Deep within my iso routine
I board the train heading back to my studio, backpack over one shoulder and a drawing I don’t like anymore, stuffed inside.
Progressive culture since 1954
Magical girls, queerness and the power of femininity
There is currently a trend within western animation studios whereby queerness in both characters and plot is inching evermore to the centre of children’s narratives. But as creators continue to experiment and expand the cultural canon, appropriate homage must be paid to the often-belittled Magical Girl genre – a medium that effortlessly makes space for queerness both within its themes and aesthetic in a naturally humble way that perhaps only ‘feminine’ stories could accomplish.
Race, disability and the search for genetic supermen
Stephen Hsu’s removal from the position of research VP at Michigan State University is not only a step forward in the context of Black Lives Matter. It can also be seen as a step toward a deeper understanding and valuing of people with Down syndrome and intellectual disability.
Teetering on a blade of grass: life as a seasonal worker in the pandemic
For insecure workers, ‘going back to normal’ is not possible or desired. What the pandemic has shown us is that in order to sustain the rural workforce, we need to improve the material and structural conditions that put precarious workers at risk.
The affordances of desire: on dating apps
Apps like Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, OkCupid, Grindr, Scruff and Brenda offer affordances that are built into the way they are designed. These affordances import all the assumptions and norms of both those who make them, and adapt primarily to what sells: they turn daters into consumers of each other, and unwitting producers of data for the monopolistic behemoths of the digital world. Dating apps are actively involved in reproducing the traits of contemporary capitalism, transforming our very desires in ways that reshape and homogeneise how we love each other.
The death cult of Tony Abbott
Abbott’s revealed more than what we already know about modern conservatism – namely that, in its relentless attacks on health, education, and welfare, as well as its racialised approaches to immigration and foreign policy, it does not hold that all lives are equally worthy. It showed his capitulation to a kind of brutal economism more often associated with Randian capitalist radicalism than the religious right.
September in poetry
Shastra Deo reviews new work by Rebecca Jessen, Cham Zhi Yi, David Stavanger and John Mukky Burke.
Fiction | Rendered, blank in pages
If I am to survive in the new Commonwealth, I must convince the AI that I exist. Last time I got a letter which just said ‘Not enough information’. A growing invisibility has been creeping over me. I have passed beyond the Test Pattern to that small white dot at the end of transmission, where there is a noise only dogs can hear.
Adding people of colour to a racist workplace isn’t the answer
Over the last few months, we’ve seen the beginnings of an anti-racist reckoning in Australia’s media, arts and entertainment sector, nourished by the Bla(c)k Lives Matter movement. I am sceptical that it will lead to any real change in Australia. Diversity and inclusion initiatives are usually a way for a company’s management to abdicate responsibility to a junior colleague who doesn’t have authority to challenge structural racism. Maybe there’ll be a couple more of us in the room. But what happens when we get there?
The death of David Graeber
For the past fifteen years I’ve been more engaged with the violence of capitalism than ever, and I realised that David Graeber was part of the company of people I think of as being my own personal squad of invisibly-present comrades. Graeber was living, now, doing the work, thinking about it, talking about it, writing about the things I was thinking.
‘What would you have me do? Go to the wars?’ Sidney Nolan's soldier
While researching Nolan’s wartime desertion from the Australian Army, I became intrigued to see a repetitiveness in his depiction of the figure of the Australian soldier – not least in the 252 paintings and drawings collectively known as the Gallipoli Series. I have traced it back to a drawing made by a psychotic patient and given to Nolan by the Melbourne psychiatrist Reg Ellery, who supported his application for release from the Army unit that was about to be sent north to face off the Japanese in New Guinea.
Global revolt on the Yarra: S11 twenty years on
S11 was a moment when tens of thousands stood up to corporate power. It showed that collective action can push the ruling class on to the back foot. As the triple crises of COVID-19, the economy and climate deepen, we need that inspiration, daring and defiance more than ever.
Poetry | The ASX pours from your chest
We squabble about the money skimmed from our drudgery, the barbs lift enemies from our skin. At the end of shifts we are lathered in sweat and the day is night