Hawke Research Institute
RCGS past events 2001–2005Andrea Case
This paper focuses on the paradigm challenges to mainstream self-help literature in the 1970s and early 1980s: challenges emerging from the second wave of the women's movement, and particularly issues concerning women's mental health. It is argued that a fictional works such as Marilyn French's The women's room (1977) provide far more value as a consciousness-raising tool about many women's lived experience than does Marabel Morgan's non-fictional best-seller, The total woman (1973). It is proposed is that most self-help literature promotes the dominant patriarchal ideology and accordingly works as form of social control rather than social insight. Attention is given to feminist literary criticism and the use of Simone de Beauvoir's self–other concept.
Jane Maree Maher and Jo Lyndsay
Critical accounts of working mothers emphasise conflict, guilt and career disruptions. Yet the labour market participation rates of employed mothers continue to increase. We argue that there is emerging evidence that women are developing new models for combining paid work and mothering that require detailed investigation. These models focus on transferable skills and the integration of necessary labour.
Valerie Adams
This presentation describes a combination of reflexive qualitative research methods developed through analysing semi-structured interview data from nurses working in residential aged care facilities. I developed these methods after I realised that nurses were understating the conditions in which they worked, having worked myself as a registered nurse in nursing homes for over a decade. The data was collected for a PhD project designed to examine the impact of Commonwealth policy on nurses working in residential aged care.
As I heard the data I discovered that nurses laughed when stating anything that could be interpreted as not being a good nurse. As a result of an investigation of nursing culture, I discovered that the deep-seated nature of this culture underpinned how the empirical data needed to be interpreted. I then developed methods to uncover the nursing culture embedded in the interview material, which involved an analysis of both metaphors and emotions, and the inclusion of an autoethnographic interview whereby I situated myself within the research project. During this presentation I will look at the development of these methods, the insider–outsider process then necessary for analysis, and the epistemology underpinning these methods in which all knowledge is situated and socially constructed. I also propose that the processes described here would be useful in other contexts where a deep-seated workplace culture occurs.
Marisa Young
Feminist literature and gender studies have helped to fuel interest in the place of needlework in women's lives. Existing accounts of needlework instruction in colonial South Australian schools have concentrated on public records and their references to needlework in government-supported schools. References to school needlework in the colony's newspapers have received little attention, yet they provide valuable insights that cannot be found in public records. These newspaper items revealed that needlework was part of the growth of promotional activities for schools. Student needlework was frequently displayed to audiences at school examination and prize ceremonies. This presentation will provide an outline of earlier references to needlework instruction as well as an overview of the range of previous accounts of needlework activities during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it will highlight the importance of examining the role of needlework in educational promotion.
Marisa Young
Feminist histories have traced the emergence of 'separate spheres' during the mid-Victorian era, when men were involved in the public sphere of business and women were frequently confined to the private sphere of the family residence. Yet educational activities provided women with opportunities to remain in their own houses and also establish positions within business circles. Homes were valued school venues for young children as well as older girls during the mid-nineteenth century, and these establishments were both commercial ventures as well as educational institutions. This presentation will provide an overview of gender theories related to women and their commercial activities during the nineteenth century, the ways that women and men used domestic residences for educational activities, and the relationship between architecture, interior design and social power. The use of references to colonial homes in South Australian educational advertising will also be highlighted.
Marisa Young
Historians interested in the early and mid-Victorian eras have frequently referred to oppositional binaries based on perceptions about the participation of men and women in the public domain. An examination of colonial South Australian newspapers suggests a more complicated picture, because women as well as men took up the practice of using advertising columns to circulate their own representations of their lives and aspirations. These newspapers provide evidence of connections between masculinity, femininity and the development of commercial opportunities in a colonial environment. This presentation will outline a range of ways in which an examination of early newspaper sources can reveal the complexity of links between gender, business activity and the formation of a civil society.
