Cosmos Laundromat by Blender Institute, 2015.

Post by Julia Velkova, Södertörn University

This post is part of a partnership with theInternational Journal of Cultural Studies, where authors of newly published articles extend their arguments here on Antenna.

By the end of 2015, the number of open content works online licensed under a Creative Commons license is estimated to pass beyond one billion[1]. Approximately one-tenth of them are hosted on major sites such as YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr, Public Library of Science, Scribd and Jamendo, and represent music, photos, animation films, online comics, texts and illustrations that are made explicitly available by their authors with the intent to encourage their circulation, use and the creation of derivative works.

One widely spread assumption about these forms of copyleft-licensed media is that they are a result of unpaid, volunteer labor, often done with the intention to disrupt broader capitalist structures or circuits of production through new forms of organising. Another common view is that while individuals give away their artifacts to the public, the market economy exploits this content by integrating it in the circuits of capitalist production and by extracting value from it without contributing back. These portraits, while true to a certain extent, do not give justice to the much more complex interactions between market and commons that inform the creative practices and intensions of producers engaged in creating digital commons, ranging from free and open source software development and hacking, to producing media of industry quality or within the creative industries themselves. Not least, these views disregard the possibility that the producers of commons are experimenting with models to financially sustain and capitalize on their own work, not necessarily standing in opposition to the markets. At the same time it is admittedly difficult to grasp the way in which economic value is generated through commons if looking just at the final artifacts that are made – software, or media since they are often shared free of charge.

Image: Morevna Project, Anastasia Mayzhegisheva, 2015

In the period between 2013 and 2015 I observed ethnographically the processes of creation of two large scale animation film projects anchored in the domain of commons and the techno-artistic communities surrounding them. One of the films was Cosmos Laundromat[2], part of the larger project Gooseberry by the Blender Institute[3] in Amsterdam, Netherlands; the other one was The Beautiful Queen Marya Morevna[4], part of the larger Morevna project[5] by an informal collective located in Gorno-Altaysk, a town of 40,000 inhabitants in Southern Siberia, Russia. The projects were particular in several ways: they gathered artists and programmers to develop and improve free and open source software for computer graphics production, namely the largely popular program Blender for 3D animation; and Synfig for 2D vector animation. These programs represent the non-proprietary equivalents of software such as 3D Studio Max, Adobe After Effects and Maya. At the same time, the production process, and the short animation films were made public and shared as commons, together with all their assets.

If looking at the main software used in the productions, respectively Blender and Synfig, they both have remarkably gone through a process of de-commodification in the course of which they have been converted from proprietary to free software programs, and their development taken over by their user communities. This suggests that not only the industry does appropriate products of the commons, but also reverse processes do occur. De-commodification helped Blender to grow significantly in the course of about fifteen years to an average of 300,000 user downloads a month(ref), and Synfig to about 20,000 a month over slightly over than six years. This growth has in both cases been largely due to the organisation of software development as practice-driven process that emerges from making animation films through a public process anchored in sharing the code, the production process and the components (assets) of the films made. This approach has so far been applied on five[6] open animation films by the Blender Institute, allowing the Blender software user community to grow. As a result Blender has also been incorporated at the core of the professional production practice of many small commercial animation studios across the world. It has also inspired others, such as Morevna project to experiment with making open-films but in a different animation genre. The approach has also led large hardware manufacturers (such as Intel and Dell), actors from the game industry (Valve Corporation) and IT corporations such as Google to provide support to Blender in the form of powerful hardware, monthly monetary donations[7] or contributions targeted at the development of specific features through, for example, the Google Summer of Code program. The direct industry support provided for developing Blender has contributed to the establishment of independent technical infrastructure that has in turn enabled the creation of open animation films. Within the production frameworks of the films themselves more funds are secured with the help of institutions of public cultural funding, philanthropic foundations, private companies, other open source communities, as well as individuals. The financial resources that are generated do not therefore stem from sales of media, but are a result of combining multiple production practices, that of films, software, and training materials that cut across the interests of multiple organisations and as a result attract financial support through the increased range of beneficiaries.

These interactions help the software and film projects ultimately to economically sustain themselves, and develop software, as well as media owned by the public. The latter could at the same time be regarded as a form of critique, from within, of the prevailing systems of cultural production that is more anchored in pragmatic considerations around the possibility to exercise craft autonomy within the cultural industries, rather than being representative of ideologies of the political left.

[1]          Link: https://stateof.creativecommons.org/report/

[2]          Link: http://gooseberry.blender.org/

[3]          Link: https://www.blender.org/institute/

[4]          Link: http://morevnaproject.org/anime/

[5]          Link: http://www.morevnaproject.org

[6]          Link: http://www.blender.org/features/projects/

[7]          Link: http://www.blender.org/foundation/development-fund/

[For the full article, see Julia Velkova and Peter Jakobsson, “At the Intersection of Commons and Market: Negotiations of Value in Open-Sourced Cultural Production,” forthcoming in International Journal of Cultural Studies. Currently available as an OnlineFirst publication: http://ics.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/08/06/1367877915598705.abstract More information on related research can be found at Julia Velkova’s blog: http://phd.nordkonst.org/]

Post by Chris Moreh, Northumbria University

This post is part of a partnership with the International Journal of Cultural Studies, where authors of newly published articles extend their arguments here on Antenna. 

As a landlocked country in Central Europe, and member of the European Union since 2004, Hungary is unlikely to be considered by many as Asian. Nevertheless, it has thrown itself into the global race to compete for advantageous positions in the postulated new international order dominated by Asia with everything its imagined cultural history and genetic composition of its population had to offer. Since the 2010 electoral success of the conservative center-right, there has been a strengthening public discourse promoting the necessity to open towards Asia, not only for economic reasons but also because of a supposed cultural and racial affinity. I see this ‘Asian discourse’ as made up of heavily mediatized themes which activate and reinforce a specific understanding of what it means to be Hungarian.

