Progressive culture since 1954
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.
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.’
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’.
A ‘good caricature, like every work of art,’ said the Italian Baroque painter, Annibale Carracci, ‘is more true to life than reality.’ This is why, I think, Bill Leak’s cartoons are so often failures. Like several pundits that take up column inches at the Australian these days, his views are so out of touch with the majority of the population that they can – in moments of ideologically charged rage – seem almost deranged.
If you’ve made even a vaguely, politically left-of-centre remark in a public forum online in the last couple of years, chances are that you’ve been hit with the more or less official insult of the alt-right nerd Nazis, and been called a ‘cuck’.
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.
The City Plaza Hotel stands a half hour walk away from the Acropolis in central Athens, nestled in an inner-city alley amongst ageing apartment blocks. Few abnormalities can be registered from outside: the building’s windows emit dim light in the grey morning and clothes are strung along half the balconies on its seven floors. The one outlier is a banner that stretches across three balusters: ‘People are dying in the camps’, it reads, ‘Open Borders. Open Buildings.’
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.
The Los Angeles Review of Books takes note of the work of Amitav Ghosh, who mulls that ‘[I]f the urgency of a subject were indeed a criterion of its seriousness, then, considering what climate change actually portends for the future of the earth, it should surely follow that this would be the principal preoccupation of writers the world over.’
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.