Elizabeth Hoon
My thesis explores how gender and class are implicated in the subjective constructions of meanings associated with work. The study is located in an organisational setting and is particularly interested in meanings associated with work for production workers. Reflecting this focus, this paper will briefly discuss past and contemporary analyses of gender and organisations; class and organisations; and the duel foci on gender and class. It will highlight the influence of the post-structural and postmodern analyses for conceptualisations of class and gender. It will also reflect on the tensions for writers when incorporating agency in their explorations of these social categories. This point is especially pertinent to this thesis as it is strongly influenced by post-structural analyses emphasising agency but at the same time explores social categories (especially class) that traditionally have strong structuralist ties.
In doing so this paper aims to locate my thesis in contemporary conceptualisations of gender, class and organisation. It argues for a focus on subjective constructions of meanings associated with work in order to explore the complexities, fluidities and interconnections between gender and class. It also argues for a reading of multiple subjectivities which departs from treating gender and class as merely separate social categories and instead allows for the interwoven nature of social categories to be expressed.
Jude Elton
During the depressions of the 1890s and late 1920s–early 1930s the Australian Workers Union federally and in South Australia continued to support Aboriginal pastoral worker employment, union membership and equal pay. This support was maintained by the union's leadership in spite of opposition from 'white' members in some regions. In contrast, from its inception in 1927, the North Australian Workers Union acted to exclude Aboriginal workers from both union membership and pastoral jobs. In the late 1920s its primary concerns were the protection of 'white' wages and securing jobs for 'white' members at the expense of Aboriginal workers. These concerns shifted in 1930–31 to include Aboriginal peoples defined as 'half-caste' and Aboriginal drovers, but during periods of high unemployment never included all Aboriginal workers.
This paper explores internal union and external factors affecting the contrasting relations with Aboriginal workers demonstrated by the AWU and NAWU in the context of depression and unemployment. Factors such as the structure of jobs and organisation of work, the place of the pastoral industry in a regional economy, the nature of contact between 'white' and Aboriginal workers prior to a period of high unemployment and state/territory laws relating to Aboriginal peoples are found to have particular significance in the formation of relations. The ideology of union leadership is also found to have a positive effect on relations when based on understandings of class solidarity that override constructions of 'race'. However, such understandings are also found to be of limited value in developing union relations that incorporate the particular circumstances of Aboriginal workers as first nations peoples and in countering 'white' hostility to Aboriginal workers in circumstances of unrestrained competition in a labour market structured by 'race'.
Elizabeth Hill
The reported increase in 'non-standard', informal and contingent work in Australia and other advanced industrial economies poses a significant organisational and cultural challenge to the trade union movement. Traditional union strategies forged primarily in the context of a masculine, blue collar, industrial context are neither appropriate nor effective amongst a labour force that is increasingly casualised, fragmented, mobile and feminised. Organising this new labour force requires new strategies. While there are examples of trade unions that have developed strategies to include and give voice to 'non-standard' workers, many unions struggle to organise these workers.
In this paper I explore strategies for organising 'non-standard' workers through an evaluation of the Indian trade union, the Self Employed Women's Association (SEWA). SEWA is an all-women's trade union with almost 600 000 members who work in the informal economy as daily labourers, small-scale vendors and home-based industrial outworkers. Based on more than thirty years of experience, SEWA has developed a comprehensive and sophisticated strategy to organise highly marginalised workers for increased socioeconomic security. My analysis of the union's strategy suggests the SEWA model provides a useful point of reflection and (possible) learning for labour activists in industrialised economies struggling to close the 'representational gap' and promote work–life reform amongst a flexible and contingent labour force. The SEWA experience is particularly informative in its affirmation of the role of union organising as an important means of promoting democracy, citizenship and social stability in a context of enhanced economic insecurity and inequality.
Cassandra Loesser
Drawing on data collected from qualitative in-depth interviews, this paper explores the complex negotiations of discourses of disability, race and sexuality in the construction of gendered subjectivity for one queer Asian-Australian man with a hearing disability in an Australian high school. Hong-Duc documents his experience of peer relations at school as marked by social exclusion, an experience he says is compounded through the social prejudices associated with his 'racial', 'disabled' and 'masculine' identity. Hong-Duc's exclusion, however, does not determine him as having a fixed subordinated status. His interview stories how a queer desire for the 'aggressive' and 'strong' male body initiates and enables a restaging of the constraints that temporarily position him in relations of social antagonism amongst his student peers. Possible implications of the paper for educational practice in schools are indicated.
