This article argues that strong theories of neo-liberalism do not provide an adequate frame for understanding the ways that measurement practices come to be embedded in the life-worlds of those working in higher education. We argue that neo-liberal metrics need to be understood from the viewpoint of their social usage, alongside other practices of qualification and quantification. In particular, this article maps the specific variables attending measurement in Higher Degree Research (HDR) programs, as the key sites that familiarize students with measurement practices around research and teaching. With regard to the incremental reframing of doctoral study as a utilitarian pursuit, we suggest a need to better identify the singular and immeasurable features of long-term research projects, and argue for a revitalized notion of failure. In this context, this article suggests that many critiques of neo-liberalism do not sufficiently advance alternative ways to think about the purposes and limitations of higher education.

Critical tools are needed for navigating the concept of minority and its
usefulness for the study of culture. This article reflects on the cultural and
political purposes that are served when distinguishing between majorities
and minorities, and the various historical and intellectual agendas that have
shaped these social practices of classification. It begins by examining Deleuze
and Guattari's concept of 'minor literature' as an anti-sociological reworking
of minor and minority, then turns its attention toward the policy-driven
sociological traditions of the Chicago School, and how this has informed the
contemporary construction of 'minorities' reflected in Australian immigration
debates. As a third key paradigm in the study of the 'minor', the article revisits
cultural studies' own embrace of the Popular as a site for political struggles
over the meanings attached to 'major' and 'minor' social identities. Finally,
we consider the range of transformative cultural practices addressed in this
Minor Culture special issue, and reflect on the utility of the minor in holding
together disparate political projects. There are a range of ways in which
the minor might productively imagine or construct collective identities, in
ways that do not anticipate, or even desire, majoritarian endings. It is argued
that minoritised social categories do substantive political and cultural work,
while acknowledging that numerical descriptions of minorities can hide as
much as they reveal.

This article provides a philosophical account of love in relation to contemporary Marxist and post-structuralist conceptions of politics. Shifting the emphasis away from both the ontological question, 'what is love?, and the epistemological question, 'how do we acquire certainty about love?, this article advances a pedagogical question: how might love enable us to learn? To answer this question we turn to the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. After examining the tensions between ontological and ideological conceptions of love, we explore Hardt and Negri's work on love as part of the affective labour of the 'multitude. We then trace the development of Deleuze's early work on love as an apprenticeship to signs to his later exploration (with Guattari) of love in relation to multiplicity. In doing so, this article seeks to renovate the concept of love itself, framing it in terms of difference rather than merging and unity, and locating it outside the confines of the heterosexual couple and nuclear family.

This essay examines masculinity as a quasicausal object and naming practice that guides a range of discussions around gender, with a particular focus on the sociology of masculinity. It begins by examining R.W. Connell's widely used concept of 'hegemonic masculinity, and scrutinises a series of specialised metaphors around hegemony – strategies, positions, goals – that present masculinity as an effect of competitive communion between men. Having identified key tensions in the explanatory model of hegemonic masculinity, the essay then turns towards the analysis of sense and language outlined in Gilles Deleuze's The Logic of Sense (1969). Deleuze's notions of 'singularity and 'event are reworked to support a pragmatic account of how masculinity studies can engage tense relationships between observation, description and representation, an engagement that remains salient for developing the ethical scope of gender studies more broadly.

This article brings together feminist philosophy, phenomenology, and masculinity studies to consider the gendered formation of ethical practices, focusing on the construction of 'male and 'female identities in quotidian social encounters. While scholarship on masculinity has frequently focused on hegemonic modes of behaviour or normative gender relations, less attention has been paid to the 'ethics of people I know as informal political resources, ones that shapes not only conversations about how one should act ('people I know don't do that), but also about the diversity of situations that friends, acquaintances or strangers could plausibly have encountered ('that hasn't happened to anyone I know). The article rethinks mundane social securities drawing on Martin Heidegger, Simone de Beauvoir, and Sara Ahmed to consider anecdotal case studies around gender recognition and political practice, and in doing so also develops the notion of interpellation in relation to everyday ethical problems. The article suggests that inquiry into diverse modes of quotidian complicities – or what de Beauvoir calls the 'snares of a deeply human liberty – can be useful for describing the mixtures of sympathy, empathy, and disavowal in the performance of pro-feminist and queer-friendly masculinities or masculinist identities. It also suggests that the adoption of an 'anti-normative politics is insufficient for negotiating the problems of description and recognition involved in the articulation of gendered social experiences. In doing so, the article approaches questions around political identification commonly considered in queer theory from the viewpoint of descriptive practices themselves, and thus reorients problems of recognition and interpellation towards the expression of ethical statements, rather than focusing solely on the objects of such statements.

