Hecate articles from May 2004

Hecate archives from May 2004

Hecate.(a letter from the editor)(Editorial)
May 1, 2004... During the 1890s, women in Queensland finally decided they were not stopping until they got suffrage. By 1893, New Zealand women were enfranchised, and in 1894 South Australia became the first to give women the vote in State elections. Many...

Negotiating passages: Asian and Black women's writing in Britain.(dialogue)(Critical Essay)
May 1, 2004... To be Black and British is to be unnamed in official discourse. The construction of a national British identity is built upon a notion of a racial belonging, upon a hegemonic white ethnicity that never speaks its presence. We are told that you...

Moving beyond otherness: exploring the polyvocal subjectivities of African Caribbean women across the United Kingdom.(social justice)(Critical Essay)
May 1, 2004... This paper highlights some of the key issues in my doctoral study on the ethnic, gendered and national subjectivities of African Caribbean women in Britain. It argues that despite the negative legacy of Anglo/Eurocentric meta-discourses,...

Gallen head.(Short Story)
May 1, 2004... A tiny island beach, sheltered. In the sun it gives the illusion of the tropics; the rocks, low scrub, the bright sand squeaking underfoot. Warm sun, getting into their bones. Lying on the sand, on the beach, light all around them. A cold wind,...

Speaking positions on indigenous violence.
May 1, 2004... The aim of this paper is to take the issue of violence in Indigenous communities and demonstrate the contestation in speaking positions. Within the debates on violence, some voices are heard while the majority, which happen to be those of...

Towards 'a postcolonial practice of writing'.("Body/Landscape Journals" by Margaret Somerville)(Interview)(Critical Essay)
May 1, 2004... The following dialogue has been woven together after a few months of email exchanges with Margaret Somerville in 2002. This was a curious way to hold a discussion with a writer so interested in questions of embodiment and relationship to place....

Radical Brisbane: an Unruly History.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
May 1, 2004... Radical Brisbane: An Unruly History Edited by Raymond Evans and Carole Ferrier 336pp 09580794 5 5 Send $50 to Vulgar Press po box 68 carlton north 3054 The next stage in the Vulgar Press's series of 'Radical Australian City' books was...

Living on the ground research: steps towards White women researching in collaboration with Indigenous people.(dialogue)(Critical Essay)
May 1, 2004... The time and the need has come for all of us who are concerned with social justice to sit down and talk to each other to devise ways and means of creating a common language so that the meanings of our words do not become...

Protocols, political correctness and discomfort zones: Indigenous life writing and non-Indigenous editing.(Australia)(Critical Essay)
May 1, 2004... The emergence of the genre of autobiographical writing by Indigenous Australian women, often categorised as life writing, is a distinctive phenomenon of the Australian publishing scene of the past thirty-five years. It has particular...

When is Aboriginal Aboriginal too much? (Not a hump but a historical speed bump).(dialogue)(Critical Essay)
May 1, 2004... Everybody is scandalised by the slogan on Richard Bell's T-shirt: 'White Girls Can't Hump.' It is condemnable because it is racist and it offends women, they say. But behind this there might be another story. It would have almost certainly been...

Choose your own adventure.(the politics of motherhood)(Short Story)
May 1, 2004... A. It has been... how long since she got her last period? Jane goes to the doctor and discovers that there are cells rapidly dividing inside of her. She tells Mathew. He is a responsible man with a responsible job and responsible investments...

Coastal Drift.(Poem)
May 1, 2004... Coastal Drift For Kaitlain Turner Once, no one envied the life of an art icon, but tides turn. Women in frames tired of restraints: the endless pose, the relentless gaze of voyeurs, bustling queues and guards ...

Drugstore Circa 1952.(Poem)
May 1, 2004... Drugstore Circa 1959 Nutmeg peppered the froth on the milkshake, ogled from a stool at the drugstore's bar. For me, it had to be chocolate, either soda or milkshake would do. A step through an arch took us to...

Sleight of Hand.(Poem)
May 1, 2004... Sleight of Hand No-name has never understood the phrase: to make love. Always, it made her travel-sick, the way those others: scantily clad and hardly a demanding husband made her squeam. But now, by herself, in...

