Progressive culture since 1954
But what does it mean to work, think, and act in profound solidarity? What are the links between solidarity and justice? I have been thinking about these questions while watching the fallout from the International Women’s Strike in the US – specifically the opposition, distaste and (perhaps) fear that has resulted from women who identify as Zionist feminists.
The Pacific has lost one of its great scholars, activists, champion of the arts and leading lights with the passing of Dr Teresia Teaiwa. Teresia’s impact in the Pacific was as expansive as the ocean which carried her across the region from Hawaii, Kiribati, Fiji and Aoteroa. In her poetry and scholarship she would turn to the Pacific Ocean as a metaphor of a universality that connects Pacific and oppressed peoples
As I read Ghost River, and the parallel narratives of Birch’s river men – their fear of police and hospitals – alongside Ms Dhu’s death and her family’s fight for justice, I tried to make sense of how to read these stories that are fictional and those that are true. And in the case of Ms Dhu, how to bear a true story that no one in positions of power cared to believe until it was too late.
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.
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.
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.’
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.
There’s something quaint and precious about this beginning – the huge grins on the players’ faces as they run out, the excitement of the fans, and the homegrown, back-to-basics, good-old-days feeling of walking into a suburban footy ground to stand on the terraces and watch the match. It’s not only the presence of the women players. In the opening season we have seen female field umpires officiating matches, watched Bec Goddard coaching Adelaide, and been introduced to many women sports reporters and commentators.
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.
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.
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’.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Buffy creator Joss Whedon did not set out to write ‘strong women’, but rather strongly written women. Buffy having slayer strength and the ability to poke stakes through the hearts of vampires don’t make her an innately strong character. Rather, that she is attentively written as a living breathing human, with a fully realised personality, personal quirks, weaknesses and vulnerabilities, make her an SFL. She is not a mere caricature of what a woman should be within a vacuum of cultural bias.
The perception that white Australians have the authority to dictate non-white identities fits more broadly into what anthropologist Ghassan Hage refers to as a ‘white national fantasy’. According to this fantasy, white Australians assume the role of ‘spatial managers’ of the Australian nation space. This fantasy does not prohibit the mere presence of non-white individuals. Rather, central to it is the assumption that white Australians have the right to ‘direct the traffic’.
Politicians continue to infantilise women’s opinions about reproductive options and downplay how difficult the reality of accessing abortion services across Queensland is.