Australian Feminist Research Articles

Feminism and spirituality in fantastic fiction: Contemporary women writers in Australia

Synopsis In this paper I argue that in Anglophone fantasy-writing depictions of feminist alternatives to patriarchal religion have been more varied than fantasy analysts acknowledge. Perhaps if critics based in the United States were to take more account of other national literatures, such differences would be recognized more often. Focusing on women authors since the 1990s, I demonstrate how in Australian fantasy there has been little sign of a celebration of ' the Goddess in imaginary goddess-and woman-led cultures. Arguably, this is largely due to the comparative absence in Australian feminist politics, culture and scholarship of the goddess side of spiritual feminism, which since the 1970s has had a significant impact in North America. I suggest in the paper that this absence can be explained by other differences of long standing between American and Australian feminism; by the impact also of post-Second Wave feminisms; as well as by other national differences.

A CELEBRATORY FEMINIST AESTHETICS IN POSTFEMINIST TIMES

In 2011, something surprising happened in terms of Australian feminist cultural memory: a celebratory feminism arrived in the shape of the hugely popular ABC television mini-series, Paper Giants: The Birth of Cleo. Eschewing dour social realism for a stylish and ludic narrative, Paper Giants uses the story of the women's magazine Cleo to tell the story of Australian women's liberation. This essay analyses the components of the mini-series' celebratory feminist aesthetics, examining the ways in which it mobilises feminist tropes to speak an intelligible feminist language in postfeminist times. Further, I detail how women's liberation becomes central to the national historical narrative underpinning the programme.

Resilience, Agency and Resistance in the Storytelling Practice of Aunty Hilda Wilson (1911-2007), Ngarrindjeri Aboriginal Elder

Resilience, Agency and Resistance in the Storytelling Practice of Aunty Hilda Wilson (1911-2007), Ngarrindjeri Aboriginal Elder

Inheriting and Inhabiting the Pleasures and Duties of Our Own Existence: The Second Sex and Feminist Jurisprudence

This essay considers the relation between the conduct and the personae of the feminist, the historian and the jurisprudent; and, the writing of history and of jurisprudence. It does so treating part of the relation between historiography and jurisprudence as engaged as an art of selffashioning, in the preparation for an ‘institutionalised social office’. The immediate purpose of this essay is to show how these arts of self fashioning came to be inherited by Australian feminism. In doing so, I will assert the centrality of Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex in that tradition. I suggest that acknowledging this practice and its inheritance is important when considering how we might live productively the plurality of institutional life and the life lived – in law, and for our present.

“These wars are personal”: methods and theory in feminist online research

Purpose – This paper aims to explore the methodological and epistemological assumptions that have foregrounded the author's research into discursive activism in Australian feminist blogs, and a discussion of her research methods and why they were appropriate to this study. In particular, it seeks to discuss internet research methods and approaches toward the study of a feminist network online in order to make a case for methodological approaches that are feminist in themselves and aimed toward discursive change. The author recognises the political and personally affective nature of research.Design/methodology/approach – The project design and methodology of the study draws on traditions of feminist online ethnography and feminist standpoint methodology, using a combination of face‐to‐face semi‐structured interviews, modified grounded theory, network analysis, and participant observation.Findings – The author used a community‐curated online “carnival” to minimise problems of researcher navigation, and expl...

From Suck magazine to Corporate Paedophilia. Feminism and pornography — Remembering the Australian way

Synopsis In the context of recent anti ‘pornification’ campaigns, this article charts the history of Australian feminist engagement with pornography from the 1970s to the 1990s. It argues that a lack of significant, enduring feminist engagement with pornography in Australia throughout this period has meant that contemporary women-centred objections to pornography have been received by the media and many in society as feminist, when they appear to contradict the Australian feminist libertarian tradition. Focusing on the work of lobbyist Melinda Tankard Reist, the article highlights an important feature of Australian anti-pornography campaigns of the past 40 years. That is, the consistent centrality of fears mobilised about children, to the detriment of nuanced debate about the meanings of men, women, sex and censorship and the relationship of these meanings to feminism.

