Within cinematic horror, trauma as a concept has often been used as an allegorical strategy to work through collective anxieties. This article on It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2014) and Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017) strikes another note. It argues that, by their aesthetic qualities, both films are rendered traumatic in their affective orientation, both toward the cinematic world and toward the spectator. It analyses the two films through trauma as an affective-aesthetic strategy that puts emphasis on the edge of (...) the frame as well as on the offscreen space. This strategy evokes a sinister mood that exists independently of the protagonists, allowing us to meaningfully feel the effects of their trauma as we engage with the film. Especially the use of the offscreen space in both films contributes to the “traumatic mood” of the films, but it also functions to immerse the spectator in the invisible filmic world. In this way, It Follows and Get Out embody trauma as a denial of relief from dread, which we both recognize in the characters' experience, and feel in our own bodies through the effective creation of ever-present threat. (shrink)

This article tells the story of the 2003 resignation of Peter Hollingworth as Governor-General as part of an ongoing hyper-anxiety in Australia about the state and status of ‘the child’. The sexually abused child sits at the centre of this story and carries a heavy burden with respect to the past and future of the white Australian nation. The recuperation of that child to a state of innocence, repeatedly, as stories of its abuse keep returning to our front pages and (...) political agendas, is necessary for the reproduction of the white nation. This article shows that the Hollingworth drama is entwined with the current politics of motherhood and fatherhood and the carriage of national feeling and temporality through the performances of these always racialised identities. Attending to the politics of the historical construction of the child, and the idealised parents who abuse or protect it, thus becomes a part of the project of accountability to the past which has also occupied public life in Australia over recent years. (shrink)

Las reflexiones en torno a la escritura de acontecimientos traumáticos como fueron las dictaduras chilenas y argentinas genera una serie de aporías que podrían resumirse en las siguientes cuestiones: ¿cómo comprender aquello que sobrepasa toda comprensión?, ¿cómo narrar lo inenarrable?, ¿cómo recomponer los testimonios de acontecimientos desprovistos de testigos? En este ensayo me propongo explorar estos asuntos en relación con cuatro novelas que parten de la ausencia, en tanto el pasado de la dictadura -identificado no solo como irrepresentable, también como (...) incomprensible- origina una falta o carencia de la que emerge la escritura. Concretamente se analizarán las novelas de los hijos, quienes eran aún niños durante la dictadura y por ello la vivieron de manera indirecta a través de sus padres: Formas de volver a casa (2011) de Alejandro Zambra, Una misma noche (2012) de Leopoldo Brizuela, El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia (2011) de Patricio Pron y Fuenzalida (2010) de Nona Fernández. (shrink)

Whilst considerable research exists on determining consumer responses to pre-determined statements within numerous ad ethics contexts, our understanding of consumer thoughts regarding ad ethics in general remains lacking. The purpose of our study therefore is to provide a first illustration of an emic and informant-based derivation of perceived ad ethics. The authors use multi-dimensional scaling as an approach enabling the emic, or locally derived deconstruction of perceived ad ethics. Given recent calls to develop our understanding of ad ethics in different (...) cultural contexts, and in particular within the Middle East and North Africa region, we use Lebanon—the most ethically charged advertising environment within MENA—as an illustrative context for our study. Results confirm the multi-faceted and pluralistic nature of ad ethics as comprising a number of dimensional themes already salient in the existing literature but in addition, we also find evidence for a bipolar relationship between individual themes. The specific pattern of inductively derived relationships is culturally bound. Implications of the findings are discussed, followed by limitations of the study and recommendations for further research. (shrink)

We all know so many words by now—genocide, death, slaughter, horror, unthinkable loss, limits of human depravity... For all their unsettling qualities, their ability to wound and provoke, these words are deeply familiar, part of the language we have come to speak. Yet in the world of material objects and sites marked by violence and loss, there exist things and places, which, as Kyo Maclear once wrote, ‘have irretrievable counterparts in those experiences for which no records whatsoever exist, those losses (...) precluded from thought or direct remembrance’. Broad Arrow cafe was my entry point into the world where the events of 28 April 1996 and their extended aftermath existed in forms radically separate from the words and opinions, from the pained and waning recollections, of the day. (shrink)

Trauma is a term that is widely used in memory studies, along with a number of other academic fields and disciplines. This article takes issue with its loose and indiscriminate application. Such application generates an unresolved paradox: trauma is associated with memories of events that are uncontrollable, yet large-scale commemorative practices or processes of social reconciliation assume that experiences of these are controllable, amenable to being assimilated into narrative form and so available for rhetorical purposes. Following an examination of this (...) paradox, the article looks in detail at two examples of experience involving painful memories of two kinds – those which have become integrated into relatively easily told stories, and which can then involve rhetorical work, and those which have not become woven into a life-narrative and so are not available for such work. The article also considers some of the methodological and analytical problems that occur when traumatic or painful memories arise in the course of sociological fieldwork. (shrink)

Political theorists have increasingly adopted the psychoanalytic language of ‘mourning’ to characterize experiences of loss and injury, and to legitimate these as claims about a past political or cultural order. Mourning would seek to work through these experiences while opening persons to their shared vulnerabilities. With this article, I return to Freud’s original distinction between mourning and melancholia, along with its development through the work of Donald Winnicott and the relational school of psychoanalysis. Although psychoanalytic mourning balances a coming-to-terms with (...) loss against investment in new social relations, when it is extrapolated to a broader community it risks over-determining the social field. The cost is a foreclosure of other modalities for articulating claims about injury and political order, and in particular those that might draw on anger as a resource for political action and solidarity. (shrink)