Australian Feminist Research Articles

Dale Spender (1943–2023): some personal reflections

ABSTRACT This appreciation looks at the life of Dale Spender (1943–2023), an Australian feminist scholar and activist who helped to establish the interdisciplinary field of Women’s Studies. She wrote over 30 books, most of them published in the UK to which she moved in the mid-1970s in order to study for her PhD at the Institute of Education, University of London. A radical feminist, her contribution to the development of women’s history in the UK and USA has often been overlooked.

Ruby Rich’s Dream Library: Feminist Memory-Keeping as an Archive of Affective Mnemonic Practices

In the so-called West, feminist activists and scholars have long been traumatised by the erasure of their histories via dominant patriarchal narratives, which has served as an impediment to the intergenerational transmission of feminist knowledge. Recently, while acknowledging the very real and ongoing impact of this historical omission, some feminists have issued a call to turn away from a narrative of women’s history as ‘serial forgetting’ and towards an acknowledgement of the affirmative capacity of feminist remembering. At the same time, memory theorist Ann Rigney has advocated for a ‘positive turn’ in memory studies, away from what she perceives to be the field’s gravitation towards trauma and instead towards an analysis of life’s positive legacies. In this article, I combine both approaches to investigate one feminist memory-keeper’s archive, analysing what it reveals about ‘the mechanisms by which positive attachments are transmitted across space and time’. Throughout her life, little-known ‘between-the-waves’ Australian feminist Ruby Rich (1888–1988) performed multiple intersecting activist activities. While she created feminist memories through her work for various political organisations, she also collected, stored and transmitted feminist memories through her campaign for a dedicated space for women’s collections in the National Library of Australia. Propelled by fear of loss and inspired by hope for remembering, Rich constructed a brand of archival activism that was both educational and emotional. In this paper, I examine the strategies Rich employed to try to realise her dream of effecting intellectual and affective bonds between future feminists and their predecessors.

Between Charity and Neoliberalism: The Campaign for Funding Women's Refuges in Australia, 1974–1985

Abstract: Australia's first women's refuge was established in 1974, marking a crucial outgrowth of women's liberation activism that placed domestic violence on the public agenda. To maintain refuges, feminists seized opportunities presented by the progressive Gough Whitlam Labor government. This convergence between a reforming government and the women's movement meant that Australian feminist refuges were among the first in the world to receive state support, in 1975. Maintaining this support required feminist activists to engage with the Australian state. They framed their claims in two ways: they foregrounded women's traumatic narratives of experiences of domestic violence, and they asserted that refuges were a distinctive feminist service. Adapting to a constantly changing political context, however, advocates found it difficult to distinguish their activities from charitable refuges. Their emphasis on women's trauma foregrounded a victimized political subject while the movement's emphasis on fostering "self-help" was co-opted by advocates of neoliberal governance.

Tracing a Female Mind in Late Nineteenth Century Australia: Rose Selwyn

Rose Selwyn (1824–1905) was a first wave Australian feminist and public speaker. The poetry, art, and scraps of writing Rose left in her archive allow the reader to piece together an intellectual history, a genealogy of the making of self. Rose attained her way of being through several contemporary influences—the mysticism of Tractarianism, a concern with death and its meanings, an interest in the literary edges of the world, a concern with the suffering body, and a passion for women and a woman-centred world. From these tangled contemporary concerns, she made a feminism for all non-Aboriginal women apparent in her speeches. Her role as a colonising woman in a violent landscape created a complex relationship with Aboriginal people where she may be seen to be criticising her elite landholding (squatter) peers and introducing concepts such as an Aboriginal parliament.

