Using the reporting of the 2006 Beaconsfield mine disaster in Tasmania as a case study, this pape... more Using the reporting of the 2006 Beaconsfield mine disaster in Tasmania as a case study, this paper explores the changing nature of chequebook journalism and the shift towards the consumerist model of entertain-ment news in Australia. The paper argues that the media's coverage ...
In 1941 Australian tabloid journalist Dorothy Gordon Jenner was caught up in the Japanese siege o... more In 1941 Australian tabloid journalist Dorothy Gordon Jenner was caught up in the Japanese siege of Hong Kong and was incarcerated in the Stanley Internment Camp. During her internment Jenner kept a clandestine record of daily life written in pencil on Bronco brand toilet paper and kept hidden in the heels of her shoes. To date her fragmented diary and notes have defied analysis. This paper provides a reading of Jenner’s personal wartime testimonio through the frame of tabloid journalism to expose how the tabloid genre Jenner’s stock-in-trade as a journalist before the war became the framework for her personal testimony during World War II. By interpreting Jenner’s private diary and notes as testimonio journalism this paper exposes the flow of the tabloid vernacular style of journalism between private and public discourses.
Chapter Six in: Mediating Moms: Mothers in Popular Culture, edited by Elizabeth Podnieks, McGill-... more Chapter Six in: Mediating Moms: Mothers in Popular Culture, edited by Elizabeth Podnieks, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2012.
Chapter Two in: Home Sweat Home: Perspectives on Housework & Modern Relationships, edited by Eliz... more Chapter Two in: Home Sweat Home: Perspectives on Housework & Modern Relationships, edited by Elizabeth Patton and Mimi Choi, Rowman & Littlefield 2014.
This Chapter appears in Hollywood and the World edited by Robert James and Roy Vallis, Oxford: In... more This Chapter appears in Hollywood and the World edited by Robert James and Roy Vallis, Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press,2014. Abstract The tension around the creation of cross-cultural romance in Hollywood films of the early twentieth century is nowhere more evident than in the creation of the sexually provocative Hollywood construct, the ‘Hula Girl’, who was the personification of female sexual abandonment from the late 1910s. Her presence in Hollywood films was a deliberate strategy to avoid the censorship laws of the day and to introduce sexually provocative leading Caucasian women into the cinema. In 1926, the Paramount picture Aloma of the South Seas was the most successful film of the year, grossing $3 million in the US alone and was the fourth most successful film of the 1920s. Starring Polish born Gilda Gray as the gorgeous ‘Aloma’, an exotic dancer who enraptured her lover through her performances of the hula, it played a significant part in the Hula Girl phenomenon. Then in 1927, the ‘It’ girl, the silent era’s greatest sex symbol, Clara Bow, brought the fashion for the hula to a fever pitch when she played the part of ‘Hula Calhoun’, the happy-go-lucky daughter of a Hawaiian plantation owner who would ‘stop at nothing to win the love of a married English engineer’. Looking to Judith Butler’s work on performance and gender, this paper will focus on a private collection of early twentieth century Hula Girl’ snapshot photographs from America, Australia, England and Europe. It will map the ways in which ordinary Western women played themselves into the potentially transgressive position of cultural producers through their adoption of Hollywood’s Hawaiian maiden persona as part of their exploration of female sexuality in the early twentieth century.
With the arrival in the 1990s of the World Wide Web the new digital realm was seen as a genuine o... more With the arrival in the 1990s of the World Wide Web the new digital realm was seen as a genuine opportunity for women to participate on equal terms in the world of global communication. The Internet has empowered women and minority groups to have a voice and speak back against inequality. Its global reach and relative affordability and accessibility make it a communication platform where humans can do great good and also great harm. This case study examines the sexism women encounter in as users of and participants in digital media in the twenty-first century. Its focus is on women who work in the predominantly male area of sports journalism and gaming.
In her study of anonymous infanticide news stories that appeared from 1822 to 1922 in the heart o... more In her study of anonymous infanticide news stories that appeared from 1822 to 1922 in the heart of the British Empire, in regional Leicester, and in the penal colony of Australia, Nicola Goc uses Critical Discourse Analysis to reveal both the broader patterns and the particular rhetorical strategies journalists used to report on young women who killed their babies. Her study takes Foucault’s perspective that the production of knowledge, of “facts” and truth claims, and the exercise of power, are inextricably connected to discourse. Newspaper discourses provide a way to investigate the discursive practices that brought the nineteenth-century infanticidal woman - known as ‘the Infanticide’ - into being. The actions of the infanticidal mother were understood as a fundamental threat to society, not only because they subverted the ideal of Victorian womanhood but also because a woman’s actions destroyed a man’s lineage. For these reasons, Goc demonstrates, infanticide narratives were politicised in the press and woven into interconnected narratives about the regulation of women, women's rights, the family, the law, welfare, and medicine that dominated nineteenth-century discourse. For example, the Times used individual stories of infanticide to argue against the Bastardy Clause in the Poor Law that denied unmarried women and their children relief. Infanticide narratives often adopted the conventions of the courtroom drama, with the young transgressive female positioned against a body of male authoritarian figures, a juxtaposition that reinforced male authority over women. At the same time, infanticide news stories created a way of knowing the women who killed their babies that fed into medical, judicial, and welfare policies regarding the crime of infanticide, created an acceptable way for society to view these women, and pathologised the women's actions. Alive to the marked differences between various types of newspapers, Goc's study offers a rich and nuanced discussion of the Victorian press's fascination with infanticide.