The question of ‘what is Hungarian?’ has been a centuries-old concern for intellectuals, artists, and politicians – and a particular answer has been resurfacing in recent years. According to it, even after more than a millennium since they arrived to the Carpathian Basin, Hungarians are still to be considered a ‘Turanic’ people. The term ‘Turan’ or ‘Turanian’ was introduced as a linguistic concept in the 1860s, but it originally had a geographic meaning, referring to the Central-Asian territories north of Iran, inhabited by nomadic tribes hostile to the Persians. While it most commonly describes Altaic-Uralian peoples like the Finns, Estonians, Turks, Mongols, Japanese or Koreans, more inclusive definitions also incorporated the Chinese, the Tibetans and the Indians. By the end of the 19th century the concept had entered into widespread use, gaining additional racial overtones. During the first half of the past century Turanism became part of the extreme right’s official rhetoric, falling into disrepute after World War II, and being evicted from popular knowledge during communism. It was only after the regime change of 1989 that elements of Turanic thought were revived in certain extreme-right circles. Today it is most openly promoted by the radical-nationalist Jobbik party, whose long-held aim is to change the official position of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences on the question of the Hungarian ‘ancestral homeland,’ together with its representation in textbooks.

The most public display of Turanism takes place every two years with the occasion of an international ‘tribal meeting’ (Kurultáj, in Turkic languages) which has been organized in Hungary since 2008. The main organizer of the event is the anthropologist and human biologist András Zsolt Bíró, who maintains close ties with Jobbik, having received the party’s ‘Pongrátz Gergely Cross of Merit’ for his scientific research. His main research centered on genetic tests carried out on members of a Kazakhstani tribe called Madjars, and his findings published in 2009 in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology disclosed a genetic affinity between the Madjars and the Hungarians (Magyars).

Photo by Mudra László (origo.hu). Taken at the exhibition “What Is Hungarian? Contemporary Answers.”

It was against this background that the ‘Asian discourse’ of the Hungarian government began to emerge through themes relating to different – economic, cultural and racial – sub-discourses. The broadest discourse officially assumed by the government at the highest level is that of ‘eastward opening,’ proposing closer economic cooperation with countries in Asia. We can track the emergence of this discourse in several speeches given by the Prime Minister in 2009 and 2010. It first surfaced through the metaphor of Hungary as a ship sailing under a western flag, but having to turn its sail according to an ‘eastern wind’ blowing in the world economy. This economic discourse, however, soon acquired a political and cultural dimension. The event which brought this discourse to the surface was a speech given by the Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in 2012, where he talked about the necessity of ‘power’ (or force) to unite and lead a ‘half-Asian’ nation like Hungary. The speech was especially controversial due to its ambiguity regarding the future of western liberal democracy. What gave more media resonance to the Prime Minister’s words was another event which occurred soon after: the official visit to the Parliament of the representatives of several Asian ‘tribes’ taking part in the Kurultáj. The fact that the Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly officially received the organizers and participants at the Parliament was presented in the opposition media as a formal acceptance of Turanism, an origin theory which remains repudiated by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

Later that year, another event caused controversy, this time a statement made by the then National Economy Minister György Matolcsy at a small gathering. Reacting to a question from the audience, the minister defended the Prime Minister’s views regarding the ‘half-Asian’ provenience of the Hungarians by explaining how both Hungarian and Japanese babies share the so-called ‘Mongolian spot,’ a bruise-like birthmark visible on the lower back or buttocks of children in their early infancy. The statement was ridiculed in the left-wing opposition media, but as an unscripted reaction to an attendee’s question, it shows just how deeply the sense of racial affinity with Inner Asian and Far Eastern nations has penetrated into popular cognition.

Such cultural and racial discourses are closely linked to Turanic visions, and have served to support the government’s economic and political discourse of ‘eastern opening.’ Nevertheless, the spread and legitimation of Turanism may in the long run serve the political ambitions of the extreme right, currently in opposition. Showing clear similarities with the Eurasianist discourse promoted in Russia by ideologues close to president Putin, the spread of Turanism in Hungary can also have geo-political repercussions.

[For the full article see Chris Moreh, “The Asianization of national fantasies in Hungary: A critical analysis of political discourse,” published in the International Journal of Cultural Studies.]

Image: Lisa Anne Auerbach.

Post by Katariina Kyrölä, University of Turku, Finland

This post is part of a partnership with the International Journal of Cultural Studies, where authors of newly published articles extend their arguments here on Antenna. 

My first memory of porn is a torn and wrinkled page I saw on a dirt road close to my grandma’s place sometime in the late 70s or early 80s (I’m born in 1973). … It was really hard to figure out what the picture was about. It was a close-up of a very hairy bush and manly equipment. I remember realizing what it must be about, and I was very confused, not turned on at all. (female, born 1973)

When I was younger, little things were enough to get me excited. A single torn page of a porn magazine, wet from the rain, could be a treasure I’d keep for a long while. … I haven’t thought that pornography significantly defined my sexuality as a child, but now I’m of course picky about what pleases me and what I aim for, perhaps because of my own activities as a creator and collector of porn. (male, n.d.)

These two excerpts, reminiscing first encounters with pornography and their influence in later life, are a part of a small but varied and colorful archive of 45 essays on how people have used porn in Finland. The essays, written as responses to a call for contributions in 2012, offer fascinating glimpses into the roles and meanings of pornography in every lives, sexual self-definitions, and media use practices from the 1930s to recent years. While yielding no possibility for generalizations, this archive is nevertheless rich in detail about the largely uncharted territory of the experiential power of porn for its users (see also McKee et al., 2008; Smith et al., 2011).

The two excerpts describe how one single page or image, seemingly bordering on trash but found and even treasured as a child, has stuck to the author’s memory for decades. The authors do not describe these early encounters as traumatic but as curiosity-provoking, looking at their younger selves with tenderness and amusement.

The influence of such encounters – or porn use in general – is impossible to specify or quantify. Instead, they can be understood to contribute to somatic archives (Paasonen 2011) concerning sexuality. Somatic archives are accumulations of memory, sensation and knowledge which layer in the body through encounters with sexual scenarios, be they lived, represented or imagined. Both personally specific and culturally shared, somatic archives direct our encounters with bodies, media technologies, and sexual acts in the present and the future, whether we are conscious of it or not. Somatic archives take shape just as much through chance encounters, carried in the body as a vivid memory of a wrinkled image of a bush, as through repeated actions of searching for porn online amongst the billions of available images.

Image: Lisa Anne Auerbach.