Influence and expertise: distancing and distinction in online youth feminist knowledge cultures

ABSTRACT In recent years, feminism’s visibility in Western pop culture and social media has seemingly made it ever more accessible for young people (Banet-Weiser, S. 2019. Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny. Durham, NC: Duke University Press). This article uses the framework of youth ‘knowledge cultures’ to analyse how feminist knowledge is negotiated and remade in online culture, going beyond characterisations of online feminism primarily in terms of either ‘activism’, or the linear ‘accessing’ of feminist ideas. Drawing on an ongoing empirical project located in Australia involving 50 young feminists who regularly engage with feminist social media culture, we highlight participants’ affective practices of analysis and critique in connection with three Australian feminist ‘influencers’ with significant social media presences: Clementine Ford, a white columnist and memoirist; Abbie Chatfield, a white former Bachelor contestant, now podcaster and TV personality; and Lillian Ahenkan aka Flex Mami, a Black entrepreneur, and podcaster. We highlight how practices of distancing and proximity are enacted by participants in affective knowledge practices in relation to these influencers. We suggest the framework of ‘accessibility’ that predominates in scholarship obscures the complex classed, racialised and gendered dynamics through which knowledge is hierarchically made, contested, and accorded legitimacy in social media knowledge cultures.

Congealing the Abject

Congealing the Abject: Blood in performance as feminine-feminist meaning-making by Laura Hartnell explores how blood – in three forms, three representations – evokes the abject in three Australian feminist performances. Through a performative exploration of Adena Jacobs' The Bacchae, Olivia Satchell's let bleeding girls lie, and Casey Jenkins' Casting Off My Womb, this paper explores blood as a tool for affectively engaging with women's bodies, grief, rage and trauma. Weaving together critical theory with autoethnographic accounts of being in-audience, written using performative writing, this paper explores how the representation of blood in performance ushers us into the feminine-feminist abject. For Kristeva, the abject is a rejection of blood and other bodily waste and fluids and her reclamation of abjection is a defiant and celebratory journey into all that the masculine Symbolic has deemed too disgusting, horrific, excessive – too bodily – to confront. This paper argues that blood in performance ruptures the Symbolic order, plunging us into the abject and therefore into an affective, bodily state where meaning is primarily made not through language, logic, and reason, but through affective forces that push and pull, slip and slide, glisten and congeal, much like blood. This feminine-feminist, abject form of meaning-making is inherently performative, and the performances explored in this paper demonstrate how blood in performance – forming a spectrum from the literal to the abstracted – opens a space within the masculine Symbolic order in which feminine-feminist meaning-making can emerge. By writing performatively about these performances, this paper aims to affectively evoke the ways in which blood 'congeals' the abject, offering us a place to explore bodily and embodied trauma, grief, rage through a feminine-feminist lens.

“To Feel Their Warmth, Sisterhood, and Closeness”: Australian Feminist Entanglements with Chinese and Vietnamese Communism, 1969–1979

Between 1969 and 1979 the Australian women’s liberation movement was richly entangled with Vietnamese and Chinese Communism. While this social movement has been substantially critiqued for its privileging of white women, this article considers a moment when women did work across racial and political difference, albeit imperfectly. Australian socialist feminists were directly inspired by Vietnamese and Chinese women, considering them tantalizing evidence of a woman-friendly communist utopia. But other feminists were entangled in ways that were less tightly woven and more surprising; for example, through the technique of consciousness-raising. Feminists also projected their desire for global sisterhood onto Vietnamese and Chinese women. Yet face-to-face visits reveal that East Asian feminists were not just a site for Australian feminist projections. As representatives of state women’s organizations, East Asian Communist women acted strategically to construct Vietnam and China as gender equal in the eyes of Australian visitors. This assertion of equality went largely unquestioned due to the revered place testimony occupied in the women’s liberation movement. Yet women’s differences were exposed in moments of bafflement during these visits. These are animated as moments of productive confusion; they are productive because they reveal the differences between women. Finally, Communist state feminists are not exceptionalized and are compared to Australian state feminists or “femocrats.” I find their agency similarly limited.

How Wealth Inequalities are Made: An Interview with Céline Bessière and Sibylle Gollac

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).

