Literature has a long history of chastising women who defy ,traditional' gender roles. By turning a critical eye on the poem danse grotesque by the Icelandic poet Sjón, its staging and visual presentations, as well as fundamental interpretive keys such as trolls and dance, one senses a resistance to the prevailing manifestations of women in the Western media. The article shows how the poem reassesses the relationship between femininity and death in Western culture.Keywords: Concrete poetry, avant-garde, decadence, gender roles, death, dance, trollsKjartan Már ÓmarssonDoktorsnemi í almennri bókmenntafræði Hugvísindasviði Háskóla ÍslandsSæmundargötu 2 IS-101 Reykjavík, Íslandko@hi.is
A haunted house can either be a monster or the habitat of monsters, or even both. These houses have a unique attraction and a variety of methods to catch their prey. The scariest haunted house in the film Rökkur by Erlingur Óttar Thoroddsen (2017) does not provide shelter from wind and weather as it is not made of wood, concrete or stone. The ghosts in Rökkur are lurking online instead. By using the premises of the horror genre, Erlingur focuses specifically on the dangers that young homosexual men can be facing today. Chat rooms and social media are like hunting grounds for the monsters stalking the main characters. The film also focuses on the staggering silence of survivors of sexual violence, as studies have indicated that male victims are less likely to report the crimes they have suffered.
Explanations of sexual violence are an important topic because they reveal the societal context of violence. Perpetrators of violence commonly reject blame, explaining their actions with survivor behavior or the situation. In this study, 397 Icelandic social media posts from Facebook and Twitter were analyzed for explanations of violence. Societal explanations included general negative attitudes towards women, biological essentialism (that men cannot control their sex drive), the entitlement of men to sex and objectification. Survivor explanations included that the survivor had been drinking alcohol at the time of the violence, and that the survivor was expected to fight back to justify the event being classified as violence. The monster stereotype of perpetrators was salient in the accounts, either as fact, or to specifically challenge that idea. The results reveal powerful societal stereotypes when it comes to sexual violence, which need to be counteracted in the future.
This article discusses the phenomenon of self-harming or "non-Suicidal Self-In-jury" (nSSI). The International Society for the Study of Self-Injury defines non-sui cidal self-injury as the deliberate, self-inflicted damage of body tissue without suicidal intent and for purposes not socially or culturally sanctioned." The article discusses the cultural and social representations of self-injury, what is implied in it, who engages in it, and for what reasons. A lot can be deduced from interviews with self-harmers who use it to gain control over bad feelings and stress, by hurting their body and participating in risky behaviour. This dangerous activity often has more complicated sides with reference to rituals and spiritual associations to bloodletting, cleansing of all evil and healing, absolution and much wanted peace of mind. Finally, the changes in self-harming discourse and channels of communication are discussed. It has opened up during the last two decades with the arrival of social media. The self-harmers have built their own subcultures with special aesthetics and often preferring theatrical staging or performances instead of verbal expres-sion. These channels can have an uncanny power and influence over young and vulnerable people. The conclusion of the article is that all this requires an informed discussion as a special world, a special angst which is expressing itself in ways that might develop into suicidal behaviour if it is not taken seriously.
The regulation of film exhibition in Iceland has closely shadowed the history of cinema exhibition itself. Although regulation practices have undergone various shifts and realignments throughout the twentieth century, they retained certain core concerns and a basic ideological imperative having to do with child protection and child welfare. Movies were thought to have a disproportionate impact on children, with "impressionable minds" often being invoked. Their interior lives and successful journey towards maturity were put at risk each and every time they encountered unsuitable filmic materials. Thus, while assuming that adults could fend for them-selves among the limited number of theaters in Reykjavík, children were a whole another matter and required protection. Civic bodies were consequently formed and empowered to evaluate and regulate films. But even in the context of fairly rigorous surveillance and codification, the turn taken by regulatory authorities in the 1980s strikes one as exceptional and unprecedented. The Film Certification Board (TFCB) was, for the first time, authorized to prohibit and suppress from distribution films deemed especially malignant and harmful. Motivating this vast expansion of the powers of the regulatory body were concerns about a variety of exploitation and horror films that were being distributed on video, films that were thought to transgress so erroneously in terms of on-screen violence that their mere existence posed a grave threat to children. Two years after finding its role so radical-ly enlarged, TFCB put together a list of 67 "video-nasties", to borrow a term from the very similar but later moral panic that occurred in Britain. Police raids were conducted and every video store in the country was visited in a nation-wide effort to remove the now illegal films from rental stores. This article posits that the icelandic nasties list can be viewed as something of a unique testament to the extent to which the meaning, aesthetic coherence and the affect of cultural objects is constructed in the process of reception, while also main-taining that the process of reception is thoroughly shaped by historical discourses, social class, embedded moral codes and a social system of values, as well as techno-logical progress. in what amounts to a perfect storm of moralizing, political games-manship and the sheer panic of a certain segment of the population, the governing institutions in iceland managed in the span of months to overturn constitutionally protected rights to free speech and privacy, as well as undermine central principles of the republic. Two decades would pass before these setbacks were recuperated, and then only on a legal and institutional level. While analyzing the history of the icelandic video nasties, the article also attempts to grapple with and articulate the symbolic register of the ban, how it speaks to the status of cinema in Iceland at the close of the twentieth century, and what ideological strains, morals and/or values were being put into play and funneled into this particular debate. Then, to close, the role of the most notorious of the nasties, Cannibal Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato, 1980), is examined in the context of media coverage and parliamentary debates at the time.
