Bodies in flux, cultural studies and the current critical climate

KEYWORDS:

• Western Australia
• cultural studies
• conference
• bodies
• flux

In 2019, we, (a very small and passionate group of Western Australian Cultural Studies academics), put forward a bid to host the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia (CSAA) annual conference in Perth (Boorloo) for 2020. A special mention to Rob Cover for this initiative.¹ The last time the CSAA conference was held in Perth, on Whadjuk Noongar Country, was in 2004. So, it would be sixteen years between the Perth Cultural Studies conferences. As Jon Stratton (2016) asserts Perth became an important nexus for the development of Cultural Studies in the 1980s-90s as ‘many of the academics who were central to the establishment of Cultural Studies in Perth went on to senior position in other cities in Australia and overseas.’ According to John Frow (2007), Perth had two out of the four tertiary institutions that have been central to the development of Cultural Studies in Australia. Perth is also from where Continuum emerged in 1987. For the new generation of Cultural Studies academics that are/and have been Perth-based, there is a still a sense of energy and commitment related to representation and cultural sites. Nevertheless, as Stratton states, Perth was ‘positioned in Australia as on the edge, outside of the mainstream of Australian culture’ (Stratton 2016, 92). Though, we are only an email and Zoom meeting away from Cultural Studies activities in the rest of Australia, the physical distance is a barrier for the types of informal dialogue, connections and inspirations that occur through physical contact. Hence, we were elated to host, network and engage with CSAA scholars from elsewhere. We titled the upcoming conference ‘Bodies in Flux’ and were very much looking forward to the upcoming event.

However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the conference was rescheduled three times. We experienced being bodies in flux. Finally in late June 2022 the conference went ahead, in person, with an opportunity for online participation. The conference theme had called for papers that interrogate the notion of bodies and change, with the understanding that the body frames everyday life (human and non-human). Bodies in flux, both political and politicized bodies, might be understood in terms of local, national and global contexts. In our current cultural climate of disruption, mobility, movement and tension, we were concerned with how bodies function in relation to each other, to the social order, hierarchies, and culture. In addition, we had Cultural Studies submissions that explore how bodies become produced and excluded through discursive practices. The programme offered an engaging cultural commentary on critical issues from geographically diverse scholars. With a dedicated conference team of mainly early career academics and postgraduates, we were delighted to attract 137 in-person participants, including academics from Indonesia, the UK, Gaza, and Singapore. We thank all for their engaged attendance, kindness and support.

It was very exciting to promote this depth of Cultural Studies activities. Edith Cowan University (ECU) hosted the main conference events. Credit is to be given to former ECU colleagues, such as Debbie Rodan, Rod Giblett and Dennis Wood who had worked well over a ten year period to establish a strong Media and Cultural studies course in Western Australia, and the development of a strong Media and Cultural Studies based postgraduate programme within Communication. This important foundational work was led by Robin Quin and Brian Shoesmith in the 1990s and early 2000s. In the past ten years, Media and Cultural Studies has one of the highest student satisfaction ratings in the university, and the only curriculum of its kind in the State. For over twenty years, Media and Cultural Studies units, such as ‘Media and Social Context’, served as core units to the Communication and Arts disciplines and provided the much-needed critical commentary for practical teaching areas. The units served as a space to develop critical thinking about the power and influence of the media and aspects of everyday culture. There was a sense of activism and this was integrated into the units. The plan was always to be responsive in our curriculum to the cultural environment. Central to Cultural Studies, as Joanna Zylinska asserts, is ‘the act of responding to difference, to what calls for recognition and respect, to what is important enough to fight for’ (Zylinska 2005, 35). Toby Miller (2018) further asserts that ‘cultural studies investigates the struggles undertaken by ordinary people to interpret dominant cultural forms in terms of their conditions of existence’.

At ECU, we have been aware of the demise of other Cultural Studies courses in Western Australia. For example, in 2013 there was a change.org petition to Save Literary and Cultural Studies at Curtin University; it garnered world-wide support with over 1600 signatories. Nevertheless, there were staff redundancies and course changes over the following two years. The closure of courses and staff redundancies has been the case in other universities, especially when new management with conservative ideas have been appointed.

After the huge success of the Bodies in Flux conference at ECU, it was announced that the Media and Cultural Studies-based units that once served as foundational critical thinking units for the wider Arts and Communication courses, and provided cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary engagement, will no longer be offered. It seems that Cultural Studies is not viewed as a core strand of scholarship. Unfortunately, this seems to be the case now across Western Australia. Over ten years earlier, Baden Offord, Grayson Cooke and Rob Garbutt, in their introduction on the CSAA 2010 conference issue stated that:

Given the present instrumentalized and corporate university environment with its dominant values of standardization and emphasis on a metric and audit-based culture, there is a compelling and urgent need to re-imagine the space and place of the contemporary cultural studies scholar and their role in society. (Offord, Cooke, and Garbutt 2012, 18)

A decade on, these words are even more salient.