Dr Afsana Wahab
There is no disagreement regarding the contribution of women in shaping a nation's future. However, how well they themselves are equipped to face their future depends to a large extent on how a nation nurtures them in an enabling environment.
After the World Conference on Women was held in Mexico in 1975, gender issues were taken on as a major theme in the development arena. Bangladesh set up a Ministry of Women's Affairs in 1978. This was the first step at the national level to recognise the fact that women have special needs. That women's position and status needs to be enhanced and strengthened if Bangladesh wants to progress both economically and socially. In response to the Beijing Platform for Action the government of Bangladesh prepared a National Plan of Action for Advancement of Women. Some progress has already been made in implementing the NAP. Legal measures have been adopted to promote and protect women's rights through the promulgation of ordinances and Acts and efforts are being made to implement these measures.
In spite of these efforts it is seen that women still lag behind and do not fully participate in the social, cultural, political and economical spheres in Bangladesh. They are still discriminated against at every tier. It is true that the Constitution of Bangladesh guarantees equal rights to all (men and women) citizens. It is equally true that women are equal in law but not in reality. Loopholes in existing laws, lack of their proper implementation and non-existing commitment of law-enforcing agencies are seen to be the major stumbling blocks. Laws without legislative will and support of public opinion will not be able to bring about a change in our attitude towards women.
Kathleen Connellan
While the white minority of pre-Apartheid South Africa aspired to the living conditions of a modernist consumer based society and its enthusiastic call for domestic efficiency, it did so within the context of extreme racial division. Maids, madams and modernity present a triangle of tension. The maids are the predominantly black women who worked as domestic servants in the homes of middle-class whites. These women were expected to clean, cook and serve food, look after the white children, and generally maintain the household as well as be on call for long hours of the day. The nature of modernism and the notion of a domestic appliance revolution in this strangely pre-modern social domestic space will be teased out in terms of electricity, concepts of hygiene and domestic labour.
Jan Edwards
The study investigates how mutual obligations policies are lived by working-class young women and girls as the group most affected by policies that require obligations on the part of welfare recipients. An innovate students-as-researchers approach was used in a secondary classroom to teach students the skills of research to enable them to investigate the topic and to interview young women affected by these policies. This study offers an analysis of policy that focuses on how the policy is lived and examines the discourses of mutual obligations policies and how these are taken up and enacted by working-class young women and girls in this location. A key interest is the effect of policy on subjectivities and two principal subject locations emerge from the information generated. These are the prefered subject of mutual obligations policies and the shadow. This presentation will provide an overview of the study and its key directions.
Anna Hickey-Moody
Performance texts offer us a unique perspective on narrative through operating affectively rather than logically. A 'being of sensation' is in an affect created within a work of art, a tool that is crafted in order to produce a specific sensibility within the work. This paper explores the nexus between the creation of textual affect, which is the product of a 'being of sensation' and corporeal affect, an extension of bodily capacity, within dance theatre. I argue that the devices of corporeal and textual affect create meaning in a dance theatre work, as here 'narrative' is framed in sensory and affective terms.
Valerie Adams
This presentation looks at reasons for using Computer-Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software (CAQDAS), what Nudist does, how to prepare interview transcripts to import into Nudist, how to code data in Nudist, the index system and why it is used, and the usefulness of Nudist in searching data.
Reina Ichii
Is the time allocation of child care more equal between men and women within the household? Analysis of national time use data between 1992 and 1997 shows that time allocated for child care within the household has gradually increased. Within this analysis, men especially now allocate more time for care of their children. Despite this increase in the length of time men spent in the childcare role, women still out-perform them in childcare duties. This gender-based gap in the time allocated to child care is uncovered particularly when parents are exclusively selected as a sample. Furthermore within this sample, this gap becomes even larger when child care as one of multiple tasks is taken into account in the total childcare time. Child care is of major importance to parents, who require support from the government both financially and physically. Within Time Use Analysis, which clarifies time-use differentials between genders, sample selection and data treatment is of major significance as it allows us to scrutinise child care, policy and budgets with a gender perspective.
