Foundation Arena Articles: Alison Caddick

Feminism and the Body

From Arena issue 74, 1986. PDF, 1.2 MB.

The ‘nature’ of the body seems today to be the central focus of feminist debate; the body now emerges as the locus of a new set of differences which supersede the earlier contestation between radical feminists and marxist or socialist feminists. Within this new setting of a fundamental questioning of the body it is my intention to draw out the implications of feminist representations of the body as they pose questions about the nature of the individual and of social life generally, and which arguably give voice to an emergent general socio-cultural transformation…

Feminist and Postmodern: Donna Haraway’s Cyborg

From Arena issue 99/100, 1992. PDF, 0.6 MB.

Many feminisms today still carry the normalizing assumptions of modernity which Foucault, among other, has exposed. In Australia in the eighties, feminists themselves engaged in a significant revision of earlier, popular understandings of second wave feminism that implicitly held women in the embrace of masculine definitions of relations between the sexes… This work bore insights which both more adequately explained women’s subordination and produced more refined – if ever more inaccessible – feminist theories which generated significant political divisions among feminists. Yet in the public culture this revision has carried little weight…