Elspeth Probyn Research Articles

Hearing home: Exploring place and identity through voice

Creating or recreating voices through the writing of fictional letters can be a way of reconnecting with places that may have been taken from us. For the person denied an authentic connection with their birthplace, the writing of voice through fictional stories, novels and creative nonfiction may have the power to bridge time and distance, to take a person back to the place where they were born and to help rebuild an origin story that was refused them. By recreating the voices of people associated with one’s original home, especially when writing for an audience who may take the theoretical place of an absent respondent, a person may come to develop a better understanding of their relationship with that region. This paper is informed by Elspeth Probyn’s theory that childhood is a repeatable point of beginning, Anne-Marie Fortier’s extended definition of home, and an examination of the results a return to the past may bring. It references studies on dialect as it relates to character the epistolary form. It provides examples that informed the author’s thinking in using voice to reflect place and follows with samples of the author’s attempts to connect with their birthplace by drawing imaginary portraits using dialect reflected in the epistolary form. It ends with a reflection on this process.

‘It’s pretty sad if I’m just betting by myself … ’: navigating shame and stigma in everyday sports betting

ABSTRACT Smartphone technologies and prominent marketing campaigns continue to contribute to the growth of sports betting in contemporary Australia, shifting the practice from pubs and clubs into the domestic and intimate lives of young bettors. This article seeks to build on prior studies of sports betting in the lives of young Australian men by focusing on how gambling shame and stigma is navigated by bettors and their romantic partners. Data collected from 20 interviews with young sports bettors and their intimate partners is used to highlight and contrast how men and women perceive and engage with modern sports betting. Drawing on the work of Elspeth Probyn, we show how shame directed by betting men towards problem gambling behaviours and perceived illegitimate forms of gambling, such as betting alone or betting on racing, helps legitimise men’s own betting practices and position them favourably in masculine betting hierarchies. In contrast to men’s shaming responses, women who have been romantically involved with sports bettors instead show feelings of understanding and indifference towards the practice, provided their partners bet at a recreational level. These findings illustrate the ways young Australian gamblers use ‘betting shame’ to navigate and justify their engagement with a rapidly transforming, stigmatised leisure practice.

Breathing places: Three filmmaking investigations

Filmmakers and scholars Christine Rogers, Catherine Gough-Brady, and Marsha Berry each find a connection with place through their video work. In this article, they share their experiences of creating short videos, focusing on their insider experiences of filming and the spatial relationships between themselves and place. Although each of them began with a proposition, they filmed unscripted, allowing themselves to respond intuitively to their environment, allowing space in their practices for fluid and organic change and letting place shape what they filmed, and their final works. Christine Rogers engages with Elspeth Probyn’s idea of belonging as movement as she films Ngāi Tahu (Māori) traveling in dinghies away from her, toward islands where she, an outsider, cannot set foot. Catherine Gough-Brady finds a connection between non-representational theory and documentary film theory, uncovering a landscape that has no eye-line. Marsha Berry explores the seaside landscape, making a constellation with Rebecca Solnit’s lyrical essays about walking and place and non-representational theory as a mooring for her practice, exposing the common experience of standing still whilst looking at the blue horizon at sunset. Each filmmaker finds a unique path through the myriad of elements that make something a place.

Men seeking women: Awkwardness, shame, and other affective encounters with dating apps

This paper draws on qualitative research conducted with cis men aged 18–35, who used dating apps to meet women both before and during COVID-19 lockdown. Men in our study — which sought to better understand the aspects of app use that make young people feel safer or less safe — offered affectively loaded accounts of app use, which featured racialized and gendered experiences of ‘awkwardness’, shame, and contempt. Our analysis engages with Bollen and McInnes’ concept of ‘sexual choreographies’, which focused on the inter-affective and embodied aspects of cis gay men’s sexual learning practices as a means of reframing our thinking around the ways cis men who date women engage with dating app technologies and cultures. Drawing on Elspeth Probyn’s theorization of shame as a pedagogically productive affect, we argue that the affect-response of shame-humiliation can be turned to a productive, self-reflexive opportunity for improving gendered experiences of app use.

