(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.

(10) ics.sagepub.com

http://ics.sagepub.com/
Australian Gay Porn Videos: The National Identity of Despised Cultural Objects
http://ics.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/2/2/178

SAGE is an online platform that publishes academic books as well as over 560 online journals. If visited through the Griffith University network, SAGE automatically recognizes the institution and provides access to the articles by enabling the download as pdf files.

One of the journals published through SAGE that are particularly interesting for our research topic is the International Journal of Cultural Studies: The journal has been around since 1998 and currently consists of six issues per year, and it focuses on developments in media and cultural studies around the globe.

Searching for information on Australian national identity, I found an essay in the journal on a rather unusual topic, written by Alan McKee, a lecturer in Communications at Edith Cowan University, Western Australia. The essay is called Australian Gay Porn Videos: The National Identity of Despised Cultural Objects, and it provides some new and valuable insights into the ongoing debate of what Australian national identity actually is, and how it is constructed in the not-so-mainstream media.

The essay discusses in detail the local/global dichotomy and authenticity in the context of national identity, and therefore provides a good example and resource for doing an equally new and unexplored research on Australian national identity (for example, a study of Australian queer cinema).