ABSTRACT In this article I argue that Jane Campion’s film The Power of the Dog (2021), can be read through Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1967); and that Campion’s films more generally can be viewed insightfully in a Nietzschean frame. Campion’s films are often concerned with ancient mythic themes and forces that continue to find expression in later times and places. I argue that Campion is also a feminist filmmaker who questions Hollywood narrative cinema from a subject position of difference, from within its genres but re-writing and re-valuing the values of its ‘plots’ (Gillett, Sue. 2004. Views From Beyond the Mirror: The Films of Jane Campion. The Moving Image 7. Australia: Australian Teachers of Media, Australian Film Institute and Deakin University). Campion explores abiding psycho-social phenomena and needs – here, masculinity, men’s relations with ‘mother’ – by drawing on mythological figures in service to the present in original ways and as a female director. I draw on Hélène Deutsch’s (1969. A Psychoanalytic Study of The Myth of Dionysus and Apollo: Two Variants of the Son-Mother Relationship. The Freud Anniversary Lecture Series, The New York Psychoanalytic Institute. New York: International Universities Press Inc.) analysis and discussion of Apollonian and Dionysian mythologies in support of this argument.

ABSTRACT Wealth is often seen as an object of desire. That is, it is what desire desires and it comes to represent desire. The accumulation of wealth is commonly considered excessive and coming at the cost of environmental and corporeal needs. Such an account of wealth follows an either/or logic that produces a set of oppositional terms such as nature or culture, desire or need, wealth or necessity, luxury or survival. This article explores questions of wealth and desire via the 2018 film Crazy Rich Asians. It uses the lens of ornament to zoom in on how the film depicts the relationship between the natural and the artificial, winning and losing, and subject and object. It proposes a feminist ornamental approach to wealth and desire that reworks the either/or logic and the oppositional terms that undergird it. It argues that this approach allows for an analysis of the relation between race, gender, nature, style, wealth and desire beyond one of commodification or recognition, ownership or dispossession.

ABSTRACT Diversity and inclusion, decolonising the curriculum, and intersectionality have become buzzwords in higher education, with questions raised about what counts as knowledge and whose knowledge counts in teaching contexts. Despite efforts being made to democratise the curriculum through reading lists and lecture content, pedagogy itself remains largely unchanged. In this article, I provide a theoretical reflection on my experiences of teaching an introductory gender studies unit at an Australian university at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The pandemic intensified existing inequities amongst students, not only outside but also inside the classroom. It is against this backdrop that I swapped the initially set research essay in the unit for a manifesto writing assignment. In this article, I explore the ways in which the manifesto assignment provided an opportunity to take seriously bell hooks’ vision of engaged pedagogy that views education as the practice of freedom and discuss the ways in which it came to represent an example of feminist praxis that assists in fostering a more inclusive classroom, grounded in feminism’s liberatory project.

ABSTRACT This article employs new materialist theory to the accounts of women who were pregnant, giving birth or parenting new-borns during the Australian bushfires of 2019/2020. As feminist scholars we are concerned with the inequitable responsibility accorded to women during this time to limit their (un)born children’s exposure to smoke. Drawing on Barad’s (2007) relational ontology we trace how (non)human phenomena like ‘smoke’, ‘public health advice’ and discourses of ‘the good mother’ work intra-actively to establish conditions of possibility in relation to mother’s agency and responsibility in this crisis. Via in-depth interviews with 25 women, we discovered these coagulating forces meant many experienced feelings of ‘powerlessness’ and subsequent ‘guilt’ at their inability to prevent smoke inhalation for their (un)born children. To challenge this burden of responsibility, we (re)configure conventional notions of ‘agency’ and ‘responsibility’ within a new materialist frame. When agency is understood as an intra-active becoming and response-ability as preceding the subject, responsibility for the air shifts to a recognition that everyone/thing is complicit in the world’s differential becoming. We extend this thinking to consider human response-ability and agency in relation to the climate change that has been attributed to causing the fires.

