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.     

Mixing Up

Increased interactions between groups of people through modernization may be embraced as mutually enriching or denounced as causing “negative social impacts.’ This paper is predicated on the assumption that people's perceptions of modernization projects influence their outcomes, because people resist rather than commit to negatively perceived projects. The nature of social contact brought about through modernization is a key factor in perceptions of modernization projects. Three types of social contact in a fishing joint venture between the Solomon Islands government and a Japanese company are explored in this paper: contact between men and women, between ethnic groups within Solomon Islands, and between Solomon Islanders and foreigners. Some of the criteria by which interviewees judged social contact included whether it was peaceful or caused friction, whether it caused cultural change, and whether it was hierarchical. The types of contact are discussed in terms of those criteria to reveal their varied effects on perceptions of modernization.     

PAPERBACK ABORTION

In 2005 Freakonomics popularised the abortion-and-crime theory based on the microeconomic model of fertility control that was buoyed by the phenomenal ubiquity of market populism at the time. In its massive popularity, the book filled the popular bandwidth with a simple caricature of abortion as an individual economic preference, the demand for which might simply be switched on or off by the prevailing market conditions of the day. This, potentially, has great implications for women's reproductive history, and for the contemporary conceptualisation of abortion as a medical need. In this article I interrogate the abortion-and-crime theory in order to expose its tendentious character as driven by market populism and outdated economic models that have long been a focus for feminist criticism. I highlight the lack of interrogation, both academic and popular, that was afforded the basic premise of the abortion-and-crime theory, in an ideological climate that at the time was overwhelmingly in thrall to market populism as promoted by neo-liberalism.     

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.