Popular culture, the 'victim' trope and queer youth analytics

This article offers a joint reading of two cultural texts that reflect the contest over victim-oriented characterizations of queer youth in contemporary culture. The first text is a representation of queer youth taken from the popular UK television series Shameless (2004). The second text is an online discussion about representations of gay and lesbian characters on television that was recently posted on the Queer Youth Network website. Through my reading of these two texts, I explore the rise of explicit mainstream representations of gay and lesbian characters and the emergence of an identifiable queer youth audience as key characteristics of the contemporary 'after-queer' moment. Through a reflection on the queer youth analytical techniques observable on the Queer Youth Network site, I conclude by outlining some key implications for future educational research in the field of youth, sexuality and popular culture.

Popular fiction and the emotional turn : the case of women in late Victorian Britain

Many within the history profession today consider that we are experiencing an ‘emotional turn’, a perception that has been spurred by a recent proliferation of research centres and outpouring of publications exploring the concept of emotion. Interest in this field looks likely to grow, although there are methodological challenges that have yet to be overcome, as, of course, there are with any newly emerging field of study. One main concern is source material. Attempting to access such an elusive and intensely subjective area of historical inquiry as emotions requires seeking out new sources, as well as returning to old ones with a fresh eye, with new questions in mind. In the specific realm of the emotional lives of women living in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, fiction proves a promising source – popular fiction especially. This is due to the fact that this was the era that ushered in the modern bestseller, novels that more often than not explored the everyday and the emotional, novels that were thought to have been ‘devoured’ by women in particular. This essay plots recent developments in the burgeoning area of emotions history, as well as those that have taken place in relation to the use of fiction as evidence in a history of women’s interior lives. It argues that, at this point in the development of emotions history, when questions of methodology, interdisciplinarity and sources are being addressed more widely, consideration should be given to popular fiction as a readily available pathway, if not an uncomplicated one, into the emotions of the past.

Singular influence : mapping the ascent of Daisy M. Bates in popular understanding and Indigenous policy

Daisy M. Bates’s influence on Indigenous affairs has often been attributed to her once romantic legend as ‘the saviour of the Aborigines’, obscuring the impact of the powerful news media position that she commanded for decades. The ideas advanced by the news media through its reports both by and about Bates exerted a strong influence on public understanding and official policies that were devastating for Indigenous Australians and have had lasting impacts. This paper draws on Bourdieu’s tradition of field-based research to propose that Bates’s ‘singular influence’ was formed through the accumulation of ‘symbolic capital’ within and across the fields of journalism, government, Indigenous societies, and anthropology, and that it operated to reinforce and legitimate the media’s representations of Indigenous people and issues as well as government policies.

Jaisa Desh, Waisa Vesh? Exploratory notes on the representations of adivasis in popular Hindi cinema

This paper seeks to discuss specific examples of Adivasi representation in Indian cinema, particularly popular Hindi cinema or ‘Bollywood’ (as opposed to ‘art’ or ‘parallel’ cinema). This choice of popular Hindi cinema is an attempt to explore the ways in which it has distilled and codified the representations of ‘other’ groups for a mass audience. Popular Hindi films have an unmatched circulation and pre-eminence (Prasad, 1998) in India, making the impact of their representations important to consider. Commercial interests of popular Hindi films are paramount, their producers and directors are generally from the upper castes and classes of Indian society. In the push for commercial interests and popular storylines, adequate representations of Adivasis, and as scholars (Vasudev & Lenglet, 1983; Bagchi, 1996; Subramanyam, 1996; Gopalan, 2000; Vridi, 2003) have pointed out women and other social groups, remain stereotypical. Mainstream Hindi cinema, even in its post-colonial phase, has not provided images of various cultural groups in India which reflect their lived reality. It is this cinematic marginalisation and cultural stereotyping, which will be explored further. This paper is a preliminary exploration and will look at particular examples of representation in Hindi films, including Naagin (1954), Ajantrik (1957), Madhumati (1958), Yeh Gulistan Hamara (1972), Lal Salaam (2002), and Chak De! (2007). It is aimed that this exploration will provide a foundation for further research into representations in Hindi cinema and the wider discourses of power, politics and inequality in Indian society.

Popular culture : a resource for writing in secondary English classrooms

This chapter explores how a secondary English teacher working with students aged 14-15 enabled them to use their popular culture practices as a resource for writing. The chapter provides examples of conventional classroom situations in which this teacher created a space for students to bring their own semiotic resources to bear on the curriculum. It argues the need for English teachers to become sensitized to the complex literacy practices in which their students engage outside school and to the ways these practices are bound up with their social relationships and sense of identity. The discussion challenges conventional understandings of ‘reading’, ‘writing’, ‘speaking’, and ‘listening’ as components of the English curriculum, arguing that a more contemporary understanding of literacy must take into account the multi-modal practices in which students engage in beyond school.

Jaisa Desh, Waisa Vesh? Explorations on the representations of Adivasis in popular Hindi cinema

This article seeks to discuss specific examples of Adivasi representation in Indian cinema, particularly popular Hindi cinema (as opposed to ‘art’ or ‘parallel’ cinema), and the ways in which it has distilled and codified the representations of ‘other’ groups for a mass audience. Mainstream Hindi cinema, even in its postcolonial phase, has not provided images of Adivasis that reflect their reality. This ‘constructed reality’ of the cinema in which Adivasis exist remains the widespread (mis)understanding of their cultures. It is this cinematic marginalization and cultural stereotyping that will be explored further. This article is a preliminary exploration and will look at particular examples of representation in Hindi films, including Naagin [Female Cobra] (Nandlal Jaswantlal, 1954), Madhumati (Bimal Roy, 1958), Yeh Gulistan Hamara [This Flower Garden of Ours] (Atma Ram, 1972), Lal Salaam [Red Salute] (Gaganvihari Boratte, 2002) and Chak De! [Come On! India] (Shimit Amin, 2007). The aim is for this exploration to provide a foundation for further research into Adivasi representation and the wider discourses of power, politics and inequality in Indian society.

