THE RADICAL POTENTIAL OF BECOMING-WOMAN AND INTRA-ACTION IN THE MUSIC OF ANNE BOYD

Anne Boyd (b. 1946) is recognised in the public domain as one of Australia's distinguished composers. Her work belongs in the Western art music tradition and emerges out of her entanglements with the Australian landscape and the music of South-East Asia. This article considers what some of these entanglements have produced and, in so doing, shifts the emphasis from questions of reflection and representation—in which Boyd's music might be understood to reflect in a representationalist mode those aspects of her identity that are bound with the Australian landscape—to exploring in a performative manner how her music offers glimpses into different aspects of the creative process in action. I consider Boyd's selected musical works and critique various biographical writings on Boyd, drawing on the work of Deleuze which I entangle with Barad's concept of intra-action. My aim is to offer a different model for thinking about the network of mutual engagements that are coimplicated in the music's becoming. I view Boyd's music as a becoming-woman, an animate flow and a dynamic process of intra-activity.     

IN THE BEST INTERESTS OF THE (SILENCED) CHILD

The rhetoric of the ‘best interests of the child’ frequently emerges in public and political debates concerning the changing nature of family and society. This article explores how the rhetoric was invoked in recent same-sex marriage debates in Australia. We analyse the public submissions to the 2009 Australian government inquiry into same-sex marriage to reveal the ways in which the abstract figure of ‘the child’ was deployed. It became evident that heteronormativity was privileged and upheld primarily through the discourse of children's best interests. Concern about the well-being of children raised by lesbian and gay parents was the pivotal argument by those who opposed same-sex marriage. Heteronormativity was reproduced through the claim that same-sex parenting is harmful to children and thus heterosexuality was positioned as the only ‘safe’ place for parenting. A small number of the submissions in support of same-sex marriage also based their arguments on the best interests of the child. Typically, these submissions positioned lesbian and gay parents as ‘just like’ heterosexual parents and in doing so they produced an idealised homonormative couple. This unwittingly reinforces heterosexuality through the construction of an ‘acceptable’ domesticated homosexuality, based on adherence to heteronormativity, which effectively marginalises other family forms and sexual behaviours. We argue that the rhetorical power of the ‘best interests’ argument relies on the absence of the voices of actual children raised by lesbian and gay parents and that this silencing has harmful consequences for these children.     

THE SEXUAL SUBALTERN IN CONVERSATIONS “SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN”: LAW AND THE OLD POLITICS OF COLONIALISM

Ratna Kapur’s recent book entitled Erotic Justice proposes a new politics of postcolonialism whereby the sexual subaltern disrupts the normative principles of the universal, liberal, legal domain. Kapur traces legal strategies regarding censorship, sex-work, homosexuality, sexual harassment, trafficking and migration which travel a treacherous path, countering allegations of ‘unIndian’ and Western practice with cultural histories of ‘authentic’ sexual legitimacies, towards a new politics of desire. Kapur frames her analysis through postcolonial feminist theory as providing a tool for feminist struggle, yet distinct from and disruptive of a liberal project of global sisterhood. This review deeply values the role of the sexual subaltern which disrupts the tenets of a linear, progressive liberalism. Drawing upon Indian feminist and Western feminist perspectives, the review considers how the distinct position of the postcolonial sexual subaltern subject informs the generic role of law as a tool constructing relations of domination regarding gender, sexuality, caste, property and religion. Kapur observes that both the West and the Hindu Right have engaged with liberal legal principles. This engagement, I argue, exposes and informs law as a historical and contemporary tool of gendered legal colonialism, for sisters to disrupt across the Western and Eastern terrains.Review of Ratna Kapur’s Erotic Justice, Law and the New Politics of Postcolonialism, London: Glasshouse Press, 2005, 219 pp., ￡26, ISBN 1-90438-524-9     

ADOPTION,SECRECY AND THE SPECTRE OF THE TRUE MOTHER IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AUSTRALIA

Adoption was legalised in Australia in the 1920s, but not widely embraced before the Second World War. During the 1950s, a series of court cases in which birth mothers challenged the validity of the adoption of their children, threatened the viability of this new social policy. This paper argues that the 1960s tightening of secrecy provisions should be understood in the context of these challenges which reopened debates around the status of adoptive motherhood. By listening for the voice of relinquishing mothers, it challenges the view they were complicit in the process which deprived them of claims to maternal status.     

