Antigone in the London office: documentary film, creativity and female agency

In this paper, the authors explore female creativity and agency through the means of documentary filmmaking. Husband and Wife is an experimental documentary concerning one woman’s journey from Poland to London, England to reclaim the body of her husband after his death. The authors/directors discuss the process of creating a space where the life of the characters and the life of the camera merge. This creative, feminist space is one of mutual influence between themselves, the protagonist and their documentary film. In their investigation of the protagonist’s journey from her Polish hometown to the city of London, they all become affected by the process of filmmaking itself and by the widow’s relentless resourcefulness in her mission to reclaim the body of her husband. To understand the widow’s tenacious approach of dealing with UK institutions, as well as her mourning, the authors refer to the feminist theories of Luce Irigaray, and Judith Butler, who offer different conceptualisations of female identity and ethical agency. Drawing upon Irigaray, and Butler’s analysis of Antigone (Sophocles, 441BC), the cinematic picture of the Polish widow’s commitment to her husband’s post-mortem civic dignity is compared to the commitment of Sophocles’ heroine, who transgressed the patriarchal order attributed only to proper, male citizens. The authors of the paper discuss the definition of otherness, as a mode of creative and ultimate resistance that both Antigone and the Polish widow embody, as women acting in the patriarchal world. In their documentary, the authors-directors articulate Polish Antigone’s act of resistance through the angle of female interiority, as defined by Lucy Bolton, which in cinema is more characteristic of male protagonists. In that way they reflect the incomprehensible agency of a woman that is gained through her gendered performance, her creativity and her everyday existence in the world of men

Sport stereotypes in the 21st century “brought to you by” Media Corporations

Since its formative years sport has had a commercial component to its operation, however, in no previous time period have we seen the type of growth in the current commercialization of sport that we have seen in the last two decades. Today, sport is big business and as argued in this paper, big businesses heavily involved in sport are mostly concerned with the preservation of established privileges (gender) and priorities (promotion) such as maintaining hierarchical control and generating profit uncritically and unwillingly inclined to take action upon the world in order to transform

A new look at microlensing limits on dark matter in the Galactic halo

The motivation for this paper is to review the limits set on the MACHO content of the Galactic halo by microlensing experiments in the direction of the Large Magellanic Cloud. This has been prompted by recent measurements of the Galactic rotation curve, which suggest that the limits have been biassed by the assumption of an over-massive halo. The paper first discusses the security of the detection efficiency calculations which are central to deriving the MACHO content of the Galactic halo. It then sets out to compare the rotation curves from various halo models with recent observations, with a view to establishing what limits can be put on an all-MACHO halo. The main thrust of the paper is to investigate whether lighter halo models which are consistent with microlensing by an all-MACHO halo are also consistent with recent measures of the Galactic rotation curve. In this case the population of bodies discovered by the MACHO collaboration would make up the entire dark matter content of the Galactic halo. The main result of this paper is that it is easy to find low mass halo models consistent with the observed Galactic rotation curve, which also imply an optical depth to microlensing similar to that found by the MACHO collaboration. This means that all-MACHO halos cannot be ruled out on the basis of their observations. In conclusion, limits placed on the MACHO content of the Galactic halo from microlensing surveys in the Magellanic Clouds are inconsistent and model dependent, and do not provide a secure basis for rejecting an all-MACHO halo.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in A&

Time Dilation and Quasar Variability

The timescale of quasar variability is widely expected to show the effects of time dilation. In this paper we analyse the Fourier power spectra of a large sample of quasar light curves to look for such an effect. We find that the timescale of quasar variation does not increase with redshift as required by time dilation. Possible explanations of this result all conflict with widely held consensus in the scientific community.Comment: 6 pages including 3 figures. Accepted for publication in ApJ Letter

Husband and Wife

Migration, documentary film, and female interiority Documentary Film: 36 minutes, 46 second