This is the author's accepted manuscript. The original publication is available at: http://dx... more This is the author's accepted manuscript. The original publication is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/978023080058
This chapter argues that Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, described by its author a... more This chapter argues that Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, described by its author as an ‘amusing thing with lots of fun and wit’, contains an explosive undercurrent of social critique. The funniest of Wilde’s plays, Earnest satirizes the subterfuge (‘Bunburying’) demanded of sexual heretics in Victorian society, where marginal identities and desires were excluded, suppressed, or in Wilde’s case, brutally penalized. Conrad investigates Wilde’s ambivalent attitude to direct revolutionary action such as the Fenian dynamite campaign of 1881-85 and French anarchist activities of the 1890s, attending particularly to the 1884 bomb explosion in the cloakroom at Victoria Station, the ‘terminus’ where Miss Prism left the infant Jack Worthing in a handbag containing her three-decker novel. As Conrad argues, ‘texts, bodies, and bombs all meet at Victoria Station’, and Wilde, as an Irishman and a homosexual, could himself be seen as ‘a potential bomb right at the terminus of Victor...
Analysis of Northern Irish political wall murals and their symbols has been almost as ubiquitous ... more Analysis of Northern Irish political wall murals and their symbols has been almost as ubiquitous as the murals themselves. Little has been written, however, about the implications of actually photographing and reproducing the murals — yet images of them circulate through postcards, books, souvenirs and the Internet, a colourful collection of images that continue to shape perceptions of Northern Ireland both at home and abroad. The constant reproduction, circulation and commodification of photographs of political murals, however, perpetuates a narrow vision of a Northern Ireland shaped primarily by a history of (para)military conflict. This in turn has material implications, effectively fetishizing a violent vision of Northern Ireland in both the local and international imaginary and thus shaping not only Northern Irish politics and culture but the economic and political relationship between Northern Ireland and the rest of the world. This chapter is an attempt to widen the frame: to make the photographic framing process more visible and in so doing to explore the ways in which the photographic frame creates the larger frame through which Northern Ireland is seen.
In our contemporary 'information age', information and the body stand in a new, peculiar,... more In our contemporary 'information age', information and the body stand in a new, peculiar, and ambiguous relationship to one another. Information is plumbed from the body but treated as separate from it, facilitating, as Irma van der Ploeg has suggested, the creation of a separate virtual 'body-as-information' that has affected the very ontology of the body. This 'informatization of the…
We reflect on the design and first iteration of an asynchronous online university English course ... more We reflect on the design and first iteration of an asynchronous online university English course focused on fan fiction, with a particular focus on the anticipated challenges of negotiating affect and analysis in the classroom and the structure of the course.
In our contemporary 'information age', information and the body stand in a new, peculiar, and amb... more In our contemporary 'information age', information and the body stand in a new, peculiar, and ambiguous relationship to one another. Information is plumbed from the body but treated as separate from it, facilitating, as Irma van der Ploeg has suggested, the creation of a separate virtual 'body-as-information' that has affected the very ontology of the body. This 'informatization of the body' has been both spurred and enabled by surveillance techniques that create, depend upon, and manipulate virtual bodies for a variety of predictive purposes, including social control and marketing. While, as some feminist critics have suggested, there appears to be potential for information technologies to liberate us from oppressive ideological models, surveillance techniques, themselves so intimately tied to information systems, put normative pressure on non-normative bodies and practices, such as those of queer and genderqueer subjects. Ultimately, predictive surveillance is based in an innately conservative epistemology, and the intertwining of information systems with surveillance undermines any liberatory effect of the former.
This is the author's accepted manuscript. The original publication is available at: http://dx... more This is the author's accepted manuscript. The original publication is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/978023080058
This chapter argues that Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, described by its author a... more This chapter argues that Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, described by its author as an ‘amusing thing with lots of fun and wit’, contains an explosive undercurrent of social critique. The funniest of Wilde’s plays, Earnest satirizes the subterfuge (‘Bunburying’) demanded of sexual heretics in Victorian society, where marginal identities and desires were excluded, suppressed, or in Wilde’s case, brutally penalized. Conrad investigates Wilde’s ambivalent attitude to direct revolutionary action such as the Fenian dynamite campaign of 1881-85 and French anarchist activities of the 1890s, attending particularly to the 1884 bomb explosion in the cloakroom at Victoria Station, the ‘terminus’ where Miss Prism left the infant Jack Worthing in a handbag containing her three-decker novel. As Conrad argues, ‘texts, bodies, and bombs all meet at Victoria Station’, and Wilde, as an Irishman and a homosexual, could himself be seen as ‘a potential bomb right at the terminus of Victor...
Analysis of Northern Irish political wall murals and their symbols has been almost as ubiquitous ... more Analysis of Northern Irish political wall murals and their symbols has been almost as ubiquitous as the murals themselves. Little has been written, however, about the implications of actually photographing and reproducing the murals — yet images of them circulate through postcards, books, souvenirs and the Internet, a colourful collection of images that continue to shape perceptions of Northern Ireland both at home and abroad. The constant reproduction, circulation and commodification of photographs of political murals, however, perpetuates a narrow vision of a Northern Ireland shaped primarily by a history of (para)military conflict. This in turn has material implications, effectively fetishizing a violent vision of Northern Ireland in both the local and international imaginary and thus shaping not only Northern Irish politics and culture but the economic and political relationship between Northern Ireland and the rest of the world. This chapter is an attempt to widen the frame: to make the photographic framing process more visible and in so doing to explore the ways in which the photographic frame creates the larger frame through which Northern Ireland is seen.
In our contemporary 'information age', information and the body stand in a new, peculiar,... more In our contemporary 'information age', information and the body stand in a new, peculiar, and ambiguous relationship to one another. Information is plumbed from the body but treated as separate from it, facilitating, as Irma van der Ploeg has suggested, the creation of a separate virtual 'body-as-information' that has affected the very ontology of the body. This 'informatization of the…
We reflect on the design and first iteration of an asynchronous online university English course ... more We reflect on the design and first iteration of an asynchronous online university English course focused on fan fiction, with a particular focus on the anticipated challenges of negotiating affect and analysis in the classroom and the structure of the course.
In our contemporary 'information age', information and the body stand in a new, peculiar, and amb... more In our contemporary 'information age', information and the body stand in a new, peculiar, and ambiguous relationship to one another. Information is plumbed from the body but treated as separate from it, facilitating, as Irma van der Ploeg has suggested, the creation of a separate virtual 'body-as-information' that has affected the very ontology of the body. This 'informatization of the body' has been both spurred and enabled by surveillance techniques that create, depend upon, and manipulate virtual bodies for a variety of predictive purposes, including social control and marketing. While, as some feminist critics have suggested, there appears to be potential for information technologies to liberate us from oppressive ideological models, surveillance techniques, themselves so intimately tied to information systems, put normative pressure on non-normative bodies and practices, such as those of queer and genderqueer subjects. Ultimately, predictive surveillance is based in an innately conservative epistemology, and the intertwining of information systems with surveillance undermines any liberatory effect of the former.
This chapter will ‘queer’ surveillance, interrogate the assumptions on which it is based and cons... more This chapter will ‘queer’ surveillance, interrogate the assumptions on which it is based and consider the uses to which it is put, by examining surveillance and policing practices in both the United Kingdom generally and, more specifically, in Northern Ireland, particularly as they have been directed at queer people. In the human crises engendered by surveillance, I will suggest, we also see a crisis in the meanings and value of the public, privacy, visibility and normalisation, issues that have long resonated with queer theory and queer studies.
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