The national and the transnational in British anti-suffragists’ views of Australian women voters

The issue of woman suffrage, and the unevenness of its development worldwide, provoked much heated discussion in the early twentieth century. In Britain women were campaigning — often violently — for the vote, while in the Antipodes women already had at least the national vote. This paper looks at national and transnational aspects of this debate as it was played out in the pages of the British Anti-Suffrage Review. It looks at how conservatives in the British metropole were compelled to articulate, even reformulate, their sense of national and imperial identity in light of the existence of the Australian woman voter. It also uses a written exchange between travelling Australian suffragist, Vida Goldstein, and her British male correspondent to demonstrate how Australian feminists — despite taking advantage of the opportunities offered to them through imperial networks — did not necessarily feel compelled to articulate their sense of identity or belonging in imperial terms. On the contrary, Goldstein insisted on a national identity based on values at odds with those of her imperial counterparts; values drawn from a non-British, wider ‘new’ world.This article has been peer-reviewed.

“The Australian women's movement goes to the museum: The ‘cultures of Australian feminist activism, 1970–1990’ project”

In the increasing academic attention placed on social memory, the popularization of material culture, and the growth of the heritage and museum industries, the modern women's movement finds itself at a strategic juncture. Given the limitations of narratives available to talk about recent feminist history, we are interested in the capacity of feminism's material culture to provide a new set of languages and esthetics through which second wave feminism might be understood. This article reflects on one particular project in which we were commissioned by the National Museum of Australia to produce a dedicated museum collection on Australian second wave feminism. We detail the criteria for selection, classifying themes, objects obtained, and the absences in the collection. We then use the methodology of object biography to interpret two of our objects to demonstrate the possibilities feminist material culture offers as ways of reading feminist activism as well as rendering museums more feminist.

The Surprise of Invention: Making Fun of the Statutory

For this special issue of The Australian Feminist Law Journal we asked contributors to critically address questions about law in its relation to, and as, technology through the thematic of invention. Invention, as the late French philosopher Jacques Derrida argued, is both necessary and impossible. Law is inventive or it is nothing at all! At least, that's what we said then. This slogan, which echoes Derrida: 'Deconstruction is inventive or it is nothing at all' requires further elaboration. Now, in this introduction we consider three aspects of invention that we have found (invented and/or discovered) in the papers collected here: Plasticity, Creativity and Justice. Although Derrida linked deconstruction and invention (and as we shall see, law and technology) he also wrote that deconstruction.

Before the Bride Really Wore Pink

Before the Bride Really Wore Pink

‘HOTTEST 100 WOMEN’

Social movement theorists have developed several concepts to explain the role of social networking in maintaining social movements. This is particularly relevant for periods when levels of public activism are low due to backlash, hostile social contexts and structural uncertainties. As part of my study of the women's movement online and feminist blog networks in Australia, I provide a review of several of these concepts, interrogating their applicability to the study of online communities. This paper explores the relevance of the social movement theory concepts of submerged networks, abeyance structures and the related idea of counterpublics for the study of feminist blog networks. In 2009, the radio station Triple J's ‘Hottest 100 of All Time’ poll featured no solo women artists, and women played on few tracks. In response to this, several strands of discourse developed in the Australian feminist blogosphere identifying ways that the history of rock music excludes or erases women. Activists developed a cross-platform poll on Twitter, Facebook and email, and promoted it through blogs and Twitter, to counter the ‘Hottest 100 Men’ with a ‘Hottest 100 Women’. This paper shows the ways these women have used blogging networks to challenge mainstream discourses and generate new ones.

‘THE QUALITY AND NOT ONLY THE QUANTITY OF AUSTRALIA'S PEOPLE’

This article is an examination of Ruby Rich (1888–1988), an Australian feminist, concert pianist, Zionist, pacifist and eugenicist. Although much lauded by her peers, Rich has gone largely unexamined by historians, particularly in contrast to the recent research on her feminist contemporaries Mary Montgomerie Bennett and Bessie Rischbieth. I draw attention to Rich's remarkable life and varied experiences, and use her example to explore the relationship between feminism and eugenics in twentieth-century Australia. From the early 1920s, Rich became a prominent figure within several Australian feminist organisations and in 1926 was appointed the founding president of the Racial Hygiene Association of NSW, an organisation which espoused eugenics. Although it is often assumed that eugenics is innately anti-feminist, Rich remained an active champion of both feminism and racial hygiene for over 50 years. Her example therefore provides an opportunity to trace the unlikely sympathies between these two movements, and highlights the extent to which eugenics found acceptance among progressive members of the Australian community.