‘Alimentary Assemblages’ at Intersections: Food, (Queer) Bodies, and Intersectionality in Marusya Bociurkiw’s Comfort Food for Breakups: The Memoir of a Hungry Girl (2007)

Abstract Clearly devoted to the analysis of various issues of belonging, the work of Marusya Bociurkiw, a Ukrainian-Canadian queer writer, director, academic, and activist, examines culture, memory, history, and subjectivity in a fascinatingly unique way. Such a thematic composition is, however, not the only aspect that visibly marks and unities Bociurkiw’s multi-generic oeuvre; what clearly stands out as yet another distinguishing characteristic that Bociurkiw’s works have in common is the idea that seems to stand behind their creation – an impelling notion that “[t]o have one’s belonging lodged in a metaphor is voluptuous intrigue” (Brand 2001: 18). Consequently, what Bociurkiw’s works vividly portray is the writing-self “in search of its most resonant metaphor” (Brand 2001: 19). In one of her works, Comfort Food for Breakups: The Memoir of a Hungry Girl (2007), this metaphor is food as the art of food-making and the act of eating become here a crucial background against which the issues of belonging are played out. The aim of this article is thus to show how Bociurkiw finds her way of discussing various aspects of subjectivity by means of writing about food, whether about preparing it, tasting it, or recollecting its preparation and tastes. Ultimately, however, the article is to prove that food in Bociurkiw’s memoir not only reflects identity but is presented as a vital site of intersectionality. Thus, embedded in intersectionality discourse, and particularly instructed by Vivian May’s Pursuing Intersectionality, Unsettling Dominant Imaginaries (2015), the analysis of Comfort Food for Breakups is carried out from an interdisciplinary perspective because it is simultaneously grounded in food studies theory, i.e., the ideas developed by Elspeth Probyn in Carnal Appetites: FoodSexIdentities (2000), confirming, in this way, that vital connections can and should be made between the two, ostensibly unrelated, fields of study.

Book review: Eating the Ocean by Elspeth Probyn

Book review: <i>Eating the Ocean</i> by Elspeth Probyn

Female “Lone Wolves”: The Anti‐Social Heroine in Recent Television Series

Female “Lone Wolves”: The Anti‐Social Heroine in Recent Television Series

To Eat or Not to Eat Kangaroo: Bargaining over Food Choice in the Anthropocene

To Eat or Not to Eat Kangaroo: Bargaining over Food Choice in the Anthropocene

Must We Eat Fish?

Must We Eat Fish? Ian Buchanan (bio) If only I could reason with those who deliberately slaughtered the societies of great whales! If only the last Great Auks and Stellar's sea cows and Atlantic walruses had not been killed! Perhaps other choices would have been made, if only the dire consequences of draining wetlands, cutting primeval forests, polluting rivers, filling productive bays, had been known to those who forever closed options for me, for all those who share the present, and for all who will come in the future. —Sylvia Earle (1995, 321) Art, Deleuze argues in his books on cinema, has the task not of addressing a people, "which is presupposed already there, but of contributing to the invention of a people" (1989, 217). Art has the unenviable and perhaps impossible task of helping to create the conditions in which a certain kind of politics becomes possible. The people it must invent, the people who are presently lacking, are people capable of hearing and acting on its message. I was reminded of this passage in Deleuze as I read Elspeth Probyn's Eating the Ocean because from the opening pages it was apparent it was going to be an extended argument in favour of maintaining the status quo, something all marine scientists agree would be a disaster for the ocean. We cannot have our ocean and eat it too. Today, as we face up to the devastation humans have wrought on this planet, we must acknowledge the deep truth and uncanny prescience of Walter Benjamin's insight that preserving the status quo is literally the last thing we should be trying to do. As Benjamin put it, the "'status quo' is the catastrophe" (2003, 184). Once a species disappears we cannot bring them back and unless we act now generations into the future will be asking us the kinds of questions Sylvia Earle wants to ask the people of the past. Probyn says she wants to find ways for us to care more about the ocean, which one can but applaud, but it is uncertain whether what she has in mind is palliative care or critical care, is she concerned to save a life or help ease one into the final darkness. Moreover as the scale tips toward extinction for countless species, it is no longer enough to talk about conservation, we need to act urgently for the sake of preservation of what remains. "Again and again through this book," Probyn writes, "I wonder how we can care a bit more, or a bit better, for the entire entangled marine elements [End Page 79] that we devour when we eat the ocean" (2016, 7). I imagine that Probyn frames her ambitions in this bitty way out of modesty, which is doubtless commendable enough in an era of overblown claims, but it has the unfortunate effect of diminishing both the scale of the problem of overfishing and marine species loss and the need for urgency in responding to these problems. If one reads Probyn alongside the work of marine biologists like Sylvia Earle or Callum Roberts, the contrast between their positions is absolute, not because their view is more complex—if anything their position is even simpler than Probyn's. Where Probyn asserts that "we" cannot afford not to eat fish, they say "we" cannot afford not to stop eating fish. In contrast to Earle and Roberts, Probyn treats the dire situation of the ocean today as something that can be remedied by a few minor adjustments to the way we do things. The reality is in fact very different, as Probyn herself fleetingly acknowledges. Somewhat tongue-in-cheek, she notes that "we are at risk of eating it up, devouring it until there's nothing left except the not-so-apocryphal jellyfish-and-chips" (2). One might expect then that her argument would be that humans must act now to save the ocean from human predation. But that is not the course she takes, her argument pivots in precisely the opposite direction. Can the ocean help feed humanity? (7). That is her question and her answer is that it must! This is an argument for the status quo...

