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In a common narrative trajectory, the protagonists of children’s films transition from a state of anxiety at the beginning to an often fragile possibility of well-being at the close. Using script theory, Lee and Stephens propose an anxiety script which manifesting as anger, fear, despair, sadness, confusion, and feelings of helplessness and hurt is employed as a catalyst for character behavior because it is an overarching and familiar experience from which young audiences can infer a more specific emotion or state. At a film’s close, well-being is apt to be framed by a eudemonic script grounded in first-order values such as positive relations, desire, contentment, growth, confidence, self-realization, and relatedness. The trajectory is explored in four films, two each from Japan and South Korea.

Heritage is important for the social and cultural health of communities, whilst local stewardship of cultural heritage has the capacity to empower and recover cultural identity. This paper describes a recent project in Lakhnu – a small rural village in Uttar Pradesh, India – to restore a nineteenth century villa formerly used as the village school as an educational facility. In this discussion, we draw attention to the right of groups to manage their culture. The loss of cultural heritage is linked to a loss of identity. We argue that heritage projects have the capacity to empower communities to sustain their heritage and identity and provide useful places for social and material advancement through the concept of a shared ‘symbolic estate’. At Lakhnu, we plan to evoke grass-root conservation where local communities become the rightful stakeholders and decision-makers who are encouraged and facilitated in the realisation of their right to cultural heritage and to stimulate growth and build capacity for th...

Built in 1929, the Western Australian State War Memorial was not the grand structure that many wanted, and its construction was hindered by the resounding failure of two appeals for funds from an a...

The sinking of Australian cruiser HMAS Sydney II in a mutually destructive battle with the German HSK Kormoran off the Western Australian coast in November 1941 was a national tragedy amplified by the failure to find the wrecked cruiser until 2008. Uncertainty over the ship’s fate and its crew led to a frenzy of speculation. Parallel to this public interest was the will to commemorate the missing sailors somewhere along the coastline opposite the battle site. And so the HMAS Sydney II Memorial in Geraldton, a highly symbolic and emotive memory landscape, was built. This paper explores this memorial as a memorial landscape to ‘the missing’—a special category of military death—and examines how this landscape offers closure to the trauma of survivors and subsequent generations by providing a narrative landscape that attempts to heal distress caused by an absent body.

This paper proposes an alternative way of evaluating heritage values in the assessment of an abandoned school building in Lakhnu, a small rural Indian village in the state of Uttar Pradesh. Its aim is to re-think the appropriateness of professionally assessed methodologies, such as the Australian ICOMOS Burra Charter, and find others which are more inclusive and sensitive of community views and aspirations. Villagers claim this building as a key part to their cultural heritage, and view its desertion and disintegration with frustration. As part of a larger scheme to improve village infrastructure and to enable its empowerment, the aim is to assess the significance of this place to the villagers, facilitate its conservation and investigate possible outcomes for its use through community participation. In this context, the concept of narrative is offered as means to establish the community meaning of a place. Narratives are powerful ways in which people understand their environment and structure a view of t...

Background: The growing trend in the development of high fidelity simulation within undergraduate health care education has produced a range of frameworks and guidelines to structure learning opportunities offered through simulation. An attempt to articulate the process of learning through simulation based on clinical practice experience would appear to be a useful step in the development of simulation-practice links in the provision of further options to facilitate students' learning and continuing professional development. Content: The experience of team identity and integration for undergraduate health care students (n=16, adult nursing, physiotherapy, radiography) undertaking their first critical care practice placement is explored and used to underpin a reflective model to inform learning opportunities offered through high fidelity simulation. The analysis of human interaction offered by Erving Goffman through the use of dramaturgical metaphor is applied to frame the key emergent themes of the critical care experience—'observation', fitting in’, and ‘making a difference’—and shape the developing reflective model. Conclusions: Within the proposed model, the importance of ‘space for reflection’ and ‘meaningful dialogue’ within the context, participation, accessibility, and credibility (CPAC) schema are critical aspects that facilitate the integration and development of confidence in task/technical and interpersonal competencies supporting effective clinical outcome.

Social movements taken up in children's literature since the 1960s have foregrounded the ethical concerns of changing societies in a range of areas that includes environmental and ecological issues. While philosophers align ethical responsibility with a need to be impartial, fiction will routinely violate impartiality because of social and emotional attachments deemed desirable for personal and general well-being. Such attachments are rendered strongly in children's fiction because of the textual dominance of heavy character focalisation in both first person and third person narratives, and thence a basis for reader response analogous to an interpersonal relationship. Questions of ethics, attachment and representation come together in a recent strand, or sub-genre, in environmental literature in which issues in environmental ethics are explored by constructing a parallel between ecoconsciousness and interpersonal human relationships of various types according to the age of the participant characters. A common narrative strategy in such texts is to construct parallel narratives underpinned by a metonymic interrelationship, whereby threatened or damaged nature is matched by threatened or damaged lives. The thematic outcome blends an interweaving of nature and culture with a more pragmatic environmentalism than usually pertains in children's texts.

