Rob Cover

Audience inter/active Interactive media, narrative control and reconceiving audience history

This article examines the ways in which recent theorizations of interactivity work to reconceive the author-text-audience relationship. Suggesting that all media forms - historical and contemporary - can be reconceptualized in light of recent understandings of interactivity, it is argued that control over the text and its narrative as mythically ‘finished’ products is struggled over between an authorial desire for finality and an audience desire for control over the arrangement, (re)configuration and (re)distribution of the text. This struggle takes place across the sites of technological developments of textual control versus full interactivity, and in the realms of both media theory and media law.

Performing and undoing identity online: Social networking, identity theories and the incompatibility of online profiles and friendship regimes

This article aims to expand the critical frameworks by which online social networking can be contextualised and understood within the broader cultural practices of identity and selfhood. Utilising Judith Butler’s theories of performative identity, it is argued that the use of social networking sites are performative acts in and of themselves. Two facets of social networking are examined from theoretical and critical perspectives: (1) the use of social networking profiles (Info pages, taste selections, biographies) as a tool for performing, developing and stabilising identity as a narrative in line with cultural demands for coherence, intelligibility and recognition; (2) identity performances that occur through relationality among online friends through list maintenance and communication (wall posts, tagging, commentary), and how identity is reconfigured within a network morphology. Finally, the article aims to open discussion around the broad cultural practices and implications of online social networking by developing some theoretical approaches to understanding the incompatibilities between these two facets which compete and risk the ‘undoing’ of online identity coherence. Within the framework of the growing use of social networking sites as one area in which our selfhood and subjectivity are performed, this incompatibility and undoing has both risks and benefits for future the cultural production of identity.

Queer youth suicide, culture and identity : unliveable lives?

Contents: Preface Introduction: queer youth suicide, vulnerability and unliveable lives Queer suicide representations in popular media Histories and genealogies of suicide research and sexuality It gets better? Online representations of hope, vulnerability and resilience Reconstitutions: identity, subjectivity and the dominant discourses of sexuality Tensions: suicide, sexual identity and shame Community: homonormativity, exclusion and relative misery Conclusion: towards liveable lives Bibliography Filmography Index.

New media theory: electronic games, democracy and reconfiguring the author–audience relationship

New media forms open many possibilities not only for the development of “new media theory”, but also for re‐conceiving previous media relationships. Digital, non‐linear and interactive media forms such as electronic games allow increased possibilities for participation in the construction of narratives, although such media are also produced with various constraints over the extent of participation. This paper examines how new, emerging theories of the interactive media process can be understood in light of previous notions of media, with emphasis on re‐conceiving earlier media author–text–audience synergies along a continuum of interactivity. It is argued here that the rise of interactivity as a form of audience participation is a strongly held and culturally based desire to participate in the creation and transformation of the text that has been denied by previous technologies of media production and distribution; interactivity achieves a new stage in the democratisation of user participation with the electronic game.

Conditions of Living: Queer Youth Suicide, Homonormative Tolerance, and Relative Misery.

Despite the increasing social tolerance accorded nonheterosexual persons in many Western countries, queer youth suicide rates remain high. This opens the need to question not only how broad social conditions continue to make lives unlivable for many queer youth but whether queer community formations and representations that emerge within a tolerance framework provide supportive environments for fostering youth resilience. This article presents a theoretical approach to understanding the continuity of youth suicide by considering how queer community formations built on tolerance create new exclusions for some queer youth that can make a life unlivable in relation to peers. The article articulates the tolerance framework through a return to Dennis Altmans 40-year-old Homosexual Oppression and Liberation and the more recent “homonormativity” critique of queer politics. It examines how tolerance and homonormativity are implicated in exclusions and suicidality through the “relative misery” suicide thesis and the concept of frustrated aspiration.

