Margaret Henderson

‘It's not that bloody far from Sydney’: notes towards a semiotic history of the Brisbane women's movement, 1973–1983*

The midto late 1990s saw the publication of a number of major histories and autobiographies that focused on the Australian second-wave women’s movement (namely Getting Equal, The Meagre Harvest, Living Feminism, Ducks on the Pond, Catching the Waves, Don’t Fence Me In). This era, then, is something of a hot period (to use Lévi-Strauss’s terminology) for the production of a feminist historical consciousness, and consequently suggests a major turning point in the specific temporality of the women’s movement. We can interpret this proliferation of historical discourse in two related ways. First, it suggests that Australian feminism experienced a relatively pronounced split between its past and present. And, second, in their appropriation of the conventions of the dominant and generally masculine traditions of historiography and autobiography, these texts suggest another kind of split. Using a Kristevan psychoanalytic framework, we can interpret these texts as the past of Australian second-wave feminism entering the symbolic order. By this, we refer to the process by which an identity (in this case collective rather than individual) is formed through the related processes of signification and misrecognition of the self. The past of the women’s movement gains an identity and takes shape, literally and figuratively, by the process of textualisation and, as part of this, by the production of an imago, specifically in the forms of conventional historiography and autobiography. As the Kristevan schema of the process of subject formation also suggests, this entering into the tenuous authority of the symbolic comes at a cost. The acquisition of language and an identity necessitates the separation from, hence repression of, the semiotic, the realm of ‘drives and their articulations’, the state of undifferentiated bliss between mother and child, which finds expression in the textual or verbal forms of laughter, melody, rhythm, intonation, poetic language. Consequently, we argue that in their strategic quest to make feminist space in the symbolic, and in their privileging of certain locations, namely Sydney, Melbourne, or an undifferentiated national feminist historical narrative, a certain inevitable repression occurs, in that quite specific textual and political formations are taken as the whole of the women’s movement’s past.

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.

Trouble: Evolution of a radical, selected writings 1970-2010

The intellectual and worldly contexts of the emergence of ‘Subaltern’ as an idea in postcolonial and feminist studies are many and varied. They have given rise to not a few genealogical accounts in the last decade. The volume under review is one such account of a critical moment in the 30-year history of the influential South Asian historiographical project, Subaltern Studies. This is the appearance in print in 1988 of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s essay Can the Subaltern Speak? which presented a dazzlingly erudite, complex and trenchant argument about the disappearance of the gendered subaltern in themost reflexive philosophical and historiographical writings of our postfordist and postcolonial era. A brief statement on the context I signal here will not be out of place. The subaltern historians began their work in the late seventies in a context of deep disenchantment with the failures of nation-building projects in India. Most were trained in the orthodoxies of Marxist history, and yet found even Marxist paradigms insufficient to account for the lives of vast non-elite masses not beholden to the modernising projects of either the nationalists or the Marxists. As Ranajit Guha declared in Subaltern Studies: ‘We are indeed opposed to much of the prevailing academic practice in historiography . . . for its failure to acknowledge the subaltern as the maker of his own destiny. This critique lies at the very heart of our project’ (1984, vii). Since 1983, Spivak has had extensive conversations with the historians who worked with Guha, and, as Partha Chatterjee notes in this volume, she began to find uncanny links between her literary and deconstructive work, and the questions of historical elision being raised by the subaltern historians. Tellingly, she felt that their sensitivity to subaltern voice and agency (or the lack thereof) didn’t extend far enough and was almost always silent about gender. Spivak’s intervention in ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ pried open unstated assumptions about representation and subject formation found not just in the work of these historians writing about the marginalised in the Indian subcontinent, but also in what appeared to be a completely unrelated corpus of philosophical reflections on another continent, Europe. The brilliance with which she brought her training in Marxist and deconstructionist modes of thought to bear on a project then modestly situated within an area studies framework has been remarked upon extensively by scholars. ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ was an intellectual event, an irruption that jolted not a few intellectual projects out of their disciplinary and area studies straitjackets and into robust, if occasionally strained, conversations with each other. Subaltern Studies itself became consciously global in its orientation if not immediately in its content. In the various disciplinary and interdisciplinary hues of postcolonial and feminist scholarship, Spivak’s seminal essay continues to circulate as a primary point of reference. Not surprising then, 20 years since that essay’s first appearance in print, Columbia University, Spivak’s institutional home, decided to publish a volume commemorating the ‘Idea’ that remains her single biggest claim to intellectual fame. The book, edited by Rosalind Morris, a long time associate of Spivak, is the product of a conference hosted

Retrovisioning chicko roles: Puberty Blues as postfeminist television adaptation and the feminization of the 1970s

Abstract A recurrent theme in the studies of postfeminist adaptations of popular second wave feminist texts is the diminution at best, or gutting, at worst, of feminist politics in the contemporary remakes. This essay explores whether a similar process occurs in the 2012–2013 television adaptation of the Australian proto-feminist classic, Puberty Blues or whether a more productive relationship between feminism and postfeminism can occur. The television adaptation of Puberty Blues is an ideal text with which to examine Australian postfeminist adaptation, given that its source text is one of the earliest examples of Australian popular feminism, and a rare example of a text associated with Australian second wave feminism being remade. In contrast to many postfeminist adaptations in which feminism is contained, I demonstrate that Puberty Blues expands its popular feminist gaze from surf culture to Australian culture more broadly. Its careful retrovisioning – in both senses of looking back and using retro style – of the Australian 1970s feminizes a crucial era of the nation, and hence criticises a number of semi-dormant Australian cultural mythologies. As a result, it offers a fictional history lesson on the necessity of the Australian women’s movement. And it thus, disturbs postfeminist times with its comforting assumption that women’s inequality has been (smoothly) resolved and women are therefore fully integrated into the nation.