This article examines the cultural politics of 'crossover at Motown Records, focusing on the relationship between genre, gender, and career longevity. Beginning with the Supremes' covers albums in the mid-1960s, the article links notions of musical originality to commercial logics of publishing, gendered divisions of labour, and racialised channels of record distribution. It also traces the rise of the celebrity songwriter-producer in soul, including artists like Isaac Hayes, Norman Whitfield, and Stevie Wonder, who fit a new mould of artistic authenticity that clashed with the carefully manicured performances of 1960s 'girl pop. The professional mobility afforded to men in both rock and r&b should prompt media scholars to consider the temporal dimensions of artist trajectories in the music industry, and taking the constraints on girl group singers seriously allows for reflection on (gendered) music industry knowledge about which audiences matter and for how long.

This paper examines Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's theories of writing and the State in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, teasing out issues of gender, primitivism and academic expertise in the authors' claims about power and politics. While noting the benefits of politically analysing social customs and traditions, Laurie highlights the complicities between Deleuze and Guattari's theories and the assumptions embedded in their anthropological sources. He further argues that the cultural and historical speculations in Anti-Oedipus cannot be divorced from the authors' privilege of philosophy as a uniquely European creative space. Seeking an alternative perspective on cultural translation, the paper turns to Walter Mignolo's study of the 'book' in Spanish-Amerindian colonial encounters. Foregrounding the critical value of philology for 'de-colonising' theory, Mignolo argues that Eurocentric cultural comparisons serve to legitimate particular ways of knowing within contested fields of representation. However, in both Deleuze and Guattari and Mignolo, the paper questions the gender dynamics of writing practices implicitly articulated in meta-narratives about the State and/or colonialism. Laurie suggests that these authors frequently remain oblivious to the role of women in the historical contexts examined, and that understanding political dynamics within cultural groups requires questioning the privilege of writing itself, both in and outside the academy. While sympathetic to the role of political philosophy in negotiating complex historical issues, this paper also advocates a rethinking of the subordinate place attributed to anthropological and historical research practices in the theoretical exegeses of Deleuze, Guattari and Mignolo.

Deleuze and Guattari have often received attention for their criticisms of bourgeois families in Anti-Oedipus, but their speculations about non-heteronormative kinship practices have rarely been addressed in Deleuze studies and are yet to be taken up in the study of kinship and the family more generally. This paper is then the first to offer their work on the family to a general academic audience as a useful tool in polarised debates about contemporary family practices. It begins with a close reading of the relationship between desire, capitalism and the private nuclear family in Anti-Oedipus before extending the political use-value of this with the concept of the 'majoritarian' taken from A Thousand Plateaus. The second half of the paper brings Deleuze and Guattari into engagement with the larger critical field of kinship studies as an entry point into topical debates about the 'normative' family and its alternatives.

Since Octavia E. Butler published her first novel Patternmaster, in 1976, her science fiction and fantasy novels have attracted interest from a range of perspectives, including feminist literary studies, postcolonial theory and posthumanism. Across the Patternmaster and Xenogenesis series, Butler's engagement with the gendered dimensions of ethical and social obligation has intersected in striking ways with ongoing discussions in feminist and postcolonial critical theory, while being criticized for its recuperation of normative family values and its naturalization of gendered social behaviours. In this paper, I will explore her complex ethical responses to developments in genetics and sociobiology in the 1970s, with a focus on the ethics of filiation and altruism in Butler's works, and drawing upon celebratory and critical readings of Butler from the feminist perspectives of Donna Haraway, Nancy Jesser and Michelle Osherow. Butler's speculations about the possibilities of futures based on very different humans will then be compared with those of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, whose philosophies of biology and human agency, especially those developed with Felix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, reflect similar anxieties around the normative definitions of human behavior implicit in both sociobiology and psychoanalysis. While it is difficult to place philosophical texts in conversation with literary works, especially when both authors and their imagined audiences are separated by linguistic, cultural and geographical divides, this analysis teases out some of the overlapping challenges faced in mapping out utopian (or revolutionary) thought beyond the limits of the human.