My Beautiful White-Washed Skin.(poetry)(Poem)
May 1, 2004... My Beautiful White-Washed Skin When you wake in the night you hear a high-pitched whine that, in some places in the world, is called the singing of the stars. Other places, it's called loneliness. And yet in...

Our Pizza of the Day Has Bio-Topping.(poetry)(Poem)
May 1, 2004... Our Pizza of the Day Has Bio-Topping a pizza is like a cell diagram, things, scattered, everywhere organelles little organs of matter requiring identification olives like multiple nuclei too many cooks in the one...

Planted.(poetry)(Poem)
May 1, 2004... Planted On this slate-grey autumn morning the lake is a churning sea choppy & clouded, the tortoise tower rising still & ghostly in the distant centre; too cold now for embraces on the...

Doorway.(Poem)
May 1, 2004... Doorway Already you are cushioned unwittingly from tears, and the quilt is an excruciating weight against the body: devising meticulous plans for a departure, almost sanely, makes a mockery of the carefully chosen...

Notes on Experiment 3332-8:.(poetry)(Poem)
May 1, 2004... Notes on Experiment 3332-8: The fingerprint in my left armpit (where no-one else has reached): The stubborn cross-dressing: myself in his cracked remains; Skin stripped as a last resort-- Sent to a laundromat,...

Nana's house.(poetry)(Poem)
May 1, 2004... Nana's house Grandad was always up to watch the sun rise, his brown bakelite radio on with the news. Beside it sat a tiny gnome smoking on a clay log. 'Eat your crusts, they make your hair curly,' he said. Scared off,...

Seam Stressing.(poetry)(Poem)
May 1, 2004... Seam Stressing When trying on a person for fit, size and comfort, turn them inside-out and look at their seams. Where and when were they made? Are they backed by a legitimate label? Have they been properly...

From the bad seed.(narrative)(Short Story)
May 1, 2004... Agatha Hock was doing Autumn again. She cut it into separate words, then jumbled them until a pattern emerged. Ah, autumn again... yesterday, I went down with Mary-Mary to pick the last dahlias... Agatha was gardening columnist for...

The Taniwha's exile: the exclusion of Maori women from environmental policy and decision-making in Aotearoa/New Zealand.(health and politics)(Critical Essay)
May 1, 2004... A main theme of this paper is notions of marginalisation, exclusion and alienation (exile), and what those might mean for Maori and particularly Maori women and their whanau/families. It is concerned with how Maori might encounter these in...

Glossary.(Australian Aboriginal)(Brief Article)(Illustration)(Glossary)
May 1, 2004... Ahuwhenua land development Haka fierce, challenging dance Hapu sub-tribe, pregnant Hikoi march Hui meeting Iwi tribe Kaitiaki caretaker Kaumatua old...

In gendered chambers: the figure of the Indian immigrant woman of Colonial Malaya.("Confessions of a Planter in Malaya" by Leopold Ainsworth)(Critical Essay)
May 1, 2004... The act of understanding our construction as agents and subjects of social processes is itself a kind of intervention in the creation of exclusive knowledge systems. Perhaps the greatest difficulty lies in relating the ideological to the...

Noisy blood.(upon acquaintance of Spanish artist Joan Miro)(Short Story)
May 1, 2004... As the rain lingers, wilful, in the river-- meticulous, alert, the stuff of a thousand pronouns-- the worlds cross the astonishing border, and leave as a wake, as ruinous traces, the instincts of the dust. Jose...

www.army.gov.au: 'First World' militaries imagining 'Third World' civil societies.(anti-Americanism in Australia)(Critical Essay)
May 1, 2004... This paper is part of a larger project on anti-Americanism in Australia, particularly as anti-American discourses have functioned in Australian media since September 11, 2001, in relation to issues of national defence and international...

A girl's guide to modernism's grammar: language politics in experimental women's fiction.(Australia)(Critical Essay)
May 1, 2004... In 1917, a writer in the New York Evening Sun indicated that 'some people think that women are the cause of modernism, whatever that is.' (1) The statement indicates an early linking of 'modernism' with 'women, and signals that both entities...

