Celebrity Stories Research Articles

Speaking of women's ‘nameless misery’: The everyday construction of depression in Australian women's magazines

In this article we examine the tensions between current Australian depression policy directions and lay beliefs about depression as constructed and circulated through popular media at a time when mental health education discourses are also promoting ‘depression literacy’ [Parslow & Jorm, 2002. Medical Journal of Australia, 177(7), 117–121]. Drawing upon research into articles on depression published in two women's magazines before and after the promulgation of the National Action Plan for Depression [Commonwealth Department of Health and Aged Care, 2000. National action plan for depression. Canberra: Commonwealth Department of Health and Aged Care—Mental Health and Special Programs Branch] we identify the cultural context of certain lay beliefs about depression as articulated through personal and celebrity stories, advice columns and resource links. The depression literacy literature privileges biomedical and psychological expertise in explaining depression and promoting help-seeking behaviour. In contrast, the magazine discourses foreground an individualising discourse of depression as a problem of self-management while also referring to biomedical expertise. They emphasise women's abilities to manage difficult life events and to build informal supportive relationships, which reinforces dominant notions of feminine identity as concerned with balancing competing gender demands. We critique the national policy on depression literacy as taking insufficient account of women's belief structures, which leads, for example, to a limited analysis of stigma. We also critique policy for not engaging sufficiently with the gendered nature of depression and its relation to social inequities, something the magazines replicate.

Riveted By The Voice: The Sadean City at Silling

Sade's recit le plus impur qui ait jamais ete fait depuis que le existe (60) (1)--Les Cent Vingt Journees de Sodome (1785)--has been so oddly neglected by critics that in her influential book Sade: A sudden abyss, Annie Lebrun dedicates a whole chapter to what she calls that strange omission. (2) Critics seem unanimously attracted to Sade's two most celebrated stories of vice and virtue written after the Revolution--Justine and Juliette--but not so much to the journey to the Castle of Silling. Lebrun speculates that one of the possible reasons is the book's unbearable physical effect: (3) as Georges Bataille put it, [n]obody, unless he is totally deaf to it, can finish [it] without feeling sick (Literature and Evil 121). When critics do take up the challenge of closely reading it, there seems to be yet another strange omission in the labor of interpretation: (4) the fact that the entire narrative is framed by the scenario of listening to stories. Aurality dominates the narrative to such an extent that one could even say that this, and not the repetitive transgression with which critics have labeled Sade's work, is the text's texture par excellence. (5) Significantly, the scenario of listening is yet one more aspect of the book's physicality: for what is at stake, I will argue, is not the word or the story to which the libertines listen--in other words, not the law--but the voice. And, as we will see, much in line with what critics like Lebrun or Bataille felt was the revolting physicality of Sade's text, it is not so much the pleasure of the voice that the libertine Castle of Silling highlights, but rather its intolerably pressing command to obey, and consequently, its irresistible socially binding power. The aural nature of the Castle, I will argue, is a figuration of its political space: in a world with no laws, the voice operates as the rivet that compels the libertines to form an alliance. A brief, interpretative account of the story is due here. For all that critics insist in reading the libertine sejour at the Castle as the story of its infamous four-month long sexually (or linguistically) perverse (or transgressive) orgy, it is rather the story of the formation of a bond. The tale's starting point is a call for order, against the background of war, at the end of Louis XIV's rule, when the kingdom is subdued in guerres considerables (1--extensive wars [191]). In the midst of civil dissolution, the four friends in crime imagine a way to resserrer leurs par des alliances ou avait bien plus de part qu'aucun des autres motifs qui fondent ordinairement ces (2). (6) The duc de Blangis and his brother the bishop summon Curval, the judge, and Durcet, the financier: each of will marry the daughter of another, and at the same time will remain in possession of the women's bodies, just as when they were their fathers. They celebrate the pact with preliminary secret orgies and then decide to set out to the Castle of Silling, the property of Durcet, where they will continue their celebration in the bloodiest of orgies. The peculiar transaction out of which the libertine pact emerges borrows not from the language of the law, but from the language of war: against contractual exchange, it is an alliance that establishes a clear line between us and them with the initial accumulation of what becomes common property--the bodies--for all its members. Before the absence of law, their liens are reaffirmed by extraordinary means: la debauche at the Castle, for which they have chosen four vicious and skilled female narrators who will provide with libertine stories to emulate each day--Madame Duclos, La Martaine, Champville, and La Desgranges. Four fouteurs (fuckers), four cooks, four duennas and eight victims-to-be of each sex selected from all over the Kingdom of France also compose the party. When they arrive at the Castle, they proclaim the Castle's regulations and routine to the subjects, declaring deja mortes au monde (57--already dead to the world). …

Dishonour, Gender and the Parable of the Prodigal Son

The parable of the Prodigal Son is one of the most celebrated stories in the Gospel of Luke. Patristic commentators have heralded the parable as a great tale of repentance, while more recent criticism has focused on the effusive love of the father. This study joins many modem authors in their emphasis on the father's love, but will suggest that not only does the father behave in an unexpected manner, his actions are representative of another point of viewnamely, the view of women. Current anthropological examinations of the dynamics of honour and shame in Mediterranean cultures support such a thesis.

The press and political controversy: The case for narrative analysis

Abstract This paper introduces narrative analysis, a method for press criticism that relies on concepts drawn from nondeconstructionist literary criticism, to study questions about the political power of the media. Narrative analysis seeks to specify the range of compositional options available to journalists covering a particular topic and the conventional meanings associated with each option. In the case at hand, the paper identifies choices made by profilers of James A. Baker III, to affiliate their news stories with six genres of American political journalism. The genres are called celebrity, contest, image, passage, investigation, and crusade stories. Classifying news stories by genre shows, in this case, that media portrayals of authority figures are not as uniformly supportive or adversarial as, respectively, left‐liberal and neoconservative theorists of media power have contended.

A reanalysis of the impact of non celebrity suicides

Previous work on suicide and the media has neglected theoretical issues. Some work has implied that only celebrity suicides can be expected to trigger additional suicides in the real world. The present study focuses on non celebrity suicides. Correcting coding errors in a previous work, it finds that the suicides of non celebrities are associated with increases in the national suicide rate. An index of publicized celebrity suicide stories was, however, more closely associated to increases in suicide than the publicized non celebrity stories. The model explains 90 percent of the variance in monthly suicide rates.

Maxims in Child Custody Cases

Divorce is disturbing to children (Despert, 1962; McDermott, 1970). Increasingly, courts look for expert and professional opinion to guide them in dealing with the often painful and knotty questions of child custody. This is certainly desirable if the expert opinion involves wisdom as well as knowledge. Substantial court experience with child custody cases leads me to seek to condense some of this experience into six maxims for behavior scientists called in on such cases, as follows: 1. Choose the most neutral ground available to you. It is ideal to be appointed by the court. Next most desirable would be to be called as a witness by the attorney for the child or children, if there is such representation. In fact, however, the request to make an evaluation usually comes from the attorney of the one of the contesting parents. In such circumstances, it is desirable to seek the most impartial position possible, and extend an invitation to interview both parents as well as the children, and to give assurance that your written opinion will be available to both sides. The evaluation should, preferably, be on neutral ground, rather than in the office of the attorney for either parent. Such actions tend to diminish the extent to which you will be identified as a partisan witness. 2. Do not divide the child. Doubtless the most celebrated story of a child custody