Bodies, movements and desires: lesbian/gay subjectivity and the stereotype

Gay and lesbian discourse has a markedly complex relationship with the contemporary understanding of stereotypes as symbolic and connotative codes fixing an image to a set of prescribed behaviours. In its political and advocacy modes it frequently denounces the stereotyping of lesbians and gay men, arguing that stereotyping is a reduction of unique individuality and diversity into wrongful notions of group behaviour. According to Richard Dyer, a stereotype ‘is taken to express a general agreement about a social group, as if that agreement arose before, and independently of the stereotype’ (Dyer, 1993, p. 16). At the same time, however, lesbian/gay discourse articulates a need for group visibility, as expressed in lesbian/gay protest marches and the more celebratory Pride Parades in cities across Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand and other ‘Western’ regions. Although such visibility drives are often linked with a local political issue, they are necessarily reliant on the presentation of a visually unified group of people through recognizable stereotyping by fixing a visible bodily image to a set of ideas, attributes, behaviours or dispositions; a shared sense of identity corresponsive with the promotion of belonging. While costuming, performance—of the conscious, voluntary and theatrical kind—and gender-play are often the mode through which this visibility is communicated, such visible presentations can be said to signify lesbian/gay group imagery and prescribe behaviours on to the bodies of other lesbian and gay identifying individuals. At stake, here, is the issue of what I will call lesbian/gay self-stereotyping. By this I mean two things. Firstly, the lesbian/gay cultural production of a small range of fixed categories of visually recognizable lesbian and gay bodies—effeminate youthful males, the muscular ‘clone’, the groomed, toned male, and butch and femme lesbians, are just a few examples. All of these employ various plays on femininity and masculinity and many are, in some way, ‘positively’ oppositional to various mainstream stereotyping of lesbian/gay subjects such as the older yet circulating stereo-

Visual Heteromasculinities Online Beyond Binaries and Sexual Normativities in Camera Chat Forums

This article presents a critical account of heterosexual men’s online sex webcam performances in terms of the capacity for challenging or disrupting heteronormativity and opening the field for the representation of a greater range of heterosexualities. Using a narrative analysis of selected examples of heterosexual performances on visual sex sites, it is argued that a deeply felt attachment to heterosexual identity coexists in complex, critical, and potentially disruptive ways with a contemporary, online approach to diverse, individualized sexual practices. Investigating examples of male performers who articulate an avowed heterosexual identity but perform acts for a gay male spectatorship and engage in practices such as self-penetration that are discursively marked by nonheterosexuality, this article explores the potential for the productive disruption of normative views of masculine heterosexuality without the need to resort to a free-floating argument for sexual fluidity. It is argued that, while heteronormativity is disrupted in such sites, masculinity has the capacity to reincorporate nonheterosexual behaviors and acts.

Object(ive)s of desire: Romantic coupledom versus promiscuity, subjectivity and sexual identity

In light of recent debates around same-sex marriage, this article examines the way in which the cultural concept of the coupled relationship is culturally produced. By showing how coupledom is constituted in a dichotomy against casual sex in contemporary discourses of sexuality, it is argued that same-sex marriage claims uphold a narrow view of social-sexual relations. The article goes on to explore how this dichotomy is articulated in a range of texts including online social networking and dating sites before exploring the ways in which these two alternatives are utilized in the performance of gendered and sexual identities.

Undoing attitudes: subjectivity and ethical change in the Go Back to Where You Came From documentary

In the context of Australian debates about refugees and asylum seekers, this article examines the relationship between attitude, as a performative articulation of selfhood, and ethics of non-violence and welcome. Exploring how attitude change has been represented in the narrative of the Go Back To Where You Came From documentary, it is argued that attitude is a concept indelibly fixed within discourses of refugee arrivals in Australia and attitude change regularly posited as the process towards ethics. An example of attitude change in the documentary is discussed through Butlers ethics of non-violence and the ways in which recognition and the recognizability of the other operate to promote or stem an ethical responsiveness or welcome. This is followed by looking at how the Butlers account of frames as the social and political mechanisms that can prevent the recognition of the other as human or worthy of hospitality can be expanded to show how the production of an ethical relationship is aided by a disturbance in selfhood such that a subject can recognize his or her own vulnerability and hence the vulnerability of the other. How an expanded theory of ethics and hospitality plays out through attitude change is highlighted.

MEMORIAL ACCOUNTS: Queer Young Men, Identity and Contemporary Coming Out Narratives Online

Abstract Under the conditions of narrative construction, young queer mens coming out stories present memorial accounts of ‘always-having-been’ queer; a queer childhood. The ways in which coming out stories operate have developed significantly over the past decade, particularly resulting from the use of online, digital technologies where such narratives proliferate. This article presents some initial theorisation of the role of young mens coming out narrative in the constitution of performative queer identity with a focus on the construction of memory. The article presents an overview of the history of coming out and the ways in which this history has influenced the conventions and genre of the coming out narrative online. It addresses some of the ways in which such memorial accounts are performative acts themselves, seeking to stabilise queer masculine identity, and ends with a discussion as to whether or not online sites such as YouTube continue or disrupt such stabilising narratives.