This paper considers those interpretations of action research that can be traced to Kurt Lewin at the Research Center for Group Dynamics at the University of Michigan, and the work in social ecology by Emery and Trist at the Tavistock Institute. It locates the logical basis of these interpretations in the philosophy of pragmatism, particularly as it relates to Peirce’s inferential logic and inquiry system. Drawing on this argument, and on the significant developments in approaches to systemic thinking over the past 40–50 years, a normative set of criteria is established for action research. The paper concludes that both positivist science (which relates to closed systems thinking) and action research (which relates to open systems thinking) are essential to any complete scientific approach.

This document is a supplement to “Physical Exchanges at the Air–Sea Interface: UK–SOLAS Field Measurements,” by Ian M. Brooks, Margaret J. Yelland, Robert C. Upstill-Goddard, Philip D. Nightingale, Steve Archer, Eric d’Asaro, Rachael Beale, Cory Beatty, Byron Blomquist, A. Anthony Bloom, Barbara J. Brooks, John Cluderay, David Coles, John Dacey, Michael DeGrandpre, Jo Dixon, William M. Drennan, Joseph Gabriele, Laura Goldson, Nick Hardman-Mountford, Martin K. Hill, Matt Horn, Ping-Chang Hsueh, Barry Huebert, Gerrit de Leeuw, Timothy G. Leighton, Malcolm Liddicoat, Justin J. N. Lingard, Craig McNeil, James B. McQuaid, Ben I. Moat, Gerald Moore, Craig Neill, Sarah J. Norris, Simon O’Doherty, Robin W. Pascal, John Prytherch, Mike Rebozo, Erik Sahlee, Matt Salter, Ute Schuster, Ingunn Skjelvan, Hans Slagter, Michael H. Smith, Paul D. Smith, Meric Srokosz, John A. Stephens, Peter K. Taylor, Maciej Telszewski, Roisin Walsh, Brian Ward, David K. Woolf, Dickon Young, and Henk Zemmelink (Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 90, 629–644) • ©2009 American Meteorological Society • Corresponding author: Ian M. Brooks, Institute for Climate and Atmospheric Science, School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, United Kingdom • E-mail: i.brooks@see.leeds.ac.uk • DOI:10.1175/2008BAMS2578.2

Like other countries of the British Empire, war commemoration and war memorial building pervaded Australia after the Great War. Anxious to remember war dead Australian cities and towns chose to erect masonry monuments or buildings to remember those of the district who had died or served. Alternatives existed in the form a tree-lined avenue with each tree representing a soldier or sometimes a nurse. This activity was reinforced by the established tradition of ceremonial tree planting on Arbor Day. More popular in Australia than other Empire countries, honour avenues to honour and represent fallen soldiers offered a fresh direction in the formation of the Australian landscape and an alternative commemorative form. Focusing on avenues of honour and groves in Western Australia established after both World Wars this paper examines their meaning in terms of their place in the landscape and their special significance to the communities that planted them.

Through the 1990s and into the new millennium, Australian children's literature responded to a conservative turn epitomised by the Howard government and to new world order imperatives of democracy, the market economy, globalisation, and the IT revolution. These responses are evidenced in the ways that children's fiction speaks to the problematics of representation and cultural identity and to possible outcomes of devastating historical and recent catastrophes. Consequently, Australian children's fiction in recent years has been marked by a dystopian turn. Through an examination of a selection of Australian children's fiction published between 1995 and 2003, this paper interrogates the ways in which hope and warning are reworked in narratives that address notions of memory and forgetting, place and belonging. We argue that these tales serve cautionary purposes, opening the way for social critique, and that they incorporate utopian traces of a transformed vision for a future Australia. The focus te...

War memorials are a significant feature of the Australian landscape. Thousands were erected after the First World War in towns and suburbs across the nation as a community focus for memory, grief, and pride of their soldiers lost in the war. The Victoria Park memorial in Perth, Western Australia, originally constructed in 1917, before the war ended, and replaced in 1957, was a small suburban memorial that was born in the enthusiasm of Empire and the growing concept of Anzac. The biography of this memorial reveals a chequered and contested history typical of many local memorials in Western Australia. Concentrating on the Victoria Park memorial this article seeks to explore the relationships between its physical aspects and setting, its meaning to the community and the linkages between objects and memory.

Ideology emerged as a concern of children’s literature criticism during the late 1970s, as discourses interrogating social assumptions about gender, race, and class began to impact upon the production and reception of children’s literature. The fi rst major study was Bob Dixon’s (1977) Catching Them Young, which set out to examine “the ideas, attitudes and opinions which authors convey to children through novels and stories” and “the ways in which this is done” (Vol. I., p. xiii). A decade later, Peter Hollindale (1988) argued that analysis needed to move beyond a focus on explicit negative content to analyze the unaddressed assumptions of texts and the propensity for ideology to inhere in language itself. Underpinning these approaches themselves was a Marxian assumption (largely mediated through the works of Louis Althusser [1971])that ideology was invariably negative in impact. That this is a limited perspective in relation to children’s literature was argued from a critical discourse studies approach by John Stephens (1992), who pointed out that there cannot be a narrative without an ideology: “Ideology is formulated in and by language, meanings within language are socially determined, and narratives are constructed out of language” (p. 8). Whether textual ideology is negative, positive, or more or less neutral will thus be determined by the ideological positioning of a text within culture. Our purpose in this chapter is to explore such positionings from the perspective of the critical discourse studies which have developed over the past two decades, as seen, for example, in Teun Van Dijk’s (2001) evolving project on discourse and ideology.

