Showing papers in "Australian Feminist Studies in 2015"

Book review : the posthuman

Abstract: It can be said that we inhabit a post-human world—an existence characterised by smartphones and social media, genetically modified food and IVF babies, life-extending technologies and prosthetic enhancements. In The Posthuman (2013), Rosi Braidotti offers a roadmap for navigating the global effects of this post-human predicament—one in which clear distinctions between the human and the non-human no longer hold, the nature–culture divide is destabilised, and man’s privileged status is under attack. The situation we find ourselves in, Braidotti argues, is neither dystopian technological nightmare nor futuristic fantasy but one that requires complex and nuanced critical responses to issues of subjectivity, ethics and politics. In the four chapters comprising The Posthuman, Braidotti outlines her vision of the post-human future based on an affirmative politics, which ‘combines critique with creativity in the pursuit of alternative visions and projects’ (54). As a feminist antihumanist, Braidotti expresses little nostalgia for the concept of ‘Man’ and its associated individualism, Eurocentrism and anthropocentrism. Chapter 1 ‘Post-Humanism: Life Beyond the Self’ charts the Humanist/anti-humanist debates to draw attention to the crisis of the human and the opportunity it affords to imagine alternative subjectivities grounded in relationality and the interconnection between the self and others (49). Methodologically, Braidotti adopts a feminist politics of location in her critique of various Humanist traditions. There is a profound reflexivity to her writing as she guides the reader through the intellectual trajectory that has resulted in her nomadic, affirmative politics. It is a legacy that incorporates social movements of the 1960s/1970s, as well as the continental feminism of Irigaray and Kristeva. Spinoza and Deleuze and Guattari also feature as philosophical touchstones from which she advances her vision for the posthuman as a ‘relational subject constituted in and by multiplicity, that is to say a subject that works across differences and is also internally differentiated, but still grounded and accountable’ (49). By framing her argument within the narrative of her own intellectual story, the book conveys an immediacy and intimacy not often found in academic prose. Stylistically, it is as though we are inside her head—a post-human experience, indeed. Her writing is as expansive and impressive as you would expect—a swarm of ideas assuredly curated into a compelling argument for generating new forms of subjectivity and ethical relations to confront the challenges of a post-human existence. Consistent with existing feminist appraisals of the post-human (Halberstam and Livingston 1995; Hayles 1999; Toffoletti 2007), Braidotti acknowledges the complexity of the post-human predicament, seeking alternative frameworks to think about post-human subjectivity in non-dualistic ways. What Braidotti brings to these debates is an emphasis on materialism by way of Spinozist monism. In championing the relational, embodied and embedded qualities of post-human existence, Braidotti reprises the concept of zoe—a generative and vitalist force that allows for connections and affinities to be made across

Notes on the Perfect: Competitive Femininity in Neoliberal Times

Abstract: This article argues that at a point in time when feminism (in a variety of its forms) has re-entered political culture and civil society, there is, as though to hold this threat of new feminism at bay, an amplification of control of women, mostly by corporeal means, so as to ensure the maintenance of existing power relations. However the importance of ensuring male dominance is carefully disguised through the dispositif which takes the form of feminine self-regulation. The ‘perfect’ emerges as a horizon of expectation, through which young women are persuaded to seek self-definition. Feminism, at the same time, is made compatible with an individualising project and is also made to fit with the idea of competition. With competition as a key component of contemporary neoliberalism, (pace Foucault) the article construes the violent underpinnings of the perfect, arguing that it acts to stifle the possibility of an expansive feminist movement. It recaptures dissenting voices by legitimating and giving s...

The Confidence Cult(ure)

Abstract: In this paper we explore how confidence has become a technology of self that invites girls and women to work on themselves. The discussion demonstrates the extensiveness of what we call the ‘cult(ure) of confidence’ across different areas of social life, and examines the continuities in the way that exponents of the confidence cult(ure) name, diagnose and propose solutions to archetypal feminist questions about labour, value and the body. Our analysis focuses on two broad areas of social life in which the notion of confidence has taken hold powerfully in the last few years: popular discussions about gender and work, and consumer body culture. Examining the incitements to self-confidence in these realms, we show how an emergent technology of confidence, systematically re-signifies feminist accounts, by turning away from structural inequalities and collectivist critiques of male domination into heightened modes of self-work and self-regulation, and by repudiating the injuries inflicted by the struct...

