Gender identity and brand incongruence: When in doubt, pursue masculinity

Gender identity is the extent to which an individual identifies with masculine or feminine personality traits. Sex roles in Western societies continue to evolve, so this research examines the developing relationship between gender identity and consumer responses to gendered branding. Grounded in self-congruency theory [Sirgy, M. J. (1982). Self-concept in consumer behavior: A critical review. Journal of Consumer Research, 9, 287–300], the present research reports an experiment that supports a congruence relationship between gender identity and brand response. Masculine consumers prefer masculine brands. The results also show incongruent brand rejection where masculine consumers react negatively to feminine brands although feminine consumers are more accepting of masculine brands. Further, the results suggest that gender identity is a more effective dimension for customer segmentation than biological sex. Overall, the results suggest that masculine brands are more effective than other gendered brand profiles for masculine, feminine, and androgynous consumers.

Gendering climate change: A feminist criminological perspective

Drawing on insights from feminist scholars and activists, this article examines the dialectical relationship between climate change and the social construction of gender. We examine in detail how gender inequalities associated with capitalism, particularly in its latest Neoliberal incarnation, help to produce global warming, as well as to produce gendered vulnerabilities and unequal impacts. After a brief review of past successes and failures to integrate gender concerns into climate change debates and policies, we suggest several criminological interventions that are compatible with a feminist perspective on climate change. We argue that a stronger criminological focus on the global political economy, particularly on the gendered inequalities it produces, is analytically essential for understanding both the etiology and harmful consequences of climate change. Simultaneously, we urge critical criminologists to employ the tools of our trade to take a more proactive role in the social construction of a just and sustainable society.

Using an ‘interpretative model’ for contextual design of heritage landscape databases: The case of St Helena Island National Park in Queensland, Australia

Due to the increasing speed of landscape changes and the massive development of computer technologies, the methods of representing heritage landscapes using digital tools have become a worldwide concern in conservation research. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how an ‘interpretative model’ can be used for contextual design of heritage landscape information systems. This approach is explored through building a geographic information system database for St Helena Island national park in Moreton Bay, South East Queensland, Australia. Stakeholders' interpretations of this landscape were collected through interviews, and then used as a framework for designing the database. The designed database is a digital inventory providing contextual descriptions of the historic infrastructure remnants on St Helena Island. It also reveals the priorities of different sites in terms of historic research, landscape restoration, and tourism development. Additionally, this database produces thematic maps of the intangible heritage values, which could be used for landscape interpretation. This approach is different from the existing methods because building a heritage information system is deemed as an interpretative activity, rather than a value-free replication of the physical environment. This approach also shows how a cultural landscape methodology can be used to create a flexible information system for heritage conservation. The conclusion is that an ‘interpretative model’ of database design facilitates a more explicit focus on information support, and is a potentially effective approach to user-centred design of geographic information systems.

Roy Kenzie Kiyooka

Roy Kenzie Kiyooka Canadian, born 1926 Roy Kiyooka was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan in 1926. Throughout his career, he was known as a painter, photographer, sculptor, poet, musician, filmmaker and teacher. He studied at the Provincial Institute of Technology and Art in Calgary from 1946-49, and then at the Instituto Allende in Mexico in 1955. During the summers of 1958 - 1960 he attended the Emma Lake Workshops in Saskatchewan, where he worked closely with Barnett Newman and Clement Greenberg. In 1959 he executed his first series of abstract paintings, The Hoarfrost Series, which assume a disciplined minimal quality. In the late 1960's Kiyooka began to push beyond painting and created mixed media works, including collage, photography, film and poetry. Kiyooka’s art is born out of personal experience and through it he records his relationship to the surrounding landscape; a night in a motel, a trip to the coast, or hoarfrost on the trees. Through the unfolding of Kiyooka’s interior/exterior landscapes he shares his personal journeys with us all. The Art Gallery of Ontario's collection of Roy Kiyooka's work began with the purchase of two paintings; Barometer No. 2, in 1964 and Surya, in 1987.

