Australian Feminist Research Articles

From equal pay to overcoming undervaluation: The Australian National Pay Equity Coalition 1988–2011

Australian feminists have struggled to define the International Labour Organisation’s Equal Remuneration Convention’ goal of gender pay equity and find a platform for achieving it. Approaches based on discrimination, or a male comparator, have proved unworkable. Networking nationally and internationally, the National Pay Equity Coalition (1988–2011) formulated many submissions to industrial tribunals and parliamentary inquiries. Early interventions argued the disadvantages to women of the decentralisation of bargaining in the 1990s, but following the failure of discrimination-based cases, this focus shifted. National Pay Equity Coalition submissions came to define the gender gap, not as one between women and male comparators, but as a recognition gap. They argued that indicators of a history of gender-based undervaluation should lead to a bias-free work value assessment. Bias lay in the distance between actual job demands and their characterisation in classification descriptions. It could be redressed by fuller recognition of the work value of feminised service roles. This approach to the recognition and remedy of undervaluation informed the 1998 NSW Pay Equity Inquiry and the NSW Equal Remuneration Principle, but is not recognised in federal labour law. No Equal Remuneration Principle yet applies in the federal jurisdiction which since 2009 has governed most Australian wage setting amidst growing social inequality.

Tyrants, Heroes, Sex and Secrets: Foundational Histories of Domestic Violence, Turning Points in Historiography and the Legacy of Judith A. Allen in Australia

Between 1986 and 1990, three pioneering histories of domestic violence in the United States and Australia appeared. Their publication coincided with a verdant period in the generation of historical accounts of women’s experiences and debates about the linguistic turn, histories of masculinity and race that were transforming the field of feminist history and of history more broadly. While these books established the field of domestic violence history, in their writing and their reception they also raised issues of representation at the heart of these broader debates. I trace these histories and their reverberations with an emphasis on Australian feminist historiography, and examine closely the important legacy of Judith A. Allen’s early historical work in Australia.

TOWARDS THE SUMMERS NIGHT: A MENTORING PROJECT FOR AUSTRALIAN COMPOSERS IDENTIFYING AS WOMEN

AbstractThe Summers Night Project is an ongoing composer-mentoring programme established in 2018 by musicians Cat Hope and Gabriella Smart, with the support of the Perth-based new music organisation Tura New Music. The project aims to support and mentor emerging Australian female and gender minority composers to create new compositions for performance, with the aim of growing the gender diversity of composers in music programmes across Australia. Three composers were chosen from a national call for submissions, and works were performed by an ensemble consisting of members from the Decibel and Soundstream new music ensembles. Three new works were workshopped, recorded then performed on a short tour of Perth, Adelaide and Melbourne, Australia in July 2018. The project takes its name and inspiration from Australian feminist Anne Summers, author of the ground-breaking examination of women in Australia's history Damned Whores and God's Police (1975) and was inspired by her 2017 Women's Manifesto. This article examines the rationale for such a project, the processes and results of the project itself, and plans for its future.

Dr Mary Mackay (1931–2017)

Mary Helena Mackay (nee Short) was an Australian art historian, researcher, teacher, printmaker, collector and feminist. She was an original and innovative thinker whose pioneering research in Aust...

Resisting the White Possessive

At the turn to the 20th century settler colonialist and racist policies of land theft and systematic devaluation of Sámi livelihoods had produced an acute and dire political situation in Sápmi. Elsa Laula (1877-1931) and Karin Stenberg (1884-1969) were central activists and writers in the anticolonial Sámi national movement that organised in the south of Sápmi at this time. The political analyses in Laula´s book Inför lif eller död (1904) and Stenberg and collegues´ Dat läh mijen situd! (1920) offer scathing critiques of the settler colonial racism of the Swedish state at the time. Their contributions theorize the relationship between whiteness and property in the colonization of Sápmi, and the crucial role that racialization of the Sámi people have played in this process. These theoretical contributions are largely unknown to Nordic feminist scholarship on race and racism, however. In this paper I show how Laula and Stenberg´s analysis of racism offered insights that feminists would lend from American and British black feminist scholarship, as well as Australian indigenous feminism almost a hundred years after they were first formulated in the Nordic context. Finally, I consider possible reasons for the denial of this scholarly history in Nordic feminism. Merk: Selv om abstractet er på engelsk kan jeg godt holde innlegget på norsk.

