Dramatic Portrayal Research Articles

Robin Campillo's 120 Battements Par Minute, or When the Dust Unsettles

Robin Campillo's 120 Battements Par Minute, or When the Dust Unsettles Loïc Bourdeau (bio) One is not HIV positive in a cultural and political vacuum. In fact, there is no other experience of HIV than one that is saturated with politics and culture. That's why it's so messy and so slippery, so dynamic that it can never sit still long enough to constitute a stable object of knowledge.1 The current COVID-19 pandemic has shown that similar patterns of fear and stigmatization occur when a new, unknown virus emerges. In particular, the question of its geographical origin and the search for "patient zero" represent central talking points, crystalize political scrutiny, garner media attention, and often lead to scapegoating or discrimination. On March 27, 2020, the French magazine Têtu reported on a gay couple who had received a threatening note at home asking them to leave their apartment because "we know that you, homosexuals, are the first to be infected by COVID-19."2 Another piece of intentionally misleading "news" argued that the current virus had been created from HIV.3 These instances not only denote an essentialized and misinformed view on homosexuality, but they also demonstrate that the history of HIV/AIDS is still quite unknown. By stigmatizing them further still, minoritized groups are thus put at heightened health risks: "they fear being . . . accused of being carriers."4 In the 1980s, Canadian flight attendant Gaétan Dugas was wrongfully referred to as "patient zero" in the media. The allegations that Dugas had brought HIV back from Africa to North America made headlines and had his and his family's reputation tarnished. Studies now show that the virus had in fact been circulating in the country long before [End Page 111] Dugas was identified; yet, he also came to represent all homosexuals. Portrayals of Dugas—as morally loose and sexually promiscuous—tainted all gay men. This article will engage with cultural productions by HIV-positive artists, and in particular with Robin Campillo, who sought to counter stereotypes and amalgamation by offering subjective and personalized accounts of life with HIV or AIDS-related complications. French director Robin Campillo's feature film 120 Battements par minute (120 Beats Per Minute; henceforth BPM), released in 2017 to critical acclaim,5 takes its viewers back to early 1990s France shortly after Act Up-Paris, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, was formed in 1989.6 If David Caron, cited in the epigraph, reminds us that living with HIV is "saturated with politics and culture," V. Hunter Capps rightly points out in his reading of BPM that "[t]he date is extremely important because it situates the film before 1996 when effective medical treatments became available as a triple combination antiretroviral therapy . . . still used today, and that transformed HIV from a death sentence into a chronic but livable condition."7 Following the French grassroots movement, BPM shows how they "organiz[ed] high-visibility stunts that highlighted stigma, lack of funding, the pecuniary agenda of pharmaceutical companies, and the slow pace of governmental response."8 While the film offers a take on a historical moment, it does so through the dramatic portrayal of several main characters, to whom viewers become progressively attached: HIV-positive activist Sean (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart), his soon-to-be boyfriend and HIV-negative Nathan (Arnaud Valois), lesbian lead activist Sophie (Adèle Haenel), and gay lead activist Thibault (Antoine Reinartz), among a large chorus of individuals with their own stories. The film constantly plays with the macro (French history) and the micro (personal stories), from scenes of headquarter meetings to joyful nightclub dance scenes, meetings with drug companies, scenes from protests, and more intimate scenes in the home. While Campillo "didn't make this film to lecture anyone,"9 he nevertheless sought to raise awareness about the trauma, to make it resurface. He notes, "I worked with young, mostly gay actors who have a very different relationship to HIV and Aids [sic] than I had 25 years ago. And I realized that I didn't know that they didn't know" (my emphasis).10 [End Page 112] The current resurgence of this trauma in contemporary French...