An introductory text that provides an overview of the 'mediasphere' to ... more An introductory text that provides an overview of the 'mediasphere' to demonstrate how a knowledge of media can inform a knowledge of journalism and vice versa; and to show how such knowledge is best acquired through a combination of theory and practice. It integrates media theory ...
Using the reporting of the 2006 Beaconsfield mine disaster in Tasmania as a case study, this pape... more Using the reporting of the 2006 Beaconsfield mine disaster in Tasmania as a case study, this paper explores the changing nature of chequebook journalism and the shift towards the consumerist model of entertain-ment news in Australia. The paper argues that the media's coverage ...
In 1941 Australian tabloid journalist Dorothy Gordon Jenner was caught up in the Japanese siege o... more In 1941 Australian tabloid journalist Dorothy Gordon Jenner was caught up in the Japanese siege of Hong Kong and was incarcerated in the Stanley Internment Camp. During her internment Jenner kept a clandestine record of daily life written in pencil on Bronco brand toilet paper and kept hidden in the heels of her shoes. To date her fragmented diary and notes have defied analysis. This paper provides a reading of Jenner’s personal wartime testimonio through the frame of tabloid journalism to expose how the tabloid genre Jenner’s stock-in-trade as a journalist before the war became the framework for her personal testimony during World War II. By interpreting Jenner’s private diary and notes as testimonio journalism this paper exposes the flow of the tabloid vernacular style of journalism between private and public discourses.
Chapter Six in: Mediating Moms: Mothers in Popular Culture, edited by Elizabeth Podnieks, McGill-... more Chapter Six in: Mediating Moms: Mothers in Popular Culture, edited by Elizabeth Podnieks, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2012.
Chapter Two in: Home Sweat Home: Perspectives on Housework & Modern Relationships, edited by Eliz... more Chapter Two in: Home Sweat Home: Perspectives on Housework & Modern Relationships, edited by Elizabeth Patton and Mimi Choi, Rowman & Littlefield 2014.
This Chapter appears in Hollywood and the World edited by Robert James and Roy Vallis, Oxford: In... more This Chapter appears in Hollywood and the World edited by Robert James and Roy Vallis, Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press,2014. Abstract The tension around the creation of cross-cultural romance in Hollywood films of the early twentieth century is nowhere more evident than in the creation of the sexually provocative Hollywood construct, the ‘Hula Girl’, who was the personification of female sexual abandonment from the late 1910s. Her presence in Hollywood films was a deliberate strategy to avoid the censorship laws of the day and to introduce sexually provocative leading Caucasian women into the cinema. In 1926, the Paramount picture Aloma of the South Seas was the most successful film of the year, grossing $3 million in the US alone and was the fourth most successful film of the 1920s. Starring Polish born Gilda Gray as the gorgeous ‘Aloma’, an exotic dancer who enraptured her lover through her performances of the hula, it played a significant part in the Hula Girl phenomenon. Then in 1927, the ‘It’ girl, the silent era’s greatest sex symbol, Clara Bow, brought the fashion for the hula to a fever pitch when she played the part of ‘Hula Calhoun’, the happy-go-lucky daughter of a Hawaiian plantation owner who would ‘stop at nothing to win the love of a married English engineer’. Looking to Judith Butler’s work on performance and gender, this paper will focus on a private collection of early twentieth century Hula Girl’ snapshot photographs from America, Australia, England and Europe. It will map the ways in which ordinary Western women played themselves into the potentially transgressive position of cultural producers through their adoption of Hollywood’s Hawaiian maiden persona as part of their exploration of female sexuality in the early twentieth century.
With the arrival in the 1990s of the World Wide Web the new digital realm was seen as a genuine o... more With the arrival in the 1990s of the World Wide Web the new digital realm was seen as a genuine opportunity for women to participate on equal terms in the world of global communication. The Internet has empowered women and minority groups to have a voice and speak back against inequality. Its global reach and relative affordability and accessibility make it a communication platform where humans can do great good and also great harm. This case study examines the sexism women encounter in as users of and participants in digital media in the twenty-first century. Its focus is on women who work in the predominantly male area of sports journalism and gaming.