About the Contributors

About the Contributors

Archives and New Modes of Feminist Research. Edited by Maryanne Dever. [Review

Originally published as a special issue for Australian Feminist Studies (volume 32, March–June 2017), this collection of writings poses a direct and thoughtful response to emerging discourse on feminist archives. It emphasizes community-focused, distributed, decolonized, and postcustodial archival approaches for many interdisciplinary and community uses and for community self-representation. Editor Maryanne Dever spends little time recounting the basic tenets of feminism or of archives and instead brings the reader directly into the challenge of the moment—interrogating the how and why of disruptive feminist advocacy and of practices that could crack open archival futures. Presented as 12 chapters by 17 contributors, it reads first and foremost as a work targeted at an interdisciplinary scholarly audience newly engaging with archival theory. First published in 2017, the writings, of course, predate the pandemic, #MeToo, #BLM, and the broader 2020 movement for racial and social justice and so only indirectly call for antiracism, reparative practices, and digital access equity. Nevertheless, in many ways, they presage those clarion calls by insisting the larger academic world must better engage with archival theory for a more just, equitable, inclusive, feminist future.

Reading Group as Method for Feminist Environmental Humanities

ABSTRACT This article argues that reading groups are a collective field building and research method in Feminist Environmental Humanities, an interdisciplinary scholarly area at the intersections of feminist social justice and environmental concerns. We begin by historicising three Australian Feminist Environmental reading groups (COMPOSTING Feminisms, Eco Feminist Fridays, The Ediths) within a longer feminist tradition, then demonstrate how they respond to declining research funding in the neoliberal university and accelerating ecological crisis. Drawing on survey data, we first thematically code and analyse the results to categorise the groups’ functions and impacts. Departing from more traditional data analysis, we then develop a method of interpretation called ‘transversal poetics’. Via a captioned photo essay, we unpack how transversal poetics yields new ways of reading the data. We show how this practice-led, creative method reveals additional themes and crystallises the reading groups’ key ethos: building situated communities of care across difference. Overall, the research underscored that while never free of ethical tensions and compromises, Feminist Environmental reading groups can be a playful, affirmative and generative method for field building and research.

“Woman as Wife, Mother, and Home-Maker”: Equal Rights International and Australian Feminists’ Interwar Advocacy for Mothers’ Economic Rights

“Woman as Wife, Mother, and Home-Maker”: Equal Rights International and Australian Feminists’ Interwar Advocacy for Mothers’ Economic Rights

‘Persistent’ Migrant Kitchens: Spatial Analogies and the Politics of Sharing

ABSTRACT Using the spatial analogy of the migrant kitchen this article makes an argument for diversifying Australian feminist architectural practice and disciplinary inquiry to anticipate other culturally plural framings and experiences of the built environment. Its parallel focus on four ethnographic vignettes offers insights into the ways in which migrants mobilise familial culinary traditions for building ontological security in new environments, examining how constituent parts of kitchen spaces migrate and are adapted by Lankan-Australians in Melbourne and Canberra. It argues that the ‘transmigration’ of kitchens and their hybrid reincarnation uncovers nuanced, temporal, socio-political dimensions of migrant origin and experience indecipherable to host communities that frequently reduce them to ethno-cultural traits. We discuss the assimilatory practices that migrant women of colour daily navigate as revealing the unavoidable complexities within normative constructions of the Australian home. We posit the migrant kitchen as a site of adaptation and persistence in the face of diffused processes of assimilation.

Reflections on, and from, Feminist Practice: Introduction to the ‘Home’ Special Issue

ABSTRACT Home is a vital site and subject for feminist research. This introduction to the special issue of Australian Feminist Studies on ‘Home’ begins by reflecting on domestic spaces and routines as they unfold through contemporary art and performance. This reflection maps home as both a material space and an imaginary: a complex realm of constraints and possibilities. The discussion on this complexity of home is then situated within the contemporary context of the gendered experience of housing, from its precarity to its porous boundaries, ideas which are engaged with throughout the special issue. Taken together, the articles in this special issue show how questions of creativity, care, labour and technology, all pivot around home as a significant and (still) politicised site for feminist thought. Research into gender, housing and homelessness, and human-centric ideas about home also provide key insights into home as an unfixed, relational and political space.