An Exceptional Choice

Abstract: Building on Penelope Deutscher's analysis of the biopolitical implications of abortion being regulated by a framework of exceptionalism, this article explores discursive constructions of abortion as an exceptional choice that is only justifiable in ‘worthy’ cases. In so doing, it extends our understanding of exceptionalism and neo-liberalism as ways for thinking about abortion. Through an analysis of interviews with New Zealand women about their views on abortion, I contend that exceptionalism operates not only as a dominant framework for talking about abortion but that it structures a hierarchy of worthiness in abortion discourse. I argue that the exceptionalism framework both obscures the ways that abortion is an ordinary and common part of many women's reproductive experiences and raises questions for how challenges to prevailing legislative regimes might be organised.

Who Gets Played By ‘The Gender Card’? A Critical Discourse Analysis of Coverage of Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s Sexism and Misogyny Speech in the Australian Print Media

Abstract: This article is concerned with questions of sexism and misogyny in the context of post-feminism. It examines the particular case of former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s ‘misogyny speech’, a rare instance of a woman in high political office directly accusing her opponent of sexism. Through a critical discourse analysis of the coverage of that speech in the Australian print media, the article explores the radical disjuncture between how the speech resonated with women, both in Australia and internationally, and its construction in the print media as an illegitimate and ill-conceived ‘playing of the gender card’. In forwarding this analysis, the article highlights how, in a post-feminist media environment, the possibilities for women of naming experiences of sexism are being closed down not least because such naming is positioned as a strategic choice on the part of women deployed only to gain advantage.

Game of Thrones, Rape Culture and Feminist Fandom

Abstract: Throughout its run, HBO's adaptation of George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire book series, retitled Game of Thrones (GoT), has attracted controversy for its depiction of nudity and graphic sex and violence. But a particular recent scene, in which a brother rapes his sister, caused outrage in media and fan commentary. This article considers the scene in question, and feminist responses to it, in the context of wider cultural debates about rape culture and the media representation of sexual violence. Following Sarah Projansky's argument that rape is a ‘particularly versatile narrative element’ that ‘often addresses any number of social themes and issues’, I read GoT and its online fan responses alongside literary theories of the fantastic, to examine how dominant rape culture discourses are both reproduced and challenged in fan communities. In particular I argue that fan narratives both reproduce discourses of masculinity and futurity that contribute to rape culture, but also provide a potential...

Women's Micro-Entrepreneurial Homeworking: A ‘Magical Solution’ to the Work–Life Relationship?

Abstract: Enabled by the global distribution affordances of the Internet, increasing numbers of creative producers of the handmade—the majority of whom are women—are working from home as sole traders. Selling their wares via online marketplaces such as Etsy, such women often do so as a means by which to balance caring responsibilities with paid employment. In this article I argue that rather than seeing the exponential growth of an online craft economy as a ‘back to the future’ moment for the status of women, these business practices are best seen as part of the process of the folding of the economy into society, a process which Lisa Adkins has located as positioning the home as an increasingly productive space for both men and women.

Talking About Sexual Consent: Heterosexual women and BDSM

Abstract: Sexual consent is an increasingly important concept for sexual violence prevention. Practitioners of bondage/discipline, dominance/submission, sadomasochism (hereafter BDSM) advocate strong communi...

‘Too Many’: Anxious White Nationalism and the Biopolitics of Abortion

Abstract: The statement that Australia has ‘too many abortions’ often circulates with intensity in times of increased worry over the vulnerability of white demographic and sociocultural dominance in Australia. Contrasting two such periods—the 1970s (with 1979 as the apex point) and the mid-2000s (2002–2008)—this article will show that, in times of national crisis, debates over abortion can become a site where politicians, journalists and other influential social commentators displace and assuage anxieties regarding the size and constitution of Australia's future population. The statement that Australia has ‘too many abortions’ carries the imperative for white women to reproduce the nation. This demand is made perceptible through a history of maternal citizenship for white women, which reverberates in the present, and the articulation of the desire to eradicate abortion (amongst white women) alongside other key biopolitical technologies—the disavowal of Indigenous sovereignty and the exclusion of non-white i...

Bad Feelings: An Affective Genealogy of Feminism

Abstract: While the importance of negativity and negative affects to queer history and theory has been the subject of much recent critical discussion, bad feelings are equally prevalent in contemporary feminist theory. The aim of this article is not to provide a summary overview of a recent negative turn in feminist theory, however, nor to identify the early twenty-first century socio-political causes of this welling up of bad feeling. Rather, its purpose is to consider the way the increasing centrality of studies of affect to feminist histories and politics allows us to reconceptualise these as ‘affective genealogies'. The article examines this by focusing on three representative texts, which it takes as representative of three key moments in the recent affective genealogy of feminism: Rosi Braidotti's Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (2002); Sara Ahmed's The Promise of Happiness (2010); and Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism (2011).