[Abstract for edited collection] Steeped in story-telling and endlessly curious, Reading the Country: An Introduction to Nomadology (1984) was the product of Paddy Roe, Stephen Muecke and Krim Benterrak experimenting with what it might be like to think together about country. Their book has since become one of the great twentieth-century works of intercultural dialogue.

Reading the Country: 30 Years On is a celebration of that book—examining not only its place and time of creation but also its movement across social, philosophical and political surfaces, seeping into the way we look and learn and teach about how people are, or could be, part of country.

Exploring the social conditions that make men laugh at other men, this chapter considers the ways hegemonic masculinity is maintained through certain kinds of homosocial ridicule.

This chapter argues that the gender politics of K-Pop videos are dependent upon their utopian narrative structures and performance conventions. Most Korean boy groups and girl groups present unrealistic social aspirations and ideal body types, but the narrative logics of K-Pop's idyllic worlds also cannot be measured against the standards of social realism. Rather, genre specific expectations around homosocial performance create internal tensions in the presentation of K-Pop masculinity and femininity, tensions carefully negotiated by f(x) and dramatically unpicked in N.O.M's 'A Guys', which I discuss in the final section of this chapter. At the same time, the estrangement between K-Pop's performance spaces and tangible social lives also provides opportunities for audiences – and most conspicuously, for fanfiction writers – to reimagine Idols in everyday settings. Although narrow conceptions of gender, sexuality, race and age circumscribe the social imaginaries of K-Pop groups in deleterious ways, this chapter argues that critical responses must be attentive to the specificity of genre in the production of musical and viewing pleasures.

"If you were introducing Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari 's A Thousand Plateaus (1980) to a seven-year-old who found Anti-Oedipus (1972) boring, you might say that the sequel has more animals."

This essay argues that Deleuze and Guattari's concept of 'becoming-animal' offers a a supple framework for reading the nonhuman outside the templates provided by psychoanalysis and structuralism. At the same time, it argues that 'becoming-animal' entraps the reader at the very moment that it acquires any normative force, because the will to 'become-animal' presupposes a modality of narcissistic ego-formation. It makes these arguments by way of DreamWorks' 'Madagascar' animated film franchise, read through psychoanalytic, structuralist and queer lenses, and pays special attention to despotic lemur King Julien, an "anomalous" figure of cultural mobility.

This paper considers feminist approaches to contrasting modalities of communication in online forums and fansites. I begin by engaging with Eve Sedgwick's schematic distinction between paranoid and reparative readings, and link each modality to a different figure of the 'troll. While paranoia and repair each provide space for novel feminist reading practices around musical and visual cultures, the troll is defined either by a refusal to read, or by its production of noise that prevents others from continuing to read. Taking as my case studies the controversy surrounding Robin Thicke's 'Blurred Lines', the paper argues that the politics of reading online may involve not only ideological combat over what people do read, but also a struggle over what people can legitimately claim not to have read.

Since the mid-1970s, heavy metal artists have drawn on baroque, classical and romantic compositional techniques to produce stock musical affects. Among these, the use of the diminished scale, the Major Locrian Scale and double-harmonic minor scales have been persistently employed to produce deliberately 'exotic effects, from UK-based Led Zeppelin's 'Kashmir' (1975) to Iron Maiden's 'Powerslave' (1984) and, more recently, war-themed concept albums from North American artists Nile and Iced Earth. This paper examines the inter-cultural and affective features of Taiwan-based band ChthoniC, who sing in Taiwanese and Mandarin Chinese, and include the erhu (two-string bowed instrument originating in Chinese ethnic communities) to supplement thrash rhythms. This paper argues that rather than merely combining traditional and modern elements, ChthoniC draw out deeper historical connections between Chinese and Taiwanese classicisms and European classical traditions. In doing so, the paper suggests that cultural geographies with popular music are mediated by cultural understandings of where sounds are heard to be 'out-of-place, and that culturally heterogeneous classical music histories continue to shape identity formations in transnational popular music.