Nevertheless, it gave much pleasure to see the wide interest in Cultural Studies, as evidenced in the diverse scope of papers, the large number of participants from diverse locations and, significantly, the large number of high-quality postgraduate presentations at the Bodies in Flux conference. These important voices offer a positive vision for the future of Cultural Studies. The papers in this special issue provide a small sample of the high-quality calibre of the current research in Cultural Studies.

Emerging from provincial isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic, we sought papers from the Bodies in Flux conference that explored changes in representation, agency, constraint and resistance in and about bodies at a variety of scales and sites: from menstrual cells to national bodies, to infectious bodies in city and national spaces. Bodies in these articles are represented in digital flows as well as in the geographies of Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore and Washington. These bodies were in flux against backgrounds of renewed borders and contamination fears.

Beginning at cellular scale, WhiteFeather Hunter reflects on experimenting in a tissue culture laboratory in taking menstrual taboo towards self-determination through the Mooncalf Menstrual Meat art project. TechnoFeminism is enacted in this project by challenging the limits of allowable biomaterial usage in a certified biosafety lab. This project combines scientific and witchcraft practices in the lab to transcend a paranoia that has haunted science for centuries, particularly evident in genocidal-ecocidal attempts to sanitize classifications of the bodies and vegetation allowed in and around new world plantations (Ghosh 2021). Hunter’s project challenges classifications such as clean meat by highlighting and problematizing the possibility of using a woman’s menstrual serum, rather than foetal calf serum, to grow meat in a lab. In doing so, the work represents cellular-replication monstrosity in obsessive biotechnological quests for ever-greater scalability towards maximum profit – also known as, The Nutmeg’s Curse (Ghosh 2021).

Shifting focus from making things from a body to bodies making things, Susan Luckman investigates the culture of craft-making in Australia. Against an employment landscape dominated by building and construction industries and their associated tradie bloke tropes in popular media and conservative politics, Luckman finds a limited future for Australian manufacturing culture in the social-media-friendly, retro-homemaker crafts that became more prominent during the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead, Luckman calls for a critical re-imaging of craft-making culture in Australia to engage with contemporary realities of a diverse, multicultural world.

On barriers to imagining a more diverse world, Jay Daniel Thompson’s article investigates memes about QAnon Shaman, the shirtless man in bearskin headdress and horns who featured heavily in footage of the storming of the US Capital building on 6 January 2021. While the memes may appear progressive in their deployment of humour and pop-culture references to comment on the Shaman’s role in ‘Stop the steal’ actions, Thompson identified a regressive tendency in these memes particularly in representations of QAnon Shaman’s failure to be a real man, which rendered his life less worthy. Through methods of integrative framing and critical discourse analysis, Thompson problematizes the memes by showing how their humour often depended on – and reinforced – male supremacy, homophobia and racism.

From problematic memes about a body in Washington, we jump to Howard Lee and Terence Lee’s problematization of Singapore’s surveillance of bodies during the COVID-19 pandemic. Lee and Lee describe a technological opportunism in the Singapore government’s introduction of the TraceTogether mobile-phone app then wearable token that tracked proximity between smartphones/tokens and recorded likely physical encounters between their holders. In discussing the slow take-up then mandated use of TraceTogether, they question the assumption that surveillance is widely accepted in Singapore. Instead, they view the introduction of TraceTogether and robot-dog surveillance of public places through the lens of Michel Foucault’s theory on the need to objectify the human body to subjectify it to a governmentality of surveillance and control. They critique the government’s technological opportunism during the pandemic for continuing the journey of objectifying and subjectifying bodies in Singapore to tracing, tracking and codification.

Meanwhile, Irfan Wahyudi et al. found that Indonesian female migrant workers in Hong Kong endured a different style of objectification during the pandemic as well as radical restrictions enforced by employers, backed by the state. In investigating the stigmatization and confinement of these workers, Wahyudi et al. conducted worker interviews and analysed texts about migrant workers in Hong Kong during the pandemic to understand a process of stigmatization that led to Indonesian women being locked inside their employers’ homes seven-days a week and working longer hours, or being locked-out without pay when infected with COVID-19. Yet, despite a radical dehumanization of migrant worker bodies in Hong Kong during the pandemic, Wahyudi et al. found Indonesian workers expressing solidarity through social media from confined, solitary, work environments. The women developed and drew on networks of emotional and material support, despite layers of knowledge that have been stacked against voices of confined female Indonesian workers (McGregor 2023).

The five articles in this edition were drawn from the pandemic-delayed CSAA annual conference to further critical understandings of a world in which bodies are in flux amid emerging technologies of constraint and potential that, nevertheless, tend to reproduce and reinforce the deeply sedimented discourses and practices that have, for so long, kept bodies in place. This edition may be read as a beacon signalling the continuation of Cultural Studies from Perth despite the near-death experience of its institutional body within Western Australia’s universities. This is cultural studies for ordinary people in extraordinary times.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. A special thanks to Jude Elund and Jess Taylor for announcing the Perth hosts at the CSAA 2019 conference at the University of Queensland. We are also grateful for the advice and kind support from Baden Offord.