The point of somatic archives is not to consider porn as an external influence on people’s sexuality, but to investigate the complex layering of cultural memory, personal inclination and media technologies. Body ideals, or sexual and porn use preferences more broadly, came up in the essays as questions of self-definition and self-styling as much as desires and orientations towards other bodies, acts, scenarios, and images. Especially memories from before the age of online porn, emphasized colors, textures and the work of gaining access to porn with much pleasure and nostalgic intensity.

It was the 80s, and one centerfold … has stuck to my mind. On the first page, it had a woman in heavy make-up and big blond curls putting her fingertip in her mouth, and between her labia in the second picture. She had bright red nail polish and equally bright lipstick, and she looked right into the camera defiantly. A teenage girl concluded pretty fast that big, curly, blond hair and red nails were sexy like nothing else! I grew out my nails and got blond highlights. It took until I was 16 before I was allowed to use even a hint of red lipstick, but oh what a victory of femininity it was when strange young men, and older ones too, commented on my red lips. (female, born 1970)

We invited a local horse breeder guy, decades older than the rest of us and of Irish decent, to one of our pornographic film viewings. He had never seen a porn film before and eyes wide he wondered about the large colorful image and the positions and skills of the man appearing in the film, and he stood up in ecstasy clicking his mouth and even went up to stroke the woman on the screen and said that his wife and him had definitely never had sex like that. (male, born 1948)

Both authors, the first describing mid-1980s, the second mid-1970s, recount the private and socially shared porn encounters as titillating highlights in their sexual history, but also as chances to expand ideas about what sex and sexuality meant for them or other people. Indeed, one of the most consistently recurring themes in the material was how pornography, whether accidentally encountered or consciously searched for and acquired, broadened and opened up authors’ somatic archives in terms of what they could imagine enjoying, desiring and being capable of sexually.

Often you hear the claim that porn gives the wrong impression of women, because they say it features only thin, beautiful, big-breasted and feminine women. But immediately when you look at what porn websites actually offer, you notice that this is not the case. You find fat, small-breasted, boyish and bald women there just as well. … I like to look at normal-sized, maybe a bit heavier women. … Men I don’t really want to see, although I’m not sure if I’m bisexual or lesbian. (female, born 1994)

For this author, like for many others in our material, porn preferences and personal sexual and romantic preferences were not always clearly compatible. The practically limitless contemporary online porn resources were seen as particularly useful and easy routes to experiment with one’s preferences and find new points of resonance for one’s sexual self-definition. Overall, our respondents’ narratives fit poorly in the current discourses of concern over the supposedly homogenizing or traumatizing effects of online porn for people’s body images or perceptions of sex.

For further reading on somatic archives, memories of porn use in Finland, and the notion of the archive in the context of queer theory, porn studies, and media studies, please read the recent article “Glimmers of the forbidden fruit: Reminiscing pornography, conceptualizing the archive” in International Journal of Cultural Studies, authored by myself and Susanna Paasonen.

Literature:
McKee A, Albury K and Lumby C (2008) The Porn Report. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Paasonen S (2011) Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Smith C, Attwood F and Barker M (2011) Pornresearch.org: preliminary results. Available at: http://www.pornresearch.org/Firstsummaryforwebsite.pdf

Post by Rayna Denison (University of East Anglia) and Hiroko Furukawa (Tohoku Gakuin University)

This post is part of a partnership with the International Journal of Cultural Studies, where authors of newly published articles extend their arguments here on Antenna. 

On the morning of March 12^th 2011, we awoke in the UK to news of a devastating earthquake and tsunami that had swept across the northern part of Japan’s main island of Honshu the previous day. From there, the news worsened with an unfolding nuclear disaster, as the Fukushima nuclear power plant was revealed to be in meltdown, requiring the evacuation of tens of thousands of people from the surrounding area. Whole towns simply disappeared. Nearly 20,000 people are now known to be dead with thousands more missing, and hundreds of thousands of people have been left without homes. Amidst this devastation, our article asks how Japan’s fiction media producers responded to the mood and needs of audiences across the Japanese archipelago.

The 3.11 disaster, as it would come to be called, has been the fastest and perhaps most highly mediated disaster in Japan’s history, and the extensive news coverage has be paralleled by the attempts of media producers to just as rapidly tell stories about, and help with the healing process around, the earthquake and its aftermath. We therefore investigated the importance of Japan’s story media to audiences struggling to deal with the consequences of the Great East Japan Earthquake of 3.11.

We have found an ongoing discourse about trauma, healing, and recovery in media ranging from manga to anime and film. Although this in itself may not surprise, the speed with which Japan’s media producers and creators have moved from issues of disaster to those debates around healing and recovery is remarkable. The disaster physically changed Japan’s media, causing everything from paper shortages to necessitating new, ad hoc cinema construction. It also shifted attention towards new media production, with popular manga including Weekly Shōnen Jump being made available online in new experimental ways. Beyond problems in production and distribution, the 3.11 disaster also highlighted the growing importance of social media in Japan, with popular Tohoku-region manga artists and filmmakers announcing their survival via Twitter and personal websites.

The story worlds of Japan’s media were also reshaped by the disaster. Broadcasters re-edited popular anime television shows to remove potentially upsetting content, while filmmakers like Sion Sono scrambled to re-design the content of their films to reflect the impact of the disaster on Japan’s mediascape. Sono was one of the first to include real footage of the tsunami-struck northern areas, making them part of the psychologically-scarred landscape of his film Himizu (2012). Likewise, media producers attempted to raise awareness and help with relief by synergistically combining popular releases with exhibition and performances in the affected region. For example, Japan’s biggest animation company, Studio Ghibli, did advance screenings of their film From Up on Poppy Hill (2011) within the disaster-stricken areas, and many pop stars put on free concerts to raise awareness and provide relief for those affected.