Dramatic portrayal of suicide: a critical analysis of Netflix's 13 Reasons Why

AimsThe aims of this project were to assess how well the Netflix drama 13 Reasons Why portrayed suicide, in terms of both accuracy and safety, and to discuss the potential effect this could have on viewers.BackgroundPsychiatric content within dramatic media can have measurable effects on the population, such as reinforcing stigma around mental illness. Given the show's focus on a character's suicide, the most serious effect here would be suicide contagion.Guidelines and regulations for the portrayal of suicide in media are in place to protect those who might be vulnerable to suicide contagion.MethodWe formed our own pro-forma of 42 criteria using existing guidelines written for both news and dramatic media. These criteria were formatted into positive and negative pairs; positive being instances of guidelines being followed, negative as guidelines being broken. These were further organised into 7 categories.Each episode of seasons 1-2 was then assessed against the criteria. Cumulative instances of guidelines being followed or broken were compared within and between seasons. Context of each instance was taken into account by the primary researcher, and we also highlighted instances of exceptional breach of these guidelines.ResultThe results showed an over-all breach of the guidelines, with no significant improvement between the seasons. Some categories of criteria, such as “asking for help” and “mental health”, were portrayed well overall. Other categories, such as “blame”, performed extremely badly.The most significant breach was the graphic suicide scene at the end of the first season, which completely disregarded Samaritans’ guidelines.ConclusionThe breaching of guidelines in this show was overwhelming. In terms of severity, although there were some positive themes running through the seasons, there were also worrying instances of guidelines being completely disregarded. This led to the conclusion that the producers of the show did not take their responsibility to young, vulnerable viewers seriously regarding the dangers around portraying suicide.Suggestions from this study are that more guidelines around suicide are needed specifically for dramatic media, and that existing guidelines should be conflated and have stronger implementation by regulators. This implementation should potentially include overseas providers such as Netflix. Ethically, a significant challenge here is maintaining balance between safety and allowing artistic licence.

The Black Revolutionary and the Black Betrayer

The Black Revolutionary and the Black Betrayer Tacuma Peters (bio) Shaka King, dir. Judas and the Black Messiah. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2021. Judas and the Black Messiah follows a brief period in the political life of Fred Hampton, Chairman of the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party, from 1968–1969. It also follows William O'Neal, the security chief of the same Black Panther chapter and an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The dramatic film is at once a political documentary, a romance, and an undercover thriller. As a dramatic portrayal of political life, it shows the services that Chicago Black Panthers sought to provide communities (i.e., the free breakfast program, medical clinics, advocacy for individual families) and the solidarities the Panthers cultivated with the Young Lords Party, the Young Patriots, Students for Democratic Society, and Black street gangs. The drama centers on the attempts of Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya) and the Black Panthers to educate communities resisting state-sponsored oppression, to foster solidarity, and to foment a socialist revolution, all while battling the agents of repression including the FBI, the States Attorney's office, local and Federal courts, and the Chicago Police Department. The film also follows William O'Neal (LaKeith Stanfield) in a set of increasingly thrilling scenes where he faces the threats of either being revealed as an FBI informant, or being rearrested and sentenced to a lengthy prison sentence if he does not act as an agent provocateur and informant. It also portrays the intimacy between Fred Hampton and fellow Panther Deborah Johnson (Dominique Fishback), including many touching scenes that range from flirting to conversations about children and revolutionary love. As a film that documents the political life of Fred Hampton and the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s, Judas and the Black Messiah has an educational imperative and reason for being. However, for audiences searching for deeper understandings of concepts such as "the people," power, love, and revolution, Judas and the Black Messiah might not provide them with the education they seek. While the film often presents shallow dramatic content, character development, and political settings, as well as renders many characters forgettable, it does feature some significant lessons. First, the film documents how the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party was committed to solidarity within and across racial difference, which made the organization a threat to local and national power structures. Second, the film shifts the California-centric public imagination of the Black Panther Party by demonstrating how local concerns and organizing influenced the history of the United States' second city. Third, the film documents the inter-agency collaboration of the FBI, Illinois State Attorney, and Chicago Police Department in the assassinations of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, thereby illuminating the complex mechanisms of political repression of Black movements in the 1960s and 1970s. Fourth, the film displays Fred Hampton's powerful oratory skills and portrays him as a charismatic, committed, and effective organizer; it does so through archiving his speeches in documentary footage as well as [End Page 885] in Daniel Kaluuya's dramatic oratory performances as the titular "Messiah." Finally, it reveals how O'Neal, "Judas," was coerced into being an informant, was valuable to the FBI, and was a deeply conflicted man. In these ways, Judas and the Black Messiah represents a real achievement for a film with wide distribution. It does not shy away from the violence of agents of law enforcement or the effectiveness and brilliance of Black revolutionaries. Though it may not satisfy the desires of all of its audiences, it does effectively leave a taste of this complex history in the mouths of viewers. If we are lucky, this film becomes an appetizer for future explorations of the period, the Black Panther Party, and Black revolutionaries. The film explores two of the more complex figures in the history of Black thought and politics: the revolutionary and the betrayer. Unfortunately, it does not do justice to either of them through its emptying of political thought and context. It does not attend to the varieties and meanings of Black life in late-1960s Chicago. For example, the absence of portrayals...