Encountering ‘the East’: Travel and Internationalism in Bessie Rischbieth’s Interwar Feminism

Over 1929–30 the Australian feminist Bessie Rischbieth spent several months travelling through ‘the East’ – specifically, Egypt, Palestine, and India. While there she encountered a range of people, including feminists and anticolonial nationalists, and witnessed first hand local social and political conditions. Through a close reading of the rich archival material, this article shows how Rischbieth’s experiences and interactions as a traveller – filtered through her positioning as a white Australian feminist and theosophist – reinforced but also added depth to her views on interracial and intercultural cooperation. It pivots away from the more-studied Pacific to further explore how differences of race, culture, religion, and experience factored in this interwar feminist’s vision for a new world, highlighting how travel both gave expression to and influenced her ever-developing internationalism.

Say her name: Madge Donohoe and the promise and problems of using Trove to write Australian suffrage histories

Like most middle-ranking suffragists, the Sydney schoolteacher Madge Donohoe is largely invisible in Australian historiography. Until widespread newspaper digitisation, the task of uncovering her name, let alone tracing her rise from Kogarah Girls’ School to the British National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies’ executive committee, would have been unimaginable. In this paper, I outline how Trove has enriched Australian feminist histories from the suffrage era (1890–1910). Yet, as indispensable as it has become, new histories relying on newspapers to vividly retell the suffragists’ stories also reveal the database’s distorting effects, not least the absence of the vibrant women’s advocacy press from its collections. Trove, I argue, affords vital new points of entry into lives like Donohoe’s but, without careful interrogation, risks privileging the pressman’s gaze above understanding the quotidian realities of feminist activism.

Introduction: Entanglements of Anti-Feminism and Anti-Environmentalism in the Far-Right

ABSTRACT This essay introduces the special issue of Australian Feminist Studies on ‘Climate Change, Gender, and Authoritarianism: Entanglements of Anti-Feminism and Anti-Environmentalism in the Far-Right’. Starting from the hypothesis that anti-feminism functions as a metalanguage in the far-right’s fight against liberal democracy as well as social and environmental justice, this special issue explores how anti-feminism and anti-environmentalism merge and inform one another in contemporary far-right discourses and politics on climate change. Focusing on the connections that form the tissue of far-right imaginaries of sex, gender, race, and the nation in the context of the simultaneous dismissal and mobilisation of ecological issues, a broad picture of the state of research on the entanglement of anti-feminism and anti-environmentalism in the far-right will be laid out. In doing so, this special issue aims at providing us with a much-needed insight into the gendered and racialised political ecology of the contemporary far-right.

Eggs, O’Wheels, hexagons, repairs: lesbian feminist Utopias in Australia, 1970s–1980s

ABSTRACT This article explores the experimentalism and utopianism of Australian lesbian feminist culture during the 1970s and 1980s. I draw upon a selection of oral histories with lesbian activists to provide a more in-depth account of lesbian feminism’s expansive trajectory in Australia during this period. As I show, Australian lesbian feminists imagined and enacted radical change through their kinship and chosen-family networks, their self-sufficient remote communities, and through the autonomous spaces they established to work and create alongside each other. In doing this, they endeavoured to live in a variety of ways that, they hoped, would transform themselves and broader society.

A Biometric Logic of Revelation: Zach Blas’s <em>SANCTUM</em> (2018)

A Biometric Logic of Revelation: Zach Blas’s <em>SANCTUM</em> (2018)

Echoes and Silences: #MeToo’s Reverberations

ABSTRACT This special section of Australian Feminist Studies is dedicated to examining the echoes and reverberations of #MeToo beyond its viral epicentre in American celebrity media culture. It focuses on how #MeToo has resonated within institutions, practices and discourses associated with culture, science, and law. It aims to shed light on Australia’s unique engagements with #MeToo discourse and charts how discourses of #MeToo have propelled feminist critiques and reconfigured existing hierarchies. It also investigates the possibilities for #MeToo beyond neoliberal cultural logics.