Serious and Seriouser

A review of Alexander R. Galloway, The Interface Effect (Polity Press 2012) and McKenzie Wark, Telesthesia: Communication, Culture and Class (Polity Press, 2013)

Men in (Shell-)Shock: Masculinity, Trauma, and Psychoanalysis in Rebecca West\u27s The Return of the Soldier

This paper undertakes to read Rebecca West\u27s first novel, The Return of the Soldier (1918), as a critical exploration of masculine trauma on the one hand and an ambivalent engagement with Freudian psychoanalysis on the other. The novel proves interesting as a site in which two shifting cultural contexts intersect: the wartime culture of England facing the shell shock of its men, and the contemporaneous infusion of English intellectual culture with psychoanalytic ideas. Though the effects of new war technology and a newer kind of doctor, West challenge existing notions of stable masculinity, West maintains that masculinity has all along been simply a construct, a shell built around inarticulable trauma. The fact that in this novel West, despite her early pugnaciously feminist journalism, remains as much within the masculine order as critical of it forces us to expand our notions of the forms feminist narrative can take. This paper argues that the novel is a feminist narrative in the sense that it positions masculine trauma as a mark of adherence to the social order for both men and women

Men in (Shell-)Shock: Masculinity, Trauma, and Psychoanalysis in Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier

This paper undertakes to read Rebecca West's first novel, The Return of the Soldier (1918), as a critical exploration of masculine trauma on the one hand and an ambivalent engagement with Freudian psychoanalysis on the other. The novel proves interesting as a site in which two shifting cultural contexts intersect: the wartime culture of England facing the "shell shock" of its men, and the contemporaneous infusion of English intellectual culture with psychoanalytic ideas. Though the effects of new war technology and "a newer kind of doctor," West challenge existing notions of stable masculinity, West maintains that masculinity has all along been simply a construct, a shell built around inarticulable trauma. The fact that in this novel West, despite her early pugnaciously feminist journalism, remains as much within the masculine order as critical of it forces us to expand our notions of the forms feminist narrative can take. This paper argues that the novel is a feminist narrative in the sense that it positions masculine trauma as a mark of adherence to the social order for both men and women

Mediating the Real

10.11157/medianz-vol16iss2id205MEDIANZ: Media Studies Journal of Aotearoa New Zealand1621-

Introduction: Mediating the Real

Peer Reviewe

Introduction: Mediating the Real

Peer Reviewe

Navigating the economy of ambivalent intimacy: gender and relational labour in China’s livestreaming industry

By examining female streamers’ everyday interactions with their viewers and their experiences as showroom livestreamers (xiuchang zhubo) in China’s livestreaming industry, this article adopts—but also re-examines—the premises of relational labour in order to investigate the gendered power relations involved in the showroom livestreaming sector. Based on semi-structured in-depth interviews with female livestreamers, we argue that showroom livestreaming work is contingent on relational labour and constitutes a precarious balancing act. On the one hand, female streamers are positioned in a gendered economy, searching to monetize their production of sexually ambivalent intimacy. On the other hand, through constant negotiation, they try to maintain the correct degree of intimacy in order to avoid violating both platform regulations and the social moral standard. Therefore, the implicitly sexualised and intimate performances undertaken by female streamers are the result of negotiating livestreaming platforms’ technological and economic affordances, the male viewers’ needs for intimate personal interactions, and their own subjectivities. We claim that the economy of aimei, or ambivalent intimacy, represents a deeper form of exploitation, whereby female streamers themselves bear the responsibility to navigate tensions and emotional alienation at the nexus of financial security, sexual desire, and morality

Stereocontrolled total synthesis of isocomene sesquiterpenes

Four isomers of the sesquiterpene isocomene have been synthesized in high yields and in a stereocontrolled fashion from the tricyclic triquinane 1 obtained by the cyclopentene annulation method. Carbon-13 data was obtained for all of the isocomene sesquiterpenes