Intimate visibilities.(performance art by Anna Maria Giannini, Mona Hatoum and Julia Kristeva)(Critical Essay)
May 1, 2004... My work as an artist investigates female subjectivity and the body, exploring ways visually to represent the notion of 'otherness', using video/performance and installation. Using video to engage with the body and narrative, controlled...

Writing The Morality of Gentlemen.(narrative)(Critical Essay)
May 1, 2004... This book was my first novel. It came out in 1984, several years after I finished it and it was hard to get it published. It's always worth talking about the conditions of literary production because we tend to think books just pop out of the...

A consequence of words.(Short Story)
May 1, 2004... Behind her the bang of the screen door finishes in a vibrato of tiny shudders. Suburban houses set in suburban lawns flick by like frames in a silent movie. Her old fawn coat flaps at her sides. She carries a brown cardboard suitcase. As she...

Changing feminisms--a personal view.(Australia)(Critical Essay)
May 1, 2004... I am not quite sure when I became a feminist but it was certainly the result of growing up surrounded by strong minded women--my mother, grandmother and High School teachers. I guess there was also a sense of rebellion against 1950s...

Feminism today.(United Kingdom)(Critical Essay)
May 1, 2004... Speaking rather from the sidelines, since it is some years since I've been involved in women's studies or active in any feminist campaign, I am puzzled by the absence today of any feminist political movement with a clear profile. On the one...

Adventures of a Black girl in search of herself: some thoughts on Canadian feminism.(dialogue)(Critical Essay)
May 1, 2004... Introduction Before I begin, I would like to give a brief explanation for this paper's title. It is borrowed from a Canadian play called Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God. Written by Djanet Sears, this play was a collaboration...

Feminism as cultural renaissance.(Australia)(Critical Essay)
May 1, 2004... 'Truly, it felt like Year One' wrote English novelist Angela Carter; 'towards the end of the sixties it started to feel like living on a demolition site--one felt one was living on the edge of the unimaginable'. There was 'a yeastiness in the...

The Gardener's Arms.(Poem)
May 1, 2004... The Gardener's Arms The pub's been rebuilt no more wall... Run the gauntlet past women with bra straps slipping down sun-burnt shoulders ... to sit on and watch pints go flat as they dug each...

Alice Grows Up.(poetry)(Poem)
May 1, 2004... Alice Grows Up One tick stretched inches past the giraffe chart on the kitchen door. Forehead curled against the ceiling, she shouldered the lintels, rasped miniature furniture, crammed all the centimetres and...

Blue Mountains Journey 2003.(poetry)(Poem)
May 1, 2004... Blue Mountains Journey 2003 For Dorothy Hewett 1923--28 August 2002 New Year's Eve I'm heading down the mountain then up the coast to Newcastle to be with Mum at midnight --her eighty-third. Left Leura ...

Battered.(poetry)(Poem)
May 1, 2004... Battered Like the last bag of shopping in the boot squashed grapes sweet biscuits bashed to sparrow food by tins baked beans cheesy spaghetti a jar of apricot jam I lie in bed pillow crammed against...

Australian Male.(poetry)(Poem)
May 1, 2004... Australian Male White Anglo-saxon English speaking Shouting, swearing 'Fuck you!' he slurs tanned muscled arms shove pinching female flesh any many he's still non-selective in pubs xxxx...

For My Daughters.(poetry)(Poem)
May 1, 2004... For My Daughters My daughter's strong beautiful logic as the ground is bigger than you so is your shadow I saw her legs grow I saw her face grow into smiles I heard her learn to speak the way that...

Remnants.(poetry)(Poem)
May 1, 2004... Remnants Every day, the lost mother arrives in a crimson four-wheel drive that tows a balking trailer. Another time, she remembers, her daughter had found this flat, and she'd hauled the trailer, stacked with...

Trilogy of TV.(narrative )(Short Story)
May 1, 2004... Three small children in their Sunday best hand-me-downs, stand by the pale blue bubble of a Volkswagen. One remains in Grandmother's lounge room, turning the dial and twisting the rabbit ears for a better reception of her siblings. They never...