Liisa Laaksonen
This research maps out the complex mix of discourses, discursive practices, subjectivities and agentic spaces in organisational life. The organisational life is challenged, complicated or reinforced through continuous input of global and local discursive dimensions, play of multiple subjectivities, performativity and culturally embodied practices. When these aspects are taken into account, the organisation culture and its establishment of fixed values, visions and missions, creation of committed but self-regulating worker subjectivities, and binaries that divide human life in work and other life are broken down. Human beings are not one-dimensional objects. They live through shifting multiple subjectivities in constantly changing situations and life and work conditions.
This research is, on the one hand, inspired by Foucauldian notions of discourses, discursive fields and discursive practices. On the other hand, it also approaches postmodern ideas on multiple subjectivities, and discussion of Bourdieu and Butler on agency in the contexts of habitus-field and performativity. Thus, the complex dynamics and interplay of structure and agency of the organisational life are analysed.
With this combination of theorists I hope to achieve a more holistic understanding of the interplay between both discursive and agentic factors as regards to the analysis of worker subjectivities and organisational life realities. This is being done by recognising both the roles of discourses in the inscription of social norms, and the positive concept of agency as generative and creative process. The organisational life and its social norms and subjects are explored by mapping out its main discursive fields, elements of material (economic) relations, and some symbolic (psychic) orders. The concepts of agency and field (Bourdieu), and performativity and psychic life of power (Butler) contribute to the understanding of agency in this process.
Carolyn Phillips
While the term 'breakdown' is familiar to us all, the word is often uttered in hushed tones or referred to indirectly. It is commonly associated with people who are weak, 'overloaded' or generally prone to illness; something shameful that could not happen to people who are 'normal'. The words 'depression', 'anxiety' and 'panic attack' all appear in the narratives of people who believe they have experienced a breakdown. Some of these people, but not all, have been diagnosed with a mental illness.
This study is explicitly directed to the experiences of people who may or may not fit neatly into the DSM-IV diagnostic criteria of psychiatry, but who see themselves as having experienced a breakdown. Some may not even have consulted a health professional. Some have recovered completely and others will continue to experience psychological distress for the rest of their lives. What is a breakdown? What is it that people fear may beset them? What do people mean when they say that they have 'had a breakdown'? In the event called 'breakdown', the mind becomes separated from the self and the self is lost in the confusion of the mental state. Clearly the mind is part of the body but it is elusive and ill-defined. My research is directed to this unexplored area in sociology of the body.
Jan Kershaw
This presentation comes from my chapter on the body and is exploratory in the sense that it will cover various theoretical positions on femininity and the material body, and is part of the process of finding a theoretical framework to work and write within.
Julie Holbrook Tolley
My PhD thesis will explore the participation of women in the establishment, development and expansion of the South Australian wine industry from 1836 to 2000, and will address the social and cultural factors that have influenced women's work in this industry. This seminar includes an historical examination of the participation of women in grape growing and wine production in the Barossa Valley, located in the context of the history of winemaking in South Australia. Interviews with women in the Barossa Valley facilitated an examination of the nature of women's participation in a wide range of occupations including pruning, processing, laboratory work and judging, all of which have been considered as traditional male areas of employment. There has been no systematic examination or interpretation of historical and primary source documents relating to the South Australian wine industry. The few published interviews with female winemakers are often trivialised, and as yet there have not been any comprehensive academic studies involving participants from the full range of occupations in vineyards and wineries. My PhD thesis will increase knowledge and recognition of the contribution of women at all levels of the South Australian wine industry.
