Hecate articles from October 2003

Hecate archives from October 2003

Editorial preface.
October 1, 2003... This issue and the next one will publish articles that had their genesis as papers presented at the July 2003 conference of the Australian Women's Studies Association held at Women's College at the University of Queensland. The conference,...

Is feminism finished?
October 1, 2003... Why is it so difficult for feminism to sustain itself as a movement and transmit its lessons to the next generation so that we can build on what we have achieved in the past rather than be fated to engage in the same battles...

Undisciplined women: a view of women's studies and institutional structures in Ireland.
October 1, 2003... The Women's Studies Centre in which I work at the National University of Ireland, Galway, recently held an open evening for our Certificate/Diploma program in Women's Studies. The Cert/Dip is an access program predominantly for women wanting to...

How students characterise the vocational gains from women's studies (or, why we need not be anxious).
October 1, 2003... Introduction How women's studies programmes relate to students' post-graduation career and employment aspirations has been a largely under-researched issue. While some attention has been given to tracking women's studies graduates, (1)...

(Other) feminisms--European women's studies/women's studies in Europe.
October 1, 2003... European Women's Studies suffers from invisibility. By this I mean that--on the whole--in the anglophone world, and that includes Britain, we have little idea either of the feminisms produced in the various non-anglophone European countries or...

(Other) feminisms--(other) values.
October 1, 2003... The notion of the family, like the notion of feminism is supposed to transcend geography and culture. However, each individual or cultural interpretation of the 'family' and of 'feminism' is firmly grounded in a specific geography, history and...

Researching whiteness: some reflections from an indigenous woman's standpoint.
October 1, 2003... Since the publication of my book Talkin' Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism (2000), which has been well received, I have been engaged in a number of conversations with feminists. (1) The chapter that seems to elicit the most...

Antigone in (post-)modern Palestine.
October 1, 2003... During the winter and spring of 2002 I taught at Grand Valley State University in West Michigan. It was a strange period for me for a number of reasons. I had just returned from the University of Pretoria and couldn't get free of the South...

Palmer's present: gender and the national community in 1934.
October 1, 2003... 'Young women of 1934 are usually bored by the mention of the women's movement', Nettie Palmer wrote in March 1934. (1) 'Looking back, they see the women who did the pioneering', she continued 'as rather dowdy, dusty, struggling creatures'. (2)...

Feminism and male chauvinism in the writings of Christina Stead (1902-1983).
October 1, 2003... Christina Stead's fifteen major works of fiction show a genius for recreating the times and the places in which she lived--especially in Sydney, London, Paris and New York. Her multi-charactered novels give us a panoply of men and women...

The devil and the angel? Australia's feminist presses and the multinational agenda.
October 1, 2003... Feminist Presses In Australia, feminist presses have been clearly distinguished from multinational publishing ventures by their publishing politics and their publishing imperative. In the 1970s and 80s, Australia's feminist presses were...

Rethinking women's birth experience: medical frameworks and personal narratives.
October 1, 2003... This paper emerges from my on-going research into birth experience and lay support people in the birth room, and presents findings from two recent projects interviewing birthing women and midwives. In the contemporary health experience of...

Breastfeeding bodies and choice in late capitalism.
October 1, 2003... In a social culture which institutionally endorses Breast is Best policy, and yet commonly refers to the nation's breastfeeding support agency as the nipple nazis or breastfeeding police, breastfeeding 'culture' is at best ambivalent in...

The subversive hearth: the installation of the domiciled artist.
October 1, 2003... Whether you stand or sit to iron that monumental pile of shirts, keep your posture good. It not only helps your figure, but saves energy, too. You don't want to be a dutiful, weary wreck when your man comes home, and he doesn't want to hear...

What's new about 'the new femininity'? Feminism, femininity and the discourse of the new.
October 1, 2003... Trends are, by nature, fleeting but sometimes they reflect a more important change in the Zeitgeist. As we enter a new century, fashion and interior designers, cosmetic companies, the media and women themselves are expressing a new interest in...