Since those early moments, though, there have been increasing numbers of film documentaries attempting to reflect on the disaster, and there have been numerous manga that have also acted to document personal accounts of disaster and recovery. Some media producers, like those behind the multiple volumes of Stories from 311 are actively helping to raise funds for the relief effort, whereas other manga authors are providing “iyashi-kei” or healing-style accounts of the events. In these ways, Japan’s fiction-oriented media producers have inherited the work of the Japan’s news media, and are continuing to produce media with the aim of keeping the 3.11 disaster, and relief efforts associated with it, in consumers’ minds. A good example would be Ryoichi Kimizuka’s film Reunion (Itai: Asu e no Tōkakan, 2013), a populist film about the treatment of the dead in the wake of the tsunami, which was produced by powerful television executive Chihiro Kameyama. Based on news stories from the time, the film both recounts the disaster as memory, while emphasising the disaster’s ongoing significance within Japan’s national culture.

[For the full article, see Hiroko Furukawa and Rayna Denison, “‘Disaster and Relief: The 3.11 Tohoku and Fukushima Disasters and Japan’s Media Industries,” published in International Journal of Cultural Studies, March 2015, vol. 18 no. 2: http://ics.sagepub.com/content/18/2/225.abstract]

Post by D. Elizabeth Cohen, Gyeongju University

This post is part of a partnership with the International Journal of Cultural Studies, where authors of newly published articles extend their arguments here on Antenna. 

In the five years that I have been living in South Korea, I have noticed an amazing amount of variety in attitudes and practices regarding the inclusion of the “foreigners” – of which I am one – increasingly sharing the country. One thing is for sure: Korea’s is not a monolithic society. In my article that appeared in the September 2014 issue of the International Journal of Cultural Studies, I wrote about the gap that occurred between the originally envisioned Digital Media City (DMC) and what actually resulted. DMC is a creative industries ICT (information and communication technology) cluster, originally planned as a creative cluster to foster the creative economy in Korea through an open environment and free exchange between locals and internationals. In my article I noted that while DMC is successful by many standards, this free exchange has not occurred and pointed to the lack of English signage at DMC as an indicator.

As a second generation American growing up in a home with two languages – one used by the adults to keep secrets from “the kids” – I am sensitive to the power of language both to exclude and to include. What I noticed at DMC – among other proper and prestigious Korean institutions – most with international aspirations and world-class pretensions – is a lack of bilingualism and the inclusion that would result. I simultaneously observed in down-to-earth organizational settings more representative of Korea’s usual homey kind heartedness, an attempt to accommodate “the other” through the use of English. Two examples: a yoga class I attended that was my life line while in Seoul, and a cultural symposium dedicated to the topic of Korea’s “comfort women.” Some forward-thinking sectors of Korean society “get” the importance of bilingualism for inclusion, and other more traditional thinkers really don’t – even, surprisingly, in the reverse (that is, the need to provide translation to make English environments more inclusive of Koreans).

I concluded in my article that because DMC’s planning occurred at an unusual time in Korea’s history – influenced by IMF mandates in the late 1990s – this accounts at least partially for the implementation disconnect. Something else I might have pointed out is that creating internationalization through an engineered creative cluster is far from a paint-by-the-numbers affair. The plan might have been half-baked from the outset, less the fault of the South Korean planners than the MIT consultants on whom they relied.

But while DMC has only fulfilled its envisioned internationalization role in a limited way, I like to think that internationalization in South Korea is slowly evolving in smaller, more humble settings – like my classroom – using popular culture artifacts! What never could have been predicted at the time of DMC’s planning would be the emergence of YouTube and its tremendous power for globalization and internationalization*. I now make extensive use of YouTube’s resources in my Literacy and Internationalization university classes in the heritage city, at which I now teach after leaving the Communication department at my former well regarded Seoul university.

Digital media from YouTube is a form of globalization that young Koreans wholeheartedly embrace. There is a huge gap in Korea between young and old – a subject for another blog piece – and young Koreans are in general more welcoming of internationals. But overall, young people reject the English learning imposed upon them by their elders, perhaps reflecting a mistrust of the instrumental motives of improving the Korean economy through the ability to provide a cadre of faceless but impeccable English speakers.

In contrast, watching quality 20^th century Western media on YouTube adds value to the individual lives of Korean young people – not just for their artistry and entertainment value but also for the communication of ethics and democratic values. This media offer students a personal reason to want to learn English. A true fan, I get a big kick out of watching my students’ reactions as I share gems such as Judy Garland’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” from the Wizard of Oz, Earth Wind and Fire tunes and performances, and archive-grade A-Train music videos. It is a privilege to equip aspiring design, musical and dramatic artists with stellar resources from which they can draw inspiration and improve their craft. It’s a do-it-yourself museum, and I’m the curator! Students get excited by these materials, and it motivates them to communicate. Where once they were shy, they now want to share their opinions – and they’ll do it in English if necessary.

Sharing these videos provides me with personal gratifications as well. As a child of the 1960s who once dismissed Dusty Springfield in favor of bigger ticket performers like The Beatles and Rolling Stones, my students’ admiration for her rendition of “Look of Love” caused me to give her and her body of work a second look that was enriching. And in watching and discussing gems from YouTube with my students, I get to be a Mom for the second time having the pleasure of witnessing the world once again through the eyes of my one-semester-only offspring.

While viewing YouTube videos in a classroom is mostly a one-way cultural exchange, and doesn’t fulfill the two-way free exchange aspirations of the architects of DMC, it is a step in the right direction of the evolving process of internationalization that does not seem to happen easily anywhere in the world. Why should it be different in South Korea?

The popular culture resources now available on YouTube are Western ambassadors that can bring great value to others around the world. Such media can be used for many educational and cultural purposes – not only to promote English literacy abroad – but within American shores as well. They are an inestimable treasure that shouldn’t be taken for granted.

* There is a connection between DMC and YouTube; some commercial content creators for YouTube are in residence at DMC where they develop and distribute digital content

[For the full article, see D. Elizabeth Cohen, “Seoul’s Digital Media City: A History and 2012 Status Report on a South Korean Digital Arts and Entertainment ICT Cluster,” forthcoming in International Journal of Cultural Studies. Currently available as an OnlineFirst publication: http://ics.sagepub.com/content/17/6/557.abstract]

Correspondence: DrDElizabethcohen@cognition-ignition.com

Post by Yiu-wai Chu, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

This post is part of a partnership with the International Journal of Cultural Studies, where authors of newly published articles extend their arguments here on Antenna. 

