Ann Vickery

When She Refuses to Settle: Reading Adolescent Female Sexuality and Sexual Abuse in the Poetry of Genna Gardini and Kate Lilley

This essay compares the representations of adolescent sexual abuse and female sexuality in the poetry of South African poet Genna Gardini and Australian poet Kate Lilley. It explores Sabine Sielkes contention that differences in sexuality have predominantly constructed female sexuality as victimisation. In contrast, contemporary poets like Gardini and Lilley unsettle such alignment, demonstrating not only its constitutive limits but also providing a counter-discourse of radicalised agency.

The Fiction of Thea Astley

Brady, Anita. 2016. “Taking Time Between G-String Changes to Educate Ourselves: Sinéad O’Connor, Miley Cyrus, and Celebrity Feminism.” Feminist Media Studies 16 (3): 429–444. Gill, Rosalind. 2007. “Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 10 (2): 147–166. doi:10.1177/1367549407075898. Griffin, Penny. 2015. Popular Culture, Political Economy and the Death of Feminism: Why Women are in Refrigerators and other Stories. Abingdon: Routledge. Hamad, Hannah, and Anthea Taylor. 2015. “Introduction: Feminism and Contemporary Celebrity Culture.” Celebrity Studies 6 (1): 124–127. doi:10.1080/19392397.2015.1005382. Hollows, Joanne, and Rachel Moseley. 2006. Feminism in Popular Culture. Oxford: Berg. McRobbie, Angela. 2009. The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change. London: Sage. Weidhase, Nathalie. 2015. “‘Beyoncé Feminism’ and the Contestation of the Black Feminist Body.” Celebrity Studies 6 (1): 128–131. doi:10.1080/19392397.2015.1005389.

THE RISE OF ‘WOMEN'S POETRY’ IN THE 1970s : An Initial Survey into New Australian Poetry, the Women's Movement, and a Matrix of Revolutions

In Paper Empires (2006), Diane Brown and Susan Hawthorne argue that until the late 1970s it was difficult to access Australian women’s writing in any genre. Certainly, the 1970s was a watershed decade for women in the poetic field, leading to greater visibility and legitimation than ever before. Brown and Hawthorne contend that the most important poetry publishing event of the 1970s was the first women’s poetry anthology, Kate Jennings’ Mother I’m Rooted (1975a) (2006, 263). Published in International Women’s Year, it was unlike No More Masks! (Howe and Bass 1973), Rising Tides (Chester and Barba 1973), and The World Split Open (Bernikow 1973)*women’s poetry anthologies that had been published in other countries only a year or two earlier* in that it did not map out a female tradition. Rather, it showcased poetry from one particular historic moment. Adrienne Rich has defined feminist poetry as challenging ‘not just conventional puritanical mores, but the hip ‘‘counterculture’’ and the male poetry culture itself’ (1993, 167 68). While Jennings’ anthology might be viewed as a conspicuous* indeed inflammatory* feminist gesture, it is my contention that it, and the nascent recognition of ‘women’s poetry’ as a literary and marketable category in Australia, was as enabled as it was constrained by the counterculture that saw a similar emergence of the term ‘New Australian poetry’, or what has alternatively been labelled the ‘generation of ’68’. In the following article, I begin to track the complex relationship between women’s poetry and the radical small press scene of the late 1960s and early 1970s. To date, scholarly work has tended to focus on Australian women’s involvement in the poetic field through a separate lens. This strategy has successfully counteracted the relative under-representation of poetry by women in Australian literary criticism. Yet Susan Stanford Friedman urges feminists to think of women writers as existing within a fluid matrix where the interactional, relational, and situational constituents of identity for both male and female writers are read together. Through so doing, feminist histories may exist as plural, localised narratives rather than one originary or totalising narrative (Friedman 1998, 226). Accordingly, this is not a story of the rise of women’s poetry against a ‘unitary foil’ of male cultural production (with its moral overtones of a battle waged between ‘good’ and ‘bad’), but rather a start in tracing how poets of both sexes were negotiating a revolution in terms of authorship and publishing. How gender was taken up and used within this discourse of transformation then becomes clearer. This is not to say that other elements such as age (generational agonism), ethnicity (the growing