Death and Fairy Tale

The music of the spectralist composer Claude Vivier is often considered through the lens of autobiography. However, from his abandonment as an infant to the circumstances of his murder at the age of thirty-four, certain aspects of Vivier’s life also seem to resist any straightforwardly autobiographical account. Borrowing the concept of “autothanatography” from Jacques Derrida and others, this essay explores how Vivier’s works inscribe a relationship to death, to the end and impossibility of autobiography, into its very origin. I argue that such an inscription occurs prominently in Vivier’s musical and dramatic portrayals of childhood, particularly those in Kopernikus: Opéra—Rituel de mort and Lonely Child. Drawing on Kathryn Bond Stockton’s writing on queer childhood and Lee Edelman’s early essay on homographesis, I further argue that this displacement of the autobiographical in Vivier’s works is also marked by his sexuality, or, more precisely, by its spectral repercussions.

Santa y Andrés: A dossier

Carlos Lechuga’s film Santa y Andrés (2016) has enjoyed worldwide acclaim as an intimate, dramatic portrayal of the unlikely friendship that develops in rural Cuba between Andrés, a gay dissident writer, and Santa, the militant citizen who has been sent to surveil him. Declared to be extreme and/or inaccurate in its historical depictions, the film was censored in Cuba and was the subject of intense controversy and public polemics surrounding its release in 2016. Debates about the film’s subject matter and its censorship extend ongoing disagreement over the role of art within the Cuban Revolution, and the changing nature of the Cuban film industry itself. This dossier brings together new scholarship on Santa y Andrés and is linked to an online archive of some of the original essays that have been written about the film by Cuban critics and filmmakers since 2016. The aim of this project is to create a starting point for researchers who wish to investigate Santa y Andrés, evaluating the film both for its contentious initial reception, and in terms of its enduring contribution to the history of Cuban cinema.

To Account for the Appearances: Phenomenology and Existential Change in Aristotle and Plato

ABSTRACT I begin by highlighting central texts from Aristotle that demonstrate both an appreciation of the rich coupling of subject and object that has been the subject of much of the most exciting and innovative phenomenological work and a fundamental methodological commitment to answering to the terms of experience. I then turn to Plato’s dramatic portrayals of Socrates’ distinctive practice—the “Socratic method”—first to document the subtlety that Socrates displays in his dialogical embrace of the description of lived experience and then, with him, to see the depths of existential change that are integral to the commitment to this method.

Albania (Go Your Own Way!) to Zimbabwe (A World of Wonders): A rhetorical analysis of the world’s country tourism slogans

Despite a large focus on polysemy and rhetorical figures in brands and logos, there is much less research on slogans in marketing literature in general and virtually no studies that relate slogans to tourism destinations using a similar methodology. The purpose of this qualitative study is to examine the tourism slogans of the countries in the world using a combination of semantic evaluation methods, including rhetorical analysis, semiotics, and thematic reviews. Results suggest dominant themes of comparing and contrasting with other regions and countries, heavy use of metaphors and dramatic portrayals, anthropomorphized country traits, and individuality along with overarching concepts of the self. Implications for destination marketing practitioners and future research are also discussed.