Kathy Is a Punk Writer: When the Underground Goes Overground

In numerous articles, interviews, and reviews, the late twentieth-century author Kathy Acker is described as a punk writer. This article explores the sources for Ackers image as a punk writer: her autobiographical narratives, mode of self-presentation, and the role the publishing and media industries played in this authorial fashioning. I argue that Ackers image is a unique suturing of the identities and ideologies of the punk and the feminist.

Memoirs of our nervous illness: The Queensland Police Special Branch files of Carole Ferrier as political auto/biography

In their memoirs, American feminists Robin Morgan, Karla Jay, and Brenda Feigen note how their activism in the late 1960s–early 1970s brought them to the attention of the FBI and/or the CIA, with resultant voluminous security files. This surveillance suggests that the new political movement of womens liberation was, from its beginnings, perceived as a risk to society, joining older political threats such as communism. Surveillance of womens movement activists also occurred in Australia by both federal and state agencies. In this essay we use one particular example of the security police file — the Queensland Police Special Branch file of the Australian socialist-feminist activist and English literature academic, Carole Ferrier — to explore just how security agencies tried to understand and record the life of a socialist-feminist in the 1970s and 1980s. That is, what did they make of this radically new form of politics and political subjectivity? In this article we position the secret police dossier as a form of political biography, and hence expand the forms and subject matter typically included within the genre. We argue that not only can the Special Branch file be read as a form of biography of Carole Ferrier, but also as an unwitting autobiographical text of the Special Branch.1

Medical students, early general practice placements and positive supervisor experiences

Abstract Introduction Community-based longitudinal clinical placements for medical students are becoming more common globally. The perspective of supervising clinicians about their experiences and processes involved in maximising these training experiences has received less attention than that of students. Aims This paper explores the general practitioner (GP) supervisor perspective of positive training experiences with medical students undertaking urban community-based, longitudinal clinical placements in the early years of medical training. Methods Year 2 medical students spent a half-day per week in general practice for either 13 or 26 weeks. Transcribed semi-structured interviews from a convenience sample of participating GPs were thematically analysed by two researchers, using a general inductive approach. Results Identified themes related to the attributes of participating persons and organisations: GPs, students, patients, practices and their supporting institution; GPs’ perceptions of student development; and triggers enhancing the experience. A model was developed to reflect these themes. Conclusions Training experiences were enhanced for GPs supervising medical students in early longitudinal clinical placements by the synergy of motivated students and keen teachers with support from patients, practice staff and academic institutions. We developed an explanatory model to better understand the mechanism of positive experiences. Understanding the interaction of factors enhancing teaching satisfaction is important for clinical disciplines wishing to maintain sustainable, high quality teaching.

From Counterculture to Punk Culture: The Emergence of Kathy Acker's Punk Poetics

1970s punk culture has recently attracted increased scholarly attention, with the publication of special issues of journals, monographs, and reference works. Although the literary aspects of punk subcultures have been identified in studies of US literary undergrounds (see Stosuy, Siegle, and Gendron), and were noted in Dick Hebdige’s early analysis of punk, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, punk writing is rarely present in discussions of punk culture. Similarly, Kathy Acker, a spectacular figure of late twentieth-century literary transgression and one closely associated with the punk subculture, is rarely analyzed in specifically punk terms. My essay addresses this gap in our understandings of Acker’s work and of punk, to explore the role Acker plays as a leading figure in the development of a punk poetics, and hence of a specifically literary form of punk culture. To position Acker as a punk writer enables her to be more fully contextualized, and the specific nature of her contribution to late twentieth-century writing, and particularly radical writing, to become apparent. Punk provides a creative milieu—including an ethos, a politics, and a poetics—and hence a context and a rationale for her stylistic repertoire. Rather than being figured as aberrant, and therefore more easily dismissed or confined in terms of significance, Acker is instead located as part of a broader cultural rebellion emerging in the 1970s. Although many accounts correctly point out that Acker can be read as a postmodernist, experimental, or feminist writer, to elaborate on the descriptor ‘‘Acker the punk writer’’ is also to delineate precisely what kinds of experimental, postmodernist, and women’s writing Acker developed in the closing parts of the century, and why. That is, her

Archiving the feminist self: reflections on the personal papers of Merle Thornton

Over the last couple of decades, the modern Australian women’s movement has been the subject of history, which includes the creation of feminist archives in various locations This essay analyses one particular collection – the personal papers of the feminist activist, Merle Thornton – as an account of the making and meaning of a feminist archive. I wish to explore the ways in which the feminist subject impacts on the archive. Accordingly, I analyse the archival process, as well as the contents of Thornton’s personal papers. What emerge are the difficulties of negotiating the public–private divide for this feminist activist.