Divinely feminist: the case for domestic violence leave

Type
Article
Category
Activism
Labour rights

We like to think we are an enlightened, postfeminist society, but in reality it still takes real courage for a domestic violence victim to come out to her employer, especially in such lean and mean economic times where steady and reliable jobs are difficult to find and hold. In a neoliberal society, where it is often assumed everyone should be productive, disciplined and ‘in control’ of their lives, especially at work, it can be embarrassing and risky to admit you do need help.

10462824664_cf29625767_z
6429773679_e9d40ab0a2_b
Type
Polemic
Category
The media
Trump

Truth: executed by political consensus

Of all the improbable things that we are being asked to believe, it seems a growing number of people are settling for the idea that Macedonian teenagers posing as journalists and agents of Vladimir Putin posing as internet commenters swung the US presidential election for Donald Trump. It was fake news who done it, making commentators declare that Mark Zuckerberg could well be the most dangerous person on the planet.

Kath and Kim_article
Type
Article
Category
Class
Culture
Television

Our suburban contempt

All narratives use character types to some degree, but if those types are static, immovable, and fail to be complicated by mediating detail, we have a problem. Notions of ‘suburban values’ provide an excuse to relax into character types, encouraging us to see the other as somehow less culturally dimensional or their worlds as less complex.

Z
Type
Article
Category
Democracy
Far right
United States

Žižek during Trump: rhetoric and philosophical impotence

Wikileaks was quick to post to Facebook a video of Žižek endorsing Trump as his candidate of choice. A post-election interview has him repeating, somewhat chastened in the rainy streets of Manhattan, that Trump is unconscionable but preferable to Clinton. What do his claims amount to now that that possibility is fact? What might before the election have passed as a hope for a radical displacement of what Žižek calls ‘status quo’ Democratic exceptionalism, now promises something more radical than even Žižek had in mind.

dolly
Type
Article
Category
Class
Feminism
Music

The higher the hair, the closer to God

Parton’s contribution to popular culture in the form of her film roles and music demonstrates a commitment to women and women’s issues that cannot, and should not, be ignored. Her female characters aren’t feminist superheroes who break the mould; instead, they are women who work within existing structures and use them to their own advantage.

Storywine2
Type
Announcement
Category
Events
Prizes

2016 Story Wine Prize: the shortlist

We received more than 500 entries in the third year of the Overland Story Wine Prize, the calibre of which greatly impressed our three judges – award-winning writer and screenwriter Michelle Law, novelist and winner of the 2015 Stella Prize Emily Bitto, and winner of the 2015 Overland Story Wine Prize, Melissa Manning.

7237989194_4cd33fc330_k
Type
Reflection
Category
Culture
History
The future

An Australia ...

An Australia where everyone in public speaks and writes in rhyming poetry with the cadences of Henry Lawson. This is the most prized ability in the whole land. School children are prepped for gruelling contests of rhyme and wit, often with improvisations on a wide range of topics. All debates in parliament are rhymed, as is the evening news. The news takes on somewhat anecdotal quality, favoring a good yarn over factual accuracy. A whole country of Lawsonian Homers sings itself into legend by sheer metrical virtuosity.

2789640134_6397b80f9b_z
Type
Article
Category
imperialism
The internet
United States

The Awful Truth: Alex Gibney’s Zero Days

During the first US presidential debate in September, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were asked to explain how the escalating threat of cyber warfare would be combatted by their prospective administrations. Clinton, whose candidacy was undermined by a hack on Democratic National Convention emails in July, went immediately on the offensive, accusing Russia of waging cyber-attacks on the US and voicing concern about the increased risk of state-sanctioned intimidation via malicious web leaks.