The ‘Playful Pluralist’: The Pioneer Genre-Roaming of ‘Crypto-Feminist’ Coral Lansbury

Coral Lansbury wrote in a number of different registers and genres. Serially, she was an Australian radio script and ‘soaps’ writer, studied in New Zealand as an expatriate, became a Distinguished Professor of English specialising in British Victorian Studies in the USA and then a novelist. As well as boomeranging between writing careers and countries of the Anglosphere, the thrice-married Lansbury experienced widowhood, unmarried motherhood and divorce; she abandoned her child to her husband and later reconciled with her son. Her life reads like a plot from one of her novels. Lansbury was not active in women’s associations or the organised feminist movement. Her radio work, lectures and book tours in which she expounded her ‘crypto’ and, then later, ‘economic’ and ‘conservative-anarchist’ feminism were ephemeral. I argue that she should be repatriated into the history of postwar Australian feminism because, while mercurial and living in the USA, she pursued an expatriate professional strategy successfully and consistently sought to extend women’s vocation through kinds of popular literature. Her work reveals pluralism as much as contradiction.

Feminism in the troll space: Clementine Ford’s Fight Like a Girl, social media, and the networked book

ABSTRACT Clementine Ford’s memoir/manifesto hybrid, Fight Like a Girl, was hailed as a significant contribution to feminist debate in Australia when it was published by Allen & Unwin in 2016. The book is one stage in Ford’s considerable media career, developed across traditional journalism, public speaking, and social media. It can be situated in the context of a recent Anglophone publishing trend of similar hybrids between feminist manifesto and memoir, as well as—as evidenced by its cover quote from Anne Summers—being part of a much longer history of Australian feminist publishing. This article positions Fight Like a Girl as a networked text, exploring its close and constitutive relationship to Ford’s social media presence and its online reception. Both book and reception tap into online feminist conversations and mainstream public debates about feminism in the wake of identity politics, trolling and shaming, and the gendered nature of contemporary online spaces. Analysing conversations on Facebook and Twitter and reviews across Goodreads and more traditional media outlets, this article explores the extent to which the book reconfigures, intensifies or enters into existing conversations as it moves through the networked space of post-digital Australian literature.

“An Independent Little Sausage”: Sexual Agency and Desire On Dearborn Street

In the teeming public space of modern U.S. cities at the end of the long nineteenth century, New Women carved out a place for themselves and navigated the opportunities and constraints associated with love and vocation on the eve of war. I address these representations, and focus on sexual agency and desire through the lens of Australian feminist Stella Miles Franklin's New Woman novel, On Dearborn Street. I examine Franklin's portrayals of a nuanced and somewhat contradictory sexual self-determination influenced by her personal and political life in Chicago, and emphasise the ways the novel resists romance narratives by refusing the choice between marriage and independence.

Feminist heritage walks: materialising the feminist past in Perth, Australia and Glasgow, UK

Alison Bartlett has been researching the ways in which post 1970s feminism can be remembered as a material movement, investigating the role of objects, museums, archives, and sites of feminist events. Her most recent book on this topic is Things That Liberate: an Australian Feminist Wunderkammer, edited with Margaret Henderson. She is an Associate Professor in English and Literary Studies at The University of Western Australia, and has published widely on Australian feminist protest, Australian literature, maternal cultures and feminist pedagogy. Her forthcoming book is Flirting in the Era of #MeToo: Negotiating Intimacy, with Kyra Clarke and Rob Cover.This article proposes the idea of feminist heritage sites as a way of remembering feminist intellectual and activist legacies in situ. Sites of feminist activism offer global positioning with longitude and latitude, somewhere to drop a Google Maps pin, and also offer tangible locations of intangible heritage that arguably shape civic life and citizenship. The article canvasses literature from interrelated disciplinary areas to propose two case studies as sites of feminist memory: a feminist tour from 1980s Perth in Western Australia where the author lives, and the Glasgow women’s heritage walks in Scotland. The idea of walking proves to be significant as a way of moving through sites and producing knowledge, and is investigated as a feminist methodology and epistemology embodying a critical process of thinking through the recent feminist past.

