Progressive culture since 1954
While it would be absurd to claim that women haven’t ever traditionally existed on cyber landscapes, their experiences are often filtered through a masculine lens, or deemed to serve a masculine function. In turn, a woman sharing a photograph of herself in a lavender bikini isn’t just a photo of a woman in a lavender bikini. Her intentions are redundant, her authorship stale and meaningless.
As time went on, and I remained out of a job, I turned on email alerts, began checking my profile daily, and then twice daily. Soon enough I was spending hours each day trawling the site. I had time – I was anxious and broke. In my desperation, LinkedIn seemed to hold the answers, if only I looked long and hard enough.
The fallout from the ‘Gamergate’ movement and its call for naive ‘objectivity’ has led to a reductionist approach in many gamer circles, whereby gamers try to focus exclusively on game mechanics in the hopes of ending the ‘politicisation’ of the hobby, which they say has impaired the quality of modern games and critical appraisals. But almost all games are inherently political, and refusing to acknowledge it doesn’t change their subtext or reality.
After the Fair Work Commission’s decision in February to cut Sunday penalty rates for hospitality and retail workers, it was virtually impossible to scroll through Facebook without seeing a post urging angry workers to join their union. Union membership was presented as the means to resist not only the Commission’s decision, but all of the industrial woes of our time. However, there is a striking dissonance between the portrait of union power painted by our Facebook feeds, and the material reality.
Doctor Henry Peak, my grandpa, was a complicated and difficult man. As a result, when he died in 2006 there were a lot of conflicting emotions on the part of his immediate family: his five children (David, Patrick, Samuel, Megan and Jonathon), his ex-wife and mother of their children (Diane), his daughter-in-law (Elizabeth) and son-in-law (another Patrick), his ex daughters-in-law (Susan, Adelina, Katelin) and his brother (Paul).
Whether you’re an emerging writer or you’ve been around the traps for a while now, Overland is sure to have an opportunity for you.
In 1996, in a remarkably prescient letter to Jorge Luis Borges, penned a decade after his death, Susan Sontag hypothesised a possible future of reading: ‘Soon, we are told, we will call up on ‘bookscreens’ any ‘text’ on demand, and will be able to change its appearance, ask questions of it, ‘interact’ with it. When books become “texts” that we “interact” with according to criteria of utility, the written word will have become simply another aspect of our advertising-driven televisual reality.’
Peter Drew’s latest project appears to be a response to the criticism aimed at his previous campaigns, which highlighted the erasure of Aboriginal folk, the traditional owners of this land called ‘Australia’. Indeed, as some of the new posters proclaim, this is Aboriginal land – but when juxtaposed with the slogan ‘Real Australians Seek Welcome’, the cognitive dissonance is unmissable. How does one ‘seek welcome’ in a land that is not theirs to begin with, while simultaneously grappling with questions of what it means to be ‘Australian’?
For some time now, Muslim activists have been increasingly aware and vocal about how their identity continues to be evacuated of political content. That this identity has momentarily exhausted its political potential can be gleaned from its consistently exhausted looking ambassadors, like Abdel-Magied, as they desperately try to affect the right composure, the pithy expressions, and the sufficient expertise to make themselves heard and taken seriously, not least by their opponents.
Reading books as tools or cures risks devaluing literary pleasure, taking enchantment and diminishing it with a utilitarian vocabulary. Certainly literature can bolster our emotional and intellectual equipment, but too much advice about how best to read describes literature as if it had a reducible, quantifiable outcome, as if a book were consumed by its reader and alchemically transmuted into intellect or aptitude.
In this precarious work environment, as Standing notes, part of the ‘work for work’ we do involves ‘cultivating goodwill and pre-empting badwill’. Anyone in the creative industry, for example, will be familiar with the need to promote themselves – and their friends – on any number of social media platforms.
So here we are: the LGBT community, once marginalised, once anathema to the values of the far right is now told that it’s only within the fold of the far right that we’ll be safe and welcome. Except that rather than the far right shielding us from attack, our rights and our existence are being used to shield groups like the FN from the charge that they’re socially backward.
When a parliamentary body over-represents certain segments of the population, there is a risk that legislation will reflect the interests of a small subsection of society. And when the people in greatest opposition to legislation are also those least likely to be represented in parliament, they will find themselves unable to voice their concerns within the standard forms of parliamentary proceedings. They may find no choice but to disrupt these proceedings.
In Australia – a wealthy and democratic country – we have a wealth of ‘shit’. But most of ‘it’ is invisible: the imprisoned refugees hidden in the torture prisons on Nauru and Manus islands; the homeless people of Melbourne who will soon be removed from the city’s centre; Indigenous peoples whose individuality and personhood is obscured by the tabloid spectre of blackness that links Indigeneity to alcoholism, barbarity, and violence.
Artificial women have served as temptresses and traps in myths, legends and fiction, usually constructed to reinforce or critique a misogynistic worldview in which all female emotion and compassion is seen as false and designed to manipulate men. The artificial woman is a familiar cinematic trope, and better entries in this milieu can present profound questions about gender, posthumanism, technological anxiety and romantic desire.
It was with much interest to me, on a sticky December day, when the Christmas carols had just started to play on the radio and most of us were thinking about spending time with family during the holidays, that Premier Daniel Andrews announced the Victorian Government would prepare a bill to legalise assisted dying to Parliament in the second half of 2017. Originally opposed to euthanasia, the Premier told reporters that the death of his father had given him time to reflect and reassess his views.
And then I read the fine print.
However, since the early 1990s, research has shown that rather than hitting a glass ceiling, men working in the ‘female professions’ take a ride on what sociologist Christine Williams famously termed ‘the glass escalator’. In 1992, she wrote, ‘men take their gender privilege with them when they enter predominantly female occupations; this translates into an advantage in spite of their numerical rarity’.