Fantasy Production Research Articles

Bestiality in the West: Geraldus of Wales’s Fantasies about the Irish Borderlands: A Medieval Colonialist’s Worldview

Medieval legal, theological, and scientific discourse was highly interested in the monstrous element both out of simple curiosity and because it represented ‘the other’ in epistemological terms. Monsters, however, were normally far-removed, and did not create real fear because they were the products of human fantasy. Bestiality, on the other hand, constituted a direct threat to the well-being of human society, breaching the boundary between humans and animals in a dangerous fashion. This article examines the discourse on bestiality in Geraldus of Wales’s Topographia Hibernica (1187) through which he succeeded to erect a cultural barrier between the Irish on the one hand and the British on the other and to project them as uncivilized, backwards, and as a people that would need to be colonized. Geraldus thus emerges as a stalwart ‘imperialist’ avant la letter. A critical reading of his treatise allows us to apply this ‘anachronistic’ term to this influential medieval writer, which in turn makes it possible to extent our modern anti-colonialist discourse to the high Middle Ages, and perhaps also vice-versa.

The Trolley Problem in Relation to Medical Ethics

The trolley problem, first formulated by Philippa Foot, has become one of the primary tools used to explain the issues surrounding practical ethics, including medical deontology. This dilemma has seen many versions, though in keeping with the context of the original convention, namely a confrontation between absolutist and utilitarian morality. This boils down to an attempt to define the superiority of objective over subjective values, or the other way around.The trolley problem is a very interesting moral problem. Although this is only a product of fantasy, it still contains the source to which refer our way of reasoning. However, today it must be changed in this way, to suits to the present reality and be consistent with the latest scientific achievements.Above was presented such a proposal, taking into account the latest achievements of the theoretical sciences (including the humanities, especially philosophy) as well as the practical sciences. In this way, the trolley problem becomes a problem, which refer to the current moral reflections and present social relations.

Espionage in British Fiction and Film since 1900: The Changing Enemy by Oliver S. Buckton, Espionage and Exile: Fascism and Anti-fascism in British Spy Fiction and Film by Phyllis Lassner

Espionage in British Fiction and Film since 1900: The Changing Enemy by Oliver S. Buckton, Espionage and Exile: Fascism and Anti-fascism in British Spy Fiction and Film by Phyllis Lassner

Diverting the Reader: Novel Strategies in the Conseil privé de Louis le Grand (1696)

The anonymous pamphlet Conseil privé de Louis le Grand (1696) subjects French monarch Louis XIV to scathing ridicule and denunciation. Interestingly, however, the pamphleteer frames his critique of absolutist politics within an entertaining narrative that deploys tropes from contemporary literary genres such as the historical novella and the historico-satirical novel. A poetics of diversion subtends the work, readable at the level of the plot as well as in the satirical mechanism employed in the text: not only does the Conseil privé de Louis le Grand incorporate scenes focusing on courtly diversions, but it also diverts readers in a more literal way by transforming the monarch into a source of amusement. Absolutism becomes grist to the mill of pamphleteering, and the king a product of authorial fantasy. The pamphleteer figures Louis the Great's privy council as a harem — a world of corruption, weakness, and ineptitude where the monarchy is painted in its imagined and unimaginable excesses. Studying this text through the lens of diversion offers a case study affirming the power of fiction as a weapon in the pamphleteer's arsenal.

La résorption de la dissociation psychotique par la solution perverse

AimsThis research aims to demonstrate that, in psychosis, addressing the Other allows the subject to differentiate him/herself and to resort to perverse defense mechanisms in order to tune the therapy. The work sets out to highlight the way in which the body articulates with psychic movements as a result of the transfer. MethodThis study is based on an analysis of the effects of an application by a psychotic patient for hospital admission in a psychiatric ward. We explore the succession of subjective alterations occurring in the patient's discourse and in his acting out, whether addressed to the clinician in the psychotherapeutic setting or to the institution. ResultsThe request for care allows the patient to differentiate, at the cost of a masochistic defensive position. Subsequently, annihilation anxiety triggers an exhibitionist process which can be considered as providing leverage turning masochism into sadism. The violence of this relationship is to be found in the transfer to the institution, where transgression of this framework “stages” what would otherwise have been experienced as real: the fantasy of the beaten child. DiscussionThe psychic impasse in psychosis can have quite specific coordinates: either the patient relinquishes his phallic position towards the Other and it is then exposed to destructive aggression, or he may risk mortifying incest. The patient can work this out in the transfer by identifying with parental aggressors. Making the patient responsible for this scenario gives him the opportunity to appropriate new therapeutic efforts. ConclusionDrive enables the psychotic subject to deploy skills and know-how. The process of subjectivation is backed up by the complementary actions of transfer to the clinician and transfer to the institution. If the institution lays the way for a dynamic of acting out, this will have a stimulant effect in the transfer and will replace self-destruction by the fantasy production that reinforces the trajectory of desire.