The Im/Possibility of Abandonment in New Materialist Ontologies

Abstract: Organising prominent critiques of new materialism is the suggestion that it contains a gesture of abandonment. New materialism abandons the past to enable its self-promotion as a novel brand and generation of feminist intervention wedded to a particular vision of matter's transformative possibilities. Or it abandons questions of race in advancing a grand ontology, while simultaneously enacting a particular politics of perspective—one that is racialised. In this article we acknowledge the importance of these critiques as we engage them through an interrogation and opening of the nature of abandonment itself. From within a new materialist frame, we ask who or what abandons, and what assumptions about matter, race, the human and the iterative act of abandonment are at work in critiques of this field? We question how a new materialist approach enacts and recasts the positionality and privilege of ‘whiteness-as-humanness’ at the same time it is considered to elide these. Taking up with discussions from within ...

Pantomime Dames: Queer Femininity Versus ‘Natural Beauty’ in Snog, Marry, Avoid

Abstract: The British Broadcasting Corporation's television show Snog, Marry, Avoid (SMA) states its mission is, ‘to reveal a nation of stunning natural beauties who are currently hiding behind layers and layers of slap’ [BBC. 2008. Snog, Marry, Avoid Season One. United Kingdom: Remarkable Television]. This article considers SMA as a useful text for deconstructing contemporary norms of femininity. I utilise queer and affect theory perspectives from Berlant [2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press], Halberstam [1998. Female Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012; Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal. Boston, MA: Beacon Press] and Puar [2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press] to reveal the queer dimensions of the excessive femininity represented in the show. Berlant's work illuminates attachments to particular stylings, to understand where ‘cruel optimism’ operates. Further, I apply the idea of ‘queening’ as an ...

Motherhood as the Value of Labour

Abstract: This article concerns migrant domestic labour It departs from existing analyses of such labour by examining the place of workers' mobility and workers' intimate life histories in the valorisation of migrant domestic labour Drawing on insights from the literature on the autonomy of migration and on affective labour, this article argues that migrant domestic workers' status as mobile bodies infused with affective histories of maternal care is critical in the constitution of a market for their labour This history endows migrant domestic workers' labour with unprecedented value, not least because the worker is expected to exude the affects of motherhood authentically in the home of her employer The analysis forwarded here demands a new understanding of the operations of global care chains and transnational motherhood

‘Porn Trouble’: On the Sexual Regime and Travels of Postfeminist Biologism

Abstract: In this article, I explore the emergent relationship between feminist media studies/cultural studies and the field of Evolutionary Psychology (EP). EP scholars increasingly conduct research on media and popular culture. At the same time, media/ted texts are increasingly marked by EP discourses. I take as my focus commercial women's online magazines produced in the UK and in Spain and accessed globally. Specifically, I explore a recurrent thread in their discussion forums: women expressing confusion, concern, disappointment, hurt and/or self-doubt, and asking for advice on discovering that their male partners consume various pornographies. A feminist poststructuralist discursive analysis is developed to explore both peer-to-peer and editorial advice on such ‘porn trouble’. I show how pseudo-scientific discourses give support to a narrative of male immutability and female adaptation in heterosexual relationships, and examine how these constructions are informed by EP accounts of sexual difference. T...

The Archive Function

Abstract: As Joan Wallach Scott warns in The Fantasy of Feminist History, the danger of depositing one's personal papers in an archive is that one's papers then become open to misinterpretation. In this article, Scott's fears are enacted in relation to another feminist theorist's archival collection, that of prominent Canadian scholar Barbara Godard who died before she could complete the process of donating her papers to the Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections at York University. Drawing on personal memories and eclectic textual traces, this article attempts to recover Godard's theory of the archive—a theory she never fully articulated in her lifetime, despite dedicating much of her time and energy to collecting and preserving her own words and the words and papers of her students and collaborators.

Evolution, Language and the Battle of the Sexes

Abstract: This paper argues that the power of evolutionary psychology (EP) and the challenge it poses for feminists reside less in any new scientific knowledge EP has produced, and more in the meta-narrative it has provided for scientists whose work is not directly concerned with evolution. Using the study of sex/gender differences in language as a case study, the paper shows how EP's meta-narrative has been taken up in both expert and popular scientific discourse. It considers what gives the meta-narrative its appeal, and how feminists have contested it. It also locates the argument within the longer history of feminist responses to evolutionary science, comparing current debates with those that took place in the late nineteenth century.

