Justine Lloyd

Listening, pathbuilding and continuations: A research agenda for the analysis of listening

This introductory paper posits ‘listening’ as a rubric for reframing contemporary media theory and practice. We propose moving beyond questions of voice, speaking and representation to focus on often-ignored questions of listening as the ‘other side’ of communication. This article sets out the ways in which it may be possible to address the neglected question of listening, not in isolation but rather, following Susan Bickfords notion of ‘pathbuilding’, through explorations of speaking and listening, voice and hearing, logos and interpretation/deconstruction. The article argues for more receptive forms of public discourse and media practice, while seeking to place the recent problematization of listening in a critical framework. Through a survey of theorizations of listening and explication of their research agenda, the authors consider listening in relation to conflict and inequality in diverse practices of citizenship. A central aim is to push discussion of listening practices beyond individual, personal, and private forms of discourse and to identify a spectrum of listening practices that complicate the speaking/listening binary.

Airport Technology, Travel, and Consumption

This essay speculates on the changing forms through which “traveler’s space” is materially constituted within the fabric of everyday life. The author first provides a history of traveler’s space as a non-place, via the writings of Le Corbusier, Boorstin, and Augé. Second, through an examination of the recent public work of celebrity architects such as Norman Foster, the author suggests that rather than displaying a tendency to an overarching “supermodernity” dictating flow and movement, contemporary technospaces work toward a new experience of waiting as pleasurable. This hybrid and remixed modernity invites a different kind of engagement between technology and travel that affects our ways of being in place. Finally, in a case study of the recent renovation of Sydney Airport, the author draws some distinctions between the scales of travel (local, regional, global), which affect such spatial performances.

Dream Stuff: The Postwar Home and the Australian Housewife, 1940–60

During the postwar period the modern family home assumed a special place in the Australian imaginary. Women achieved a greater public presence in this context, reflected in calls to Australian housewives to think about how their ideal home would look. The ‘new look’ required of the national home was addressed to its occupants, the Australian family, and was articulated through both government policy discourses and the popular media. Planning for and dreaming about modernity became key activities of homemaking. The requirements of women, in particular, to dream and plan for the future family produced the housewife as a modern figure responsible for the planning of a successful future for her family. The modern challenge to make home anew spoke to womens authority on day-to-day living, moving the efficient arrangement of the home and its public exposure firmly into their domain. However, this new, mass-mediated way of looking at domesticity created a contradiction in female domestic subjectivity. On the one hand, both state and market discourses suggested that women could sweep away the elements of traditional, particularly prewar, home designs that bound them to the home. On the other, popular magazines also placed a great deal of emphasis on the look of things and on looking itself, further inscribing womens identity within domestic space. We argue through a case study of the figure of the housewife in Australian home magazines that as a result of this contradiction during this period the identity of ‘housewife’ came to offer a new, reflexive relationship between female selfhood and home. Via the domestication of modernity in terms of gender, previous divisions between the public and private were destabilised. We suggest that the housewifes gaze both towards the home and towards her ‘domestic self’ intensified the problematic of feminity, putting it on the threshold of public and private space, offering a critical, enabling position for an ensuing feminist analysis.

The listening cure

This article explores how the recent problematization of listening can be understood as a form of therapy beyond politics, and outlines some strategies for counteracting this tendency. Departing from Claus Offes observation that increasingly the state addresses policy not to ‘constituted collective actors, but directly to the everyday life praxis of individuals … [giving] the impression that the state is incapable of steering, or that conditions in its problem environment are irremediable’, I ask whether listening in and of itself is being offered as a ‘remedy’, and for what? Susan Bickfords attention to listening as ‘communicative interaction’ and Roger Silverstones interest in the mediation of everyday life both raise the possibility of listening as a sort of symptom and panacea to social discord. I suggest that the historical formation of practices of listening around management point to a need for a new, culturally historical approach to understanding contemporary anxieties over representation and reception. The question of ‘listening’ rather than ‘speaking’ positions in a mediated society underpins these changing social dynamics, which challenge established frameworks of rights, responsibilities and social action. The earwitness makes no effort to look, but he hears all the better. He comes, halts, huddles unnoticed in a corner, peers into a book or display, hears whatever is to be heard, and moves away untouched and absent. One would think he was not there for he is such an expert at vanishing. He is already somewhere else, he is already listening again, he knows all the places where there is something to be heard, stows it nicely away, and forgets nothing. Elias Canetti, Earwitness, 43

'People just don't care': practices of text messaging in the presence of others

The demands of flexible labour and the technologization of social networks are currently being felt in profound shifts in the ways in which we spend time with others. This article analyses the everyday communicative practices of adults living in Sydney surrounding their use of text messaging in shared social spaces. Asking the research participants when, how and why they rely on text messaging exposes increasingly routine transgressions of boundaries between different social spheres. While participants were acutely aware of largely unspoken social norms and expectations attached to mobile phone use in the presence of others, they themselves strategically used text messages to create layers of intimacy within shared social spaces. We explore the implications of this tension by highlighting how rituals of social interaction are cared about by social actors but play into a wider sense of the abandonment of care for the presence of others.