THE MIRAGE OF MERIT

This paper takes a hard look at merit and the ideal academic, twin concepts that have been accorded short shrift by the scholarly literature. For the most authoritative positions, the ideal displays all the hallmarks of Benchmark Man. Despite the ostensible ‘feminisation’ of the academy, the liberal myth that merit is stable, objective and calculable lingers on. As a counterpoint to the feminisation thesis, it is argued that a re-masculinisation of the academy is occurring as a result of the transformation of higher education wrought by the new knowledge economy. In response, the ideal academic has become a ‘technopreneur’—a scientific researcher with business acumen who produces academic capitalism. This new ideal academic evinces a distinctly masculinist hue in contrast to the less-than-ideal academic—the humanities or social science teacher with large classes, who is more likely to be both casualised and feminised.     

THE SINS OF THE SON

Masculine sentimentality played an important role in Australian culture in the 1930s and 1940s, as in other places where plaintive country music songs attracted a passionate following. Using ‘Australia's Singing Cowboy’ Tex Morton as a case study, we show that this sentimentality became part of both the bush tradition and country music in Depression- and Second World War-era Australia, associated with the bushworker or rugged ‘lone hand’. This sentimentality was deeply problematic from a feminist perspective, as indeed was Morton's personal life. It romanticised what he called ‘the sins of the son’; that is, the lone hand's inability to do right by those he loved. It also glamorised his tears and self-pity, treating them as signs of his hardy masculinity. Given the significance of this form of sentimentality both in Australia and elsewhere over the rest of the twentieth century, feminist scholars of popular culture and historians of gender and the emotions need to pay more attention to country music songs about errant sons and lovers from the 1930s and 1940s.     

GENDERED AND CLASS RELATIONS OF OBESITY

Rising attention to the ‘social determinants of health’ puts questions of gender and class squarely on the public health agenda. Most health outcomes and health risk factors are inversely correlated with social class: people with better education, better jobs and higher incomes typically enjoy better health. By comparison, gender differences in health are quite variable, depending on the health outcome or risk of interest. Furthermore, the distribution of any given risk factor tends to vary from society to society, from time to time, and between specific sub-populations. Public health research rarely considers class and gender together. In this paper we summarise and problematise the interplay between gender and class in empirical research on the ‘problem’ of obesity. We suggest that some of the difficulties in explaining research findings arise from limitations in the evidence base used to measure obesity, conceptual ‘slippage’ between key terms like gender and sex, and an erasure of social class from academic language. It is via an examination of these issues that underpin current obesity research that we offer more innovative and effective ways to approach the underlying theoretical and health promotion problems. Nevertheless, we acknowledge the considerable practical and intellectual challenges of analysing and reporting social determinants like gender and class in an environment that demands certain kinds of scientific evidence.     

DESIRING YOUNG LES(BI)AN VISIONARIES IN THE ARCHIVE

This paper presents a critically reflexive account of the experiences of a group of researchers at the Canadian Women's Movement Archives. Drawing on the work of Sara Ahmed, Claire Colebrook, and Victoria Hesford, it argues that the researchers shared intensely embodied and emotional encounters with the archival record of lesbians’ struggles to create and define community. These encounters encouraged the researchers to explore the potential of their own sexual subjectivities. Their deepened understanding of the complex lesbian and feminist past provided them with the desire to reconsider the collective promise of ‘lesbian’ and ‘bisexual’ for their own future community.