Theorising The Everyday

Abstract: This article reflects on the gender politics integral to theories and cultural histories of the everyday in the contemporary Humanities and (to a lesser extent) Social Sciences. Since the 1990s feminist scholars have observed the gender bias integral to many canonical twentieth-century theories of the everyday. In spite of these observations, I suggest that much everyday life theory and recent studies that map a cultural and intellectual history of the everyday continue to reflect this gender bias. I suggest that one possible reason for this is women’s historical exclusion from the realm of theoretical discourse broadly conceived, and propose that in order to trace alternative critiques and histories of the everyday feminist scholars need to look to alternative modes of cultural and discursive production—for example, literature, the essay and art—through which to trace implicit and explicit analyses of the everyday by women. The second part of the article turns to the work of the twentieth-century...

Gender and the Political: Deconstructing the Female Terrorist

Abstract: Recent years have seen increasing interest in new feminist histories of second wave US feminism. Amanda Third's Gender and the Political offers a different kind of history of the second wave, one t...

Secret Things and the Confinement of Walls: ‘The Private Sphere’ in Crimes of Child Sexual Abuse Perpetrated by Women

Abstract: This article explores the under-examined issue of sexual abuse of children by women. It asks what are the conditions under which such things become knowable or when are they rendered unthinkable? The private sphere, marked by domestic walls, has been identified as the space most influenced and shaped by women. Its walls symbolise shelter and protection, and they are associated with the safety of all within. At the same time, however, the walls which constitute the private also enable a space within which women's actions can take place with limited oversight by others. Walls foster secrecy and what happens within can include elements of transgression. The sexual abuse of children by women—either their own or those entrusted into their care by others—is one such transgression. This article analyses a series of case studies derived from different historical sources in order to highlight how walls and the understandings of privacy that they support help to perpetuate a widespread belief that women can...

Performance Anxieties: Trans Women's Un(der)-employment Experiences in Post-Fordist Society

Abstract: Drawing on the narratives of 23 un(der)employed trans women residing in Ontario, British Columbia, Canada and Washington State in the USA, this article explores the connections between affect, gender and labour in post-Fordist society. Post-Fordism is characterised in part by the putting to work of immaterial labour. Workers' whole personalities are harnessed to produce value for capital through evoking feelings of satisfaction, security and contentment amongst consumers. While women's employment rates have increased dramatically within post-Fordism, I argue that trans women's experiences of marginalisation within and expulsion from the workplace points to the narrow parameters of femininity deemed capable of producing such positive feelings. Trans women's visible, audible and behavioural cues of gender alterity lend insight into criteria that position some women employable and others disposable.

Teaching with Feminist Materialisms

Abstract: Teaching with Feminist Materialisms is an edited collection that explores what it might mean to teach with new materialist methodologies. With this aim, the authors have set themselves a challenge, for it is not immediately obvious how to implement new materialist theory as a teaching practice in our current neoliberal, economic-rationalist climate. Judging by the content of the essays, the latter phenomenon is not limited to Australia but is a common feature of European universities as well, as authors note that their universities also focus increasingly on the marketability of the educational product rather than encouraging experimental or open-ended investigations with outcomes that may be difficult to quantify. The authors in this collection have, however, successfully risen to this challenge and the result is a thoughtful and incisive interrogation of prevailing teaching practices as well as an open discussion of new feminist materialist pedagogy which acknowledges its promise as well as its potential conflicts with the predominant free-market ideology. The collection is a mix of practical examples in which teachers have drawn on their own experiences of the classroom, and theoretical investigations of new materialisms as political teaching practices, which are at the same time, critiques of humanist and anthropocentric styles of reasoning. The book opens with an introduction by the editors, Peta Hinton and Pat Treusch, which sets out the aims of the book and discusses the theory of new feminist materialisms as well as engaging with recent critiques of new materialism. They also situate the volume in the context of other critical investigations of conventional educational theories, methodologies and practices. There are already a considerable number of critiques of the teaching process, and Hinton and Treusch give a thorough overview of relevant work, taking care to mark the points of difference between other current analyses and that of the new materialisms so as to delineate and enact a place for such materialist educational practices. These facets of the work will be helpful to readers not overly familiar with, or confounded by, new materialist theorisations as Hinton and Treusch guide us through these analyses and signpost the essays in the volume that are the most pertinent to particular aspects of these comparative critiques. What emerges from the collection is that a major differentiation between new materialist teaching practices and more conventional approaches is a questioning of education as a practice of mastery. The traditional relationship between teacher and student is figured as one of mastery, where the teacher possesses knowledge that is then passed on to the student. It is a necessarily unequal power relation, where the possession of knowledge and experience renders the teacher superior to the student. The aimof this book is to elaborate hownew feministmaterial critique-contemplationpractice disrupts the assumptions enfolded in this familiar model. Newmaterialism does not assume that teaching is the transmission of knowledge but instead views learning as a

It's not about the women: gender equality in research

Abstract: The Australian Research Council (ARC) has recently released its Gender Equality Action Plan 2015–16 in which it pledges to carry out a program of monitoring, evaluating and raising awareness in reg...