Hong Kong, now a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China, had been a British colony for 156 years before sovereignty over the territory was handed to China in 1997. Shortly after reversion to its “motherland,” it was expected that Hong Kong people would have a stronger sense of belonging to their home city. The surprisingly stellar rise of China in the new millennium, however, has resulted in many impacts on Hong Kong. Hong Kong people have worried about forced integrations, in particular during the post-free-tour period, when countless Mainlanders crossed the border to purchase different commodities, ranging from luxury goods to baby formula.

The Hong Kong SAR government launched BrandHK, a global communications platform, in 2001 to focus international attention on Hong Kong’s drive to become “Asia’s World City.” In March 2010, a “Faces of Hong Kong” campaign was inaugurated via the BrandHK platform as a new marketing and communications strategy to promote the city and enhance the sense of belonging of Hong Kong people. The strategy of the overhauled campaign endeavored to highlight the “human” side of Hong Kong, thus its main thrust was focused on a series of promotional videos that featured different Hong Kong citizens. While the series of promotional videos feature both celebrities and common folk, familiar faces, such as international film star Chow Yun-Fat, have stolen the limelight. Although Chow Yun-Fat has achieved global success in his film career, he is well-known for being local as well. Praised by local media as “The Son of Hong Kong,” Chow Yun-Fat is famous for living an ordinary local life, despite his enormous success. As such, Chow Yun-Fat was the choice to promote Hong Kong to the world, as this campaign focuses on locals.“Faces of Hong Kong” tactfully used Kowloon City, Chow Yun-Fat’s favourite neighbourhood, as the main setting. In the video there were lots of signatures local stores where Chow has been hanging out for several decades. “Over the years, other parts of Hong Kong have changed a lot, but Kowloon City is a place that still feels the same. Much of what I remember from my childhood is still here. The way of life, the atmosphere, the friendliness of the neighbourhood. It’s the same for me now as it was back in the sixties.” Chow’s voice-over in the video might sound sweet to many years, but my “re-search” of Kowloon City told a different story. If the feeling of being at home is based on “security, familiarity, community and a sense of possibility,” which are actually the underlying themes of the “Faces of Hong Kong” promotional videos, the case of Kowloon City exposes a harsh reality that insists on showing a different picture: these key feelings have no place in the redeveloped district.

Photo 1: Kowloon City wet market; across the street once stood the famous local restaurant Dragon Palace.

Photo 2: New Citygate Chinese Herbal Medicine Store on the left; across the street once stood the district’s largest department store, International, boasting a history of more than 50 years.

My pedestrian inquiry started with Kowloon City’s public wet market, Chow Yun-Fat’s favourite. Just across the road from the market stood a well-known local restaurant called Dragon Palace, but it was closed in 2012 and was subsequently torn down to make way for new luxury apartments (Photo 1). Unfortunately, this was not an isolated event. On the other side of the public market, the same developer demolished another old residential building to make way for its real estate project entitled “Billionaire Avant.” One block away from the public market stands three famous local stores: New Citygate Chinese Herbal Medicine Store (Photo 2), Hoover Cake Shop (Photo 3) and Kung Wo Soya Bean Factory (Photo 4). In the “Faces of Hong Kong” video, Chow Yun-Fat tastes delicious egg tarts at Hoover and consumes thirst-quenching soya bean milk at Kung Wo. These are undoubtedly landmark stores with a long history. However, on the same street many old buildings have already been swallowed up by developers. In the promotional video, Chow Yun-Fat works excitedly with the staff of New Citygate Chinese Herbal Medicine Store. The store is still there but the building just across the road, once housing the district’s largest “international” department store and boasting a history of more than fifty years, was pulled down not long after the video was released. Urban redevelopment is not uncommon in metropolis regions such as Hong Kong; however, what is most troubling is that the retailers of the new buildings are often completely different from their predecessors. As profit is the raison d’être of property developers, it is not surprising that the street stores in the luxurious redeveloped buildings target chain-store renters who can afford higher rates (Photo 5). It is a shame that the recent changes in Kowloon City, which might become a “generic district” in the near future, has told a story opposite to a local sense of belonging.

Photo 3: Hoover Cake Shop on the left; a new luxury apartment project across the street.

Photo 4: Kung Wo Soya Bean Factory on the right; a new luxury apartment project across the street.

Photo 5: A new building with street shops occupied by chain stores.

While “Faces of Hong Kong” highlights the stories of Hong Kong people from all walks of life, they are simply used to illuminate the values of “Asia’s World City,” which desperately brands Hong Kong as a generic global city. Generic cities that embrace neoliberal capitalism are very similar in nature. It is difficult if not impossible to have a strong sense of belonging if the “homes” in these cities are all equals. The problem is that both China and the West would like Hong Kong to further develop into a generic commercial city. The fluid, vibrant, and hybridized everyday life practices, a vital source of multiplicity in Hong Kong over the past fifty years, have been under threat in the past decade or so. Hong Kong citizens recently expressed that it is ever more important to safeguard core local values. Apart from values, sadly, local space cannot remain unfazed as well. Urban redevelopment has been sped up by not only rampant capitalism but also integration with the Mainland, the free tours from which, for instance, profoundly alters the ecology of the local market. The example of Kowloon City has shown that “to belong” has already become a luxury for many Hong Kong people.

[For the full article, see Yiu-Wai Chu, “‘Faces of Hong Kong’: My City? My Home?,” forthcoming in International Journal of Cultural Studies. Currently available as an OnlineFirst publication: http://ics.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/02/25/1367877915572186.abstract]

All photos taken by the author on 23 October 2013.

This post is part of a partnership with the International Journal of Cultural Studies, where authors of newly published articles extend their arguments here on Antenna. 

Amid the flood of actors, directors, and reporters congregating in Park Springs, Utah, for the 2015 Sundance Film Festival was a cadre of social media influencers that New York Times writer Sheila Marikar designated the “new celebrity crowd.” With thousands—even millions—of social media followers each, these fashion bloggers, YouTube vloggers, and Instagrammers were being wooed by advertisers and publicists at the Sundance gifting suites, where they were furnished with designer clothes, shoes, tech accessories, and more. In exchange, the social media personalities were expected to share photos and reviews of the Sundance swag with their followers, part of a mutual incentive system that increasingly structures digital communication in the so-called “attention economy.”