This paper examines higher degree research supervision through the concept of generation. It considers the ways that a broad range of recent historical changes in the higher education system that can be characterised as massification, internationalisation, and marketisation have effected notions of the PhD and of best-practice supervision. In doing so, it reflects on the stories we tell about changing universities and the demands we make of supervision practices, including the utility of 'generation' to explain historical differences.

Extended Abstract

This paper considers higher degree research (HDR) supervision as modern work. Across the last decade, academic research has increasingly reflected on its own institutional cultures and practices of subject formation, including the affective qualities of academic work (Barcan 2013), comparisons of precarious labour in academia with other industries (Gill 2014), and scrutiny of community formation within – and sometimes against – the modern university (Zambrana et al. 2015). In this context, problems attending the relatively unique 'dyadic supervision relationship link together a range of concerns around tertiary institutions, including the invisibility of emotional labour, crises around expertise and disciplinarity, the reproduction of social capital, and the sector-wide impacts of casualisation.

Research on HDR supervision as work invokes two antagonistic models of academic community and postgraduate experience. First, the discourse community of the discipline is organised by the pursuit of collective truths, underpinning the investment in the position of the scholar and processes of subjectification as such. Second, higher degree research is imagined as an asset in human capital to be transferred beyond the university. Across these models of community, the supervisor is charged, respectively, with implementing the academic apprenticeship and preparing the supervisee for the competitive job market. In the face of such tensions, one response has been to re-conceptualise the work of supervision as an ethical responsibility that transcends the marketisation of contemporary Anglophone universities (see Halse and Bansel 2012).

However, the concept of ethical responsibility is extremely elastic. In particular, key distinctions need to be made between the purposes of ethical conduct in institutional settings that themselves contain contradictory purposes. This paper therefore situates contemporary research on ethical supervision within the broad...

The higher degree research (HDR) supervision relationship has come under recent academic scrutiny as both an ethical site and an instrument by which students should be situated in various learning communities (Halse and Bansel, 2012; Boud & Lee, 2005). This has occurred alongside increasing attention paid to HDR student completion rates, graduate outputs, and strategies for professionalisation. As part of efforts to formalise supervision training, many Australian universities have sought to better align supervisors' practices with desired outcomes for supervisees, understood primarily – although not exclusively – through quantitative metrics. Thus the supervisor operates as both a protective buffer between the institution and the supervisee, and as an important node through which supervisees learn which measurements matter and why.

This paper examines the significance of the turn to measurement in both how we learn to supervise and notions of good supervision. First, we consider the means by which early-career academics learn to supervise (Barcan, 2015). We contend that much of this learning occurs outside formal supervision training and instead via forms of minor speech – such as cliché, gossip, and anecdote. Such speech acts and their social relations are difficult to measure, but they are central to tacit learning about good supervision, and to the construction of communities on which supervision depends (Eraut, 2000). Second, this paper considers how the shift towards quantification bears on HDR supervision. Statistical knowledge about student populations, departmental ERA scores, and institutional diversity (e.g. LSES participation) circulate through and are mediated by social relationships – protective, critical, and empowering (Connell & Manathunga, 2012). The measurement of postgraduate advancement and success should not be simplistically rejected; indeed, such formalisation has provided protection against negligent supervision itself. Further, quantif...

This paper seeks to develop a philosophical account of love beyond what Laurent Berlant calls the 'love plot' of heterosexual romance. Focusing on the banal violence of coerced coupling and the symmetrical violence of those who oppose coupledom in Yorgos Lanthimos' The Lobster (2015), the paper interrogates the concept of romantic love in three ways. Firstly, it examines the reorganisation of the bodily habitus both through compulsory rituals of courtship, and through atomised practices of self-cultivation oriented against romantic sentimentality. Secondly, the paper examines practices of boundary-making between private and public spaces, focusing on the gendering of privacy and intimacy in both The Lobster and Lanthimos' earlier film, Dogtooth (2009). Finally, the paper explores the status of species-being and sexual dimorphism in relation to the non-human animals in Lanthimos' work, and in doing so links contemporary scholarship on more-than-human intimacies with feminist critiques of political community formation and the heteronormative production of sexual outsiders. Throughout, the paper draws on key concepts from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to tease out alternative understandings of 'love as a collective practice, while remaining attentive to the practical challenges of coupling cultures in everyday life.

