Pub Date : 2020-06-09DOI: 10.1080/08164649.2020.1774864
M. Nash, H. Nielsen
ABSTRACT Antarctica is a remote, historically masculine place. It is also a workplace, and the human interactions there are connected to power structures and gendered expectations. Today, more than half early career polar researchers are women. However, women in Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine (STEMM) are also more likely than men to experience sexual harassment during fieldwork making questions of safety, power, and harassment pertinent. Gender equity initiatives coupled with #MeToo have provided new platforms for reporting sexual harassment and challenging problematic research cultures which position science as meritocratic and gender-neutral. Yet, the impact of #MeToo in Antarctic science is uneven. Following revelations of his harassment of female graduate students in the international media, the termination of Professor David Marchant is widely cited as evidence that #MeToo is positively affecting Antarctic science. We argue it is problematic to focus on individual cases at the expense of the wider culture. We examine the complex historical (e.g. gendered interactions with the Antarctic landscape), cultural (e.g. identity politics), and relational (e.g. gendered power dynamics) tensions underpinning recent #MeToo revelations in Antarctic science with a view to providing more nuanced approaches to structural change.
{"title":"Gendered Power Relations and Sexual Harassment in Antarctic Science in the Age of #MeToo","authors":"M. Nash, H. Nielsen","doi":"10.1080/08164649.2020.1774864","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2020.1774864","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Antarctica is a remote, historically masculine place. It is also a workplace, and the human interactions there are connected to power structures and gendered expectations. Today, more than half early career polar researchers are women. However, women in Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine (STEMM) are also more likely than men to experience sexual harassment during fieldwork making questions of safety, power, and harassment pertinent. Gender equity initiatives coupled with #MeToo have provided new platforms for reporting sexual harassment and challenging problematic research cultures which position science as meritocratic and gender-neutral. Yet, the impact of #MeToo in Antarctic science is uneven. Following revelations of his harassment of female graduate students in the international media, the termination of Professor David Marchant is widely cited as evidence that #MeToo is positively affecting Antarctic science. We argue it is problematic to focus on individual cases at the expense of the wider culture. We examine the complex historical (e.g. gendered interactions with the Antarctic landscape), cultural (e.g. identity politics), and relational (e.g. gendered power dynamics) tensions underpinning recent #MeToo revelations in Antarctic science with a view to providing more nuanced approaches to structural change.","PeriodicalId":46443,"journal":{"name":"Australian Feminist Studies","volume":"35 1","pages":"261 - 276"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-06-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/08164649.2020.1774864","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45146075","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-06-05DOI: 10.1080/08164649.2020.1775067
Shameem Black
ABSTRACT What can we learn from cultural practices that are simultaneously narrated as the cause and cure for sexual violation? In recent years, yoga has come to exemplify one such practice. The world of yoga has been roiled by accusations of violation, yet yoga has also gained prominence as a therapeutic tool and even as a policy recommendation to reduce assault. I analyse such competing rhetoric from India and the United States to shed light on how patriarchal and capitalist discourses can gain new vitality in the name of contesting violations they enable. Such cultural logics frame yoga-themed narratives solicited and archived under the sign of the #MeToo hashtag. Cultivating yoga as a feminist practice requires us to examine more radical visions found before and beyond #MeToo, exemplified within memoir and fiction.