Although gender was scarcely mentioned in the NYT article, the feminized nature of the system was patently clear: the majority of the social media personalities mentioned were female, a disparity which was highlighted by a comment from a PR rep, “When it comes to the sales, the digital girls are making those. We see higher conversions off those girls than we do with celebrity placement that we might have paid money for” (italics added for emphasis). And save for the male chief executive of a talent agency, three of the four publicists quoted were women. This brings to mind Ann Friedman’s provocation last year about the gendered dimension of the public relations profession, which she said is treated like “a pink ghetto.”

The article also drew attention to the highly gendered discourses of affective or emotional labor, particularly in the context of the promotional “love fest.” Justine Ezarik, more commonly known as iJustine, gushed to Marikar, “I love products, and I love sharing if I love something. Like, you can probably guarantee that it’s going to be posted, especially if I love it.” For retailers and advertisers, an endorsement by a social media influencer like Ezarik enables them to rise above the flood of ubiquitous marketing messages through a seemingly authentic brand promotion.

While the NYT article profiled those faring quite well from their social media promotions, legions of other young women engage in similar brand work—without monetary compensation. Often, these creative aspirants are seduced by the infectious rhetoric of “dream jobs” and “passion projects”; indeed, the notion of doing what you love has become so central to contemporary career narratives that scholar and Jacobin contributor Miya Tokumitsu declared it the “unofficial work mantra of our time.”

My recent International Journal of Cultural Studies article, “The Romance of Work: Gender and Aspirational Labour in Digital Culture Industries,” brings gender politics to the fore of discussions about using social media to pursue one’s labor of love. Based on a study of female social media producers, I contend that digital labor scholars must take seriously the meaning-making activities of participants, especially female content creators.

Drawing upon in-depth interviews with eighteen fashion bloggers, beauty vloggers, and DIY stylists—as well as an analysis of social media professionalization resources—I argue that these young women are engaged in “aspirational labor”: a highly gendered form of (mostly) uncompensated work that 1) amateur participants believe has the potential to “pay off” in terms of future economic and social capital; and 2) that keeps female content creators immersed in the public circulation of commodities. Like individuals performing social roles through aspirational consumerism—for instance, purchasing luxury goods to mark oneself as a member of elite social strata—aspirational laborers seek to mark themselves as creative producers who will one day be compensated for their craft—either directly or through employment in the culture industries.

My analysis explores three salient features of aspirational labor: narratives of authenticity and realness; the instrumentality of affective relationships; and entrepreneurial brand devotion. The latter, which describes the “new celebrity” Sundance promotions, reaffirms a cultural history of gendered social sharing surrounding consumer goods. Scholars Crystal Abidin and Eric C. Thompson aptly refer to the presentation of intimacy that takes place at the intersection of femininity and commercialism as “persona intimacy.”

As I show in the article, many individuals try to curry favor with brands by freely publicizing their products and messages; however, the reward system for these aspirants is highly uneven. Only a few of these young women rise above the din to achieve the level of digital stardom associated with internet personalities like Ezarik. The rest, meanwhile, remain suspended in the highly gendered consumption and promotion of branded goods. Despite such unevenness, I argue that aspirational labor does “pay off” in one important way: it has successfully romanticized work at a moment when its conditions and affordances are evermore precarious, time-intensive, underpaid—and decidedly unromantic.

[For the full article, see Brooke Erin Duffy, “The Romance of Work: Gender and Aspirational Labour in the Digital Culture Industries,” forthcoming in International Journal of Cultural Studies. Currently available as an OnlineFirst publication: http://ics.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/02/25/1367877915572186.abstract]

When the young British celebrity Peaches Geldof was found dead at her home in April 2014, early speculations frequently pointed the
finger at anorexia, suggesting that her low weight and dramatic weight loss could have played a causal role in her untimely demise (aged 25). Indeed, the apparently high incidence of anorexia – which is still positioned predominantly as a female problem – within female celebrity culture is suggestive of the ways in which the latter can be seen to function as an arena which offers hyperbolic representations of femininity. Female stars and celebrities live under a constant media spotlight of surveillance which in turn demands a prescriptive regime of self-maintenance, and thus can be seen to represent an extreme version of the condition of femininity within patriarchal culture (Holmes and Negra, 2011). Furthermore, the emphasis on eating disorders as somehow an ‘inevitable’, naturalised and expected discourse in female celebrity culture at least gives space to the argument that eating disorders are culturally produced (by, for example, the pressures placed on female celebrities in terms of the dominant corporeal norms of the entertainment industries, which in turn reflect back upon the cultural norms and pressures surrounding the feminine body more widely). Although medical explanations of anorexia do not entirely exclude the presence of cultural or social factors, their definition of the eating ‘disorder’ – itself a medical term – as a mental illness places greater emphasis on psychological and ‘individual’ causes. In addition, mainstream treatments of anorexia – the limited success of which is widely noted – invariably pay no attention to gender at all.

I never really thought about this fact when I spent the summer of 2009 in a residential clinic for the treatment of eating disorders, a period which marked my 20^th year as a sufferer of anorexia. Working as a lecturer and scholar in Media, Television and Cultural Studies, I had long since been aware that there existed a large body of feminist research on anorexia, but despite identifying as a feminist since my undergraduate  days, and adopting a feminist approach in many aspects of my research and teaching, I saw this as an academic terrain to avoid. I understood that feminists preferred cultural rather than biological or psychiatric explanations of eating disorders, and I imagined that the media was presented as a prime causal factor here. I felt insulted by the suggestion that I was simply pursuing an excessive imitation of the slender ideal, which simultaneously positioned me as a vulnerable or ‘passive’ media reader. I also didn’t want to give any more headspace to anorexia, which already dominated my every waking hour: to me, it was my life, my everyday hell, and not an object of scholarly enquiry or debate.

