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Romeo ＋Julietのバズ・ラーマンがオーストラリア出身で、オーストラリアといえばシドニーのマルディ・グラで、『プリシラ』だぁ、てので、まだまだ続く。

Priscillaにおけるフィリピーナ表象の続き。

Beyond 'Australian film'? Australian cinema in the 1990s by Tom O'Regan

http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/film/1990s.html

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Another controversy surrounding Asian representation emerged over Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert. Priscilla opened with a largely benign press as its drag queens were celebrated. Like Strictly Ballroom, this was a feel good movie, but properly 'camp' in the tradition of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. It was shocking then to hear Melba Margison of the Centre for Filipino Concerns saying 'that film, the way we have been treated there is actually killing us. For us, it is the murder of the dignity of Filipino women. It will encourage more violence against us'. The Filipino character in the film, Cynthia, was 'a gold-digger, a prostitute, an entertertainer whose expertise is popping out ping-pong balls from her sex-organ, a manic depressive, loud and vulgar'. And that 'while all the main and secondary characters in the film were treated with respect, humanized and dignified, the Filipina was treated with condemnation, dehumanised and stripped of any form of dignity'. The problem lay not with the by now familiar and routine excoriation of outback and heterosexual Australian men as Wake in Fright deviants, but with the woman, Cynthia, who panders to and is implicated in their heterosexuality. In response to this criticism, one of the film's producers, Al Clark, rejoined

The film is a gentle satire with enormous affection for its characters. Cynthia, the Filipina character in the film is a misfit like the three protagonists are, and just about everybody else in the film is, and her presence is no more a statement about Filipino women than having three drag queens is a statement about Australian men. (Caffarella 1994)
While Priscilla is celebrated for its social text mainstreaming gay lifestyles and 'acceptable gay culture' and its expansion of an Australian filmmaking tradition of 'freaks' to include Mitzi and Felicia and to a lesser extent the Cynthia character alongside Nino, Barry McKenzie, Stork, Alvin and Sweetie, it is also a problem film in that in 'rehabilitating' a marginalized group, it denigrated another 'marginalized' one: Asians and women. Such dissension over the meaning of the film is structural to filmmaking. Popular filmmakers work with hesitations, moral ambiguities, and not the moralities that sustain identity politics and critical intellectual debate.

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Sex, Botany and Empire (Icon Science): The Story of Carl Linnaeus and Joseph Banks

18世紀のコレクター、Joseph Banks。彼が脚に脚絆みたいなものを巻いているのは、痛風のせいらしい。別のあだ名がBotanic Macaroni. Macaroniというのは、もともとは、大陸旅行でイタリアかぶれになった若者をさしていたらしい。
１８世紀の植物学は、エロい言葉を使うのだけど、Banks批判で、Momosa: or, The Sensitive Plantというのがあるらしい。感じやすい植物、ミモザか。エロいなぁ。Ｋさんがキーツ関係でやっていたことと、かかわるんだろうか？

ここから病自慢の話に飛ぶ。

Gout: The Patrician Malady

ずっとほうっておいたのだけど、上の本の関係でぼちぼち。贅沢病で、ぽっちゃり型に多いとされた痛風だけど、これを煩っていたホレス・ウォルポールは、ガリガリだった。痛風は、他のもっと深刻な病を抑えるとされていたので、痛風welcome!という雰囲気もあったらしい。body politicのconstitutionと、身体のconstitutionのアナロジーでいえば、痛風は、国家身体において、よくはないけどなんとか共存を図るべきものの比喩、mixed or balanced constitutionの比喩とされていたらしい。