In her study of anonymous infanticide news stories that appeared from 1822 to 1922 in the heart o... more In her study of anonymous infanticide news stories that appeared from 1822 to 1922 in the heart of the British Empire, in regional Leicester, and in the penal colony of Australia, Nicola Goc uses Critical Discourse Analysis to reveal both the broader patterns and the particular rhetorical strategies journalists used to report on young women who killed their babies. Her study takes Foucault’s perspective that the production of knowledge, of “facts” and truth claims, and the exercise of power, are inextricably connected to discourse. Newspaper discourses provide a way to investigate the discursive practices that brought the nineteenth-century infanticidal woman - known as ‘the Infanticide’ - into being. The actions of the infanticidal mother were understood as a fundamental threat to society, not only because they subverted the ideal of Victorian womanhood but also because a woman’s actions destroyed a man’s lineage. For these reasons, Goc demonstrates, infanticide narratives were politicised in the press and woven into interconnected narratives about the regulation of women, women's rights, the family, the law, welfare, and medicine that dominated nineteenth-century discourse. For example, the Times used individual stories of infanticide to argue against the Bastardy Clause in the Poor Law that denied unmarried women and their children relief. Infanticide narratives often adopted the conventions of the courtroom drama, with the young transgressive female positioned against a body of male authoritarian figures, a juxtaposition that reinforced male authority over women. At the same time, infanticide news stories created a way of knowing the women who killed their babies that fed into medical, judicial, and welfare policies regarding the crime of infanticide, created an acceptable way for society to view these women, and pathologised the women's actions. Alive to the marked differences between various types of newspapers, Goc's study offers a rich and nuanced discussion of the Victorian press's fascination with infanticide.
An introductory text that provides an overview of the 'mediasphere' to ... more An introductory text that provides an overview of the 'mediasphere' to demonstrate how a knowledge of media can inform a knowledge of journalism and vice versa; and to show how such knowledge is best acquired through a combination of theory and practice. It integrates media theory ...
Uploads
Papers by Nicolá Goc
Abstract
The tension around the creation of cross-cultural romance in Hollywood films of the early twentieth century is nowhere more evident than in the creation of the sexually provocative Hollywood construct, the ‘Hula Girl’, who was the personification of female sexual abandonment from the late 1910s. Her presence in Hollywood films was a deliberate strategy to avoid the censorship laws of the day and to introduce sexually provocative leading Caucasian women into the cinema. In 1926, the Paramount picture Aloma of the South Seas was the most successful film of the year, grossing $3 million in the US alone and was the fourth most successful film of the 1920s. Starring Polish born Gilda Gray as the gorgeous ‘Aloma’, an exotic dancer who enraptured her lover through her performances of the hula, it played a significant part in the Hula Girl phenomenon. Then in 1927, the ‘It’ girl, the silent era’s greatest sex symbol, Clara Bow, brought the fashion for the hula to a fever pitch when she played the part of ‘Hula Calhoun’, the happy-go-lucky daughter of a Hawaiian plantation owner who would ‘stop at nothing to win the love of a married English engineer’. Looking to Judith Butler’s work on performance and gender, this paper will focus on a private collection of early twentieth century Hula Girl’ snapshot photographs from America, Australia, England and Europe. It will map the ways in which ordinary Western women played themselves into the potentially transgressive position of cultural producers through their adoption of Hollywood’s Hawaiian maiden persona as part of their exploration of female sexuality in the early twentieth century.
Books by Nicolá Goc
Abstract
The tension around the creation of cross-cultural romance in Hollywood films of the early twentieth century is nowhere more evident than in the creation of the sexually provocative Hollywood construct, the ‘Hula Girl’, who was the personification of female sexual abandonment from the late 1910s. Her presence in Hollywood films was a deliberate strategy to avoid the censorship laws of the day and to introduce sexually provocative leading Caucasian women into the cinema. In 1926, the Paramount picture Aloma of the South Seas was the most successful film of the year, grossing $3 million in the US alone and was the fourth most successful film of the 1920s. Starring Polish born Gilda Gray as the gorgeous ‘Aloma’, an exotic dancer who enraptured her lover through her performances of the hula, it played a significant part in the Hula Girl phenomenon. Then in 1927, the ‘It’ girl, the silent era’s greatest sex symbol, Clara Bow, brought the fashion for the hula to a fever pitch when she played the part of ‘Hula Calhoun’, the happy-go-lucky daughter of a Hawaiian plantation owner who would ‘stop at nothing to win the love of a married English engineer’. Looking to Judith Butler’s work on performance and gender, this paper will focus on a private collection of early twentieth century Hula Girl’ snapshot photographs from America, Australia, England and Europe. It will map the ways in which ordinary Western women played themselves into the potentially transgressive position of cultural producers through their adoption of Hollywood’s Hawaiian maiden persona as part of their exploration of female sexuality in the early twentieth century.