Women Modernists and the Legacies of Risk: An Introduction

ABSTRACTThis introductory essay for the Australian Feminist Studies special issue on Modernist Women and Risk examines the changing fortunes of risk for feminist aesthetic and political work. It considers how risk in the work of modernist women intellectuals, writers and artists prompts us to imagine what it might mean in the twenty-first century to ‘risk anything’?

Women in Australian Politics: Maintaining the Rage against the Political Machine

Women in Australian Politics: Maintaining the Rage against the Political Machine

The Somatechnics of Life and Death: Recent Trends in Gender Studies

ABSTRACTThis article introduces the special issue of Australian Feminist Studies on The Somatechnics of Life and Death. The issue emerges out of the 10th International Somatechnics Conference held in December 2016 on beautiful Bundjalung country in Byron Bay. Building on the conference theme, ‘Technicity, Temporality, Embodiment’, this special issue explores current trends in feminist and gender studies scholarship on the nature of ‘life’ and ‘death’. Key themes emerging from these articles include: current feminist uptakes of Foucault’s concept of ‘biopower’; new materialist focuses on animacy and vitality; the importance of critical perspectives on both ‘life’ and ‘death’; rethinking binaries around inanimacy and animacy and ‘life’ versus ‘death’; and the place of somatechnics in refiguring these binaries.

A Woman’s Place Is in the Morgue: Understanding Scully in the Context of 1990s Feminism

A Woman’s Place Is in the Morgue: Understanding Scully in the Context of 1990s Feminism

Throwing Our Weight Around: Fat Girls, Protest, and Civil Unrest

Throwing Our Weight Around: Fat Girls, Protest, and Civil Unrest

Money: a Feminist Issue

This special issue of Australian Feminist Studies asks: how is money a feminist issue? For second wave feminists, ascendant socio-economic conditions made the answer to this question relatively str...

Relationships with the Past: How Australian Television Dramas Talk about Indigenous History

Relationships with the Past: How Australian Television Dramas Talk about Indigenous History

Feminist Technoecologies: Introduction

This special issue of Australian Feminist Studies is a collective effort to think with and through the notion of ‘feminist technoecologies’. One of the shared starting points of the contributions i...

Woman to Woman: Australian Feminists’ Embrace of Radio Broadcasting, 1930s–1950s

ABSTRACTThis article demonstrates the crucial importance of the radio medium in the post-suffrage era as a space in which women could expand their sphere of influence and enact their responsibilities as citizens. It challenges previous scholarship which has argued that during the early decades of radio women were confined to the world of the everyday and the domestic. In the interwar years, Australian feminist organisations were quick to take advantage of the still-developing radio medium, which they used to publicise their activities to mass audiences. One such organisation was the United Associations (UA), founded in Sydney in 1929 by Jessie Street and Linda Littlejohn. Perth feminist Irene Greenwood was introduced to radio broadcasting as a member of the UA in the 1930s, and she later drew on these media skills and her extensive feminist networks to create her own innovative and interactive radio program in Western Australia, Woman to Woman (1948–1954). Correspondence between Greenwood and her audience shows that the program provided women from diverse backgrounds with the opportunity to engage publicly with significant political debates, to create a new imagined community of listeners, to communicate across geographical and class boundaries, and to become media producers themselves.

“I Am Woman Hear Me Draw”

“I am woman hear me draw,” wrote Australian feminist cartoonist Judy Horacek in 2002, whose work draws attention to the capacity of cartoons to de/story masculinist versions of the world. Taking a critical autoethnographic approach, a series of black-and-white line drawings are explored in this paper as the kind of l'ecriture feminine (feminine writing) work that Hélène Cixous speaks of—writing that aims to release the subject away from the stagnant confines of phallocentric thought to create new forms of feminist post-academic writing.

Australian Feminist Studies extends thanks to those who acted as peer reviewers for 2016 issues:

Australian Feminist Studies extends thanks to those who acted as peer reviewers for 2016 issues: