Heather Brook

Stalemate Rethinking the politics of marriage

This article argues that although marriage has been a historically productive and important site of feminist inquiry, feminist theorizations of the institution of marriage have reached something of...This article argues that although marriage has been a historically productive and important site of feminist inquiry, feminist theorizations of the institution of marriage have reached something of a stalemate. Moreover, contemporary debates on the merits of same-sex marriage risk disarming feminist marriage critiques while simultaneously replicating their limitations. This does not mean, however, that marriage should be evacuated as an arena of feminist concern; rather, new ways of thinking about politics, subjectivities, sexualities and gender should be brought to bear against our understandings of what contemporary marriage is and does.

Learners, learning, learned: class, higher education, and autobiographical essays from working-class academics

In this article, we argue that the expectations, experience, and identities of academics may be just as crucial to improving the participation of students from low socio-economic status (SES) as higher education policies, admissions and marketing activities, but are routinely ignored. In particular, we observe that highly relevant, well-informed, and readily accessible accounts offered by academics from working-class backgrounds are not credited with the attention they deserve. This gap, or silence, signals a complex and poorly-understood relationship between education, knowledge and class. We assert that without addressing and better understanding this relationship, the situation is unlikely to improve, and the enrolment share of low SES students will remain shamefully low.

Heterodoxy: Challenging orthodoxies about heterosexuality

The intention of this article is to challenge orthodoxies regarding heterosexuality, which have tended to constitute it as a static monolith and queer as the only potential site for a less oppressive sexuality. By contrast, we consider heterodox possibilities for pleasure and change within the realm of the dominant. We examine three examples – divergence, transgression and subversion – and then consider some terminologies that might flesh out experiential aspects of these examples of social change in heterosexuality. This conjunction offers a means to acknowledge heterosexuality’s coercive aspects while attending to its more egalitarian, less orthodox forms.

Feed your face

Fifteen years ago, Naomi Wolf described women’s magazines as ‘a world of female consumer apotheosis, beyond appetite’ (Wolf 1992, 70). But women’s magazines have never been beyond appetite: they deliver, in fact, a parade of obsessions centred on temptations, hunger, and appetites. The two largest categories of advertising in women’s magazines are cosmetics and food products (Blood 2005, 64). These offer and deny simultaneously: you could be thin and beautiful if only you had the discipline to reject fattening food; you deserve to eat lovely rich chocolate (Bordo 1993; Cox 1987). Angela McRobbie argues that scholarship on women’s magazines has constituted four stages: ‘angry repudiation’, ‘theory of ideology’, ‘women’s pleasure’, and the ‘return of the reader’ (McRobbie 1999a, 47). These stages illustrate the gradual (and incomplete) disappearance of feminist resistance to objectification. At first, outrage over women’s representation in humiliating or limiting ways gave way to our becoming ‘social dupes’ caught in patriarchal ideologies designed to keep women ‘in their place’. More recently, however, the focus has shifted to women’s multiplicities, along with the plurality of meanings and often pleasurable subject positions magazine readership can facilitate (McRobbie 1999a, 48). The contemporary focus on women’s sometimes contradictory pleasures in consumption presents a range of political risks (McRobbie 1999b, 31), not least of which is the potential solipsism of reading images without regard to the structures and systems which underlie their production—seeing only representations of particular women for particular purposes, for example, even in discourses displaying conspicuous patterns and motifs of meaning. These changes in feminist attitudes have been driven, at least in part, by theoretical developments. In Rachel Alsop et al.’s excellent survey of contemporary theories of gender, the index entry for ‘objectification’ guides readers to two lonely pages. The entry for ‘subjectivity’, however, has 13 subheadings and refers readers to over 70 pages (Alsop et al. 2002). Consistent with McRobbie’s schema, this suggests, broadly speaking, that today feminist thinkers are more interested in processes of subjectivity than objectification and its effects (but see also Attwood 2004). To extrapolate: if women continue to be represented in certain limited ways, perhaps these representations have little or no power to harm—perhaps they have no ‘power’ at all, except that with which we vest them as viewers. If gender is socially constructed, written and read, it follows that when it comes to gendered representations, surely exploitation is in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps, also, in a movement now very conscious of its diversity, other struggles matter more than the treatment of body hair or the high-camp femininity of beauty