This paper considers the philosophical background of Stafford Beer's Viable Systems Diagnosis (VSD) as profoundly influenced by Charles Peirce. In a general sense, our work discusses the VSD theory base in the development of a model for actionable theory in organizations. This paper examines VSD theory in the Beer trilogy ‘Brain of the Firm,’ ‘The Heart of the Enterprise’ and ‘Diagnosing the System’ and we propose that a sound set of VSD action principles can be derived from this trilogy. We contend that the philosophical background underpinning these principles is important. Using Beer’s ‘Decision and Control,’ we consider that philosophical background and link Operational Research and the interdisciplinary learning within Cybernetics to modern general systems theory. We explore Beer’s viewpoint on the Peirce depiction of four main methods of fixing belief; tenacity, authority, a priori and finally the scientific to assist in that expansion. We consider how knowledge of Beer’s perspective on making sense of the world is important in the linkage of VSD theory to the managerial problem arena. We relate the Peirce methods to previously reported problem solving exercises involving the VSD ideology, which we will develop individually at a later date. This paper reflects our desire to express the interpretation of VSD theory in a language that the well-informed manager may readily translate into the third step of testing theory in practice.

A text’s primary meaning and its larger significance is produced through the dialogue between the text’s own discourse and a reader’s prior knowledge. The author of a series of stories, either as stories within an integrated collection (such as The Magnificent Nose and Other Marvels) or as books published serially (as in the Tashi books), has the opportunity to ask a little more of her readers as they proceed through her texts. Thus textual sophistication and reader sophistication may develop in tandem. To address young readers whose prior knowledge is limited, writers may initially confront these questions: “How do children understand text?” “How can writers make their text understood by children?” In his examination of how a text and its adult readers coproduce the meaning, Peter Hunt concludes that “children are outsiders to the adult secrets of text” (222). According to Hunt

The objectiveof this paper is to provide “practitioner researchers” with insights into the initial findings around the challenges of conducting “business action research in practice” in “commercial” settings on the basis of experiences of a PhD cohort at Monash University in the first 18 months of candidature. In performing the role of a concluding paper, it sets out a generic framework for action research that the cohort has come to embrace. In doing so, it draws on emergent themes spread across the six diverse topics that are the subject of action research interventions of the cohort members. The paper then identifies and analyses the common patterns that have emerged and offers observations and conclusions for those involved in practitioner research.

Series Editor's Foreword. Preface. 1. Making Boys Appear: The Masculinity of Children's Fiction, Perry Nodelman. 2. Picturing the Male: Representations of Masculinity in Picture Books, Kerry Mallan. 3. "A Page Just Waiting to be Written on": Masculinity Schemata and the Dynamics of Subjective Agency in Junior Fiction, John Stephens. 4. Redeeming Masculinity at the End of the Second Millennium: Narrative Reconfigurations of Masculinity in Children's Fiction, Beverley Pennell. 5. Reframing Masculinity: Female-to-Male Cross-dressing, Victoria Flanagan. 6. Come Lads and Ladettes: Gendering Bodies and Gendering Behaviors, Kimberley Reynolds. 7. Masculinity as Social Semiotic: Identity Politics and Gender in Disney Animated Films, Robyn McCallum. 8. Making the Invisible Visible: Stereotypes of Masculinity in Canonized High School Literature, Ingrid Johnston and Jyoti Mangat. 9. Challenging the Phallic Fantasy in Young Adult Fiction, Kerry Mallan. 10. Queering Hereotopic Spaces: Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy and Peter Wells' Boy Overboard, Beverley Pennell and John Stephens. 11. Trigger Pals: A Case History, Roderick McGillis. 12. Masks and Masculinity in James Barrie's Peter Pan, Monique Chassagnol. 13. Representing Masculinities in Norwegian and Australian Young Adult Fiction: A Comparative Study, Rolf Romoren and John Stephens. Bibliography. Index.

Stephens John. Writing By Children, Writing For Children: Schema Theory, Narrative Discourse and Ideology. In: Revue belge de philologie et d'histoire, tome 73, fasc. 3, 1995. Langues et littératures modernes - Moderne taal-en letterkunde. pp. 853-863.