{"title":"Yoga, Sexual Violation and Discourse: Reconfigured Hegemonies and Feminist Voices","authors":"Shameem Black","doi":"10.1080/08164649.2020.1775067","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2020.1775067","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT What can we learn from cultural practices that are simultaneously narrated as the cause and cure for sexual violation? In recent years, yoga has come to exemplify one such practice. The world of yoga has been roiled by accusations of violation, yet yoga has also gained prominence as a therapeutic tool and even as a policy recommendation to reduce assault. I analyse such competing rhetoric from India and the United States to shed light on how patriarchal and capitalist discourses can gain new vitality in the name of contesting violations they enable. Such cultural logics frame yoga-themed narratives solicited and archived under the sign of the #MeToo hashtag. Cultivating yoga as a feminist practice requires us to examine more radical visions found before and beyond #MeToo, exemplified within memoir and fiction.","PeriodicalId":46443,"journal":{"name":"Australian Feminist Studies","volume":"35 1","pages":"277 - 292"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/08164649.2020.1775067","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48321264","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-04-02DOI: 10.1080/08164649.2020.1774865
Hema’ny Molina Vargas, C. Marambio, N. Lykke
ABSTRACT This article discusses death, mourning and decolonisation, focusing on the Selk’nam of Karokynka/Tierra del Fuego, Chile. Methodologically, it is grounded in feminist experiments of bringing creative and personalised writing into an academic scholarship to challenge subject/object-relations, and to generate platforms for affective, world-making intra-actions and undoings of power. Through collaborative efforts of three differently situated co-authors, using poetic epistolary forms of address, the article unfolds an indigenous centred, feminist, decolonial methodology. Along similar lines, the theoretical approach to death and mourning is pluriversal, transgressing Western epistemologies and ontologies. Through letters, addressed to dead and alive, human and non-human key actors in a revitalising of Selk’nam culture, the article questions ethico-politically in/appropriate ways of mourning the consequences of the necropolitics imposed on the Selk’nam through white colonisation, Western modernity and its colonial matrix of necropower. It is critically addressed how mourning the lost became embedded in colonial discourses of white melancholia and humanism. Moreover combining creative writing methodologies, inspired by feminism, posthumanism, and by indigenous activism and practices of reviving Selk’nam culture, the authors use their different locations to search affirmatively for ways of mourning, which open horizons towards decolonising, cultural revitalising, reclaiming of indigenous rights and philosophies of death and mourning.
{"title":"Decolonising Mourning: World-Making with the Selk’nam People of Karokynka/Tierra del Fuego","authors":"Hema’ny Molina Vargas, C. Marambio, N. Lykke","doi":"10.1080/08164649.2020.1774865","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2020.1774865","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article discusses death, mourning and decolonisation, focusing on the Selk’nam of Karokynka/Tierra del Fuego, Chile. Methodologically, it is grounded in feminist experiments of bringing creative and personalised writing into an academic scholarship to challenge subject/object-relations, and to generate platforms for affective, world-making intra-actions and undoings of power. Through collaborative efforts of three differently situated co-authors, using poetic epistolary forms of address, the article unfolds an indigenous centred, feminist, decolonial methodology. Along similar lines, the theoretical approach to death and mourning is pluriversal, transgressing Western epistemologies and ontologies. Through letters, addressed to dead and alive, human and non-human key actors in a revitalising of Selk’nam culture, the article questions ethico-politically in/appropriate ways of mourning the consequences of the necropolitics imposed on the Selk’nam through white colonisation, Western modernity and its colonial matrix of necropower. It is critically addressed how mourning the lost became embedded in colonial discourses of white melancholia and humanism. Moreover combining creative writing methodologies, inspired by feminism, posthumanism, and by indigenous activism and practices of reviving Selk’nam culture, the authors use their different locations to search affirmatively for ways of mourning, which open horizons towards decolonising, cultural revitalising, reclaiming of indigenous rights and philosophies of death and mourning.","PeriodicalId":46443,"journal":{"name":"Australian Feminist Studies","volume":"35 1","pages":"186 - 201"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/08164649.2020.1774865","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47856423","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-04-02DOI: 10.1080/08164649.2020.1811952
M. Radomska, Tara Mehrabi, N. Lykke
ABSTRACT This introduction to the Queer Death Studies special issue explores an emerging transdisciplinary field of research. This field critically, (self-)reflexively and affirmatively investigates and challenges conventional normativities, assumptions, expectations, and regimes of truths that are brought to life and made evident by current planetary scale necropolitics and its framing of death, dying and mourning in the contemporary world. It is set against the background of traditional engagements with the question of death, often grounded in Western hegemonic and normative ideas of dying, dead and mourning subjects and bodies, on the one hand; and on the other contemporary discourses on human and nonhuman death and extinction, directly linked to the environmental crisis, capitalist and post/colonial extractivist necropolitics, material and symbolic violence, oppression and inequalities, and socio-economic, political and ecological unsustainabilities. By bringing together conceptual and analytical tools grounded in feminist materialisms and feminist theorising broadly speaking, queer theory and decolonial critique, the contributions in this special issue strive to advance queerfeminist methodologies and ontological, ethical and political understandings that critically and creatively attend to the problem of death, dying and mourning in the current environmental, cultural, and socio-political contexts.