Merchants, usurers and harlots: Genoa in early modern English drama

The portrayal of Italy in early modern English drama has enjoyed ample and diversified scholarly treatment, especially as regards Rome, Venice, Naples, Milan, Florence, Padua and Verona as settings for William Shakespeare's plays. Admittedly, Genoa does not readily come to mind when discussing the presence of Italy in Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline drama. Yet, its presence in the drama of the period is far more tangible than commonly assumed. After identifying written sources and mapping out references and allusions to Genoa in the dramatic writings of the period, this article identifies and discusses for the first time usury and prostitution as core themes specifically associated with the dramatic portrayals of Genoa, and examines the engagement of such portrayals with urgent social issues in sixteenth‐ and seventeenth‐century London. By shedding light on the early modern English playwrights’ significant and continuing engagement with Genoa, this article seeks to contribute to a broader understanding of Renaissance Anglo‐Italian relations while simultaneously laying fertile ground for further scholarly enquiry, as well as leading to further critical insights into plays that are set in or host references to Genoa.

Between Science and Supernaturalism: Mimesis and the Uncanny in Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Culture

Curiously placed between the realms of science and supernaturalism, the phenomenon of the uncanny double has a distinctive presence in both. Another kind of duality is at issue in the imagined presence of the doppelganger, as a figure in both physical and mental life. While the phenomenon of the Brocken spectre is one of the era’s most resonant manifestations of an uncanny mirroring of the body, later nineteenth-century developments in clinical psychology began to focus on the sense of an alien presence residing in unknown reaches of the human brain. As they did so, these clinical experiments involved an engagement with the interweave of mental and physiological expression. In Nicholas Royle’s words, the uncanny is associated with ‘a flickering sense (but not conviction) of something supernatural’. Somewhere between the conviction afforded by cognitive processes and the flickering sense intimated by the live wiring of the nervous system, new dimensions of reading and interpretation were opened up. My concern here is to explore how the overlay of scientific and supernaturalist frames is managed in some of the more influential literary and dramatic portrayals of uncanny mimesis. These include evocations of the doppelganger in works by Thomas De Quincey, James Hogg, and Walter Scott, and in Henry Irving’s theatrical productions. Irving’s interest in the double consciousness of the actor is discussed in relation to psychological theories of dual consciousness, and their exploration in clinical practice with patients diagnosed as hysteric.

No Safe Heaven

Adopted from the Greenwich bombing which had taken place in 1890, The Secret Agent is a dramatic portrayal of the sociological concept of “anomie” – radical disorder in the social structure and consequent personal dislocation. Despite its ironic scepticism, the novel carries with it certain implications for conduct. It does not amount to a political program, any more than it provides to a moral code, but it suggests an ideal social order through its representation of a world with order. This paper thus seeks to explore Conrad’s version of a modern world in a state of fragmentation.

Victor and Erika Webnovela: An Innovative Generation @ Audience Engagement Strategy for Prevention

Entertainment-education (E-E) approaches for young audiences continue to evolve in order to keep stride with younger generations’ affinity for technology. E-E and novelas have been used with a wide variety of audiences in the United States, in particular hard-to-reach Latino populations, and have demonstrated effectiveness in disseminating culturally relevant prevention information for a wide variety of health-related risk factors and behaviors. This study discusses the formative research and active engagement of Latino youth living in Langley Park, Maryland, for the development and filming of an innovative 6-episode webnovela titled Victor and Erika (V&E). V&E is part of a larger branding strategy of the Adelante Positive Youth Development intervention that seeks to prevent substance abuse, sexual risk, and interpersonal violence among Latino youth; V&E is also an intervention component. The V&E webnovela is a dramatic portrayal of the lives of 2 immigrant Latino teenagers that also disseminates risk prevention messages. The storyline represents the turning the corner (to a better life) theme that underlies the Adelante intervention brand. Formative research was conducted for character development (n = 20) and creative development of the episodes (n = 14). Results of the formative research showed that youth recommended inclusion of the following topics in V&E episodes: sex, unintended pregnancy, fidelity, trust, family dynamics, immigration status, violence, school dropout, respect, home life, and poverty. Detailed character and episode descriptions are provided, and the implications of using the V&E series as a tool for in-person and online engagement of youth and the dissemination of prevention messages are also discussed.