The flying prostitute: identity of the (im)possible other.
October 1, 2003... How does one address her--a street walker or an escort woman? Or flying prostitute as she calls herself?. Whatever the name, there has been an alarming increase in their numbers in recent times. They can be seen anywhere and anytime in the...

Writing the self: Taslima Nasrin's autobiography and the silent voices of Bengali feminism.
October 1, 2003... Taslima Nasrin is arguably South Asia's most controversial writer, perhaps even more so than Salman Rushdie, to whom she has often been compared: a comparison unfair to both, for this forcible yoking together at once flattens their very...

Female conductors: the incarnation of power?
October 1, 2003... The term 'orchestral conductor' seems to evoke images of greatness, divinity, authority, power and tyranny. In the conducting profession those who have had the power to create this role have been men and, thus, through weight of historical and...

The depoliticising of lesbian culture.
October 1, 2003... One has the imagination of one's century, one's culture, one's generation, one's particular social class, one's decade, and the imagination of what one reads, but above all one has the imagination of one's body and of the sex who inhabits it....

Lesbians and gay men flirting with/ disengaging from vital statistics: same sex relationships and the NZ Census 1971/2001.
October 1, 2003... Introduction Lesbians and gay male communities' relationship with the New Zealand Census sounds a somewhat dry topic, but I had a lot of fun writing this paper. Looking at the ways in which the statistical bureaucrats have phrased...

Practicing feminism in South Korea: the issue of sexual violence and the women's movement.
October 1, 2003... This paper explores feminist practice in South Korea on the basis of a case study on a feminist-run sexual assault centre (SAC). Feminism has been regarded as Western culture' in most parts of Asia. Feminists in Asian countries have been...

Creating a space: Sybylla Feminist Press, 1988-2003.
October 1, 2003... Sybylla Feminist Press has been around in one form or another for over twenty-five years. We survey fifteen of those years, and seven collectives, filtered through the lens of two rapidly evolving decades in feminist politics and feminist...

Homage to Three Painters.
October 1, 2003... Homage to Three Painters 1. For Clarice Beckett (1887-1935) Subject to derision for your 'drizzly views', You went out in the rain and caught a cold, died and were forgotten, but not before you fixed ...

Semaphore.
October 1, 2003... Semaphore To Virginia Woolf 1882-1941 When most other writers were concerned with people plot, and problems you took off, wrote bravely of 'moments of being', you said, 'blown like an old flag', ...

The Glass Menagerie.
October 1, 2003... The Glass Menagerie Around the time the world first saw Tennessee Williams' play about Laura a cripple inhabiting an imaginary world with her collection of tiny glass animals I saw my friend's glass menagerie. She...

The Yugoslav Women and Their Pickled Herrings Rubber Company--1971, Melbourne.
October 1, 2003... The Yugoslav Women and Their Pickled Herrings Rubber Company--1971, Melbourne So cold and long this walk wet too at 6.30 in the morning with tram fares to payday already spent like wishes I see some Yugoslav women...

The Birdcage.
October 1, 2003... The Birdcage Of pressed tin roof and back rusted wire and weathered wood with four little legs to support its hexagonal body of a 1/2 feet fallen sideways under a tree buffalo grass growing where a pair of finches or a lone...

Distress shop.
October 1, 2003... distress shop shop shop shop fashion for the ladies eat my money I want to look lovely mirrors thin fluorescent word change me outside in fit in hyperventilating air conditioner anxiety attack on a hanging rack...

No think tank.
October 1, 2003... no think tank tea-towel heads tent in the desert hot guns hairy camel terror terrorist cave-man allah is great big tick tick boom kill the bus kill the disco rocks in your sandals throw stones in your face arms in the...

The White Dress.
October 1, 2003... The White Dress Dancing circles of flight bulbous round happy with life at the baptism at the birthday party at the communion blushed russian temple doll rouge dawn wisps of pink and sugar hearts wishing wand shiny happy...

