Aesthetic Strategies Research Articles

Figure and ground, image and sound: The digital medium in Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon

Abstract This article analyses the discrepancy between the medium-specificity of Brian Eno’s 1985 compact disc (CD) Thursday Afternoon and the intermediality of its precursor, Eno’s 1984 video artwork of the same name. I historicize these seemingly contrasting aesthetic strategies vis-à-vis medium alongside an epistemological shift in our conception of the musical recording during the rise of the CD in the early-to-mid-1980s. I argue the counter-intuitive point that the home video version of Thursday Afternoon represents the fullest realization of Eno’s medium-specific inquiry into the emergent CD technology.

Deictic transformers: Phenomenological analyses of time-shifts in video art installations

Abstract This article seeks to define a phenomenon in video installations that emerged during the 1990s. It is a type of audio-visual architecture that I call deictic transformer. Deictic transformers are not representations, they are events that trigger a specific type of effect, namely, a shift in time-consciousness, which is characterized as total engagement with the present moment in its impermanence, non-substantiality and self-differentiation. The article unfolds in the form of experiment. As a first step, phenomenological accounts of Christian icons are compared to phenomenological readings of Bill Viola’s ultra slow-motion video art installations. The reader is guided to experience how different media (religious paintings, video) generate different engagements with the present moment. The main subject of this article is ‘the now’. The article suggests that there are various ways of engaging with ‘the now’ and these ways trigger specific shifts in present-time consciousness. These shifts are closely related to the formation of subjectivity and thus demonstrate that temporality is not a given, but could be seen as a technology of the self. Christian icons are representative of a metaphysical approach to the present moment, predominant in the arts and philosophy of the western tradition before the twentieth century. Bill Viola’s video installations The Greeting (1995) and The Passions series (2000–2001) represent a new sensitivity towards time brought by electronic media. The dualist experience of time that is deeply embedded in the Christian tradition is recomposed via video and digital manipulation into a dynamically holistic temporality. The second step addresses other video-based examples of deictic transformers such as Gary Hill’s Viewer (1996) and David Claerbout’s Rocking Chair (2003). The third step examines the aesthetic strategies of these video installations and formulates a definition of their modus operandi. This article does not claim that deictic transformers represent the mainstream of video art installations. Deictic transformers, however, are seen as a growing tendency in new media art praxis that demands intensive engagement with the emerging dynamic of embodied presencing; a tendency that is relatively unprecedented in western culture, and that could be considered an (in)direct result of the technological capacities of video and digital media. In other words, the analyses of Viola, Hill, and Claerbout’s audiovisual experiments demonstrate that video and digital technologies of late twentieth century shift our perception of time from attempts to escape everyday impermanence and the search for permanent metaphysical presence towards an entanglement with the non-substantiality of presencing.

Informatization as an aesthetic strategy of modern screen culture

This work is aimed to identify the cultural changes that have occurred as a result of informatization. The article investigates the strategies of contemporary screen culture aimed to satisfy human needs in information. The analysis of technical improvement of information possibilities of screen media is based on J. D. Bolter's and R. Grusin's theory of remediation. The article identifies informational potentials of visual novel (contemporary TV series), which is the result of remediation of TV, movie and literary novel. In addition, the article investigates the process of informatization by means of screen space formation or, in other words, by screen aesthetics. The article identifies and analyzes the hybridization strategy and the strategy of visual eclecticism. Hybridization strategy is a method to combine information of different nature, whereupon more truthful visual stories are created. It is mainly used in movies and video games. The strategy of visual eclecticism that allows viewers (users) to perceive multiple information flows, mainly related to the screen space of modern television. The article, basing on G. Deleuze's concept of cinematic images, analyzes the informational characteristics of medium shot and the reasons of its frequent usage in modern movies. The comparison of essential characteristics of close-up shot and medium shot is made. It is determined that the change of emphasis on medium shot and full shot in contemporary cinema is related to the change of priorities in aesthetic human needs, because today the sense of presence of information becomes more important than emotions. The article notes the important problem of attitude changing towards information - the loss of its essential content characteristic (due to its transition into aesthetic form). Screen aesthetics that now is served under the guise of information gradually replaces the value of the latter. The transition of information to the field of aesthetics says that its main essence is lost, because quantitative characteristics and the fact of presence are becoming more important than its quality.