Dr Fiona McPhail
In this talk I will discuss issues of gender and paid work in rural China (in the Provinces of Shandong and Jiangsu). In terms of context, this work contributes to a larger project on the impacts of privatisation of township and village enterprises in China which is being undertaken by a team of Canadian researchers and carried out in conjunction with scholars at the University of Shandong. The focus of the talk is on paid work, although it fits conceptually within a broader perspective that takes account of the social construction of paid work, the gender division of labour in the household, and the relationships between paid and unpaid work (and these are topics of a different paper). The topic arises from the literature that has documented gender biases in the economic transition from planned to capitalist economic systems. The paper uses concepts from the dynamic labour market segmentation literature to examine the nature of gender segregation at work, in terms of control and wage discrimination. One of the most startling changes arising from privatisation is the gender bias in share ownership, a new and important form of workplace benefit emerging with privatisation, which confers wealth and control within the workplace. It is concluded that privatisation has accentuated gender segmentation within the workplace, a result that supports the growing body of literature demonstrating that the process of economic transition is not gender neutral.
Anna Hickey
An 'event' points towards the unthought in thought and in so doing becomes part of our virtuality, the unique set of possibilities a body can actualise. An 'event' within thought creates new conceptual spaces. In this paper I explore the work of Deleuze and Guattari through the work of Restless Dance in order to perform a study of 'intellectual disability' that is not grounded in mind–body dualism and based upon an assumption of personal lack. The history of the 'event' in which Angus becomes dinosaur traces a line from material states of affairs to a virtual 'event'; a becoming within thought that performs the infinite potential of the yet unthought.
Reina Ichii
This research project aims to assess childcare budgets and policies and their impacts on women and men. The impact of the federal governments' budget is recognised by the means of time spent for childcare activities in the household. Within this research Time Use Data in 1992 and in 1997 is utilised as a tool for what has been termed a gender-responsive approach to budgets. Within this presentation a methodology to aggregate childcare time is realised.
Cassie Loeser
This paper theorises specific sites of artistic production as providing a network of fluidly imagined spaces of masculinity for young men with hearing impairment. Drawing on data collected from 19 in-depth interviews, it will be argued that artistic works and improvisations serve to incite and facilitate a diversity of communications and gendered practices. An experiential history of communicative disruption has led many of the interviewed men in this research to identify and instrumentalise alternative practices and places of conversational engagement as means of identifactory expression. Some of the men's opportunities to valorise their masculine positionings are constrained by the ongoing difficulties they experience in adhering to imperatives that designate choreographies of 'meaningful' communicative practice premised on verbal articulation and hearing. The research findings reveal that, among other forms of artistic work, social dancing enjoys a higher status of communicative expression than that of oral engagement. Still further, the research narratives demonstrate that social dancing imparts an opportunity to explore aesthetic movement as a medium of gendered representation and experience that the forum of vocal language as communicative mechanism does not permit. In relation to this the paper endorses artistic performances as important forms of interactive engagement precisely because it allows the men's desires for sociability and a viable masculine status to be realised. Finally, the paper argues that through their presence in dance, the young men are constructing a culturally inspired public space in which they can engage in dialogic exchange with dominant categories of masculinity and hearing disability.
Elizabeth Hoon
This presentation will outline the research questions as I have developed them to date, and specifically examine how I came to these questions. Secondly I will briefly discuss how I intend to implement these research questions into an appropriate methodology. Finally I would like to open a discussion regarding the challenges in thinking about how to empirically uncover the lived experiences around gender and class for workers in the wine industry.
Jude Elton
In this paper I will show that constructions of 'race' in the settler societies of South Australia and the Northern Territory in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries differed significantly by class. Employers and workers of European background created competing discourses of 'race' for the purpose of protecting and promoting their divergent economic interests. Both discourses drew upon social Darwinian notions of a hierarchy of 'races' and civilizations, and the 'natural' and proper domination of a superior European 'race' over others. They also contained significant variations reflective of their respective class origins and particular historical circumstances. The employer discourse on 'race' and labour was prominent in debates over colonial expansion in the Northern Territory and provided justification for the inferior pay and conditions granted to Aboriginal and other non-European workers. The racialised discourse of European background workers was most virulent during industrial disputes in South Australia and the Northern Territory, in competition for scarce job opportunities in the Northern Territory in particular and in support of wages and conditions claims in the cattle industry.