Series Editor's Foreword 1. Introduction: The Politics of Identity: a Transcultural Perspective on Subjectivity in Writing for Children John Stephens 2. Metamorphosis: The Emergence of Glocal Subjectivities in the Blend of Global, Local, East and West Anna Katrina Gutierrez 3. The Muslima within American Children's Literature: Female Identity and Subjectivity in Novels about Pakistani-Muslim Characters Seemi Aziz 4. Cooperation and Negotiation-Formation of Subjectivity in Japanese and Australian Picture Books Miyuki Hisaoka 5. Subjectivity and Culture Consciousness in Chinese Children's Literature Lifang Li 6. "How Can I Be the Protagonist of My Own Life?": Intimations of Hope for Teen Subjectivities in Korean Fiction and Film Sung-Ae Lee 7. Contingent Subjectivity and Masculinity in Japanese Film for Young People Christie Barber 8. Strong Is Beautiful: A Thai-Thai Happiness Salinee Antarasena 9. Subjectivity and Ethnicity in Vietnamese Folktales with Metamorphosed Heroes Tran Quynh Ngoc Bui 10. All is Relative, Nothing is Reliable: Inuyasha and Japanese Subjectivities Mio Bryce 11. Strategic empowerment: a study of subjectivity in contemporary Indian English children's fiction Suchismita Banerjee 12. Subjectivity without Identity: Huang Chunming's Fiction in Postcolonial Vein Suh Shan Chen and Ming Cherng Duh 13. Scrivener's Progeny: Writing the Subject Robyn McCallum

We face an uncertain future and calls for change tug at our consciousness. As the preceding chapters have argued, change is occurring at an unprecedented rate and on a global scale. Many of the texts we have discussed not only reflect current societal, environmental, and political changes, but extrapolate the impact of change to an unknown and unimaginable future. While change is an inevitable constituent of civilisation as we have known it, in the past few decades the world has been transforming at a bewildering pace: we have witnessed the demise of the bipolar arrangement of global politics of the Cold War era; the emergence of a global marketplace; mass migration, displacement, and relocation; the dissolution of nation states; new forms of family and community; an information explosion; rapid technological advancement; and increased global warming. These changes engender insecurities and fears, as well as offering new opportunities and ambiguities. In particular, the rapidity and intensity of new technologies and globalisation present enormous challenges in terms of posthumanism, ecological sustainability, and the utopian goal of a stable and just world order.

The changing global politics we pointed to in Chapter 1 call for a thorough examination of the rhetoric of utopian imaginings and speculations in children’s texts, and of the ways in which these texts participate in what Ruth Levitas has termed ‘the education of desire’ (1990, pp. 7–8), especially in so far as they mediate ways of regarding the world and offer shape to children’s anxieties and aspirations. In this chapter, therefore, we will consider the variety of themes and narrative forms in which the concept of ‘new world orders’ and ‘transformative utopianism’ are brought into conjuncture. Representations of utopian societies are virtually non-existent in children’s literature, where such representations swiftly disclose themselves as critical utopias (rejecting utopia as blueprint while preserving it as dream — see Moylan, 1986, p. 10). Gloria Whelan’s Fruitlands (2002) or William Nicholson’s The Wind Singer (2000) are notable examples of narratives in which communities ordered and orchestrated ostensibly for the good of all members are revealed, through the perceptions of young enquiring minds, to be repressive patriarchies organised to serve the self-interests of those in control.

Contemporary children’s texts in English are produced both in former colonies such as the United States, Canada, South Africa, and Australia, and also in nations which were formerly colonising powers, such as Britain (see Bradford, 2001, 2007). Moreover, modern societies (in particular the United States) have since the Second World War engaged in neocolonial processes and politics that have effected new forms of conquest, seeking to produce a world order based on international capital and Western conceptions of democratic government. Formulations of nationhood and cross-cultural relations in many children’s texts are thus shaped by colonial histories and by a plethora of contemporary debates centring on colonial, postcolonial, and neocolonial politics, including the extent to which citizens of postcolonial nations should take responsibility for the consequences of past acts of invasion and violence; the ethics of the ‘war on terrorism’, especially in relation to its impact on the citizens of nations such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran; and the projected ‘clash of civilisations’ which, according to Huntington, will inevitably take the form of a contest between ‘the West and the rest’ (Huntington, 1996, p. 33).

One of the more extreme polarities of utopian and dystopian representation appears in the relationship between nature and culture in depictions and interpretations of ‘natural’ environments. This is not a concern which in itself emerges as a consequence of a post-Cold War ‘new world order’, but the range of discourses falling under the broad titles of ecopoiesis and ecocriticism emerged slowly and sporadically in the last quarter of the twentieth century from even broader discourses about ‘the (natural world) environment’ or simply ‘nature writing’. There were, however, some significant confluences. As an analytical discourse, ecocriticism became identified as a distinctive — albeit loosely defined — field in the first half of the 1990s. The collapse of the East-West binary also coincided with a growing acceptance across the world that global warming was a fact, not a theory. Hence, the coincidence of an identifiable critical discourse emerging at the same time as major changes in global political structures resulted in a palpable shift of emphasis, and for almost a decade until the advent of the ‘war on terror’ environmental issues, especially global warming, were widely perceived as the greatest threat to the continued survival of human beings. Environmental issues — habitat protection (and celebration of wilderness), ecosystem conservation, pollution prevention, resource depletion, and advocacy of harmonic balance between human subjects and natural environments (as opposed to an anthropocentric hierarchy of humans and nature) — became major social concerns.

