SUE VERONICA ANGELATOS:
“To Fear or Not to Fear...?” – Does Unswerving Faith Ultimately Triumph Over the Bloody Brutality of the Martyrdoms Painted at the Venerable English College, Rome?

In 1583 Niccolò Circignani, called “il Pomerancio”, painted a “history” of the foundation and gory persecutions of the Catholic Church in England and Wales at the Venerable English College in Rome. Credited to Fr William Good S.J., an erudite scholar, former missionary papal delegate and confessor to the students, this graphically brutal martyr-cycle, the subject of my research, formed an inescapable backdrop to the daily rituals of devotion as young aspirant missionaries to heretical England celebrated the divine sacraments, engaged in self-mortification in the quest to imitatio Christi, and practised the distinctly Jesuit mode of meditation directed by visual or textural prompts. While evoking natural responses of fear and repulsion, these visual mnemonics tapped into a core belief that just as Christ freed mankind from sin and suffering by His death, so too these future “soldiers of Christ” might expect, even aspire, to suffer and die as martyrs for the Faith. The same artist had already painted martyr-cycles at other national colleges placed by Gregory XIII under the jurisdiction of the Society of Jesus. While the Venerable English College cycle ostensibly subscribed to the format of these precedents, each fresco bay of continuous narrative with individual events keyed alphabetically to the Latin text below presented a novel and blatantly nationalistic specific agenda. It was the last six images, the “virtual news” recordings of the recent bloody martyrdoms of fellow Jesuit and secular missionaries, commencing with those of Fr Edmund Campion S.J., the College’s proto-martyr Ralph Sherwin, and Fr. Alexander Briant S.J. on 1 December 1581, which would however engender the greatest sense of fear in these seminarians. Thus my paper will examine the impact and relevance of these images of ‘fear’ upon this original sixteenth century audience of missionaries/martyrs; upon the late nineteenth century faithful who had re-instated the then “lost” cycle to fervently “plead the cause” for the canonization of these martyrs; and finally, upon the contemporary viewer who has become largely de-sensitised by multi-media scenes of brutality and violence but yet cannot escape unscathed from the visual inducement of “fear” and its antithesis, “heroism through martyrdom”.

Sue Veronica Angelatos is currently completing her PhD in the School of Culture and Communications at the University of Melbourne under the supervision of Dr. Christopher Marshall and Prof. Jaynie Anderson. Her thesis topic: “Piety and Propaganda at the Venerable English College, Rome” examines the intrinsic link between the painted and printed image in late 16th century Rome, and, in particular, how these graphic images of bloody martyrdoms, including the near contemporary executions of Jesuit and secular missionaries to England, were utilised as spiritual tools by the Jesuits to encourage and sustain the flow of missionaries, and as vehicles of propaganda by the Papacy, namely Pope Gregory XIII, to re-instate the Catholic Faith in England and Wales.
 

YVETTE BLACKWOOD:
“What If I’m Not A Girl?” Fear and Loathing of the Vampire Girl in the Swedish Horror Film, Let The Right One In (dir. Thomas Alfredson, 2008)

Fear in horror films almost always takes a Freudian model of depth/surface, abject/clean, and audiences’ fear in horror films is so often quelled by the origin story of the monster. In films from Psycho to The Ring, it’s most commonly a Freudian story involving a smothering mother. But in Let the Right One In, another, new kind of horror presents itself: a girl without origins. A girl who isn’t quite a girl at all. “What if I’m not a girl” is first understood to be an attempted outing of Eli as a vampire. But a shot of Eli lifting her skirt to reveal a large cut suggests she hasn’t always been a girl. Typically the audience would be given answers to this image (as they are in the novel version), along with an origin story, but Eli in the film is a cyborg, a body without organs. She is a creature that is everywhere and nowhere, everything and nothing. This is a creature to be feared as well as loved. Using Haraways’s cyborg theory, along with Deleuzian notions of the body and territory, I argue that Let The Right One In embodies the contemporary anxieties and fears about the girl.

Dr Yvette Blackwood is a Lecturer in the School of Philosophy at the University of Tasmania, specialising in gender and popular culture. Her PhD on hotels in contemporary theory, film and literature was completed in 2005. Yvette is also a film writer and producer, having several short films screened at national and international film festivals.
 

