Alison Bartlett

Scandalous Practices and Political Performances: Breastfeeding in the city

Picture this: 388 babies in one room breastfeeding. All at the same time. Imagine the quantities of milk being produced and consumed. Imagine all those breasts in the one room. The room is the new ‘megaplex’ movie cinema at Marion shopping complex in Adelaide, South Australia. Is this a coincidence, that such a surreal event takes place in a cinema complex? The event has been dubbed a ‘Breastfest’ and is organized by the South Australian College of Lactation Consultants, the Nursing Mothers Association of Australia (NMAA) and midwives from the nearby Flinders Medical Centre. It is intended to be a world record for the most babies being breastfed at any one time, making it into the Guinness Book of Records. Once the baby has latched on, the mother puts up her hand to be counted. It’s a stunt, a media event. It’s also World Breastfeeding Week. But in August 1999 when it takes place, it comes amid almost two years of media ‘scandals’ about breastfeeding in public. I’m interested in recent media ‘events’ involving breastfeeding because they generate particular narratives about breastfeeding and most are infused with ‘scandal’. ‘Breasts are a scandal for patriarchy’, writes Iris Young, ‘because they disrupt the border between motherhood and sexuality’ (Young, 1990, p. 190). As if that weren’t enough, I want to show how lactating breasts when they are taken outside the home are capable of disrupting the borders of morality, discretion, taste and politics; in short, breasts are capable of transforming legislation, citizenship, and cities themselves. Lactating breasts are particularly scandalous, and I want to read the scandals they have recently provoked as crucial elements in cultural change. The ‘scandals’ I have chosen to read are events between 1998 and 2000 that were given national coverage in the print media in Australia and provoked a divided response through letters to the editors to those newspapers about women’s breastfeeding practices in public. These events and the scandalizing rhetoric used to debate women’s public breastfeeding practices can be read as marking a critical cultural moment in the contestation and renegotiation of social values. The examples of breastfeeding in public that reach the newspapers are always to do with white middle-class urban dwellers. It is signi� cant that indigenous, ethnic, rural and lower socio-economic groups are not the subject of scandals about breastfeeding. White middle-class women like myself are the women with the most available power in a Western colonized nation like Australia—we are the ones in a position to publicly contest social values. We are usually assumed to be ‘average’, or normative, and so do not usually have to negotiate discourses of race or class or sexuality, which are rendered invisible. While acknowledging that we all inhabit specific social, historical and discursive contexts, I argue that the narratives produced about these women breastfeeding in public can be read symptomatically as an historical moment when particular social values are threatened, and that this has much broader implications about the politics of women’s sexuality, use of public space and citizenship.

Feminist protest in the desert: researching the 1983 Pine Gap women's peace camp

This article examines the rich symbolism offered by the central Australian desert, and what happens when it becomes a site of feminist protest, as happened in 1983 when Australian women mounted a women-only peace camp at the Pine Gap military facility. The desert holds iconic status as both the ‘centre’ of Australia and ‘the middle of nowhere’, evoked as the ‘heart’ of the country and yet represented as dangerous and deadly. Its ambivalent meaning for white Australia unsettles Pine Gap as a site of protest, and also differentiates it from more traditional protest sites like urban streets, as well as from the most famous womens peace camp at Greenham Common in England. This account is made more complex by my own formative relation to central Australia, where I lived as a child and left in 1983 around the same time as the protest. The impact and limits of situated knowledge and feminist writing practice thus form part of this research as it also intimately addresses the formation of my feminist self through the remembering and remaking of meanings for this landscape of my childhood.

Feminism and the museum in Australia: an introduction

ABSTRACT Is second wave feminism something that can be collected? Does it even have a material culture? If so, what would a second wave feminist object be? This issue of the Journal of Australian Studies places feminism and the museum together to find whether Australian museum practice and feminist culture resonate or not, and whether social movements such as feminism are amenable to collection and exhibition in the public sphere. Our primary interest is in museums as institutions that collect items of cultural, historical and scientific value; however, the broader, European definition of museums, which includes art collections, can also yield invaluable insights regarding the relations between feminism and the museum.

What is a Feminist Object? Feminist Material Culture and the Making of the Activist Object

ABSTRACT Investigating the idea of feminist material culture, this paper proposes ways of considering, classifying, and making meaning of feminist objects. Material things are an important constituent of second-wave feminism that have yet to attract much attention, possibly because of the difficulties of deciding what might constitute a feminist object. We therefore draw some more specific observations from two recent projects: a collection of objects on feminist activism for a national museum, and a collection of essays focused on feminist objects. Both projects are related to Australian feminist activism from the 1970s onward and are used to identify a system of feminist objects and the nature of the feminist object as an activist object. After outlining a possible classification system, we offer another form of object analysis by adapting the idea of object biography to sketch a collective biography of feminist objects. The conclusions we draw around the nature of feminist things suggest this is a rich source of physical evidence of socially transformative ideas that offer innovative ways of attending to feminist times and social movement histories.

Sites of feminist activism: Remembering Pine Gap

Abstract In 2009, the Jessie Street National Women’s Library curated an exhibition in Sydney, Remembering Pine Gap, using their extensive collection of materials relating to the Pine Gap women’s peace camp held in central Australia in 1983. Arguably, one of the most iconic events of the Australian women’s peace movement held at the height of Cold War politics, the event accrues significance through being the subject of an exhibition. As well, the exhibition is one of the few that takes a feminist event as its sole focus, and so reminds us of the material connection between the politics and aesthetics of feminist space and time. This article investigates what this might mean as a form for remembering feminist activism, and as an activist form. Remembering Pine Gap is therefore critically situated in relation to other feminist and social protest exhibitions, and is then addressed as an activist form through its feminist aesthetics. In doing so, the paper seeks to extend the ways in which activist spaces and forms can be remembered as physical and material sites as well as intellectual cultural heritage.