Valerie Adams
The research topic is introduced with a brief outline of some issues raised in the literature, a short quantitative analysis of the industry situation targeted by the research, and a summary of the research design and methodology. The presentation is centred on the development of a semi-structured questionnaire for interviewing nurses working in nursing homes. The pilot questionnaire is explained with reference to the reason for each question, the results obtained in the pilot interview, and the changes made to the questionnaire to improve the quality of the data collected. The presentation will conclude with a discussion of the questionnaire development.
Anna Hickey
Recent work in disability studies has problematised the lack of agency accorded to the body within social models of disability. In this paper I offer a description of the method of thought outlined by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari through their concept of 'becoming'. I argue that the concept of becoming offers a positive and productive method for thinking bodies outside of the binary divide constructed through ideas of ability and disability. As a performance-based concept, thinking through 'becoming' offers a particularly valuable method for theorising the work of performers with intellectual disabilities. This is because 'becoming' draws upon Benedict de Spinoza's idea of 'substance', which attributes power to form and acknowledges the productive capacity of group process. My research is informed by the work of Adelaide-based Restless Dance Company (RDC), and this paper offers a critical analysis of the work of RDC members with intellectual disability through developing a relationship between the methods of ensemble-based process employed by RDC, and 'becoming' as a method for thinking the actual as a means of 'turning away' from static methods of thought.
Cassie Loeser
The focus of this paper explores the sporting activity of Aussie rules football as an experiential arena for the choreography and performance of body practices of pleasure by young men with hearing impairment. It theorises the hearing-impaired male body as a site between goal (work)-driven discourses and acts and pleasure-driven male imaginations and practices that repudiate subscription to any teleology. A move in the direction of pleasure-oriented discourses is distinguishable amongst many of the men who participated in my doctoral study. These men identified that finding stable occupations, or employment from which they derive a degree of self-fulfilment, is an ongoing difficulty. Yet in what they perceive as an economically subordinate and often powerless position in their working lives, Aussie rules football is understood instead as circuits of exchange and connection to dominant discourses of masculinity and hearing impairment that leave them with limited opportunities to negotiate or valorise their social positionings in their respective work cultures. It is with respect to this element that the primary focus of this paper is upon the pleasures and possibilities some young men with hearing impairment proscribe to Aussie rules football as a way of defining and reinforcing their gender identities. The emphasis of the paper is a consequent departure from previous studies that sustain that idealisations of Australian football cultures subordinate and oppress the bodies of disabled individuals.
Sarah Baker
Drawing on my ethnographic research with seven girls aged eight to eleven, this paper looks at how young girls struggle to negotiate the sexual and socially desired bodies of female pop stars. In their negotiations of the corporeal, the girls in my research contested the values and messages surrounding the images of female performers. It was the physically developed body, especially the breasts, of the stars which were particularly struggled over. These girls also struggled with the fact that the 'pop star body' was the most desired body among their social network.
Here I argue that the girls' negotiations of the pop star body was a negotiation of their own bodies, bodies in process. This will be discussed in terms of the girls' comments and concerns about the bodies of a number of female performers (thirteen year old singer Kaci [UK], the women in the all-girl group Bardot [Aust.], teen idol Britney Spears [US]) and the image of femininity presented in the song 'U.G.L.Y.', as the girls attempted to negotiate and constitute their own sense of identity surrounding the body and gender. This paper will be illustrated by tape recordings and photographs made by the girls during the research.