Finding Sequins in the Rubble

Abstract This essay is based on the fashion choices, negotiations, and embodied knowledge or “theories in the flesh” of Bamby Salcedo and other trans Latinas in Los Angeles. Their experiences and memories are instrumental in the development of “finding sequins in the rubble,” a theoretical framework for understanding trans and queer Chicana/o and Latina/o life in the city, and how they make sense of their lives, engaging in an ongoing process of self-fashioning that involves aesthetic and affective strategies, fashion, and style practices. The essay explores the aesthetic, cultural, and archival relevance of physical and metaphorical sequins in the lives and memories of trans and queer Latinas/os.

The War Novel in Africa

The War Novel in Africa

Dancing for Human Rights: Engaging Labor Rights and Social Remembrance inPoor Mouth

There is a tradition of dance artists developing work for the concert stage in order to engage pressing social justice issues and, more specifically, the abuse of human rights. Anna Sokolow's Strange American Funeral (1935), Pearl Primus' Strange Fruit (1945), Katherine Dunham's Southland (1951), Alvin Ailey's Masekela Langage (1969), Jawole Willa Jo Zollar's Womb Wars (1992), William Forsythe's Human Writes (2005), and Douglas Wright's Black Milk (2006) are examples of acclaimed dances that address the manner in which marginalized individuals and social groups have not been granted equal ethical or political consideration.1In this essay I consider how dance enacts secular rituals of remembrance for victims of human rights abuses characteristic of a particular community's or nation's historical legacy. This entails discussion of aesthetic strategies used to portray human rights abuse, a consideration of the ethics of memory, and analysis of specific dance work. I discuss my site-adaptive work Poor Mouth (2013) which centers on labor rights issues in the American South during the Great Depression and I argue that dance which presents such issues performs a valuable social function as it encourages audiences to remember the past in a manner that facilitates a historically informed understanding of communal identity. Further, since historical instances of human rights abuse often have contemporary correlates and since remembrance affects the significance of places associated with the history in question, the implications of such work temporally and spatially extend beyond the performance venue and thereby contribute to political discourse in the public sphere.Dance intersects with human rights issues in many ways, but here I focus on dances intended for performance on the concert stage. For the purposes of this essay, the terms ‘dance activism’ and ‘political dance’ refer to dances that intentionally grapple with explicit human rights abuses and that are intended to be performed for a theatre-going audience. Along the way I note what bearing my points have for other forms such as popular dance, dance used in acts of public political protest, site-specific dance, and dance therapy, but I should emphasize that it is beyond the scope of this essay to consider the many ways that dance intersects with human rights and with political activism more generally. Lastly, I should say that my approach to this topic is informed by the personal experience of collaboratively creating and performing dance work in a particular community and that it is interdisciplinary in nature since its draw on aspects of philosophical ethics in order to reflect on that experience.

Gothic Matters: Introduction

Text Matters, Volume 6, Number 6, 2016 DOI: 10.1515/texmat-2016-0001Agnieszka Soltysik MonnetUniversity of Lausanne, SwitzerlandOnce considered escapist or closely linked to fantasy, the Gothic genre (or mode, as scholars increasingly call it) has recently begun to be explored for its material concerns and engagement with real-world matters. This issue of Text Matters features essays that develop this line of inquiry, focusing on how the Gothic attempts to matter in concrete and critical ways, and mapping its rhetorical and aesthetic strategies of intervention and narration, affect and inuence. The pun in the title of this volumeGothic Mattersis intended to acknowledge both the material concerns of the Gothic as agenre and the continuing relevance and value of the cultural work performed by the Gothic, i.e. why it matters.The Gothic is the brainchild of the eighteenth century, an eminently modern aesthetic mode, obsessed with the cultural changes that were re-mapping Europe and North America. Born in the wake of the rst global warthe Seven Years War (also known as the French and Indian War) the Gothic quickly became associated with violent and sensational plots, an aesthetics of emotional extremes, graphic depictions of bodily injury, and nally, revolution itself. De Sade famously linked the Gothic to the political violence of the era when he suggested that Gothic novels were the necessary fruits of the revolutionary tremors felt by the whole of Europe. More recent observers and scholars of the Gothic have noted its inherently political and reformist bent, often tackling controversial social issues such as the social control of women, aristocratic privilege and class power relations, as well as traditional institutions including the church, the prison and the family (cf. Ledoux). The body was inevitably at the center of these explorations: its pain, discipline and control at the heart of the Gothics critical concerns.If revolutionary politics were the most obvious cultural context for some observers, the larger tectonic shifts in epistemology and moral judgment were also at stake. Changes in science, in political philosophy, and cultural values all impacted the Gothic, bringing with them afascination with cultural relativism, the complexities of social justice, and anew self-awareness about history. The Gothic staged and interrogated these questions with its narratives of cultural otherness, excessive revenge, and repressed or Gothic Matters: IntroductionAgnieszka Soltysik Monnet buried crimes that reverberated throughout family lines and local legends. Inherently sceptical of the Enlightenment values that nevertheless underpin its critiques of traditional institutions, the Gothic interested itself in alternative epistemologies such as folk culture, family legends, and rumors. Agenre of the forgotten, unspoken and buried, the Gothic gave voice to characters that normally had no voice or weight in society. Although often subversive, the Gothic was not inherently or inevitably so, and more conservative or even paranoid and reactionary formations exist, most notably what critics recently have come to call the Imperial Gothic, which uses the rhetoric of monstrosity to depict racial and colonial others.Nevertheless, the most interesting cultural work of the Gothic is linked to its creative explorations of the non-normative aspects of human life, such as the body in its queer, raced, gendered and physical materiality. It is no coincidence that many of the following essays focus specically on the body and its subversive materiality. The volume opens with two essays that take up the issue of the body specically within the context of the French Revolution. The rst, by Agnieszka owczanin, examines representations of female bodies in Matthew Lewiss The Monk and argues that they serve as interventions in the debates around revolutionary violence taking place in England at the time. …