This paper examines the relationship between gender, genre and race in the international promotion of four Australian artists: Guy Sebastian, Keith Urban, Iggy Azalea and Sia. Performing within r&b, country, hip hop, and electronic pop, respectively, these artists have each negotiated problems around authenticity and generic verisimilitude in the crafting of peculiarly Australian identities for non-Australian audiences. This article argues that tensions around cultural mobility have been mediated through the strong gendering of Australian national cultures. But while Urban and Azalea directly capitalise on gender as a means of assimilation within country and hip hop (respectively), the careers of both Sebastian and Sia suggest more oblique, or geopolitically minor, artistic trajectories. Sebastian's popularity in Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and Indonesia, and his performance on behalf of Australia for Eurovision, provide new transnational frames through which to understand the relationship between gender, ethnicity and genre in Australian popular music. At the same time, Sia's irreverant and evasive queer femininity challenges the enduring expectation that Australian artists reproduce the archetypes of banal heterosexual belonging that dominate national cultural imaginary. Having juxtaposed these globally successful Australian artists across four genres, this paper concludes by reconsidering debates around Australian musical cultures and musical genders as inextricably tied to the transnational genre formations that make new iterations of artistic identity legible.

Paper presented at Trans/Forming Feminisms: Media, Technology, Identity, November 23-25, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand.

This paper examines the relationship between gender, sexuality and K-Pop, focusing on the celebrity of Amber, an androgynous singer and dancer from f(x). It begins by considering the formal attributes of K-Pop music and videos as bound by genre rules for harmony, synchronicity, and high fidelity. The paper then suggests that queerness in K-Pop must be understood in relation to the values sustained by its musical and visual forms, especially around the eternity of youth, the perfectibility of the body, and the triumph of group solidarity over the contingencies of geography and history. Drawing on recent discussions of queer identification and slash fiction by K-Pop fans, the paper finishes by considering the relationship between the aesthetic constraints of K-Pop videos and their readability as potentially 'queer texts, paying special attention to synaesthetic devices in f(x), Lee Hyrori and A Guys. A formalist approach to visual cultures is combined with anecdotes from fan cultures to explore the possibilities and limitations of queerness within transnational K-Pop cultures.

In Hardt and Negri's collaborative writings the concept of 'love' has come to function as an important pivot between the indictment of poverty and oppression, and the activation of social bonds to produce new political groupings and energies. However, 'love' is invoked in two entirely contrasting ways: firstly, as an encounter from the outside, that disturbs and unsettles the subject; and secondly, as an attachment and investment in familiar forms of social belonging. This paper explores tensions in Hardt and Negri's accounts of love, and argues that the concept needs to be supplemented with a notion of learning. To develop a more 'pedagogical' understanding of love, we draw on Deleuze's writing on Proust, as well as Deleuze and Guattari's collaborative writings. By comparing approaches to love in Deleuze and Guattari and Hardt and Negri, we argue that a key difference around these scholars is not as much in their respective critiques of Marxism (although this remains important), but in the ways that love and desire are taken up in 'post-Marxist' ethical frames.

If you're concerned about 50 Shades of Grey, the "dark fairy tale" with dubious consent politics, you should go and see it. Better yet, you should take your teenagers to see it with you.

Geophilosophy is a placeholder for things we cannot yet do, things we hope to do, and things that we have failed to do so far. This issue of Angelaki aspires towards ways of doing philosophy, geography and gender studies that stray from the analytical comforts of philosophical reasoning, and from the sociological certainties that dominate the study of masculinity. In particular, it brings a sexed and gendered body to extant Deleuze-Guattarian scholarship, while prompting a thirst for creativity and ambivalence to masculinity research. Each article explores the ways in which lived cultures of masculinity might be read across uneven political formations and aesthetic practices, while calling into question tacit understandings of where 'masculinity begins and ends. In doing so, the collection teases out the ethical and methodological implications of poststructuralist approaches to gender in a range of disciplines, including cultural geography, art criticism, sociology, and disability studies.