But in 2014, and five years into my recovery (the clinic worked for me, although sadly not for many of the friends I made in there), I got curious, and I began to read about feminist approaches to anorexia, staring with many of the foundational books in the field  (e.g. Orbach, 1978, 1986, Lawrence, 1984, Chernin, 1985). The work was more rich and complex than I imagined, yet despite the fact that some of the early books were penned by women who had experienced anorexia, or who had worked directly with sufferers, I baulked at the apparent assumption of commonality between all women, as well as the tendency to insist on one particular political interpretation of the anorexic body and experience. This was particularly so given the suggestion that the anorexic was seen as essentially unaware of the political contours of their problem or ‘protest’ (e.g. see Bordo, 1993: 159). This tension between how feminism speaks to the experience of ‘woman’, and the ways in which it cannot ‘be taken as a password misleading us into false notion of “oneness” with all women purely on the grounds of gender’ (McRobbie, 2000, 127) has been widely discussed within feminism. But it remains the case that the emphasis on political solidarity and common experience has historically retained an effective political charge within the feminist movement. Indeed, whilst I felt angry, frustrated (and initially somewhat patronised) by the feminist literature on anorexia, I also began to feel a sense of growing identification as I recognised myself on page after page. I realised that much of the feminist claims rang true for me and my own anorexic trajectory, and as a result, I got angry about how my two decades of suffering might well be explained by recourse to gender subordination.

I felt that this apparent tension between my identities as (former) anorexic and feminist, and the complex, uneasy, frustrating and rewarding fit between them, was worth writing about, and in using authoethnography, I wanted to capture the contradictory ways in which the critical feminist work on anorexia spoke to me. Yet in writing this blog now in February 2015, I am aware of how my perspective on the feminist work has changed yet again: I now harbour even less anger and ambivalence about my own relationship to its claims, and I find the work increasingly persuasive, illuminating and even empowering. Such research has enabled me to undertake a political re-evaluation of the ways in which I was treated (and mis-treated) as an anorexic, seeing the medical definitions and interventions as deeply ideological, subjective and thus open to challenge. Indeed, writing the original article made me remember – although I had never really forgotten – the political travesty of the fact that thousands of girls and women are starving themselves, every hour of every day (and that many more are developing anorexia as I write these words).  Why such sufferers are unlikely to encounter feminist interventions of anorexia, why they should and how they might do so in the future, is the ambitious focus of my next piece.

[For the full article, see Su Holmes, “Between Feminism and Anorexia: An Autoethnography,” forthcoming in International Journal of Cultural Studies. Currently available as an OnlineFirst publication: http://ics.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/12/19/1367877914561831.abstract]

At the moment, the Internet is overflowing with new music streaming services. Spotify, Wimp, Beats Music, and Deezer are only a few examples from a popular media format for finding and listening to music. The business idea is to sell subscriptions for the services, containing a large selection of music. The person subscribing can then personalize the collections by making their own playlists and saving favorites on the streaming service. No files are downloaded, but the data is streamed and if payment stops, the access to music will disappear. At the same time, music blogs and file sharing are still available sources of music online, complementing rather than competing with the streaming services.

While young adults participating in interviews about their music use online are overwhelmingly positive regarding the availability of music on the internet today, they also argue that it can be hard to find the music they want to listen to since the amount of music online is endless. The role of guidance—through the streaming services’ interfaces as well as by named experts, music nerds, and persons knowledgeable about technology—is therefore perceived as important. Perhaps the experts take on an even more important role today because of the enormous access to all kinds of music?

Expertise in the area of music and technology has often been ascribed to men and understood as being something masculine. Through the history of popular music artists, producers, journalists, and listeners, those valued as good and important have often been men. Roles as experts like talent scouts and music journalists who have influenced what can be labeled ‘good music’ have contributed, through their positions, to symbolically rule the taste of the music industry. To fill these roles, persons have often been men/masculine and expected to be men/masculine. While women and femininity—especially sexy femininity—has always been used to sell records, music promoted with femininity has often been devalued. So has, often, music defying gender binaries in different ways. This can also be said about music by racialized others and music loved by the working class—music that has not been considered ‘good’ by contemporary critiques. Many devalued genres have been reconsidered and reevaluated in a later historic time, such as jazz and Motown. Much like the role of the music expert or music nerd, the technologically savvy person is often understood as man or masculine. In the area of music, the high fidelity lover building his own speakers as well as the home producer, using computers or a home studio to produce his own music, are known figures—figures that combine technological skills with masculinity and music knowledge.

Thus, when the expert with particular and technological competence in general is regarded as important in order to find and listen to music online today, the field of music consumption is gendered. It is not gendered in a simplistic way—not all experts and technologically savvy persons are men—but when young music consumers talk about music listening online, they understand expert roles and technological competence as something masculine. Interviews show that the persons ascribing technological knowledge to themselves, and using specialist jargon when discussing hardware and software for music listening, were mostly, but not only, men. Also, when asked who had influenced their music taste or who gave them music, dads were mentioned in many interviews, and many young women referred to boyfriends, while moms were less frequently brought up, and girlfriends were not mentioned as musical influences at all.

On streaming services that are presently popular, there may be named and appointed experts fore-fronted in the interface. But there are also algorithms recommending music to listeners and these are not neutral engines. The services are often connected to other social networks (such as Facebook) where your friends may pose as experts. What may at first seem like vast libraries of music are really services spreading opinions, pictures, sounds, and ideas collected from other media, software, and famous, as well as ordinary, people.

It is beyond doubt that women today use the internet for all purposes, including music consumption and gaming (another form of popular culture associated with masculinity). Still experts, music nerds, dads, and boyfriends are points of reference when it comes to good music and technological knowledge. How can this contradiction be understood? The idea that equality is promoted automatically in online cultures—since everybody has access and thus the ability to reach the same position—is clearly incorrect. While digital media permeates our society in new ways, the power imbalances in terms of who is considered an expert in online music use seem familiar. I would even take this reasoning one step further: the expert plays a highly central role for music consumption online, as the interviewees believe. Experts guide others by recommending new music, creating playlists, and writing music blogs. Could the expert be getting even more important in digital music use? If that is the case, and experts are still in different ways perceived as masculine, then guidance for music-use online may be doing the opposite of promoting equality: reinforcing differences.