Close Encounters of the Continuum: Speaking (to), Performing and Experiencing Gender In Janet Cardiff’s Whispering Room

This 'project' investigates Janet Cardiff's Whispering Room. It examines how Cardiff deconstructs the privileging of the visual over all other corporeal senses in her work, the Whispering Room. Using sound as a fulcrum, Cardiff explores the links between subjects, collective narratives, memories, experiences and performances. Janet Cardiff destabilizes time and space and fractures the continuum through the use of sound. My 'project' celebrates sound as a transgressive medium — sound not as a gendered medium but as a vehicle in which to speak (to) gender. It explores how sound can destabilize notions of perception and reception and question art and museal practices. In the process this 'project' reveals the complexity of interpreting and representing art as an object. My aim is to reflect the very intertextual and expressionist collage that Cardiff has created in Whispering Room in my own text. Cardiff solicits the viewer's intimacy and participation. Whispering Room is a physical yet metonymic space in which Cardiff creates a place for performatvity, experience, memory, desire and speech, thus she opens up a space for the utterance and performance of the viewer. Viewers construct and create meaning/s for themselves within this mnemonic space by digging up their own memories, desires and reveries. The strength of Cardiff's work is that it relies on a viewer to perform, a body to trigger the pseudo-spectacle and a voice to interrupt the whispers. One might ask of Whispering Room where the illusionistic space begins and where the physical space ends. This 'project' investigates how in Whispering Room there is no one experience but many experiences.

Trapping to monitor tephritid movement: Results, best practice, and assessment of alternatives

Movement of tephritid flies underpins their survival, reproduction, and ability to establish in new areas and is thus of importance when designing effective management strategies. Much of the knowledge currently available on tephritid movement throughout landscapes comes from the use of direct or indirect methods that rely on the trapping of individuals. Here, we review published experimental designs and methods from mark-release-recapture (MRR) studies, as well as other methods, that have been used to estimate movement of the four major tephritid pest genera (Bactrocera, Ceratitis, Anastrepha, and Rhagoletis). In doing so, we aim to illustrate the theoretical and practical considerations needed to study tephritid movement. MRR studies make use of traps to directly estimate the distance that tephritid species can move within a generation and to evaluate the ecological and physiological factors that influence dispersal patterns. MRR studies, however, require careful planning to ensure that the results obtained are not biased by the methods employed, including marking methods, trap properties, trap spacing, and spatial extent of the trapping array. Despite these obstacles, MRR remains a powerful tool for determining tephritid movement, with data particularly required for understudied species that affect developing countries. To ensure that future MRR studies are successful, we suggest that site selection be carefully considered and sufficient resources be allocated to achieve optimal spacing and placement of traps in line with the stated aims of each study. An alternative to MRR is to make use of indirect methods for determining movement, or more correctly, gene flow, which have become widely available with the development of molecular tools. Key to these methods is the trapping and sequencing of a suitable number of individuals to represent the genetic diversity of the sampled population and investigate population structuring using nuclear genomic markers or non-recombinant mitochondrial DNA markers. Microsatellites are currently the preferred marker for detecting recent population displacement and provide genetic information that may be used in assignment tests for the direct determination of contemporary movement. Neither MRR nor molecular methods, however, are able to monitor fine-scale movements of individual flies. Recent developments in the miniaturization of electronics offer the tantalising possibility to track individual movements of insects using harmonic radar. Computer vision and radio frequency identification tags may also permit the tracking of fine-scale movements by tephritid flies by automated resampling, although these methods come with the same problems as traditional traps used in MRR studies. Although all methods described in this chapter have limitations, a better understanding of tephritid movement far outweighs the drawbacks of the individual methods because of the need for this information to manage tephritid populations.

