emotional resonance, affirm their self-worth through consumption, and navigate new forms of digital intimacy. Far from being mere escapism, Otome games provide an interactive emotional landscape where players exercise narrative authorship, rehearse relational agency, and cultivate emotional self-efficacy. Through monetized engagement, players transform consumption into acts of feminist self-assertion, challenging traditional gender norms and reframing emotional labor as valuable and autonomous. These digital platforms foster communal forms of emotional solidarity, enabling women to collectively reimagine intimacy, desire, and identity in ways that contest both mainstream media representations and entrenched patriarchal structures. By analyzing these dynamics, this study reveals how Otome games serve as profound mediums for cultural negotiation, emotional meaning-making, and the redefinition of female subjectivity within China’s rapidly evolving digital and social landscape.