THE TERMS ON WHICH CHILD ABUSE IS MADE TO MATTER

In 2007 the Australian mainstream news media extensively covered a child rape case in the Indigenous community of Aurukun. In this coverage, the media positioned themselves as having a moral requirement to report the ‘Aurukun rape case’ in order to bring issues of Indigenous child sexual abuse to the attention of the public. This paper examines the representations of this case made available by mainstream news media, and specifically examines both the depiction of Indigenous communities as dysfunctional and the claim made by the media that Indigenous child sexual abuse is ‘our business’. The paper concludes that the coverage of this case represents a form of ‘war porn’ that became more about white control over Indigenous lives and less an investigation into child sexual abuse.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

(ALL THE) SINGLE LADIES

In the film fragment Smart B**ch, two women—a black Sudanese-Australian and a white American-Australian—share what it means to be diasporic travellers and explore their similarities and differences within evolving feminist discourses which have in some ways abandoned the subaltern for the subdivided. No longer content to criticise the ways in which we speak for and to each other, and to accommodate hierarchies of class, race and sexuality, this ethnocinematic dialogue prefers these film personae to speak with each other and their audience using Conquergood and Denzin as performance ethnography guides, while challenging hegemonic notions of diaspora to include such diversities as adoptees, queers, and others.     

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.     

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.     

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 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.