There is 'hope for you yet': The female drug offender in sentencing discourse

Language and gender research has, in recent years, emphasised the importance of examining the context-specific ways in which people ‘do gender’ in different situations. In this paper, we explore how women involved in drug offences, specifically methamphetamine manufacture offences, are constructed within the language of the courts. Thirty-six sentencing transcripts from the New Zealand courts were examined to investigate how such offences, committed by women, are understood. In order to explore the representation of female offenders, a critical discourse analytic approach was adopted. Such an approach recognises that linguistic modes not only create and legitimise power inequalities but also embody a specific worldview. Three gendered discourses were identified in the sentencing texts: (i) the discourse of femininity, reinforcing the socially prescribed female role; (ii) the discourse of aberration, concerning women who breach traditional gender role expectations, and; (iii) the discourse of salvation, presenting aberrant women with an opportunity to become ‘good’ women once again. The findings illustrate the ways in which processes of gendering take place within a specific community of practice: the courtroom.

Threats and Promises: The Promotion of Artificial Lighting to Women Consumers in the United States, 1880s – 1960s

This article examines the development of a specific gendered discourse in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century that united key beliefs about feminine beauty, identity, and the domestic interior with particular electric lighting technologies and effects. Largely driven by the electrical industry’s marketing rhetoric, American women were encouraged to adopt electric lighting as a beauty aid and ally in a host of domestic tasks. Drawing evidence from a number of primary texts, including women’s magazines, lighting and electrical industry trade journals, manufacturer-generated marketing materials, and popular home decoration and beauty advice literature, this study shifts the focus away from lighting as a basic utility, demonstrating the ways in which modern electric illumination was culturally constructed as a desirable personal and environmental beautifier as well as a means of harmonizing the domestic interior.

Identifying landscape meanings: Images and interactions at Gas Works Park

This thesis contributes a substantial new theoretical understanding of what 'landscape meanings' are, and what constitutes the specific meanings of particular landscapes to individuals. Further, it proposes how landscape architects may identify these meanings to inform critical and ethical research, theory, professional practice and education. What emerges from this representative case study of the landscape of Richard Haag's Gas Works Park in Seattle is the understanding that a person's expressions of their 'cognitive landscape images' of a particular landscape, coupled with their expressions of their 'interactions' with that landscape, constitute the specific 'meaning-narrative' they attach to it.

Sepulchre

The work in Sepulchre (2015) came from my research into female ritual practices and my fascination with specific mythological and historical narratives. These themes were explored during a month-long Summer Residency at Boxcopy Contemporary Artspace. Of particular note were the chronicles and rituals from the terrain around the Adriatic Sea, including Greece and Italy. During the residency, I kept referring to specific mythological texts, which had women as the main protagonists. I kept returning to female characters whose representation was framed by aspects of their sexuality. When looking at these women together, they seemed to sit within a greater narrative archetype, a communal dialogue of shared characteristics, repetitious narrative components and mutual landscapes. Sepulchre became my attempt to develop a conversation between these women by drawing from their commonality, and reimagining these collective elements into sculptural objects and moving images. The video explores an apotropaic gesture, a Baubo-style ‘flashing’. A glass star chart rests on white cliffs, speaking to the narrative of Andromeda and her position as both a celestial and terrene landscape. Another object, a wall mounted copper light burst, pays homage to the framing device used by Gian Lorenzo Bernini in The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. By reconciling these dialogues, I was interested in exploring expanded portrayals of female sexuality and depictions of subversive and authorial femininity, developed through connotations with mysticism, ritual practice and women’s knowledge.

