Recreating Reality: Waltz With Bashir, Persepolis, and the Documentary Genre

This paper examines Ari Folman’s Waltz With Bashir (2008) and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2007) to elucidate how artists, distributors, and audiences shape and define the porous boundaries of the documentary genre, and how such perceptions are shaped within a digital context. By analyzing how each film represents reality; that is, how documentaries attempt to represent the real world, this paper explores the elements of performativity within animated documentary as a reflection of both the growing fluidity of the documentary genre and the instability of the indexical in a digital age. In a digital context, where the “real” can be manufactured at an increasing rate, stronger skepticism and cynicism push the documentary genre towards more subjective explorations, with animated documentaries serving as a key example of how genre distinctions have fluctuated in response

Visualising the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’: emotion work and the representation of orgasm in pornography and everyday sexual interactions

Visual representations of orgasm – whether in the flesh or mediated through a screen –are produced in a context of intense uncertainty about whether what is being seen represents an authentically experienced bodily event. Despite detailed scientific scrutiny and close attention to bodily signs, the authenticity of women’s orgasm remains a site of cultural anxiety and contested gender politics. This uncertainty is exacerbated by the construction of female orgasm as inherently invisible or un-seeable,and ‘faking’ orgasm as a prevalent social practice. Drawing on existing literature from psychology, sociology and porn studies, this theoretical paper explores the problem of visually representing orgasm in the context of these uncertainties, and examines how the distinction between the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’ is structured by discourses of authenticity. Pornography and everyday sexual interactions provide ideal contexts for exploring the practices of producing and consuming visual representations of embodied experience because both necessitate a see-able orgasm which consumers/lovers can read as ‘real’. This paper demonstrates that considerable interpretative work is necessary to read the female body as authentically orgasmic in the context of cultural uncertainty, and that distinctions between the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’ are continuallyre worked. Drawing on the contrast between ‘surface’ and ‘deep’ acting (Hochschild,1983), I argue that the distinction between the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’ cannot be established by recourse to unmediated bodily experience, and instead, researchers should consider how and when this distinction has traction in the world and the implications of this for gendered power relations, subjectivities and practices

Choreography, controversy and child sex abuse: Theoretical reflections on a cultural criminological analysis of dance in a pop music video

This article was inspired by the controversy over claims of ‘pedophilia!!!!’ undertones and the ‘triggering’ of memories of childhood sexual abuse in some viewers by the dance performance featured in the music video for Sia’s ‘Elastic Heart’ (2015). The case is presented for acknowledging the hidden and/or overlooked presence of dance in social scientific theory and cultural studies and how these can enhance and advance cultural criminological research. Examples of how these insights have been used within other disciplinary frameworks to analyse and address child sex crime and sexual trauma are provided, and the argument is made that popular cultural texts such as dance in pop music videos should be regarded as significant in analysing and tracing public perceptions and epistemologies of crimes such as child sex abuse

The detection of deception within investigative contexts: Key challenges and core issues

A large and continually-growing body of research has explored the ways in which deception might be detected. The area is developing rapidly, opening up new avenues of study. This special issue of the Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling brings together an exciting array of papers on the detection of deception within investigative contexts, examining a wide range of issues including; the efficacy of different interviewing techniques, the reliability of statement veracity assessment, factors influencing ability to detect deception and the need for applied research and ecologically valid studies. This examination of the key challenges and core issues surrounding the detection of deception within the criminal justice domain helps move the field forward, providing powerful results that have potentially far-reaching impacts. These are considered in detail throughout the following discussion

Six propositions on the sonics of pornography

Pornography (and all its contentious pleasures, contested politics and attendant problematics) is enjoying a fresh wave of academic attention. The overwhelming majority of these studies, however, focus on the visual discourses of sexually explicit material. This risks the sonic dimensions of pornography being overlooked entirely. Yet porn is anything but silent. This speculative article maps out some of the ways in which the sounds of pornography (and the pornography of sound) might be approached in the analytical context of gay male culture. Not only do the texts of porn contain assorted sounds (dialogue, soundtracks, non-verbal noises of participation, background and accidental audio), they also seek to prompt sounds (not least the non-verbal noises pornography seeks to elicit during the moments of its consumption) and sometimes depend on sound alone (telephone lines that allow access to recorded narratives or ‘live’ chat). Pornography speaks in particular accents, it mobilizes particular music, it dances to particular tunes and it relies on the pants we hear as much as the pants we see. If queer cultures have their own distinctive worlds of sound, then the sonic armouries of porn play a prominent role within them

Mis-taken identity: being and not being Asian, African and British

This article offers an auto/biographical approach to understanding the links between transnational migration, citizenship and identity. It explores the relationship between fixed and fluid identities in the lives of migrants through consideration of a puzzle about essentialised identities in the form of 'roots' against more plastic identities in the form of 'routes'. Both the appeal of and some problems with this dichotomy are discussed. Drawing on personal and familial auto/biography, the paper delves into the identities of East African Asians and their capacity to both be and not be African, Asian or British at different times and places. The key argument is that felt and ascribed identities operate in uneven ways that are not reducible to matters of personal choice or structural determination. The context of the discussion and the examples used are intended to underline the key intervention this article aims to make – the enduring significance of being racially or ethnically marked as Asian as the process by which identity is, or can be, reduced into a singular form