BRANDON CHUA:
Aphra Behn's The Widdow Ranter and the Romance of Fear

The Widdow Ranter, Aphra Behn's 1689 tragicomedy depicting the historical 1676 armed uprising in the Virginia colony, has frequently been read as a dramatic engagement with England's own political crisis in the 1680s that was to culminate in the Dutch invasion and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. This paper seeks to combine a formal and political reading of the play in contending that Behn's unorthodox use of the tragicomic form to depict a bloody rebellion can be understood in terms of the play's engagement with the politics of fear. The recuperation of Bacon's tragic narrative into a comic resolution is effected, I argue, through a subplot involving the fearful council members governing the colony. The play's representation of a fearful government will be read in the context of seventeenth century debates on political obligation, best represented in the political treatises of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. The passion of fear featured prominently in these attempts to re-theorise political sovereignty, as notions of contract came to displace the divinely sanctioned political power of the monarch. The concept of fear occupied a crucial position in this renegotiation of political power, with its ability to generate an argument for political subordination on the basis of rational self-interest through the positing of a natural, dependable emotion present in every subject. However, this location of political subjection in the naturally fearful bodies of contracting individuals produced a problematic juxtaposition of the opposing concepts of rational interest and irrational passion — a juxtaposition that Behn exploits through the medium of theatrical artifice. Behn's play interrogates this politicising of the emotion of fear through a generic engagement with tragicomic structure and aesthetic notions of catharsis, thus revealing the political nature of literary and theatrical form.

Brandon Chua is a PhD candidate in the discipline of English Literary Studies in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. His thesis focuses on the relationship between emotion and political theory in late seventeenth century English tragedies of state.
 

JOY DAMOUSI

Joy Damousi is the Head of the School of Historical Studies, University of Melbourne. Her many research interests include Australian cultural history, feminist and women's history, memory and war, the history of emotions, psychoanalysis, football and popular culture, speech, accent and elocution. Her most recent book, Freud in the Antipodes: A Cultural History of Psychoanalysis in Australia, won the Ernest Scott History Prize in 2006.
 

DIANNE DE BELLIS:
Fear of Australian Deserters in World War I

The fear experienced by a deserter under bombardment in dreadful trench warfare conditions has been explored in a range of military, medical and social research. In a reversal of attempting to understand the fear of the individual deserter, my paper examines what was so frightening about desertion to the army and society that the death penalty was the accepted solution. Australia’s Federation in 1901 created a need to develop a sense of the Australian nation, which was distinct from that of the British. The battles at Gallipoli in 1915 and on the Western Front 1916-1918 provided such an opportunity for the Australian Imperial Force (AIF). However, the Australian had a reputation as the most undisciplined soldier in the British Expeditionary Force (BEF). One hundred and twenty-one Australians were sentenced to death, the majority for desertion, during the war. Many more were sentenced to prison after being convicted of absence without leave, bringing the service into disrepute and reinforcing the idea of Australian insubordination. None were executed because of Clause 98 in the Australian Defence Act (1903). The fear within the BEF was that once it became widely known that the Australians were not subject to the death penalty the incidence of desertion would increase to the extent that it would weaken the discipline and efficacy of the AIF. Sir Douglas Haig considered that unless the Australian government placed their troops under the British Army Act without any restrictions as regards the death penalty, “the fighting efficiency of these divisions will deteriorate to an extent which may gravely affect success of our arms”. In my paper I argue that the fear of deserters is a fear of losing control and of losing power. The deserter is not only leaving the front line; by deserting he is challenging the whole social and moral code, not only of war, but of the society and culture that sanctioned that war. Desertion undermines and threatens the order of the army and by extension, society.

Dianne De Bellis is currently doing research at the University of South Australia, looking at how Australia's involvement in World War I created the Anzac legend and how the Anzac narrative became a foundational myth of the Australian identity. She is finding and telling the stories of Australian soldiers who deserted during World War I and analysing how this interrogates the Anzac myth. Dianne returned to tertiary study as a mature student gaining her BA in 2006 and winning the University Medal for outstanding academic achievement. She was awarded First Class Honours in 2007. She worked as a technical writer for 10 years and in various Federal Government departments. She currently tutors at UniSA in cultural studies and ethics.
 

