Wendy Keys

Queering rurality: reading The Miseducation of Cameron Post geographically

ABSTRACT This paper contributes to research on geographies of queer rural youth through an analysis of an award-winning young adult novel, The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Danforth (2012a. The Miseducation of Cameron Post. New York: Harper Collins). Three themes from the text are explored in this paper. The first is the well documented heterosexism of rural life. We note that the main protagonist, Cameron Post, experiences rural life on the margins, not only because of her queer identity but also because of her age and gender. A second theme in Danforth’s text is that rural spaces can be transgressively queer. In this respect the author subverts conflations of rurality and heterosexuality and urbanity and homosexuality as well as universalising notions of rurality as static, repressive and exclusive. The final theme emerging from a geographical reading of the text is that of placelessness. While highlighting the pervasiveness of this theme, we note that it elicits criticism from readers in relation to the book’s ending as it departs from the norms of familiar coming-out-narratives. In conclusion, we emphasise the efficacy of young adult literature as a source for furthering geographic knowledge about young people and sexuality.

Aestheticising rural poverty: representations of white working class youth in the documentary Rich Hill (2014)

ABSTRACT This paper examines representations of white rural working class youth in the award winning United States observational documentary Rich Hill (2014) through the lens of the aestheticisation of poverty. We begin the paper by establishing what we mean by the aestheticisation of poverty arguing it is a common trope in western culture which positions the poor as ‘other’ rendering them either invisible or as a failure. Following this, we situate our analysis within the literature on ethics in documentary film, examining debates which have inflected the release of other documentaries focused on the poor. In the next section we examine the film-makers’ positionality revealing that while they foreground their historical connection to the town, they mute their middle-class subjectivity. The close textual analysis of the film in the subsequent parts of the paper detail the ways in which the film aestheticises poverty, that is via its particular visual style, sound/image relationship and deliberate focus on youth. Despite the director’s intent the film does not challenge poverty but instead aestheticises it because it does not elaborate upon the complex factors which have given rise to the social problem that is rural poverty, and rendered it so intractable.

Representations of rural lesbian lives in young adult fiction

ABSTRACT This paper examines representations of rural lesbian lives in three young adult novels. The novels analysed are Beauty of the broken by Tawni Waters (2014), Julie Anne Peters (2005) Pretend you love me, and Forgive me if you’ve heard this one before by Karelia Stetz-Waters (2014). The first of the novels by Waters (2014. Beauty of the broken. New York, NY: Simon Pulse) presents a very negative portrait of rural life for queer youth. Its message is that the only positive queer life is one that is lived in the urban. In contrast, the texts by Peters (2005. Pretend you love me. New York, NY: Little Brown) and Stetz-Waters (2014. Forgive me if you’ve heard this one before. Portland, OR: Ooligan Press) present rural spaces as potentially both inclusive and exclusive for queer youth. These novels also demonstrate that urban spaces can be equally problematic for queer youth. While we do not discount that Waters (2014. Beauty of the broken. New York, NY: Simon Pulse) description of rural life may be the experience of some queer youth, we argue that the novels by Peters (2005. Pretend you love me. New York, NY: Little Brown) and Stetz-Waters (2014. Forgive me if you’ve heard this one before. Portland, OR: Ooligan Press) offer a more nuanced and complicated notion of place and its relationship to non-normative sexual subjectivities.

Review: The Small Screen: How Television Equips Us to Live in the Information AgeOttBrian L., The Small Screen: How Television Equips Us to Live in the Information Age, Blackwell, Malden, MA, 2007, ISBN 9 7814 0516 1558, 199 pp., US

No. 130 — February 2009 need further development in relation to gaming, and are only applied in this study in a very general way. Marolf’s study focuses mostly on uses of adgames by corporations for branding. He also introduces the practice of ‘en-game-ment’, where public organisations create games to promote public awareness, health initiatives and recruitment drives. The first generation of in-game advertising offered only the static placing of advertisements within the gaming environment. The emerging advergaming practices enable dynamic placement of ads. An insightful part of Marolf’s argument is his analysis of the way the game environment can respond to individual users, and dynamically change the game’s brandscape based on a user’s identity, behaviour and demographic information. Marolf ’s interview with Microsoft demonstrates the careful integration of commercial content (like advertisements, product placement and branded experiences) into the gaming environment. Intriguingly, Microsoft claims that it does not use the information collected in these dynamic, interactive environments for ‘commercial purposes’ (like advertising). Instead, it claims, information collected is used solely for improving the games. Dynamic and interactive gaming environments do enable corporations to collect information from users. These processes of interactivity and surveillance raise questions for further research. VDM Verlag Dr Muller specialises in the publication of research theses and other research work. The publisher makes an important contribution to the public domain by publishing work that would otherwise be ‘shelved’ due to the high cost of publication. With respect to Advergaming, publication by VDM puts a unique and specialised study into the public domain. While the book offers a concise introduction to the emerging field of advergaming, the text would have benefited from more rigorous editing and development of some of the key arguments. Both the use of advergaming by corporations and by public organisations warrants further research. As Marolf notes, advergaming is an emerging practice that will no doubt spill over into other forms of communication practice in the broader field of new media, branding and advertising. The communication practices described by Marolf in Advergaming are mirrored in other interactive Web 2.0 spaces. Advergaming offers a contribution to an emerging aspect in the scholarship of new media. While the scope and style of the book is limited, it offers some useful frameworks for thinking about the field of Advergaming in future research. — Nicholas Carah, Journalism and Communication, University of Queensland