(13) media-culture.org.au

http://www.media-culture.org.au/
M/C Journal: Disability, Heroism and Australian National Identity
http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/48

Media/Culture was founded in 1998 to offer an intellectual place for discussions about the intersections of media and culture, supported by the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology. On the website of media-culture.org.au, several publications can be found: The M/Cyclopedia of New Media, a record of key issues and terms, the M/C Reviews, which reviews books, movies and music, and the academic journal M/C Journal.

The article Disability, Heroism and Australian National Identity was published in that journal in 2008, written by Martin Mantle, a lecturer at University of New England. It is mostly about the Australian mocumentary We Can be Heroes: Finding the Australian of the Year, and how the process of inclusion and exclusion, that constitutes a national identity to a great extent, intersects with the ‘ableness’ or the disability of publicly visible bodies.

The satirical view on national ‘heroes’ (what is seen as ‘national’ as well as who is considered to be a hero in that context) in We Can be Heroes goes beyond the binary oppositions of ability/disability and positive/negative. It therefore contests the simple stereotypes that are usually portrayed as national and able bodies, just like they are shown in the opening credits of the show: Surf Life savers, firemen, cricketers, swimmers and running children.

(11) tvn.sagepub.com

http://tvn.sagepub.com
Television & New Media: Cultural Identity, Soap Narrative, and Reality TV
http://tvn.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/6/4/415

Just like the online journal I wrote about in link number 10, Television & New Media is a journal published on the SAGE platform since 2000, and it is committed to recent developments in Television and New Media studies.

In 2005, there was an article published in Television & New Media called Cultural Identity, Soap Narrative, and Reality TV, written by Graeme Turner, available for download as pdf. Turner is an internationally prominent academic figure in cultural and media studies (amongst others) concerning Australian nationalism, television and film.

In the article, he focuses on two television formats: The Australian soap opera and Australian reality TV shows, particularly Big Brother. He links the distinctive Australian elements of the soap Neighbours to its great success, domestic as well as overseas, and he explains how even a ‘global’ format like Big Brother was indigenized and therefore functioned as a discursive space for cultural and national identification: Instead of a competitive fight between the individuals, like it happened in other national versions of Big Brother, the participants became a family, a house full of ‘mates’.

Turner shows how patterns of cultural identification are not only found in TV formats that are distinctly labeled ‘Australian’, but surprisingly they are very visible in ‘gobal’ formats (the soap opera or reality TV), where one would least expect them.