Productive faces of shame: An interview with Elspeth Probyn

Shame has typically been understood as a negative emotion, a view which is prevalent in individualist, psychologising discourses about human experience. Elspeth Probyn's approach to shame departs significantly from these tropes. As interviewers, we share a common interest in feminist ethics and productive affects in teaching and scholarship. Hence, our specific interest in Probyn's Blush: Faces of Shame. Blush is an excellent example of viewing the politics of shame as a productive and relational process. Probyn proposes that shame comes about through an interest in and a connection with another. This connection can result in building care for the other and community through re-evaluations of the self. In this way, shame can be a productive force in postcoloniality, in the feminist political ethics of care and in attempts at reconciliation. This view corresponds with the focus of this Special Issue – an affirmative and relational but political view of shame. The interview provides an illuminative account of the author's thoughts behind the writing of the book Blush, historical, theoretical and personal influences which impacted on the ideas expressed in the book, and how the book relates to past and future ideas and practices.

Working With/in/Against More-Than-Human Environmental Sustainability Education

This article moves beyond the anthropocentric agenda that is currently dominating environmental sustainability education and looks to what authors such as Carolyn Merchant, Elspeth Probyn and Stefan Helmreich can bring to these spaces, working with/in/against feminist new materialism and ecofeminism in a more-than-human environmental sustainability education.

Geopolitics and Social Resistance: Flows of Latin America’s Natural Resources

This review essay looks at Christopher Boyer’s Political landscapes: forests, conservation and community in Mexico, (Duke University Press, Durham, 2015), Thomas Miller Klubock’s La Frontera: forests and ecological conflict in Chile’s Frontier Territory (Duke University Press, Durham, 2014), Pablo Lapegna’s Soybeans and power: genetically modified crops, environmental politics and social movements in Argentina (Oxford University Press, New York, 2016) and Elspeth Probyn’s Eating the ocean (Duke University Press, Durham, 2016) as each provide a holistic study of how political ecology and marginalized peoples engage the issue of natural resources in Latin America. Through they deal with different regions and a wide range of approaches to management, collectively they shine light on the social interactions that accompany changes in the land and how local communities engage issues surrounding nature’s use. On a larger level, they offer readers more insight into the field of the environmental humanities and what it means to live with the land.

“Tweet Me Your First Assaults”: Writing Shame and the Rhetorical Work of #NotOkay

This essay features a study of the #NotOkay Twitter thread, which arose as a response to the Access Hollywood Trump tape and comprises thousands of tweets by women who describe their first experience of sexual assault. I analyze this hashtag as an act of what Elspeth Probyn calls “writing shame.” I first trace the cultural habitus of emotion around sexual assault and harassment, which teaches survivors to internalize shame and normalizes assault. I then examine how #NotOkay contributors—both before and after the election—participate in writing shame, a practice that does the following rhetorical work: serves as an invitational space for women to rewrite assault-related shame; revises the locus of shame from the individual to the culture that shames; and generates calls to transform this emotional and rhetorical sphere.

