After Sex? On Writing since Queer Theory, edited by Janet Halley and Andrew Parker [Review]

In its earliest and simplest form queer theory proposes that sexual identity is not essential, but socially constructed, and understandings of identity, gender and sexuality are constructed differently at different times and in different places. Queer theory aims to challenge normative understandings of sex, sexuality and gender, and also normative concepts of knowledge and being. Since its inception, queer theory has been taken up by a number of disciplines as an analytical framework. These include cultural geography, education studies, film studies and sociology. In the last decade queer theory has been used to consider citizenship, diasporas and post colonial experiences. A queer theoretical perspective has also been used to analyse emotions, the Death Drive, phenomenology, and disability. As queer theory enters its third decade Janet Halley and Andrew Parker ask what is after sex? ‘What has queer theory become now that it has a past?’

The internet and the changing global media environment

This chapter describes current trends in the global media environment, with a focus on their implications for the management of public agendas and political processes. It assesses the extent to which trends such as the growth of the blogosphere, "citizen journalism," and other forms if user-generated content, have complicated and problematized news and agenda management as engaged in by both media and political elites. It argues that, in large part due to the rise of the internet and the proliferation if online producers of information and commentary, alongside 24-hour news channels such as CNN and Al Jazeera, political and social actors today face a much more complex, chaotic communication environment than ever bifore, an environment characterized as one of cultural chaos. Having outlined the roots of this trend in the emergence of an expanded, globalized public sphere, the chapter goes on to ask if elite control over the political agenda has been eroded, and if it has, what the consequences for governmmt and the exercise if power might be. Can authoritarian regimes in China, the Middle East, and elsewhere survive the onset if internet-fueled global journalism, for example? In a political environment where public opinion is driven and buffeted by news coverage if unprecedented speed and volume, can democratic governments retain sufficient control over decision- and policy-making processes to enable competent social administration al'ld political management? Can the citizens of contemporary democracies use the emerging media environment to enhance elite accountability and strengthen the democratic process? The chapter concludes that the changing global media environment has the potmtial to strengthen democratic processes, though there is no sil'lgle template for the impact of the internet and other new media on specific countries.

The art of interpretation: Tracing logics of evaluation in Shaun Tan’s The Lost Thing (2000) and Andrew Ruhemann and Shaun Tan’s The Lost Thing (2010)

Celebration (and the celebritisation) of the Australian-ness of children’s authors who enjoy critical or commercial international success, and especially of those who win international prizes speaks to a desire to partake in both national and international cultural spheres. Prizing is often presumed to both guarantee and emerge from a creator's reputation at home and abroad. Australian artist and writer Shaun Tan has received a wide array of cultural and literary prizes, ranging from Australian book awards, to an Academy Award, to the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Prize. This paper considers logics of evaluation and interpretation as they can be traced in the intratextual, intertextual, and extratextual codes of Shaun Tan’s picture book, The Lost Thing (2000), the animated film adaptation of The Lost Thing (2010). It further considers the ways in which the desire for a global audience may necessitate an erasure of the national culture which is traded on in a global market.

Andrew Bolt isn't a racist, but ...

The Coalition's push to make changes to the Racial Discrimination Act was in part a response to a court ruling that Andrew Bolt had breached the Act over his comments about Aboriginal Australians. Here, Chelsea Bond revisits the newspaper columnist's treatment of Aboriginality, explaining that race is more than skin deep.

Texture for Script identification

The problem of determining the script and language of a document image has a number of important applications in the field of document analysis, such as indexing and sorting of large collections of such images, or as a precursor to optical character recognition (OCR). In this paper, we investigate the use of texture as a tool for determining the script of a document image, based on the observation that text has a distinct visual texture. An experimental evaluation of a number of commonly used texture features is conducted on a newly created script database, providing a qualitative measure of which features are most appropriate for this task. Strategies for improving classification results in situations with limited training data and multiple font types are also proposed.