Why do We Need <i>Grundstücke</i> (Land Units), and What are They? On the Difficulties of Divining a European Concept of ‘Thing’ in Property Law

The article analyses one of the most fundamental but surprisingly difficult and contested concepts of European property law: the notion(s) of land, immeuble, immovable, and Grundstück. Grundstück and ownership in ‘land’ are reciprocal ideas, with each depending on the other. Grundstücke are constructs of the law and products of legal fantasy; they are not natural entities. To describe them as ‘corporeal’ things is as imprecise and incorrect as the notion of ‘immovables’ is. A piece of land (or land unit) is an item of property not because it is ‘corporeal’ but because the law creates its corpus. A Grundstück (equivalent to the Estonian maatükk) is a ‘normative thing’. Therefore, the paper discusses why the law needs Grundstücke (or their linguistic equivalents in other European languages), what is requires for bringing them into existence, and what space they encompass.

Metaverse-retail service quality: A future framework for retail service quality in the 3D internet

This study argues that service quality in retailing in 3D Collaborative Virtual Environments (aka Metaverses) is distinct from service quality in the more familiar 2D, mainly menu-driven, web internet store (e-SQ) and conceptualises the determinants of Metaverse Retailing service quality (MR-SQ) through a combination of focus groups and Critical Incident Technique with current users of Metaverse retail stores. The emerging set of four overarching determining elements of MR-SQ includes customer service, product dimension, store dimension and a 3D platform dimension. While some of these features are found in 2D e-SQ others are unique to MR-SQ such as human contact, emotional expressiveness, virtual trial and fantasy products, in addition to the 3D platform features. Thus, the CVE/Metaverse context presents opportunities for retailers to enhance social experience, responsive service and creative co-production opportunities. The study provides a framework for guidance for retailers to improve service quality in 3D Metaverse stores, as well as for future research.

Role of the Game in the Development of Preschool Child

Abstract A child's play is the meaning of its life in preschool age. It was his refuge from fears, field of battles, the polygon of game, achievements and successes, soothing and dreams. There come to the fore desires, aspirations, feelings, thoughts and needs of the child for active action in the environment in which it lives. The game satisfies the biological and psychological needs of children and contributes to their mental, emotional, social and moral development. Different roles in the games, although the product of a child's fantasy, allow the child to gain personal experience of good and bad, about what is positive and what is not in behavior. Games are an important form of entertainment for children and adults, through which children organize independently and they have special educational significance. They are a powerful tool for education because through games children acquire knowledge, enrich their experience, and develop skills and habits. The goal of our research is to investigate how the game is implemented in the educational work of preschool institutions, and at the same time to determine which of the traditional games are used in kindergartens, and how modern games enable and assist the process of coming to self-knowledge.

Teasing Out Clues, Not Kooks

Teasing Out Clues, Not Kooks

Tracking Prosumption Work on eBay

Ritzer suggests that we are witnessing the emergence of a prosumer society where early forms of prosumption (the gas station, the automatic teller machine, McDonalds, etc.) are now being universalized across industries, product and service categories, and geographies. This essay presents the results of a qualitative study of the lived experience of “doing prosumption,” in particular, how prosumption work in user-generated media environments is experienced by prosumers over time. For the purpose of this investigation, the authors conceptualize eBay as a space for the social production and consumption of desire, where, akin to the concept of prosumption, the consumer of these experiences is also, at least in part, a producer of the same experiences. The authors argue that the experience of prosumption changes over time even as the frequency of using eBay as a marketplace may not. The data suggest a trajectory from “enchanted prosumption” to “disenchanted prosumption” as, over time, the collective social production and consumption of desires, daydreams, and fantasies give way to a sense of eBay as a place for routine, efficient, and habitual buying and selling activities. In the final analysis, the authors argue that the disenchantment of and through eBay is a function of the routinization of the self and the rationalization of eBay as technological structure. Hence, the authors extend recent theorizations of the de-McDonaldizating effects of user-generated Web 2.0 spaces by suggesting that the dimensions of McDonaldization built into the technological structure of such spaces can encourage a slow re-McDonaldization of the user experience, albeit not universally. In sum, a longitudinal view of prosumption in user-generated online spaces cautions those studying new media spaces, not to underestimate the power of the McDonaldization processes.