PATRICIA DI RISIO:
Fear, Gender Angst and Film

In this paper I will examine how fear is an emotion which is used not only as a means of control or intimidation but also as a covert instrument for cinematic commercial gain. I argue that the fear generated by gender angst, particularly during the rise of queer culture and politics as a movement (Butler 1990, 2004), has been exploited by New Hollywood cinema in order to deliberately titillate and disturb spectators as a means of attracting filmgoers. This is particularly evident in the ambiguous representation of femininity and the manipulation of an ever-increasing use of lesbian chic that has pervaded popular culture since the 1990s (Ciasullo 2001). An example of this can be found in films such as Basic Instinct (Verhoeven, 1992) which, I argue, intentionally subverts conventional representations of women and femininity by invoking the ambivalence and the uncertainty that transitional gender or sexuality incites. I aim to demonstrate how this film successfully exploits the fear harboured in cultural anxiety about sex, gender roles and sexual orientation. The discussion will focus on how this film capitalises on this anxiety. The controversy surrounding the way the film employed lesbian imagery was not only inconsequential to its cinematic employment but becomes part of the marketing machinery. I will discuss how the typical association of homosexuality and villainy protested against in this film (Galvin 1994, 220) actually functions as part of its appeal and actively manipulates a range of fears inherent in unconventional representations of femininity. Overall, I wish to demonstrate how Basic Instinct is exemplary because it is an uninhibited example of how New Hollywood is not only indifferent to feminist, queer or any political protestation and the fear it elicits, but actually seems to relish the extra marketing edge it may give the distribution and exhibition of the film.

Patricia Di Risio has taught film and media studies and drama at secondary and tertiary level in Australia, England and Italy. At secondary level in Australia (Maribyrnong Secondary College) she has taught courses in film and video production including scripting and storyboarding. At tertiary level in Italy (International Academy of Image Arts and Sciences, L’Aquila) she has taught courses in Visual Literacy focusing on cinematic apparatus, genre, film theory and analysis and auteur study. She is currently researching the cinematic representation of femininity in New Hollywood and its impact on genre filmmaking (supervisor: Barbara Creed). She recently gave a paper on gender and genre at the Film, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis symposium held at King’s College London (March 2009).
 

JANE ECKETT:
Geometry of Fear — A New Dimension in the Work of Three Australian Sculptors: Julius Kane, Robert Klippel and Lenton Parr, 1949–60

In his catalogue essay for the Venice Biennale of 1952, Herbert Read coined the now infamous phrase, “geometry of fear”, to describe the work of eight young British sculptors whom he saw as responding to a post-war climate of anxiety, despair and collective guilt. Read’s phrase was rapidly absorbed by the contemporary press, who began referring to the eight sculptors as adherents of "the geometry of fear school”. Whilst some subsequent writers and curators interpreted the work of these sculptors as representative of Cold War political anxiety, others rejected the phrase outright in an attempt to reconcile the early work of the eight artists with the varying concerns of their later oeuvres. Rather than simply dismissing Read’s thesis, I wish to problematise it by examining the work of three Australian artists — Julius Kane, Robert Klippel and Lenton Parr — whose work may be usefully considered within Read’s terms. To do so it is necessary to explore the origins of Read’s ideas in the philosophy of Wilhelm Worringer. In his influential text, Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer argued that geometric abstraction arose at times when humans felt “an immense spiritual dread of space” and a sense of helplessness in the face of an ever-changing natural world. Read likened this spiritual dread to a collective unconscious guilt in the wake of World War II atrocities. In later years Read re-interpreted his phrase, broadening its meaning to a more pervasive expression “of an ‘Angst’ or despair induced by the alienation prevailing in our technological civilization — a ‘geometry of fear’, as I once expressed it”. To this definition I would like to add a further dimension: the anxiety of the “outsider” artist propelled — whether by mass migration or voluntary exile — into foreign lands. The intention is to thereby demonstrate the broader relevance of “geometry of fear” for sculpture internationally.

Something of a voluntary exile herself, Jane Eckett spent the past nine years in Ireland working for a fine art auction house. She holds bachelor degrees in science and arts from the University of Queensland and undertook honours in art history at the University of Sydney. In 2007 she completed a Masters by research (MLitt) at Trinity College Dublin and since then has tutored in the history of sculpture and Irish art at University College Dublin. She is now based at the University of Melbourne engaged in a PhD provisionally titled “Modernist Sculpture in Australia: Group of Four, Centre Five and the Europeans, 1945-75”.
 

DAVID ELLIOTT:
The Grindhouse Is Closed — Can There Be a Contemporary “Grindhouse” Aesthetic?