The Postfeminist Biopic. Narrating the Lives of Plath, Kahlo, Woolf and Austen

Abstract: The publication of a volume entirely devoted to the woman's biopic through the lens of feminist theory, was, in many respects, overdue. Bronwyn Polaschek's The Postfeminist Biopic comes to fill thi...

Adaptation, Authorship, and Contemporary Women Filmmakers

Abstract: Successful women filmmakers are a rare breed. The statistics for female directors working on top grossing films continues to be woefully small. To be a woman who directs is to face systematic disad...

Feminist Encounters with Evolutionary Psychology

Abstract: This Section of Australian Feminist Studies is the product of an event that took place at King’s College London in January 2015, hosted as part of the UK-based ‘Critical Sexology’ seminar series. Participants at this event – feminist scholars working across the fields of lin- guistics, cultural studies, sociology, and psychology – were invited to reflect on their encounters with evolutionary psychology (EP). As the event organiser, I was interested to prompt a discussion about how EP shapes the contours of contemporary feminist scholarship, insofar as arguments from EP are something feminist scholars continually find ourselves coming across and coming up against both within and outside the academy. Conversely, I was interested in thinking about how encounters with EP might illuminate certain limit-points in contemporary feminist theorising.

Body-building-becomings: the productive material life of the artisanal-architect

Abstract: This paper concerns the conceptual resonances and ‘relays’ between the two contrasting philosophical notions and operational modes of the ‘architect’ and the ‘artisan’, here explored though a feminist philosophical framework and focus on materiality and corporality. There is a particular concentration on the way in which a ‘DIY’ (Do It Yourself) production methodology in architecture complicates Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s invocation of the architect-artisan binary in their collaborative text A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980). For them, the architect is a hegemonic figure whose detached operational approach differs from that of the artisan who discovers and responds to ‘real-life’ circumstances as they are directly encountered within project settings. Through reference to writings on the body and space by specific feminist philosophers, this paper draws attention to an artisanal mode of operation associated with architecture in which the body is deliberately enfolded...

Racial Excess: Rethinking How Race Comes to Matter

Abstract: Why is it racial prejudices and inequalities persist despite the sustained efforts in challenging their underlying premises, through for example the anti-essentialist conception of race as an illusion or as a discursive phenomenon? Can an analysis of the specificities of racialised lived realities as well as the generational and carnal attachments of race (see for example Bell 2007) pose challenge to, without reinstalling, an essentialist account of racial differences as innate and unchangeable? Where and when is the transformation of racial thinking located if the perception of race is always already structured by and circumscribed within the racialised visual episteme that constructs whiteness as humanness (see for example Sullivan 2012)? These are some of the key questions that inform current conversations about and studies on the question of race and racism. The works reviewed in this essay all contemplate these questions with an explicit hope to identify the possibilities of—and the sites for—change and transformation. I want to suggest that despite their different conceptual frameworks and analytical foci, the texts are exemplary of the current keen interest in the new and alternative ways to investigate and imagine (the materiality of) the matter of race. The aim of this review essay is to outline the ways in which the materiality of race, in its various configurations, is increasingly invested with transformative potential. Given that the question of race is often approached in terms of representation in order to contest the biologisation of race, the current turn to the materiality of race certainly merits scholarly attention. In my view, this turn resonates with the renewed interest in and robust engagement with matter, which is reconfigured as dynamic and agentic, rather than fixed and pregiven. Since this will be discussed in detail in the following pages, it suffices here to note that the materiality of race in the works reviewed here evokes notions of specificity, relationality and multiplicity, and generates what Alexander G. Weheliye calls, ‘an affective surplus’ (2014, 67). It follows then that the materiality of race is perceived as capable of

Feminism and art: unexpected encounters

Abstract: Susan Best, Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-garde. I. B. Tauris: London and New York, 2013.Katy Deepwell (ed.), Feminist Art Manifestos: An Anthology. KT Press: London, 2014.Elea...