Reading/writing women : feminist criticism in/and Australia

Abstract

This dissertation will offer a discussion and critique of the emergence, associated with the ’second wave' of the women’s movement since the late 1960s, of a political criticism in Australia that foregrounds questions of sex and gender: usually known in its several, and sometimes divergent, varieties as ’feminist criticism.’ In discussing the range of practices that have been developed for the analysis of questions of women and cultural production in general and, in particular, questions of women and literary production, I shall offer an account of their political effects, with special attention to the relationship of race, class, ethnicity,and sexual preference together with those of gender and nationality, to the activity of 'feminist' criticism. The various ways of talking about women's writing in Australia have been developed in relation to, and are ultimately inseparable from, the historical conjunctures in which they have emerged. The dissertation will therefore examine not only what has been said about women and writing in Australia, and how that might be used and understood by critics, but also the conditions within which and, often, against which these critical discourses have developed. These conditions of production and reception apply as much to fiction writing as to criticism and theory. Attention will therefore be paid throughout to the varying ways these issues are mediated and explored in writing from different literary and critical forms and genres, and with different effects as well as 'intentions' (itself a problematic, and problematised, concept in recent criticism). This dissertation is not a history of feminist criticism in Australia as such nor of recent Australian women’s writing, but aims to examine both of these in relationship to each other and in the context of relevant political and cultural debates. A ’cultural studies' approach is thus taken to literary study. Accordingly, the dissertation is organised around a number of central theoretical issues and problems. It begins by identifying some key critical and political terms that provide a framework for considering the overall area, and then examines the emergence of feminist criticism in Australia, followed by a discussion of the ways in which the figure of the Australian woman writer has been culturally produced.