With the advent of the 1970s, the horror film moved away from the star system of both the Universal and Hammer eras, and entered dangerous, uncharted territory: no-name, often anonymous actors, cinema verite, naturalistic dialogue and soundtracks, and the shift from monsters and mad scientists to horror that came from within — cannibals, serial killers, and “body horror”. With horror being used as a platform for addressing social, political, and cultural issues, horror's insularity was suddenly eliminated, and the genre became a source of relevant and exciting social documents. These films were often visceral in their approach, teetering on the edge of a simulated “snuff” aesthetic, their power to shock and disturb pushed into overdrive, creating such nightmarish, unforgettable films as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Last House On The Left. Horror has, since then, been colonised by the Hollywood mainstream, and despite all attempts to recreate the power of the original 1970s masterpieces, the genre seems to be in a state of decay. Despite an obsession with using celebrity casts, pop music soundtracks, winking irony and self-awareness, and a return to apolitical irrelevance, Hollywood seems determined to recreate the Grindhouse, while completely misunderstanding the aesthetic, political, and cultural elements that made the early 1970s a pathfinding era in the development of the horror genre. I will be examining a host of films from the early 1970s to explain how their uniquely gruelling aesthetic is very much a part of their socio-political climate, how contemporary issues regarding censorship have affected depictions of violence in film, and to explore the unique qualities that imbued the films with the power to disturb. I will go on to contrast these elements with the modern recreation of the Grindhouse aesthetic — from Hostel and The Devil's Rejects to Tarantino's Grindhouse, and will detail the inability of modern filmmakers to capture a mode of filmmaking that was so imbued with the cultural and political moods of its historical moment.

David Elliott is a PhD candidate in the professional writing program at Latrobe University, Melbourne. Although his work is primarily in creative writing, he is in the process of writing a number of academic pieces on new media, including an exploration of user-generated narratives in free-form online gaming, and the rise of a new kind of semiotics in the youth culture of the electronic underground. He holds an MA in professional writing and has lectured and written on fair use, electronic collage and art terrorism.
 

IFDAL ELSAKET:
The “White Peril” in the Early Egyptian Cinema: Foreign Women and Masculine Anxiety in the Early 1930s

The alleged seductiveness of foreign women featured as a major theme in the early Egyptian cinema (1931–1934). The supposed ability of foreign women to lure, marry, and ruin Egyptian men formed part of a wider national anxiety concerning Egyptian masculinity. In this paper, I argue that cinematic representations of foreign women as seductive temptresses were part of an anti-colonial response to “western” stereotypes of brutish and uncivilised Egyptian men. During the 1920s and 1930s, Egyptians viewed the cinema as a tool through which they could resist and overturn “western” images of Egyptians and Muslims. To explore this idea, this paper will focus on the 1932 Egyptian film Awlad al-Dhawat. Awlad al-Dhawat operated as an “anti-Orientalist” film by evoking a gendered articulation of Egyptian anti-imperialist culture that positioned the Egyptian male as the victim of the seductive deceitfulness of the foreign woman. By examining the context of this gendered cross-cultural encounter, this paper calls for a reassessment of the gender structures of analysis that are dominant in postcolonialstudies that usually position the native woman as the victim of the violent white man or the white woman as the victim of the native male. To overturn traditional colonial gendering, the producer of the film positioned the foreign woman, instead of the native man, as the feared character. This paper will also shed light on the processes by which a gendered anti-colonialism that sought to respond to negative stereotypes of Egyptian men in the West, and a long history of representing the manipulative strength of foreign women, came together to encourage societal, and at times legal, regulations on who the Egyptian male should, and should not be in a relationship with.

Ifdal Elsaket is a PhD student in the departments of Arabic and Islamic Studies and History, University of Sydney, whose thesis examines Egyptian uses of the early cinema to respond to western stereotypes of Egyptians, Arabs and Muslims.
 

ARASH FALASIRI:
Politics of Fear: A Study of the Relationship Between Fear and Fantasy in Totalitarian Regimes

Fear, one of the most important characteristics of a totalitarian regime, is a phenomenon that plays a subtle role in both the spreading and maintaining a totalitarian state’s power. As Slavoj Zizek argues, today’s predominant mode of politics relies much on “the manipulation of a paranoid ochos or multitude: that is the frightening rallying of frightened people” (2008, p. 35). Although terror and suppression are mostly employed by totalitarian states, forcing the implementation of their ideologies on a broad scale is the crucial strategy of such regimes. Such states commonly use propaganda to instil fear in their peoples — fear of being found to oppose state power. While it is obvious that totalitarian states have a “vertical” relationship with their peoples, this paper suggests that fear is the only phenomenon within which the state and its peoples find a “horizontal” type of relationship. In other words, fear is a concept shared by both the state and the people. People fear the power of the state and, equally, the state fears the impact of oppositional minds. The paper (a) argues that the one factor that can effectively restore this “horizontal” relationship to a “vertical” one is the use of fantasy by the state, and (b) explores the ways in which such use of fantasy is manipulated to elicit the desired public response. The state employs the potentials of fantasy to fulfil the public need to feel safe and respected within the global span. To this end, Hannah Arendt’s notions of totalitarianism and transforming society into a mass society, the Frankfurt school’s discussion of domination of the public sphere, and Lacan and Zizek’s accounts of fantasy and fear will be used to develop the main argument of the paper. The case of Iranian nuclear power, the associated fantasy of re-establishing a “Great Persia”, and its common points with fascism will be discussed to substantiate the arguments proposed above.