Allyson Nadia Field, Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity

Reviewed by: Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity by Allyson Nadia Field Julie Lavelle Allyson Nadia Field, Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015 In her ambitious book, Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity, Allyson Nadia Field makes an important contribution to film history, broadly speaking, as well as to the growing scholarship on African American film culture in the early twentieth century. Field’s exacting primary research expands the historical record in several directions by both deepening our understanding of the role of media in the social and political movement of racial uplift, and by revising the standard periodization of “race film” to account for African American filmmaking practices prior to 1915. In a 2013 report from the Library of Congress, historian David Pierce estimates that 70 percent of American films made [End Page 242] between 1912 and 1930 are permanently lost. For the period prior to 1912 the number is even higher. Field notes that there are no extant prints of uplift cinema. Her work tackles one of the central methodological questions facing silent film historians: how do we write film history without films? One response to this question has been to center the films that remain. In terms of the history of African American filmmaking, this has privileged race films: narrative films produced by African American filmmakers in the late 1910s and 1920s. Film historians have largely interpreted race films as emerging out of the controversy surrounding D. W. Griffith’s racist representation of African Americans in Birth of a Nation (1915). Another approach to this methodological question is most clearly articulated by Eric Smoodin, who claims that shifting attention away from the text is where the field is (and should be) headed; according to him we should take André Bazin’s concept “What is cinema?” and rework it, posing instead, “What is cinema culture?” Allyson Nadia Field intervenes to challenge both of these methodologies. She turns her attention to the years prior to 1915, when the earliest efforts at black film production emerged out of Tuskegee, the Hampton Institute, and the larger social and civic project of race uplift. For Field, race film begins prior to 1915, includes a wide variety of genres, and engages in various ways with uplift. In addition, Field refuses to sideline the film texts, and instead develops a framework for performing textual analysis and ideological criticism by excavating an impressive array of sources adjacent to uplift cinema. Working with novels, publicity, and promotional materials, postcards, photographs, newspaper editorials, trade reviews, and internal institutional documents, Field reconstructs the earliest years of African American film production in the United States. Field provides background on the uplift movement and its development in the South, primarily by analyzing materials from Tuskegee and the Hampton Institute. She locates and defines a set of aesthetic strategies employed in uplift media that highlighted the positive contributions of successful African American graduates of these institutes, while nevertheless foregrounding the constant threat of failure. She explores the production of films made to publicize the Tuskegee-Hampton ideal by George Broome (A Trip to Tuskegee, 1910), Louis B. Anderson (A Day at Tuskegee, 1913), and Leigh Richmond Miner (Making Negro Lives Count, 1914). Particularly fascinating is the chapter on The New Era, a repurposed version of Miner’s Making Negro Lives Count that was appended to the end of The Birth of a Nation during its exhibition in the mid-1910s. She ends the book with a chapter dedicated to African American entrepreneurs William Foster, Peter J. Jones, and Hunter C. Haynes. [End Page 243] Field selects these films and filmmakers for closer analysis in order to demonstrate the diverse use of the films for promotional, educational, and entertainment purposes. She demonstrates effectively the critical role that exhibition played in shaping meaning, and the ways that the ideology of uplift might have been understood differently in different contexts and by different audiences. Exhibition practices at this time were incredibly varied, and a great deal of control was in the hands of local...