Labienus and Sceva: Two Classical Supporting Characters and Their Early Modern Dramatic Life in Fletcher and Massinger’s <i>The False One</i>

This note explores the early modern dramatic reception of two characters, Titus Labienus and Cassius Scaeva, featuring in Julius Caesar’s Commentaries and subsequently reincarnated in Fletcher and Massinger’s The False One (ca 1620). I investigate the ostensible reversal in the depiction of status and dramaturgical importance of the two characters in the play as compared to the Commentaries . Since Lucan’s Civil War , accepted as a major source of the play, marginalises Labienus and elevates Scaeva’s exploits into a major scene, this note considers the extent to which Lucan’s epic poem conditions the dramatic portrayal of Labienus and Scaeva.

The tone of laughter and the strangely warm comedy of Hagimoto Kin'ichi

Featuring the comedian Hagimoto Kin'ichi as on-screen father, the hybrid drama-variety show Kinchan no doko made yaru no! (How far will Kinchan go! 1976–1986) won a loyal following of viewers and critics who praised the ‘warmth’ of its parodic television family, describing it as affectively more real and compelling than depictions of the family in traditional dramatic portrayals. Through close readings of scenes from the show and the critical discourse surrounding it, I consider how the show created a consensus that its laughter was tonally warm, and thus well fitted to the domestic space in which television would be viewed. Further, I argue that the show's producers created this impression by inserting the show and Hagimoto's public persona within contemporary discourses on laughter, domesticity, and normative femininity. In doing so, my analysis highlights the ascendant role commercial television played in shaping and harnessing these discourses, and re-assesses, through the lens of the affective experience of 1970s and ’80s media culture, the cultural shifts taking place in Japan during these decades.

Age groups and the measure of population aging

Measures of population aging are important because they shape our perception of demographic trends. Indicators of aging based on fixed ages contributed to a dramatic portrayal of demographic evolutions, some of which were associated with the myth of declin

