The War with the Ottoman Empire: The Centenary History of Australia and the Great War,Volume 2

The War with the Ottoman Empire: The Centenary History of Australia and the Great War, Volume 2. By Jeffrey Grey (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp.x + 238. 16 Maps. AU$59.95 (cloth).     

Queering the World or Worlding the Queer? New Readings of Anna Kavan’s Who Are You?

Abstract

This essay explores world-literary and queer approaches to Anna Kavan’s little discussed 1963 novel Who Are You?. It argues that world-literary scholarship demonstrates the centrality of white colonial masculinity to capitalist modernity, while a queer reading highlights the anxious performativity at the heart of such power. The most distinctive feature of Kavan’s text is its unusual format, whereby the story is told once, in detail, before immediately being retold, in more concise fashion and with some adjustments. What both fields add to the analysis of this formal deviation is a shared concern with the failings of normative order—whether that be the bourgeois, heteropatriarchal family or the capitalist system itself—and, in turn, the relationship of such failure to narrative disjuncture.     

Nature,art and artfulness

[E]cosocialism entails different and more complex judgments of value than first-epoch socialism. It demands of us that we take into account a kind of valuation distinct from those values, attached to use and exchange, that enter into economic calculation. Once we open ourselves to the ecosphere, a realm of intrinsic value opens as well, a value inhering in ecosystemic being …. What is called an “ecocentric ethic” is essentially ethics in defense of intrinsic value. Simply put, it is the refusal to reduce the world to cash, and to knuckle under to the lords of economic calculation. … This perspective becomes necessary in the overcoming of the ecological crisis, and therefore the climate crisis as well. It is the deepest level of the resistance to capital, and the foundation of all others.1 ¹Joel Kovel, “Ecosocialism, Global Justice, and Climate Change,” Capitalism Nature Socialism, Vol. 19, No. 2, June 2008, p. 9.      

Carry the Banner Where It Can Be Seen: Small Wins for Social Justice

In this article we address the following questions: How is oppression maintained? What resources enhance human welfare, thereby weakening oppression? and How can the systems of oppression be challenged and interrupted? Our response to the last question is: “Organize on the local level with real allies to effect small wins that encourage political participation.”     

Discipline, Punishment And The Homosexual In Law

This article examines the creation and legacy of the 1957 Wolfenden Report, arguing that current trends to simplistically address the Report, along with a long standing academic focus on Foucault and the nineteenth century, have disregarded the productive and revolutionary nature of its recommendations enacted in the Sexual Offences Act 1967. Contrary to the common emphasis placed on Victorian medical discourse, and the 1895 trials of Oscar Wilde, it was the Wolfenden Report and the twentieth century that created the homosexual identity in law – an identity created not with a view to freedom, as is regularly assumed, but with the objective of the control of recalcitrant bodies in the forms of men's homosexual sex, and women's prostitution. Dr.Kate Gleeson is Postdoctoral Research Fellow. Thanks to Helen Pringle for the heads-up on Discipline and Punish. And thanks to Aleardo Zanghellini for helping me to clarify this argument.