Two Rooms, Monologues, Imaginaries, as Seen through their Texts

These texts represent monologues previously unavailable in English from two Chantal Akerman films, La Chambre 2 (1972) and Le Déménagement (Moving Out, 1992), made two decades apart. Because they add significantly to the corpus of Akerman's writing and its aesthetic strategies, they have been specially translated and included in this dossier as a contribution to the archive. The Editors thank Cyril Béghin for facilitating access to these texts from the fonds Chantal Akerman, published (in French) in Bande(s) à part, Tome 25: Chantal Akerman, and give special thanks to Katharina von Bismarck and Éditions de l'Arche for their cooperation.

Deleuze Against Control: Fictioning to Myth-Science

Through recourse to Gilles Deleuze’s short polemical essay ‘Postscript on Control Societies’ and the accompanying interview (in Negotiations) on ‘Control and Becoming’, this article attempts to map out the conceptual contours of an artistic war machine (Deleuze’s ‘new weapons’) that might be pitched against control and also play a role in the more ethico-political function of the constitution of a people (or, what Deleuze calls subjectification). Along the way a series of other Deleuzian concepts are introduced and outlined – with an eye to their pertinence for art practice and, indeed, for any more general ‘thought’ against control. At stake here is the development of a concept of fictioning – the production of alternative narratives and image-worlds – and also the idea of art practice as a form of myth-science, exemplified by Burroughs’ cut-up method. It is argued that these aesthetic strategies might offer alternative models for a subjectivity that is increasingly standardized and hemmed in by neoliberalism.

After Language as Such: Gershom Scholem, Werner Kraft, and the Question of Mathematics

This article investigates a forgotten essay contest proposed by Gershom Scholem to Werner Kraft in the wake of Walter Benjamin's seminal text “On Language as Such and On the Language of Man” (1916). Intent on completing Benjamin's language essay by focusing on the relationship among language, symbolism, and mathematics, the contest and conversation sparked by Benjamin explores the enigmatic proposition with which his essay leaves off: that language is both communication of the communicable and a symbol of the incommunicable. The effects of Benjamin's “On Language” can thus be found in Scholem's formulation of a privative structure of communication in mathematics, lament, and his translations of the Book of Lamentations that—negatively—communicates language's own limits. That Scholem locates in mathematics such an aesthetic strategy, while Kraft's responses remain ambivalent about mathematics, indicates a growing concern over mathematics’ supposed opposition to language and representation, which prefigure Benjamin's and the Frankfurt School's later polemics against mathematics.

Points of contact, points of distance: DR/TV 2 meet HBO/Netflix

Abstract Danish public service broadcasters have taken long strides into the international marketplace at the level of funding, production and distribution of TV drama series. The series are sold across the globe, remade in countries as different as the United States and Turkey, and the international co-production set-ups are becoming increasingly complex (e.g. Broen/The Bridge [SVT/DR, 2013–] and The Team [ZDF/vtm/DR, etc. 2015]). This article tests the limits of cross-national collaboration by discussing two recent co-production initiatives that involve DR/HBO and TV 2/Netflix. The co-production initiatives discussed are located at the intersection of at least three strands of development: first, the commercialization of European public service media that can be traced back to regulatory changes in the 1980s; second, the tendency towards cross-national partnerships regarding television funding, production and/or distribution; and third, the advent of streaming services available on various digital platforms. The article highlights tension and obstacles prohibiting or undermining these two co-production initiatives. In the case of DR/HBO, the obstacles have their source in alternative media systemic logics and differing narrative and aesthetic strategies, whereas competition and business development strategies are particularly pertinent to the case of TV 2 and Netflix.

The Dematerialization of Architecture

In 1970 the journal Design Quarterly published a special issue titled “Conceptual Architecture.” While the term conceptual architecture has been invoked periodically in architectural discourse since this initial pronouncement, it has often been denigrated by skeptical historians and architects. In The Dematerialization of Architecture: Toward a Taxonomy of Conceptual Practice , Ross Elfline considers conceptualism as a set of broad aesthetic and antiaesthetic strategies designed to question the foundational premises of a discipline. With the Design Quarterly issue as a focus, Elfline divides conceptual architecture strategies into four main categories: the birth of the activated user, radical negation, disciplinary retrenchment, and ephemeral performance. He further establishes links between these strategies and their cognates in the field of conceptual art. The study provides a taxonomy of self-critical aesthetic strategies in conceptual architecture in the 1960s and 1970s.

