Alison Horbury

Alison Horbury investigates the reprisal of the myth of Persephone - a mother-daughter plot of separation and initiation - in post-feminist television cultures where, she argues, it functions as a symptom expressing a complex around the question of sexual difference - what Lacan calls 'sexuation', where this question has been otherwise foreclosed. She takes four television heroines dramatizing this Persephone symptom - Ally McBeal, Sydney Bristow, Veronica Mars, and Meredith Grey - to show what is unconscious in this symptom, and identifies an impasse in feminist cultural criticisms on the topic of 'woman'. She introduces psychoanalytic approaches to the novel to rethink the engagement of audiences with long-form serial narrative, and suggests that post-feminist discourses manifesting in Persephone's story offer us a cultural symptom that, when analysed, offers us new reflections on feminism today.

In his seminar on ethics, Lacan examines how certain forms of art reveal desire to us in ways that allow us to affirm and better handle it in our lives, positioning a psychoanalytic ethics in opposition to traditional ethics––what he describes as ‘the cleaning up of desire,’ through ‘modesty,’ and ‘temperateness.’ This article asks: can this psychoanalytic ethics be applied to a pornographic aesthetic? Within the vast array of production and performance modalities that shape pornography in the digital era (including the digitised back-catalogue), I argue something at once particular and universal in the pornographic aesthetic might be distinguished and articulated prior to any categorisations of it being ‘good,’ ‘bad,’ or ‘better.’ Where this aesthetic animates something of the Freudian revolution it may be thought of as an artefact of the libido––our partial drives and erotic life—in ways that differentiate it from other screen cultures. This aesthetic is ethical, I suggest, for refusing to substitute or displace its libidinal origins; here I draw on Barthes’ theory of the punctum to consider how the intractability of this aesthetic may ‘prick’ our symbolic identifications and ideals to generate a more honest engagement with the (libidinal) truth of our desire.

Like Freud’s famous inquiry ‘what does a woman want?’, this paper asks a similar question of the signifier ‘Feminism’ for if one aims to (re)imagine feminism for the new millennium one must first ask: what does Feminism want? This (imperfect) reference to Freud’s question hopes to draw attention to the particular and the universal underpinning the signifier Feminism, a slipperiness that works idiosyncratically at the threshold of public and private politics which, though it is perhaps the most unifying aspect of feminism, nevertheless undermines it. To politicize the personal one must question the signifier that comes to universalize an indefinite article for, as I argue in this paper, what ‘a’ woman wants is beneath the bar of what Feminism wants when it is mounted in public discourse. To continue to invest publically in a signifier of personal politics––as Jacqueline Rose advocates (2014)––then, one must rephrase the question: of what does this signifier Feminism speak when it is mounted in public discourse? This paper considers some mechanisms by which this signifier generates and mobilizes desire, fantasy, and phobia in public politics where feminism’s knowledge product covers over or, in Rose’s terms, “sanitizes” those “disturbing insight[s]” (2014: x) of experience, “everything that is darkest, most recalcitrant and unsettling” (2014 xii), in the “furthest limits of conscious and unconscious life” (2014: x). Here, where this signifier constitutes an ideal-ego, its effects are inhibiting. In short, this paper argues that before any future of feminism can be imagined, those occupying a feminist position—discourse, politics, or identity—must ask what their unconscious investment in this signifier is. In Lacanian terms, one must relinquish Feminism’s discourse of protest and complete the circuit through the analyst’s discourse to ask: what does a woman want in feminism? What does Feminism want?

This paper takes the emergent field of digital feminisms as a case for thinking about the ways in which Jacques Lacan’s theory of the four discourses–that of the master, hysteric, university, and analyst–can contribute to our understanding of the subject in and of digitally mediated communications. Lacan’s theory is useful in formulating the relationship between the (feminist) subject and knowledge production and the modes of enjoyment that structure speech where these relationships undergo a revolution in digital communications. As a protest discourse, feminist discourses have been equated with the productive discourse of the hysteric but, once institutionalized, I argue, take on the structure of the university discourse, bypassing the critical phase of the analyst. Digital feminisms offer a particularly reflective case for, while they replicate qualities of off-line feminisms–fervent and vociferous disagreement over definitional positions, agendas, and praxis–with no gatekeepers, digital feminisms can subvert traditional hierarchical structures of power in media production to represent subjectivity within the digital fantasy of democratic transparency. Here, where nothing restrains the personal becoming political, the structure of feminist discourses are amplified, exposing the dynamic affects of discursive production in online spaces that obfuscate communication and make ‘true dialogue’ problematic. Drawing on Lacan’s theory of the four discourses, I map some of these affects as feminist discourses shift into the position of knowledge (what Lacan calls ‘S2’), where they are divided–cut off from their own experience and enjoyment–and are positioned to address the jouissance of the Other.

Nic Pizzolatto was transparent in claiming the second season of True Detective aimed for a tragic narrative form, focusing on characters whose detective journey pursued a tragic knowledge that fated their path. The cacophony of criticism grew with each passing episode, yet few grasped the true tragedy of this season: that it was the flawed execution of tragic narrative form that fated the series. Why? I want to make a contentious claim: that Pizzolatto followed the path of the tragedian Euripides, who, Nietzsche tells us, transformed attic tragedy into a lesser version of its former glory by bringing the masses onto the stage and entertaining their every-day troubles. In short, Pizzolatto listened to his critics, and took up their concerns while forgetting the key aspect of tragic narrative form: the double-crossing of ‘the Good.’

