The Scarlet Letter: A critical review

Nathaniel Hawthorn’s 19th century romance The Scarlet Letter centres on the simple transgression of adultery and its social consequences. Hawthorn’s narrative and story-telling skill, however, is far from simple; the author manages to subtly and cleverly set the tale within a framework of other transgressions. Ideas of space and other social constructions such including language and belief systems are tested and subverted in this description of a 17th century Puritan settlement. In this paper David Littlefield and Rachel Sara set out the transgressive qualities of this classic American text, putting it into the context of the theme Body + Space and demonstrating how the book pre-figures much 20th century thinking on the subject

Festival and the City: Performativity of Sexual acts in public spheres

In this paper, we address the perception of sexual activities in public spaces and how they become aesthetic, social and cultural intervention once expressed through and embodied within performative events (theatre, street performance, carnival, festival, rave etc). A substantial amount of research has been done on the relation between sexuality and gender about public spaces, and influence of civic and urban identity on public expression of sexuality and gender. We will look at the invented rituals establishing sexuality within a context of performativity through relationships with public spaces. As the case studies, we will use the works of theatre companies La Fura dels Baus and Teatro Oficina. To set up the set of relationships between inside and outside, we will borrow a useful concept on ‘spheres' from the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk to look at the public space as a system of spheres where a different set of rules apply enabling actions to take place. These performances in urban contexts, as well as some festivals and particularly carnivals, become a way of the staging of sexual acts in public space, in opposition to the dominant narrative of private – domestic space. We will look at how collectiveness and civic spaces become essential elements of this phenomenon and its relevance in our contemporary reality as an element of subversion of social structures. We will also examine performative events where sexual acts as a language of human relationship in public spaces bringing intimacy

I will leave you now and this loudspeaker will take my place

Notions of ‘presence’ and ‘liveness’ run through academic theories and popular conceptions of sound mediation generally, and mediation of voice in particular. This article looks at experimental video that engages with these questions, particularly around the notion of the ‘authentic’ voice and vocal ‘presence’. We will demonstrate how these different experimental approaches explore the interaction between voice, vocal technique and audio-visual technology, thus challenging and interrogating conventions of how the soundtrack represents the voice and (in conjunction with the moving image) the audio-visually mediated body. Presenting Anneke Kampman's work as an experimental practice-led research response to seminal theories of sound and the film soundtrack, we provide further context through engagement with key examples of earlier video art and sound art by Vladan Radovanović, Richard Serra, and Meredith Monk. Overall, the article intervenes by demonstrating how video art and sound art can address key theoretical questions concerning voice and body in a broader sound and moving image context, as well as adopting a sound-focussed approach to aesthetic analysis of video art

Rogue diva flows: Aoi Sola's reception in the Chinese media and mobile celebrity

Theorizations of celebrity often contend with questions of the constructed nature of star persona. This is more so the case when discussing divas in Japan, as they are subject to a wide range of gender regimes that mould the ways in which their persona is produced and consumed. Contemporary forms of transnationalism in East Asia, however, have created media flows and fan bases that provide new opportunities for Japanese female celebrities to re-construct their star personas, transcending their celebrity status in Japan. Focusing on the case of Aoi Sola, a Japanese adult video actress turned celebrity, this article demonstrates how transnational East Asian flows problematize our static theorization of celebrity. Sola's interactions with her Chinese social media fan base have afforded her a cosmopolitan persona that has been celebrated as a cultural bridge between China and Japan. At the same time, her star persona leaves her vulnerable to re-inscriptions into transnational politics as played out in everyday media flows. This dynamic is best demonstrated in Sola's attempts to quell anti-Japanese sentiment in China as well as in her efforts to reinscribe her star persona using nostalgic associations of cultural similarity and a shared past. Based on analyses of Sola's celebrity trajectory from adult video to online Chinese mediascape Diva, this article suggests that contemporary star persona status is better understood in terms of gender, movement and ‘meshworks’