Arash Falasiri is doing his Masters research at the University of Sydney in the Department of Philosophy. Having been a journalist for over ten years, Arash is keenly interested in current political and philosophical issues. He won the annual prize for the best journalist of the year 2002 in his home country Iran. While his main concerns are concepts of civil society and public sphere, he is also very interested in the politics of fear and fantasy and in theories suggested by Hannah Arendt, Jurgen Habermas, Slavoj Zizek and Jacques Lacan.
 

JESSICA LAKE:
“This isn’t Big Brother, it’s Little Sister and maybe more dangerous for that”: Patterns of Fear in Narratives of Surveillance and 'Sub-veillance'

Fear is integral to nearly all surveillance narratives. By “surveillance narratives” I mean narratives in which the practice of surveillance plays a central thematic and/or structural role. Etymologically, the word “surveillance” derives from the Latin “videre” meaning to see or “vigilare” meaning to watch and “sur” meaning above or over. In its most general form, surveillance means “oversight” or “supervision” — the watch kept over a person or thing. The word itself, therefore, designates a metaphorical power relation, a looking from above upon those below. Traditional surveillance narratives such as George Orwell’s 1984 commonly represent that power imbalance as between a government, organisation or corporation and the individual man — not surprising given the panoptic origins of our surveillance society in Bentham’s model prison. This particular surveillance dynamic has held the imagination of story-tellers for almost a hundred years, replicated in various forms by films such as Charlie Chaplain’s Modern Times (1936), both Michael Radford’s (1984) and Michael Andersen’s (1956) versions of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985), Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca (1997), Tony Scott’s Enemy of the State (1998) and Stephen Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002). Fear in these narratives is primarily located in the individual subject of surveillance as a result of the increased oppression of the state or authority and invasion of privacy and/or humanity. The watchers in these films are nearly always white men, reinforcing and consolidating traditional ownership of the gaze. However, recently, a new sub-genre of surveillance films has emerged which I have termed “sub-veillance” narratives. These “sub-veillance” narratives reverse the traditional dynamics of looking and by doing so, challenge and subvert our responses and understandings of the practice of surveillance. Using Andrea Arnold’s Red Road (2006) and Michael Haneke’s Hidden (2006) as examples, I will suggest that as technologies of vision become more widely accessible, a more unsettling sense of fear or unease is generated when one is watched from “below” rather than “above”.

Jessica Lake is a PhD student in the School of Culture and Communication (Screen Studies) at the University of Melbourne. Her research focuses on shifting representations of surveillance in narrative cinema. She is also admitted to practice as a lawyer and prior to returning to study practised for a number of years in the areas of media law, intellectual property and privacy.
 

LJ MAHER:
A Little Glass Booth: Auschwitz, Eichmann, Schneewittchen and the Performance of Fear

“In the gas chamber they had a, like a little glass booth, you know — it's very interesting that they had that glass booth later on for Eichmann because they had them in the gas chamber... it was like a protrusion that they could go in without actually coming into the gas chamber... they could watch the people inside...”

Bruno Bettelheim famously suggests that fairy tales help children work through both painful experi-ences and everyday psychic trouble. Donald Haase, among others, takes Bettelheim’s assertion and examines “the fairy tale’s potential as an emotional survival strategy” in and around Holocaust narrative. Haase asserts that the fairy tale’s potential as an emotional survival strategy is premised on its “anticipation of a better world” and its “future-oriented” nature — happily ever after is not the end of a story, it is a wish for the future. I look to the use of fairy tale motifs in the narration of fear as a means of combating the unarticulated nature of the différended survivor, drawing a parallel between the unspoken fear and the unspeaking vulnerability in Snow White, Briar Rose and The Glass Coffin.

LJ Maher graduated from a combined degree in Performing Arts and Law in 2006, and is currently in the final agonising throes of her Honours year in a Bachelor of Letters. Her thesis examines the use of the Abject and the Sublime in Vergangenheitsbewältingung literature. She has previously spoken on queering Harry Potter, the sexual pedagogies in vampire romance fiction and the intersection between property law, prostitution and slavery.
 