{"title":"Queer Death Studies: Death, Dying and Mourning from a Queerfeminist Perspective","authors":"M. Radomska, Tara Mehrabi, N. Lykke","doi":"10.1080/08164649.2020.1811952","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2020.1811952","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This introduction to the Queer Death Studies special issue explores an emerging transdisciplinary field of research. This field critically, (self-)reflexively and affirmatively investigates and challenges conventional normativities, assumptions, expectations, and regimes of truths that are brought to life and made evident by current planetary scale necropolitics and its framing of death, dying and mourning in the contemporary world. It is set against the background of traditional engagements with the question of death, often grounded in Western hegemonic and normative ideas of dying, dead and mourning subjects and bodies, on the one hand; and on the other contemporary discourses on human and nonhuman death and extinction, directly linked to the environmental crisis, capitalist and post/colonial extractivist necropolitics, material and symbolic violence, oppression and inequalities, and socio-economic, political and ecological unsustainabilities. By bringing together conceptual and analytical tools grounded in feminist materialisms and feminist theorising broadly speaking, queer theory and decolonial critique, the contributions in this special issue strive to advance queerfeminist methodologies and ontological, ethical and political understandings that critically and creatively attend to the problem of death, dying and mourning in the current environmental, cultural, and socio-political contexts.","PeriodicalId":46443,"journal":{"name":"Australian Feminist Studies","volume":"35 1","pages":"81 - 100"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/08164649.2020.1811952","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41884101","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-04-02DOI: 10.1080/08164649.2020.1775068
Tara Mehrabi
ABSTRACT In this article I explore human and transgenic fruit fly relations in the laboratory and in relation to everyday practices of waste management. I rely on ethnographic material collected from one year of participatory observation in an Alzheimer’s laboratory in Sweden, in which scientists work with Drosophila Melanogaster, commonly known as fruit flies. Grounding myself within new materialism, posthuman theories and queer theories, I explore queer ecologies of death in the lab as a material-discursive phenomenon. I discuss how heteronormative and humanistic ideologies about ‘purity’ and ‘pure Nature’ shape the space of the laboratory and regulate waste management practices. However, as I present, the materiality of the living and dead matter problematises such fantasies of purity and pre-described categories of laboratory waste. Flies’ bodies, living and nonliving, cross the boundaries between inside and outside, natural and unnatural/artificial, safe and hazardous waste, and life and death, creating queer ecologies of death. Queer ecologies of death suggest new modes of thinking about agency, (non)human and (non)living within the context of laboratory waste management that go beyond the limits of human exceptionalism and modernist hierarchical binary logic that is essential to and constitutive of the notion of purity and the imaginary of a pure nature out there.
