Beyond the Darklands: cheap and nasty stories + massively annoying extremely pleasant voice-over (Samuel Johnson) + irritating presenter (Dr Leah Giarratano) = psychopathology as popular entertainment.
Last night’s week’s episode of the new Australian shockumentary TV series Beyond the Darklands concerned Katherine Knight:
…who committed a murder that’s almost incomprehensible. In February 2000, the former abattoir worker stabbed her de facto husband to death, skinned him and then cooked his body parts in a pot on the stove. She then proceeded to set the table for his children’s arrival, complete with vindictive letters. This appalling murder shows the darkest reaches of the human mind. Katherine Knight is Australia’s first and only women to be jailed for the remainder of her life without parole. Tonight clinical psychologist Dr Leah Giarratano takes us inside the mind of Australia’s most vicious female killer and explains why she comes from Beyond the Darklands.
What turns normal people into monsters? Are they born evil or merely products of destructive environments? asks the show’s producers. Alternatively: “THE title and premise of this nausea-inducing series were all that was needed to accurately predict the substance of it: a prurient, luxurious rehash of a murder dressed up as some sort of project serving the public interest” (Larissa Dubecki, The Age, September 7, 2009). Which actually isn’t too bad a description of the social role of television: a prurient, luxurious rehash of reality dressed up as some sort of project serving the public interest.
Funnily enough — and let’s face it, the story is a barrel of laughs — Knight was a slaughterhouse worker, who took great delight in her work.
Which brings me, of course, to Mia Freedman.
Mia is a “journalist, blogger, author” and “mama”; she’s also the former ‘creative services director’ at Channel Nine. Former CEO Eddie Maguire “had brought Freedman across from Nine owner PBL’s magazine stablemate ACP to add a strong feminine voice to the channel’s traditionally male-dominated management culture” according to The Daily Terror (It’s goodbye from Mia Freedman, Marcus Casey, June 14, 2007). During her brief tenure at the network, Mia creatively serviced the network in the direction of a daytime chat-show called ‘The Catch-Up‘, an Australian version of US chat-show The View.
It was fail. It did, however, * Lisa Oldfield, who is ace, and for many reasons. For example:
The TV personality and wife of former One Nation politician David Oldfield reveals explosive details about her past drug abuse and depression. “Six months into taking a couple of ecstasy tablets on a weekend, I was introduced to cocaine.” Soon, she couldn’t “imagine life without it” and was combining the two drugs in a potentially lethal cocktail. After three months of heavy drug abuse, she lost control. “I was having violent episodes where I would throw things and scream at people — not bash anybody, but I had to be physically restrained. I abused my partner, he bore the brunt of much of it.” Lisa, who credits husband David with turning her life around, now wants to warn others about the dangers of drugs. For the full story, see this week’s issue of Woman’s Day (on sale March 12).
Further, she should sue herself, possibly with the help of a law-talking guy, for the following comments: “I’m just the most irritating individual you’ll ever meet. I’m a pompous snot and I brought them all down. But they went down fighting”. She should also be sued by Libbi Gorr: “I learned so much from Libbi (Gorr) — like how to be a complete bitch” (The Catch-Up rubbish, says Lisa, Herald Sun, June 15, 2007). Marieke Hardy is also mean and cruel and should be sued (Catch up with sisters and dolls, The Age, April 5, 2007).
Where was I?
Oh yeah.
In addition to being responsible for The Delight that was The Catch Up, Mia is The Occasional Vegetarian (The Age, September 7, 2009).
Now, I appreciate pointlessness as much as the next 30-something single low income male, but this example left me feeling strangely depressed.
In her article, Freedman reveals that, for some years, she was an off-again, on-again vegetarian — ‘vegetarian’, in this context, not meaning ‘no meat’ but ‘no red meat’. Further, that, like a relatively large number of other grrls, her initial aversion to eating meat developed when she was quite young (12), and was the outcome of an emotional attachment to the (baby) animal in question, and an intellectual understanding of the process by which the cute fluffy became the yummy thing on her plate.
My own decision to pursue a vegetarian diet occurred in my last few years of high skool, and was triggered by my participation in a bout of vivisection in a Science class. Or rather, the nature of the participation of my classmates, whose fun and games with the tiny bodies of the mice we were meant to be cutting up — so as to learn more about digestive systems, I think — triggered in me a kind of moral revulsion: at the contempt being displayed for Animals, for Science, and for Education. I think this decision also functioned, on a psychological level, to distance myself from a particular form of aggressive masculinity, and the behaviours and values associated with it.
At which point, another diversion.
The concept of hegemonic masculinity was first proposed in reports from a field study of social inequality in Australian high schools (Kessler et al. 1982); in a related conceptual discussion of the making of masculinities and the experience of men’s bodies (Connell 1983); and in a debate over the role of men in Australian labor politics (Connell 1982). The high school project provided empirical evidence of multiple hierarchies—in gender as well as in class terms—interwoven with active projects of gender construction (Connell et al. 1982).