The subject of ‘families’ has long been a dominant topic of children’s literature and films. While literary and filmic representations of families are impossible to catalogue, they invariably align with other contemporary social and political discourses which position the institution of ‘the family’ as both a problematic and an ideal social construction: problematic in that ‘the family’ is not a fixed, known entity, but a formation that is always in the process of construction; and ideal in that families carry the burden of the utopian promises of a better future promulgated by governments, nations, and religious idealists. Thus, family is often metonymic of the State and other forms of governmentality in that it stands for the collective desires, dreams, and political visions of a new social order of the future.

In Julie Bertagna’s Exodus (2002), Noospace is superior to the old cyberspace. In Noospace young people literally jump into a new cyber world and race at frightening speed through the gleaming maze that traverses the New World, with its endless pattern of connections: ‘A living world of info and data within each pattern. All of it endlessly changing and mutating and repatterning. All dying and recreating every microsecond’ (Bertagna, 2002, p. 245). Welcome to global utopia: the ultimate adventure!

The phrase ‘a new world order’ has been used by politicians from the early years of the twentieth century to describe the new political dawning, the end of the old warring world, and a new beginning. Woodrow Wilson is credited with being the first US president to proclaim the optimism of a ‘new world order’ at the end of the First World War, ‘the war to end all wars’. Again at the end of the Cold War, other leaders (Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, President Mikhail Gorbachev, and President George H. W. Bush) spoke of a new world order, and outlined their various visions for a world shaped by tolerance, human rights, superpower cooperation, north-south alliance, and an end of military conflicts. By the time of the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, ‘new world order’ rhetoric had been replaced by other concepts: ‘globalisation’, ‘end of history’, ‘clash of civilisations’, and ‘the war on terrorism’.

The Common Learning Programme in the North East of England (CLPNE) sought to introduce interprofessional education into the practice setting for pre-registration health and social care students. Students, clinical educators/mentors, and facilitators met within groups over a period of 3 - 6 weeks to explore interprofessional working and learning together. This paper evaluates the use of a game, the Football Stadium, to stimulate participants' exploration of practice-based interprofessional working and learning at CLPNE induction sessions. Data consisting of verbal and written feedback from students and clinical educators/mentors, and field notes from facilitators covering 22 CLPNE pilot sites (February 2003 - July 2005) was supplemented by researcher observation at 12 sites. Two themes emerged from the data: the use of the Football Stadium as an "ice-breaker" at team induction and, the use of the Football Stadium as a vehicle to facilitate reflective learning. Key issues included personal identity and role within a novice--expert continuum, creating and developing the team environment and, enhancing and developing learning communities. Although recognized as requiring careful, sensitive facilitation, the Football Stadium is a simple means to present learning opportunities for interprofessional education within a non-threatening learning environment that facilitates active participation.