[For the full article, see Ann Werner and Sofia Johansson, “Experts, Dads and Technology: Gendered Talk About Online Music,” forthcoming in International Journal of Cultural Studies. Currently available as an OnlineFirst publication]

Ann Werner is Senior Lecturer at Södertörn University, Sweden

On January 2015, a new set of measures by the United States government opened a path towards the “normalization” of relations with Cuba after decades of mutual mistrust. However, as the expert in Cuban history Antoni Kapcia has argued, this should be seen as another milestone rather than a sea change in the long story of Cuban-U.S. relations. It is one thing to open up relations with the U.S. and another totally different thing to soften the internal power structure and the aggressive discourse towards the exile community in Cuba. Indeed, reconciliation between the “two Cubas” demands much more than political agreements or the abolition of the trade embargo. Since reconciliation is as much political as it is symbolic, it has to be preceded by a transformation of the public symbols and historic narratives that define what constitutes the imagined national community, and who is included or excluded from it. Cultural heritage and museums are tightly linked to the politics of recognition, defining the official discourses about past, present, and future. The politics of heritage have indeed played a fundamental role in this regard since the beginnings of the Cuban Revolution.

My IJCS paper “Transforming Ideology into Heritage: A Return of Nation and Identity in Late Socialist Cuba?” aims to shed light on the transformations of Cuban heritage policies in the period following the collapse of the Soviet Union. This contradictory period is characterized by pragmatism and ideological ambiguity, as Cuba has been hovering in no-man’s-land, not clearly transitioning towards capitalism nor abandoning its communist past. Since Cuba has not enacted a complete break with the symbols and heritages of its communist past, it is still more appropriate to talk about heritage management under communism than about the management of the heritage of communism. The latter applies in Eastern European countries, where post-communism has been characterized by a frenzy of heritage destruction and the construction of new monuments, as well as the musealization of the communist past and a popular nostalgic drive for communist material culture.

Cuba, however, is comparatively closer to countries such as China, Laos, or Vietnam where the communist party leads the transition towards hyper-capitalist economies. The ongoing process could be proof that Cuba is moving in the same direction in terms of economic and heritage policies, although a few decades later. These states endured the Soviet collapse because, as in Cuba, their revolutions enjoyed local support and were grounded on nationalist and anti-colonialist ideas rather than ideas imposed by the Red Army, as in Eastern Europe. The commoditization of the communist past in these Asian countries is paralleled by a growing divergence between the official heritage discourse and the capitalist values and beliefs that pervade their societies. The question remains whether Cuba will follow their steps or whether the representational regime inherited from communism will still be the dominant symbolic and representational regime. If this were the case, it is not feasible to expect abrupt short-term changes in the official discourse of the Cuban leadership — although the erratic trajectory of the Cuban Revolution defies any attempt to foreshadow its future routes.

The IJCS paper attempts to ground these questions in terms of heritage by showing how heritage policies have been tightly connected to government interests. Late socialist Cuba has concentrated on creating a sense of historic depth, triggering a memory-war to reinforce the idea of siege by an external enemy — globalization and the U.S. — and reinforcing the geopolitical links with Latin American left-wing governments. In addition, national identity has been highlighted over the class identity that had formerly permeated Cuban discourse under Soviet influence. These transformations are encapsulated in what I call the transformation of ideology into heritage. This process implies that every new ideological shift is immediately given heritage status through monuments and museums. The twofold aim is to emphasize the significance and future endurance of the new ideology, and to make it look older and therefore to appear more legitimate. The transformation of ideology into heritage involves a construction of identity in exclusionary nationalist and dialectic terms, thus posing a challenge to reconciliation. The revolutionary insistence in defining Cuban identity against an external Other and to reinforce the sense of collective belonging can indeed be problematic if a transition towards more inclusive forms of discourse is intended in the new period.

Statue of Cuban intellectual and national hero José Martí in the Anti-Imperialist Tribune, Havana. Martí is holding the children Elián González and pointing with an accusatory finger to the US Interest Section, the potential future full-embassy of the US. This hostile symbology of the area illustrates the need to revisit public symbolic landscapes in Cuba if new political and social identities are to be constructed.

Reconciliation should not be limited exclusively to giving exiles the possibility to travel or live  in Cuba; it should consider their inclusion in the narratives and symbols of the nation, which still present them largely as traitors or “others” rather than as constituent subjects of the national community. Heritage has been fundamental in the negotiation of these identities, both in the island and abroad. In Miami, a parallel Cuban exile heritage industry has emerged where monuments and museums make different claims from the past, commemorating other Cuban stories, heroes, and values. On the island, an utterly ambiguous but clearly more open institution that could pave the way for reconciliation in heritage terms is the Oficina del Historiador de la Ciudad (Office of the City Historian of Havana), led by the charismatic Eusebio Leal. The Office revisits the Republican and Colonial pasts of Havana while restoring Old Havana and packaging it for international tourists.

The official discourse of the Office avoids state propaganda and aims to establish more friendly relationships with foreign cultural and political institutions. Certainly, the new Cuban-U.S. agreements will boost tourism and will probably force the Cuban government to follow the path of the Office in presenting a friendlier image for tourists through heritage representations. The maintenance of two images of Cuba for different target publics (domestic and foreign) will not be feasible to sustain as tourism rockets. However, it is unlikely that the regime will market the communist past and symbols because those have become the official “language of power” and representational regimes of the state (e.g., socialist realism).

Understanding the roots of this process is fundamental to current prospects of reconciliation with Cuban exiles, as Cuba will surely not get rid of the burdens of the past right away. The radical nationalist approach to heritage policies and the politics of recognition deriving from it distort history prevent the possibility of learning from past errors and conflicts. Because inclusion can only be successful by recognizing the narratives of others and representing them publicly, the endurance of exclusionary and acritical heritage policies hampers any move in this direction. Cuba is thus beset by a complex conundrum. If the revolutionary past is ignored and the country draws a line under the past to move on, the society that caused the Revolution might reproduce their conflict. But, if Cubans strive to deal with the heritage of the Revolution, they will most likely cling to partisan views and be surely conditioned by their involvement with the system in one way or another. The new turn in the Cuban-U.S. relations therefore opens more questions than it solves in terms of the future political and cultural trajectory of the Revolution and the question of reconciliation. Without doubt, however, heritage will be a terrain of struggle for Cubans, both on the island and abroad, in the years to come.

[For the full article, see Pablo Alonso González “Transforming Ideology Into Heritage: A Return of Nation and Identity in Late Socialist Cuba?,” forthcoming in International Journal of Cultural Studies. Currently available as an OnlineFirst publication: http://ics.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/12/23/1367877914562712.abstract]