The Reverend Bob
Fart Machine and Beastmaster
Can any of you tell which of these postmodernist essays are fake or real? And remember no using the internet for peeksees.
A Conceptual Framework for Studying Gender in Information Systems Research
Introduction Approaching the issue of Information Systems (IS) from an innovation perspective (Quintas, 1996), this paper seeks to enhance our understanding of IS process by introducing theoretical concepts and observations advanced in sociology and technology management disciplines under the heading of ‘Social Studies of Technology’ (SST).1 Specifically, the proposal of the paper is that a focus on gender within this approach will mean an increased awareness of organisational and social concerns of both the IS development process and the consequences of IS deployment into organisations. In so doing, I am assuming, in line with significant feminist research elsewhere, that gender relations involve difference, inequality and power. This is deemed pertinent to access to, and control over, material and symbolic resources (Knights and Willmott, 1986). I propose one potential means to theorise both the way user interaction with developed IS is gendered, and the way the technology itself comes to be gendered through the process of its design, development and diffusion into organisations and society as a whole. Although studies on gender differences in relation to computers, as well as on the underrepresentation of women in computing exist, within the IS literature, the role of gender and Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) is largely under-theorised (Adam et al., 2002; Wilson, 2002), restricting itself to the (laudable if limited) project of add-more-numbers (Adam et al., 1994). This is partly because of the assumption that technology is gender neutral – ‘a sure guarantee that it embraces all sorts of taken-forgranted assumptions’ (Knights and Murray, 1994: 17).
Playing It Queer: Understanding Queer Gender, Sexual and Musical Praxis In a 'New' Musicological Context
Across ages and cultures, music has been associated with sexual allure, gender inversion and suspect sexuality. Music has been theorised as both a putative agent of moral corruption and an expressive mechanism of gender and sexual signification, capable of arousing and channelling sexual urges and desires. This research examines musically facilitated expressions of queerness and queer identity, asking how and why music is used by queer musicians and musical performers to express non-normative gender and sexual identities. A queer theoretical approach to gender and sexuality, coupled with interdisciplinary theories concerning music as an identificatory practice, provides the theoretical landscape for this study. An investigation into queer musical episodes such as this necessitates an exploration of the broader cultural milieu in which queer musical work occurs. It also raises questions surrounding the corpus of queer musical practice—that is, do these practices constitute the creation of a new musical genre or a collection of genres that can be understood as queer music? The preceding questions inform an account of the histories, styles, sensibilities, and gender and sexual politics of camp, drag and gender****, queer punk and queercore, as well as queer feminist cultures, positioning these within musical praxis. Queer theory, music and identity theories as well as contemporary discussions relating to queer cultural histories are then applied to case studies of queer-identified music performers from Brisbane, Australia. A grounded theoretical analysis of the data gathered in these case studies provides the necessary material to argue that musical performance provides a creative context for the expression of queer identities and the empowerment of queer agency, as well as oppositional responses to and criticism of heterosexual hegemony, and the homogenisation and assimilation of mainstream gay culture. Resulting from this exploration of queer musical cultures, localised data gathering and analysis, this research also supposes a set of ideologies and sensibilities that can be considered indicative and potentially determinant of queer musical practice generally. Recognising that queer theory offers a useful theoretical discourse for understanding the complexities and flexibility of gender and sexual identities—particularly those that resist the binary logics of heteronormativity—this project foregrounds a question that is relatively unanswered in musicological work. It asks: how can musicology make use of queer theory in order to produce queer readings and new, anti-oppressive knowledge regarding musical performance, composition and participation? To answer this, it investigates the history of resistance towards embodied studies of music; the disjuncture between competing discourses of traditional and ‘new’ musicology; and recent developments in the pursuit of queer visibility within music studies. Building upon these recent developments, this work concludes that the integration of queer theoretical perspectives and queer aesthetic sensibilities within musicological discourse allows for a serious reconsideration of musical meaning and signification. In the development of a queer musicology, a committed awareness of queer theory, histories, styles and sensibilities, together with an embodied scholarly approach to music, is paramount. It is through this discursive nexus that musicology will be able to engage more fully with the troubling, performative and contingent qualities of gender, sexuality and desire.
Hegemonic identities in Cowboy Bebop
Cowboy Bebop, a popular anime series set in the year 2071 onboard the space-
ship Bebop, chronicles the bohemian adventures of a group of bounty hunters.
This paper presents how the imaginary characters and their voices are conven-
tionalized to fit hegemonic norms. The social semiotic of desire depicted in
Cowboy Bebop caters to a general heterosexual market in which hero and babe
characters represent the anime archetypes of heterosexual normativity. Scripted
speech used in the anime functions as a role language which indexes common
ideological attributes associated with a character’s demeanor. This study focuses
on how ideas, including heterosexual normativity and culture-specific practices,
are reproduced in media texts in order to negotiate the intertextual distances
that link the characters and audience.
1. Introduction: Media intertextuality
Modernity has seen a widespread implementation of the institutionalization of
standard language and discourse, although in reality varieties of language and dis-
course are able to coexist, if in a somewhat disorderly manner. In Foucault’s (1980)
terms, the semiotic construction of discourse practices depends on general rules
that characterize the discursive formation to which they belong. The semiotic no-
tion of intertextuality introduced by Kristeva (1980) refers to connections between
a text and other previous or synchronic texts across time and space. When characters
are created in media, discourse practices are strategically assigned to such
characters in order to assign them to their given roles (see Lazar and Wahl this
issue) by utilizing existing concepts and conventions. Thus, even the creation of a
new personality is not entirely new as its attributes are constructed through inter-
textual discursive practices based on preexisting social norms.