In The Threshold of the Visible World, Kaja Silverman advances a subtle, ethical, post-Lacanian account of what constitutes “the active gift of love” and how this might be expressed on the screen. She argues for an orientation of subject to love object which is not merely an alternative to romantic passion, but an account of how identification of the loving subject and love object “might function in a way that results in neither the triumph of self-sameness, nor craven submission to an exteriorised but essentialized ideal”. In a move particularly relevant to our focus in this paper, she goes on to suggest that a gift of love so constituted entails an escape from conformity with culturally dictated ideals and thence a capacity “to put ourselves in a positive identificatory relation to bodies which we have been taught to abhor and repudiate” (79). Two lesbian/gay teen films of the late 1990s – Lukas Moodysson’s Fucking Åmål (1998; also known as Show Me Love) and Simon Shore’s Get Real (1999) – offer an illuminating contrast in the ways they deal with the possibility of the gift of love in the conflictual contexts both of teenage gay and lesbian love and sexuality, and of small-town spaces. Space solicits desire, but the sexual frisson that is evoked through encounters in various spaces in film depicted as offering excitement, risk, and bodily pleasures seems limited in three ways. First, the progression from desire to love is severely circumscribed by cultural presuppositions about the physical and social attributes of appropriate love objects. This is particularly evident in the Hollywood teen film, with its recurrent male and female Cinderella roles. Second, the desire represented is predominantly heterosexual, so the appropriate love object is further specified by the assumption of heteronormativity. Finally, there is a persistent attribution of space to woman and time to man – as early as the late eighteenth century William Blake had written, “Space is a woman” (in Bal 169) – and although this has been questioned by feminist thinkers (see Irigaray 1987) it still pervades filmic imagery. As Sue Best notes, the bounded spaces that people inhabit – “the nation, regions, cities and the home” – often rely on feminine metaphors to describe their attributes, contours, architecture; in the case of the romantic ‘home’, its enclosures suggest a warm, uterine space and maternal care. In a related sense, the open spaces of the countryside, the city streets and solitary travel have connoted a masculine space and prerogative (182-3). Traditionally, man moves through these spaces with a sense of temporal purpose, while woman bides her time in bounded domestic space. In Fucking Åmål, the film’s preoccupation with enclosed spaces, and especially the domestic spaces of home and school, on one hand generates an intense mood of claustrophobia while, on the other, communicates the terrifying aloneness of the young person abjected by the “in”-crowd. A measure of the inanity of the teenage boys of this small Swedish community is the unexamined misogyny of their spatial thinking, as when, for example, Jessica’s boyfriend Markus asserts that boys are interested in and understand technology, like cell phones, and that girls are instead good at things like "make-up and looking good". Get Real expresses the contrast more as that of outside and inside: the male domain of the sports field set against the interior space of the room where girls and boys like Steven (“I don’t smoke or play football and have an IQ over 25”) produce the school magazine. While these binaristic notions of gender and space serve as useful means for considering the restrictive nature of masculine and feminine constructions which still exist in various contemporary societies, they are also limited and limiting when it comes to thinking beyond a heterosexual framework. The imbrication of space and woman could account for the ongoing censure, disruption, and violation of feminised movement in so-called masculinised spaces. The notion of transgressing across spaces is the underlying theme of both Get Real and Fucking Åmål. Both films, with their “coming out” narratives, move away from conventional cinematic representations of teen love. Moreover, they provide a cinematic space in which the female or male body is a source of same-sex pleasure and desire, and offer viewers a space not defined by the other gender or by a narrative progress towards heterosexual romance and fulfilment. Consequently, the characters’ sensual/sexual encounters privilege bodily pleasure, response, and the ability to go beyond “the blind spot” of patriarchal sexuality (Irigaray 1985). Where they differ is that Fucking Åmål depicts Elin (the “love object”) progressing so far in her love for Agnes that her triumphant coming out is simultaneously an affirmation of a body universally abhorred and repudiated within the dominant youth community. There is no suggestion, for example, that Agnes will need to abandon her loose, oversized clothes and her trousers in favour of Elin’s short skirts and low-cut tops (although there is a hint that Elin may find Agnes’s intellectual interests more engrossing than the belated and etiolated versions of popular culture she has up until now inhabited). In contrast to Fucking Åmål, Get Real depicts the ultimate failure of John Dixon (the love object) to acknowledge love for Steven Carter, abhorred and repudiated by male peers for his suspected (and actual) homosexuality. Space is a shifting signifier which points to, but does not anchor, meaning across social, cultural, and territorial dimensions. In a Foucauldian sense, space is often linked to concepts of power. Furthermore, space, particularly queer space, becomes both a visual and metaphorical entity which needs to be interrogated in terms of its relationship to, and representation through, the eye of the beholder. In Get Real and Fucking Åmål “looking” becomes a complex play between characters and viewers. The specular logic that operates within the conventional notions of the gaze, with its underlying structure of a dominant subject and submissive object, is thus both interrogated and undercut (Mulvey). In Get Real a hole in a public toilet wall provides a spatial site for spying on illicit gay sexual encounters as well as a means for checking out a potential sexual partner. Such voyeurism is perverse as it disrupts the visual pleasure which has become intimately tied to patriarchal ideology with its structures of looking (male) and being looked at (female). This is one instance (and there are others in both films) when looking occupies a queer space, demonstrating complicity with voyeurism, desire, and visual pleasure, and disrupting the association of the gaze with rigid gender roles. The act of looking that the characters undertake also helps to make the viewer aware of the particular quality of their own gaze. The films contrive to position the viewer in ways that focus attention on the specific nature of his/her gaze as we become