New lads or ladettes? A critique of current theoretical explanations for young women’s violence proliferated over social media

Current theoretical explanations for young women’s violence examine physical violence as a masculine behaviour. This means that young women are constructed as rejecting elements of their femininity in favour of masculine behaviours in order to perform violence in an acceptable way, which results in them being constructed as violent femmes, new lads or ladettes. Alternatively, theoretical explanations construct young women as adhering to a feminine gender performance when avoiding physical violence, or engaging what are traditionally considered to be feminine characteristics of aggression. This paper critiques existing theoretical approaches applied to young women’s violence, by drawing on empirical research that examined young women’s physical altercations proliferated through social media. Preliminary research findings illustrate how continuing to construct young women’s violence through a gendered paradigm offers inadequate explanations for what young women’s violence actually entails. It concludes by suggesting how young women’s violence may be more adequately explained using a theoretical framework of embodying gender that moves away from gender dichotomies and constructs violence as a series of bodily practices.

Temporal: The artwork

The interactive artwork Temporal arose from a series of art-science investigations with some of Australia’s leading flying fox ecologists. It was designed as a gently evolving meditation upon the complex, periodic processes that mark Australia’s often irregular seasonal changes. In turn these changes directly govern the migratory movements of Australia’s keystone pollinating mammals - the mega bats (Flying Foxes). Temporal further called attention to our increasing capacity to profoundly disturb these partners within Australia’s complex, life-supporting systems

Social processes of health and physical education teachers’ identity formation: Reproducing and changing culture

This paper examines Initial Teacher Education students’ experiences of participation in health and physical education (HPE) subject department offices and the impact on their understandings and identity formation. Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, field, and practice along with Wenger’s communities of practice form the theoretical frame used in the paper. Data were collected using surveys and interviews with student‐teachers following their teaching practicum and analysed using coding and constant comparison. Emergent themes revealed students’ participation in masculine‐dominated sports, gendered body constructions, and repertoires of masculine domination. Findings are discussed in relation to their impact on student‐teachers’ learning, identity formation, and marginalizing practices in the department offices. Implications for teacher education and HPE are explored.

Running men: The precarious, paranoid body in screen culture

This paper discusses my video installation Running Men as an example of how an artist’s appropriative engagements with screen images of the perilous body can reflect the technological zeitgeist of the last hundred years but also create a space of meditative and mediated reflection in Slavoj Žižek’s “endlessness” of the present-future. In this artwork, iconic male characters from Hollywood films are recontextualised to create infinitely looping scenes of running; trapping the characters in a kind of Nietchzen eternal recurrence that suspends them between impending violence and uncertain futures. Stemming primarily from my investigation into anxiety as a shared social experience, one perhaps primed by the increasing intensity of visual culture in the 21st century, these digitally reconfigured bodies become avatars or surrogates for myself, and for the viewer. Through selective editing, these emblematic figures are caught in a space of relentless confusion and paranoia – they run with, and from anxiety. They are never caught by any unseen pursuers, but are equally unable to catch up to any unseen goal. These figures map an historical trajectory of violence and masculinity as it has been projected through various iterations of screen culture Simultaneously, as celebrities, they are also fictions of the media sphere, both real and ethereal, they are impossible to grasp but paradoxically are objects of identification and emulation. In this duality, the work also references cinema’s tangled conflation of character and celebrity identity. This discussion will address the two distinct but connected sites and activities of body/image engagement. Firstly, the artistic process and conceptual ramifications of this activity, and secondly in the artwork’s potential as an installation to provide an opportunity for the viewer (like the artist) to reflect on the constructed-ness and complicated power structures at play in the representation of a gendered body.

Realities on the ground: Human trafficking constructs in Thailand and the implications on NGO anti-trafficking prevention strategies

This thesis is a qualitative study that examines how participating staff from Thai based non-governmental organisations interpret and construct the notion of human trafficking; and how this impacts prevention methods. The research examined the impact of different socio-cultural, political and religious ideologies on anti-trafficking prevention and programme implementation. Findings highlighted that while a 'raid and rescue' approach to human trafficking was widely recognised by donors and the media; it was not suitable or complementary to sustainable and community focused anti-trafficking models. Rather, a holistic approach that considers contextual factors and inter-agency collaboration is essential for effective anti-trafficking prevention strategies.