BEORNN McCARTHY:
In Fear of the Chiffonnier: Bram Stoker’s The Burial of Rats, Ragpickers and Recycling Terror

Observed as far back as the eighteenth century on the streets of London and Paris by urban journalists and political writers, the chiffonnier or ragpicker was a conspicuous figure of fascination as well as terror well into the twentieth century. In Bram Stoker’s horror story The Burial of the Rats, first published posthumously in 1914, the chiffonnier is a decided object of fear. Set in Paris in the 1850s, and narrated in the 1890s, The Burial of the Rats portrays ragpickers as a monstrous “octopus” of autonomous labourers who rule the dirtiest and beastliest zones of the city of Paris. Yet as environment and bricolage have become the new paradigms of unsustainable times, this fear of the chiffonnier is no longer so understandable. For the chiffonniers once collected rags to make paper and are still, en masse in countries like India, recycling the detritus and refuse of other classes and industries. As I explain in this paper, however, Stoker’s story embeds itself in a long and continuous modern history of observations and myths about lower class urban labourers to stigmatise the chiffonnier with social, economic and even racial otherness. Stoker draws on Victorian-era comparisons between London and Paris and further patches up his story with fears that were developed by previous representations of chiffonniers. As a fascinated attack on the ragpicker, The Burial of the Rats does more than simply allegorise bourgeois identity. I argue that Stoker’s story is a first-hand response to industrialisation in modernity. For nation states such as France and Britain, the ragpicker’s second-hand life represented an old and inconvenient problem: a parasitical multitude. The response to the multitude that Stoker foresees is the birth within industrialisation of a terrifying new paradigm, on the ragged edges of which we again encounter the ragpicker.

Beornn McCarthy is a PhD student and Masters Graduate at the University of Melbourne in the School of Culture and Communication. He has lectured and tutored undergraduates in many subjects in English Literature at the University of Melbourne and Deakin University. His PhD is on the life and writings of Isaac D’Israeli, “Curiosities of Romanticism: Isaac D’Israeli (1766–1848), Collecting, Literature and Anglo-Jewish Identity”. While writing his thesis on Romanticism, he remains a rag-picker at heart and is interested more generally in politics and contemporary theory and criticism, and continues to research theories of parasites, collection and literature, Judaism, and animal studies.
 

POLLY McGEE:
Parthenophobia and Other Popular Stories About Girls

Parthenophobia is a condition in pandemic proportions throughout Western culture. Defined as a morbid fear of girls, this paper uses the notion of Parthenophobia to discuss the pervasive abjection of the girl, exemplified through narratives generated by the 2008 Bill Henson exhibition ‘Untitled’ at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney’s Woollahra. The genesis of the furore over Henson’s work intersects with my investigation of the power of the girl as subject in process/on trial, and this paper will read and recast the girl body and her powers of horror. Even before the velvet ropes had been erected for the Henson opening, the exhibition had created international headlines. Dramatic footage of the photographs being stripped from the gallery walls and taken into police custody pending an investigation into the exhibition of restricted images relating to child pornography was on every new medium. Much of the media focused on the paucity of parenting regarding consent for the underage model to pose (known only as ‘N’ to protect her anonymity), the intent behind the photographer, and the inherent moral and ethical wrongs in displaying images of a prepubescent girl on the borderline of adolescence. Far more intriguing was the reaction to the simple representation of the girl, the ambiguous lines of her body unsettling the definitive position abjection seeks. In amongst the baying righteousness that surrounded the media, church and state narratives of the Henson exhibition, there was a monumental silence regarding the dis-ease that the girl as the central figure in the photographic images caused. Through a contested landscape of art, paedophilia, sex, death, abjection and biblical defilement, this paper seeks to reveal the true nature of fear behind the image of the girl and her imminent defilement of the clean and proper (symbolic) body.

Polly McGee is an academic, writer and artisan coffee roaster whose production-company partnership Mouth and Quiet develops scripted, documentary and reality products for film and television. McGee’s PhD research focuses on the development of identity through narrative for girls and girl culture, and her non-fiction writing covers women, girls and entrepreneurship, the intersections between popular culture, food, and identity. She regularly lectures in gender studies, film and popular culture, writes opinion pieces for the ABC’s “Unleashed” and has a children’s feature film and adult drama TV series in various stages of commission. When not globally roaming, she lives in Hobart.
 