witness/voyeur to the characters’ spatial trajectories across private and public spaces - bedroom, toilet, home, school. Early in Fucking Åmål the gaze is invited and dismantled when Elin goes half undressed to try on clothes in front of the mirror in the apartment block’s lift, only to find that her sister Jessica has forgotten to bring the clothes. By overtly and comically replacing the narcissistic gaze with the gaze of the camera (and hence audience) the film problematizes looking, and begins to establish the situation whereby to look at Elin is to share the looking with Agnes, effectively queering the look. Further deconstructions of the look, or gaze, occur in the contrasting femme/butch representations of Elin and Agnes. The erotic pleasure of looking (at Elin) provides a counterpoint of gazes and highlights the vicissitudes of desire. While Elin’s sexy body and conventional beauty conform to an image of female desirability and make her the object of male fantasy, she is also the love object of Agnes. However, Elin’s feisty, restless character refuses any image of passive femininity. Rather, she embodies an active, desiring female subjectivity. Thus, the space of both female and male spectatorship is open to erotic imaginings. By contrast, the film undoes the tradition of fetishisation associated with the male gaze through the character of Agnes: she wears no makeup, hides her body in oversized clothing, and her hair is unadorned and simply styled. Thus, the camera’s attention to Agnes’s silent watching of Elin undermines the male gaze, creating a female gaze and a space of female desire. A comparable effect is achieved in Get Real when Steven uses his membership of the school magazine committee to suggest that a queer community exists within the school. First, and more subtly, the photographs he takes of John Dixon as school sporting hero queer the act of looking: Steven’s father, a professional photographer, sees them as examples of photographic art; John’s father views them as a celebration of a finely tuned athletic body; girls look at them heterosexually; but from Steven’s perspective they are gay pin-ups. The ground of a love relationship, as Silverman argues, is to posit the other rather than the self as the cause of desire, and hence to perceive perfection in the features of another and to celebrate that perceived perfection. This is the work performed by Steven’s photographs of John, and the irony inherent in the fact that the significance of the photographs depends on the interpretation of the beholder exemplifies how irony operates in these films to change how people interpret the “cultural screen”, the mental picture of society which they have naturalised. In Fucking Åmål, a class photograph of Elin in a school magazine also serves to queer the act of looking as it represents the love object of both Johan and Agnes. Whereas Johan cuts out Elin’s image, effectively excising her from the others in the photograph, and stores it in his wallet, Agnes is content to contemplate the image in the privacy of her bedroom, leaving it intact. Elin’s image has a strong erotic and visual impact on both Johan and Agnes, connoting “a to-be-looked-at-ness”, and the actions by Johan and Agnes to look and to possess can be understood in psychoanalytic terms as their attempt to turn the represented image into a fetish object (Mulvey). In a related way to Steven’s photograph of John Dixon as a gay pin-up, Agnes is able to reinvest erotically in the body of another woman. Steven’s second intervention by means of the magazine is to write the “Get Real” article about youth homosexuality. Once this is banned by the school Principal, it functions as a space of absence which defines and publicises the lack at the heart of the community. Further, in so far as it is lack which makes desire possible, Steven’s manifesto on a more individual level legitimises that lack for homosexual subjects. Get Real quite explicitly seeks to overturn the heterosexist stereotype of gays as lonely and unhappy figures, and to offer a different perspective on gay subjectivity and sexuality. Fucking Åmål performs the same work for the subjectivity and sexuality of young lesbians, as Agnes works through the trauma of her initial rejection by Elin and her “outing” at home, and Elin works through the identity crisis prompted by her emerging desire for Agnes. For each, the journey from abjection to joy ends triumphantly as, with no apparent threat of retribution, they redefine the significance of key spaces, of school and home. Both films use space to articulate the characters’ joys and anguish as they struggle with the conflicting effects of love and desire for another, the taunts they suffer from others because of their sexuality, and the eventual amelioration of the restrictions of their spatial location. While the gaze offers a metaphorical space for looking in Get Real and Fucking Åmål, space is also defined in regional and sexual terms. Elin and Agnes are space-bound characters, living within the claustrophobic confines of small town Åmål (Sweden). The original title of the film (Fucking Åmål), rather than the more bland, international release title (Show Me Love), captures teenage boredom with the stifling confines of their environment. Elin’s howls of exasperation give voice to her feelings of entrapment: “Why do we have to live in fucking Åmål? When something’s ‘in’ in the rest of the world, it’s already ‘out’ by the time it gets here.” When Elin and Agnes attempt an escape by hitching a ride out of town, their make-out session in the backseat of their lift’s car is accompanied by Foreigner’s “I want to know what love is”; the interplay of song lyrics, the young lovers’ sexual play, and their eventual eviction from the car offering an ironic performance that rehearses the double meaning of the film’s title and the story’s vexed themes of subjection and subjectivity. The visual style of Fucking Åmål also adds to the pervading sense of containment that the young protagonists experience. Interior domestic scenes dominate and appear spatially constrained. Often a low-key colour scheme serves as an iconic sign indicating the metaphorical nature of the drabness of Åmål. Agnes, as a relative newcomer to Åmål, occupies the spatial fringe both in terms of her strangeness to the place and her perceived queerness. She is the subject of ridicule, innuendo, and ostracism by her peers. Agnes’s marginalisation and abjection are metaphorically expressed through camera framing and tracking – close-ups capture her feelings of rejection and aloneness, and her movements in public spaces, such as the school canteen and corridors, are often confined to the perimeters or the background. By contrast, Elin appears to be in the spatial centre as she is a popular and sexually desirable young woman. It is when she falls in love with Agnes that she too finds herself dislocated, both within her self and within her home town. The stifling confines of Åmål offer limited recreational spaces