The Three Faces of Eve: The Post-war Housewife, Melodrama, and Home 1

Introduction In this essay we wish to trouble a received history of popular cultural narratives about women’s lives in the 1940s and 1950s as shaped by dominant ideologies of the home as women’s “proper place.” By comparing two post-war Hollywood films that feature housewives as main characters, we show that these texts, rather than being concerned with promoting domesticity as women’s proper social role, actively explored a tension between discourses of modernity and femininity. We suggest that the housewife in such popular cultural forms of the period must work through the problem of the modern individual’s relationship to home; that is, the discourse of self-determination that requires the modern self to be completed in the public world of work. Gender complicates the housewife’s story: she must become a modern citizen; yet stil complete her feminine subjectivity “at home”. We suggest that popular films of the 1940s and 1950s therefore reveal changes in a historically formed emotional ambivalence about the figure of the domestic woman.

Home alone : selling new domestic spaces

About the book: This collection offers a global perspective on the changing character of cities and the increasing importance that consumer culture plays in defining their symbolic economies. Increasingly, forms of spectacle have come to shape how cities are imagined and to influence their character and the practices through which we know them - from advertising and the selling of real estate, to youth cultural consumption practices and forms of entrepreneurship, to the regeneration of urban areas under the guise of the heritage industry and the development of a WiFi landscape. Using examples of cities such as New York, Sydney, Atlantic City, Barcelona, Rio de Janeiro, Douala, Liverpool, San Juan, Berlin and Harbin this book illustrates how image and practice have become entangled in the performance of the symbolic economy. It also argues that it is not just how the urban present is being shaped in this way that is significant to the development of cities but also that a prominent feature of their development has been the spectacular imagining of the past as heritage and through regeneration. Yet the ghosts that this conjures up in practice offer us a possible form of political unsettlement and alternative ways of viewing cities that is only just beginning to be explored. Through this important collection by some of the leading analysts of consumption, cities and space Consuming the Entrepreneurial City offers a cutting edge analysis of the ways in which cities are developing and the implications this has for their future. It is essential reading for students of Urban Studies, Geography, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Heritage Studies and Anthropology.

Trouble comes to me: The mediated place of the urban citizen

This essay explores the role of media production within a framework of urban citizenship. Urban citizenship is defined in terms of strategies rather than location: not as a “bundle of rights, but as a struggle for expanding the public sphere.” The possibilities of using media narratives and images to negotiate a place in the city are explored through a set of short films produced by participants in community arts projects in Sydney. I trace how media forms are a key to attending to the “unreal” materialities and temporalities of everyday dimensions of citizenship within states of exclusion.

Gendered labour and media: histories and continuities

On the evening of 5 September 1975, 150 women occupied the offices of the Canberra Times, protesting about an editorial hostile to participants in a national conference on ‘Women and Politics’. This action, at the production site of the Australian capital’s only broadsheet newspaper, provides a context for this themed issue’s focus on gendered labour and media. We review recent perspectives on contemporary labour, and note that a persistent theme of this research is that recent changes in the media industries have seen the devaluation of professional work cultures as work in such industries has become more precarious. These changes are set against legacies of the devaluation of women’s work within the media, and negotiations of spaces for women to carve out media careers, which are explored by contributors to this issue. The article concludes by drawing out the need for a historically informed position on the gendering of media labour.

Domestic destinies: colonial spatialities, Australian film and feminist cultural memory work

Elsa and Charles Chauvels 1955 film Jedda was the first Australian feature film to cast Aboriginal actors in lead roles. The film was also unusual in the context of Australian film of the time for its rural domestic setting. Because the film explored the experiences of its lead character – Jedda – as an Aboriginal child adopted by a white woman, it is also one of the few films of the period to deal with colonial legacies in its attention to policies and practices of assimilation. The twin processes of racialisation and gendering of space in Jedda have been responded to by Tracey Moffatt in her surrealist short film Night Cries. This article uses the notion of intimate geographies to examine the production of relationships of power within domestic space that both films explore. The temporal and spatial practices deployed by the female figures within each film make visible a set of possible transformations of, as well as continuities within, enduring colonial power relations. Moffatts retelling and respatialising of the Jedda narrative, however, is ultimately understood as a specifically feminist practice of cultural memory work, suggesting that struggles over memory are also struggles over place.