Nicola Evans | University of Wollongong (original) (raw)

Papers by Nicola Evans

Textual Practice , 2018

At first sight, Julian Barnes and Michel Houellebecq are two authors with little in common, but t... more At first sight, Julian Barnes and Michel Houellebecq are two authors with little in common, but this article uncovers a shared interest in the life of objects and their capacity to shape and sometimes eclipse the subject. Both Flaubert's Parrot and La Carte et le Territoire raise compelling questions about subject object relations and their special relevance for the institution of authorship. In a reading that tracks the novels' common concerns with tourists, copies and dead authors, I trace the lineage of these concerns back to eighteenth century debates over the relationship between authors and the material book and forward to new anxieties surfacing as the anticipated death of the material book reanimates questions of what makes an author. By foregrounding the role of tourists in literary culture, both novels challenge the conventions of anti-tourist discourse, inviting us to consider whether tourists played a part in bringing authors to life, and whether they may perform a similar service for the book.

Continuum, 2010

In the 1980s, producers of 'making of' documentaries for special effects movies worried that tell... more In the 1980s, producers of 'making of' documentaries for special effects movies worried that telling the audience too much would undo the magic of cinema. In a radical shift, contemporary 'extras' offer hours of behind-the-scenes information, sometimes before the film hits cinemas. Has what constitutes the magic of films changed, or was it other than we imagined all along? This essay draws on media and film theory in an effort to understand the attraction of looking behind the screen. Focusing on the Superman franchise, I track the shifting relationship between feature film and the 'making of' featurette from 1980 to 2006. A central aim is to challenge the assumption of a clear line separating the feature film from its 'extras' and to consider how the ubiquity of such supplementary materials may reconfigure how we imagine and what we consume as the film text.

International Journal of Cultural Studies , 2005

A B S T R A C T • One effect of the interdependencies fuelled by globalization and new communicat... more A B S T R A C T • One effect of the interdependencies fuelled by globalization and new communication technologies is the disappearance of a stable sense of the size of the world and our location in it. This article looks at a number of attempts to cognitively remap the world by scaling it down to more manageable proportions, drawing on examples from anthropology, cosmopolitan discourse, Hollywood film and 'small world' theory. My focus is on how these new world maps transform the role of the stranger. Focusing on six degrees of separation chains in which individuals form connections with randomly encountered strangers across the world, I argue that this type of global networking reveals the many ways there are of not knowing other people and provides a useful counter-narrative to the paranoid cosmopolitanism fostered by the contemporary war on terror. • K E Y W O R D S • six degrees of separation • small world • stranger

Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 2015

Quarterly Journal of Speech, 1998

Culture, Theory and Critique , 2014

Life Writing, 2011

For several years acclaimed director David Lynch phoned in regular weather reports to a community... more For several years acclaimed director David Lynch phoned in regular weather reports to a community radio station in Los Angeles. The act pokes fun at an industry in which autobiographical exploitation of star directors and name-brand authors has become a key marketing strategy in the sale of creative work. The weather is, of course, no different with David Lynch's name appended, even if Los Angeles were not famous for its unvarying sunshine. But the act also emblematises Lynch's creative use of banality as part of a consistent strategy of life withholding. This essay addresses forms of anti-life writing emerging in reaction to the current multimedia boom in confessional literature, a boom in part fuelled by the exponential growth of ancillary texts such as production diaries, commentaries and making of documentaries that purport to take us behind the scenes of a text to the lives of the people who created it. Focusing on Lynch's aptly named film Inland Empire and on the wealth of satellite texts that surround his films, I argue that Lynch's deployment of banality is not merely a form of mystification, but a challenge to rethink the kinds of stories that life writing genres prioritise.