for its youth, with the urban shopping centre and park are places for congregation and social contact. Ironically, communal spaces, such as the school and the park, effect a spatial intimacy through proximity; yet, the heterosexual imperative that operates in these public and populated spaces compels Elin and Agnes to effect a spatial distance with its necessary emotional and physical separation. When Elin and Agnes finally ‘come out’, it is part of a broader teen rebellion against continuing ennui and oppressive strictures that limit their lives. Steven (Get Real) lives a privileged middle class life in Basingstoke (Hampshire, UK) although this is unsettled by a pervasive sense of homophobic surveillance, locally and immediately embodied in the school’s masculinist bullies, but networked more widely through fathers, school principals, and the police. As Foucault argued, surveillance has a disciplinary function because individuals are made conscious that they are being watched and judged from a normalising perspective. This being so, even open spaces in Get Real have a claustrophobic effect. The park where Steven goes in quest of sexual contact thus signifies ambiguously: messages are passed from within the smallest space (a cubicle within the toilet) but once outside an individual’s presence can be registered by any neighbour, and the concealed spaces of the woodland are subjected to police raids. The film neatly ties this physical surveillance to mental surveillance when Steven’s father confronts him about being seen in the park when he was supposed to have been working on his essay project about youth in the contemporary world. For Steven, the project is a sham because he is only enabled to write from within the normalised perspective which excludes himself. Communication at the highest level available to him – a prize-winning essay in a public competition – thus denies him any subjective agency. The film’s ironic chain thus entails first the winning of the prize (but only because his father secretly submitted Steven’s discarded essay) and then Steven’s subsequent use of the award ceremony to present his other, suppressed essay and to declare his sexual orientation. In both films, gay and lesbian sexualities are constructed as paradoxical spaces. On the one hand, gay and lesbian desires and identities are distanced from the heterosexual paradigm, yet firmly embedded within it and (therefore subject to) homophobic discourses. Difference is not tolerated. In Fucking Åmål, characters are marginalised because of physical and sexual difference; in Get Real, difference is defined in terms of class, sexuality, and hegemonic masculinity. Both films offer positive outcomes which affirm a resignification of the “cultural screen”. By depicting the dystopic effect of heteronormative society on the principal gay and lesbian characters, each film functions to highlight issues of access to and place within the spatial public sphere. From Fucking Åmål, indeed, we might infer that such strategies as the ironic transformation of the gaze have the potential to produce utopian visions. Despite the strategy of allowing Steven one further transformation of public space, when he seizes a public forum to deliver his coming-out speech, Get Real offers a less utopian vision, but still a firm sense that social space has undergone significant disruption. While Elin comes to accept and realise the value of Agnes’s original “gift of love” to her, John Dixon is unable to move beyond the restrictive confines of heteronormative space and therefore rejects Steven’s public and personal gift of love. Nevertheless, in both films, it is through the agential actions of Elin, Agnes, and Steven in publicly declaring their love for the other that serves as an active signifier, openly challenging the sexualised space of their school and community: a space that passively accepts the kind of orthodoxy that naturalises heterosexualised ways of looking and loving, and abhors and repudiates homosexual/lesbian desire. In this sense, there is an opening up of a queer space of desire which exerts its own form of resistance and defiance to patriarchal discourse. Works Cited Bal, Mieke. Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Best, Sue. “Sexualising space”. Eds. Elizabeth. Grosz & Elspeth Probyn Sexy Bodies: The strange Carnalities of Feminism. London & New York: Routledge, 1995. 181-194. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish : The Birth of the Prison. London: A. Lane (Penguin Books), 1977. Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. G.C. Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985. Irigaray, Luce. “Sexual difference”. Ed. Toril Moi, French Feminist Thought: A Reader. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987. 118-130. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) reprinted in Visual and Other Pleasures. London: Macmillan, 1989. 29-37. Silverman, Kaja. The Threshold of the Visible World. New York: Routledge, 1996. Filmography Fucking Åmål (Show Me Love). Dir./writer Lukas Moodysson. WN Danubius/ITA Slovakia, 1998. Get Real. Dir. Simon Shore. Paramount, 1999. Links linenoise.co.uk (Accessed 31/10/02) cinephiles.net (Accessed 31/10/02) brightlightsfilm.com (Accessed 31/10.02) hollywood.com (Accessed 31/10/02) movie-reviews.colossus.net (Accessed 31/10/02) culturevulture.net (Accessed 31/10/02) english.lsu.edu (Accessed 3/11/02) Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Mallan, Kerry and Stephens, John. "Love’s Coming (Out)" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.6 (2002). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/lovescomingout.php>. APA Style Mallan, K. & Stephens, J., (2002, Nov 20). Love’s Coming (Out). M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 5,(6). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/lovescomingout.html

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Reading literature is a quest for sense, involving us in a need to grasp both how meaning is produced by the words on the page and how history, culture and ideology have influenced the choice of those words. Literary English changes from period to period as it reflects variations in the society and culture in which it is produced - variations in the ways writers construct images of their world, shifts in the relationships between readers, texts and writers, and linguistic change. "Literature, Language and Change" offers an historical perspective on literary English, from the mid-14th century to the present-day. Through detailed analyses of individual texts and comparisons with texts from different periods, Stephens and Waterhouse build up a picture of the important and distinctive characteristics of each period and examine the changes between them. Exercises provide students with the opportunity to apply the insights and methods presented in each chapter. Terms which may be unfamiliar are defined and explained in a glossary, and a bibliography gives useful pointers for supplementary reading.