Kate Egan
Related: academic - culture theory
Profile
Kate Egan is a PhD Student at the Institute of Film Studies, University of Nottingham, UK. Her thesis is provisionally titled “The ‘Video Nasty’ as Cultural Object”, and aims to assess the variety of cultural meanings and cultural uses that have been ascribed to the “nasty” from the early 1980s up until the present day (by the press, academia, fans and collectors, and a variety of other media institutions). She is also an editorial board member of Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies.The Amateur Historian and the Electronic Archive: Identity, Power and the Function of Lists, Facts and Memories on “Video Nasty”-Themed Websites
In a piece devoted to the gender dynamics of internet chatrooms, Lori Kendall argues that the web is a particularly useful receptacle for the performance of identities, and, in particular - considering that, according to her research, the web remains a male dominated realm - the performance of a variety of masculine identities. Kate Egan via http://www.cult-media.com/issue3/Aegan.htm
Indeed, it is notable that, if “nasty” websites sometimes include pages of video covers, and sometimes include lists of running times, cuts and distributor details, every single site that I visited always has one central and identical staple - the Director of Public Prosecutions’ (DPP) list of “video nasties” (or, more specifically, the list of videos that, in the early 1980s, were deemed liable for prosecution under the 1959 Obscene Publications Act). While the contents of this list vary from site to site - something which is perhaps inevitable, considering that the DPP frequently removed and added titles to the list prior to the passing of the 1984 Video Recordings Act - it is always included, and is often given the air of a being an “official” list (in particular, on the Hysteria/Slasher/Nasties site, where the list is introduced as “…the original, the infamous, the banned, the…video-nasties” and on Wayney’s Movie World, where it’s described as “…the DPP’s original list of ‘Video Nasties’” --Kate Egan, The Amateur Historian and the Electronic Archive: Identity, Power and the Function of Lists, Facts and Memories on “Video Nasty”-Themed Websites via http://www.cult-media.com/issue3/Aegan.htm [Feb 2005]