Marisa Young
Feminist historians devoted considerable attention to the concept of the ideal Victorian lady. Accomplished yet passive and reticent, the perfect Victorian lady was usually expected to remain restricted to the separate, private sphere of a tasteful domestic life. Few occupations were available to women who wished to attain or maintain the status of a lady. However, the role of headmistress-proprietor of a private venture school for young ladies provided an avenue for some Victorian women to use their own homes in order to earn revenue as well as keep a semblance of respectability. Earlier studies of lady principals in colonial Australia stressed the capacity of such women to tread the fine line between dignified genteel lady and business promoter in a very competitive arena of educational enterprise. This seminar presentation will examine one exceptional and very open conflict between two lady principals in colonial Adelaide. Attention will be devoted to the connections between accounts of conflicts between women during the mid-nineteenth century, the history of cultural consumption and concepts of femininity. Any analysis of representations of women in business can still benefit from the examination of a concept of gender based on the ideal of 'the perfect lady' as well as interactions between women when they sought commercial success during the Victorian era.
Dr Bronwen Levy
The paper looks at autobiographies by two Australian women, Imelda P Smith (b 1924) and Shirley Walker (b 1927), with a view to considering how 'romance' is simultaneously deployed and critiqued and, on occasion, rejected in texts that, on the face of it, are implicated in the biggest romance of all, telling the story of her own life, the project of feminine life-writing. The paper focuses on such 'romantic' dreams of women (and women's writing) as dancing, music, learning and reading which, taken together, indicate desire for knowledge of all types and on all levels. Smith and Walker are both of an age and of the same age, so that some of their memories are of the over-determined 1940s, of being young in the war years and shortly after. As another has written in an equivocal account, 'dancing to the romantic music of those days is something I'll always remember with pleasure'. The paper asks how far engaging with romance means engaging also with its close associate, nostalgia, and what this means for writing that actively, if critically and sometimes sceptically, asserts the difference of feminine gender.
Prof Judith Halberstam
While the transgender body has been theorised as an in-between body and as the place of medical and scientific construction of gender, when it comes time to picture the transgender body in the flesh, it nearly always emerges as a transsexual body. In the images and videos I consider here, the transgender body is not reducible to the transsexual body and it retains the marks of its own ambiguity and ambivalence. Representations of transgenderism in film and video as well as in the art work of Saville, Grace Volcano and Linda Bessemer offer us a particular narrative about embodiment in the twenty-first century and, studied together, they pose some answers to the riddle of why transgenderism becomes such a potent site within postmoderism for remapping relations between body, identity, labor, desire and capital.
Mim Hughes
Mim is a Canadian feminist with a background in sociology and fundamentalism. Her area of expertise is women in religion and she will be talking about her transition as a PhD student from Canada to Australia (her family are still in Canada) as well as women and the Jehovah's Witnesses' beliefs.
Lana Zannettino
This paper emerges in the course of a doctoral study that explores the role of cultural texts (those found in both curriculum and popular culture) in the construction of adolescent girls' 'envisionings' of womanhood. The analysis of girls' imaginary constructions of their adult selves as well as their favourite texts indicates that subjectivity is a cultural and discursive construction. However, the analysis also invokes the existence of the more essential subject of psychoanalytic theory. It does so in two distinct, yet interrelated ways. Drawing upon the recent work of Nancy Chodorow, I argue that subjectivity is also a personal construction. That is, girls' lived biographies emotionally nuance their favourite metaphorical constructions in psychologically creative ways, making texts like 'Romeo + Juliet' subjectively meaningful and uniquely personal. Girls' responses also point to the possibility of an 'abiding substance' in their emerging subjectivities. The negligible change in girls' imaginary constructions over the course of twelve months attests to the relative stability of their internal worlds and the existence of a 'core' identity. Drawing upon object relations theory, I argue that girls' favourite literary figures intersect with and serve to form their 'core' selves in much the same way as relational experiences in childhood.
Jude Elton
In their analysis of Australian trade union responses to immigrant workers, Michael Quinlan and Constance Lever-Tracy propose a framework with which to better understand racism and ethnocentrism amongst working people. They identify key historically contingent and interrelating factors affecting union policy and action in relation to 'race'. This paper tests the framework developed by Quinlan and Lever-Tracy, with reference to Australian Workers Union responses to Aboriginal workers during the period 1878–1927. The AWU was vitriolic in its opposition to Australian Chinese, Kanaka and 'Afghan' workers and 'coloured' immigration. At the same time, federally and in the southern states, it supported Aboriginal worker membership. Far from being called into question by this apparent contradiction, the framework suggests explanations for the simultaneous adoption by the AWU of different stances in relation to 'race'. It may also shed light on current responses to refugees arriving by boat.
