FROM OBAMA TO ABBOTT

Abstract This article analyses how politicians' use of emotion is gendered. Key Australian, US and UK politicians studied include Obama, George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, Cameron, Rudd, Abbott and Gillard. Emotions analysed range from fear to compassion. A particular focus is placed on issues of masculinity; however, the implications for constructions of both femininity and masculinity will be considered, including arguments that female politicians face particular problems in utilising emotion, for example, in projecting an image of being both tough and compassionate. It will be argued that it is not just that politicians' use of emotion intersects with issues of gender but that particular gendered identities are a key vehicle via which emotion is deployed. Consequently, the analysis contributes new insights to both the literature on the politics of emotion and the literature on masculinity and gender.     

FROM RESCUE MISSIONS TO DISCIPLINE

This paper maps a shift in emphasis in the representation of Muslim women in Western discourse from that of victims in need of Western rescue to that of active participants in Islamism and the ‘Islamisation’ of the West. Muslim women activists have developed an articulate response to representations that depict them as passive victims, emphasising that many women undertake their religious practices (in particular, those relating to dress) by ‘choice’ and play an active role in resisting patriarchal practices imposed in the name of their religion. Their responses to representations of Muslim women as perpetrators of Islamic extremism who must be disciplined into acquiescing to Western/Enlightenment/secular norms, however, are still evolving.     

RETHINKING THE CREATIVE SPACE

Anything painted has a particular beauty when seen in a looking glass, provided it be free from faults; and it is wonderful how every defect in the picture will therein show more considerable. (Leon Battista Alberti, quoted in Kahr 1976 Kahr, Madlyn Millner. 1976. Velasquez: The art of painting, New York: Harper & Row.  [Google Scholar], 176, n. 74)     

THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN

Abstract In this article I reveal how texts produced by Aboriginal women scholars signify a racialised and gendered body that functions discursively, as an immediacy of racism in the form of white patriarchal epistemic violence (Lloyd 1991, 74). I demonstrate how this dominant racialised and gendered form of violence is an assertion of power that involves or arises from racialised knowledge by examining Dirk Moses' analysis of ‘Indigeneity’ via the Northern Territory Intervention (Spivak 1988).     

OUT OF THE COMMUNITY

This paper looks at the establishment of Women's Studies programs in selected Australian universities. It highlights the resistance to Women's Studies as an academic knowledge by some feminists outside of the academy as well as non-feminists within the academy. This paper argues that connections to the Women's Liberation Movement and the difficulties encountered by feminists when introducing Women's Studies into the academy made some feminists suspicious of the value of theory for feminism, especially in relation to a political agenda.

Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. (Austen, Persuasion ([1818] 1946)     

THE BURDENS OF CARING

In this paper I use an ecofeminist and a postfeminist framework to assess two images from the long-running ‘I'd Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur’ campaign by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). I find that, while sexism persists in these ads, the postfeminist context illuminates a specific problem in the way that hypersexualised models are not only objectified for men, but are positioned as celebrated exemplaries, whom other women should aspire to be. This exploits not just the naked models, but all women, as it falsely links sexualisation as imperative to animal protection and perpetuates female responsibility for the burden of care. Ultimately, I seek to show how a greater consideration and awareness of the overlapping struggles fought by social movements might strengthen their affinity coalitions.     

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 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.     

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.