Text and Performance Quarterly, 1998

This article argues that contemporary film drag has become the vehicle for the revival of race an... more This article argues that contemporary film drag has become the vehicle for the revival of race and gender stereotypes, a blackface for the nineties, camouflaged by drag's new status as a "subversive" performance. The logic of masking and unmasking that drag promotes lends itself to a double bluff, wherein the masks worn reveal rather than conceal the politics of the performance. Through a reading of The Crying Game and The Birdcage, I elucidate the mechanics of this double bluff and suggest how it challenges a simple labeling of performance as either true or false. This argument invites reconsideration of how ideology operates. Borrowing from Poe's classic story of the purloined letter, I indicate ways in which genres of the obvious may derive their power from assumptions, post-Foucault, that oppressive ideologies are intelligent, self-effacing and hard to detect. Keywords: Drag, film criticism, blackface C C Tn a universe in which all are looking for the true face beneath the mask," writes A. Slavoj Zizek, "the best way to lead them astray is to wear the mask of truth itself (42). This article focuses on male drag in film as a type of performance that lends itself particularly well to this kind of deception. Contemporary drag on film, I will argue, is a vehicle for the revival of race and gender stereotypes that escape the eye of even the most progressive reviewers because, like the purloined letter, these stereotypes are too much on view. Critical perceptions of drag have shifted dramatically in the past few decades. Once regarded as an embarrassment, the practice of drag has moved into the vanguard of cultural politics, celebrated as a performance that denaturalizes gender and subverts essentialist views of sexuality. In the wake of theoretical endorsement of drag as a subversive act, drag also moved center stage at the box office, demonstrating strong cross-over appeal in its capacity to attract straight audiences to films about gay men. To the surprise of many, The Crying Game, a film about a romantic relationship involving a man who cross-dresses as a woman became a successful date movie among heterosexual audiences (Naremore). More recently, the success of comedies about gay drag queens such as The Birdcage, and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, suggested to some that a mainstream American audience might be ready to see gay men in roles other than the amiable sidekick. The reception of these films has predictably centered on the representation of gay relations, with opinions differing as to whether drag is a step forward or backwards in the struggle to end homophobia. In this article I advocate shifting the focus to look more closely at the masks worn by men who cross-dress as women. What kind of women are featured, to what class and to what race do they belong? My intent here is to suggest that under the cover of drag's new transgressive status, some very old-fashioned notions about race and gender are being smuggled back into popular culture, an idea that offers an alternative explanation for the wide acceptance of such Nicola Evans is an Assistant Professor in the

Cultural Studies Review, 2005

Limited on (02) 93947600 (ph) or (02) 93947601 (fax) caviar and friendship Sensational Trials and... more Limited on (02) 93947600 (ph) or (02) 93947601 (fax) caviar and friendship Sensational Trials and the Reinvention of PublicSpace NICOLA EVANS In the mid 18605, Sydney was electrified by the trial of Louis Bertrand, a dentist accused of murder and adultery. I As the press and citizenry furiously debated Bertrand's guilt and motivations, a curious assortment of bigotry and superstition entered public discourse. Expla

Discourse: Berkeley Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture , 1999

In lieu of an abstract, here is an extract: The name 'fag hag' is given to straight women who f... more In lieu of an abstract, here is an extract:

The name 'fag hag' is given to straight women who form their strongest attachments with gay men. Although the exact nature of these attachments is elusive, reports of how the term is used indicate that it includes women who seek romantic and sexual affiliations with gay men. Fag hag is hardly a dignified name, evoking as it does the plaintive characters of a French farce trapped in an absurd round of misdirected affections. Fag hags seem to take female supplementarity to its grotesque limits by appending themselves to men who by definition, that is by some definitions of gay identity, can have no use for them. Yet the fact that we cannot make sense of the fag hag's proclivities in terms of existing categories of sexual identity suggests that the fag hag deserves more serious attention. If, for example, fag hags are straight in the sense that they desire members of the opposite sex, to what extent does heterosexuality depend upon the consummation as well as the experience of desirer? What does it mean for the heterosexual desires of women to be trained on gay men rather than straight men - what is it about a gay sexual orientation that could around a heterosexual response? To what extent is sexual identity defined, changed or expanded not merely by the gender of the people we desire, but by the gender and sexuality of the people we attract?

The first part of this essay tracks the emergency in contemporary gay fiction of a fag hag narrative in which a woman, usually a fat woman, is positioned between two gay men whose relationship she mediates and defers. ...The second section of this essay considers the intriguing emergence of the fag hag in a theoretical exchange between Eve Kososfsky Sedgwick and David Van Leer that addresses Sedgwick's pioneering work in gay studies.

This symposium explores the intersection between feminist studies and animal studies in research ... more This symposium explores the intersection between feminist studies and animal studies in research and activism. What can contemporary feminism offer to the animals whose lives are deemed to be outside of legal protections and ethical concerns? How might considering the perspective of nonhuman animals advance the aims and practices of feminism?

The Material Ecologies (MECO) research network is a research network for critical and creative pr... more The Material Ecologies (MECO) research network is a research network for critical and creative practices. It is a collective of scholars investigating entanglements across the social, cultural and political contexts of the Anthropocence. The network’s interdisciplinary focus is beyond the human: material intersections of the animal, the technological, the animate and inanimate, material and immaterial objects. Adopting an ecology of practice approach, MECO is a vehicle for transdisciplinary exchange, research generation, support and collaboration across intersecting theoretical, disciplinary, and methodological interests based in the broad fields of Contemporary Arts, Media and Humanities.