Barbara Jane Cowie
'...a glass blower's creativity is restricted by the level to which his skill has developed...' Keith Cummings, 1980
My research provides an account of the major factors that have influenced the development of studio glassmaking in South Australia. It begins with a deconstruction or re-visiting of the popular studio glassmaking narrative developed in North America and considers the impact and relevance of this popular narrative to studio glassmaking in South Australia. The study identifies major factors that influenced the development of glass in South Australia in published texts, interviews and images of artifacts, and goes on to undertake experimental research by remaking a series of artifacts that have been found within the published texts, made in South Australia. Insights, experience and certain knowledge can be gained from the process of remaking through the tacit experience. Is studio glassmaking a considered integration of 'poesis' and 'praxis', or were '...some [glassmakers], hiding lack of skill and knowledge under the guise of art'?
Through the presentation of slides, objects and verbal explanation I will illuminate the tacit research findings. It is relatively easy to look at an image to see the form, decoration and texture of a glass artifact. It is a little more difficult to read a lengthy text about that same artifact, but to re-make that artifact allows the researcher to explore the tacit experience implicit within the artifact. The way it feels and the energy the maker receives from the making process can be determined through the remaking process. The experience gained from making something and the feeling you receive from touching something is the tacit experience that is not recorded in the text or the image, but exchanged through looking, touching, making and remaking.
Cassandra Loeser
The abundant literature on men's relationships is and continues to be marked by a lack of reference to how young men with hearing impairment appropriate their masculine subjectivities in relations of friendship and intimacy. This paper critically assesses the possibilities for understanding the construction of masculine identification for young men with hearing impairment through relations of friendship. Using qualitative data based on in-depth interviews with nineteen men, it examines how discourses of masculinity and disability intersect within their familial relations and how their friendships grow develop in relation to these conflicting discourses that converge and diverge within their social lives. The extent to which the continuity of friendship is grounded within the sustained performances of these men in reference to a prescriptive system of hegemonic masculinity is identified. From an exploration of these issues it is argued that socially situated hierarchical positionings of masculinity operative in friendship relations affects the ways in which young men with hearing disabilities come to recognise themselves as 'appropriate' or 'inappropriate' gendered subjectivities.
Terry Evans
'If it is the women who are being transacted, then it is the men who give and take them who are linked, the woman being a conduit of a relationship rather than a partner to it.' (Gayle Rubin, 1975: 174)
Sexual threesomes involving two men and a woman provide a cultural space within heterosexual hegemony for men to explore homosexual desire. Australian male culture is intensely masculine, homophobic and misogynistic as evidenced by its preoccupation with masculinising pursuits such as football in which women and gay men are culturally subordinated or excluded. Mateship is an Australian masculine institution in which men can become intensely homosocial but not homosexual. Men may love their mates, die for their mates, spend most of their time with their mates but may never have sex with their mates ... unless a woman is present. Men who sexually desire their mates must search for culturally sanctioned ways to express this desire such as sexual threesomes, gang bangs, male bonding rituals and football. This presentation explores how sexual threesomes enable men to channel their sexual desires through women using evidence from popular culture and research interviews.
Mary Rasmussen
This paper discusses the idea of how a Foucauldian inspired 'ethics of pleasure' might be used to proliferate ways of reading, producing and experiencing research related to sexualities and schooling in Australia and the United States. It is argued that this consideration of pleasure provides an efficacious departure from educational research that too often reinscribes pathological stereotypes of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning young people.
Anna Hickey
In this paper I conduct a detailed reading of 'Introduction:
rhizome', suggesting that the six key principles by which Deleuze and
Guattari structure their discussion can be read as a 'roadmap' for
exploring what a rhizomatic text might look like.