Dialettica del fantastico. Il (mobile) confine tra noto e ignoto in Guy de Maupassant

Maupassant, a writer of a largely positivist background, considers the problem of the relationship between the known and the unknown and rationalistically deals with this issue in several texts, both of a narrative and a theoretical nature. With an approach in some measure similar to Zola’s, he claims for the writer the right and the capacity to explore the unlimited scope of the still unknown to discover its darkest and most mysterious areas. Within his wide literary production it is possible to highlight a “fantastic” line of reasoning that develops alongside his literary creativity and is characterized by a singular dialectic between a rational and positivistic instance and a tension towards the unknown and supernatural. Both items co-exist and intermingle to combine in different blends. Such a dialectic tension between two opposites – positivistic rationalism and fantastic irrationalism – is often synthesized in Maupassant’s works and is represented in characters who have an extremely rational forma mentis and a deeply rational intellectual frame. These characters, in an extent a projection of the author himself, are forced to admit that the unknown is ‘real’ and its being real is somehow reinforced by their scepticism. We can find evidence of this typology of characters in Magnetisme, La Peur (1882), Lui?, La Main among others; however the profoundly contradictory mental and spiritual attitude, explicitly expressed in such texts, is the basis and a characteristic feature of almost all the writer’s fantasy production, as his masterpiece in this genre, Le Horla, shows.

“Japayuki,” or, Spectacles for the Transnational Middle Class

Although “vaginal commodities”—feminized and sexualized bodies in the economic system—are found everywhere on the globe today, this article focuses on the ways in which such sexualized images of the Filipino “Japayuki” entertainers working in Japan have been produced and consumed. Suzuki will trace the history of this fantasy production back to the 1970s when the Japanese first began to construct the workers in a particular way. Subsequently, these images became widely circulated among the transnational public in which most eager consumers of these representations are the transnational middle class such as advocates, academics, lawmakers, and the media people, including the Philippine elite. Recently, such overt sexualization of the workers has also subjected Filipino male workers in the night businesses. Whatever workers' sex and sexual orientation, they are seen not as humans but as objects of sex. They are feminized by the hands of the indifferent narrators of the images, and the workers' entirety as humans is reduced to those who are only good at making a living in bed. To analyze, Suzuki takes “Philippine cinema,” the theme of this journal, to mean a site that both veils and invokes global audiences' particular visual fantasies about laboring Filipina/o entertainers. The data used here are queer and drawn not only from filmic but also from printed and audio materials. The time period covered is from the 1970s to March 2005, when the Japanese government suddenly tightened the issuance of the entertainer visas.

New Media, New Audiences, and New Questions: Exploring a Communication Research Agenda for Fantasy Sports

Despite the popularity of fantasy sports, scholarly exploration of the topic has been rare. This study explores a communication-oriented research agenda in that area, using a qualitative analysis of data from in-depth interviews with U.S. fantasy-sports industry leaders. In addition to extending the limited body of literature on fantasy sports, the analysis revealed potentially fruitful research topics, including consumer motivations to use fantasy sports products, information and services; perceptions of gambling; content quality of fantasy sports information; and others.

Cognitive Bizarreness in the Dream and Waking Mentation of Nonpsychotic Patients With Parkinson's Disease

Cognitive Bizarreness in the Dream and Waking Mentation of Nonpsychotic Patients With Parkinson's Disease

Why do public policies fail so often? Exploring health policy-making as an imaginary and symbolic construction

Although it is widely accepted that public policies are difficult to implement, most analyses of policy failures are conceived of as predominantly rational processes. This article questions that assumption by introducing ideas of a desiring subject and socio-symbolic order drawn from Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to suggest that public policies are also a product of social fantasy, and to draw attention to the implications of this unrecognized function of policy-making. It also employs the idea of defensive splitting borrowed from Kleinian object relations theory to explain the difficulty of translating policy into public organizations, which have to perform often conflicting societal tasks. The example of patient choice in the UK National Health Service (the NHS) is used to illustrate theoretical arguments and to propose an alternative understanding of public policy-making by way of bridging fantasy with reality.