The first season of True Detective won critical acclaim for its aesthetic mastery of a cinemascope language in the world of the every day––television––where it was further distinguished by openly grappling with philosophical themes. For many critics, however, such philosophical interests were seen as lofty, sophomoric, macho ambitions, obscuring the moral imperative that has come to shape debates about ‘good’ television: the representation of a certain moral Good in the equal and progressive representation of oppressed figures, namely (in season one), women. That is, in a society shaped by the political movements of feminism, we expect to see the fruits of these movements on the big and small screen. In season two, Pizzolatto seemed to take on this criticism, introducing tragic figures caught up in their own conflicts over identity; in particular, Ani ‘Antigone’ Bezzerides’ struggle with sexuality promised to address the conflicts emerging between feminist and post-feminist women in twenty-first century culture, a conflict shaped by questions of the ‘Good’ in sexed and gendered social relations. In attic tragedy, however, such conflicts can only be resolved by laying waste to the moral ‘Good’ that shapes social life––not forever, but for the duration of the drama. As Lacan puts it (SVII), tragedy ‘necessitates crossing not only all fear but all pity, because the voice of the hero trembles before nothing and especially not before the good of the other’, the consequence of which is that ‘the subject learns a little more about the deepest level of himself than he knew before.’ Simply put, as disturbing as tragedy is, we walk away with a stronger notion of the good, because tragic art ‘lure[s] us to face the difficulties of the human condition… in a way that is crucial for an informed ethics’ (Themi 2014, 3). By the end of season two, however, it became clear that a relatively unchallenged moral ‘Good’ had won out over full tragic knowledge. In this chapter, I map the meta-tragedy of this elision in season two, to disclose some of the more difficult insights into Ani-Antigone’s belated confrontation with her desire.

The political, social, and cultural development of what has become known as ‘post-feminism’ has redefined female citizenship within a network of contradictory discursive technologies that, Angela McRobbie has argued, encourage young women to relinquish a traditional feminist critique in order to count as ‘sophisticated’, knowing citizens. Concurrent with this phenomenon is an unprecedented growth in female-centred drama that Amanda Lotz argues, has become a key industrial product of the post-network era. In this paper, I argue that the heroines of female-centred dramas in the post-feminist era – from Ally McBeal to more recent series – stage the silencing of feminist discourses in their positioning as knowing, ‘sophisticated’ citizens. In turn, this creates a crisis in feminist media scholarship, which has traditionally investigated the TV heroine for her particular feminisms. For the discourses that have shaped the discipline of feminist media criticism – philosophies of feminine identity – are foreclosed in post-feminist discourses. I present this impasse as a site for analysis that, in its rupture of the old approach, could propel the field of feminist media studies towards a new era.

Following the Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria in 2009, a convenience sample of data from a variety of social network services (SNS) was assembled to investigate how people were using social media to understand and respond to the events. Two broad trends have so far emerged: social media were used to construct vernacular, as opposed to 'expert', knowledges of the events; and SNS were sites of performance of self as caring, empathetic and ethical. Any emergency media communication strategy seeking to mobilise SNS would do well to understand the place of SNS in popular constructions of catastrophic events.

I talk about Forbrydelsen and the US remake of The Killing as part of a panel discussion at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), now available as a podcast. 'In this Podcast we investiage the new Golden Age of Scandinavian television, from Forbrydelsen to Bron/Broen, and the popular US remakes that followed in their wake.'

This paper takes the BBC series Killing Eve (2017) as a case for thinking about the ethics of aesthetics in contemporary (anglophone) television cultures. Where the HBO effect (DeFino 2014) has seen both broadcast and over the top subscription services compete to develop and stream content that is edgier, sexier, funnier, and ultimately more transgressive than what came before, we have seen a rise in television content that is especially focused on the ethics and pleasures of transgression. Where this content is said to be of a higher, cinematic, quality that transcends its industrial context to approach the status of art, I suggest we can begin to understand the connection between the function of aesthetics and the pleasures of transgression increasingly found on the small screen. Bataille maintains that accessing the aesthetic realm offers a space set aside for a satisfaction of the drives normally prohibited in order to function in our capitalist mode of accumulation and, as such, holds a ‘sovereign value for us’ (1957, 3). This paper considers Bataille’s work apropos ‘television as art,’ insofar as series like Killing Eve might be said to animate something of our need for the aesthetic realm and the sovereignty promised in the pleasures of transgression.

This paper explores the ways in which Darren Aranofsky’s 2010 film Black Swan––as a cumulative performance and dramatic experience––approximates the effects of tragic art, to comment on the excessive investment of an ideal Good in contemporary concepts of gendered identities. Reading Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, I show how the function of Dionysian and Apollonian impulses in Black Swan’s use of the Swan Lake libretto articulates a crisis in feminine subjectivity through the unraveling psychosis of ascetic ballerina, Nina (Natalie Portman). Nina’s pursuit of a perfect Apollonic ballet technique and body align her with an Imaginary feminine subject, detonated in her relation to the inflated ‘Good’ of white swan Odette; her attempts to discover what has been foreclosed in this movement effect an encounter with the Dionysian Real that triggers psychosis. What Nina has foreclosed in the Real returns in the form of paranoid fantasies that locate eroticism as a violence of the Other’s desire, animating the tragic excesses of contemporary feminist discourses that, foreclosed to the Real of the drives, work towards a performative, gendered ideal. The culmination of the film in Nina’s triumphant performance as the Odile destroys the inflated ideals of the Good by locating the Other’s violence as originating within––offering a tragic knowledge, too late for Nina, but not the audience.