GUEST EDITORIAL: Heterosexuality

Heterosexuality has the potential to be pleasurable, comfortable, and even exciting or transgressive. Yet these aspects are seldom addressed in contemporary academic work. In contrast, there is a great deal of work about pornography, sex trafficking, sexual violence and other negative aspects of heterosexuality. These are very important issues, but they have received considerable attention, from classic works like Brownmiller’s Against Our Will (1975) to recent publications, such as Sex, Violence and the Body (Hearn and Burr 2009). There have been efforts to add to these crucial accounts of the dangers of heterosexuality by providing analyses of pleasure (such as Vance 1984; Loe 2004), but these have been rather limited in comparison. Even studies on women’s orgasms have rather dourly concluded that, if achieved, it is through men’s technical skill and/or women’s emotion work (sometimes involving faking it) (Duncombe and Marsden 1996; Jackson and Scott 1997, 2001; Roberts et al. 1995). More recent work has allowed for some sense of pleasure or play (for instance, Jackson and Scott 2007) but the outcome of the ‘sex wars’ appears to have left the ‘sex-critical’/‘sex-as-danger’ approach in place as the prevailing perspective with regard to heterosexuality. Even the emergence of ‘pro-sex’ views has not altered this situation substantially, given that these views largely assume that exciting, pleasurable and transgressive sex is the preserve of non-heterosexuals. In addition, there appears to be a troubling gap between the cacophony of popular commercial voices proclaiming the joys of (hetero)sexuality and the comparatively silent and largely negative critical voices to be found in Gender/Sexuality Studies. There is a need for broader and more nuanced understandings of heterosexuality. The central aim of this special issue is to add to understanding of heterosexuality by more fully exploring the possibility that it is not monolithic, not always oppressive and can provide pleasure. This needs to be done with some care in order to avoid reinscribing heteronormativity or reinstating fixed sexuality/gender categories. The articles contained here show the way, providing both theoretical and empirical insights into the diversity and more positive potential of heterosexuality. The intention is to go beyond the limits of existing critical analyses of heterosexuality, especially those that remain mired within the binary oppositions of the sex wars. Such binary analyses fail to appreciate the variety of heterosexual practice and its transgressive possibilities. Moreover, in order to provide a fuller picture of heterosexuality, there is a concern to engage with theories about the intersection of sexuality with other markers of difference such as class, age and ethnicity. Heterosexuality is not homogeneous and involves a variable set of practices. It is not inevitably an exercise in oppressive villainy. Heterosex may often be routine, though none the less significant for that. The point here is to focus upon its complex possibilities rather than presuming in advance that it is inexorably normative, uninteresting, unpleasant and irredeemable. Indeed, this issue offers a counter to dominant negative conceptions of heterosexuality within Gender/Sexuality scholarship. These conceptions are ironically

Bros before Ho(mo)s Hollywood Bromance and the Limits of Heterodoxy

This article considers whether mainstream Hollywood “bromance” movies offer potential for sex/gender transgression and/or progressive representations of masculinity. Bromances resemble the heavily feminized genre of romantic comedy (or “rom-coms”) except that the action centers on male friendships rather than heterosexual romance. On the surface, at least, bromances promise opportunities for gender subversion and seem to offer richly heterodoxical possibilities. Using The Hangover (2009), Wedding Crashers (2005), and I Love You, Man (2009) as examples of mainstream bromance, this article argues that while it is possible to observe crevices in the representation of monolithically heteronormative masculinity in each of these films, their subversive potential is decidedly limited. These limitations suggest that while considering heterodox masculinities in bromantic movies may be productive, heterodoxies are complex and, perhaps, even contradictory. While the concept of heterodoxy seems to have potentially exciting applications in masculinity studies, this articles argues for care and caution in its adoption.