Brown gaze and white flesh: exploring ‘moments’ of the single white female in Hindi cinema

This paper posits that the contemporary (re)configuration of the generic white woman of Hindi cinema solely as a spectacle was produced by the nationalist discourse during the colonial encounter. This essay explores both the textual analyses and aesthetic strategies employed in the construction of national imagery of white female subjectivities. My approach is twofold: (i) to chart the historical specificities of the representational construct of the white woman through discontinuous changes occurring across Bombay cinema, and (ii) to explore the white female subjectivities across specific historical and cultural milieu. This paper probes the historicity of the ‘Otherness’ of the white woman in Hindi cinema reviews and re-examines how Hindi cinema constitutes female whiteness. I posit that the representation of the white woman in Hindi cinema as promiscuous and sexually available was constructed within the nationalist discourse of the colonial era and is a continuation of the white memsahib in her absence. It is my position that all that was ‘repressed’ in the Hindu woman resurfaces in the white woman – the racial, sexual ‘Other’, onto whom everything repressed within the self could be projected.

‘What I want is the straws, flotsam, etc.’: Beckett and the Nominalist Ethic of Humility

In the ‘German Letter’ of 1937 Beckett hints that a ‘nominalist irony’ may be a necessary stage in his ultimate aim ‘to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind language’. As Beckett's letter attests, the perennial debate between Nominalism and Realism reached its height in the Scholastic period. Matthew Feldman has shown convincingly that Beckett's own ‘Philosophy Notes’ from the early 1930s onwards revolve specifically around the doctrine of Nominalism. With its internal threats of atheism, pessimism, and nihilism, Nominalism certainly seems like a good fit for Beckett. However, aligning Beckett too closely with Nominalism obscures both the ‘irony’ that his letter shackles to the term, and the fact that Beckett always observed the oxymoronic duties of a ‘systematic sceptic’. Beckett could no more accept the ‘authentic’ particular, than he could the ‘transcendent’ universal. However, far from observing the silence of this mute impasse between the particular and universal, Beckett felt keenly the obligation to express.This essay explores how Beckett transformed his meticulous study of the controversy of universals into an aesthetic strategy: the Nominalist ethic. Examining text and manuscript, this essay argues that Beckett's growing sense of humility, shaped by his reading on Christian mystic Thomas à Kempis' humilitas, encouraged him to embrace Nominalist particulars (the straws, flotsam, births, deaths etc.) as entities of the lowest ontological kind. In the bare particulars of the Nominalist ethic he found a minimally acceptable literary method of going on, without going on. This essay will address the three main ways that the Nominalist ethic manifests in Beckett's writing: in his pronounced linguistic scepticism, in his attack on anthropomorphism, and, finally, in the casual inertness that is a as a condition of his writing.

Creating alternative public spaces and negotiating identities and differences through community theatre praxes in Hong Kong and Taiwan

Abstract With the rise of mainland China in the twenty-first century, Hong Kong and Taiwan have endeavoured to sustain and reassert their own cultural identities to resist Chinese hegemony, and political and economic dominance. The community theatre praxes devised and performed by community members and applied theatre practitioners in Hong Kong and Taiwan in recent years have created an alternative public sphere, and negotiated identities and differences in various communities. They have presented the shifting and dynamic relationship of settlement and mobility in our glocalized cities. This article aims to employ two case studies to investigate how these community theatre praxes present diverse local people’s histories, concerns and issues, and thus negotiate the constantly changing identities of Hong Kong and Taiwan through re-presenting different local voices. This research will employ theories of public sphere, cultural geography, and participatory and engaging community art to explore the social and cultural implications as well as the various aesthetic strategies adopted.