"Monsterized Saracens," Tolkien's Haradrim, and Other Medieval "Fantasy Products"

"Monsterized Saracens," Tolkien's Haradrim, and Other Medieval "Fantasy Products" Margaret Sinex (bio) In 1995, Virginia Luling suggested that Sauron's Easterlings and Southrons "draw on inherited images of 'paynims' and other enemies" (56-7). Others, such as Patrick Curry, have noted the geographical parallel between the Haradrim living to Gondor's south in the "Sunlands" and medieval Christendom's perceived enemies to the south and east. Curry writes: "Tolkien's evil creatures are frequently 'swart, slant-eyed' and tend to come from the south ('the cruel Haradrim') and east ('the wild Easterlings') both threatening directions in [his] 'moral cartography'" (30-31).1 Most recently, Dimitri Fimi contextualizes Tolkien's notions about race by examining theories advanced in the late Victorian period and early twentieth century in several fields (physical anthropology and philology among them) as well as the influences of Social Darwinism and the Eugenics movement.2 Writing from a multi-cultural perspective, Brian McFadden and Jane Chance have examined relations among the Races of Middle-earth and have illuminated the Haradrim's indebtedness to the sigelwara or Ethiopians of Old English and Anglo-Latin literature. In this essay, I wish to explore the contributions of later English texts, Middle English romances in particular. Tolkien did not simply select traits from the "monsterized Saracens" (Cohen Giants 78) of English romance and the French epics and bestow them unaltered on his Men of Harad. Within the terms of his fiction, Tolkien mirrors the Western Europeans' methods of constructing their imaginary Saracen.3 I say "imaginary" because, as many have noted, in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's words: "'Saracens' are fantasy products of the Christian imaginary, that, like all monsters, could take on an uncanny life of their own" (Cohen "Hybrids" 88). He makes this remark in the context of analyzing the process of "othering" in the letters of John of Salisbury (1115-1180). In these letters, John represents the Welsh people in ways that Cohen demonstrates: "are manifestations of an othering impulse also visible behind the racialized representations of Islam disseminated throughout the Latin West" (88). "Impulse" conveys an urgency, a drive perhaps, to demarcate "the Welsh" or "Muslims" as the Other distinct from European Christians. When pondering this othering impulse, Paul Freedman cautions that the viewpoint of the European Christian elite was neither perfectly unified nor unchanging over the centuries. Such a claim oversimplifies the [End Page 175] matter as "cracks" in this viewpoint are readily apparent (11). Freedman offers the further caveat that the term "Other" itself is not perfectly stable: A second problem is the tendency to treat alien or Other as if they were stable terms denoting complete and consistent rejection when in fact there were degrees of marginality, so much so, that seemingly contradictory positions could be held simultaneously. (10) We should, he warns, remain conscious of the range of types and gradations of marginality (11). One such degree or gradation might rest on the geographical distance between the targeted group and the European intellectual. There was a distinction to be made, the learned believed, between lepers who lived in Christian Europe (and yet were set apart) and pagan Saracens who lived outside of Europe in remote, ill-defined lands to the east. Keeping Freedman's cautions in mind, when I assert that Tolkien mirrors the Western Europeans' methods of constructing their imaginary Saracen I am suggesting that he is necessarily mirroring the othering process of the Christian West. Three characteristics of the othering processes of medieval Europe are especially relevant to the Haradrim it seems to me. The first is the reliance on binaries (inner/outer, light/dark, Scythian/Ethiopian, saved/damned). Both medieval Church authorities and ethnologists reconceptualized pairs of opposed elements that they had inherited from the classical period. The second feature is the determining power of climate on various races and thus the crucial significance of geography in racial theorizing. And the third is the use of color as a tool with which to guide audience response to characters in literature and the visual arts of the late Middle Ages. The issue of gradations of marginality has a bearing on the Haradrim as well. They appear as one term or component of...