{"title":"Queer Ecologies of Death in the Lab: Rethinking Waste, Decomposition and Death through a Queerfeminist Lens","authors":"Tara Mehrabi","doi":"10.1080/08164649.2020.1775068","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2020.1775068","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In this article I explore human and transgenic fruit fly relations in the laboratory and in relation to everyday practices of waste management. I rely on ethnographic material collected from one year of participatory observation in an Alzheimer’s laboratory in Sweden, in which scientists work with Drosophila Melanogaster, commonly known as fruit flies. Grounding myself within new materialism, posthuman theories and queer theories, I explore queer ecologies of death in the lab as a material-discursive phenomenon. I discuss how heteronormative and humanistic ideologies about ‘purity’ and ‘pure Nature’ shape the space of the laboratory and regulate waste management practices. However, as I present, the materiality of the living and dead matter problematises such fantasies of purity and pre-described categories of laboratory waste. Flies’ bodies, living and nonliving, cross the boundaries between inside and outside, natural and unnatural/artificial, safe and hazardous waste, and life and death, creating queer ecologies of death. Queer ecologies of death suggest new modes of thinking about agency, (non)human and (non)living within the context of laboratory waste management that go beyond the limits of human exceptionalism and modernist hierarchical binary logic that is essential to and constitutive of the notion of purity and the imaginary of a pure nature out there.","PeriodicalId":46443,"journal":{"name":"Australian Feminist Studies","volume":"35 1","pages":"138 - 154"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/08164649.2020.1775068","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45780598","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-04-02DOI: 10.1080/08164649.2020.1791688
S. W. Adrian
ABSTRACT Born with half a heart, my firstborn child died when he was three weeks old. This auto-ethnographic article takes as its point of departure one of the questions that this tragic event made me ask: How do technologies reconfigure responsibility for death, as technologies are involved in ending or saving the lives of children like my son? With this question, I introduce a new research agenda within reproductive studies regarding how technologies remake death and dying at the beginning of life. Drawing on the notion of phenomena from agential realism, I examine how responsibility emerges in different ways as I tell my son’s story together with media and medical stories told about foetuses or infants who died after having been diagnosed with hypoplastic left heart syndrome. I show that we need to challenge the idea of the autonomous subject that shapes the Cartesian understanding of ethics and responsibility. By stitching stories of broken hearts together, my storytelling is not only a call for a feminist ethics of living response-ably with technologies of death and dying at the beginning of life, it is a way to find response-able practices of living with the deaths of foetuses and infants.
{"title":"Stitching Stories of Broken Hearts: Living Response-ably with the Technologies of Death and Dying at the Beginning of Life","authors":"S. W. Adrian","doi":"10.1080/08164649.2020.1791688","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2020.1791688","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Born with half a heart, my firstborn child died when he was three weeks old. This auto-ethnographic article takes as its point of departure one of the questions that this tragic event made me ask: How do technologies reconfigure responsibility for death, as technologies are involved in ending or saving the lives of children like my son? With this question, I introduce a new research agenda within reproductive studies regarding how technologies remake death and dying at the beginning of life. Drawing on the notion of phenomena from agential realism, I examine how responsibility emerges in different ways as I tell my son’s story together with media and medical stories told about foetuses or infants who died after having been diagnosed with hypoplastic left heart syndrome. I show that we need to challenge the idea of the autonomous subject that shapes the Cartesian understanding of ethics and responsibility. By stitching stories of broken hearts together, my storytelling is not only a call for a feminist ethics of living response-ably with technologies of death and dying at the beginning of life, it is a way to find response-able practices of living with the deaths of foetuses and infants.","PeriodicalId":46443,"journal":{"name":"Australian Feminist Studies","volume":"35 1","pages":"155 - 169"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/08164649.2020.1791688","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49370200","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-04-02DOI: 10.1080/08164649.2020.1802697
M. Radomska
ABSTRACT In the contemporary context of environmental crises and the degradation of resources, certain habitats become unliveable, leading to the death of individuals and species extinction. Whilst bioscience emphasises interdependency and relationality as crucial characteristics of life shared by all organisms, Western cultural imaginaries tend to draw a thick dividing line between humans and nonhumans, particularly evident in the context of death. On the one hand, death appears as a process common to all forms of life; on the other, as an event that distinguishes human from other organisms. Against this background, this article explores how contemporary art—in particular, the series of works The Absence of Alice (2008–2011) by Australian new-media and bioartist Svenja Kratz—challenges the normative and human-exceptionalist concept of death. By employing queerfeminist biophilosophy as a strategy that focuses on relations, processes and transformations instead of ‘essences’, the article examines the ways Kratz’s works deterritorialise the conventional concept of death. In this way, it hopes to attend to the intimacies between materialities of a human and nonhuman kind that form part of the processes of death and dying, and what follows, to reframe ethico-ontology of death as material and processual ecologies of the non/living.