Adapting Chekhov: the text and its mutations

J. Douglas Clayton and Yana Meerzon, eds. Adapting Chekhov: Text and Its Mutations. Routledge Advances in Theatre and Performance Studies. New York and London: Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, 2013. xviii, 316 pp. $135.00, cloth.In dialogue with Linda Hutcheon's A Theory of Adaptation and categories outlined by Gerard Genette, Adapting Chekhov explores potential of adaptation a permanent feature of globalized culture, as Caryl Emerson recognizes in her foreword, by engaging categories and methodologies of mutation in diverse, particularly post[ist], contexts and performances (p. xv). Examining concretizations and transformations-intramedial and intermedial transpositions-of Chekhov text across cultures, recent histories, and media, this collection of fifteen essays attests to challenge of collectively defining much abused adjective as well as to adaptability and mutability of Anton Chekhov's dramatic vision. With thorough inquiry as to nature of relationship between Chekhov and modem dramas and performances informed and shaped by his texts, this selection of scholars and directors considers socio-political contexts of text and intertext, hypertext and hypotext, thereby enriching the enigma of Chekhov's poetics (P-7).The first part of collection centres on artistry and historical context of Chekhov's plays and their mutations in modem post-narrative or post-dramatic modes (p. 8). J. Douglas Clayton's Diagnosis and Balagan draws on Vsevolod Meierkhol'd's The Balagan to identify a Chekhovian tradition of linguistic satire and generic innovations-a balagannost'-celebrated in Bedbug by Vladimir Maiakovskii and in Elizaveta Bam by Daniil Kharms (pp. 28-29). Marie-Christine Autant-Mathieu (Rewriting Chekhov in Russia Today) discovers a debased, deconstructed, and recycled Chekhov in several post-Soviet works, including those of Nikolai Koliada, Vladimir Sorokin, and Boris Akunin. Against backdrop of Czech concretization of Chekhov in 1960s in dramatic texts by such playwrights as Milan Kundera and Josef Topol as well as in stagings of Chekhov by director Otomar Krejca, Veronika Ambros (Talking and Walking Past Each Other) highlights Chekhov's appearance amidst Vaclav Havel's pastische of fragments from famous texts in Leaving. remaining two articles address Chekhov's presence in anglophone drama with Maria Ignatieva (The Flight of Dead Bird) concluding that in Notebook ofTrigorin Tennessee Williams desymbolizes Chekhov's seagull and uses sub-sex to motivate his characters' behaviour, and with Charles Lamb in Howard Barker's {Uncle) analyzing Barker's conception of an angry and ironic Vanya that puncture[sj Chekhovian complacency in a polemic with dramatist's extensive veneration in British stage tradition (pp. 65, 105).The second part of volume focuses on Chekhov's participation in cultural transfer in post-communist and post-colonial contexts. situatedness of his dramatic portrayals in a liminal period of Russian history (the fm-de-siecle transition between old world and new) motivates their appropriation in post[ist] contexts, but post-colonial reception of Chekhov's plays reflects a tension between their expressed anticolonial sentiments and their association with language of Empire owing to their place in a Western canon imposed on colonial subjects. Following a brief discussion outlining fusion of communist and Western influences on post-communist Romanian productions of Chekhov, Diana Manole (Transtextual Crossbreeds in Post-Communist Context) identifies in her anthropological analysis of Romanian hypertext Seagull from Cherry Orchard by Horia Gârbea a postmodern hybrid of Vanya and Lopakhin with Hamletian undertones (p. 109). Magda Romanska (Chekhov in Age of Globalization) considers how anti-Soviet sensitivities and Russophobia affect Polish reception of Janusz Gowacki's Fourth Sister, which grapples with dislocation and fear of transiency arising from liminal quality of post-communist existence in a world fractured by globalization without communist-era myth of American dreamscape, or the Promised Land (p. …

Applying Sociodramatic Methods in Teaching Transition to Palliative Care

We introduce the technique of sociodrama, describe its key components, and illustrate how this simulation method was applied in a workshop format to address the challenge of discussing transition to palliative care. We describe how warm-up exercises prepared 15 learners who provide direct clinical care to patients with cancer for a dramatic portrayal of this dilemma. We then show how small-group brainstorming led to the creation of a challenging scenario wherein highly optimistic family members of a 20-year-old young man with terminal acute lymphocytic leukemia responded to information about the lack of further anticancer treatment with anger and blame toward the staff. We illustrate how the facilitators, using sociodramatic techniques of doubling and role reversal, helped learners to understand and articulate the hidden feelings of fear and loss behind the family's emotional reactions. By modeling effective communication skills, the facilitators demonstrated how key communication skills, such as empathic responses to anger and blame and using “wish” statements, could transform the conversation from one of conflict to one of problem solving with the family. We also describe how we set up practice dyads to give the learners an opportunity to try out new skills with each other. An evaluation of the workshop and similar workshops we conducted is presented.

