Progressive culture since 1954
When US musician Mariah Carey was diagnosed with bipolar back in 2001, she feared it would end her career. Over the following seventeen years she worried that someone would ‘expose’ her secret. Stigma concerning mental illness is real; although Carey’s one of the most successful performers of all time, she was still unable to talk about her diagnosis.
The (mostly) young men who classify themselves as incels do so not merely because they lack romantic or (perhaps more significantly) sexual relationships, but because they accept their celibacy as a permanent and inevitable condition. Incels understand biology as destiny.
Last year I was fortunate enough to have the creative component of my PhD published as a novel. Would I say my PhD has taught me how to write novels? I think, rather, it helped me write that one. As Helen Garner has famously said, ‘we have to learn to write again for each new book’. For context, I’d already had one novel published; for further context, that too had been developed through a higher education program – a masters. Clearly I’m in favour of formal learning, but coming to the end of our highest arts degree I’ve been reflecting on what, exactly, it’s taught me.
Every dollar of the $88 million the Department of Defence is contributing towards the Monash Centre is a dollar not spent on, say, bettering the material and mental lives of Australian veterans, 325 of whom suicided between 2001 and 2015 (almost six times as many as Australian Defence Force personnel have been killed in conflict since 2001).
Friday 25–Sunday 27 May, Queen Victoria Women’s Centre
Three days of feminist politics, feminist perspectives and collective solutions. Catch the editor of Overland Jacinda Woodhead, with fiction editor Jennifer Mills and writer Natalie Kon-yu in conversation on mentorship in the arts – then stick around for special event presented by Overland on writing and activism with Santilla Chingaipe, Tarneen Onus-Williams and Asher Wolf.
In March, the US Senate passed a bill known as the Fight Sex Trafficking Online Act (FOSTA), with ninety-seven votes in favour and only two opposed. This bill and its predecessor, the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), seek to address widespread concerns about child trafficking in the sex industry by targeting internet platforms deemed to facilitate trafficking, particularly Backpage.
Last year I was fortunate enough to have the creative component of my PhD published as a novel. Would I say my PhD has taught me how to write novels? I think, rather, it helped me write that one. As Helen Garner has famously said, ‘we have to learn to write again for each new book’. For context, I’d already had one novel published; for further context, that too had been developed through a higher education program – a masters. Clearly I’m in favour of formal learning, but coming to the end of our highest arts degree I’ve been reflecting on what, exactly, it’s taught me.
Most critiques of awards like the Vogel centre on the age restriction.
My argument relates to a much broader issue, and one that these earlier critiques assume: the persisting myth that the Vogel sets up a literary career.
This book is a glowing accomplishment, scathing and funny and apt in its lambasting of well-meaning Australians, so good it is atrocious. We can’t help but laugh along with de Kretser, just like we can’t help but ugly-sob when she rips her character’s lives apart at the seams. You might feel uncomfortably implicated somewhere along the line, but soon you realise the joke is not only on the tolerant, but on everyone. The lightness of the prose carries us into desolate landscapes, but we are never dismayed, only moved.
It is supposed to be a good time to be single and trans. We’re hot property, after all – the flavour of the month. We’re on magazine covers and winning civic and cultural awards. We’re mostly allowed to use the bathroom in public, and you can even marry us in any number of uncomplicated ways.
There is a growing wave of back-to-the-land millennials seeking to engage with a slower, more humble, more natural lifestyle that look towards agricultural self-sufficiency – but questions of education and options (often socioeconomic in nature) are pivotal here. Not only does such thinking show a glaring lack of historical reckoning, it also reveals that the modern appropriation of peasantry hides a warped understanding of class, because peasantry was never about romantic walks behind the plow and gleaning fallen fruit.
The woman I knew best, of course, was my own mother. I could see my hips, legs and breasts becoming hers, and I heard her every self-abasement as my own. She’d take up walking regimes, or cut out bread for a month, and then on weeknights I’d come into the kitchen to find she’d caved and drunk an entire bottle of white wine. It was a cliche, a stock-standard Electra complex, but there was no way in hell I was going to become her.
Promise is a company that aims to reduce the population of people detained while awaiting trial because they cannot post bail (what Australians call being on remand). There are currently 450,000 people in the US in this category. Through a variety of technical tools, from tracking devices to intelligent calendars, Promise would allow the state to keep tabs on these people, but without the need to keep them in jail.
But this does not mean that doing nothing is a good, or even the least bad, option. Opposing certain forms of action (namely, military action) by our governments has not led to proposals or demands for alternative action. Indeed, it hasn’t led to much action at all from those of us in the anti-war, anti-interventionist, pro-peace camps.
‘Millennials are, potentially, a great revolutionary force,’ writes Helen Razer in a key passage of her latest book, Total Propaganda: Basic Marxist Brainwashing for the Angry and the Young. ‘First, many of them have inherited the useful parts of so-called ‘identity politics’… Second, many of them have acquired what we call class consciousness. It would be quite difficult to be young in this era and not sense that the greater part of your effort, both in leisure and in work, is in the service of somebody else’s profit.’