Water and Ocean

A review of Elspeth Probyn. 2016, 'Eating the Ocean'. Durham: Duke University Press and Astrida Neimanis. 2017, 'Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology'. London: Bloomsbury.

Ethnic diversity, scarcity and drinking water: a provocation to rethink provisioning metropolitan mains water

ABSTRACTUrban water scarcity in south-east Australia forces us to engage with how our present centralised public utilities are embedded in our everyday lives, amidst uncertain futures. In the last decades, socio-technical approaches have illustrated how the myth of endless main water supply is made possible by cultures of engineering and plumbing. To extend debates about the cultural dimensions of environmental sustainability, this paper takes an ethnographic approach to understand the processes by which Burmese refugees and migrants who lived with water scarcity pre-migration make water potable post-migration to Australia. With a focus on mapping the material, discursive, spatial and emotional relations that enable the provisioning of potable water, the paper brings into conversation Elizabeth Shove's social practice theory with Elspeth Probyn's emplaced formulation of subjectivity. The adaptive provisioning capacities of people whose lives are immersed in cultures of water scarcity point towards a politics and relational ethics of care underpinned by provisioning and first-person contact. To conclude, these grounded Burmese examples provide an opportunity to employ scenario thinking to imagine alternative drinking water futures for south-east Australian cities.

Troubling Academe

Troubling Academe

Transformative Taste-Encounters

This article considers the potential and significance of taste as a transformative part of the theatrical and culinary experience. The cross-pollination between food and performance in restaurants and contemporary theatre is explored through an analysis of Reckless Sleepers’ The Last Supper, Leo Burtin’s The Midnight Soup and restaurateur and chef, Simon Rogan’s ‘Tasting Menu’ served in his Michelin-starred restaurant L’Enclume.Drawing on Michel Serres’ philosophy of taste (2008) and theories of the body and eating from Elspeth Probyn (2000), I examine how the performances of taste in these three dining events were constructed as relational encounters that invited intimate and active engagement with food and bodies. I offer a reading of taste in these instances as both cathartic and anxiety inducing, and consider the different ways that the taste experiences afforded contemplation on the relationship between life, death and eating. I identify the culinary aesthetic strategies of distaste, agency, catachresis and synaesthesia that were in play across the theatrical and culinary-performative contexts discussed. I argue that these strategies can contribute to a discourse of a beyond of taste by revealing the interconnectedness of taste, and enabling the perceived nebulousness and seeming impossibility of taste to become manifest in new ways.

QUEERING OCEAN CONSUMPTION, IMBRICATING THE MORE-THAN-HUMAN

If one of the accepted understandings of queering is to disrupt normativity by rendering it strange (Jagose), then Elspeth Probyn’s Eating the Ocean definitely fits within a queer rubric. Its intro...

The unsettling of shame: Examining There Was This Goat: Investigating the Truth Commission Testimony of Notrose Nobomvu Konile in the light of Elspeth Probyn’s construction of shame

In their book, There Was This Goat, Antjie Krog, Nosisi Mpolweni and Kopano Ratele investigate Mrs Notrose Nobomvu Konile’s testimony at the 1995 South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The authors explore the way the TRC disregarded Mrs Konile’s testimony about her son’s murder because they did not see it as a clear and straightforward narrative of victimhood. In the process of trying to understand Mrs Konile’s testimony and life, all three authors as racialized persons living in South Africa are confronted with various aspects of shame. The article uses excerpts from There Was This Goat to explore Australia-based writer Elspeth Probyn’s conception of shame as a productive force that has the power to radically transform notions of the self and the political arena. Comparing Probyn’s account in Blush: Faces of Shame and other texts of her visit to Uluru in Australia’s Northern Territory with the trip to Indwe in the Eastern Cape made by the authors of There Was This Goat, it discusses how shame can be embedded in space. It critiques Probyn’s argument that shame can be transformative of power dynamics by looking at Krog’s feelings of displacement as a white South African. Probyn’s construction of shame may challenge social inequalities, but it is also a privileged and elusive shame that can reproduce colonial structures and relationships.

“Dear Obese PhD Applicants”: Twitter, Tumblr and the Contested Affective Politics of Fat Doctoral Embodiment

“Dear Obese PhD Applicants”: Twitter, Tumblr and the Contested Affective Politics of Fat Doctoral Embodiment