Seizing Moving Image Pornography

Seizing Moving Image Pornography Jos B. Capino The proliferation of hard-core film pornography during the 1970s in the form of feature-length adult films intensified the production of sexual fantasies and sexualities through the cinema. The porno chic heralded by works such as Boys in the Sand (Wakefield Poole, 1971) and Deep Throat (Gerard Damiano, 1972) turned the motion picture apparatus and some fledgling pornographers, performers, and audiences into instruments of what Michel Foucault calls the implantation of perversions. Something of an American Kama Sutra began its intense and rapid expansion, engendering and also recording what Foucault discussed as the visible explosion of unorthodox sexualities, the analytical multiplication of pleasure, and the optimization of power that controls this new discourse of sex.1 To cite one example, the famous series of extra deep blow jobs given by Linda Lovelace, while dismissed by one contemporary feminist for being only as erotic as a tonsillectomy, nevertheless inspired much discussion, became a set piece of straight porn films, and have since been rehearsed offscreen to such a point of mastery that talk of young women with no gag reflex has become common in college dorms. Seen in this light, the visual text of porn movies is revealed to consist of much more than just filmed sex acts. They encode and disseminate practices of sexuality. They ceaselessly improvise scenarios of erotic fantasy. They generate schemes for the disposition of bodies across historical, ethical, and imaginary space. They [End Page 121] weave fugitive patterns of moving and still elements. They legislate the pleasures that should be associated with the perversions on display. One even finds in these films, just beneath the overplayed expressions of ecstasy, marks of the actors self-consciousness about performing the perversions and being seen while doing the dirty deed. Those nervous ticks and awkward gestures make visible such abstractions as the films mode of production or, to use colorful moralistic language, even the actors (and spectators ) state of concupiscence. The resulting massification and complexity of pornographic moving images demand a triangulation of analytical approaches that deploy mise-en-sc ne analysis along with the explication of sonic elements, the decoding of symptomatic and referential meanings, the disclosure of the text s mode of production and contextual relations, etc. Regardless of the scholar s specific research question, the political stakes of the project should rest at least partly on the examination of the implanted perversions as they are visually instantiated by the pornographic text.2 I have in my mind the look of Wakefield Poole s Boys in the Sand. In interviews with The Advocate and Drummer, the justly celebrated pornographer stressed the importance of beauty as a legitimating strategy in his depiction of gay sex ( I wanted a film that gay people could look at and say, I don t mind being gay; it s beautiful to see those people do what they re doing )3 and in his mise-en-sc ne ( That atmosphere was very controlled. That s why straight film reviewers took notice. Boys was the first gay film that straights perceived as not sleazy. )4 Without showing examples of Poole s beautifully composed images, it would be very difficult to demonstrate the extent to which he invested in ornate and often ethereal images to make all male action aesthetically pleasing to a critical audience that he saw as including not just gay men but straights. Still images of Poole s films show us precisely how he deployed fantasy—deliberately, reflexively, and often daintily—to soften the hard-core rawness with which the camera registered the homosexual perversities that were emerging into visibility at the time of gay liberation. To see these prettified images is thus to grasp the politics behind their conjuration. And while it seems odd for Poole to mind the straight audience, the following quote from Screw s review of his second film, Bijou (1973), shows us just how important (but ultimately insufficient) beautiful images were to the heteronormative standards of the adult film s most...

Digital Play and the Actualization of the Consumer Imagination

In this article, the authors consider emerging consumer practices in digital virtual spaces. Building on constructions of consumer behavior as both a sense-making activity and a resource for the construction of daydreams, as well as anthropological readings of performance, the authors speculate that many performances during digital play are products of consumer fantasy. The authors develop an interpretation of the relationship between the real and the virtual that is better equipped to understand the movement between consumer daydreams and those practices actualized in the material and now also in digital virtual reality. The authors argue that digital virtual performances present opportunities for liminoid transformations through inversions, speculations, and playfulness acted out in aesthetic dramas. To illustrate, the authors consider specific examples of the theatrical productions available to consumers in digital spaces, highlighting the consumer imagination that feeds them, the performances they produce, and the potential for transformation in consumer-players.

The Clothes Make the Fan: Fashion and Online Fandom when Buffy the Vampire Slayer Goes to eBay

The public's reception of eBay's auction of Buffy the Vampire Slayer wardrobe items marked an instructive collision of online fandom, television production/consumption and e-commerce. As opportunities for critique and fantasy production, the clothes crystallized tensions within the series and among fans: between ownership and authorship; a viable feminist politics and the sexualization of cast and characters; the perceived egalitarianism of online communities and eBay's explicit competitiveness.

Le langage fantasmatique du mythe dans Antony and Cleopatra

This paper explores the many references to classical mythology in Antony and Cleopatra as a consistent language, whose syntax is based on a process of accumulation and amplification. As wielded by the hero and heroine, myths bring about other myths, in a ceaseless engendering of visions which tend to obscure their perception of reality. The often-commented contrast between Antony and Cleopatra’s understanding of their situations and the apparent reality of the play is thus connected with the mythological production of fantasies, which invade the stage in the last two acts in a desperate attempt to ward off the inevitable catastrophe, and also to fight the humiliating counter-vision of a Roman triumph.