Working-Class Intellectuals (Oxy) moronic Professors and Educational Equality (A Response to Ken Oldfield, A&S, 41, 1016-1038)

Ten years ago, when I was a graduate student in Politics at one of Australia’s most prestigious universities, I was invited to join a reading group. The group was composed of faculty and graduate students from a range of disciplines, with a common interest in gender and feminism. The group met at members’ homes for pizza, wine, and discussion. I was pleased to join, and looked forward to attending my first meeting. Shortly after arriving at that first session, and before the “real” discussion started, one group member announced, in a gossipy, lighthearted tone, that she was apparently, “officially,” White Trash. In response to other members’ promptings, she explained that she had just come across a new definition of the term. To be classed White Trash, she said, you had to have a relative in jail. And, she went on, because her sister’s husband’s cousin’s son was doing time for theft, or possession, (or something), she fit the bill. The murmurs of amusement that followed were whimsically ironic—to them, this was a quaint, slightly silly exercise in categorization. If I’d had the nerve, I would have asked “If you’re White Trash, what does that make me? My dad’s doing 8 years.” Of course I said nothing. Anything I might say would be wrong: I would dampen the mood; expose the chip on my shoulder; I would be “whining”; I would embarrass the woman who had spoken (who may well have been

Just Married? Adversarial Divorce and the Conjugal Body Politic

Fault does not figure in Australian divorce law. The Family Law Act 1975 regulates divorce, allowing a decree nisi to be issued where a marriage has irretrievably broken down. Australian regulations do not inquire into the cause of breakdown, but simply seek evidence that the divorcing spouses have lived separately and apart for at least 12 months. However, it has not always been so and, if the backlash against womens interests accelerates, it may not remain so. Recently, mens rights groups such as the ‘Blackshirts’ and ‘Promise Keepers’ have added their weight to the backlash push for a return to those ‘family values’ epitomized by an earlier, ostensibly pre-feminist era. These groups trumpet the desirability of truly lifelong marriage and an end to ‘easy’ divorce. They favour marriage laws harking back to obsolete, fault-based judgements. This article revisits divorce premised on matrimonial offence. With the benefit of hindsight, the Acts adversarial operations and effects are re-examined to expose the vestiges of coverture inhering therein.

CHOOSING USING: Drug policy, consumer culture and ‘junkie’ manquées

This article investigates the shaping of contemporary drug-using (and non-drug-using) subjectivities through operations of choice and consumption. Examining various registers of ‘possession,’ it argues that in the construction of both docile and irredeemably flawed consumers, ‘choice’ (and its negation) is pivotal. Exploring motifs of choice, possession and pleasure in the operations of ‘normal’ consumer culture and the problematization of drug-using exposes a deeper anxiety underlying contemporary drug panics.

Re-orientation: Marriage, heteronormativity and heterodox paths:

‘Hetero’ (from the Greek, ‘different’) is most familiar to us in its attachment as a prefix to ‘sexuality’. In gender studies, sexuality studies and feminist scholarship, heterosexuality is routinely contrasted with homosexuality, and this contrast is often mapped over the opposition of heteronormative versus queer (ideas, practices, effects). These word-pairs (heterosexual and homosexual; heteronormative and queer) tend to operate dichotomously – that is, in exclusive, exhaustive and hierarchically ordered ways. Taking up Sara Ahmed’s work on orientation, this article experiments with an alternative pairing, exploring the potential for admixture or subversion in those dichotomies. ‘Heterodoxy’ is introduced as a concept that might be usefully contrasted with ‘orthodoxy’ in sexuality/gender studies – particularly in relation to current debates on marriage. The larger aim of this endeavour is to theorise heterosexuality in more accurate ways, and to seek out understandings of heterosexuality (including its historical relationship with heteronormative marriage) which acknowledge its horrors without foreclosing hope for its future.