{"title":"Deterritorialising Death: Queerfeminist Biophilosophy and Ecologies of the Non/Living in Contemporary Art","authors":"M. Radomska","doi":"10.1080/08164649.2020.1802697","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2020.1802697","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In the contemporary context of environmental crises and the degradation of resources, certain habitats become unliveable, leading to the death of individuals and species extinction. Whilst bioscience emphasises interdependency and relationality as crucial characteristics of life shared by all organisms, Western cultural imaginaries tend to draw a thick dividing line between humans and nonhumans, particularly evident in the context of death. On the one hand, death appears as a process common to all forms of life; on the other, as an event that distinguishes human from other organisms. Against this background, this article explores how contemporary art—in particular, the series of works The Absence of Alice (2008–2011) by Australian new-media and bioartist Svenja Kratz—challenges the normative and human-exceptionalist concept of death. By employing queerfeminist biophilosophy as a strategy that focuses on relations, processes and transformations instead of ‘essences’, the article examines the ways Kratz’s works deterritorialise the conventional concept of death. In this way, it hopes to attend to the intimacies between materialities of a human and nonhuman kind that form part of the processes of death and dying, and what follows, to reframe ethico-ontology of death as material and processual ecologies of the non/living.","PeriodicalId":46443,"journal":{"name":"Australian Feminist Studies","volume":"35 1","pages":"116 - 137"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/08164649.2020.1802697","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45072465","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-04-02DOI: 10.1080/08164649.2020.1791689
P. Maccormack
ABSTRACT Extinctionism and efilism were once considered lunatic fringe movements but are increasingly popular. They focus on immanence, care and prevention of life but are maligned as being death cults. Covertly the protection of the yet-to-be lives over those of citizens, the rise in suicide, murderous political acts from welfare cuts to genocide and individually driven massacres are understood as aberrations. The status of death itself is now in question over its Semiocapitalisation – a signifier or spectacle. This article expresses the crucial nature of materiality in thinking death and the various trajectories of the antagonistic relationship the human has with death which could (and should in certain circumstances) be loving, vitalist and as prevention and cessation of life could offer a future open to nature and the potentialisation of a natural epoch.
{"title":"Embracing Death, Opening the World","authors":"P. Maccormack","doi":"10.1080/08164649.2020.1791689","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2020.1791689","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Extinctionism and efilism were once considered lunatic fringe movements but are increasingly popular. They focus on immanence, care and prevention of life but are maligned as being death cults. Covertly the protection of the yet-to-be lives over those of citizens, the rise in suicide, murderous political acts from welfare cuts to genocide and individually driven massacres are understood as aberrations. The status of death itself is now in question over its Semiocapitalisation – a signifier or spectacle. This article expresses the crucial nature of materiality in thinking death and the various trajectories of the antagonistic relationship the human has with death which could (and should in certain circumstances) be loving, vitalist and as prevention and cessation of life could offer a future open to nature and the potentialisation of a natural epoch.","PeriodicalId":46443,"journal":{"name":"Australian Feminist Studies","volume":"35 1","pages":"101 - 115"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/08164649.2020.1791689","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46014943","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/08164649.2020.1781534
Anthea Taylor
ABSTRACT In March 1971, American women’s magazine McCall’s published an extract of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch. Myriad unpublished letters to the editor contained in the Greer archive at the University of Melbourne reveal that the magazine’s readers were largely dismissive of Greer’s feminist vision. These reader-writers, best conceptualised as ‘anti-fans’, took both author and editor to task for criticising them as wives and mothers. Through an analysis of these letters, this article argues that their authors contested Greer’s burgeoning authority as a second-wave celebrity feminist largely by pathologising her, invoking essentialist assumptions about femininity, and mobilising discourses of ‘choice’ more commonly understood as the product of a ‘postfeminist’ representational environment. Through their anti-fan practices, they challenge Greer’s attempts to deprive housewives of agency, deploying rhetorical strategies that are at once reliant upon and highly critical of second-wave feminism. By complicating dominant ways of framing the feminist past and the postfeminist present, this article demonstrates how celebrity feminists, including ‘blockbuster’ authors, have historically always elicited complex affective responses.