English Convents in Eighteenth-Century Travel Literature

‘A Nun’s dress is a very becoming one’, wrote Cornelius Cayley in 1772. Similarly, Philip Thicknesse, witnessing the clothing ceremony at the English Augustinian convent in Paris, observed that the nun’s dress was ‘quite white, and no ways unbecoming … [it] did not render her in my eyes, a whit less proper for the affections of the world’. This tendency to objectify nuns by focusing on the mysterious and sexualized aspects of conventual life was a key feature of eighteenth-century British culture. Novels, poems and polemic dwelt on the theme of the forced vocation, culminating in the dramatic portrayals of immured nuns in the Gothic novels of the 1790s. The convent was portrayed as inherently despotic, its unnatural hierarchy and silent culture directly opposed to the sociability which, in Enlightenment thought, defined a civilized society. This despotic climate was one aspect of a culture of tyranny and constraint, which rendered nuns either innocent and victimized or complicit and immoral. Historians have noted that these stereotypes were remarkably similar to those applied to the Orient and have thus extended Said’s notion of ‘otherness’ - the self-affirmation of a dominant culture as a norm from which other cultures deviate – to apply not merely to oriental cultures but to those aspects of European culture deemed exotic. In so doing, they have challenged the notion that travel writing was an exact record of social experience and have initiated a more nuanced understanding of textual convention and authorial experience. For historians of eighteenth-century Britain this has led to an examination of the construction of anti-Catholicism within travel literature and its use as an ideology around which the Protestant nation could unite. Thus, Jeremy Black has noted that anti-Catholicism remained the ‘prime ideological stance in Britain’ and has claimed that encounters with Catholicism by British travellers in France ‘excited fear or unease … and, at times, humour or ridicule’. Likewise, Bryan Dolan and Christopher Hibbert have seen encounters with continental convents culminating in negative descriptions of rituals, relics and enclosed space.

A Father, a Daughter and a Procurator: Authority and Resistance in the Prison Memoir of Perpetua of Carthage

The prison narrative attributed to the early third‐century Christian martyr Perpetua of Carthage has long attracted attention because of its dramatic portrayal of a Roman father's failure to extract obedience from his adult daughter as he tries to dissuade her from allowing herself to be punished as an enemy of the Roman state. This study explores the alignment between paternal authority and the authority of the Roman procurator Hilarianus in Perpetua's narrative, considering how the civic spaces of forum and arena became theatres for both filial and civil disobedience.

Communist Moral Corruption and the Redemptive Power of Art in The Lives of Others

Widespread moral corruption, particularly of the sort fostered by their internal security agencies, was a key feature of communist regimes. The Lives of Others provides a dramatic portrayal of this phenomenon as it occurred in East Germany. The film can appear, given its central story of the moral redemption of a Stasi officer through his becoming intrigued by the lives of artists, to be an overly idealistic or audience-pleasing testament to the humanizing power of art. But the film also reveals the possible moral corruption of the artists. This essay provides a typology of the sorts of moral corruption exemplified by the situations of different characters in the film and shows that the main artist is actually saved from his impending corruption by the Stasi officer's actions. This reciprocal rescue is the key feature of the film's plot; it teaches that while art can undermine and resist totalitarian corruption, it is also susceptible to its snares—especially when it apolitically relies upon its own resources.

Re-thinking the fiction–reality boundary: investigating the use of drama in HIV prevention projects in Vietnam

Drama is often used as a tool to investigate experience and to assist people to rehearse for change. Dramatic portrayals, however, can reinforce rather than challenge limiting stereotypes, and there is the potential for a positivist approach to research through drama to contribute to a pathologising of the subject and to limit the possibility of change. Assumptions are commonly made about the protective nature of the divide offered by the drama, but within the naturalistic tradition, a certain rule-play may confine the role-play, with actors replicating social norms and dominant storylines in order to create a level of believability or verisimilitude. For change to occur one must rupture the assumed and re-imagine what is possible. The paper discusses the way in which poststructuralist approaches to drama can be used to enable participants to grapple with the limiting positions and categories provided in the dominant discourses and to re-imagine their futures. Examples are drawn from a HIV prevention project with the Women's Union in Vietnam. The project aims to equip women and girls to talk openly about sex within a culture in which this is not the norm. Theory is developed which identifies that the selection of genre influences the knowledge that can be represented through the drama, and consequently the possibilities for change that can be fashioned. Multifarious and poly-vocal accounts of the self are needed to re-fashion the shared and gendered identity absorbed as part of culture and to create new storylines within which to enact change.