These beginnings were systematized in an article, “Towards a New Sociology of Masculinity” (Carrigan, Connell, and Lee 1985), which extensively critiqued the “male sex role” literature and proposed a model of multiple masculinities and power relations. In turn, this model was integrated into a systematic sociological theory of gender. The resulting six pages in Gender and Power (Connell 1987) on “hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity” became the most cited source for the concept of hegemonic masculinity.
The concept articulated by the research groups in Australia represented a synthesis of ideas and evidence from apparently disparate sources. But the convergence of ideas was not accidental. Closely related issues were being addressed by researchers and activists in other countries too; the time was, in a sense, ripe for a synthesis of this kind.
The most basic sources were feminist theories of patriarchy and the related debates over the role of men in transforming patriarchy (Goode 1982; Snodgrass 1977). Some men in the New Left had tried to organize in support of feminism, and the attempt had drawn attention to class differences in the expression of masculinity (Tolson 1977). Moreover, women of color—such as Maxine Baca Zinn (1982), Angela Davis (1983), and bell hooks (1984)—criticized the race bias that occurs when power is solely conceptualized in terms of sex difference, thus laying the groundwork for questioning any universalizing claims about the category of men.
The Gramscian term “hegemony” was current at the time in attempts to understand the stabilization of class relations (Connell 1977). In the context of dual systems theory (Eisenstein 1979), the idea was easily transferred to the parallel problem about gender relations. This risked a significant misunderstanding. Gramsci’s writing focuses on the dynamics of structural change involving the mobilization and demobilization of whole classes. Without a very clear focus on this issue of historical change, the idea of hegemony would be reduced to a simple model of cultural control. And in a great deal of the debate about gender, large-scale historical change is not in focus. Here is one of the sources of later difficulties with the concept of hegemonic masculinity.
Even before the women’s liberation movement, a literature in social psychology and sociology about the “male sex role” had recognized the social nature of masculinity and the possibilities of change in men’s conduct (Hacker 1957). During the 1970s, there was an explosion of writing about “the male role,” sharply criticizing role norms as the source of oppressive behavior by men (Brannon 1976). Critical role theory provided the main conceptual basis for the early antisexist men’s movement. The weaknesses of sex role theory were, however, increasingly recognized (Kimmel 1987; Pleck 1981). They included the blurring of behavior and norm, the homogenizing effect of the role concept, and its difficulties in accounting for power.
Power and difference were, on the other hand, core concepts in the gay liberation movement, which developed a sophisticated analysis of the oppression of men as well as oppression by men (Altman 1972). Some theorists saw gay liberation as bound up with an assault on gender stereotypes (Mieli 1980). The idea of a hierarchy of masculinities grew directly out of homosexual men’s experience with violence and prejudice from straight men. The concept of homophobia originated in the 1970s and was already being attributed to the conventional male role (Morin and Garfinkle 1978). Theorists developed increasingly sophisticated accounts of gay men’s ambivalent relationships to patriarchy and conventional masculinity (Broker 1976; Plummer 1981).
An equally important source was empirical social research. A growing body of field studies was documenting local gender hierarchies and local cultures of masculinity in schools (Willis 1977), in male-dominated workplaces (Cockburn 1983), and in village communities (Herdt 1981; Hunt 1980). These studies added the ethnographic realism that the sex-role literature lacked, confirmed the plurality of masculinities and the complexities of gender construction for men, and gave evidence of the active struggle for dominance that is implicit in the Gramscian concept of hegemony.
Finally, the concept was influenced by psychoanalysis. Freud himself produced the first analytic biographies of men and, in the “Wolf Man” case history, showed how adult personality was a system under tension, with countercurrents repressed but not obliterated (Freud [1917] 1955). The psychoanalyst Stoller (1968) popularized the concept of “gender identity” and mapped its variations in boys’ development, most famously those leading to transsexualism. Others influenced by psychoanalysis picked up the themes of men’s power, the range of possibilities in gender development, and the tension and contradiction within conventional masculinities (Friedman and Lerner 1986; Zaretsky 1975).
~ R.W. Connell & James Messerschmidt, ‘Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept’, Gender & Society, Vol.19, No.6, December 2005 (PDF).
But if I could eat all the animals, just imagine it, chompin’ on a chimp (or chimpanzee), imagine tearing into a tiger, chewing on a cheetah, what a neat achievement it would be!
Slaughterhouse: The Task of Blood, VEG-TV:
The vast majority of people in Britain eat meat but have little knowledge of how that meat ends up on their table. In a powerful observational documentary, Slaughterhouse: The Task of Blood reveals the day-to-day workings of a small, family-run abattoir and attempts to get inside the minds of the people who work there. It’s a hidden part of British life, but the reality is that thousands of animals are slaughtered every day in abattoirs. This film shows the process of meat production as animals are killed, butchered and stored in fridges before being transported to retail outlets. It reveals the attitudes of the workers to their task, their colleagues and life. Slaughterhouse: The Task Of Blood is produced by BAFTA award winning film-maker, Brian Hill.
See also : Smash! Magnavox! Spectacle! Videocracy! (September 4, 2009) | Nando’s! Tits! Arse! ¡Pollo! (July 21, 2009).