Prigov and the Gesamtkunstwerk

This article discusses the relation of Prigov's cultural project to a concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art. It is not only notable that Prigov was simultaneously a poet, a painter, a sculptor, a performance artist, and a theoretician (and it is hard to say which of these roles he identified most strongly with), but that he also experimented with all possible materials, forms, genres, and types of art. Also remarkable is that openness and intersections are manifest in all his work: text in painting, a visual quality and theatricality in text, text as a score for performance (of the alphabet), philosophizing as an artistic text (premonitions), and so forth. The author traces the transformation of Wagner's concept from its reception in the Silver Age, to its appropriation by Socialist Realism, and finally to Prigov's ultimate vision of it. The article analyzes two main directions of transformations of the Gesamtkunstwerk in Prigov's oeuvre. Firstly, although Gesamtkunstwerk as an idea of shaped formlessness became irrelevant with the loss of traditional conventions and the crisis of modernist strategies of subversion, its practices, since it was itself the product of a modernist breakthrough, proved themselves to be extraordinarily fruitful. One can easily find those very same structural elements in Prigov's texts and visual works, where functionally they are completely reinvented and form part of a completely different–“de‐totalizing”–aesthetic strategy. Secondly, the transformations of Wagnerian mythology became the only possible realization of the totalitarian romantic utopia in contemporary mass society. Prigov took up the idea of the total work of art after the collapse of the utopia, completing the ruins and reconstructing them into an almost “intact” state. But the main thing is that he constructed his total work of art, not from different arts, but from a single subject–Dmitrii Aleksandrovich Prigov. He did not create a synthesis of the arts, but rather a personality synthesis, by carrying out an experiment in the creation of a total work of art after the experience of modernism. Accordingly, we should regard Prigov's texts not only as an new ideological construct that both defamiliarizes and makes explicit (thereby exposing the totalitarian aspirations of language and ideology), but also as the product of a unique experiment on himself, laying the headstone for not only the totalitarian utopia but also for its creator, the artist‐visionary.

Argumentación e imagen periodística en la evaluación axiológica del desempeño de la función pública

En este trabajo proponemos un análisis multimodal del discurso argumentativo periodístico que combina imagen y componente verbal. Se analizan dos casos de noticias internacionales que han causado revuelo internacional. Las herramientas metodológicas utilizadas provienen de la teoría argumentativa contemporánea, el análisis semiótico-discursivo y la gramática funcional para el análisis de imágenes. El análisis nos permitirá concluir que, cuando los intereses socio-económicos corporativos de la compañía periodística se ven afectados por alguna razón, las líneas editoriales despliegan una posición argumentativa tajante y una estrategia sutil y elaborada desde la perspectiva semiótica y estética. Cuando se trata de evaluar y controlar el desempeño de la función pública, la imagen periodística toma el aparente rol del ciudadano crítico.

‘My anorexia story’: girls constructing narratives of identity on YouTube

ABSTRACTThe phenomenon of pro-anorexia (‘pro-ana’) communities has attracted extensive academic attention over the last 15 years, with feminist scholars fascinated by the political complexities of such cultures. But the internet has also enabled a range of eating disorder recovery cultures to emerge – whether organized around blogs, Facebook, Instagram or YouTube – and such spaces have been largely ignored by feminist scholarship which has fetishized the apparently more resistant and controversial discourses of pro-ana. As such, this article explores a set of videos posted on YouTube under the title of ‘My anorexia story’ which present narratives of recovery, or efforts to recover, from anorexia. Primarily produced by white, Western, teenage girls, these videos are effectively slide shows made up of written text and photographs, with selfies of the body sitting at their core. The conceptual and political significance of self-representation has been seen as central to the construction of subjectivity within the digital media landscape, with particular attention paid to the ways in which such practices compare, speak back to, or challenge the existing representational discourses of ‘dominant’ media and wider relations of social power. In this regard, this article explores questions of agency in gendered self-representation, examining what kinds of self-narratives the girls are producing about anorexia. In doing so, it examines how the stories seek to ‘author’ and regulate the meanings of the anorexic body; how these constructions intersect with dominant constructions of anorexia (such as those offered by medical discourse and the media); as well as the implications of the aesthetic strategies they employ. In considering how the narratives visualize, display and ‘expose’ the anorexic body, I draw upon a growing area of work which examines the selfie in relation discourses of surveillance, visibility and selfhood.

Embalmed in the Camera's Glowing Formaldehyde: On John Yau's Hollywood Asians

Abstract The poetry of John Yau has examined identity and exile through complex portraits of pop culture icons. His portraits of Peter Lorre as Mr. Moto draw upon postmodern techniques from the visual arts, particularly the aesthetic strategies of Jasper Johns, and his poetic experiments embody the thematics of interior exile and displacement in dense surrealist texts. His dominant strategy is to undermine representation in ways similar to both philosophies of deconstruction and postmodern aesthetics, but without losing sight of the cultural politics of ethnicity.