The Politics of Blogs: Theories of Discursive Activism Online

Many discussions of discursive politics online take a deliberative democracy, or public sphere, approach. Public sphere theory has had value for the discussion of discursive politics online, but I argue that the problems of public sphere theory have led to the neglect of counter-hegemonic political projects in understandings of online deliberative democracy. Agonistic democracy should be explored further as an alternative framework for the study of online political communities. In addition, I propose that this conception be modified with greater analysis of the affective dimensions of online politics, the productive uses of conflict, the role of political listening and an understanding of discursive activism informed by feminist philosophy. The Australian feminist blogging community, a network comprising group and individual blogs, provides a case study for my research into discursive activism in online contexts.

Identity Politics in Australian Context

Identity mobilises feminist politics in Australia and shapes discursive and theatrical practices. Energised by the affirmative politics of hope, celebration and unity, Australian feminism is also motivated by injustice, prejudice and loss, particularly among Indigenous women and minorities. During the 1970s, when feminist theatre opened up creative spaces on the margins of Australian theatre, women identified with each other on the basis of an unproblematized gender identity, a commitment to socialist collectivism and theatre as a mode of self-representation. The emphasis on shared experience, collectivism and gender unity gave way in the 1980s to a more nuanced critical awareness of inequalities and divisions among women based on sexuality, class, race and ethnicity. My discussion spans broadly the period from the 1970s to the present and concludes with some commentary on recent twists and turns in identity politics.

Women in the "Grey Zone"? Ambiguity, Complicity and Rape Culture

Women in the "Grey Zone"? Ambiguity, Complicity and Rape Culture

Untold Tales of the Intra-Suburban Female

Untold Tales of the Intra-Suburban Female

‘The waiter speaks’: Stella Miles Franklin and the Chicago garment workers' strike, 1910–1911

Synopsis This paper focuses on Australian feminist novelist Stella Miles Franklin's unpublished one-act play ‘The Waiter Speaks’, previously unremarked by Franklin scholars. Written during Franklin's work as secretary for the National Women's Trade Union League, the play addresses the 1910–1911 Chicago garment workers' strike, a massive conflict that shaped union history through its precedent for arbitration and a female leadership that crossed class and ethnic lines. Franklin was in charge of League publicity for the strike and provided commentary on the conflict through the League's journal Life and Labor. Such experiences provided narrative authority for her protest play that sought to educate and provide a ‘call to arms’. The paper contributes to U.S. women's history and Australian literary studies by giving voice to this long-forgotten play of a notable feminist author, contextualising it in labour history and in the literary traditions that shaped Franklin's writing during this period.

(Un)reasonable Doubt: A "Narrative Immunity" for Footballers against Sexual Assault Allegations

(Un)reasonable Doubt: A "Narrative Immunity" for Footballers against Sexual Assault Allegations

Mrs Dance strikes the first cut: visual storytelling and girlhood

This paper takes its title from the oil painting by George Pitt Morison held in the collection of the Art Gallery of Western Australia, called ‘12 August 1829. The Foundation of Perth. Mrs Dance strikes the first cut to mark the founding of Perth’. As a young girl in rural Western Australia I transformed Mrs Dance, the boat captain's wife, into the first West Australian feminist. My unsophisticated mind inexplicably linked the image of Mrs Dance with the feminist sticker my father had put on our refrigerator in the mid–1970s. This painting provides an example of how visual representations of historic moments work to both open out and close down thinking about history in a process that Martine Joly describes as ‘the force of the image’. In discussing my girlhood response to this image, this article will explore how visual representations impact upon the storytelling of history and on both individual and national identities.

Feminist protest and maternity at Pine Gap women's peace camp, Australia 1983

Synopsis In November 1983, eight hundred women converged in the central Australian desert to stage a two-week protest against the presence of the U.S. military installation at Pine Gap. Part of a global women's protest against militarism and the dangers of nuclear war keenly felt in the early 1980s, I argue that in its organisational practices and ideological conflicts this event can be regarded as a microcosm of second-wave Australian feminism. In this paper I look at the function of maternity. While Pine Gap is often publicly remembered for its lesbian presence, when mothers became protestors their political agency was often recognised at the cost of their maternity. And yet maternalism was a major discursive argument for the protest. Drawing on newspapers and newsletters, pillowcases and poetry, mothers and memory, this paper seeks to create a sense of the controversial place of maternity, its uses and limits, in this particular event of 1980s feminism.