1049005160_810eaf5a9d_z
Type
Article
Category
Electioneering
Nationalism
United States

Khaki fervour and the new militarism

For Trump, nation-building is essentially a form of ‘politically correct’ warfare, in which one tries to sort the good from the bad. The premise of nation-building – that other people were virtuous, ‘yearned for freedom’ and should be liberated from their oppressors, and turned into loyal American allies – is detached from its position on the political right, and re-attached to liberalism/progressivism, which is where it was located from Theodore Roosevelt to the fall of LBJ in 1968.

facebook piece
Type
Polemic
Category
Technology
The future

On nationalising Facebook, or perhaps just its architecture

Over the past few years I have been diligently collecting public pledges to abandon Facebook, a subset of the equally interesting genre of people saying they will quit the internet altogether. While I seldom agree with the arguments, I look for the sentiments hidden behind these declarations. What these pieces often don’t say but invariably mean is that the swift rise of the networked society has had a profoundly unsettling effect on people’s daily lives.

7968825892_9f21aac38d_z
Type
Article
Category
Homophobia
LGBTQI

Double bind: on performing bisexuality

‘That’s the issue with bisexuals’ says my girlfriend, jokingly. ‘Double the choice, double the chance of cheating. You should be scared.’ She’s joking, of course. She’s bisexual, I guess; I don’t usually feel a need to express it so simplistically. She’s mocking the dialogue that goes on even in liberal circles. But she’s not offended as such. Like me, she recognises the trade off. Given the dialogue around bisexuality – that bisexuals are less real, more flippant – the homophobia directed at you can feel somewhat less real, less harmful.

29405104981_1d1f0d22b4_h (2)
Type
Polemic
Category
Activism
The environment

The 400ppm tipping point

Over this past week, I’ve been watching the news roll in from Standing Rock, where protesters are fighting the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline: dramatic images of police brutality woven through news of an election campaign where climate has been glaringly absent. In my newsfeed, a mix of independent and mainstream media, the images of the election and the images of #noDAPL sit side by side but never seem to interact, like an illustration of the chasm between climate policy and climate reality.

2449482700_eca11171dd_z
Type
Polemic
Category
Feminism
Politics

A plague on the Whitehouse

Gender oppression is only one part of this story. Simplistic analyses that see men as the problem – for which the binary solution is women – have led to a dead end. It’s time for something new. Or as the great Louise Michel summarised it nearly 150 years ago: ‘[a woman] bends under mortification; in her home her burdens crush her. Man wants to keep her that way, to be sure that she will never encroach upon his function or his titles. Gentlemen, we do not want either your functions or your titles’.

It might not feel like it right now, but there is a lot more to politics than elections.

5505412804_23d3305073_b
Type
Article
Category
Activism
Labour rights

The enemy within

Let’s be clear about how dire this situation is: an Australian trade union representing young, low-paid workers, who are disproportionately women, was found by the independent umpire to have knowingly pushed the wages and conditions of their members below the minimum legal standards. Why would a trade union do such a thing?

Brett-Whitely-crop
Type
Article
Category
Art
Culture

Authenticity & the market: the existential threat of art fraud

Notwithstanding the seismic shudders that cases like these send through the art world, what is most unsettling about art fraud are not the fakes that we know about, but those that we don’t. In criminology, this statistical and research blind spot is known as ‘dark figure’ crime, which is a suitably ominous way to describe the difficult-to-quantify incidence of a crime that largely goes undetected, unreported and unsolved.

4019535209_b786e5ac6f_o
Type
Reflection
Category
Writing

On writing ghosts

Fiction is the product of the things we shied away from as children – whether that was strangers, darkness, or (in my case) a particularly scary episode of Baywatch. Fiction is the people we have loved, the sex we have had, the places that haunt us. Fiction is the stories of our families, our childhood friends. It is whether we believe in ghosts or heaven or hell.

hashtag
Type
Article
Category
Technology
The internet
Writing

Hashtag determinative: how the internet is changing us

Where they coexist, (and they needn’t) spoken and written language are tightly bound to the social and technological regimes that they animate. Technologies of writing – from hammer, chisel, and stone tablet, to ink and parchment or the modern keyboard – influence how specific systems of writing will emerge.

One of the most interesting developments on the internet has been the emergence of the pound (#) symbol as a linguistic figure, for its use in hashtags. What exactly ‘#’ is, is not immediately apparent.