Supermarket.
October 1, 2003... Supermarket The supermarket was busier than usual the day after the funeral. The strawberries sweated in their plastic box. Taste'n'See. Some were growing delicate white fur. In aisle 71 read the cereal labels ...

Live Raw Rats.
October 1, 2003... Palindrome: from the Greek palindromos--running back '600 gilt-edged frames each holds a page of the holy book, written... using the blood of Saddam as 'ink'. Age 18-19.4.2003 'next to a rose garden... (inside) small concrete kennels...

Dreaming of pineapples.
October 1, 2003... Dreaming of pineapples That night I dreamt of pineapples and when my cousin asked where I wanted to go, what to see, I said I wanted to know how it was now Along the road to the Sunshine Coast, at Nambour, the...

All I ever wanted of love.
October 1, 2003... All I ever wanted of love was a bowl of musk sticks and jelly beans my nose pressed into your talking neck a two-dollar ring your legs making me an igloo in the flannel sheet our hair, flickering under...

Eve of the war.
October 1, 2003... eve of the war it is simple she is sad, much more than radio waves tug at her peripheries, the verbal swagger of manhood criss-crosses unseen expanses reaping a messianic havoc the...

Visiting my Aunts.
October 1, 2003... Visiting my Aunts In that strange world of childhood my aunts stood for mystery for sad and gothic romance. All of these though I knew their mornings and evenings were ordinary and plain: milking cows,...

Gardening.
October 1, 2003... Gardening Blackheath, 2001 And there it is, the water thundering Into the bucket propped up sideways To catch all the splash splashed out from the tap A column of aqua vita hitting The bottom of brown plastic....

First Time.
October 1, 2003... First Time Her uncle's khaki sleeve roiled up, his hand inside the body, turning pulling, the split wound like a secret, the hot, closed-in smell somehow familiar to her. After he's thrown the guts to the dogs,...

Busking.
October 1, 2003... busking a tin whistle with dull pigeons while St Francis sleeps in the doorway, a cello squats in a tunnel draught conducted by a cigarette, and swallows everything slowly, a violin unfolds an old and angular man...

The Waterline.
October 1, 2003... The Waterline I have waded all these years through a long trough of depression. Most days, it was like trying to walk through custard, Or mud. It seemed normal at the time. All I owned was a small boat. It wasn't...

Elephant Rock.
October 1, 2003... It is 1997. The voice of the piece is Claire's voice. Claire, Gerda and Bryce are housemates in Carlton, an inner suburb of Melbourne. Rose is daughter of sole parent Gerda. Her boyfriend Beanstalk is not well liked by Gerda. Elephant...

Black Fish.
October 1, 2003... He ran into their campsite grinning, carrying a yellow plastic bucket that wasn't his. 'Catch anything?' Daniella asked. 'Yeah, lots,' he said and showed her inside the bucket. The fish were piled up like firewood, their eyes still...

From The Golden Courtesan.
October 1, 2003... This is an excerpt from the fifth chapter of Shady Cosgrove's The Golden Courtesan. Set in the 1830s, the novel responds to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre in a Rhysian tradition by exploring the life of Edward Rochester's mistress, Celine Varens....

A ravel of skin.
October 1, 2003... Jackie had her back pressed against the passenger side window, locking and unlocking her knees. The cold was biting. The aching impression of its teeth on her nipples made her fold her arms across her chest, flattening her breasts in her palms....

Fork-tongued frescoes.
October 1, 2003... Cassie invited me in one day to see her 'pride and joy.' I didn't know what to expect. A waft of incense met me when she opened the front door but I wasn't prepared for what I saw then. They were everywhere. 'Rosa says she doesn't mind what I...

Catherine.
October 1, 2003... For years I remembered the telegram as printed in red. It wasn't, I discovered the other day, sorting papers and relies. Just ordinary black type on the usual yellow-buff telegram paper. It was all in capitals, but maybe that was ordinary...