Virtual world security inspection : a software inspection process carried out on popular virtual world environments

 Virtual property theft is a serious problem that exists in virtual worlds. Legitimate users of these worlds invest considerable amounts of time, effort and real-world money into obtaining virtual property, but unfortunately, are becoming victims of theft in high numbers. It is reported that there are over 1 billion registered users of virtual worlds containing virtual property items worth an estimated US$50 billion dollars. The problem of virtual property theft is complex, involving many legal, social and technological issues. The software used to access virtual worlds is of great importance as they form the primary interface to these worlds and as such the primary interface to conduct virtual property theft. The security vulnerabilities of virtual world applications have not, to date, been examined. This study aims to use the process of software inspection to discover security vulnerabilities that may exist within virtual world software – vulnerabilities that enable virtual property theft to occur. Analyzing three well know virtual world applications World of Warcraft, Guild Wars and Entropia Universe, this research utilized security analysis tools and scenario testing with focus on authentication, trading, intruder detection and virtual property recovery. It was discovered that all three examples were susceptible to keylogging, mail and direct trade methods were the most likely method for transferring stolen items, intrusion detection is of critical concern to all VWEs tested, stolen items were unable to be recovered in all cases and lastly occurrences of theft were undetectable in all cases. The results gained in this study present the key problem areas which need to be addressed to improve security and reduce the occurrence of virtual property theft.

Popular consent and foreign policy choices : war against the Philippines and covert action in Chile

It is usually assumed that US policymakers need to generate popular consent in order to undertake regime change against another state. This article explores the ways in which contextual factors such as the joint democracy effect, popular values and public moods influenced efforts by elites in the United States to generate popular consent for regime change in the Philippines and Chile. Against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, the United States undertook covert action in Chile due to public recognition of the target state's democratic credentials and a public mood opposed to further military ventures. In contrast, the absence of a strong joint democracy effect, a national mood infused with romantic nationalism qua militarism and social Darwinism facilitated efforts by US elites to generate consent for the invasion and occupation of the Philippines. Subsequently, this article contributes to understandings of the domestic-level factors that influence foreign policy decisions.

Erotic capital, popular pedagogy, and healthy adolescent female sexuality

The sexualization of the female body in contemporary media has created considerable anxiety about its impact on girls. Much of the resulting research focuses on the influence of visual media on body image and the flow-on effects for girls' health. Rather less attention is paid to the pedagogical role of popular romance fiction in teaching girls about their sexuality. Given the pronounced increase in eroticized fiction for girls over the past decade, this is a significant oversight. This article applies Hakim's (2010) concept of erotic capital to two chick lit novels for girls. The elements of erotic capital—assets additional to economic, cultural and social capital—are used to explore the lessons these novels teach about girl sexual subjectivities and sociality in a sexualized culture.

Browsing behavior mimicking attacks on popular web sites for large botnets

With the significant growth of botnets, application layer DDoS attacks are much easier to launch using large botnet, and false negative is always a problem for intrusion detection systems in real practice. In this paper, we propose a novel application layer DDoS attack tool, which mimics human browsing behavior following three statistical distributions, the Zipf-like distribution for web page popularity, the Pareto distribution for page request time interval for an individual browser, and the inverse Gaussian distribution for length of browsing path. A Markov model is established for individual bot to generate attack request traffic. Our experiments indicated that the attack traffic that generated by the proposed tool is pretty similar to the real traffic. As a result, the current statistics based detection algorithms will result high false negative rate in general. In order to counter this kind of attacks, we discussed a few preliminary solutions at the end of this paper.

Reconstructing the south : how commercial myths compete for identity value through the ideological shaping of popular memories and countermemories

This study explicates the coconstitutive relationships between commercial myth- making and popular memory that arise through myth market competitions for identity value. We develop a genealogical analysis of the representational strategies and ideological rationales that two prominent New South mythmakers use to shape popular memories in relation to their competitive goals and to efface counter- memories that contradict their mythologized representations. We then derive a conceptual model that highlights competitive, historical, and ideological influences on commercial mythmaking and their transformative effects on popular memory, which have not been addressed by prior theorizations of the meaning transfer process.

New girl heroes : the rise of popular feminist commentators in an era of sexualisation

The level of public interest in what has variously been called ‘raunch culture’, ‘pornification’ or more broadly ‘sexualisation’ of culture, has created new opportunities for enterprising women. In recent years, a number of immensely popular books have emerged raising concerns about girls and sexualisation by female authors across Western nations such as the USA, Australia and the UK. Here, I explore the media work of two prominent Australian media commentators on girls and sexualisation, Melinda Tankard Reist and Dannielle Miller. I explore how, in their educative work designed to empower girls and free them from the stifling, damaging aspects of sexualised popular culture, these commentators may be citing and performing other normative dimensions of contemporary young femininity that go unremarked upon and are thus reinscribed as normal and expected.