KATE NASH:
Performing Autobiographical Video: Fear, Shame and Ethics

What is it like to perform oneself within the context of autobiographical video? Autobiographical video appears to offer a space in which the author can freely explore and express the self. Its use by marginalised peoples to enter political debate implies a liberating potential. But this is to view the autobiographical video as visual text, understanding it apart from the individual who creates it. Exploring autobiographical video as an act, an experience that carries multiple meanings, freedom must take its place alongside darker feelings. What does it feel like to create an autobiographical documentary? This paper takes up this question by presenting a study of Vanessa Gorman’s documentary Losing Layla. Empirical research in the form of narrative study merges with textual analysis in exploring this unique experience. Gorman’s narrative points to the importance of cultural context, notions of appropriate femininity and maternity in the experience of the autobiographical video-maker. Engaging in autobiography is to risk charges of narcissism, inviting criticism of one’s constructed self. Fear is integral to the experience with the filmmaker performing the self conscious of the imagined response of the future audience. The self constructed by the video auto-biographer does not reflect a stable inner identity but is a reflection of the multiple fluid identities emerging from relations with others. The autobiographical self is therefore a performance of self in which context constrains that which can be spoken and visualised. If notions of fear and shame accompany some acts of self-speaking are ethical questions raised? This study is part of a broader research project that seeks to understand documentary through empirical study. Going beyond the documentary text and taking stock of the experience and perspective of the documentary participant the meaning of the video documentary text is contested.

Kate Nash is an Associate Lecturer in journalism and media at the University of Tasmania. Her training and professional experience has been in documentary making and she has made a number of radio and television documentaries for the ABC. Kate’s PhD thesis, “Beyond the Frame: A study in Observational Documentary Ethics” (to be submitted in June 2009), looks at the documentary participant’s experience as a foundation for ethical reflection.
 

ROBERT NELSON

Robert Nelson is Associate Professor and Dean at Monash University and art critic for The Age. A practising artist, his research into visaul language is embedded in art history, comparative language studies and philology, spiritual history and studio production. He is the author of The Spirit of Secular Art: A History of the sacramental Roots of Contemporary Artistic Values.
 

SUSAN PYKE:
New Faiths and Old Ghosts: Do Ambivalent Ghosts Scare the Life into Feminist Productivity?

Using the hauntings in and around Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, this paper argues that unsettled ghostly representations can work productively with fear to escape dominant symbolic constraints. Brontë’s Cathy ghosts combine the materiality of primal repression with spiritual transcendence in a way that encourages active readings. Brontë’s Cathy ghosts are both “real” and “not real”, that is, they are part of the masculine Law that bounds psychological thought and they also admit the transcendental, such as the Thou contested and embraced in Brontë’s work. This productivity is demonstrated by textual revisions of Wuthering Heights which maintain and build on Brontë’s refusal to contain the ghost trope as “real” or “not real”. Anne Carson’s poem, The Glass Essay is a powerful example of the performative possibilities of such an engagement. As with Wuthering Heights, the unsettling open-ended representations of ghosts in The Glass Essay invite readers to acknowledge and work with fear. Like Brontë, Carson uses the ghost trope to move in and out of the containment of psychological and religious perspectives to create a “could be” visioning that refuses readerly resolution and encourages an acceptance of an unknown which can be as liberating as it is terrifying. Together with Carson’s protagonist, readers can transform faithless uncertainty to a productive fear that can be used as a tool to “prevail” against the repressive dominance of the masculine symbolic. This reflexive approach to fear, created by ambivalent ghosts which are not comfortably “real” or “not real”, exemplifies the possibility of “becoming” divine. This divine is marked by faithful multiplicities, as championed by feminist philosophers such as Luce Irigaray. In this way the fragmented divines emerging from the fears allowed for in Brontë’s text and Carson’s response suggest a creative praxis that moves texts beyond dominant normalising discourses.

After completing an MA in History (ethnography) under Greg Dening, Susan Pyke worked as a curator with the Museum of Victoria before setting up a consultancy business, which led to a strategic consulting role with Deloitte. She left this work to focus on parenting and creative writing and now works part-time with Sustainability Victoria, while studying for a PhD in Creative Writing under Marion May Campbell and Grace Moore. She has published a number of short stories and poems in journals including Overland, Island and Hecate and has also published in academic journals such as Victorian Institute Journal and Intermedia.
 

MARK STEVEN:
This Microphone Explodes: Rocking Against the End of History

At the onset of the twentieth century, William Butler Yeats wrote that “darkness drops again; but now I know / That twenty centuries of stony sleep / Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle”. The unmistakable fear expressed in these lines has as its catalyst an elusive force that has continued to evolve and mutate across the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. However, the rocking that instilled nightmare in Yeats’ Spiritus Mundi has since halted. While thinkers like Francis Fukuyama have praised this caesura as the “end of history” — the alleged victory of global capitalism and liberal democracy — dissidents such as Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek argue that Fukuyama’s “end” is a manifestation of capitalist nihilism, the disintegration of any cohesive sense of “world” into “a group of singular disconnected situations”. Aligning myself with Badiou and Zizek, this paper argues that capitalist nihilism is supported by a doctrine of fear which serves to displace any anxiety about the true nightmare: a “blood-dimmed tide” that has been loosed upon the world.