ABSTRACT This article explores the complex emotional geography of contemporary domestic spaces and invisible forms of care during periods of working and caring from home (WCFH) during the COVID-19 pandemic. During the pandemic lockdowns and restrictions carers and creatives were disproportionally impacted. In June 2020 we developed an open call for creative responses under the title of ‘Work, Care and Creativity Study (WCCS): value and visibility’. Our study sought to explore the lived experiences of creatives working at a university who were also carers WCFH and to capture the complexity of care responsibilities, their affects and effects on wellbeing, mental health and career disruptions. Through cultural probes our study sought to render visible some of the overlooked emotions, perceptions and practices that were emerging for carers during the pandemic. We were interested in how playful approaches to cultural probes could invite creative workers and carers to ‘map’ the materialities of the home as a way of expressing the relational, emotional, and material entanglements of WCFH. Our research illustrates the value of creative prompt techniques for articulating the constant (re)negotiation of the relational intensities and compressions of work, care and creativity at a time of COVID-19.

ABSTRACT Although wealth concentration and large fortunes have attracted increased scholarly attention in recent decades, this work has been largely gender-blind. This study examines changes in the gender composition of global billionaires over the last 14 years (Forbes world’s billionaires list, 2010 – 2023) and asks how male and female billionaires differ in their likelihood to perpetuate their billionaire status. Between 2010 and 2023, we find a modest increase in the percentage share of female billionaires, from 9.0 to 12.8 percent. While the share of female self-made billionaires more than doubled, the share of female billionaire heirs increased only by 43 percent during the observed period, highlighting the importance to differentiate between the source of billionaires’ wealth when studying gender differences. To examine differences in the long-term perpetuation of billionaire fortunes by gender and source of wealth of billionaires, we apply survival analyses. We find that men stay on the Forbes list significantly longer than women. Overall, this study contributes to the literature on gender wealth inequalities by showing how billionaires’ wealth is structured by gender.

ABSTRACT This article examines the intersections between coloniality and gender in the generation and maintenance of Australian wealth. Settler colonialism is ongoing in Australia and is intricately linked to wealth accumulation – where First Nations people’s labour, land and lives have been, and continue to be, expropriated. Whilst feminist scholars have long shown how the capitalist economy free rides on unpaid care work, understandings of care have centred around colonial and settler notions of care which can overlook First Nations meanings and practices of care such as those intricately linked to looking after country, and are at the forefront of struggles and endurance against settler colonialism, including the unpaid work of healing settler induced trauma and violence. Through examining these areas of unpaid care, and drawing on Indigenous, racial capitalism and settler colonial literature, this article outlines contemporary processes of expropriation of First Nations women’s unpaid care, in the making and maintenance of Australian wealth.

ABSTRACT Scholarly interest in assets has grown over recent years, with housing receiving particular attention. At the same time a related body of work has focussed on intergenerational financial assistance with home ownership, considering how proximity to assets may lead to direct assistance with purchasing property. In this article I draw on interviews conducted with 80 donors and recipients of family financial assistance with first home ownership in order to consider the role of assets (specifically property) in the imagined futures of the recipients, focusing particularly on ambitions to own investment properties. I argue that the provision and receipt of financial assistance of this type is underpinned by shared investor subjectivities. I then consider how these investor subjectivities may lead to specific orientations to property investment in the recipients’ imagined futures, finding that many of them aim to use property wealth to meet some of the costs of social reproduction in ways that recreate the gender dynamics that they experienced during their own childhoods. I ultimately draw together these claims to contend that the Minskian household is perhaps best thought of as a kinship network, and to identify some of the empirical features of these networks.

ABSTRACT In 2022 Sophie Dyring and Samantha Donnelly published A Design Guide for Older Women’s Housing. 1 The guide addresses older women’s housing needs through the lens of design and architecture and places women and their needs at the heart of the design process. It is based on conversations with women about different housing types and their experiences of space, safety, belonging and connection. Sophia Maalsen and Cathy Smith met with the authors to talk about women, housing, design, and architecture.

ABSTRACT As part of this special issue on Wealth, Australian Feminist Studies Co-Editor Lisa Adkins met with Céline Bessière and Sibylle Gollac to discuss their book, The Gender of Capital: How Families Perpetuate Wealth Inequality (2023). Published by Harvard University Press and translated by Juliette Rogers, The Gender of Capital was first published in French as Le Genre du Capital: Comment la Famille Reproduit les Inégalités (2020, La Découverte).