Rosemary Overell
Rosemary Overell completed a doctorate at the University of Melbourne in 2012. Her thesis, Brutal: Affect Belonging In, and Between, Australia and Japan’s Grindcore Scenes, explored how fans of grindcore metal music feel ‘at home’ in scenic spaces and was based on ethnographic research in Osaka, Japan and Melbourne, Australia.
Her most recent work considers how gendered subjectivities are co-constituted by and through mediation. She draws particularly on Lacanian psychoanalysis to explore a variety of mediated sites. In particular, she considers the intersections between affect and signification and how these produce gender. Rosemary has looked at media as varied as anime, extreme metal and reality television.
More broadly, Rosemary's research interests include gender studies, music subcultures and how affect can enable or curtail particular modes of gendered being and belonging for otherwise marginalised people. This was explored in her 2014 monograph, Affective Intensities in Extreme Music Scenes (Palgrave). She is also the co-editor, with Catherine Dale (Chuo University) of Orienting Feminism: Media, Activism and Cultural Representation (Palgrave, 2018), a collection which explores the meaning of feminisms in the contemporary moment as constituted by both action and uncertainity. Focusing on feminist media representations, the collection asks questions about how feminist subjectivity is articulated and intersects with media technologies and representation.
In addition to her academic scholarship, Rosemary writes regularly for The Conversation and has contributed to public debates on how gender and the media work in the contemporary moment.
Rosemary is a member of the Performance of the Real research theme steering group and leads the 'Mediating the Real' programme within the theme. She is also the co-editor, with Sarah Thomasson(University of Queensland) of the Performance of the Real: Working Papers series - a site for the circulation of dialogues, provocations and ideas arising from 'Real' events. She is currently co-running the Mediating the Real reading group with Brett Nicholls. This group primarily draws on Lacanian and Baudrillardian approaches to mediation of 'the Real'.
Rosemary is also on the editorial board of Metal Music Studies and Puratoke: Journal of Undergraduate Research in the Creative Arts and Industries.
Supervisors: Audrey Yue and Carolyn Stevens
Address: https://www.otago.ac.nz/mfco/staff/rosemaryoverell
Her most recent work considers how gendered subjectivities are co-constituted by and through mediation. She draws particularly on Lacanian psychoanalysis to explore a variety of mediated sites. In particular, she considers the intersections between affect and signification and how these produce gender. Rosemary has looked at media as varied as anime, extreme metal and reality television.
More broadly, Rosemary's research interests include gender studies, music subcultures and how affect can enable or curtail particular modes of gendered being and belonging for otherwise marginalised people. This was explored in her 2014 monograph, Affective Intensities in Extreme Music Scenes (Palgrave). She is also the co-editor, with Catherine Dale (Chuo University) of Orienting Feminism: Media, Activism and Cultural Representation (Palgrave, 2018), a collection which explores the meaning of feminisms in the contemporary moment as constituted by both action and uncertainity. Focusing on feminist media representations, the collection asks questions about how feminist subjectivity is articulated and intersects with media technologies and representation.
In addition to her academic scholarship, Rosemary writes regularly for The Conversation and has contributed to public debates on how gender and the media work in the contemporary moment.
Rosemary is a member of the Performance of the Real research theme steering group and leads the 'Mediating the Real' programme within the theme. She is also the co-editor, with Sarah Thomasson(University of Queensland) of the Performance of the Real: Working Papers series - a site for the circulation of dialogues, provocations and ideas arising from 'Real' events. She is currently co-running the Mediating the Real reading group with Brett Nicholls. This group primarily draws on Lacanian and Baudrillardian approaches to mediation of 'the Real'.
Rosemary is also on the editorial board of Metal Music Studies and Puratoke: Journal of Undergraduate Research in the Creative Arts and Industries.
Supervisors: Audrey Yue and Carolyn Stevens
Address: https://www.otago.ac.nz/mfco/staff/rosemaryoverell
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Here, I depart from my earlier work, where I used Deleuzian / Massumian understandings of affect to suggest that affect works to construct community belonging in grindcore scenes (2014). Instead, I use Lacan’s approach to affect to suggest that Melbourne grindcore fans construct their identity via furiously producing a fantasy of Sydney fans as ‘Other’. They Symbolically construct Sydney as a “cultural wasteland” populated by “poofter[s]” (Melbourne Grind Syndicate 2016) who are imagined, and positioned as, inauthentic due to their affective enthusiasm for grindcore. Here, affect works to exclude and Other grindcore fans rather than as a force for collectivity.
Articles by Rosemary Overell
Here, I depart from my earlier work, where I used Deleuzian / Massumian understandings of affect to suggest that affect works to construct community belonging in grindcore scenes (2014). Instead, I use Lacan’s approach to affect to suggest that Melbourne grindcore fans construct their identity via furiously producing a fantasy of Sydney fans as ‘Other’. They Symbolically construct Sydney as a “cultural wasteland” populated by “poofter[s]” (Melbourne Grind Syndicate 2016) who are imagined, and positioned as, inauthentic due to their affective enthusiasm for grindcore. Here, affect works to exclude and Other grindcore fans rather than as a force for collectivity.
https://michaellett.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/04_Denny_SeeingThings.pdf
KGB’s style and lyrics echo earlier rap strategies of appropriation and resignification of majoritarian (white) language and culture. However, KGB’s noise making pushes and disrupts ‘major’ signification even further in terms of her failure as a cross-over hip hop artist appealing to majoritarian / white audiences. KGB’s hyped mixtape Bandz & Hittaz (2012) was briefly lauded by Pitchfork, but she disappointed crowds at SxSW due to her apparent diversion from standard ‘ratchet’ black femalehood.
I suggest that KGB’s failure as a white imagining of hip ratchetness is a minoritarian tactic which troubles neat oppositional readings of rap – particularly ‘underground’ or unsigned (to major labels) rap. Her failure draws attention to the strictures of black cultural production in the white neoliberal context – to be a success one must either acquire whiteness via what Robin James dubs the performance of a ‘Look, I Overcame’ narrative, or operate instrumentally to provide white subjects with the cultural and economic capital required to be hip. KGB fails on both fronts. Instead she embodies a minoritarianism that noisily disrupts white hipsterism.
Since the ascent of both popstars’ careers in 2013, mainstream media has regularly pitted Lorde – a self-proclaimed feminist – against Miley, who is framed as a ‘trashy’, talentless, teen.
Using Bourdieu’s ideas around taste, class and modalities of cultural capital I propose that the discussion around the two women’s worth in terms of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ feminism masks the constitution of a class-based hierarchy.
For all the hyping of Lorde’s apparent critique of capitalist consumer culture, we see the same old class positions rehearsed. Lorde is indie – original and authentic. Miley and her ilk are not. Middle classness remains the status quo.
In this paper, I draw out the cultural politics of Darge as an example of the Japanese nikkeijin population minoritarian political potential. I suggest that the band’s refusal of standard music generic and national signifiers of belonging to a music scene and national space disrupt majoritarian understandings of Japan as possessive of a homogenous cultural identity. In particular, Darge present a challenge to the Japanese extreme-metal scene’s construction of scenic identity around ‘Japanese spirit’ – or yamato damashii. Yamato damashii presumes there is an essential Japanese ‘soul’, and is closely linked to the nationalist concept of Japanese exceptionalism (nihonjinron).
After outlining the historical and contemporary context of Japanese understandings of national identity, I will introduce nikkeijin – returned migrants of Japanese ethnicity. Following from this, I will explain how I will use Deleuze’s idea of the ‘minor’ and the ‘minoritarian subject’ in relation to my case-study of Darge.