There are few rock bands more sensitive to this situation than Rage Against the Machine and Nine Inch Nails, whose politically charged performances are aimed at rallying insurgency against capitalist nihilism, the fear it perpetuates, and its nightmarish symptoms. While RATM and NIN direct explosive music against the arrest of Yeats’ cradle, are these bands not rocking against the end of history? Taking this question as a point of departure, my paper examines RATM’s infamous concert performed outside the US Democratic National Convention (2000) alongside NIN’s With Teeth (2005) and Year Zero (2007) tours in order to locate a place for musical performance within Badiou and Zizek’s dialectically shared corpus of contemporary critical theory.

Mark Steven is a PhD candidate in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney where he also teaches media and popular culture. He has delivered papers and has forthcoming publications dealing with philosophy, film, and literature. His thesis combines critical theory with ideas about media and modernity to rethink the concept of genocide.
 

JAY DANIEL THOMPSON:
Helen Garner Meets the Femme Fatale: Shades of Noir in The First Stone

There have been many critical responses to Helen Garner’s The First Stone (1995). A majority of these have focused on the author’s hostile attitude towards young women and the way she apparently trivialises the issue of sexual victimisation. This focus is understandable. Puzzlingly, though, few critics have acknowledged the shades of noir that run throughout Garner’s text. I argue that, while Stone is ostensibly based on “real-life” allegations of sexual harassment brought against a university college master, it borrows a key narrative of classic noir films and “hardboiled” detective novels. In this narrative, a world-weary investigator pursues a pair of femme fatales. These femme fatales embody a mix of fear and eroticism. They can destroy families and lure even the most powerful men to their personal and professional downfall. A major difference between Stone and classic noir texts is that in Garner’s book, the “investigator” is a woman — in fact, it is Garner herself. This reading of Stone, I argue, presents us with a number of fascinating questions that I will explore throughout the paper. These questions include, can Stone’s narrative be classified as “queer” or “lesbian” in any sense? Does Garner’s positioning as the “investigator” figure in her narrative subvert or complicate the gender hierarchy implicit in more traditional noir texts? Or does Stone simply invoke familiar (male) fears about female sexual power? I will engage with existing commentaries on Garner’s book, as well feminist analyses of the “noir” film and novel by theorists such as Judith A. Markowitz and Valerie Traub. My overall aim is to present a fresh and provocative perspective on Garner’s already heavily discussed text.

Jay Daniel Thompson is completing a PhD in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. His thesis focuses on a selection of texts (fiction and non-fiction) about sex that were published in Australia during the “culture wars” of the mid-1990s. He is also a freelance writer and reviewer.
 

JENA ZELENY:
Brecht’s Response to Hell on Earth

Was mich an Brecht interessiert is das Böse /
What interests me about Brecht is the evil (Heiner Muller, 1990).

This paper will look at how and why Bertolt Brecht used mimesis to develop his concept of evil, the sinister and the unholy as being “the primary force of seduction in the midst of politics”, in his early works, particularly Baal and Jungles (Astrid Oesmann, 2005). The figures of Baal and Shlink came to represent for Brecht a disposition that was outside the normative, and beyond moral determination: in the words of Walter Benjamin “a distanced observer” who provided the critical distance needed to withstand or survive not only the emotional impact and material effects of war and revolution but translation of the rationale for war delivered to the communities involved. Part one focuses on fear in both Baal and Jungles and in selections of poetry from the same period. Brecht was influenced in the project of subversion and transgression of dominant hegemony not only by the conditions of war and violence, but by responses from other artists and philosophers such as Benjamin and Spinoza. I am suggesting that this early Brecht presents a radical re-thinking of the concept of morals/ethics: a human ethics derived not from a divine command, but rather, an ethics linked to factors determined by necessary contingencies embedded in the cycles of all living things. This concept of ethics developed a relation with fear. Part two examines how Butler’s theory of performativity intersects with and assists in exploration of Brecht’s interest in the production of fear, of things/others perceived as fearful, the uses of fear and the development of a collaboration with fear.

Jena Zelezny is currently in her third year of a PhD in the School of Culture and Communication. Her thesis gives primary focus to agency in the early work of Bertolt Brecht as the concept of agency intersects with Judith Butler’s theory of performativity.