{"title":"‘The Most Revolting Ideas I’ve Read in a Woman’s Magazine’: The Female Eunuch, Affective (dis)investments, and McCall’s Reader-writers’","authors":"Anthea Taylor","doi":"10.1080/08164649.2020.1781534","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2020.1781534","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In March 1971, American women’s magazine McCall’s published an extract of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch. Myriad unpublished letters to the editor contained in the Greer archive at the University of Melbourne reveal that the magazine’s readers were largely dismissive of Greer’s feminist vision. These reader-writers, best conceptualised as ‘anti-fans’, took both author and editor to task for criticising them as wives and mothers. Through an analysis of these letters, this article argues that their authors contested Greer’s burgeoning authority as a second-wave celebrity feminist largely by pathologising her, invoking essentialist assumptions about femininity, and mobilising discourses of ‘choice’ more commonly understood as the product of a ‘postfeminist’ representational environment. Through their anti-fan practices, they challenge Greer’s attempts to deprive housewives of agency, deploying rhetorical strategies that are at once reliant upon and highly critical of second-wave feminism. By complicating dominant ways of framing the feminist past and the postfeminist present, this article demonstrates how celebrity feminists, including ‘blockbuster’ authors, have historically always elicited complex affective responses.","PeriodicalId":46443,"journal":{"name":"Australian Feminist Studies","volume":"35 1","pages":"20 - 36"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/08164649.2020.1781534","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44845289","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/08164649.2020.1793661
Rob Cover, M. Rasmussen, Christy E. Newman, Daniel Marshall, P. Aggleton
ABSTRACT Marriage equality is routinely located as evidencing a domestic, non-radical or neoliberal approach to sexual diversity. This article questions such assumptions by highlighting the reflexive approach to the utility of marriage and the significant diversity of opinion and attitudes towards marriage equality among gender- and sexually-diverse Australians. It does so by drawing on a major study of two social generations of gender- and sexually-diverse Australians’ conducted in the lead-up to a controversial postal survey on same-sex marriage in 2017. In the survey many participants discussed their views on marriage equality, its benefits, and how they saw its relationship or relevance to their own lives. This article identifies four themes present in participants’ responses: (1) the personal and domestic importance of marriage equality to some participants; (2) the social and political affordances of marriage equality for LGBTQ+ persons in Australia more generally; (3) the apparently unremarkable status of marriage equality for some participants; and (4) continuing deep ambivalence about marriage equality for others.
{"title":"Marriage Equality: Two Generations of Gender and Sexually Diverse Australians","authors":"Rob Cover, M. Rasmussen, Christy E. Newman, Daniel Marshall, P. Aggleton","doi":"10.1080/08164649.2020.1793661","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2020.1793661","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Marriage equality is routinely located as evidencing a domestic, non-radical or neoliberal approach to sexual diversity. This article questions such assumptions by highlighting the reflexive approach to the utility of marriage and the significant diversity of opinion and attitudes towards marriage equality among gender- and sexually-diverse Australians. It does so by drawing on a major study of two social generations of gender- and sexually-diverse Australians’ conducted in the lead-up to a controversial postal survey on same-sex marriage in 2017. In the survey many participants discussed their views on marriage equality, its benefits, and how they saw its relationship or relevance to their own lives. This article identifies four themes present in participants’ responses: (1) the personal and domestic importance of marriage equality to some participants; (2) the social and political affordances of marriage equality for LGBTQ+ persons in Australia more generally; (3) the apparently unremarkable status of marriage equality for some participants; and (4) continuing deep ambivalence about marriage equality for others.","PeriodicalId":46443,"journal":{"name":"Australian Feminist Studies","volume":"35 1","pages":"37 - 53"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/08164649.2020.1793661","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44488571","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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